More powerful? Perhaps, in that the powers-that-be would have less ammunition with which to delegitimize the Occupy movement. The thing is, you can’t always discount the “less educated” members of a movement as they have just as much potential for greatness as anyone else. Fannie Lou Hamer dropped out of school in 6th grade, a segregated Mississippi school no less that only met for a few months at a time and at certain times of the year to accommodate the cyclical demands for labor in southern cotton cultivation. But despite this lack of formal education, she remained instrumental in the drive to register rural African Americans to vote in the early 1960s, in the leadership of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, in organizing for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and ultimately in the Civil Rights Movement. But I don’t think that’s what you’re asking.
Of course I think people should learn more about a group or movement before they join up. I’ve only attended General Assemblies in Albany, and sure at those meetings, topics didn’t get covered as quickly and coherently as I would have liked. People were asking questions like, “We want to support you but we can’t find any information on you. Do you have a website?” to name one example. To which Occupy Organizers would reply that they’ve been running a website, twitter, Facebook, etc. for months. Things like that certainly take away from moving the protest forward, but I think that’s part of the beauty of the Occupy Meetings I have attended. Any person that wants a say can have a say. Those that make seemingly less-than-informed statements may do so but not for lack of Occupy trying to educate. Veteran protesters are constantly fielding questions, giving interviews, showing and explaining signs and slogans, handing out literature, etc. There also seems to be an internal system for addressing differing opinions and an underlying (perhaps idealistic) effort to achieve consensus. I guess my answer is that you should strike up a conversation with these people. Their curiosity, outrage, or ambition got them in the same room as you talking about and planning an organized protest of many of the same inequities that you see plaguing our Country. What would it hurt to calmly discuss your qualms with them and/or the rest of Occupy? They hold open forums just so these kind of grievances can be heard.
As for re-instituting the barter system, well, get ready for a nerd rant: Rural, frontier stores in the mid-West and South were known to have signs out front advertising their acceptance of “Cash or Country Produce” in exchange for goods and services at least into the early Jacksonian Era of the 1830s, some plantations stores accepted eggs, milk, corn, and other goods like a bank would a paycheck even after the Civil War. Granted, both examples are from well over a hundred years ago and things like modern capitalism, industrialization, population’s spread across the continent and globe, and global economics among other confounding developments have emerged since then. If we were to even assume it was practical to revert back to the barter system, it took generations and a constitutional amendment just for the U.S. to allow women to vote; imagine what it would take to eliminate American currency, raze tax codes at every level of government, and then reconcile this new system with property and asset values, prior debt accumulation, blah blah blah. TL;DR
