In case you have been living in a cave, OWS is Occupy Wall Street: a protest movement that arose from an initial call by AdBusters, and is now a world-wide affair with “occupations” springing up in cities across the USA and the rest of the world.

The idea is simple and brilliant:

1. Choose a method — occupation — that overcomes the customary weakness of other actions of the powerless such as rallies and marches: politicians, administrators, the police, simply wait them out; let the protestors have their day with marching and speeches, after which the powerful can return to business as usual. Even the term “occupy” upends that relationship.

2. Target the clearest representation (Wall Street) of the few who were the primary cause of the economic meltdown of 2008, while also the greatest beneficiaries of the government response to the crisis.

3. Make the identification clear: the most common slogan used by the group is “we are the 99%“. While their sentiments may not be shared by all of the 90+% that took the bulk of the pain and gained little benefit from the Bush-Obama bailouts and half-hearted programs, the material reality is well captured by the slogan. A long overdue challenge, in simple terms, to the Right’s effortless claim to the majority opinion or position.

Due to their resilience, and with the “help” of the inevitable police brutality, this movement has struck a chord and gained popularity and sympathy among the larger public. The response from right-wing organs such as Fox News has been predictable. More unexpectedly, some on the left have issues as well. Here is Jodi Dean:

[T]he language of occupying occupy wall street that I am using suggests that any attempt to hegemonize the space will be a problem for the ‘movement.’ That is, to remain the movement it is (18 days in), it has to resist any and all efforts to channel the message. But that then implies not that the priority is a contestation among people to forge a way ahead but instead that openness and indeterminacy are themselves the goal, that which is to be protected. If that’s the case, then there is something wrong, a kind of built in (self-deceiving?) confusion: the goal is just to keep the occupation going, not to use the occupation to overthrow capitalism or bring down the banks, or redistribute wealth at all. In fact, it’s probably wrong for me to call this confused or self-deceiving: it’s explicit in a number of different statements about democracy and discussion and raising questions. This language is a language of process rather than ends. Or, the process is the end. To the extent that this is the goal, rather than a means of overthrowing capitalism and working toward putting in place a communist solution, then that’s not my revolution.

There is a lot going on in this single paragraph, almost all of which is troublesome. To begin with, Dean gives away the strawman quite explicitly in her very first sentence, with the  accurate qualifier that “the language of occupying occupy wall street” is one that she is using i.e., this is her take on it, and if her take or language leads to some “confusion” or “self-deception” it is not clear who else is to blame here!

And what exactly is a “language of process“, or a “language of ends“? I am pretty sure I don’t know. What is clear however is that Dean wants to lay down the terms on which she will consider Occupy Wall Street “her” revolution: the movement has to share her goal, without question, of a communist solution. Well, okay, that’s her call to make. Why we worry? The trouble I have with Dean’s post is the way she goes about making her point, using all sorts of bad faith hypotheticals, logical leaps, and by playing games with the meaning of words like “process” and “goal”.

One example is Dean’s worry about the presence of Ron Paulites:

To the extent that Occupy Wall Street remains open to and for multiple political persuasions, it is not a left movement at all.  [...] As I understand it, Ron Paul supports an odd notion of free markets; he thinks that individuals make better decisions than groups and that a social safety net damages freedom. If there is space for this view in Occupy Wall Street, then that’s not my revolution. In fact, it seems like a version of the one that hijacked the country in the 70s.

What is “space for this view“, per Dean, and how do the protestors please Dean by purging the movement of such space? Should they chase away Paul leafletters hovering around the periphery? Should they not  listen to them should Paulites attempt to start a discussion? Dean’s own hypothetical extent to which OWS is “open” to alternate “persuasions” or provides “a space” for them, is evidence (“it seems“) that OWS is out to hijack the country. In this analysis, it’s a direct route from hypotheticals (“to the extent that“, “if there is space“) to conclusions.

Another example is the first section quoted above, where Dean condenses all the varied procedures, activities, slogans and positions of OWS to a matter of obsession with “process“. Out of the Brownian flurry of hypotheses bouncing around in her own mind, Dean builds a caricature of a movement — not a movement that is occupying a space to achieve goals (explicitly stated in their statements and placards); not a movement trying to avoid co-option by staying open (while also guarded) to ideas and arguments; but really rather a movement in love with its on machinations and minutiae.

