In social movement terms, a single year is nothing. Movements that aim for immediate, legislative goals tend to flicker quickly in and out of existence; in America, movements that have successfully aimed for a broad moral transformation of society (from the abolitionists to feminism) have taken much longer to see concrete results. But when they do, those results are deep and abiding. In one year, Occupy managed to both identify the problem—a system of class power that has effectively fused together finance and government—and to propose a solution: the creation of a genuinely democratic culture. If it succeeds, it is likely to take a very long time. But the effects will be epochal.
* It’s hard to know how much to credit the six hundred figure—I think it’s accurate, technically, but a number of the smaller “occupations” probably consisted of just one or two people.
† Union support was only partly due to the media attention—there had been a long courtship with an emerging alliance of more radical union activists over the course of the summer, but the union leadership had decided to sit out September 17 itself.
‡ Indeed, as I have noted elsewhere, it would be almost impossible for them to do so, since American journalists define the word “violence” as “the unauthorized use of force.” Gandhi, I might add, succeeded in part because he had an old school friend who had become a prominent British journalist.
§ I remember a Taiwanese woman around 2000 who recalled her reaction to watching the protests against the WTO in Seattle the year before. “I had always assumed there must be decent people in America who tried to fight what their country was doing to the rest of the world. I knew they had to exist. But I’d never actually seen them.”
‖ I should note that there are other factors at play here. The TWU is historically an African-American union, and anti-intellectual populism is, in the United States, an almost exclusively white phenomenon, in no way shared by people of color or organizations representing them. But many unions with a largely white membership supported OWS, too.
a Technically the number is 12.5 percent, but again, this counts the financial divisions of manufacturing firms as “manufacturing” profits and not financial profit.
b Unless, that is, one prefers to see these charges, as many do, as a form of hidden inflation, again, authorized by government policy.
c Similarly, social theorist Max Weber argued that the “irrational political capitalism” of “military adventurers … tax farmers, speculators, money dealers, and others” of, say, the Roman world was a historical dead end, since it was ultimately parasitical off the state, and had nothing in common with the rational investment of production of modern industrial capitalism. By Weber’s logic, contemporary global capitalism, which is dominated by speculators, currency traders, and government contractors, has long since reverted to the dead-end irrational variety.
d Though in fact shockingly low percentages of mortgages actually were renegotiated, despite government programs purportedly put in place to facilitate this.
e One notorious example is an earlier call for an occupation of Zuccotti Park called by a group called Empire State Rebellion, to demand the resignation of Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, on June 14, 2011. Four people showed up.
f The term “free trade” is, like “free market” and “free enterprise,” an obvious propaganda term. What the movement was in fact opposed to was the creation of the world’s first effective planetary administrative bureaucracy—ranging from the IMF, World Bank, WTO, and similar bodies to those created by treaties like the European Union or NAFTA—ostensibly to regulate and facilitate global trade. Or even more specifically, the fact that such bodies were, effectively, democratically unaccountable and covers for financial imperialism and global plunder. My own take on the movement can be found in Direct Action: An Ethnography (Oakland: AK Press, 2009).
g This began to change somewhat when the presidential election campaign began to kick into gear, because of the lack of specific legislative issues and the specter of a Republican victory, but also, I suspect, because so many progressives stopped following electoral politics entirely.
h In Illinois, to cite a typical example, 54 percent of voters over thirty turned out in 2010, but only 23 percent of those under thirty.
i I heard this trick done endlessly with Ralph Nader: during campaigns, there is almost no discussion or even description of his positions, but merely warnings that a vote for Nader is a vote for the Republican candidate. Afterward, his positions are treated as if they represented the opinions of 2.7 percent of the American public (the percentage of the popular vote he received in 2000).
j I am simplifying. Imperial states, like the British empire or U.S. postwar system, tend to shift over time from being industrial powers to financial powers. What I say here becomes especially true in the latter phases. I discuss this below.
k Keynes’s model for an international currency named the “bancor” would have led to a very different system where instead of the monetization of war debt, the international monetary system would be based on the recycling of trade surpluses. There have been occasional suggestions of reviving the idea, most recently right around 2008–2009, by then IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn.
l I tell the story in somewhat greater detail in Debt: The First 5,000 Years, where among other things, I note that the curve of growth in military spending, and growth in overseas debt, almost perfectly correspond.
m An even more startling example: for many years and until quite recently, Somali pirates had never raped, tortured, or murdered anyone either, all the more remarkable considering their entire ability to operate as pirates depends on being able to convince potential victims they might do so.
n Actually, over 80 percent of campaign contributions flow from the wealthiest 0.5 percent, and 60 percent from the wealthiest .01 percent. Of this, far and away the largest chunk comes from the financial sector. After that, business and law firms, and after that, health lobbyists—that is, pharmaceutical corporations and HMOs—then media, and then the energy sector (Federal Election Commission, Center for Responsive Politics, Public Campaign’s “The Color of Money” Project).
