Where Next for Occupy?

Where Next for Occupy?

Charles Eisenstein

Occupy has awakened a potent energy that had been lying dormant. It has made activists of people of a new generation, and brought renewed hope to veterans of past movements. Unlike earlier protest movements, it has not objected to any specific policy, such as segregation or the Vietnam War. It is a protest against a condition of society, highlighted by the maldistribution of wealth and debt whose symbol is Wall Street, that goes deeper than anything the Occupiers can easily name. As we say, no demand is big enough.

Having been awakened though, this energy needs to find appropriate avenues of expression. So far, the movement has eschewed involvement in electoral politics, nor has it adopted any specific social cause. An outside observer might think that its purpose were to fight for the right to camp in urban centers. While the right of free assembly and the reclamation of public space are important issues, the vast groundswell of public indignation that OWS has tapped into is not primarily about those. If the movement turns inward and becomes about the encampments themselves, it will alienate the majority of the public and become an historical footnote.

The occupations have served an important purpose, but the time has come to direct the energy they have awakened toward tangible goals. I say this with all due respect for the wariness that has held the movement back from political involvement so far. Whatever these tangible goals are, they must not be too narrow. No one in the movement is going to get very excited about any proposal on the mainstream political radar: the payroll tax cut, for instance, or Obama's health care plan. For too long, the left has mortgaged its soul to a dispirited, defeated version of the practical. Society and the planet are in such a strait that the old practical isn't enough. We need to think big -- and then be practical.

Let us name, then, the underlying object of the protests' discontent. It is a society that fundamentally isn't working, a system that coerces us into ruining the planet and exploiting its people, denying us life and liberty if we refuse to comply, and sometimes withholding them even if we do comply. It is a society where life is a little bleaker, gaudier, uglier, less authentic, and less hopeful with each passing year. It is a system of winners and losers, in which even the winners are less happy than a typical Ladakhi peasant or Amazonian hunter-gatherer. It is a society of pretense, image, and illusion. It is a society where more human energy goes to war than to art. Most tellingly, it is a society where it is normal to hate Monday. The discontent behind the protests comes from the conviction, "We can do better than this!"

Despite the rhetoric of the 99% and the 1%, I find in talking to influential people in the movement a deep understanding that no one is merely a victim of the system I have described. We are also its perpetuators and its enforcers; it is woven into our habits, our psychology, our very being. That is why the movement has striven to embody a different way of relating and being through consensus-based decision-making, open space technologies, gift-based allocation of resources, non-violent communication, and so forth. We want to change the psychic and interpersonal substructure of the system we live in. That is why this movement has united the long-sundered currents of spiritual practice and political activism. And that is also why we say: The revolution is love.

While such a statement might trigger the inner cynic who associates love with a mere emotional state, akin to the spiritual escapism of the last three decades, I think it actually offers an organizing principle around which meaningful social and political action can coalesce.