Surviving Capitalism (Not) : The State, Occupy, and Disaster: What Radical Movement Builders Can Learn from the Case of Occupy Sandy

We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Saturday, September 6, 2014

The State, Occupy, and Disaster: What Radical Movement Builders Can Learn from the Case of Occupy Sandy

Click here to access article by Easton Smith posted at Occupy Wall Street.

In this rather lengthy but important article, Smith examines a report issued by the Department of Homeland Security regarding the Occupy Sandy project and finds that it offers lessons for future grassroots organizing.

The achievements and pitfalls of the Occupy Sandy’s tactics and strategy contain salient lessons about how to build large scale, direct-aid organizations and broad social movements in horizontal and effective ways. The ways in which Occupy Sandy interacted with the state in a crisis situation can likewise teach us valuable lessons about how to effectively organize radical projects without being co-opted, marginalized or outright repressed. The activist community in the United States as a whole, however, does not know that much about what happened in the weeks and months following the storm, and those who participated in the efforts have few resources for reflecting on and understanding the value of their work.