The People Out of Doors: Change You Can Believe In

Jeremy Brecher | 
Submitted to portside by the author
Published on The Nation (http://www.thenation.com)
October 21, 2011

http://www.thenation.com/article/164116/people-out-doors-change-you-can-believe

The occupation movement that began on Wall Street and is now
spreading across America is part of a tradition known in the
American Revolution as the "people out of doors" - marches,
demonstrations, and impromptu assemblies that historian
Gordon S. Wood described as "extra-legislative action by the
people" who "could find no alternative institutional
expression for their demands and grievances." The movement
has provided new hope for progressive social change. But it
also raises many questions about how such movements can be
sustained and grow powerful while retaining the democratic
impulse that inspired them in the first place.

From Tahrir Square to Madison, Wisconsin, to Wall Street, few
things are more predictable than unexpected social movements.
While the new electronic social media facilitate their
emergence, the history of such movements is far older than
the Internet. Indeed, the startling appearance of social
movements has played a crucial role in shaping modern history
from the Great Upheaval of 1877, whose strikes and general
strikes closed America's railroads and more than a dozen
American cities, to the Russian Revolution of 1905, to the
Montgomery bus boycott, to the general strikes of Polish
Solidarity. When and how such movements will arise may be
unpredictable, but their patterns and dynamics can be better
understood by studying their history.

More than a "Tea Party of the Left"?

Why is it possible for social movements to emerge, often at
the very point that people seem most disorganized and
hopeless? The answer usually lies not in the clever tactics
of organizers (though they can help), but in the realization
of common problems and the often surprising human capacity
for self-organization in response to them. As people feel
increasingly outraged at the conditions they face, they begin
to mutually recognize each others' discontent and potential
readiness to act. In such contexts, an exemplary act like
walking off the job or refusing to leave a segregated lunch
counter -- or occupying a park near Wall Street -- can
dramatize for large numbers of people their common situation
and their ability to act in response to it. Once people
recognize that, the action of a few hundred protesters can
"spread by contagion" across boundaries of geography,
subculture, and even nation and in a few days draw in
thousands of people in hundreds of distant locations. It's
happened over and over again.

We know that social movements ranging from abolitionism to
the American civil rights movement to the Women's Liberation
Movement to Polish Solidarity have had made genuine social
change. But how can they have such powerful effects when they
are made up of people who appear -- and feel -- so powerless
within existing institutions and when they are opposed by
such massive concentrations of power?

As the theorist of nonviolence Gene Sharp, channeling Gandhi,
has made so clear, the answer lies in the fact that
governments, corporations, and other powerful institutions
depend on the people who cooperate or acquiesce in their
power by providing labor, resources, civility, and consent.
Social movements can be powerful because they embody the
possibility that people may withdraw their acquiescence and
consent, undermining the "pillars of support" that
governments and institutions need to survive and realize
their goals. Social movements can present a significant
threat to those who hold power - and thereby compel them to
change. As Bertolt Brecht put it in his poem "From A German
War Primer,"

General, your tank is a strong vehicle.

It breaks down a forest and crushes a hundred people.

But it has one fault: it needs a driver.

How this potential "power of the powerless" can actually be
mobilized depends on the specific pillars of support. For
example, in the civil rights era many Southern businessmen
swung from "massive resistance" to encouraging acquiescence
in desegregation because they feared the reactions of
Northern business investment to racist violence. The Kennedy
Administration moved to support civil rights, albeit tepidly,
in part from its fear of foreign disapproval of US racism,
especially in newly independent African countries courted by
the Soviet Union. Democratic Party politicians were highly
dependent on large black voting blocs in Northern cities like
Detroit and Chicago, but their support was jeopardized when
Democrats in the South perpetrated and Democrats in the White
House and Congress tolerated highly visible racial
oppression. While the civil rights movement was a direct
confrontation with the evil of segregation, it actually drew
much of its power from the "indirect strategy" of putting
pressure on the forces whose acquiescence made it possible
for segregation to persist.

Occupy Wall Street dramatically illustrates the withdrawal of
acquiescence in the domination of American economics,
politics, and life by the 1 percent economic elite. It also
represents the withdrawal of consent from the silence of
politicians and the media about the realities of class in
America and their impact on the 99 percent. Indeed, it
represents a withdrawal of consent from Barack Obama and the
leadership of the Democratic Party who colluded in the
bailouts and other economic policies that made the rich
richer and the poor poorer.

In the long run, the "anti-Wall Street movement" can be more
than simply a "Tea Party of the Left" that perhaps influences
elections but fails to make significant social changes that
address its participants' problems. But to do so it will need
to develop concrete ways the "99 percent" can undermine the
pillars of the "1 percent." Stimulating the 99 percent to
self-organize on their own behalf is the crucial first step
in that direction.

We know that, despite their contributions, social movements
have sometimes come to a bad end. Some have flared up
brilliantly, only to peter out after their initial flash in
the pan. Others have become the bases for new hierarchies:
Some Communist movements became totalitarian tyrannies; some
labor movements became corrupt bureaucracies. Some movements
for liberation have been like William Blake's "iron hand"
that

"crush'd the Tyrant's head

And became a Tyrant in his stead."

The current generation of youth movements around the globe is
often characterized - by themselves and others - as
"anarchist" or "horizontalist." Whatever the term, the key
idea is opposition to hierarchy not only in society but in
the movement itself. They are often mocked for their
sometimes extreme opposition to leadership in any form. But
their insistence that, as the old-time Wobblies of the
Industrial Workers of the World used to say, "We don't have
any leaders - we're all leaders" provides a partial antidote
to the danger of liberation turning to domination and to the
interminable ego-driven battles among would-be leaders and
leadership groups that scorched Students for a Democratic
Society and the New Left.

