A Movement Without Demands? by Marco Deseriis and Jodi Dean
The question of demands infused the initial weeks and months of Occupy Wall Street with the endless opening of desire. Nearly unbearable, the absence of demands concentrated interest, fear, expectation, and hope in the movement. What did they want? What could they want? Commentators have been nearly hysterical in their demand for demands: somebody has got to say what Occupy Wall Street wants! In part because of the excitement accumulating around the gap the movement opened up in the deadlocked US political scene—having done the impossible in creating a new political force it seemed as if the movement might even demand the impossible—many of those in and around Occupy Wall Street have also treated the absence of demands as a benefit, a strength. Commentators and protesters alike thus give the impression that the movement’s inability to agree upon demands and a shared political line is a conscious choice.
Anyone who is familiar with the internal dynamics of the movement knows that this is not the case. Even if some occupations have released lists of demands, the entire question is bitterly contested in New York, where only independent organizations such as labor unions have released their own demands. In this essay, we claim that far from being a strength, the lack of demands reflects the weak ideological core of the movement. We also claim that demands should not be approached tactically but strategically, that is, they should be grounded in a long-term view of the political goals of the movement, a view that is currently lacking. Accordingly, in the second part of this text, we argue that this strategic view should be grounded in a politics of the commons. Before addressing the politics of the commons, however, we dispel three common objections that are raised against demands during general assemblies, meetings, and conversations people have about the Occupy movement.
First, demands are said to be potentially divisive as they may alienate those who disagree with them and discourage newcomers from a variety of backgrounds from joining it. The argument is that insofar as Occupy aspires to be a movement that expresses the views and interests of the vast majority of the social body, every attempt to define it through a politics of demands entails a reduction of this potentiality. We call this the anti-representational objection. Second, it is argued that demands reduce the autonomy of the movement insofar as they endow an external agent—notably, the government or some other authority—with the task of solving problems the movement cannot solve for itself. This second objection is usually accompanied by the argument that the movement should focus on “autonomous solutions” rather than demands. We call this point of view the autonomist objection. The third common objection, which stems from the second, is that by meeting some demands the government would be able to divide and integrate (parts of) the movement into the existing political landscape, thus undermining the movement’s very reason for being. We call this the cooptation objection. Some counteract this third objection with the idea of releasing “impossible demands,” i.e. demands that cannot be met without igniting a radical transformation of the system. The very impossibility of the demands is said to demonstrate the rigidity of the system, its inability to encompass much needed change. Impossible demands thus cannot be co-opted. This proposition is in turn rebuffed by pragmatists who argue that if demands are to be issued they should focus on attainable objectives so as to show that the movement can achieve concrete and measurable changes.
Let us first consider the anti-representational objection. The objection begins from a basic and unspoken assumption about OWS, namely, that the movement is an organic and undifferentiated bloc comprised of people from all walks of life, and all racial, cultural, religious, and socioeconomic backgrounds. From this perspective, the slogan, “We are the 99 percent,” is seen not as a rhetorical strategy and political fiction but as the designation of an existing sociopolitical entity that would define itself in opposition to the 1 percent.
The anti-representational objection takes two primary forms. In its first, it insists that it is too early for demands. Because the movement is still young, it is argued, there has not been sufficient time for the 99 percent to reach consensus on the issues most important to it. Introducing demands now would hinder the organic unfolding of a collective discussion whereby the movement can articulate its own interests and desires. In the second (and more radical) form, the anti-representational objection argues that it is never the right time for demands. Demands always and necessarily activate a state apparatus apart from and over and against society. For example, anarchists and libertarians in the movement have repeatedly blocked proposals for introducing taxes on financial transactions and stronger oversight of the banking sector on the grounds that such proposals would expand the size of the government and the scope of its intervention.
Both the not now and not ever versions of the anti-representational objection obfuscate the fact that the 99 percent is not an actual social bloc. It is rather an assemblage of politically and economically divergent subjectivities. The refusal to be represented by demands is actually the refusal or inability to make an honest assessment of the social composition of the movement so as to develop a politics in which different forces and perspectives do not simply neutralize each other. Such inability is further obfuscated by emphases on democratic processes and participation. In order to avoid conflicts and pursue the myth of consensus, the movement produces within itself autonomously operating groups, committees, and caucuses. These groups are brought together through structures of mediation such as the General Assembly and the Spokes Council, which struggle to find a common ground amidst the groups members’ divergent political and economic positions. In other words, the emphasis on consensus, the refusal of demands, and the refusal of representation may well have served the purpose of inciting political desire and expanding the social base of the movement in its first phase. Nonetheless, it has installed in the movement a serious blindspot with regard to real divergences, a blindspot that has high costs in terms of political efficacy as serious proposals get watered down in order to meet with the agreement of those who reject their basic premises.