What do we make of the  analysis that people have occupied a park for the fun of the process of being open to Ron Paulites and for the thrill of continuing such occupation into the balmy days of winter, rather than the more probable case that they are using the occupation as a base for protests whose goals are made explicit in their slogans? What could the author possibly mean?

I suspect that to get to the content, you have to work through Dean’s post in a different sequence than top down. It is the Lenin references up front and the political identifications towards the end (“those of us who think of ourselves as communists, Leninists, Trotskyists…“) that provide the necessary backdrop for Dean’s dismissals: “that’s not my revolution” and “Occupy Wall Street … is not a left movement at all“. The contrast to watch for is not the one Dean draws between libertarianism and leftism:

The easiest rough initial cut is between those who begin with an emphasis on equality and those who begin with an emphasis on freedom; another crude cut would distinguish between those who begin from an emphasis on individualism and those who begin from an emphasis on collectivity, solidarity, and a commons.

For surely those actually collected in solidarity in the commons hardly need lecturing (a la Ricard Dawkins: by all means let’s be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out) on libertarianism! Dean is of course not lecturing OWS. She is writing to that “those of us“, her people, and the contrast she draws out is really between the ideological commitment of those like her, and the open-ended process of discovery through action employed by OWS. We cannot take seriously the speculation that OWS is some sort of ISO9001 circle jerk. So, when she raises the suspicion that OWS may not be about “overthrowing capitalism and replacing it with a communist solution“, the emphasis is likely on the latter part. The lack of a priori commitment to communism is Dean’s real issue. But there is good news. She is willing to wait for OWS to come around:

For those of us who think of ourselves as communists, Leninists, Trotskyists, Maoists, and socialists, our challenge is finding ways to work within and together with the movement, which can well mean not pushing too quickly for something for which the proper support has not yet been built.

Or of course there is the alternate possibility. As a fellow subscriber on a left mailing list summarised this kind of analysis (using a quote that seems to be widely attributed to Mahatma Gandhi):

There go my people. I must run and catch up with them because I am their leader.

Scratch even a leftist in the West and you will often find a hippie-hating individualist/reductionist. Every since Dawkins and Sokal, Summers and Pinker did a number on their brethren, many leftists have been labouring (no pun intended) hard to distance themselves from any feel good, “new age”, hippie type framework or explanations. This has to be a bit embarrassing:

Shankar Vedantam – When Play Becomes Work – washingtonpost.com

Psychologists have long been interested in what happens when people’s internal drives are replaced by external motivations. A host of experiments have shown that when threats and rewards enter the picture, they tend to destroy the inner drives. Paychecks and pink slips might be powerful reasons to get out of bed each day, but they turn out to be surprisingly ineffective — and even counterproductive — in getting people to perform at their best.

[...]

Deci tracked a bunch of college students who were solving puzzles for fun. He divided them into two groups. One group was allowed to keep solving puzzles as before. People in the other were offered a small financial reward for each puzzle they solved.

The psychologist later evaluated the volunteers: He found that people given a financial incentive were now less interested in solving puzzles on their own time. Although these people had earlier been just as eager as those in the other group, offering an external incentive seemed to kill their internal drive.

Rewards and punishments guide the lives of most Americans. Young children are given stars for putting away their toys, kids earn a few bucks for mowing the lawn, and teens are told they will be grounded if they get in trouble. For adults, stock options, raises, demotions and firings become different kinds of carrots and sticks.

Beliefs about the utility of rewards and punishments in motivating human behavior are deeply ingrained, and most people don’t know that more than 100 research studies have shown that motivating people in this manner can have the unintentional effect of undermining their internal drives.

The striking thing about the research, said Roland Benabou, an economist at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, is that it is so starkly at odds with bedrock economic principles.

“A central tenet of economics is that individuals respond to incentives,” Benabou noted in one research study. “For psychologists and sociologists, in contrast, rewards and punishments are often counterproductive, because they undermine intrinsic motivation.”

But wait, there’s more… the killer part, in fact:

But rewards and punishments are not always counterproductive, Benabou said. He drew a distinction between mundane tasks and those that carry meaning for people. In the first case, Benabou argued, rewards and punishments work exactly the way economists predict: They get people to do things.

