ing those types of occupations—those are all tactics that are part of the playbook of civil resistance. So if we look at that wider playbook and say, “OK, how has it been used in the past? How is this particular movement doing it?” some of that comparative work can give us some insights into why this stuff works. The other thing we see with Black Lives Matter is you get this constant refrain of, “We support your cause, we support your issue, but we just don’t like the way you’re doing it. Can’t you go about this in another way?” And one thing that the comparative work does is it shows that this is actually something that shows up again and again. So, this is the same thing that they said to Martin Luther King… we see patterns, we see trends that happen again and again. You write in the book, “Movements at their most transformative produce tectonic shifts that make the ground tremble, and although the impact is undeniable, predicting exactly which buildings or bridges will buckle is often difficult. Because of this, activists who generate the tremors often do not receive the credit they deserve in the policy changes that came about.” The Occupy movement is potentially one of those instances, and you cite some real reforms. But it seems the real impact over time has been somebody like Bernie Sanders becoming a viable presidential candidate. ME: The more structural side of organizing often has a very, very specific demand. So it might be a 25 cent raise for a particular group of workers in a particular classification within a corporation, and they’ll fight the boss for that 25 cent raise. These mass mobilizations, in order to bring in thousands of people, tens of thousands of people, millions of people—the types of issues they’re bringing in are much broader than that, they’re more symbolically loaded with that wider political significance. And because these movements flare up and seem to fade out, a lot of people say, “Well they didn’t accomplish anything,” while the union or community group can point to a specific reform that they change. My argument is that while it’s easy to be cynical and say that these [mass] movements didn’t do anything, if you actually track what they did, they can have some
very important accomplishments, oftentimes with no budget, no paid staff—this is an outpouring of people power that is not well-resourced to begin with. So, in the case of Occupy, they had a very clear and documentable impact on the media discussion, which went from the summer before being about austerity, being about the debt ceilings, and changing that to a national conversation that was about inequality, that was about jobs, about the unjust power of the 1 percent versus the 99 percent. And we’re not satisfied to stop and just say, “Well they changed the conversation.” I think that’s really important, but changing the conversation does have concrete impacts—they passed millionaires’ taxes in California and New York that were considered dead in the water before. They passed a homeowner’s bill of rights in California. In Ohio—where they tried to do an anti-union drive similar to what Scott Walker did in Wisconsin—that effort failed, and it failed with people on the ground organizing, saying, “Occupy totally changed the framework how we were fighting about this, where we went door-to-door and every conversation was in that context
T HIS EXC ER PT ED INT ERVIE W H AS BE E N E D I TE D FO R CLA R I TY
of the 99 percent and 1 percent,” and that effort loses where Scott Walker had been able to succeed. These are long-term changes, too. It’s not just those specific things that we can point to in the first year or six months… We see people like Elizabeth Warren coming into office, we see Bernie Sanders raising a lot of the same issues, echoing a lot of the same rhetoric as Occupy Wall Street, and finding this really surprising—at least to the professional political class—shocking response, a resonance among the public that people wouldn’t have predicted. You said in the book that people surprise themselves with the amount of power that they actually have. ME:I think that that’s absolutely true, and that’s another part of the problem of seeing voting as the end all be all. Mark Engler is an author living in West Philadelphia who co-authored the book “This is an Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt is Shaping the Twenty-First Century” with his brother Paul Engler, executive director of The Center for the Working Poor. O CTO B E R 20 16
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