For all their passion, they lacked focus.
I talked to one in Portland as the protest had gone on for a while.
“What can the big banks do to make you dust off your hands, go ‘my work here is done!’, and go back home?”
“I want them to fucking die!”
Well, clearly that’s not going to happen, but he had no backup plan.
I read an anecdote from Reddit about a protestor’s experience in Occupy Wall Street. Some people just went along to the protests for the sake and experience of it. Many people didn’t know what they were doing. I think this is why protests require some sort of organisation and leadership. The civil rights movement was so effective because they more were organised and had focus. Any movements after that haven’t gained more momentum because of disparate structure and factionalism.
I’ve attended a few pro Palestine protests here in the UK and I was so unaware of what I was attending for the first one. I’m in a very liberal city and had previously gone to pride marches and trans pride ‘protests’ that were effectively demonstrations for fun as it was largely preaching to the choir.
Showing up to the first pro Palestine protest and realising that it’s a coordinated effort to block roads and generally financially harm the companies that support Israel made me realise how naive I was being by conflating peaceful demonstrations to drum up support with a coordinated effort to harm the opposition.
Sounds like what happened at CHAZ, except with less murder investigations in the follow-up
That was just hilarious to watch, first the tanks were fawning all over it and clambering for their own AZ districts to institute tyranny of the faithful over, and then when it went bust suddenly it was anarchists and they all knew it was doomed from the start.
Nothing has changed since then it seems. I constantly read comments with similar sentiment towards rich people here.
Lemmy users would never post images of a guillotine on a serious discussion post, it goes against our collective morals 🦑
Sounds like a typical lemmy.ml user.
there was a handful (like about 3 or 4) of the movement that actually came up with serious economic analysis and ideas for reform, there were a few youtube video presentations of their work from that time but i have no idea if they still exist
Personally, I think its because its message became diluted. At least here in Portland, it started off strong, in solidarity with the rest of the country. But as the days went on, it became unclear what anyone was actually protesting. Then as the week dragged on, it became less of a protest and more of an opportunity for vagrants to join in and camp. As all that happened, there was less discussion about the protest and more about the giant camp that was building downtown, the drug use, the fighting, etc.
So the message was just never strong and clear enough to cut through the problems that surrounded it.
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It feels like the powers that be have perfected the art of setting a popular dialogue with movements that credibly threaten their interests, guaranteeing that they always get their way and it’s so thorough that pointing this out gets you branded as a tankie.
Even that word feels like another psyop on its own with the way leftists use it as a cudgel against each other; also guaranteeing that we will never be able to work with each other to accomplish anything of merit.
But how do we rekindle?
Edit: what would a battle on Wall Street’s turf look like? Perhaps a company could take a stand against all of this bullshit, but who would invest in such a business? Where does the street call home? When can we start? Right fucking now.
Cant stop. Wont stop.
I mean that is how DJT described it too. It was in a meeting with the secretary of defense asking why he couldn’t invade Chicago with the army to replicate the effect on the BLM movement
Lack of centralized messaging and organized leadership
You probably can’t name a single person who came to national prominence as a direct result of their participation in OWS, and that’s exactly why it fizzled, movements don’t need leaders necessarily, but absent that they absolutely need a gameplan, which OWS did not have, just a general anti-rich sentiment without many proposals for change other than “lock them up.”
I think this is the broad issue with most would be revolutionary groups, they never plan further than “just do a revolution bro” beyond dreaming of the utopia they’ll surely usher in when the enemy is defeated. Revolutionary movements need to operate more like John Brown, man didn’t just go south and start shooting, he gathered a convention of black leaders to sign a new constitution to inaugurate in the event that he won. Granted it was a bit loco, part of it literally involved turning black America into a settler nation in the Appalachia’s, but the point still stands, the man knew what victory would look like and that’s how he was able to gather the following he did before his capture and death.
