Occupy Nation by Todd Gitlin

Author:Todd Gitlin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

12. The Co-optation

Phobia

Sunday, December 19, was a big day for Occupy Wall Street conferences. At the New School in Greenwich Village, Occupy intellectuals put on a full afternoon of brisk, sharp panel discussions about banks, foreclosures, debt, and strategy, in front of an audience numbering a hundred or more. Not far away, at Pace University, near the Brooklyn Bridge, several hundred met for an all-day “unconference,” which had the imprimatur of the GA. This was a jamboree of workshops, covering vision, strategy, and tactics—under the rubric “Where Do We Go From Here?”

The largest session, “Visioning,” took up the entire gym. The floor was open for anyone to say whatever they liked. There was a moment of silence for Vaclav Havel, that paragon of nonviolent liberation, whose death had just been announced. Facilitators read out various propositions, inviting the ring of two hundred or so present to declare themselves bodily. “If you want Occupy to stay out of politics,” he said, “step forward.” Almost everyone did. A few minutes later, the format changed. This time, if you agreed with a proposition, you were to walk to one side of the gym; if you disagreed, to the other side; if you weren’t sure, to the center. One proposition read: “Achieving reforms is important.” Ninety percent moved to the “agree” side.

The Occupy movement wanted to win reforms and to stay out of politics. At the same time.

Movements are social organisms, living phenomena that breathe in and adapt to their environments, not objects frozen into their categories while taxonomists poke and prod them. They come, go, mutate, expand, contract, rest, split, stagnate, ally, cast off outworn tissue, decay, regenerate, go round in circles, are always accused of being co-opted and selling out, and are often declared dead. If they are large, they contain multitudes, and contradict themselves. Outsider movements struggle to finesse their tensions, to square circles, striving to hold onto their outsider status while also producing results.

Can Occupy’s tensions be finessed, its circles squared? It partly depends, of course, on the strengths of the arguments pro and con (which I shall try to assess in part III). But it’s also important to take seriously the resistance points, the points at which Occupy not only rejects arguments but deflects them. There is fervor in its resistance and it is the fervor as well as the arguments—the fervor beyond and beneath the logic and evidence—that deserve attention. Why the largest and fastest-growing movement of the left in many decades should have declined (with some exceptions) to throw its weight directly into the political campaigns of 2012 is a matter of culture and identity. Occupy does not want to be mainstream. It is, at its core, an outsider movement, deeply committed to a radical departure from political norms. That is its identity, an identity only reinforced by its early flush of success. And such success imposes burdens.

Success? Is it reasonable to speak of success when the plutocracy prevails, when big money still dominates official politics, when

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