What’s different about the current iteration of New York street theater is the abandonment of some of the previous movement’s costly overhead. It suggests progressives, even the ones who weren’t there, have learned some lessons from Occupy’s downfall. In 2011, the very thing which Occupy considered its chief strength—the refusal to go home, the attempts to claim public space as their own—turned out to be its fatal flaw. It was far easier to critique society-at-large than to run an actual society, even on a very minute scale. Stories of rape, theft, and assault spread from Occupy camps around the country and an earnest attempt to create a fledgling anti-capitalist utopia failed. By contrast, the new protesters seem content to at least live in the real world as they agitate for a new one.
The other thing the new protests have abandoned is the former movement’s foolish insistence on not having a message beyond a vague anti-capitalist stance (“We are the 99 percent!”). Recall that it became a kind of thoughtcrime in Occupy camps to speak to the media on behalf of the movement, at least without hours of dialogue and near-universal agreement on what should be said. In practice, the result was that the movement never said much of anything. There was a message about economic inequality, but it didn’t go anywhere. Some banks were occupied briefly. Some ATM’s were vandalized. A few foreclosed homes were reoccupied. There was talk of a Robin Hood tax or student loan forgiveness, but often the movement seemed to see politics as beneath its ambition to remake everything. And that arrogance hurt them.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member