From Occupy Movement to Social Reconstruction
The movements that made headlines in 2011 are turning their energy toward rebuilding society from the ground up
By Nathan Schneider, Al Jazeera America
30 June 14
Ever since I wrote a book about Occupy Wall Street, I’ve often found myself on the receiving end of people asking, “What happened to Occupy, anyway?” Now, more than two years since the movement faded from the headlines, and in the wake of French economist Thomas Piketty’s bestselling diagnosis of economic inequality, the urgency of these questions is mounting, not diminishing. The answer is also becoming clearer: the networks of activists that formed in the midst of 2011’s worldwide wave of protest are developing into efforts to create durable economic and political experiments. Rather than focusing on opposing an unjust system, they’re testing ways to replace it with something new.
The 2011 movements were always prefigurative in some respects. From Tahrir Square in Cairo to Zuccotti Park in New York, protesters eschewed formal leadership in order to practice direct democracy, a means of revealing just how false our societies’ claims to being democratic have become. They built little utopias that provided free food, libraries, music, religious services and classes, trying to put on display what they thought a good society should look like.
The 2011 movements also reflected the emergence of a global community that spans borders as protesters in different countries borrowed strategies and slogans from each other. Though the U.S. media tended to present Occupy Wall Street as a homegrown phenomenon, the early meetings in New York that led to it were full of people with ties to movements in places such as Cairo, Athens and Barcelona. In the first weeks of the occupation in Zuccotti Park, I remember an activist from Spain rolling her eyes as she watched New Yorkers repeating some of the mistakes she and her comrades had made a few months earlier in Madrid. Even now, a careful observer can see these movements around the world riding a common wave, maturing in parallel with each other as they paddle their way to the next breakthrough, one experiment at a time.
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