The Wonderful, Unpredictable Life of the Occupy Movement
Wednesday, 11 April 2012 00:00 By Arun Gupta, Truthout | Report

I met Nomi on a bus in Baltimore. She was from Wisconsin and had been
involved with Occupy Wall Street. She was part of Occupy Judaism and
fondly recalled the Yom Kippur services she attended at the Wall Street
occupation with hundreds of other people. Nomi said that, for the first
time, she and her friends felt like they could combine the religious and
radical dimensions of Judaism. The conversation fell silent as the bus
rolled along. Suddenly she turned to me and excitedly announced that she
met her girlfriend at Liberty Plaza. I smiled and responded, "That's why
Occupy Wall Street matters."

By enabling people to find fulfillment in all parts of their lives,
whether romantic, spiritual, political or cultural, the Occupy movement
is more than a movement. It is life-changing. People experience
themselves as complete social beings, not just as angry, alienated
protesters. Nomi said she was no longer involved in the movement, which I
thought was more evidence of why the actual occupations were so important.

The emergence of every mass movement makes sense in hindsight, but no one
could have predicted hundreds of occupations and thousands of groups
would pop up across the United States just weeks after a ragged
encampment secured a tenuous foothold on Wall Street last September.
Sure, anger was boiling over prior to the takeover of Zuccotti Park in
downtown Manhattan, but the occupation crystallized who is to blame for
the economic crisis and who are the legitimate people. Anyone could walk
into the public space, share their stories, find people with similar
grievances and help build micro-societies. Occupy wasn't just a rejection
of Washington and Wall Street. It revealed the failings of liberals,
unions and the left. New activists didn't first have to master volumes of
social and cultural theory, attend grueling anti-oppression workshops and
learn how to pepper their comments with academic jargon before joining.
Nor did the movement require consultants, focus groups or polling to
occupy the center of American politics with a radical left message. And
the form was not the same old rallies with canned chants, pre-printed
protest signs and preaching to the choir.

It's worth considering why Occupy Wall Street was such a smashing success
last fall, as well as where it is headed. While the media lens has
shifted away, Occupy has spawned a menagerie of energized movements and
ambitious plans. Veteran organizer David Solnit, who is involved with Bay
Area Occupy movements, sums up the current state: "The numbers showing up
at GAs have dropped. Any movement has its mass mobilization and its in-
between times. The organizing a lot of people are doing around housing
and education are less visible but go much deeper. We need a better
measuring tape than numbers and public space and whether it's amplified
through media owned by the 1 percent."

Like plants that lay dormant for the winter conserving energy, many
occupations are blossoming anew with ambitious plans now that it's
spring. Solnit says in San Francisco the movement is defending a dozen
families in foreclosure, and is working toward a citywide moratorium on
bank foreclosures and evictions. In Los Angeles, organizers say May Day
plans include large-scale marches by immigrants and unions, rolling
street blockades and even an attempt to disrupt the main airport. In New
York and around the country, a campaign has been launched called "F the
Banks" to force the government to dismantle Bank of America, which is
still receiving taxpayer subsidies. In Chicago, after the G8 summit set
for May was moved to Camp David because of fear of large-scale protests,
activists are moving forward with large-scale demonstrations to
coincidence with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) meeting
the same month.

Challenging the status quo comes with costs. As the Occupy movement
struggles to effect radical social change, it faces persistent police
attacks and co-optation by Democratic Party forces from the outside and
divisions over identity politics, militancy, localism and diffusion from
the inside.

Rethinking Democracy

Occupy Wall Street is foremost a democratic uprising from the left
because it advocates for the downward and outward distribution of wealth
and political power. Tying political democracy to economic democracy has
made class relevant again for millions of people. As for the form,
occupying public space is an old tactic. Since the early 20th century,
examples include the Wobbly free-speech campaign, the automobile factory
sit-down strikes, lunch-counter sit-ins, the Columbia University student
takeover and Cindy Sheehan's vigil outside of Bush's Texas ranch. The
need for democratic forums is greater than ever as public space is ever-
more surveilled, regulated and commodified.

Occupy also challenges the notion that workers are the sole agent of
revolution. Clearly, labor's power is unmatched in potentially bringing
capitalism to a halt, but in actuality, collective action on the shop or
office floor has been crippled by a lack of working-class consciousness,
timid and self-serving union bureaucracies, and the legal and repressive
tools of the corporate-state hybrid. Occupations of public space by
activists, intellectuals and marginal workers - as shown by Egypt's Tahrir
Square, Oakland's November 2, 2011, general strike and the December 12,
2011, West Coast port blockades - can attack capital from unexpected
directions, creating space for organized labor to take more militant
action.

