As tensions between Occupy Vancouver and the City of Vancouver continue to mount and a court battle looms, Business in Vancouver spoke with one of the Occupy movement’s authors about the criticism that the protest has no clear core.
Kalle Lasn, co-founder of Vancouver-based Adbusters, defended Occupy as a new kind of movement.
“The people who are criticizing the movement for not having a clearly articulated list of demands, they are the old school types,” he said.
“These are the people that still have a foot in the past, and they still expect that every movement and every revolution has to be a vertical revolution, it has to be a revolution that has a manifesto and has clearly defined leaders and clearly-defined demands and then we put pressure on the existing power structures and get what we want out of them.”
Lasn said that “old” revolutionary approach hasn’t succeeded in the past.
“This is the way we tried to do it back in 1968 and we failed and we tried to do it again during the Battle in Seattle and it failed.”
The Occupy movement, he said, is a different kind of protest, with a different structure – which he called “horizontal.”
“This movement is run by people who grew up in the culture of the Internet, they have a much more egalitarian way of thinking about things. They have the social media going for them, so they don’t need leaders as much as they used to in the old days.”
But Lasn rejected the idea that the protest doesn’t have a clear direction, and said that for many, the push is for a more equal distribution of power between individuals and corporations.
“In a way, they know what they want: They want to have a deep down transformation of the existing order.”
And he said that the proof of the movement’s effectiveness is in its results.
“We’re starting to put pressure on the G20 leaders that [met last week] with all our various demands. We’ve got everybody talking about us. We’ve already done something miraculous without clearly-defined demands. So what’s the beef?”
See next week’s edition of BIV for a look at how the Occupy movement is benefitting Adbusters.
Jenny Wagler
@JennyWagler_BIV