In the news accounts on graduation ceremonies, the speeches of public figures are highlighted. This is not a bad thing. Important matters, more deliberately considered, are put on the public agenda. Thus, to take a key example, President Obama has used commencement addresses to present his deep assessment of the state of the union, as a recent report by NPR reveals. Obama, as the ceremonial speaker seriously reflects on the gap between past and future, assessing American promise and problems, using his full intelligence, free, or at least somewhat free, of the inside the beltway logic of official Washington and the popular media. A good thing, no doubt.

Yet, for me, significant oratory by Obama, and lesser public speakers, is not where the real action is on graduation day. Rather, I focus on the achievements of the graduates, our students and their promise, what they have said and done already, and where they may bring us. They help me understand the personal and the political, and all that lies in between. It is with this in mind that I am leaving my house this morning for The New School’s commencement, thinking once again about the relationship between promise and practice at The New School, specifically as it is revealed in the work of three new Ph.Ds.

Julie Tel Rav, a trained architect, turned sociologist, and a rabbi’s wife, used her broad creative and intellectual interests, and her communal experience to examine how the material environment influences ritual and everyday life of a religious community. In Set in Stone: The Influence of Architecture on the Progressive Amercan Jewish Community, she explores Jewish synagogues and community centers across the country, and how the built environment supports and undermines the goals of congregations. Particularly interesting is her thesis that the makers of the buildings seek to use physical space as a key support for Jewish ritual communal life, substituting space for time. This was her unanticipated finding, which emerged as her research proceeded. It was her discovery, which I found particularly interesting, as I have been exploring the relationship between the material world and the human world, and the way the human condition is specified in the social condition. I chaired Tel Rav’s committee, and have had, therefore, a great opportunity to learn from her.

I proudly served as an adviser on Lindsey Freeman’s dissertation committee (Vera Zolberg was the chair). I hope that Lindsey has benefited from my advice. I know I have learned a great deal from her scholarship and creativity in her dissertation: a study of the collective memory of the making of the atomic bomb in the (at first) secret utopian project in Oakridge, Tennessee, her hometown. Her study is to be published next year by the University of North Carolina Press as Longing for the Bomb: Atomic Nostalgia in Post-Nuclear Landscape. She analyzes the rise and fall of an atomic city: from top – secret war project, to post WWII memory center of patriotic heroism, to the ambiguities of the present day. This is a special kind of community study: focusing on the creation of the modern mythology about the bomb, moving on to nuclear nostalgia, and then to the struggle for meaning as myth and nostalgia fade.

One of the great interdisciplinary events at The New School for Social Research in the past decade has been an annual conference on memory. Freeman has been an important organizer. In her dissertation, she makes her unique contribution to “memory studies,” showing how imagination and memory shape ordinary everyday practice in an extraordinary place. The locals and the nation did indeed learn to build, live with and love the bomb, until the passion cooled.

Ana Mallen in her dissertation, Participatory Democracy and Social Polarization in the Times of Hugo Chavez, shows how the move from a corrupt liberal democracy to a promised participatory democracy, led to a rethinking of popular sovereignty, and the emergence of two mutually exclusive, antagonistic publics. Daily interactions, media representations, key political actors and the media combined to create a deeply polarized society. It is a dissertation in historical studies and sociology. The focus is on key turning points in the recent past and the way significant actions pushed forward polarization. Mallen concludes, surprisingly, with a community study of a district of Caracas that seemed to move against the polarizing trend (with an opposition leader using the ideology of Chavez to prevail over a Chavez supported candidate). Her account of the way the media wars and the civil strife interacted, leading to social polarization is without heroes and villains. She illuminated a complex story from multiple angles in a way that really informs.

Mallen’s committee included my New School sociology department colleague Carlos Forment, an eminent historical sociologist of civil society in Latin America, and María Pilar García-Guadilla, of the Universidad Simon Bolivar, Venezuela, with whom Mallen had studied and worked with in Caracas on the Chavez phenomenon. As a non-expert, I was a little embarrassed to be the supervisor. Although Ana assures me that my approach to politics and media were a key to her work, my colleagues obviously had the historical knowledge to judge Mallen’s work that I lacked. That said, I realized at the defense that I actually have been understanding political developments in “the times of Chavez” quite well. This, of course, is thanks to talking to and reading Mallen over the years, as she has been developing her project. She has been my teacher as I have been hers. This is also true of Freeman and Tel Rav. That in fact is what advanced study and research is all about, what it ideally is, and where it quite often does lead.

The special mark of The New School: critical insight, careful social, political and historical investigation, and theoretical sophistication, beyond parochial clichés, worldly, socially and politically consequential: Tel Rav, Freeman and Mallen, along with many other New School students, have kept it alive in their work. I am grateful, and off to celebrate them for making an ideal, real.

When I’m in China, conversations with friends and colleagues often begin with their asking about the name of my university: Why is it called “The New School?” Most are not familiar with the university, but when I mention the name of John Dewey and the intellectual spirit associated with the university’s founding in 1919, there’s an immediate connection. Dewey traveled and lectured in China beginning in 1919, just as The New School was being established, and just as Chinese intellectuals were engaging in unprecedented forms of public engagement and education.

