Why did Occupy Wall Street fail?

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Mainly because the movement as a whole refused to get involved in the political process. Same reason #BlackLivesMatter will fail, if we're being honest.

But they were also disorganized, didn't really have a clear plan of action of any sort, and at the height of it, it was as much about the stupid party atmosphere.

I supported the movement and its broad goals. I still do. You can see it's still kind of alive in another form in the Bernie Sanders campaign, as well as the Elizabeth Warren movement and the like.

But yeah. You can't start a political movement if you refuse to get involved in politics because you think the system is dirty. The Tea Party movement jumped into the political system head first and has made huge gains, to the detriment of the country.
 
OWS brought it systemic inequality that has been killing this social system for decades.

I would call that a win. Sure, it's still a failure in the sense we've done nothing, and this system has become rigged that sincere change that works for all shall only happen through futility and the collapse of our framework, so we can just sit back, relax, and wait for another crash. Some argue we've already started the fire for a second crash.

Americans in particular seem crazily prone for settling for less, even if what they're assimilating to is not worth the ground it's conceptualized upon. Hard to feel democratic in an oligarchy.
 
sphagnum said:
It's important to remember that it started out explicitly as an anarchist movement that liberals latched onto, and so the two sides wanted to do completely different things; for the anarchist element, the movement was the message, the idea of retaking a space and making it public and showing that a society could run within that, which it did to an extent with the way that things were controlled in a democratic and uncentralized manner. The liberal element wanted to turn it into "the Democrats' Tea Party" and make it a vehicle for getting Democrats elected, which obviously the anarchist faction was disgusted by.
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Yeah, I think it can't be overstated that the radical left portion of it made it impossible to really go national. Being decentralized was the entire point of it in a lot of respects, but America isn't exactly comfortable with political change coming from people's assemblies, it's too out there, and that definitely filtered down to the protesters, the media, and the general public. "Unwashed, unorganized hippies" as opposed to "political commune".

I think OWS succeeded in at least making income inequality a centerpiece in the national dialogue. Everyone across the political spectrum can agree that its a central piece of the problems facing America, a modern populist revival.
 
Because it had no clear message. It mostly was a disorganized mess. Along with the fact most of the protestors had no idea about the actual issues. Yes there are issues but OWS was mostly just a poor attempt to stay f u to the 1%.
 
Bronx-Man said:
Was it because of lack of organization? Unclear goals? Bad publicity? A mix of all three? It feels odd how the Tea Party not only lasted six years but took over congress as well, while OWS fizzled out in just less than a year.
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Tea Party has achieved the same level of success as a faceplant or a traffic jam. As a branding exercise it's a disaster too in that saying you are a tea partier is basically admitting you're a fucking idiot. However if compared with a titanic fart noise, yes, it's a contender.


Occupy Wall Street was a dark, silent fart that made its creator's eyes water and little else.
 
XenodudeX said:
Another economic crash. The reality is this: We know for a fact the the system is fucked up, but we lack the will to actually do something about it.
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That and the potential future of a jobless economy for a good population. Technology is going to wipe the floor with a great deal of human beings.

The fact the banks are talking about this as a problem - and these guys are a great deal of problems in and of themselves - should be telling. It's not just some economists and technologists talking about potential dangers of disruption anymore.
 
because those in charge don't need to get down their pedestal and change things, they're already up there, why lose the privilege?
 
Did it fail, or was it crushed? I see a lot of blame placed on the movement itself, but not much on the massive state and corporate crackdown. There were over 7000 arrests.

From a Naomi Wolf article:

It was more sophisticated than we had imagined: new documents show that the violent crackdown on Occupy last fall – so mystifying at the time – was not just coordinated at the level of the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and local police. The crackdown, which involved, as you may recall, violent arrests, group disruption, canister missiles to the skulls of protesters, people held in handcuffs so tight they were injured, people held in bondage till they were forced to wet or soil themselves –was coordinated with the big banks themselves.

