I would like to examine some scenarios for the future of Occupy Wall Street, both in terms of its accomplishments and how threatened elites may respond. For each scenario discussed below, I describe the decisions that will bring them about, and what we may do either to realize or avoid them.
The scenarios are listed in order from most to least ideal.
1. Impossible Ideal
There are several abstract metaphysical concepts that have - sometimes embarrassingly - come to be associated with OWS, despite its overall appeal to practical matters. For instance, the idea of expanding the social definition of Self to encompass the whole community and world while still maintaining a healthy respect for individuality; and being more skeptical of hierarchy while still holding on to awareness of personal responsibility to the group. Concepts like this are sometimes extolled as part of the "new consciousness" being engendered by the movement, and some people have gone off the deep end in their assessments of how potent this aspect of it is, claiming to be changing the face of society.
In an ideal world, they would be correct: Such concepts are at the very psychological root of the otherwise nebulous phenomena we call "freedom" and "democracy" - at the very root even of empathy-based morality and scientific empiricism. In their absence, authoritarian thinking is unavoidable: Without understanding the dynamic relationship of the parts to the whole, the only remaining action principle is zero-sum power - one thing existing in a vacuum, arbitrarily dictating to another with no back-flowing consequences. This delusional viewpoint is the origin of both fascism and libertarian anti-government ideology - they can't see how the individual and group relate, so they must hold one to be fundamental and destroy the other.
Democracy, however, is the outward manifestation of appreciating this relationship - majority rule, minority rights. Unfortunately, democracy to date has not been very thorough: We participate in infrequent elections roughly once per year, but our daily lives are still excruciatingly authoritarian - we answer to bosses we do not choose due to circumstances we cannot control in order to earn wages most of us have no say in setting so we can pay prices few of us have the power to negotiate. Although we have some degree of redress, it involves a significant effort and expense to right even modest wrongs committed by those wielding authority, and at the highest end even proven, admitted guilt of the worst crimes imaginable is not enough to obtain justice in these conditions.
But if people's "consciousness" changes to the mentality underlying democracy, then it could be reflected in daily life, all the time, everywhere. Mutual support, accountability, and liberty would be omnipresent simply by virtue of people existing. This would be an ideal society that perfectly reflects the basic values of OWS, and one that is completely, utterly impossible to realize. I only include it as a scenario to provide an absolute perspective on the possible ones - ones that reflect the fact that human beings are physical creatures with evolved responses and inescapable baggage of history. Still, it doesn't hurt to cultivate awareness of these things, as long as we don't count on a magical sea change in human behavior.
2. Possible Ideal
The next best thing to worldwide Buddhahood is the evolution of institutions to reflect the ideals noted above, without having to remake the human species into something it's not. In other words, instead of trying to change people, change their environment to achieve the best net outcome by balancing competing interests against each other - the "checks and balances" concept pioneered by the architects of American representative democracy. Despite our present difficulties, the underlying concept has more than proven its effectiveness - we must simply evolve its implementation to reflect a growing imbalance of power. By equalizing the power of competing interests, cooperation and consensus is fostered. Only when power is unbalanced do oppression, injustice, and inequality flourish.
Why has a system that worked reasonably well become so inadequate? Frankly, it's a victim of its own success - it fostered the unbounded growth of a private sector that soon advanced beyond its own control, and soon the tail was wagging the dog. That is where we find ourselves. Now we must extend checks and balances to a new level of dynamism so they can keep up with the power still being accumulated by corporations and private wealth. How we do that is something I've been harping on as often as I can: Create General Assemblies as explicit institutions of authority integrated into the power structure of local government. There are too many details and challenges involved in this idea to deal with in this diary, but I've explored them more thoroughly in a previous one: OWS Next Step: Change City Charters, Become Official Institutions. Please do not raise objections to the concept in this diary that I already dealt with in the other one.