For Chinese intellectuals and students today, 1919 invokes the stirrings of the “New Culture Movement” and the foundations of the Chinese revolution more broadly. The New Culture Movement is closely associated with what became known as the “May Fourth Movement,” so named for the student protests in Beijing on that day in 1919 to reject the humiliating outcome of the Paris Peace Conference. The protest was over the terms that allowed Japan to retain territorial concessions that had been negotiated before the war by a discredited president of the fledgling Republic of China. (The Qing dynasty had fallen in 1911-12.) But the May Fourth Movement was less about geopolitics and much more about the vibrant intellectual pursuit and experimentation with new ideas–anarchism, Marxism, socialism, and much else.

John Dewey arrived in China just a few days after May 4, 1919, and would spend the next two years teaching and lecturing at Chinese universities. Dewey had been invited by his former student at Columbia, Hu Shih, by then a prominent leader in the New Culture Movement. Hu, like others in the movement, advocated the wholesale rejection of Confucian culture and practice–first and foremost the educational precepts that stressed the close engagement with Confucian and other classical texts. In its place, Hu and those who would become the presidents and chancellors of China’s leading universities adopted many of Dewey’s ideas about education and its roles in constituting citizenship, democratic practice, among much else.

Several scholars have examined closely Dewey’s China lectures and his writings from China there in 1919-1921. What impressed Dewey perhaps most was the self-organization and mobilization under way in Chinese society at the time. As he wrote (pp. 97-8) in one of several essays during his time in China,

American children are taught the list of ‘modern’ inventions that originated in China. They are not taught, however, that China invented the boycott, the general strike and guild organization as means of controlling public affairs.

Dewey’s lectures were generally well received, in part because so many of the competing intellectual and ideological camps in China at the time could read his texts as supportive of their positions. But Dewey’s call for gradual reform over radical social change was seen as insufficient in the eyes of many among his audiences. Indeed, Dewey rightly predicted that Bertrand Russell’s arrival in China in the fall of 1920, to deliver lectures on Bolshevism, would far eclipse Dewey’s in their popularity. Mao Zedong never attended Dewey’s lectures, but would have been quite familiar with Dewey’s ideas from the intellectual circles in which he traveled the early 1920s. Many years later, Mao would proclaim that “Practice is the sole criterion of truth”– a quotation that “Maoists” in the 1960s would repress (along with Dewey’s ideas). Deng Xiaoping strategically revived Mao’s slogan in 1978, and it became one of the mantras of his developmentalist reform program that followed. Dewey’s works are widely read on Chinese campuses today.

I am preparing my class on the new “new social movements” this week. I will be giving it at The New School’s Democracy and Diversity Institute in Wroclaw, Poland in July. I am excited and challenged about the course, happy to be returning to our institute, which has a long history, related to the topic of my class. The seminar, also, will be an attempt to thoroughly address the complex issues in my May Day post.

In that post I noted the media obstacles OWS faced on May 1^st. Neither the serious, nor the sensational media portrayed a meaningful popular demonstration, a national commemoration of May Day demanding social justice. While some might see this as a kind of conspiracy, I, as a matter of principle, don’t, or rather won’t until I consider alternative explanations. In the summer seminar, I hope to explore the alternatives with an international student body. Here’s an overview, which is informing my preparation.

Social movements have generally been understood in two ways. They have been seen as non-institutional means of a group of people to pursue their common interests and achieve their shared goals. The traditional archetype for this is the labor movement. Alternatively, social movements have been seen as not only interest focused, but as well, and perhaps more importantly, as non-institutional means for the formation of a group with common identities, concerned with supporting the identities and acting upon them. Civil rights movements, the women, lesbian, gay, bi-sexual and transgender movements, environmental movements and the like, are understood as being newer kinds of movements, “new social movements.” To tell the truth, I never quite understood why the new social movements were considered new. They, like labor movements, emerged in the nineteenth century. They, like the traditional movements, pursue interests. And the traditional movements, like the new ones, are about identity. Yet, I know this is not central. Rather we need to note that new and old movements are not only about the pursuit of interests. Movements are important ends in themselves for the people who create and are active in them.

And clearly, this is still the case. Social activists in Tahrir Square in Cairo and in Zuccotti Park in New York have specific ends, and the demonstrations in these places also create identities that are as significant as the ends the demonstrators are seeking. But something else is important, quite apparent in these and other such places around the globe today. The coming together based on some shared concerns with different identities and even different goals has been a common feature of the movements in our most recent past. The demonstrators occupy a space and the way they do so, the way they interact with each other is an important end of the movement. The form of interaction, as well as the identity and interest content, is central.

Coptic Christians and Muslims protect each other with mutual respect in Egyptian demonstrations in Tahrir Square and throughout Egypt. Radical anarchists and conventional trade unionists hung out at Zuccotti Park last fall and in Union Square on May Day. Their political ends may be different, radical critics of the American Dream, along with those who want to keep the Dream alive, but they have figured out ways to find common purpose and joint actions. The new “new social movements” are first about that commonality, the creation of independent public space, in New York and beyond, people with differences working together in the name of the 99%, creating an alternative free public space.

