Occupy (II)

The encampments

Were the encampments necessary for Occupy to work? And what can or should Occupy do without them? As police forces in one city after another began to roll up the encampments, no question was more discussed within Occupy itself. The most common assertion (whether held seriously or only hopefully, I'm not sure) is that the encampments were a tactic, while Occupy is a movement, and that the movement could go on by changing tactics. I don't think that this is true.

First I'll go back to the beginning. Why did Occupy appear at all? A short answer might be "Because of the economic crisis and the resulting high unemployment" -- the Lesser Depression, or Greater Recession, or whatever you want to call it. All right. But why did it appear in that form? The first post I've written in this series tries to explain why the ordinary forms of politics didn't work. But what made Occupy appear as it did?

Political attempts of this type appear in very Darwinian-evolutionary fashion, complete with variation and selection. At the time when people were setting up the first Occupation, all sorts of other efforts were being tried. There were any number of one-day protests, which occurred and were promptly forgotten. There were nonprofits, other political parties, etc. There were even other encampments -- there were both short-term ones at the time and have been long-lasting protest encampments in D.C. since long before Occupy existed. Why did Occupy take off and those other efforts didn't?

In part it could be random, of course. Perhaps the graphic image of the ballerina on top of the Wall Street bull appealed to people, or the focus on Wall Street rather than a traditional political protest location was different enough to be interesting. It certainly wasn't planned -- the people who came up with the original idea for Occupy Wall Street had no idea what it would turn into (see, if you care, more description at the end of the post here). I'm inclined to think that there were two elements that made Occupy succeed (as much as it did) while other efforts disappeared without notice: the combination of encampments and General Assemblies. The first meant that Occupy was noticed, the second meant that it was an ideological threat.

First, encampments. A typical protest is a one-day wonder. People tend to measure the seriousness of a protest by how much people give up, or what risks they take, in order to achieve it. So of course people understand that the Egyptian protests whose protesters risked getting shot by the military were of the utmost importance. In contrast, showing up for a day and marching somewhere doesn't mean much. This is why the police in America typically don't shoot protestors any more -- not because they are benevolent, or because there will be legal consequences, but because this kind of repression boosts a movement. People who decide to live in a public square are making a much greater commitment than people who march for a day. They are symbolically giving up the very benefits of settled housing that the foreclosure crisis was taking away from people.

But merely living on the streets isn't enough. There are encampments of homeless people all over the U.S. -- some of them a good deal larger and more long-lasting than the Occupy ones. Homeless people aren't considered to be giving up anything that they could get; they simply can't obtain housing. Occupy encampments might have been seen this way if people believed that those in them really were on the streets because they had no other place to live -- but they didn't. (More about the middle-class profile of Occupy later). In any case, what really ensured that the Occupy encampment would be seen as political protest rather than desperation housing was the General Assembly.

The General Assembly is an outgrowth of anarchist ideas, though it carefully was not labelled "anarchist". In connection with an encampment, it is a direct challenge to the system, put in the most elemental terms that everyone understands. Most political organizations have hierarchical leadership, but there are any number of political groups where the membership meets and decides what to do next. Then those members go back to their private and work spheres after their meeting, and the important parts of their life happen. A General Assembly running an encampment has people, meeting directly in democratic consensus (putting off for the moment the inherent opposition between those two terms), deciding how they will live. To quote David Graeber, "You’re creating a vision of the sort of society you want to have in miniature." The General Assembly changed protestors into creators, providing the food, housing, jobs, and direct political participation that the larger society was denying to people. And unlike a commune, the General Assembly was doing this right in the middle of the public square where everyone could see it and join it.

When Occupy started, the left-of-center activists in the U.S. divided fairly quickly into people who were active in Occupy (or wished they could be) and people who just didn't get it. Those who didn't get it were generally those to the center, who were indebted to the system as it was, and those to the far left, whose interest was in demonstrating their superior analytical understanding and in co-optation. And those who were active in Occupy and those who wished they could be quickly divided from each other based on who had a 9-5 job -- but I'm getting ahead of myself. In any case, the right wing pretty universally got it.

