The Occupy ‘Movement,’ 2 Years Later
Tuesday (2 days ago) was the nominal anniversary of the Occupy Movement. Or maybe that should be the Occupy ‘Movement,’ with scare-quotes softening any suggestion that an actual social movement of any scope has arisen and persisted.
September 17 of 2011, protestors flowed into New York’s Zuccotti Park, a small private park just two blocks from Wall Street in the city’s financial district. Months of periodic mayhem in isolated pockets ensued, with Occupy sit-ins and marches happening in cities all over the US and to a lesser extent around the world. In theory, Occupy was a protest against economic inequality, a reaction not just to the gap between “the 1%” and “the 99%,” but to the widening of that gap in the years following the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009.
In practice, Occupy became a rallying cry for complaints of all kinds. One Occupy rally I stumbled across here in Toronto featured speakers from a big trade union, members of which enjoy jobs that pay relatively well, and a representative of one of Canada’s aboriginal groups, whose complaints are legitimate but have little to do with having been left behind by capitalism. This dilution of the main Occupy message was unfortunate, since it virtually guaranteed that the movement would suffer additional criticism while at the same time raising the probability that such criticism would be avoid the real issue.
Two years later, it’s hard to see Occupy as having achieved much of anything, other than a lot of overtime for police and a few weeks’ fodder for the nightly news. Certainly its economic impact has been negligible. A year ago, on the 1-year anniversary, I suggested that the main lasting effect of Occupy was more cultural than economic, and that’s still true. Politicians now must now acknowledge income inequality in speeches, for example, but action has been scarce.
So inequality is now ‘on the table,’ but it’s not clear yet that putting it on the table means much in practice. I wrote two years ago that “Wall Street needs to be fixed, not occupied. Even a die-hard capitalist has to admit that there are problems with the way Wall Street runs, but those problems won’t be fixed by sit-ins. They need to come from an understanding, on the part of Wall Street and its supporters, that there are changes that should be made because those changes stand to make capitalism work better. Any changes that can’t be made on that basis — changes for example that simply redistribute money — will have to be made through legislation, if and when there is political will to do so.
Of course, Occupy doesn’t necessarily need to have brought lasting change in order to have been significant. It may be enough for that word to mark a moment in time. It reminds us that there was a day when people rose up in peaceful opposition to fight for an ideal. Even those who think the movement misguided should in principle be happy about its idealism. But then, it’s much harder to inspire idealism about the painfully slow, methodical route to institutional change, even when the slow and methodical route is the more plausible one.
The Business Ethics Blog 
Having been there on Sept 17, knowing people who are still involved, and sleeping out with the occupy movement in DC, I get a different take on the occupy movement than you do. First, if the only source of information one has on the occupy movement is the newspapers, then one is terribly underinformed. The occupy movement is alive, it just isn’t grabbing the headlines that it did before the breakup of the encampments. The occupy movement has been involved in educational events, recovery from natural disasters, partially successful attempts to halt foreclosures, protest events in different cities, and education on the internet.
What makes their present status invisible was its meteoric headline grab for the first 2 months. Most anything that could be followed seems dead in comparison.
The national campaign to breakup the encampments did hurt the movement but might have helped in the long run. For the democratic changes that the occupy movement wants requires changes in thinking that can, for the most part, occur over time rather than be rushed. In fact, if you look at the nonviolent leftist uprisings in modern history, you will find that though the left had popular support for overthrowing dictators, it did not have the democratic commitment to provide substitutes for what was undone. This has been because there was not enough commitment to create more participatory political-economic systems. What is needed is not just the nonviolent, democratic overthrow of the current elite-centered system, we need for the general population to participate in creating new system. We have not achieved that level of support yet. On the other hand, the relative smallness of the Occupy Movement’s contributions today could reflect more on the audience rather than the performers.