But to briefly recap, numerically-limited groups of people would assemble and wield some level of direct political authority on the local level. Whether the number is 100, 200, 500, 1000, or x, it would have to be large enough to be a meaningful reflection of something, but small enough that everyone is able to have a voice. A city with a population of 6x would have 6 Assemblies, and their decisions would interact in ways to be determined by the Assemblies themselves. They would also relate to elected government institutions as an independent branch of government exercising some level of check over them, but also being checked themselves to avoid disasters like the Athenian invasion of Syracuse or California's anti-tax Prop. 13 (yes, the two examples are equally disastrous).
Once established on the local level, people could begin working on how to implement practical statewide General Assemblies. How exactly that would work is a matter of speculation - it would probably have to be some kind of coordinated process among local GAs, and that could extend indefinitely upward to national or even global direct democracy (generations later, if ever). For now, the obtainable ideal is to establish these institutions locally, or if we want to be bold, pass state ballot initiatives requiring all incorporated municipalities in the state to establish these institutions.
How can this be accomplished? First, people have to become familiar with the concept and accustomed to the practice of regularly participating in a democratic institution with strong political influence. That is where Occupy has a special opportunity to rise to the occasion, if it can rise above issue parochialism (I'm looking at you, Oakland) and be strongly focused on forging ties with the community at large. Instead of arrogantly presuming the rightness of the cause will bring people into the fold, bring the message to them - be welcoming, transparent, and familiar to the apolitical population, not obscure and exotic just for the sake of being exotic.
Invite random people to General Assemblies. Sell popcorn and hot dogs or whatever (on a non-profit basis) to entice an audience, and some will stick around even after they're done eating. Adjust procedures to be more accessible to people unfamiliar with them. And...you might consider some other signal of affirmation than "jazz fingers" - you know, if you ever plan on union guys becoming more than arm's-length allies with the movement.
Anyway, once the community is convinced to embrace GAs as a social institution, it's not such a far leap to get it passed into law as a political institution. Politics reflects where power already exists, it doesn't create it anywhere new - so put the power in the GAs and the city governments will inevitably find themselves currying their favor, and that process ultimately leads to official recognition. From there, who knows how far it goes - entire states, entire countries, whole continents, maybe the world. Maybe eventually more than one world, if space colonization ever gets going.
I realize there are elements in OWS who would bitterly resent such a development, and who see the movement as their personal fashion statement that they don't want other people wearing, but that's just not the way it is. This whole thing is about equalizing power, and the only way to do that is to accelerate and evolve democracy by creating these institutions. Everything else has tried and failed - the romantic poet/guerrilla/tyrant who equalizes everyone but himself; the revolutionary council / politburo that equalizes everyone but the connected few into servility; and even the relatively successful limited movement that achieves temporary changes that are subverted within a few years of being enacted. It's time to institutionalize democracy thoroughly. No more tyrants, no more oppressive bureaucratic revolutionaries, no more limited movements whose children have to repeat the same sacrifices to receive a lower return. Democracy now and forever, right outside our doorsteps.
3. Collision, with Good Outcome
Even if the above set of developments occurs, there is no guarantee the process would be linear - there are bound to be reactions by the power elite and their numerous sycophants. I refer to such scenarios as "Collision" - a rising and increasingly successful Occupy movement slams head-on into reactionary forces trying to stifle, corrupt, and weaken it. This is a constellation of wide-ranging possibilities with multiple combinations of events. Examples of Collision with Good Outcome, in order of decreasing civility:
- Officially recognized General Assemblies come to loggerheads with corrupted state or federal institutions, and largely come out ahead due to court rulings and/or because people simply refuse to cooperate with harmful policies. Politicians on the state and federal level come to recognize the power of the GAs and are more careful in dealing with them, expanding their power even further. They begin to use GAs as campaign forums, debate venues, and places to raise their issues, further expanding the legitimacy and influence of the institution.
- If GAs are institutionalized, corporations find novel ways of corrupting the process. E.g., buying up unincorporated land, settling it with their executive employees, incorporating it, and then creating rigged GAs of their own with procedures that allow them to control its proceedings and pollute the wider statewide, national, and international debate. They could also pay people of certain ideological persuasions to move into these Potemkin Village GAs, proliferating the number of such institutions under corporate control. This is a very dangerous situation, but the Good Outcome would be that the existing GA system has become powerful and confident enough to push laws that preclude such tactics before they overwhelm the newly evolved democratic institution.
