We are the Ninety-Nine Percent

Who are we? What exactly are we demanding? Who is leading this thing?

This is a leaderless movement without an official set of demands. There are no projected outcomes, no bottom lines and no talking heads. In the Occupy movement, We are all leaders. This is not just a charming mess. We are all leaders represents a real praxis, and it has a real history.

The Occupy movement has no central leaders, it is a movement lead by the people of the world for the people of the world, with each locale establishing its own set of organizational practices. Locales, and the virtual Occupy communities in cyberspace, are federated according to a simple yet powerful point of unity: “The one thing we all have in common is that we are the 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%”—an obvious reference to the well-known, yet still appalling, statistic that the top 1 percent of households in the United States own somewhere between 30 to 40 percent of all privately held wealth. And counting.

Embedded in consensus process is an ethical assumption that decision-making is not a competition: It is not about converting other people to one’s way of thinking. It is about compromise. For every person involved, there is a new viewpoint to consider. This can get messy, but efficiency is not the measuring stick of success here. Democracy is.

Similar to the feminist and alter-globalization movements, these groups want to avoid replicating the authoritarian structures of the institutions they are opposing. This is part of what differentiates them from the Tea Party. Occupy will never become an arm of the Democratic Party because the Democratic Party is part of the problem. These protesters want to prefigure within their own organization the free society they seek to create. And they want to demonstrate against the corrupt and hypocritical culture in mainstream politics and Wall Street—by operating with integrity.


Occupy the Streets[www.occupytogether.org]