The Utopian

By Jeremy Kessler.

“In taking to the streets with their peculiar brand of leadership and organization, the Occupy Wall Street movement taps into a deep American tradition of outdoor politics: for much of American history, the motor of progressive political change was the assembly of the people out-of-doors, coming together to debate and organize beyond the prescribed avenues of official political reform.”

________________________________________________________________________________________

The Occupy Wall Street movement seized Zuccotti Park on September 17, three years and two days after Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy and the United States entered its most severe economic crisis since the Great Depression. Many have wondered what kept the Occupiers waiting.  To weary eyes that have witnessed three years of economic hardship and our country’s repeated flirtations with economic collapse, a movement that just now chooses to occupy the physical center of national finance looks almost belated.  And yet there is good reason why the Occupation’s moment has come today, rather than in 2008 or 2009. The key to Occupy Wall Street’s timeliness can be found in the movement’s essentially political – rather than economic – character.

To the extent that the American left did have an economic response to the financial crisis of 2008, it was the election of Barack Obama and the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act less than two months after Obama took office. The Tea Party, in turn, arose in direct opposition to this relatively modest left-wing attempt to ameliorate the stiff recession that rocked the country in the wake of the 2008 crisis.

Two years of skirmishing between left and right culminated in the surreal debt-ceiling crisis of last summer, when Republicans steeped in tea and Democrats paralyzed by ideological ambivalence manufactured a national emergency. Media, political, and financial elites all began to suggest that the current American regime no longer had the political will to govern itself. Meanwhile, legitimation crises swept the Middle East, North Africa, and the European Union, as workers, students, and the mass unemployed flooded the streets of their cities not just to protest the policies of their governments, but to contest their governments’ right to rule.

It was not economic recession but these political crises – in the United States and abroad – that provided the conditions of possibility for Occupy Wall Street.  To be sure, economics and politics are impossible to disentangle, and every current political crisis — from the debt-ceiling debate to Tahrir Square – has deep economic roots. But when comparing Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party, the two populist movements that currently structure American political discourse, it becomes clear that the Tea Party merely issues a checklist of middle-class economic demands, while Occupy Wall Street offers a truly political critique of modern American society.

****

The Tea Party does seem to be political. After all, Tea Partiers are deeply interested in the Constitution. But in fact their devotion to the Constitution only serves as a blueprint for depoliticization. Indeed, Tea Partiers believe that the nation’s founding documents enshrines a de-politicized vision of property relations: they believe “government” and the “free market” to be two distinct forces locked in a zero-sum contest. As government grows, the marketplace shrinks; as government shrinks, the marketplace grows. While the market is the sacred source of whatever the Tea Partier possesses, the government is an unholy and alien threat. What’s more, the Tea Party’s preferred theory of constitutional interpretation – a simplistic version of “originalism” — works to banish actual democratic politics to a distant past. This theory holds that the Founders were not just the best statesmen, they were the last statesmen: What the Founders believed (properly understood) remains the true, unchanging law. Ever since then, the only role for politicians is to respect these inviolable laws which secure for the water-carriers what they have won in the marketplace.

The Tea Partiers’ thin account of democratic statecraft helps explain their surprising comfort with modern American electoral politics. Though the Tea Party has plenty of bad things to say about Washington, it is happy to keep sending its representatives there. The task assigned to these representatives is, of course, to shrink the government and to expand the reach of the marketplace. The Tea Party’s commitment to electoral politics – as an entirely non-revolutionary means of maintaining existing property relations – most clearly distinguishes its version of populism from that of Occupy Wall Street. While the Tea Party begins with an economic vision and uses extant political channels to realize it, the Occupy Wall Street movement begins with a critique of politics.

****

The practice of Occupation offers radical answers to three basic political questions:

1.     Who are the legitimate political leaders?

2.     How do they govern themselves?

3.     Where do they govern?

1.