o The poststructural theory, interestingly, has always had an odd blind spot for economics, and even more about military force; though when Michel Callon, one of the doyens of Actor-Network Theory, did turn to economics, he predictably argued that economists largely create the realities they purport to describe. This is actually true, but Callon completely neglects the role of government coercion in the process. So the left versions of power creating reality ignore exactly those elements—money and force of arms—that the right makes the centerpieces of their analysis. It’s also interesting to note that just as the right has their materialist heresy, the left continues to have its own as well, in Marxism.
p Silvia Federici, in a little essay called “Women, Austerity and the Unfinished Feminist Revolution” (Occupy! #3, n+1, November 2011, pp. 32–34), moves in a similar direction when she makes the point that mainstream feminism has gone astray in placing all its emphasis on guaranteeing women’s participation in the labor market, seeing this as intrinsically liberating, rather than the domain of what she—using a somewhat ungainly Marxist phrase—calls “the sphere of reproduction.”
q As I’ve written in the past, claiming that globalization protesters were really so many “trust fund babies” was perfectly calibrated to achieve the desired effect: it was a way of saying, “Don’t think of what you are doing in defending this trade summit as a matter of protecting a bunch of fat cats who have contempt for you and everyone like you; think of it rather as an opportunity to beat up on their bratty children (but don’t actually kill any of them, because you never know who their parents might be).”
r The tragedy in New York, at least, was that while a spokescouncil model was introduced, it was brought in what was widely seen as a top-down, divisive way at a moment of maximum conflict. There are currently efforts under way in New York to revive a spokescoun
cil model in a more democratic fashion.
THREE
“THE MOB BEGIN TO THINK AND TO REASON”
The Covert History of Democracy
Reading accounts of social movements written by outright conservatives can often feel strangely refreshing. Particularly when one is used to dealing with liberals. Liberals tend to be touchy and unpredictable because they claim to share the ideas of radical movements—democracy, egalitarianism, freedom—but they’ve also managed to convince themselves that these ideals are ultimately unattainable. For that reason, they see anyone determined to bring about a world based on those principles as a kind of moral threat. I noticed this during the days of the Global Justice Movement. There was a kind of mocking defensiveness on the part of many in the “liberal media” that was in its own way just as caustic as anything thrown at us by the right. As I read their critiques of the movement, it became clear to me that many senior members of the media, having gone to college in the 1960s, thought of themselves as former campus revolutionaries, if only through generational association. Within their work was an argument they were having with themselves; they were convincing themselves that even though they were now working for the establishment, they hadn’t really sold out because their former revolutionary dreams were profoundly unrealistic, and actually, fighting for abortion rights or gay marriage is about as radical as one can realistically be. If you are a radical, at least with conservatives you know where you stand: they are your enemies. If they wish to understand you, it is only to facilitate your being violently suppressed. This leads to a certain clarity. It also means they often honestly do wish to understand you.
In the early days of Occupy Wall Street, the first major salvo from the right took the form of an essay in The Weekly Standard by one Matthew Continetti entitled “Anarchy in the U.S.A.: The Roots of American Disorder.”1 “Both left and right,” Continetti argued, “have made the error of thinking that the forces behind Occupy Wall Street are interested in democratic politics and problem solving.” In fact, their core were anarchists dreaming of a utopian socialist paradise as peculiar as the phalanxes of Charles Fourier or free love communes like the 1840s New Harmony. The author goes on to quote proponents of contemporary anarchism, mainly Noam Chomsky and myself:
This permanent rebellion leads to some predictable outcomes. By denying the legitimacy of democratic politics, the anarchists undermine their ability to affect people’s lives. No living wage movement for them. No debate over the Bush tax rates. Anarchists don’t believe in wages, and they certainly don’t believe in taxes. David Graeber, an anthropologist and a leading figure in Occupy Wall Street, puts it this way: “By participating in policy debates the very best one can achieve is to limit the damage, since the very premise is inimical to the idea of people managing their own affairs.” The reason that Occupy Wall Street has no agenda is that anarchism allows for no agenda. All the anarchist can do is set an example—or tear down the existing order through violence.
This paragraph is typical: it alternates legitimate insights with a series of calculated slurs and insinuations designed to encourage violence. It is true that anarchists did, as I said, refuse to enter the political system itself, but this was on the grounds that the system itself was undemocratic—having been reduced to a system of open institutionalized bribery, backed up by coercive force. We wanted to make that fact evident to everyone, in the United States and elsewhere. And that is what OWS did—in a way that no amount of waving of policy statements could ever have done. To say that we have no agenda, then, is absurd; to assert that we have no choice but to eventually resort to violence, despite the studious nonviolence of the occupiers, is the kind of statement one only makes if one is desperately trying to come up with justifications for violence oneself.
