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All spectacle, no substance: The #Occupy leader who says protest is dead

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The Pepsi ad featuring Kendall Jenner
The Pepsi ad featuring Kendall Jenner.()

Back in April, Pepsi released a commercial featuring a protest of racially diverse young people holding signs like 'join the conversation'. A sweaty cello player invites model Kendall Jenner to take part. She generously abandons her modelling shoot and defuses a tense standoff between the youth and police by giving a cute cop a can of soda.

The lyrics go: 'we are the lions, we are the chosen, we are the movement, this generation'. The text on screen reads: 'live bolder, live louder, live for now'.

Within 24 hours Pepsi had pulled the ad and begun apologising. The concept was being mocked as tone deaf, dumb, and generally insensitive to Black Lives Matter - a protest against police brutality towards black people in America. It was also just bizarre. What was Pepsi thinking?

Well, that ad pretty much sums up the problem with protesting these days, says Micah White, the co-creator of Occupy Wall Street.

Micah White
Micah White.()

"We have corporations calling for protest now," he told Hack.

"Protest has become a kind of social marketing - the proliferation of protest has destroyed protest. You can go to the concert or you can go to the protest march."

That may sound like Micah is jaded by the failure of the Occupy Wall Street movement - at its peak, the protest spread to 82 countries around the world - to seize power and install a more democratic system of government. Which is half right. But he's not calling for the end of protest or suggesting this has already happened - that people are protesting less.

Recent years have seen some of the biggest protests in history.

"What I'm saying is that we've experienced the greatest number of protests ever, more people have participated in protests in the last 10 years than ever before."

"But we see these protests are increasingly ineffective."

"I'm not saying do not protest, if anything I'm saying protest differently."

'Win wars or win elections'

In 2016, White published The End of Protest: A New Playbook For Revolution, based largely on his experience with Occupy. Since then, Donald Trump has been elected to the White House, and there has been a surge in the number of street marches. There have been protests and counter-protests.

A protest in Baltimore over a death in custody
A protest in Baltimore over a death in custody.()

Micah, who is speaking at the Melbourne Writers' Festival and Sydney's Antidote Festival, argues these protests - despite the buzz they cause on social media - will not grant political power. He argues the only way to gain power is to win elections or win wars.

"In a protest we're acting out a story about democracy - that if we get enough people in the streets the government has listen.

"[In Occupy] that turned out to not be true.

The best outcome of Occupy Wall Street is we don't have to do this anymore."

He's also not calling for war.

"I think winning wars is morally dubious."

That leaves elections. To test his theory of change he recently ran for mayor in a small town in Oregon of 210 people on a platform of delegating power to the people. He formed a people's association and promised that, as mayor, he would abide by the decisions of the association. If the association votes for a new swimming pool, he'd build one. If they vote to fill it in, he'd do that too.

"Unfortunately I lost," he says.

"I'm now in New York City trying to figure out the next step."

So he wants a revolution?

Yes.

Micah argues movements like Occupy show we're living in a "revolutionary moment" of building pressure and possibility for a "positive dramatic social change". But we've also given up on the possibility of revolution. The bloody aftermath of the Chinese and Russian revolutions have ruined our appetite for revolt.

Revolutions, says Micah, are an inherent part of human civilisation, they are the way we break out of patterns of living and achieve greater liberties.

"Without the French revolution we wouldn't have the concept that everyone should be allowed to vote, without the Russian revolution we wouldn't have the eight-hour workday."

"We're in a moment where something beautiful could suddenly emerge."

"But I don't subscribe to idea it's inevitable."

"It could be a long time."

What does this revolution look like?

The revolution Micah is describing is a bit like his Oregon mayoral campaign - win elections, devolve power to people's assemblies, and repeat.

The details are fuzzy, partly because he acknowledges no-one has yet figured out how to give political power back to the people. How would the decisions be made? What decisions would got to the vote? How do the people govern themselves?

But he's sure someone will figure out a mechanism that works. When that happens, "it will spread to many countries."

Micah is also fuzzy on what kind of society he would like to see. His revolution doesn't come with manifesto or an ideology. As a populist, he wants give people decision-making power over their communities. Whatever they decide to do then is up to them.

"What I'm aiming for is to give power back to people but in a post-ideological perspective.

We don't need to create a manifesto but to change how power functions.

The alternative, he says, are "charismatic individuals detached from our desires", such as President Trump, or something even worse: a military coup.

He predicts this happening in Washington within five years.

"In America, I think the intelligence community already has all the intelligence necessary to prove Trump used Russia's interference to win the election.

"I think they're slowly doling out that information. They'll create a social protest in the streets to get rid of Trump, and they'll put in someone far worse than Trump. And in a certain sense yeah he must be removed from power - he's insane.

"But because there's no social movement that could take power, we're stuck."

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United States, Government and Politics