[OccupyComms] Fwd: Yes, but what are you for?

[Mark Barrett]

fyi

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Le Monde diplomatique <english at mondediplo.net>

  7 January 2013
 [image: Le Monde diplomatique] <http://mondediplo.com/>
 Occupy Wall Street and its evil twin, the Tea Party
Yes, but what are you for? <http://mondediplo.com/2013/01/06occupy>
by Thomas Frank
 Reading all the accounts of Occupy Wall Street's theorising in Zuccotti
Park can send you to sleep: all academic prose and no real world action or
demands. They also make explicit Occupy's resemblance to its enemy, the Tea
Party.

There is a scene I always recall when I try to remember the exhilarating
effect that Occupy Wall Street (OWS) had on me when it was first getting
going. I was on a subway train in Washington, DC, reading an article about
the protests in Zuccotti Park in Manhattan. It was three years after the
Wall Street bailouts. It was two years after everyone I knew had given up
hope in the creativity of Barack Obama. It was two months after the
bankers' friends in the Republican Party had pushed the country right to
the brink of default in order to underscore their hallucinatory economic
theories. Like everyone else, I had had enough.

Anyhow, the subway car was boarded by some perfectly dressed, perfectly
polished corporate executive, clearly on the way back from some trade show,
carrying a tote bag that bore some jaunty slogan about maximising
shareholder value or what a fine thing luxury is or how glorious it is to
be a winner - the kind of sentiment that had been commonplace a short while
before but that the American public had now turned bitterly against. The
man was clearly uncomfortable with it on his person. And I considered the
situation: once upon a time I would have been embarrassed to hold a copy of
this magazine on a crowded subway, but now it was people like him who would
have to conceal what they did.

A while later I happened to watch an online video of an Occupy panel
discussion held at a bookstore in New York; at some point in the recording,
a panellist objected to the way protesters had of saying they were
"speaking for themselves" rather than acknowledging that they were part of
a group. Another one of the panellists was moved to utter this riposte:
"People can only speak for themselves, that the self would be under erasure
there, in that the self is then held into question, as any
poststructuralist thought leading through anarchism would push you
towards... 'I can only speak for myself', the 'only' is operative there,
and of course these spaces are being opened up."
'Remember, carnivals come cheap'

As soon as I heard this long, desperate stream of pseudointellectual
gibberish, I knew instantly that this thing was doomed. *"*There is a
danger," the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek warned the OWS encampment
in Zuccotti Park last year: "Don't fall in love with yourselves. We have a
nice time here. But remember, carnivals come cheap. What matters is the day
after, when we will have to return to normal lives. Will there be any
changes then?"

Žižek's remarks appear in *n*+1 magazine's *Occupy!: Scenes from Occupied
America,* the first book to appear on the subject of last year's protests.
That volume was eventually followed by numerous others
(1<#13c1605e095b28e2_nb11-1>
).

Nearly all of these books wander more or less directly into the "danger"
Žižek warned against. They are deeply, hopelessly in love with this
protest. Each one takes for granted that the Occupy campaign was
world-shaking and awe-inspiring - indeed, this attitude is often asserted
in the book's very title: *This Changes Everything: Occupy Wall Street and
the 99% Movement<http://www.yesmagazine.org/people-power/this-changes-everything-how-the-99-woke-up>
*  (2 <#13c1605e095b28e2_nb11-2>). The superlatives are heaped up without
restraint or caution. "The 99% has awakened. The American political
landscape will never again be the same," says the editor of *Voices From
the 99 Percent: an Oral History of the Occupy Wall Street Movement* (Red
and Black, 2011). But that is nothing when compared to the enthusiasm of
former *New York Times* re porter Chris Hedges. In *Days of Destruction,
Days of Revolt* (Nation Books, 2011), he compares Occupy to the
1989 revolutions in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. The
protesters in New York, he writes, "were disorganised at first, unsure of
what to do, not even convinced they had achieved anything worthwhile, but
they had unwittingly triggered a global movement of resistance that would
reverberate across the country and in the capitals of Europe. The uneasy
status quo, effectively imposed for decades by the elites, was shattered.
Another narrative of power took shape. The revolution began."

With a few exceptions, these books are amazingly, soporifically *the same*.
They tell the same anecdotes. They quote the same "communiqués". They dwell
on the same details. They even adopt, one after another, the same
historical interpretations.

