Matthew Continetti here makes a persuasive case for the reemergence of the anarchist movement in Occupy Wall Street for The Weekly Standard:
When he looks at the world, the utopian is repelled by two things in particular. One is private property. “The civilized order,” Fourier wrote, “is incapable of making a just distribution except in the case of capital,” where your return on investment is a function of what you put in. Other than that, the market system is unjust. ...
If Charles Fourier emerged from a wormhole at the Occupy Wall Street D.C. tent city in McPherson Square in Washington, he’d feel right at home. The very term “occupy” or “occupation” is an attack on private property. So are the theft and vandalism widely reported at Occupy Wall Street locations. The smells, the assaults, the rejection of the conventional in favor of the subversive, and the embrace of pantheistic spirituality flow logically from the utopian rejection of middle-class norms. The things that Mayor Bloomberg found objectionable about the encampment in Zuccotti Park—that it “was coming to pose a health and fire safety hazard to the protesters and to the surrounding community”—are not accidental. They are baked into the utopian cake.
