[On September
17th, 2011 the Occupy Wall
Street protests began in lower Manhattan. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy
that event and four other mass protests, leading up to a special weekend post
on mass protest in the age of Trump.]
On a frustrating
side to the groundbreaking mass protest, and a more important effect.
I wrote
in this space about Occupy Wall Street just a few months after it began, as
part of my 2011 year-end series, and would still emphasize many of the same
historical and cultural contexts that I highlighted in that post (many of
which, it turns out, will be focal points for later posts in this week’s
series). More broadly, I would argue that if anything the subsequent six and a
half years have driven home far more clearly and frustratingly one of my main
points in that post: the many parallels between our contemporary moment and the
late
19th century Gilded Age, an era full of layers and
contradictions but most centrally defined by striking, growing, and hugely
destructive inequalities across a wide range of communities and issues. (But
also by images of gold, making a president
who literally shits on a golden throne about as on-the-nose as a metaphor
can possibly get.) If we are indeed inside a new Gilded Age, then the Occupy
Wall Street protests could be seen a vital origin point for the kinds of
collective protests and activisms that helped produce the prior Gilded Age’s
progressive, muckrakers, and other voices of resistance and reform.
The Occupy
protests also have a good deal in common with another Gilded Age movement of
mass protest and resistance, the incipient
labor movement. While the late 19th century labor movement
achieved many vital victories and reforms, it also found itself inextricably
linked to a historical tragedy where mass protest and mob violence became
frustratingly interconnected: the May
1886 Haymarket bombing. As I wrote in that hyperlinked post, there’s no way
to know whether the Haymarket bombers had anything to do with the labor
movement (or
anarchism, or etc.); but at the very least domestic terrorists used the
occasion of a justified mass protest to enact an act of violence. And
similarly, while the rise of
antifa and its central strategy of (often) violent
leftist mass protest is a separate 21st century trend from
Occupy Wall Street, I would argue that the two communities overlap (or at least
occupy a continuum) and are at times difficult to separate—justified and
overtly peaceful mass protests in service of vital social and political goals
blending far too closely with extreme and often violent mob actions. (To be
fair, antifa does many
other things as well, but mob violence is a part of the movement without
question.) Violence and mass protest are never entirely unrelated, but to my
mind they cannot become too closely tied without producing a fundamental and
frustrating shift in purpose for the protests themselves.
Frustrating
continuums or not, however, the Occupy Wall Street protests themselves remained largely nonviolent and peaceful, and I
don’t mean to suggest otherwise. Moreover, I think OWS achieved at least one
hugely important effect that has endured long beyond the disassembling of the
camps: a crucial reframing of national narratives to include issues like the
minimum wage and the need for a living wage, student loan debt and the cost of
higher education, health care costs and realities, predatory banking practices
and loan forgiveness policies, and many more. All of those issues pre-dated
Occupy of course, but as often with mass protests Occupy helped draw sustained
and substantive attention to them, forcing them into our collective
conversations. As a result, Occupy-linked political figures like Elizabeth
Warren and Bernie
Sanders have been able to make their fights for these and other parallel
issues central to their public service work and identities, extending Occupy’s
protest activisms into the policy-making arena very successfully. As the rest
of the week’s posts will illustrate, mass protest is most effective when it
creates legacies that survive and thrive long after the protests have concluded—and
on that note, OWS has to be counted as one of the most effective and important
mass protests in American history.
Next protest
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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