Gitlin Occupy's Predicament: The Moment and The Prospects For The Movement1

The British Journal of Sociology 2013 Volume 64 Issue 1
Occupys predicament: the moment and the

prospects for the movement1
Todd Gitlin
Abstract
Occupy Wall Street has stalled in its attempt to make a transition from a moment
to a movement. It had a sizable impact upon the presidential election, driving
Americas political centre of gravity toward the left, but has been unable or
unwilling to evolve beyond its original core into a full-service movement that
welcomes contributions from a wide range of activists at varying levels of com-
mitment and skill and plausibly campaigns for substantial reforms. In contrast to
earlier American social movements of the twentieth century, the Occupy move-
ment began with a large popular base of support. Propped up by that support, its
inner movement of core activists with strong anarchist and horizontalist beliefs
transformed the political environment even as they disdained formal reform
demands and conducted decisions in a demanding, fully participatory manner. But
the core was deeply suspicious of the cooptive and hierarchical tendencies of the
unions and membership organizations the outer movement whose supporters
made up the bulk of the participants who turned out for Occupys large
demonstrations. The inner movements awkward fit with that outer movement
blocked transformation into an enduring structure capable of winning substantial
reforms over time. When the encampments were dispersed by governmental
authorities, the core lost its ability to convert electronic communications into the
energy and community that derive from face-to-face contact. The outlook for the
effectiveness of the movement is decidedly limited unless an alliance of disparate
groups develops to press for reforms within the political system.
Keywords: Occupy; social movement; plutocracy; anarchism; Barack Obama;
assembly
The following is the text of the 2012 BJS Annual Public Lecture, given at the
London School of Economics on 18 October 2012, and was based upon Todd
Gitlins book Occupy Nation (see image I)
Gitlin (Columbia University) (Corresponding author email: tg2058@columbia.edu)

London School of Economics and Political Science 2013 ISSN 0007-1315 print/1468-4446 online.
Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden,
MA 02148, USA on behalf of the LSE. DOI: 10.1111/1468-4446.12001
4 Todd Gitlin
Image I:
HarperCollins Publishers
I. Rudiments: the inner movement and its structure of feeling
One Occupy organizer in NewYork,ShenTong,began his political life in Beijing

in 1989, as a leader of the students who occupied Tiananmen Square until they
were dispersed by troops, tanks, rifles, and a bloodbath. He was one of the
leaders able to flee to the USA, where he earned advanced degrees, and in the
storybook way of immigrant successes started a software company with an
office near Wall Street, where (in a departure from the storybook) he observed
a new social fact right down the street and felt the stirrings of a new structure of
feeling (as Raymond Williams would have put it) and proceeded to devote
himself for the better part of a year to Occupy Wall Street.There are two crises
for a movement, he told me. One is to be massacred. The other is to succeed.
The massacre part is easy to understand.What did he mean by succeed? Why
does it make sense to speak of the Occupy movement as a qualified success?
Last September, Occupy Wall Street was one of those upheavals that burst
out of nowhere,like the volcano that famously erupted from a farmers cornfield
London School of Economics and Political Science 2013 British Journal of Sociology 64(1)
Occupys predicament: the moment and the prospects for the movement 5
in Mexico in 1943 and suddenly transformed the landscape. Except that in this
case, the volcano triggered hundreds more around the country. After it arrived,
the eruption seemed inevitable, for the ground had been rumbling for weeks.
There were, as some of us say, structural preconditions those grand social
features so conspicuous in retrospect, so indecipherable in prospect. (The
molten undermass was there for years, but where was the eruption?) Before the
ground trembled, no one not the participants who camped out in Zuccotti
Park, not the pundits or politicians or the rest of the political class saw the
eruption coming. When it arrived, a host of journalists and pundits, whether or
not they approved of the politics of plutocracy, pronounced it peculiar, incom-
prehensible, dangerous, evanescent, and ineffectual, if not revolting.
What erupted in Zuccotti Park and spilled across the USA in 2011, was, in
truth, a movements beginning, or the beginning of the beginning, as one
placard put it, acknowledging, or wishing, that a campaign to reverse the
accretion of plutocratic power in recent decades must endure a matter of years.
It was spontaneous, but there were rumblings during the preceding months.
(See image II) It was organized, but not in any obvious way, and the organizers
had tried to ignite previous incarnations, and failed.
This time, to change metaphors, the flame caught.
Image II: New York City Assembly
Source: Produced by Isham Christie.

