What makes Martinez's candidacy unique is that he's proudly announcing himself as an Occupy Wall Street candidate—the first one ever to get on a congressional ballot. That makes him an anomaly in the world of electoral politics and a contentious figure inside the movement. Is he committed to this thing called Occupy, or is he piggybacking on it to advance his own political ambitions? Does it even matter if his intentions are pure, if Occupy Wall Street has been clear from the jump that it won't rely on elected politicians to bring the changes it demands? ...

The Martinez candidacy poses these questions at a delicate time for Occupy Wall Street. Seven months after it was forcibly evicted from Zuccotti Park, the movement has metastasized, carrying on in working groups and circles of mutual trust, pursuing agendas ranging from finance reform to sustainable agriculture to an end to the NYPD's stop-and-frisk policy.

But without the park, and in the absence of regular media-friendly spectacles, the profile of the movement has diminished in the popular consciousness, and with it media coverage of the issues it briefly forced to the top of the national agenda: income inequality and corporate control of politics. ... In the hangover of the past six weeks, Occupiers have been turning inward, returning to first principles and asking one another how the movement has to change, what new strategies and tactics it has to adopt to regain the momentum that it held last fall. ...

But the Occupiers' spurning of conventional politics was never a failure of organization or maturity. It was a political calculation—born partly of the anarchist ideology woven inextricably into its roots and partly out of a shared appraisal that the political system, especially after the Citizens United decision, is irretrievably corrupted by corporate influence.