The Good and Bad of Occupy

That made me cry. Especially these bits:

The policing of protest in America makes it clear that protest has become mere ritual, a farce, and that, by definition, it becomes illegal if it threatens to change anything or inconvenience anyone. In time, all the police announcements came to say the same thing to me. “You may go through your constitutional ritual,” they intoned, “but it must stop before anything of consequence happens.” We must, above all, preserve everything as it is.

No one walked away from Occupy the same person. The occupiers will always say “we learned so much,” and the simplicity of the words belie how deep the change runs. We all learned so much in the season of Occupy. We learned there is a hostile army threaded through our nation. We learned that children can be casually brutalized, just to keep traffic from being inconvenienced.

We learned that Americans can come together and care for one another. We learned there is a great and terrible spirit in this land, the sleeping giant of our spirits summed together.

Occupy seems to be half of a movement. It knows what it doesn’t like, but it totally fails to commuicate what change it wants, because it has no process for coming to agreement on principles. I’m very much in sympathy with its values in general, and realize that a format that depends on the mobilizing and strategizing abilities of teens and twenty somethings will look pretty strange to adults; but Occupy didn’t seem interested in broadening its appeal by allying with groups that share the values but depend on structure and internal consensus to do what needs to be done.

Occupy failed to learn from earlier movements that succeeded. Maybe they’re using the winter to learn those lessons.

Brilliant, powerful, haunting, and wise: a great essay. Thanks very much for linking to it, Henry. Still, I have to say this:

The idea of the [General Assembly]–its process, its form, inclusiveness–failed. It had all the best chances to evolve, imprinted on the consciousness of thousands of occupiers like a second language. No idea gets a better chance than that, and it still failed. Fuck the GA. Bury it at a crossroads, staked through the heart, and pray it never rises again.

I hope not–and I sincerely doubt it. It will rise again, just like workers councils and farmers alliances and cordones and räte and soviets keep arising again and again, because people want to govern themselves. All this article proves, insofar as the idea of collective, participatory, and democratic decisionmaking is concerned, is that before any community of people can do any of that you need a “people,” a demos, with its imaginary boundaries and civil parameters and basic solidarity in place. Without that, without that unifying acceptance of or performance of some kind of common identity, then how can you ever make sense of the people about and for whom decisions were going to be made? The GA was a beautiful idea and alternative for getting harms expressed; as a form of government, though, which is what “occupying” requires,” its tragic flaw was not, I think, its process, but rather the very randomness and separateness and norm-lessness of the people who made use of it.

I’d like to comment on this, but it’s pretty much impossible to in a place where “teens and twenty somethings will look pretty strange to adults” is unremarkable, and the commonplace reaction to that would draw a threat of a ban. I wrote a series from my own experience with Occupy, which is here if anyone is interested. Quinn Norton is right that the GA failed.

Beautiful article.

It seems to me that between voice and exit, exit has long since stopped being an option. And voice is increasingly being removed. What does that leave? Submission? Or should we just be hunting for new tactics of exit?

The pleasant sounding name for it is “loyalty.”

Amazing piece. And I wouldn’t ever have ended up at Wired by myself. Thanks.

“tell me one concrete thing that came out of occupy”

http://interoccupy.net/occupysandy/

http://rollingjubilee.org/

maybe I’m old and cranky

Yeah, maybe.

Quinn’s a friend, so I’ll declare my interest here, but her reporting for WIRED on the concurrent beats of Anonymous and Occupy (and Wikileaks) has been exceptional, and she’s done a great job of teasing out common strands of the generational kicking-off-everywhere.

Occupy open space and both the self-identification and the demands have much, much fuzzier edges.

