The Democrats are desperate to make OWS their Tea Party moment(um). Barney Frank and some of the hired pundits at MSNBC have been trying to co-opt the movement by suggesting that demonstrating alone is not enough and that the occupy movement has to join the political process to be effective. While true, the OWS folks are not interested in the current political options, as evidenced by this piece provided to us by our SoOC correspondent, Sir William of Orange (more on that moniker after the post). Paragraph 4 is of particular importance.
Occupy Wall Street excerpt from article.. author below.
The Occupy movement operates similarly, with each locale establishing its own set of organizational practices. Locales, and the virtual Occupy communities in cyberspace, are federated according to a simple yet powerful point of unity: “The one thing we all have in common is that we are the 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%”—an obvious reference to the well-known, yet still appalling, statistic that the top 1 percent of households in the United States own somewhere between 30 to 40 percent of all privately held wealth. And counting.
Occupy Wall Street’s organizational presence is the New York General Assembly or “GA,” which convenes numbers in the high hundreds at its squat-site in Zuccotti Park. Daily GA meetings are led by facilitators who rotate on a regular basis, and facilitation training is open to all. Specific issues, such as food, medical, legal, outreach, security and others are handled by working groups—also open and inclusive—that periodically report back to the GA. Instead of issuing top-down directives, Occupy groups use a consensus process in which anyone can join in the decision-making and propose an idea. Proposers must field questions, justify the hows and whys of their ideas, and engage a large-scale group discussion. Votes are then cast via an innovative system of hand signals, and proposals are revised until a nine-tenths majority approves.
Of course, all this requires a degree of good faith. Embedded in consensus process is an ethical assumption that decision-making is not a competition: It is not about converting other people to one’s way of thinking. It is about compromise. For every person involved, there is a new viewpoint to consider. This can get messy, but efficiency is not the measuring stick of success here. Democracy is.
Similar to the feminist and alter-globalization movements, these groups want to avoid replicating the authoritarian structures of the institutions they are opposing. This is part of what differentiates them from the Tea Party. Occupy will never become an arm of the Democratic Party because the Democratic Party is part of the problem. These protesters want to prefigure within their own organization the free society they seek to create. And they want to demonstrate against the corrupt and hypocritical culture in mainstream politics and Wall Street—by operating with integrity.
The Occupy movement is a laboratory for participatory democracy. It’s a massive crash course in leadership training. Most of these activists have a particular issue, problem or political idea that is meaningful to them, on which they have developed an expert knowledge. Occupy is both a concrete and virtual space for connecting these issues and expertise without any one position or issue taking precedence. This movement is not mired in the competitive mindset of “my issue is more important than yours” that appears to be stymieing Congress as the country slowly crumbles.
Implicit in this structure is also a rejection of the narcissistic, “I know what’s good for you” form of leadership, now pervasive in this country, in which lawmakers fail to consider the needs and desires of the people they claim to represent. The failure of representative democracy in the United States is perhaps one of the most serious problems of our time, and the Occupy movement is a symptom of this crisis of legitimacy. The people no longer trust their leaders and are even starting to indict the system itself. They think we can do better. We are all leaders.
Heather Gautney, PhD, is an assistant professor of sociology at Fordham University and author of Protest and Organization in the Alternative Globalization Era (Palgrave Macmillan).
This will segue into my post later tonight about what to do next. Sir William of Orange is neither from Orange or is he John Boehner. The nickname was given to him by my mother because of his love of the oranges from her tree. Really.
Hamster Prez
No comments:
Post a Comment