Communicating from this space to the dominant media and mainstream publics is a fundamental challenge, now evident for the Tahrir democratic activists and OWS. The quality of their public character, its social media constitution that facilitated the formation of the movement, also presents problems for moving beyond the newly constituted public space. Leading spokespersons are not evident, a strength but also a weakness, nor are clear ends and demands forthcoming. The new sensibility and purpose of the new “new movements” can get lost, as it was in New York on May Day, as is happening as the Egyptians are about to go to the polls to elect a president.

The summer seminar will be an exploration of this. We will try to discover any common cause of the movements. Is it the state of global capital and the breakdown of neo-liberalism? While I have my doubts, we will discuss the works of observers suggesting this. I think that there is a generational dimension to the emergence of the new movements: we will discuss my depiction of the “wisdom of youth” and reconsider the sociology of generations. We will analyze precedents such as the American civil rights movement and Solidarność in Poland. The old distinction between new and traditional social movements revealed as much about the old as the new, and we will consider the way the creation of independent publics were central to movements past as well as movements now.

And herein lies the irony of the course being given in Poland. It is the fruit of the alternative public of a major social movement past. The Democracy and Diversity Institute is an outgrowth of the Solidarność underground. Members of The New School, led by Democracy and Diversity founder and director, Elzbieta Matynia, and I worked with Adam Michnik, the great Polish “dissident” intellectual and later editor of Poland’s major newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza, on a clandestine “Democracy Seminar” in Budapest, Warsaw and New York in the 1980s. The seminar was a small activity of the underground Solidarność cultural world. The Democracy and Diversity Institute built upon its legacy. I have always thought of my class as being explicitly a continuation of this activity, starting my classes where the discussions of the Democracy Seminar left off. This history continues in July, taking on very new concerns and experiences.

To skip this introduction and go directly to the full In-Depth post, click here.

A couple weeks ago, I gave the keynote address at a conference honoring my dear friend and colleague, Vera Zolberg. The papers presented to this conference, “From the Art of Memory to Memory and Art,” were in her special fields of inquiry, the sociology of culture, the arts and the study of collective memory. It was a wonderful event, a long set of conversations with Vera and her work. The day’s proceedings revealed how her fields of inquiry have advanced in the past twenty years, how she has contributed to this advance, and how the fields can and do speak to general public concerns. I am hoping that we will be able to put them together in a special collection drawn from the conference. Here I present my contribution to give a sense of what we discussed and its significance. I started with one of my pet peeves, concerning the word “reflection.”

To continue reading the full In-Depth post “Art, Culture and Memory: Conversations with Vera Zolberg,” click here.

I am thinking of this pet peeve of mine today for two reasons: because I think that the work of Vera Zolberg stands as a model of what can be learned when we move beyond sociological truism in thinking about the sociology of the arts and memory, and culture broadly understood, and also because I am, ironically, tempted in opening my presentation today with a “reflection note.” As in: the intellectual quality of Zolberg, as a sociologist of the arts, collective memory and culture, is a reflection of the quality of Vera, as a person. And, ironically, I am not sure I can, or should even try, to explain this connection between professional accomplishment and personal quality, but I know I should talk about both the quality of Zolberg’s work and about Vera as a person (our people would say a mensch) today.

Vera and I have been closely connected professionally for a long time, from the beginning of my career as a serious student of sociology. We both worked to specialize in the sociology of the arts at the University of Chicago. When I was preparing my special field exam in this area, I discovered that there were three students who focused in their studies on the arts before me, Mason Griff (who I had studied with as an undergraduate), Hugh Dalziel Duncan and Zolberg. This was when I first read Vera’s work, her dissertation on the Art Institute of Chicago (a work that I still refer to, as the students in this semester’s departmental dissertation seminar can confirm).

Vera and I studied with the same teachers, Morris Janowitz, Donald Levine, Terry Clark and Edward Shils. I would say they, particularly Janowitz (Vera’s chair), only tolerated our interests. But there is no doubt that Vera’s accomplishment in analyzing the sociological complexities of the Art Institute, made it so that they accepted my work on Polish theater more readily. She showed how significant a study of an art institution could be in understanding social structures and processes more generally. I had an easier time of it, because she preceded me by a few years. I think that in a similar way all who study the sociology of the arts have benefited from Zolberg’s writings, especially after her publication of Constructing a Sociology of the Arts.

As for many of you, I at first only knew Zolberg as an author, who showed in her dissertation on the Art Institute of Chicago how careful institutional analysis of the workings of a museum over time could start an inquiry into the big questions about the relationship between art and politics, culture and social life. As a student, I perceived this in her work. She has acted upon it in her research and writings ever since.

Only a bit later after I read her dissertation, we actually met. It was towards the end of my studies at the University of Chicago. I can’t remember who arranged the meeting (it may have been Janowitz), but I do remember the place we met and (vaguely) the reason why we met. It was in the cafeteria in Woodward Court, a building that no longer exists at the University of Chicago. We met on some business connected to the Social Theory and the Arts conference. This was the beginning of our life long conversations about the sociology of the arts and culture, with collective memory to be added as we both went along.

