Talking Points Memo today linked to a couple demographic surveys of Occupy Wall Street participants. A close reading will have to wait. But here’s something that jives with what Peter Frase argued the other day — there’s a conflation of “partisanship” with “political ideology” among both elites and our fellow protesters.

One survey was posted to the OWS website yesterday. It introduces the findings of Héctor R. Cordero-Guzmán, a CUNY sociologist who the site’s operators asked to analyze a poll of its visitors.

Among the most telling of his findings is that 70.3% of respondents identified as politically independent.

Dr. Cordero-Guzmán’s findings strongly reinforce what we’ve known all along: Occupy Wall Street is a post-political movement representing something far greater than failed party politics. We are a movement of people empowerment, a collective realization that we ourselves have the power to create change from the bottom-up, because we don’t need Wall Street and we don’t need politicians.

A “post-political movement” of people who recognize that they have the power to create change? It’s an obvious contradiction. If one side is pushing austerity and the other is proposing a massive public works program paid for by taxing the wealthiest “1%,” a high-stakes class struggle is being waged.

Overcoming the conflation of partisanship with politics, as Frase argues, relies on drawing out and clarifying what’s implicit in the movement. The forces pushing austerity know what kind of fight they’re waging, it behooves our side to understand the same. This doesn’t mean we need sectarian sloganeering. The beauty of the “we are the 99%” slogan is that it not only creates a polarization, it does so in a way that appeals to the vast majority. Inclusive rhetoric in defense of popular public goods does the same. And all that’s a return to the political. We’re just waiting for the language to catch up with this fact.