The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, in a groundbreaking scoop that should once more shame major US media outlets (why are nonprofits now some of the only entities in America left breaking major civil liberties news?), filed this request. The document – reproduced here in an easily searchable format – shows a terrifying network of coordinated DHS, FBI, police, regional fusion center, and private-sector activity so completely merged into one another that the monstrous whole is, in fact, one entity: in some cases, bearing a single name, the Domestic Security Alliance Council. And it reveals this merged entity to have one centrally planned, locally executed mission. The documents, in short, show the cops and DHS working for and with banks to target, arrest, and politically disable peaceful American citizens.
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Buddha Beam said:
Mainly because the movement as a whole refused to get involved in the political process. Same reason #BlackLivesMatter will fail, if we're being honest.

But they were also disorganized, didn't really have a clear plan of action of any sort, and at the height of it, it was as much about the stupid party atmosphere.

I supported the movement and its broad goals. I still do. You can see it's still kind of alive in another form in the Bernie Sanders campaign, as well as the Elizabeth Warren movement and the like.

But yeah. You can't start a political movement if you refuse to get involved in politics because you think the system is dirty. The Tea Party movement jumped into the political system head first and has made huge gains, to the detriment of the country.
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This is completely wrong. Have you not read a history book?
 
Vague vision and messaging, poor image management, poor resource and support identification and recruitment, unclear leadership if any, lack of clarity of expected outcomes and tangible wins, unwillingness to actually engage the current processes towards a change.

If you can't articulate your own message well and succinctly, then you probably shouldn't expect the media to do it for you. If you can't manage whatever message you put out there, then expect it could be misrepresented.

If you don't have clear leadership/guiding coalition and your decision-making process involves waving your hands in the air like you just don't care, you're probably not going to be taken very seriously by anyone with political capital nor achieve much in the way of tangible change.
 
captainnapalm said:
Did it fail, or was it crushed? I see a lot of blame placed on the movement itself, but not much on the massive state and corporate crackdown. There were over 7000 arrests.

From a Naomi Wolf article:
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Yes, the powers that be were heavily anti-OWS. The Democrats liked to adopt some of their rhetoric in mollified fashion but the administration was quite willing to put it down.
 
Because even people that would be theoretically sympathetic to their mission don't even understand what their mission is.
 
They had no real message, no real solutions, and no clear motivation other than saying poor people getting a raw deal.

It was doomed from the start.
 
Basically they didn't have an answer for their rhetorical question.

tumblr_lsd8ucoCX91qbrgmdo1_500.jpg
 
Too small. Too little motivation. Unclear motivations.

Do you think sit in protests are going to change the way wall street does things?

People aren't willing to do what needs to be done if they really want these large institutions to be brought down.
 
Very disorganized movement overall, certainly much less organized than the Tea Party.

Granted, the Tea Party is rather disorganized as well now compared to a couple years ago, but they aren't dead. I disagree they took over Congress considering Ryan is now the speaker. They certainly have some power though.
 
I'm not sure it failed. The message got out. Now people recognize it by name. They know what the general idea is. They agree with it. That's something.
 
Claiming that OWS is a success because it increased awareness but without any real goals, agenda, proposals or anything else to carry the momentum forward is some real low-bar shit.
 
How many days you guys think it would take for guillotines to start suddenly appearing in people's conversations if they ban porn?
 
It was hard for me to take them seriously when they kept doing that college hipster insistence that everyone instead of doing the most ancient and basic human gesture of applauding look fucking silly with "jazz hands".

OWS-Gestures-600.jpg


Not to mention they kept using the human microphone
the human microphone
which is really annoying
which is really annoying
instead of just investing
instead of just investing
in a fucking megaphone
in a fucking megaphone
and speak like a normal person.
and speak like a normal person.

In the end, they just came across as pretentious college kids instead of representing any 99%.
 
