It’s another page right out of Scientology’s playbook.
According to everyone I know that was involved no spin was needed
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The vast majority of Occupy protesters seemed united around the cause of fighting economic injustice. The movement’s primary weakness was a lack of specific actionable plans for fighting said injustice. I think the key lesson from Occupy was “engagement is crucial, but so is organization.”
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Judean Peoples Front vs People’s Front of Judea
No one even agreed what those words mean.
Getting the wealth gap under control, for one. One thing the Occupy movement was very successful at doing was hammering home the concept that the top 1% of the country wield grossly disproportionate power and influence.
ETA: Specific goals I think the vast majority of the protesters would tell you they agreed on included
- Preserving and/or expanding universal health coverage and other social services that working-class people depend on
- Restructuring our tax code to make sure the people at the top had an effective tax rate at or above what ordinary people pay
- Overturning or counteracting the Citizens United decision which ruled that unlimited, often anonymous political spending is a legally protected form of free speech in the United States (along with being a major force of corruption elsewhere)
- Legal accountability for the Wall Street firms and investment bankers who destroyed the economy and received a fat government bailout in response
That’s about as focused a set of goals as you could expect from any broad social movement. Certainly at least as well defined as the goals and slogans of many past movements. “We are the 99 Percent” is a lot easier to get one’s head around than “Flower Power!”
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Is that an actual image at The Nib website, or did you stitch it together from the separate frames?
i would hate for my cartoon scraping script to be missing anything
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I found it shared on another site and realized I should credit the original source shortly after I posted it.
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Seems to be a lot more people with very specific goals now though.
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“Down with Trump!” is a specific goal, I guess.
If it is actually achieved,* the metaphor of the dog who finally catches the bus may apply.
Possible lessons from Occupy:
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Truly enormous protests in New York and DC might have had a greater impact than smaller camps around the country, which local authorities were able to marginalize and destroy
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If your plan is: “Get as many people as possible together” + “Proceed by consensus,” then there will be no actual decisions, no list of demands, no coherent statements to the press, etc.
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Eventually those protesters who expected decisions and demands and statements will go home, leaving a countercultural rump with nothing to say about the world outside the protest zone
∗ historical parallel: richard nixon
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Maybe if you were creating another occupy protest it might make sense to focus on occupy, but I don’t see that happening right now, instead I see marches and protests and town hall engagement and other types of engagement with the political machine.
Probably focusing on the here and now, rather than worrying about the minutiae of imperfections in previously held, different forms of protest, is preferable?
ETA:
Although I would agree that seeking to learn from your mistakes is admirable.
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Tell you what - I’ll show you my tax returns.
Motherfucker.
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“I know you are but what am I?”
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Obviously it doesn’t pay as well as selling out your constituents.
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I think Occupy is a valid comparison and worthy of consideration. It was a recent massive nationwide protest, but utterly ineffective. So it’s worth asking why and how to avoid that happening in this case.
Occupy didn’t have a clear message. Sure, it told us that there was a 99% and a 1%, but when asked what they were protesting for, everyone said different things and a lot of them sounded rather whiny (people saying why they were unhappy rather than what they wanted). There was no cohesion.
BLM had a very clear message “we don’t accept cops getting away with killing black people just because they can get away with it. we want proper legal process and justice.”, and it was cohesive. TBD whether it was effective.
But Occupy taught us that people unifying behind a cause need to actually be able to state what that cause is and…have some unity.
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I don’t disagree, and I do think that the current protests have been influenced by the previous occupy stuff, and will continue to be.
I just think that focusing on what went wrong in that situation, different in key details to what is happening now, provides less constructive dialogue than focusing on improving, strengthening and amplifying the protests which, for the moment at least, are more engaged with the regular political system.
I think I said it or intimated upstream but I think exhausting all possible official channels first will serve to drive the Tramps into their endgame without being fully prepared. Keep them on the back foot, as it were but I agree, keep in mind what may need to come next.
Perhaps I’m a little hung up on focusing on the positive…
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Point out that the leftists are protesting the interests of wealth, then ask who fuck is paying them. Then, upon response, ask “How the fuck did Soros get rich? By paying protesters? Have you met any rich people?”
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I have a friend who was a big actor in Occupy Cleveland. He was kind of a leader though they didn’t designate him as such. From what he told me, they were experimenting with a new model of government which was more ground up. That part of Occupy was not reported on. But it was a deeper movement than the press reported, with a cooperative model of governing being explored. The lack of message and leadership was not a bug but a feature. The goal specifically was to not have a cohesive message but to operate in a group fashion that allowed for differences.
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I’m not sure Occupy was as ineffective as many people say. I think maybe people expect too much to immediately happen as a result of protests about something that big.
For instance, the protests in Ferguson didn’t actually deliver justice for Mike Brown, and obviously racism and police brutality are still massive problems. But between that and Black Lives Matter, there is more attention on it now. And in the greater St. Louis area, the predatory practices of municipal police in terms of speeding tickets and fines in poor black areas has been greatly curbed (to the point where some small city police departments shut down entirely because revenue was their entire purpose, and others are crying for tax increases to fund them). And they have body cameras. Obviously there’s still a long way to go.
Standing Rock didn’t really stop the pipeline but it delayed it for months, and made the whole world aware of what’s going on.
Occupy spread the theme of the 1% vs the 99% as you said… and there’s no doubt it was influential. People started paying more attention to income inequality at that point and warming up to the idea of democratic socialism. Had Bernie won the primary, I would definitely have credited Occupy for some of his success.
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Laugh?
I don’t think we do. Unfounded charges, based on zero evidence deserve no attention. Either ignore it altogether, or ask simply “…based on what?”.
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10/10 dizzy people agree
No one even agreed what those words mean.
intolerance of ambiguity is no mark of character.
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