Excursus on Occupy Wall Street (13)

What follows is background-- a piece of how I came to think what I think.

 

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When, about ten years ago, I “quit” Occupy Wall Street, it was with the conviction not only that Occupy had failed, but that any large-scale, publicly visible movement in opposition to the power structures was bound to fail. But to make this at all clear, I must explain what it is I thought Occupy had failed at.

 

It is an oft-repeated complaint about Occupy Wall Street (or it was back when anybody bothered to talk about OWS) that it never made any demands. This complaint is based on a misunderstanding. You make demands if your aims are specific. If you want to stop the construction of a gas pipeline, get better labor protections for farm workers, change the rent laws, etc.—then demands make sense: if you make enough of a stink, then those in power may eventually decide to meet your demands to get rid of the stink. But if your aim is to do away with the whole economic and political system by which those in power hold power, then demands are meaningless. You are engaged in a revolution, not a protest movement.

 

The peculiar thing about Occupy was that while, on the outside, it acted just like a protest movement—it was driven by a particular set of grievances, it held marches, it acquired political allies—on the inside, it was something very different. The core of the movement—the people who lived in the park and those who regularly attended working-group meetings—had much more radical ideas. To them, the occupation was not so much a protest as an experiment, an attempt to build a completely different kind of society in the midst, in the very financial heart, of the surrounding post-industrial, late-capitalist, etc.

 

This project ended because Bloomberg, along with mayors of other major cities (following orders, rumor has it, from the Department of Homeland Security) forcibly cleared the park (and all the “defenses” that the activists had planned were of course completely meaningless in the face of an NYPD that had decided to put its foot down). But the project was failing long before it ended, and one of the major reasons it failed is that the people who were forming this “new” society came from the old one and, it turned out, could not help but reproduce it.

 

The occupation of Zuccotti Park began on September 17^th, 2011, with wild Marxist-anarchist ideals; but by mid-October it had already became a bizarre little microcosm of all the problems of the surrounding city. People fought over real-estate within the park (who got to put their tent where). The park itself quickly divided along class lines, with the college educated and professional activist types mostly sleeping at one end and poorer, more burnt-out hippie and crusty-punk types at the other. No one planned this, it just happened. Because the official decision-making apparati were completely transparent but also became completely dysfunctional once donations began to pour in, real decisions about resources were often made through more informal or opaque processes—because in fact they had to be made in this way if they were going to be made at all, if budget was going to get allocated for food, shelter, and so on. Thus, a small number of people came to effectively control the resources and distribute them to others, in the form of blankets and food, on what began to look more and more like a (disorganized) welfare-state model. Those who did not control the resources formed elaborate conspiracy theories about those who did: how they were hording them, embezzling them, getting drunk on GA dollars, even, one wild-eyed young man informed me, carrying out secret masonic/satanic rituals.

 

By February of 2012, when I told everyone who I worked with that I was “stepping back” and would no longer be facilitating meetings, organizing events, liaising with clergymen, cleaning church sanctuaries—I was convinced of various things:

1. That any project to remake our whole way of living must not oppose or threaten those in power; it must begin quietly, proceed gently and accommodatingly; and, in our wildest dreams, we should imagine not that we will someday overcome the powerful but that we will finally seduce even them.
2. That, if you “tear down everything” and “start from scratch,” you inevitably just create a shoddy, disorganized version of what you just tore down.
3. That it is easier to see what does not work about the world than what does; so, however radical one’s critique, any project to remake the world should make as much use as possible of the structures that already exist.

(I want to mention that any “understandings” that I came to in reaction to Occupy, I came to in conversation with others, and especially in conversation with one particular other, without whom I could not have seen things nearly as clearly. He knows who he is, as do most people reading this.)

 

At that time, in February of 2012, I was filled with a vague excitement and believed that from these ideas a new project, very different from Occupy but fully consuming, would soon emerge. But after a year of listlessness, intermittent depression, and religious reading, I came to a different conclusion: political progress was impossible; the times were evil; the only wise course was to withdraw and to focus on developing my own system of values and understanding.