British Journal of Sociology 64(1) London School of Economics and Political Science 2013
6 Todd Gitlin
Many if not most of the prime movers in Occupy the inner movement
were anarchists and democratic radicals, desirous of reorganizing social deci-
sions around directly democratic,horizontal assemblies. But the flame caught,
and burned, not only because of the spunk and audacity of the young insur-
gents but because there was ample tinder: indignation over the consequential
but obscured fact that Americas leading institutions had, for more than three
decades since the end of cheap oil in the early 1970s, growing competition
from abroad and the beginning of wholesale deregulation in the late 1970s
for more than three decades the concentrated energies of American capital
had safeguarded themselves while heightening a Great Divergence of wealth
and leaving the living conditions of the great majority of the population to
stagnate or worse, thus breaking the implied contract that had been wrestled
out of the convulsions and reforms of the previous four decades, namely, that
a collective bargain among capital, labour, and the state would not only
produce growth but keep inequality in check. (In fact, it was generally assumed
that growth was tethered to incrementally growing equality.) It was easily
established that the proverbial 99%, most of whom consider themselves
middle class, did not benefit from the economic growth of these decades. (See
image III: Income share 19202010).
Image III: Income share 19202010
Source: Piketty and Saez, World Top Incomes Database http://topincomes.g-mond.paris

schoolofeconomics.eu/ or T. Piketty and E. Saez, Income Inequality in the US, 19131998
(Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2003), updated series (World Top Incomes Database, 2012).
The share of total wealth in the hands of the wealthiest 1 per cent grew to
two-fifths. However famously optimistic they used to be, Americans were, in
the main, persuaded that the world was not going their way, and some were
ready to understand the situation as more than a regrettable economic condi-
tion but as a moral crisis:
In 2010 . . . the Walton family wealth is as large as the bottom 48.8 million
families in the wealth distribution (constituting 41.5 percent of all American
families) combined.
Josh Bivens, Inequality, exhibit A: Walmart and the wealth of American
families, Working Economics Blog, epi.org (2012)
Another way to represent this can be seen in image IV: Total wealth
Image IV: Total wealth
Source: http://blogs.berkeley.edu/2011/12/05/the-few-the-proud-the-very-rich/
A moral crisis with a conspicuous nemesis a savage capitalism that

brought the global economy to its knees by building castles in the air with
counterfeit paper. This movement could not have erupted and grown were
there not passionate indignation everywhere at the moral default of societys
chief institutions. The inner and outer movement alike could agree that the
political class was largely in hock to the wealthy (partly in the case of the
Democrats, almost wholly in the case of the Republicans), with Robert Rubin
and Alan Greenspan elevated into the power couple of bipartisan, deregula-
tory Washington. (Culture did not lag behind, if you recall Reagan-era Dallas
and Dynasty, and Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.) As bankers lavished
conspicuously inscribed gift buildings and sanctuaries upon the universities,
hospitals, museums, and worshipful palaces of their choice, and were primped,
flattered, solicited for benison and lionized, there was an ideological and moral
vacuum to be filled. The universities and colleges held their palms up, contrib-
uting their own measure to the exaltation of wealth, for the main note struck
in business schools and economics departments was that markets were self-
regulating. (Even now, unfazed by the long, catastrophic global experiment in
8 Todd Gitlin
financial bloat and deregulation, much of the economics profession continues

