Is OWS a movement calling for the people to be bailed out, too, or a movement of noble anger against the corporate welfare state we’ve been living in? Or is it, in fact, an actual liberation movement, aimed largely at reclaiming the freedom of the streets for popular assembly, against tourism and a managed public sphere?
— Marco Roth, n+1
Slightly more than two months into its life - and, it seems now, even closer to its death - the OWS movement has delivered two clear lessons. Both should have been predictable, given the movement's character and the character of American politics generally. That they weren't is a sign of its early potential. It's also a sign of need. OWS wasn't the movement we wanted, but it's probably the movement we deserved.
The first OWS lesson is this: the system assimilates. Even when dissent is polite; even when it's humanitarian; or even, for that matter, when it wears a clown suit, the culture finds a place to house it in relative comfort. When police moved through Zucotti Park in October to clear it for street cleaners, the response was predictable and meaningless. A few protesters were arrested and released; the remainder plunged into lengthy deliberations in their now famously idiosyncratic fashion. They marched once or twice, then stumbled into a series of so-called direct actions on bridges and subways - one last blood-thumping foray that accomplished little aside from pitting the movement against its poster children. Abortive and awkward as these were, they might have been enough to finish the job of pushing OWS off center stage. Because what we've had since all that - which was never really all that - has been gradual dissolution. Police went on to clear parks in Los Angeles and Philadelphia with minimal fanfare. Aside from a few California-based displays of law-enforcement recklessness, the nation's initially enthusiastic response resolved itself, in the end, to a collective shrug.
What happened?
Therein lies the second lesson, which is this: the US Left - to the extent one can be said to exist - has divorced itself almost entirely from the real lives of working humans, and embraced in their stead an academic formalism obsessed not with outcomes but with gestures, metaphors, symbology. How else to explain why a movement that might have reintroduced basic economics to the national conversation, achieved broad resonance across cultural and political affinities, and ultimately generated, in an election year, enough political momentum to recompose the House, the Senate, even the White House, will instead be remembered for masks, silly hand gestures, and an elaborate methodology for passing out blankets? Worst of all is the sense we get now that the movement itself feels just fine about that.
How did we get here? There's no single reason. It's been in the making since Vietnam, both a cause and a product of the academicization of progressive thought. It's also a cause and product of the perverse right-wing co-optation of unskilled labor that began with Reagan. The two trends reinforce one another: as the left academicizes, the working class sours on it, and the right wing capitalizes with a siren song of anti-pointy-headed left-wing academicization. Late nineteenth and early twentieth century struggles that led, in part, to the explosion of the American middle class - these became late twentieth century debates over lifestyle. Success - the very middle-class comfort those early struggles purchased - combined with a phenomenally sophisticated media and a highly motivated affluent class to produce cultural and electoral trends that are, factually, devastating to middle-class economic interests. And as its prospects shrivel, that middle class has embraced, like Plains Indians and ghost dances, the delusions and distractions proffered by those its demise will serve. It’s astonishing, really: within the space of four generations we'll witness the crest and comedown of what may be western civilization’s definitive cohort - as seminal an epoch as communism's, but quieter, and in the end more brutal, more devastating in what it forecasts for mankind.
Against this backdrop, OWS is a sideshow. But it's a telling one. We hear the word "radical" tossed around a lot these days, mostly by right-wing candidates for office or their network spokesmodels. It should make us laugh. There may never have been a less radical time in US history, at least as far as policy’s concerned. The mildest description of recent history puts us on a modest but steady three-decade drift from center to center-right. Tax policy hasn’t been more favorable for the affluent since the Gilded Age. Communism has been relegated to dark corners of the Netflix catalog, where only Kim Jong Un and college sophomores can study it. It’s never been cheaper to move capital, and governments have never been quite so willing to help - especially if you’re already, you know, well capitalized. The rich get richer isn’t a slogan so much as an executive summary of recent history.
As a result, to the extent OWS represents deep dissatisfaction with the scale and pace of economic inequality in the US, most of the population has been sympathetic. And most of the population has admired, a little or a lot, the creativity and tenacity the movement has shown. But aside from sending pizza, OWS gave us precious little by way of an action plan. For anyone other than the deeply committed, the out of work, the young and responsibility-free - all those, in other words, for whom the encampments could become home - its been hard to see the occupations as anything more than publicity stunts. They’ve existed to bend the spotlight, to enter and swerve the dialogue.
