Leaders and the Left
by David Atkins (“thereisnospoon”)
Todd Gitlin has a thought-provoking piece in the New York Times’ Sunday Review. It focuses on the rift between hierarchical and anti-hierarchical ideologies, especially when it comes to organizing on the Left. As the Occupy movement gains steam (including with a general assembly in my hometown this week that I am excited to be attending), this is an issue that is going to require some introspection by the movement.
For starters, the Right and the Left in America have differing visions of the power of change through the political structure. Leftism in general over the 20th Century has certainly had its authoritarian impulses, as seen in the Soviet Union and Maoist China, with disastrous results. But most on the American Left would argue that those historical examples were deeply misguided in practice, and that modern European and East Asian models are more suited for a better contrast to American capitalism. In America, the Left tends to be deeply distrustful of hierarchy and power per se:
The Tea Party, for all its apparent populism, revolves around a vision of power and how to attain it. Tea Partiers tend to be white, male, Republican, graying, married and comfortable; the political system once worked for them, and they think it can be made to do so again. They revile government, but they adore hierarchy and order. Not for them the tents and untucked shirts, the tattoos, piercings and dreadlocks that are eye candy for lazy journalists. (“Am I dressed too nice so the media doesn’t interview me?” read one Occupy Wall Street demonstrator’s sign.)
In contrast, what should we make of Occupy Wall Street? The movement is, of course, nascent, and growing: on Oct. 5, it picked up thousands of marching supporters of all ages, many from unions, professions and universities, and crowded Foley Square. Its equivalents rallied in 50 cities. Deep anger at grotesque inequities extends far beyond this one encampment; after all, a few handfuls of young activists do not have a monopoly on the fight against plutocracy. Revulsion in the face of a perverse economy is felt by many respectable people: unemployed, not yet unemployed, shakily employed and plain disgusted. A month from now, this movement, still busy being born, could look quite different.
And yet it remains true that the core of the movement, the (mostly young and white, skilled but jobless) people who started the “occupation” three weeks ago, consists of what right-wing critics call anarchists. Indeed, some occupiers take the point as a compliment — because that is precisely the quality that sets them apart from the Tea Party. Anarchism has been the reigning spirit of left-wing protest movements for nearly the past half century, as it is in Zuccotti Park.
Tea Party trolls who harass me via email and twitter never cease to remind me that the Tea Party as a movement accomplished much of its objective. They see Barack Obama as a dangerous socialist, and their movement helped elect a wide array of wildly conservative extremists to the House, thus (in theory) negating Obama’s agenda. The Tea Party approach, funded by billionaires and promoted by Fox News, was to capture the spirit of conservative resentment, and distill it in the form of electoral victories in 2010. That approach, it must be said, was very successful by any quantitative or qualitative measure.
Movement progressives like myself have sought to use the tools the Right has successfully used for decades against them. These tools include the infiltration of Party organizations by progressive groups; a close attention to primaries as a means of selecting more progressive Democrats; a focus on local elections to help breed a new crop of progressive legislators; the creation of think tanks to provide ready-made legislative ideas for lawmakers; the creation of media infrastructure to challenge right-wing orthodoxy; the list could go on and on. The Democratic Establishment has been variously welcoming to this agenda, or has fought it tooth and nail depending on the location. In many cases, it’s pulling teeth at the local level to simply get Democrats in local leadership to support good endorsed Democrats, rather than secretly work for conservative decline-to-state candidates because of other personal or organizational allegiances. This battle is long and arduous.
So given the difficulty of this multi-pronged fight for progressives, as well as the fact that institutional hierarchy on what passes for the Left has done little to accomplish real change, it is a legitimate question to ask why we should work for change through organizational rather than anarchic processes at all. After all, isn’t the Occupy Movement doing quite well in a leaderless fashion?
It’s a good question. But the answer isn’t quite so simple:
IN this recent incarnation, anarchism, for the most part, is not so much a theory of the absence of government, but a theory of self-organization, or direct democracy, as government. The idea is that you do not need institutions because the people, properly assembled, properly deliberating, even in one square block of Lower Manhattan, can regulate themselves. Those with the time and patience can frolic and practice direct democracy at the same time — at least until the first frost.
The anarchist impulse is nothing new in America. There were strong anarchist streaks in the New Left of the 1960s — stronger than the socialist streak, in fact, despite all the work Marxists did to define proper class categories for the student movement. “Let the people decide,” one of the early rallying cries of Students for a Democratic Society (of which I was president from 1963 to 1964), meant, in practice, “Let’s have long meetings where everyone gets to talk.” De facto, this meant that politics was for people who, in a sense, talked for a living — in other words, college types…
Disgruntled by big-talking leaders, turned off by celebrity media, the left of the ’70s developed a horizontal style, according limited authority to their own leaders, who were frequently at pains to deny that they were leaders at all. “Affinity groups” and “working groups” replaced organized factions and parties. Even movements that seemed to require some level of verticality — those with concrete goals, like banning nuclear power and weapons, or opposing apartheid — were mostly leaderless.
That explains why, to the bafflement of their ideological opponents, such movements barely paused at the fall of Communism. When Leninist regimes collapsed, and their self-confident social democratic rivals crumpled as well, anarchism’s major competitors for a theory of organization imploded.
This new protest style is more Rousseau than Marx. What the Zuccotti Park encampment calls horizontal democracy is spunky, polymorphic, energetic, theatrical, scattered and droll. An early poster showed a ballerina poised gingerly on the back of Wall Street’s bull sculpture, bearing the words: “Occupy Wall Street. September 17th. Bring Tent.” It likes government more than corporations, but its own style is hardly governmental. It tends to care about process more than results.
