"What do you want?" Occupy Wall Street and the question of Demands

A lot of virtual ink has been spilled as to whether any official demands should be put out by Occupy Wall Street (and/or any of the satellite occupations).

I'm pretty firmly in the "no demands" camp. We should think of the Occupations as fora for conversation, exchanging ideas, and also as base camps for launching actions - e.g. a day or week of actions/marches/workshops around demanding for a free and democratic education. For radicals to influence the debate of the reformers, that's the kind of pressure we want.

Let individuals and groups associated with Occupations issue demands, but there's very, very little benefit to listing official demands of the movement. You'll just piss off and alienate people who don't agree with your specifics. Most liberals will think they're too radical, and most radicals will think they're too liberal. The people who want numerical detail will scoff at them being too utopian, and the utopians will scoff at them being too detailed.

Of course, with groups from MoveOn to the Obama campaign trying to co-opt, er, I mean "support" the occupation movement (including darling of the electoral left, Van Jones), both liberals and mainstream media types are clamoring for demands. Liberal demands of course - prescriptions from the CBO, Paul Krugman, bills already before congress, etc. But without official demands, it'll be much, much harder for them to corral us into the veal pen of Democratic Party politics.

In that spirit, I whipped up a poster (11 x 17 format, get PDF here):