The Institutions of the Left Did Little: How Occupy survived despite a lack of union support

[marmar]

from In These Times:


The Institutions of the Left Did Little
How Occupy survived despite a lack of union support.

BY Cole Stangler


Last April for In These Times, I wrote that the Occupy movement marked the maturation of the Obama generation—a collective realization that our generation’s problems have far more to do with a rotten political and economic system than they do with the individual in office or the party in power.

Occupy wasn’t just what Slavoj Zizek warned of—a kind of 21st century Human Be-In that we now get to reminisce about over beers and joints. While the revolt was short-lived and limited, we gained the sense of participating in a mass-movement expressing a basic level of class solidarity absent from American political life for generations—the kind of thing you can only learn if you’re there in the streets. And as OWS veterans continue their lives beyond the movement, many of us card-carrying members of the precariat, we retain the common experience of struggling together, fueled by the conviction that, organized together, we represent the interests of the majority of this country.

The movement itself was, of course, deeply flawed. And its fizzling out had as much to do with its own structural inadequacies as it did the deficiencies of the American political landscape.

Police repression should not be easily dismissed—reports have revealed that city police departments colluded with the Department of Homeland Security to monitor and shut down protests, and one can only shudder at the levels of surveillance we have yet to learn of. But successful movements have dealt with worse. ......................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://inthesetimes.com/article/15915/the_institutions_of_the_left_did_little/