Occupy The Progressive Movement: Why Occupy Should Embrace "Co-Optation"

Occupy The Progressive Movement: Why Occupy Should Embrace "Co-Optation"

An Occupy organizer asks: When established groups show up wanting to
help, then who's really co-opting whom?

April 26, 2012 |
Photo Credit: David Shankbone LIKE THIS ARTICLE ?
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Almost immediately after a small band of activists first occupied
Zuccotti Park in September of last year, many in the movement started
expressing concern about potential co-option by more established and
moderate forces. These concerns have become more central in 2012, an
election year. Wariness is certainly warranted. But angst about an
over-generalized sense of co-option may be an even bigger problem. We
cannot build a large-scale social movement capable of achieving big
changes without the involvement of long-standing broad-based
institutions. OWS should actively and strategically forge
relationships with many of these institutions, while preserving the
role of OWS as an "outsider" force.

Good problem to have

In the wake of the initial successes of Occupy Wall Street,
establishment Democrats—including the White House—started clamoring to
figure out how to ride the anti-Wall Street populist wave. Some
Democratic Party strategists asked what electoral use they might get
out of the new movement. Judd Legum of the Center for American
Progress (CAP) told the New York Times in early October that
"Democrats are already looking for ways to mobilize protesters in
get-out-the-vote drives for 2012."

The hypocrisy of a party that is deeply in the pocket of Wall Street
trying to ride an anti-Wall Street surge was widely ridiculed. Salon's
Glenn Greenwald scoffed at efforts "to exploit these protests into
some re-branded Obama 2012 crusade and to convince the protesters to
engage in civil disobedience and get arrested all to make themselves
the 2012 street version of OFA [Organizing For America]." Greenwald
was right, and was echoing a widespread sentiment inside Zuccotti Park
and the other occupations around the country. Very few of the
committed folks sacrificing time, safety, and comfort to make the
occupations and street protests happen are going to switch
uncritically into re-elect Obama mode.

And yet, something important is missing in many movement conversations
about the threat of Democratic Party co-option: namely that this is a
good problem to have. This is what political leverage looks like.
Grassroots social justice movements haven't had much leverage for a
very long time, and over the past months we've finally gotten a taste
of it. Having leverage allows us to frame the national discussion and
to pull things in a social justice direction. In a very short time
span, Occupy Wall Street dramatically shifted the dominant national
conversation from a conservative deficit framework to a critique of
economic inequality and the political

How often is a genuinely grassroots social justice movement in a
position where it's framing the national narrative, and where the
major political parties are reacting to us? Having this kind of
leverage is perhaps the most important thing in politics. Without
leverage, all you have is a political analysis. Trying to engage in
political struggle with an analysis but no leverage is like coming to
a gunfight armed only with the truth. Good luck with that!

So, in political struggle, when powerful forces want to co-opt your
momentum, that means you have leverage, and that's a good problem for
a grassroots movement to have. Serious movement strategy conversations
about the threat of co-option should start with this happy
realization. Yes, wariness of establishment and "moderate" forces is
certainly warranted. But generalized fears of co-option can have a
paralyzing effect on our ability to activate a broad spectrum of
allies — especially if we uncritically lump together and dismiss every
national organization, labor union, community organization, etc., that
engages in any electoral work or even legislative work.

Even if you concede that establishment forces want to co-opt a more
radical agenda — well, so what? What does that even mean? It means
that different groups and institutions have different agendas, and
they're always looking for ways to further those agendas. NEWSFLASH:
We all have this in common! We all have agendas, and we're partial to
our agenda over others' agendas. It is certainly true that more
established institutions tend to command more resources than dynamic
new configurations like Occupy Wall Street — and that established
groups tend to get stuck in their ways, and even to sometimes actively
resist more radical accelerations of change. This is part of the
terrain that we have to map and understand. But we should do this with
an eye to finding and cultivating allies within institutions — not to
dismiss the institutions wholesale.

