Mainstream liberals and the Institutional Left frequently
criticize the Occupy movement for its lack of public spokespersons and
its lack of clear demands. But according to David Graeber, it came very
close to having those things — and to being just another protest that
fizzled out after a few days.
Graeber, an anarchist University of London anthropology professor, showed up for a preliminary meeting held in early August to prepare for the next month’s Occupation. As he recounts, it was shaping up as a typical top-down movement controlled by the usual suspects of the Institutional Left. Adbusters, which posted the original call for a September 17 Occupation, New Yorkers Against Budget Cuts, and the Workers World Party (which created the International ANSWER coalition at the outset of the Iraq War in 2003), between them pretty well had things sewn up.
My guess is that had those groups kept control, Occupy would have had all the public spokespersons and demands anyone could want — and would have been in the news for maybe a week.
Fortunately, Graeber and some friends began talking with other “horizontals” — Wobblies, veterans of the Greek and Spanish protests, etc. — who, like him, had been hoping for something on the libertarian model of the Spanish indignados’ protest. They quickly coalesced into a General Assembly and bypassed the power grab of Workers’ World et al.
Those who object miss the point. A large share of those participating in OWS have learned that playing by the normal rules of “progressive” politics — getting out the vote and organizing pressure groups — doesn’t work. They tried that in 2008, electing the most “progressive” president of a lifetime with the biggest majority since LBJ, and a Democratic super-majority in Congress. And then they were betrayed as Obama revealed himself to be either totally ineffectual or, worse yet, a conscious stooge of Wall Street.
As Graeber says, “Clearly, if progressive change was not possible through electoral means in 2008, it simply isn’t going to possible at all. And that is exactly what very large numbers of Americans appear to have concluded.”
So this time they’re not playing by the old rules. What, exactly, are they trying to accomplish? I believe their significance has to more to do with their form of organization itself — a distributed, self-organized network — as a model of the society they hope to build, than with any concrete demands. In Rowan Wolf’s elegant phrase, “the organizational model … is the carrier wave of the movement.”
As Graeber points out, it’s their lack of specific demands that gives them strength. Despite op-ed jabbering to the contrary, it’s hard to miss what their main focus is: Hatred for Wall Street, for the concentration of wealth, for crony capitalism, and for the unholy alliance between Big Business and the state.
That common set of values is the basic operating platform of the movement. Beyond that, the specific agendas built on that platform are beyond counting. It includes everyone from libertarian communists to social democrats and conventional liberals to left-wing market anarchists like me, and quite a few Paulistas who want to abolish the Fed.
Occupy, with its organizational style and the cultural memes it propagates, is a source of strength for all those individual agendas. The loosely allied subgroups are modules operating on a common platform. The very fact that so many different groups share a common brand, united only by their enmity toward plutocracy, is the movement’s source of power.
That’s the same stigmergic model of organization used by the open source software community. The basic platform can support as many modular utilities as there are developers. The utilities themselves reflect the needs and concerns of individual developers. Likewise, there are as many sub-movements piggybacked on Occupy as there are reasons for hating Wall Street, ways of being affected by it, and walks of life among the Occupiers.
In Occupy, like other stigmergically organized projects ranging from Linux and Wikipedia to al Qaeda, nobody needs “permission” from “leadership” to try out ideas. And whatever idea works for one node instantly becomes property of the whole network. “Occupy Our Homes,” which sprang up almost overnight, is one example of such stigmergic innovation. Other groups are likely to arrive independently at innovative ideas, like flash-mobbing the homes and country clubs of politicians, CEOs and plutocrats. As they used to say in the civics textbooks, Occupy is a “laboratory of democracy.”
If you want to see “leadership” and unified agendas, go back fifty years and look at GM or the CBS evening news. We don’t need it. “Leadership” is so 20th century.
Five Dumbest Reasons Not to Support the Occupy Movement
Reality check: That’s the kind of people you want to suck up to—people who would be offended by a peaceful occupation of a park? With friends like these…
*It’s divisive. It sets up a separation between some kinds of human beings and others, between the 99% and the 1%. It’s not Buddhist enough. It’s not Zen. It’s not spiritual.
Reality Check: The super rich don’t want you. They don’t like you. They don’t need your sympathy. They’ve hired guys to beat you up. They’re not impressed by your attempt at brotherhood. You have lice. That limo coming at you? It isn’t going to slow down.
*They think they’re the first people to ever do this? Where were they back in [whenever] when we were [young]. They have no sense of history. We’ve been slogging away in the trenches all these years.