At that time, I was struck by the personal qualities of Vera as a person. She was elegant, warm and respectful, reaching out to me, taking me more seriously than I took myself. She had broad and interesting experience and knowledge. She seemed to know many accomplished scholars and cultural figures. And most strikingly, she was friendly. It was, in fact, at this time that I noticed her most special quality, her gift for friendship. She cares about the person she is talking to. She makes human connection.

Vera and her husband Ary, are perfect hosts. An invitation to their loft for dinner is an invitation to a world of fine food, fine conversation and fine art (art which is drawn from their travels and reveals their unorthodox taste). Vera’s gift for friendship clearly has contributed to a rich and warm personal life. It also has contributed to scholarship. Over the years, the sociology, liberal studies and the politics departments of the New School, and our Graduate Faculty more generally, have been enriched by occasions at the Zolberg’s.

In a similar way, Vera’s sincere social embrace, I think, helped develop the circle of scholars who institutionalized the sociology of culture in American sociology and beyond.

We sociologists have concepts to describe such developments: social capital and social networks. The inadequacy of the concepts, their thin coolness, is revealed in Vera’s life. As I said, I first saw this at the Woodward Court cafeteria, and because we both moved from Chicago to The New School, I have regularly enjoyed her friendship ever since. And this has not been separate from scholarly exchange and learning. Rather, friendship and scholarship have been intimately connected. Today’s conference vividly reveals this. The issues and problems we have been discussing grow out of our conversations with Vera’s work and with her person.

Thus, we have been talking about the institutional practices of art and around art.  Zolberg returned to the topic in an important article published in Theory and Society, “Conflicting Visions in Art Museums.” From my point of view, the most upsetting move in the piece is her summary of it. In her abstract, she maintained: “the macro-trends in society which are most germane to museum formation are professionalization of occupations, bureaucratization, elite formation, democratization of education, and market rationalization. These are reflected at the micro-level in institutions founded and developed in their context.” Reflection once again: yet, in the article itself what Zolberg studies is not an automatic process of reflection, but the social actions that constitute both the macro and the micro. She shows how the move from pre-professional laymen’s, to art professional curators’ to post professional managerial executives’ leadership has shaped the development of American museums, but also that this leadership has always met with a variety of different forms of resistance in museums and from the greater society, that push and pull them in different directions. She describes and analyzes the professionalization of the leadership and the staff of museums and then, the rise of bureaucratic managerial control as a challenge to art standards. The big story is of the developing autonomy of the art world in opposition to the control by gilded wealth (the founders and original administrators of American art museums) and then the re-colonization of the art world by corporate powers. But she also highlights resistance.

We could observe that the museum does imperfectly “reflect” developments in the greater society. But the real interest, as Goffman would say, “where the action is,” is how this imperfection works, which Vera nicely explains. The macro and the micro are constituted by action.

For example, Zolberg gives an account for how émigré German Jewish scholars influenced professional developments and the refinement of critical art historical standards, but she also shows how that influence was limited by elite anti-Semitism. More significantly, she analyzes the continued tensions between wealthy collectors and museum benefactors, with artists, art professionals and managerial experts: understanding how artistic values, and cultural judgment and cultural capital are at stake, taking us far beyond the confines of museum walls. What I especially like about her analysis is that she gives account of the tensions in the art world, its rich qualities, rather than provide an easy formula for its central values or ideological functions. Her theoretical contribution is in the details.

This textured account of art museums informs Zolberg’s approach to collective memory, another theme we have been talking about today, a conversation which has also been one of her major contributions to sociology, as was most nicely revealed in Zolberg’s great study of collective memory, “Contested Remembrance: The Hiroshima Exhibit Controversy.” I remember thinking this was a particularly wonderful piece when Vera first presented it to General Seminar here at The New School, in which it stimulated a very interesting discussion, and have continued to think so when I first read it, and now re-reading it in my preparation for giving this talk. What I think is particularly exciting about her analysis is how she extends her themes that she developed concerning the institutional workings of art museums, and shows how they illuminate the sociological study of collective memory. Her analysis is of the sociological texture of contestation in institutional life.

“Contested Remembrance” is a study of the controversies surrounding an exhibit at the National Air And Space Museum in Washington DC. The primary artifact was the “Enola Gay” B -29 bomber from which the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Vera presents an analysis of the exhibit as key interested parties debated about the dropping of the bomb and how they learned to hate and love it. WWII veterans, professional historians and museum curators, the Japanese government, peace organizations and anti-war activists and crucially official Washington, especially Congress, battled over the exhibit. Zolberg shows how the exhibit provided a public space for a debate about the bomb and American identity. She shows that the exhibit does not present a clearly articulated institutionalized collective memory, but a domain for debate about the connection between past, present and future at the sacred center of American public life. Collective memory is understood as contested public remembering. This is the insight I drew from the work, it’s great accomplishment to my mind beyond the specifics of the case.

It is an important study, which contributed to the renewed interest in collective memory in sociology, and in the social sciences and psychology more generally. Yet, I must admit, I have some concerns about this intellectual movement. I wonder: Why is it that so many of us, including Zolberg and many of you here, have become interested in collective memory? Why is it that the student-sponsored conference on memory, which this special conference honoring Zolberg is an extension of, is probably the single most successful interdisciplinary project in the history of The New School for Social Research?  I think there are both positive and critical answers to these questions.

