Adbusters on the origin of #Occupy Wall Street

Salon talks to the editor of Adbusters about the practical and philosophical roots of the movement

In July Adbusters, a Vancouver-based publication known for its incisive critiques of capitalism, included a poster in that month’s magazine that read simply:

#OCCUPYWALLSTREET

September 17th. Bring tent.

www.occupywallst.org

In response to the call, several loose-knit groups of organizers got involved and hundreds of people showed up on Wall Street on Sept. 17. A few weeks later, Occupy Wall Street is now spreading around the country and attracting intense interest from the media.

I spoke to Adbusters co-founder and editor in chief Kalle Lasn about the practical and ideological origins of the movement and about the continuing debate over its demands. The following transcript of our conversation has been edited for length.

You issued the original call to occupy Wall Street back in July. How did that come about and what was the thinking behind it?

It was a poster that we put in the middle of the July edition of Adbusters magazine and a listserv that we sent out to our 90,000-strong culture-jammers network around the world. It was also a blog post on our website. For the last 20 years, our network has been interested in cultural revolution and just the whole idea of radical transformations.

After Tunisia and Egypt, we were mightily inspired by the fact that a few smart people using Facebook and Twitter can put out calls and suddenly get huge numbers of people to get out into the streets and start giving vent to their anger. And then we keep on looking at the sorry state of the political left in the United States and how the Tea Party is passionately strutting their stuff while the left is sort of hiding somewhere. We felt that there was a real potential for a Tahrir moment in America because a) the political left needs it and b) because people are losing their jobs, people are losing their houses, and young people cannot find a job. We felt that the people who gave us this mess — the financial fraudsters on Wall Street — haven’t even been brought to justice yet. We felt this was the right moment to instigate something.

Read the rest of the post at Salon, The origins of Occupy Wall Street explained