I’ve gotten pretty sick of hearing journalists and others say that the Occupy Wall Street movement has no “clear ideas or demands.” I keep wondering where political critics were when the Tea Party first arose as I don’t recall anyone calling the Tea Party out along these lines, other than to kill “Obamacare” and cut taxes.
But since the mainstream media—that liberal media you read so much about—seems to have different expectations for left and right, I want to take a moment and explain why the OWS movement hasn’t been characterized by ten point plans or laundry lists of demands.
The Basic Goals of OWS
Let me begin by pointing out, first, that the overall goals of the OWS movement is pretty straightforward—to reduce inequality in American and improve the lives of working people and the middle class. The movement also has a straightforward explanation for the growth of inequality, that giant corporations and the richest people in American have used their wealth to grab an unwarranted share of power in our democracy and used that power to deliberately undermine the well-being of working people and the middle class. So the overall goal is to take back power for working people and the middle class.
Leftists are not Fools
But while the goals and analysis of the OWS movement is clear, the policies that would attain those goals are many and quite complicated. That the movement hasn’t gravitated towards one solution to these problems just shows that the folks within it are not fools. The problems they want to address weren’t created overnight. The right-ward tilt in our politic has been in progress since the late 1970s. Growing inequality and corporate power was created by a huge swath of public and corporate policies—tax cuts for the rich; cuts in public services and public employees at all levels of government; a National Labor Relations Board that has strongly tilted against union organizing; the declining value of the minimum wage; the flight of manufacturing jobs from America; a decline in investment in new manufacturing technology that would have allowed American workers to remain far more productive than overseas workers even with our higher wages; rising health care costs caused by a number of different factors, not least the corporate power of hospitals and insurance companies; and on and on. The growing power of the corporate rich itself has also been caused by many factors.
One would have to be simple minded to think that one, two, or three public policies could reverse the increasing inequality in America and the stranglehold corporations have over our public life. Some folks on the right may be simpleminded enough to believe, wrongly, that cutting government and taxes would improve the well-being of everyone. But anyone who takes that notion seriously is a crackpot. The others who say it are ideologues who are deliberately trying to over-simplify political life with the hope of continuing to bamboozle people into voting against their own economic interests. The right wing mantra of cutting taxes and spending may look like a policy agenda but that’s not what it really is. It’s an attitude, worldview and narrative that is meant to build a movement to pressure politicians, especially Republicans, to carry out a detailed right wing agenda that has and will continue to be devised by right wing policy activists among Congressional staffers, think tankers, opinion journalists, and in many cases, lobbyists.
Raising Consciousness and Movement Building
And that leads us to the second point: the immediate goal of the OWS movement is not to set out a policy agenda but to raise people’s awareness of the source of their difficulties: the growing dominance of the corporate rich over our lives. The goal is to build an alternative attitude and world view, a new narrative of our political life, that has the power to mobilize people around a new set of problem and solutions. This is what progressive activists have always done, going back to the populist and progressive movements, to the Townsend movement of the 30s which led to Social Security, to the civil rights, anti-war, and environmental movements of the 1960s and 70s to the movement for health care reform that began in 1993 and made some progress just last year. Those movements sometimes coalesced around one, two or three policy ideas. But they began with the identification of a problem and its cause. And the solutions they eventually proposed were put forward more with the aim of building a movement than with the goal of giving Congress and the President a precise blueprint to follow.
Why HCAN was Different
Some campaigns did eventually coalesce around clear policy goals—as the HCAN campaign did in 2008. But the HCAN campaign was unusual. The policy statement that animated HCAN came after years of effort on health care reform and at a time in which it was evident to the majority of labor and progressive leaders that the sheer complexity of the issue meant that the lack of consensus on a solution was a main barrier to addressing problems that were acknowledged by everyone but those on the extreme right. Most of the time in our politics, the first and biggest barrier to progress is not the lack of a solution but a failure on the part of a majority of the country to recognize they have a common problem that can only be solved through common effort.
Conflict Between the 1% and the 99%
That’s where we are in addressing injustice today. Working people and the middle class know and have known they have been suffering as individuals and families. But what they haven’t been able to articulate is the notion that this suffering is the product of deliberate policy on the part of the corporate elite. For too long, Democrats have believed that stagnant wages are a product of unintended economic changes that just happened while Republicans claimed that the problem is large government and high taxes. It’s only been in the last few months that a different theme has been developing—that the corporate elite has deliberately and systematically used its power to increase its profits by driving down wages among working people and the middle class.
