My initial reaction to the occupation of Wall Street was generally positive. But soon that feeling gave way to doubt and unease. I still find much hope in so many people taking to the streets but I wonder what is going on? From Naomi Klein, to Micheal Moore, to Chris Hedges to David Graeber to Slavoj Zizek and even Kayne West (???) every lefty public intellectual (and/or celebrity) and has come out in support of Occupy Wall Street and its progenitors. There seems to be an unquestioning lefty cheerleading section developing around this and it made me wonder why I still have my doubts.  Am I some sort of political dinosaur who doesn't get it? Can I not see revolution when it is thrust into my face(book)? So I thought I would  jot down some ideas of why Occupy Wall Street raised such feelings of doubt within me.

Democracy. Here is the conundrum right off-the-bat: democracy has failed us, we need more of it! This seems to be the one of the key ideas driving the occupy everywhere idea (hence forth I will use OE). The idea is democracy, as is practiced today, is corrupt, cynical, and alienating. We need TRUE democracy. On some level I agree, however, by positioning democracy, no matter how radical you perceive it, as the way forward you are foreclosing radical alternatives. Possibilities remain confined within the democratic horizon. The language of democracy offers a mechanism for lots of people to understand and be drawn into struggle, yet it also provides limits and dangers. It is quite possible that the fetishizing of democracy could lead the OE down the path of democratic renewal (i.e. we need to fix our broken system). While I have been inspired by some elements of the New York General Assembly, I wonder when we engage in the General Assembly model without doing the hard work of building REAL solidarity first, who is it really speaking for? And who has the opportunity and privilege to have their voices heard?

Consensus. During most of my organizing life I have been part of groups that have used consensus. It has worked lots and failed lots too. I prefer to work with consensus models, they build trusts and dialogue, however they have limits. Firstly consensus really only works if group members share certain core values. Secondly, it really only works in small groups. I am sorry to say when you have hundreds or thousands of people consensus will always be broken. Always! The third major...

I am not going to vote in the upcoming election. I take no pride in this nor do I think it is a stance which is effective per se.

How can I reconcile these two statements?

To begin with let's start with the obvious facts. There are differences between parties. The Conservative agenda is extremely regressive, especially socially. Less taxes for corporations, more jails, more military spending, less funding for women's groups, no real childcare policy, an attack on the bodies of trans people, queers and women, a hatred for people of colour both migrants and indigenous peoples, an extremely regressive foreign policy, the defunding of progressive civil society groups and an utter contempt for the people.

The Liberals are less regressive on certain social issues but offer only slight policy differences on issues such as military spending, foreign policy, the tax system and the funding of social programs.

The NDP, the party most susceptible to grassroots pressure, fares better than the rest. A better foreign policy, more funding for social programs and it is by far the least regressive party when it comes to trans rights, queer and women's issues. However, it still offers the same old when it comes to crime, nationalism, and the basic tenets of our economic system.

There are differences between parties and depending on your economic situation and especially your race, gender, sexual orientation and/or your status these differences are hard to overstate. The array of choices presented by the three major parties aren't between ideal options and evil one's but between degrees of compromise. However when it comes down to things such as deportations or access to abortions the differences between degrees can be the difference between life and death.

While it would be a grotesque simplification to say that there are no differences between three major federal parties it would, in my view, be accurate to say that the parties offer only moderate variations of the same choice. All three parties present themselves as responsible stewards of the economy, they all want to govern using the same institutional models and that none of the three major parties presents a threat to the overall trajectory of our society. If the NDP were to somehow come to power during this election they would be faced with the same market forces which dictate policies within the other two major parties.

Jacques Ranciere, the...

Writing in the Globe and Mail just after the Tunisian dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was ousted in a popular revolt, Micheal Bell, a former Canadian ambassodor to Egypt stated that a similar event would not happen in Egypt. Egyptians were too fatalistic.

But to everyone’s surprise the impossible did happen in Egypt. Mubarak was thrown out and the seeds of revolution have been sowed. As Slavoj Zizek wrote on February 10th “The uprising was universal: it was immediately possible for all of us around the world to identify with it, to recognise what it was about, without any need for cultural analysis of the features of Egyptian society.”

This universal intervention of justice dignity and freedom in Egypt has created the start of a new historical sequence, maybe most similar to the uprisings in South Korea, Burma and the Philippines in the 1980s.

As we begin to digest the gravity of events in the Arab world we must realize that the many moving parts and competing narratives lay just under the surface of the of the universal event.

The narratives, I think can be broken down into three tendencies, which at times overlap with each other. The first is the obvious liberal narrative of the people over throwing their autocratic leader and demanding a something resembling western liberal democracy. Expectedly this narrative dominated the mainstream media in the west and even to a large extent the coverage provided by Al Jazerra.

This narrative is intimately tied to the technology used to circumvent state control. Stories which talk about individuals such as Wael Ghonim, an internet activist who works for Google, as being the spark for the revolution are really stating the largesse’s of late capitalist technology finally allowed people to express their true desire for democracy.

Another major narrative to emerge in explaining the Egyptian uprising is the obvious conservative racist one. The narrative spin is that while the youth genuinely want change in Egypt, there is a darker ominous presence lurking behind the scenes: Islamists. According to this narrative explanation, Egypt is just another Iran in the making and the Muslim Brotherhood or other Islamic groups using the uprising to position themselves for a take over of power. This narrative, popular in mainstream Israeli discourse and in conservative circles, relies on a racist assumption that Egyptians are fatalistic and incapable of having a...

Facing a 300% increase in university fees, English students have been engaged in an ever deepening struggle to stop the massive cutbacks to education.

Back in 2007, the world financial system began to show signs that it was about to tank. Housing prices, the motor of wealth creation in the five previous years, began to stumble. Banks all over the world had been leveraged to the hilt with complex financial instruments that at the end of the day relied on shoddy loans which artificially pumped up housing prices. These housing prices where the very thing people were making loans against. When housing prices crashed people instantly couldn't make payments on their loans. They defaulted, banks foreclosed houses and put them up for sale which further flooded the market with a huge supply of houses which in turn depressed prices even more. The house of cards came tumbling down.

To make matters worse banks and other financial institutions had bundled mortgages and "created" things like credit default swaps and other crazy schemes to make more money. (Watch this for a nice simple explanation) The result was no one knew who held what mortgages.  In America, Europe and the rest of the world, banks and large financial institutions were given huge sums of money, with no oversight. That money along with the other public spending pledges that happened in 2008 and 2009 created massive deficits and added to the public debt. Some of those same institutions, such as Goldmann Sachs then turned around and attacked smaller countries over their supposed debt crisis.

In Britain, the government very publicly bailed out the banks and in a way nationalized them and mortgage lenders,...