The Beginning Of The American Fall: A Comics Journalist Inside The Occupy Wall Street Movement

While the banking crisis demonstrated capitalism's long-term bankruptcy the barefaced fleecing of the public purse to balance the books was an insult added to injury.

The Occupy movement's rebellious euphoria was, however, characterised by a widespread dilettantism that made its impact on the political firmament akin to that of a shooting star.

Expected to light the fuse for mass rebellion, it was too often caught navel-gazing. It became instead a highly visible and embarrassing, but sadly only minor, irritant for capitalism's elites.

What it's done for the participants is yet to be seen.

Stephanie McMillan was there on Wall Street, sketchbook in hand, and although the ambition of her book's title sounds over-optimistic there is little doubt that while it lasted Occupy served as a political nursery for the indignant few in the otherwise politically comatose US middle classes who were stung into action by the state's direct attack on their entitlements.

Devised as an illustrated A-Z of political activism for beginners, The Beginning Of The American Fall will ring plenty of bells in the US but fewer elsewhere.

McMillan's post-mortem brings Occupy's many inadequacies painfully to light, including self-defeating insularity.

But it is Marx's all-important assertion that it's not consciousness that determines life but the obverse which has the potential to filter through.