The Occupy Wall Street movement more effectively addresses the cause of the financial crisis than economists and discussions in the mainstream press. Further, this movement embodies democratic solutions for a way beyond the crisis. This essay focuses on Occupy Wall Street’s facilitating of political action from disparate, heterogeneous partisans; increasing of transparency and participation in decision-making; and relying upon both human-scaled and participatory technologies. Through these processes, the Occupy Wall Street micro-community embodies a vision for a pluralistic, direct democratic society and demonstrates it through practice.
Three years into an economic recession that rivals the Great Depression, economists are scrambling for explanations of its origins and the steps to take. While there is much hemming and hawing over causes, and plenty of caution and hesitation over solutions – especially those that might impinge on profits at financial institutions – tens of millions of Americans are unemployed, and just as many are in nearly catastrophic situations. But one would be in error to expect economists to focus on this group of Americans that outnumber the entire population of any member state in the European Union. “They’re happy to take the credit in the good times, but the disciples of this false science are hard to find in a recession” (Jenkins, 2009).
On September 17, 2011, several hundred activists marched to Wall Street, near the New York Stock Exchange. This was the beginning of an uprising now known as Occupy Wall Street. This broad group of citizens, who claim to be united by being “the 99%” against the corporate influence in American politics, was more clear in assigning blame for the financial crisis: it belongs to the top 1%. This group quickly grew to several thousand protestors who took control of Zuccotti Park. They expressed concerns ranging from access to medicine and healthcare to oil spills, truth in media to internal colonialism and imperialism, weapons to healthy food, and animal rights to the rights of children (General Assembly, 2011). Three weeks later, the park remains occupied, and the movement has inspired over 1100 other solidarity protests and occupations throughout the world, mostly in the United States (Occupy Together, 2011).
These heterogeneous groups have a functioning pluralism, whereas “liberal democratic states have not sufficiently practiced it” (Lindblom, 1986, p. 352). Perhaps the lack of familiarity with authentic pluralism is what has inspired perplexity toward the movement, especially among journalists. Most media pundits express exasperated confusion by this diverse group of interests expressed by an even more visibly diverse group of activists and citizens. Commentators on FoxNews complain about the lack of a cohesive message and clearly stated goals. The New York Times ran a story on the “faulty aim” of the movement, condemning its “lack of cohesion and its apparent wish to pantomime progressivism rather than practice it knowledgably” (Bellafante, 2011).
FoxNews reporter Griff Jenkins asked protestor Jesse LaGreca, “how do you want to see this [end]? If you could have it in a perfect way, how would it be?” LaGreca replied, “I wouldn’t like to see this end. I would like to see the conversation continue” (Grant, 2011). This micro-community has come to represent a parallel political model based on direct democracy and rooted in affinity. Whereas commentators and reporters – as well as their viewing public – are accustomed to responding to protest marches and demonstrations expressing the politics of specific cause and populated by a group of citizens defined by a narrowly specified aim, Occupy Wall Street engenders the all-embracing meeting point of partisans. At this juncture, the people are united by a politics of negativity: in identifying a common enemy in the ruling elites; and a politics of practice: pluralist, direct democracy. So in this sense, as LaGreca commented, there is no end. Even if the politics of negativity is transcended with the actual removal of corporate influence in governance, the process remains. This is a model of change exemplified by “the newest social movements” that seeks to generate a living, nonhegemonic model of politics as a revolutionary process, in contrast to that which would see the seizure and control of state power (Day, 2005; Al-Jazeera, 2011). As Lindblom reminds us, “no social scientist or researcher can tightly derive short-run or middle-run interim steps from a model of a far-distant, wholly harmonious society…” (Lindblom, 1986, p. 364). Occupy Wall Street appears to embrace Agamben’s expression of “a politics and a life that are yet to be entirely thought” (2000, p. 111).
Douglas Rushkoff explains that “It is difficult to comprehend a 21st century movement from the perspective of the 20th century politics, media, and economics in which we are still steeped” (Think Occupy Wall St. Is A Phase? You Don’t Get It., 2011). The politics of the past century stress the objective pursuit of goals for the broader public, emphasizing the common good. This tradition led to “the public interest to be defined around conventional positions… However another result is that dissident interests are disproportionately deprived…” (Lindblom, 1986, p. 349). This is precisely why Occupy Wall Street is so important to turn to for insight – this is perhaps the first model of a truly postmodern movement in the United States. Some might see the WTO protests in Seattle as an antecedent, and that event has an important genealogical place in the development of what we now see in New York. But in turning to the decision-making and processual aspects of Occupy Wall Street, we see that transparency and participation is embedded in this movement, and without a predetermined “cause,” list of demands, or a clear beginning and end.