Nonetheless, there is a truth in the anti-representational objection: demands are divisive. They animate distinctions between “for” and “against” and “us” and “them.” This is the source of their mobilizing strength insofar as the expression of a demand provides not something that people can get behind but something that they must get behind if they are part of a movement or on the same side in struggle.
The autonomist objection is certainly better founded than the anti-representational objection. For autonomists (and anarchists), the practice of occupation and the very mode of existence of the movement are themselves prefigurative of a new, more democratic and more egalitarian world. The modes of action and interaction associated with occupation attempt to “be the change they want to see in the world.” Participants work to act in accordance with the ideals of mutuality and egalitarianism animating the movement against exploitation and inequality. The autonomist approach, then, emphasizes the creation of autonomous structures and new political organizations and practices. From this perspective, the problem with demands is not only that they provide life support to a dying system, but that they direct vital energies away from building new forms of collectivity ourselves. Demands focus the movement’s attention outside when it should be focused inside.
As with the anti-representational objection, the autonomist objection proceeds as if the multiplicity of political and economic interests of the 99 percent could immanently converge. Yet where the anti-representational objection ignores political differences, the autonomist objection overlooks economic ones. The practice of occupation that the autonomists imagine is full-time. It demands total commitment—living, breathing, and being the movement. The politics of remaking the world is anchored in supporting the occupation, primarily logistically. Many of the activities of logistical support, however, of necessity are not prefiguring at all but rather require interaction with dominant arrangements of power. Legal support involves lawyers, permits, injunctions. Someone has to pay for and someone has to make the tents and sleeping bags. Someone has to do the work of growing and preparing food. So the very practices of prefiguration in fact rely on infrastructures, goods, and services that are by and large provided, maintained, and distributed through capitalist means and relations. Additionally, many who would like to support the movement work to earn an income. With needs, debts, and responsibilities of their own, they want to participate in the movement yet not give up their jobs. Bluntly put, their economic position doesn’t give them the time that the practice of permanent occupation demands.
Both the anti-representational and the autonomist objections fail to recognize two key features of demands. First, we can make demands on ourselves. Second, demands are means not ends. Demands can be a means for achieving autonomous solutions. When demands are understood as placed on ourselves, the process of articulating demands becomes a process of subjectivation or will formation, that is, a process through which a common will is produced out of previously divergent positions. Rather than a liability to be denied or avoided, division becomes a strength, a way that the movement becomes powerful as our movement, the movement of us toward a common end.
If the truth in the anti-representational objection lies in its insight into the divisive nature of demands and the truth of the autonomist objection lies in its emphasis on making the world we want to live in, the truth of the co-optation objection is its recognition of antagonism and division. The problem is that the objection as it has been raised in the movement misconstrues the location of the division that matters. The co-optation objection presents the problem as between the state and the movement rather than as a division already within, indeed, constitutive of, the movement itself. Instead of grappling with the multiplicity of different positions in the actuality of their economic conditions, the fear of co-optation posits that the strength of the movement comes from a kind of unity of anger and dissatisfaction that will dissipate in the face of any particular success. Thus, the anti-co-optation argument initiates a discussion about particular proposals, playing out their pros and cons. Will the demand for a national jobs plan mean that the movement has been co-opted by the unions? Will a push for a constitutional amendment to eliminate corporate personhood fold the movement into the Democratic Party? And isn’t the support of partisan organizations such as MoveOn a symptom that this co-optation is already under way? In pursuing such a discussion, the co-optation objection obscures actual and potential connections among different proposals. It thus reinforces, in the attempt of preventing it, the very fragmentation that has long plagued the contemporary Left.
The problem that cuts through all the objections to demands is the movement’s inability to deal with antagonism. So the very question of demands brings to the fore the fact of division within the movement, a division that many—but not all—have wanted to deny.
