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After a little more than a month of explosive growth, there’s a growing sense that Occupy Wall Street is at a crossroads.

“The first phase of this movement has peaked. And now it gets interesting,” says Kalle Lasn, editor of Adbusters, the magazine that issued the original call for a Sept. 17 protest on Wall Street. “The original magic of some of those general assemblies is wearing a little thin in some – though not all – places. And winter is coming. People are wondering whether they want to hang around for three hours talking about protocol.”

With its decentralized structure, it’s impossible to predict where the Occupy movement might end up. But we can at least identify the questions that will determine its future.

Can the movement move from tactic to strategy?

Michael Kazin, a historian of left movements, argued in an interview with Salon this week that the occupation of public spaces to bring attention to economic injustice and corruption on Wall Street is at heart a tactic – one that has been remarkably successful. Can Occupy now shift to a broader strategy for effecting change?

The answer to that question depends on what sort of change Occupy wants to accomplish, which is itself not a settled issue. Adbusters’ Lasn predicts the movement will go in a variety of directions. “I believe the movement will break up into components and there will be myriad projects bubbling up from the grass roots,” he says. He imagines campaigns centering on a variety of legislative goals designed to address economic injustice – or even the creation of a third party in America.