The global moral crusade that began on Wall Street

When 1000 protesters invaded Wall Street on September 17, Republicans dismissed it contemptuously and predicted it would fizzle out. A month later Occupy Wall St (OWS) has not only caught the mood of the moment in the US but spawned co-ordinated protests in 900 cities across the world at the weekend, including Glasgow and Edinburgh.

In Frankfurt 5000 people crammed the square outside the European Central Bank and 60,000 gathered in Barcelona. OWS draws inspiration from the Arab Spring, Spain’s “indignados” and the French “People First not Finance” campaign. Now these protests appear to be not just growing but coalescing.

What’s going on? Despite some anti-capitalist symbolism and radical chic overtones, these gatherings have little in common with the menacing, chaotic anti-capitalist protests of the 1990s. At the week-end only Rome saw violence. Nor are they the heir of leftie love-ins like Woodstock. The marchers came from all walks of life and generations. Many had never protested before.

Most lack a specific agenda but there is a common target for their resentment: inequality. They are hacked off and fearful. Hacked off with struggling to make ends meet or prevent their meagre savings being eroded by inflation and hacked off stacking up debts to go to college only to find there are no jobs or only dead-end low wage work.

Fearful that things will get worse, fearful about the prospects for their children and grandchildren, fearful that the welfare state will no longer save them from penury. And while real wages have stagnated in the UK for a decade and the US for a generation, a small self-appointed elite with more lucre than they know how to spend pours salt into the wound.

In the US the top 1% hold a bigger share of income than at any time since 1928. In particular, the protesters reject bank bail-outs that privatised gains and socialised losses, leaving bankers free to trouser huge bonuses while the rest of us pay the price with harmful austerity.

There is a sense that capitalism is more powerful than democracy and that the odds are stacked against ordinary people, who feel controlled by events. And they are tired of being told: “There is no alternative”. These are not the sentiments of some lunatic fringe. It’s what we hear every day in cafes and check-out queues. Hence the catchphrase: “We are the 99%”.

Unlike the Arab Spring, this is truly a Facebook revolution, which may help to account for its exponential growth. The month-old OWS Facebook page has 250,000 fans, Twitter hashtag #ows pours out scores of tweets per minute. Try checking out the website “wearethe99percent” which invites individuals to write out their story and post a photo of themselves holding it.

OWS has done more than arouse casual curiosity. In a poll in Time magazine, 54% of respondents rated the Wall Street protests positively and 25% were “very favourable”. It is attracting high profile support too. The feminist author and campaigner Naomi Wolf was arrested there this week at an event organised by the Huffington Post.

Children’s author Lemony Snicket, has been attempting to explain OWS to his young readers on the website Occupy Writers: “People who say money doesn’t matter are like people who say cake doesn’t matter. It’s probably because they’ve already had a few slices.”

Academics too have competed to analyse the movement. Professor Bernard Harcourt of the University of Chicago, author of The Illusion of Free Markets, says, “Our language has not yet caught up with the political phenomenon that is emerging in Zuccotti Park [where the OWS protest originated] and spreading across the nation, though it is clear that a political paradigm shift is taking place before our very eyes.”

He defines OWS as “political disobedience”, as opposed to the civil variety and praises its refusal to articulate policy demands or embrace old ideologies. He argues that the new protests take the economic argument beyond the false choice between free market capitalism and Soviet-style command economies to the real issue of how we regulate markets and distribute wealth in society.

Politicians need to catch up with this. If they were having these discussions, their constituents wouldn’t feel the need to take to the streets. Ed Miliband’s Labour Party conference speech contained elements of this new sort of thinking, with its theme about the relationship between morality and capitalism but where is the follow through?

If Labour wants to reassert itself as the party of social justice, the shadow cabinet should hurry down to St Paul’s. Barack Obama too was slow to recognise and identify with the frustration of the protesters.

All could take a leaf out of the Financial Times, which published an editorial this week arguing that growing inequality is economically as well as socially disastrous: “Today only the foolhardy would dismiss a movement reflecting the anger and frustration of ordinary citizens from all walks of life around the world.” It ends: “The cry for change is one that must be heeded.”

Political discourse in the UK is often sterile and remote from people’s lives. So let’s hear it for the passion and energy of these protests. They have an honourable pedigree: the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, the Diggers and Levellers of the English Civil War, the Luddites of 1811, the Jarrow Crusade of 1936.

They have been compared too with the Festival of Fools, the New Year European medieval event that mocked the worldly powers of the time. The so-called fools were those who refused to accept the hypocrisy, venality and selfishness of the political and economic elite. Call me a fool if you wish. The beginning is nigh.