External rewards and punishments are counterproductive when it comes to activities that are meaningful — tasks that telegraph something about a person’s intellectual abilities, generosity, courage or values.

Killer part because it spells out what any worker knows to be true — rewards and punishments (more often the latter) are employed to get us to do the dirty work of those handing out the rewards and punishments.

[ Link ]

[With apologies to Missy Elliot]

A minor skirmish has broken out in Bloglandia between the left purists and the “netroots”. The opening salvo was fired by our good friend Max Sawicky, with this bit:

The “Internet Left” is a mostly brainless vacuum cleaner of donations for the Democratic Party.

Congratulations are first due to Max: in a world that lives on and for catchy one-liners, he can justifiably claim to have moved us farther, with this clever aphorism, irrespective of its validity. Second, is it just me, is Max looking pretty slick in that picture (for contrast see the wiser gent on Crooks and Liars)?

The “purists” are the old guard, the textbook leftists, the big thinkers who understand the systemic rot, the root cause dudes who will fix the problem not the symptoms. The “netroots” are a gaggle of bloggers who gained popularity and prominence after the 2004 Dean debacle. Some are just wide-ranging commentators (much as we here at PB are, albeit with a readership that is non-trivial) but for our exercise we can limit the group to a couple of biggies: DailyKos, the mothership of the movement, and MyDD one of whose writers (Matt Stoller) figures in the very first sentences of Max’s assault on the virtual roots.

What is Max’s beef against the young Turks? I am guessing he is unhappy with their apparent attitude that they have the whole leftist enterprise covered (from activism to theory). Instead old Max finds that they are ill-read if at all (and extends that point to suggest that they have little coherent theoretical understanding and analysis of their positions and the things they, or rather the Left, should work against or for), and they are not very left at that (as attested by the unbridled enthusiasm for Democrats — which seems to exceed that of a Democratic convention speaker, Al Sharpton, who memorably quipped: we want to see how far this donkey can take us — and election politics and activism). Further evidence is not hard to come by, ranging from Kos’ attitude towards marches and the activists involved (“boring”, “obsolete”) to Duncan Black on Chomsky (Google it. I refuse to link to random blather!). The “netroots” wants the old Left (the 60s left in particular?) out of their way in a hurry, but as Max outlines, what is the alternative they offer to the many facets of old style organising and activism?

The purists, usually from the Church of Marx, have nothing but disdain for party politics, electoral victories, crackpot realism. It’s all ephemeral, these meagre and meaningless victories … a mistaken identification of the roots with the trees and the trees for the forest. The Democratic Party is the buffer, a parasite that lives off the malcontent of the left, bleeding away its anger while offering no real progress. The destruction of the DP is the first step towards the inevitable and necessary confrontation with the real powers that keep us down! Even the extended discussion of elections, potential candidates and results, is not mere waste of time but a dangerous distraction (aided by the “netroots” which offer the fora and gravitas for such chatter).

Theoretical analysis and such elaborate arias can also be seen as a luxury of those who can afford them. Every bit of change can mean something significant for someone else — the return of Democrats might return funding to medical services in poor nations, alleviate conditions in Iraq (the 2006 GOP electoral humiliation, in itself, has generated a significant number of defections into the camp that questions the Iraqi strategy), a bit more safety for immigrants at risk of landing in Guantanamo, increase in minimum wage, and so on. If a coherent argument is available to demonstrate that these incremental steps have a net negative effect (and a large one at that), I am yet to hear it put forth without resort to magic language.

Another little matter nags: I do not vote on MyDD straw-polls because I believe I am furthering the grand leftist agenda, but because I have nothing better to do. The problem lies in the mistaken idea that the purists and the “netroots” are battling over scarce eyeballs and limited time. I can eyeball both of them and still have enough time to write this silly blog. My problem is not too little time but too little opportunity.

And on that question of opportunity, I return to consider Max’s original point regarding the “Internet Left”, and his own conclusion:

The real Internet left is the Internet of leftists who use the Internet.