All of a sudden, right wing rhetoric about Occupy went into full David Neiwert-documented-style eliminationist mode. Occupiers were commonly described as bearers of lice, tuberculosis, and crime, as a disease vector that had to be stamped out. Local governments everywhere decided that the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances, was one thing, but what about the grass? They were killing the grass! The political class of people who mattered had no trouble seeing Occupy for the challenge that it was. All of a sudden people on the right began to take an intense interest in public health regulations, grounds maintenance, and on the fair use of public space that none of them had been to in years.

And the full force of the police was called out in order to remove this menace to public order. Everyone reading this is probably familiar with the broad outlines of the police actions that took place. But it is worth re-emphasizing that the main encampments did not simply dwindle away or have people give up. Police destroyed them with mass evictions, hundreds of arrests, and pepper spray.

Everywhere, it turned out that public space -- or public / private space -- was not really public after all. The case of the small Occupy group that I was in might be a good example. We were in a public park that had been deeded to the town on the explicitly written condition that the town couldn't keep people from sleeping there overnight. But, the town decided, a tent was a structure, and a structure required a permit. And a permit couldn't be issued for that area, since it was a park. We could sleep there in a New England winter if we could sleep outside in a sleeping bag on a tarp. But if we kept our tents there, we were going to get arrested.

Why were the encampments so threatening? Let them sit there through the winter and slowly dwindle, some people publicly counseled. Some people in Occupy were quite surprised too. We could get this much notice simply by hanging out in a park? Good deal. I could come up with a number of reasons why they were. The threat to the public order of people publicly living unlike how our system says that they should. The idea that people might start to develop alternative power structures that owed nothing to the existing system. But mostly I think that the political history of the industrialized countries just sends up an emotional red flag whenever unemployed people start gathering in public complaining about having no jobs and not disappearing. The political class is highly motivated at a basic level to try to make that go away. If the intellectual ringhtwingers always think they're fighting the French Revolution, and the nuttier ones the Communist Party, America's more pragmatic political class is always looking out for people acting as they did in the Great Depression.

At any rate, what happened when the encampments were shut down? People in Occupy mostly said, all right, we'll find some other tactic. And they didn't. Without the encampments, what did people have? Protests, petitions, and electoral politics, just as before. And flash mobs. Flash mobs are even better than normal protests, I guess, because they are there in a flash and gone in a flash.

And people in Occupy had already started to discover something else about the General Assemblies. They were really pretty horrible for running anything except an encampment. An encampment has some very concrete jobs, done in some very concrete ways. Once they were gone, people were free to consider goals, projects, and process at length without having to worry about how the trash was going to be picked up. A General Assembly might still work pretty well if people go into with an already existing level of basic political agreement that the people in Occupy really didn't have. But as anarchist testbeds, seeing whether the people of America are ready to handle direct democratic consensus if they're thrown into it, the effects were pretty frequently tragicomic. And the 99% started to discover that they really weren't the 99%.

This is getting long as it is; more about the post-encampment phase in the next post.

Occupy (I)

I've been meaning to write about the Occupy movement in the U.S. for some time, and I've realized that there's too much that I'd like to write about to fit it all into one post. If I'm going to write about it, I'll have to do it a bit at a time, within a loose series divided into sections.

My experience of Occupy has been at a college town in New England, so it's been from the margins, not at one of the major urban centers where most of the action has been.

Summary

The Occupy movement in the U.S. was a short-term success in that it increased the media exposure and political salience of left economic issues generally. It did better than any other form of left activism around economics attempted at the time. The movement did not have long-term staying power, however. It was destroyed by police repression -- once the Occupy encampments were forcibly dispersed, the movement itself lost what it needed to exist. The encampments were necessary both because they gave Occupy its influence and because its form of organization contained tensions that made it unstable outside that environment. In a larger sense, Occupy was a middle-class movement, and middle-class economic protest movements are generally hard to sustain.