The positive side is obvious. A new domain of interdisciplinary inquiry has been opened, and its exploration helps address difficult and important problems. I myself was working on this topic when Vera and I first met. I published my one and only article in the American Journal of Sociology, using collective memory to account for the existence of critical expression in Communist societies. Later the Czech writer, Milan Kundera summarized my argument in his novel, A Book on Laughter and Forgetting, more succinctly than I could: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

Yet, I think there is something troubling about the collective memory renaissance. At one of the earlier meetings of the conference, I expressed my concern, from the audience. As I recall, I wondered out loud whether our interest in the topic was a sign of a major cultural problem: resignation and an absence of imagination – careful study of memory of the past, with little investigation of forward looking projects. The next year I gave a paper, entitled. “Against Memory.” My point was that forgetting was every bit as significant as remembering.

Emphasizing this point, I have recently been playing with the concept of “the wisdom of youth,” thinking about how the ignorance of the young about the past, or at least their sense that it is really passed, is a significant ground for creativity. This explained my own journey to Poland, willing to go to a country from which my grandparents fled, because the horrors of the first part of the 20^th century seemed to me to be over, in a way that wasn’t possible for my parents or grandparents. It also explains how the young before their elders took it as being quite possible that a black man could become President of the United States, and now, most significantly, the new “new social movements” from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street seem to be manifestations of this special forgetful wisdom. I am struck by the fact that a sociology of generations is necessary to understand the new movement wave and believe that collective forgetting is part of the force behind this generational push.

I am not questioning the importance of studying memory, least of all am I questioning Vera’s work on the subject, rather what I am trying to do is highlight the importance of continuing to study the imagination as it works against memory, as it is unconstrained by established practices. And I see two ways that Zolberg has addressed this in her writings.

First, there is her ongoing concern with how museums work, particularly relevant is her concern with how museums confront and are pushed by contemporary artists, and second, of course, her continuing interest in “outsider art.” The creativity of those who work outside of the collective memory structures of official art institutions, even against them, are a significant part of the liveliness of the art world, which Vera recognizes both in her work and in her life.

Significantly, she and Ary early on studied and collected African Art, stimulated by their work and shared adventures in the Ivory Coast. I suspect those experiences were important in how she studied both the center and the peripheries of the art world, to use the language of Edward Shils. Significantly the hierarchy that Shils maintained was crucial for understanding the relationship between center and periphery, Vera has questioned in much of her work.

Zolberg’s most influential work, I imagine, is her 1990 book, Constructing a Sociology of the Arts. It has been translated into Italian, Korean, Spanish and Portuguese. It provides a comprehensive overview of the field, which recognized and summarized new research and theory, the various currents and central problems up to the moment of its publication, and, more significantly, the book suggested problems that the field needed to address. It pointed to the kinds of research and debates, the kinds of scholarly conversations, that should be done, which, by now, have been done, strikingly by Vera and her students. For Vera, I think, it is a pivotal work. It summarized where she was then and suggested where she would be going.

I have to admit. She took seriously research that I questioned, perhaps too quickly, with the foolish assertiveness of youth. To my mind, too much of this work took the arts to be like any other social institution, to be examined in the same way, without any special concern with their specific aesthetic and normative value. Our different judgments of the value and limitations of Bourdieu’s sociology of the arts can be found here.

During the decade before the writing of her book, roughly dating back to the time Vera and I first met, there was a rapid development in the sociology of the arts. It entered the sociological mainstream. Perhaps the key figure was Howard S. Becker. He published his book, Art Worlds, and mentored a significant group of sociologists who were informed by his explorations, including Chandra Mukerji if I am not mistaken. (And by the way, Becker served on my dissertation committee) There was also much work being done on the social organization of art, the production of culture, the socialization of artists, among other themes. Zolberg seriously and deliberately considered all these inquiries. She highlighted two sociological approaches, ones that systematically studies how artwork comes to be art, and the other which examines what are the effects of these things and performances called art on the greater society. Informed as I was by critical theory, I found much of this problematic. Studies of the production and reception of the arts, with no art, it seemed to me.

A hint at the quality of our conversations about these things is revealed in how she thanked me in her acknowledgements. She wrote: “I have profited as well from contact with my colleague Jeffrey Goldfarb, whose serious commitment to the goals of cultural excellence and democracy have stimulated me to probe more deeply the implication for sociology of the disciplinary cleavages in academic life.”

The fact is that I believed the new sociology of art was turning away from the art, not thinking sufficiently about its critical role in social, political and cultural life, as was explored by Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse and Lowenthal, my teachers in this regard. Zolberg, on the other hand, who never turned away from the art, appreciated, more than I did, how the study of the context and reception of art helped shape the quality of art, and its critical potential. I felt sociologists didn’t go far enough. Vera was more patient. She understood and appreciated what I was after, but she also understood how more limited studies could help get us there. This she has done in her subsequent work, on outsider art and on collective memory.

Sometimes patience is a virtue, as Vera’s long and distinguished career reveals. The wisdom of youth, including mine back then, has its limits. And what I especially appreciate was that as she took seriously pretty conventional studies of the art institutions as institutions like others in the social world, she knew that something distinctive was involved.

