by Christopher Carrico <http://asitoughttobe.com/author/ccarrico/>
The Occupy Wall Street movement is one of the most significant developments on the American left to have emerged in years. An important victory has been won by the fact that the movement has already shifted American public discourse to now include the recognition of economic inequality as a political issue. This alone is long overdue, and will most likely be of lasting historical significance.
We are experiencing, as Andrew Levine wrote in the wake of events in Madison, Wisconsin earlier this year, the “endgame of the Reagan Revolution.” The U.S. experienced increasing income and wealth equality from the time of the Great Depression until the late 1960s. The U.S. capitalist class began, in the 1970s and even more markedly after the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, to engage in conscious class warfare for the restoration of capitalist class power.
The economic crisis that began in 2007 and has continued to the present is the end result of these three decades of class warfare, and the social movements of 2011 mark the beginning of a new historical sequence that cannot as yet be named. Having, at long last, revived the tradition of egalitarian universalism in American political discourse, the Generation of 2012 must brace itself for the hard fight ahead against the forces of reaction and entrenched power.
view full text here: http://asitoughttobe.com/2011/11/13/insurgent-anthropologies-occupy-wall-street-and-the-hard-tasks-ahead/