Occupy – the impact and legacy

8.1    The pre-occupation

To many in the outside world, and in particular members of the global elite and mainstream media establishment in the U.S., the outbreak of protests on Wall Street appeared spontaneous. As they’re wont to do, journalists and photographers flocked to the sensational, the lurid, the weird. Unsurprisingly, the initial impression the majority of onlookers received through the lens of the predominantly corporate-owned media was one of stereotypical flaky kids, hippies, granola guzzlers and tie-die enthusiasts, wandering minstrels with four-string guitars, ‘60s rejects, malcontented ingénues with some growing up to do. Not only was much of the early coverage of Occupy Wall Street slanted and skewed, it also failed to reflect the motivations of the majority of protesters, failed to ascertain the movement’s rationale, and failed to appreciate the months of planning that had preceded it (Gitlin, 2012).

Contrary to the general sentiment of novelty and spontaneity among outsiders, and oblivious derision that rained down from the heights of power, community organizers had in fact begun to plan the congregation well in advance. Kalle Lasn’s Adbusters issued the “call to occupy,” along with the post-script “Bring a tent,” on June 9. On June 14, a group of anti-austerity protesters established “Bloombergville” in Zuccotti Park—a tent village inspired by the Hoovervilles of the 1930s—which held daily general assemblies during its brief lifespan. On August 2, a group of activists gathered at the Wall Street bull for a preliminary planning session—a precursor to what would later become the Occupy General Assembly. By September 17, hashtags and chatter related to the occupation had spread broadly, and by November 15, the movement had inspired more than 4.4 million tweets, and hundreds of thousands of posts on blogs and other social fora. Social media thus represented, in a way reminiscent of the Arab Spring uprisings, a redoubtable vehicle for sharing information among activists and observers, a forum by which organizers could coordinate their plans, sympathizers, share and reaffirm their grievances, and political thinkers, expound on the causes they hoped to champion.

For the initial weeks of the Zuccotti Park occupation, demonstrators bemoaned a “media blackout.” But this was not entirely the case; rather, news articles and features began to appear in various media soon after Sept. 17, but few were sympathetic to OWS. One of the first analytical articles on the Manhattan encampment came from Ginia Bellafante of the New York Times on Sept. 23, 2011—under the headline “Gunning for Wall Street, with Faulty Aim.” Bellafante’s piece portrayed the movement as disorganized, dominated by “hippies” and fringe elements, intellectually vacuous, and lacking in clarity, articulacy, coherence and leadership. At least as memorable as Bellafante’s appraisal was a segment of CNN anchor Erin Burnett’s program OutFront in October, which ridiculed the protests and questioned Occupy’s raison d’etre given that, Burnett asserted, the big banks had already repaid their bailout funds to the U.S. treasury, with interest. (This statement was later proven incorrect in spectacular fashion, when a Nov. 2011 audit of the U.S. Federal Reserve revealed $7.7 trillion in loan guarantees that had been hidden from the American people—$111 billion of which was earmarked for a capital injection into Canada’s largest banks that the Canadian government continues to disavow.)

Likewise, Occupy was not without precedent, having been inspired by the Arab Spring, the Indignados Movement and labour unrest in Madison, Wisconsin that same year (Castells, 2012). But it also stood on the shoulders of decades of American resistance movements that preceded it: from the battle for universal suffrage beginning in the 19th century; to labour unrest during the Great Depression; the civil rights and anti-war demonstrations of the 1960s; anti-nuclear and environmental protests in the 1970s and ‘80s; and uprisings against economic globalization and corporate hegemony in the 1990s and 2000s. Occupy not only shared the spirit of protest movements from years past, but borrowed and built upon their tactics as well. Like a living organism, the art of resistance evolves from one generation to the next, and OWS, in 2011, was merely the latest manifestation of the force of popular dissent that has won millions of people the freedoms they now enjoy (Gitlin, 2012; Zinn, 2010).

8.2    The General Assembly: hand signals, horizontality, consensus, and their origins

Many aspects of the process and manner of organization characteristic of Occupy owe their origins to prior social movements and institutions. The General Assembly was introduced into the Civil Rights movement by the Quakers in the 1960s, but has roots in antiquity, having played an instrumental role in the consensus decision-making of Athenian direct democracy. The eight primary hand signals used by Occupy protesters—raising one’s hand to speak, pointing to elicit a direct response, curling one’s hand into the shape of a letter “c” to request clarification, or forming a letter “o” with one’s thumbs and forefingers to issue a point of order, “twinkling” and “de-twinkling” one’s fingers to display approval or disapproval, the raised fist of opposition and the crossed forearms indicating a “block”— all trace their origins to prior social movements. The concept of horizontality—or horizontalidad—first emerged during popular uprisings in 2001 in Argentina, in the wake of that country’s own devastating financial crisis. The intent of this mode of group organization and dynamics was to eliminate hierarchy within political movements, which served the dual purpose of averting cults of personality, power struggles and envy, and of engendering a revolt whose leaders the powers that be could not undermine through systematic campaigns of character assassination (or, as in the case of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., physical assassination).

Marina Sitrin, an Occupy organizer who has been involved in various working groups within the movement, described the solidarity shown by many New Yorkers on one of the first nights the Zuccotti Park protesters faced eviction, as one of the more memorable moments of her Occupy experience.

In a show of support for the Zuccotti occupation, and even at risk of personal arrest, Sitrin recalls, “people mobilized from throughout the city, from all different sectors…[University students, union members, high school students and parents] came, beginning around 4:30-5:00 in the morning, from all around New York City.”

“It was a moment where Occupy was clearly something much bigger than what was happening in the park.”

Occupy has also added to the repertoire of protest a few innovations of its own—like the “Human Mic”—which arose from a need for non-electronic vocal amplification, in response to a New York City bylaw prohibiting the use of electronics. While some of the protesters’ chants will be familiar to veterans of popular dissent, like “Whose streets? Our streets!”, “The people, united, will never be defeated!”, or “Hey hey, ho ho! The status quo has got to go!”, at least one novel chant emerged from OWS and became the movement’s signature rallying cry: “We…are…the 99 per cent!” In due course, these tactics spread, disseminated through the use of social media, to sister Occupations throughout the continent, and eventually around the world.

