Let’s Meet the 99 Percent Where They’re at

by Chris Maisano

Chris Maisano at Occupy Wall Street

As the #OccupyWallStreet protests in lower Manhattan near their one-month anniversary, it’s worth taking stock of what has been accomplished so far and what remains to be done in the weeks, months, and even years ahead.

Since its birth on September 17, this phenomenon (I still hesitate to call it a movement) has accomplished very much indeed. It has captured the imagination of countless people in the United States and around the world, and garnered a great deal of attention in the mainstream media. It has shown that discontent with the exceedingly bleak political-economic situation that confronts us does not come exclusively from the libertarian and conservative Right. While the populist cry of “we are the 99 percent” may set my Marxist teeth on edge, it nonetheless speaks to the aspirations, insecurities, and interests of the working-class majority and points toward the construction of a solidaristic, collective political subject—a highly welcome development for a Left that’s typically been far more concerned with the politics of recognition and difference in recent decades. And in inspiring at least 150 copycat protests in cities and towns across the country, it has fired hopes that—at long last—a new period of mass social protest has begun.

Everyone who has been involved in #OccupyWallStreet, from the nucleus of activists who have spent weeks sleeping on cold concrete to those whose contributions have been far more episodic, should be proud of what we’ve done. Considering the chaotic and frustrating conditions that prevailed during the first days of the protests, as well as the rather unimpressive record of left organizing and activism in recent years, I’m still in disbelief that things have developed so far and so fast. This is no small victory.

Still, there is a staggering amount of work that remains to be done. Global capital can easily withstand a few weeks’ worth of political theater, no matter how brilliant or inspiring. As Slavoj Žižek put it in his moving speech to the general assembly in Zuccotti Park last Sunday, let’s not fall in love with ourselves and our beautiful gestures but with the long, hard struggle for a new society that lies ahead. Occupation can be a highly effective tactic, but it is not a strategy and it is not a movement. As fall turns to winter and the encampments in lower Manhattan and elsewhere inevitably disband, activists will need to build new organizations, institutions, and coalitions that can follow through on the promise of these protests and make concrete gains in the lives of the people they claim to speak for.

But not everyone among the multitudes on Broadway feels the same way.

On Monday night, I went to a meeting of a self-organized group of #OccupyWallStreet activists who are putting together a set of demands that might sustain the protests after the occupation ends and rally a broader constituency to its banner. Many of the proposed demands would be non-controversial in most left circles: a federally funded jobs program, an end to the attacks on workers’ and immigrants’ rights, Medicare for all, nationalizing the banks, and paying for these things by ending the wars and making the tax system more progressive.

But for a small number of people within the group, the very idea of raising a set of demands should be rejected entirely. The spirit of their rejection brought me back to those meetings I used to frequent in my days as an undergraduate anarchist, when seemingly interminable arguments over whether to call our student groupuscules “federations,” “confederations,” or “autonomous networks” assumed world-historical importance. Their reasoning had a surface plausibility, and a case could be made for some of their specific objections: making demands of a political system owned by capital grants it unwarranted legitimacy; concessions won from the state could have a potentially demobilizing effect on the larger movement; the things we want can be won only if the entire political economy is revolutionized, so revolution should be our watchword. Demands, if they should be made at all, should be made of the people—not of the state—and there should be only one. Join us!

This speaks to my more anarchic impulses. But if I ask my neighbors or coworkers to join us in Zuccotti Park, they’ll inevitably ask me what we want and how we intend to go about getting it. That’s entirely reasonable. In fact, it’s the only reasonable response from someone who is not already immersed in a left political milieu and committed to long-term movement work. So it’s not just the media or political elites that we speak to by raising demands. We speak to most of the 99 percent that we have ostensibly aligned ourselves with.

Also, why should a small-scale, short-term victory necessarily result in demobilization and an end to protest? These kinds of victories could just as easily demonstrate that protest works and make activists hungry for bigger and better victories. Those who claim that nothing can change until everything changes not only erect a false dichotomy of reform versus revolution. They are the ones who raise the specter of demoralization and demobilization by setting criteria for success that these protests can never hope to meet.

In “Building Solidarity,” a piece in his essential essay collection Class Notes, Adolph Reed, Jr. distinguishes between two approaches to political activity: the witness-bearing approach and what he calls the “organizing model of politics.” Thus far, proponents of the former have tended to hold sway not just in the general assembly meetings but in the smaller working groups as well. These are the kinds of activists who come to the meetings of a working group devoted to building a positive political program only to question the legitimacy of the project.

To be sure, their moral fervor, media savvy, and youthful exuberance have been instrumental in launching and sustaining the protests, and I do not want to see them marginalized or purged (the Ron Paul enthusiasts and goldbugs are another story). But if #OccupyWallStreet is to persist and become a mass movement with the potential to challenge the power of capital, it needs an infusion of activists oriented toward the organizing model of politics. As Reed defines it, this approach is based on “intensive, issue-based organizing of the old-fashioned shop-to-shop, door-to-door technique. The paramount objective is to reach out to people who aren’t already mobilized in left politics, to build a conversation that builds a movement.”

It’s fun to hang out in the park, eat too much donated pizza, and chill with Kanye West and Russell Simmons. Let’s keep doing that for as long as we can. But what if the thousands of people who have come to Zuccotti Park day after day fanned out throughout New York to organize neighborhood assemblies, campus-based direct action groups, and community-based workers’ organizations too? The political possibilities might be even greater than we currently realize, but we won’t know until we move beyond the park and meet the rest of the 99 percent where they’re at.

Chris Maisano is a member of the Young Democratic Socialists New York City chapter. He currently works as a librarian at a large public library branch in Brooklyn. Chris is the current editor of the Activist. This post originally appeared on Arguing the World, the blog of Dissent.  He was interviewed in Justin Elliott’s  Salon article on Occupy Wall Street.