Forum Post: Suggestion for this mass movement

I want to start this off by saying that I fully support what you are doing and that mass movements are the only thing that are going to bring real change. That being said I wanted to make some suggestions for you. I’ve studied several social movements and this is some of what I think you need to make this one work:

1. Figure out what success for OWS will look like. How will you know when you’ve been effective? I agree that serious reform needs to be made but that takes time and require a lot more than demonstrations so how will you know when the demonstration part of this revolution has accomplished its goal and when its time to move to the next steps? In order to know when you’ve accomplished what you’ve set out to do you need a concrete goal which is my number 2

2. I know the spontaneous, unfettered nature of OWS is really appealing right now, but until you make it clear what your specific demands are- demands that can be met before the demonstrations end- the protests will fizzle out without having accomplished anything. You can’t just demand comprehensive reform, you first have to ask for something specific, something easily granted by Wall Street and politicians because one you get them saying yes to something small, you open the door to them saying yes to more.

I have a suggestion for a concrete demand: instead of going to the homes of the 1% and telling them that they need to be taxed more, go to their homes invite them to spend a week living like the rest of the 99%. Instead of protesting that Rupert Murdoch is absurdly rich, invite him to spend just one week living like the rest of us to see what its like. Ask the prominent members of the upper class to “show their solidarity” with the rest of us by living in an average house, on a minimum wage salary, working a normal job for just one week. This could work well for a number of reasons. The first is that you have a concrete demand that requires a response. Billionaires will either have to accept or decline the invitation publicly. Even ignoring is a type of response. But you have to actively engage them because even when you take up all of Wall Street, if you’re just occupying space they can ignore you and pretend you don’t exist. With all the media attention on the demonstrations, inviting the 1% to live like the rest of the 99% for a week would place the spotlight and scrutiny directly on them, where it belongs. Most would probably ignore or decline the offer but if even one says yes, you open the door for more yeses to further more comprehensive and constructive demands. It’s a simple request, they can certainly afford to take a week out of their time. And who knows maybe one of billionaires will actually learn something from experiencing how the rest of us live. If one of them did take up the challenge, it would also get a lot of media attention on how hard life actually is for the "average"person in our society.

1. You have to get more people out on the street. You already have an impressive number but its going to take a lot more to actually pull this off. You can’t just rely on people to spontaneously join; you have to go out and recruit. Right now the media is dismissing the movement as being radical, hippie, leftist students. A good recruiting mechanism is actually through churches. Christian, working class conservatives are hurt just as much by the system of inequality as liberal, atheist students. People are more likely to join something if their church endorses it. OWS should contact preachers, priests, rabbis, etc, to get their congregations to come out and demonstrate for social and economic justice. Use already existing groups and networks to boost the numbers. For this to work it has to be a true mass movement with millions or at least hundreds of thousands like what happened in the Arab Spring.

I think OWS has the right idea and is doing the right thing, it just needs to refine its tactics!