Nathan Schneider, one of the first journalists to cover the Occupy Wall Street movement, has written a feature for Al Jazeera entitled “From occupation to reconstruction“. Anyone who has experience in Occupy knows the reaction from other people since the major encampments were dispersed. What happened to Occupy? It seems to have been a total failure.
The truth is more complex. Schneider, more than any other journalist I’ve seen, catalogs the evolution from 2011 to today. This is both internationally and in America, as Occupy was not the original spark. There were student strikes in Chile, an ongoing radical revolution in Spain, the crisis in Greece. Some protestors I met were led to believe that this was unique and special, it’s important when charting a global movement to avoid chauvinism.
Occupy was not shattered, it flowed into the thousand crucial issues that its participants cared about. Anyone who visited an encampment or went on a march knew that Occupy was big-tent in the extreme. Through the large actions, formerly unacquainted people met, formed workgroups, and it went from there. All the national media coverage about a $15/hr minimum wage comes in large part from the energy of Occupy. Before Kshama Sawant was a member of the Seattle City Council, she was a an Occupy organizer. What $15/hr is, fundamentally, is the working class playing offense. It’s putting the American economic system on the table. Beyond a system where the employer and the corporate politician says what they will allow, the last year has seen a shift towards workers saying what they need. Occupy was a key part in translating a key phrase bandied about- when something is “bad for the economy” it’s often just bad for people in power. The economy is a lot more than a few billionaires. Or at least it should be.
For a year or more I had an Occupy hangover. I missed the mass turnout, the radical direct democracy, the egalitarian nature of an encampment. There are new developments, evolutions of what started in September 2011, and they’re something to get excited about. It’s the real deal. And each tangible victory in 2014 makes every word chanted in 2011 mean something more.
Unspoken Politics 