The details of that carnival are the subject matter of nearly all the books
reviewed here - details that are described with loving, granular
singularity. Should readers be interested, they can now learn as much about
what happened in Zuccotti Park in New York City during those magical 60
days of OWS as they can from other books about the inner workings of the
Obama Administration, or the decision-making of Congress. Indeed, measured
by words published per square foot of setting, Zuccotti Park may well be
the most intensely scrutinised landscape in recent journalistic history.
Why did this effort fail?

Yet, Occupy itself is pretty much gone, evicted from Zuccotti Park about
two months after it began. With the exception of some residual groups here
and there, populated by the usual activist types, OWS has pretty much
fizzled out. The media storm that once surrounded it has blown off to other
quarters. Pause for a moment and compare this record of accomplishment to
that of Occupy's evil twin, the Tea Party movement, and the larger
rightwing revival of which it is a part. Well, under the urging of this
trumped-up protest movement, the Republican Party proceeded to win a
majority in the US House of Representatives; in the state legislatures of
the nation it took some 600 seats from the Democrats; it has even succeeded
in having one of its own, Paul Ryan, named as the GOP's vice-presidential
candidate.

The question that the books under consideration seek to answer is: What is
the magic formula that made OWS so successful? But it's exactly the wrong
question. What we need to be asking about Occupy Wall Street is; Why did
this effort fail? How did OWS blow all the promise of its early days? Why
do even the most popular efforts of the left come to be mired in a gluey
swamp of academic talk and pointless anti-hierarchical posturing?

The action certainly started with a bang. When the occupation of Zuccotti
Park began, in September 2011, the OWS cause was overwhelmingly popular;
indeed, as Todd Gitlin points out, hating Wall Street may well have been
the most popular leftwing cause since the 1930s. Inequality had reached
obscene levels, and it was no longer the act of a radical to say so. The
bank bailouts of the preceding years had made it obvious that government
was captured by organised money. Just about everyone resented Wall Street
in those days; just about everyone was happy to see someone finally put our
fury in those crooks' overpaid faces. People flocked to the OWS standard.
Cash donations poured in; so did food and books. Celebrities made
appearances in Zuccotti, and the media began covering the proceedings with
an attentiveness it rarely gives to leftist actions.

But these accounts mostly misread that overwhelming approval of Occupy's *
cause* as an approval of the movement's mechanics: the camping out in the
park, the way food was procured for an army of protesters, the endless
search for consensus, the showdowns with the cops, the twinkles. These
things, almost every writer separately assumes, are what the Occupy
phenomenon was *really* about. These are the details the public hungers to
know.

The actual sins of Wall Street, by contrast, are far less visible. For
example, when you read *Occupying Wall Street,* the work of a team of
writers who participated in the protests, you first hear about the subject
of predatory lending when a sympathetic policeman mentions it in the course
of a bust. The authors themselves never bring it up.

And if you want to know how the people in Zuccotti intended to block the
banks' agenda - how they intended to stop predatory lending, for example -
you have truly come to the wrong place. Not because it's hard to figure out
how to stop predatory lending, but because the way the Occupy campaign is
depicted in these books, it seems to have had no intention of doing
anything except building "communities" in public spaces and inspiring
mankind with its noble refusal to have leaders.
The process is the message

Unfortunately, that's not enough. Building a democratic movement culture is
essential for movements on the left, but it's also just a starting point.
Occupy never evolved beyond it. It didn't lead a strike (a real one, that
is) or a sit-in or a blockade of a recruitment centre, or a takeover of the
dean's office. For Occupy, the horizontal culture was everything. "The
process is the message," as the protesters used to say.

Whether or not to have demands was something that Occupy protesters debated
hotly among themselves in the days when Occupy actually occupied something.
A year later, that debate seems to have been consensed out of existence.
Virtually none of the authors reviewed here will say forthrightly that the
failure to generate demands was a tactical mistake. On the contrary: the
quasi-official account of the episode (*Occupying Wall Street*) laughs off
demands as a fetish object of literal-minded media types who stupidly crave
hierarchy and chains of command. Chris Hedges tells us that demands were
something required only by "the elites, and their mouthpieces in the
media." Enlightened people are supposed to know better; demands imply the
legitimacy of the adversary, meaning the US government and its friends, the
banks. Launching a protest with no formal demands is thought to be a great
accomplishment, a gesture of surpassing democratic virtue.

And here we come to the basic contradiction of the campaign. To protest
against Wall Street in 2011 was to protest, obviously, against the
outrageous financial misbehaviour that gave us the Great Recession; against
the political power of money, which gave us the bailouts; against the
runaway compensation practices that have turned our society's productive
labour into bonuses for the 1%. All three of these catastrophes were
brought on by deregulation and tax-cutting - *by a philosophy of liberation
as anarchic in its rhetoric as Occupy was in reality*. Check your premises,
Rand-fans: it was the bankers' own uprising against the hated state that
wrecked the American way of life.

