Posted by rflacks on: Tue 18th Sep, 2012

The anniversary of Occupy Wall Street has made me want to
post a blog, breaking a several month hiatus (a hiatus dictated by the fact
that Mickey and I are working on our joint memoir, titled Making History and Making Blintzes).

The anniversary is being marked on one hand by a wide
variety of street actions and gatherings intended to make it clear that the
struggle continues. Meanwhile, much of the mainstream media frame the story as ‘a movement fizzles’. Neither the street scenes nor the media frames help us
understand what the Occupy movement has achieved, what it means and what
follows.

Frances Fox Piven, one of our most astute scholars of bottom
up social movements, has written an anniversary comment
that emphasizes a crucial point: social movements can’t be understood simply as
episodes of explosive mass protest.  The
movements that have made history over the last century are multi-pronged, long
term struggles expressed in many forms with many competing strategies, ebbing
and flowing in terms of large scale participation. From the beginning, the
incessant demand that the occupiers themselves issue policy statements, define
their goals and direction and map out strategies has been misplaced. The occupy
initiative was an effort to dramatize a deep and central issue—the way our
lives are now being determined by a small group of financially super powerful institutions and persons. “We are the 99%’ as a slogan has had a transforming effect on political consciousness.  Not only does it define the power disproportion—but it suggests that there is a shared interest among the great majority that cuts across the big historic antagonisms that
divide ordinary people—of race, of gender, of religion and of income level.
Since those antagonisms have been the main social story of our lifetimes, a
dramatic move to tell a new and much more hopeful story is bold. It’s not that
it has worked already. But something is stirring. Mitt Romney we learn has constructed a fantasy about the 47% of dependent and irresponsible victims who should be overcome by the 53% who are making it on their own.  It’s a remarkable case study of a one per
center struggling to destroy the potential solidarities among all sorts of
people who differ greatly but who share, not dependency, but a sense of being
robbed and tricked by banksters and their ilk.

Anyway, I think it makes sense to see Occupy not as a
movement in itself but as one expression of a rising and very long delayed
class struggle. Marx may have taught that all history was constituted by class
struggle, but in our life time, even the left has learned not to expect class
to be manifest and central to the ways disadvantaged and subordinated people
will consciously organize. We assume that class  will lurk behind the things that shape  how people act—but when people band together
they see their interests in more particular terms—and terms that may be as much
‘cultural’ as ‘economic’. The year just passed—2011—may well be understood as
the point  in time where class solidarity
and anger started to be a conscious driving force in collective action—all over
the planet. Workers of the world aren’t yet uniting. But everywhere we look
mass uprising is boiling up and it has taken a class-y turn.

OWS came after the Arab Spring, after the Wisconsin revolt,
after the Tel Aviv social justice encampments, the Chilean student protests,
the revolt of the indignados in Madrid, Greek riots. In a real sense, to Occupy
wall street was to make a public move that would help the world locate the
physical source of the problems that sparked all these diverse mass actions.
OWS, I mean to say, didn’t start or even spark protest; it was a creative
effort to help unify the mass protests already visible by communicating their
common target, their shared enemy. It’s not at all a stretch to see all of
these uprisings as linked—not only in form but in substance. And whatever we
come to understand the central linkage to be— that is the movement whose fate needs to be worked on.  The question isn’t—where is Occupy going, but
rather can and how will people find ways to redistribute power and wealth in
democratic directions.

More concretely, though we ought to think about how the many
sparks flying out of the Occupy movement have or may ignite ongoing effective
action. It’s clear that certain key issues, bearing on predatory financial
power, have flowed out of Occupy and continue to be ongoing frameworks for
organizing at a community level. Thousands of people have been moving their
money out of big banks and into community credit unions and the like. Several
city governments and other institutions have done the same. The ‘Move Our Money ‘website estimates that $300 million have been moved since organized efforts began. Much more organizing and action on this is possible—and already this effort has stimulated discussion about how communities and localities can create alternative financial institutions and reimagine banking for social benefit.

A national campaign on student debt  has been gathering force—aimed at relief, and at a longer run rethinking of who and how education should be paid for. Nothing in this country yet compares with the student uprisings in places like Quebec and Chile, but it’s very possible that the coming school year will see much
more engagement and intensity—not only on campus but in the wider communities where student debt relief could be a job creator—removing a significant barrier
to home ownership and other consumption. And beyond immediate relief—perhaps the Chicago teachers strike will help foment a far-ranging debate about the value
of education. The teachers are I think saying in effect—the corporate education
reform movement is really a way to undermine a massive social investment in education and in children’s well-being.

Mortgage debt is of course another focus for national and local
organizing—and occupy activists have been central in a number of places in
preventing foreclosures and challenging bank practices. Recent federal and
state policy initiatives promise relief—but it is clear that bottom up action is
necessary if these promises are to be fulfilled.

A great deal of organizing, much of it inspired by what has
happened over the past year and a half in the US and globally, is going on
right now. We could use some coherent effort to systematically help people in commnities who want to connect to such campaigns. Still, a little web surfing does pay off in locatingresources and ideas.

The election campaigns have for months absorbed most organizing
energy. Some of the campaigns—most obviously Elizabeth Warren’s in
Massachusetts—are strongly linked to the 99% perspective. I don’t think it’s
overly optimistic, however, to predict that after the election (and Obama’s
expected win) a much larger and more developed set of campaigns on issues of
class will quickly emerge. A Democratic majority in congress would make this even more possible.

There’s another way that the occupy movement opens possibility
for real change and that is with respect to imagination. We on the left have
been in a defensive mode for pretty much the last 30 years. The results have
not been rewarding. Trying to defend the safety net, and the legacy of the New
Deal and the Great society, has maybe bought some time for the welfare state,
but the public consciousness—the way people think and talk and feel about what’s
socially possible—has narrowed. The narrowing is in part due to the fiscal crisis
of the state—predicted for more than 40 years to call into question the standard
assumptions of social democracy—and in part due to the tremendous onslaught of
rightwing propagandizing, We’ve reached some kind of limit. The massive unrest
of the past 18 months is rooted in the rebellion of people against austerity
regimes being laid on their lives –austerity claimed as necessary because of
the fiscal crisis. The incredible fantasy world being created by the Tea Party
and the GOP leadership is rooted in the evident impossibility of their beliefs
and values when faced with social reality.

In short, there is a desperate need and a decided
opportunity for the creative articulation of social alternatives beyond
capitalism.

 

 

 

Tags: occupy wall street, fiscal crisis, world wide protests im 2011

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