And at that they’ve been spectacularly effective. But most of the resulting discussion has been about OWS itself - tactical, characterological examinations of the protesters and their methods. How they set up their tents. How they form the Human Microphone. How they debate with their forearms. When there has been chatter on substance, it's mostly been about the fact that said substance is tough to find. "We are the 99%" is brilliant sloganeering. But as political platforms go it's a cypher. And if there's anything Americans hate more than rampant economic inequality and corporate personhood, it's political puzzles.
Weirdly, the movement's discourse on itself has been even more obsessed with process than that of their observers. One could be forgiven for concluding that its enemies aren't so much economic inequality or corporate personhood as protest etiquette, group dynamics, and the police tactics that greet them. Zucotti Park and the other locations under occupation are in theory just settings, places to set down the soapbox and deliver the argument. But the movement doesn't seem to see it that way. For the movement, it seems, occupation is the argument.
The left has always loved a good process debate; that love has always been reckless and self-destructive. In this case pervasive self-righteousness converged on historical allusion in a post-sixties perfect storm. Above all else, OWS is committed to the forensics of movementing. It's a protest about protesting, a meta-demonstration excavating not tax policy or banking regulation or entitlement strategy but movement dynamics as such. Away from the quirky camera-friendly vignettes about libraries and bicycle-powered iPhone chargers, it all resembles an academic exercise. The kind you go through in, say, business school.
There have been steady accusations about OWS's demands, or lack of them - demands for demands, you might say. OWS has never ducked the subject. Aside from a few sputtering satellite attempts, they've refused to have any. In fact they've more or less rejected the notion of demands as such. To quote from an admin note on OccupyWallSt.org, appended to a forum post entitled "Proposed list of OWS demands":
This is not an official list of demands. The user who posted this speaks only for themselves [sic], not the movement. This website would never in a million years endorse a list of demands of the 1%. [Emphasis in original.]
In one sense, OWS has achieved an enviable purity. If you don't make demands, you can't expect outcomes. And if you don't expect - or don't map, or don't target - outcomes, you are free to devote yourself to process. Endlessly. For its own sake.
OWS itself is by no means without precedent. There have been dress rehearsals for OWS since the eighties, including anti-apartheid encampments on college campuses, anti-first-Gulf-War demonstrations, and anti-second-Gulf-War demonstrations. Most of these began as single-issue, results-driven escapades. Divest now. Troops out now. No troops in the first place. The Anti-apartheid activists were the only ones truly successful. They never wavered, and they never muddied the waters. They didn't debate process. They didn't speak in poli-sci abstractions. They named the names of individuals and corporations, and they demanded action. Divest. Now. No one stood around marveling at the clever signs.
The rest - the anti-war protests, for example - turned themselves over to what the right wing calls the professional left. I hate this phrase. It's cheap and vicious. But having been at anti-war demonstrations on both occasions, in Washington and New York, the thing it purports to describe is a thing that exists. I've seen it with my eyes. Not that there are activists who take money for their efforts (though there are; they just work for the Koch brothers and FreedomWorks, not OWS). What I mean is that these particular protests were hijacked, to a great extent, by activists who crave the thing for the sake of the thing as such, rather than for any outcome the thing might deliver. You can call it griping, or shaming; you can call it education or consciousness-raising. This kind of activism takes lament itself as its goal.
During the 1991 anti-Gulf War march on Washington, I wandered by the speakers' podium, where a sermon of sorts was in process. The subject wasn't the Gulf War, though. The subject wasn't even big oil, or alternative energy, or middle east policy. The subject was the Native American decimation. And it was anything but impromptu: there were props, including a drum circle and a small host of living, breathing Native Americans, looking nearly as glum as the flags hustled to the podiums of politicians during low campaign moments. Discourses on the evils of nuclear energy followed, and on the disparity between women's wages and men's.
These were all excellent points. Made then and there, though, they were disastrous. Among protesters themselves, their effect was profoundly deflationary. They blunted when they should have galvanized. They promoted drift rather than cohesion, and they gave those who'd travelled sometimes hundreds of miles through many hours a reason to wonder if they'd come, after all that, to quite the right place.