- Hate media propaganda and GOP rhetoric whips up a widespread pattern of "stochastic terrorism" against OWS protests (if it remains a protest movement) or General Assembly institutions if/when they gain official recognition. The largest numbers of incidents are assault, vandalism, and threats, but mass-murders and bombings with significant numbers of deaths also occur. The GOP and its affiliate organs maintain plausible deniability, but take the Sinn Fein route of rationalizing the crimes as an "understandable response" to social forces that are "provoking" them. The right finds the violence gratifying, but it massively backfires in public perception and they are even more marginalized because of it. Soon it is they who are the "disruptive element" and OWS/GA that represent order and decency, further cementing their ability to affect change. The threat continues in fringe groups, but ultimately abates.
- Economic elites directly finance and promote terrorist attacks on OWS-affiliated groups and events through funding of mercenary outfits, criminal gangs, and right-wing terrorist groups. Local police officers and in some cases entire departments are subverted to this violent agenda through payoffs, blackmail, and infiltration of people already on board. They blow up GAs, shoot up rallies, kidnap and execute people at random, etc. The money flows all over the world and is difficult to track down, and so much of the government is corrupted or terrified that investigations are badly hampered.
But the danger is temporary, as the people coalesce in mutual defense, and law enforcement organizations are able to mobilize while discovering and removing corrupt elements and infiltrators. Individual elites responsible for it run to other countries, and are found in places like Dubai where their money means everything. Their capture or death may involve military assaults on their mercenary forces.
- OWS evolves into a form disruptive enough that corporate elites are backed into a corner and take desperate action, subverting the military and attempt to seize control of the country by force. In the least dire case, the core civilian leadership of the US escapes the attempt and a brief civil war ensues with wingnut militias siding with the corporatists, but are utterly annihilated. In the most dire case we can still imagine having a Good Outcome, the civilian leadership is eliminated by the coup, but most of the military and law enforcement institutions refuse to go along with it.
The latter's support among the public gives them endurance while the coup leaders have to increasingly rely on external funding that declines as business is disrupted by the violence, and eventually lose. Parallel civil wars may be occurring in other countries as they face similar attempts to seize control by overlapping sets of people. What emerges out the other side of the conflict are governments temporarily purged of corruption because the truly corrupt all sided with the coup and are now in prison or dead, but also newly-strengthened public sense of democratic obligation.
- All of the above, or combinations thereof.
Unfortunately, there is no way to avoid Collision if it's in the cards - people who oppose democracy will do what they do, and the more successful OWS is, the more quickly it advances, and the starker its moral authority is, the more desperate and violent the reaction is likely to be against it. The best we can do to hedge against these possibilities is to be thoroughly focused on our own integrity, message clarity, moral authority, responsibility, commitment, and intelligent decision-making. Even though it would involve a period of horrors, the disasters would be a crucible out of which would emerge something better than existed before.
4. Cycle Reset / Compromise Result
The word "movement" says it all about how progressive politics typically operates: A problem reaches a critical point of intolerability, a movement forms to address it, and if it succeeds it does so by making things difficult enough for the political establishment that they are motivated to pass reformed laws and/or regulations to deal with the problem. Only that isn't the end of the story: Once the reforms occur, the coalition created to pass them begins to focus on elaborating them into more obscure areas, becoming distracted with minutiae and divided on priorities. While everyone agreed on the core change, opinion is divided on where to go from there, so subsequent reforms are less motivated, less interesting.
The movement begins to run out of steam and dissolve into more specific constituencies that are less powerful. Meanwhile, the interests they were originally fighting are no less powerful than before, and their lobbying to undermine and subvert the reforms is constant and tireless because it's based on profit rather than personal values or commitment. They are infinitely patient, because they represent immortal corporations that do not tire or forget where their interests lie. Every year they push the debate further in their favor, select candidates closer to their interests, and erode the reforms that oppose their power. Opposition to the erosion is weaker than the energy put into enacting them, because it's harder to muster progressive energy in service to a status quo.
