Occupy one year on: what is the financial system's achilles heel?

"Did Occupy make a difference?"

I've lost count of the number of times I've been asked this. It's usually at social gatherings after the inevitable "what do you do" question, and my reply that I write about social change. Until recently the question was slightly different – I was asked whether I thought Occupy would make a difference. But now it's always in the past tense.

While the tents have been (mostly) absent from St Paul's for a year now, the perception that the movement in Britain is dead is slightly awry. Protests continue in solidarity with local anti-cuts campaigns, most recently in the form of occupations in a library and adventure playground in south London. But it's true that the UK movement hasn't managed to maintain the momentum on the scale of Occupy Wall Street, and the change it called for remains a way off.

Having said that, the list of Occupy's achievements are many: the movement helped change the debate, involved new people, may have influenced the last set of elections and when the activists seriously discussed the possibility of moving the protests indoors in protest at unpaid "workfare" labour being used to stack chainstore shelves, numerous retailers rapidly abandoned the practice. But did the central tactic get the movement closer to its ultimate aim of recreating the economic system?

Although meant as satire, when comedian Stewart Lee compared using tents against capitalism to using "bows and arrows against the lightning", he had a point. The reason, he argued, that public opposition to global capitalism hasn't yet reached a tipping point is "precisely because its real crimes don't conclude in physical space itself, but in a virtual world of virtual money and virtual profit".

In From Dictatorship to Democracy, nonviolence theorist Gene Sharp advises that every regime has an achilles heel. If strategically targeted, nonviolent action can not only win concessions but bring oppressive structures crashing down. So what is the weak point of the current financial system?

In Occupy part 1 – implicitly at least – there was an assumption that the system's achilles heel was the financial districts of city centres that can be occupied physically. There is plenty of evidence for the efficacy of the tactic. In recent history, almost every successful close-down of a stock exchange, summit meeting, political party office or tax-dodging shop has had some kind of impact. It can work to re-open things too – indeed earlier this month it was announced that the five-month occupation of a library threatened with closure in Barnet would result in the library staying open and the handing of the keys to the community. But there's a difference between that and the tented cities that could only bear witness in the parks and squares outside. For all of the movement-building reasons for a tented occupation, there wasn't a successful closedown of a bank or stock exchange in Britain. However many tents were pitched, the imaginary digits of global finance still ticked away.

There are alternative suggestions. Perhaps the achilles heel of financial capitalism is labour. Again we can certainly point to historical and present times and places where a strike (or threat of a strike) – particularly in the resources sector – could influence the direction of our economic system. Theoretically, trade unionism amongst finance sector workers could make some difference to the direction of the economy, a general strike would be a genuine challenge to the security of the government and a rise in employee-run workplaces could signal the beginnings of a quiet revolution. But what about full-time parents? The unemployed? The retired? Children? Students? The precarious mass of freelancers who disguise the severity of Britain's employment statistics? All of these people are among those most hurt by the current regime, and least able to participate if the withdrawal of paid labour is seen as our principal method of resistance. A strike of unpaid labour would be a very interesting idea, but still problematic when nappies need changing and relatives need caring for.

In the past few months there have been murmurings about the development of another form of resistance. It is based on the view that the central commodity of the British economy is not stuff but debt, which banks create, buy, and sell. Proponents make the case that the 1% are overwhelmingly creditors and the 99% are largely debtors or ineligible for credit. With this analysis, the beginnings of what could form a new focus for the movement are being born. Already in Spain, movements resisting house repossessions born of debt are bearing fruit in the shape of a moratorium on evictions. Already we are familiar with the longstanding demand for a debt jubilee for poor countries. What if that could be escalated into a full-blown debt rebellion?

In May 2012, a new strand of the Occupy movement began. Following a 50,000-person march on Wall Street, a general assembly was called where debt was declared an instrument of coercion that makes democracy impossible. In actions growing out of it, people burnt their bills and threw them in the river – a physical action helping to build the consciousness of participants as being not only part of the 99%, but having a more specific identity, a new subjectivity usually laced with shame: the debtor.

Next came the idea of a "Rolling Jubilee" – involving Occupy Wall Street activists fundraising to buy cut price debt on secondary markets, but then instead of suing for it, simply cancelling it. Donations of over $500,000 have led to millions of dollars worth of debt being written off. Now the movement is contacting all the people they have cancelled the debts of, and telling them that Occupy Wall Street did it. No one thinks this alone will cancel all debt, never mind bring down capitalism, but it is exposing the injustices and vagaries of the debt system. Strike Debt UK was formed later in the year.

We don't need to expect the peak of the rebellion to take place tomorrow. Analyses of movements that came before show that after the initial consciousness-raising stage of a movement (perhaps in this case manifested in the form of the encampments) comes a co-ordination stage, when activists become organisers and seek to build the resilient mass movement that will be necessary to move to the next stage of non-cooperation that takes place on a large enough scale that it is capable of being effective. If the Occupy movement (or whatever comes next) is to succeed, then now is the time to plan: how many variations of resistance could there be? Which would be most targeted? What preparation and training needs to happen?

Such a stages model changes the way we evaluate actions. It means that next time someone asks whether the first stage of the Occupy movement was a success the answer can be that it is impossible to say. This is partly because we often don't know the effects of our actions until long after they've happened. But it is also because of a bigger point: whether Occupy part 1 is judged in the future to be a phenomenal success or little more than a footnote, largely depends what happens next.