I expect to write a good deal explaining what I mean by that.

I. What did Occupy want?

I'll skip over the early history of Occupy, which I've written about on this blog as it happened and which should be generally familiar to anyone interested enough to read this. But there is still a general sense in which some people will say "I never understood what they wanted. Why didn't they issue a list of demands?" This is a form of misunderstanding that's common enough so that I think it's worth following an example through in order to try to clear it up.

In fact, some elements of Occupy did issue demands and write economic position papers, but overall, Occupy steadfastly resisted doing so. Let's imagine that Occupy had. In particular, let's imagine that when asked "what are your demands?" as everyone was doing at one point, people in Occupy had decided that a top demand was "Reinstate Glass-Steagall". That is not a radical demand by any means, given that Glass-Steagall was originally passed in 1933 and is a straightforward form of governmental regulation of an industry. The general idea has wide support among economic experts, as evidenced by even Sandy Weill, former CEO of Citigroup, calling for it in July 2012.

All right, so imaginary Occupy has issued this demand. What happens next? Nothing. It has to be remembered, above all, that Occupy happened during Obama's term, not Bush's. And Obama and the Democratic Party generally oppose reinstating Glass-Steagall because the financial industry has captured both of the parties in the U.S. two-party setup.

There are typical ways in which people work within the system towards a desired end. They were tried. The people who say things like "Well, Occupy could have got something done if they'd just buckled down and done X" apparently don't know that X was being attempted at the time. Lobbying? Sure, there were many left groups who were lobbying around this issue and still are, to no effect against the concentrated power of political bribery. Running primary challengers in order to drag the party to the left? The netroots have been trying that, and Obama has successfully cut off any space there. A third party? Pretty much mathematically impossible for one to have lasting effect given how U.S. elections are set up. People power, demonstrations in the streets? The media and response to media have evolved so that standard protests, petitions, and so on are meaningless and ignored. Protests against the Iraq War, for instance, were large and widespread, and did nothing.

People in Occupy were systemically cut off from the usual ways in which democratic opinion is supposed to affect power. If they'd demanded anything, nothing would have happened. Everyone knew this. That is why people opposed to Occupy were generally loudest in their demand for a list of demands -- there is nothing so dispiriting as a demand that is an immediate loss because there is no apparent way of even approaching getting it.

I'm tempted to say that what Occupy really wanted was that one of our two political parties would actually work towards left economic interests. If the Democrats had done that, there would have been no real reason for Occupy to exist at all. Certainly the Democrats would have lost sometimes, but the energy of people working towards those issues would have gone through the party, not outside it.

But this wasn't an explicit demand of Occupy, and from what I saw, there were always a large number of people in Occupy who didn't agree with it even implicitly. Instead, Occupy settled on an existential challenge. They would break out of normal life and settle in the public square until the system was forced to recognize them. This was rational, given the lack of alternatives, and it worked. At that point it was up to the system to decide what had to be done to appease the people who weren't following the script, and who weren't helpfully disappearing at the end of the day as normal protestors did. If the system had decided on appeasement, elements like the reinstatement of Glass-Steagall would have followed naturally. By "the system" here I'm not talking about the capitalist system or something as large and abstract as that; this was up to a relatively finite set of political decision makers.

This challenge was taken seriously, and got a serious response -- much more response than anything else the left in America tried at the time. In the end, political decision makers chose repression, not appeasement, and repression was successful because Occupy didn't have a broad enough base of political support. I'll write more about that later. But Occupy can not be understood without understanding the political choices available at the time, and "what it wanted" is quite explicable in terms of those constraints.