Fortunately, the truths animating each of the objections suggest a way forward. In order to metamorphose from a protest movement into a revolutionary movement, Occupy will have to acknowledge division, build alternative practices and organizations, and assert a commonality. The set of ideas and practices built around the notion of the commons fulfills this function. The commons is a finite resource whose mode of disposition and usage is determined by the community of its users and producers. The finitude of the commons enables us to address social inequality and environmental limits to capitalist development in their dialectical unity.
Against those who claim private rights and particular interests, then the idea of the commons asserts the primacy of collectivity and the general interest—an idea found in Aristotle’s emphasis on the common good as well as in the work of contemporary theorists such as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Silvia Federici, George Caffentzis, Iain Boal, Elinor Ostrom, Eben Moglen, Slavoj Žižek, and others.
A politics of the commons acknowledges division in that it begins from the shocking recognition that the commons does not exist. Destroyed and privatized by over two centuries of capitalist enclosure and “accumulation by dispossession,”1 what Elinor Ostrom calls “common-pool resources”2 have been reduced to tiny pockets of the world economy. To be sure, informal economies and communal practices such as worker-owned cooperatives, community-supported agriculture, community gardens, occupied and self-managed social centers and houses, free and open source software, are diffused at a molecular level everywhere. Yet the natural and social resources such practices mobilize are quantitatively irrelevant when compared to the wealth that is appropriated and exploited by capital. For instance, while cyber-enthusiasts such as Yochai Benkler point to the Internet as a vast repository of knowledge accessible to everyone and often managed in common by the Internet users themselves,3 these same technophiles overlook the fact that industrial production and agriculture rest by and large in private hands. Further, the apologists of the information commons often fail to recognize that such commons can be, and in fact is, functional to capitalist development as long as their fruits are productively reintegrated within the capitalist cycle. (One may think of the use of Linux in the public administrations of several developing countries and the adoption of open source software by corporations and military.)
If this is true, then the first question that stems from a radical politics of the commons is “how can truly anti-capitalist commons be created, recreated, and expanded”? It goes without saying that such a question points directly to the centrality of private property to capitalist accumulation—an issue that looms so large that most activists prefer to avoid it altogether. Demanding the creation and expansion of commons that are not subject to the imperative of accumulation and profit would make the divisions that are latent in the 99 percent apparent. Weary of the historical failure of actually existing socialism—and lacking large-scale models of alternative development—most Occupiers seem to content themselves with a neo-Keynesian politics that begins and often ends with demands for fiscal reform and government investment in strategic sectors such as infrastructure, green technologies, education, and health care. As we have noted above, however, these demands cannot be properly articulated as they meet the opposition of anarchists and autonomists who reject demands and focus instead on communal processes of self-valorization and self-organization. For the autonomists, the organizational forms of the movement are already functioning, in many ways, as institutions of the commons. Such a perspective fails to recognize that the vast majority of the resources managed by the movement are produced and distributed according to capitalist logic.
In this respect, while neo-Keynesian and socialist positions downplay and overlook existing processes of self-organization, the autonomist perspective cannot address the issue of the long-term sustainability of the movement insofar as it fails to recognize that the massive accumulation of wealth in the private sector is a major obstacle for an expansive politics of the commons. In our view, the autonomous organization of the movement and a politics based on radical demands have to go hand in hand if durable transformations are to be achieved. Once an expansive politics of the commons is adopted as the centerpiece of the movement’s strategy, demands become tactical devices in the service of such strategy rather than floating signifiers power can use to divide and conquer. From this perspective, every attempt the state makes to co-opt the movement through concessions enables an expansion of the communal management of common-pool resources—setting in motion institutional transformations whose political and symbolic power should not be underestimated.
Because a broad-based politics of the commons does not yet exist (even as the conditions are ripe for it) and will not emerge over-night, the tactical use of demands creates opportunities for testing and learning from experiments in managing the commons. For example, what if the environmental movement against hydraulic fracturing were to envision a national campaign to declare the ground waters a commons? This not only would prevent gas companies from putting at risk the lives of millions, but it would immediately empower water management boards elected by local communities with unprecedented powers. How would these governing bodies be constituted and how would they be run? Following this logic, we may also ask similar questions in regard to education, health care, and the production of energy. In each of these sectors, we may have to design solutions to manage these resources not as commodities but as goods whose mode of disposition and usage is determined by the community of their users and producers.
