3Qs: Walking out for financial and social change

Jef­frey Juris, an asso­ciate pro­fessor of anthro­pology in Northeastern’s Col­lege of Social Sci­ences and Human­i­ties, researches social move­ments and protests, often by embed­ding him­self with pro­testers for an extended period of time. We asked him to talk to us about the new Occupy Wall Street move­ment, which has spread to cities across the United States – even prompting marches on Northeastern’s campus.

The eco­nomic con­di­tions at the heart of the Occupy Wall Street and related protests have existed for sev­eral years, since at least 2008. Why is this move­ment emerging now?

There is a con­flu­ence of fac­tors in play. People see that Wall Street is not being held account­able for its role in the finan­cial col­lapse. The gov­ern­ment is talking about cut­ting the budget rather than addressing the gross inequal­i­ties and the need to pro­mote jobs. People are just more and more frus­trated. The other factor, I think, is the influ­ence of protests around the world. I think this absolutely has to be seen in the con­text of the Arab Spring, of the “Indig­nados” move­ment in Spain, even the move­ment of occu­pa­tion in Israel.

These move­ments among young people are hap­pening all over the world, and young people feel they are con­nected to them – through social media, through the Internet, even just through reading the paper and knowing what’s hap­pening. I think that’s part of it. I don’t think it’s acci­dental that it’s being led by stu­dents, just like so many of these move­ments all around the world. There’s no job market for stu­dents who are going way into debt and they’re asking, “What’s going on here? What’s going to happen to me?” While a lot of these move­ments tend to be in sol­i­darity with some­body else, this really hits people directly. With all the budget debate and dis­cus­sion, people finally realize some­thing is going to change.

Many observers are having trouble pin­pointing exactly what the Occupy Wall Street pro­testers in New York and in satel­lite protests around the country are sup­porting or opposing. What is the movement’s mes­sage?

I think there’s actu­ally a very con­crete focus. There are three things: First, Wall Street and the banks and their role in the finan­cial crisis; they were bailed out and everyday working people in the middle classes weren’t. I think people are upset about growing inequality, and that’s clear with the 1 per­cent /​ 99 per­cent dis­cus­sion. And they’re upset about the eco­nomic system over the past 20 or 30 years, which has been working for the people with resources and money and not for any­body else.

While they do have a focus, it needs to become more sharply artic­u­lated. And over the coming weeks and months, you’re going to see a sharper artic­u­la­tion of those themes, but prob­ably not a single mes­sage, and that has to do with the nature of this sort of lead­er­less move­ment.

A few weeks into these protests, what has the move­ment achieved so far?

It’s already achieved a vic­tory – if it’s done nothing else, it’s changed the con­ver­sa­tion. One of the things the Tea Party did was, after the finan­cial crisis of 2008, when every­body should have been talking about reg­u­la­tion and how to pre­vent another crisis from hap­pening, help get people talking about the budget deficit. The Tea Party, by and large, changed the debate.

What’s hap­pening now is this move­ment is changing the debate back to what it should have been in 2008. The move­ment has suc­ceeded already in doing that. Even if it goes away after the next few months, I think it will achieve that and it is extremely important.