Occupy Wall Street and the limits of spontaneous street protest

 Previously Published on the Guardian UK

Those who, like me, expected the Occupy Wall Street protest to fizzle out, or be actively stomped out, after just a few days, have been surprised to see that after nearly two weeks, it is still going strong. Recent confrontations with the police – especially the 'pepper spray' incidents – have emboldened protesters and stimulated the kind of media attention many supporters complained was lacking in the demonstration's early days.

It is hard to disagree with Doug Henwood and others that insofar as any political ideology can be discerned from the protest, it would be the flavor du jour of American anti-corporate populism. But, in the absence of anything else, that's been enough to draw leftwing luminaries from Michael Moore, to Roseanne Barr, to Cornel West.

Sure, the fact that people are angered enough by the largely unpenalised greed and venality of major financial institutions to camp out in Zuccotti Park indefinitely is certainly a welcome development. But the protest leaves unanswered a number of questions about just what kind of effort it would take to create a more just society. The statement of purpose for the demonstration reads:

"The beauty of this new formula, and what makes this novel tactic exciting, is its pragmatic simplicity. [W]e talk to each other in various physical gatherings and virtual people's assemblies … we zero in on what our one demand will be, a demand that awakens the imagination and, if achieved, would propel us toward the radical democracy of the future …"

On a screen, this message has a sort of melodic appeal; in practice, its shortcomings are thrown into relief. Josh Sternberg of Mediaite.com, who visited the protest on Wednesday, noted:

"As of now, it's a haphazard process, as there's no leadership, no message. Nothing but a group of a few hundred people – and of that group, I saw about 10 to 15 actually take charge of something – trying to figure out what they're doing."

In addition to underscoring the folly of the current fascination with the "leaderless" protest, this illustrates the more general problem with the impulse on the American left to be "doing something" – without necessarily much idea of what that should be. We may be looking at what Liza Featherstone, Doug Henwood and Christian Parenti aptly termed "activistism" in their 2002 essay, "Action Will Be Taken":

"This brave new ideology combines the political illiteracy of hyper-mediated American culture with all the moral zeal of a 19th-century temperance crusade. In this worldview, all roads lead to more activism and more activists. And the one who acts is righteous.

"The activistists seem to borrow their philosophy from the factory boss in a Heinrich Böll short story who greets his employees each morning with the exhortation 'Let's have some action.' To which the workers obediently reply: 'Action will be taken!'"

Where, to their credit, the Wall Street occupiers differ from the "activistists" described by Featherstone et al is in their attempt to think of change in much broader, systemic terms – as muddled as their demands may be. But what they have in common with "activistism" is a misunderstanding of the relationship of the movement to the demonstration.

The parallels being drawn by protesters and some of the media between Occupy Wall Street and the Tahrir Square uprising in Egypt that began early this year are revealing. As Patrick Glennon writes for In These Times:

"The activists behind Occupy Wall Street hope to emulate the success of Tahrir Square, which was an integral force in the dethroning of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak last February. In Cairo's case, the occupied square became the most compelling symbol of the country's spontaneous rebellion against its autocratic leader."

But just what is the parallel here? It seems more stylistic and rhetorical than anything else. After all, we now know the uprising in Egypt to have been anything but spontaneous. "Spontaneous" is a label frequently applied by the media to describe insurgencies that to them appear to have come out of nowhere. In fact, the circulation among Egyptian protestors of a 26-page leaflet providing a blueprint for action suggests a great deal of foresight and preparation by organisers. As Robert Dreyfuss of the Nation wrote:

"Contrary to some media reports, which have portrayed the upsurge in Egypt as a leaderless rebellion, a fairly well-organised movement is emerging to take charge, comprising students, labor activists, lawyers, a network of intellectuals, Egypt's Islamists, a handful of political parties and miscellaneous advocates for 'change'."

Which brings us to my central point: what is the purpose of protest? As history shows, protests can certainly be effective in winning concessions from those in power, but only to the extent that they are representative of broader movements. When it is effective, protest itself is little more than the public expression of a major social mobilisation already organised.

In all probability, Occupy Wall Street will achieve no measurable political change; the best-case scenario for participants is that they will leave Wall Street with wind in their sails. The scope has already widened as plans emerge for similar protests in cities like Boston and Los Angeles. These protests, though, will continue to draw from a relatively narrow pool of self-selecting participants. And without any clear definition of goals or constituency, without organisation of a leadership structure or an attempt to form coalitions with established movements, they are likely to skew towards a voluntaristic politics of "witness-bearing". The endorsement that protesters received Thursday from the New York Transit Workers Union is a major step in the right direction, but without more support and links like this, they risk remaining isolated from the broad class-based movement that is needed to alter the shape of the American political and economic terrain – a movement that can unite the 99% against the 1%, to use their supporters' formulation.

The advent of "hashtag activism" has been greeted with breathless claims about the birth of a new form of technology-based social movement. While such technologies can be extremely useful tools, they do not represent alternatives to the exhausting, age-old work of meeting people where they are, hearing their concerns, reaching common ground, building trust and convincing them that it is in their interests to act politically to change their circumstances. There are no shortcuts here; or to put it another way, it's not the protests that matter, but what happens in the time in between.