Thoughtful analytical post by Paul Mason, economics editor of the BBC, exploring how this economic moment in history is, and is not, like the early 1930s. Mason is clearly worried, and takes Bank of England governor Sir Mervyn King’s recent remark that this crisis could get worse than the Great Depression seriously. Here’s what, in Mason’s view, is the main reason why:

Social unrest is different this time. As I’ve reported from Greece it is “anomic” – that is, there is a tendency for societies to become listless, lawless, with low level social conflict and breakdown.

Such Communist parties that still have mass support – Portugal, Greece – do not want to take power; the hard right parties, such as LAOS in Greeceor the True Finns in Finland, want to be power broker, not prime ministers. That aside, in a Greek poll this morning, the leaders of the far left (SYRIZA) and the far right (LAOS) were the most popular politicians, each with 38%.

So if we look into Mervyn King’s eyes and wonder what his nightmares might be, and indeed our own, it could be this: a situation where politics, economics and social unrest prove incapable of making the kind of switch that happened between 1931 and 1934.

Let me be clear – I am not advocating such a switch, but exploring the reasons why it is not going to happen, and what the alternatives are.

The “switch” he’s talking about is the Keynesian policy shift undertaken by governments fighting the Great Depression. The atomization of society makes it harder to rally the people around a particular course of action. Mason raises an interesting question: what if the only thing worse than mass demonstrations over our broken economy is no mass demonstrations over our broken economy?

It could be that the diffuse, non-specific, ineffective OWS demonstrations are, in fact, particularly expressive of the Zeitgeist. People are upset, but they don’t really know what they’d like to see happen, and they don’t have any leaders around which to rally. Indeed, the fact that the OWS movement takes an ideological view against hierarchy and hierarchical decision-making is a strategy for disempowerment, for the reasons to which Mason alludes in this post.

Nevertheless, Mason reports this morning from Cannes, where he’s covering the G20 summit, that OWS is on everybody’s lips:

I can sense very clearly here at Cannes that this is the moment “the masses” start shaping the policy response to the global financial crisis.

Why? Because everybody I speak to, interview or discuss background with keeps dropping the words “Occupy Wall Street” into the conversation. In fact if #OWS were a global brand, like the designer apparel shops that line the Rue d’Antibes here, it would have a profile to die for among the super-elite.

#OWS has, in just a few weeks, become global shorthand among policymakers for “what can happen” if they don’t regain control of the situation. Once you get a coalition of perfectly ordinary people saying “we’ve had enough”, and then you have to watch as the cops baton and taser them in the name of the trespass laws, you know you are in a reputational crisis.

Mason goes on to say that elites at the summit are looking at Greece as an example of what happens when violent street protests — as they’ve had in Athens — start to move government policy. In other words, they’re foreseeing OWS 2.0, and it’s scaring them. Mason:

The subtext: it’s probably better to deal with protesters whose symbolic image is a ballet dancer pirouetting on top of the Wall Street bull statue, than some other, less politically endearing iconography.

You watch: Greece defaults, triggering a credit-default swap riot that topples major banks, and collapses the global economic system, and elites will very quickly long for the days when the people who took to the streets to object to them were tenured radicals and peaceable hippies.

UPDATE: Papandreou offering to resign immediately.

UPDATE.2: The great sociologist Robert Bellah made these remarks in a talk about the state of religion in contemporary America, but I think the political implications with regard to Mason’s point about contemporary social atomization are clear:

Americans tend to think that there are only two options. There is either inclusion in a kind of engulfing absolute, authoritarian community, or radical and total privatistic autonomy. And what I think that we need to do to respond to that second tendency-which has become in some ways ever stronger in our society-is to suggest that that tendency pushed to its extreme also leads to authoritarianism. This is Tocqueville’s teaching. Society reduced to its constituent individuals, each isolated and alone, shut up in the solitude of their own hearts, as he said, automatically becomes a despotic society, because people cannot effectively, through corporate action, make a difference in their government. And so they will be ruled, whether they like it or not or even whether they know it or not, by powers entirely out of their control. So radical individualism-far from bringing freedom-is the condition for the loss of freedom. Genuine freedom exists in the polarity between respect for individual dignity and freedom, on the one hand, and groups in which people can realize that freedom together in a vital communal way. I think the very symptoms of our society cry out for that middle ground as the proper solution to our problems.

UPDATE.3: In Oakland, OWS has gone Greek, with street violence, police clashes, vandalism.

UPDATE.4: Now Papandreou denying he’s offered to resign.