Such questions are only the beginning of a larger investigation that takes the commons not as a one-size-fit-all solution but as a mobile concept that can and should operate at different levels of granularity and on different plateaus. As a preliminary exploration, we suggest that a politics of the commons should operate on three levels: 1) the management of land and natural resources; 2) the production and reproduction of social life (including care work, housing, education, and labor); 3) the production and allocation of energy, knowledge, and information. Because these three layers interpenetrate one another, multiple conflicts arise as soon as one attempts to set priorities. Yet it is also clear that there are elements that cut transversally across these areas, namely, the understanding that the commons is a finite resource that can not only be extracted but needs to be actively reproduced. Such a notion, we believe, marks a decisive break with the capitalist system of production. This system has been thriving by constantly overcoming the limits to its own expansion—with the result of producing an unprecedented demographic explosion while bringing the life support systems to the brink of total collapse. The Occupy movement is an extraordinary opportunity to rethink this model. But in order to do so, the movement has to dispel the illusion that all proposals and visions are equivalent as long as they are democratically discussed, and begin to set priorities on the road to a truly transformative and visionary politics.
Marco Deseriis in conversation with Jodi Dean
JD: Marco, you were present at the birth of Occupy Wall Street. Some people claim that Adbusters started the movement, others credit David Graeber, others emphasise the artists at 16 Beaver. How do these stories link up with the fact of over a hundred people sleeping in privately owned public space in New York’s financial district? And how much of a role did the other occupations—particularly those in Greece and Spain—play in the unfolding of the US movement?
MD: All those accounts contain a share of truth, except of course that no particular individual can be credited as the architect or even the main organiser of Occupy Wall Street (OWS). OWS was made possible by the intersection of four factors. First, the return of revolution as a powerful idea that has circulated across national borders through the global media sphere and the bodies of migrants who bring this imaginary into various national contexts. Second, Adbusters’ adaptation of this ‘ideoscape’ to the North American context. Even if Adbusters didn’t play any organisational role in OWS, the idea of launching a permanent occupation of Wall Street beginning 17 September and the PR campaign associated with it were brilliant. I am thinking not only of the well-known poster image of the ballerina hovering on top of the Wall Street bull sculpture, but of another, less known image of a mass of protesters brandishing shoes in front of the stock exchange building covered with Adbusters’ corporate flag. In this image the symbol of Iraqi resistance against US occupation was adapted to the US context by prefiguring a mass revolt against the corporate occupation of American democracy. The caption complements the force of this image by asking a simple question: ‘Is America Ripe for a Tahir Moment?’ This is culture jamming at its best, a strategy that doesn’t limit itself to debunking power’s narratives but sets a new narrative in motion.
Of course, the aesthetic-political adaptation of the Arab Spring to the US context would never have generated a mobilisation on the ground if activists hadn’t decided to take up the call and organise in New York City. And here the terrain was already fertile. Beginning 14 June, a few dozen New Yorkers had set up a permanent camp around City Hall to oppose city budget cuts to libraries, schools and other social services. Although it was by and large ignored by the media the experience of ‘Bloombergville’, which went on for three weeks, contained all the seeds of OWS. What Bloombergville lacked was a global dimension, or the understanding that any protest in New York has the potential to become a global mobilisation if it is framed as such. Thus, the third factor was the existence of an informal organisational structure on the ground that lent a body to the meme ‘Occupy Wall Street’. It was New Yorkers Against Budget Cuts—the main group behind Bloombergville—that called for the first general assembly at the bull statue on 2 August to discuss Adbusters’ call.
Finally, the intellectual diaspora from the Mediterranean region also played a significant role. Since May, many Spaniards residing in New York had created DemocraciaRealYa NYC, a Facebook group and a series of meetings to discuss how to import and translate the M-15 movement to New York. Also, 16 Beaver has always been an important convergence point for artists and intellectuals from different countries. The first general assemblies at the bull and in Tompkins Square Park in August saw the participation of a number of activists from Spain, Greece, Palestine, Tunisia and Italy who knew each other, in some cases, through 16 Beaver. The core group of organisers was still relatively small (between 40 and 70), and nothing guaranteed the success of the occupation at that point. It was a mix of factors, including the luck of finding a square open to the public 24/7, and the mobilisation of several student groups from the Columbia University system and other colleges that allowed the occupation to survive the first weekend, when many expected it to be dispersed or suppressed with mass arrests.