Keasar said:
It was hard for me to take them seriously when they kept doing that college hipster insistence that everyone instead of doing the most ancient and basic human gesture of applauding look fucking silly with "jazz hands".

[IMG http://occupyannarbor.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/OWS-Gestures-600.jpg /IMG]
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Applauding takes up too much time, since the speaker has to stop and wait for it to die down. The human microphone was because they were barred by the police from using actual megaphones.
 
Keasar said:
It was hard for me to take them seriously when they kept doing that college hipster insistence that everyone instead of doing the most ancient and basic human gesture of applauding look fucking silly with "jazz hands".

OWS-Gestures-600.jpg


Not to mention they kept using the human microphone
the human microphone
which is really annoying
which is really annoying
instead of just investing
instead of just investing
in a fucking megaphone
in a fucking megaphone
and speak like a normal person.
and speak like a normal person.

In the end, they just came across as pretentious college kids instead of representing any 99%.
Click to expand...

The hand signals and human microphone were ways of getting around noise ordinances that the police kept threatening to shut the down for, since they weren't allowed to use bullhorns. They were effective ways of communication and make sense given the communal nature of the project. They were ad hoc solutions designed to keep the process moving and functioned well enough that they were adopted throughout the various occupations.

You don't know what you're talking about.
 
I don't think it failed. It put a lot of things when it comes to our economy into the forefront and is at the least sculpting the way the Democratic race is being fought.

They didn't get sweeping changes done because of the protests but like a lot of movements it takes time and more than one protest.

Also the rolling jubilee came out of the OWS and that's awesome.
 
I don't think it outright failed, it helped move the political conversation, which is what movement like that can hope to achieve at their outset.
It had no followup though, and that's the main problem, because again, if you look at other grassroots transformational movements, you'll see those things took time, years, often decades.

With that being said, I don't think it was able to achieve what I (or I guess a lot of its participants/sympathizers) hoped it would achieve, and I think the main reason for that is that you had a Democrat in the white house.
For all the talk about non-partisanship, it was at its essence an attack on the status quo from the left, the problem is that when you have Democrat president (which is as left as one could hope in this country) you'll find it hard for establishment to come to your cause and you cause many of your potential natural allies to shy away from participating, because they don't want to attack "the home team".

That is not to say that all the nuts and bolts of that movement worked perfectly, and there's definitely things that could've been improved, but again, if you look through history, grassroots movements are often messy, poorly organized and poorly thought-out affairs, at least at their beginning.

IAmtheFMan said:
You could've at least provided a link.

http://youtu.be/kwk_Ot8orPY
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Aaron Sorkin is just the worst.
 
lednerg said:
Applauding takes up too much time, since the speaker has to stop and wait for it to die down. The human microphone was because they were barred by the police from using actual megaphones.
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Aw man, having to wait 10-20 seconds between speeches to continue while people applauded a approved point is so annoying. Its almost like they were in a hurry in a "occupy-this-space-indefinitely" movement.

sphagnum said:
The hand signals and human microphone were ways of getting around noise ordinances that the police kept threatening to shut the down for, since they weren't allowed to use bullhorns. They were effective ways of communication and make sense given the communal nature of the project. They were ad hoc solutions designed to keep the process moving and functioned well enough that they were adopted throughout the various occupations.

You don't know what you're talking about.
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So much for standing up against a corrupt establishment that ruined a nation then.
"We are here! We are angry! But we also of course wanna respect the local laws given by a police force who have over the recent years shown signs of corruption so lets keep it down a notch okay?" Not that it seemed to make any difference, they were creating just as much noise through their drum circles and human microphone as one guy with a megaphone would.

And of course, these ad-hoc solutions were so ingenious that that nobody ridiculed them for it.

OP asked why they failed, I said my opinion, they were pretentious college kids like that one who called applause "annoying". A human gesture old as humanity itself, tried and tested through generations and civilizations across the globe that has been the common ground across languages for approval and these kids called it "annoying". It was hardly representing the 99% of the common people, more like the 10% currently attending college.
 
