An Epitaph for Occupy

Three months ago, I exhorted Occupy Wall Street to focus its message and prune some of the lunacy it invited. I wanted a sharp ideological tack to puncture into the mainstream and really make itself relevant. That—criticism? no, prescription—was soon joined by a chorus loud enough to lift the commentary to the increasingly permeable “meta” plane and was suddenly itself the debate. And now, at the end of the year, what have we to show for any of it but the academic musings that began, sustained, and now commemorate what could have been a very meaningful event? The global scope of the protests validated the fundamental discontent that drove the Occupiers into the streets. Probably the most important effect of the Occupy banner has been its injection of equality language and social restlessness into the West’s bloodstream. The world of this writing is more aware than it was on September 16, 2011. And still, I feel compelled to register an epitaph for Occupy, a necessary protest that wasted its traction on nowhere to go. It couldn’t get out of its own way because it didn’t know where that was.

The message was nonexistent. The stunt of the actual sleep-in gave the protest a platform, but it whiffed its chance by muddling its goals. A chorus onstage also has a platform, but it doesn’t reach the audience until its voices come together and says one thing. Occupy said nothing by saying everything. The dubious excuse started to arise that there was just too much to fix for specificity. “It’s impossible to translate the issue of the greed of Wall Street into one demand or two demands,” said Dr. Cornel West. “You’re talking about raising political consciousness so it spills over all parts of the country, so people can begin to see what’s going on through a different set of lens.” So…what are we supposed to do with that? Talk amongst ourselves? A movement can’t be an art project; it can’t let its meaning be assigned to it. Such an attitude is an artifact of our “awareness” culture, a marketing construct that resets the goal of ‘curing’ a disease to ‘raising awareness’ of it, to absolve consumers the failure of medical science/global charity/etc. while keeping the donations flowing. Occupy either did or should have sought to be a real agent of change, but the fact of the matter was that there was no way to draw a line from the end-the-Fed Paulite to the Marxist protesting alongside each other, incuriously applauding forth each other’s spittle. At some point, the agent of change must specify the answer to “What is the first thing that should change?” if anything is to change. They couldn’t, so nothing did.

The protest generated dizzying media interest, most of it due to the novelty of the “Occupation of New York City,” as the General Assembly’s manifesto turgidly stated. In reality it had all the substance and flair of John and Yoko’s Bed-In. But it worked, temporarily. I originally thought that the physical occupation of Zuccotti Park was only a preface to the more considered, flannel-lined movement that it was sure to spawn, that sleeping in the park was not the source of its power, but rather a PR move. We soon found out there were no PR considerations aside from the slogan-swollen rhetoric of vague redistributive tendencies. There was only the hope that capturing the interest of the world writ large would lead it to take up the fight that Occupy was afraid to. The clock expired when it became clear that the event itself was central to the media attention. The sit-in sat in for any discernable agenda, leading Zuccotti Park to become the fulcrum around which debate formed (legitimate use or not?) and opinions vacillated (I sympathize but can’t they leave?). The plane of the discussion they hoped to spark was thus fatally compromised. Occupy Wall Street used the park to good effect in the beginning, but never expanded past it, which meant that the inevitable end of the “occupation” meant the inevitable end of the line.

Then there were the protests in the other cities. The Zuccotti eviction showed weary mayors across the world that this was not a group that was going to particularly defend itself, and a blanket settled across the movement like the thick cover of snow that never fell on a single sleeping trustafarian. Occupy’s death marked little else besides the United States’ first foray into austerity protests, a veritable industry in Europe. Ultimately, though, Occupy will be remembered as a lost opportunity to change the discussion. It will be remembered as a failure to marshal widespread support into anything tangible, which is exactly what so many of its supporters feared from the outset. We can attribute this to a general lack of leadership, but more importantly, Occupy failed to grow up because it was never willing to admit that its aspirational relevance required the jettison of many of its founding die-hards.

The reason an organized, maintained political realization of Occupy was needed was that Wall Street is simply not Tahrir Square. The American powerless are not dictated so much as they are cogs in a machine that they are free to change if they’re able to muster enough commonly-interested voters. The Arab Spring doesn’t face the fundamental “first step to change” question that perplexes Western progressives because the removal of autocracy is the clear answer. Here, nothing is clear. Our problem is a general usurpation of popularly-intended governance for the benefit of the powerful, but solving such a problem is not easy. The voice of dissent cannot rise to equal the squeals of the elite without speaking together. This solidarity is what Occupy fell short of fostering.

Occupy’s fatal flaw was that it aspired to be a surging, compelling force instead of a political one. The General Assembly’s perfectly usable manifesto was never given the platform befitting a guiding charter, or even a definitive statement, because it didn’t really want to have one. OWS started an impressive discussion, but did not adequately articulate its dissatisfaction, let alone steer the conversation. The window in which the American public is willing to hear these arguments doesn’t open often, and it has shut once more. That chance slipping away is the unfortunate and utterly precedented legacy of Occupy.