To the question, “Who are the legitimate political leaders?,” the Occupation answers “We are.” Many of the men and women who seized public parks and city squares earlier this fall were eager Obama voters in 2008. While the Obama campaign maintained a grassroots aesthetic – its base of small donors (since eschewed) and its adoption of the United Farm Workers of America’s catchphrase “Yes We Can!”— its heart was plebiscitarian. The people were called upon to put their leader in power, and they did so with passion. But as Obama supporters watched their beloved representative quickly surround himself with banker-economists, a Republican Secretary of Defense, and two brash and amoral chiefs-of staff, disillusionment set in.

While the Occupiers may not have a ready-made alternative to their country’s failing political institutions, they do have a practical response to their feeling of disempowerment: they will now lead themselves. The Occupation’s roots are in anarchism, a surprisingly radical source for a contemporary American oppositional politics.  One of the early members of the movement, the anthropologist David Graeber, cites the “refusal to work through the government” and the “determination instead to act for oneself” as core, anarchist principles of occupation. This emphasis on autonomous action is a clear rebuke to the rhythms of representative democracy, which demand the people’s passion for election-season contests and expect popular passivity the rest of the cycle.

Each person who arrives at an Occupied camp site or meeting is encouraged to take control, to propose and realize their ideas in real time. No credentials are required to run discussions, plan marches, handle finances, reach out to the media, or care for the sick. Even today, after the November 15 eviction from Zuccotti and several other evictions at Occupied sites around the country, the movement’s distributed leadership rolls along. In New York, countless working groups and general meetings continue to develop new “direct actions” (targeted protests of certain political and economic institutions) and solve logistical problems – such as where to house all the people the NYPD threw out of the Park.

At a recent panel discussion, several audience members offered suggestions to one long-time Occupier about how he and his colleagues might better represent the 99 percent. His answer was not so much a dismissal of the audience’s concerns but a call for them to mobilize their own beliefs. “Come on down to the park,” he counseled, his deeper meaning being: the direction of the movement is determined by whoever acts in its name. This focus on autonomy is one reason why the Movement has never produced a single set of demands. In making a demand, one calls upon others to do something. From the beginning, the Occupiers have emphasized doing things on their own.

2.

If the Occupiers are their own leaders, then how do all these leaders govern themselves? At the heart of the movement is the General Assembly (G.A.), where proposals are discussed and plans made for future action. Each Occupied site or city has its own General Assembly. The composition of these G.A.s is entirely fluid: anyone may participate and whoever shows up on a particular day becomes a decision-maker. All proposals require a ninety percent super-majority to pass, ensuring that when the movement speaks or acts as a whole, it is not representing a select few, but mobilizing a near-consensus.

Because of its size, of course, a G.A. is not always the best forum for deliberation and decision. A variety of working groups – media outreach, direct action (planning protests), medical support, housing – emulate the direct democratic structure of the G.A. but focus on specific needs. Working groups are composed of volunteers and funded by a Spokes-council, a streamlined arm of the General Assembly to which each working group sends representatives. These representatives must rotate every meeting to prevent – as much as possible – the crystallization of leadership blocs within working groups or the Spokes-council itself. These Occupied forms of deliberation and organization constitute a clear, if cumbersome, rebuke to “indoor” politics, which the Occupiers perceive to be plagued by hierarchies – of money, secrecy, credentials – and thus inaccessible to many Americans. 

The anti-hierarchical ethos of the Occupy Wall Street movement goes deep, and has influenced its relationships with the wider society – from the press to the police. Most political organizations have privileged decision-makers who coordinate with outside groups. Worried that these liaisons would develop special relationships with powerful outsiders such as politicians and police chiefs and thus become a vanguard, the movement eschews such forms of coordination. While this rejection of coordination limits the ability of the movement to grow rapidly, it also prevents professional outsiders from imposing their preferred hierarchies on the Occupiers. As a result, the movement retains a critical ethos, inherently antagonistic to the forms of order with which political and social authorities are comfortable.

The more that Occupy Wall Street’s leadership and organization function as a critique of extant political institutions, however, the less they seem to offer a viable alternative to those institutions. It seems impossible for tens of millions of people to participate in a General Assembly or for autonomous groups with uncertain authority to run a country’s defense or health-care systems.  In other words, Occupy Wall Street’s vision of direct democracy does not appear to work on a national level. Here, Occupy Wall Street’s answer to the third question – “Where do the people govern?” – suggests why the movement’s alternative politics need not be fully scalable to be considered successful or coherent. The movement’s answer to this question of place is “Outside, in the streets.”

