The Occupy movement has done something amazing, getting Americans to start questioning our economic divides. It's created spaces for people to come together, voice their discontents and dreams, creatively challenge destructive greed. It's created powerful political theater, engaged community, an alternative to silence and powerlessness.
But it also faces major challenges. I'm fine that this new public commons isn't offering detailed platforms for change. We can find plenty in almost any Paul Krugman or Robert Kuttner column. Instead the movement has highlighted the destructive polarization of wealth while voicing what one young woman called "a cry for something better." And that's a major contribution. The movement and its allies now need to keep spreading this message to that majority of Americans who are sympathetic but have given up on the possibility of change. To reach those more resistant, who might respond if seriously engaged. To make the physical occupations not just ends in themselves, but bases where more and more people can participate, and find ways to publicly act. To keep momentum building even in the winter cold, and when media coverage fades. To find continuing ways for people to act without dissipating their energy in an array of fragmented efforts. And, although some participants would disagree, to become part of a broader movement that without muting its voice help bring about a better electoral outcome in 2012 than the disaster of 2010, when corporate interests prevailed again and again because those who would have rejected their lies stayed home.
One solution, which is beginning to happen, is for the movement to move to the neighborhoods, building on its existing efforts in hundreds of cities and towns. This doesn't mean abandoning the current encampments. At their best they've created powerful new centers for conversation, reflection, and creative action. People talk, brainstorm ideas, make posters and banners, draw in the curious, including those just passing by. In Seattle, even tourists riding the amphibious tour buses broke into cheers as they drove past. Participants tell stories of lost jobs, medical bills, and student debt, putting a human face on how they and so many others have been made expendable by a country that seems to care only for the wealthiest. Self-organized committees plan creative tactics, handle donations of food, address medical needs, reach out to the media, create innovative art projects, clean the occupation grounds, and ensure physical security. Common meals become a form of communion. The gatherings also convey a sense of festival, inviting in those not yet involved with puppets colorful banners, drum circles radical marching bands, signs saying "I'll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one," and people dressed up as predatory billionaires, Lady Liberty and dollar spewing zombies who chant "I smell money, I smell money." The spirit of play echoes the defiant folk and hip hop music of Tahir Square and the Gandhi meets Monty Python approaches of the Serbian youth movement Otpur, who helped train the initial Tahir Square occupiers.
But for all the value of creating visible protest communities in the centers of our cities, for all the powerful stories and Dadaist humor, most Americans are still watching from a distance, at most passive spectators. So maybe the rest of us. who are about these issues but aren't ready to sleep on the hard cold ground, need to build on the opening that this movement has created to consciously reach out to the rest of America. To the degree that the occupations have led the media to even briefly question America's fundamental divides is a victory. But it's not one that we can count on indefinitely. So we need to find creative ways to take the key issues that the movement's placed on the public agenda to every neighborhood, community, workplace and campus, even those that don't seem natural hotbeds of change.
This could mean extending the existing protests to places they haven't yet reached. Bank of America, Chase, Wells Fargo and Citibank branches are everywhere. So are Exxon/Mobil stations, symbols to challenge that corporation's avoidance of taxes and massive funding of climate change denial. So are the offices of regressive elected officials and candidates. Local Harlem residents just met at a local church to launch Occupy Harlem. In my Seattle neighborhood activists criss-cross a major intersection every weekend holding banners and talking about the Iraq war and unaccountable corporate power, and our main Occupy encampment recently shifted from a downtown plaza to a community college a dozen blocks away, where their presence has grown to 150 tents and they've coexisted amicably with classes, campus events, and a weekend farmers market. For the movement to make progress, it's going to have to do more along these lines--not just hope that if they build enough tent cities and hold creative enough marches change will come.
The people camping don't have to be the same ones working in the neighborhoods. That may be a task best suited for long-standing activist organizations, whose participants have deeper local roots--organizations that might also help find resources to shelter the Occupiers in visible sympathetic churches or union halls as we head into winter. Whatever happens to the physical occupations if we're to build on the powerful momentum that they've created, we're going to need to take the issues they've raised into face-to-face communities, like local businesses and churches, cafes and clubs soccer leagues and Rotary associations. The occupations have played a powerful role in highlighting America's profound economic disparities. But it's up to us to take this message to all the diverse communities we ultimately need to reach. We can't trust capricious and compromised media outlets to adequately translate it and relying on our own social media gives us far too narrow a reach.
Fortunately, models exist for the kind of systematic grassroots outreach that could fuel the movement's next stage. Here are a half dozen that might offer lessons:.
If the Occupy movement is going to find a similarly fertile path as these movements, it's going to have to let go of grandiose revolutionary dreams like the sentiments of a student who told me, "If we're following the Arab Spring model we have to demand that all the politicians step down. Then Americans can meet and decide what to do." Except that Egypt didn't have real elections and we do, however compromised by wealth-driven lies. So while the encampments and marches need to maintain their independent voice, enough of us are going to have to engage the messy electoral terrain to overcome the millions of dollars that will be pumped in for anonymous attack ads by people like Karl Rove, the Koch Brothers, the predatory banks and the oil and coal companies. If the Occupiers stay too contained in their familiar enclaves, or steer people away from electoral participation, they risk helping those at the top prevail even more.