The worst thing we could do right now is make Occupy Wall Street into
a small "radicals only" space. We cannot build a large-scale social
movement capable of achieving big changes without the involvement of
long-standing large membership institutions, including labor unions,
national advocacy organizations, community organizations, and faith
communities. Radicals never have and never will have sufficient
numbers to go it alone. We have to muster the courage and smarts to be
able to help forge and maintain alliances that we can influence but
cannot fully control. That's the nature of a broad populist alignment.

If we are to continue building on the momentum that Occupy Wall Street
kicked off, we can't treat institutions and individuals as if they
were one-dimensional characters with simple and permanently fixed
motives. Larger membership organizations can be complicated, and their
programs and politics are often a mixed bag. The temptation for
radicals is to focus on everything they've ever done wrong (i.e. all
the things that radicals don't like). But many of these institutions
and movements began with premises that are not so far from our own. We
have to figure out how to invite them and the people inside them to
shift and to change. This includes institutions we don't align with on
every issue and who have disappointed us in the past. Achieving
significant changes requires building broad alliances. While of course
there are lines to draw (e.g. we should never align with organized
racists), generally we can't afford to be puritanical when it comes to
building a broad movement.

One Co-option at a Time

Social movement theorists have a term for the sort of co-option that
Occupy Wall Street should prize: infrastructure co-option. Nascent
movements become mass movements not by building their own
infrastructure entirely from scratch or recruiting new volunteers one
at a time, but by "co-opting" existing institutions and social
infrastructure into the service of the movement and its goals. The
Civil Rights movement went big when existing institutions—especially
black churches and schools—came to identify strongly as part of the
movement. Organizers provided opportunities for members of those
pre-existing institutions to make this new identification actionable
and visible. This was cultivated to such an extent that, eventually,
to be a member of certain institutions implied active involvement in
the Civil Rights movement. When this happens with enough institutions,
the movement gets a huge boost in capacity. And capacity means power.

Over the past few months many organizations and constituencies have
been watching Occupy Wall Street, trying to figure out whether and how
to relate to it. These organizations—including faith communities, the
NAACP, MoveOn.org, labor unions, community organizations, and many
other groups—understand how they and their members are affected by the
crises that Occupy Wall Street has named and confronted. Some of them
are already engaging in important ways, explicitly as part of—or in
support of—Occupy Wall Street. And many more have long been engaged in
work that clearly aligns with the movement's core values—and probably
even deserve some credit for helping to lay the long-term organizing
groundwork that helped create OWS.

But there are still significant barriers standing in the way of
broader constituencies conceptualizing themselves as part of a 99%
movement and getting actively involved. The first and most obvious
barrier is that many groups haven't really been asked to get involved.
During the first couple months of OWS, if a group wanted to get
involved, it was typically a matter of them taking the initiative to
approach us and ask what kind of support they might provide. Usually
the answer was some variety of "Come down to Zuccotti Park" or "Stand
up against Bloomberg for our right to occupy the park." Often the
groups that wanted to support OWS simply showed up. While this kind of
involvement made perfect sense when we held the park, it's clear that
we now have to come up with other ways for more people and groups to
take action as part of the 99% movement.

This is a critical transition for Occupy Wall Street and the 99%
movement. Remember that Occupy Wall Street kicked off with a well
timed call-to-action, a ripe target, some planning, and a lot of crazy
luck. As a result, OWS has understandably had more of a culture of
mobilizing than of organizing. It's been a little like a group of
folks who don't know anything about farming who arrive at a farm at
harvest time. There's delicious food everywhere, and all they have to
do is pick, pluck, and gather it. And eat it! "Wow," one of them
exclaims, "farming is awesome! Why would we waste our time cultivating
the soil? This food is delicious! I want to eat it all the time! This
is working very well. We should just keep doing this — all the time!"

