Christopher Ketcham writes: It’s 4:45 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 15, the day Occupy Wall Street went global. The march in Manhattan is twin pronged on 6th Avenue, several blocks long on the east and west sidewalks of the street. It flows as juggernautish and loud and flashing as a flood in a canyon. The police don’t know what to do except keep it on the sidewalk, barricade it off the street with a line of scooters and hundreds of foot cops and dozens of cop vans directed by the dreaded White Shirts. These latter are the captains, the field commanders, feared because in the five weeks the occupiers have been at Zuccotti Park, clawing into the financial district with no intention of departure, the White Shirts have done the most cawing into bullhorns, have seemed the most pissed off about the occupation, and have shown the most willingness to bust heads and punch kids and break out the mace and the pepper spray when faced with the threat of young women.

I get swept in the boiling mass on the east sidewalk next to a man in a white linen suit coat who chews on a cigar and is chiding the cops mercilessly. “What’s next, officers? How about planting season? Time to plant drugs on these people!”

“Keep tawkin,” says a detective.

“Randy Credico,” says the man in the linen suit, turning to me. “Activist, political comedian. Ran against Chuck Schumer in 2010.” A little guy, spry, a cynic who likes to dress up in public as Diogenes, a New Yorker with one of those sinewy New York accents. We shake hands. Then the drums are upon us, the banners—“Revolt” and “Generation Revolution” and “Wall Street: The Enemy of Humanity”—and the shouting: “We! Are! The 99 percent!”

The goal today is the convergence at Times Square, where it’s said 20,000 people are already waiting.

The goal tomorrow is the toppling of the 1 percenters—the Wall Streeters, the socially useless financiers, the bankers, the hedge funders, the derivatives traders, the corporate lawyers, the big-moneyed class that, in a more muscular age of progressivism, say, a hundred years ago, would be denounced as the parasite class. The parasites in New York, at last count in 2007, took for themselves close to 45 percent of all income in the city. Forty-five percent of all income going to roughly 34,000 households. The occupiers know their addresses, and in recent weeks have visited their doors in a most disrespectful manner to make known that the parasite class is not welcome anymore.

That’s a good start, the act of shaming and ridicule. How the toppling of the parasites is functionally to be accomplished, the machinations needed to smash their power and put them on a rocket ship to an airless planet, is as yet unknown. Nor does anyone here much care that it’s unknown. What matters on a day like this is morale, and to find morale means to gather en masse to make a mess of the normal state of affairs—the politics of disruption for its own sake. The Occupy Wall Street movement has collaborators in dozens of cities—Occupy Chicago and Occupy Los Angeles and Occupy Seattle—but it is the occupation in New York, the most regressive city in the nation, to which Occupiers nationwide look for inspiration. The enemy is nested in New York, and it is here the battle is to be joined.

Justin Elliot talks to Michael Kazin, professor of history at Georgetown and author of “American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation” about where Occupy Wall Street is heading.

We’re now a month-plus into this. Does Occupy Wall Street remind you of any past movements or does it seem like a fundamentally new type of thing?

This is the first time in a long time, perhaps since the 1930s, that the left — and I think this protest does belong to the left, though a lot of people who are involved in it wouldn’t call themselves that — has focused on economic injustice as a central issue. That is both new and of course harks back to the beginnings of the New Deal. At that time, most activists on the left were primarily targeting economic inequality — in the form of wages, the lack of democracy at work, and resistance by industrial corporations to recognizing unions. What’s obviously different now is that Occupy Wall Street has been put together by people who are proud of being children of the Internet age: with horizontal organization, leaderlessness and consensus decision-making. The main tactic is about hanging out with and learning from one another. There is no sense of how the tactic will lead to either taking political power or having a big share of political power. This movement seems to think from tactic to tactic, rather than tactic to strategy.

Is there precedent for this kind of form and structure?

Many a protest campaign begins this way. The sit-ins at Woolworth lunch counters beginning in February 1960 had an end — desegregation of public facilities — but they weren’t quite sure of where it was going after that. They just thought, “This is a neat tactic that will draw attention.” And it did. That began with four students in Greensboro, N.C. But it soon blossomed, and now their lunch counter is in the Smithsonian. The movement against the Vietnam War also began with very small protests in 1964, and then grew into ones with hundreds of thousands of demonstrators. So protests can grow and become catalysts for larger and more diverse movements.

The two examples you just mentioned had obvious, discrete goals they were trying to accomplish. In contrast, Occupy Wall Street has only a broad theme. Are there precedents for this?

There was Coxey’s Army in 1894, which was the first group to march on Washington. They were mostly unemployed people with a vague demand for public jobs. But they were basically just pissed off about the widespread depression of that era, and they were determined to compel Congress and the president to do something. Like Occupy, they did not have a well-worked-out agenda. Historians disagree about what effect the march had. But it certainly dramatized the situation of the poor and the unemployed, much as Occupy Wall Street is trying to do. People marched from around the country on Washington; they took freight trains, and hitchhiked on wagons, and walked a lot, too. It was very dramatic and the press covered it very widely. But the depression continued until 1897.

What can Occupy learn from history about how to sustain itself beyond the initial burst of interest and energy?

I think protests like this have to progress from tactic to strategy if they are going to endure. They have to either start their own organization — as the sit-in movement started SNCC — or link up with other organizations. The problem with that strategy is that what’s gotten people’s attention is the clever, somewhat novel tactic Occupy is using — and the participatory, very small-d democratic nature of it. The next step will inevitably not be that clever and novel. But for it to go anywhere, the Occupiers have to figure out, to some degree, what kind of demands they want to make. That doesn’t mean they need a 12-point program, but maybe a three-point program. They have to figure out what sort of relationship they want to have with existing groups on the left. But with no leaders and everything run by consensus, how do you make these decisions?

What’s more likely to happen — and I think to some extent already is happening — is that this will become a catalyst for other people to do other kinds of things about economic inequality. I think it’s likely that Occupy Wall Street will be seen as a spark. I think it’s unlikely that people are going to stay in the park for month upon month unless they are homeless. Most people eventually will want to get on with their lives. In the end, a tactic, no matter how successful, is just a tactic.

Micah Sifry writes: Overall interest in the Occupy Wall Street movement appears to be cresting at the moment, with affiliation through the nearly 500 Facebook pages that we’ve been tracking starting to top out and organic interest in the topic also showing signs of calming down on Google search. At the same time, the movement–which deliberately has avoided appointing leaders and spokespeople–continues to expand its networked base. Nearly 250 of those Facebook groups have at least 1,000 members. Another 70 “Occupy X” Twitter accounts also have at least 1000 followers. And in a fascinating development noticed by Shane Castlen, who is tracking all of these metrics on his CollectiveDisorder.com website, while the main Reddit community for OWS now has more than 10,000 members, a number of local Occupy groups are slowly building their own “subreddits” focused on the news and debates occurring around their own encampments. Boston, Los Angeles, Austin, Chicago, DC, Orlando, Philadelphia, Seattle, Richmond, Omana, Columbus, South Dakota and Boise are all active there.