Fall 2011 was pretty exciting, wasn’t it?  Protesters in Egypt and Tunisia had just won a non-violent revolution.  Over 1200 Americans took part in the biggest act of civil disobedience in the history of environmentalism and it looked like they had won.  Occupy Wall Street appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, and became a national phenomenon calling the nation’s attention to the interrelated crises of political cronyism and deep structural inequity threatening our democracy.   For a second it felt like maybe the “post-hope” era was coming to an end.  Maybe we’d all finally get off the internet and start directly confronting those things we’d been waiting for President Obama to fix for us since January, 2009.

But then, as quickly as it began, it started to feel like it was over.  Egypt’s revolution turned sour.  Obama started waffling on Keystone.  Occupy encampments all but disappeared from our cities and our public life.  The Republican primaries came around and it was time to watch in bemused horror as one climate change denying corporate stooge after the next pranced and preened for the opportunity to duke it out on live TV with our very own Disappointment In Chief.

Well, here’s the good news.  Occupy is trying to make a comeback. 

For the past few months organizers in cities all over the country have been focusing on this coming Tuesday, May 1.  Here in New York you can’t walk more than three blocks without seeing a sticker, poster, or some scrawled sharpie graffiti reminding you of the, “May 1 General Strike. No School. No Work. No Shopping.”  I won’t go into whether or not it makes sense to call what’s happening a general strike.  The point is that folks are trying to jump start the engine of public critical thought and grassroots resistance and they need your help, just like you need their help if you’re going to be serious about fighting climate change and environmental injustice.

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“The issues that now shape man’s fate are neither raised nor decided by the public at large.  The idea of a community of publics is not a description of fact, but an assertion of an ideal, an assertion of a legitimation masquerading- as legitimations are now apt to do- as fact.” 

C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (1956)

The cover of the December 5, 2011 issue of New York Magazine features a black and white photograph of a young man’s face, his hand held up to his mouth in an attempt to amplify a shout aimed at an unseen crowd.  The caption in bold red lettering reads, “Occupy 2012, Will It Be 1968 All Over Again?”  The high contrast image is just as striking as the idea it evokes.  Like 1776 or 1945, 1968 has come to connote much more than then twelve months on a calendar.  It signifies an entire set of political conflicts, changes, and lingering questions.  As historian James Miller points out “Many Americans first heard of the New Left in 1968.  It may be the only year in post-war American history when many intelligent people sincerely believed a revolution was about to occur though few could explain what this might mean.”   Of course, while the New Left may have only entered the consciousness of a larger population in 1968, its proper origin was in 1962 when Students for a Democratic Society articulated their vision for participatory democracy in The Port Huron Statement.  The SDS story unfolded over seven years, ultimately collapsing at their national convention in 1969.   Despite politicizing a generation, SDS ultimately failed to achieve the revolutionary democratic aims it set out to accomplish at Port Huron.  In fact, many have placed blame on SDS and the New Left for fueling the conservative counter-revolution that brought Richard Nixon, and eventually Ronald Reagan to power, and upended much of the New Deal order.  

So, will the escalation of the Occupy movement be 1968 all over again?  Supporters of the movement should hope not, and they may have reason to be hopeful.  Occupy is less than three months old, having started on September 17, 2011 in New York and rapidly spread to cities throughout the world.   It has emerged in the midst of a radically different political-economic climate than that of the American 1960’s, a distinction that certainly improves the Occupy movement’s chances of mobilizing a broad base for change.  Although it is too early to compare the movements as discrete historical objects, we can learn a great deal from analyzing their founding documents.  Whereas the forty-page Port Huron Statement was drafted entirely by Tom Hayden and then edited by sixty SDS leaders using Robert’s Rules of Order, The Declaration Of The Occupation Of New York City, only one page long, was written through a consensus process of the New York City General Assembly held in public in Zuccotti Park over the course of two autumn evenings.  A close comparative reading of these two documents shows how the Occupy Movement is, in many ways, a full realization of the break which was beginning to occur between the Old Left and the New Left in the 1960’s.

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