OCCUPY'S BIG BELLYFLOP

How Bad Theory Leads to Political Failure

Hey Folks,

I hope that you guys are enjoying my deep dive into Occupy Wall Street. Sure seems like you are!

Although Occupy may be yesterday’s news, I think it’s important. Downright hatred of the U.S. government is probably at an all-time high, and there’s no sign that things are about to get better.

The only way they’ll get better is if people get together to make them better, but the U.S. these days is a deeply polarized society in which the Left and Right despise each other and no one can even agree what’s real.

But if things keep getting worse, they will eventually reach a point when they are intolerable to enough people that some kind of resistance movement appears. As Occupy showed us, this can happen extremely quickly.

But Occupy also showed up that a bunch of well-intentioned people gathering together without a plan doesn’t really lead to satisfying results. If a movement has any hope of success in the current political climate, it must act strategically.

I think it’s a very useful exercise to ask ourselves: “What should Occupy have done differently?” And the short answer is: a lot.

Anarchists would like to blame their liberal allies for abandoning them, or cops for brutalizing them, the media for spreading lies about them, or the system for creating the conditions in which there are so many homeless drug addicts, but I think we need to take responsibility for the failure of Occupy.

If it makes you feel any better, we can also take responsibility for the movement’s initial success.

If you ask me, the reason Occupy failed was a lack of a coherent strategy. And this grew out of a lack of basic political literacy. Most people simply don’t understand how social movements can leverage their collective power to grant concessions from the state. And anarchists argued against the whole idea of fighting for concessions, apparently believing that because the Occupy movement was anti-government, any attempt to engage with the government was betraying anarchist values. But this is nonsense.

Engaging with the government is not a matter of choice when it comes to politics. If it were, anarchism would be unnecessary. We could just go off and do our own thing. If tax collectors showed up, we’d just smile, politely decline to pay taxes, and maybe serve them up a nice glass of lemonade to make sure there were no hard feelings.

But that’s not the way reality works. In the world we live in, political action which challenges the status quo will be met with violent repression. If you attempt to take over an empty lot in your neighbourhood to make a community garden, people will show up with guns to tell you to leave. If you refuse to, you will be arrested. If you put up a fight, you may be beaten or otherwise physically harmed. You don’t get to choose whether or not to engage with the government. You do get to choose HOW to engage with the government. And getting together with a bunch of like-minded people to leverage your collective bargaining power is kind of the point of activism. In no way are anarchists betraying their values if they make demands of those in power. What they’re doing is exercising their power.

Also, Occupy was doomed from the start if its organizers expected everyone to convert to anarchism. You’ve got to meet people where they’re at. Anarchists are a tiny minority in every country. We don’t have much power alone. Any revolutionary movement capable of achieving ambitious goals will necessarily be ideologically diverse. That means working alongside liberals, trade unions, Christians, Muslims, Jews, immigrant communities, Marxists, conservatives, anarcho-capitalists, etc. It’s also worth pointing out that most people are not married to any given ideological position. Many of them consider flexibility a virtue, which means they’re open to new ideas. That’s who you want to be working with.

To some it might seem like I’m advocating for watering down anarchist politics to make them more palatable to statists, defeating the purpose of revolutionary activity in the process. But I don’t think I am.

Here’s why: people will inevitably be radicalized once the violence starts. Anarchists have been insisting for centuries that statism is evil, but most people can’t see it. They grew up watching TV shows where cops come to help cats down from trees. They’re brainwashed. But when a gang of uniformed thugs start busting the heads of peaceful protesters, people can see the injustice of the system on full display.

As anarchist martyr Brad Will once said: “If you want to understand something, try to change it.”

Today, I’d like to share an excerpt taken from an amazing YouTube video which touches on Occupy Wall Street.

It comes from the What is Politics? YouTube channel, which I highly recommend.

If you’d like to watch the whole video, you can find it here:

What do you think? Am I on the right track? Or am I being too harsh?

I’m open to having my mind changed!

Solidarity,

Crow Qu’appelle

HOW BAD THEORY LEADS TO POLITICAL FAILURE

By Dr. Scrotes

On one hand, Occupy was an incredible success. It mobilized an unheard-of number of people for weeks on end, camping out in over 2,200 parks in more than 1,300 cities and towns across the world. Its slogan, "We are the 99%," which was Graeber’s idea, reintroduced class conflict into mainstream political discourse for the first time in 70 years. In its aftermath, it inspired a reinvigorated socialist movement that had become moribund even before the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989.

Occupy articulated an explicit rebuke to finance capitalism and an explicit rejection of corrupt representative democracy and authoritarian "socialism." Instead, it espoused and adopted deep democratic decision-making forms inspired by the historical libertarian socialist/anarchist movement.

Polls showed that Occupy had the support of the overwhelming majority of the people in most of the countries where they mobilized—something unheard of for a movement with such a radical message and ideology. Authorities were secretly afraid of them. It received no media attention at the time, but the Obama administration shelved some pro-Wall Street reforms they were going to implement for fear of incurring the wrath of the occupiers and their admirers.

Just the fact that they were able to illegally occupy so many parks for so long, in violation of the law, shows that in the right circumstances, organized people can be stronger than the state despite all its police, nukes, and tanks.

All of this success was a huge surprise to even the organizers!