In terms of development, the Occupy movement has gone through a series of
stages, though they are not so much distinct phases as overlapping and
intermingling trends where one stage may take prominence over the others
at different times. First, the occupation created an awareness of a group
that could be called "the people," which is often invoked with the now-
ubiquitous chant, "We are the 99 percent." The flipside of "the people"
is those who are not a legitimate part of the community: "the 1 percent,"
in this case. Both categories are social and psychological concepts that
mobilize rather than analytical terms that accurately describe social
forces. Segments of the 99 percent, such as white-collar managers, small-
business owners and the police, generally act as the social and physical
enforcers for the elite, while the real owning class is perhaps the
top .01 percent. But "We are the 99.99 percent" is hardly a catchy
slogan. In this respect, Occupy Wall Street is similar to the Tea Party,
which invokes its legitimate community with slogans like, "We the
people," "Take back America" and "Founding Fathers." For Tea Partiers,
however, nearly everyone else is illegitimate - unions, immigrants,
Muslims, liberals, welfare recipients (code for blacks and Latinos),
feminists, environmentalists, socialists, and gays and lesbians.

Combine a public organizing space with "the people," and the second stage
follows: assault the citadels of illegitimate power. As one organizer
told me about Zuccotti Park, "At any moment, you could call for an
impromptu march on Goldman Sachs and a hundred people would join you."
The night of October 5, 2011, was an exhilarating example of this. After
a union-led rally in downtown Manhattan, thousands of people surged
through the financial district in breakaway marches for hours. With so
many people in the streets feeling the wind of public support at their
backs, the police were taxed to hold the line. Wall Street was no longer
an impenetrable bastion and the New York Police Department (NYPD) was no
longer omnipotent. They felt fragile and under siege.

The occupation was a focal point for the media as well, and,
surprisingly, many corporate media outlets gave the movement favorable
press at times. Some observers have suggested that one lesson is not to
see the corporate media as the enemy. Rather, it should be treated as a
battleground, albeit one that is tilted toward the interests of the
wealthy and the imperial state. The physical occupation also served a
valuable role in making, "politicians realize there are people watching
what they are doing," says Anne Gemmell, political director of the labor-
backed community group Fight for Philly.

"You Have to See to Be Able to Dream"

The third stage is carnival. After years of clichéd protests bearing
witness to power, street politics had become futile and predictable.
Leaders of the anti-Iraq War movement excelled at polite marches on
weekends with no risk and little impact, and adjusted its politics to the
election cycle, leading to its demise by 2007. Occupy Wall Street hit the
big time because it is innovative political theater, a quality shared by
the civil rights movement, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP),
the global justice movement and the Arab Spring before it. I would stand
on the steps of Zuccotti Park and watch as hundreds of people below
exchanged food, art, knowledge, books, politics, health care, bedding,
anger, ideas, skills and love. Not one exchange was mediated by money (of
course, the goods were paid for at some point). It felt like being able
to breathe for the first time, because relations were being forged
according to human needs and concerns, not according to the logic of the
market. Revolutionary consciousness was being born through collective,
democratic political action, which is essential to igniting a new era of
activism and organization.

The occupation made a different ...

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--
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution
inevitable” -JFK

--
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution
inevitable” -JFK

--
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution
inevitable” -JFK

--
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution
inevitable” -JFK

you will starve if your work fails to satisfy us.

the lash will not be spared.  the only rights you will have will be to
work and not be punished for failure.

Of course it's life changing. Exposure to bio-hazards and paranoia is
very corrosive.

So why have they dropped off the political radar in the mainstream
media despite being their darlings at first? First, the public looked
closer and saw that they're spoiled brats who text with their iPhones
and drink Starbucks coffee while whining about how cruel life is. Then
the videos came out of them throwing rocks at police. After they were
finally forced out, the sprawling piles of feces, urine, used condoms
and tampons were the nails in the park crappers' coffin.

Why can it be called unpredictable? Because the left had grand visions
of its future but didn't predict what an abject failure it would become.

--
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution
inevitable” -JFK

--
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution
inevitable” -JFK