Yes, but still: Tahrir Square. And I think the message that the Egyptian protesters sent to Occupy was actually a better articulation of the ideology than came out of Occupy itself, albeit one soused in the spirit of ’68:

We are not protesting. Who is there to protest to? What could we ask them for that they could grant? We are occupying. We are reclaiming those same spaces of public practice that have been commodified, privatised and locked into the hands of faceless bureaucracy, real estate portfolios and police “protection”. Hold on to these spaces, nurture them and let the boundaries of your occupations grow. After all, who built these parks, these plazas, these buildings? Whose labour made them real and livable?

The portions of the article that consist of her actual observations – from the homeless man in Oakland to the dysfunction of the GA – are excellent. The portions telling of her own states of mind are excellent. But those portions contrast jarringly with what can only be described as her aspirations for the movement, and with her efforts to delve into the interior of non protesters such as the police. A police officer is less able to refuse to obey orders than a soldier, she claims at one point, presumably in an attempt to impress upon the reader the immense pressure to conform; but the claim is so implausible that it simply distracts from her narrative. Other examples of lines that stretched my effort to interpret charitably: police departments are always on the edge of disaster; OWS was a mission of mercy from the future (though the objective of that mission is no clearer by the end of the article than it was at the beginning); the armies of Bloomberg have only guns to fight against time. The article is worth reading, but her analysis needs some work – I wonder if she wrote it too soon, or if the editors had too light a hand.

As to OWS… imho, to the extent it was concerned about inequality, it was hardly ahead of its time; to the extent it was concerned about accomplishing political change, it failed to learn from those who came before.

All the supposed truths and hard facts and realism incorporated into the article don’t prevent it from being wildly (and not wisely) partisan, quite ridiculously subjective; essentially an attempt to justify and mythologize a movement that can (as a couple of previous comments confirm) be plausibly interpreted in considerably less favorable terms.

Saying Occupy caused inequality to a part of the political discussion seems entirely backwards. Protest movements are a symptom of something being a part of the political discussion, not a cause. Shit like the Tea Party or Occupy didn’t change anything, it was just a lot of emotional nothingness.

nick s @18: a better articulation of the ideology than came out of Occupy itself, albeit one soused in the spirit of ’68

Great quote. That in itself – the fact that Egyptian protesters articulated what Occupy was about better than Occupy did – is a bit troubling, though.

I’ll give them a pass on the spirit of ’68 – it seems like a genuine return, not trainspotter-ish quotation. And let’s not forget the spirit of ’36:

you must not forget that we can also build. It is we who built these palaces and cities, here in Spain and America and everywhere. We, the workers. We can build others to take their place. And better ones. We are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the earth

Contrary to some of the points made here, I think the great strength of Occupy was that it wasn’t a protest and didn’t have demands: as I wrote here, I think the brute physical presence of people joining together to say no to business as usual is where the most hopeful and the most radical political movements start. But Occupy did have weaknesses, and perhaps the lack of definition associated with occupying an open space was one of them.

One other thing: the battered and elegiac tone of Norton’s piece (did she mean ‘eulogy’?) is completely understandable, I think the conclusions it tends to lead to should be resisted: I don’t think she’s shown that Occupy was doomed from the start or that its own failings destroyed it or that the innovations of Occupy will be useless for future oppositional movements, although you could take all of those things away from her piece. Occupy had very powerful enemies who wanted to shut it down from day one, and eventually they succeeded. This isn’t to say that we should whitewash the faults of Occupy, just that we can afford to take a cooler approach to them – not so much “we got it all wrong, again!”, more “what should we do better another time?”

“Anarchists, homeless and drug addicts” is as valid a constituency as any (well, maybe not the anarchists…) The homeless, in particular, have a more serious political grievance than most of us, sometimes coupled with a greater willingness to take really drastic action. Ther government probably ought to be fearing this group more than (e.g.) leftist University lecturers with blogs.

