A Walk on Telegraph Avenue

A thick fog of teargas hung low in the street. The white particles in the air stuck to everything – exposed skin, jackets, baseball caps – like the smallest of snowflakes, too small to see. It stuck, clung to the figures moving in-and-out of the rays of sunlight breaking through and burned into their skin. Stinging at first with a saline smell, it assaulted their noses and eyes even under scarves and masks, behind sunglasses and under the collars of shirts. It seared in their lungs when they were unfortunate enough to heave it in, and fell into the sweaty rim of their low-cut socks when they ran through it in confusion.

Flashbangs exploded around them, rubber bullets flew overhead, and debris strewn the streets as the protesters tried to regroup. They rushed to shield their wounded from the hail of fire with makeshift cover and screamed for medics. To compare this scene to a battle would be no metaphor or cheap simile: this would-be protest had become an authoritarian war zone.

Despite what the mind might jump to at first, this wasn’t a remote local. This wasn’t the upturned Middle East, or a turbulent Europe rocked by economic instability. This was Oakland California, January 2012. This was my home turned Baghdad.

A peaceful protest in the East Bay metropolis of Oakland had turned violent one sunny day in January. Asking different people ‘why’ will get you different answers: protester antagonizes, police antagonizes, the protest “hijacked” by wayward demonstrators in the anarchist community. What is for certain is that the “99%” protests in the Bay Area – with its painfully obvious class differences and tensions – were far more urgent and less academic than in many other parts of the country.

As horrible as it may have been to see streets I knew so well turned to a bloody firing line, it was more than a little exciting. My fellow Bay Area leftists (because let’s be frank: that’s who they were) were finally marching in numbers that mattered. Even as familiar scenes were choked by a burning cloud, these protesters stood tall and demanded that the system let them be heard—

—And then it was over.

The Occupy movement fell out of national interest just as quickly as it had risen to its precipice; all the kids went back to school, all the people went back to their daily lives, and Occupy was reduced to a handful of Radicals holding on to vague egalitarian ideas. Even the infamous “Black Bloc” protesters – a combination of anarchists and hired goons paid to instigate police forces – vanished back into their daily lives, their revolutionary spirit just as muted as the rest of ours. The movement that made my heart swell with patriotism and reminded me of the unfinished struggles of my father’s generation was suddenly just *not*, just another passing news story in the twenty-four/seven media barrage.

I live on the East Coast now, far away from the memories of would-be revolutionaries and students-turned-patriots in the teargas fog. It is hard to think that six months ago this country was dancing on the brink of something close to open class warfare, that only half a year ago the People had become so tired of the lies and the rhetoric that they took to the streets… and it is even harder to answer why Occupy has faltered.

What’s Not Not-Right With Occupy

Make no mistake: there are several ‘easy answers’ as to why Occupy has failed or ‘lulled’ in these past months; those answers, however, reek of denial and lack a critical quality needed to push the movement forward. These answers will usually be:

A) The Occupy movement is alive, but suffering a media black-out.

Let’s be honest here: our news sources live off ratings from controversy. Unless you prescribe to a vast conspiracy theory, there is no reason why a contentious and large movement would be blacked out on all channels unless the movement simply wasn’t large.

B) Occupy has evolved into a different organization with different goals/tactics.

This statement is technically true, but mostly a kind delusion. It is true if by ‘EVOLVED’ you mean ‘Occupy has concerned itself with local politics to the point of becoming regional special interest groups with no semblance to the movement that spawned it’; and by ‘DIFFERENT TACTICS’ you mean ‘Occupy has adapted to the fact that it no longer enjoys enough physical support to hold large demonstrations’.

OR

C) People do care and would like to be involved, but are too busy with their daily lives.

This is probably the only basically true answer, but is also virtually the same as saying ‘people care, just not enough to inconvenience themselves’.

I’m not going to accept another answer I get often – that saying the average American’s attention span is too short – because I simply see it as untrue. If people can pay attention to half a year’s worth of Baseball or a season’s worth of television, people can follow a controversial issue that literally handles how they live *if they choose to*.

So what’s the truth? How did the Occupy movement go from pushing us to the brink of change to an afterthought? I would offer that the reason for the slow death of Occupy had less to do with the three above excuses than it does with problems at the very heart of the movement: it’s lack of focus, organization, and – most importantly – goals and the movement’s approach to them.

The Left and Leftism

I do not believe it would be unfair to categorize Occupy as a Leftist movement, nor do I think it would be unfair to criticize them as one. What I mean by this is that Occupy, like many other modern-day American Leftist movements, suffers from a lethal lack of focus. While Conservative movements can often focus their complaints and issue to a narrow band of interrelated topics, a pouring out of the American Left ‘snowballs’ into a collection of *all* Leftist causes. In the summer of 2010 I attended a pro-education organization meeting in Los Angeles where such a problem occurred.

I attended as an observer along with Save Our Schools, a Bay Area group representing local community colleges. The meeting was a statewide attempt to form some consensus on what the many disparate groups fighting budget cuts to higher education could do, would do, and wanted to do about it. As a group of moderates with a clear focus, SOS was assuming that this would be the start of a unified, statewide group defending education through action. What transpired was a massive quagmire; a meeting about education spiraled into immigrant rights, environmentalism, and Marxist infighting over the finer points of dialectic materialism. Paranoia and egocentric grand-standing trumped logical debate. A critical lack of focus gridlocked the would-be committee, and to this day the many groups fighting to reverse the budget cuts to public colleges in California have failed, their weakness their inability to bond over their one uniting cause.

