As Occupy Enters Third Month, a Look at How Protesters Are Building a Global Movement

As the Occupy movement approaches its two-month anniversary, we’re joined by two guests who are studying its strategies and successes. Author Jeff Sharlet helped found the group Occupy Writers and is assisting efforts to reestablish the evicted library at Occupy Wall Street. His recent article for Rolling Stone is "Inside Occupy Wall Street: How a Bunch of Anarchists and Radicals with Nothing but Sleeping Bags Launched a Nationwide Movement." We also speak with Marina Sitrin, who is researching global mass movements from Spain to Egypt and has just returned from Greece. Sitrin says the Occupy movement’s assemblies offer a "radical, if not revolutionary, way of organizing... When we’re in our neighborhoods and come together and relate in that way, it’s more like alternative governance."

So both schools, workplaces, neighborhoods, but then, yes, coming together, as well, just like in Athens. I mean, learning from the experiences in Athens, it was both going to the neighborhoods, but then coming back to Syntagma Square and having assemblies of assemblies. So we had gatherings—I participated in gatherings from many different neighborhoods coming together to share experiences, learn from the Argentine experience, talk about New York.

So, in New York and all over the U.S., if we’re more in our neighborhoods, but then we also do come together—we have to—whether it’s in general assemblies or spokescouncils or whatever directly democratic form to reflect on our experiences and generalize out, I think that’s actually more powerful. But yes, holding—Liberty Plaza has become so important to people around the world.