Comment Re:What's the alternative? (Score 1) 944
Which rhetoric is that? Rhetoric by Bolsheviks (ruling-class people that would manipulate public sentiment to gain power) or the protesters themselves? I haven't heard a protester interviewed that sounded like they were looking for a worker's revolution. (I'm sure there were some, but not more than a small minority, based on what I've heard them say.)
I can't tell if you're being sincere or trying to discredit the whole idea of protest against a broken financial system as communism. (Not that I think we should dismiss communists out of hand, but these protesters are generally not communists.) If the former, I think you should relax, as there is really not much communism happening that I've heard. I mean, the revolutions you link to all started with a philosophy calling for armed rebellion, not peaceful protests in the street that allow the authorities to identify all the participants.
I'm not down there with them, but many of them are protesting real problems with real, simple solutions. For example, there are a lot of people successfully convinced that it was somehow individual, irresponsible mortgagees or regulations that forced banks to lend to them that caused the triggering real estate collapse in the US. You really don't have to look at many numbers or think too hard to realize that wasn't the case, and our financial system makes it very easy to build castles of sand, even without any one person being malicious about it. You can't have banks leveraged to the extent they were, or buying securitized debt from each other the way they were, or relying on corrupt, easily manipulated ratings agencies. These problems are all pretty easy to solve, without bloodshed.
So, what are governments doing about it? In the US, for example, who should I vote for to fix this problem, as opposed to marching in the streets, to make my voice heard? The regulatory changes are perfectly simple, evolutionary solutions, and protesting in the street is about the only way to be heard. It's all perfectly rational and democratic.
In the US, at least, you also have rhetoric and general belief that a liberally interpreted limited-liability corporation is everyone's birthright, i.e., when you simply substitute some definitions, that nobody should be personally responsible for anything they do. When you say it that way, does it still sound anti-capitalist to say that maybe our corporate legal structure and culture has a problem? When people talk about "corporate greed", this is ultimately what they mean, and it doesn't require bloodshed to reform corporate law.
Most of the protesters I've heard interviewed are suggesting a perfectly solid alternative to what we have now, which is basic regulatory and possibly corporate structural reforms. Sure, some of them don't say anything sensible when they're interviewed, so we somehow should ignore the lot of them as retards? To say they're not offering a solid alternative is really to build a straw man you don't have to respect.
It's good that it's going global, because many of the simple solutions can be dismissed by saying "but then the US wouldn't be competitive with the rest of the world". But it's clear that people all over the world perceive some of the problems with the state of the art financial, legal, and cultural norms, even though most countries are not as far gone as the US (in terms of income inequality, incarceration rates, and finance industry deregulation, for example).
To answer your question directly, the simple alternative is modest, common-sense reforms. If you're not getting that from the protesters, you're intentionally ignoring it, because it's generally known what needs to be done to fix some of the most egregious structural problems that led to the recent global recession. Not that the protesters speak with a unified or articulate voice, but you really have to wilfully ignore the context to not understand where the protesters coming from, or identify them as (uniformly) communist.
(I apologize if my response is a little heated. I don't mean to make it personal. I think we disagree but I hope I can be civil.)