[OccupyCU] Fwd: [CentralILJwJ] FW: Occupy's Protest Is Not Over. It Has Barely Begun

Tue Sep 18 17:29:15 UTC 2012

FYI--thought this artical was good one to share... 

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From: "A Belden Fields" <a-fields at illinois.edu> 
To: "central il jwj" <CentralILJwJ at yahoogroups.com> 
Cc: sf-core at yahoogroups.com 
Sent: Monday, September 17, 2012 9:20:18 PM 
Subject: [CentralILJwJ] FW: Occupy's Protest Is Not Over. It Has Barely Begun 

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From: Portside Moderator [ moderator at PORTSIDE.ORG ] 
Sent: Monday, September 17, 2012 9:02 PM 
To: PORTSIDE at LISTS.PORTSIDE.ORG 
Subject: Occupy's Protest Is Not Over. It Has Barely Begun 

Occupy's Protest Is Not Over. It Has Barely Begun 

by Frances Fox Piven 

Monday, September 17, 2012 

by The Guardian 

Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org Source URL: 
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/09/17-7 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/sep/17/ 
occupy-protest-not-over 

A good many observers wonder, is Occupy over? After 
all, the encampments that announced the movement a year 
ago have largely disappeared, and no obviously similar 
protest demonstrations of young people have taken their 
place, at least not in the United States. 

Nevertheless, I think the ready conclusion that the 
protests have fizzled is based on a misconception of 
the nature of movements, a misconception influenced by 
the metaphors we rely on. We think of these eruptions 
as something like explosions, Fourth of July fireworks 
perhaps that shoot into the sky, dazzle us for a 
moment, and then quickly fade away. The metaphor leads 
us to think of protest movements as bursts of energy 
and anger that rise in a great arc and then, exhausted, 
disappear. 

In fact, no major American movement of the past fits 
that description. The great protest movements of 
history lasted not for a moment but for decades. And 
they did not expand in the shape of a simple rising arc 
of popular defiance. Rather, they began in a particular 
place, sputtered and subsided, only to re-emerge 
elsewhere in perhaps a different form, influenced by 
local particularities of circumstance and culture. 

Movements that may appear to us in retrospect as a 
unified set of events are, in fact, irregular and 
scattered. Only afterwards do we see the underlying 
common institutional causes and movement passions that 
mark these events so we can name them, as the 
abolitionist movement, for example, or the labor 
movement or the civil rights movement. I think Occupy 
is likely to unfold in a similar way. 

And it will not subside quickly. Like earlier great 
movements that changed the course of American history, 
Occupy is fueled by deep institutional lacunae and 
inconsistencies. The mainly young people who are Occupy 
represent a generation coming of age in societies 
marked by an increasingly predatory and criminal 
financial capitalism that has created mass indebtness 
and economic insecurity. At the same time, the policies 
that once softened the impact of economic change (which 
some commentators once thought were necessary for the 
"legitimation" of capitalism) are being rolled back. 

Think of the bitter pill of the broken promises to 
young people who were told that education was the route 
to security and prosperity and who now graduate to 
unemployment and huge debts. And this is occurring in 
the context of amazing revelations of the corruption of 
always-flawed American electoral procedures. 

Then, there is the looming threat of ecological 
disasters that threaten the future of the planet 
itself. These conditions reflect deep institutional 
problems: they are not likely to be solved or even much 
softened very quickly, and so long as they persist, 
they will fuel the protests that are an extension and 
continuation of Occupy, whether we give them that name 
or not. 

A movement forceful enough to change the course of 
history must accomplish two great tasks. One is 
communicative. The movement must use its distinctive 
repertoire of drama and disturbance, of crowds and 
marches and banners and chants, to raise the issues 
that are being papered over by normal politics, for the 
obvious reason that normal politics is inevitably 
dominated by money and propaganda. 

On this, Occupy has already made substantial headway. 
The slogans that assert we are the 99%, they are the 
1%, named the historic increase in inequality in the 
United States during the past few decades as the main 
issue, and the movement dramaturgy of encampments and 
masks and general assemblies and twinkling fingers 
helped to give the message heft and appeal, even to the 
media that had at first simply disparaged the movement. 

To be sure, there were lots of complaints that Occupy 
had failed to issue its own policy proposals - which I 
think it was wise not to, since to do so would have 
ensnared the activists in endless disputes about 
particulars. But that is quibbling. It is far more 
important that we can see the influence of the 
movement's main issue - extreme inequality - on the 
speeches at the Democratic convention, for example, or 
on the ongoing strike of 29,000 school teachers in 
Chicago who have been joined by students and parents in 
their demands not only for salary increases, but for a 
roster of improvements in the public schools. So far, 
good. 

However, movements that make an imprint do more than 
communicate. They also threaten to exert a distinctive 
kind of power that results from refusing co-operation 
in the routines that institutionalized social life 
requires. That is the power that workers wield when 
they walk off the job, or that students muster when 
they refuse to go to class, or that tenants have when 
refuse to pay the rent, or that urban crowds exert when 
they block streets and highways. In principle, it is 
also the power that debtors might mobilize if they 
threatened to default on their loans. This sort of 
disruption - in essence, the strike writ large - is 
harder to organize than a rally or a march because 
people will fear reactions, which are likely to be 
swift and harsh. So, the protesters have to figure out 
how to defend themselves. 

This is also the problem that other great protest 
movements confronted: the abolitionists had to work out 
how to sustain the "underground railway" in the face of 
southern posses, and the sit-down strikers of the 1930s 
had to figure out how to defend their factory 
occupations in the face of company police and sometimes 
state militia. I suspect that Occupy is struggling with 
that problem now, as an expanded Occupy begins to try 
to organize campaigns against mortgage foreclosures, 
student and credit card debt, and even the public debt 
saddling municipalities. 

The stakes are large, for the 1%, and for the rest of 
us. (c) 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited 

Frances Fox Piven is professor of political science and 
sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University 
of New York, where she has taught since 1982. Her 
latest book, just published, is Who's Afraid of Frances 
Fox Piven? The Essential Writings of the Professor 
Glenn Beck Loves to Hate (The New Press). She is the 
author and co-author of numerous books, including The 
War at Home: The Domestic Costs of Bush's Militarism 
(2004) and Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People 
Change America (2006), and has received career and 
lifetime achievement awards from the American 
Sociological Association and the American Political 
Science Association. Frances has been featured on 
Democracy Now!, and regular contributor to The Nation 
more Frances Fox Piven 

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