Much worse was the squandered opportunity among those who hadn't come to Washington. For one day, the national eye was (reluctantly) trained on the war's dissenters. For one day, there was an audience for the argument, and a platform from which to deliver it. And instead of making a clear, concise, broadly resonant case against military action in the Gulf - this military action, undertaken now - the defacto voice of the antiwar coalition had chosen to make a general complaint against the totality of American history, against white guys and Western civilization as a whole. The argument on the Gulf War got lost as one thread among many, never bright enough and never meshed. And never tied, in the end, to a particular action on the part of an individual politician or individual American citizens. Vote no. Pass the bill. Bring the troops home. Or: Call your congressman. Write a letter to Senator Y.
Divest.
Now.
It happened again in 2003, this time before the war began, when the stakes were, if anything, higher, and there was a chance to stop a bad thing from starting. The opportunity for making a clear and focused case to a willing audience was again given over to the generalizers, the systematizers, the theoreticians of gripe. A bite-sized cause got lost in a banquet of complaint.
The outcome in both cases speaks for itself. We got our day of righteous scolding, then we got our wars. Muddied blame narratives are no match for stark fables of goodness and evil. The impulse toward peace never spread; quick successes on the battlefield gave the appearance, in both conflicts, of lowered stakes, rapidly impending resolution, and no need for deeper thought. The moment was squandered. And the consequences have been severe, in lives and treasure.
It begs a question: to what extent are outcomes a moral imperative? Can they benchmark our judgment of a movement's character?
This isn't a new question. It's as old as movements themselves, in any form. The bridge between theory and act goes often unbuilt. But we are, at this moment, in a position to consider it in both historical perspective and immediate political and socioeconomic context. We can ask - of OWS, of the tea party, of ourselves - what will come of it. In the world, among people: what will happen?
The time has arrived. Now that two months have passed; now that the occupations have settled in, taken root, been shaken and had their chance to rebut; now that the marches have happened, and happened again; now that panels have been assembled on the Sunday talk shows, finger gestures decoded on Conan and Colbert - now it's time for the wind-down. People - the 99% of the 99% who aren't presently engaged in occupation - need to figure out what to do with themselves. It's the moment of transition, when the little movement that could becomes the big movement does. Or doesn’t. Or goes away, slipping quietly back to campus, the think tanks and the coffee shops.
This was the moment at which, in a preceding universe, the tea party pounced. Sure, they had help from the Koch brothers and Dick Armey. But that fact - and the exposure of that fact, even while it was happening - never threatened their moral authority. Because the tea partiers themselves were utterly focused, and utterly consistent, on outcomes. They knew what they wanted and they declared it. Demanded it, even. They stood in front of candidates and grilled them on it, and when they didn’t like the answers they hit the bricks in search of other candidates. They organized, and the form of their organization followed their platform. They weren’t marching to explore new memes in marching theory; they were marching to see legislation introduced and passed. The distance between any given theoretical point and its impact in any given living room was never too great to be made in a sentence or two, or to be understood by the least politically interested of that living room’s occupants.
It's a cute but increasingly tired trope to ponder the intersections of interest between the tea party and OWS. Look at them - people who paint signs and march! They must be alike underneath it all!
No doubt, both movements are reactions to the same set of cultural phenomena. Stagnant wages; crumbling infrastructure; a tanking education system and a decline in competitiveness against a heated global marketplace for talent and labor; at the end of it all, the piece by piece dismantling of what we like to call the American dream. Each group looks at these trends - or, more likely, senses them - and tracks them to different causes. They prescribe very different solutions. Which is to say, one group proposes solutions that happen to be pointless, self defeating, and noxious; the other group works out cute new hand gestures for indicating "yes" and "no."
Neither will do. The tea party is simply inaccurate, misguided in its analysis; their prescriptions add up to gasoline thrown on a fire. OWS succeeds at description, but fails at prescription; they have nothing meaningful to say about the path forward. We don't need utopianism. We don't need ghost dances. This is a time for embracing the future. The tea party wants to stage an aggressive, bombastic retreat. OWS wants to walk off the field for an obsessive debate on rules.
For the rest of us, the time has come to show up and play.
An OWS Reading List