The piece went on to correctly trace the origins of the current global anticapitalist networks back to the Zapatista revolt in 1994, and, again correctly, to note their increasingly anti-authoritarian politics, their rejection of any notion of seizing power by force, their use of the Internet. Continetti concludes:
An intellectual, financial, technological, and social infrastructure to undermine global capitalism has been developing for more than two decades, and we are in the middle of its latest manifestation.… The occupiers’ tent cities are self-governing, communal, egalitarian, and networked. They reject everyday politics. They foster bohemianism and confrontation with the civil authorities. They are the Phalanx and New Harmony, updated for postmodern times and plopped in the middle of our cities.
There may not be that many activists in the camps. They may appear silly, even grotesque. They may resist “agendas” and “policies.” They may not agree on what they want or when they want it. And they may disappear as winter arrives and the liberals whose parks they are occupying lose patience with them. But the utopians and anarchists will reappear.… The occupation will persist as long as individuals believe that inequalities of property are unjust and that the brotherhood of man can be established on the earth.
You can see why anarchists might find this sort of thing refreshingly honest. The author makes no secret of his desire to see us all in prison, but at least he’s willing to make an honest assessment of what the stakes are.
Still, there is one screamingly dishonest theme that runs throughout the Weekly Standard piece: the intentional conflation of “democracy” with “everyday politics,” that is, lobbying, fund-raising, working for electoral campaigns, and otherwise participating in the current American political system. The premise is that the author stands in favor of democracy, and that occupiers, in rejecting the existing system, are against it. In fact, the conservative tradition that produced and sustains journals like The Weekly Standard is profoundly antidemocratic. Its heroes, from Plato to Edmund Burke, are, almost uniformly, men who opposed democracy on principle, and its readers are still fond of statements like “America is not a democracy, it’s a republic.” What’s more, the sort of arguments Continetti breaks out here—that anarchist-inspired movements are unstable, confused, threaten established orders of property, and must necessarily lead to violence—are precisely the arguments that have, for centuries, been leveled by conservatives against democracy itself.
In reality, OWS is anarchist-inspired, but for precisely that reason it stands squarely in the very tradition of American popular democracy that conservatives like Continetti have always staunchly opposed. Anarchism does not mean the negation of democracy—or at least, any of the aspects of democracy that most Americans have historically liked. Rather, anarchism is a matter of taking those core democratic principles to their logical conclusions. The reason it’s difficult to see this is because the word “democracy” has had such an endlessly contested history: so much so that most American pundits and politicians, for instance, now use the term to refer to a form of government established with the explicit purpose of ensuring what John Adams once called “the horrors of democracy” would never come about.2
As I mentioned at the beginning of the book, most Americans are unaware that nowhere in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution does it say anything about the United States being a democracy.* In fact, most of those who took part in composing those founding documents readily agreed with the seventeenth-century Puritan preacher John Winthrop, who wrote that “a democracy is, among most civil nations, accounted the meanest and worst of all forms of government.”3
Most of the Founders learned what they did know about the subject of democracy from Thomas Hobbes’s English translation of Thucydides’ History, his account of the Peloponnesian War. Hobbes undertook this project, he was careful to inform his readers, to warn about the dangers of democracy. As a result, the founders used the word in its ancient Greek sense, assuming democracy to refer to communal self-governance through popular assemblies such as the Athenian agora. It was what we would now call “direct democracy.” One might say that it was a system of rule by General Assemblies, except that these assemblies were assumed
to always operate exclusively by the principle of 51 to 49 percent majority rule. James Madison for instance, made clear in his contributions to the Federalist Papers why he felt this sort of Athenian democracy was not only impossible in a great nation of his day, since it could not by definition operate over an extended geographical area, but was actively undesirable, since he felt history showed that any system of direct democracy would inevitably descend into factionalism, demagoguery, and finally, the seizure of power by some dictator willing to restore order and control:
A pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction.… Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.4
Like all the men we’ve come to know as Founding Fathers, Madison insisted that his preferred form of government, a “republic,” was necessarily quite different:
In a democracy the people meet and exercise the government in person; in a republic they assemble and administer it by their representatives and agents. A democracy, consequently, must be confined to a small spot. A republic may be extended over a large region.5
Now, this notion that republics were administered by “representatives” might seem odd at first glance, since they borrowed the term “republic” from ancient Rome, and Roman senators were not elected; they were aristocrats who held their seats by birthright, which meant they weren’t really “representatives and agents” of anyone but themselves. Still, the idea of representative bodies was something the Founders had inherited from the British during the Revolution: the rulers of the new nation were precisely those who had been elected, by a vote of property-holding males, to representative assemblies like the Continental Congress, originally meant to allow a limited measure of self-governance under the authority of the king. After the revolution, they immediately transferred the power of government from King George III to themselves. As a result, the representative bodies meant to operate under the authority of the king would now operate under the authority of the people, however narrowly defined.