GENERATION OCCUPY

A vigorous history of the Occupy Movement by a journalist and activist.

“Collapsed both from its own lack of structure and from the state violence that suppressed it, Occupy vanished almost as quickly as it had arrived,” writes Levitin. It did not die, however. Occupy has spun off into numerous social justice enterprises, one of the most vocal being the movement to resist and forgive student debt, another being the battle against economic inequality (Occupy “introduced the vocabulary of the 99 percent and the 1 percent, putting the crisis of inequality on the map”). Though it seems to have been born overnight and to have centered on Wall Street, Occupy, by Levitin’s account, really emerged slowly from the ashes of the Supreme Court’s 2000 decision to award the presidency to George W. Bush, who, activists held, was firmly in the thrall of big business interests. That seems to have been confirmed when the court followed up with Citizens United, which gave corporations the same civil rights as individuals, and especially the right to provide endless streams of money to like-minded political candidates. Occupy, essentially, was an anti-corporate movement that “seized its strength from the epicenter of financial greed.” Like many autochthonous political movements, it seemed to lack an epicenter itself, and as the author notes, it quickly spread in somewhat diluted form to more than 600 U.S. cities and communities. What its adherents agreed on was that government had a duty to reduce inequality. Given the government’s failure to do so meaningfully, by, say, imposing an inheritance tax and otherwise redistributing the $84 trillion in the bands of the baby boomer generation, those adherents have moved on to different battles, including agitation to do something about climate change and to promote immigrant rights, among other matters.

An evenhanded account of a political strain that remains influential, if now relatively subdued.