Once it got going, many Occupy participants with roots in working-class organizing wanted to take advantage of what they understood was going to be a short window of leverage. They aimed to put forth one overwhelmingly popular demand. This was seen as a win-win situation. If the government would actually buckle and make concessions, this would embolden the movement and set a precedent. Imagine that every time the government did something that an overwhelming number of people opposed, or didn’t do something an overwhelming majority wanted, people would rush out to occupy everything until the government buckled and people got what they demanded or at least some version of it, akin to the early Soviets in Russia in 1917.

If the demands got rejected, then the whole world would see that our political systems are so corrupt and undemocratic that even when 99% of the population wants something, our supposed representatives do nothing except send the police to come in and beat us up, which would lead to more radicalism and a higher level of general consciousness.

Some of the demands they were considering were ending corporate personhood, implementing a universal jobs program, and getting money out of politics, which I think would have been a winner as it had and still has upwards of 90% support even among self-described conservatives in the US.

OCCUPY NARCISSUS

But the people who initially organized Occupy Wall Street were largely upper-middle-class kids coming out of expensive universities. Coming from comfortable backgrounds on the whole, they were more interested in their theories and identities than in actually achieving anything. They had some pretty narcissistic ideas—they thought that making demands of the government would somehow taint their movement and legitimize the authority of the state.

Imagine if someone is invading your house and instead of demanding that they drop your things and get out of the house or else you’ll club them with a bat, you just pretend they’re not there and have a jerk-off festival with your roommates so as not to sully yourselves with foul criminals. Making demands is not legitimizing anything; it’s exercising your power!

But to the initial Occupy organizers, it was seen quite the opposite; they saw making demands as somehow giving up their power. To quote Graeber at the time, who was one of the big proponents of the no-demands ideology:

"I think that the problem of asking for demands is that, who are you demanding them of? You’re in a sense saying to the people in power, 'We would like you to do things differently. Do something for us. Save the whales. Who’s going to save the whales? I’m not going to save the whales, I guess they’re going to go out and save the whales.'… But ultimately the idea of protest is you’re saying, 'You people in power are doing this wrong and we want you to do something.' And even if that something is 'step aside,' you are addressing them directly."

Oh no—addressing them directly! That causes anarcho-cooties!

Now the issue, of course, wasn’t saving the whales; it was about bailing out homeowners instead of banks, it was re-regulating the finance industry so they can’t rob the country, it was enforcing the actual existing laws so that they wouldn’t be incentivized to do it all over again—it was about running the economy in the interests of the population, not the lizard class. And if Graeber had listed those actual issues in that interview instead of saving the whales, then we would see right away how absurd this proposition was.

If you’re not in a position to do the types of things that the state currently does—like if you’re not in a position to start regulating finance and redistributing money from banks to humans—then the only way you’re going to make the things that you want to happen, happen, is by putting pressure on the people who do have the power to make those things happen and forcing them to obey you instead of their big-moneyed circus trainers. And this is true whether you think the state is a legitimate institution or whether you think the state should be abolished.

Using a hammer to hammer in a nail isn’t giving away your power to the hammer; it’s wielding the hammer as a tool to make your will a reality—you are the one with the power. Yes, the master’s tools can dismantle the master’s house because tools don’t just do things on their own; they do what you make them do.

Erased from the recent celebratory retrospectives on Occupy is the fact that the pro-demands organizers sometimes had huge majorities in the Occupy assemblies. So in order to keep their control over the movement, the anti-demands people pulled all kinds of anti-democratic shenanigans. First, they jacked up the required majority to pass resolutions from 75% to 90%. And then they engaged in smear tactics against the pro-demands organizers, and they shut down their internet presence, and they even tried to physically disrupt their efforts. You’d think these people were corporate Democrats trying to sabotage Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020, or else Labour centrists in the UK trying to make Jeremy Corbyn lose the election on purpose in 2017.

Ironically, the organizers were so wrapped up in their identities as anarchists—that they ended up betraying the actual values of anarchism: democracy and horizontalism. And instead, they acted like a “vanguard party” in the words of one of the pro-demands occupiers.

And you can read all about this stuff in an essay by sociologist and Occupy participant Susan Kang called "Demands for the 99%."

[Note: If anyone knows where I can find this essay, please send me a link in the comments - C.Q.]

And so, no demands were made, and as a result, when the protests were eventually crushed, which anyone could have predicted—especially given that the movement was bound to lose energy without any accomplishments to keep it going—the movement had absolutely nothing to show for it.

Not just nothing, they actually set back their own ideals and goals in several important ways.

Interest in socialism had revived because of Occupy, which is one of Occupy’s big successes—but the anarchist and libertarian socialist varieties favored by the organizers lost an enormous amount of prestige and have faded in importance and relevance. To young people today who are facing increasingly grim futures and want results and real change, Lenin and increasingly Stalin are seen as heroes who know how to take power as people look for mighty superheroes and vanguard ninja parties to rescue them.

And the most damaging consequence of Occupy’s no-demands whimpering belly flop is that it taught hundreds of millions and maybe billions of sympathizers around the world that organizing and mass mobilization are a waste of time—a juvenile exercise in blowing off steam for college kids. You organize a zillion people, get the world on your side to agree about a whole bunch of issues... but who cares—because nothing happens, nothing changes, like nothing ever changes! There’s no point in ever trying.