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Nice piece Monday in the Daytona News-Journal (of all places) about a successful student protest campaign at the University of Denver to save the campus library from being emptied of books. The whole thing is worth reading, but this introductory graf is a fascinating little tidbit:
“Activism at DU has a rich history, including the anti-war protest in 1970 known as Woodstock West, and the earlier Coffee Break Riot of 1965. In the 1965 incident, passion was roused after the administration ended the morning coffee break, a 50-minute period during which no classes were conducted. Students blocked traffic, lit fires and battled with police, but failed to win back their caffeine privileges. It was an era when everything was a Big Deal, and the mood on many campuses was volatile.”
That “Coffee Break Riot” is exactly the kind of thing that gets pooh-poohed as unsubstantial in student protest. But if you squint just a little you can see it’s about student culture, campus environment, and the question of who is going to set the rules under which students will live. None of those are trivial matters, and all of them are worth thinking seriously about.
Also worth noting in that vignette is the year: 1965. That’s well before the widespread protests of the sixties got underway. As see over and over again in student history, huge campus movements often begin in small, strange ways. As I said in a keynote address once, the student past is far weirder, far more interesting, than we imagine.
I’m mulling a (nother) longer post on the question of demands and clarity of mission as it applies to activist movements, but in the meantime, check this out:
“We affirm the philosophical or religious ideal of nonviolence as the foundation of our purpose, the presupposition of our belief, and the manner of our action.
“Nonviolence, as it grows from the Judeo-Christian tradition, seeks a social order of justice permeated by love. Integration of human endeavor represents the crucial first step towards such a society.
“Through nonviolence, courage displaces fear. Love transcends hate. Acceptance dissipates prejudice; hope ends despair. Faith reconciles doubt. Peace dominates war. Mutual regards cancel enmity. Justice for all overthrows injustice. The redemptive community supersedes immoral social systems.
“By appealing to conscience and standing on the moral nature of human existence, nonviolence nurtures the atmosphere in which reconciliation and justice become actual possibilities.
“Although each local group in this movement must diligently work out the clear meaning of this statement of purpose, each act or phase of our corporate effort must reflect a genuine spirit of love and good-will.”
Weak, no?
Other than a commitment to “nonviolence,” which is itself more than a little fuzzy as a strategy, it’s completely vacuous. “A social order of justice permeated by love.” What the hell does that mean? That “the redemptive community supersedes immoral social systems.” Well, okay, but how? “By appealing to conscience and standing on the moral nature of human existence.” Seriously?
And then, of course, the last paragraph is a total punt. “Each local group in this movement must diligently work out the clear meaning of this purpose.” Come on.
Movements need demands. Movements need clear and specific goals. Otherwise they’ll never amount to anything.
So I’ve been tweeting up a storm today on the question of whether #OccupyWallStreet needs to compile a formal list of demands. (Spoiler alert: Nope.) I’m not going to rehash my whole argument here right now, but someone just tweeted something at me that gives me an opportunity to explore a piece of it.
Here’s the tweet, posted in response to me saying that “When people say #OccupyWallStreet needs to articulate demands, they usually mean they want it to embrace their demands.”
@dc_dsa: @studentactivism Partially agree. As Frederick Douglass said, “power concedes nothing without a demand.”
That was pretty well played, I must say. Apt, pithy, and deploying one of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite activists. But let’s look at all of what Douglass said there:
“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. In the light of these ideas, Negroes will be hunted at the North, and held and flogged at the South so long as they submit to those devilish outrages, and make no resistance, either moral or physical. Men may not get all they pay for in this world; but they must certainly pay for all they get. If we ever get free from the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and if needs be, by our lives and the lives of others.”
This is Douglass is at his very best, but when he talks about making a demand he’s talking about planting your feet in the struggle, not drafting a bill of particulars.
The Montgomery bus boycott started out demanding a line separating the whites in the front of the bus from the blacks in the rear, so that black patrons wouldn’t have to give up their seats when the white section filled up. (Rosa Parks was obeying the law when she sat down that day.) Mario Savio made no demands at all in the most famous speech in the history of the American student movement. Malcolm X’s demands shifted weekly, sometimes hourly, and the suffragist and abolitionist movements both encompassed vast, unwieldy coalitions.
Now, I’m not anti-demands in principle. If you happen to be fighting a narrow, single-issue, clearly-defined campaign, then by all means articulate what you’re looking to get. But if you’re not — and Occupy Wall Street isn’t — then any demands you put forward should serve a tactical purpose, and the question of what to demand has to be preceded by a discussion of whether it serves your interests to make any demands at all.
Some folks at Occupy Wall Street want to see Congress overturn the Citizens United decision. Some want to see an end to US military adventurism. Some want to see Nick Kristof’s head on a pike. Would endorsing any one of these demands bring the group together, or would it peel people off from the coalition? If you want OWS to make demands, you’ve gotta have a solid answer to that question.