When they came, marching in their neat black coats up the steps among dead and dying men and women, they found on the high, grey, polished wall of the great foyer a word written at the height of a man’s eyes, in broad smears of blood: DOWN
They shot the dead man who lay nearest the word, and later on when the Directorate was restored to order the word was washed off the wall with water, soap, and rags but it remained; it had been spoken; it had meaning.
– Ursula LeGuin, “The Disposessed”

Perhaps too dramatic for Occupy, where hardly anyone got shot, but it’s as good an answer as any to “what good is inchoate protest?”

Excellent.

Occupy was the beta test for mass protest in the 21st century – new media, organizing methods, governance etc….as the article describes well, it didn’t all work, but it was all given a chance and some kernels of learning and/or goodness were taken away.

Protest and change is an iterative process. Some future “Occupy”maybe 2.0, 4.0 or 8.0 will “get it right” and combined with the right and possibly random set of circumstances will achieve something for the ages…..until some Occupy long after that wants yet another round….

Thanks for sharing

and for that criticism to be heard… is the key point here.

The trouble is, adopting concrete, achievable demands would have killed Occupy. What happens when a demand is granted?

All the pundits from Yglesias to David Brooks were tut tut-ing Occupy for not formulating demands.

Ergo, refusing to formulate demands was the correct thing to do.

QED

@ Susan:
The homeless can’t be an effective political group because there just aren’t enough of them by themselves to seize political power, so like most marginalized minorities they need to make alliance with a larger group, say, the middle class.
But the motivations and grievances of the middle class aren’t about helping the homeless- if they were only aggrieved by the mistreatment of the homeless, that would mean that the middle class themselves were satisfied. the only way to help the homeless is to help the middle class.

This is what angered me about my local Occupy- they scorned the middle class organizations such as labor unions, the Democrats, MoveOn and so forth. They prized their own ignorance and inexperience of how to organize effective political movements and shunned heterodox thought and inclusiveness as “co-option”.
In the end, instead of representing the 99%, Occupy alienated 99% of the American electorate,

they scorned the middle class organizations such as labor unions, the Democrats, MoveOn

It might be true that your local Occupy scorned labor unions, but more generally, this doesn’t seem all that true. To call the Democrats a “middle class organization” seems odd—we are after all talking about one of the two major political parties, and there might be all sorts of good reasons to—at least initially—organize independently of the existing structures of electoral politics. If, e.g., Occupy had too quickly assimilated itself to the Democratic party, it almost certainly could not have helped bring about the change in political focus that most people, including me, think it managed to.

Look, I don’t want to deny that Occupy could have been better at gaining/retaining allies, etc.; at the same time, worries about co-optation were real and well-founded.

I never met Quinn Norton and I was only ever involved with OWS in NYC, so I can only comment so far, but her account of the GAs doesn’t really fit with my own. As a structure, the GA definitely became progressively more unworkable over time, and I’ve definitely seen it fail dramatically (eg one night in Washington Square Park, we discussed racism and privilege and Israel/Palestine for two hours while hundreds of police surrounded the park to evict us), but the idea that it became a space of pervasive racism, sexism, and violence seriously strikes me as weird. Most people I know got sick of the GA because it became a place of agonizingly slow arguments—with, yes, far too much of an open door to crazy people, but more often that was the guy in the alien hat/bike helmet who claimed to be from another planet, talking about how we could fix everything by growing hemp.

Which isn’t to say uglier things didn’t happen or that the GA wasn’t a failure (as a functioning decision making body, it kind of was)—and I am not a woman and never could get a sense of where the sexual violence rumors stopped being fictional right wing propaganda and became real (there are people whose accounts of this I trust and other people I really really do not). But what I do think is worth emphasizing is that the image of the encampment as a place of violence and systematic disenfranchisement doesn’t really fit with any of my experiences, and the images of failure that do come to mind, especially late october and post eviction, are much more dominated by despair and alienation as OWS receded and left us back in the old world.

It’s also worth noting that with OWS actions post eviction and especially since the 1 year anniversary (where a huge three day convergence protest was held with near zero media coverage), the GA has largely taken a kind of ceremonial role with decision making done in spokescouncils and federated working groups instead.