3.

In taking to the streets with their peculiar brand of leadership and organization, the Occupy Wall Street movement taps into a deep American tradition of “outdoor” politics. “Outdoor” political movements arise to oppose “indoor” politics – the current set of representative political institutions and actors. “Outdoor” political movements derive their name from literally assembling out of doors – beyond the corridors of power – to make themselves heard and to demonstrate their political will. For much of American history, the motor of progressive political change was the assembly of the people out-of-doors, coming together to debate and organize beyond the prescribed avenues of official political reform.

Pillars of modern American democracy –  women’s suffrage, the welfare state, racial equality – all rest upon the surprisingly fluid foundations of outdoor and anti-institutional assemblies of motivated citizen. From the suffrage movement’s conventions and parades to the labor movement’s sixty year campaign of strikes that begain in the 1870s to the civil rights movements sit-ins and putatively “illegal” marches – all these movements seized the public square to broadcast their views. They did so to assert their right, as popular sovereigns, to the public land so often dominated by the officials whose political dominance they opposed.

Occupy Wall Street’s repertoire of spatial tactics continues this august tradition. Most notable are the movement’s occupations themselves – seizures of public or semi-public land for the purposes of 24-hour political organizing and action. But even in the wake of violent police clearances of these static sites, the Occupy movement has insisted on the holding of public space; in New York, marches snake through the barricaded streets of the Financial District and around police cordons at City Hall, while G.A.s and working groups continue to meet in parks and public atria to debate and organize.

Like Occupy Wall Street, earlier “outdoor” political movements were also intent upon fulfilling the promise of popular – as opposed to oligarchic – rule; their members saw themselves as taking direct control of the ship of state from untrustworthy captains, just as the Occupiers see themselves today. And just like the Occupiers, earlier “outdoor” politicians adopted models of leadership and organization that were widely seen as peculiar in order to distinguish themselves from the status quo.

 “Outdoor” political movements, then, are neither protests, petitioning the current government with a list of demands, nor parties, offering themselves as an electoral alternative to the ruling machines. Rather, “outdoor” political movements threaten the social and political order, forcing everyday Americans to reckon with alternative ways of life and changing the national agenda. They do so through direct confrontations with the representatives of order – whether police or pundits – who seek to maintain the dominance of “indoor” politics and its self-interested regulations of appropriate kinds of political actors and modes of discussion. The medium of “outdoor” political movements is an integral part of their message: the very spectacle of disfavored groups – such as women, blacks, or workers – engaging in political discussion and action (sometimes illegally), altered the national consciousness and thus the conditions of representative politics. Similarly, Occupy Wall Street’s economic populism – to name one facet of the movement – is already challenging the moral shame which attaches to debt in contemporary American social and political life.

There is one important disanalogy between Occupy Wall Street and previous movements of outdoor politics in American history, however. For, although “outdoor” politics has always been America’s vital supplement to representative democracy, it has grown increasingly endangered by the power of professional police forces and the presence of standing armies. In recent decades, police suppression of the people-out-of-doors entered a new phase, first in response to the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle and, most dramatically, as an adjunct to the war on terror. The militant police response to the Iraq War protests of 2003 and the Presidential Convention protests of 2004 and 2008 was audacious, typified by the construction of Orwellian “designated demonstration zones” – barbed wire cages only within which protesters were permitted to express themselves without fear of officially-sanctioned assault or detention.

Today, in order to assemble legally out of doors, groups must generally obtain costly permits from political officials and coordinate their every action with heavily-armed urban police forces. Under these conditions, “outdoor” politics is stamped with the barriers to entry and hierarchical structures of “indoor” politics. The Occupy Wall Street movement, however, has self-consciously refused these contemporary constraints on outdoor politics, occupying land and conducting marches without permits or police coordination. The intentional chaos these unpermitted actions produce has attracted intense media attention and galvanized citizens jaded by docile protests that seem to recapitulate the talking points of political leaders. Thus, it may well be that Occupy Wall Street heralds a return to “outdoor” politics.

