“How to make Occupy catch on: To build a fairer economy, we need to reclaim time-tested progressive narratives.”
The article begins:
“Were history a guide to today’s politics, progressives would be redoubling their efforts to turn the still-unraveling crisis of capitalism into an opportunity for system-changing reform. Certainly they would be doing everything within their power to combat the logic of austerity and entitlement-slashing that has crystalized into a new Washington “consensus,” and instead to shape the debate around issues of employment, inequality, the erosion of the safety net, and the unprecedented concentrations of wealth and economic power that have survived the Great Recession intact. But they would also move to engage the debate at a deeper level: in terms of what a just, equitable and socially as well as financially productive economy looks like and what roles the state and the market should play in bringing it about.”
Click O’Connor on Occupy for the rest of the article.
Alice O’Connor is a professor of history at the University of California Santa Barbara, where she teaches and writes about the history of U.S. social policy, political economy, and the politics of wealth and poverty. Her publications include “Social Science for What?: Philanthropy and the Social Question in a World Turned Rightside Up” and “Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy and the Poor in Twentieth Century United States History.”
hm 3/5/12