Craig Draeger
In the last edition of Inquire, I wrote about how social movements like the TEA Party and the Black Bloc represent a shift in the countercultural ethos. The emergence of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) late last year has changed the equation, so this time I'd like to factor OWS into an examination of social movements generally, with the aim of identifying what makes some successful while others fail.
In preparation for this article, I did everything I could to try to understand the Occupy movement better. “OCCUPY EVERYTHING” screamed the headline of The Socialist Worker that I picked up in an independent book store. The lead article beams with pride about the “young campaigners, artists and students” who first congregated on September 17 of last year in Zucotti park to demonstrate.
The writer went to great lengths to compare Occupy to the Egyptian revolution, as well as the 1999 anti-globalization protests in Seattle against the World Trade Organization (WTO). He also laid out an ambitious list of demands, to say the least.
“The initial declaration coming out of the OWS is promising as it challenges the racism and colonialism at home and abroad, criticizes the continued foreclosures, the ridiculous profit of executives and downloading of the crisis onto ordinary people, the declaration calls for renewable energy and collective bargaining rights and so forth (emphasis mine).”
A lot has been said about how the movement prides itself on the plurality of viewpoints it contains, and the inability of passive observers to pin down a particular ideology or agenda. While this pluralism is commendable in its own right, it also renders their movement impotent.
The aim of any social movement is to affect some form of institutional or cultural change, specifically regarding an aspect of our political, social or economic structure that the movement sees as unfair or unearned. In Occupy’s case, the unifying raison d’etre is anger over economic inequality.
Regrettably, they’ve failed to get their message across and affect real change. Their voices were drowned out, not just by the natural cacophony of so many disparate viewpoints, but by their inability to organize into a vehicle for influence.
True power only exists in relationships between individuals, but institutions (like the media or the government) allow for the projection of power over a greater distance and number of people.
All through history, successful movements have channelled public sentiment into something more concrete: engagement with these institutions. Indeed, the success of a social movement is directly proportionate to its ability and willingness to engage with power-intensive institutions.
It’s appropriate that OWS was compared to the WTO protesters, another group who distain so-called “co-optation” by the tainted system and cast shame on those who would “sell-out” their principles by working within it. The Egyptian uprising is a different creature altogether.
The fundamental failure of the Occupy movement is the mistaken conviction that social pressure alone can influence the realm of public policy. It cannot. Significant social pressure can topple a government or a ruler, but it can’t change something as abstract as our economic interrelations. Those can only be changed through the institutions of power.
To see this in practice, recall again the TEA Party. Their success has not been the result of big, noisy rallies. Those only serve to reinforce their other efforts by demonstrating their organizational capacities to the government and media.
The success of the TEA Party has been in influencing institutions. They influence the government by affecting the outcomes of Republican primary races, and influence the public sentiment through favourable media coverage. This is how a successful social movement operates.
Moreover, these aren’t the only ways to broadcast power. Interest groups exist for the express purpose of influencing the government between elections (on behalf of the issues of the elderly, of gun owners, and so on). And there are influential workers’ unions, of course.
So it shouldn't surprise at all that Occupy didn’t force a restructuring of our base and superstructure, because the entire OWS contingent refused to follow the proven formula for successful social movements.
If the government is corrupt, vote them out of office. If they are despotic, take to the streets. But if our economic and social relations are perverted, start working toward their betterment rather than rejecting them outright.
All the successful social movements in history morphed into something different for the sake of accomplishing at least some of their goals. If this is selling out, so be it. Whether Occupy will learn this lesson and change course is yet to be seen, but it didn't look very likely at the time of this writing.
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