Last July, Adbusters sent out this invi­ta­tion addressed to those ​“ready for a Tahrir moment”: ​“On Sept. 17, flood into low­er Man­hat­tan, set up tents, kitchens, peace­ful bar­ri­cades and occu­py Wall Street.” And thus, the Van­cou­ver-based non­prof­it mag­a­zine pub­lished by self-described ​“cul­ture jam­mers and cre­atives work­ing to change the way infor­ma­tion flows, the way cor­po­ra­tions wield pow­er and the way mean­ing is pro­duced in our soci­ety” sparked a movement.

A power struggle is going on in the movement, between the old vertical type of a Left and a new young Left that isn't so enamored with the old wolf pack mentality.

Eston­ian-born doc­u­men­tary film­mak­er Kalle Lasn co-found­ed Adbusters in 1989. Lasn, 70-years-young (“old,” as in ​“old Left,” is an adjec­tive he eschews), draws his inspi­ra­tion from the Sit­u­a­tion­ists, avant-garde Euro­pean rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies who believed cor­po­rate cap­i­tal­ism per­vert­ed the human spir­it. The Sit­u­a­tion­ists reached their zenith in 1968 Paris and dis­band­ed in 1972, but their efforts to affirm what it means to be free live on in Adbusters.

In These Times spoke with Lasn in March to see what ​“the man behind the cur­tain” had to say for him­self and the move­ment he helped ignite.

What chal­lenges does the Occu­py move­ment face?

It is a replay of what hap­pened in 1968 when an insur­rec­tion in the Latin Quar­ter of Paris explod­ed onto cam­pus­es and cities around the world. For a few brief moments it looked like the first glob­al rev­o­lu­tion. Occu­py is round two of 1968. Young peo­ple around the world have this sink­ing feel­ing that the next 30, 40 or 50 years of their lives will be one big black hole of eco­log­i­cal and polit­i­cal and finan­cial and per­son­al cri­sis. And if you are fac­ing that sort of prospect you real­ize that unless you stand up and fight for a dif­fer­ent kind of future, you don’t have a future. Unlike 1968, it is going to have legs.

We on the Left have become an inef­fec­tive, whiny, com­plain­ing, fin­ger-point­ing kind of move­ment that hasn’t had a new out-of-the-box idea for a cou­ple of gen­er­a­tions. Every­thing we’ve tried, includ­ing the Bat­tle of Seat­tle and all sorts of anti-glob­al­iza­tion move­ments, has fiz­zled out.

A pow­er strug­gle is going on in the move­ment, between the old ver­ti­cal type of a Left and a new young Left that has social media at its fin­ger tips and isn’t so enam­ored with the old wolf pack men­tal­i­ty but is ready to do things in a much more hor­i­zon­tal way with­out lead­ers – some­times even with­out demands. The ques­tion is: In this tus­sle between the old Left and the new Left, who will win? And if tem­porar­i­ly the old Left tri­umphs then we’re in for a hard year this year and pos­si­bly even next, but bit by bit this move­ment does her­ald a new Left. This move­ment has made the Left cool again.

How does one build counter-hege­mon­ic pow­er and get beyond ​“crowd sourc­ing,” which is real­ly what the Occu­py gen­er­al assem­blies are?

In the next few years there will be what I call a ​“meme war” – a war of real­ly big ideas with­in eco­nom­ics. Will we be able to pull off a par­a­digm shift from neo­clas­si­cal eco­nom­ics to this new eco­log­i­cal or bio­nom­ic or psy­cho­nom­ic dis­ci­pline that is bub­bling under­neath the sur­face? Will we be able to change our cur­rent dys­func­tion­al mar­ket­place into one in which the price of every prod­uct tells the eco­log­i­cal truth? Will we be able to impose Robin Hood tax­es and dis­man­tle this glob­al casi­no with more than $1 tril­lion a day flush­ing around the sys­tem in deriv­a­tives and cred­it default swaps and oth­er finan­cial instruments?

If we on the Left try to fig­ure out what these meta memes are and start fight­ing for them, then we will get some­where. If we fall back on the old ways of doing things, then cap­i­tal­ism is going to swal­low us whole.

Where does pow­er over the dis­tri­b­u­tion of soci­etal resources fit into this equa­tion? How is the Occu­py move­ment going to redis­trib­ute wealth from the 1% to the 99%?