Anyway, it’s still an excellent piece, even if her account of a few things didn’t feel right to me. I really did appreciate the weird inclusion of Zizek’s signs from the future at the end. The larger sense of popular support for the protests erupting in a need for something to matter feels very true to me. That that’s faded or been beaten into submission or killed—and how political imagination was put back in its place of permanent cynical alienation—is still something I’m grappling with.

I think Occupy tapped a lot of popular discontent, but the “activist” culture is dysfunctional and transformed it into an ineffectual symbolic gesture of the sort they found more acceptable than a movement that had a constituency to serve. A 10% reduction in transit fares for regular riders would have been not unreachable and something to build on.

Trader Joe: Simon Critchley actually wrote an entire chapter of his last book, Faith of the Faithless, in response to that review. It’s pretty devastating and well worth reading, and I think the debate turns on a very different issue from the oak/pollen metaphor: namely, violence.

There’s an early version of it here:
http://www.nakedpunch.com/articles/39

I’d like to turn back to Zizek and to the criticisms he makes of my position in his essay in the London Review of Books, entitled ‘Resistance is Surrender’. Really, the title says it all: all forms of political resistance are simply surrender unless they seize hold of the state. Now, oddly enough, and for quite unrelated reasons, when a friend of mine sent me the link to Zizek’s critique of Infinitely Demanding, a copy of Lenin’s State and Revolution was sitting on my desk at home in Brooklyn. One of the striking features of Lenin’s text is the fact that his critique of liberals, social democrats and the bourgeoisie pails in comparison to the venom reserved for the true enemy: the anarchists. Everything turns here on the interpretation of the Paris Commune in 1871. The question is: to whom does the memory and legacy of the Commune belong? Does it belong to the anarchists, and the commune might very easily be understood in Bakunin’s terms, or is it a foreshadowing of Lenin’s Bolshevism? The key to State and Revolution is Marx and Engels’ phrase, ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’ and the issue is whether the legacy of the Commune and the possibility of communism requires a centralist, statist dictatorship of the kind that Lenin envisages, or the decentralized non-state federalism of the anarchists.

As Carl Schmitt reminds us – and we should not forget that the fascist jurist was a great admirer of Lenin, which is only exceeded by the praise lavished on Mao – there are two main traditions on the non-parliamentary, non-liberal left: authoritarianism and anarchism. If Zizek attacks my position with characteristic Leninist violence for belonging to the latter, then it is crystal clear which party he supports. Zizek begins his piece by listing various alternatives on the left for dealing with the seeming indestructibility of capitalism. This listing seems initially plausible – indeed some of it seems to be lifted unacknowledged from the conclusion to Infinitely Demanding – until one realizes what it is that Zizek is defending, namely dictatorship and a centralized state defended with military power.

And while I was at Zizek’s talk at OWS in October (and really liked it, actually), he has also written rather ridiculous stuff celebrating (eg) Obama’s victory as a victory for the left, the healthcare bill as a victorious blow against neoliberalism, etc. His attack on Critchley is not one of his stronger moments, I think.

When a demand is granted, the people are empowered.

The people are empowered for the next time round. When a demand is granted to occupiers, the occupiers have to either pack up or face division and loss of credibility (we’ve already given you what you asked for!). The only way occupiers will be empowered by having demands granted will be if those demands related to the occupation itself, which is very much not what you were talking about.

There were plenty of expressions of solidarity. You think thousands of people showed up to stop Bloomberg’s first eviction attempt just by accident? Or that people massively inconvenienced by marches, sitting in cars in traffic we’d blocked, would still cheer us on because… what, they were having fun?

There is a kind of pathetically reductive liberal reasoning that floats to the top of OWS discontent from time to time: that if only we’d settled on concrete goals, then we could have had concrete accomplishments, and then people would have joined us and we would not have been defeated.

