Those who call for the Occupy movement to have a coherent set of demands at its birth ignore the history of social and protest movements.
Often, the coherence to the programs of protest movements is only retrospectively secured: it only “makes sense” when seen historically.
It is not clear yet what will result from Occupy. And this uncertainty is precisely the point.
New realities
Truly radical and revolutionary situations establish new coordinates of action, feeling and thought. They do not merely slot in with what exists.
If successful, they forge a new language and a new grammar of political claims.
If unsuccessful, they can lay dormant, stalking the future – their potential unrealised yet present.
Our reality today is defined by the successful struggles of the past. And it is this reality itself that confers “sense” on the actions of those previous actors.
So too is it their role in shaping our present reality which makes these events and struggles “successful.”
The conservative game of “what if?” history likes to toy with these pasts. What if 1917 had not happened in Russia? What if Germany had won either of the World Wars? The progressive version of this gambles, instead, on the future: what if we don’t act now?
Openness and propriety
The novelty of certain political protest can disrupt easy categorisation. The “openness” of the political situation today can make many observers uncomfortable.
There have been derogatory reactions to the “meaninglessness” of the Occupy protests, to their “ragtag” make-up and their refusal to, as yet, formulate a full set of demands.
The anxiety here reminds us of that around the London riots earlier this year. What both moments reveal — despite the many differences in their situations — is an inability for some commentators to tolerate the ambiguity of a protest that begins with no demands in a familiar and “proper” form.
The protests we see today do look different from the form familiar to us over the past half century. So critics claim that this is an “improper” form of protest, that the “proper” form would be different (“better organised,” “more coherent,” “more realistic,” and so on).
This emergent form of protest has a basic message: “we are here". The current occupations, for example, are concerned with assembly — gathering people together for discussion about our shared social reality, as well as literally embodying an apparently forgotten polis.
And yet, what is often missed in the dismissal of these protests is that it is the arch contest of political dispute.
That is, politics is grounded in the establishment of what is proper and what is improper – from this, everything else flows; the “commonsense” of the day is established.
Similarly, the language of the “possible” and the “impossible,” or the “realistic” and the “unrealistic,” is deeply political and ideological.
For example, we are told that the eradication of inequality is “impossible.” These everyday terms harbour an ideological kernel: they are attempts to constrain action to a prescribed domain. So a politics can be formed around these limits.
East Germany
As a researcher of the end and afterlife of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), I find a few interesting parallels in the historical situations of today’s movement and that which saw the end of East German socialism in 1989.
Clearly, today, we do not live in an authoritarian gerontocracy with Stalinist characteristics. So the similarities are necessarily limited by this difference.
But the lessons are there: they lay in the role of the historical account and the way movements generate demands.
The movement which eventually led to the “Fall of the Berlin Wall” in Germany was fostered by many groups with radically different agendas. But they all latched on to the possibilities offered by assembling at prayer meetings held in the remaining – largely Protestant – churches in the GDR.
Churches were the seedbed for the movement that followed from the prayer meetings. They offered a chance for assembly and quasi-public, relatively free spaces for the exchange of ideas.
The diverse groups at these protests could barely agree on the fundamentals. Some thought it was time to call for a reform of socialism and others called for a complete move to capitalism.
But as the movement grew and gained popular support, it came to issue demands for reform and overhaul of the well-embedded status quo.
In such situations, groups may ultimately make demands that, at the tentative beginning of their mobilisation, may even have surprised themselves: the situation forces an opening into which the movement steps, therein reworking what was once thought possible or realistic.
The shock of the rapidity of this change – it all happened within the space of a year – is captured in the title of a book about the downfall of the Soviet Union: “Everything was forever, until it was no more.”
“Realistically,” some would have said, early on in 1989, “if you want to take on the state, it will act violently in response. Just as it did in 1953.”
Eventually the movement was large enough to answer the live question of a violent put-down by the police and People’s Army. The size of protests was of a scale to reframe the notion of what was “realistic”.
No more gaps
But what does such a smooth narrative leave out? For one, it suggests an all-at-once and consciously directed process.
