He provides a good description on the psychological state of many among the inactive 99 Percent. However, many in the Occupy movement are optimistic and dedicated to bringing about the liberation of the 99 Percent. We may have a clue as to his negative outlook by examining his last paragraph.
The ‘you are a leader, I am a leader’ mantra is patently nonsense, because it takes a highly intelligent, charismatic and forceful figure to galvanize and inspire. A leader must earn his status, and when he has, lesser voices will naturally defer, and if he turns out to be a fraud, he should be chucked aside. Faced with a monomaniacal, brutal and well organized enemy, we cannot just offer them a horizontal position, because they will gladly accommodate this inclination.He clearly doesn't like, or maybe doesn't understand, the bottom-up organizational methods of the Occupy movement. The paragraph suggests that he subscribes to a vanguardist type of organizing model such as we have seen so often in left movements. And often this method of organization has merely replaced one authoritarianism for another. Which is why they all failed.
Young, and not so young, activists all over the world are devoting their efforts to another model, a very radical, democratically inclusive model of organizing. Because they are starting almost from scratch, it will take some time, trials and errors, two steps forward-one step backward kind of progress. But the end result will be a powerful organization filled with people totally committed to the overthrow of the existing oppressive system serving the One Percent and the construction of a life sustaining system that serves the needs of everyone. (See also this, this, and this for more information on theory and practice of the Occupy movement.)