As David Graeber’s pointed out elsewhere, in the history of bad advice, this has to rank somewhere near the top of the list. It’s not hard to come up with a list of protests in the last ten (or whatever) years that had concrete demands, but it is hard to think of the off the top of your head because none of them spawned particularly memorable movements or historical moments. This isn’t to say that OWS shouldn’t have focused on concrete goals—or even that it hasn’t, because that’s exactly what Occupy Sandy and Strike Debt have done recently. But the assumption that protest can only be meaningful and successful if it fits into a liberal framework of pragmatism is as historically indefensible as it is obviously ideological.

Henry@44 – Shevek and Estrevan both have the kindness, and both books contain the same point about small kindnesses and shared pain. I need a quote about that to balance the one I chose and make a LeGuin-style union of opposites, but I don’t have a good one right now.

@50

The most successful Anarchist political movement of the 20th century, the CNT/FAI followed, during its most successful years, an explicit strategy of winning a sequence of smaller goals. In fact, Zizek’s critique has zero to do with state power and is only concerned with effectiveness even though Zizek is nostalgic for Lenin in other works. In the end, the protests against the Iraq war, which I participated in, did nothing positive. Nobody was saved. No movement was created. Nothing was done except to make some people feel better about themselves. For some of us, the impotence of “the left” re Iraq and Katrina was a point of departure, at long last. The moral position that being ineffectual is ok if one’s heart is in the right place wears thin.

That’s great to be able to return to the Moon or one’s comfortable study in Brooklyn and leaf through State and Revolution or the Odonian dialogue or Corey Robin’s memoirs. But still a lot of people were killed or hurt in Bush’s Iraq war. That can’t be talked away.

@54
” There were plenty of expressions of solidarity. You think thousands of people showed up to stop Bloomberg’s first eviction attempt just by accident? Or that people massively inconvenienced by marches, sitting in cars in traffic we’d blocked, would still cheer us on because… what, they were having fun?”

I do not think that at all. But months later it had turned into something else. As is well documented.

FWIW, Ray Williams.
http://krebscycle.tumblr.com/post/29051516425/the-dispossessed-in-late-middle-age

Against my better judgement, I’ll comment. The people who are rehashing the tired ideas about how there should have been demands, and how the “activist” culture is dysfunctional etc. etc. have to confront the real history of what happened that year. Everything was tried. You want organized, top-down attempts to build a movement? People tried that. You want a list of demands, and a series of protests focussed on them? People tried that too. You want more experienced organizers? They existed in droves.

Occupy emerged as it did for particular reasons. However you might have wanted to replay a playbook from another decade, that playbook didn’t work. OWS may or may not have succeeded at anything in some world-historical sense, but it certainly worked better than anything else tried that year. The people going on about how they knew better, and they’ll never get through certain heads, aren’t demonstrating their practicality and knowledge. Rather the reverse.

Occupy failed for particular reasons too. I’d be interested in talking to other people who were in Occupy groups about that. For people who weren’t, well, I don’t think that you know very much about it.

There’s a certain paradox of protest. Either the PTB are rat-ass bastards and will not heed your demands, but will go ahead with what they’ve already planned and ruthlessly suppress any dissent in the process, (or otherwise contain and disable it). Or they will attend to your demands and grievances and attempt to remedy them or at least bargain a compromise, in which case they aren’t such rat-ass bastards to begin with. The way to resolving this quasi-paradox is to realize that the protest,- (and such protests are most always on the part of the weaker, much less tightly organized portion),- is directed not just at the power-structure, but just as much at the third party, the various public at large, and is aimed at undermining the legitimation of prevailing power and exposing it in its raw, stark and brutal nakedness. How effective that might be depends on to just what degree (one thinks) power depends on legitimation to work its will, ranging from the quasi-positivist account of Weber, as the mere consent or acquiescence of the governed, to much more robust forms of the active assent of the govern, along the lines of Arendt and other republican thinkers. (The limit is Luhmann’s purely functionalist, which is to say, abysmally cynical, theory of self-legitimating political elites). But if there is any such requirement at all, then the introduction of an element of incalculable disorganization and disrupted coordination in the power elites is already the beginnings of fundamental directional change. Hence the non-strategy of negative demand, as opposed to the demand for demands, for strategic “goals”, put forth so pompously by soi-disant “players” within the all too constricted options of the status quo. I’m not saying that protest is the only form of “action”, nor that it is self-sufficient, nor that more organized and structured forms of oppositional activity aren’t necessary. (I am saying, though, that “direct action” is really indirect action). But keeping score and toting up points is hardly the relevant criterion of “success”, when the whole point is to change the rules and nature of the game.