Nor does it require "poststructuralism leading through anarchism" to
understand how to reverse these developments. You do it by rebuilding a
powerful and competent regulatory state. You do it by rebuilding the labour
movement. *You do it with bureaucracy*. Occupiers often seemed aware of
this. Recall what you heard so frequently from protesters' lips back in the
days of September 2011: restore the old Glass-Steagall law separating
investment and commercial banks, they insisted. Bring back big government!
Bring back safety! Bring back boredom!
Cult of participation

But that's no way to fire the imagination of the world. So, how do you
maintain the carnival while secretly lusting for the CPAs? By indefinitely
suspending the obvious next step. By having no demands. Demands would have
signalled that humourless, doctrinaire adults "were back in charge and that
the fun was over. This was an inspired way to play the situation in the
beginning, and for a time it was a great success. But it also put a clear
expiration date on the protests. As long as demands and the rest of the
logocentric requirements were postponed, Occupy could never graduate to the
next level. It would remain captive to what Christopher Lasch criticised
- back in 1973 - as the "cult of participation," in which the experience of
protesting is what protesting is all about.

The rhetoric in Zuccotti Park was also, of course, loudly majoritarian. But
in practice, to judge by these books, OWS tasted overwhelmingly of one
monotonous flavour: academia, with a subtle bouquet of career activism.
Protestors are not always identified by occupation in these books, but when
they are, they usually turn out to be college students, or recent
graduates, or graduate students, or professors.

There's nothing wrong with college students and grad students taking to the
streets, of course. Society needs to hear from them. When tuition prices
hit stratospheric levels, when recent grads routinely carry a hundred grand
in debt, and when people studying for a PhD are exploited shamelessly, they
damn well *ought* to be protesting. They should be shutting the system
down. They should be screaming for price controls. Just look at what
happened earlier this year in Quebec, where a huge part of the population
came out in support of student groups demanding affordable higher
education: *the protesters actually won*. They got what they wanted. Social
protest secured academic opportunity.

What I object to is the opposite: high-powered academic disputation as a
model for social protest. Why does the subject of Occupy so often inspire
its admirers to reach for their most elevated jargonese? Why would certain
Occupiers break from the action to participate in panel discussions? Why
did others choose to share their protest recollections in the pages of
*American
Ethnologist* or the *Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies*? Why would
a pamphlet clearly intended as a sort of* Common Sense* for the age of
Occupy be filled with declarations such as this: "Our point of attack here
is the dominant forms of subjectivity produced in the context of the
current social and political crisis. We engage four primary subjective
figures - the indebted, the mediatised, the securitised and the represented
- all of which are impoverished and their powers for social action are
masked or mystified. Movements of revolt and rebellion, we find, provide us
the means not only to refuse the repressive regimes under which these
subjective figures suffer but also to invert these subjectivities in
figures of power" (3 <#13c1605e095b28e2_nb11-3>).

And dear god *why,* after only a few months of occupying Zuccotti Park, did
Occupiers feel they needed to *launch their own journal of academic theory,
Occupy Theory,* which then proceeded to fill its pages with impenetrable
essays seemingly written to demonstrate, one more time, the Arctic futility
of theory-speak? Is this how you build a mass movement? By persistently
choosing the opposite of plain speech?

I know the answer: for a protest to become a broader social movement it
must analyse and strategise and theorise. Well, this one did enough
theorizing for all the protests of the last 40 years, and yet it somehow
never managed to make the grade.

Occupy did lots of things right: It had a great slogan and a perfect enemy
and it captured the public imagination. It built a democratic movement
culture. It reached out to organised labour, a crucial step in the right
direction. It talked a lot about solidarity, the basic virtue of the left.
But in practice, academic requirements often seemed to come first. OWS was
taken as a proving ground for theory. Its ranks weren't just filled with
professionals and professionals-to-be; far too often the campaign itself
appeared to be an arena for professional credentialing.

Actually, that's an optimistic way of putting it. The pessimistic way is to
open Michael Kazin's recent book, *American Dreamers,* and take sober note
of the fact that, with the partial exception of the anti-apartheid campaign
of the 80s, no movement of the left has caught on with the broad American
public since the Civil Rights/Vietnam War era. Oh, there have been plenty
of leftists during this period, of course - especially in academia.
Studying "resistance" is a well-worn career path, if not the very
definition of certain sub-disciplines. But for all its intellectual
attainments, the left keeps losing. It simply cannot make common cause with
ordinary American people anymore.