The actual physical arrangement, as well as the organizational technologies and the mechanisms for decision-making depict unique features of this newest movement. First, the occupying of a physical space emphasizes proximal origins. Without walls and doors dividing people, the occupiers are in constant interaction. Occupy Wall Street has a unique capability to develop politics through interaction among a variety of partisans, and through challenging existing structures – both institutional but also internalized – beyond the level of abstraction, and instead through practice. The capacity for power to be challenged and democracy to be exercised not through ideology and structures but through practical decision-making and action appears to better connect with findings in social research about how humans associate with and think about one another.
Second, the organizational technologies employed are explicitly participatory. Occupy Wall Street, without predetermined demands or goals, and with its General Assembly structure, allows participants to speak freely to shape its evolving politics. Decisions are concensed after anyone can take the open floor. This leads to synchronous yet slow decision-making. Asynchronous decision-making can lead to the prioritization of rationalizing, reduction to ideology, and a diminishing of the role of affect. Rapid decisions suppress certain voices and propel conventional thinking and action. Democracy that is direct and participatory is notoriously slow, however is deliberate and mindful: only those things worth the investment of time and cognitive energy are endeavored.
Additionally the use of human-scaled technologies pulls participants together. Amplification is banned in the parks in New York. To effectively communicate with a large crowd, speakers break up their communication into small phrases that are echoed by the crowd. Sometimes this occurs in succession, so the speech is transmitted in waves emitted away from the oratory among the audience. This is referred to as the “people’s mic,” which introduces reciprocity and feedback, thereby producing a democratic communication as opposed to “the more conventional Saussaurean model of sender-message-receiver, which so easily becomes the conservative media model that produces non-communication” (Mason, 2011). When author of The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein, spoke at Occupy Wall Street, she characterized the people’s mic as encouraging one to “Say unto others what you would have them say unto you, only way louder” (Occupy Wall Street: The Most Important Thing in the World Now, 2011). This is a human-scaled technology in the most literal sense.
Too often we are apprised of complicated or muddling explanations of a predicament and offered simplistic and reductionist recommendations for a way out of it. Occupy New York offers a break from this tradition. The financial crisis is their (the 1%’s) crisis, yet we (the 99%) have to bear the brunt of it. What Occupy Wall Street encourages is an attention to practice and process. While the liberal democratic state has failed to integrate pluralism, Occupy Wall Street shows the degree to which transparency and participation is essential for partisan politics to play out. Further, it lacks both the demand for the feasible and the focus toward official representatives (c.f. Lindblom, 1986). These critical aspects are embedded in the very processes, organizations and technologies employed by Occupy Wall Street, and thus its commitment to democracy is not merely ideological but also practical. None of this is to say that Occupy Wall Street will take monumental steps forward; rather, the argument is that this model enables such steps while the existing political, organizational and technological structures prohibit them.
This blog has been heavily redacted from its original version, and an updated and revised version now appears in the journal Humanity & Society (February 2012).
Works Cited
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This is fascinating. I’ve been struggling to explain the importance of both analysis and process — others have said it, but I haven’t been able to capture the words, so it’s important to me that you’ve written it. I participated tonight in the comment stream while watching #OccupyMN start to get organized. Some folks were quite wary of the People’s Mic technique; I love Naomi Klein’s characterization of it! Others, quite clearly, were frustrated with the amount of time and wanted to “get something done.” Thank you for pointing out why it’s important not to jump there, for several reasons.
Thanks for your thoughts on this. The concerns for the people’s mic is that:
1) It “seems cultish” or “fascoid.” I heard someone compare it to the borg (Star Trek).
2) It slows things down.
On the first item, I couldn’t disagree more. Perhaps this concern is coming from many who haven’t participated in the people’s mic yet. (I have.) Imagine personally engaging in speaking the positions of all the many people and all their varied ideas – in fact, saying many things you disagree with, but also things you’ve never fully considered before. Most people repeating statements are “twinkling” (giving hand gestures involving holding both hands up and waving all fingers, indicating approval or support) or by showing disapproval (waving fingers downward). This is an amazing exercise in active listening. I would imagine any educational psychologist would be impressed by this practice.
On the second item, I think that when slowness is integrated into actual procedures that it’s almost always a good thing. It allows more time for reflection – emotionally and rationally – and give more opportunity for people to think about whether they have something helpful to contribute to the conversation or not. It also encourages people to chose their words more wisely. It additionally makes the effects of speech much more explicit, uncovering its power – for better or worse. Slowness challenges our notion that more and bigger and more complicated is better. Slowness encourages less, smallness, and the simple. As a big fan of the work of E.F. Schumacher, Ivan Illich and the direction given by appropriate technology, as well as Kirkpatrick Sale’s discussion of the human-scale, I deeply appreciate this latter approach. The people’s mic is a human-scaled appropriate technology.
In an online discussion with a longtime friend and radical in Phoenix who is involved in organizing Occupy Phoenix, he mentioned his hope that they would have amplified sound precisely because he doesn’t like the people’s mic. The reason is because there is a developing ‘leadership’ in the organizing who indicate both inexperience and some politically problematic positions (i.e. they are working directly with the police, condemning as violent anyone who gets arrested, and making statements as concensed by the group without votes). I think the people’s mic – as opposed to amplification – actually helps prevent the ability of leaderships developing. When these people try to dominate others by forcing their speech on them, the megaphone or microphone helps make this possible. But when you are people-powering the communication of someone who is attempting to dominate and control the movement, you can pull your participation and disempower those who have utilized softer forms of power (charisma, discipline, etc.) to elevate themselves.