Vera and I have had many conversations over the years on the topics discussed at this special conference in her honor, indeed, on topics we first started talking about in Woodward Court many years ago. Perhaps the most interesting ones were mediated by our students and colleagues, who have been informed by our critical and empirical interests, drawing from the sociology of culture that was developing in the first decade after Vera and I met, and who have extended Zolberg’s contributions in scholarly discussion with her and in conversations of their own, as has been revealed in the papers presented in this conference and in the remarkable work of her students.

Her students have had long and fruitful conversations with Vera, culminating in their serious contributions to intellectual life: Lisa Aslanian, Catherine Bliss, Anne Bowler, Hui-tun Chuang, Karen Coleman, Irit Dekel, Lindsey Freeman, Yifat Gutman, Nancy Hanrahan, Siobhan Murphy Kattago, Despina Lalaki, Susan Pearce, Donna Marie Peters, Jackie Skiles, Amy Sodaro, Hakan Topal, and Sophia Vackimes. Their work ranges from the historical analysis of the futurists, to a high theoretical critical analysis of the sociology of music, to an ethnography of tap dancing, to a critical analysis of the photography of Robert Mapplethorpe, to studies of collective memorials of the murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, and of the African American burial grounds in lower Manhattan, and of the presence of the Palestinian absence in Israeli collective memory.

These “conversations with Vera,” between Zolberg and her colleagues and students, and on a personal note, I add, between Vera and me, are testaments to her and their shared accomplishments, as they have defined the sociology of the arts, the sociology of collective memory and the sociology of culture.

PS. The papers at the conference were excellent. They affirmed Vera’s patience and addressed my critical concerns. I am hoping we can find a publisher. More about that soon, I hope.

Last week, while observing the nationwide strike on May Day, and also the performance of a sociology student from The New School on Fox News a couple of days later, I wondered about the possibilities and obstacles of reinventing political culture. I was impressed that there was a significant attempt to bring May Day home, and also impressed by powerful media resistance to significant change in our political life.

May Day is celebrated around the world as Labor Day, everywhere, that is, except where it all began, the United States. The holiday commemorates the 1886 Haymarket Affair in Chicago and the struggle for decent working conditions and the eight-hour workday. It is an official holiday in over eighty countries, recognized in even more. Yet, until this year, it has been all but ignored in the U.S., except by those far to the left of the political mainstream. Thus, the calls by people associated with Occupy Wall Street for a nationwide general strike was notable, and it was quite striking that there were nationwide demonstrations including many in New York, capped by a large a mass demonstration at Union Square Park, right near my office. Not only leftists were there. Mainstream labor unions were as well. In many ways, I found the gathering to be as impressive as the ones I saw in Zuccotti Park last fall. Yet, it did not attract serious mass media attention.

The New York Times was typical. It had a careful article on May Day in Moscow, but reported the American actions as a local story, focused on minor violence, arrests and traffic disruptions.

The events’ significance did not reach beyond those who immediately were involved or who were already committed to its purpose through social media. Where OWS broke through to a broad public in its initial demonstrations downtown in the Fall, it failed to do so on May Day in demonstrations that were both large and inventive. Beyond the violence of the fringe of those involved in the movement and the provocative actions of police, and beyond traffic disruptions, the first major American May Day demonstrations in years were pretty much invisible to the general public, other than those who were already convinced of their importance before the fact and those who were quick to dismiss and demonize them. The demonstrations in Zuccotti Park resonated. May Day didn’t. As Daniel Dayan would put it, the task of monstration, of showing a broader public, on May Day failed, and things even got worse, apparent right here at Deliberately Considered.

On May 3rd, I noticed a lot of activity here. An old post was getting many hits, and there were unusual replies being posted. At least at first, the character of the replies was upsetting, not with the deliberately considered tone. The post was by Harrison Schultz on his experiences as an Occupy Wall Street activist, and the replies were aggressively and vilely critical. -“They are just a bunch of little crying little girls. Grow up have some nads and get a job,” “Fucking Retard !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!,” “You my friend are an idiot. I’m I feel sorry for people like you.” “What a Dipshit you are. Good luck working at Starbucks after Grad school. RTARD!!!” and the like.

I was at first puzzled, but soon realized that Harrison had appeared that evening on the Sean Hannity show and Hannity fans googled Harrison and were using Deliberately Considered to give him a piece of their minds (if that is what it was).

I initially wanted to delete these comments because they clearly run counter to our comment policy and represent all that I oppose when it comes to political debate. But because of some technical problems, I couldn’t, and, after thinking about it for a bit, I decided that the comments should remain because they so clearly reveal a very significant cultural problem. They are a part of the Fox script, which I fear Schultz couldn’t escape.

Schultz went on Hannity and tried to do unto Hannity what Hannity would do unto him. Harrison came out aggressively, attacking Hannity for labeling him as a radical hippy. Hannity responded in kind, and for his audience, the exchange demonstrated the truth of all their preconceived notions about OWS and those who would dare to criticize the prevailing political and economic order. To be sure, on Harrison’s Facebook page, his friends congratulated him for standing up to the man, though some, including me, had doubts. Clearly, for the convinced, Hannity and Schultz were applauded by their supporters (with Schultz’s numbering in the hundreds, Hannity’s in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions). Clearly, Hannity solidified his viewers opinions about May Day and OWS. Harrison did not break through. The comment by David Peppas to the Deliberately Considered replies gets to this central point cogently.

