It takes more than a few months of camping in the street.
You got that right.
Even Micah White, one of the the main organizers of OWS, says the protests essentially failed. But apparently it wasn’t a useless exercise because they discovered that protests of that type don’t work.
From occupywallst.org:
There is a detrimental narrative that activists like to repeat which is that everything is a success. We like to tell each other that Occupy wasn’t defeated, it just splintered into a thousand shards of light. And you know, that is a positive story, but it is not actually the truth. And false positivity won’t get us closer to an effective revolutionary strategy. The truth is that Occupy set out to achieve very specific goal: to end the power of money over our democracies. And we failed. So I call Occupy Wall Street a constructive failure because in failing it revealed the limitations of contemporary activism. The movement was not a total failure, it did achieve some things and it did have some positive outcomes. But it was a constructive failure because it showed us that our methods of protesting and our theories of activism are false.
I don’t think OWS can succeed (in the US at least) for the same reason I think people don’t care about the 0.1% hiding money in offshore accounts: most people are pretty happy with their lives.
I believe change will finally come when widescale automation raises unemployment numbers to crazy new highs (maybe +30%). I think change will come quickly then because the remaining 70% will realize their ability to earn a living through work is coming to an end as well. The change will have nothing to do with OWS and it won’t take centuries as White seems to think it will.