Occupy Wall St. arose belatedly in response to a massive financial and economic crisis, which was also felt acutely, if diffusely, across wide swathes of the population to be a crisis of legitimacy in the whole “system”. And what was being occupied wasn’t just a physical space with embodied presence; what was being occupied and reclaimed was the public square, in opposition to the privatization of everything, which has been the neo-liberal agenda for 30+ years and which the crisis and bailouts only re-enforced. If various members of a marginalized public came out of their cubicles, niches or crannies and re-assembled themselves in a first encounter, which seemed inchoate and confused, that really was only to be expected, since it had been so long and finding common ground, when so much ground had already been pulled out from under them, would be an arduous task, requiring people to move off of and re-examine their priors and prejudices. And the call, (not demand), to the broader public was that they too move off of and re-examine their priors and prejudices and begin to articulate and clarify and cross-weave a vast array of hitherto ignored and repressed grievances as an act of public disclosure, in contrast to the dumb-show of corporate-dominated politics and media and the carefully scripted lies and illusions of business-as-usual. It may well be that Occupy “failed” and is passe’. But the attempt to form an oppositional public sphere that it initiated, however tardily, is by no means defunct, even if the “brand name” fades. These struggles will “necessarily” continue amidst the spreading misery of the Long Stagnation that awaits us, (unless the Eurozone blows, in which case it will be the Greater Depression). And exactly what forms of organization and what tactics and strategies it will require remains an open, experimental question. But it is no longer a matter, at least, of playing along with the neo-liberal game, which if not dead yet, has clearly reached its limits as a “regime of accumulation”.

If smug, conformist centrist-liberals fail to understand that in their delusions of mastery, then they are even more out of touch with “reality” than the vagabonds of Wall St.

” As noted above, Tahir Square that produces a Theocracy is not really all that wonderful”

An opposition that puts pressure on those with autocratic inclinations to open up the political system is (if not wonderful) a force for good. Lets see how it plays out. As you’re only to fond of saying, these things take time, and effort

I’m a day late, and find that while I am repeatedly distressed by some of the comments, I am hearted that Steven T-C and js and the wonderful Anarcissie ad others are holding it down. Liberalism isn’t the be-all, end-all; and the bizarre Taylorist view of protest that perpetually dismisses the *actual work of protest* (which is often fucking tedious) in favor of managerialism really needs to be re-examined in light of its classist assumptions of value.

But I’m really writing a comment because Russell Arben Fox @6 deserves recognition. Well said, Russell. And beautiful. Thanks for that.

= = = Rich Puchalsky 12.13.12 at 9:20 pm

Against my better judgement, I’ll comment. The people who are rehashing the tired ideas about how there should have been demands, and how the “activist” culture is dysfunctional etc. etc. have to confront the real history of what happened that year. Everything was tried. You want organized, top-down attempts to build a movement? People tried that. You want a list of demands, and a series of protests focussed on them? People tried that too. You want more experienced organizers? They existed in droves. = = =

