Amorous Analogies: How #OWS Connects the Dots. In a social theory graduate seminar about a year ago, Peter Marcuse, a radical lawyer and urban planning prof, came by for a chat. He asked us what social theory was for. First came embarrassed silence. Then convoluted soliloquies. Eventually he gave us his take: The role of theory is show people hurt by capitalism the unity of their opposition. This is what #OWS has done. The original analogy here is the 99%. #OWS’s practical piece is the occupation and the actions that have sprung from it.
Comparing an #OWS event to the marches through Wall Street that I remember from last spring is telling. Expanding coalitions has also become a point of pride, and not just a hoped-for horizon. #OWS’s simple anti-Wall Street, anti-1% message has helped build a global 99%, inspiring actions and occupations across the country and around the world. Because analogies are central to #OWS, lots of the big arguments have been phrased in terms of analogy. For the Fracture of Good Order. “Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children….”
These were Father Daniel Berrigan’s words when he was on trial in 1969 for a draft board raid in Catonsville, Maryland. He and eight others had entered the draft board office during business hours, removed draft files (against some resistance from the staff) and then burned them out front with homemade napalm. At the time, there were many who construed this as an act of violence and, given the denunciations of property destruction emerging out of Oakland today, there are many in our current day who would undoubtedly agree.
But Berrigan and many of the others who carried out draft board raids were principled pacifists and did not understand the destruction of draft files as an act of violence. Disruptive, disturbing, provocative? There are no easy or simple parallels between the destruction of draft files in the 1960s and the breaking of bank windows today. Occupy Wall Street and Transformational Strategy. The beginning of the new year seems an appropriate time to reflect upon the progress, and potential, of what must surely rank as one of the most astonishing and encouraging developments of 2011: the emergence and rapid spread of the Occupy movement.
Most participants in, and observers of, the Occupy movement in the US agree that its 'first phase' – the seizure and occupation of public space for use as a base for political action, experimentation, discussion and organisation – is either over or approaching its end. What ought to come next is a matter of pressing concern. Erik Olin Wright is Vilas Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin. He is current president of the American Sociological Association and the author of many books, including Envisioning Real Utopias (selected chapters of which can be read here). He discussed with New Left Project the American Occupy movement's character and achievements thus far, and the directions it might pursue going forward. Occupy Wall Street's anarchist roots. New York, NY - Almost every time I'm interviewed by a mainstream journalist about Occupy Wall Street I get some variation of the same lecture: "How are you going to get anywhere if you refuse to create a leadership structure or make a practical list of demands?
And what's with all this anarchist nonsense - the consensus, the sparkly fingers? Don't you realise all this radical language is going to alienate people? You're never going to be able to reach regular, mainstream Americans with this sort of thing! " If one were compiling a scrapbook of worst advice ever given, this sort of thing might well merit an honourable place.
I should be clear here what I mean by "anarchist principles". Anarchism versus Marxism Traditional Marxism, of course, aspired to the same ultimate goal but there was a key difference. It's not just that the ends do not justify the means (though they don't), you will never achieve the ends at all unless the means are themselves a model for the world you wish to create.