The Significance of the Occupy movement

2012-08-15 · first published in Against the Current · 184 words

This was not a Socialist Resistance publication. marxsite was Phil Hearse’s own long-form site, run alongside the paper he helped edit. It is kept here with his agreement, recovered from the Internet Archive after the domain lapsed and was taken over by someone else; nothing here links to the address it now points at.

As credited on the page: “link to solidarity-us.org”

Only part of this piece survives. The capture it was recovered from is truncated, so the text below stops before the article did. The original is still readable at Against the Current: read it in full (Internet Archive copy).

---

By Dan LaBotz, Robert Brenner and Joel Jordan Against the Current August 9 2012 The Occupy Movement, the first such broad, national, multi-issue, mass movement in forty years, represented a test for the revolutionary socialist left in several senses. First, would the left recognize its important and immediately move to become an active part of it and work within it to help provide leadership? Second, would the left during Occupy be able to both appreciate its strengths and develop a critique of its weaknesses and limitations? Would it as the same time be able to conduct socialist propaganda and recruit to the socialist movement? Third, would the left in retrospect be able to analyze and learn from the Occupy experience in order to prepare itself for future movements? The following document is seen as part of the process of understanding and analyzing Occupy and what proved to be the most important development of the Occupy movement--its interaction with the labor unions. This interaction represented the greatest challenge to the movement and to those of us who seek to understand it and learn from it.