From The North Star: http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=935
At the height of Occupy Wall Street’s efflorescence, when the enragés
who took up residence in Zuccotti Park succeeded in raising the battle
standard of the 99% for the entire world to see, I sat down for an interview with Frances Fox Piven
to help make sense of what was unfolding before us. Although I thought I
knew more than my fair share about the theory and practice of social
movements in the U.S., as a child of the End of History, I had never
really been part of one. I was born in the early 1980s, during the
dreadful dawn of “Morning in America,” so aside from my days as an
undergraduate global trade summit-hopper I learned almost everything I
know about this stuff from books. The occupation of Zuccotti Park went
on for days, days turned into weeks, and weeks turned into months. It
looked as if an honest-to-goodness social movement was breaking out in
this country for the first time in my life. To be sure, I was elated.
But to my surprise, that elation was often overcome by a sense of
foreboding. I looked at all of the silliness that accompanied the
encampments and feared that the movement (I still hesitate to use that
phrase) would self-destruct before it made even a small dent in the
power of the 1%.
As is her wont, Piven was effusive in her praise
for the protests. But she also reminded me and anyone who read the
interview that when it comes to assessing the strength and development
of social movements, it’s best to not get caught up in the exigencies of
the moment and to take the long view instead. All the great movements
in history, she reminded us, do not progress in a linear fashion, ever
onward and upward until the final battle has been won. They grow and
develop unevenly, moving by fits and starts, hitting peaks and valleys
along the way. They may produce moments of collective euphoria, as in
those first few weeks in Zuccotti Park, but they also inevitably bring
with them periods of discouragement and demobilization.
There’s no
question that the Occupy movement is currently mired in one of those
periods of discouragement. Despite professions to the contrary among its
truest believers, ever since the nationally-coordinated police assault
on Occupy encampments last fall, the movement appears to have completely
lost its sense of momentum and efficacy. Efforts to bring about a
“spring awakening” in New York and elsewhere have proven to be
stillborn, exemplified by the failure of the various May 1 “general
strikes” to jumpstart the movement or to broaden its appeal beyond its
activist core.
Although this all has been rather disheartening to
witness, the current ebbing of Occupy’s fortunes presents us all with a
crucial opportunity to engage in critical reflection and analysis of
where we’ve been and where we might go from here. Such a project seems
even more urgent in light of the growing strength of anti-austerity
forces elsewhere, particularly the spectacular rise of SYRIZA in Greece
and the burgeoning student movement in Quebec, Canada.
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