Occupy Wall Street in perspective.

Occupy Wall Street was a thrilling protest that briefly dominated media attention and reshaped American public life.As Todd Gitlin suggests, it was perhaps more moment than movement, but of course moments can be very important to movements. Movements are relatively long-term collective engagements in producing or guiding social change. Indeed, in the nineteenth century, the term social movement was often used to describe the actual course of social change, especially change bringing broader social participation. The term is now used to describe all manner of mobilizations, but it is important to distinguish specific protests and other relatively short-term manifestations from longer-term patterns of action seeking to produce major changes. Movements often proceed in alternating phases of intense public action and seeming dormancy, and much of the work that shapes the long term is in fact done during what appear superficially to be mere spaces between waves of activism. The waves, moreover, are often conjunctures among multiple movements. In the 1960s, for example, people were mobilized not only around peace (or against a specific war), but also in the civil rights struggle, union struggles, the women’s movement, the environmental movement and so forth. Likewise the Progressive Era saw a wave in which mobilizations for many causes around labour, immigration, women’s suffrage and other issues reinforced each other in a field of movement activity. The same goes for the era of the Second Great Awakening with religious revitalization itself, temperance, labour, women’s and above all anti-slavery movements. So there is no shame in being more moment than movement. It is no denigration of Occupy Wall Street (or the Occupy movement(s) more generally) to say it may not have a future as such. It may be a shaping influence on a range of movements and on the course of social change even if there is no continuing movement under the Occupy name. Even at its height, it was a loose-knit coalition among activists with a variety of different primary concerns: labour conditions in Walmart, fracking and energy policies, financial