Mayor Bloomberg versus Occupy Wall Street

“Protestors have had two months to occupy the park with tents and sleeping bags. Now they will have to occupy the space with the power of their arguments.” -M. Bloomberg

I find this to be the most interesting component of Bloomberg’s statement today. On its face, it appears to be an appeal to the virtues of public discussion and critical public debate. Bloomberg suggests that if the Occupy Wall Street movement is in possession of the most truthful account of our current collective predicament, then it will be proven in the so called marketplace of ideas.

Yet, in my judgment, Bloomberg’s appeal to the tenets of deliberative democracy is nothing more than cynical, and, in fact, a strategic attempt to silence protest and squash democracy. At the forefront of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement is a critique of the inequality of voice within the public sphere. The kinds of arguments members of the political elite, such as Bloomberg, are even capable of hearing is precisely what is at issue. Take, for example, Bloomberg’s recent critique of the association of Wall Street Bankers with the 2008 economic collapse. Bloomberg blames the collapse on government housing policy that encouraged the expansion of the home owning class in the United States. In Bloomberg’s mind, the federal government put pressure on lenders to lend to unqualified borrowers. Yet, as Michael Powell of the New York Times points out, all available evidence proves this argument to be baseless. Bloomberg cannot even imagine that Wall Street banks could possibly be at fault for the great ongoing economic calamity we are all suffering through.

A fundamental critical point of OWS is that political elites have difficulty even hearing certain kinds of arguments. The fact that the elite commentators and politicians continuously prove their myopia by misunderstanding the basic structure and symbolics of OWS movement demonstrates the movement’s ongoing critical importance. Some, such as the Times’ David Brooks, acknowledge that the OWS movement has successfully “changed the conversation,” but they still decry the movement’s lack of leadership and what they perceive to be its loose agenda. They see the movement structure as being chaotic and even amateurish. Such criticisms smugly assume that OWS’ open structure is the accidental result of incompetence, while, in fact, the openness is reasonably organized to maximize responsiveness to new and varied voices. The daily repetition of the general assembly registers continuous discussion, and the resistance to a hard agenda leaves the movement open to ever new and expanding participants (for instance see this).

OWS’ open structure is a substantial aspect of its labor to be exactly what the general public sphere dominated by elites is not, open to critical discussion. Organizing a hierarchically vertical movement structure with a cadre of leaders might make the movement more legible to elites and it might enhance the movement’s ability to broker deals. However such organization would too specifically define the movement’s constituency and close the organized movement off from the vastness of the real 99%.

In this vein the vital importance of the symbolics of the OWS encampment in Zuccotti Park should be recognized. The sometimes small, sometimes expansive tent city sits in the shadows of the great vertical skyscrapers of financial capital. The horizontal conversations that occur on the ground stand out against the private hierarchical maneuverings of grand capital furiously unfolding within the shiny glass facades. The OWS movement does not promote alternative living, or the right of individuals to live free of a certain kind of social system. It is not about styles of life. OWS necessarily sits in the canyons of financial capital in order to bring attention to the globally integrated economic system in which the narrowly self-interested decisions of a very few determine the living conditions of everyone else. What OWS has shown is that one could not practice a separatism of life style today even if one chose to. We are all directly affected by the decisions of a small elite whether we like it or not. The changed conversation of the past two months has revealed that so many among us do not like it one bit.

Clearly it is symbolically important for OWS, in fact, to occupy Wall Street. Yet more should be said about the occupying of public space. On the face of it, such occupying is a contradiction in terms. How can one occupy a space that is by definition universally accessible? But the occupation of public space is also symbolically necessary to the OWS movement. By indefinitely camping out in a city park (that is absurdly privately owned), the OWS movement makes itself about the idea of the public itself. That a group would have to resort to occupying a public park to have their voices heard, and that thousands more would rely on this group to become the soundboard by which they could finally participate in a “changing conversation,” reveals the structured myopia of our public conversation. In other words, without unmasking the current deficits in our elite versions of public debate, the Bloombergs of the world will continue to see what they want to see, and hear what they want to hear. The little encampment in Zuccotti Park was, until this morning when Bloomberg violently swept it to the side, the living representation of our right to democratic expression, our right to be listened to, the right to “change the conversation” when elites chatter on in their glass fortresses while the rest of us are being bled dry by systematically enforced inequality.

The OWS movement is not about a specific policy agenda or in defense of a particular social group. The OWS movement is a desperate amplification of a silenced and ignored expression of broad based and deep social suffering. The metastasizing ills and injustices of social inequality can be ignored no longer. Although born of desperation, OWS has peacefully organized an open structured movement that threatens to create a public space of discussion in perpetuity. It is precisely the perpetuation of public discussion that has been so threatening to elites. This is why they want what they see as the smelly rabble to ordain a leader, i.e. because leaders have to be accountable to constituents. Leaders have to develop programs that favor some at the expense of others, and because in the ever returning crises, fiscal and otherwise, leaders can be told to “get real” and take the crumbs that might otherwise go to some other group, and go home. But it is precisely the amorphous never ending occupation of the public, in Zuccotti Park and beyond, that is threatening to make democratic debate live up to its own principles.

If Bloomberg were truly open to the arguments and ideas of the 99%,, he would acknowledge and respect the meaning of Occupy Wall Street and promote the continued democratic occupation of Zuccotti Park. If Bloomberg and others want to “get real,” they need to listen to the conversations unleashed in that little park, because they are the multiplier effects of democracy, the messy, chaotic and real voice of the suffering of the 99%.  If they are silenced now, we will suffer an unbearable cost.