JD: The first day of the action, 17 September, didn’t seem a harbinger of the movement it would open up. Watching the live feed, I saw some people doing yoga in the street and a schedule of events that included various discussions and crafts. It seemed like a kind of New Age-y or left alternative hippie be-in, with a bit of an anti-Wall Street political edge. The turnout for the protest was far short of the 20,000 predicted. Yet people stayed, they really occupied, and this perseverance, so remarkable in the US setting of the fast and easy, ruptured the veneer of futility and cynicism that coats many on the US Left.
There wasn’t a lot of mainstream media attention that first week, but reports, images and videos kept building, along with the occupation itself, so that by the end of the first week, several hundred people were sleeping regularly in the park. Even more were attending general assemblies and thousands were joining the marches, rappers and celebrities were stopping by to lend support, and thousands more were watching the live feed at Global Revolution or AnonOps. Mainstream media coverage was helped along by the brutality and aggression of the NYPD, especially police corralling protesters in orange net and pepper spraying them. The 22 September convergence of a march from Occupy Wall Street with the much larger march protesting Georgia’s execution of Troy Davis was also important: this convergence indicated the malleability of the movement, the openness of the OWS signifier and the array of concerns that could be linked together under its name.
The real turning point was the arrest of 700 protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge or, to be more precise, getting that extra surge of people to come out in support of the occupation in the first place, which was accomplished by spreading the rumour that Radiohead was going to play in the park. All these events, especially when combined with the support of ever growing numbers of unions, added momentum so that by the end of its third week it was clear the movement had changed the American political terrain. It was at that point that mainstream commentary started to ask: Who are these people? What do they want? What are their demands?
The first question was answered—and continues to be answered—by endless first person accounts of people who ‘lost their jobs but found an occupation’, people who had lost their houses and, with nothing else to lose, headed for Zuccotti Park; as well as stories of recent college graduates with massive debt and no prospects. Particularly powerful in this regard is the moving Tumblr photo archive, ‘We are the 99%’.
The second and third questions remain enormously fraught and controversial, going to the heart of the movement. We should recall the initial announcement from Adbusters: once the occupation of Wall Street is set up, ‘We shall incessantly repeat one demand in a plurality of voices’. Not only was there to be one demand, but Adbusters already had a suggestion for what it should be: ‘democracy not corporatocracy’. Not only has OWS not agreed on or issued a demand, but the very notion of demands is hotly contested, with some saying that we need practical demands, some urging impossible demands, some saying that it’s too early to make demands, some saying that simply being there is itself the demand, and some saying that the plurality of views and the absence of demands is a strength.
MD: Adbusters’ call to issue one demand was doomed to fail in the US situation, which is not comparable to that of Middle Eastern countries, where the single demand is ‘this regime must go’. What puzzles me the most in media accounts of OWS is that they often treat the movement’s inability to agree upon demands and no common political line as a conscious strategic choice. Anyone who is familiar with the internal dynamics of this movement knows this is not the case.
JD: Some commentators write as if the absence of demands was a choice—almost as if there had already been deliberation and consensus in the General Assembly over demands and, after thoughtful reflection, several thousand people concurred that the time was not right to issue a demand. Nothing could be further from the truth. Even as some occupations (Chicago, specifically) have come up with demands, the entire question is bitterly contested in New York. And the way it is being contested not only puts the lie to the illusion that ‘no demands’ is a tactical answer but also puts into sharp relief some of the organisational problems plaguing OWS.
We have open and transparent working groups. The benefit of these groups is that anyone can join. The burden is that anyone can join. So the composition of groups, changes, with relatively high frequency, which means it’s always unclear at any meeting or conversation whether all or most members are participating. The movement from the start has opposed a politics of representation and supported a vision of direct democracy in terms of decisions being made by whoever shows up. The problem is that it becomes very difficult for working groups’ past decisions to have any staying power. People who missed one meeting show up at another and treat previous decisions as violations, almost as usurpations of their democratic right to participate.