With every chip flaked off the reforms, progressives become more cynical and paradoxically less engaged in their defense, leaving the door wide open for frontal assaults by the other side. The entire narrative of politics shifts to the mentality they wish to cultivate - supply-side economics, "job creator" bullshit, government is bad, etc., and Democratic politicians have a hard time avoiding being polluted by the meme, because most of them don't have the personal charm to stand on their own without media support. This makes the situation even worse, until finally it gets so bad that the original energy is once again stoked and the cycle repeats itself. If OWS goes the way of a limited movement, then it may or may not succeed, but even "success" would just mean winning a temporary concession from the elites - one bound to be a bad-faith compromise they would instantly be working to erode.
In this scenario, at best we would restore the New Deal for ourselves, only to see our children having to fight the same damn fight against even stronger and more tenacious enemies. So while it's better than nothing, this scenario is not ideal - we have to be focused on addressing the problem all the way down to its roots, not merely pruning the poisoned fruit every few generations. Sooner or later the toxin will just be too strong and it will overcome us. We can't allow things to go that far. We have to build robust solutions to the problem of power inequality, and that is why I call Scenario 2 the "Possible Ideal" - it does exactly that. If OWS is just a movement, and if that movement succeeds, it would still just be a stay of execution. It has to evolve into something more than a movement. Cycle Reset is the scenario most people involved in OWS are aiming for, but we should all aim higher - then if we fail, at least our "failure" could still result in some form of success. But if you aim modestly and fail, there are no consolation prizes.
5. Fizzle & Rot
Of course, nothing says OWS would succeed at all, even if its aims were the modest ones of a limited movement. People may become disillusioned; it may splinter; it may disgrace itself through the actions of an extreme minority; or the other side might simply find a way to neutralize its message so that people stop paying attention. This isn't exactly an "outcome" so much as a crossroads toward other negative outcomes, because the failure of OWS would not lead anywhere good. People enraged by its failure could become militant, or the other side would cement its power to new extremes, leading to some of the scenarios outlined below.
6. Collision, with Mixed/Bad Outcome
Now we examine the same basic scenarios as the first Collision set, but with muddled or negative outcomes:
- After gaining a degree of prominence and influence, corrupt court decisions, regulatory machinations, and arbitrary policing put OWS and every affiliated movement or event in a virtual cage that badly compromises its effectiveness and ability to grow. SCOTUS goes full-on Orwell to define the law as permitting whatever most disrupts the movement, and disallowing whatever would facilitate it. Institutionalized General Assemblies may be ruled unconstitutional on the basis of pure gibberish "because we say so," or have their powers curtailed by judicial fiat to become virtually symbolic. Protest actions continue, but solutions to the grievances being raised are denied at every turn. Some states and localities may remain staunchly supportive despite the hostile environment, leading to social and political fragmentation (but what else is new).
- Corporations succeed in co-opting the message of the 99% and/or General Assembly process through front groups, media blackouts, propaganda, staged events, fictitious or tightly-controlled GAs, and other Orwellian tactics. The message of OWS becomes muddled and confused by the noise, with internal divisions being stoked by external interference. Some real GAs become internally alienated and dissolve; some become uncontrollable, irresponsible mobs that embarrass and damage the movement; some that have gained official recognition are overthrown by local politicians through legal maneuverings with the backing of corrupt courts. At best, the result is unease and dread, with little in the way of further progress being made; at worst, a climate of disorder is deliberately cultivated and the movement blamed for it.
- Stochastic right-wing terrorism breeds extreme left-wing splinter groups who pollute the message and reputation of progressive change by retaliating in kind. They are motivated by the belief - not unjustified in some cases - that police departments are more sympathetic to the wingnut terrorists than to their victims, but their constant harping on the fact and hate-filled screeds based on it only drives law enforcement into being even less concerned with protecting them or those associated with them, reinforcing the cycle of alienation from the broader community.