to emphasize the self-regulating magic of markets as certified by the Ayn
Rand disciple who became the Republican partys nominee for vice-
president.) The churches were inert, speaking of Jesus but quietly; the line
about the rich man and the eye of the needle was written in invisible ink. So
there arrived an Occupy movement that in its soul wished to amount to a new
Awakening to join the line of religious and moral Awakenings that have
shaped American history since the seventeenth century.
The rise of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) duly impressed the opposition.
Rupert Murdochs New York Post and Fox News expressed their loathing daily.
House Republican leader Eric Cantor denounced what he called the mobs
of Zuccotti Park, but then (and here was the remarkable part) clammed
up refusal to condemn a popular cause being the better part of politics.
During the Republican primaries, former Speaker Newt Gingrich, in desper-
ate need, was the beneficiary of $10 million from Mr. and Mrs. Sheldon
Adelson buying him a TV commercial casting Mitt Romney as a predatory
capitalist, a theme that proved unhelpful to Gingrich but helpful to the Obama
campaign, since it succeeded in labeling Romney as the poster boy of the 1%
before hed had a chance to define himself. Meanwhile, by and large Demo-
crats handled the movement gingerly, for fear that any more intense expres-
sions of friendliness might tar them with unruly brushes, but unions and the
multimillion membership organization MoveOn, only too aware that they had
been treading water, were suddenly infused with life and lent their material
support, especially for the larger Occupy demonstrations; still, the larger
movements hostility to electoral politics and big hierarchical organizations
did not accord with the weakened unions idea of how to invest their energies
during a presidential campaign year. The inner core of the movement was
phobic about the risk of being coopted. It didnt want different policies; it
wanted a different way of life; or better, it wanted to be, in its daily functioning,
its direct democracy and provision of services, that way of life.
At the core of Occupy was an identity, however absurd it appeared to the
outside. It prided itself on a famously horizontal style, a will toward a coop-
erative commonwealth, a repertory of rituals and repertories of playful, some-
times confrontational, action. What floated this style was that Occupy was,
believe it or not, the first American social movement to begin with the benefit
of majority support for its main thrust. The industrial union surge of the 1930s
did not; neither did the civil rights movement (see image V) nor the move-
ment against the Vietnam War, nor the womens nor gay movements. But
recently, and consistently, American supermajorities consistently agree that
the power of money in politics needs to be curbed, that taxes should be more
progressive, that the too-big-to-fail banks were a pyramid of negligence and
self-dealing if not criminality, acting irresponsibly and with impunity to plunge
the world into financial crisis, and that the government has, by and large, been
Image V: Question from Roper Commercial Survey
Source: http://www.ropercenter.uconn.edu/data_access/ipoll/ipoll.html, Roper Commercial

