Vijf liberale tendensen die Occupy parten speelden

The excessive focus on social media distracts us from the lived dynamics of actually-existing spheres of human sociability, and it subtly promotes a liberal prescription for political problems: that political change is primarily about disseminating isolated ideas for atomized individuals to consider, rather than organizing collectively from the ground-up and compelling our oppressors to adhere to our power. As I’ve argued elsewhere, this is a variation of what I call “the idea as motor of history”, or the notion that change follows from enough people having come into contact with a transformative idea isolated from context. In Zuccotti Park in the fall of 2011 there were a lot of people who thought that if we could just articulate the Occupy idea to enough people they would just have to come around to it because of its sheer righteousness. But although the Occupy idea was broadcast far and wide, it was not enough on its own in the absence of strong and sustained connections with concrete struggles. Many liberals argue that all we need to do is come up the right ideas to “fix the world”, but felled-forests-worth of visionary thought has been published for some time. We don’t need another idea; we need the power to make it happen.

Mark Bray in Five liberal tendencies that plagued Occupy (Roarmag.org)