Average people, forced to choose between ranting ideologues and cops, will choose cops. Meanwhile, the wingnut terrorists will not be ranting against police, but throwing off propaganda designed to make themselves seem "mainstream" - and meanwhile the GOP will adjust its own rhetoric to cover theirs so that the perception is cemented. The OWS alliance is torn apart, with people committed to nonviolence forced into the fold of typical politics while those driven primarily by an urge to gratify their anger are radicalized in order to punish the injustices they see and avenge the violence committed by their enemies. Even if the right-wing terrorists are far more violent, prolific, and well-funded, the organs of state would focus on destroying the left-wing splinter groups, and even legitimate movements would be targeted for investigation and sometimes prosecution because of it. Progress politics fails for the time being, and government comes to resemble a Latin American kleptocracy.
- A civil war / coup scenario plays out, but enemy forces are too strong, operating with the support of foreign nation-states like China and Saudi Arabia that have an interest in ensuring the US is ruled by oligarchy. Propaganda and media blackouts persuade the general public that nothing of importance has really changed, just a little "bureaucratic kerfuffle" over appointment of thus-and-such or the specific powers of so-and-so to do this-and-that. Perhaps they buy Congress, buy a Republican the Speakership of the House, impeach the President and Vice President on some made-up bullshit, and install their boy as head of state - all nice and technically legal.
Most people are still more or less free, for the moment, because the oligarchy has no interest in the vast majority of political content - they've spent decades figuring out how to immunize themselves from being in any way affected by public opinion. But OWS is nixed straight out - long jail terms for petty "crimes," redefining the term "riot" to mean whatever they want it to mean, etc. All effective tactics are precluded, people imprisoned, both group and private assets seized, web sites shut down (under SOPA, naturally), and everyone remotely associated with it monitored like hawk. From there, things would probably get worse.
7. Nightmare Lite
Republicans win the 2012 elections - even a narrow win is sufficient to make the premise of this scenario inevitable. SOPA (the internet censorship bill giving corporations the power to blacklist websites) and the indefinite detention bill are passed and the corrupt SCOTUS affirms them in a 5-4 decision. Perhaps overnight or perhaps strung out over time, progressive political websites disappear from the internet and individuals who post liberal-leaning commentary begin to find themselves excluded from their accounts and services as mainstream websites terminate their access to avoid being blacklisted themselves.
Low-level organizing continues, but the large-scale operations are impossible without electronic networks, and nobody sees what's going on because the content from cellphone cameras is blocked. Police beat, torture, arrest, and maybe in a few cases murder people with impunity and word rarely gets out. The internet continues as a medium of entertainment and mundane communication, but begins to resemble China's Great Firewall in that progressive politics disappears from it with increasing speed and reliability. What passes for liberal debates are Alan Colmes-like moderate discussions where no strong position is ever taken, and the insanity, violence, and mendacity of the right is never pointed out. Or sometimes whacked-out weirdo hippies will be allowed on to serve as straw men, but never anyone who isn't wearing tie-dye and rambling about something totally obscure.
Activists who prove too ingenious at evading the communications controls are arrested and detained indefinitely under the aforementioned bill, whisked away in the night to points unknown and rarely if ever heard from. They're probably tortured, albeit perhaps in the petty "non-violent" ways that cowardly authoritarian states concerned with appearances employ - sleep deprivation, loud noises, humiliation, etc. Some of them might be murdered in custody for arbitrary reasons, although no one would ever hear about it. Their families would be told they died of pneumonia or something equally innocuous, or told nothing at all.
America would become a schizophrenic state where the TV screens are full of "ordinary families" living in huge mansions, driving tons of cars, and engaging in lives singularly dedicated to consumption and the proposition of wealth as moral value while off-screen the ordinary person is sharing a rundown house they don't own with other families like a third-world country. Crime would be everywhere, and police would be nowhere except arresting people who complain about it because the rich who run everything can afford their own private armies. Basically, Mexico.
8. ...Uber Alles ☠.