The danger in this last point is that unpopular ideas will be disempowered as well. However, access to a microphone is easier to control and keep particular people from accessing it. It’s a definitive gateway that’s easy to maintain.
Thanks so much for your comments and your contribution to the movement. Best of luck to you and yours in your community.
Cheers,
Ben
Ben, to elaborate on the human mic that breaks up the codes of non-communication:
The mass-media working to produce non-communication: transmitter-message-receiver, or encoder-message-decoder.
Baudrillard’s essay ‘Requiem for the Media’ responds to this equation:
“The message itself being structure by its code and determined by the context. ..This structure is based on the same arbitrariness as signification: two terms are artificially isolated and artificially reunited by an objectivized content called a message. There is no reciprocal relation nor presence of one to the other of these terms, since both are determined in isolation in their relation to the message and the code, an inter-medium which maintains both of them in a respective situation, distanced from one another, a distance which comes to fulfill the full automated ‘value’ of the message (in fact: its exchange value). This ‘scientific’ construction institutes a model of simulation of communication for which reciprocity, the antagonism of the partners, or the ambivalence of their exchange is immediately excluded.” p. 87, Utopia Deferred.
The abstract bipolarity of the terms of communication. The mega-system of centralized control is a myth – it doesn’t need to play itself out in Orwellianism, accordingly “the is censorship in their [mass-medias] operation itself; they don’t need a mega-structure. They never cease from being totalitarian: they realize in some way the ideal of what we can call a decentralized totalitarianism.”
And the mass-media have attempted to insert a ‘reversibility’ into their circuits – through public opinion polls, televised voting, letters from readers, call-ins, etc.) whilst simtaneously still leaving room for speech without response – that is, without changing the discrimination of the roles. The communicative simulation.
On this note, perhaps the human mic is a means of symbolic-exchange, since by exchanging messages on the human-to-human basis it allows for feedback and perhaps (why not?) collapses ‘distances’ between the people.
Baudrillard cites Umberto Eco ‘ changing the contents of messages changes nothing, one must modify the reading codes, impose other reading codes.
From the same article, speaking on May 68 graffiti, “It’s transgressive not because it substitutes another content, another discourse, but because it responds, there, in place, and breaks the fundamental rule of all media, non-response.” & “it simply breaks the code. It does not offer itself as a text to be deciphered alongside the advertising discourse: it lets itself be seen as transgressinon.”
May one hypothesize that the human mic works in a similar way? The charm of symbolic exchange is the gift: the one who gives in implicated in the gift. I think the human mic works like this — when you speak you are implicated in the gift of speech. Perhaps the human mic breaks the technology of speech coded on exchange-value?
lots of spelling mistakes in the above, apologies !
Wow! This was an insightful read. I stumbled upon it today because I was looking to see if anyone else had made a connection between OWS and Day’s work. I have written about this myself on my own blog: http://insightyou.wordpress.com/2011/10/26/the-crisis-of-democracy-and-occupy-wall-street/
Keep up the great work!
My hope for this emerging movement the 99% occupy all, is for it to rally the disenchanted who now can only elect media and money promoted goons to carry out the work of the elite control of finiance methods that fail due to overspeculation and greed hurting others & not themselves.
When enough people can understand that the taxpayer/worker provides the foundation for all wealthy elite that has positioned itself as the know it all of civilizations progress so long as they can keep bleeding the serf/worker/ provider.
Today this elite can not solve the clean available water problem, the clean energy problem, the money problem,the job problem mostly due to not being able to allow cheaper, cleaner, technologies they have yet not got control of so a blackout on the wide range of solutions individuals have come up with exists.
The elite opperate a false system of money supply treating it as a comodity rather than a means of supplying goods and services, the speculation and the expansion of our money system is proven false every time banks fail and turn belly up with no money and grabbing at what the taxpayer has left after being robbed beforehand.
Today the people are fed up and need a new method of governing themselves bypassing the elite selected goons we now call government this can be set up so that people can develop issues, vote on them as well as choosing who will do our will in the implementation of the public will, this can be extended to hiring and firing those we place our trust in as well.
The old guard have got into place laws that allow fractional reserve banking that gets its reserves small as they are compared to advances from such things as “government securities” “treasury bonds” and even other debts most of which are backed by the hard pressed taxpayer, laws like this that allow interest to be charged on the portion of a loan that had a tiny fraction of assett would be changed if the public decided they were benifiting only the 1% of the public if they had direct democracy without all the money promoted fanfare provided for selected goons as it is today lets make 2012 a year for a better world let us all think of how this can be achieved by joining in the development of ideas in the forums of the 99% & occupy groups.