8.3    Other occupations materialize

Occupy’s encampments were deliberately designed to represent microcosms of a collectivist, sustainable society, of the sort Occupiers hope will prevail in the future, but the specific logistics of which remain more theoretical than concrete. Whilst populating public spaces, Occupy campers have developed their own models of political economy and division of labour, their own libraries and places of learning, their own methods of resource allocation and citizen engagement. Participants in the Occupy movement aspire to an ideal of co-operative living, consensus-based decision-making, sustainability, egalitarianism, a robust and accessible public commons that encourages the sharing of ideas, and the prioritization of “people before profit.” But the Occupy sociopolitical model has not been without its challenges, setbacks and regrets: laborious general assemblies that tested Occupiers’ patience and commitment to the consensus approach; the incidence of problems from the wider world, like male sexual violence against women, drug and alcohol abuse, homelessness, racism, and petty crime; painful but necessary confrontations arising from patriarchy and various forms of privilege; police crackdowns and mass arrests; chilly and inclement weather that tried the mettle of even the most dedicated activists.

Reflecting on his experience in the movement, Occupy Vancouver organizer and Simon Fraser University professor Stephen Collis recalls a time of euphoria and novelty, of shifting paradigms and cognitive challenges, of learning new lessons and relearning old ones, of hostilities and perceptions imported from society at large and the struggle to overcome them, and of that unique form of camaraderie and solidarity that emerges when people who share common desires, but envision disparate ways to attain them, confront challenges together.

Collis was motivated to join the movement, he explained, by a feeling of dissatisfaction with the unequal structure of Western capitalist society, a circumstance he felt was worsening rather than improving in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, as governments in the industrialized world resorted to austerity measures in an effort to clean up a mess left by unscrupulous, billionaire bankers.

“Their [governments’] response to the economic crisis was to make poor people pay the burden, and use public funds to bail out people at the top, cut programs for people at the bottom,” he recalls. “It seemed as though their response to inequality was, ‘Well, let’s just really increase the inequality, and see if that gets us out of this somehow.’”

“So, when the Occupy movement happened, it seemed like a real chance to at least gather with people who were, similarly, feeling frustrated, and talk about that, and see what common ground there was, what kind of world people would actually prefer to live in.”

To justify a collective embrace of austerity, numerous policymakers throughout the Western capitalist sphere have cited a study by economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard University, claiming that countries with a debt-to-GDP ratio near or above 90 per cent would begin to experience declining economic growth. (Leave aside the fact that perpetual economic growth is a questionable priority in the first place.) However, the deduction of Reinhart and Rogoff was illogical; it drew no distinction between countries with sovereign currencies and Eurozone states, or between those (like the U.S.A.) with a formidable stockpile of commodity assets and others (like Belgium) with virtually none. Moreover, their argument did not consider the role of privately held debt even in passing. The authors also mistook correlation for causation and, more embarrassingly, committed a crucial arithmetic error by copy-pasting the wrong column of figures in an Excel spreadsheet. Despite all this, the findings of Reinhart and Rogoff were immediately adopted as gospel by credulous economists and politicians alike, before finally being debunked in April of 2013 by Thomas Herndon, an astute 28-year-old graduate student at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

But despite the disintegration of any semblance of a sound evidentiary foundation for their budget cuts, both main political parties in the U.S., the Harper government in Canada, and technocratic administrations in the European Union all remain steadfast in their conviction that further cutbacks—and, correspondingly, further increases in the wealth disparity between the richest and the poorest in society—are the key to future economic prosperity.

In the process, critical government programs and services are being slashed, eliminated, or underfunded, billions of dollars are being systematically siphoned out of the global economy and into corporate coffers, growth in gross domestic product is stalling, contracting or anemic in most Western capitalist democracies, and millions of civilians are losing their jobs, their homes, their livelihood, and in extreme cases, even their lives. Meanwhile, multinational corporations and private equity buccaneers are swooping in to buy up the assets cash-strapped administrations are relinquishing—like Greece’s gold stocks, Ecuador’s Yasuni oilfield, Cyprus’s natural gas, and Ireland’s offshore hydrocarbons—often at a discount, in an effort to move expenses off the public books and settle debts. In Spain, and to a lesser extent in the U.K., universal healthcare systems  have been privatized in the governmental scramble to de-leverage. In the U.S., “sequestration” cuts have denuded many program budgets. And in Canada, the federal administration has effected deep budget reductions that threaten services Canadians depend on (like food inspection, environmental monitoring, and funding for emergency assistance by the Canadian Forces).

“When I look back on 2011, the Harper government had just been elected to a majority, and I don’t think we knew yet, the extreme program that they were going to set out upon,” Collis recounts. “And Occupy, here in Canada, wasn’t a direct response to Harper and his policies, but the ideology that he represented was very clearly what people [who participated in the movement] were opposing.”

Collis admits that he is somewhat mystified that the outcry against the government’s policy agenda has not been louder or more sustained. After Canadian Occupy encampments were forced to disband in November of 2011, mass popular resistance has—at least where appearances are concerned—fizzled out.

“I guess it could be that whole ‘frog in a pot of water’ kinda thing, where it’s not got really bad yet for most Canadians,” he speculates, “even though it is really bad for a lot of Canadians.”

A democracy survives when its citizens have access to trustworthy and impartial sources of information, when it can discern lies from truth, when civic discourse is grounded in verifiable fact. And with the decimation of reporting these sources of information are disappearing. The increasing fusion of news and entertainment, the rise of a class of celebrity journalists on television who define reporting by their access to the famous and the powerful, the retreat by many readers into the ideological ghettos of the Internet and the ruthless drive by corporations to destroy the traditional news business are leaving us deaf, dumb and blind. The relentless assault on the “liberal press” by right-wing propaganda outlets such as Fox News or by the Christian right is in fact an assault on a system of information grounded in verifiable fact. And once this bedrock of civil discourse is eradicated, people will be free, as many already are, to believe whatever they want to believe, to pick and choose what facts or opinions suit their world and what do not. In this new world lies will become true.

Christopher Hedges, “Lies Become Truths.” Truthdig.

The casualties of the modern corporate state are many, but the deterioration of a truly free press is among the most consequential. As large, profit-driven corporations glean increasing market shares in the dissemination of knowledge, news coverage shifts appreciably in their favour—and public opinion follows.

“Public broadcasting and public knowledge are being slashed, which by default leaves knowledge production to the for-profit model, and the for-profit model is based on selling advertising space, or selling virtual goods,” remarks Bakan. “And if you’re selling advertising space, you’re selling to people who can afford it, and if they can afford it, they’re going to be the people who don’t want a lot of critical stuff in the vehicle where they’re placing their ads.”

“People aren’t stupid,” he says, “but they are dependent in terms of forming their views on the information that’s out there. And when you have such a coherent and narrow message being delivered by the mainstream media with no challenges at all, or challenges around the edges…that the state shouldn’t be involved [in the economy], austerity is the right approach…you can’t fault the people, the citizens, for kind of buying into that.”