Reality check: Seriously? You want to emphasize how humorless and old you are? As they say on the television machine, “can I ask you a question? Shut up!”
*I feel left out.
Reality check: Go to a general assembly and tell everyone you need a lot of hugs.
*The Occupiers don’t have clear demands that a capitalist society can enter in a concise capitalist-style checklist and present on TV.
Reality check: Yeah. And yet there they are. Kind of unnerving, isn’t it?
*Dirty hippies. Who’s going to pay the costs of throwing out the personal belongings of the Occupiers? Hazmat suit deployment isn’t cheap.
Reality check: Nazi eugenicists shared your pain in the 1920’s. Obsession with cleanliness, ja. Racial hygiene, check. Nordic purity, check. Dirty Jews, jawohl. Everyone’s dirty who isn’t on our team. We’re pure, and the blond hair with highlights doesn’t hurt. Zer iz uh poopie in ze toilet and vee must scrub it and retain zee anal formation.
*Supposed to get a permit. Supposed to tell your Congressperson. Supposed to get approval. Supposed to think about votes. Supposed to do it the way it’s always been done. Supposed to have leaders.
Reality check: Daddy said no. Now what, little boy?
*Occupying land as an expression of free speech is a non-starter in the courts.
Reality check: Occupying a seat in the front of the bus was a non-starter in white courts. And yet we have all these black people in the fronts of buses now. Funny thing happened on the way to the front of the bus. The most important point about leaders and people who think they’re allowed to judge others is that they’ll follow when they have to. We occupy the space because it’s ethical, not because some rich judge surrounded by lackeys or because some politician surrounded by suitcases of cash from K Street gives permission. You think your soft-palate little democracy ga-ga goo-goo arrangement is the only arrangement of human affairs that exists? We didn’t sign on to yours.
*I want a different percentage number than 99. Some of those 99 are jerks too, you know.
Reality check: Yes dear. Thank-you for sharing. 69 isn’t quite the same somehow.
*OWS is a joke. More bleating. It will fail miserably. Nothing will change. The reason is obvious: the whole point of OWS is to further reinforce the idea that the real power is with the 1%. We have to beg them to change things. We have to demand change from them. They have to agree to it. But it is not the 1% who are bruising us with batons, burning us with chemical sprays, electrocuting us with stun guns, and worse. Who are these cops hiding behind the armor and masks? Are they not our brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, nieces and nephews and mothers and fathers and cousins? Are they not us?
My response: Ouch. This is the sleeper embedded here in the middle of the article.
Hopefully the difference in font size will come through to indicate “sleeper.” Embedded in the article. Embedded, perhaps, in the middle of the movement. The words are those of a man in Argentina with the middle initial F, and the words aren’t dumb. Personally I take the 99/1 split to be about wealth distribution and spectacular greed, but if the movement means that the 99/1 split is that we’re the 99 kids and we have to supplicate the daddy leader, then Middle-F’s right and the power of the movement will be neatly diverted back to the belief in daddies and voting. Back to K Street. Back to the belief that it was Hitler who actually killed people rather than his willing executioners. Back to the belief that Bush was pure evil and tremendously important and we have to get the big O (as Lacan might say) to save us.
Seventy-five folks braved rain Wednesday night, for example, to occupy or Occupy the Supremes. Oh-O—the big O again. Reminds me of the great O-Bum in the sky, our anal savior, ja. If these folks were occupying the street because it’s right to get in the way of car culture and its massive systemic violence, and it is, or because it’s fun to walk down the street in the rain, and it is, or they’re occupying some building because there are idiots in it who think they’re the Supremes, and apparently there are, then we have a movement. But if they’re just off to daddy’s house to beg and supplicate, then we’ve got a problem.
Washington is a city filled with people who never grew up. These lesser gods are the last people to whom anyone should send pleas, petitions, supplications, or indeed any form of prayer at all. On a purely practical note, it is for this reason that seewalk-the-ungoogleable thinks that while occupying everywhere is a good idea, Washington should be the last place where we should bother. Now back to our regularly scheduled article:
*Plenty of these people in these Occupy encampments are on drugs, use needles, and have mental health problems.
Reality check: Isn’t it great? What a wonderful testimony to the kind of people who Occupy, that the downtrodden and the towntrodden and the messed up feel a sense of belonging and solace here, where there are so many people who can help direct them to social services in a supportive, caring way, or offer a bowl of soup, or just hang out.
*You people can’t count. You said five reasons.
*I can’t walk my dog in the park.