Prior to the initiation of Occupy Wall Street, the discussion amongst the Very Serious People of DC and New York was along the lines of how deeply to chop Social Security and Medicare, how many more hundreds of billions fire out of the free money bazooka at the huge financial institutions, how right they were to take all criminal prosecution of financiers off the table, how the populace would just have to suffer through a good cold douche of 12% unemployment, etc. And that was just the Democrats and core members of the Obama Administration; the Republicans were of course pumping even more hard Radical Right Austarianism. After OWS really got rolling the “conversation” [a word I despise] changed, at least on the public face of the Administration, and the idea that 100% financialization of the economy and 15% unemployment as far as the eye could see was not, perhaps, in the best interest of the nation started to be whispered aloud. Whether or not that led to Obama’s decision to run a somewhat more aggressive campaign in 2012, and actually speak a few liberal phrases, I can’t say, but I have to think it contributed.

That was a significant change in the outlook of the VSP, one that would not have occurred if lists of “concrete demands” had been presented.

Cranky

As Cranky Observer notes, no one outside of left blogs was talking about the hugely increased concentration of wealth at the top, instead it was all about how much pain needed to be inflicted on the little people in order to get the country moving again.

That’s just not a factually correct statement.

“just as the former group dismisses things like Krugman’s column” . . . sorry

@67 – Tell me, anyone, what was Occupy’s vision?

If you’ve paid any attention – there wasn’t one. That was the point. Your tone says you know that but it also says you don’t get why that’s important.

What does it mean to say “$hit’s f-d up!”

You and I and the next 13 posters undoubtedly have different views about what “$hit” and how “f-d up”….but we might agree with the basic statement – “$hit’s f-d up!”

Picking this or picking that and making it a cause or a vision dilutes the message by whatever proportion doesn’t buy the selection…we have politicians and thousands of cause specific activists groups to advocate your choice, my choice or the next 13 choices…go talk to them if you want a vision.

Until Occupy – there wasn’t anyone saying hey, “$hit’s f-d up!” Doing the same old thing ain’t getting anywhere….despite the fact so many know this to be true.

You want a vision? It was being verbal, visual, viral and sometimes violent.

Spirit doesn’t have a name.

Societal change is hard to measure in 1 year time lines. I’m not defending that they accomplished something we can write in a sentance and pin on the wall or build a statue for….I’m suggesting that, depending what happens next, we might look back and say that’s where it started.

FWIW, a lot of Occupy Richmond folks were involved in the protests against the transvaginal ultrasound bill in Virginia. My guess is that the sit-down arrests at the state capitol wouldn’t have happened without Occupy.

In any case, I don’t think this is actually a good practical metric of success, but it tends to be the first one radicals reach for when liberals wade in and demand to see practical results. For some reason, they don’t go for Occupy Sandy, perhaps because it’s too parochial; and they don’t go for Strike Debt, perhaps because it’s too new.

You begin by assuming that your position is the “radical” one and that skeptics must be “liberals” who essentially buy into capitalism as it exists modulo some cosmetic changes. This is a methodological error. Perhaps that reason that people like me don’t critique OccupySandy or StrikeDept in the same way we critiqued an ongoing middle management meeting in a park is that we see the first two as possibly effective and the last as more of the vanguardist posing that has crippled the US left since the 1970s.

“To me, maybe the greatest achievement of OWS was to reopen radical political imagination”

I don’t see this achievement? Where is it?

@276 “You want a vision? It was being verbal, visual, viral and sometimes violent. ”

That’s not vision. It’s a reaction. Which begets utterly predictable counter reactions.

And so on.

Everybody knows ‘shit’s fucked up.’ Even the Tea Party agree with that. And yeah, it’s good to vent, to stand up and do the whole ‘I’m mad as hell …’ routine. But I can’t see Occupy as anything much more politically significant than that: showing you are as mad as hell. In a park. For a long time.

