How Occupy Wall Street Works
Why It Will Remain Nonviolent
Article Summary and Author Biography
The power of protest comes from its capacity to disrupt business as usual. As long as protesters believe they are making progress through other means, they will not resort to violence.
RORY McVEIGH is Professor of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame, the Director of Notre Dame’s Center for the Study of Social Movements, and editor of Mobilization: The International Quarterly Review of Social Movement Research.
Review Essay
Increasing inequality in the United States has long been attributed to unstoppable market forces. In fact, as Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson show, it is the direct result of congressional policies that have consciously -- and sometimes inadvertently -- skewed the playing field toward the rich.
Snapshot
Occupy Wall Street's anger is mostly directed at the ruling economic class. But the movement is gaining traction because it is exposing a larger failure of democratic representation.
Snapshot
Unlike other movements, the rallies across the United States have no distinct constituency, put forward few policy proposals, and have a shifting configuration of supporters. They are something new. These are "we are here" protests.
As the U.S. economy sank ever deeper into recession, and as millions of Americans faced job loss, plummeting home values, and deferred retirement dreams, angry protesters rallied across the nation. Activists on the conservative side were first to arrive on the scene. Throughout the winter and spring, the Tea Party managed to shift blame for the recession to the Obama administration and demanded that it reduce spending. The burgeoning Occupy Wall Street movement could be the spark that progressive activists have been waiting for -- an opportunity to reframe the economic crisis and generate broader support for government economic stimulation and for measures to promote greater equality. Occupy Wall Street's success will depend, in large part, on whether protesters effectively manage violence (as the Tea Party has) or fail to do so (as in the 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle).
Protest movements must always walk a fine line between nonviolent and violent action. The power of protest comes from its capacity to disrupt business as usual. Without such disruption, it fails to give opponents any incentive to grant concessions or to give the media any reason to pay attention. Yet violence can generate a significant backlash among the general public, which in turn provides authorities with the cover they need to crack down.
Negotiating between impotence and overaggression is difficult. It is often police action that triggers violence at large protest events; research has shown that police crackdowns can quickly transform nonviolent events into violent ones. This was certainly the case in many campus demonstrations of the 1960s and 1970s. Excessive force used by police can work to the protesters' advantage, winning them public attention. For their part, the Occupy Wall Street protesters already seem to have benefited from media coverage of the police using pepper spray to disperse them and of a chaotic mass arrest on the Brooklyn Bridge...