The problem is that figureheads can be discredited and taken down. You need a figurehead who isnt only has an unimpeachable background, but so do their parents, their friends… they need to have the right education, the right job, the right EVERYTHING
I’d even go so far to say that you would almost NEED to have a woman of color because a few grand slipped to the right girl and all of a sudden "Occupy Spokesman John Smith"standing up to Wall st is “Alleged Rapist John Smith”
I have no doubt they would find a way to discredit them.
The problem is that figureheads can be discredited and taken down
The problem is that Leftists always eat each other because of their ridiculous utopian ideals. Anyone who has even the slightest whiff of something wrong with them is immediately attacked and cast down, so no leader can ever emerge.
If y’all ever want to have any sort of influence, you need to reject the idea of purity tests. People are flawed, and people are different. Embrace it, don’t keep hoping for a perfect messiah.
Quit projecting, it wasnt the left who continually pointed out that George Floyd had a criminal record and somehow that justified a cop kneeling on his back for 7 minutes until he suffocated. It was the right wing boot lickers.
The right are the ones that accuse the left of being groomers but keep getting busted on child sex offenses. The right are the ones campaigning on family values and then getting busted sucking other men off in airports.
Any leftist leader who isnt squeaky clean lets the right turn it into a discussion about the person not the movement, lets them muddy the waters with endless whataboutim and if they cant do that, they will pay someone to create mud.
Not the parent commenter, but: That’s not what projection is, no one brought up George Floyd, being a sex offender isn’t the only thing people get canceled for, and leftists absolutely eat their own on a regular basis.
I think this was because occupy was a product of the internet and there are very few leaders that come out of the internet in the social justice space. There are a lot of voices, but few stand above the crowd and even if they do manage to, when you’re dealing with controversial topics, there is a very good likelihood that such a person’s opponents would dig up some dirt on them or exaggerate something they did or said in an effort to cancel or make them into a joke.
It’s a built-in feature of internet groups that they are bad at producing messages and leaders for a wider audience. The dynamics of facebook groups and internet forums reward preaching to the choir and punishes compromises, both with opposition, moderates and reality.
Was part of a qualitative research study put on by a university and related to a local chapter of the Occupy movement.
My thoughts on 2 reasons why the larger movement died:
- No unified list of attainable objectives.
- The physical persecution ended.
While no one in the movement disagreed with the main tenants that the group stood for, when Wall Street came calling to know what the Occupy movement wanted, the distributed leadership model made it hard to form a coherent list that went beyond “overturn Citizens United”. It really was a leaderless movement for awhile there, and that has downsides.
Regarding the physical persecution, I first got interested in the movement because of the news coverage I was seeing from independent channels. US citizens were being beaten, gassed, and corralled in a way that infringed on civil rights and usually without incitement (Occupy was vehemently non-violent). Once those acts of injustice started to fade, I think people lost some of their zeal.
It was a wild time, though, and I’d be happy to talk about it further. From limited news coverage by US MSM, to folks coordinating carpools to NYC and DC, not to mention the unique style of communication at rallies to get around the ban of sound amplification by police… a lot happened.
No unified objective is why we on the left tend to lose.
It’s not a surprising issue; whenever we get a unifying leader, the FBI assassinates them.
What’s this about the unique communication style?
At the Occupy meetings, there were no defined leaders, which meant everyone’s voice equally deserved to be heard. As such, people who wanted to speak would generally queue up and then be given a few minutes to address the crowd (which was sometimes in the thousands).
Since PA systems and megaphones were prohibited by police early on (and would often be used as an excuse by police to break up a gathering), Occupy Wall Street gatherings began using the “human microphone” method of making sure speakers were heard.
In short, a speaker’s words would be repeated back by the crowd so that the words of the speaker would project back further in the crowd. With thousands at a gathering, it often took 2-3 waves of repeating the speaker’s words until they reached the back of the group.
If you stood at the right spot, you could kind of hear the sound “roll” back over the crowd. It was a strange feeling of unity to know that everyone at the gathering was truly understanding the speaker, because they weren’t just hearing what was said, but were echoing it back to others.