Sometime in 1990 or 1991 I was introduced to the term “user”. It seemed an elegantly apt way to describe those who were interested in consumption and not participation (elegant because “user” is also the term to designate a non-technical human using a computer). These were the sort of people who made posts to newsgroups or mailing lists with the preface: please respond to me at my email address, since I do not read this list. I bring this up for a reason. Max is wrong. The real Internet Left is not the leftists who use the net, but the people who contribute to making it what it is. If you need a name, that name would be Richard Stallman. Behind all this noise that they enable is a dedicated community of developers, documenters, testers, bug reporters, and volunteers for all kinds of other roles, who work using the simple philosophy of from each according to his ability and to each according to his needs. The best unsolicited advice that I can offer anyone that faces the problem I bring up above, of the lack of opportunity, is to forget about theoretical frameworks or blog activism, but rather get involved in this thriving actual community (that is by the way, among other things, enabling communities in the so-called Third World), which exists despite (and perhaps because of) the disimissal of it as a serious and important force and phenomenon. Forget the Marxist thesis and the Technorati rank, or rather along with that, write some code, help out with answering questions, get your hands dirty.

A random list of efforts that you could involve yourself in today, directly related to what you are doing now:

• WordPress — open source blogging software and service
• Mozilla — open source web browser and email software with ad/spam blocking
• GNU — extensive suite of tools from the Free Software Foundation

Recently, I posted about Max being dropped by dKos and a bit earlier about Kos opinion on peace marches. At that time, I had no problem with Kos in general but found some aspects of his approach (and his rhetoric) disturbing. More on his attitude has emerged (follow the Bitch|Lab blog link quoted below to read direct Kos comments on the dearth of minorities/women in the blogosphere, and from there on about affirmative action, etc) that casts further doubt on Kos’ credibility as a true progressive.

The quoted text below is of particular interest to me because it is rare to hear this (what I consider) older form of leftist/progressive ideal, here in the West. In fact new leftists (like Kos himself, though he probably does not consider himself a leftist) probably dismiss this as some sort of romanticizing, on various pragmatic grounds.

I have always thought that the job of the left is much harder: (I am not good at metaphors, so bear with me) We have the task of dragging the conservatives away from the last good idea we brought about to the next good one. Our techniques are part of who we are, just as theirs betray their outlook (Don’t worry, no Nietzsche quote shall follow).

Without more verbiage then, a comment from Bitch|Lab that says it most beautifully:

Bitch | Lab » Blog Archive » Flicked off

For him (dKos), it’s about winning elections. And the content of his blog is zeroed in on yakking about the races, promoting candidates, promoting campaign issues, battling the enemy.

And he wants to imagine that the only legitimate way to build this “Progressive” community is via this narrowly defined political practice. Thus those blogs that focus primarily on doing the same are considered legimitately part of the ‘political community’.

But, can a social movement for real progressive change rest only on this narrow conception of politics? How does such a narrow concpetion of politics foster community and solidarity? I don’t think it does — not for the long haul at any rate.

A progressive politics needs story tellers. It needs shared symbols which express, in crystallized for, those stories. Those story tellers speak from the voices of those who feel the burning edge of the need for social change.

Those story tellers seem to me to almost always emanate from the impassioned heart of those who feel most oppressed or who can, somehow, identify with them and give voice to that pain — and that desire.

Those stories are what the whole “values” debate is really all about. Those stories are what Mr. Framing (I’ve forgotten his name) is really talking about. But things he talks about don’t inspire the people who struggle. He only wants to get people to pull levers in voting booths. He only wants to bring USers to a point where more people thinkt he Democrats are more appealing than the Republicans.

Real social change — which is what I thought a progressive supports — is something that needs to be sustained by larger mythic stories of what’s wrong with contemporary life and what we can do to change. Those mythic stories we tell ourselves tell us why we struggle. They tell us why we’re doing this. They tell us why we keep fighting, even when we lose, even when we think nothing’s ever going to change. Those stories nourish us and reinvigorate us. They keep us fighting when the going gets tough. They connect us to a past through a present and onward toward an imagined future.

Ahem.

Sorry. There’s this weird thing that takes over me sometimes and I sound like a durn fool.

No you don’t. You sound just about right, and just about exactly what I learnt was worthwhile about being a progressive (and acting as one) from my father (the most gentle human being I ever knew).

By the way, B|L, the Mr.Framing guy you are looking for is, I think, George Lakoff (PDF).