Cultural Outcomes of the Occupy Movement By William Gamson I must begin by acknowledging the extent to which the occupy movement has occupied my own life in the last several months, knowing no boundaries between work life and social, political, and personal life. In my worklife, I was teaching a graduate seminar on social movements (“The Quest for Social Justice”) in which each participant chooses a case to study and to which they apply the various course readings. Outside of class, in my professional life, I have been struggling for the past few years in trying to understand why there was not some high energy mobilization against the increasing economic inequality in American society. The movement has already succeeded in making its efforts an item of widespread cultural interest in my circles of friends and family. My wife and I made time to make personal visits to Dewey Square (Occupy Boston) and Zuccotti Park in New York and to participate in meetings and actions of our local support group, “Occupy Martha’s Vineyard.”
Occupy Wall Street | September 17th | #OCCUPYWALLSTREET The joyous freedom of possibility. Dissent can be personal, collective, creative — whatever you want it to be. Revolt can be physical or spectral, a blackspot on a corporate logo or a digital mindbomb posted online. Edit a billboard, speak to a friend. There are no limits, no minimum or maximum. The revolutionary spark is the same one that lit human existence. Print & Post If you only do one thing today and during the heady days of climate protest that follow, print out as many copies of this #WORLDREVOLUTION poster as you can and tape them up on bus stops, bank and shop windows, cash machines, government buildings, everywhere in your city where people will see them. Download September 11, 2014 What will you do on the September 17th anniversary of Occupy Wall Street? September 16, 2013 Revolution is a Rhizome September 19, 2012 Tactical Briefing #38. September 12, 2012 Where do we stand? July 23, 2012 Tactical Briefing #36 June 5, 2012 Occupy morphs into a new model! May 24, 2012 May 16, 2012
Occupy Wall Street's Battle Against American-Style Authoritarianism The Occupy Wall Street movement is raising new questions about an emerging form of authoritarianism in the United States, one that threatens the collective survival of vast numbers of people, not through overt physical injury or worse, but through an aggressive assault on social provisions that millions of Americans depend on. For those pondering the meaning of the pedagogical and political challenges being addressed by the protesters, it might be wise to revisit a classic essay by German sociologist and philosopher Theodor Adorno titled "Education After Auschwitz," in which he tries to grapple with the relationship between education and morality in light of the horrors perpetrated in the name of authoritarianism and its industrialization of death.[1] To see other articles by Henry A. Giroux visit The Public Intellectual Project. Democracy is always an unfinished project. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.
The Corporate State Will Be Broken I spent Friday morning sitting on a wooden bench in a fourth-floor courtroom in the New York Criminal Court in Manhattan. I was waiting to be sentenced for “disturbing the peace” and “refusing to obey a lawful order” during an Occupy demonstration in front of Goldman Sachs in November. Those sentenced before me constituted the usual fare of the court. The country’s most egregious criminals, the ones who had stripped some of those being sentenced of their homes, their right to a decent education and health care, their jobs, their dignity and their hope, those wallowing in tens and hundreds of millions of dollars, those who had gamed the system to enrich themselves at our expense, were doing the dirty business of speculation in the tall office towers a few blocks away. Our electoral system, already hostage to corporate money and corporate lobbyists, gasped its last two years ago. Turn off your televisions. Voting will not alter the corporate systems of power.
America’s last hope: A strong labor movement The fate of the labor movement is the fate of American democracy. Without a strong countervailing force like organized labor, corporations and wealthy elites advancing their own interests are able to exert undue influence over the political system, as we’ve seen in every major policy debate of recent years. Yet the American labor movement is in crisis and is the weakest it’s been in 100 years. That truism has been a progressive mantra since the Clinton administration. However, union density has continued to decline from roughly 16 percent in 1995 to 11.8 percent of all workers and just 6.9 percent of workers in the private sector. The urgency is striking. Over the past 30 years, American employers have become even more aggressive at violating their workers’ rights to organize under a toothless and outdated labor law regime. As worker power has eroded in the workplace, the labor movement’s political clout has also declined. Now is the time to challenge that feudal relationship.
The Resurgence of the Civic Occupy Wall Street and cognate groups around the world are part of a protest movement that is both global and local. It is global in terms of geographic scope, thematic range, and social composition. It is local in terms of the specific objects of protest and the protesters’ goals. The organic blending of the global with the local is reflected in the very unfolding of this worldwide wave. The movement’s “glocal dynamic”—to coin an ugly phrase—is also visible in the protesters’ response to the violent crackdown that has already been unleashed in Cairo, New York City, and elsewhere. The fusion of the global with the local is equally evident in relation to the specific objects of protest and the goals of the individual Occupiers. Civic Anatomy I shall return to the interlocking of national states and transnational markets presently. Linked to the primacy of shared “civicness” is an interesting development beyond the categories and practices of postmodern pluralism.
Fear of a Slacker Revolution Occupy Wall Street and the cultural politics of the class struggle You can learn a lot about a movement by listening to its opponents. Everywhere, evidence is accumulating that at the level of formal power relations, the targets of the Occupy Wall Street movement—banks, transnational corporations, and the politicians who serve them—are quaking in their boots at the sight of a mass, leaderless, flexible, inchoate, constantly morphing movement characterized by unprecedented solidarity across formerly separate and even antagonistic groups and by the use of direct, disruptive, and innovative tactics. But at the level of substance, as well, the reaction from the other side speaks volumes. From very early on in the protests, familiar cries of “get a job!” In drawing these connections, the enemies of OWS may understand its historical and politico-cultural context better than do ostensible friends, like Democratic politicians. An Anti-Austerity Tradition The OWS Vision Slackers (Re)Unite Conclusion
The Vacancies of Capitalism Throughout the first several weeks of Occupy Oakland’s existence the analysis and discussion at the General Assembly and elsewhere has been about the need to construct an entirely different social order. It is not so much that “the system is broken” but that it is, and always has been, set up to deliberately benefit, a small minority. The few social provisions that allowed many people in Oakland to survive off of low or no wages have been cut, largely to maintain a police budget that consumes 2/3rds of the city budget. Budget cuts to education and services, police brutality, unemployment and housing foreclosures all serve to multiply the pain and precariousness of a growing number of Oaklanders, displacing many more, including 25% of Oakland’s black population in the last 10 years. The Power of Solidarity: Occupy Strikes Back The vacancies of capitalism in Oakland overlap each other and effect different communities in different ways. Factories and Housing: From Usefulness to Speculation
Global Solidarity and the Occupy Movement On December 1, 2011, twenty-four people joined together in a small Pennsylvania town to show their solidarity with the protesters of Tahrir by targeting a company that makes tear gas used in the suppression of crowds in Tahrir Square. Their numbers were not great, but their example anticipates the kind of consequential solidarity that could develop globally. More than a message gone viral or a day of simultaneous protest about inequality’s injustice, focused actions that publicize the chains of injustice linking distant sites can transform the ways in which we think not only about solidarity, but the conditions movements seek to change. Occupy Wall Street’s Genealogies and Affinities The protesters in Zuccotti Park seem to have heralded the membership of a significant portion of our population in a new form of Third World, a development that our media and government appear to have been the last to absorb. (14) Tahrir, Los Indignados and Vetëvendosje We are ordinary people.