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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