Maybe this has happened because the left has come to be dominated by a
single profession whose mode of operating is deliberately abstruse,
ultra-hierarchical, argumentative, and judgmental - handing down As and Fs
is its daily chore - and is thus the exact opposite of majoritarian. Maybe
it has happened because the left really is a place of Puritanical contempt
for average people, almost all of whom can be shown to have sinned in some
imperialist way or other. Maybe it is because the collapse of large-scale
manufacturing makes social movements obsolete. We do not know. And none of
the accounts on OWS under review here get us any closer to an answer.

Occupy people don't like Tea Party people; this is another point of
unanimous agreement. Indeed, in the mind of Occupy, Tea Party people
apparently aren't really people at all; different biological principles
apply to them. Consider a recent essay in Occupy's theory journal by Judith
Butler, a professor at Columbia University, who writes with revulsion about
a Tea Party gathering where people reportedly cheered for the coming deaths
of sick persons who weren't insured. "Under what economic and political
conditions do such joyous forms of cruelty emerge?" she asks.

It's a good question. Two paragraphs later, however, the subject has
inevitably changed to Occupy and its glamorous refusal to make demands, and
Butler has theorised herself into a very different understanding of
protesters-in-crowds: they are inherently liberationist. "When bodies
gather as they do to express their indignation and to enact their plural
existence in public space, they are also making broader demands," she
writes. "They are demanding to be recognized and to be valued; they are
exercising a right to appear and to exercise freedom; they are calling for
a liveable life" (4 <#13c1605e095b28e2_nb11-4>). This is automatically what
indignant people do, just by showing up and enacting their existence with
their bodies - except, apparently, when they are the people described two
paragraphs before. When the indignant ones are Tea Partiers, I guess, their
bodies carry a negative charge or something so that when *the y* gather,
what they demand is that the lives of others be stripped from them.
Similar cultures

However, the two movements are superficially similar. Both are almost
obsessively concerned with the bailouts of 2008. Participants in both
describe the bailouts as "crony capitalism." Both make their displeasure
known by occupying public spaces, and both forms of protest cherish stories
about the lengths to which their cadres have gone to keep those public
spaces clean. Both Tea and Occupy gave Ron Paul followers prominent roles,
and you could hear calls to "End the Fed" in Zuccotti Park as well as at
the big Glenn Beck rallies. Then there were those Anonymous masks, popular
with both groups.

The movement cultures are similar, too. Tea Partiers as well as Occupiers
deliberately kept their demands vague, the better to rope in a wide cross
section of the discontented. And both groups fetishised their persecution.
For the Occupiers it's the cops, pepper-spraying the defenceless and
rounding up the righteous in scenes that each of these books dwells on at
length. Will Bunch's *October 1, 2011: the Battle of the Brooklyn
Bridge* (Kindle
Singles) is a 45-page account of how a single Occupy march ended in a mass
arrest. For the Tea Party, it's the liberal media calling them "racist," a
bit of cruelty that rightwing authors reiterate as obsessively as the
Occupiers do the cruelty of the NYPD (5 <#13c1605e095b28e2_nb11-5>).

Leaderlessness is another virtue claimed by *indignados* on the right as
well as left. In fact, there's even a chapter in the 2010 "Tea Party
manifesto" written by Dick Armey, entitled "We are a Movement of Ideas, Not
Leaders". The reasoning, though, is the same here as it is with Occupy. As
Armey puts it, "If they knew who was in charge, they could attack him or
her. They could crush the inconvenient dissent of the Tea Party."

If you look closely enough at Tea Party culture, you can even find traces
of the Occupiers' refusal to make explicit demands. Consider movement
inamorata Ayn Rand (a philosopher every bit as prolix as Judith Butler) and
her 1957 magnum opus *Atlas Shrugged,* where "demands" are something that
government makes on behalf of its lazy and unproductive constituents.
Businessmen, by contrast, deal in contracts; they act only via the
supposedly consensual relations of the market. As John Galt, the leader of
the book's capital strike, explains in a lengthy speech to the American
people Rand clearly loathed: "We have no demands to present to you, no
terms to bargain about, no compromise to reach. You have nothing to offer
us. *We do not need you.*"

A strike with no demands? Why not? Because demands would imply the
legitimacy of their enemy, the state. Rand's fake-sophisticated term for
this is "the sanction of the victim." In the course of actualizing himself,
the business tycoon - the "victim," in Rand's distorted worldview - is
supposed to learn to withhold his blessing from the society that exploits
him via taxes and regulations. Once enlightened, this billionaire is to
have nothing to do with the looters and moochers of the liberal world; it
is to be adversarial proceedings only.
Rising up against 'the state'

So how do Rand's precursors of the downtrodden 1% plan to prevai*l? By
building a model community in the shell of the old, exactly as Occupy
intended to do. *Instead of holding assemblies in the park, however, her
persecuted billionaires retreat to an uncharted valley in Colorado where
they practice perfect non-coercive capitalism, complete with a homemade
gold standard.