In resisting the modern war on “outdoor” politics, the Occupiers are, ironically, the true inheritors of the Tea Party tradition. Unlike their namesakes, contemporary Tea Partiers are piously committed to the letter of the law. Thus, Jenny Beth Martin, a co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots organization, told the New York Times that “We have worked very hard to be respectful of the laws.” Similarly, Tim Philips, the president of Americans for Prosperity and a Tea Party supporter, explained to Politico that the Tea Party would only benefit from the disreputable “lawbreaking” and “radical vision” of Occupy Wall Street. Yet American history shows that true political change only comes when citizens push the envelope of what contemporary political institutions are willing to authorize. The Tea Party’s absolute commitment to legalism indicates their lack of interest in such deep change.

****

But even if Occupy Wall Street marks a renaissance in “outdoor” politics, does the movement have an end-game? To be sure, the Occupiers’ unorthodox approach to political leadership, organization, and location performs a vivid critique of our paralyzed and corrupt representative institutions, a critique in which Americans excluded from “indoor” politics can participate. But to what can this critique possibly lead, other than more Americans in the streets complaining about the way things are? After all, in apparent contrast to the outdoor political movements of the past – women’s suffrage, labor, civil rights – Occupy Wall Street does not have a silver-bullet policy prescription toward which it moves: the 19^th amendment, labor protection laws, the end of Jim Crow.

There are several, partial responses to concerns about the nebulousness of the movement’s goals. None of them may be entirely satisfying. But, taken together, they suggest that a quick dismissal of the future prospects of Occupy Wall Street is unwise.

First, although the Occupy Wall Street movement does not organize itself around an agenda of parliamentary reform , it may well be that more reformist political actors can capitalize on the political energy, anxiety, and even antagonism that the movement produces. Describing the impact of Occupy Wall Street on a recent union-backed repeal of an anti-collective-bargaining law in Ohio, Damon Silvers, the policy director of the AFL-CIO, explained, “They helped define what it was that was going on, and gave people a sense that you can do something about it.” Meanwhile, Democratic politicians have increasingly adopted Occupy’s rhetoric of class antagonism – the 1 percent and the 99 percent. And it was the proliferation of Occupations in October that punctuated a stark shift from summer talk of austerity to autumn talk of “income inequality,” even among some Republicans. If the movement proves long-lived, traditional political actors may be able to work in parallel to it, capitalizing on – or being compelled by – the attention that Occupy Wall Street draws to political and economic failure.

Second, the perception we have today of earlier outdoor political movements as efficient vehicles for the delivery of concrete and coherent policy goals may itself be misleading. Although, in hindsight, these movements appear to culminate in obvious policy reforms, much of their work was in self-constitution. Before it makes sense to talk of vindicating a group’s interests through policy change, there must be a group and there must be interests. Even in the seemingly clear-cut case of the movement for women’s suffrage, the very idea that women were not represented by current political institutions had to be carved out of the stony edifice of virtual representation. And even then, class and racial divisions threw into question whether there was such a general social group – “women” – that required emancipation. Decades of ostentatious organizing and action – in which women increasingly adopted postures of leadership, solidarity, and defiance previously considered unnatural if not impossible – constructed the systemic figure of a “woman without a vote.”  Only once such a figure existed did the passage of the 19^th amendment make sense as a serious goal.

Third, there may be something unique about Occupy Wall Street’s discontent that explains the ambiguity of its end-game. Even if one accepts that social movements must struggle over time to construct the “group” and “interests” they represent, the coherent group and consistent set of interests that Occupy Wall Street might one day come to embody seem particularly obscure. This obscurity partly arises from the political situation that the movement seeks to critique. In 1990, reflecting on the future of the Left, Jürgen Habermas noted the difficulty of organizing around political economic discontent in a democratic welfare state:

The classical conflict over the distribution of wealth in the society based upon labour was structured against the background of the interests of labour such that both sides were in a position to threaten the other. Even the structurally disadvantaged side could resort, in the last instance, to a strike; in other words, to the organized withdrawal of labour and the concomitant interruption of the production process. Today this is no longer the case. The conflict over the distribution of wealth has been institutionalized by the welfare state in such a way that a broad majority of people in work confront a minority of marginal groupings thrown together to form a heterogeneous mass without the power to set up any similar sort of embargo. If they do not just give up, and resort self-destructively to illness, crime or blind revolt to deal with their burden, the marginalized and the underprivileged can, in the last resort, only make their interestes known by means of a protest vote.