Here’s a wiki page that talks a bit more about the technique: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_microphone
I also remember that the OWS movement had made up some hand gestures which could be used for holding votes among large crowds during their meetings. I can’t recall what they were exactly, but I remember that gaining consensus was important to the group and anyone in the crowd could hold up a “veto” hand signal and be given the ability to address the crowd about why they disagreed.
I was impressed by the creativity of it all.
Some anecdotes from my experiences during this time:
I lived and worked in downtown Chicago at the time, right next to the Board of Trade. The local OWS was set up right next to it. I remember the traders had dumped out a bunch of McDonald’s job applications from the window onto them below. I would walk by them everyday for months and absolutely no one was paying them attention. It was a small group of people and eventually one day just like that, they were gone.
A week or so after OWS started I was visiting NYC and we ended up at Zuccotti Park where it all started. I think there were more people selling pins, buttons, and various arts and crafts than there were actual protesters. I remember my FIL asking each one if they were trying to supplement a living or if they were purely a for-profit capitalist venture taking advantage of an opportunity at an anti-capitalist protest. I just couldn’t stop laughing. He was serious.
Went to a wedding in Tulsa a few months in the whole OWS movement and their main park had an encampment of tents with signs but didn’t see any activity.
The big thing I noticed was there was virtually no people of color present, no organization, was a gathering of almost entirely white (mostly young) Leftists, that like usual, failed to cobble together a coalition from other demographics and really just seemed like a spectacle.
Oh god, we missed the don’t vote squad when they were at their least threatening!
I remember my FIL asking each one if they were trying to supplement a living or if they were purely a for-profit capitalist venture taking advantage of an opportunity at an anti-capitalist protest.
Out of curiosity, how would he draw that line? When does it stop counting as a living and start being a purely for-profit venture?
No idea. I tried to get him to just simply observe and either buy something or not. I still have my pin somewhere, I think I know where it is. I’ll look for it tonight and post it.
God, you nailed my experience of this protest. I was going to college in New York when they happened. It was a joke.
Their goal won’t be accomplished without violence AND it won’t start again until a major event makes people on both sides realize that they should be fighting together (like the economic crisis back then) against a common enemy.
Be prepared for violence? Of course. Do what you can to stay armed, trained, and active in your local community defense and aid organizations.
But we don’t NEED violence to effect this change. We aren’t Russia (for now).
Is it difficult? Of course. But it’s not impossible to effect change.
I don’t want to wait either. I can see my people suffer this way of life. I wish we could rush to a better place as much as you do. Its all I ever think about when I don’t have my nose stuck in a video game machine or a book. Instant depresso when I leave my basement and behold our twisted visage of a “civilization”.
This is just the jungle with extra steps.
Find a major change in society like OWS wanted that didn’t come from a violent revolution. The US had its war against Great Britain and its civil war and more, Canada had its war against the US and against itself (GB vs France, against the patriots in Quebec and so on), there’s been too many violent revolutions in Europe to count…
The day people truly have had enough with the ultra rich and realize that they’re manipulated into fighting each other instead of fighting for each other, there will be blood on the street.
The people from OWS just wanted a piece of the pie, to get the whole pie someone’s gotta leave the table.
You can’t build a revolution on top of slogans, they lacked unified ideology and goals. without palpable goals you can’t achieve anything
They actually had goals, some of which were achieved via the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. But that wasn’t enough, and then it was repealed during the Trump era.
No, they were disbanded (at night, by force, with cameras off) because they were becoming too much of a problem for the ownership class, who was not willing to fix what caused the subprime mortgage crisis and was not willing to let too-big-to-fail companies collapse which they should have, according to common capitalist ideology.
