Occupy Wall Street and The Case For Radical Disobedience
A classic expression of the Occupy ethos. Photo by Timothy Krause.
For 59 fateful days in the autumn of 2011, thousands of activists occupied Zuccotti Park, adjacent to Wall Street, protesting economic injustices they felt caused the Great Recession. It was a moment of crisis: 2.6 million Americans lost their jobs and faced dire economic straits. Capitalizing on the opportunity of this historic moment where the faultlines of the American economic system emerged clearer than ever, they mounted a campaign of anti-capitalist rage that sought to build nationwide consensus through rhetoric of “We are the 99%.” The movement indeed garnered national attention and sympathy as the country supported the idea that working Americans were served a gross injustice by the financial crisis.
The movement became known as Occupy Wall Street, or Occupy. It was distinctively non-hierarchical and prided itself in being “leaderless.” Decisions were made by an intensely cumbersome process of collective consensus building. Strikingly, Occupy did not have an actual political program with specific demands. It held an underlying lack of faith in conventional processes of advocating for demands, like nonviolent civil disobedience, policy remedies, and the legal system. These immediate and easily measurable solutions could be unfaithfully satisfied. Agitating within a system seemed dubious to Occupy because the system itself contained much of the problem.
But the choice to move beyond the conventions of protest drew intense criticism from all sides of the political spectrum. The famous public intellectual and political theorist Slavoj Zizek, who aligned closely with much of the Occupy ideology, nevertheless decried them for choosing what he saw as a path of uncontrolled rage. He situated Occupy within a broader moment of international social unease (with uprisings that year in Paris, London, and the Arab Spring): “Opposition to the system can no longer articulate itself in the form of a realistic alternative, or even as a utopian project,” he said, “but can only take the shape of a meaningless outburst.” To say that Zizek viewed Occupy as a “meaningless outburst” would be an oversimplification. He did cautiously support the work but was wary of the lack of direct political program. His critique exposes a key question—in times of deep injustice: is it viable to organize movements of protest that do not directly articulate specific demands? While it may not initially seem so, the answer is in fact an emphatic yes.
To understand this, we must change what we mean by success: not solving a problem directly or immediately, but making an impact. When we look at Occupy, we must ask ourselves, did they change how people thought? And did that change ultimately affect the political landscape? Occupy and its legacy provide an excellent illustration of this wider point. Its basic ethos, refusal to accept status quo governance, has since blossomed in our political climate in ways not immediately obvious. Occupy asserted the right to imagine alternatives, and despite critics who dismiss it for seeming to have achieved little or nothing at all, it is undeniable that it has affected the thinking of millions. Accordingly, alternatives that once seemed remote are now closer than ever. In America today, the conversation around income inequality has thickened and advanced to levels that were unheard of before the 2008 recession: polls indicate an increasing proportion of people view income inequality as a major problem and support policies to address it, such as raising the minimum wage and taxes on the wealthy. Understanding this impact fully depends on our ability to adequately consider something difficult to measure by raw data—an ambiguous, though ultra important political concept—the minds of the people for instance.
One of the biggest barriers to social change is lack of political will. Awakening large swaths of the public to an issue is hard, and it is an even more momentous task to empower them to mobilize. We cannot blame politicians if we do not act ourselves—nothing forces them to accommodate the whims of those who idly complain from the armchair. Action depends on enough people making themselves heard to elected officials that they care, and that there will be consequences if the people are ignored. Thus, changing the priorities of people in power begins with changing the desires of people in general. Doing so is not immediately about working towards some practical goal. It begins with minds—that is, before you change the world you have to change how people think.
Bernard Harcourt, professor of law at Columbia University, situated the Occupy movement’s style of protest within a radical style of political disobedience that refuses to engage with status quo “political rationality, discourse, and strategies.” Mainstream strategies are easily compromised by political and economic elites, and Harcourt thereby praises movements that “avoid producing a set of demands that can easily be met, yet amount to nothing.” A key example of how embedded interests obstruct genuine reform was a 2009 proposal by Paul Volcker. His “Volcker Rule” was a simple proposal to combat banks from making reckless investment decisions like those which triggered the recession. It was communicated in a brief three page letter to President Obama but turned into a bewildering monstrosity of a 298 bill by the time it got through Congress, “accompanied by more than 1,300 questions about 400 topics.”
How did this happen? “Countless millions of dollars” from Wall Street, as columnist James Stewart explained. Firms fought the bill for being convoluted and difficult to adopt—problems caused by the very exemptions they fought for. While the Volcker rule eventually passed, the comical number of loopholes made it very much a Pyrrhic victory. These difficulties illustrate why exclusive reliance on traditional modes of political change—legal recourse and policy action—is hopeless to ameliorate root causes of inequality. While there are certainly limits to radicalism, a reliance on the conventional style alone also falls tragically short of success. It may in fact be even worse because victories that do not actually solve root problems provide a false illusion of success. Lasting remedies require a new paradigm of resistance that opens up possibilities. Although this is unlikely to bring about the world we want to live in by itself, its effect on changing thought is a necessary first step.
