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This Week's Big Questions: Where Does Occupy Go From Here? (and others)
(with David Graeber)
How much has Occupy changed the global political landscape?
That depends on how you define Occupy. If you see it as a single revolutionary movement starting with the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings, then carrying through to Greece and Spain, then finally exploding when it hit America ... well, then I think you can even speak of a world revolutionary moment in many ways parallel to the world revolutions of 1848 and 1968. Everything has changed. And as in those cases, we won’t know what’s really changed for some time yet.
In the US, we managed to put the issue of social class, and not just social class, but class power, back on the political agenda. No one’s managed to do that in the US since the Great Depression. I’m also convinced that if it wasn’t for Occupy, we would probably have a President Romney. Back when he was planning his campaign, he was doing so on the assumption that most Americans would take the fact that he was a Wall Street executive as a positive.
<snip>
You coined the phrase “We are the 99 per cent”. How worried should the 1 per cent be?
Well, I was part of the team that came up with it, yes. In the short run, not so worried. They basically own the political system and all political parties, which no longer resembles democracy in any meaningful sense of the term. Almost all new wealth continues to flow upwards. In the longer run, I think they should be – and are – quite worried indeed...
That depends on how you define Occupy. If you see it as a single revolutionary movement starting with the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings, then carrying through to Greece and Spain, then finally exploding when it hit America ... well, then I think you can even speak of a world revolutionary moment in many ways parallel to the world revolutions of 1848 and 1968. Everything has changed. And as in those cases, we won’t know what’s really changed for some time yet.
In the US, we managed to put the issue of social class, and not just social class, but class power, back on the political agenda. No one’s managed to do that in the US since the Great Depression. I’m also convinced that if it wasn’t for Occupy, we would probably have a President Romney. Back when he was planning his campaign, he was doing so on the assumption that most Americans would take the fact that he was a Wall Street executive as a positive.
<snip>
You coined the phrase “We are the 99 per cent”. How worried should the 1 per cent be?
Well, I was part of the team that came up with it, yes. In the short run, not so worried. They basically own the political system and all political parties, which no longer resembles democracy in any meaningful sense of the term. Almost all new wealth continues to flow upwards. In the longer run, I think they should be – and are – quite worried indeed...
Read more: http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/this-weeks-big-questions-where-does-occupy-go-from-here-should-thatcher-have-been-given-such-a-grand-funeral-8580342.html
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