Where is your CVC code?
Today, people in cities from New York to Hong Kong—in both directions—are responding to the longstanding call from the Spainish Indignados for a day of protest against rampant corruption, austerity, and the power of high finance over and against the needs of the vast majority of people. The call has been strengthened, heartened, and echoed in recent weeks by the occupation movement in the United States that began at Occupy Wall Street, on top of this whole year of revolutionary activity, starting in Tunisia. The news is so far highlighting images of protesters damaging property—windows broken, cars on fire—even while briefly noting that, in the vast majority of cases, the protests are entirely peaceful. Typical.
The really important question, though, is whether and how this outburst of outrage will turn into meaningful change in the structures of power. Coordinated, worldwide protests have happened before in recent years—February of 2003, against the war in Iraq, or even 350.org’s mobilization against inaction on climate change in October of 2009. What can the movement do to turn this passion and momentum into a strategy that will really undermine the foundations of the corporate elite’s power? Protests on the streets can only be a beginning. What will it take to make this system cost more to maintain than to transform?
The next two steps would be to revoke corporate person hood and form another political party. That would take the money out of political campaigns, and more competition among candidates in elections.
No, it would do no such thing.
If those who’ve joined in the various Occupy Wall Street protests believe it’s actually a movement, they must make it so — by helping to organize a larger and more diverse base of people who are willing to become regular if not constant participants; by planning actions that will highlight the laws and the abuses that need to be changed; by adopting new tactics other than physical protests (such as boycotts, temporary work stoppages, temporary blockades, and dozens more) which impose costs on those who are defending practices that have victimized people; and, most of all, by advocating specific goals that embody the change that the general public is being asked to support.
They’ll also need to realize that they’re engaged in a conflict. This is not a walk in the park. The existing system will not change unless its defenders and beneficiaries are compelled to do so — and that is not going to happen in weeks, or months. This effort, if it’s successful, will take years. Political and social movements are not overnight revolutions — never have been, never will be. This isn’t a movie and you are not an actor, much less a bystander. This is your country, and it won’t change unless you make it do so — you, not those who sit in leather chairs in city halls or legislatures, not the CEO’s, and not even the president. It’s not about them. The Constitution says you own the country, that the people are sovereign. Are we finally ready to make that a reality?
Tom—I very much agree that loudmouthing alone a movement doesn’t make, but I think that by your own standards Occupy Wall Street is already, at the very least, a movement in formation. At the very least.
I submit that, in a state of political disobedience, general disruptions, like obstructing traffic and so forth, are appropriate. And the extent to which they arouse the violence of the NYPD has certainly been successful in attracting public attention—much more successful, in fact, than the more targeted actions.
I think your criteria are really good ones, and, from all I’ve witnessed, they are already being taken to heart by those most centrally involved in organizing these occupations. From even before the outset, I can assure you that the organizers, both of the Wall Street and Freedom Plaza occupations, were thoroughly aware “that is not going to happen in weeks, or months. This effort, if it’s successful, will take years. Political and social movements are not overnight revolutions — never have been, never will be.”
The imposition of costs on a complacent elite–characterized by the tactics of work stoppages, boycotts, and blockades–is a strategy guaranteed to polarize, that’s for sure. Would the complacent elite respond by seeking to avoid those costs by capitulating to the demands of the cost-imposers? Or would they experience it as a call to arms? Unclear.
A crucial aspect of OWS is that it convinces a complacent electorate that the current system *itself* is costly. The current system is full of stoppages and blockades as it is. The great triumph of OWS would be to show the electorate that it is too costly to enable the elite to maintain this system. There are better ways, and a world of boycotts and work stoppages is inconsistent with those ways — at least in the long run, an possibly in the short run, as well.
A productive strategy — and one consistent with the deep principle of nonviolence — would be to raise the consciousness of those who do truly hold power: voters, shareholders, employees, and, yes, even CEOs and even the President. For he is a citizen, too: he can be convinced by the words and deeds of his peers. An adversarial fight with those who hold outsized power as a first step is a *fight,* and a fight is characterized by the mutual imposition of harms and costs. Is such a fight what we need right now? Is it truly what we want? I do not think it is.