Reality check: Oh, you have a dog that doesn’t like kisses and getting petted? That probably is a problem.
Graeber, an anarchist University of London anthropology professor, showed up for a preliminary meeting held in early August to prepare for the next month’s Occupation. As he recounts, it was shaping up as a typical top-down movement controlled by the usual suspects of the Institutional Left. Adbusters, which posted the original call for a September 17 Occupation, New Yorkers Against Budget Cuts, and the Workers World Party (which created the International ANSWER coalition at the outset of the Iraq War in 2003), between them pretty well had things sewn up.
My guess is that had those groups kept control, Occupy would have had all the public spokespersons and demands anyone could want — and would have been in the news for maybe a week.
Fortunately, Graeber and some friends began talking with other “horizontals” — Wobblies, veterans of the Greek and Spanish protests, etc. — who, like him, had been hoping for something on the libertarian model of the Spanish indignados’ protest. They quickly coalesced into a General Assembly and bypassed the power grab of Workers’ World et al.
Those who object miss the point. A large share of those participating in OWS have learned that playing by the normal rules of “progressive” politics — getting out the vote and organizing pressure groups — doesn’t work. They tried that in 2008, electing the most “progressive” president of a lifetime with the biggest majority since LBJ, and a Democratic super-majority in Congress. And then they were betrayed as Obama revealed himself to be either totally ineffectual or, worse yet, a conscious stooge of Wall Street.
As Graeber says, “Clearly, if progressive change was not possible through electoral means in 2008, it simply isn’t going to possible at all. And that is exactly what very large numbers of Americans appear to have concluded.”
So this time they’re not playing by the old rules. What, exactly, are they trying to accomplish? I believe their significance has to more to do with their form of organization itself — a distributed, self-organized network — as a model of the society they hope to build, than with any concrete demands. In Rowan Wolf’s elegant phrase, “the organizational model … is the carrier wave of the movement.”
As Graeber points out, it’s their lack of specific demands that gives them strength. Despite op-ed jabbering to the contrary, it’s hard to miss what their main focus is: Hatred for Wall Street, for the concentration of wealth, for crony capitalism, and for the unholy alliance between Big Business and the state.
That common set of values is the basic operating platform of the movement. Beyond that, the specific agendas built on that platform are beyond counting. It includes everyone from libertarian communists to social democrats and conventional liberals to left-wing market anarchists like me, and quite a few Paulistas who want to abolish the Fed.
Occupy, with its organizational style and the cultural memes it propagates, is a source of strength for all those individual agendas. The loosely allied subgroups are modules operating on a common platform. The very fact that so many different groups share a common brand, united only by their enmity toward plutocracy, is the movement’s source of power.
That’s the same stigmergic model of organization used by the open source software community. The basic platform can support as many modular utilities as there are developers. The utilities themselves reflect the needs and concerns of individual developers. Likewise, there are as many sub-movements piggybacked on Occupy as there are reasons for hating Wall Street, ways of being affected by it, and walks of life among the Occupiers.
In Occupy, like other stigmergically organized projects ranging from Linux and Wikipedia to al Qaeda, nobody needs “permission” from “leadership” to try out ideas. And whatever idea works for one node instantly becomes property of the whole network. “Occupy Our Homes,” which sprang up almost overnight, is one example of such stigmergic innovation. Other groups are likely to arrive independently at innovative ideas, like flash-mobbing the homes and country clubs of politicians, CEOs and plutocrats. As they used to say in the civics textbooks, Occupy is a “laboratory of democracy.”
If you want to see “leadership” and unified agendas, go back fifty years and look at GM or the CBS evening news. We don’t need it. “Leadership” is so 20th century.
~~~~~~~~
Five Dumbest Reasons Not to Support the Occupy Movement
My God, what’s happened?*We could alienate the very people who might be our supporters.
—Princess Diana
Reality check: That’s the kind of people you want to suck up to—people who would be offended by a peaceful occupation of a park? With friends like these…
*It’s divisive. It sets up a separation between some kinds of human beings and others, between the 99% and the 1%. It’s not Buddhist enough. It’s not Zen. It’s not spiritual.
Reality Check: The super rich don’t want you. They don’t like you. They don’t need your sympathy. They’ve hired guys to beat you up. They’re not impressed by your attempt at brotherhood. You have lice. That limo coming at you? It isn’t going to slow down.
*They think they’re the first people to ever do this? Where were they back in [whenever] when we were [young]. They have no sense of history. We’ve been slogging away in the trenches all these years.
