On the Place of the Left in OWS

Having posted a couple of tweets recently about an OWS-focused interview with David Graeber on WNYC’s Brian Lehrer show, I ended up in a contentious (and frustrating) back and forth with Justin Stone-Diaz that I’m still trying to sort out, both for the substance of the exchange itself and for the questions it raises about the place that our individual politics play in a large and diverse movement.

While I don’t want to assume that I can represent his argument completely – especially with Twitter as the medium of communication – it seems from this exchange that Stone-Diaz believes Graeber is both taking credit for Occupy Wall Street and attempting to coopt it – maybe to sell books or to fit the needs of either leftists or Adbusters or the 1%.  It’s true that some news sources have referred to Graeber as the wink-wink “not leader” of OWS.  But much in the same way that I wouldn’t trust these institutions to accurately represent OWS as a whole, I would not necessarily trust them to faithfully reflect Graeber’s take on his own involvement in the movement.

Pulling from Graeber’s own words in the WNYC interview (and/or an interview on Democracy Now, where he covers a lot of the same ground), he seems to represent himself as a participant in an originating general assembly that formed following some dissatisfaction with a more traditional rally event.  While Lehrer tries to play this up as a “rift” within the nascent movement, Graeber focuses on people coming together.  When I hear Graeber describe his own role by saying, “I was one of the facilitators.  We had a lot,” I don’t hear somebody trying to individually take credit for a movement.  I also don’t hear him painting Adbusters as a particularly central player beyond coming up with a kernel for the initial gathering.

Stone-Diaz implies factual inaccuracies in Graeber’s representation of those events and the part that Graeber himself played in them, but he doesn’t cite them directly.  Maybe Stone-Diaz has personal investment in some other narrative of OWS’ conception – one that excludes anything prior to 9/17.  I don’t know.  In any case, I did take from all this one question that’s worth some additional consideration: what is the relationship between the Occupy movements at large and the politics of the individuals who make up those movements?  In particular, is there something wrong with acknowledging that one approaches OWS as a way to take action on leftist politics?

At this point, mass media representations of OWS as a Tea Party for the left (or for Democrats) have been consistently and rightfully rejected by most protesters.  It’s a fairly common refrain that Occupy movements gain much of their power from their broad base, not by engaging a left/right dichotomy.  Certainly corporate cronyism can be a concern for both Democrats and Republicans.

But it also seems disingenuous not to acknowledge the fact that anti-corporate activism in particular has historically had a clearer home with popular movements on the left (anti-WTO, environmentalism, etc.) rather than the right.   Furthermore, OWS has allowed leftist positions and frameworks – including anarchism – a space in public discourse hat they had not enjoyed in “mainstream” American political discourse in some time.  Has OWS produced a similar change in public discourse of the right?  If so, I’m not aware of it.

Of course, when thinking about anti-corporatism at OWS, one should also consider OWS’s relationship with labor movements.  To some extent, OWS has been sympathetic to labor movements as opposition to a corporate/management lockdown on our economic system.  But this doesn’t necessarily peg labor as a leftist movement per se – certainly not on social issues.  In any case, OWS has been wary of cooptation by unions as much as by the Democratic party.

Additionally, there’s the issue of the non hierarchical-structure.  Here, Graeber does seem to call for a particular reading of OWS’ origins.  Describing the general assembly, he says:

Have a group of people, without a leadership structure, come together and make decisions collectively. And people within the anarchist, anti-authoritarian and also feminist traditions in America have been working for years on how to do that, people kind of know how you can conduct a meeting in a real democratic way.

It’s worth noting that the left can’t claim exclusive ownership of consensus systems – Quakers and agrarian societies have utilized these structures as well.  It’s also possible that there are conservative movements that have utilized consensus and horizontalism, but it’s certainly much more natural for me to think about these things in the context of the left.

For the time being, what I take from this topic is the potential OWS presents us to denaturalize the way we talk about left/right or conservative/liberal dynamics in popular political movements or discourse.  It would be terrific if these movements could chip away at the oversimplified and divisive rhetoric of news network pundits.  And yes, I think it’s crucial that OWS ensure that people who have generally subscribed to what we understand as “conservative values” feel comfortable joining a movement against a corporatist system that has screwed the 99% as a whole.  But to the same extent, I think it’s appropriate to acknowledge the place that leftist positions and structures have played in this movement thus far and encourage a broader segment of the public to reconsider their outlook on what the left wants and does.