The openness of the movement, which many hold as a strength, means that there is no ideological core, not even a relatively loose one. The absence of demands isn’t a strength. And it is ill-informed to say that it is ‘too soon’ for demands — as if political events unfolded according to a proper timetable rather than they themselves pushing and changing the temporalities of action. We have no demands because at this point OWS does not yet name a ‘we’. It names a movement oriented around a tactic, an occupation, motivated by an anger and frustration that has been building for years. The real tactical question is whether the painful, difficult process of generating demands is an important one now, important for further growth of the movement (people know what they are joining) and for building courage, confidence, and solidarity among its members (in part because those who disagree will leave) or whether the message of occupation (we belong, this is our space) and the struggle it requires to maintain these occupations (particularly in the face of increasing political push back and police violence) is enough.
MD: There are several groups who have been trying to open up a political discussion on the general objectives of this movement. These groups have been running into two major obstacles, which concern both the current organisational form of OWS and the difficult work of mediating among the different political souls of OWS. On a first level, it’s obvious that OWS lacks a context to articulate a political discussion in general terms. At this stage, this is not necessarily a bad thing as the movement has so many chapters that its plural composition is undoubtedly a resource. Yet I am convinced that in the long run OWS’s most important political task will be to find and create a common ground. Even if we limit our analysis to the local level, it is clear that the current mode of functioning of a general assembly doesn’t lend itself to the articulation of complex political discussions. General Assemblies deliberate, by and large, on daily management issues, whereas broader questions regarding demands, objectives, alliances, the relationship between tactics and strategies, are confined to myriad working groups, committees, caucuses, listservs and so on. But these groups have no deliberative power and a very limited influence over the General Assembly. The paradox is that groups and individuals whose approach aspires to be general and strategic can exist only insofar as they accept their inability to represent anyone other than themselves.
In this respect the General Assembly seems to function as the perfect incarnation of Jacques Alain Miler’s definition of democracy—‘the master signifier that says that there is no master signifier … that every master signifier has to insert itself wisely among others’. It is argued that because it is a framework that enables anyone to speak and be heard, it can keep functioning as such only insofar as no one is able to bend its neutrality to a specific political agenda. But if this is the case, then OWS is just recreating from below institutional forms and modes of deliberation that are essentially liberal.
In your recent work you have been arguing that the Left’s insistence on democracy arises from the loss of communism as a shared vocabulary and horizon, a way of envisioning a common large-scale solution. In my understanding, your criticism is pointed at the liberal illusion that participation in the social web—and the related emphasis on conversation, collaboration and process—are in and of themselves means of achieving substantial political change. Would you extend this criticism to OWS, or do you think that the embodied and public dimension of this movement marks a discontinuity with the ideology of ‘participationism’? And do you think the current organisational structure of OWS is adequate to undertake the large-scale transformation that the radical components of OWS seem to evoke every time the word ‘revolution’ is mentioned?
JD: My sense is that the loose, horizontal, consensus approach of OWS demonstrates the impotence of participation as an ideal—and the very reason that participation has become such a banal refrain: it stands for activity for its own sake, activity that is primarily that of a single individual doing their individual thing, that is, an individual that in no way comes into contact with others with whom they have to work. So in this respect, the horizontal, consensus basis of OWS repeats the worst aspects of participationism: individuals just ‘participate’, stop by, say something, do their thing, and move on. Unfortunately, this mobility subverts the achievement of duration so central to occupation as a tactic.
This problem of mobile membership combines with the problem of unrepresentability. In the movement ideology of direct democracy no one speaks for another, no one has any more right than anyone else to participate in the deliberations of a group. In practice, this isn’t quite the case. People now speak in terms of their dedication to the movement: ‘I’ve slept in the park for a month’ or ‘I’ve been to every GA meeting’ or (differently) ‘I spoke to a lot of people about this’ or ‘I consulted with four different union groups’. Any of these ways of backing one’s claim is good. The problem comes in the dis-organisational practices that invalidate the claims, again, under the heading of ‘no one can speak for any other’.