Majorities and the left

I thought about titling this "Non-electoral politics, USA, September 2012" just to match the one below, but it's not quite as symmetrical as that. I've also thought about writing a wrap-up of what I learned from the Occupy movement now that it's effectively dead, but I'm not quite ready to. This will be a little bit of both.

The 20th century left, broadly defined, has always had problems with democracy. If the left is supposed to speak for the majority of people, and the nation in which a particular left exists is more or less democratic, why can't they just win? The Marxist left devoted a whole lot of energy to this question -- theories about the interests of the proletariat being the only really important and historically necessary interests of society, theories about how the vanguard party spoke for the ignorant proletariat, and of course a wide range of theories about false consciousness. All of this can pretty easily be dismissed along with the rest of Marx-worship, now that it's over.

Then the left-liberals had their turn. "What's the Matter With Kansas" and all that. People are supposedly fooled by social issues into not understanding their real, economic interests as defined by people who know better -- this is leftist false consciousness writ small.

Occupy, as I've written before, commonly confused their slogan with their political reality. "We, are, the 99% -- and you are too!" makes a good chant. But of course it's politically false. 99% of the people at the bottom of the wealth distribution share the defined characteristic that they are the 99% of people at the bottom of the wealth distribution, but this does not make them vote the same way or believe the same things or have the same political interests. The Occupy people that I saw were in the main that part of the white left-leaning intelligentsia that did not currently have a 9-5 job.

Who is the conservative base in America? John Quiggin looked at that here. 49% of working-class white people vote GOP. And they make up about a quarter of the GOP base. The largest group in the GOP base is middle-to-high income white people without college degrees. The left in the U.S. is mostly non-white people and educated but not rich people. The left is not "the working class" and does not speak for the working class. Nor does the working class, as a reified entity, support the left.

The whole idea of democracy breaks down, or at least becomes highly hypocritical, if you don't think that people are the best judges of their own interests. I don't think that the left should come up with a new round of excuses for themselves and for that part of the working class that is "supposed" to vote left but doesn't. What are some of those interests?

A good number of the working-class people in America are racists, to take one common example. Racism is perfectly rational for some of those people, just as rational as support for oligarchy is for some rich people. They're never going to do well no matter who is in charge, and racism gives them the comfort of knowing that no matter how poor they are, they're white, and therefore according to their values always at least one step from the bottom. That is more important to them than any economic solidarity that the left would like to pretend exists. That is their overriding political interest: the defense of a value system that gives them a sense of intrinsic worth. They aren't being fooled by racism into letting elites manipulate them. It's a trade-off: they give the elites support for oligarchy, and the elites give them support for racism.

It's not all racism, of course. The match to Romney's moochers and looters speech is supposed to be Obama's clinging to guns and religion speech. People find self-worth in all kinds of things. I wouldn't say that what's politically important to them is fake and what's important to the left or to me is real. I would, of course, say that what they believe is destructive and wrong, and that I think they should be defeated. But there is no magical solidarity between us that occurs because we are all in the 99%.

I don't know what the answer to this is, in practice. But the left's categories and self-image seem to me to be all wrong, inherited from an era in which we lost, and in which the strongest parts of the left were authoritarian in any case. I've always understood the left to be about freedom: the negative freedoms of people not controlling your actions as long as you aren't hurting others, the positive ones about using socially created wealth to give everyone the resources that they need in order to act, the overall support for a functioning ecosystem that is required for people to do anything. Being on the left has nothing to do with who is or is not a worker, or who is or isn't wealthy. It has to do with what kind of society you want to live in.

Electoral politics, USA, September 2012

Certain commonplace ideas have been trotted out in every recent American Presidential election. The candidates, people are told, are moving to the center for the general election after tacking to the right or left during the primary. There is a nudge-and-wink, in-the-know quality to this. Everyone who follows politics is supposed to know that this move to the center is insincere, a cheap theatrical to fool the low-information rubes who make up the only undecided voters at this point.

