Jour­nal­ist Austin G. Mack­ell, who has been cov­er­ing the Egypt­ian rev­o­lu­tion since its begin­ning, remarked that this is akin to ​“a bunch of envi­ron­men­tal­ists join­ing the log­gers guild, to you know, change things from inside the system.”

David Atkins wrote a blog post yes­ter­day that stat­ed OWS could draw lessons from the Egypt­ian elec­tion in which the lib­er­al par­ties and youth activists failed to com­pete with Islamists who emerged from the Mubarak years. ​“There is a les­son here,” Atkins writes. ​“No mat­ter how well-inten­tioned the rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies and no mat­ter how suc­cess­ful the rev­o­lu­tion, at the end of the day orga­ni­za­tion­al pow­er will step in to win the day.” While Atkins is clear­ly sym­pa­thet­ic to those who seek ​“anti-orga­ni­za­tion­al” and ​“apo­lit­i­cal solu­tions to Amer­i­ca’s prob­lems,” he adds that ​“those who either refuse to or fall behind in the par­tic­i­pat­ing in the process, like the lib­er­als and sec­u­lar­ists in Egypt, will find them­selves at the mer­cy of those who do.”

There’s an inter­est­ing debate hap­pen­ing right now among Occu­py par­tic­i­pants and Pro­gres­sives observ­ing the move­ment about what the best strat­e­gy is for the group mov­ing for­ward. Rather than delv­ing into the end­less sea of advice heaved at the pro­test­ers on a dai­ly basis about what their ten-point pol­i­cy plan should look like, I want to exam­ine the issue more broadly.

Atkins clar­i­fies that he does­n’t mean Occu­py should nec­es­sar­i­ly get involved with­in the Par­ty, but per­haps pro­test­ers could instead cre­ate sep­a­rate orga­ni­za­tions that are designed to ​“instill fear” of the base and of pri­ma­ry chal­lenges in Par­ty politi­cians. Alas, Atkins seems to have much faith in Amer­i­ca’s elec­toral sys­tem that con­sis­tent­ly shuts out mar­gin­al­ized voic­es such as Ralph Nad­er and Ron Paul.

I want to unpack the con­cept of ​“instill­ing fear” a bit here because the obvi­ous par­al­lels between the civ­il rights move­ments and Occu­py are too great to ignore. Like Occu­py, civ­il rights lead­ers did­n’t ask per­mis­sion to protest, and while Mar­tin Luther King Jr. did ulti­mate­ly form a ten­ta­tive alliance with Lyn­don John­son, (though it was no love affair – John­son once said King was a ​“hyp­ocrite preach­er”) in order to see the land­mark pas­sages of the Civ­il Rights Act of 1964 and the Vot­ing Rights Act in 1965, the real strug­gle hap­pened on the ground in acts of civ­il dis­obe­di­ence. It took hor­ri­ble footage of police dous­ing pro­test­ers with fire­hoses and unleash­ing fero­cious attack dogs on inno­cent pro­test­ers to cap­ture nation­al, and the Pres­i­den­t’s, attention.

But the com­par­i­son between the two move­ments is shaky in oth­er areas. In the 1960s, the con­cept of civ­il rights was a tru­ly ter­ri­fy­ing con­cept to white south­ern­ers (and many north­ern­ers,) so I don’t want to dimin­ish the strug­gle MLK and oth­ers endured to see these acts passed. How­ev­er, while a polit­i­cal part­ner­ship was pos­si­ble between MLK and LBJ, it’s dif­fi­cult to see how Occu­py will form a sim­i­lar part­ner­ship con­sid­er­ing their demands would mean their politi­cian allies would be engag­ing in career sui­cide by anger­ing their cor­po­rate donors.

Yes, there is a leg­end that after John­son signed the Civ­il Rights Act, he turned to an aide and said, ​“We have lost the South for a gen­er­a­tion,” but with a two-par­ty stran­gle­hold on the coun­try, which no third par­ty can hope to com­pete in, and is now fund­ed by mas­sive cor­po­ra­tions, Democ­rats have grown to stop fear­ing their con­stituents and start fear­ing the upper brass at Gold­man Sachs and Exxon Mobil.

Occu­py is attempt­ing huge feats here, and while some emerg­ing demands (rein­stat­ing por­tions of Glass-Stea­gall, for exam­ple) seem more man­age­able, there is also momen­tum build­ing to fun­da­men­tal­ly change the sys­tem of hyper-Cap­i­tal­ism crush­ing the major­i­ty of Amer­i­cans rights now. Occu­piers are nev­er going to ​“instill fear” into the larg­er Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty by allow­ing them­selves to be co-opt­ed by the very bro­ken sys­tem they’ve been protest­ing this whole time. Seri­ous­ly, try to envi­sion what a meet­ing between Democ­rats and Occu­piers would look like when pro­test­ers pro­pose ban­ning ​“big cor­po­rate dona­tions to cam­paigns and [set­ting] equal spend­ing lim­its.” I mean, holy shit, Max Bau­cus won’t stop scream­ing for days.

The main take­away beyond all our hand­wring­ing should be an under­stand­ing that the whole rea­son Occu­py has been such a excit­ing, rev­o­lu­tion­ary move­ment is pre­cise­ly because it does­n’t ask for per­mis­sion – not from city offi­cials when mem­bers camp out­side or occu­py aban­doned build­ings, not in order to wage some of its march­es, and cer­tain­ly not from the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty. It does­n’t seem like the group is going to ask for per­mis­sion when it breaks into fore­closed hous­es to rein­tro­duce home­less fam­i­lies to them on Tues­day, either.

By the way, that ​“instill­ing fear” thing has already worked, and has GOP poll­ster Frank Luntz shak­ing in his boots. He recent­ly advised the Repub­li­can Gov­er­nor’s Asso­ci­a­tion to avoid men­tion­ing Capitalism.

​“The public…still prefers Cap­i­tal­ism to Social­ism, but they think cap­i­tal­ism is immoral. And if we’re seen as defend­ers of quote, Wall Street, end quote, we’ve got a prob­lem,” he said.

It may be true that a major­i­ty of Amer­i­cans still favor Cap­i­tal­ism to Social­ism, but 36 per­cent of Amer­i­cans have a pos­i­tive image of Social­ism despite decades of pro­pa­gan­da attempt­ing to con­vince them oth­er­wise, and some polling indi­cates Con­gress is less pop­u­lar right now than Com­mu­nism. The coun­try, it seems, is ripe for change. (Not sug­gest­ing Com­mu­nism is a good alter­na­tive here. I’d much pre­fer a Demo­c­ra­t­ic Social­ist mod­el myself).

Atkins is right that social move­ments do need to instill fear into the polit­i­cal elite in order to have a sig­nif­i­cant impact, but that fear won’t come from Occu­py ask­ing per­mis­sion to sit at the nego­ti­a­tion table. That change will come fol­low­ing mass acts of civ­il dis­obe­di­ence — by dis­rupt­ing the flow of nor­mal­cy until the move­ment can no longer be ignored. Even­tu­al­ly, if nego­ti­a­tions do occur, Wash­ing­ton will have to learn how to work with Occu­py, a lead­er­less move­ment that votes on every­thing demo­c­ra­t­i­cal­ly, which can often­times be a painful­ly slow process. But that is the very nature of Occu­py. Any­thing oth­er than that process won’t be OWS, but rather a co-opt­ed mutant breed mas­querad­ing as the rev­o­lu­tion­ary force.