And yet the protestors who gathered in the actual Occupy encampments,
like the young couple I met in New York, often stepped away from the
classic forms of Anarchism by excising clear moral purposes from their
protests. They typically took it as a point of pride, as a moral
principle, that they would not specify exactly what they wanted—for
"Demands imply condition, and we will never stop. Demands cannot reflect
the time scale that we are working with." In doing so, they found
themselves recapitulating not
the history of anarchistic revolution but
an old religious history of apocalyptic movements, aghast at the failure
of God to bring an end to the mess, the evil, they thought they could
perceive so clearly.
They accomplished nothing, but at least their smug self-satisfaction will keep them warm at night.
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