People don't generally seem to have considered what it means that Obama is moving to the left for the general election. The Democratic convention was supposedly a festival of the assertive, confident liberalism that people have looked for in vain throughout Obama's actual term. I've seen plenty of well-known political bloggers argue that turnout may be more important than focussing all appeals on the small pool of undecided voters in states that matter, and with Obama's moves to "evolve" on gay marriage and to stop some deportations, I've guessed that he's decided that he needs someone to actually be enthusiastic about him. After all, you need people to get out the vote. But the corollary of the rhetorical moves to the left for the general election is that he has no intention of governing that way. Otherwise it wouldn't be a change that he's making now.

Meanwhile, what's happening with Romney? As I write this, a tape has recently surfaced of him telling donors that he's written off 47% of the country as moochers and looters who depend on handouts from the government and will never vote for him. Basically, all Republicans now talk as if they are cartoons drawn by hippies sometime in the 1970s. It used to be that only a few fringe leftists described America as an empire, until the neoconservatives took over and said that yes it was and we should be damned proud of it. People would have derided it as crazy if you said that the GOP political elite would generally turn out to be followers of Ayn Rand. And of course "everyone knew" that the contemporary GOP's core objection to a black President would not be as crudely racist as thinking that he couldn't run for election because he was literally un-American, literally an African.

The hippies, as usual in this decade, have been right. That really is who the GOP is. Under these circumstances, either Obama will win, or basically nothing he could do would make him win. I think that he'll most likely win. After which we'll be back to GOP policies in all but name, market-based do-nothing environmentalism, health care individual mandates, assassination and aggressive wars, a financial system run on the behalf of elites, basically everything that the part of the GOP that ever cared about policy would have liked, stripped of their desperate craziness and given a liberal-managerial sheen.

If the Democrats do win this election, it won't be a triumph of any kind of ideas over any other kind of ideas. On the contrary, as far as I can see the broad outlines of governance for the elite are going to be the same no matter who wins. This is mostly an election about demographics, and prefigures what I think will be the GOP's perpetual loss in national elections. There is no way that they can give up on racism: their funders don't actually care about it, but it's how they get enough votes. And there simply isn't a high enough percentage of white people in the population any more.

As a Republican strategist said, with rare apparent honesty, "'This is the last time anyone will try to do this' — 'this' being a near total reliance on white votes to win a presidential election." (Quoting Jonathan Chait quoting the strategist). But of course it's not the last election in which they will try. They will try in every election in which the GOP exists; they have nothing else. They are trapped into one loss after another, unable to keep themselves from demanding identity papers from the same Hispanics who were supposed to be their next socially conservative base of support. Their funding is now inextricably hooked to crazy billionaires who will insist on making their craziness public.

So the right will lose, but the left will not win. The lesser evil is clear to a bare majority, and a bare majority will dutifully vote Democratic. That is the best that can be expected from our system, and any actual political progress is going to happen elsewhere. ...Read more

Health care redux

In my last post, I was wondering whether anyone would understand the concept of how criticisms blend into each other (assuming that anyone read it). Here's a post from Ian Welsh:

Roberts voted how he did because health insurance companies are absolutely desperate for the money they will get from the mandate. All of the legitimacy arguments are bullshit, about 70% of Americans want Obamacare repealed. This is more similar to TARP than anything else: it is a massive corporate giveaway, opposed by the majority of the population, and passed over their dissent.

(Update: the post was later clarified to read that 70% of Americans want the mandate repealed, not Obamacare as a whole repealed -- which I think is a distinction without a difference, since I don't think that the unstated reasons that people have for opposing Obamacare are really separable from their opinion of the mandate.)