This is not a throwaway "worst-case scenario" - it is in fact possible, and even credibly so. In 1930s Germany the economic elite were afraid of Communism and resentful of Jews, but if you had given them a stark choice at the time between continuing the Weimar Republic or participating in the premeditated murder of millions of men, women, and children, the vast majority would have chosen to continue muddling along with economic disaster and social disorder. But unfortunately, people do not see that far enough ahead, either because they're limited or because they're deliberately blind. All they see is the step in front of them, and then the next step, and then the next, and eventually the unspeakable becomes the inevitable.
Hitler promised them the removal of Bolshevism from German society, and the segregation of the Jews - a "return" to "German purity and dignity." These were things that played to the narcissism and power of the elite in German society, and also addressed their (quite justified) fear of Communist takeover, given how violently the Bolsheviks had dealt with Eastern European aristocracies. They were promised order, culture, and the protection of "civilization." And in the twisted right-wing mind, violent authoritarianism is exactly that. But as even that perverse idea was transcended into realms of Satanic totalitarian nightmare, they still went along because they had totally invested themselves in it, and only near the very end, when they had already lost the war they signed on for, did they try to reverse themselves and overthrow Hitler - millions of corpses later. These were educated, intelligent, "cultured" people.
Now fast forward to 21st century America as envisioned in the Nightmare Lite scenario. This same class of people - the wealthy right-wing - has done everything in its power to avoid losing that power, including turning elections into auctions, passing dictatorial powers over the internet and abolishing habeas corpus, smashing up any public assembly that isn't sanctioned, funded, and scripted by them, turning the internet into a Potemkin Village, and sending people to internment camps for being too innovative at avoiding these controls. But suppose the public is just a little too good at resisting them, and everything they do just seems to backfire on them. What do "American" wingnuts do when they fail? Double-down. Always. If they can't win a fist fight, they don't stand back and question why they're fighting or try to resolve it cheaply with a conversation - they come back with a bat, then a knife, then a gun, then they call in airstrikes. That's just who they are: Vindictive sociopaths.
Well, let's say they've already killed people in the normal course of enforcing an authoritarian state - most by accident, but maybe a few because their goons got overzealous. Perhaps they decide it's time to "take the gloves off" and "teach the socialist mobs a lesson." At first, there would be no reason to conduct massacres as official actions - just arm and unleash wingnut militias on the unarmed population, then send in the military to "restore order" if anyone tries to fight back. A good old American Rwanda. But maybe that doesn't work either to their satisfaction, so they just drop the pretense and start sending out death squads to restive towns and neighborhoods. Liberals, Jews, homosexuals, blacks, Latinos, union members (when unions were still legal), scientists, academics, feminists, pretty much anyone who might be opposed to the situation is a legitimate target.
You know those nice, kind Republican neighbors of yours whom you'd never say a bad thing about? Well, they're very concerned by what they're hearing from official state media about all the liberal "terrorist groups" trying to overthrow civilization, and are outraged by the fictional massacres of Christian families by leftists they keep hearing about. They think you're nice, but they know you're on the left, so maybe it couldn't hurt to inform on you just to make sure? The good, god-fearing Republican authorities would surely not punish you if you're innocent, so what could it hurt? And after all, the reward for informing on a neighbor is enough to buy a new big-screen HDTV. If you're innocent, no worries. And if not, they've done their patriotic duty and got a new TV. No harm, no foul. When they never see you again after the midnight ruckus in which you were taken away, they'll decide that you must have been a terrorist, and are now being humanely incarcerated in a state-of-the-art facility with good plumbing and no torture.
This is a very bad scenario, but it isn't incredible - quite the contrary. It is a credible possibility. It is one of the things that can happen to a society when its poisonous elements manage to get control of the center of things, and has enough support in the population to not have to rule as a completely foreign occupation. The way to avoid it is to do what is already obvious: Be as focused as possible on growing OWS, on forming tight and open relationships with the community, and building as much moral authority and good will as possible with as many people as possible, as soon as possible. That will make it stronger, faster, and limit the options of its enemies, causing extreme actions to blow up in their face, and also limiting the ability of more insidious tactics to muddle the message.