So I’ve been tweeting up a storm today on the question of whether #OccupyWallStreet needs to compile a formal list of demands. (Spoiler alert: Nope.)...
The Montgomery bus boycott started out demanding a line separating the whites in the front of the bus from the blacks in the rear, so that black patrons wouldn’t have to give up their seats when the white section filled up. (Rosa Parks was seated legally when she sat down.) Mario Savio made no demands at all in the most famous speech in the history of the American student movement. Malcolm X’s demands shifted weekly, sometimes hourly, and the suffragist and abolitionist movements both encompassed vast, unwieldy coalitions.
I should say, I guess, that I’m not anti-demands in principle. If you happen to be fighting a narrow, single-issue, clearly-defined campaign, then by all means articulate what you’re looking to get. But if you’re not — and Occupy Wall Street isn’t — then any demands you put forward will serve a tactical purpose, and the question of what to demand has to be preceded by a discussion of whether it serves your interests to make any demands at all....
What’s going to change the dynamic in Washington DC, if anything will, is the continued growth of this movement. If you want to see Occupy Wall Street lead to a transaction tax, you want the movement to grow. If you want it to compel the demise of the legal concept of corporate personhood, you want the movement to grow. If you want it to overthrow global capitalism, you want the movement to grow.
It won’t grow if it’s completely contentless, of course. But it’s not contentless now. The General Assembly passed a “declaration of occupation” a few nights ago, and there’s some real meat there. I said in a recent blogpost that it was my sense that pretty much everyone in Liberty Plaza thought “that something was seriously broken in the American economy, that something was seriously broken in American politics, and that an accelerating concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a small minority was at the root of most of of that brokenness,” and none of the many people who’ve read or linked to that post have yet disagreed. If you think OWS has no message, you’re just not paying attention.
The OWS critique of our current national (and global) crisis will continue to unfold. Those discussions are ongoing, in a zillion venues. And I’m not convinced that this movement is any less coherent right now than the suffragists at the turn of the century or the lunch-counter sit-in crowd in the spring of 1960 or the London demonstrators over the last few months.
And at any rate the crucial task for Occupy Wall Street right now isn’t coherence, any more than it’s the articulation of specific demands. It’s resonance as an idea, as a movement.
You don’t win by making demands. You win by taking power or forcing power to bend. Either way your stated demands are peripheral to the outcome — what you demand has only the vaguest relationship to what you win.
Cross-posted at Daily Kos.
Alright, so assuming no concrete demands, what about a defined opponent? The author mentions a recent blogpost in which he wrote "that an accelerating concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a small minority was at the root of most of th[e] brokeness" of the American economy and American politics.
ReplyDeleteYou know I've been railing for a while against the increasing concentration of wealth in the country, so of course I agree. But if OWS is to have no concrete demands, can't it at least have a defined villain? The "1%" seems ready-made to play that part.
At some point it just can't be enough to have a large group of pissed off people gathered together and proclaim that it is a "movement" analogous to the Civil Rights Movement cited by the author. There has to be some firm thing the uncommitted public can grab hold of so that they can understand why so many people are so angry. Doesn't there?
The defined opponent is the 1% and everyone who enables them to remain the 1%, right?
ReplyDeleteThis stuff is all not very comfortable for me - I want everything very defined - how else can you be effective? (As if ANYONE on the Left has been effective - over the last 30+ years you'd be hard pressed to find anything as ineffectual as the Left).
But I think right now, there's a rallying cry: "We are the 99%" - that is VERY inclusive. And sure, at some point...but we're sooo early right now. Right now, the idea is to inspire and grow. Bring in as many people as possible.
Look at MLK's I Have a Dream - lofty idealism, designed to inspire. This is a movement. There hasn't been a legitimate movement for a lot of years - the rules for movements are really different.
They've stated the problems - 1% has all of the wealth and power. How to fix that? Well, not an easy thing, for sure. But mainly, it will take a lot of people - right now, the idea is getting people. The idea is inspiring.
There were those who said the Declaration of Occupation should have been more specific in its demands (and I haven't read your critique yet so, not sure if that's what you say). But the Declaration wasn't aimed at the 1% - it was aimed at the 99%. Their goal is to mobilize and they're talking to us, not to politicians or to the enemy.
I think a lot of what has got people like me puzzled is that what we've been told is the process - not the goal, but the process itself - seems to be constantly changing.
ReplyDeleteWhen Adbusters first go the ball rolling on this they asked for input from everybody as to what the demands should be. In response to your excellent post from the other day, I thought about it and came up with a suggestion. I'm certainly not saying it is the only suggestion or the best suggestion, but - like a lot of other people - I feel like this is all a communal kind of activity and I thought I'd try to do my part.
And, IIRC, the First Official Statement did reference a future set of demands that are going to be made so, at least up until yesterday, I thought that trying to come up with some concrete demands was the plan.
But I just got back from going through links Ezra Klein put together about OWS and have read a recent diary up at DKos and, of course, this one, and now I am given to understand that - nope - there should be no concrete demands made. Okay, I can go along with that as well, but it does seem like the "organic" nature of this movement applies not only to its substance but to its structure as well, and that makes it very hard (for me, at least) to figure out what is going on.
What I am most concerned with is that the movement continue to grow and that it do so not only by attracting more and more like-minded people, but that it also bring in the less-informed Americans who are hurt and upset and don't know why this is all happening to them. That's what I meant by there needing to be some "firm thing" for those people to latch onto.
As for the critique, I basically was just saying that I thought the statement could have been made more persuasive (again, for reaching out to those who aren't already on board) by being simpler, but also - and this is the more important part - I was stressing the need to have a defined villain. My suggestion was the Wall Street bankers ('cause, you know, Occupy Wall Street) but if the villain is going to be expanded to cover everyone in the 1% that works too. Hell, probably works better, especially since the Official Statement seemed to be directed at corporations as a whole.
Oh, and here's a little factoid for you, courtesy of Don Peck: Between 2002 and 2007, out of every 3 dollars of income growth in America 2 of those dollars went to the top 1%, and the rest of us got to scrabble over the remaining dollar. That's the kind of tidbit more people should know about.
I think no one is sure yet what it can be - so yeah, everyone is adjusting as it grows - and it's growing fast enough that I think not getting too concrete yet is good.
ReplyDeleteHOWEVER, that doesn't mean we shouldn't talk about concrete ideas amongst ourselves. I really do think that when the time comes, if you don't have ideas on the ready you'll get hi-jacked. So yeah, I still believe talk about how the fuck to fix this mess and be as specific as possible. But in terms of presenting demands - not right now.
And yeah, it's in kind of an uncertain phase - it's in a let's wait and see what we can be phase.