did the occupy movement reject the civil rights movement?

On an ideological level, the Civil Rights Movement and Occupy are clearly fellow travelers. They both are openly anti-racist and anti-inequality. However, there is an important sense in which the Occupy movement is an obvious rejection of the CRM: tactics and organization.

Roughly speaking, the CRM deployed “big organizations” in the pursuit of a clearly defined mission. The organizations were Black churches, political groups (e.g., the NAACP), and various labor and student groups. While there was no single leader, the CRM clearly has a leadership class that set the agenda and worked in a fairly top-down manner. It was also highly bureaucratic in that that they set a vast apparatus (the SCLC) to collect funds, conduct litigation, and distribute resources.

In contrast Occupy works on an explicitly decentralized plan. The movement strives to have a horizontal structure and leadership, in the traditional sense, is discouraged. There is no analog to the NAACP or CORE. It also has a very vague set of goals, at least in comparison to the CRM’s demands for voting rights and equality in housing and education. And they openly reject institutionalized politics, rather than engage in the way the CRM did with voting drives and occasional electioneering. Perhaps the only major overlap between Occupy and the CRM is the use of non-violence.

The split between Occupy and the CRM raises an important question: why is the most celebrated progressive movement of the present one that so obviously rejects the successful strategies of the past? Maybe it has to do with the collective memory of the CRM, where the typical Occupier sees the CRM as a failure in some way. Maybe it’s historical amnesia, an ignorance of progressive history. Or perhaps the goals of Occupy in some way are completely incompatible with the tactical and organizational innovations of 20th century left politics. It’s a questions that merits an answer.

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz