Elegy for Woo!

THE one time I got a chance to go visit the Occupy Wall Street camp at Zuccotti Park, I was supposed to meet up there with my uncle, Steve. Steve is a professor of American history who studied in the 1960s under Herbert Marcuse at Brandeis and was involved in the New Left. I was hoping to get a chance to go back to a conversation we’d had way back in 1992, when Bill Clinton was running for president. At the time, I was optimistic about politics, and Steve was kind of pessimistic; he was just finishing a book about the 1913 Paterson silk strike. In any case, I thought Mr Clinton would make a pretty good president, and I thought Steve should be optimistic that he might return the country to the sort of centre-left template we’d last seen under Jimmy Carter: progressive tax rates, responsible budgeting (yes, the federal debt shrank under Mr Carter), solid environmental and energy policies, public-private partnerships, federal job-creation and education initiatives and so forth.

Steve wasn’t particularly excited about a return to the Carter days. “That wasn’t really what we were looking for in the New Left,” he said, as I recall. “We were more hoping for participatory democracy.”

I considered this an extremely unrealistic thing to hope for, which is probably why Steve was so pessimistic. But 19 years later, participatory democracy was what we were getting, or at least a modestly powerful temporary instance of it. Participatory democracy can mean a lot of things, but Occupy Wall Street is certainly one of the things it means. I think others are correct to understand that when OWS protestors shout “This is what democracy looks like”, they are staking a claim for a particular vision of democracy that is opposed to the more sedentary, passive, poll-driven vision of representative interest-group democracy. It’s a vision in which democracy is not polls, campaigns, lobbying groups and PACs, but mike checks, general assemblies and direct action, in which people don’t just reactively register their preferences but go out into the public arena to engage each other, to develop and advocate and realise their visions for what society ought to do and be.

These two visions of democracy are often in conflict, and most Americans have some sympathy for both kinds. I think my colleague expressed this tension well in the contrast between two posts: on the one hand, you have democracy as “the frustrating grind”; on the other hand, you have democracy as “Woo!”

My colleague and Julian Sanchez are right that the claims by many OWS protestors that they are the true representatives of “the people” are misguided, that life in democratic polities requires respect for rules and for the real inescapable plurality of interests and opinions, and that you don’t have the right to permanently take over public parks for the use of your movement. Though I think it’s a bit off-target for Mr Sanchez to imply that the clearing operations and arrests at Zuccotti Park were motivated by the desires of constituents who “want their parks to remain usable for traditionally park-ish purposes”; before the protestors took it over, Zuccotti Park was scarcely used at all. It’s odd to believe that the large-scale police action was the result of complaints by nearby office workers who wanted their lunch spot back. (Just try getting that kind of government attention for your neighbourhood’s pet cause sometime. No way.) The complaints of neighbours about the drumming and sanitation problems were more serious, but as Nick Kristof put it: “Sure, the mayor had legitimate concerns about sanitation and safety, but have you looked around New York City? Many locations aren’t so clean and safe, but there usually aren’t hundreds of officers in riot gear showing up in the middle of the night to address the problem.”

The main intent of the police action was clearly a moral-aesthetic one, to remove a highly visible shantytown that created the impression of a breakdown in law and order. This is, after all, the city of William Bratton’s “broken windows” strategy. It’s a question worth raising whether it’s legitimate for police to hit people with batons or douse them with pepper spray in order to get them out of an area where their prolonged presence damages the moral-aesthetic feel of the city. This is also a question that cuts across ideological and party lines, depending on who’s being cleared out of where. Is this repression by the hired lackeys of the financial class? An assertion of the social rights of the community over the expressive rights of individuals? Both?

The larger point, though, is that calls for OWS activists to settle down and get busy with the humdrum mechanics of representative democratic politics misunderstand who many of these activists are, and what they want out of democratic political engagement. Many of those who came out for the demonstrations are mainstream people who’ve been radicalised by the situation, but at the movement’s core, you have a lot of people who basically believe that democracy is in the streets. In this they are the descendants of a vital utopian strand in American political history. And it’s not surprising that these are the kinds of people who’ve succeeded at putting inequality on the national political agenda, where more conventional interest-group, lobbying, think-tank or campaign-based efforts had failed.

The participatory-democracy folks have never gone away; they’ve always been out there, from Emma Goldman and the Industrial Workers of the World to the New Left to Adbusters and OWS. And they’ll always be out there, because their kinds of utopian transformations are never going to be realisable projects. But the fact that they’re unrealisable doesn’t mean that people who are willing to invest their lives in striving for utopian transformation should stop. There will be a lot of people who got involved in OWS who now shift into more pragmatic applications of effort in the representative democratic sphere, and that’s great. But people who want to gather in spontaneous camps, hold come-one come-all general assemblies and try to radically re-envision the entire global social and economic system should keep on doing that too. They’re never going to see anything that we who think in terms of mainstream politics would understand as a “victory”. But they are a wellspring to which conventional representative politics periodically turns for inspiration and momentum, when the conventional mechanisms run out of torque. Without the woo!, the frustrating grind might well grind to a halt.