Some demands are certainly more innocuous than others. I imagine that demanding a financial transaction tax, for instance, wouldn’t in and of itself alienate many people currently in Liberty Plaza, and it might bring a few more on board.
But even if that demand could be approved smoothly and easily and without dissent, would its articulation bring the implementation of such a tax any nearer? I honestly don’t see how it would. A Google search on “transaction tax” and “occupy wall street” already returns more than twenty thousand hits, so the idea is already a big part of the conversation. And it’s not like a formal statement from next Tuesday’s GA is going to upend the legislative dynamic that currently pertains in Washington DC.
No. What’s going to change the dynamic in Washington DC, if anything will, is the continued growth of this movement. If you want to see Occupy Wall Street lead to a transaction tax, you want the movement to grow. If you want it to compel the demise of the legal concept of corporate personhood, you want the movement to grow. If you want it to overthrow global capitalism, you want the movement to grow.
It won’t grow if it’s completely contentless, of course. But it’s not contentless now. The General Assembly passed a “declaration of occupation” a few nights ago, and there’s some real meat there. I said in a recent blogpost that it was my sense that pretty much everyone in Liberty Plaza thought “that something was seriously broken in the American economy, that something was seriously broken in American politics, and that an accelerating concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a small minority was at the root of most of of that brokenness,” and none of the many people who’ve read or linked to that post have yet disagreed.
If you think OWS has no message, you’re just not paying attention.
The OWS critique of our current national (and global) crisis will continue to unfold. Those discussions are ongoing, in a zillion venues. And I’m not convinced that this movement is any less coherent right now than the suffragists at the turn of the century or the lunch-counter sit-in crowd in the spring of 1960 or the London demonstrators over the last few months.
And at any rate the crucial task for Occupy Wall Street right now isn’t coherence, any more than it’s the articulation of specific demands. It’s resonance as an idea, as a movement.
You don’t win by making demands. You win by taking power or by forcing power to bend. Either way your stated demands are peripheral to the outcome — what you demand has only the vaguest relationship to what you win.
Four Egyptian university presidents with ties to the overthrown Mubarak regime resigned yesterday, clearing the way for campus elections to choose their successors.
Students, faculty and staff have been engaging in ongoing protests against Mubarak-era holdovers in university administration, protests that have intensified after the new government reneged on promised to oust all top university leaders this summer. These new resignations come just weeks before the scheduled start of the new Egyptian academic year.
Only faculty members are eligible to vote in these elections for university administrators, but students are asserting newfound power in the university system as well. Student activists have been at the center of recent campus demonstrations, and a weeklong sit-in at American University in Cairo ended on Monday in victory for student activists. Meanwhile, Egypt’s national union of students held its first leadership elections since the 1970s last month.
“Twenty years have passed since this Court declared that the death penalty must be imposed fairly, and with reasonable consistency, or not at all and, despite the effort of the States and courts to devise legal formulas and procedural rules to meet this daunting challenge, the death penalty remains fraught with arbitrariness, discrimination, caprice, and mistake. This is not to say that the problems with the death penalty today are identical to those that were present 20 years ago. Rather, the problems that were pursued down one hole with procedural rules and verbal formulas have come to the surface somewhere else, just as virulent and pernicious as they were in their original form. Experience has taught us that the constitutional goal of eliminating arbitrariness and discrimination from the administration of death can never be achieved without compromising an equally essential component of fundamental fairness – individualized sentencing.
“It is tempting, when faced with conflicting constitutional commands, to sacrifice one for the other or to assume that an acceptable balance between them already has been struck. In the context of the death penalty, however, such jurisprudential maneuvers are wholly inappropriate. The death penalty must be imposed ‘fairly, and with reasonable consistency, or not at all…’
“This Court, in my view, has engaged in a futile effort to balance these constitutional demands, and now is retreating not only from the promise of consistency and rationality, but from the requirement of individualized sentencing as well. Having virtually conceded that both fairness and rationality cannot be achieved in the administration of the death penalty, the Court has chosen to deregulate the entire enterprise, replacing, it would seem, substantive constitutional requirements with mere aesthetics, and abdicating its statutorily and constitutionally imposed duty to provide meaningful judicial oversight to the administration of death by the States.
“From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death. For more than 20 years, I have endeavored – indeed, I have struggled – along with a majority of this Court, to develop procedural and substantive rules that would lend more than the mere appearance of fairness to the death penalty endeavor. Rather than continue to coddle the Court’s delusion that the desired level of fairness has been achieved and the need for regulation eviscerated, I feel morally and intellectually obligated simply to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed…
“In my view, the proper course when faced with irreconcilable constitutional commands is not to ignore one or the other, nor to pretend that the dilemma does not exist, but to admit the futility of the effort to harmonize them. This means accepting the fact that the death penalty cannot be administered in accord with our Constitution.”
—Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun gives up on the death penalty (Callins v. James, 1994).
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