Collective Conscious

The Slack Wire:

In for­mal polit­i­cal econ­omy, Ace­moglu and Robin­son have a famous the­ory of democ­ra­ti­za­tion, which might illu­mi­nate the splits inside OWS. Non-​​democracies are char­ac­ter­ized by elite con­trol of the pol­icy mak­ing process. Occa­sion­ally, non-​​elites are able to solve their col­lec­tive action prob­lems and tem­porar­ily threaten the elites with rebel­lion. Elites can respond to this threat by repress­ing, tem­porar­ily reform­ing, or democ­ra­tiz­ing. When a move­ment is weak, it can be eas­ily repressed. If it is a bit stronger but not over­whelm­ingly pow­er­ful, elites might alter a few poli­cies here and there, but not change the iden­tity of who gets to decide future poli­cies. Because pol­i­tics is fickle and promises aren’t worth any­thing unless they are insti­tu­tion­al­ized, the tem­po­rary pol­icy changes won by a polit­i­cal move­ment aren’t going to last unless the iden­tity of the peo­ple decid­ing pol­icy in the future changes. A sad exam­ple of a regime’s worth­less promises is the 1381 Wat Tyler peas­ant rebel­lion, where the king promised amnesty to the anti-​​landlord rebels, only to have them hanged once they put down their arms. Zuc­cotti square is our pitch­fork, and we shouldn’t put it down for non-​​credible promises from our elites. But what is a cred­i­ble promise? What could we demand that would last and work well after we’ve gone back to nor­mal life (in my case ref­eree reports and regressions)?

In Ace­moglu and Robin­son, when protest­ing cit­i­zens have enough polit­i­cal power, they demand and win democ­racy instead of just redis­tri­b­u­tion. In this way, democ­racy is a com­mit­ment device, ensur­ing that non-​​elites get to decide poli­cies even after they have demo­bi­lized from the streets. If one admits that de jure U.S. pol­i­tics, while demo­c­ra­tic in form, has cer­tain parts of it (e.g. mon­e­tary pol­icy, finan­cial reg­u­la­tion, tax pol­icy) cap­tured by elites regard­less of the politi­cian in power, then this democ­ra­ti­za­tion model becomes pretty applic­a­ble. Per­haps it took Obama’s elec­tion and sub­se­quent inef­fec­tive­ness to really com­mu­ni­cate the extent of elite cap­ture of U.S. pol­i­tics, although the evi­dence has been accu­mu­lat­ing for decades. In any case, many of the folks in Zuc­cotti square think that elec­toral pol­i­tics is com­plete run by the rich, and so it takes street pol­i­tics to force reform. The prob­lem is, as in Ace­moglu and Robin­son, that mobi­liza­tion is gen­er­ally tem­po­rary: you don’t get peo­ple protest­ing on the streets for years. A last­ing vic­tory would depend on con­vert­ing this mobi­liza­tion into insti­tu­tions and durable pol­icy gains.

The claim that OWS is par­tially a democ­ra­ti­za­tion move­ment has been made by Hardt and Negri. I think they are right, because from the inside it exhibits the frac­tures that all democ­ra­ti­za­tion move­ments face. Social democ­rats want the move­ment to cash in the tem­porar­ily polit­i­cal energy for eco­nomic poli­cies to gen­er­ate eco­nomic growth right now. I under­stand this, as polit­i­cal power via the street mobi­liza­tion and media is fleet­ing and there is a worry that we will lose it before we actu­ally secure any­thing at all. But there is a big­ger, bet­ter demand: “real” democ­racy. The abil­ity to set pol­icy is worth much more than any par­tic­u­lar pol­icy, and democ­racy is an insti­tu­tional setup that gives every­body the abil­ity to par­tic­i­pate in set­ting pol­icy. We’ll take a jobs pro­gram, thank you very much, but don’t think we leave the park just because a bill passes the leg­is­la­ture. The demands will keep com­ing until the only peo­ple that we are demand­ing from are ourselves.

So rad­i­cals want the move­ment to con­tinue to try and build polit­i­cal power so that we can demand not just finan­cial trans­ac­tions taxes or even a jobs pro­gram, but all that and the abil­ity to have a say over all kinds of other deci­sions, from incar­cer­a­tion to the envi­ron­ment. This is why the over­ar­ch­ing con­cern for the anar­chists is to build the orga­ni­za­tional archi­tec­ture of the occu­pa­tion, grow­ing its semi­otic and spa­tial reach. This makes the whirring of activ­ity around Zuc­cotti square an ampli­fier for all the pop­u­lar eco­nomic jus­tice strug­gles, from Sotheby’s work­ers to anti-​​foreclosure activism to move­ments to democ­ra­tize the Fed. I like the metaphor of OWS as a wildlife gar­den for a left polit­i­cal ecol­ogy, which is attract­ing and cul­ti­vat­ing a bios­phere of demands, griev­ances, ide­olo­gies and cul­tural prac­tices to evolve a stronger left. This is also why we are some­times accused of hav­ing a “grab bag” of dis­con­nected issues: its because one of the promises of the move­ment is power for the major­ity over all kinds of deci­sions, instead of mak­ing demands from the incom­pe­tent and deca­dent elites that cur­rently make those deci­sions. Its part of the idea that is the just the begin­ning; we have a long win­ter and a longer strug­gle ahead, and need to use this moment to set our­selves up for build­ing more polit­i­cal power in the medium run. So we’re not going to coa­lesce and harden into “demands”, but instead con­tinue to nur­ture a cul­ture of a thou­sand dif­fer­ent demands and recruit peo­ple and develop a hege­monic agenda (that we don’t have yet!). But the promise of that power and hege­mony is grander: demo­c­ra­tic con­trol over pol­icy mak­ing writ large. Occupy Every­thing, until we get all our demands and we don’t have to make any more.