Occupying Wall Street: What Went Right?

Of all the criticisms being hurled at Occupy Wall Street, the most substantively interesting is the issue of scale. How large can the living-society portion of the occupation grow, dependent as it is on a reasonably small living space and an inspiringly simple if limited amplification system? Questions like this are worth pondering, and I’ll be taking some of them up here at Truthout in the coming weeks, but let us pause for a moment to consider how astonishing it is that this is a concern at all.

Three weeks ago, the Wall Street occupation began with a demonstration whose coverage was virtually non-existent and whose turnout frustrated and disappointed organizers. Today, every news outlet of note devotes column inches and television segments to the protest, the President and his press people field questions about it, hundreds of solidarity occupations have sprung up across the United States, and in the middle of any given business day, one to two thousand protesters can be found at the Liberty Park Plaza encampment. That the question three weeks on shouldn’t be “What went wrong?” but rather “Where from here?” is remarkable.

How did that happen? Similar attempts at organizing movements to liberate our democratic politics from its corporate stranglehold didn’t catch fire this way. Some of these attempts were quite recent, and involved many of the same people as populated the original Google group tasked with organizing the occupation. US Uncut made some small waves in the late winter and early spring as it staged teach-ins in bank branches, disrupted investors meetings and carried out pranks on the corporate beneficiaries of crony capitalism. An occupation of the New York State capital in Albany, inspired by what materialized in Madison, Wisconsin and a City Hall camp-out called Bloombergville similarly garnered some interest and press but didn’t capture any sustained attention or energy.

More