Indeed, in the U.S., President Clinton also made his mark in deregulation of the Federal Communications Commission, which allowed for the transformation of the country’s news media apparatus into a narrow oligopoly, thrusting 90 per cent of the traditional U.S. mainstream media into the grip of six multinational corporations: Disney, ClearChannel, Viacom, General Electric, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation and AOL/Time Warner. (For comparison’s sake, this market share was divided among 53 distinct enterprises in 1983.) All of these entities still perform credible reportage on news and current affairs, but cutbacks at foreign bureaus and investigative departments, along with corporate influence over editorial departments, have diminished the breadth and depth of news coverage these organizations are able to offer.

The situation in Canada is arguably even direr. At the time of this writing, a single corporation—Postmedia Network Inc.—controls newspapers in multiple major cities across the country, including National Post, the Vancouver Sun, the Vancouver Province, the Montreal Gazette, and the Ottawa Citizen. Canada’s other national newspaper, the Globe and Mail, makes the pretense of delivering balanced information, but neoliberal assumptions underlie much of its coverage of economic issues, including “free” trade agreements and austerity.

Canada still features an independent broadcaster in the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, but cutbacks in recent years have forced the Crown corporation to downsize. Moreover, the public broadcaster has a tendency to seek multi-partisan “impartiality” and “objectivity” in its political coverage, and is typically conservative in its deference to extant institutions and the (neoliberal) capitalist economic system—conventions that sometimes work to the detriment of critical analysis. The organization also tends to reflect the relatively socially liberal and politically correct attitudes of the majority of Canadians, a predilection that galvanizes critics from the ideological right. One of the CBC’s self-proclaimed competitors, Sun Media—labeled “Fox News North” by its detractors—features commentators who still consider the public broadcaster an overly liberal institution, and are unsurprisingly keen to see its government funding eliminated.

Min Reyes—like Collis, an organizer of Occupy Vancouver—admits that she does not have the fondest memories of the manner in which the Canadian mainstream media sought to frame and represent the movement.

“The media was just brutal,” she chuckled. “I have to say that media played a huge role in bringing Occupy down…in demonizing Occupy, and making it irrelevant to the struggles of everyday people.”

More than a year after the occupation of the Vancouver Art Gallery courtyard in Vancouver dissolved under a provincial Supreme Court injunction, for Reyes, the wounds have had time to scar over. But the memories remain fresh.

“I think in the beginning, the media was trying to understand Occupy in the Canadian context…but you could kind of tell, with the people they picked, and the quotes they picked…they were selecting people that reflected what they already thought about Occupy, either personally or organizationally. And they viewed Occupy as a group of, well, kinda lazy people.”

Among the news commentary that stood out in Reyes’s mind, was an October 2011 piece by well known columnist Andrew Coyne, who attributed Canadian Occupiers’ motivations to “envy” rather than legitimate grievances.

The bulk of Canadian commentators and columnists, particularly those in English Canada, in Reyes’s view, are overly preoccupied with their own preconceived notions about protest movements. And in the case of Occupy, it was their failure to draw connections between the federal government’s misdemeanours and the protest movement that vexed her.

“When Occupy died down, when all these scandals started happening in government,” like the F-35 debacle and revelations about deceptive robocalls during the 2011 federal election, Reyes recounted, “some of these writers wrote articles where they asked ‘Where’s the outrage?’ And I’m like, ‘Hello? We’re outraged. Remember Occupy and all these issues?’”

“Oh, of course. You thought [Occupy] was just about us being, like, jealous of rich people.”

U.S. President Clinton may have set the standard in the modern era for political representatives of the “left” who sold out to neoliberalism and corporate power. But he’s not alone by any stretch of the imagination. His gambit has been emulated by parties of the supposed left, particularly in the industrialized Northern countries, for decades. And current U.S. President Barack Obama has, in contrast to the campaign promises that instilled renewed optimism in millions of young Americans who buoyed his election victory in 2008, continued the trend toward policies that favour corporate America—like a health care law that legally cornered the health market on behalf of medical insurance companies, and continuing bank bailouts and financial support for Wall Street. Much of this has come at the expense of U.S. taxpayers, many of whose public services continue to face steep funding reductions, and the working class, which has watched its net worth and earning potential decline.

Little wonder, then, that stock markets and corporate profits surged to record highs in 2012, under Obama’s tenure.

Neoliberalism has, by and large, seduced the left with its promises of power and fineries, eliciting an array of false reformists, of wolves in sheep’s clothing. There was British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his vision for a New Labour, which manifested as little more than Thatcherism with a friendlier face, and an all-too-willing vim for the War in Iraq. There was Canada’s Liberal Party under the steely grip of Jean Chretien, which bought wholesale into the dubious mantra of trade liberalization post-NAFTA, and undertook the most severe austerity program in Canada’s modern history in the mid-1990s, vitiating both transfers to individuals and to the provinces in order to avert slamming into a largely fictitious “debt wall.” The Liberals’ policy decisions in the 1990s drove a wedge between the wealthiest and poorest Canadians that continues to grow, along with household debt.

Federal New Democrat Thomas Mulcair has thus far responded to media pressure to become “electable” by shifting his New Democrats decidedly toward the centre of the political spectrum. How much further to the right he will permit the party to drift in the name of having a shot to lead the country—and whether a merger with the Liberal party will enter the realm of possibility—remains to be seen.

The Liberals’ spritely new leader Justin Trudeau, meantime, has selected a former oil industry lobbyist, Cyrus Reporter, as his chief of staff—indicating that the Liberal Party will remain “Plan B” for Canadian oil sands profiteers, just as Barack Obama was (in fact) “Plan A” for Wall Street in both 2008 and 2012. And the return on investment for America’s too-big-to-fail firms has been spectacular.

The Political Compass, a website devoted to analysis of politics and ideology, described the 2012 U.S. presidential election—between Democratic incumbent Obama and his Republican challenger Mitt Romney—as follows:

This is a U.S. election that defies logic and brings the nation closer towards a one-party state masquerading as a two-party state.The Democratic incumbent has surrounded himself with conservative advisors and key figures—many from previous administrations, and an unprecedented number from the Trilateral Commission. He also appointed a former Monsanto executive as Senior Advisor to the FDA. He has extended Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, presided over a spiralling rich-poor gap and sacrificed further American jobs with recent free trade deals. Trade union rights have also eroded under his watch. He has expanded Bush defence spending, droned civilians, failed to close Guantanamo, supported the NDAA which effectively legalizes martial law, allowed drilling and adopted a soft-touch position towards the banks that is to the right of European Conservative leaders. Taking office during the financial meltdown, Obama appointed its principle architects to top economic positions. We list these because many of Obama’s detractors absurdly portray him as either a radical liberal or a socialist, while his apologists, equally absurdly, continue to view him as a well-intentioned progressive, tragically thwarted by overwhelming pressures. 2008’s yes-we-can chanters, dazzled by pigment rather than policy detail, forgot to ask can what? Between 1998 and the last election, Obama amassed $37.6 million from the financial services industry, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. While 2008 presidential candidate Obama appeared to champion universal health care, his first choice for Secretary of Health was a man who had spent years lobbying on behalf of the pharmaceutical industry against that very concept…This time around, the honey-tongued President makes populist references to economic justice, while simultaneously appointing as his new Chief of Staff a former Citigroup executive concerned with hedge funds that bet on the housing market to collapse. Obama poses something of a challenge to The Political Compass, because he’s a man of so few fixed principles.

