'The spirit of occupy is alive': an interview with Kalle Lasn.

• Author: Whitney, Jake
• Position: Interview

Kalle Lasn, editor of the anti-consumerist magazine Adbusters and one of the brains behind the Occupy movement, told me recently from his headquarters in Vancouver that he sees a new movement in the makina.

Lasn is in the midst of planning a Billion People March to take place on December 19 right after the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris. He expects the #billionpeoplemarch to be the first "global big bang moment" in a series of protests aimed at drawing attention to how the global financial system drives climate change.

To announce the protests, Adbusters, which helped spark the original Occupy movement with a Tactical Briefing, sent out a new message.

"The revolutionary spirit is stirring again," it read. "This time we know exactly what we want."

To many, the revolutionary spirit of the Occupy Wall Street movement seemed to recede almost as soon as it arrived in late 2011. For two months, huge numbers of protesters camped out in Zuccotti Park in New York City, and in other cities around the world, igniting a debate over income inequality and financial corruption. Yet the movement was widely criticized for being ineffectual and lacking a coherent strategy or message, and seemed to quickly flame out. Lasn disagrees with that analysis.

Q: There is a perception that Occupy burned out without accomplishing much. Does the Occupy movement still exist, and did it accomplish its goals?

Kalle Lasn: It was inevitable that the first phase was going to fade out. But people who say that don't get it, quite frankly. They expected the Occupy movement to make demands to the government and accomplish specific policy goals. That's not what happened. Occupy politicized millions of young people around the world. It sent a message that if we're smart and come up with smart strategies like occupying the iconic heart of capitalism, and if we use social media to organize, then we can create global big bang moments that change things. The Billion People March that we're working on now --and a whole bunch of other initiatives that are happening around the world--is because the spirit of Occupy is alive.

Q: The stated goal of the Occupy movement was to stop the moneyed corruption at the heart of American democracy. But that corruption exists more than ever.

Lasn: This is the core idea behind the Billion People March, that to solve this existential crisis we need to change the guts of the financial system. You're not going to solve climate change by...