Culture & Media
Occupy Wall Street’s Bittersweet Birthday
Two years ago the “Occupy” movement roared into view, summoning the energies and attention of large numbers of people who felt the economic system had got out of whack and were determined to do something about it.
Occupy put the issue of the nation’s savage inequality on the front pages, and focused America’s attention on what that inequality was doing to our democracy. To that extent, it was a stirring success.
But Occupy eschewed political organization, discipline, and strategy. It wanted to remain outside politics, and outside any hierarchical structure that might begin to replicate the hierarchies of American society it was opposing.
So when mayors, other public officials, and university administrators cleared the Occupy encampments by force — encampments that had become the symbol of the movement — nothing seemed to remain behind. Some Occupiers made plans for further actions, but a movement without structure, discipline, and strategy proved incapable of sustaining itself.
All major social-change movements in American history that widened opportunity and made this a more just society — women’s suffrage, the labor union movement, the civil rights movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, the environmental movement, the gay rights movement — have depended, to some extent, on leaders who helped guide them, and decision-making structures that provided discipline and strategy for those who joined.
These movements could sustain themselves over many years, sometimes many decades, because they consciously maintained hope on the basis of small but concrete victories, built their numbers by choosing their battles carefully and kept their eyes on the big prizes. They educated the public about what was at stake and then used public pressure to push elected representatives.
Occupy served an important purpose, but lacking these essentials it couldn’t do more. Inequality is worse now than it was then, and our democracy in as much if not more peril. So what’s the next step?
(Robert B. Reich, Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley, was Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration. Reposted from his website with permission.)
-
Latest NewsApril 10, 2024
The Transatlantic Battle to Stop Methane Gas Exports From South Texas
-
Latest NewsApril 23, 2024
A Whole-Person Approach to Combating Homelessness
-
Latest NewsMarch 27, 2024
Street Artists Say Graffiti on Abandoned L.A. High-Rises Is Disruptive, Divisive Art
-
State of InequalityApril 11, 2024
Dispelling the Stereotypes About California’s Low-Wage Workers
-
Latest NewsApril 24, 2024
An Author Reflects on the Effort to Rebuild L.A. After the ‘Violent Spring’ of 1992
-
State of InequalityMarch 28, 2024
Los Angeles Hotel Workers Could Use the 2028 Olympics to Their Advantage
-
Striking BackApril 12, 2024
Organizing the Slopes
-
State of InequalityApril 25, 2024
California Often Leads Change, but Not for Single-Payer Health Care