As outrageous as it may appear, civil libertarians and human rights supporters would have actually fared better under a Republican administration. Had a Bush or McCain presidency permitted extrajudicial executions virtually anywhere in the world, expanded drone strikes and introduced the NDAA, the Democratic Party would have howled from the rooftops. Senator Obama the Constitutional lawyer would have been one of the most vocal objectors. Under a Democratic administration however, these far-reaching developments have received scant opposition and a disgraceful absence of mainstream media coverage.

As author, cultural critic and former New York Times war correspondent Christopher Hedges observes, America is subject to “a rigged political system, one in which it is impossible to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, General Electric or ExxonMobil” (Hedges, “The Day That TV News Died.”). In Europe, so-called “liberal” and “socialist” parties have slavishly bought into austerity measures, exposing the European social democratic model to the avaricious claws of multinational capital. And increasingly, the same is becoming true of Canada, where none of the parties that stands a chance of winning the federal election can reasonably be expected to usher in substantive reforms that run contrary to the interests of the corporate elite, in the absence of sustained pressure from the citizenry. In this new reality, there is, more and more, only one option, one exercise of genuine democracy still available to activists who hold out hope for a better world, and that is mass protest.

But the neoliberal state, devoted to the service and protection of major corporations and powerful financial interests, is decidedly unenthusiastic about permitting street protests to overstay their welcome.

 11.1   If you can’t beat them…beat them harder

Stand ye calm and resolute,

Like a forest close and mute,

With folded arms and looks which are

Weapons of unvanquished war.

And if then the tyrants dare,

Let them ride among you there,

Slash, and stab, and maim and hew,

What they like, that let them do.

With folded arms and steady eyes,

And little fear, and less surprise

Look upon them as they slay

Till their rage has died away.

Then they will return with shame

To the place from which they came,

And the blood thus shed will speak

In hot blushes on their cheek.

Rise like Lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number,

Shake your chains to earth like dew

Which in sleep had fallen on you—

Ye are many—they are few.

– Percy Bisshe Shelley, “The Masque of Anarchy”

Although Occupy was a distinct, purposive political uprising in its own right, in many ways, the G20 Summit in Toronto in 2010 provided a premonition of what was to come in Oakland and other Occupy encampments the following year.

The response of law enforcement to the G20 protests was swift and severe—bringing to bear the tactic of “kettling,” or surrounding and entrapping protesters in a small area in order to arrest “persons of interest”—of which a total of 600 were captured.

In fairness to the police responsible for the maintenance of law and order during the G20 summit, the perception that the protests had descended into mayhem was not unwarranted. Black Blocs, noted for their predilection to inflict property damage on business establishments, smash windows, and even set police cars alight, were engaged in their usual tactics. In the mind of the black-clad battalions, the destruction of private property is an activity distinct from physical violence against civilians, and it’s a distinction about which adherents to the anarchist organization’s foundational principles remain adamant.

However, the group’s methods have also drawn justifiable criticism from detractors. One of the most vociferous of these critics is Occupy participant and writer Christopher Hedges, who points out that Black Bloc adventures in property destruction, which in some cases have endangered small business owners and journalists, tend to be counterproductive to one of the most important objectives of a mass movement: namely, to win hearts and minds among the public.

A year after one of the most prominent demonstrations of Black Bloc “diversity of tactics” in recent memory, similar circumstances would play out in multiple Occupy venues. And arguably the most spectacular confrontation between police and militant anarchists took place in Northern California. 

11.2   Oakland

“I would rather die on my feet, than live on my knees.” – Emiliano Zapata

It was more sophisticated than we had imagined: new documents show that the violent crackdown on Occupy last fall – so mystifying at the time – was not just coordinated at the level of the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and local police. The crackdown, which involved, as you may recall, violent arrests, group disruption, canister missiles to the skulls of protesters, people held in handcuffs so tight they were injured, people held in bondage till they were forced to wet or soil themselves –was coordinated with the big banks themselves.

The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, in a groundbreaking scoop that should once more shame major US media outlets (why are nonprofits now some of the only entities in America left breaking major civil liberties news?), filed this request. The document shows a terrifying network of coordinated DHS, FBI, police, regional fusion center, and private-sector activity so completely merged into one another that the monstrous whole is, in fact, one entity: in some cases, bearing a single name, the Domestic Security Alliance Council. And it reveals this merged entity to have one centrally planned, locally executed mission. The documents, in short, show the cops and DHS working for and with banks to target, arrest, and politically disable peaceful American citizens.

– Naomi Wolf, “Revealed: How the FBI coordinated the crackdown on Occupy.”

http://www.democracynow.org/2011/11/16/police_crackdowns_on_occupy_protests_from

Like so many municipalities in the U.S., Oakland and its citizens have suffered under the ravages of urban decay, the degradation of critical programs and infrastructure, violence, injustice, fraudulent sub-prime lending and wrongful foreclosures, all of it perpetuated and exacerbated by a corrupt economic system, and a political establishment that has failed to uphold the best interests of the citizenry. By the fall of 2011, thousands of Oaklanders decided they’d had enough. Like their counterparts in cities across America and around the world, they set up camp in a public space—in Oakland’s case, a plaza contiguous with City Hall named for Japanese-American activist and city councillor Frank Ogawa—and laid down the roots of a de facto community.

Occupy Oakland would soon garner a reputation for its remarkable staying power, even in the face of a police crackdown characterized by—quite literally—breathtaking violence.

Journalist Abby Martin, founder of the independent news blog Media Roots, and host of Breaking the Set on RT America, covered two police raids of the encampment at Frank Ogawa Plaza, and managed to record video of the events as they unfolded—at considerable risk to her personal safety. She responded to my questions via e-mail.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13WaOp95d0M

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rgn4IXHyVdI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Tu_D8SFYck

“My experience was one of shock – shock that such a harsh police presence would show up to tear gas and spray people sleeping in tents with rubber bullets in the middle of the night,” Martin recounted.

