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>From One Moment to the Next, Wisconsin to Wall Street

Dan S. Wang

#occupy and assemble∞

	

I was brought to New York to make a few remarks about the Wisconsin
Uprising at the Creative Time Summit 3. Having just arrived in
Manhattan, I found myself catching a cab to Liberty and Broadway,
urged in by a New York activist friend who foresaw a Troy Davis
protest march soon converging on the Occupy Wall Street encampment in
Zuccotti Park, a granite-blocked open space in the canyon of the
financial district. I made it there just in time to see and hear the
marchers bearing down on the occupied park.

THE SYSTEM!
IS RACIST!
THEY KILLED TROY DAVIS!

THE SYSTEM!
IS RACIST!
THEY LYNCHED TROY DAVIS!

This was the chant in the air, in many voices as one, over and over.
Troy Davis, an African-American man sentenced to death for a murder he
had likely not committed, had been legally killed by the State of
Georgia less than 24 hours earlier, in the face of an international
effort to grant Davis a stay of execution. A hastily organized
speak-out event in Union Square turned into an impromptu march. The
energy crested when hundreds of enraged protestors met up with the
Occupy Wall Street activists in the park.

It was Thursday, September 22, and the occupation was going into its
sixth night. Although to a careless observer it might look like all
the same people, this was in fact an encounter of potential, between
activist worlds not quite in solid alliance. The marchers represented
a part of the activist universe different than the Occupy Wall Street
campers—namely, the worlds of death penalty abolition, wrongful
conviction activism, prisoners’ rights groups, punk anti-racism, human
rights organizations, criminal justice reform work, and efforts to end
racial profiling and police brutality. Though many individual
activists are undoubtedly comfortable with different ways of thinking
about particular social injustices, the death penalty activists do not
usually frame their work against the problems of financialized
capital. This is necessarily true once you get beyond abstract
analyses and bumper sticker sloganeering and go into the concreteness
of legal challenges, policy work, and legislative reform.

By contrast, the OWS encampment seemed to be populated mostly with
young people newly radicalized by the economic crisis, the debt
burdens of themselves and their parents, the evident wealth gaps, and
the fast withering democracy in their country, all foisted upon them
in their formative years. I saw some graybeards scattered around the
plaza, but it was the early twenty-somethings, carrying with them the
slightest vibe of desperation, who made up the core.

The temporary presence of the Troy Davis constituency, self-identified
as having been organized around and motivated by a political cause and
movement with its own discourse, history, political fronts, and
priorities, raised the temptation to speedily conflate one dissenting,
outraged, and righteous segment of society with another. On that
evening, the articulation of an equivalence seemed to be strangely and
perhaps wisely resisted. The momentary satisfactions of unity were
shared through the aesthetic experience, the surge of feeling that
went through the combined crowd, generated by the encounter between
two groups of committed people, each standing for radical social
change. It made sense; there was not much to say, as neither group had
any further recourse, at least not at that stage. What seemed most
important was what in fact happened, that is, simply taking the time
to be together, to let communications run informally at the molecular
level, person-to-person, until the enlarged crowd eventually
dissipated. This episode is worth recounting because it prefigured
some of the complexities of Occupy Wall Street that we are seeing now,
in the third week.

Over the weekend part of my mind stayed on Wisconsin, for two reasons,
neither being the Creative Time gig. First, there was the inevitable
comparison with OWS—I could not help this, as the Wisconsin Uprising
is now my movement frame of reference, like it is for everybody from
Madison, and possibly for today’s labor movement as a whole. Second,
being invested in the Wisconsin movement as a resident of that state,
of course I followed the two breaking state political stories of that
weekend: new coverage of the ongoing FBI corruption investigation into
the Walker regime, and the latest efforts by the regressives to
rewrite mining regulations in face of citizen and indigenous tribal
opposition.

