Occupy Wall Street: How We Surprised Ourselves

[marmar]

from The Progressive:


Occupy Wall Street: How We Surprised Ourselves
By Arun Gupta


At the top of the list of what the Occupy movement accomplished is, “We surprised ourselves.”

By “we,” I mean anyone residing on the left. To be on the left is to be intimate with defeat. Sometimes defeat is heroic, as with the Spanish Civil War. Sometimes it’s betrayal, as with the fate of the Russian Revolution. Defeat can be bewildering, as in, “What happened to that moment of Feb. 15, 2003?” Often it’s just depressing, like the delirious 60s that gave way to the tortuous 80s.

Occupy, in contrast, was a rocket ship of giddiness for nearly two months. Liberals squirmed, reluctant to criticize or embrace it. Conservatives yelled from rocking chairs that the dirty hippies needed a job. Every police attack gave Occupy strength. A bewildered media tried to grasp how a leaderless movement could shake the halls of power.

It helped that there were no expectations for success. There were no pollsters tut-tutting that the 99% versus 1% was divisive. No professional organizers corralling the herd into a single message. No revolutionaries hectoring that only the scientific terms proletariat and bourgeoisie would do. No Democrats demanding that lofty aspirations be pulverized into middle-of-the-road mush. ..........(more)

- See more at: http://www.progressive.org/news/2014/09/178309/occupy-wall-street-how-we-surprised-ourselves#sthash.45QD47Jb.dpuf

[MADem]

1. No expectations for success?

I thought there were great expectations, actually. ENORMOUS ones. The disappointment is that they weren't realized.

This writer is revising history.

This is what happened at very near the outset--it didn't "fall into" these problems. An unwillingness of the model to accommodate visible leadership, spokespeople and accountability doomed it.

....the Occupy movement fell into bad habits. Occupy made us want to be better selves, but pettiness, paranoia and selfishness stewed beneath. Donated money and equipment was stolen. Fights broke out over control of Facebook and Twitter accounts. Shady outsiders set up a national convention unaccountable to the movement. One power-hungry individual tried to grab all the money flooding into the Occupied Wall Street Journal by seizing control of the Kickstarter campaign. One labor organizer in Los Angeles attempted but failed to hijack the entire movement there by setting up a rival occupation. Liberals succeeded in co-opting Occupy through their branded “99% movement.” - See more at: http://www.progressive.org/news/2014/09/178309/occupy-wall-street-how-we-surprised-ourselves#sthash.45QD47Jb.fUxsVI82.dpuf