The May Day demonstrations presented Hannity with an opportunity to vilify OWS and Hannity played his role. And the dominant mass media, such as the Times, didn’t recognize and show the demonstrations, didn’t even explain why they had been called and their deep historical significance. If I weren’t as a matter of principle the last one to recognize a conspiracy, I might suggest that there is one.

More on this later this week

My New School colleague Michael Cohen’s new book Argentina’s Economic Growth and Recovery: The Economy in a Time of Default provides the first detailed account in English of one of the remarkable episodes in recent economic history.  Cohen’s rendering of 21^st century Argentine political economy is detailed, nuanced, filled with summaries of political debates and standoffs and with a rich appreciation of the unequal ways in which the economic benefits are shared as the Argentine economy recovered from its macroeconomic collapse in 2001.

The book is a fast-paced (at times blow-by-blow) account, of macroeconomic extremes in terms of debt, exchange rates, government budget and trade balances and fiscal and monetary policy in Argentina.  But when I finished reading the book (and took a big exhale) what struck me — not an expert on Argentina by any stretch — were the many ways that the Argentine experience contradicts the conventional economic wisdom.  Without much explicit attention to issue of conventional economic wisdom (other than the attack on World Bank and IMF structural adjustment policies imposed on Argentina in the 1990s), Cohen’s account nonetheless forces us to think critically about some widely-held views in economics and especially development economics.  Let me describe seven different ways in which Argentina’s experience in the 21^st century should make us revisit some of the accepted aspects of economic wisdom.

To continue reading Will Milberg’s review of Argentina’s Economic Growth and Recovery by Michael Cohen, click here.

My New School colleague Michael Cohen’s new book Argentina’s Economic Growth and Recovery: The Economy in a Time of Default provides the first detailed account in English of one of the remarkable episodes in recent economic history.  Cohen’s rendering of 21^st century Argentine political economy is detailed, nuanced, filled with summaries of political debates and standoffs and with a rich appreciation of the unequal ways in which the economic benefits are shared as the Argentine economy recovered from its macroeconomic collapse in 2001.

The book is a fast-paced (at times blow-by-blow) account, of macroeconomic extremes in terms of debt, exchange rates, government budget and trade balances and fiscal and monetary policy in Argentina.  But when I finished reading the book (and took a big exhale) what struck me — not an expert on Argentina by any stretch — were the many ways that the Argentine experience contradicts the conventional economic wisdom.  Without much explicit attention to issue of conventional economic wisdom (other than the attack on World Bank and IMF structural adjustment policies imposed on Argentina in the 19990s), Cohen’s account nonetheless forces us to think critically about some widely-held views in economics and especially development economics.  Let me describe seven different ways in which Argentina’s experience in the 21^st century should make us revisit some of the accepted aspects of economic wisdom.

Conventional wisdom #1.  Conventional wisdom is that default on foreign debt will have disastrous consequences for economic growth, economic suicide.  The country that defaults, the thinking goes, immediately shuts itself out of international capital markets for an unpredictably long period of time, brings on a long-term collapse of the exchange rate, requires a long-term recession as the country is forced to “live within its means.”

Argentina defaulted in early 2002 and then:

*one year later was borrowing considerable  from the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank.

*between 2002 and 2006 inward FDI rose at a rate of 26% per year  (much from Brazil)

*by 2006 was experiencing rapid economic growth rates, funding new social programs aimed at reducing poverty and was considered fiscally very sound.

Conventional wisdom #2.  Conventional wisdom runs that globalization is a process that drastically reduces the power of the nation-state, since increased capital mobility means that capital’s interests no longer coincide with those of the nation state and, anyway, the state’s influence over capital and the economy generally is diminished because capital (and labor) can simply move or shift production locations if domestic policies put it at a disadvantage.

Argentina’s example in a time of default is increased power of the national government, first over the decision to default on foreign debt, and then to run very active jobs and redistributional policy. Nestor Kirchner’s “strong state” was even criticized for being too powerful at time.

Conventional Wisdom #3. A corollary of this conventional wisdom about the diminished power of the nation state in the era of globalization is that one size – that is the neoliberal policy package – fits all.  Fiscal and monetary restraint, current and capital account liberalization, removal of subsidies are the basic requirements of any structural adjustment.  As a result of this thinking (which Cohen shows originated in the US and Europe), these policies became the basics of IMF and World Bank conditionality attached, in one form or another, to loans made throughout the later part of the 20^th century.

Cohen’s account of Argentina in the run-up to default is a case of “the (neoliberal) operation was a success but the patient died.”  Hyperinflation was cured but the debt became unsustainable.  Cohen’s account since default is a description of a complicated set of deviations from this policy prescription – and with considerable success: Higher taxes, pro-poor redistribution and spending, job creation programs, loose monetary policy with careful attention to a competitive exchange rate.  This was the political foundation for the rapid growth of the 2000s.