In regards to the first point, ie the comparison between OWS and the
Wisconsin Uprising, I tried to absorb the mood, setting, rhetoric, and
activist profile, and put all in relation to Wisconsin at the same
one-week point. Of the many differences, what strikes me now as
probably the most consequential in terms of movement character and
future evolution, is the comparatively abstract target: “Wall Street,”
or “the banksters” or the 1%. In Wisconsin we have a central figure,
Governor Scott Walker, and a host of background players (the
Fitzgeralds, the Kochs, Paul Ryan, Alberta Darling, JB Van Hollen,
etc), each of whom is a real person who can be personally targeted.
Most of them being public figures, their career trajectories, at
least, offer activists something by which we can measure our strength.
With OWS, the monster before us—the banking structure, the corporate
political system, and financialized capital in its entirety—is so
huge, global, faceless, out of control, and fundamentally rotten, that
it is difficult even for informed people to identify and prioritize
specific aims, much less individual targets.

As for the second point, it is important to understand that even
though the massive mediagenic protests in Madison are long over, the
movement continues on any number of specific, localized and
continually unfolding fronts. Each of these battles requires resources
and prolonged attention. To lose focus on them is to lose the war,
because it is in these localized theaters that the actual
implementation of the regressive agenda happens. As OWS moves through
a growth phase of insurgency in which well-articulated generalities
attract participants, and in which people situated in very different
contexts can recognize themselves and organize for parallel uprisings,
the other side of follow-through political struggle—the tediousness,
dedication, and minutiae of in-depth, localized research, organizing,
and action—must be expected and planned for. It is in the particular
instances of policy execution that the corruption from above touches
the ground, that is to say, where it is most readily witnessed,
exposed, directly confronted, and arrested.

My feeling is, because OWS has from the beginning called into account
a system rather than persons or groups, compared to Wisconsin the
movement has more long term potential for growth and endurance. This
is for two reasons, one obvious and one less so. First, systems
themselves are broad and endure, outlasting the reach and careers of
any single, embodied villain. Though it is true that systems can
crumble in amazingly short order, the conventional wisdom says that,
for example, the system we refer to as “Wall Street” will outlast
Scott Walker’s tenure as governor. As long as the target remains, the
opposition, now sparked, may as well.

The less obvious reason is also less positive in the short term. The
abstract truth of the OWS critique reaches a limit on the ground. That
is to say, the shared reality of living under a single system can fuel
a mass movement only until that shared reality begins to fray in the
uneven geography of capital. This problem is exemplified by the second
point related to Wisconsin above; who, outside of the people of
northern Wisconsin, knows or cares about the devastation of long wall
mining now looming over the Penokee Hills? Every mining disaster,
every home foreclosure, every supermax prison is sited in a local
context, against which it casts its most heavily weighted shadow,
rendering abstractions about systemic operations nearly moot. In
Wisconsin it is already an achievement in translocal activism that
many people in southern and urban areas have come to recognize the
system as it takes this particular form in another part of the
state—and that is under the comparatively unifying regime of the
villain Walker. Thus the question for OWS—and really any new US left
formation of national scale—is how does the movement embed within
itself the function of articulation, as Laclau and Mouffe define that
term, and apply it to these problems of translocal activism?*

This was the underlying challenge I perceived in the Troy Davis
march-turned OWS rally. How is Wall Street and the market theocracy it
has imposed on the world readable in the Troy Davis travesty, and in
prison-related issues generally? How can the one be articulated as the
other, but in a way that preserves routes into the untransferable
realms of tedious and specialized campaigns that define all of the
specific, localized battles? These kinds of questions become more
important as different constituencies, each with its own history,
demands, and ongoing campaigns, joins OWS—an accelerating development
as the occupation as of now looks toward a fourth week. Clearly,
grappling with the essential fluidity and unfixed nature of the
discursive identities that make up the socialist terrain, within a
movement context, presents short term challenges. Familiar fractures
are being voiced within OWS even as I write. But if properly
negotiated, even partially, the current internal challenge also hints
at a long term possibility we have not seen in the US since Seattle: a
terrain of understood alliances able to shift, divide, and
reconstitute according to the uneveness of capital itself. Again as
Laclau and Mouffe might say, we will in time have before us a field of
moments, each one an instance and place of movement identity only
readable in relation to others, from northern Wisconsin to Occupy Wall
Street, to the world.



* “…we will call articulation any practice establishing a relation
among elements such that their identity is modified as a result of the
articulatory practice.” Hegemony & Socialist Strategy, Ernesto Laclau
and Chantal Mouffe, p. 105.