My experience in LA exposed the fundamental weakness of the Left. Unable to focus on, fight for, and organize around a single cause, the Left remains fractured and confederate, disparate groups often unable to or unwilling to associate simply out of localized stubbornness. To those of us who remember the anti-war movement in the previous decade, a grim memory lurks of the same patchwork nature of the Left mentality that stopped organized support against the war. The left suffers from attention deficit disorder in the most severe form, and Occupy is by no means immune.

We All Can’t Be Che

Occupy also suffers from another of the Left’s lethal maladies: structural pluralism.

When individuals refer to the ‘Occupy’ movement, they are either referring to the famed ‘Occupy Wall Street’ organization, or the hundreds of similar movements around the world. Occupy in and of itself is not a singular group with an agenda, but a franchise of politically-alike protest groups who claim to represent “the 99%”. Their immediate goals, outlooks, and actions vary wildly between localities. In one cannot effectively refer to Occupy as a single entity, but a collective confederation of concepts stitched together by frustration. This is the group’s [sic] second weakness, and, unfortunately, a genetic one – a problem it inherited from its radical roots.

Occupy could not have arisen in any other form than this current tumor-like state. Started by the Canadian “grass-roots” organization AdBusters, Occupy’s chronic disease is a reflection of their parents’ mentality; that is to say, AdBusters philosophy of ‘grass-roots’ activism not only allowed the Occupy protests to spread, regionalize, and intensify, but also pre-programmed its national-level ineffectiveness.

Because of the Occupy groups’ independent natures there is little national-level coordination between the groups. As such, the Occupy movement as whole is unable to push forward a national-level agenda that could effective push through legislation (or at least make the attempt to). This renders the Occupy groups essentially infertile; local groups might be able to make stands or influence local politicians for a short period of time, but ultimately we will see Occupy disappear, witling down to a collection of die-hard activists who are unable to be taken seriously due to numbers alone.

The structural pluralism of Occupy – the construction of the Occupy groups as separate groups fighting essentially different battles – creates a condition in which the would-be reformers can’t win. Like a Hindi guru on a bed of nails, the evenly distributed pressure of the many different groups fighting many different fights prevents the skin of the system from being pierced. While a unified group with a national-level command structure could coordinate efforts and reinforce support, the tribalism of Occupy prevents success and makes their efforts so much for not.

Activists Without A Cause

Although the curse of the Left’s ‘snowball effect’ and Occupy’s ‘grass-roots’ weaknesses disable Occupy’s real effectiveness, the ultimate flaw with Occupy is more fundamental: what they hope to accomplish.

As many of the Occupiers may have originally stated, Occupy was intended as a vehicle to raise awareness about the intermingledness of the financial sector and the political process. Transforming quickly across the nation, Occupy became a cover for challenging alike issues over class and classism. Although many politically Radical individuals like myself celebrated this, it was also Occupy’s swan song indicating its coming demise.

Occupy decided to make itself the Liberal-Radical tool of challenging a classist, classically Conservative establishment, but did so without any real way of doing so. Inspired by uprisings in the Middle East, Occupy lacked the concentrated fervor of the thick urban population of Egypt. Its message was powered by urgency by lacked singular demands: Egypt wanted Mubarak gone, while Occupy just wanted *change*. Unable to imagine the impossible and realize their wildest, undreamt dreams, Occupy surged with support but lacked a plan of action. No single voice rose up over the chaos to deliver a plan, a prophetic message. No Dr. King emerged in the massive marches on Wall Street to preach peacefully fundamental shift in race relations, and no Huey P. Newton battled alongside our compatriots and inspired the downtrodden to save themselves through militancy. With so many voices screaming, Occupy has remained silent – it has no singular demand to cry out for. Without this final destination to fight for, Occupy is dying.

A movement that once threatened the very foundations of class in this country is dying, tearing itself apart into irrelevancy. Muddled by a lack of focus, lack of organization, and true lack of goals the Occupy movement is fading away into a dim memory of excitement. No change has rocked the nation, and no great overturning of the obvious unfairness of our system has taken place.

Home in the Rearview Mirror

Far away from my Californian home, I can only think of Occupy in retrospect. Occupy Oakland’s website viciously claims to be alive, and my friends involved with its efforts would most likely be offended by my grim treatment of the movement. I see videos of fires in the street and battles with police post-marked months ago and can’t help but be overwhelmed by the idea that my generation’s shot at change is slipping through our fingers. Contention and rage over injustice has limped away into muted public acceptance of the protests. Without unity, without agreement, and without direction Occupy is dying, fading out of the public mind like so many other blips in the 24-hour news cycle.

If the movement is to continue past this sophomoric summer, it must fundamentally change. If any of the pain endured by my comrades is to be for a greater victory, then a hard conversation needs to start – not about the flaws of the system, or our own shortcomings. If Occupy is to survive it must transform: not to a pluralistic confederation of independent singers, but a unified chorus of political actors working towards a specific goal. Occupy has to seek to possess the Republic itself instead of its city-states, otherwise the tear gas was for not.

Or perhaps this was all but past tense… or is it?

Part 2 to come: How to Save Occupy