Why Now? What's Next? Naomi Klein and Yotam Marom in Conversation About Occupy Wall Street
http://www.thenation.com/article/165530/why-now-whats-next-naomi-klein-and-yotam-marom-conversation-about-occupy-wall-street
Naomi Klein: One of the things thats most mysterious about this moment is Why now? People have been fighting austerity measures and calling out abuses by the banks for a couple of years, with basically the same analysis: We wont pay for your crisis. But it just didnt seem to take off, at least in the US. There were marches and there were political projects and there were protests like Bloombergville, but they were largely ignored. There really was not anything on a mass scale, nothing that really struck a nerve. And now suddenly, this group of people in a park set off something extraordinary. So how do you account for that, having been involved in Occupy Wall Street since the beginning, but also in earlier anti-austerity actions?
Yotam Marom: Okay, so the first answer is, I have no idea, no one does. But I can offer some guesses. I think there are a few things you have to pay attention to when you see moments like these. One is conditionsunemployment, debt, foreclosure, the many other issues people are facing. Conditions are real, theyre bad, and you cant fake them. Another sort of base for this kind of thing is the organizing people do to prepare for moments like these. We like to fantasize about these uprisings and big political momentsand we like to imagine that they erupt out of nowhere and that thats all it takesbut those things come on the back of an enormous amount of organizing that happens every day, all over the world, in communities that are really marginalized and facing the worst attacks.
So those are the two kind of prerequisites for a moment like this to take place. And then you have to ask, Whats the third element that makes it all come together, whats the trigger, the magic dust? Well, Im not sure what the answer is, but I know what it feels like. It feels like something has been opened up, a kind of space nobody knew existed, and so all sorts of things that were impossible before are possible now. Something just got kind of unclogged. All sorts of people just started to see their struggles in this, started being able to identify with it, started feeling like winning is possible, there is an alternative, it doesnt have to be this way. I think thats the special thing here.