This consensual social experience centered on the autonomy of the individual. Occupiers were not held accountable to any particular agenda or leadership. As one participant put it at a general assembly meeting, “None of us are leaders; [therefore] we are all leaders.”
Today, as high school students walk out en masse and anti-Trump protests sweep the country, the memory of Occupy should give us pause. [...]
Yet it’s telling that the sixties critique of uniformity and authority was appropriated not only by subsequent social movements, but by capitalism. Calls “to live, to express oneself, to be free” now survive as tag lines for soft-drinks and SUVS. In their book The New Spirit of Capitalism, Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello go so far as to argue that capitalism co-opted the ’68 demands for autonomy to create our contemporary postindustrial economy of worker instability and commanded flexibility. [...]
Occupy’s system of consensus-based decision-making turned this into a tiring and time-consuming, if not effectively impossible, task. Inspired by Spain’s acampadas, the occupiers opened general assemblies to everyone. If someone vehemently disagreed with a proposal, they could block it, and it would have to be adapted until a super-majority of ninety percent supported the proposal. It did not matter if the dissenter was new to a movement others had been invested in for weeks; they had just as much of a say as the original Occupiers. As a result, a simple decision like how to take care of laundry could take hours to make. [...]
While it’s easy to laugh at his claim that “climate change is happening because of the state of our minds,” this sort of magical thinking survives in the recent outpouring of praise for Occupy as consciousness-raising. It also lives on in the call to check one’s privilege, which often imagines that self-edification — rather than structural change — can solve inequality. But realizing one’s individual privilege does nothing to dismantle the prison industrial complex, or block environmentally destructive legislation, or improve wages for workers.
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