When we say Martin Luther King [Jr. But in real life, these struggles take a very, very, very long time. It takes a long time to change the world.
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Skip to content. Kai Ryssdal and Richard Cunningham Sep 14, Heard on:. Listen Now. Share Now on:. Many experts believe the economic justice movement has had lasting influence. How socialism became the talk of the midterms. Divided Decade: How the financial crisis changed politics. What unites the global protesters. The super-rich might not be riding as high as we thought. It was an approach that called for an awful lot of meetings. Many activists love meetings. White is not one of them. Holmes, however, is a meetings person.
And she was not alone. In a film she made about OWS called All Day All Week , we see a number of mostly young people excited by outreach meetings, actions groups, legal groups, communications groups, town planning, treasury and comfort groups, food committees and student assemblies. There was even a demands group, that duly failed to come up with any demands. In the film you can see a performative aspect to the occupation, and not just in the drummers and buskers who seem to provide an endless noisy soundtrack to the proceedings.
Although the autumnal weather soon turned cold, people kept coming in the early days, and the crowds kept swelling. The police made continual attempts to stem the flow by insisting that all tents and permanent structures be removed, but Liberty Plaza, as it was renamed by the protesters, held firm. On 25 September, protesters marched from the plaza to Union Square, where the police pepper-sprayed screaming demonstrators and arrested dozens of activists. The scenes were captured on smartphones and quickly went viral, turning up on the evening news, which served to bring more people to the protest.
There were also celebrity visitors, such as the film-maker Michael Moore and the radical academic Cornel West. A rumour also went round that Radiohead were going to pay a visit and play a concert in solidarity.
Had the band actually turned up, there is the question of whether they would have been allowed by the occupiers to perform, and how long it would have taken to reach that decision. After 20 minutes of listening to this back and forth, Lewis left, having not addressed the gathering. Although the Radiohead rumour was soon exposed as false, more people came flocking to the plaza un New York. For one young protester from Brooklyn, the new arrivals were not a wholly positive development.
Cantave herself only spent one night sleeping out in the plaza. It was not always a safe space for women or female-presenting, female-identified people.
Yet by comparison with sleeping out elsewhere in the city, it was relatively safe. As one witness testifies in All Day All Week , horizontalism faltered when it met homelessness. No one had the expertise or knowledge to deal with people who had really been let down by the system they were all protesting against.
Cantave says she can remember a lively discussion about whether they were organising a protest project or providing social services. The fact is, even in the most egalitarian of settings, some people are practised in discursive dynamics and others struggle to make their voices heard.
It was amazing. To the academic, it was a theory that had been put into practice. The US housing markets experienced a violent crash in late In response, newly-elected President Obama authorized the US government to bail-out the banks using billions of taxpayer dollars. The financial institutions that survived began to foreclose on struggling homeowners while continuing to reward their executives with million-dollar bonuses and lavish incentives.
This stark contrast exposed the growing income gap between the wealthy and the rest of the country Castells, The OWS protestors pointed to this inequality and advocated for a more just system.
The roots of the OWS movement can be traced to other significant nonviolent protest movements in America and across the globe. The anti-war and Civil Rights movements of the s used principles of nonviolence to persuade mass audiences that their causes were just. They understood that riots, looting, and destruction of property would undermine their moral position.
While some OWS protestors wanted to engage in violent acts to garner attention to the cause, others pointed to the success of the Civil Rights Movement as an example of the effectiveness of nonviolent protest.
They believed the same tactics — large scale occupation of public spaces and creative use of technology and social media — could be used to unite protestors around the perceived injustices of the US financial system Jensen and Bang, Although the OWS movement had deep roots in earlier nonviolent protests, it was the first opportunity for many in the Millennial generation to address their own unique social, political, and economic concerns.
Many had voted for Obama and were inspired by his vision for hope and change in America, but the climate in America three years later was not what they had expected. Millennials brought their generational values with them to the protest: a commitment to social justice, democratic decision-making processes, a resistance to formal organizational hierarchies and an insistence on openness and dialogue between people of different classes, genders, races and sexual orientations.
Though critics argue that the OWS movement did not accomplish any concrete political goals, the participants argue they were only seeking to establish a public conversation around the issue of economic injustice Castells, By drawing attention to the deepening income inequality in America, protestors considered OWS a success.
Web sites and social media were the perfect vehicles for the OWS message because the internet was a radically democratic form of communication; anyone could post their ideas and suggest activities to further their cause. The use of technology — particularly social media — to organize protests and communicate goals, objectives and activities is a new form of social movement that constitutes a break from the protest movements of the past.
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