Fear of the risk of collapse is supposed to encourage hedge funds to be cautious, and the bail-outs showed they don’t need to fear, because the US government is in their pocket and will bail them out with taxpayer money. As things currently are, hedge funds can use other people’s money to get rich, and when they fuck up and lose everything, the taxpayers take the hit instead. This is still the case, and at smaller scales is still a very common grift on Wall Street. (This is what Romney did before he went into politics, and how Toys-R-Us died.) We’re looking at a number of markets that are now at risk of suffering the same kind of short-sell blowout leading to a market collapse which will tank the economy. Again.
The grievances Occupy explicitly expressed to their elected representatives were never addressed, and confidence in the US economy and the US government (in doing its job serving the public and not corporate or plutocratic interests) has suffered, leading to the election of trump and the rise of fascist movements such as the transnational white power movement and the closely-aligned Christian nationalist movement. Without big money fueling the propaganda machines that keep these movements alive, discontent would turn against the ownership class, who would tremble before class war.
Would that class war turn into a communist revolution? Probably not, but after a dozen or so dictatorships and overthrows across a century (and a lot of war casualties) or so we might see the US stabilize. If the internet and interpersonal communications are preserved that will improve the chances that we’d see more public-serving models get implemented. This is the part of how we get there from here for which we don’t have sound theory. But we also don’t know yet how to stop fascist movements from redirecting outrage from the ownership class to marginalized population demographics, hence the genocides currently developing.
But Occupy absolutely had a legitimate grievance and some specific demands, many of which were not unreasonable or out of the scope of US state and federal governments. It’s just that the plutocrats that control our officials didn’t want to do those things, kinda like universal healthcare.
When Occupy was huge, I had wished they had not focused so heavily on camping in parks and instead bought cheap land in the middle of nowhere and built “Occupy town”. Somewhere people can come and join the movement with their family and not worry about living in a tent.
Make our own jobs in federated worker co-ops like Mondragon our own community defense organizations, our own public housing, our own city government. If we had picked a state like Wyoming, it would only take about 15k people from each state to move there to take over the entire state government.
I get people were trying to do that in every park and also stay visible in the media, but I felt like it was just to limiting to stay in such locations.
As for what should be the focus, clearly it needs to be electoral reform. While stuff like campaign finance reform and changing the electoral college is important, we absolutely must do something about First Past The Post voting.
Switching away from first past the post voting allows people to vote for who represents them best while still counting their vote against those they dont want to win. Just search for videos on FPTP voting if you want an explanation on how and why the spoiler effect exists.
Electoral reform is possible in each individual state (for now), we dont need federal reform! Maine and Alaska have already passed electoral reform.
Republicans are moving to make alternative electoral systems illegal in their states. Why would you want to use the same voting system republicans prefer?
More political parties means a higher percentage of the population is representedby their choices in the voting booth. More people involved in the electoral process, more people engaged.
Its a win win win all around for not just the people, but also for the democratic party. More people voting means more democratic votes. The numbers dont lie. So what’s the hold up blue states?
You believe it’s critical to vote for the democrats to beat the Republicans, thus you should 100% be fully invested in passing electoral reform in your state.
Electoral reform needs to be the number one priority for every democrat. This is a existential threat to our nation, so we must use EVERY tool at our disposal. No more waiting. This especially goes for those in blue states.
Consider starting a campaign to change how we vote in your own state! Force our representatives to compete with fresh outside ideas. We deserve the best representation, not excuses.
I usually prefer people to seek out information about electoral reform on their own, but today I come with some of my favorite videos on the topic.
First Past The Post voting (What most states use currently)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo
Videos on alternative electoral systems we can try out.
Alternative vote
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Y3jE3B8HsE
Ranked Choice voting
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Z2fRPRkWvY
Range Voting
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3GFG0sXIig
Single Transferable Vote
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8XOZJkozfI
STAR voting
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-mOeUXAkV0
Mixed Member Proportional representation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QT0I-sdoSXU
Edit: don’t put ourselves down for things not working out yall. This is all our first lives, and we’re up against a ton of cultural momentum. Plus things were heated in the moment with the banks getting bailed out. In such emotion, it’s hard to see the bigger picture.
