In recent years I've started entertaining a bit of a heresy. I wouldn't say I believe this, but it's at least a question worth asking:
Is there actually any such thing as a "grassroots" movement?
Over the years I've seen so many unmasked as the product of someone or something with deep pockets: corporations, think tanks, governments. At the very least it's hard for me to think of any movement where major institutions didn't play some role.
Intelligence agencies seem to figure prominently too, and not necessarily in the areas you would think. The 60s counterculture was in part seeded by CIA LSD research, and Tor was funded by the US Department of Naval Intelligence (to provide two random examples).
Is it possible for a movement to spawn purely out of a cultural vacuum? Sure. I'm sure the people in the Tea Party think so.
Thing is, once the people notice opportunity, it isn't long until money and power follow suit. And even then it's hard to determine what was genuine feeling or subversive influence, or complex forces of history we can't even recognize. The dead are a presence among the living
You'd have to say that - yes, there is such a thing.
But gaining momentum and power requires money and leadership. Unless a grassroots movement can create those things themselves - which would be quite rare - inevitably a true grassroots movement is going to be co-opted by someone seeking to use their popularity. Thus the origins of the movement are always likely to be questioned by the opponents, because plenty of evidence of funding and leadership are going to appear. Placing them in a chronological order to determine the 'grassrootedness' of the movement is going to be tricky, unless someone kept very careful notes. Which is also very unlikely.
(Note that this is not necessarily a good thing -- Occupy's leaderless, grassroots-über-alles nature is a big part of why it eventually tore itself apart.)
Indeed. Occupy ran into the inevitable growing pains of any organization acquiring a measure of power or prestige. It attracted people who like power and prestige. They immediately proceeded to do what such people do best - fight over power and prestige while insisting loudly they do nothing of the sort.
The anti war movement was dead before Occupy, IMO. Of course, it's still dead after Occupy, which is a problem. There may only be carrying capacity among the left wing for one (strong at first, then weakly sustained) protest group at a time-- right now it's Black Lives Matter.
Besides, it's somewhat fundamentally the same group of people from what I can tell. A few scruffy leftists at the core, a few victims of the issue du jour, and a bunch of irritated but fleeting "moderates" (apoliticals) orbiting from time to time.
I am from Brazil, from my point of view Occupy was a sort of copy-cat of the spanish occupy (that spawned from the financial crisis), also vaguely related to Arab Spring.
At the time, I even tought about how closely it looked to the "Stand Alone Complex" discussed in the anime series of same name, when people create a social movement, and they believe they are being copy-cats, but there is no "original" to copy.
When Occupy happened, it was the same time as occupy-style protests in Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece, the Spanish and Portuguese called themselves "Indignados", and if you saw live feeds of the Greece movement, you could see people carrying "Indignados" banners too.
Also Arab spring happened at the same time, one thing interesting was that Anonymous (the 4chan Anonymous "group") was present in all of those, sometimes doing important things, for example in the same IRC channel they organized live feeds of spanish protests, medical help in Tunisia (a couple of "Anons" with actual medical training in Tunisia roamed around in makeshift ambulances helping injured protesters) and internet infrastructure in Egypt (in Egypt after the government shutdown the internet, "Anons" drove around in vans with satellite and various forms of local connections to provide data links so people could upload photos and videos of the protests).
Occupy Wall Street was a sort of natural consequence, lots of US people got involved in the overseas protests, and it does not surprise me they decided to try the same in US.
The thing is, that in US the cause they could fight for was completely unrelated, in Europe the problem was the stupid austerity programs and the debt problems, in the muslim world it started as protests against corruption (the first protester, a Tunisian that set fire to himself, was upset that the Tunisian police could stroll on the market and take whatever they wanted without paying, that Tunisian was a shopkeeper).
US has much less obvious corruption than Tunisia (ie: no cops stealing food from food trucks), and although US has crazy debts, the dollar being reserve currency allow the US to pretend the debt problem does not exist, so Occupy had to protest confusing stuff.
I agree that a lot of the details of the financial system fly over society's collective heads, but I think the impunity of white-collar bad actors was a very concrete non-confusing source of outrage.
It's a very power populist message. But it's hard to channel that into reform. Holding banks responsible for the crash just wasn't possible. Creating regulation for the future was possible, but it's wonkish and doesn't lend itself to crowd pleasing measures.
"Somebody had an idea and it grew naturally from there" is very different than "somebody conjured it up out of whole cloth by dumping money on people." Adbusters planted the seed, but Occupy was hardly a Wholly Owned Subsidiary of Adbusters Inc., especially by the time it became something significant.
I've been fascinated to read some comparisons between Occupy and I think it was second-wave feminist groups. Basically, the feminists ran into many of the same problems as Occupy, a few decades ago.
Which brings up the interesting situation of the linux kernel. Lots of corporations (with their own agendas) have contributed alongside with lots of independent devs.
I think that progressives (especially Chomsky) overstate the role of hard power/money in politics. Or perhaps they understate the role of soft power. E.g. the progressive movement in the West is driven by a relatively small group of academics and journalists. It is notable how many social sciences professors are self-professed Marxists. I don't see this in a conspiratorial way (as some do), of Marxists seeking to push an agenda. But rather, the core of the progressive movement are people who think that both the economic, and also the political and social realm, are characterized by power, domination and oppression. If you don't believe this about economics, it's much harder to believe this about the rest.
"Is there actually any such thing as a "grassroots" movement?"
I would hope that this would be an easy question to answer, simply by identifying some minor thing you have done that would qualify as - even as the germ of - grassroots action.
I can think of one or two things I have done myself that would fall into that category, and I would hope that would be the case for everyone. Even if it's minor (as mine have been) if it welled up from within you it is ipso facto the start of a grassroots movement.
How about movements that direct money towards smaller or local entities? It's hard for me to imagine the eat local / farmers market movement as being quietly backed by corporations.
Unless you know who Satoshi Nakamoto is, Bitcoin's origins are a mystery.
As for LSD, it was discovered by Albert Hofmann, a Swiss and while the US government helped the movement along a lot (mostly unintentionally), they didn't start it or control it.
Is there actually any such thing as a "grassroots" movement?
Over the years I've seen so many unmasked as the product of someone or something with deep pockets: corporations, think tanks, governments. At the very least it's hard for me to think of any movement where major institutions didn't play some role.
Intelligence agencies seem to figure prominently too, and not necessarily in the areas you would think. The 60s counterculture was in part seeded by CIA LSD research, and Tor was funded by the US Department of Naval Intelligence (to provide two random examples).