Starting Point: Demands

Admittedly, this seems like a loaded approach.  Besides run of the mill reactionary tropes about stoned hippies, the movement’s lack of specific demands is probably the most widespread critique of Occupy Wall Street.  The Declaration of the Occupation provides an eloquent and appropriately extensive (but non-exhaustive) list of grievances, but indeed does not propose solutions.  It was not designed to do so.

Though the “no demands” critique has been blunt and shallow when coming from Fox News, you don’t just hear it from the movement’s opponents.  On the surface, it seems quite reasonable: shouldn’t a movement be able to articulate what it wants?  There’s a Montreal Gazette interview where OWS PR working group member Bill Dobbs puts an interesting spin on this argument.  Dobbs says:

“There’s this push – ‘get a slogan, get a central demand’ – a lot of us are focused on, but sending out a loud enough outcry that draws in more people is a huge job.”

So what’s the message?

“Reporters come down here and actually have to work to define it. It’s great. Why do we have to say it?”

So what’s the goal? “To bring more people.”

“I’m not dodging your question. This plaza is being held against the NYPD, the weather and everything else that can get in the way. And it’s still here. There’s no money paying anybody. You cannot get people to work 96 hours a week if there wasn’t something in it for them. So you have to ask, why are they here?”

I think it’s interesting to put the responsibility for interpreting the movement in the hands of the observer.  At the very least, the requirement for engagement disrupts the narrative packaging of the infotainment news cycle.

In any case, it seems to me that at least some of the supportive discussion in popular media has undergone a shift in the last week or so.  I’ve seen a range of articles, including work in decidedly mainstream sources, pointing out that producing a list of specific demands should be a secondary concern to OWS’ increasingly successful efforts to provide a visible space, physical and otherwise, where people with a broad range of political views can have critical public conversations about very large, complex, and powerful economic and political systems with the hope that those conversations will make a difference.

Ultimately, however, I think all supporters of the movement would agree that we want OWS to produce tangible, foundational shifts in our political and economic systems.  I like what Zizek said during his speech at Zuccotti: “carnivals come cheap. What matters is the day after, when we will have to return to normal lives. Will there be any changes then?”

Revolutionary change surely requires (among other things) a substantial discussion of goals rather than just ramming through a limited policy agenda.  I believe that it is possible to find balance between keeping the movement’s message inclusive and developing more tangible visions of change.  But for all the hope I have that this movement will produce an era of revolutionary civic engagement, I worry that public attention could fade before OWS working groups offer concrete strategies.

In Dissent Magazine, Chris Maisano gives more extensive consideration to the pros and cons of OWS’ initial reticence to focus on demands thus far.  He concludes that while there is an argument to be made that narrow policy victories might drain power from broader revolutionary agendas,

[I]f #OccupyWallStreet is to persist and become a mass movement with the potential to challenge the power of capital, it needs an infusion of activists oriented toward the organizing model of politics.

This raises key questions for me: what role does direct democracy play in the construction of tangible goals (especially when we consider the larger movement beyond New York City) and how do differentiate the operationalization of the movements demands from their co-optation?

There is a valid concern among OWS’ supporters that political parties and PAC’s are already attempting to direct our momentum for the benefit of their own platforms, and in some cases their own power.  The danger here is that these entities will, at best, dilute the movement’s impact.  At worst, they could redirect our momentum toward superficial reforms that ultimately bolster the very systems OWS opposses or reduce us to factional bickering against the backdrop of next year’s elections.  This concern is why I have trouble with Paul Krugman’s suggestion in a recent New York Times op-ed that:

[W]e shouldn’t make too much of the lack of specifics. It’s clear what kinds of things the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators want, and it’s really the job of policy intellectuals and politicians to fill in the details.

The suggestion that our demands should be filtered through existing policy-making structures sounds like it might just ensure surface reform without substantive change.  It’s not as if there’s been any turnover in the powers that be over the last four weeks and a bit of vague lip service from one side of the partisan aisle doesn’t suggest to me that the political establishment is ready to lash out against the corporate interests that have bankrolled policy decisions to date.  After all, that was (at least in part, at least for some) what the 2008 mobilization of progressives behind Obama was supposed to achieve.  It didn’t anybody very far.

At the end of a call-in segment on the Brian Leher show yesterday, OWS organizer Justed Wedes suggested that some demands from the General Assembly was forthcoming.  One discussion on proposed policy demands can be found on OWS’ website.

In the meantime, here’s my initial take on how we could re-frame the question of demands and results:  We should not ask what Occupy Wall Street’s demands are, but rather how we all might take the social/political momentum for which the occupation itself is currently the vessel and organize it into myriad forms of real, lasting, revolutionary changes that transform the corporatist system we currently inhabit into something human and just.  I think these efforts could be put into three basic categories.

1. Policy demands. Maybe enough public pressure can bring about viable systems of regulation.  I certainly don’t want to rule it out.
2. Direct action.  I’m thinking largely of divestment here, whether that’s closing a bank account or organizing a boycott, but activists will no doubt produce other options as well.
3. Equitable alternatives. Alongside divestment, OWS can provide a venue for creating and/or strengthening alternative economic systems that are more equitable, community-based, and more economically and environmentally sustainable.  This could mean credit unions and community banks, food co-ops and CSAs, mutual aid societies, barter systems, etc.

It seems to me that working towards change on all of these levels allows for a level of plurality and local engagement that would be difficult to achieve if we were to focus exclusively on a unified policy agenda.  It also has the advantage of spreading our eggs across a lot more baskets.