One last similarity. The distinctive ideological move of the Tea Party was,
of course, to redirect the public's fury away from Wall Street and toward
government. And Occupy did it too, in a more abstract and theoretical way.
Consider, for example, the words anthropologist Jeffrey Juris chooses when
telling us why occupying parks was the thing to do: "The occupations
contested the sovereign power of the state to regulate and control the
distribution of bodies in space ... in part, by appropriating and
resignifying particular urban spaces such as public parks and squares as
arenas for public assembly and democratic expression"
(6<#13c1605e095b28e2_nb11-6>).
This kind of rhetoric is entirely typical of both Occupy and the academic
left - always fighting "the state" and its infernal power to "regulate and
control" - but it doesn't take a very close reading of the text to notice
that this language, with a little tweaking, could als o pass as a
libertarian protest against zoning.

Since none of the books described here take seriously the many obvious
parallels between the two protests, none of them offers a theory for why
the two were so strikingly similar. Allow me, then, to advance my own.

The reason Occupy and the Tea Party were such uncanny replicas of one
another is because they both drew on the lazy, reflexive libertarianism
that suffuses our idea of protest these days, all the way from Disney
Channel teens longing to be themselves to punk rock teens vandalising a
Starbucks. From Chris Hedges to Paul Ryan, every dissenter imagines that
they are rising up against "the state." It's in the cultural DNA of our
times, it seems.

But here's the rub: only the right manages to profit from it. As things
developed, the Tea Party didn't really mean any of its horizontalist talk;
that was just there to make the movement attractive to potential joiners.
The Tea Party had no poststructuralist thinkers, but it did have money,
organisation and a huge TV network (Fox News) at its back. It quickly
developed leaders, and demands, and an alignment with the Republican Party.
Occupy Wall Street never made that turn. It took its horizontality
seriously. It grew explosively in the early days. But after the crackdown
came, there was almost nothing to show for it.

Today the 2012 election is over, Barack Obama is still in the White House,
Paul Ryan is still in the House of Representatives, the war on workers
still goes on in places like Michigan, and Wall Street is still running the
world. Yes, the plutocracy failed in its grand effort to persuade the
public that it was our best friend. But the old order grinds on the same as
before. It is obvious to me that the neoliberal era will only be brought to
a close through some kind of mass social movement of the left - something
like what I originally thought Occupy to be.
Original text in English

Thomas Frank is a journalist with *Harper's Magazine *and founder of *The
Baffler *in which this article was first published (no 21,
November-December 2012); he is the author of *Pity the Billionaire: the
Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right, *Metropolitan
Books, 2012

(1 <#13c1605e095b28e2_nh11-1>) For instance, Todd Gitlin's *Occupy Nation:
the Roots, the Spirit, and the Promise of Occupy Wall
Street,*HarperCollins, 2012, and the collective memoirs of
participants,
*Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action that Changed
America,*Haymarket, 2012.

(2 <#13c1605e095b28e2_nh11-2>) By Sarah Van Gelder and the team from *Yes
Magazine,* Berrett-Koehler, 2012.

(3 <#13c1605e095b28e2_nh11-3>) Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, "Take up
the baton <http://jacobinmag.com/2012/05/take-up-the-baton/>", Jacobin, May
2012

(4 <#13c1605e095b28e2_nh11-4>) Judith Butler, *From and Against
Precarity<http://occupytheory.org/read/from-and-against-precarity.html>
,* December 2011

(5 <#13c1605e095b28e2_nh11-5>) See, for example, Michael Graham's 2010
book, *That's No Angry Mob, That's My Mom: Team Obama's Assault on
Tea-Party, Talk-Radio Americans,* which is concerned almost exclusively
with cataloguing liberal insults directed at Tea people.

(6 <#13c1605e095b28e2_nh11-6>) Jeffrey S Juris, "Reflections on #Occupy
Everywhere: social media, public space and emerging logic of
aggregation<http://www.americanethnologist.org/2012/reflections-occupy-everywhere-social-media/>",
*American Ethnologist,* vol 39, no 2, May 2012.
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