NO!—the Occupy Movement did not just fade away!

Some people have commented that they haven’t seen much of the Occupy Movement so it must be fading out or fading away. I saw a comment recently where a person wrote that “I drove by the park and only saw one guy with some signs.” Another said he figured that Occupy has “just faded away.”

But that just isn’t true. All across the country there are Occupy organizations named after the cities they are located in. They have websites and are well organized.

There has been a lull of activity this summer, but it would be foolish to believe that such a struggle is now over and the assholes on the right and the cowards to the left are free to go back to business as usual.

The Occupy Movement is a natural reaction to an economy and political system that intentionally leaves many Americans out. Young, poor, minorities and some elderly have been marginalized to the point where they politically don’t exist. There very existence depends on a political movement outside the two-party system.

The American right, such as the Tea Party movement, seem to overlook a simple rule of nature. “For every action there is a reaction.” Why do they believe they can pound on the poor, the weak, the working class and the left in this country and they will just get what they want with no real opposition? We saw how they used the police and terror tactics to try and scare away the Occupy movement. They may believe they succeeded in scaring them off. But that is foolish and wishful thinking. -សតិវ អតុ

The following is from Kasama;  

“While higher education has historically been understood, with some validity, as a marker and reproducer of middle class status, college is no longer a guaranteed ticket to a stable, decent paying job. Increasingly, it offers to the degree-holder little more than decades of indebtedness and precarious employment. Our generation of students is facing a process of proletarianization; and rather than clinging to a fantastical “middle class” status, definitively refuted by economic transformations, we should act in solidarity with, and with an eye towards, the working class from which many of us hail and into which we’re headed. As we plan another round of protest, let’s concern ourselves with the perception of the broader class, those facing another devastating round of austerity, rather than with the sanctimonious vision of those who fear and resent the pleasures and possibilities of working class struggle and mutual aid – pleasures that many of us experienced last fall at the Occupy Oakland encampment, and during strikes on our campuses.

While things have been slow this summer, we’re still here; and if the recent past is any indication, another upsurge is likely imminent.”

by Amanda Armstrong

We’re passing through a low phase in Northern California – a lull that partially parallels those facing organizers from Madison to New York. The rebellious energies so evident recently seem scattered these days, dormant. The universities are quiet. And the forces that had gathered in city parks and squares, most massively at Oakland’s Oscar Grant Plaza, are largely absent. The encampments are broken up, the assemblies dissolved.

It’s hard to know whether this is simply a period of incubation, from which another, similar wave of class struggle will soon emerge, or if this moment of relative inactivity is allowing for the recomposition of our forces, our alliances, the ways we take action together. If the terrain of struggle we now encounter has been remade by the past year of action – by our effective acts of opposition, by new forms of state repression and co-optation, and by our own missteps – how can we most effectively intervene in the shifting political force fields we’re coming to inhabit? 

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