occupy wall street and change

The Occupy Wall Street protests are fascinating.  For a social movement scholar, these protests are like gold. We get a seemingly spontaneously organized protest that quickly captures the nation’s attention, replete with vivid imagery of protestors being harassed and arrested by police and a sudden diffusion of the protests to other large urban centers. And because the movement is evolving over time, we get a unique view into the dynamics of collective action and social change. Amazing stuff.

Jenn Lena’s photos on her blog tell a really interesting story about the internal dynamics of the protest. Looking at this organizing board, you can’t help but be impressed by the enormous effort of coordinating a protest of this scale.  Forget the coordination issues inherent in keeping an ideologically diverse group such as this together and marching in the same (roughly) direction or the incredible public relations job the activists are doing, some of the biggest and most problematic organizing issues are  more mundane (e.g. where do we get food and latrines for all these folks?). Organizing a protest of this size requires a massive amount of coordinating and organizing, and so the fact that this group is making it up on the spot is really impressive.

The movement has gained momentum to the point that now everyone is asking, what’s next? Where do we go with all of this energy? The resources are in place, the nation is watching, but does the movement have any objectives? I think that at a very abstract level, there is some agreement about what the objectives should be. For example, this video (again, thanks to Jenn for the link) points to an outcome of changing the process of community decision-making based on participation and consensus-building around a general assembly. Scholars of the 60s movements will recognize a lot of similarities in the philosophy behind the general assembly idea and the notion of participatory democracy practiced by groups like SDS. So one clear objective is to get more people involved in participatory democracy and form linkages between like-minded people who might form the base of a broader change-oriented movement. I think this is inspiring, and restoring this organizational know-how could be the most important product of these protests.

But clearly that’s not the only goal that participants in the movement would like to see accomplished. For one, restoring a process of participatory democracy in a relatively small social movement will have a limited impact on society unless they come up with other clearly articulated goals. In other words, while participatory democracy will certainly make a difference in the lives of those involved, at some point new demands have to be set if the movement is hoping to influence real social and political change. Those demands will probably come, even if it means losing many supporters who don’t see to eye-t0-eye on concrete reforms, but will it come soon enough? I think the time to strike is when the iron is hot, and right now the iron is HOT.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the Occupy movement is that the media is completely on board and excited to cover protests again. Of course, for that the movement can thank mace-spraying cops and the massive arrests that followed marches like the one that took place on the Brooklyn Bridge. The intense drama that unfolds as passionate protestors are swept into police buses and carted off while singing Beatles songs is pure storytelling genius. Because of all this, journalists are listening (and consequently, so is the rest of the public). These kinds of media moments don’t come often and they don’t last long. If I were involved in these protests, I would not want to let this moment go to waste. We know that media coverage is one of the main mechanisms whereby activists influence their targets to do something, to change. If that’s the case, then the pressure is on now.

The problem, as I see it, is that the moment is going to waste. Yes, media coverage is helping the movement recruit more participants and is leading to the diffusion of tactics around the nation. That’s a positive outcome. But because the movement is focused more on process and less on targets, it’s likely that the movement’s moment will pass without specific demands being made or specific targets getting any pressure to do anything. I think that’s a shame. There are plenty of worthy targets out there that could be pressured to reform, but the media coverage of the protests fails to focus on any of these targets. It’s like the villains here are getting a free pass. In some ways this is the best thing ever for corporate America and politicians. The protestors make a lot of noise and capture the media’s attention, while they can blissfully go their way and do whatever the hell they want. The protestors are actually distracting the business press’s coverage away from serious reform efforts! You could make the case that these protests are being counterproductive, at least in the short term.

I can’t help but compare this movement to another protest movement that also generated a lot of media attention and seemed to form almost spontaneously among a set of diverse ideological groups – the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in 1964.  Like the Occupy movement, the FSM emerged rather suddenly and was comprised of groups that had very different social change goals. Like the Occupy movement, the FSM was committed from the beginning to participatory democracy and consensus-building. The movement was also tactically masterful and figured out how to communicate their messages to the broader public via an engaged media. Of course, the biggest difference is that from its inception the FSM had very clearly defined goals. They wanted to be able to engage in political advocacy on campus and they didn’t want students who engaged in this advocacy to be singled out and punished by the Berkeley administration. The FSM knew who the “enemy” (.e., target) was and it knew what it wanted from its target. The clarity of its goals helped to sustain the movement even as different coalitions within it waxed and waned in their enthusiasm. They knew how to communicate those goals to the media, which gave them leverage when negotiating with the powers-that-be.

What some people forget about the FSM was that there was a broader process-oriented outcome that the movement pushed for as well. Many in the movement saw the immediate goals as just one step in a greater effort to completely revolutionize the university system and alter the manner in which people were educated. The “Free University” movement evolved from this.   The free university concept was similar to participatory democracy in form and intent. It intended to place greater responsibility and stewardship into the hands of the students themselves and would potentially overturn the old hierarchies of disciplines and departments. It was a grand idea that if it had been fully implemented would have disrupted the academic system as we know it. Parts of the free university system were actually set up as an experimental form of education on the Berkeley campus, and my understanding is that some of it persists in local Berkeley counterculture to this day.  You could argue the merits of such a system, but I’m trying to point out the deficiencies of this sort of process-based outcome. We rarely think of the free university concept when we consider the FSM, despite its true revolutionary potential. One reason is that it failed to materialize as part of the media narrative. Another is because changing a process occurs slowly and extends over a longer period of time than a discrete reform. But the other, and I think this is important, is that processes don’t have targets – they don’t have villains. That’s what is needed to make a movement story stick and to lead to eventual social reform. The FSM succeeded in getting their way, despite their relatively small numbers, in part because they were able to draw clear lines around who the good guys and bad guys were. They identified a discrete change that needed to take place, and then they united behind that change. They proved to be more united than their opponents in the administration. Once that goal was accomplished, it became much harder to sustain their previous level of mobilization while also keeping the media engaged*

Ultimately, the Occupation movement is going to need that kind of unity around a clear, discrete reform. The question is whether they will become united while the media still cares.

*The leftist leaders at Berkeley realized this, and so most of the post-FSM activism was redirected to the anti-war movement, which had a villain and fairly clear goals. One reason the free university movement faltered may have been that it simply couldn’t compete with anti-war activism.