Intellectual Roots Wall St. Protest Lie in Academe

[Dan Clore]

News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo

http://chronicle.com/article/Intellectual-Roots-of-Wall/129428/
October 16, 2011
Intellectual Roots of Wall St. Protest Lie in Academe
Movement's principles arise from scholarship on anarchy
Intellectual Roots of 'Occupy Wall Street' Lie in Academe 1

Occupy Wall Street protesters have been demonstrating in Zuccotti Park
since mid-September. The movement has an academic heritage that spans
political science, economics, and literature, but its organizing
principles owe a debt to an ethnography of Madagascar.

By Dan Berrett

Academics have become frequent visitors to Zuccotti Park, the
33,000-square-foot pedestrian plaza in the heart of New York City's
financial district that is now the site of a nearly monthlong protest,
Occupy Wall Street.

Famous scholars like Cornel West, Slavoj Zizek, and Frances Fox Piven
have spoken to the crowd, with their remarks dispersed, word-for-word,
from one cluster of people to the next through a "human megaphone." Many
others, such as Lawrence Lessig, have lent their support from farther
away, as the demonstrations have spread to cities and college campuses
nationwide.

The movement has repeatedly been described as too diffuse and
decentralized to accomplish real change, and some observers have seen
the appearances by academic luminaries as an attempt to lend the protest
intellectual heft and direction. Certainly, its intellectual
underpinnings and signature method of operating are easier to identify
than its goals.

Economists whose recent works have decried income inequality have
informed the movement's critiques of capitalism. Critical theorists like
Michael Hardt, professor of literature at Duke University, and Antonio
Negri, former professor of political science at the University of Padua,
have anticipated some of the central issues raised by the protests. Most
recently, they linked the actions in New York and other American cities
to previous demonstrations in Spain, Cairo's Tahrir Square, and in
Athens, among other places.

But Occupy Wall Street's most defining characteristics—its decentralized
nature and its intensive process of participatory, consensus-based
decision-making—are rooted in other precincts of academe and activism:
in the scholarship of anarchism and, specifically, in an ethnography of
central Madagascar.

It was on this island nation off the coast of Africa that David Graeber,
one of the movement's early organizers, who has been called one of its
main intellectual sources, spent 20 months between 1989 and 1991. He
studied the people of Betafo, a community of descendants of nobles and
of slaves, for his 2007 book, Lost People.

Betafo was "a place where the state picked up stakes and left," says Mr.
Graeber, an ethnographer, anarchist, and reader in anthropology at the
University of London's Goldsmiths campus.

In Betafo he observed what he called "consensus decision-making," where
residents made choices in a direct, decentralized way, not through the
apparatus of the state. "Basically, people were managing their own
affairs autonomously," he says.

The process is what scholars of anarchism call "direct action." For
example, instead of petitioning the government to build a well, members
of a community might simply build it themselves. It is an example of
anarchism's philosophy, or what Mr. Graeber describes as "democracy
without a government."

He transplanted the lessons he learned in Madagascar to the globalism
protests in the late 1990s in which he participated, and which some
scholars say are the clearest antecedent, in spirit, to Occupy Wall Street.

Soon after the magazine Adbusters published an appeal to set up a
"peaceful barricade" on Wall Street, Mr. Graeber spent six weeks in New
York helping to plan the demonstrations before an initial march by
protesters on September 17, which culminated in the occupation.

It is far from clear, of course, how attuned the protesters are to the
scholarship of Mr. Graeber, other critical theorists, or academics who
study anarchism. A growing collection of fiction and nonfiction books,
however, has a post-office box to which supporters are invited to send
books. "The People's Library" in New York City, which has been copied at
other Occupy protest sites, houses nearly 1,200 books in cardboard boxes
that are protected against the elements by clear plastic sheeting.

"I really am amazed for the respect they have for the word," Eric
Seligson, the librarian at the protest site on Wall Street, told
Esquire. "There's a real reverence for what has been written that has
surprised me, since they eschew whatever came before, all the thought
that came before."

The defining aspect of Occupy Wall Street, its emphasis on direct action
and leaderless, consensus-based decision-making, is most clearly
embodied by its General Assembly, in which participants in the protest
make group decisions both large and small, like adopting principles of
solidarity and deciding how best to stay warm at night.

This intensive and egalitarian process is important both procedurally
and substantively, Mr. Graeber says. "One of the things that
revolutionaries have learned over the course of the 20th century is that
the idea of the ends justifying the means is deeply problematic," he
says. "You can't create a just society through violence, or freedom
through a tight revolutionary cadre. You can't establish a big state and
hope it will go away. The means and ends have to be the same."

When 2,000 people make a decision jointly, it is an example of direct
action, or direct democracy, Mr. Graeber says. "It makes you feel
different to go to a meeting where your opinions are really respected."
Or, as an editorial in the protest's house publication, Occupied Wall
Street Journal, put it, "This occupation is first about participation."

Three days after the protests began, Mr. Graeber left. Since then, he
has kept a low profile because he wants to avoid what he calls an
"intellectual vanguard model" of leadership. "We don't want to create a
leadership structure," he says. "The fact I was being promoted as a
celebrity is a danger. It's the kids who made this happen."

