Last weekend I went down to New York. I had planned to participate in taking Duarte Square. The action ended before we arrived. I did get to attend an interesting conference put together by n+1. There were panels on finance, direct action, foreclosures, and debt. Panelists included Doug Henwood and David Graeber. I would estimate that a couple of hundred people were there (but I am not so great at estimating).
McKenzie Wark was sitting in front of me in the audience. He said two things that have stuck with me.
The first: you can tell the US is a third world country because the activist groups are basically NGOs.
The second: the issues of the movement are easy--jobs, austerity, debt, and a broken political system.
The rest of this post connects loosely to these two ideas. The first one is depressing not just because it brings home the condition of the country (New York City is more unequal than Brazil). It's depressing because the NGO activist model, for all its local achievements, has not stopped the ravaging of the so-called Third World or so-called global South. It's a political model that cooperates with capitalism. Organizations are issue-focused and donor-driven. They rely on experts and specialists.
Geert Lovink, Jon Anderson and I (in the introduction to our edited collection. Reformatting Politics) call this a "post-democratic governmentality." We say "post-democratic" because NGOs are not representative; they might try to help or serve, but they don't represent constituencies in the sense of being elected or chosen by them. Ultimately, they aren't responsible to them but rather to themselves, their boards, their donors.
To be clear, I don't mean "post-democratic" as a critical term; it's descriptive. It designates a kind of political action that arises when democracy has either broken down or has not emerged. It can also exist alongside democratic practices and institutions as a post-democratic element (in the same way that feudal elements also persist).
My worry for the occupy movement is that this post-democratic governmentality will trump/displace the more radical and collectivist parts of the movement. I am worried about this because of the high quality of the contributions to the panels at the n+1 conference. Panelists were focused, smart, knowledgeable--and dedicated to the issues they discussed. They were specialists with specialized expertise. Some of them might have just recently become specialists. They might have started to learn about particular matters of concern because the movement radicalized them. Yet it seemed to me as the discussion went on that the special issues and topics had a singular momentum, not a conjoined or collective one. People wanted others to join them in their special issue or part of the movement (student debt, housing), but they were not actively linking the parts. Of course, this is part of the autonomist ideology that has been so influential: everyone should just independently pursue what they want, using the occupy political brand.
Is it surprising that attendance at the GAs has declined, that the GAs are less and less crucial (Oakland activist and musician Boots Riley has a post on FB discussing a similar issue in Oakland)? They are time-consuming and exhausting. And they also break with our regular habits of being, forcing people to act and engage differently. What makes them great, makes them difficult and vulnerable to both exhaustion and to yielding to political forms that already fit the system--NGOs and issue groups.
The second point: there are collective issues here and they are what hold the movement together. The issues are fairness and responsiveness. Our economy is unfair and our political system is not responding to this unfairness. Everything in the movement has to be focused here. Jobs and debt.
The challenge for the new year, it seems to me, is growth. People. We need more people. I'm not saying a majority of the country; we need more people in order to do more actions, bigger actions, more dramatic actions. We need more people in order to wage a general strike, to occupy the Capit0l, to shut down financial markets. We need more people in order to push the broken system over the brink.
And how do we do this? Services and direct outreach. These are time-consuming and difficult. They quickly become localized and personalized, de-radicalized, re-inserted in regular frames. Yet the more services (stopping foreclosures and evictions, say, activities the current scope of which appeared dramatically in the events of December 6) can be used to bring people into a larger movement, the stronger the movement as a national and global force will be.
since you mention both doug henwood & boots riley, i should point out the Occupied Media interviews with both of them, as well as others, linked at the top left sidebar at plutocracy files:
http://www.plutocracyfiles.com/
Posted by: rjs | December 23, 2011 at 11:30 AM