The global 99 percent

While much of the discussion of the occupation movements has
focused so far on their relation to upcoming contests in
American politics, the occupiers themselves have a far
broader, indeed global perspective. From its inception, the
Occupy Wall Street movement consciously modeled itself on the
"Arab Spring" and the movements that subsequently spread
around the world from Spain to Chile and from Wisconsin to
Tel Aviv.

In a statement produced by consensus after days of
discussion, Occupy Wall Street's General Assembly declared,
"We acknowledge the reality: The future of the human race
requires the cooperation of its members." They urge "the
people of the world" to "create a process to address the
problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to
everyone."

The problems faced by the "global 99 percent" are indeed
global. We face a globalized economy whose problems cannot be
solved by any one country alone. We face a global climate
catastrophe that requires radical carbon reductions by all
countries in the world. The same goes for hunger, destruction
of the oceans, weapons of mass destruction, and so many of
the other problems we face. Behind them all is a crisis of
global self-government in which the last vestiges of global
cooperation are being replaced by a war of all against all
and in which international economic, political, and military
forces systematically defeat efforts for national
democratization.

Even problems that appear primarily national like health
insurance or education or unemployment are aggravated and
made intractable by globalization and global neo-liberalism.
The banks and other corporations that Occupy Wall Street is
protesting are, after all, global. More than half of the
profits of S&P companies come from outside the US, according
to Bernard Baumohl, chief global economist at The Economic
Outlook Group. Similarly the solutions will have to have a
global dimension.

National organizations and movements faced a similar
situation in the 1990s as neoliberal globalization hit full
speed. Labor, consumer, environmental, and other
organizations that were overwhelmingly focused on national
issues came up against the emergence of NAFTA, the World
Trade Organization, and the globalization of corporations and
labor markets. What happened, unexpectedly, was a kind of
self-organization on a global scale. Different groups in
different countries began getting to know each other, backing
each other's campaigns, reading each other's analyses,
passing joint declarations, and organizing joint actions. The
result was the Battle of Seattle - and a plethora of other
international campaigns around debt, AIDS drugs, food policy,
genetically modified organisms, capital markets, and myriad
other global issues. The global climate protests that
accompanied the Copenhagen climate summit represent their
most recent progeny.

The big difference is that Occupy Wall Street and its kin are
already part of a global movement with many common themes and
objectives. Their global self-organization is well under way.
And they can only achieve their objectives if they can make
governments cooperate to meet the common interests of the
global 99 percent.

Creating a process

Many people are asking whether the Occupy Wall Street
movement can be sustained. But that may not be the most
important question. When historians look at the hunger
marches of the early 1930s, they don't ask how many years
they continued, let alone how they affected contemporary
elections. Rather, they consider them as part of a process
that generated the unemployed movement, the industrial union
upsurge, and the leftward swing of the "Second New Deal."

Of course at the moment it is critical to spread the
occupations and provide support and resources to help them
continue. But ultimately their significance will lie in what
the rest of the 99 percent do. What will the occupations
stimulate beyond simply a continuation of themselves?

Occupy Wall Street does not need to be the whole movement of
the 99 percent. Occupy Wall Street recognizes this when it
calls on people everywhere to form their own assemblies and
"create a process to address the problems we face." It isn't
their job to organize unions, lobby Congress, or run
candidates in elections. Their job is to inspire the rest of
the 99 percent -- including those who are in non-youth
milieus and in educational, political, legal, and other
institutions -- to organize themselves and develop concrete
strategies to make the entire range of changes that will be
necessary to meet "the problems we face." And they can do
that best when they stay true to themselves, retain their own
authentic voice, and provide the direct action, street heat
expression for the discontent of the 99 percent.

A delegation from Occupy Washington recently marched to join
a rally against the Keystone XL pipeline. Street heat support
for anti-eviction actions and strikes is a logical next step.
Such action builds alliances, show how people can directly
affect a situation, and ties the movement more visibly to the
needs of the 99 percent.

Social movements have often combined battles on the ground
with struggles for change through legislation. In the 1930s,
labor struck and organized on the ground and defied local
bans on freedom of speech and at the same time fought in
Congress for "labor's Magna Carta," the Wagner Act. In the
1960s the civil rights movement fought white supremacy one
lunch counter and one voting booth at a time, and at the same
time campaigned for the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts.
In fact, the two levels were synergistic.

The people out of doors were crucial players in the events
that led up to the American Revolution. Encampments like
Occupy Wall Street have played a critical role in American
politics from the war veterans' Bonus March encampment of
1932, to the Resurrection City encampment of the Poor
People's Movement following Martin Luther King's
assassination in 1968, to the 1989 Camp Solidarity where some
50,000 people camped out in support of striking Pittston mine
workers. Occupy Wall Street is writing one more chapter in
that noble story.

Power to the people out-of-doors!


Source URL:
http://www.thenation.com/article/164116/people-out-doors-change-you-can-believe

[Jeremy Brecher's new book Save the Humans? Common
Preservation in Action, just published by Paradigm
Publishers, addresses how social movements make social
change. Brecher is the author of more than a dozen books on
labor and social movements, including Strike! and Global
Village or Global Pillage and the winner of five regional
Emmy awards for his documentary movie work. He currently
works with the Labor Network for Sustainability.]

___________________________________________

Portside aims to provide material of interest to people
on the left that will help them to interpret the world
and to change it.

Submit via email: [log in to unmask]

Submit via the Web: http://portside.org/submittous3

Frequently asked questions: http://portside.org/faq

Sub/Unsub: http://portside.org/subscribe-and-unsubscribe

Search Portside archives: http://portside.org/archive

Contribute to Portside: https://portside.org/donate