Published in "il manifesto' on December 31, 2011

A meeting with the Marxist economist Richard Wolff, one of the inspirers of the movement: "It's the first time in thirty years that there emerges an organized left, wide-reaching and receiving popular consensus."

Since the first tents set up in Zucchotti Park on September 17 only a little more than three months' time has passed, but with a considerable impact on the overall meaning of 2011. Born in the heart of the New york financial district to contest the American political and economic system, the spirit of the movement spread rapidly to all of the United States, giving vent to the rage of dissatisfaction of people in big cities and small communities. What pushed people into the American squares were the exasperation caused by the great economic inequalities in the country, the disgust with corporate interference in politics, and the anger about the fact that those who created a devastating global crisis have gone unpunished. "this is the culmination of a long process, not just the result of the economic crisis," explains to the manifesto Richard Wolff, a noted economist of New York's New School and Professor Emeritus of the university of Massachusetts, in a coffee shop behind Union Square. "What we have with OWS is the product of at least thirty or forty years of evolution. Forty years ago the distance between rich and poor was much less in the US than in Europe. Now it is the absolute greatest here. Something changed psychologically with the crisis of 2007, people saw that the wealthy were having difficulties, a vision which obfuscated the American belief that with hard work everyone one day can become rich. But the system no longer works, not even for the rich, who, after saying for forty years that they did not need the state, now count on it to rescue them. This is very difficult to see for Americans, who see the government help the banks but not the people and feel like they are being fooled."

In addition to teaching Marxian economics and a course on the economic crisis, Professor Wolff is one of the inspirers of the OWS movement, for which it has written articles and given speeches in encampments throughout the US, from Maine to California. "Two months ago I spoke at the university of Maine in the village of Orono, a suburb of Bangor." he recalls. "After the speech we were at Bangor Center, and there was an Occupy camp. That the movement is present in a small town of 40,000 people in the North can tell you about its echo, the interest it has aroused. Occupy Wall Street represents the answer to forty years of evolution, of inequality, and of a collapsing American dream."

The movement grew over the internet during the Summer, conceived by the Canadian anticonsumerist journal Adbuster and re-energized by the powerful collective hacker anonymous, which encouraged their reader to erect pacific barricades against Wall Street."What started at Zucchotti Park had been tried ever year for at least the prior twenty years. I too was part of that," explain Professor Wolff. "Then someone had the idea of setting up tents at Zucchotti Park, and this time it took. This was the result of the conditions on the ground, which help make of Zucchotti park a success. that's why the movement has grown so rapidly, reaching three hundred cities throughout America in two months." These conditions, explains Professor Wolff can be seen in "real wages, which have remained unchanged since 1978. nothing has changed in thirty years, and Americans responded by working more, 20% more hours than Europeans, according to oecd data. In addition, American workers were debt pioneers, accumulating it to a greater extent than in any other country. this is a mature economy, with no growth. Americans were thrown into the gelid waters of economic decline without adequate psychological preparation. Young people today don't think they'll be able to have the same quality of life their parents had--the first time that has happened in American history. Immigrants used to come here to find a better life, but it has not been so since the 1970's, and it took a long time for Americans to get this into their heads, and now they are furious."

This anger has led to the occupation of Zucchotti Park and hundreds of other squares. An heterogeneous group of thousands of people united to contest the cupidity (not sure this is THE word) of American firms, intoning to the chant of 'we are the 99%.' "Suddenly the entire world has been rethought in terms of the 1% and the 99%. the movement has passed from being a small group of people to being on the front page of the New York Times, and this means that there is a mass response. Everyday there is a story on the 99%, everyone thinks in these terms. The movement is changing everything," says Professor Wolff, who identifies himself as an exponent of the American left and admits that he is living the best days of his life. "To understand the Occupy movement, it is important yo understand that this is the first time in thirty of forty years that an organized left has emerged, beginning to find two things: a good audience, with the population willing to accept its existence, and an organizational form. This is a very dangerous combination for this country's capitalism. This is occupy Wall Street, a movement which shows organization, even if it a movement very proud not to have an organization. This country needs to believe that there is not a left, which nonetheless exists and is even large. Given the fiction that it does not exist, the left has freedom of movement and now enjoys the best in fifty years. We are at the end of the decline, now the reconstruction begins."

The wide popular support the protesters have received has, however, often come into conflict with the civic authorities. The protesters counted significantly on the pacific nature of the protest in order not to distract from the goal of the movement. "But it will not continue so," adds Professor Wolff, "the violence begun by the state here will continue, given that the government has no way to confront the conditions which have produced Occupy Wall Street. The government's only recourse id repression. Here in New York the camp clearing was an act of violence on the part of Mayor Michael Bloomberg. the protesters were not creating any problems, but they were violently evicted, and the image Americans will continue to have is that of the state bulldozers destroying the camp's library. People speak about peace in Zucchotti Park, and they are attacked by the police. Obviously, they get angry. The police know this, and they try to provoke. In addition to the repression, there will now be a right-wing movement, to channel the anger in other directions. They will tells us that they are protecting us from immigrants, who come mostly from Latin America, much as in Italy they are mostly from Morocco and Albania." The strength of Occupy Wall Street is "the originality, the energy, the enthusiasm," continues Professor Wolff, convinced as he is that "the movement is changing the American political landscape. when i spoke at Zucchotti Park at the beginning of October, i had never seen anything like that before. During the preparations, we had discussed a megaphone, but they told me that the police was not allowing them. Then they explained the human mike to me. I was at the top of the steps, with all the people in front of me. If you are a professor, you always have people in front of you, but the problem there is the distance between you and them. I had to speak no more than six or seven words at a time, then the people in front would repeat them, and the words traveled back into the crowd, reaching the people in the back. I got a lot more attention than I had ever had before [I don't know if that's true, Rick--you always got rapt attention], because they were all listening carefully and wanted to understand the meaning of the words, because they had the job of passing the words back to the people behind them."

During these three months of protests there has been a lot of talk about the potential impact of the movement on the presidential elections of the coming November, with whether the Democrats could ride the wave of enthusiasm of Occupy Wall Street. "When the movement became popular in the second half of October, the democratic Party sent in people from Washington, the Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi in particular, to try to bring the Occupy protesters into the Obama campaign, which no longer has the army of volunteers it had three years ago," tells us Professor Wolff. "The Party was looking for people, and in Washington they were thinking of recruiting the protesters. But the movement sent them back home, explaining that it was not with Obama. They tried for weeks, meeting with all the leaders, but to no avail. A few will return to Obama, but not many, and he could even loose for this reason." Professor Wolff's words throw light on one of the secrets of occupy. "There are recognized leaders," he says, "but I prefer not to name names. There is a profound diffidence of leaders, it's very difficult for Americans to understand (the idea of) leadership."

Permission to reprint Professor Wolff's writing and videos is granted on an individual basis. Please contact profwolff@rdwolff.com to request permission. We reserve the right to refuse or rescind permission at any time.