Occupy Wall Street has been something of a harvest moment. It pulled
thousands of people out of the woodwork who'd been waiting for
something just like this to come along, and who were in a place where
we could carve out time from our lives to engage it. But movements
need hundreds of thousands if not millions of active participants to
become mass movements. It's difficult if not impossible to activate
those kinds of numbers by just taking public action with the hope that
other like-minded individuals will decide to join you. We need more
on-ramps and more ways to be involved — for folks who might not yet
feel comfortable camping out at a public park.

More than any other factor, people get involved in social change
because people they know and respect provide an opportunity for them
to get involved. In their essay Collective Identity and Activism:
Networks, Choices, and the Life of a Social Movement, Debra Friedman
and Doug McAdam cite proximity to movement activity as the single
biggest factor for why people become active in grassroots change
efforts:

Structural proximity to a movement, rather than any individual
disposition, produces activism. Although individuals differ in their
dispositions, the opportunities afforded by structural location
relative to a movement determine whether they are in a position to act
on these dispositions. Empirical support for these positions is
unimpeachable.
In other words, while many people hold beliefs compatible with Occupy
Wall Street, a very small percentage are currently taking action on
those beliefs — and a primary factor for why some people have become
active is simply that they encountered opportunities provided by
people close to them who are already active. This is why our growth
has reached something of a plateau. And this is why it is now critical
that we meet with folks who are movers and shakers in other social
networks and institutions. That's how the 99% movement can grow at the
rate we all know it needs to; byactivating whole swaths of society at
a time.

But we have to approach those movers and shakers in the right way. Our
"asks" of organizations shouldn't be overly prescriptive. We have to
start by establishing relationships. The term infrastructure co-option
suggests a kind of functionalist attitude; as if a movement uses
existing institutions in order to accomplish movement goals. One could
look at the Civil Rights movement, point to core leaders, and argue
that they exploited existing institutions to advance their agenda. But
such an assessment would be wrongheaded. Civil rights leaders
cultivated relationships with other organizations based on shared
self-interest. This was a process of courting trust, cultivating deep
collaboration and accountability, and making good judgments about the
kinds of actions and messages that would resonate with different
constituencies. Leaders had to act boldly, but also humbly.

Movement Season & Election Season

All of the above gets so much more complicated in an election year.
Occupy Wall Street is an outsider force. It should remain an outsider
force this year. If it were to endorse candidates or a particular
political party, it would immediately lose all of its value and
leverage. Our job is to push from the outside.

But that's not at all to say that we shouldn't have a strategy for
engaging with the energy and media attention of the election season.
We should. And how we do it will seriously affect our ability to
continue to grow this movement, to be seen as relevant, to cultivate
alliances, and to leverage power to effect real change.

As an outsider force, one of our biggest tasks is to set the terms of
debate. For decades now, the terms of debate have shifted further and
further to the Right, as conservatives united under a shared
anti-government (i.e. anti-social spending) narrative, and progressive
forces, fractionalized, waged mostly defensive campaigns to limit
damage on an issue-by-issue basis. Interestingly, the rightward
direction was probably no more apparent than in the case of the 2010
midterm elections, where the so-called Tea Party shifted the national
debate into something of a moratorium on taxation and government
spending on social programs and infrastructure. While the Tea Party's
agenda was deplorable, there are some lessons we might glean from
aspects of their model (of an outsider grassroots force shifting the
debate).

To be clear, Occupy Wall Street is not "the Tea Party of the Left." To
our disadvantage, we don't have nearly the financial backing that the
Tea Party enjoyed via the Koch brothers and other major funders. Nor
do we enjoy our own major cable news network that mobilizes people to
come to our rallies. But to our advantage, because of our genuine
independence from big corporate backers, we have been willing and able
to tell the whole truth: not just that the government is broken, but
that there were particular institutions and people who broke it. In
other words, we have been willing to name Wall Street, the big banks,
and the one percent as a culprit, and this naming rings true to a lot
of people (even including some from the Tea Party base).