The GDR movement, from the start, had serious intent. Yet its form and content was inchoate.
So the common picture skips over the many important deliberations, as well as the hundreds of gatherings needed to make and move on decisions.
The most basic error to flow from this is to confuse a successful movement at its popular height for its scrawny beginnings: the wilful error of comparing the end of one movement with the beginning of another.
The historian Gareth Dale has calculated the scale of the revolutionary sequence in the GDR: “between August 1989 and April 1990, 2,600 public demonstrations and over 300 rallies took place, as well as over 200 strikes and a dozen factory occupations. The largest three of the 2,600 demonstrations attracted well over 1 million people.”
So, ultimately, the narrative of “The Fall of the Wall” makes a process which took literally thousands of meetings in many cities coherent.
It also brings together what was necessarily unhomogenised and internally antagonistic. How could anti-socialist and anti-capitalist (and anti-fascist and environmental and…) groups ever do anything together, we might wonder?
How might they make demands and establish the re-unified Germany we know today?
Strange lessons
The smooth narratives we are told about history, like that of “The Fall of the Wall,” lead “realistic” commentators – be they political scientists or newspaper columnists or Twitter snarks – to lambast new political formations for not having a cohesive ideological platform and too few participants.
We might well imagine a newspaper article from the GDR early on in 1989: “A ragtag bunch of long-haired idealists has gathered for three consecutive Mondays to talk about change in the GDR. Less than a hundred people were in attendance as talk swung without clear logic between the environment and the economy.”
Such political experiments can fail or have unintended consequences. But there may be a productive antagonism at play. As in the GDR, if the movement holds and achieves hegemony, these antagonisms will be drawn together and “resolved” by the movement itself.
One lesson of both successful and unsuccessful protests is that there is contingency at the heart of political mobilisation. Decisions to protest, stand ground, change tactics, move sites and so on, led onto open paths.
But the decisions are ultimately decisive and may well come to be narrated as either “commonsense” and “realistic” or “foolish” and “unrealistic”.
In the alchemical act of historical narration, disunity becomes unity. It is the ending which grants an organic “natural” consistency to the preceding events. Indeed, the ending can seemingly efface all traces of inconsistency. This does not mean that future history will then be without dispute.
Endgame
So what is the other lesson to take from history?
History shows us that those movements that persist and act with broad support can shift the very coordinates of the system from which they set out.
Today’s “sensible cynics” may scoff from the sidelines: but, then, cynicism and disavowal are leading features of ideology today.
Snark comes easily, change does not.
Foreclosing early on future possibilities is the conservative’s wager.
Join the conversation
Comments (14)
Sue Morrison
Environmental management student, UNE (logged in via email @yahoo.com.au)
I'm at the very tail end of the baby boomers. My perspective on the movement is that more and more people are realising - and prepared to openly acknowledge - that the current economic and social systems in "rich" countries are broken. I don't think there's any coherent message about how we might fix them, but the first step is to point out their flaws (eg. GFC, growing inequality and increasing environmental damage) and demand change. This movement has started the public conversations we need to be having to find our way forward. I hope it lasts and grows stronger - but I fear there will be growing resistance from those with vested interests in maintaining the status quo (largely the baby boomer generation!).
TonySearl
(logged in via Twitter)
Historical perspective is important. I'm tending towards #Occupy as a "way of life" argument more than a protest as such.
That's certainly where heritage media want it pinned down on their terms.
http://tsearl.edublogs.org/2011/11/03/coherant-ends-possible-or-not/
The PropheticKleenex
(logged in via Twitter)
I think Ben Gook would be better served examining the similarities to protests that resulted in revolutions throughout South America, and Africa, last century.
All engineered by Jesuits.
The incoherence and confused message may well be a tool to use people opposed to communism , help you in achieving your goal.
I read Tony Searle's article also and it seemed to be saying, if you know something is wrong then act in ignorance without a specific purpose and it''ll resolve itself in time.
Which might…
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Ben Gook
(PhD candidate at University of Melbourne)
I'll try to be as generous as I can with your argument, reading through the typos.
