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Occupy Wall Street: Reclaiming Public Space, Reclaiming Dignity
As the public-space prairie fire known as Occupy Wall Street spreads across the country from New York to Portland, it's becoming glaringly apparent activists are pinging the political target. In the face of both predictable right-wing detractors as well as high-profile liberals who want a crisp list of specific demands, activists have rejected top-down, slicker than slick press-release politics in favor of messy, slow, ground-up politics -- the essence of radical democracy. Because the movement is leaderless, it has left the media rudderless.
At first many journalists were befuddled, wondering what the movement stood for. This is a bit odd. After all, the movement is called Occupy Wall Street and one of its central slogans is "We are the 99 percent." People are fed up with the wealthiest 1 percent reaping the economic rewards, with the super-rich stuffing their pockets while the rest of us -- the 99 percent -- are left holding the bag.
Occupy Portland, October 7 (photo: Bart Howard Everts)
Let's not forget, corporate America is squatting on $2 trillion. According to the Federal Reserve, this is the biggest corporate stockpile since the 1950s. Meanwhile, Wall Street "banksters" and financiers have had their bonuses restored to pre-recession levels, while the unemployment rate clicks upward. Talk about gall.
When the media weren't ignoring Occupy Wall Street, they've been busy attacking it. Many journalists slid into the well-worn ruts of covering dissent: treating activist outliers as movement spokespeople, maligning them for having too many disparate causes, deriding them as ignorant, zany, or disruptive. Naomi Klein dubs such mocking and deprecation "a sick cultural ritual" perpetrated by the press.
Right-wing columnist Rich Lowry offered an extreme caricature of the attack-dog punditocracy when he wrote, "The left's tea party is a juvenile rabble, a woolly-headed horde," a band of "stereotypically aging hippies and young kids who could have just left a Phish concert." Notice what gets lost: actual ideas.
Such coverage is reminiscent of 1999 when New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman called the anti-WTO activists in Seattle "a Noah's ark of flat-earth advocates, protectionist trade unions and yuppies looking for their 1960's fix." We'd be wise to note, though, he went on to write a book called "The World Is Flat."
Even National Public Radio -- the trusty barometer of bourgeois sensibilities -- conspicuously ignored OWS only to start covering it with metronomic predictability. In one recent segment, an NPR correspondent went to Manhattan's Zuccotti Park, where she homed in on a scrappy cigarette salesman who said, "Everybody is supporting it because they know it keeps people calm, you know, everybody needs their nicotine." How this helps us understand why people have taken to the streets is a mystery. Then, in a flimsy gotcha moment, the journalist pointed out how anti-corporate activists were using the restroom at McDonald's and corporate mobile phone firms. What an insight.
The media -- and the rest of us, too -- have been primed to expect shiny, focus-group-tested activism with sharp, calculated messaging and snazzy graphics. We've been taught that the economic ends justify the political means.
With its real-deal grass roots approach and consensus-based decision-making, OWS -- and its offshoot movement Occupy Portland -- explodes these expectations. The movement is a dynamic process, not a static thing. They don't have behind-the-scenes bigwig funders. These activists are showing us how to slow down, take each other seriously, and identify the real culprits in our economic debacle -- they shouldn't also be expected to concoct policy.
On the gerbil wheel of Twitter and Tumblr this might seem quaint or lacking goal-oriented ambition. But for those who take an open mind down to Occupy Portland's vibrant encampment at Chapman Square, you'll find people courageously living by Edward Abbey's maxim that "Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul."
Plus, if the movement were more decidedly focused, they'd likely be derided as a single-issue group. If they had a list of precise demands, they'd be criticized for being too wonkish. The quizzical insistence that it enumerate concrete demands is an expression of the instant-gratification-is-too-damn-slow mentality that pervades our thinking today.
Slavoj Zizek recently wrote in the London Review of Books: "We are often told that privacy is disappearing, that the most intimate secrets are open to public probing. But the reality is the opposite: what is effectively disappearing is public space, with its attendant dignity."
The Occupy Wall Street moment, which has flowered into an Occupy Together movement, has done us the favor of reclaiming public space. It has also reclaimed the political energy of this country. And it may well help us reclaim our collective dignity in the face of Wall Street's systematic rapacity.
People across the political spectrum are tired of legalized plunder. And they're tired of the politicians who bail out the banks and lock out the workers. Politics have become shambolic, and the Occupy Wall Street movement aims to inject some humanity into what's become a cruel, corrupt political-economic system, some modicum of consensus into a polarized shout-festival. This movement deserves our keen attention, not knee-jerk derision.
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17 Comments so far
Show AllJules Boykoff,
good essay, clearly msm is not occupy's friend. thank you.