Do 70% of the population oppose Obamacare because it is "a massive corporate giveaway"? No. Articles like the one that I linked make an easy seque from opposition to "Opponents argue that such a mandate is an unconstitutional expansion of federal power, amounting to Congress ordering private citizens to buy a particular product." But that is the rationalized argument for public consumption. I would guess that real reasons for opposing Obamacare include "because Obama is black", "because I hate those leeches who want my money and I hope they die", "because there will be death panels", and, on the slightly more rational side, "because Obama is a Democrat". Maybe ten or fifteen percent are opposed to it because it's a massive corporate giveaway.

So there is opposition, yes -- but the idea that those who oppose it agree with each other isn't true. So, on the other side, do the elites agree? The idea that the decision is overdetermined -- that the insurance companies had a preferred outcome and that's why it happened that way -- doesn't appear to be true, as far as we know. The risible failure to cut-and-paste "concur" to/from "dissent" in the Supreme Court opinions makes it clear that the four more conservative judges thought that the decision was going to go another way until the last minute. If Roberts had voted the other way, all of the people who said that this was predetermined by elite interests would have still said the same thing. People could argue back and forth over whether it was straightforward elite interest, "enlightened" long-term elite interest, whether one set of elites edged out another, or so on. But the Occam's Razor explanation, at least to me, appears to be that Roberts decided as he did for basically unimportant personal reasons. Saying that the insurance industry is smart enough to figure out which decision is best for it, and capable enough to get this decision implemented, runs into the critical problem that our elites are not smart or capable. Every time we're able to observe what they do, they're doing stupid and medium-term self-destructive things.

How the system works is that none of the possible solutions on offer will be noxious to elites. Roberts could have decided to strike down the law and let people suffer under the current system, or to implement the massive corporate giveaway. But he couldn't decide that we'll have a single payer system. None of those solutions survive the gauntlet of elites at every stage of our politics. At the end, we get the arbitrary decision of a single person, whether it's how we're going to kill teenagers with drones or how we're going to keep bailing out banks, and none of our elites will be competent enough to control the exact form of what we end up with. But that won't really matter to them.

It may matter to us, however. Massive corporate giveaway or not, I can say that Romneycare is far superior to the private insurance that I had to buy directly in Massachusetts before it was created. I think that people on the left of the spectrum generally have good reason to prefer that the decision was made this way rather than being struck down. It's just that if we got something better than we might have otherwise, this time, it was because of the equivalent of a lucky die roll. And our political system is what makes this the best we can do again and again.

Today's Supreme Court Health Care Decision

Today, the decision about whether millions of people would get health care was left to one person, John Roberts. There was plenty of contorted legal reasoning on all sides to justify any decision that John Roberts wanted to make for us. The reason why he decided as he did can not be judged with any certainty, but given the clash of competing legal and ethical principles and how any decision could have presented itself as being principled, "principle" can be regarded as standing for "how John Roberts wanted to present himself to history".

In a degraded political system, it's impossible to write anything with clarity. If I write that the Constitution gives us a dysfunctional politics in which elites make important decisions for the rest of us, it instantly blends into every other criticism of the system, in which belief that the decision is invalid because Obama is supposed to be a Kenyan Muslim goes right along with the U.S.-libertarians believing that it's invalid because taxation is theft and with the various moderates of all kinds talking about "activist judges" or "executive overreach" if the particular decision happened to be one that they didn't like.

We don't actually live within a rule of law. For a while, Bush was the Decider of what was legal. Then Obama took it on himself to decide who we should kill. Ben Bernanke has decided that we should remain in the Little Depression. The Supreme Court chief judge gets to decide on close elections and various social issues. Underlings produce the rationalizations, which are not really worth studying, and a two-tiered system of enforcement ensures that elites are not punished for whatever they decide to do, whether it would be illegal for lesser people to do or not.

The first step in getting out of oligarchy is to reject the political nonsense that we grew up with. The Constitution is a relic, and we'd be better off without it.

P.S.: Also, see here.

Occupy

Today Zuccotti Park was cleared. Today the first tent went back up at Occupy Northampton, weeks after the police made us take them down.

We aren't going away.