MD: You’re right, the tensions that arise among occupiers on the basis of experience-based claims are very hard to manage. Further, the claim to radical unrepresentability is mobilised not only between individuals but also between groups. Recently, the General Assembly introduced a new body called the Spokes Council whose function is to ensure that groups can begin working together. Each working group, caucus and thematic group nominates a spokesperson who is the only one entitled to speak at a Spokes Council meeting. Spokes are mandated to rotate at every meeting and everyone can attend a council as a listener. In my opinion this is an important ‘constitutional reform’ because it recognises for the first time that the General Assembly can’t simultaneously address everybody’s concerns without holding endless sessions that wear everybody out. It also recognises that individuals have too much power within the GA as anyone, including newcomers, can block a proposal that may have been elaborated through collective work for weeks.
JD: So we’ve moved from the success of the occupation movement, its openness and adaptability, the way occupation as a form enables what it enjoins, to some of the problems this very form creates for political organisation. Perhaps it makes sense to end by attending to the physical, spatial, embodied dimensions of occupation. Some of the anarchists connected with the movement (I’m thinking of David Graeber here) present the focus on the logistical challenges of lots of people living together out of doors in urban settings, and the patience required for face-to-face deliberation among thousands of people who may not yet have much in common, as a specifically anarchist contribution. In other words, anarchist attunement to the basic elements of living together, to the ethical practice of revolution, has benefits that a communist focus on strategy not only lacks but tends to foreclose. I have to admit that I have been mightily taken up by the changes that occupation effects on those who occupy, how it reconfigures our ways of being together. One can’t rush, one can’t force. Decisions take immense time and this is crucial to the reformation of subjectivity—it remakes individuals into a collective.
MD: Yes, but at the same time we should not idealise communal forms of living, in the same way as we should not idealise the General Assembly. As OWS encampments grow into villages with their semi-permanent dwellers and structures, the occupiers tend to focus on internal dynamics and increasingly perceive non-residents as outsiders. This creates a gap and a specific division of labour between full-time occupiers and part-time activists that makes it difficult for OWS to think of itself as a movement for the general transformation of society.
And there are different political sensibilities within the movement that are objectively difficult to bridge. For instance, neo-Keynesians and socialists focus on economic demands such as higher taxes on financial rent, national jobs programs with direct government employment, and a single-payer health care system. Liberals and progressives typically demand a tighter regulation of the banking system, a ban on corporate donations to political candidates, and so on. The anarchists, as you say, direct their attention mostly to internal democracy, while the environmentalists focus on sustainable forms of living. But there is little discussion on how to link the struggle for social justice to that for real democracy and a sustainable economy. In particular, it is not clear how self-governing bodies such as the General Assembly or Spokes Council can facilitate these broad discussions. These issues keep being discussed in separate working groups as there is no strategic vision of how to link them.
Some of these demands are objectively in contradiction with one another. For instance, demanding a national jobs program with direct government employment means to demand de facto an expansion of the federal government—something anarchists and libertarians would never accept. The demand for reducing or eliminating the influence of corporate power on politics relies on the notion that that there is such a thing as a democratic capitalism. Likewise, the demand for reducing carbon emissions relies on the fantasy that there is such a thing as sustainable capitalism. In my view, all these demands can be articulated only by acknowledging that the world we live in has limited natural resources and that if we want to use them we also have to learn how to manage them in common.
So at this point, OWS faces some fundamental questions. How do we ensure that the emerging institutions of the movement take up the challenge of managing the resources they use in common? The commons is a finite resource whose mode of disposition and usage is determined by its users. In this respect, the movement is trying to develop communal ways of managing resources such as limited public space, limited time for discussion, food, shelter, donations. At the same time, we have to acknowledge that the vast majority of the resources we rely on in this society have already been privatised. Additionally, how do we expand the existing commons or create new ones when the law is designed to protect private property? And, if the movement learns to reproduce itself as a commons, what are the strategic resources it needs to secure to make this process durable and sustainable? Can, for example, the Food Committee strike a long-term agreement with community supported agriculture and urban farms? Can the Town Planning Committee come up with ideas to expand the commons in urban and rural settings? Relatedly, how can we develop a communication infrastructure that is managed in common? If we think that education should not be treated as a commodity but as a commons, how do we link the campaign to cancel student debt to the struggle to defend public education? Is it possible to think of a system of education that is free, whose physical infrastructure is managed by the state, but whose cultural production is managed in common by students and faculty?
Jodi Dean is Professor of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, New York and is currently finishing a manuscript entitled The Communist Horizon (Verso).
Marco Deseriis is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Eugene Lang College, New School for Liberal Arts in New York City.
