Occupy: Thinking Locally, Acting Globally?

As the movement nears its second month, we take a look at what its impact has been so far.

Occupy Wall Street has been going on for nearly two months now, and the transnational movement has only built in intensity in recent weeks. Organizers in Oakland staged a general strike that led to the temporary closure of the city's port, leading to clashes with police that sent at least four people to the hospital. How the public responds to that flashpoint has yet to crystalize, but Chris Good of The Atlantic takes a look at opinion polls taken before the strike and concludes that if anything, the endless comparisons to the Tea Party are becoming even more apt, so long as you don't look at their ideologies:

"The movements are strikingly similar. Both are founded on simple, inclusive messages: OWS on wealth disparity, the tea party on spending and taxes. Both are characterized by emotions of outrage and indignation. And both have dealt with bad eggs and critics' eagerness to paint the movements accordingly: the tea party as racist, OWS as anti-Semitic.

Those similarities carry over to the polls, too. A month after the Tea Party protests began in 2009, they carried about 31 per cent support from the public; the Occupiers took about 30 per cent. But large swaths of the population were largely ignorant of both groups at the one-month stage, with about a third of the population saying they hadn't heard enough about either group to form an opinion either way. The Tea Party, Good notes, only really took off among the public once they staged the Tax Day protests on April 15, 2009. He speculates that the Oakland showdown could have the same effect on the Occupy movement, although whether that dooms or boosts the movement remains open.

The National Post's Jonathan Kay offers keen insight into the role – or lack thereof – that university campuses have played in fostering the movement. While giving a speech at Bard College in upstate New York, where "all of the caricatures of America’s scholastic elite come alive," he observes that the uber-liberal make-up of the college is at best tacitly supportive of the movement, but nowhere near as vocal as campuses were during the tumult of the 1960s. "Bard is a sign of the times. Historically, left-wing protest movements have been hatched and nurtured on campuses — Berkeley, Kent State, Paris University at Nanterre. Back in 1970, more than 450 American campuses were shut down when 4-million students when on strike," writes Kay. "Compare that to 2011: The Occupy movement has almost completely bypassed North American university life, and has instead coalesced in downtown areas." Kay cites a talk he had with Brandeis University president Frederick Lawrence, who noted:

"'If you look at what was going on in the 1960s, you have to consider that it was a lot easier to be a ‘revolutionary’ if you knew that there was a job waiting for you when you were ready to be absorbed into the economy,' Lawrence says. 'The students of today are worried that they will be part of the first generation of Americans who will not be better off than their parents. That focuses the mind.'"

Kay notes the irony that "campus protest culture has been killed by the very economic turbulence and unemployment ennui that has propelled Occupy protesters onto the streets." We'd add that the amount of debt students take on just to get a degree is probably one of the best reasons to hit the streets, especially here in Canada. That the movement has yet to galvanize students speaks to the potential for it to gain steam in the long term, particularly if job prospects don't improve in the near-term.

And finally, Terry Glavin observes in the Ottawa Citizen that one of the most welcome aspects of the Occupy movement has been its aversion to the tactics and messages of the anti-globalization crowd that were the dominant force in the protests of the past two decades. "After an entire generation of ever-deeper retreats into the cul-de-sacs of identity politics and dead-end irrational antagonism to working-class culture, there's suddenly an acute emphasis on the politics of equality," says Glavin. The tone of the protests is a far cry from, say, protests against Israeli apartheid or the World Trade Organization (says Glavin, "'What Is Our One Demand?' may not be much of a slogan but it's a damn sight better than 'We are All Hezbollah Now.'" Indeed.). This shift in rhetoric is probably due to the very real concerns that "one in every 10 Canadian children lives in poverty, youth unemployment is 14 per cent, and nearly half the 770,000 Canadians who rely on food banks are kids," says Glavin. Those stats are compounded by the fact that the old vanguard of progressive protesters will get to retire at 65 with pensions, houses, and benefits, while these kids likely won't. The Occupy movement's greatest legacy, then, could be in radically refocusing the efforts of activists to issues affecting themselves and their neighbours, albeit with an eye to the global dimension that economics necessarily involves in the age of globalization. In some sense, then, Occupy has inverted the old slogan "think globally, act locally" into something far more befitting of the times.

More on the Occupy Movement from The Mark:

In Defence of Occupy

On 'Free Markets' and Social Struggle