Survey, Sep, 1960. Retrieved 4 December 2012 from the iPOLL Databank,The Roper Center
for Public Opinion Research, University of Connecticut.
their handmaiden. The public did not like all Occupys tactics or its ragamuffin
image; and indeed, levels of support for the movement have plunged after the
fall of 2011, as they did earlier for the Tea Party. But the Occupy movements
terminology (1%, 99%) entered into popular lore so readily because it
summed up, albeit crudely, the sense that the wielders of power are at once
arrogant, self-dealing, incompetent, and incapable of remedying the damage
they have wrought; and that their dominance constitutes a moral crisis that can
only be addressed by a moral awakening. As one Occupy slogan had it: THE
SYSTEMS NOT BROKEN, ITS FIXED.
Occupy Wall Street was jump-started by a radical core, roughly anarchist,
veterans of left-wing campaigns running back to the anti-globalization move-
ment of 1999, or even earlier, whose master stroke was to devise a form of
action, occupation, that parlayed electronic networks into the forming of face-
to-face community in public places, as (earlier in the year) in Cairos Tahrir
Square and Madrids Puerta del Sol. The core created an inner movement
which had a definable thrust stop plutocracy within an intense existential
affirmation of its communal self, an insistence that what it stood for was the
virtue of encampment itself, assembly as a way of life, a form of being. The
10 Todd Gitlin
political edge, while not articulated in the form of specific demands, was plain
in slogans like We are the 99% and Banks got bailed out, we got sold out.
These resonated with a larger public that was severely disillusioned with
politicaleconomic establishments widely seen as having superintended the
economic breakdown of 2008 and then having thrived with impunity. Restive
young people rebelling against political stagnation had in fact made an appear-
ance three years earlier in the Obama campaign of 2008, but with Obama in
the White House, they had gone into early retirement, what with Obamas own
lack of interest in sustaining it coupled with their general disinclination to
remain publicly clamorous and engaged. Now, with the country awash in debt
and unemployment, Wall Street had become an enemy both symbolic and
concrete a system and a moral abomination. The emotional tenor of OWS, a
structure of feeling with roots in the antiglobalization movement a decade
earlier, combining hope, earnestness, spunk and playful nonviolence, struck
chords in a much larger public. (See figs VIVII and also the article in
Image VI:
Todd Gitlin 2012

Image VII:
Todd Gitlin 2012
the Guardian, 2 October 2011 http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/oct/02/

occupy-wall-street-protesters-brooklyn-bridge)
Rapidly, and with the at least implicit support of institutions including
unions and elements of the Democratic Party, OWS and its spin-offs moved
political culture at the popular level.
They did so by infusing eighteenth century constitutional principle
enshrining the value of public assembly with twenty-first century methods
(social media, text messages and the like) for summoning such assembly.
Around kitchen tables and on late-night comedy shows, the Occupy move-
ment gained currency. This was something apparently new under the sun.
Whatever it was, it was a story, and it floated to the top of the detritus of
newsworthy sensations borne along on the torrential gush of media. It out-
lasted the medias misrecognitions, the framing of its diffuseness and devi-
ance front and centre, as a failed organization, a failed platform, or a poor
excuse for a political party, anything but that unruly social fact, a social
movement. It had to thank its own theatrical vigor along with no small assist-
ance from brutal and clumsy police response straight out of Central Cast-
ings villain rolls, playing Bull Connor to Martin Luther King, who knew
exactly what he was doing when he chose the thuggish police chief of Bir-
mingham, Alabama, as conspicuous antagonist. Some of Occupys antago-
nists were cast in that role, like the police who arrested 700 protesters who
were half-courting arrest on the Brooklyn Bridge Oct. 1, 2012 (See ima-
ge VIII plus the link to the YouTube video http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=yULSI-31Pto).
12 Todd Gitlin
Image VIII:
Source: Uploaded by wearechange on 1 Oct 2011 http://wearechange.org
But Occupy also had the benefit of volunteers from the ranks of the
authorities. There was the pepper-spraying Lt. Tony Bologna in New York: see
image IX plus link to You Tube video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
TZ05rWx1pig&feature=player_embedded,
Image IX:
Source: Uploaded by USLAWdotcom on 24 Sep 2011.The Law of Occupation http://occupy.

uslaw.com
and even more notoriously, Lt. John Pike of the University of California, Davis,
coolly and methodically spraying a whole line of students protesting tuition
increases. (See image X plus link to YouTube video http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=Ys1gPp2Gkow)
Image X:
Source: Uploaded by 12160info on 19 Nov 2011 http://12160.info/. Uploaded by Russia