The social, economic, and political differentiation of modern capitalist democracy prevents any sort of constructive, direct action, such as a general strike, aimed at the sources of systemic inequality.  But Habermas does not merely find a general strike improbable. Rather, according to him, the same systemic complexity that impedes such an extra-parliamentary attack also makes it ethically dubious. For Habermas, modern capitalist democracy is so complex that attempts to alter its basic economic and political structures risk terrible disorder. The old hope of the Left – to dissolve and reconstitute existing property relations – becomes a piece of nihilistic adventurism (“crime,” “blind revolt”) when there is no way to vouchsafe a non-violent, economically sustainable, and persistently democratic transformation. In other words, things might not be perfect, but overly-invasive and ambitious reforms will only make them worse.

Sustainable, gradual reform, then, will come not through the organization of a vanguard party or the escalation of competition over interests (whether economic or cultural), but through the minority’s moral appeal to the majority. By “introducing morality into the debate” and highlighting the plight of “the homeless and the beggars … . the areas of town that have been reduced to ghettoes,” Habermas argues that the minority can lead the majority in self-reflection and “self-correction,”  consolidating “electoral support” for reform. This is a story familiar to Americans, a story about the efficacy of minoritarian moral outrage. Our country’s signal example may be the civil rights movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The example that Habermas chose in 1990 was successful protest against the installation of medium-range missiles in West Germany.

Unlike these reformist protests, however, Occupy Wall Street arises from discontent with the system itself. Indeed, the sense that animates the Occupiers is that moral appeals about economic and political inequality no longer stand a chance of being translated into systemic reform. Perhaps the system of political economic power that administers society has become entirely unmoored from social influence. Habermas admits the possibility of just such a situation, in which “the network of intersubjectively shared and communicatively structured lifeworlds is torn so definitively that the autonomous system of the economy, and, with it, the self-programming processes of state management, will never be brought back within the horizons of the lifeworld—not even by the most indirect types of regulation.” Whether such a situation obtains is a question that Habermas argues cannot be “answer[ed] adequately at the level of theory, and must therefore [be] reformulate[d] practically and politically.”

Habermas does not, however, make clear how one can verify that such a disastrous situation obtains. Nor does he say what citizens should do once they believe that, in fact, system and lifeworld have entirely parted company. The Occupy Wall Street movement stands near the edge of this uncertainty, where no one can say for sure whether the system is beyond democratic control, and no one can say for sure what the proper response to such democratic failure would be.

The movement’s self-conscious refusal to promulgate demands expresses this uncertainty by means of a disturbing silence. Similarly, its self-conscious refusal to seek permits – a refusal that transforms every moralizing protester into a criminal – accentuates the disturbingly thin line between democracy and crime that exists when the legitimacy of a democratic state is in doubt. That the Occupation has remained non-violent, on the other hand, distinguishes it from a traditional revolutionary movement, a movement confident about the total illegitimacy of the prevailing system.

Of course, anger at the current economic crisis and political paralysis may peter out soon enough. If it does, then traditional politicians will not be able to continue to capitalize on Occupy Wall Street’s oppositional energy; nor will the movement have lasted long enough to develop a socially significant sense of group identity and needs. On the other hand,  if the European Union collapses, the United States enters a second, deeper recession by its own devices, or a Republican Party truly intent on austerity budgeting takes control, there may be many more Americans – out of patience, out of their jobs, out of their homes – looking for a new form of public life. In such a case of obvious systemic failure, Occupy Wall Street’s reinvigoration of outdoor politics will seem timely. People will look back on the fall of 2011 as a moment when American society developed a form of political action capable of exerting immediate pressure on the broken institutions that preserve control of the public sphere.

Jeremy Kessler is a J.D./Ph.D. candidate at Yale Law School and Yale University’s Department of History.