“People were beaten, kettled and subjected to crowd control methods for little to no reason multiple times in front of me.”

Among the tactics police used against the non-violent protesters: tear gas, flash grenades, rubber bullets, and helicopters outfitted with searchlights. While similar forms of state repression took place at Occupy encampments elsewhere, the crackdown on Oakland was particularly severe, because the demonstrators in Oakland were uncommonly persistent.

At first, the Oakland police raids seemed to backfire. Rather than frightening protesters off as they’d been intended to do, the attacks seemed to galvanize support for the Occupy Oakland cause, Martin recalls.

“The mood after the initial raid was anger, and mass organizing followed by the masses in the city,” she writes. “I think people in the community who didn’t necessarily care about Occupy’s cause at all initially became very upset with the way OWS was treated and ended up joining the efforts of the movement.”

But it was short lived. As the protesters bent but refused to break, the police intensified their assault.

“Occupy Oakland organized a massive May Day shutdown of the city and march to the ports of Oakland,” she recalls. “After that there was another crackdown and an attempt to re-occupy some spaces. But since the police were relentless, people eventually gave up and the movement there on out tapered.”

Collis recalls how the physical removal of Occupy encampments in late October and November of 2011 took place, in a seemingly coordinated fashion, within a brief window of time.

“Camping in a public square…ultimately is not a desirable goal. That was simply a tactic that forced the issue for a while,” he explained. “Which it very clearly did, [as evidenced by] the fact that the state, everywhere, in a very rapid fashion—in a matter of weeks—decided to physically remove all these camps.”

“[The respective authorities] all found different excuses and reasons to do that, and took different measures to eliminate that idea of camping in public.”

Despite its physical demise, however, Martin believes the movement’s achievements were significant.

“People say [OWS] is dead,” she said, “but it was literally beat out of existence.”

“The main thing [OWS] did was create awareness about class issues and the systemic problems all being rooted from the same system.”

Collis agrees.

“[Occupy’s] real gain was to add some fuel to the idea of people having agency, of change being possible…it was an adrenaline boost for people who desire, or are working toward, social change,” he says.

“And now you see the Quebec student movement, you see Idle No More, there’s more energy in the last couple years in the housing and rent movement here in Vancouver. All of these things, I think, we’re seeing because of the adrenaline that Occupy pumped back into the system.”

Detractors of the Occupy movement, particularly as it carried on into the late fall of 2011, began to increase in number. Some of the more strident criticism, as expected, came from the corporate class, Fox News, and right-wing pundits, who alleged that the movement’s emphasis on an effective class struggle—1% versus 99%—lent it an air of entitlement, or even Marxism. More common and mainstream, though, was the contention that Occupy had begun to lose track of its initial purpose by November of 2011, that its objectives were overly disparate, that its encampments had become unhygienic, unsightly and a nuisance, and that it lacked leadership.

In a November 2011 editorial, Neil Macdonald of the CBC summarized these criticisms, adding his personal view (shared by others in the mainstream press, politics and much of society at large) that anarchist elements within the movement had eroded their own credibility, effectiveness and mainstream influence by refusing to seek solutions to their grievances within existing institutions.

“In individual discussions, Occupiers patiently explain their aversion to any sort of leadership, and their dedication to rejecting the entire corporate/governmental system—everything, in their view, is broken, therefore any solution that works within the system is doomed,” Macdonald indited.

“To me, anyway, a declaration that the U.S. government must be dismantled, or that all corporations must be ‘taken down’ pretty much steers the conversation into Neverland. Allrighty, then. Thanks.”
The frustration Macdonald and other have articulated toward Occupy seems, in part, a reaction to the movement’s core impetus. At the heart of Occupy are the notions that modern neoliberal capitalism is a system effectively rigged against the interests of the majority, and that liberal democracy has failed to offer reform (particularly in the case of U.S. President Obama, whose initial campaign promised “Hope and Change”, but whose policies have maintained or even enhanced many disturbing aspects of the status quo). Of course, Macdonald’s argument has merit: taken at face value, the goals of some of the protesters—anarchists in particular—to dismantle systems of power through peaceful means is beyond quixotic.

Most occupiers past and present, even those committed to anarchism, Marxism or socialism, would probably concede that their vision of dismantling the dominant political and economic institutions of our world would not come to fruition anytime soon. A far more realistic goal would be to shift the political centre, to persuade governments and political parties to embrace change within the present paradigm. Such a process promises to be slow and painstaking at best, but progress is not impossible.

One important question that remains, however, in an era of extraordinary hurdles like climate change and environmental despoliation, is whether this approach will be good enough.

Today’s young people have a monumental mess on their hands. To clean it up, they will need character, determination, and ingenuity. But the first step toward fixing a broken system, is to acknowledge its failure.

What economists call “externalities” have never been fully integrated into the equation of exchange in the extant capitalist system, and a closer examination of the evidence reveals that our predilection to overtax the natural support systems furnished by our planet has brought us perilously close to a point of ecosystemic and economic collapse.

In early May of 2013, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s carbon dioxide meter at the summit of Mauna Loa, on the island of Hawaii, reached an historic milestone, surpassing 400 parts per million for the first time since measurements began in 1958. More worrisomely, NOAA scientists observe, the rate of annual increase in this concentration has accelerated. And while the correlation between carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere and global temperatures is well established, an equally important figure—though one commonly overlooked by the majority of talking heads—is the acidification of the world’s oceans, which continues to threaten all manner of sea life, and, indirectly, the future viability of our own species.

In the following chart, the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations at Mauna Loa is compared to oceanic carbon dioxide concentration and pH—also measured from the island of Hawaii.

Fig. IX

(Source: Hawaii Ocean Time Series, University of Hawaii. Retrieved from Skeptical Science http://www.skepticalscience.com/ocean-acidification-global-warming-intermediate.htm)

And let there be no doubt, that the rise in global carbon dioxide emissions is indeed correlated to a rise in global average temperatures,

Fig. X

(Source: NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Retrieved from Earth Policy Institute http://www.earth-policy.org/indicators/C51/temperature_2005)

and a rise in global sea level.

Fig. XI

(Retrieved from Wikimedia Commons http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Trends_in_global_average_absolute_sea_level,_1870-2008_%28US_EPA%29.png)

However, another key issue which receives minimal attention in the public discourse compared to climate change is global biodiversity loss.