Quite frankly, the ques­tion you ask betrays the fact that you are quot­ing the old Left. The way to fix the prob­lem may not actu­al­ly be a straight­for­ward approach of pass­ing some laws and tak­ing some mon­ey from the 1% and giv­ing it to the 99%. Maybe we have to have a more sophis­ti­cat­ed approach where we don’t play out this kind of class war­fare idea. The change has to be deep­er. If we can final­ly ram through this Robin Hood tax, which a lot of peo­ple are for in Europe, and make it very high, not just a .01% but a 1% tax on all finan­cial trans­ac­tions, then that will be a deep-down trans­for­ma­tion of casi­no cap­i­tal­ism, and all of a sud­den the Robin Hood tax would col­lect tril­lions of dol­lars every year and then we the peo­ple of the world could start argu­ing over how to spend that money.

Isn’t the leg­isla­tive process need­ed to enact or ​“ram through” redis­trib­u­tive poli­cies like the Robin Hood tax?

Once you do that, you’re accept­ing the sta­tus quo. Maybe the real job is to launch a third polit­i­cal par­ty in Amer­i­ca that is ini­ti­at­ed on the Inter­net, gets mil­lion of sig­na­tures, and then has a con­ven­tion. Maybe the task of chang­ing the polit­i­cal land­scape of Amer­i­ca with a third par­ty is a way smarter move than what the Tea Par­ty did with the Repub­li­cans, and what so many peo­ple are say­ing we should do with the Democ­rats. The trick for the polit­i­cal Left is to think deep­er. Instead of think­ing, ​“Hey, let’s pass a law that leg­is­lates the Robin Hood tax,” let’s change the polit­i­cal landscape.

Take, for exam­ple, the idea we launched last year. In the gen­er­al assem­blies we have a micro­cosm of a demo­c­ra­t­ic process that’s mag­i­cal and beau­ti­ful. It works and this is a metaphor for how Amer­i­ca should work.

Even­tu­al­ly, I agree, we will have to pass laws and do all that stuff you are talk­ing about, but there is a lot of deep-down rab­ble-rous­ing that needs to hap­pen before we get to that point.

Rep. Bar­ney Frank (D‑Mass.) has said: ​“Sim­ply being in a pub­lic place and voic­ing your opin­ion in and of itself doesn’t do any­thing polit­i­cal­ly. … I don’t know what the vot­ing behav­ior of all these peo­ple is but I’m a lit­tle unhap­py when peo­ple who don’t vote, who didn’t vote last time, blame me for the con­se­quences of not vot­ing.” Is this an argu­ment for the Occu­py move­ment to enter the elec­toral system?

It reminds me of an old adage: If you’re a car­pen­ter, you see every­thing as a nail and a ham­mer. Bar­ney Frank has done some good things with leg­is­la­tion. But he is blind, as are so many oth­er Amer­i­cans, includ­ing the Tea Partiers and most of the peo­ple in Con­gress and most of the peo­ple on the Left, as to how change ulti­mate­ly hap­pens. Change finds its bed with­in a cul­ture with big ideas that res­onate with peo­ple. There has to be a sort of mys­tery and mag­ic to the whole thing and so far the Occu­py move­ment has been very good at oper­at­ing on that deep­er lev­el. Some­where along the line we will have to pass laws and we will need Bar­ney Franks. But there are a lot of meta memes that we have to con­jure up, and a lot of strat­e­gy that we have to per­fect, and there are mil­lions more young peo­ple that we have to inspire and recruit into our move­ment before we sim­pli­fy the whole process into a cut-and-dry pass­ing of a law.

The Occu­py move­ment has been com­mit­ted to devel­op­ing actions and strate­gies through con­sen­sus. How do the ​“tac­ti­cal brief­in­gs” issued by Adbusters fit into that process?

This tus­sle over what we should do next is some­thing we should all get involved in. When we put out that call [in the Jan­u­ary 25 ​“Tac­ti­cal Brief­ing #25”] for 50,000 peo­ple to descend on Chica­go [on May 1, ahead of the NATO sum­mit], peo­ple in Chica­go said, ​“You haven’t been talk­ing to us. How dare you do this. You haven’t been part of our meet­ings.” I say, ​“To hell with them.” We want to put out a tac­ti­cal brief­ing, and you can take it or leave it.

Adbusters’ mis­sion state­ment says that you want to change ​“the way mean­ing is pro­duced.” What does that mean?

At the moment, mean­ing is pro­duced by a com­mer­cial­ized mass media that is mix­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tions with com­mer­cial­ism and mind-fuck­ing us all and not giv­ing us the infor­ma­tion we need to make wise deci­sions about the future. The polit­i­cal Left has been pret­ty lousy at cre­at­ing that kind of deep-down mean­ing, of hav­ing nar­ra­tives that inspire young peo­ple. The future is a meme war and the win­ners will be the peo­ple who know how to cre­ate the meaning.