Today
When the police went for overkill pepper spray, mass arrests pictures
of official abuse flew around the world through the movements
own media and then via the mainstream. Support for the movement
mushroomed.
So Occupy poured forth as a social amalgam, a sort of polyform,
polychromatic organism that floated on a wave of public opinion, having
captured for the moment that indispensable commodity of contemporary
culture: attention. As a focus of the collective imagination it quickly caught up
with the Tea Party, which had erupted in 2009, in local uprisings fueled by
right-wing media and money and Washington-based organization, converging
on the conviction that the government was the root of all evil. Occupy, on the
contrary, defined the financial sector of plutocratic power, symbolized by Wall
Street, as the adversary, with government as a too-willing accomplice. In its first
two months, producing clever theatrical events, it garnered popular sympathy.
Camping out cheek-by-jowl with Wall Street, using online networks to build up
face-to-face communities spaces to meet, argue, eat, take shelter, care for
14 Todd Gitlin
each other, argue some more, shout, rant, drum, sleep, read, consult, drift by, dig
deeper, learn, refuse to learn it won points by confronting corrupt adversar-
ies in whimsical and inventive ways. It brought hard-core activists anarchists,
revolutionaries, drifters, homeless people, foreclosed and indebted people,
desperate people, reformers of many stripes together with a myriad allies.
These were people who wanted community, a new start, a society in secession
or a society somehow of their own. Caught off-guard, city administrations
dithered for a time, then responded with toleration, brutality, and eventually,
dispersal.
There is much to say about what the Occupy core did and didnt achieve. Im
coming to that. But first I want to show you a sampling of photos that the
photographer Victoria Schultz 2 took in and around Zuccotti Park during the
early months. Let them speak for themselves about who they were. (See
figs XI-XVII.)
Image XI:
Victoria Shultz 2012

Image XII:
II. The outer movement and its structure of feeling
The movements activist core numbered still numbers a few tens of thou-
sands of activists nationwide. By inspection, they are largely young and
largely by circumstance or choice disconnected from social institutions.
This number is very likely commensurate with the civil rights activist commu-
nity that devoted itself to civil disobedience, mobilized larger networks and
circles, and suffered murders and beatings during the peak civil rights years of
195565. After Occupys sites were disbanded in NovemberDecember 2011,
the core struggled with mixed results to contain their divergences. They
16 Todd Gitlin
Image XIII:
quarreled, on the one hand, over whether to be more explicit than before
about their non-violence or whether, on the other hand, to affirm that a
diversity of tactics is legitimate. They fought over their majority whiteness,
and over the place of women and transgendered people. Although all factions
paid, and pay, lip service, at least, to the idea of organizing in the community,
there are not so many enduring networks of such organizers, and they are
largely untrained though the OWS core did perform yeoman relief work in
flood-battered districts of New York after Hurricane Sandy. The activists know
they need a wider base, but do not know how to find or activate one. In many
working groups, entropy prevails. As some new recruits pile in, older ones burn
Image XIV:
out. The core movement devotes proportionately more energy tending to its
own bailing them out, defending them in court, sustaining their morale,
feeding them. The care and feeding of infrastructure outweighs the building of
exostructure a sustaining network of organizers.
The Occupy movement loomed much larger in numbers and influence
because on special occasions it was able to gather hundreds of thousands of
people, possibly low millions, nationally, in grand mobilizations. Another way
of putting it, adopted by some activists, was that Occupy was the core of a
larger (or perhaps a different) movement, a 99% movement (an overstate-
ment, of course, with symbolic pizzazz), whose political expectations were
18 Todd Gitlin
Images XV:
more concrete and more contained than revolution in behalf of an anarcho-

syndicalist vision of a society governed by directly democratic assemblies.
The movement was famously unwilling to make specific demands, to agree
on a simple charter, to speak of the British precedent of a previous century. But
its thrust, if its whole amalgam of longings and fears could be translated was
overall clear. I mentioned Banks got bailed out, we got sold out. The other
main chant was, We are the 99%. Beneath surface appearances, you didnt
have to be a cryptographer to discern what the movement was about. It
wanted all sorts of things, but there was an intersection, a crosshatch area: a
redress of the gross imbalance of wealth. As I said, to the movement, flagrant
inequality which might be characterized as the collapse of the middle class,
and of upward mobility expressed not just an economic fact and a cause of
financial misery and inefficiency but a palpable indecency a grotesque squan-
dering of wealth and a warping of values.
Image XVI:
The Occupy camps were also revolutionary in an American sense. They