“We’ve reached a point where efforts to preserve species and biological diversity might no longer be an act of altruism,” noted ecologist Diane Srivastava, of the University of British Columbia, in 2012. In light of all the ecosystem services provided to human beings through the biodiversity that still exists on the planet, she and the co-authors of a research review conducted in 2012 concluded that the threat biodiversity loss poses to our way of life might be every bit as substantial as the climate menace.

The following figures, which date back to 1970, do not suggest that our efforts to curb the problem have been successful. (Note in particular an acceleration of the decline in some measures of biodiversity beginning around 1980, when countries that had taken IMF and World Bank loans saw the rate of interest on those loans suddenly skyrocket.)

Fig. XII

(Retrieved from treks.org http://www.treks.org/arcticthe.htm)

Despite assurances to the contrary from defenders of the capitalist system in its present form, evidence from the natural world alone suggests that the status quo is unsustainable. But given the rising costs of housing and university tuition, combined with the virtual necessity of post-secondary education for any hope of securing a comfortable lifestyle, it’s also more difficult than ever before for this generation to opt out of the neoliberal capitalist system. In Canada, student debt is not nearly as onerous as it is in the U.S., but tuition costs continue to outpace the rise in inflation. Add this to the fact that low-paid service jobs have dominated the recovery from the Great Recession in both countries, and the prospects for the crisis generation are, arguably, worse than those their parents faced—all in an economic system whose primary claim to legitimacy is that it (supposedly) raises the living standards of all of its participants.

Fig. XIII

As American philosopher, professor and political dissident Noam Chomsky puts it:
Students who acquire large debts putting themselves through school are unlikely to think about changing society. When you trap people in a system of debt, they can’t afford the time to think. Tuition fee increases are a “disciplinary technique,” and, by the time students graduate, they are not only loaded with debt, but have also internalized the “disciplinarian culture.” This makes them efficient components of the consumer economy.

It all lends credence to Occupy’s contention that radical, systemic change is needed—and very soon.

Paradoxically, the corporate state, indomitable though it may appear, increasingly seems to fear for its future. This might be why it lashes out in fitful displays of violence against peaceful protesters, repression of individual freedoms, draconian laws like the Patriot Act, National Defense Authorization Act, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and Canada’s Bill S-7, allowing pre-emptive arrests of virtually anyone in the country provided police have evidence that an act of “terror” may be committed. State surveillance of political activists has also intensified.

These are among the reasons why millions of people have taken to the streets, recognizing a threat to not only their democratic freedoms, but to the viability of future generations as well. The program of control and domination on the part of state powers, and their corporate collaborators, has also inspired courageous whistleblowers—like former National Security Agency employees Thomas Drake, Jesselyn Radack, Edward Snowden, and US Army Private Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning—to risk liberty and career in order to expose the surreptitious violations of human rights and privacy undertaken by the U.S. government and its allies. The consequence has been a vigorous public debate over the role of government, and how far the privilege of maintaining state secrets ought to extend. But the revelations have also unveiled the depth of the corruption of the state-corporate complex that has developed in the U.S., the U.K., Canada, and several other Western powers.

Judy Rebick, co-founder of Canadian progressive news web site Rabble, is now in her fifth decade of social justice activism. She notes that while popular discontent can lead individuals and groups to protest, it is typically a crisis or catastrophic threat that serves as a precursor to conflagrations on the scale of Occupy, or the anti-war and anti-colonial movement of the 1960s.

“In the ‘60s, we had the threat of nuclear annihilation. And now we have that again…but we have it in a different way,” says Rebick, in reference to the ecological crisis. “So maybe it takes that kind of threat to get people off their asses, so to speak…especially in North America.”

Among the interviewees who contributed their perspectives to this project, there were a few significant points of disagreement. But on one score, there was perfect unanimity.

“I think OWS was just the beginning of something great,” writes Martin. “It’s the beginning of a dialogue criticizing the establishment as a whole, the system as a whole, which has never been done before in this country.”

Like Martin, Rebick believes Occupy was only the beginning, and sees great potential in the Idle No More movement to carry the torch of resistance into the future.

“[G]iven the way that [the protesters] present their struggle, which is that it’s a struggle led by Indigenous people, but for all of us, because of the environmental element of it, I think that’s very exciting and very important to support.”

Wolff also believes further uprisings, either under the banner of Occupy or a different name, are inevitable.

“It is a certainty in my mind that more of this [revolt] is coming,” he said, “especially since I don’t see a decline of the conditions that brought this crisis to bear.”

“Occupy’s legacy, is that they dared, finally, to put the economic, systemic inadequacy of the system right in front and centre,” Wolff believes. “And instead of failing as a result, they got more sympathy from more Americans than any of the other [recent protest] movements have been able to achieve. And they did it faster than anyone could imagine.”

Unsurprisingly, perhaps the most animated in his prognostications is Lasn.

“I see Occupy Wall Street as just being one of many Big Bang moments…and there’s going to be many other Big Bang moments to come,” he said. “I think we are headed for some kind of Global Spring, a global revolutionary moment, when all those national moments will somehow cohere into one big global moment.”

As Lasn points out, Occupy in its physical form may have fizzled out, but the core impulse that the status quo is not working persists. Popular dissatisfaction is evidenced by the Quebec student uprisings, anti-gentrification rallies, the Idle No More movement, environmental protests, and offshoots of Occupy like Strike Debt, InterOccupy, and community initiatives in low-income neighbourhoods like Occupy the Hood. The empirical evidence—an economic system that is despoiling the natural environment and exacerbating climate change, while doing little or nothing to raise the standard of living of the vast majority of people in Western countries—suggests there’s good reason to object to the status quo. But danger lies ahead in the form of new policy proposals and legislation even more reprehensible than their predecessors: internet surveillance bills like the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA); pharmaceutical patent protection wrapped up in some “free trade” pacts that will almost certainly increase the cost of prescription drugs, medical technologies and health care overall; further annulment of environmental regulations; and investment protection agreements that override national sovereignty. Perhaps most distressingly of all, the secretive and ominous Trans-Pacific Partnership—called a trade agreement despite the fact more than 95 per cent of its chapters don’t deal with trade—will enhance the ability of multinational corporations to establish oligopolies and monopolies, gouge consumers, override domestic environmental and health laws, and, naturally, offshore even more jobs in sectors like manufacturing and telecommunications.