In reply to both of the two comments above: No political movement using civil resistance has succeeded in taking power away from abusive power-holders by “raising consciousness”. Movements using civilian-based, nonviolent tactics such as protests, noncooperation and civil disobedience must compel either the remedial action or the ouster of authorities who are practicing those abuses. To do that, they must raise the cost of maintaining and defending the status quo. Frederick Douglass said that injustice will be imposed by those who benefit from it until they are forced to stop, and the ensuing 160 years of history proved him right.
In my view, it is very unrealistic to think that exhibitionistic protest and consciousness-raising are going to force voluntary changes by institutions enriching themselves at the expense of people who have comparatively little leverage on government. In this context, boycotts and work stoppages would be mild. Any struggle for power –and that’s what this is — is adversarial. Without a robust movement that organizes throughout American society to enlist the participation of millions of people, no serious or systemic change will occur. Not this time, not with unlimited financial control of political campaigns at the disposal of the very power-holders whom this would-be movement has begun to challenge.
The good news is that the felt sense of injustice among the “99%” is very deep, and they are convinced that the political system is being held hostage by those who have magnified that injustice. A true movement, which we haven’t seen yet (numbers of protesters, on a cumulative national basis, are a small fraction of those who marched six years ago in the immigrant rights movement), would galvanize that sense of “enough is enough” and develop manifold ways to make business-as-usual impossible by an emblematic group of specific institutions and corporations.
If this movement manages to organize so as to orchestrate the tactical actions of at least hundreds of thousands engaged in a variety of nonviolent tactics, it will have an opportunity to influence next year’s elections, at all levels. To avoid trying to do that would be to ignore an opportunity to show that it can have impact and to arouse the suspicion that it is not interested in using electoral leverage where it can be developed. But that will require standing for something concrete, or else ordinary people who are bystanders or who will only vote as their form of action will be expected to support a movement that has no objectives (which has never happened in the history of political movements).
Having “evolving conversations” as a way to formulate the substance of what a movement stands for hasn’t worked in any previous case of which I’m aware when that movement has taken to the streets. Ordinary people don’t join “evolving conversations”, historically they decide to participate in a movement when they agree with what it stands for, as that’s expressed in concrete grievances and in the political or systemic changes needed to fix those grievances, which become the movement’s goals. Those should be simply formulated but they have to be concrete or they won’t be understood, remembered and repeated — as has to happen for the discourse of a movement to work. This isn’t something that can be tacked onto a movement “later”, because it’s a prerequisite for mobilizing sufficient numbers who are sufficiently representative of the adult population. What are sufficient numbers? Sufficient to alarm those who may begin to realize that the people as a whole are determined to use this new movement not merely to blow off steam but to force change.
I respect the sacrifices and commitment of those who are involved in OWS protests on an ongoing basis, and I am not criticizing either their motives or the enthusiasm they have mustered from many people. But the shape and scale so far of what has been done is modest in relation to the popular force that earlier American movements have mobilized. The leaders of the civil rights movement used nonviolent resistance in shrewdly selected locations, on which they could focus disruptive actions that would raise the cost of maintaining segregation. That system fell apart in less than ten years, city by city and state by state, with voting rights legislation serving as a historic capstone on its achievement. Hundreds of thousands of Americans, cumulatively, participated.
OWS presumes to change “the structure of partisan politics” and the “very ideologies” that dominate our country, in the words of Bernard Harcourt cited above. Vague as it is, that suggests a far more sweeping agenda of change than the civil rights revolution took on. However that may be distilled into more concrete objectives, it will require a movement on a scale that this country hasn’t seen since the movement to organize labor unions. I accept Nathan’s assurances that the present organizers understand the magnitude of what they have begun. All I’ve tried to do is to offer a frank assessment of certain factors based on what other movements in the past have had to do, when taking on formidable power-holders.
While I’m not myself much of a fan of the term “consciousness-raising,” I think it does have some usefulness, at least in describing the sudden sense of possibility and empowerment that happened as the Arab Spring spread across the Mediterranean earlier this year. One event caused lots of people to realize that they had more power to bring about change than they’d previously thought. I think the occupation at Wall Street is having a similar effect on many Americans.
