Occupy Wall Street and the Art of Demanding
Of all the internal controversies Occupy generated, the one over whether the movement should adopt specific demands may have been the most significant. The resistance to raising demands, particularly on the state, is understandable since the notion of demands has become associated with negotiation, legislation and similar “business as usual” that would blunt and even compromise the radical edge of the movement. Anarchist and quasi-anarchist currents have played a role in rousing that reluctance among people who may not be ideological anarchists but who may be receptive to the anarchist message on this issue for a number of reasons but especially because of two kinds of fears.
Occupy Wall Street and the Art of Demanding
By Samuel Farber
Jacobin Magazine
13 September 2012
Of all the internal controversies Occupy generated, the one over whether the movement should adopt specific demands may have been the most significant. The resistance to raising demands, particularly on the state, is understandable since the notion of demands has become associated with negotiation, legislation and similar “business as usual” that would blunt and even compromise the radical edge of the movement. Anarchist and quasi-anarchist currents have played a role in rousing that reluctance among people who may not be ideological anarchists but who may be receptive to the anarchist message on this issue for a number of reasons but especially because of two kinds of fears.
One fear is that whatever success the Occupy movement attains may become narrowed down or even wiped out through judicial, legislative or governmental administrative undermining or sabotage. This is a rational concern based on real historical experience. However, the real root of the problem lies on the strength – or weakness – of the movement, and not on the pitfalls inherent to the demand for reforms itself. This becomes especially evident when the movement weakens after the reform has been gained leading to a change in the relation of forces that in turn propitiates the cooptation, bureaucratization and sellout of movement leaders. This has been the case with the American labor movement since the late thirties. Labor reforms like the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) granting workers the legal right to organize unions and engage in collective bargaining were already born with limitations in coverage and other features undermining worker autonomy, betraying the original goals that people fought for. Later, organized labor was unable to defeat subsequent legislation such as the post World War II Taft-Hartley Act that undermined many of the positive features of the original legislation. But this has been, more than any other factors, the outcome of labor’s weakness relative to the increased power of the corporations, not of raising demands by the workers on the state as such. The labor movements and left parties in western Europe generally succeeded in winning labor and welfare state reforms that were substantially more comprehensive and favorable to the working class and the poor, not because they did not make demands on the state but because they were much stronger than their American counterparts.
The dynamics of demands for reform and how reform is affected by the changing relation of forces can also be seen in another important mass movement, the Civil Rights Movement. The Civil Rights Movement was organized most of all around one powerful demand on the government: “Freedom Now,” which centered on the call to end Jim Crow in the southern states. Although this single demand remained the principal focus throughout the duration of the movement, demands were also placed on private businesses and institutions, particularly outside of the South.
As a member of the UC Berkeley Campus Chapter of CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) in 1963 and 1964, I participated in two-person teams that visited merchants along Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley’s principal commercial road, asking that they sign contracts promising to hire one African-American out of every two new hires, a form of affirmative action before the term was invented. Similar demands started to be made of bigger businesses through big demonstrations that took place at Berkeley supermarkets (shop-ins,) Oakland’s Jack London Square, and San Francisco’s auto row and the Sheraton Palace Hotel.