The world economy limps along on unsure footing, laden with debt and credit bubbles, and plagued by the environmental catastrophes of climate change, biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, and deforestation. These menaces to the welfare of future generations notwithstanding, languorous economic indicators have impelled many political and economic elites to call for even more deregulation, even lower corporate taxes, even more dismantlement of barriers to business at virtually all costs. Economic crises continue to ripple through Europe, and the U.S. balance of payments deficit grows. The BRIC countries —Brazil, Russia, India and China—have threatened to abandon the U.S. dollar as their reserve currency (Hudson, 2009) and establish a sister organization to the World Bank and IMF in which the U.S. has no veto power, a move that would undercut American monetary hegemony and vastly shift the balance of economic power in the world. Protests and uprisings continue to shape the future of political discourse. Vigilantist organizations like Anonymous gain currency as opaque, unresponsive governments—from China, Turkey and Syria to the increasingly authoritarian U.S., U.K. and Canada—persistently fail to deliver economic or even judicial justice, but seemingly have no shortage of public monies to invest in propaganda campaigns, and an increasingly militarized security apparatus to stifle dissent. Activists and whistleblowers are persecuted and imprisoned, while CIA torturers and war criminals within the U.S. military operate in impunity. Criminal prosecutions of financial executives have been scarce, as regulators have favoured civil suits and fines in an effort to avoid destabilizing the big banks; HSBC, for example, was issued a fine for covertly laundering billions of dollars worth of securities with links to Mexican drug cartels. We are living through an era in which power is entrenched and ubiquitous, but true political leadership seems scarce.

13.2    Dare to envision an alternative

The Occupy movement and its constituents have succeeded at identifying the serious, systemic problems inherent in the current model of political economy, and starting a conversation around those issues. Where they have fallen short, perhaps, is in articulating a vision for something better.

Many economists, former political staffers and members of the news media advocate what mildly resembles a return to the pre-neoliberal era: re-regulation of the financial sector and multinational corporations, increased taxes on those corporations to fund programs to bring about full employment, reduce deficits and increase investment in infrastructure and social services. And it should be abundantly clear to all people concerned, that private “Too Big To Fail” banks are inherently problematic.

But in Richard Wolff’s view, a deeper critique of the system is required. The reintroduction of the old rules, he maintains, in an arrangement that pits the captains of business and industry against regulatory authorities in the context of a profit-seeking financial marketplace, is an endeavour doomed to failure.

Capitalism, Wolff points out, has a built-in tendency to undermine itself. As competitors vie for paramountcy in a battle over market share, the inevitable outcome is that some fare better than others; “winners” and “losers” emerge. This is how oligopolies and monopolies take shape, in the absence of robust antitrust laws. Hence, if left to its own devices, unfettered capitalism threatens both freedom of choice and the freedom of the individual from state coercion, as a corporation’s influence over the political, economic and knowledge production systems is invariably commensurate with its scale. Indeed, Wolff points out, this is exactly the process that created the giant banks in the first place, the same process by which corporations colonized and came to dominate the media, the internet and other means of knowledge dissemination, business schools on university campuses, U.S. state legislatures, and federal politics.

“The financial sector isn’t the bad guy,” says Wolff. “It’s a little stupid…to blame the bankers, since they were doing…what the system rewards them for doing, and punishes them for not doing.”

But what ought to be done about it?

Wolff believes there are options available, like nationalization of the executive functions of the large banks that played such a prominent role in the collapse, a position echoed by other economists and policy experts (Alperovitz, 2012). But, maintains Wolff, our society must also confront a cultural taboo that suppresses debate over the system of economic organization that predominates in the U.S., Canada, and several other Western states.

“Most Americans have been taught to believe that the capitalist form of enterprise is somehow inevitable, perhaps even natural, for sure optimal. In other words, shut off any conversation that imagines and weighs the costs and benefits, and the pros and cons, of alternative organizations, alternative systems.”

For Wolff, corporate capitalism’s dysfunction lies largely within the organizational structure of the profit-seeking enterprise, which pits the interests of management and ownership against the interests of workers. On the other hand, if the archetype for organizational structure were that of a worker-owned co-operative, in which the producers of goods and services exercise their decision-making power in a democratic fashion, many of the pitfalls inherent in capitalism could be mitigated, or avoided entirely, he maintains.

For instance, the workers in a co-operatively-owned, co-operatively-managed factory would be unlikely to vote to move their operation to a foreign country. Nor would they be nearly as inclined to duck environmental or food safety regulations in the name of enhanced profits, since the workers themselves would be obliged to live with the consequences of their decisions. And under a co-operative model, there would still be plenty of opportunity to reward individuals for their contribution to the productivity and success of the enterprise, Wolff argues. But the presence of a CEO who earns 500 times the salary of a worker or staffer, for example, would be anathema to the organization’s founding principles.

Like any other business, of course, the worker self-directed enterprise (WSDE), or co-operative, is subject to the forces of economic globalization, mechanization, and changes in market conditions. It must likewise contend with competition from multinational corporations, which may be able to offer comparable goods or services at lower prices through economies of scale and globalized supply chains. But the WSDE also possesses cost-saving advantages over the standard capitalistic multinational corporation: no need to attract top executives with lavish compensation, no imperative to pursue profit for profit’s sake in order to raise a stock price and appease investors. The selling points of local job creation, economic development (and tax revenue) appeal to politicians in a position to offer financial incentives to co-operatives (rather than to multinational corporations), particularly in underdeveloped localities. The genuine benefits associated with buying local goods and services hold substantial appeal to many consumers. Beyond this, co-operatives also have the option to confront economic globalization by going with the flow—that is, by offshoring some of their own operations, seeking out and entering foreign markets, offering co-operative membership to workers overseas, and adjusting their business models at home.

The WSDE is already a prominent economic presence in many countries, and a growing phenomenon in the U.S. Worldwide, roughly a billion adults are members of co-operative enterprises, including Spain’s Mondragón Corporation, credit unions throughout the U.S. and Canada, worker-owned enterprises in Cleveland, Ohio, and various economic development initiatives under the auspices of Mayor Chokwe Lumumba in Jackson, Mississippi. Among the aims of these various co-operative endeavours is to permit economic development at the local level—retaining capital within the community, and to promote a more environmentally sustainable form of production and distribution.

The advantages and disadvantages of the WSDE relative to the conventional capitalist firm merit discussion and debate in countries like the U.S. and Canada, maintains Wolff—especially considering the negative consequences associated with the economic system that prevails in those countries now.

“[Occupy] taught Americans, who believe that this system is in deep trouble and needs change, they taught each other, in that upsurge, that they number in the millions, that Americans all over the country feel this way. And that overcomes one half, or more, of what’s holding the United States back.”

