Fixing Occupy

Frank Cortes

5/6/16

Engl 306

Occupy Wall Street

In September of 2011, Occupy Wall Street sprang up as a protest movement aimed at fighting for economic equality, freedom of speech, and dismantling the power structures of large corporations. This last goal marked Wall Street a prime location for protest as it served as the economic center of the United States, and also to the protesters it represented the root cause for inequality and corruption. The protesters operating the movement used various methods to voice their concerns on the matter, one of which was the occupation of Zuccotti Park, (Kasperkevic). This occupation was accompanied by the use of slogans declaring the protesters as the “99%” while the wealthy Wall Street stock traders and Company CEOs represented the “1%”.

Not much later, in the fall of 2011 after several months of demonstrations and media coverage, the protesters suffered a large hit when law enforcement evicted the occupiers from Zuccotti Park. This show of police force followed two long months of strained tension between themselves and protesters, including many arrests and cases of pepper spraying movement participants (Kasperkevic). The Occupy Wall Street movement tapered off in national news after the eviction in November of 2011 and slowly began to lose the attention of those not directly in contact with Wall Street.  Although the Occupy Wall Street movement remained active through 2012 it was in no way as powerful and recognizable as it was at its inception. The moment of crisis proved to be fatal to the movement's efforts to incite change. Their goals appeared to most clear at the beginning of the movement, but the longer the protest remained the more convoluted and unreachable. The protest became a failure because of many reason but the immediate reason was that it did not accomplish any of the goals it set up. Occupy Wall Street was trying to influence the way Wall Street ran and change the ways they believed it created inequality, and at the end of their occupation no change was enacted. A second more wide perspective of why this movement failed was because it not only failed to enact the change they wanted in the first place but they also fell out of popularity and legitimacy in a rather short period of time.

Occupy Wall Street was a failure for a few reasons. These failures will be examined in order to justify the corrections that will be offered to create a more successful protest that may have had a better chance at reaching its goals. One aspect of the Occupy Wall Street movement that proved to be a piece of its failure was the lack of definite leadership. Unlike several of the protests we have examined throughout the course, the Occupy Wall Street movement operated with hardly any leadership. The protesters within the movement had a sense of their collective identity,  which centered around a climate of anarchy, (Griffin).  This climate of anarchy fueled the animosity held by the protesters towards economic establishments of power, as well as governmental institutions. This rejection of authority figures went as deep as their own movement as the acceptance of a single authority figure leading the protesters was never officially appointed. The commitment to refuse standard methods of authority may have gone too deep and likely have caused the emphasis on a more communal approach to protest which didn’t allow a clear path to be taken in order to insight the change Occupy was attempting to create.

This lack in a leader, or defined leadership, led to the second reason Occupy failed as a movement; it didn’t stay linear in its demands and strayed too far off the path with protesters forming off into segments asking for a large variety of goals. The emphasis on economic inequality was redirected and spread out into more issues like gender inequality, race inequality, political corruption, condemnation of police brutality and many more. A social movement spread so thin between different objectives was bound to fail because the context was obscured quickly enough for the movement objectives to be hard to recognize after a while.

In order to fix Occupy Wall Street and give it a better shot at success the three main things that needed to be done immediately at the beginning in September of 2011 was the appointment of an agreed leadership, establish a set of goals that would remain constant throughout the protest and finally to disassociate the protest to one location. The reasoning behind creating an immediate leader for Occupy is not only to create a more organize protest but to also provide an element of ethos. A well established center of authority and credibility within the movement would have perhaps gone against the anarchic notion behind the collective identity behind Occupy Wall Street, but it would have given the collective identity a singular voice to follow rather than protesting aimlessly at times with no actual plan to reach the goals they proposed. Also for the purpose of gaining more attention in the media, a single leadership would have been able to perhaps create a persisting narrative to show to news outlets and online social media.

This brings up the second issue of  the conflicting trajectories that arose after the protest reached a rhetorical crisis. The moment of rhetorical crisis is defined as the period when new arguments or channels are added into the original rhetoric, which then leads to a disturbance in the balance that was once perceived, (Griffin). The Occupy movement needed to keep a linear organized rhetoric from the very beginning as to not lose their original goals to protest against Wall Street. In order to avoid the rhetorical crisis the first thing that needed to be done has already been proposed. An established leader would mediate the rhetoric much better than the open forum style protest that blended the messages and goals of what could be considered several protest movements into one large congregation. More emphasis could have been put to continuing the attack directly onto Wall Street and CEOs which may have led to more positive results in terms of how long the protest movement could have stayed relevant. This could have happened through the geographical occupation of the Zuccotti Park, or with banners and signs sending the protest message through mass media. The point of keeping the protest much more resistant to diverging concerns within the movement is to not only keep the protesters focused but also the audience at home. Any prospective protesters who may have not been directly involved with on the ground participation might have found it too difficult to conceptualize what the objective really was by the time the rhetorical crisis hit. Keeping it simple and clear may exclude participants who agreed with the initial message and only wanted to add a goal they believed was just as important, but it would keep the initial message strong.

Lastly this protest movement used kairos, specifically the geographic space of Wall Street, very well at the beginning. That being said, I believe it eventually became a key component to the fall of the movement. In order to have a successful protest there should have been less emphasis on the occupation of Zuccotti Park. It was a good show for media and perhaps a moral boost to those watching how dedicated the participants were but ultimately the protest stagnated into what appeared to look more like a campground. Rather than occupy for months on end the protest should have taken to social media much more in order to diversify how grounded the concept of Occupy Wall Street appeared to be. It is hard to determine how strongly the eviction of Zuccotti Park affected the movement but it surely hurt the moral of protesters. By relying less on the concept of physical occupation, and perhaps more on digital occupation, the movement would have lasted longer and gone on to achieve some of its goals.

Implementing all these adjustments close to the start of the Occupy Wall Street movement would not only fix some of the issues the protest suffered from, but it would also keep the movement ethical. All the proposed changes avoid the use of violence. Although violence may have helped in a short period of time, it could not have been sustained for a long amount of time and it would have left the movement vulnerable to a bad reputation with mass media. Adding a single leader, simplifying the message to only about about Wall Street and widening the protest location parameters keeps the movement legible, legal and ethical.

*The purpose of my conclusion is to provide a short argument in favor of the changes I made to the protest in comparison to a violent approach. I wanted to make the case for the reader that a violent alternative could have been taken, but to stay within legal and ethical frameworks these methods did a better job.

Work Cited

Dietz, David. “Occupy Wall Street Six Months Later: Why OWS Failed and How it Can Be

Revived”. Policy.Mic, March 18 2012.

Griffin, Leland. "The Rhetoric of Historical Movements." Readings in the Rhetoric of Social Protest.

2013.

Kasperkevic, Jana. “Occupy Wall Street: four years later”. The Guardian, 16 September 2015.