Occupy’s commitment to an expansion of political horizons, pushing conversations to places previously unimaginable, is hard to account for; surface level analysis would point out that income inequality in the United States has worsened since 2008. Discouraging statistics might prompt one to blame Occupy for failing to capitalize on their revolutionary moment, and it is indeed a disappointment that there have been few major policy victories to reduce income inequality throughout the entire history of this country. But there are no “quick fixes” to a broken system: the basis for meaningful change in the long run is the harder work of modifying the public consciousness, making people aware of, and care about that which is invisible or unspoken of. Robert Reich, the former Secretary of Labor for President Bill Clinton, lauded Occupy for its contribution in reaching the minds of the American public in an unprecedented manner. Speaking to a crowd of 10,000 students who were “occupying” the University of California Berkeley in November 2011, he spoke to the positive impact of their work: “This country is beginning to discuss an issue, and a set of issues, it has avoided discussing for years.” This particular asset of Occupy—that they opened somewhat of a Pandora’s box that had been long neglected by the country—can be difficult to measure. But the legacy has blossomed in the proliferation of many other movements throughout the past decade.
Kalle Lasn, key architect of the movement (but characteristically of the leaderless philosophy, he distances himself from taking credit) hailed Occupy as an “incredible success” if only because “it politicized millions of young people around the world.” So as we examine recent popular movements which address a wide range of injustices—from low wage workers to racial and climate justice—we should consider ways they might carry the torch Occupy lit. A clear example of this impact is the candidacy of Bernie Sanders, who embraced the “socialist” label and in two separate elections nearly secured the nomination of a major political party for the President of the United States.
Examining the historical record, few politicians are anywhere near as progressive as Sanders. Candidates who actually engendered his same kind of radicalism, such as Eugene Debs at the turn of the twentieth century, came nowhere near as close to victory. Understanding Sanders’ unprecedented candidacy necessitates an acknowledgement of the shifting political headwinds he was able to capitalize on. His campaign openly embraced a new political climate that Occupy helped usher in; Karthik Ganapathy, spokesperson for the campaign, remarked in a CNN interview that, “Occupy Wall Street helped create the political climate that helped Bernie’s message to resonate so widely, simply by shining a spotlight on issues of Wall Street greed and income inequality.” It is clear that Sanders' near success is deeply indebted to the impact of Occupy on galvanizing a generation of young people in support of progressive, even radical, values.
We cannot simply conclude that Occupy Wall Street merely wreaked havoc to no avail. It demonstrated that millions of Americans had become aware of and enraged about something hardly discussed before. Of course the radical critique engendered by Occupy, with a lack of immediate results, is far from enough in itself: real change involves concrete action. Robert Reich illustrates this point well. He may be effusive in praise for the movement's broader cultural impact, as discussed, but overall is more of a cautious ally. Reich offered incisive remarks about the limits of Occupy in an interview with Business Insider, appreciating it for the issues “it brought to the public’s attention” but emphasizing that “you can’t have a movement unless you combine activists who are getting and receiving attention with activists who behind the scenes are working to mobilize and organize people in a very specific political direction.” The lack of an explicit political programme with directly actionable demands was both the saving grace and the Achilles heel of Occupy. To achieve its radical aims, they needed a marriage with more conventional organizing strategies. The lack of this is why the movement ended up “without very much to show for it,” Reich laments. While Occupy did important work in steering previously radical agendas closer to the mainstream, that work in itself is not enough to bring about the necessary changes. Successful movements ultimately require concrete programs that can bring about specific results.
While criticisms of Occupy mount important objections because policy victories remain necessary at some point, it cannot be discounted on that basis. Its radicalism is vital: not purely in the sense of extremism on the left-right spectrum, but radicalism understood as a refusal to accept the legitimacy of governance by an oppressive power and the refusal to only pursue piecemeal reforms through an inherently rotten system. As a bastion of critique against the oppressive norms of the status quo, Occupy changed the way people thought about themselves and their social conditions. The victory was not a policy one, it was a transformation of public consciousness which will continue to display its effects as we move into the future, because its ability to affect thought is critical to opening up new political possibilities for future activists.
This understanding of the public consciousness is essential for conceptualizing how to build a successful movement of social and political change. The imagination is central to solving large scale problems; instead of taking an issue immediately at face value, marshaling available resources to address it in the most strategic and efficient manner, it is better to first step back and hope—to imagine what the best solution is, freed from the constraints of practical life. When enough people do this, the collective consciousness awakens to a new realm of possibilities. The goal posts of politics shift, and things that were previously impossible become within reach.
Traolach O’Sullivan (GS’24) is a Staff Writer at Columbia Political Review studying History. His experience community organizing in Chicago has been foundational for the views articulated above about how to construct movements for social and political change.