That's a real possibility given the blanket dismissal of voting by far too many of the Occupy participants I've spoken with, or at least of voting within the two party system. The constantly repeated phrase "they're all corrupt," has its truths, but it also slams the courageous along with the compromised, and masks the major difference between politicians who disappoint us because we haven't pressed them hard enough, and ones who've been doing their best to make the entire country and planet available for open season plunder. If we want to avoid permanently enshrining the reign of the one percent, we might remember the Citizen's United decision, where five Republican justices opened the floodgates for money to dominate politics as never before. If any of the current Republican candidates get to appoint one more justice, we'll lock in similar decisions for the next 30 years. We might also remember the Disclose Act, which would have at least required corporations and wealthy individuals to visibly put their names on ads and mailers that they funded. Every Democratic Senator voted for it, even those most compromised with corporate dollars, but it fell one vote short when it couldn't get a single Republican backer. The result, combined with a massive drop-off from a disillusioned Democratic base, was a wave of anonymously funded attack ads that swung election after election, from legislative, Congressional and Senate seats to electing governors like Scott Walker, Rick Scott and John Kasich, who promptly disenfranchised voters, gutted education and social service budgets, busted unions, stripped away environmental protections, and handed out ever-more massive tax breaks to the rich.
I'm not suggesting the Occupy movement subordinate itself to Obama, the Democrats, or any other party or individual. Part of the tragedy of the past three years is that we didn't have vital independent movements pushing both parties to deal with unemployment, foreclosures, and America's massive economic divides. But nothing stops the Occupiers and their supporters from raising their key issues as clearly and powerfully as possible, while reminding people that showing up at the polls still matters. The alternative is a revolutionary purism, where instead of registering voters like the Tea Party did, and reaching out to engage those on the fence, Occupy participants and their supporters stay home and hand the 2012 election to people who represent everything they loathe.
Like participants in previous movements for justice, the Occupiers need to avoid the false choices between protest and organizing, community building and electoral involvement, surrealist theater and the grunt work of change. The criticisms they raise go beyond any single election, Congressional bill, or policy shift. They need to keep raising them, but in ways that keep spiraling out. If they can trigger enough conversations in communities as yet untouched by their voices, they have a chance to prevail. But they have to recognize that the powerful public presence they've created is just a beginning.
Paul Loeb is author of Soul of a Citizen, with 130,000 copies in print including a newly updated second edition. He's also the author of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, named the #3 political book of 2004 by the History Channel and the American Book Association. See www.paulloeb.org. To receive Paul's articles directly, see www.paulloeb.org/subscribe.html You can sign up here for his Huffington Post articles.
Follow Paul Loeb on Twitter: www.twitter.com/paulloeb
Christine A. Scheller: Protesting Greed in the Shadow of 9/11
Michael J. Hunt: Occupy Oakland Deposits OWS Funds WHERE? Protest Group's Bank Choice Shocker
Occupy Wall Street | NYC Protest for American Revolution
About Us | OccupyWallSt.org - Occupy Wallstreet
Occupy Wall Street : Pictures, Videos, Breaking News
Think Occupy Wall St. is a phase? You don't get it - CNN.com
Lynn
BC, Canada
Might be worth looking at what happened after the Great Depression as a model for action, from what little I've read, there were demonstrations all over like the current Occupy movement, but wasn't there also a big shin-dig in DC?
But maybe you're fine with things as they are--most of us are not.
I might be interest. Right now it is my own conviction for Non-Violence and my teachers Gandhi, Christ, Buddha and Krishna
No one I follow in these Modern Times, at all
At the same time, while the much larger percentage of discussion/organizing/action can be done outside the political process (there is much that can be done that does not require the approval of any government body, local, state, or national), it is counterproductive to ignore the political process. We've seen the threatening effects of the sweeping election of repub/tea party politicians to many of the freedoms people enjoy that make occupations possible. We don't want to permit these radical lawmakers to take them away. Further, electing politicians that actively support (or who at least simpathetic to the) issues and solutions will make it much easier to usher in the kinds of change people want to see.
This means pushing politicians to the people, not automatically falling in line behind the politician.
America, divided in the senate a hundred times twice in each state, the House more like a crazed picture puzzle, is where elections are decided not under a cold tent. To get from the tent to the bubble that is a neighborhood, yes Democrats live in the same area as do Republicans is a thousand times harder then yelling at a bank.
To do this you need a pin to burst the security and political bubble 90% of Americans live in. You need a real to the core statement beyond bad banks making money. You need a face Americans can look at and a voice they will listen to!
So far the core idea is lacking and the voice and face is hidden. Unless the radical groups can get the harried mother of three to listen, propose a real set of ideas that will help home town people they will be a media circus and a small dot in the history books.
Average American
Look at the elections of last Tuesday. I'm not saying Occupy was responsible for all of it, but at least a good chunk of it - a total repudiation of right wing extremism (the teapublicon/Wall Street/Kocj Bros/1%).
from sand, abundantly populated oceans from dead seas, or complex ecosystems from the ruins of a depleted environment. When we expand our definition of profit to include that which benefits life - and when we reward industry for improving social profit - is perhaps when we will experience a better, more humane and harmonious world.
History can provide many lessons that Socialism doesn't work in the long term, The late 60's co-op living and recent Greece are recent example's
The American economy was based on Capitalism and when keep pure form government mismanagement is the best system for the masses. Look at Russia, China and know even Cuba are moving towards a more open Capitalism....
Socialism teaches that Nothing is Free! even though many would like a free ride.