I think you might be mistaking the Anonymous appropriation of the Guy Fawkes masks for their appearance at various Occupy assemblies. The use of those masks by Anonymous is no simple thing. The genesis of that decision to wear those masks isn't clear -- although it may have as much to do with the film V is for Vendetta as it does with an intimate acquaintance with the historical and political situation of Mr Fawkes…
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The PropheticKleenex
(logged in via Twitter)
You can do a little better than that Mr gook.
Let me make one point then.
Review your work and consider every revolution post world war 2.
How they began through popular protest.
Was there a common denominator?
For example the Jesuits.
Is there any link to today's occupy "movement"
The Berlin wall example in isolation doesn't really serve as a tool to discern much at all to my mind.
Ben Gook
(PhD candidate at University of Melbourne)
Tony -- I basically agree with everything you've put down in that blog post. My only concern with the "way of life" argument is that it could de-politicise the basis of the movement, pushing it in the direction of a (mere) ethical dispute. I do agree it can "model" alternative social arrangements -- i.e. beyond "what exists" -- but to achieve broad support, there would need to be a sense of it reaching well beyond various public parks etc.
I think the developments in the US, where unions are getting involved and general strikes arranged, suggest that could be happening there. The US police, too, are struggling with their suppression tactics: more people turn up the next day.
As I argue, though, we don't know what happens next. So I won't say much more than that for now!
AnnMarie Brennan
Lecturer of Design Theory (logged in via email @gmail.com)
I totally agree with what you are saying here, although I do think it is simply disingenuous that some people claim not to understand what the movement is about. We are so used to being advertised and lobbied to with very clever pre-packaging PR and publicity campaigns, people cannot recognise a REAL, meaningful message!
I have also noticed that those who claim to 'not understand' the Occupy movement 'demands' seem to be of a specific generation, ironically - baby boomers - and from a specific socio-economic background - upper middle class and above. If you are Gen X and younger, you probably understand quite clearly the message, because you are living it.
Good luck and be safe!
Andrew Hack
Business Analyst and Full-Time Law Student UNDA (logged in via email @gmail.com)
Why don't you set it out for us then, in such specific terms?
Ben Gook
(PhD candidate at University of Melbourne)
I'm sorry, I don't know what you mean. You'll have to be more specific.
Andrew Hack
Business Analyst and Full-Time Law Student UNDA (logged in via email @gmail.com)
I'm asking what is the general concept of what the Occupy movement? Is it wealth inequality, as seems to be reported by the MSM?
AnnMarie Brennan
Lecturer of Design Theory (logged in via email @gmail.com)
Yes, it is generally about the inequity of the current political system reinforced by the terrifying forces of global financial capitalism
It is the political system consistently putting the interests:
of the wealthy before the poor and middle class
of home owners and property investors before renters and social housing needs
of infrastructure car drivers (and their tolls and fees) before investment in public transportation
of on-street parking before cycling lanes
of profit (Coal Seam Gas) before…
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Ben Gook
(PhD candidate at University of Melbourne)
AnnMarie -- I'm not sure if your last comment was directed at me. But I wasn't solely discussing America. I guess I used the American example in reply as the movement is strongest there -- despite, or because of, some quite strong attempts to put it down with policing tactics...
Ben Gook
(PhD candidate at University of Melbourne)
It's worth stressing I'm not a spokesperson for the movement. I'm writing here as a very interested observer who has visited the Melbourne protest to get a sense of its spirit.
But across all the protests around the world, the question of inequality seems central, yes. I think it is about more than "wealth," though. Focussing on that doesn't capture the depth of the "inequality" that is being discussed -- which I think reaches across into other spheres not so clearly determined by wealth.
So in…
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Ben Gook
(PhD candidate at University of Melbourne)
No disagreement here, either, AnnMarie. As I intimated in the piece, these baby boomer critics are confused by the new form this protest is taking. It doesn't look like the 60s -- or at least it doesn't look like how they are told (by documentaries, books, articles and popular memory) the 60s looked.
But the narrative, as I stress, is absolutely central. "The 60s" was a sequence, just like 1989 was. So the idea that Occupy could establish itself and create change in a month -- well, that's a little…
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