I wrote this as I was watching streaming video of yesterday's massive Day of Action going on in New York, where people were literally taking the streets. It was an amazing effort. I've read comments and heard a lot of hand wringing over whether Occupy Wall Street is shooting itself in the foot by continuing the overnight campouts, holding demonstrations that block traffic, heckling speeches by the likes of Karl Rove, Michele Bachmann, Eric Cantor and others in positions of power. The chattering classes have leapt onto (and progressives are fretting over) one poll showing the OWS movement is losing support to of all people, the Tea Party.
Some argue that although OWS's message remains popular, they fear the tactics may be starting to wear on the public. I've also read complaints of people feeling inconvenienced in their daily lives by the demonstrations. Others feel the public heckling is infringing on the free speech rights of the heckled, even if those heckled are odious individuals. Some say it's time for the Occupiers to go inside, choose a leader, come up with a strategy for change, and work within the political process to achieve that change. Are the naysayers right? Or are they missing something here?
Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi wrote a thoughtful article a couple of days ago about how he felt he had been mistaken about what OWS is supposed to be about and how the movement should go forward. He writes that he first thought the movement wouldn't be taken seriously because, so far, it has refused to work within the political system. The Occupiers needed to be on message, they needed to start making a concrete list of demands. But Taibbi now says he missed the whole point of the movement:
Occupy Wall Street was always about something much bigger than a movement against big banks and modern finance. It's about providing a forum for people to show how tired they are not just of Wall Street, but everything. This is a visceral, impassioned, deep-seated rejection of the entire direction of our society, a refusal to take even one more step forward into the shallow commercial abyss of phoniness, short-term calculation, withered idealism and intellectual bankruptcy that American mass society has become.
Taibbi ends by suggesting that OWS may be something different from protest movements of the past, and that's okay (also listen to his interview with talk show host Nicole Sandler). Time will tell what OWS will morph into and how it will continue to be received. However, the beauty of the OWS movement is that it is impolite; it is noisy; it is confrontational; it is outside the political system, not of the system; it doesn't care what others think; it is different - in short, it is subversive. We haven't seen something like this in America in decades.
I'm certainly an advocate of OWS committing to non-violence. Non-violent movements are more effective than violent ones. But what the hand-wringers and the complainers don't understand is that non-violent civil disobedience is supposed to be disruptive. It's that disruption of daily life - of normality - that gets the attention of the elites. Otherwise, what is the point? Revolutions are meant to upset the social order and move society toward something different and better.
Americans really have little idea how truly disruptive mass demonstrations can be. All people need to do is look at what's going on in Europe. The Europeans are more more aggressive when it comes to mass protest than we Yanks are. For example, French transit unions have no hesitation shutting down all of Paris. The United Kingdom, Greece and Italy have all seen unrest, which, unfortunately, turned violent. General strikes in the United States are rare (the Oakland strike two weeks ago was the first one we've had in more than 60 years).
It seems that in the so-called "land of the free," Americans are more reluctant to confront power than in the historically class-based societies of Europe. It's because we've been conditioned by our mass consumer culture not to confront power, and when we do want to rebel, we have few spaces to do so. In other countries, vast public squares in central cities are common, places where people can gather and voice their displeasure with their governments. Often these plazas are situated near seats of power. In America, many of our urban areas and suburbs, especially, have been built up over the years purposefully to isolate people from one another. I live in Los Angeles, and anyone whose ever spent time here knows that we have very few public gathering points, as well as very little green space for a city of our size. The green space around Los Angeles City Hall where Occupy LA has its encampment isn't massive. Our major downtown urban park, MacArthur Park, is rather rundown. This lack of vast public spaces is coupled with poor public transportation, stifling traffic and expensive parking, which makes it difficult to get to large public gatherings anywhere in L.A.
So when you have few public gathering places, public anger is going to leak out elsewhere. Maybe heckling Karl Rove inside a university auditorium is unfair. After all, Tea partiers did the same thing to Democratic (and some Republican) lawmakers during the health care debate in 2009. But do I feel sorry that the tables were turned on Rove, or on Bachmann, or on Scott Walker? No, I can't say that I do. I can see why some Occupiers are using this particular tactic. Which comes to my next point. Thanks to media consolidation, the ruling elite have pretty much taken away many of the communication outlets where the average person can speak back to power. Rove has a much, much larger megaphone than you or I do. He can go onto any broadcast news channel or radio station and deliver his message. He can speak before hundreds and get paid handsomely to do so. Any major newspaper will publish an op-ed he writes, but I'll get lucky if I see my little letter to the editor make it to print. Thanks to Citizens United, Karl's corporate buddies can spend millions, even billions, of dollars buying advertising on television, radio and in print publications. The right wing has FOX and a vast network of radio stations and talking heads at its disposal, while progressives only have a few. Right-wingers have the rest of the mainstream media eating out of their hands. Yes, we still can use the Internet, but the ruling elite is busily trying to take that away as well. Meanwhile, Tea Party lawmakers try to keep out dissenters by screening questions or charging fees to town halls.
The ruling elite has tried very hard to shield themselves from seeing and hearing the public's wrath. It's not easy to tell Karl Rove to his face that he shares the blame for the deaths of thousands of American servicemembers and thousands more innocent Iraqis and Afghans. Where else can you tell Michele Bachmann to her face that she's a monster for insisting that people starve if they can't work? How else can you tell right-wing political figures and their enablers that they're not as popular as they think they are? How else can the American public be shaken out of their comfort zones so they will actually get up and change this vile, corrupt political system?
Social revolutions aren't always initially popular. They occur when people feel they have few or no options to improve their lives within existing societal and political institutions. Always insisting revolutionaries keep protest tactics legal makes no sense when the laws one is protesting are unjust, and when the elites arbitrarily decide what is legal and what isn't. The point of civil disobedience is to break unjust laws, but to do so peacefully. Certainly the Freedom Riders in the 1960s were "breaking the law" at the time by engaging in sit-ins. And no doubt many Southerners at the time viewed them as "disruptive." But few today would say the Freedom Riders didn't do the right thing.
However, I understand the argument that the Occupiers shouldn't keep people from getting to their jobs or to school. But when you have tens of thousands of justifiably angry people flooding the streets, and a phalanx of militarized cops in riot gear itching for a fight, it is inevitable that some people will be inconvenienced. As this movement grows, more will be inconvenienced. But that is the nature of mass protest.
6:50 PM PT: Thanks all for the comments and tips. Rushing out to dinner right now, and will read and comment later.