While Media Looks for Encampments, Occupy Helps Build the Popular Resistance
Yesterday, a media outlet contacted us to be on a show about how Occupy had “fizzled coming into this year’s May 1.”
The media keeps looking for encampments or last year’s protests and is missing how popular resistance is growing and demonstrating all over the country.
This year there were actions in many cities on May Day. On Occupy Washington, DC we have reports from New York, NY, Denver, CO, Portland, OR and Richmond, VA as a few examples among many.
Allison Kilkenny, the movement writer for the Nation, got it right when she wrote, “Now is actually the time when the most exciting grassroots workers’ actions are taking place.” She points to the low-wage worker, fast food and non-unionized workers actions as examples.
The popular resistance is growing. Historian Howard Zinn in the “Coming Revolt of the Guards” described a vision of how a broad popular resistance could bring change, and that is what we see growing in our midst:
“The prospect is for times of turmoil, struggle, but also inspiration. There is a chance that such a movement could succeed in doing what the system itself has never done-bring about great change with little violence. This is possible because the more of the 99 percent that begin to see themselves as sharing needs, the more the guards and the prisoners see their common interest, the more the Establishment becomes isolated, ineffectual. The elite’s weapons, money, control of information would be useless in the face of a determined population. The servants of the system would refuse to work to continue the old, deadly order, and would begin using their time, their space-the very things given them by the system to keep them quiet-to dismantle that system while creating a new one.”
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