{Slavoj Zizek recently wrote in the London Review of Books: "We are often told that privacy is disappearing, that the most intimate secrets are open to public probing. But the reality is the opposite: what is effectively disappearing is public space, with its attendant dignity."}
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure
it's been happening for centuries and technology both exacerbates the problem (tapped phones, survielence drones, cameras everywhere) while simultaneously providing a way out by enabling resistance (cell phones/computers).
...peace...
Thirty years of corporate control of government has created so many problems that a list of demands would be thicker than a big city phone book.
The first steps are to restore all of FDR's New Deal financial regulations to control greed and the banksters, and get all private money out of political campaigns.
Perhaps. But if there's no chance for me to win, there's no chance for you to win.
http://www.gpln.com/announcing_for_2012.htm
The mainstream media doesn't know how to define the OWS movement because that would require the work of true journalists. Most MSM journalists are media whores who want to climb the corporate ladder. They are there to serve the empire, and have done a great job.
Hoa binh
The MSM specializes in collating and relaying corporate press releases disguised as news.
Excellent article.
"You do not become a 'dissident' just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well and ends with being branded an enemy of society."-Vaclav Havel
==The Occupy Wall Street moment, which has flowered into an Occupy Together movement, has done us the favor of reclaiming public space. It has also reclaimed the political energy of this country. And it may well help us reclaim our collective dignity in the face of Wall Street's systematic rapacity.==
Is he tenured yet?
Trylon
You're pretty lame as trolls go. What are they paying you?
Slavoj Zizek delivered a very thought provoking speech at OWS, most of which is transcripted/recorded here, http://occupywallst.org/article/today-liberty-plaza-had-visit-slavoj-zizek/
Instead of posting an excerpt when anyone interested can go and read/see/listen to what he said, I'm posting one of the comments that I thought was very perseptive and offers a lesson for many here at this site:
"Thank God! There's someone else working to keep on including those who disagree with him! How coincidental, that it would be a fellow Socialist! I've been running around trying to convince discouraged conservatives and moderates to stay with us, hang in there, and not give up on us! We can't represent the 99% if we drive away everyone who disagrees with us. The folks who disagree with us are precious and irreplaceable, and if we don't find a way to all work together, supporting each other, this movement is going to fail. As a nation, we used to be able to work together, and our government stopped working when its people forgot how to do that. Here we have the chance to re-learn how to work together, to build a movement that isn't liberal, conservative, neo-con, socialist, or any of the other hate-camp "-isms" that have ruined us. The 1% rejoices every time someone who disagrees with you or me gets discouraged and goes home. They WANT us to choose a single ideology and drive everyone else away! Can we all please stop trying to do their work for them?"
The 99% for President!
This is why they occupy Wall Street!
The Declaration of Independence
IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776.
" We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, these are Life, Liberty that among and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government
It's interesting.
You can take every thing from a person, enslave them, impoverish them, kill their children, take their home, but they will endure it all as long as they have their dignity.
Morticia:
Lest you be misunderstood, Is there dignity in Slavery? Poverty? Murder? Robbery? Slavery was not endured, Slavery was maintained by physical and psychological force. Poverty is not endured, Poverty is maintained by structural isolation. Did you mean what you said? To endure implys free will, from my perspective.
Yes, I meant what I wrote.
I do not mean what you wrote.
I think there is less coercion than I would like to believe.
The fact is people overwhelmingly accept the reality they are born into and because of that they endure.
I do not think people are complicit in the abuses they suffer but that they are unwitting of who and how it comes about.
And no , there is no dignity in abuse. The dignity I am writing about is self worth.
"[T]he Occupy Wall Street movement aims to inject some humanity into what's become a cruel, corrupt political-economic system": This is the point really, to aim for a humanism, the common good.
The Author makes outstanding points and I'm glad he took the time, Looks like he'll getting his sleeping bag out soon. I've been thinking about it. "Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul."
What's going on is the breaking down of the 99% to THIRD WORLD status so that state-corporatist globalization can proceed with all possible speed --- moving the 99% to the bottom. Corporate Personhood, war, and systemic looting, legitimized by a corrupt business community, congress, executive and court are effective and preferred methods.
Most of the 99% still think the political process can be re-established for the people from within the system. The quiet ones.
The noisy ones don't. I don't. I have not attended, yet, but have contributed some ideas:
The political spectrum as not a straight line, but a broken circle.
The base only of the pyramid on the Great Seal as a symbol for the movement.
And tactics: Which is for the #Occupiers to gather, as they are, around the districts in need of reformation, BUT WITH THEIR BACKS TO THE 1% (in the classic gesture of shunning), ---- THEIR CHANTS/SIGNS DIRECTED AT THE AMERICAN PEOPLE AND THE CAMERAS !!
Neither the 1% nor their enablers will voluntarily change. The PEOPLE must be moved off their asses.
The protest misses a grand opportunity to speak directly to the people through the cameras of the MSM.