You write:
I would object to this at least in part. For one thing, as Mary King writes on this site today, successful campaigns have often been essentially “evolving conversations” with regard to their messaging and demands. (In fact, the horizontal and deliberative nature of an organization like SNCC bears some resemblance to Liberty Plaza’s General Assembly that I’d like to see further explored, I hope someday by Mary herself.) Second, as Tina Rosenberg’s analysis of the Otpor! movement in Serbia suggests, people do not simply join resistance movements because they happen to rationally assent to its values or not. Just as much, they join because the movement offers them something; belonging to it is more appealing to them than not belonging to it, for whatever reason. As a visit to Liberty Plaza (on a good day) shows, hundreds or thousands flock there not simply because they’re attracted by some message, but because they want to be part of what’s happening there. Maybe they just come for the free food, library, and first aid. In any case, they go because the experience of being there is better than what they would otherwise do with their days or evenings. (Again, with the possible exception of whatever might be inflicted by the police.) These days, for just this reason, hundreds or even thousands of people at a time are taking part in the “evolving conversations” of the General Assembly each night.
You’re absolutely right about the numbers—the occupation movement still has yet to win broad participation, even if it is gaining very broad popular support. But I often remind myself that 20,000 people marched on Wall Street in May, and few seemed to notice or remember. In this case, the tactic of occupation has shown itself vastly more effective than numbers, at least in capturing national attention and conversation.
I do appreciate the hard bargain you’re pushing. I just worry that the way you do it only feeds those who are eager to dismiss it before it even has a chance to continue to grow.
I did not say that OWS had to mobilize by finding people who can “rationally assent to its values.” This is not as much about values as it is about ideas and beliefs, and what they represent in people’s lives. I simply said that there is no instance of a successful civil resistance movement in recent history (of which I’m aware) that was able to mobilize a population-representing mass of ordinary people without defining concrete grievances and proposing ways to fix them (particularly when the movement is taking place in an open society where the political media can be maneuvered to report the latter). The purpose of doing this is to define what the movement stands for, which includes defining the changes it wants to bring about — to win the participation of people who want to agree with the object of what they are going to be called upon to do, often with significant risk and sacrifice. Why would that be difficult or unreasonable for this new movement to do, in this case?
It is often, and it ought to be, an existential decision to join a nation-changing movement, and that kind of commitment is not predicated on momentary emotion, and in my view it is not motivated because “belonging to it is more appealing…than not belonging to it.” Such a casual motivation would be unlikely to have a lasting hold upon followers, but it is resilience and persistence that a movement must call forth from those it mobilizes. What a movement stands for and calls for is necessarily contained in language, and language is the way we define and articulate what motivates us, which includes our ideas and beliefs as well as how we feel. The full keyboard of that has to be played by how a movement articulates what it is and what it wants to do.
I’d rather not start a debate about Tina Rosenberg’s observations about civil resistance. But citing Otpor as a basis for what the OWS ‘movement’ should stand for seems to me to be a case of apples and oranges: Everyone in Serbia knew what that movement was about, because a vast majority wanted one man out, Milosevic. Defining the cause concretely, to enable the movement to grow sufficiently, was obviously not the Serbs’ problem. But the very fact that we are having this discussion does suggest that to some extent OWS has that problem.
One final note: If constructive analysis of a movement cannot be done because it might “feed” those who are “eager to dismiss it”, then no movement could learn from anyone who’s done it before or who’s studied the relevant history. All movements are attacked by those “eager to dismiss it”. That goes with the territory of trying to build a movement, but those sorts of attacks can easily be distinguished from constructive analysis and feedback. If OWS is too fragile to deal with constructive criticism, then it has issues that are more serious than I assumed.
If indeed your criticism is meant constructively, then, as I indicated in my first comment, we’re on the same page:)
And believe me, I don’t think you have to worry about the “existential” quality of this experience for many of those involved. Perhaps to the detriment of my supposed objectivity, I (as well as many others I know) can certainly attest to that!
But I’m curious. Do you not consider this an inadequate expression of “concrete grievances” that apply to a broad range of Americans, at least for a three-week-old undertaking, or something like this as evidence that a serious discussion about “proposing ways to fix them” is underway?
The Times also just published a new article on the issue of demands.