ShareThisThe Occupy Wall Street movement is nearing a very real deadline for figuring out how to evolve into a long-lasting, influential social movement: winter.
Subfreezing temperatures and snow will make it less attractive to camp in Manhattan, Chicago, Detroit, Washington, D.C., and other U.S. cities. California's rainy season will likely shoo away the less-than-hard-cores from encampments in Oakland and San Francisco.
Occupy spawned a worldwide movement through a provocative act -- physically occupying public space -- that gave voice to a widespread belief: The middle-class American dream is slipping away because of broken political and economic systems that favor the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans.
But analysts say sympathizers will need different ways to express that frustration to maintain the movement's momentum.
"If all that happens is those groups continue to try to occupy public space to express outrage, this dissipates relatively quickly," said Doug McAdam, a Stanford University sociology professor and an expert on social movements.
As Occupy approaches a fork in the movement-building road, experts and veterans compared it to other social movements as it confronts its challenges.
"People are not going to invest time and energy to come to demonstrations that don't appear to be linked to specific outcomes," McAdam said.
That is changing. The liberal online hub MoveOn.org is among the groups promoting "Bank Transfer Day" this Saturday, Nov. 5, when people are being encouraged to transfer their funds from major financial institutions.
"There's so much energy now, frustration at Wall Street, and people looking for ways to get involved over and above Occupy," said Justin Ruben, executive director of MoveOn.org, which is not affiliated with Occupy.
The Occupy protests are structured as a leaderless, highly democratized body, where decisions are made by consensus. While that is attractive to those repelled by politics, it makes it a challenge to collaborate with more traditional organizations, like labor unions.
"Who ends up taking control of this Occupy idea?" asked James Miller, a politics professor at the New School for Social Research and author of "Democracy Is in the Streets." "Will it be the anarchists who created it, or will it be all these people who flocked to it? That's the drama."
Labor groups, some Democratic politicians and other liberal organizations are reaching out.
"Some movements are born with very specific goals," McAdam said. "But lots of them are as amorphous and broadly expressive as the Occupy protest."
The 1955 Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott was intended to be a one-day, localized action, McAdam said. But when many more people participated than even organizers expected, it carried forward, with specific goals in mind. It eventually lasted for 381 days.
"We typically look back at any of these movements as united top-down efforts," he said. "But the civil rights movement was a collection of local struggles."
There have been Occupy protests in more than 1,000 cities. But for the movement to flourish, suburbia needs to embrace it on its own terms.
Those at the front of the modern women's movement in the 1960s, McAdam said, "were radical left feminists" who were "culturally anathema to middle-class suburban women."
But they "made visible and salient a general concern about issues about gender discrimination. And lots of women could identify with that even if they weren't about to go out to some angry demonstration and throw bras in a trash can."
The do-it-yourself, locally organized, democratically run ethos of the Occupy movement appeals to Millennials, who were born between 1982 and 2003.
"They do very much believe that the system has screwed them and left them with a ton of debt and no real way of making their way in the world," said Morley Winograd, co-author of "Millennial Momentum." "The issue that's missing for some is more specific actions. More specific goals."
He pointed to cities including San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York that are considering measures to divest from banks they consider complicit in the home foreclosure crisis.
Winograd likened it to the way that cities, states and universities divested themselves of investments in South Africa in the 1980s to protest the country's apartheid policies. "Millennials are interested in changing the world ... by taking action, not by talking."
(Contact Joe Garofoli at jgarofoli(at)sfchronicle.com. Chronicle staff writer Kevin Fagan contributed to this report.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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