Animated by Anger

Those kids include college students, who have been animated by anger
over mounting student-loan debt and declining job prospects, and have
become visible participants in the protests. Several Occupy Colleges
demonstrations took place last week.

The concerns of the protesters are primarily economic, and scholars of
that discipline have had much to say about economic fairness that has
resonated with the demonstrations.

In a Vanity Fair article in May, Joseph E. Stiglitz, the Nobel laureate
and professor at Columbia University framed income inequality as a
matter of a wealthy 1 percent versus the remaining 99 percent—a trope
that the movement has championed.

Critics of the movement, including David Brooks, have faulted this line
of thinking because "almost no problem can be productively conceived in
this way."

Mr. Stiglitz visited the protests this month, where he said the
financial markets, which are supposed to allocate capital and manage
risks, have instead misallocated capital and created risk. "We are
bearing the cost of their misdeeds," he told the demonstrators.

Jeffrey D. Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia, also
visited the demonstrations and spoke to them this month. He says his
primary goal in attending was to show his support for the demonstrators'
efforts. He also wanted to share ideas, many of which he stakes out in a
recent book, The Price of Civilization, which one commentator has urged
the protesters to read, though it is not yet in the collection of the
People's Library.

As a macroeconomist and fiscal expert, Mr. Sachs says he sees the
nation's priorities most clearly expressed in the budget of the federal
government, and he has come to believe that the market and government
must both play a large role in assuring fairness, productivity, and
environmental sustainability. "I was trying to explain that we arrived
at a fiscal crisis in the country," he says of his remarks to the
demonstrators. "Either our government is going to become completely
shrunken and dysfunctional, or we're going to start paying for
civilization again."

Other scholars have embraced the movement, either in person or from
afar. The American Association of University Professors issued a
position statement this month, and more than 200 faculty members at
Columbia signed a petition pledging support. The presumption that
academics favor the aims of the occupation has become so widespread that
Paul Krugman recently felt compelled to explain that the ethical
guidelines of The New York Times forbade him from visiting Zuccotti Park.

But visits like these are little more than a celebrity academic "walk
by," says Todd Gitlin, professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia
University, who has written about the protests for The Chronicle. And
other observers have pointed out that the student-loan burden imparted
by universities makes these institutions an ambiguous force, at best, in
the demonstrations.

Of greater influence than any particular thinker or group of thinkers
are the recent demonstrations in other countries, and the knowledge that
protesters have been gaining there, says Evan Calder Williams, a
doctoral candidate in literature at the University of California at
Santa Cruz and a Fulbright fellow at the University of
Naples-L'Orientale. Protesters in Egypt, Greece, and Spain, among other
sites, have been creating a growing record of their experiences, through
blogs and social media, which other protesters are reading and
commenting upon.

"This isn't anti-intellectualism: It is simply to say that the relevant
theory is that which will be developed from struggling to grasp the
obscure shape of the past few years," Mr. Williams said in an e-mail.
"It's safe to say that Syntagma Square, the many-month occupation of a
Chilean girls' school by its students, and Occupy the Hood are—and
deserve to be—of far greater intellectual import than any contemporary
theorist will be."

The idea that intellectual ferment is coming from the streets rather
than academe is evidence that anarchism is witnessing something of a
resurgence of interest among both activists and academics, says Nathan
J. Jun, assistant professor of philosophy at Midwestern State
University, in Texas, and author of the forthcoming Anarchism and
Political Modernity.

While some students in the movement might be passingly familiar with
anarchist studies, Mr. Jun says, they have probably not read much of the
scholarship. It is much more likely that anarchism itself has had the
greater influence on Occupy Wall Street because, he says, many activists
there "regard anarchy as an ideal to be realized."

♦ ♦ ♦

Scholars Visit Occupy Wall Street

David Graeber, of the U. of London's Goldsmiths campus: "You can't
create a just society through violence, or freedom through a tight
revolutionary cadre. You can't establish a big state and hope it will go
away. The means and ends have to be the same."

Michael Hardt, of Duke U. (writing with Antonio Negri): "Indignation
against corporate greed and economic inequality is real and deep. But at
least equally important is the protest against the lack, or failure, of
political representation."

Jeffrey D. Sachs, of Columbia U.: "Either our government is going to
become completely shrunken and dysfunctional, or we're going to start
paying for civilization again."

Slavoj Zizek, of the European Graduate School: "Don't fall in love with
yourselves, with the nice time we are having here. Carnivals come
cheap—the true test of their worth is what remains the day after, how
our normal daily life will be changed."

Cornel West, of Prince­ton U.: "It's impossible to translate the issue
of the greed of Wall Street into one demand or two demands. We're
talking about a democratic awakening."

Joseph E. Stiglitz, of Columbia U.: "We are bearing the cost of their
misdeeds. There's a system where we've socialized losses and privatized
gains. That's not capitalism; that's not a market economy. That's a
distorted economy."

Lawrence Lessig, of Harvard U.: "The arrest of hundreds of tired and
unwashed kids, denied the freedom of a bullhorn and the right to protest
on public streets, may well be the first real green-shoots of this, the
American spring. And if nurtured right, it could well begin real change."


--
Dan Clore

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