restated primordial revolutionary impulses. When I say primordial I mean that
they descended from the eighteenth century Enlightenment impulse which
elevated public assembly to a high place, which is why in the USA we have a
First Amendment doesnt just address freedom of religion, and speech, and the
press, but explicitly specifies the right of the people peaceably to assemble, to
petition the government for redress of grievances. This is why an even more
explicit terminology justifying assembly appears in so many state constitutions,
beginning with Pennsylvanias from 1776, which will remind you of the third
segment of the First Amendment:
20 Todd Gitlin
Image XVII:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or

prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or
of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition
the government for a redress of grievances.
First Amendment to the United States Constitution
which is the part commonly neglected both in jurisprudence and in
scholarship. Assembly, in the language of the time, conveyed something sub-
stantially more than a lot of speech. It spoke to a collective right, an affirmation
of republican procedure. The same point is made in many state constitutions:
The citizens have a right in a peaceable manner to assemble together for
their common good, and to apply to those invested with the powers of
government for redress of grievances or other proper purposes by petition,
address or remonstrance.
Constitution of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (1776)
But in the minds of the political class that ordered the clearing of the Occupy
camps, the idea of consulting upon the common good, has become radical as
Image XVIII:
Todd Gitlin 2012
in a way, it is, going to the heart of the democratic idea that government of, by,
and for the people requires that the people speak to each other in their
fashion, which might be utopian (indulging in fantasies of a moneyless society,
for example), might be dithering, meandering, highly disruptable, and by any
efficiency measure, grossly inefficient and off-putting, suitable strictly for the
hard-core 24/7 activists.
As you will have noticed, not so many Americans are anarchists, radicals,
professional drummers or street puppeteers. There are not so many here-and-
now revolutionaries. Let me underscore that the much greater numbers of
people who marched with Occupy on its days of maximum pageantry (up to
30,000 or more in New York City) were middle-class people, union members,
progressives of various stripes not so photogenic, not outr, though far more
numerous. (See image XVIII)
It was the combination of the verve of the inner movement and the outer
movement numbers showing up on special occasions that remade the political
landscape even as the core of the movement heatedly and anomalously
objected to electoral politics during an election year. But most progressive
turned, however grumpily, toward election campaign work.
As long as the encampments lasted and their epiphany moments could
multiply, the outer movement was willing to live with the inner movements
22 Todd Gitlin
participatory disorder and radicalism of style. It would turn out when invited
and play its part. But when the central rallying places were dispersed, the
respectable citizens peeled away from the Occupy core. Then centrifugal
motion prevailed. All the fissures of politics and style deepened. Wounds
festered. Some activists got into a go-for-broke mood, with no small assistance
from intransigent authorities. It became routine for demonstrators to be
penned up in remote free speech areas as the police became specialists in
intimidation, deployed noxious chemicals and rolled out tanks. Such shows of
force fueled disruptive tactics. Some riots started. In the popular mind, it didnt
matter who threw the first stone or smashed the first window. Collisions tended
to play as the fault of the protest. A police attack would be framed as a violent
demonstration. The encampments did not always demonstrate that (to use
their slogan) another world is possible, except a more unsettling world, a
world less congenial and more dangerous.
The outer movement was repelled by the drugs, the boisterousness, the
black bloc provocations, the unruly rejections of any authority, even the
movements own. After the American Autumn, there would be two more
large mobilizations on May 1 and the anniversary date of September 17.
But in public estimate, the movement crashed. In an August 2012 survey, for
example, 18 per cent said they identified with the Occupy or We Are the
99% movement, half of them strongly, and another 27 per cent said a little,
for a total leaning pro of 45 per cent as against 48 per cent who did not
identify at all. Comparisons with the Tea Party now came up mixed. In one
August poll, the Tea Party claimed 24 per cent support (24 as against 18 for
OWS, that is); in another, about one-third of those who expressed an opinion
said they looked favourably on the Tea Party, as opposed to two-thirds
unfavourably.
Still, for Occupy there were small victories. The financial system did not
buckle but it did, here and there, budge. Under pressure, some giant banks
rolled back some fees and, under pressure from local protest groups, renego-
tiated mortgages and reversed some foreclosures. Citigroup shareholders
voted (albeit nonbindingly) to recommend against a $14.9 million payout to
their then CEO, Vikram Pandit a trustee, I must add, of my home institution.
Some public officials declared their commitment to public financing of election
campaigns, or a special millionaires tax, though whether the movement will
have the resilience and focus to sustain a political campaign to bind them is
unclear. Meanwhile, capital, for its part, rolled on unfazed perhaps to the
benefit of the banks PR and advertising departments, which would be pressed
to work overtime in the months to come churning out the ads plastered
everywhere telling us of the wonders of job-creation from companies that
actually hoard cash wherever they can. But absent an extended strategy, expe-
rienced networks, and a stabilizing organizational structure, Occupy cannot
parlay small victories into action for long-term potential.
Predictions are cheap. But it might be worthwhile to try sketching prospects.

