You might be thinking of this, on the G20 protests from 2009:
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/2009/2009-April/005113.html
<http://www.breakingviews.com/2009/04/02/G20%20protests.aspx>
Incoherent dreams BY EDWARD HADAS
A great age of protest should be dawning. The global mismanagement of the financial system has led to a deep recession. Intellectual paralysis has gripped the authorities and their policy response has been risky. After such failure, the political leaders gathered in London for the G20 conference deserve a serious challenge. Sadly, all they are getting are the senseless slogans of a hippie festival.
The manifesto of the G20 Meltdown group, which managed to collect a scraggly band of a few thousand malcontents on Wednesday, borrowed a piece of contemporary rhetorical vacuity from President Barack Obama. But their “Yes we can” answered questions that were depressingly naïve – “can we guarantee everyone a job, a home, a future?” and “can we make capitalism history?” The audacity of hope was not matched by a discussion of means.
Of course, demonstrations aren’t the natural home for intellectual rigour, but this effort is particularly fragmented and foolish. It’s a shame, as the world’s leaders really do have a big ideological gap to fill. In the two decades since the fall of Communism, they have mostly been guided by a slogan of their own: “Trust the financial markets”. That now sounds almost as simplistic as the protesters’ plan to “abolish all borders and be patriots for our planet”.
The G20 doesn’t have time to develop big ideas during their meeting. There are too many disasters to be averted, not to mention petty squabbling over hedge-fund regulation and executive pay. But the next generation of leaders needs to get finance right, to balance the global economy and to keep development on track. That requires a new intellectual framework.
Protesters who look like they just want a street party aren’t likely to be up to the challenge. Sadly, the more intellectually sophisticated Left seems to be hardly more capable of helping out. Any protester who can articulate a coherent alternative to the establishment’s tattered notions really could change the world.
--
"I had never understood why Socialism need imply the arraying
of oneself in a green curtain or a terra-cotta rug, or the
cultivation of flowing locks, blue shirts, and a peculiar cut
of clothes." -- Isabel Meredith, _A Girl Among the Anarchists_ Voyou Desoeuvre <http://blog.voyou.org/>