Hope has a cost. Hope is not comfortable, or easy. Hope requires personal risk. It is not about the right attitude, or peace of mind. Hope is action. Hope is doing something. The more futile, the more useless, the more irrelevant and incomprehensible an act of rebellion is, the vaster and more potent hope becomes. Hope never makes sense. Hope is weak, unorganized, and absurd. Hope—which is always non-violent—exposes, in its powerlessness, the lies, fraud, and coercion employed by the state. Hope knows that an injustice visited on our neighbor, is an injustice visited on all of us. Hope posits that people are drawn to the good, by the good. This is the secret of hope’s power. Hope demands for others what we demand for ourselves. Hope does not separate us from them. Hope sees, in our enemy, our own face. Hope is not for the practical, and the sophisticated, the cynics, and the complacent, the defeated, and the fearful. Hope is what the corporate state, which saturates our airwaves with lies, seeks to obliterate. Hope is what this corporate state is determined to crush. Be afraid, they tell us. Surrender your liberties to us so we can make the world safe from terror. Don’t resist. Embrace the alienation of our cheerful conformity. Buy our products. Without them, you are worthless. Become our brands. Do not look up from your electronic hallucinations, no. Above all, do not think. Obey.

The powerful do not understand hope. Hope is not part of their vocabulary. They speak in the cold, dead words of national security, global markets, and electoral strategy, staying on message, image, and money. The powerful protect their own. They divide the world into the damned and the blessed, the patriots and the enemy, the privileged and the weak. They insist that extinguishing lives in foreign wars, or in our prison complexes, is a form of human progress. They cannot see that the suffering of a child in Kandahar, or a child in the blighted urban pocket of our nation’s capital, diminishes and impoverishes us all. They are deaf, dumb and blind to hope.

Those addicted to power, enthralled with self-exaltation, cannot decipher the words of hope, any more than the rest of us can decipher hieroglyphics. Hope to Wall Street bankers and politicians, to the masters of war and commerce, is not practical. It is gibberish. It means nothing. And this is because they kneel before the idols of greed and money.

If we resist, and carry out acts, no matter how small, of open defiance, hope will not be extinguished.

– Christopher Hedges, from a speech outside the White House fence to Veterans for Peace, Dec. 16, 2010.

Did Occupy change the world? Perhaps not. But there is a distinct possibility that it still could.

Occupy highlighted the problems we could all see, but had learned to countenance as “just the way it is.” Its constituents drew attention to economic injustice and asked the hard questions we’d all been taught to shun: Is capitalism, in its current form, meritocratic? Does it even work? Can we do better? Where is this train taking us?

Occupy revealed, in stark relief, shortcomings of both liberal democracy and the neoliberal economic system, along with the interplay between these two entities. It exposed, in many cases, the ineptitude and brutality of the police response to peaceful protest. And it uncovered the fundamental injustice of taxpayer-funded executive bonuses in the millions for those Wall Street bankers whose activities contributed to a global economic crisis, at a time when poverty and food insecurity afflict tens of millions of Americans.

But perhaps most importantly of all, Occupy inculcated in many activists a feeling of personal agency, contributing to the organization of new uprisings like the Quebec tuition revolt, Idle No More, and mass protests in Turkey, Brazil, Bulgaria, and elsewhere.

“The conversation has changed fundamentally” in activist circles, Sitrin maintains. “People feel a different kind of empowerment…saying ‘Wait a minute! We’re not the ones who are making the problem here. And we’re not going to be blamed anymore for it.”

Occupy was “a re-awakening of our collective power,” she says.

Occupy’s spirit endures, although its encampments have been uprooted—sometimes violently—by law enforcement. The conditions that incited the movement remain. Strike Debt was born last year, with the objective of emancipating debtors at random. Occupy Sandy continues, a grass-roots endeavour to collaborate with and build upon the efforts of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Activists in neighbourhoods across the contiguous U.S. are organizing to curtail home foreclosures and evictions, with some even occupying abandoned houses on behalf of displaced families. And in 2013, uprisings in various countries have persuaded governments—including the administration of Dilma Rousseff in Brazil—to change tack, perhaps in the realization that the game of repression, in an age of social media and streaming cellphone video, is one they are increasingly unlikely to win.

In the hearts of those devoted to the dream of a better future, the fire of conviction still burns, quelled but not doused.

“I still get goosebumps thinking about Occupy,” says Reyes. “[The fall of 2011] was the time for that movement to happen, but I think the failure was also meant to happen. No movement is meant to last forever, right?”

Having had time to contemplate the true significance of Occupy within the bigger picture, Reyes says her understanding has shifted. Occupy was not the be-all and end-all, she believes, but rather represented a single wave in a vast ocean of hope.

“After Occupy came Idle No More” and the Quebec uprisings, she says. “But I think at every turn, every wave, we tweak, and we kind of examine what happened before…Even Occupiers knew that Occupy was not unique, that it’s been building, that it comes with the global energy, that something is not right.”

“And there will be a different [movement], under a different name, or maybe no name. But I think every time [the wave] comes, it comes stronger, and it comes bigger.”

One of the key achievements of social movements, in Reyes’s view, is the shift they effect in the public conversation. After all, she asks, who was talking about bankers, or switching to a credit union, before Occupy came along?

“We tend to forget the little victories…and we might not be able to get rid of a government, but I think change is already happening…and it’s not going to be overnight. But we’re all doing the best we can, the best way we know how,” she says.

“And I get really hopeful about it, because I realize that [the desire for change] will not die down.”

As a physical entity and subject of media fascination, Occupy came and went, effecting only modest changes. However, social movements reveal their character not necessarily in their own successes and failings, but in the zeitgeist of the era in which they arise. In the 1930s, a deep depression afflicted much of the Western world, and the capitalistic market democracies were thrust into conflict with alternate—and in some cases, extreme—ideologies like fascism, communism, anarcho—syndicalism and socialism. In the turbulent 1960s, war was ravaging Vietnam, the menace of nuclear annihilation loomed, the baby boom generation was coming of age, and people of colour in America were emboldened to fight for equality at the ballot box, before the judiciary, and in the eyes of society. And in 2011, after decades of mounting inequality and environmental carnage, the worst economic collapse in the capitalistic democracies since the 1929 stock market crash, massive bailouts for corporate interests at the expense of the citizenry, and the realization by many of the inadequacies of the traditional configuration of parliamentary democracy, organizers and activists in New York City decided the time had come to vocalize grievances once again. Their message met with sympathy in many other countries and jurisdictions in which neoliberal capitalism has prevailed since the 1970s, and in which citizens perceive their governments to have let them down.

Occupy may have dissipated from the public consciousness, but much of the popular discontent that precipitated it remains, or has intensified since 2011. That more uprisings are on the way seems inevitable, even if they bear a different name or assume a different form.

Rather than a climax, then, the annals of history may well record Occupy as an omen of more intense and sustained social upheaval on the horizon.

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