The Occupy Wall Street protests are approaching a month in life, and the protests seem to be growing, branching out into other cities, involving large unions and rallying support structures to keep them going. Despite a massive arrest by the NYPD and continued crackdowns, the numbers in Zuccotti (renamed 'Liberty') Square are growing. Fueled by widespread disdain for the congressionally-supported lack of corporate accountability, and by record numbers of young people that are unemployed, saddled by student debt, and living with their parents; Occupy Wall Street is growing into an enormous....what?

It's not a movement because it lacks a clearly-stated message. It's not just a protest because it the groundswell seems to be nationwide. I suppose the best way to describe it is a populist uprising; a rally against corporate irresponsibility and the government's complicity in it. Occupy Wall Street is not anti-capitalist, as John Wellington Ennis of the Huffington Post pointed out, because the U.S. does not have a true capitalist economy. Instead Occupy Wall Street seems to be anti-aristocratic, raising awareness of the massive popular disdain for the structures in place; socially, economically, and politically, that are allowing the rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer at a break-neck pace.

With the end of the Russian Civil War in 1922, Lenin created the Soviet Union, a Communist nation that would persist until it's eventual demise in 1990. However, Communism's 68-year reign in the Soviet Union was not true communism. Instead, it was the world's largest feudal state, with the central government and its leaders controlling the vast majority of the power and wealth in the country and portioning out what little was left to the rest of the nation. It's much more difficult to use the same method in a representative democracy such as ours, so instead the power-brokers in the U.S. are in their economy. The Soviet Union had Lenin and Stalin, the U.S. has Goldman Sachs and Koch Industries. That's because the U.S. economy is not true capitalism, as Ennis pointed out in his article, "The End of Occupy Wall Street Is Critical Mass". 

Capitalism is a merit-based economy that is consumer-driven, much as democracy is (supposed to be) citizen-driven. However, the largest companies in the country have enough wealth to purchase political favoritism by co-opting each election cycle. This ensures that they are given fist priority in constructing everything from regulatory policy to the tax code (of which most of the biggest companies pay little or none). On the economic side, they use their massive wealth to push out smaller competitors, or simply buy them up in order to create a favorable market environment. Manufacturers offshore their operations to countries where they can pay pennies on the dollar, financial institutions cater to investors (their real customers) with middle-class debt, and the mainstream corporate media spoon feeds the news that will keep us A) misinformed or B) distracted. There’s nothing “capitalist” about this system because it’s entirely built around the insulation and preservation of a very small group at the top. That kind of system is feudalism in the same way it was perpetuated by the Soviet Union. Different names, different means, same result.

Fortunately for us, education, a globalized social structure and the internet make it nearly impossible for the system to survive this way for 68 years. That said, it's still gone on far too long.