The Corporate Rich Are Different
Even now, making the point so bluntly still sounds off. It’s hard to get our heads around the notion that the interests of American corporations and the corporate rich has come so far apart from the interests of American working people that they benefit if our wages go down. But that is the truth. There really is no such thing as an “American corporation” anymore. Corporations based here produce and sell and make profits everywhere in the world. They don’t need us to produce or buy their products. And the lives of their owners and managers have become totally disconnected from our lives. They live and work in isolated campuses, towers and gated communities. They attend private schools, ride in limos, take private jets, and get to their box seats at sporting events in private elevators. And given how they have organized their businesses—it wasn’t the only way they could do it—their profits go up when our wages stagnate or go down. They seek lower government spending not just to reduce their own taxes, but in order to force a reduction in the power of government to increase wages directly—by means of health care, retirement, and safety net benefits and the minimum wage—or indirectly—by paying public workers decent wages and making it easier for unions to form.
Seeing Ourselves Acting Together
As I see it, the chief goal of the OWS movement is to build a movement around a new understanding of our economic difficulties, one that puts the conflict between the interests of the top 1% and rest of us front and center. And it’s not just that we need to come to a new understanding of our problems. We need to grasp the importance of working together to solve them and see ourselves doing it. Movements are hard to sustain. To make them happen people not only have to believe that they are necessary but that enough people will join the movement to make it successful. Thus we need, in the words of the great historian of the populist movement, Laurence Goodwyn, to “see ourselves acting together” in order to keep the movement alive and growing.
Once we build such a movement, the solutions to our difficulties are really not that hard to articulate. The policy agenda has many pieces, which our policy analysts have been developing over the years. It’s not hard to articulate the kinds of taxes, regulations, public goods, and other interventions in the economy that will restore our middle class, provide for our common good, reduce inequality and enable all Americans to develop their talents and skills and use them to contribute to our common good.
One a broad majority of the country agrees with this analysis, we will be able to force our political leaders enact public policies that attain these goals. And our Congressional staffers, think tankers, opinion journalists, and even lobbyists, will be there to help them with the details.
Warning: Democracy At Work
Of course, in building this movement, it’s not just that we are acting together but how. One of the most beautiful features of the OWS movement is that it has operated in so democratic a fashion. Decisions have been made by general meetings in which all are welcome to take part. Workings groups of various kinds have been created to guide different parts of each occupation.
I know that participatory democracy can be frustrating. Certainly those of us who have been working, either professionally or as volunteers in politics for years, can be frustrated by the difficulty the various Occupy groups sometimes have in making decisions or in articulating their ideals. And the Occupy groups sometimes reveal the justice of one of the most common criticisms of participatory democracy, that it gives the most power to the people who have the most time to attend meetings.
Those criticisms are somewhat valid. But at this very early point in the movement, when the Occupations are centers of education as well as activism, of building commitment as well as of deciding on direction, I think they are pretty much besides the point. Participatory democracy is the most appropriate means of attaining those goals. And as Occupations take off in more and more places, and as they become a stimulus for the larger conversation on the left that is taking place on the internet as much as in town squares, what each Occupation does or doesn’t becomes less critical to the larger movement of which it is a part.
(The one difficulty with this model is that the Occupy Movements can’t easily make difficult decisions about their own situation. That’s why it is so unfortunate that Occupy Philadelphia has chosen a location that will bring it into conflict with the city when the Dilworth Plaza renovation project begins. Occupy Philly is not structured in a way to easily make the right decision, which is to move to another location so that the focus remains where it should be, on building a movement, not on an unnecessary dispute with the city.”
The Future
I suspect that the OWS movement will remain amorphous and decentralized as it carries on the task of education and commitment building and modeling a more democratic form of government. I don’t know whether or worry much about whether it becomes institutionalized itself. I think it more likely that the activists and ideas developed in the OWS movement will feed into other campaigns and advocacy efforts, and into a wide variety of organizations on the left, some old and some new. Those organizations will find ways, as they have in the past, of working together on election and advocacy campaigns. But the left will be very different than what it was before OWS began. For the animating idea of OWS, the notion that there is a serious conflict between the corporate rich and everyone else, an idea that for a long time has been held by many individuals and small disconnected groups of activists who thought that they were alone, has now once again become the common property of the left.
We who believe that it is time to fight back, stand up, and retake our democracy from the corporate rich are not alone anymore and we know it. We actually were never alone. Millions of us shared the concerns that the movement has raised. But because we didn’t know how many of us there were, we didn’t speak up as loudly enough. And because we didn’t know how to reach each other, when others spoke, we didn’t hear or respond to them.
What the OWS movement has done is given us new voices with which to speak and new ears with which to listen to one another. Because we know we’re not alone, we’re louder and stronger. And we’ll stand together until we change this country.
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