And oh, how it loves to talk. It is no surprise that it makes fervent use of the technologies of horizontal communication, of Facebook and Twitter, though the instinct predated — perhaps prefigured — those tools. Not coincidentally, this was also the spirit of the more or less leaderless, partyless revolutions of Tunisia and Egypt that are claimed as inspiration in Lower Manhattan. An “American Autumn” is their shot at an echo of the “Arab Spring.”
OCCUPY Wall Street, then, emanates from a culture — strictly speaking, a counterculture — that is diametrically opposed to Tea Party discipline.
The biggest challenge facing the Occupy movement isn’t one of demands but rather goals. The media in typically clueless fashion is constantly asking what the demonstrators want. That question is actually relatively easy to answer. The ultimate goal, however, is far less well defined.
“Consciousness-raising” is usually the primary answer given. And that is indeed an excellent answer, but it’s only part of an answer. Raising consciousness about a problem is not an end in itself, but rather a means to an end. The Tea Party motivated its base for two principal reasons: to attempt to weaken and derail the ACA, and to elect conservatives to the right of Attila the Hun to Congress. They failed to do the former, but they succeeded with flying colors in doing the latter. It remains unclear what the Occupy movement is raising consciousness to accomplish.
Leaderless movements can indeed succeed just as they did in Tahrir Square. But without a defined legislative agenda and the leadership to put that legislative agenda into place via the established process, the only thing leaderless movements can really achieve is systemic overthrow. That is perhaps what many in the movement are advocating or hoping for. But in Egypt, Libya and Syria, there were doubtless massive majorities in favor of deposing the regime. America is still deeply politically divided into cultural camps–camps largely defined by geography. Which means that systemic overthrow is likely to end less in peaceful revolution than in the breakup of the Union along red state-blue state divides. And even then it isn’t that simple, as the division is less between states than it is between urban and exurban all across America. There are rabidly conservative bastions in California just outside of Los Angeles that share none of the protesters’ goals, while even ruby-red Utah has strongly liberal bastions in the urban confines of Salt Lake City.
If systemic overthrow is in the cards, it will be a long, painful and very likely bloody process.
If, on the other hand, the movement seeks change along more traditional lines, then it is going to have to muddy its feet in the nasty realm of politics and hierarchy. It is going to require leaders and defined legislative goals. So far, the Occupy Movement has fiercely rejected those things.
And to be fair, the fault (if it can be described as such) for that lies not with the Movement, but rather with Democratic Leadership. As Gitlin notes:
It makes sense. Here, finally, is what labor and the activist left have been waiting for. For two years, Barack Obama got the benefit of the doubt from fervent supporters — I’d bet that many of those in Lower Manhattan during these weeks went door-to-door for him in 2008 — and that support explains why no one occupied Wall Street in 2009. Now, as Jeremy Varon, a historian at the New School, said of Zuccotti Park: “This is the Obama generation declaring their independence from his administration.”
By allying itself with the protest, the left at large is telling the president that a campaign slogan that essentially says “We’re better than Eric Cantor” won’t cut it in 2012. “We are the 99 percent” would be more like it. If President Obama takes this direction, the movement’s energy may be able to power a motor of significant reform.
Indeed. But even if the Obama campaign attempts to leverage the spirit of the movement, it is unlikely to succeed in doing so. The Obama Administration had its chance for years to prove its populist bona fides, but and was correctly judged to be severely lacking. Many people gave the Administration the benefit of the doubt for months if not years, but the handwriting has been on the wall for a long time now. Further, it’s not as if the national Democratic Party is going to wean itself off Wall Street campaign donations overnight, either.
But if not the Obama campaign, then where would political pressure be leveraged? Certainly, support for more progressive Democrats is one option. Tea Partiers were not so cynical about the legislative process that they figured the Republican Party could not be bent to their will. Tea Partiers engaged in primary warfare and forced the GOP to take notice. The Occupy Movement could do likewise, but it would require a significant shift in tactics. The broader question is whether many progressives have lost all faith in the electoral system entirely.
If that is the case, then systemic overthrow is all that is left. But in America, systemic overthrow won’t be as in Tahrir Square. The broad swath of conservative America will never come along for the ride, but will fight tooth and nail against the protesters, not just rhetorically but physically as well. Many on the right have been itching to do so already. Real systemic overthrow will require a lot fewer drums, and a lot more boxes of ammunition. But use of that, too, would be contrary to the spirit of the American Left.
So it’s difficult to understand where precisely the change will come from. Politicians don’t respond to protest movements any more than Dems were cowed from passing the ACA by the Tea Party protests. It takes more direct lobbying, electoral activity and leadership than simple protest to achieve legislative change. If electoral and legislative politics are eschewed, then revolution is all that is left. But that revolution will not be peaceful, and the American Left would need to be prepared for that eventuality.
Gitlin has a perhaps more optimistic take than I can manage:
The culture of anarchy is right about this: The corporate rich — those ostensible “job creators” who somehow haven’t gotten around to creating jobs — rule the Republican Party and much of the Democratic Party as well, having artfully arranged a mutual back-scratching society to enrich themselves. A refusal to compromise with this system, defined by its hierarchies of power and money, would be the current moment of anarchy’s great, lasting contribution.
Until now, fury at the plutocracy and the political class had found no channel to run in but the antigovernment fantasies of the Tea Party. Now it has dug a new channel. Anger does not move countries, but it moves movements — and movements, in turn, can move countries. To do that, movements need leverage. Even Archimedes needed a lever and a place to stand to move the world. When Zuccotti Park meets an aroused liberalism, the odd couple may not live happily ever after. But they can make a serious run at American dreams of “liberty and justice for all.”
Let’s hope he’s right. For all our sakes.
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