As recently as August of last year, anyone watching the mainstream
news might think that the national deficit and social spending was the
biggest problem facing the nation. That was a pretty impressive feat
by the Tea Party. A month later, however, media outlets were at long
last shifting their scrutiny to the consolidation of political power
by the extremely wealthy, and the corresponding political
disenfranchisement of the 99%. That shift should have happened long
ago—that analysis should have long been commonsense—but it's still an
achievement that OWS can be proud of. And if we can keep that as the
dominant framework—as the new commonsense—through the election season
and beyond, we will have accomplished a great deal.

But many questions remain. What do we do, for instance, when
candidates start to run on platforms that explicitly name "the 99%"?
This is already happening. Are they co-opting our movement?

Yes, they are, in some ways. But, really, of all the slogans in the
world, "We are the 99%" may be the one most difficult to claim
exclusive ownership of — after all, it's a slogan that invites an
overwhelming majority of people to identify with it. Moreover, there's
another way of looking at this: in some ways we are the ones who are
co-opting them. At the very least, we are co-opting their speeches
with our rhetoric. Once someone starts running on your rhetoric, you
then have more leverage over them. You are better positioned to expose
them if they're just giving lip service to your ideas without any
intention of delivering. And for all the horrendous limits of the
two-party system, still a slate of candidates who get elected pledging
to take on the big banks gives us a lot more to work with—as an
outsider social movement—than a slate of candidates elected on a
pledge to cut social spending. And more importantly, it keeps the
momentum on our side.

Another important question has to do with how we engage allies who do
endorse candidates. Many labor unions, for example, are likely at some
point to endorse President Obama's reelection bid. Some already have.
And some will surely endorse specific state and local candidates.
We're an outsider force. We should never endorse candidates. But is it
possible to ally around specific actions with organizations that also
endorse candidates?

It has to be. We join up with others where we can, and we depart where
we depart. If we call for an end to corporate personhood, for example,
we should welcome as many co-endorsers as possible, including
organizations that endorse politicians — and even politicians
themselves. Welcoming politicians' endorsements of our goals doesn't
mean endorsing those politicians. This is an important detail, and it
requires a precise threading of the needle. As an outside force, we
have to take all politicians to task, regardless of party. But the
details of how we do this matter. We need to pressure politicians and
candidates, and the best way to do this is to ask them hard questions
and provide pressure that pulls them in our direction (or put them on
the defensive). If we ask good questions that resonate with the people
who hear them, then we're doing our job well. If, on the other hand,
we make general statements like, "It doesn't matter who you vote for,
they're all the same," then we're being needlessly belligerent to our
allies and potential allies (without even putting politicians on the
defensive). An organization focused primarily on reproductive rights,
for example, will understandably be very concerned about whether
Barack Obama or Mitt Romney occupies the White House. We can take
candidates from both parties to task on an array of other issues
without spurning their reasons for deciding to endorse a candidate.

Every once in a very long while, an "earthquake moment" hits and
shakes the foundations of the political landscape. In an earthquake
moment, structures that you long took for granted may suddenly display
new features. Perhaps a structure was built on a hitherto invisible
fault-line, and the quake splits it right down the middle. Someone who
had felt constrained within her institution before the shake-up may
now see and seize openings to move the institution in a bolder
direction. And this is more likely to happen if organizers from Occupy
Wall Street—the visible catalyst of the earthquake—approach
longstanding institutions to strategize together about how they might
engage with this moment.

An earthquake moment is a time to invite people to engage. It's not a
moment to keep people in boxes, or to draw rigid lines. It's a moment
to hammer Wall Street, the big banks, and the political system that
has been fixed to serve only the very wealthy and powerful. Our task
now is to activate as many people as possible into action. And this
has to include people we wouldn't necessarily choose to have as our
best friends.

More:
http://www.alternet.org/story/155161/occupy_the_progressive_movement%3A_why_occupy_should_embrace_%22co-optation%22?page=entire

--
Together, we can change the world, one mind at a time.
Have a great day,
Tommy



--
Together, we can change the world, one mind at a time.
Have a great day,
Tommy

--
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