Opinion: The Occupy L.A. Movement and Beyond---As Big as It Gets

The majority of my students at Cal State, Los Angeles had not heard of the Occupy movement before I projected the Wall Street feed live into the classroom alongside my lecture on State Theory. There is something eerie about lecturing on revolutions alongside live images of white shirts beating on decent people. The streets of Manhattan have never looked at once so familiar and so foreign. 

There are real grievances: the bailouts, Wall Street excess, abuses from banks, the lack of jobs, and so on. There are many ideas about what has sparked this outburst now: an SEIU lecture, the Zapatistas, the Spanish Indignados, Adbusters, anonymous, alter-globalization protesters, the Tea Party, and so on.

Decades of social movement scholarship has failed to answer the question of why movements happen when they do, though I do not see an end anytime soon to people trying to answer the question. The more interesting question, however, is how do we get from where we are today to where this movement wants us to go?

Public expression in the form of occupation has spread quickly, and there are now dozens of occupied spaces in the U.S. involving thousands of people. Many of my colleagues around the country have observed that the core of the Occupy Movement is anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist.

One might link this to the anti-capitalist trajectory launched (or augmented) in Seattle 1999, gaining momentum in the G8 protests, RNC and DNC protests, and other such events in Spain, UK, Greece, Buenos Aires, Santiago and even the World Social Forum.

When I was down at City Hall to observe the movement first-hand as it made its landing in Los Angeles and when I have popped in during the week, the core of those I see are similar to the folks I have seen at anti-capitalist protests. There are also new faces and new links, indicating that this expression is growing. What the ultimate result will be is hard to see. It will depend entirely on the institutions and organizations that come out of this to carry the work forward.

This cultural trend is currently creating that new infrastructure to carry out real policy change. At worst, if they fail, this will be similar to the wave of yippies and hippies; of levitating the Pentagon and the summer of love and of Haight Street. That phenomenon had real effects -- liberalizing attitudes about authority, gender, sexual orientation, and so on. This new trend might have the effect of opening up the media and maybe even security laws. This is important and culturally significant.

This kind of occupation tactic might keep popping up for a while longer but absent a large acute event, the Occupiers may have to re-group. Some thought that the 700 arrests in New York would have been exactly the kind of large acute event to make the movement even larger. But perhaps arrests are not repressive enough to cause this effect.

While the number of arrests is a high outlier in recent years, mass arrests have been a steady feature of government response to anti-capitalist protesters in the US and elsewhere in the past decade. Moreover, some on the ground in New York have indicated that at least a few officers on the street have expressed verbal sympathy for the movement.

As Jeff Goodwin, a colleague of mine at New York University, has expressed, if the Occupations continue and as the presidential election nears, Democrats will be in a difficult position to choose between the Occupiers or Wall Street. The test may come when that day arrives.