Because plutocracy is tethered to stagnation and inequality, and because so
much economic damage continues, and because Occupys outlook meets with
public approval insofar as it can be reduced to reform propositions, there
might evolve into a long-lasting full-service movement, a 99% movement that
makes room for a broad range of participants, not just those who hunger for
the Year Zero of participatory democracy or think that voting in one election
concludes their political work. Both radicals and reformers would have to
concentrate on winning over reinforcements. Beginnings, however joyous,
dont sustain the momentum that movements need if they are to leave big
imprints.
In other words, OWS changed the political landscape, but it cant build a
home there. Thus its predicament. What it built, in a burst of social entrepre-
neurship, was camps useful for a time, inspired, inspiring, and self-limited.
The camps animated just about all the anarchists and full-time radicals in
America, and inserted the movement into the public topography. This was a
substantial achievement, but not nearly enough to transform the country and
address the moral crisis. If there is to be a next phase, it will not come by
clamoring for Occupy 1.0 to become something it isnt and doesnt want to be.
A next phase would have to build on the platform created by Occupy, not try
to restore it. It requires a hardheaded appraisal of whats been accomplished
and what hasnt.
Occupy 2.0, if there is to be one, requires reconfiguration. It would have to
be powered by people of many sorts and networks and organizations of many
sorts. It cant be run horizontally theres too much frictional energy spent in
self-maintenance. It would expedite disparate spinoff projects, some of which
could plausibly culminate in victories within a few years. A network could
include the robinhoodtax.org campaign, led by the National Nurses United,
one of the more committed unions at work for serious financial reform. (See
image XIX)
This would load a trading surcharge onto the biggest, fastest investor-
speculators, a proposal with much support in Europe. There might be a push
for an updated law to separate commercial from investment banking, and
break up the banks that, being too big to fail, are too big to exist. There could
be state initiatives for full public financing of elections. (There are groups
working on variations of public financing in many states.) There might be
statewide coalitions pushing for reform programmes. In the not very populous
state of Maine, adult population 1 million, theres a 32,000 member organiza-
tion, the Maine Peoples Alliance (https://www.mainepeoplesalliance.org/)
with a paid staff of 39, running a campaign for free higher education, govern-
ment job creation, and shored-up health care for the poor. There might con-
ceivably be agreement across state lines on a common programme the
precedent might be your own nineteenth-century Chartist movement.
24 Todd Gitlin
Image XIX:
Source: National Nurses United. The poster was produced as part of the US Robin Hood
Tax Campaign which grew out of the Nurses Campaign to Heal America.
(My proposed version can be found at http://www.dissentmagazine.org/