Like in Minneapolis, when the police station fell… imagine if people were deputized and the community just did their own policing.
But in the moment, after the police lit the fuse by using chemical weapons against the crowd. After such a lack of justice in the world, day after day of injustice and wrong in the world… you just wanna fucking have a fire. I get it. Hell, I wanted that to back then. But it didn’t fix anything, as cathartic as it was.
Sorry about the rants. Hope we find our way. Peace.
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How do you envision the usage of one of these playing out at Zuccotti Park in 2011?
OWS existed because banks were getting bailed out and ordinary people weren’t.
Since then, an alternative money supply with no bailouts has gained tremendous momentum.
So we’re still protesting, just in a way that’s harder to shut down for “public safety” reasons. And instead of participation making you worse off, it makes you better off. Over time, adverse selection will leave only bailout recipients using bailout money.
People are still getting hosed with that “alternative money system”. It’s the rare person that makes enough and bails out with profits, even rarer gets enough to be wealthy. It’s the “influencer” of money. Everyone thinks they can be the winner, but there’s tens of thousands of failures for each person on the top.
I recognize that most of the time, the market isn’t soaring like this. The average user, most of the time, has lost money. The tried-and-true method of becoming a winner with this instability is to “Dollar Cost Average” over long time periods. Nobody who has DCA’ed for more than a few years has lost out; it’s trying to time the market that tempts and screws beginners.
As one dev put it - Bitcoin isn’t a “get rich quick” scheme, it’s a “don’t get poor slowly” scheme.
If you’re referring to bitcoin for that alternative money supply then I regret to inform you that it’s manipulated to hell and back, from "stable"coin printing to now ETFs.
Believe it or not, it used to be even worse! The big step forward IMHO is that there’s no privileged party that has an advantage manipulating the price. Congress should be prohibited from owning anything but long-term dollar bonds.
The big step forward IMHO is that there’s no privileged party that has an advantage manipulating the price.
Until Elon Musk tweets out that he will exchange Tesla vehicles for Bitcoin or that Dogecoin is a good investment.
Digital currencies are somehow worse than gambling unless you’re famous enough to do a pump-and-dump.
Musk doesn’t have any authority over Bitcoin, though. When he eventually fails, the rules won’t be changed to save him - like they were for dollars.
I’d have a look at David greabers interviews on the subject. He was heavily involved and part-mastermind behind it.
Contrary to what a lot of people seem to think, a lot of it was about become too specific in their aims. The powers that be want to whittle away the numbers with infighting. So, they ask the sort of duck or rabbit questions to make that happen.
When they made specific demands, they stopped being a scary, faceless and uncompromising mob.
Theres more too and he’s very honest in his self critique imo.
He’s also pretty candid about how the authorities came up with a bullshit excuse to shut the camps down (claiming health and safety over bathroom conditions when that had been figured out for ages) and then came and beat people up. Big omission
Because it was one of the only time the “racists” and the “communists” (before they were called that) actually came together against the only people holding them down.
how can we start it back up again
Stop buying into petty, culture-war “Parade of Politics.” This goes for both sides.
Normally yes - agreed and upvoted - but the current petty, culture-war “Parade of Politics” has ramifications that will make Occupy, protest, and rights in general a lot harder or more dangerous to fight for.
It seems shit to fight the politicians instead of the money driving them, but they don’t intend to stay subservient to the money once the choices are gone.
It’s hard to keep a protest going when you don’t have focused power behind it. The general messaging of economic inequality carried on and we’ve been talking about the 1% vs the 99% since, but the key advantage that the billionaires have is that even though there are far fewer of them, the system is structured such that they can use their money to direct the focus. The raw numbers of people mean nothing without that focus.
It takes an extraordinary event to bring out the sheer number of people, so I’m afraid something like it won’t start back up unless something catastrophic happens (e.g. popping of the everything bubble leading to a new great depression). Sustaining it will be a matter of organization which is much more difficult to figure out, especially when individual resources are scarce.
(From someone who was there)
