Another Look at Occupy Wall Street

In the end, every movement has to have a target or a discernible -- not to say concrete -- goal. Steven Zunes, quoted in my last post, is right to say that protests do not in themselves make a movement. SNCC wanted the repeal of certain laws in the segregated southern United States, PORA wanted fair elections in Ukraine, Gandhi wanted changes in India's caste laws. To maintain momentum and purpose, a movement must point to outcomes.

But in the beginning, such clear, concrete goals may not be the purpose of a movement. In Montgomery, Alabama in 1957, the boycott movement began as a series of inchoate meetings of black citizens who were anngry and wanted to support each other. Right now, Occupy Wall Street is trying to figure itself out. People with something in common have rallied together in many places and have put together a program of behavior. Once they determine exactly what it is they share and what they might do about it, the movement can change.

Here's what a friend of mine, who observed the branch in Denver, wrote to me. (She gave me permission to quote her, but not to give her name.)

I hope you're teaching about the occupy together movements because they're insane. It's actually blowing my mind. Like ten years ago the Dalai Lama wrote a book called Ethics for the New Millenium and spoke about this spiritual awakening that everyone was or was going to experience whether or not they wanted to. And as a result there would be this incredible paradigm shift and I'm prettty sure thats what's happening. People everywhere are supporting each other in solidarity to fix not just their economic problems but all of their problems. It is spreading to everything ( which is mostly all still due to large corporations but still ). And while "authority" figures may stand there with the media and criticize Occupy Wall Street and say that they're protesting and protesting but not saying what they want it's because they just want change. No one can continue to survive in this type of society. People with college degrees are starving because they have student loans to pay and its disgusting. So now It's like america is waking up and realizing the difference between dependency and interdependency. They're understanding that capitalism and neoliberal free trade policies are wrong, they're the problem.


There's an Occupy Denver and basically what is happening is a true democracy. Whenever there is a problem such as sanitation or recycling or electricity the people will go directly to the GA ( General Assembly) and tell them what they need help with and the GA will have someone go and take care of it within an hour or two.You dont have to go through representative after representative you go directly to this board of people and they fix it because people are beginning to realize it's not about who has the most power, it's about us all having a community to live in that we can love and appreciate. It's crazy too because everyone is realllly supportive; people from Denver support the UCD kids and the Denver kids all support the Boulder kids and everyone shows up at each others meetings and protests and its just crazy.

She's saying that the real target in this movement is the participants themselves. They're talking to each other, not someone else. The key line is this description is that "it's not about who has the most power, it's about us all having a community to live in that we can love and appreciate." They don't like the world as it is, so they are making a small piece of the world more to their tastes.

I don't know whether this program will succeed or whether it even can. But if my friend is right, and the people in Zucotti Square are sensing or pushing a paradigm shift, they will be at the front of something quite dramatic.

 And before you dismiss the idea of a paradigm shift, think on this: is the basic idea that we can run the world on internal combustion really working? We have to make so many radical maneuvers, some of which are extraordinarily destructive, to maintain this view of the world that we can't help but fail. And if the internal combustion engine goes away, what does the world look like? More like it does now, or like Zucotti Square?