online_articles/a-charter-for-the-99-percent). What is plain is that Occupys
predicament endures. This is the classic predicament of prophetic radicals
in a society whose institutions pay off enough people, well enough, to keep
them reasonably satisfied with their everyday dissatisfactions and disaffiliated
form a movement that might continue to shift the social dynamic over a long
haul.
In any case, networks of organizers at work over time will not spring into
existence spontaneously. Neither will a Charter. Neither will alliances com-
mitted to overcoming internal weaknesses and jurisdictional disputes, finding
and training leaders. There are not (not yet, anyway) clear signs of a full-
service or full-spectrum movement, affording space for full-time activists com-
mitted to nonviolent civil disobedience or broad-gauged debt refusal, but also
for wider circles of people who roll up their sleeves and perform the requisite
chores: sign a petition, work for a candidate, lobby for a bill and turn out to
elect politicians who can be moved, who can help by securing the movement
more space to grow and a structure of feeling that is serious about tangible
successes. The moral upheaval that Occupy invoked is still more notional
than actual. It cannot be the exclusive property of a tiny movement a
subculture that hungers for the politics of the streets. There are not enough
saints. None of the great movements of the last half-century not civil rights,
not anti-Vietnam war, not feminist, not LGTB were movements of saints
alone. Once again, a sustained majority-backed movement is possible, one that
feels, thinks, plans, judges, tries things, assesses results, sizes up who might join
and what adversaries are up to a community that in manifold ways consults
upon the common good and keeps its eyes on the prize, in the words of a
civil rights anthem, but has the acumen, stamina, and luck not to fall on its
face.
(Date accepted: November 2012)
Notes
1. The contents of this lecture are based Promise of Occupy Wall Street, Harper
upon my book: Todd Gitlin 2012 Occupy Collins Publishers.
Nation, The Roots, The Spirit and the 2. www.victoriaschultzphotography.com

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Gitlin Occupy's Predicament: The Moment and The Prospects For The Movement1

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The British Journal of Sociology 2013 Volume 64 Issue 1

Occupys predicament: the moment and the

Gitlin (Columbia University) (Corresponding author email: tg2058@columbia.edu)

I. Rudiments: the inner movement and its structure of feeling

One Occupy organizer in NewYork,ShenTong,began his political life in Beijing

Image II: New York City Assembly

Source: Produced by Isham Christie.

Image III: Income share 19202010

Source: Piketty and Saez, World Top Incomes Database http://topincomes.g-mond.paris

Image IV: Total wealth

A moral crisis with a conspicuous nemesis a savage capitalism that

financial bloat and deregulation, much of the economics profession continues

Image V: Question from Roper Commercial Survey

Source: http://www.ropercenter.uconn.edu/data_access/ipoll/ipoll.html, Roper Commercial

Todd Gitlin 2012

Todd Gitlin 2012

the Guardian, 2 October 2011 http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/oct/02/

Source: Uploaded by wearechange on 1 Oct 2011 http://wearechange.org

Source: Uploaded by USLAWdotcom on 24 Sep 2011.The Law of Occupation http://occupy.

Source: Uploaded by 12160info on 19 Nov 2011 http://12160.info/. Uploaded by Russia

Victoria Shultz 2012

Victoria Shultz 2012

II. The outer movement and its structure of feeling

Victoria Shultz 2012

Victoria Shultz 2012

Victoria Shultz 2012

more concrete and more contained than revolution in behalf of an anarcho-

Victoria Shultz 2012

The Occupy camps were also revolutionary in an American sense. They

Victoria Shultz 2012

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or

Todd Gitlin 2012

Predictions are cheap. But it might be worthwhile to try sketching prospects.

(My proposed version can be found at http://www.dissentmagazine.org/

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