It's like the movie Snowpiercer, you either take over the train or you get off. OWS allowed a number of grassroots movements to grow and provide opportunities for people to get off the train (examples like mentioned above, rolling jubilee). If you're still on the train, which you have no way of taking over, good luck at the next financial crash.
 
Polari said:
I still don't really know what they were trying to do.
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And this is it. A straightforward message and method about the economy is something everyone could get behind. OWS let anyone add anything, including fragmentary identity politics, which tore apart at the sense of a common goal.

To be fair to them though, there hasn't been a very organized protest movement for a long time. I think BLM has learned from OWS. Still identity politics, but it's specifically that identity group that is running it and there ARE people running it.
 
sphagnum said:
It's important to remember that it started out explicitly as an anarchist movement that liberals latched onto, and so the two sides wanted to do completely different things; for the anarchist element, the movement was the message, the idea of retaking a space and making it public and showing that a society could run within that, which it did to an extent with the way that things were controlled in a democratic and uncentralized manner. The liberal element wanted to turn it into "the Democrats' Tea Party" and make it a vehicle for getting Democrats elected, which obviously the anarchist faction was disgusted by.
Click to expand...

This is more or less a perfect summarization. This is why the movement had two faces. The first being the anarchist "hippies" who were obsessed with being disorganized and setting up camps, with the second being the traditional American left of marginalized people and union workers who wanted to make Occupy Wall Street the Democratic Tea Party. For the former occupying WAS the movement. "Occupying Wall Street wasn't a metaphor, they really meant it, the idea was to set up communes across the country to defeat capitalism. The latter wanted the movement to do to class in America to what the Civil Rights Movement did to race in America. This discord and just plain misunderstanding between the two groups doomed the movement from the start and it is really a miracle that it went as far as it did.

Regardless, the OWS is more likely the beginning of something rather than the end. The Civil Rights Movement didn't succeed overnight, it was struggle that lasted decades.

stolin said:
This was the very moment..

Occupy Richmond 10/6/11 Intro to "Progressive Stack"
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I don't see how this is bad. Though they could have summed up by saying "there are less amount of people from a certain background so it is likely that they won't get their voices heard as they are vastly outnumbered."

Mike M said:
Basically they didn't have an answer for their rhetorical question.

tumblr_lsd8ucoCX91qbrgmdo1_500.jpg
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What a badass poster.
 
True Savior said:
We had no real life Bane.
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Collectively, we are Bane. We as a society are the problem here, for it comes from nowhere else.

None of our ills came from a cosmic virus, but a virus of the human mind. Inequality, greed, and division are especially modern American values, and they ruin everything they touch. These will not be dealt with until collective metastasizing is it absolutely insoluble levels for almost every player in the game, and by then it will be too late to even bother.
 
If you think OWS unreservedly "failed," you must have missed the degree to which it has changed political rhetoric and even policy prescriptions in recent years. The language of "the 1%" and "the 99%" is everywhere now, and even Republican presidential candidates are squabbling over how best to placate voters furious over systemic inequalities — even if their analysis and prescriptions are batshit.
 
I live in DC and I remember one night during the middle of all that I was out getting slammed with some buddies and ducked into a 2am Wendys for a late night snack. Somehow got in a conversation with some random guy and we all ate together. He'd had a shitty day. Got his wallet stolen or something. Said he went to a cop who was nearby after it happened and he couldn't help him. So he was gonna head down to McPherson square and join the protests.

Didn't really know where to begin with that guy, but it was pretty clear a lot of people didn't have a clue what was really going on. To a lot of them it was just a vehicle to yell about something that you were personally unhappy about, whether it's a bad day at work or Starbucks being out of pumpkin spice lattes that morning.

Granted this was in DC, one of the satellite protests, so maybe it was just different here from NYC.
 
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