At first glance, the Occupy Wall Street movement looks like a parody of left-wing protests. The demands are not so much utopian, but instead nonexistent. The problem is not that their leaders are radicals whom mainstream America can’t relate to; it’s that they don’t have leaders. The problem is not they have alienated potential activists who want to join their movement. Instead, the “General Assembly” that takes place every night is done without any microphones or amplification. Anyone is allowed talk, and the crowd repeats everything which a single speaker says to ensure that he or she can be heard.
In an article for The Nation Nathan Schneider described the protests as “a horizontal, autonomous, leaderless, modified-consensus-based system with roots in anarchist thought.” The idea here is that it is not so much the specific demands that matter, but the way the movement conducts and orients itself. Anthropologist David Graeber, one of the leading figures behind the protests, described it in The Washington Post as “creating a vision of the sort of society you want to have in miniature.” If such a movement is to make demands, those demands must come organically from an open, deliberative and inclusive process.
Other “occupations” have popped up all over the nation – including Chicago – and the main one in New York has gained the support of mainstream left-wing groups and major labor unions. Yet the model seems like it could never work. And maybe it won’t. But this type of purposely vague and non-hierarchal movement only has a hope of working because of the most powerful use of rhetoric attached to the protests: We are the 99 percent.
The Occupy Wall Street movement has been able to take on this unceasing, open deliberation because of the ever-widening inequality since the late 1970s. We have seen more and more of the nation’s wealth controlled by fewer and fewer people and the wages and economic prospects of the vast middle class has remained more or less stagnant. Tim Noah, in his seminal multi-part series on inequality in Slate, wrote that “from 1980 to 2005, more than 80 percent of total increase in Americans’ income went to the top 1 percent.” Richard Posner the conservative University of Chicago law professor wrote that “between 1997 and 2008, median U.S. household income fell by 4 percent after adjustment for inflation.” Nearly everyone has a reason to be up in arms.
The biggest beneficiaries from this great divergence have been those in finance. According to research done by economists Steven Kaplan and Joshua Rouh, in 2004 the top 25 hedge fund managers made more than all of Standard & Poor’s 500 CEOs combined. And finance and banking were at the crime scene of the biggest economic downturn since the Great Depression which, combined with a lethargic response from the government, has left us on the precipice of another recession following years of high unemployment and bleak job prospects for youth. Faced with this grim set of facts, the Occupy Wall Street movement can afford to spend its time getting the theory of protesting right before articulating any demands. The essential vagueness stems from the fact that it is more and more plausible to see economic and political life as a struggle between the top one percent (or, really, the top 10 percent) and everyone else.
It is no wonder that the organizers have been inspired by the Arab Spring. In Egypt or Tunisia, the revolutionaries depicted their struggle to be between the ruling clique and everyone else. The structure of the movement grew out of this essential fact. If the folks behind Occupy Wall Street can convince America to see things the same way, with finance taking the place of Mubarak, then who knows what will come next.
Matt Zeitlin is a Weinberg senior.
He can be reached at [email protected]
