The origins of Occupy Wall Street explained

Salon talks to the editor of Adbusters about the practical
and philosophical roots of the movement

BY JUSTIN ELLIOTT
TUESDAY, OCT 4, 2011 2:50 PM EDT
http://politics.salon.com/2011/10/04/
adbusters_occupy_wall_st/singleton/

In July Adbusters, a Vancouver-based publication known for
its incisive critiques of capitalism, included a poster in
that month’s magazine that read simply:

#OCCUPYWALLSTREET

September 17th. Bring tent.

www.occupywallst.org

In response to the call, several loose-knit groups of
organizers got involved and hundreds of people showed up
on Wall Street on Sept. 17. A few weeks later, Occupy Wall
Street is now spreading around the country and attracting
intense interest from the media.

I spoke to Adbusters co-founder and editor in chief Kalle
Lasn about the practical and ideological origins of the
movement and about the continuing debate over its demands.
The following transcript of our conversation has been
edited for length.

You issued the original call to occupy Wall Street back in
July. How did that come about and what was the thinking
behind it?

It was a poster that we put in the middle of the July
edition of Adbusters magazine and a listserv that we sent
out to our 90,000-strong culture-jammers network around
the world. It was also a blog post on our website. For the
last 20 years, our network has been interested in cultural
revolution and just the whole idea of radical
transformations.

After Tunisia and Egypt, we were mightily inspired by the
fact that a few smart people using Facebook and Twitter
can put out calls and suddenly get huge numbers of people
to get out into the streets and start giving vent to their
anger. And then we keep on looking at the sorry state of
the political left in the United States and how the Tea
Party is passionately strutting their stuff while the left
is sort of hiding somewhere. We felt that there was a real
potential for a Tahrir moment in America because a) the
political left needs it and b) because people are losing
their jobs, people are losing their houses, and young
people cannot find a job. We felt that the people who gave
us this mess — the financial fraudsters on Wall Street —
haven’t even been brought to justice yet. We felt this was
the right moment to instigate something.

One Adbusters editor was quoted saying the role of the
magazine in this is “philosophical.” Can you define the
philosophy behind this?

We are not just inspired by what happened in the Arab
Spring recently, we are students of the Situationist
movement. Those are the people who gave birth to what many
people think was the first global revolution back in 1968
when some uprisings in Paris suddenly inspired uprisings
all over the world. All of a sudden universities and
cities were exploding. This was done by a small group of
people, the Situationists, who were like the philosophical
backbone of the movement. One of the key guys was Guy
Debord, who wrote “The Society of the Spectacle.” The idea
is that if you have a very powerful meme — a very powerful
idea — and the moment is ripe, then that is enough to
ignite a revolution. This is the background that we come
out of.

1968 was more of a cultural kind of revolution. This time
I think it’s much more serious. We’re in an economic
crisis, an ecological crisis, living in a sort of
apocalyptic world, and the young people realize they don’t
really have a viable future to look forward to. This
movement that’s beginning now could well be the second
global revolution that we’ve been dreaming about for the
last half a century.

In the original call to action, Adbusters asked that
20,000 flood into lower Manhattan and set up tents. The
piece also said:

Once there, we shall incessantly repeat one simple demand
in a plurality of voices. Tahrir succeeded in large part
because the people of Egypt made a straightforward
ultimatum – that Mubarak must go – over and over again
until they won. Following this model, what is our equally
uncomplicated demand?

I sat in on discussions down in Zuccoti Park where this
very issue was being discussed. But obviously there is no
single demand yet. Do you think it has developed
differently than the vision outlined in Adbusters?

Originally we thought that the idea of one demand was very
important. There’s been a debate going on between the
one-demand vision and this other vision that is playing
itself out right now on Wall Street. I think it’s a
wonderful debate and there are good pointers on both
sides. Currently this leaderless, demandless movement —
that is still growing in leaps and bounds — I think it is
fine the way it is. After these assemblies have been
conducted and debates have been had in cities all around
America, demands will emerge. These demands will be
specific things like reinstatement of the Glass-Steagall
Act or a 1 percent tax on financial transactions or the
banning of high-frequency trading. We will get into
specifics, just give us time.

I think this whole thing will stay fairly amorphous
through the next big event on Oct. 6 in Washington. Then
it will gain global momentum on Oct. 15 when the Europeans
have their big moment in the sun. I think the big global
catalytic moment may well happen on Nov. 3 or Nov. 4 when
the G-20 is meeting in France. In the month following that
these demands of ours will emerge and we may well find
millions of people marching around the world.

Can you speculate about how these demands will emerge? Do
you see leaders or spokespeople emerging? How do you see
it playing out as a process?

The political left has always had problems with this. All
my life I’ve been sitting in meetings where loony guys get
up and talk, and eventually very little happens. This is
the kind of weight that is dragging the political left
down. We don’t seem to have the clarity of vision that for
example the Tea Party has. This may be our undoing again.
This whole movement may fizzle out in a bunch of loony
lefty kind of bullshit.

Then again, at the same time, I’ve been in daily touch
with dozens and dozens of people in cities all around the
world who are involved in this. And I have a feeling that
because of the Internet and a different kind of mentality
that young people have, a horizontal way of thinking about
things, this movement may not just come up with some
really good demands and put incredible people pressure on
our politicians, but a more beautiful thing may come out
of this movement: a new model of democracy, a new model of
how activism can work, of how the people can have a
radical democracy and have some of their demands met. This
new model may well be a new kind of a horizontal thing
that in some strange way works like the Internet works.

David Graeber, an anthropologist and Adbusters contributor
as well as one of the original organizers of the protest,
told the Washington Post the other day:

You’re creating a vision of the sort of society you want
to have in miniature. And it’s a way of juxtaposing
yourself against these powerful, undemocratic forces
you’re protesting. If you make demands, you’re saying, in
a way, that you’re asking the people in power and the
existing institutions to do something different. And one
reason people have been hesitant to do that is they see
these institutions as the problem.

Isn’t that a fundamentally different model than making one
single demand?

This is the deeper level of the debate that is going on
within this movement. I think that as this movement grows,
it will have room for different things. I think it’s
wonderful that people are doing exactly what Graeber
describes and providing an example of how a democracy can
work, sort of creating a mini-democracy within Zuccoti
Park. But that doesn’t stop other people from actually
starting to make demands. I don’t see any reason why we
can’t have some people who really want a 1 percent Tobin
tax and why those people can’t be putting pressure on the
G-20 in November while at the same time the people in
Zuccoti Park and other cities are providing this inspiring
example of real democracy. I don’t think that the two are
mutually exclusive.


Justin Elliott is a Salon reporter. Reach him by email at
[log in to unmask] and follow him on Twitter
@ElliottJustinMore Justin Elliott

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