Reality check: Seriously? You want to emphasize how humorless and old you are? As they say on the television machine, “can I ask you a question? Shut up!”
*I feel left out.
Reality check: Go to a general assembly and tell everyone you need a lot of hugs.
*The Occupiers don’t have clear demands that a capitalist society can enter in a concise capitalist-style checklist and present on TV.
Reality check: Yeah. And yet there they are. Kind of unnerving, isn’t it?
*Dirty hippies. Who’s going to pay the costs of throwing out the personal belongings of the Occupiers? Hazmat suit deployment isn’t cheap.
Reality check: Nazi eugenicists shared your pain in the 1920’s. Obsession with cleanliness, ja. Racial hygiene, check. Nordic purity, check. Dirty Jews, jawohl. Everyone’s dirty who isn’t on our team. We’re pure, and the blond hair with highlights doesn’t hurt. Zer iz uh poopie in ze toilet and vee must scrub it and retain zee anal formation.
*Supposed to get a permit. Supposed to tell your Congressperson. Supposed to get approval. Supposed to think about votes. Supposed to do it the way it’s always been done. Supposed to have leaders.
Reality check: Daddy said no. Now what, little boy?
*Occupying land as an expression of free speech is a non-starter in the courts.
Reality check: Occupying a seat in the front of the bus was a non-starter in white courts. And yet we have all these black people in the fronts of buses now. Funny thing happened on the way to the front of the bus. The most important point about leaders and people who think they’re allowed to judge others is that they’ll follow when they have to. We occupy the space because it’s ethical, not because some rich judge surrounded by lackeys or because some politician surrounded by suitcases of cash from K Street gives permission. You think your soft-palate little democracy ga-ga goo-goo arrangement is the only arrangement of human affairs that exists? We didn’t sign on to yours.
*I want a different percentage number than 99. Some of those 99 are jerks too, you know.
Reality check: Yes dear. Thank-you for sharing. 69 isn’t quite the same somehow.
*OWS is a joke. More bleating. It will fail miserably. Nothing will change. The reason is obvious: the whole point of OWS is to further reinforce the idea that the real power is with the 1%. We have to beg them to change things. We have to demand change from them. They have to agree to it. But it is not the 1% who are bruising us with batons, burning us with chemical sprays, electrocuting us with stun guns, and worse. Who are these cops hiding behind the armor and masks? Are they not our brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, nieces and nephews and mothers and fathers and cousins? Are they not us?
My response: Ouch. This is the sleeper embedded here in the middle of the article.
Hopefully the difference in font size will come through to indicate “sleeper.” Embedded in the article. Embedded, perhaps, in the middle of the movement. The words are those of a man in Argentina with the middle initial F, and the words aren’t dumb. Personally I take the 99/1 split to be about wealth distribution and spectacular greed, but if the movement means that the 99/1 split is that we’re the 99 kids and we have to supplicate the daddy leader, then Middle-F’s right and the power of the movement will be neatly diverted back to the belief in daddies and voting. Back to K Street. Back to the belief that it was Hitler who actually killed people rather than his willing executioners. Back to the belief that Bush was pure evil and tremendously important and we have to get the big O (as Lacan might say) to save us.
Seventy-five folks braved rain Wednesday night, for example, to occupy or Occupy the Supremes. Oh-O—the big O again. Reminds me of the great O-Bum in the sky, our anal savior, ja. If these folks were occupying the street because it’s right to get in the way of car culture and its massive systemic violence, and it is, or because it’s fun to walk down the street in the rain, and it is, or they’re occupying some building because there are idiots in it who think they’re the Supremes, and apparently there are, then we have a movement. But if they’re just off to daddy’s house to beg and supplicate, then we’ve got a problem.
Washington is a city filled with people who never grew up. These lesser gods are the last people to whom anyone should send pleas, petitions, supplications, or indeed any form of prayer at all. On a purely practical note, it is for this reason that seewalk-the-ungoogleable thinks that while occupying everywhere is a good idea, Washington should be the last place where we should bother. Now back to our regularly scheduled article:
*Plenty of these people in these Occupy encampments are on drugs, use needles, and have mental health problems.
Reality check: Isn’t it great? What a wonderful testimony to the kind of people who Occupy, that the downtrodden and the towntrodden and the messed up feel a sense of belonging and solace here, where there are so many people who can help direct them to social services in a supportive, caring way, or offer a bowl of soup, or just hang out.
*You people can’t count. You said five reasons.
*I can’t walk my dog in the park.
Reality check: Oh, you have a dog that doesn’t like kisses and getting petted? That probably is a problem.
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