I left the

 panel debate on Occupy Wall Street on October 14 pretty dispirited. In the process of trying to address shared concerns that the protests would dissipate, the participants seemed to be instantiating the dissipation. They talked past one another and at times seemed to want to cast suspicion on the good faith of other leftists (narcissists! reformists! armchair revolutionaries! union bureaucrats! party hacks! running dogs!) rather than articulate different approaches to defeat common enemies. It made me wonder if there really is enough of a shared sense of what the problems are for the Occupy movement to generate coherent demands. Is OWS a model for a strategy of refusal, a precursor to a general strike? Should the protesters seek to seize the state or smash it? Is the occupation a preparation for the transition to communism, to anarchism, or to a kindler, gentler neoliberalism? At the debate, the various diagnoses of what is wrong with politics, the economy, financialization and inequality and so forth, were barely discussed. The word “precarity,” somewhat surprisingly, was not uttered.