In conversation with Newsclick, Vijay Prashad analyzes the American Occupy Wall Street movement and the Tea Party movement.

In conversation with Newsclick, Vijay Prashad analyzes the American Occupy Wall Street movement and the Tea Party movement.

If you had followed May Day protests in New York City in the mainstream media, you might hardly have noticed that they happened at all.

A huge number of issue based struggles have sprung up in recent years, building new alliances and activists. What the Occupy Wall Street has done is to build this large space in which all these movements can come together, with new energy, new methods and with new creativity. This is the excitement of the Occupy Wall Street Movement. It not only has the legacy of the 60's but also the owes its many of form and methods to Tahrir Square and the movements in the Arab world.

The Occupy Wall Street has changed the discourse in the US, bringing out the exclusions of 99% of the people and the total inequality that now prevails. It has brought in different kinds of movements and created a huge oppositional space. The challenge in the days ahead is how to bring together all these elements in a coherent way without losing the vitality of the movement.

I was honored to be invited to speak at Occupy Wall Street on Thursday night. Since amplification is (disgracefully) banned, and everything I said had to be repeated by hundreds of people so others could hear (a.k.a. “the human microphone”), what I actually said at Liberty Plaza had to be very short. With that in mind, here is the longer, uncut version of the speech.