8 Paulo Freire, Ana Maria Araujo Freire, and Donaldo P. Macedo, The Paulo Freire Reader (New York: Continuum, 1998), 212.
9 I first heard this phrase from my friend and comrade Max Berger.
10 Tariq Ali, “Venezuela: Changing the World by Taking Power,” VenezuelAnalysis.com, interviewed by Jardim, Claudia and Jonah Gindin, July 22, 2004, http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/598.
11 By suggesting that the value of an action is mostly symbolic I do not mean that it is therefore unimportant. Symbolic contests are indispensable to changing structures and relationships of power and winning measurable gains. I will explore this theme in depth later in the book.
12 While I do lead some trainings on my own, I have mostly worked collaboratively with co-trainers through training organizations or campaigning organizations, including The Ruckus Society, Center for Story-based Strategy, School of the Americas Watch, War Resisters League, MoveOn.org, and many other local campaigns and ad hoc mobilization training working groups. Today my training work is through Beyond the Choir (see http://beyondthechoir.org).
13 I mean here the mission statement for the larger effort, which was dubbed the Mobilization for Global Justice.
14 At first activist was used to describe people in Sweden who advocated getting involved in World War I; it was intended as a counter to the label pacifist.
15 Google Ngram Viewer is a corpus tool that charts the frequency of words and phrases in books published from 1800–2012 (to date).
16 Nadia Bashir, Penelope Lockwood, Alison Chasteen, Daniel Nadolny, and Indra Noyes, “The Ironic Impact of Activists: Negative Stereotypes Reduce Social Change Influence,” European Journal of Social Psychology 43, no. 7 (2013): 614–626.
17 Bill Bishop and Robert G. Cushing, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-minded America Is Tearing Us Apart (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008).
18 Ronald Inglehart, The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles among Western Publics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977).
19 Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).
20 Theda Skocpol, Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life (University of Oklahoma Press: Norman, 2003).
21 The rise of neoliberalism is an important backdrop to both tracks.
22 I am borrowing language here from my friend and comrade, Beka Economopoulos, who I once heard advocate, informally at a meeting, that we must “weave ourselves into the fabric of society.”
23 Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass on Slavery and the Civil War: Selections from His Writings (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 2003 [1857]), 42.
24 Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press., 1997), 108.
25 This is not to suggest that elites never conspire to maintain and expand their powers, privileges, and profits. Of course they do.
26 Pierre Bourdieu, Practical Reason (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press., 1998), 96.
27 “Wrong” from the vantage point of elites, of course.
The 99%: The Symbol and the Agent
In this chapter I take a brief first look at Occupy Wall Street, a key “case study” that I will keep coming back to throughout the book. Occupy succeeded in introducing a popularly resonant populist narrative about economic inequality and a rigged political system. How it did so is instructive and foreshadows key concepts that I will keep building upon in later chapters. However, Occupy also offers us lessons about what not to do; I will examine how Occupy turned inward in ways that severely limited its ability to take the popular outrage it had stirred up and mobilize it into a political force.
“The years in which the hegemony of neoliberalism was unchallenged have fortunately come to a close.”
—Chantal Mouffe28
November 15, 2011, 1:36 a.m. EST
A massive police force is presently evicting Liberty Square, home of Occupy Wall Street for the past two months and birthplace of the 99% movement that has spread across the country.
The raid started just after 1:00am. Supporters and allies are mobilizing throughout the city, presently converging at Foley Square. Supporters are also planning public actions for the coming days, including occupation actions.
Two months ago a few hundred New Yorkers set up an encampment at the doorstep of Wall Street. Since then, Occupy Wall Street has become a national and even international symbol—with similarly styled occupations popping up in cities and towns across America and around the world. The Occupy movement was inspired by similar occupations and uprisings such as those during Arab Spring, and in Spain, Greece, Italy, France, and the UK.
A growing popular movement has significantly altered the national narrative about our economy, our democracy, and our future. Americans are talking about the consolidation of wealth and power in our society, and the stranglehold that the top 1% have over our political system. More and more Americans are seeing the crises of our economy and our democracy as systemic problems that require collective action to remedy. More and more Americans are identifying as part of the 99%, and saying “enough!”
This burgeoning movement is more than a protest, more than an occupation, and more than any tactic. The “us” in the movement is far broader than those who are able to participate in physical occupation. The movement is everyone who sends supplies, everyone who talks to their friends and families about the underlying issues, everyone who takes some form of action to get involved in this civic process.
This moment is nothing short of America rediscovering the strength we hold when we come together as citizens to take action to address crises that impact us all.
Such a movement cannot be evicted. Some politicians may physically remove us from public spaces—our spaces—and, physically, they may succeed. But we are engaged in a battle over ideas. Our idea is that our political structures should serve us, the people—all of us, not just those who have amassed great wealth and power. We believe that is a highly popular idea, and that is why so many people have come so quickly to identify with Occupy Wall Street and the 99% movement. You cannot evict an idea whose time has come.
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