Occupy is getting its own debit card. The Occupy Money Cooperative, which emerged from a group who met at Zucotti Park a couple years ago, plans to provide the “unbanked, underbanked, and even just angry-banked” with access to the cashless economy. It claims to be “a better and more affordable product,” allowing its users a little “protest with every purchase.”

Yet the Occupy Money Cooperative may ultimately be undermining its own values, fostering illusions that workers can, in fact, buy into a better world. “Buying in” in this instance comes with a series of economic and ideological presuppositions, ultimately redefining the citizen (who may protest in the streets) as a consumer (who may “shop for a better world”).

It isn’t new to say that capitalism excels at co-opting dissent, making it yet another niche commodity for sale among the countless others. While the Occupy Money Cooperative — a member-run cooperative — should be applauded for attempting to challenge corporate banking, it’s in practice just one more pre-paid debit card, posing no real threat to Wall Street. In fact, the Cooperative needs to raise $900,000.00 just to launch the card ($895,000.00 more to go — apologies to the underbanked and unbanked, donations are only accepted through Visa, Mastercard, Discover, or American Express).

The blurring of distinction between the citizen and consumer is all around us — from the over-zealous “pinking” of the world as we know it and the growing agro-business monopoly of “fair trade” certification processes to the absurdity of “One for One” companies like Toms Shoes who redefines “success” in charitable terms while veiling its very real economic success. These attempts to reconfigure capital as a more equitable system don’t actually work, at least not in any systemic way, for they rely on the same economic structures and social institutions that produce inequities to begin with.

Yet for-profit businesses such as Toms have been effective in framing themselves as a “movement” and their affluent customers, who carry flags and march around barefoot on “A Day without Shoes,” transform into staunch activists “raising awareness” that some kids in the world don’t have shoes.

With the commodification of civic engagement, the commodity-form takes on an entirely new level of abstraction, no longer merely disguising the social relations of production, but also any notion of citizenship, which becomes redefined within the economic sphere, excluding those without the capital to participate. “Buying into a better world” as an economic stance, therefore, poses a threat to the longevity of resistance, not capitalism, if its supporters actually believe that effective civic engagement may be supplanted by consumer engagement. Let me assure you, Bank of America is probably breathing a sigh of relief over the Occupy Card, which removes the physicality of dissent from its doorsteps and instead metamorphoses protesters into obliging, card-carrying consumers.

Let’s assume, however, that the Occupy Money Cooperative recognizes that its not about to break the chains of capitalist oppression with a pre-paid debit card. That it, instead, is merely one little jab at the gut of the system. It is “like a bank, but better:” FDIC insured, a horizontal system controlled by its members, and works towards making banking fair and affordable for all. After all, one of the cooperative’s main selling points is that it “empowers” those who have traditionally been excluded from realizing their “full economic potential” due to limited or no access to banking. The least of our worries, both inside and beyond the United States, is our ability to swipe a card. After all, swiping a card presumes existing access — that there is money to put on a pre-paid card.

The transparent fee structure of the card, a hierarchy in and of itself, demonstrates this point. Adding money onto the Occupy Card is only free for those who set up direct deposit, which presumes stable and formal employment. For those using cash to reload the card, who may be underemployed, unemployed or operating outside of the sphere of the formal economy, it costs between $3.74 and $4.95 per deposit at participating 7-Eleven, CVS, and Walmart stores.

Moreover, users are charged a monthly service fee of $.99 unless they qualify as a “No Monthly Fee Member.” This status is determined by a point accrual system (much like traditional credit-cards) and is granted when a member reaches 15,000 “OMC” points or makes five direct deposits. Since cash deposits earn one point per dollar, cardholders must deposit $15,000 in order to reach no-fee status. Want to check your balance? Well, unless you have easy access to the Internet or own a smart phone, this too will cost you 99 cents. Declined at an ATM? $2.00.

My point is not merely to quibble over the fee structure of the Occupy Card, but to reveal its own potential stratifying effects on the truly underbanked. Rather than challenging the economic predominance of global capitalism today, it reinforces such terms of service. Considering the idea of the Occupy Money Cooperative comes from, as the New York Times notes, “a Cornell law professor, a former director of Deutsche Bank and a former British diplomat,” we shouldn’t be surprised that the project owes much to neoliberal cosmology.

So, I’m sorry, Gawker, I’m calling it: “bank thing bad.”