Books reviewed: What happened to Occupy?
The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement, by David Graeber, Allen Lane
Meme Wars: The Creative Destruction of Neoclassical Economics, by Kalle Lasn and Adbusters, Penguin
Occupy: Three Inquiries in Disobedience, by WJT Mitchell, Bernard Harcourt and Michael Taussig, University of Chicago Press
Reviewed by Martin Sandbu
When the anti-consumerist magazine Adbusters issued a call to “Occupy Wall Street” (OWS) in 2011, the response took everyone by surprise – including the Occupiers themselves. Anti-capitalist activists and their sympathisers flooded the streets, starting in Zuccotti Park in Manhattan and spreading quickly to St Paul's Cathedral in London and cities across the Anglo-American world. Largely supported by the public, they also captured significant media attention.
In retrospect, the real surprise is that all this did not happen sooner. Anger with banks and the mess they had caused had been boiling for three years. Recall, for example, the (thwarted) attempt by the US House of Representatives – not normally an anti-Wall Street body – to impose a 90 per cent tax rate on bonuses by bailed-out financial companies. That the protests proved shortlived is explained in part by the relative speed with which the Occupy encampments were cleared by shamefully thin-skinned authorities. A more profound reason was yet another surprising fact about the Occupy movement: while it suddenly and unexpectedly held the establishment’s attention, it chose to be silent.
Nobody doubted what the Occupiers were against. Whatever else divided them, they were united in their disgust with a financial capitalism that had sacrificed the rest of society to the “one per cent” at the top, and at the politicians who had betrayed the 99 per cent they claimed to represent. But to the frustration of critics – even sympathetic ones – the movement never stated what it was for. In the battle of ideas around the significance of Occupy – and the entire politics of protest in the wake of the crisis – this is the most paradoxical thing: what the Occupiers find most transformative about their protests counts for their detractors as the principal reason to dismiss them.
As a new crop of Occupy-related books shows, it was a conscious choice to forswear a concrete policy agenda – a choice that in the eyes of Occupiers themselves was vindicated by the course of events. David Graeber, the anarchist anthropologist who by his own account played a key role in organising OWS, writes in The Democracy Projectthat it was “only when a movement appeared that resolutely refused to take the traditional path, that rejected the existing political order entirely as inherently corrupt, that called for the complete reinvention of American democracy, that occupations immediately began to blossom across the country”.
Graeber’s book includes a diary-style first chapter that, without apparent irony, recounts his and fellow activists’ role in creating a “leaderless” movement around the Adbusters appeal. His complaints against the political and economic order are all familiar and often warranted: the corruption of US politics by money; the concentration of wealth and power by the top layer of society; and the increasing number of students trapped in debt.
But the veteran anarchist seems strangely incurious about the Occupiers’ ideas for solving these problems. What moves him are the procedures of participatory democracy they adopted: general assemblies; working groups; the “people’s microphone” (the crowd repeating speakers’ words – a technique born out of a police ban on PA systems in Zuccotti Park); above all, decision by consensus. If the system is irredeemable, this is where the action is – in the creation of a “genuinely democratic culture” outside of it.
Other writers echo his view. “Those who incessantly have wanted to gift the movement a reasonable set of demands ... failed to understand that the Occupy movement was precisely about disobeying that kind of conventional political grammar,” writes Bernard Harcourt, a University of Chicago scholar of politics and contributor to Occupy: Three Inquiries in Disobedience. Harcourt distinguishes “political disobedience” from traditional civil disobedience, although OWS surely witnessed some of that too. Civilly disobedient activists, he writes, accept the consequences of breaking selected laws in order to highlight the injustice of those laws; political disobedience refuses to engage with the existing political order at all... read more:
