First there was the “Tea Party” and now there are the various “Occupy Wall Street” movements. The former was from its start better organized and financed than the latter, and one is on the right while the other is on the left, but both are responses to similar frustrations and fears besetting America. Analogous movements, some of them already heading toward more violent confrontations, are springing up in Europe as well.
All posts tagged Occupy
#OccupyDemocracy
On November 3rd occupiers amassed in an Oakland “general strike,” shutting down the entire port of Oakland for several hours. Over 3,000 people have been arrested in association with the Occupy protests since they began in New York on September 17th. Inspired by the citizen revolutions that unfolded this past spring across the Middle East and North Africa, occupations have spread to nearly every state in the United States, and gained traction in cities across the globe from London to Athens to Madrid to Bogotá. The occupations have succeeded in galvanizing a conversation—unseen since the 1970s—about equity, inequality, opportunity, the influence of money in politics, and the outsized power of corporations and financial institutions.
Global Solidarity and the Occupy Movement
On December 1, 2011, twenty-four people joined together in a small Pennsylvania town to show their solidarity with the protesters of Tahrir by targeting a company that makes tear gas used in the suppression of crowds in Tahrir Square. Their numbers were not great, but their example anticipates the kind of consequential solidarity that could develop globally. More than a message gone viral or a day of simultaneous protest about inequality’s injustice, focused actions that publicize the chains of injustice linking distant sites can transform the ways in which we think not only about solidarity, but the conditions movements seek to change.
The Oakland Commune
As a site of resistance, “Wall Street” is a metonym for a system, a transnational apparatus of capital and politicalMore…
Fear of a Slacker Revolution
You can learn a lot about a movement by listening to its opponents. Everywhere, evidence is accumulating that at the level of formal power relations, the targets of the Occupy Wall Street movement—banks, transnational corporations, and the politicians who serve them—are quaking in their boots at the sight of a mass, leaderless, flexible, inchoate, constantly morphing movement characterized by unprecedented solidarity across formerly separate and even antagonistic groups and by the use of direct, disruptive, and innovative tactics.
Feeding OWS
Diligence. Work. Revolution. My first night sleeping in Zuccotti Park, at about one in the morning, some be-suited white guyMore…
An Idea Whose Time Has Come
When I arrived at Zuccotti Park on the night of Tuesday, November 15th, I was struck by the way in which the mass of people was arranged and how the NYPD had turned the surrounding blocks into a paramilitary zone. I’d seen large numbers of people in Zuccotti Park before … This was a very different scene.