Which is not to take away from the personal significance for those involved. There is much to be said for attaining a sense of personal liberation, however fleeting, through action. But the distrust of politics, the fear of being corrupted or co-opted, pretty much preempts any possibility for public engagement outside the camp. What you are then left with is a group therapy session in the public view: sometimes fascinating, sometimes grotesque, to watch. Politics as theatre on an essentially closed stage, the mimesis of action.

Verbal, visual, viral and sometimes violent, to be sure.

But political? Tangentially, yes. You express your anger. You say your ‘hell no we won’t go,’ and eventually the cops come and bust heads and tear shit up. You annoy Leviathan, it swats you. Everybody knows … . It’s entirely predictable — the proverbial train wreck.

Vision is what allows the cadres to connect with the peasants, the Ashram with the village, the Civil Rights worker with the townies, and maybe even the Camp with the middle class. It is theatre of reaching out: not mimesis, but the performative politics of action.

And also — yes, I am a liberal. Actually, I am a card carrying Canadian Liberal. But I am not here to ‘demand practical results.’ (@79) I thought that the Occupy people did something quite remarkable. I am grateful to them for trying. But if you simply circle the wagons and start shooting critical voices from outside the camp, well, that’s just repeating the same mistake. Again.

“80 and 81 are perfect. The radical and the liberal, coming together as one to agree that they know better. “

Yep, same old same old, explaining how it’s done but not putting anything in themselves. Everyone has waxed lyrical on how ‘an opposition’ should behave, but ironically no one has spelled out specifics. So tell us, how would you have done it? (Voting Obama is not an answer)
Personally it’s not my thing, to many anarchists and too much of the usual leftist opposition to immigrants,( they’re stealing our jobs etc etc).
But each to their own….

He speaks as someone who put some effort in. Read Rich’s blog..you don’t have to like the man to recognise the effort

Very last thing, I meant the comments not the main post

Funny how Occupy had no leaders, but plenty of political commissars.

The policing of protest in America makes it clear that protest has become mere ritual, a farce, and that, by definition, it becomes illegal if it threatens to change anything or inconvenience anyone. In time, all the police announcements came to say the same thing to me. “You may go through your constitutional ritual,” they intoned, “but it must stop before anything of consequence happens.” We must, above all, preserve everything as it is.

This is so sad but true. It is how America has decayed into irrelevance. Our country started by protests, but we’ve succumed to so much Stockholm Syndrome that the future for America is the same way that Russia has gone. And that our protesters are not that much different from Russian protesters.

I’m an older person, working on another bachelors degree, and when some of the Occupy people were commiserating with me on campus (here in Denver), I pointed out that their very appearance threatened the people they wanted to try to reach. All of them were dressed like homeless, or druggies, or whatever passes for fashionable among the late teens to early 20s crowd. We have always been a visual people, and that when they appear on the news dressed like that, the typical viewer is going to want the police to protect them from the protesters, and the typical viewer was going to cheer the cops beating and macing the protesters. If they wanted sympathy or even acknowledgment of their grievances, they should have dressed like they were going to work. Because then the TV viewers would have thought “wow, that could be me!” when the cops were hassling the protesters, instead of “good job, beat them some more for me – those bums need to get a job!” They argued with me and complained that I sounded like their parents (I am old enough to be the parent of almost everyone in my courses, and only some of the teachers are my age). They also did not like it when I reminded them that the people they were trying to reach were “my age.”

Not everyone here is old enough to remember the Oliver North hearings during Iran Contra. People who heard the testimony on radio, or read it in the newspapers wanted Ollie hung from the nearest streetlight. People who saw the testimony on TV were overcome by how he appeared (including wearing a uniform he was not entitled to wear) so that everyone who saw him on TV felt that he was being unduly harassed by Congress, and that the congresscritters should be hanging from the nearest streetlights. That is how much our mental facilities are overwhelmed by appearances and images. That’s why Triumph Of The Will is such a pivotal film, and why most political conventions use the same sort of layout and structure. Because that is how our brains work, and anyone who wants to control how we think about something will use that to their advantage.