Conventional wisdom #4. Latin American wisdom (from  1950’s structuralist views on economic development made famous in the writings of Raul Prebisch and Hans Singer) says that developing countries should actively seek to avoid a pattern of specialization which is too reliant on commodities and primary goods – they have a low income elasticity of demand and are standardized goods for which no market power and no labor bargaining can take place.

What happened in Argentina in the 2000s was a period of rapid economic recovery strongly supported by the global commodities boom that drove an explosion of exports and which had a considerable multiplier effect across the Argentine economy – continuing to this day.  The terms of trade — driven to a great extent by high world prices for soybeans — is up over 50% in the last decade.  And this has come even in a period of depreciation of the Peso against the Brazilian Real. (Note that Cohen also questions whether the main source of economic growth was domestic demand.  When the peso was devalued in 2002, import substitution took place, raising demand for domestic goods and services.  Government spending also grew.  These, he argues, were the basis for the “demand-led recovery.”

Conventional wisdom #5: With the rise of China, consensus is growing around the view that the autocratic is most able to promote development.  Increasingly, Chinese success is connected to the autocratic nature of the political system.  It is this absence of democratic accountability in China, the conventional wisdom goes, that has allowed the Chinese government the ability and nimbleness to harness labor and capital investment in a massive industrialization effort.  Argentina’s remarkable era of democratically-elected governments belies this consensus view.

Conventional wisdom #6: Conventional economic wisdom is that a tide of economic growth will raise all boats.  The friendly World Bank amendment to this has been that one also needs good institutions, i.e. clear property rights protections.  The conventional wisdom is that economic growth per se is the central means to the improvement of well-being and the reduction of poverty.

The Argentine case shows that growth alone was not adequate and Cohen attributes progress on the poverty and employment front to Kirchner government efforts to support housing, health care, job creation, social protection and infrastructure.

Conventional wisdom #7. Conventional wisdom is that the international financial institutions are more powerful than domestic political forces – thus the old joke that the World Bank has brought down more governments than have national revolutionary movements.

Cohen’s account tells the fascinating story of a country that defaults on its foreign debt in the face of enormous IMF pressure not to do so.  Then, just a few years later, the government elected with the largest plurality in decades finds itself in an unwinnable battle about export taxes with the powerful and large domestic farmers.  These huge corporations, profiting greatly during the commodities boom of the 2000’s succeed with a lockout (keeping produce and meat off the domestic market), protests, influence peddling in the Senate, control of the media.  So what’s new?  Argentina defies the conventional wisdom.

Perhaps what is the most unconventional part of this book is the way Cohen tells the economic story of Argentina in a time of default.  Contrary to the economists, Cohen argues that all economic processes must be understood as political, that economic change comes generally with a “major realignment of political power.” Even more interesting is Cohen’s insistence that you can’t assess economic policy in some pure way, but only in the context of its institutional and political overlay.  This leads him to strongly resist the notion of the end of history or the end of politics in Latin America.  The book resounds with a very hopeful view of the possibilities of creativity and innovation in policy making and poverty reduction, management up urban development, but also with a realistic sense of the limits of politics.

Cohen’s views on these issues are closest to those of Peter Evans and his notion of “embedded autonomy.” The idea is that the most effective developmental states are those most closely connected to economic and civil society actors, but which also have sufficient autonomy  (a) to be able to implement policy effectively even when the impact of a policy shift is not favorable to one or more group of actors, and (b) to implement policies with long-term developmental consequences rather than short-term ones. Embedded autonomy is a particularly useful lens with which to think about economic policy making in Argentina, with its history of Peronism, military dictatorship and now a vigorous democracy.  Embedded autonomy remains particularly relevant in the Kirchner era, which at various moments was accused of being too embedded and at times too autonomous.

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t speak of Cohen’s own problem of “embedded autonomy.”  Cohen has been personally friendly with the Kirchner’s over many years and  they have supported the Latin American Observatory at the New School.  So the big question as I opened the cover of the book for the first time was whether Cohen would pull his punches in his assessment of the Kirchner governments.  The answer is that he does not hide his colors – he is mostly supportive of the Kirchner governments and their efforts at redistribution and poverty alleviation.  But he does this within a distinct analytical frame and from a clear sense of principles – that economic growth alone does not alleviate problems of extreme inequality, persistent poverty and lack of access to health care.  While the rapid recovery following default is remarkable, Cohen does not let the reader lose sight of the perhaps more remarkable feat which is the recovery from a brutal military dictatorship in 1976-1983 to a strong democracy that seems to have come not just with ambitions of voting rights but also of economic rights.  And he is critical of the Kirchner’s in a number of places, mostly for ignoring important aspects of long-term social well-being related to the development of science and technology, infrastructure and the apparent collapse of energy production over the last decade that may cripple the economy going forward.

Recent economic reports indicate that Argentina is once more on the edge:  The economy may well be spiraling into another crisis — exchange rate overvalued once again, capital flight, expansionary fiscal policy, inflation taking off.  Rumor is that the government may be falsifying the published rate of price inflation.  And while Cohen covers the politics of this in much detail, he is insufficiently critical of the government in its dangerous politicization of inflation data.  The recent law regarding the accountability of the central bank makes sense in that public accountability is in general a good thing, but the political pressures this creates for monetary policy to finance public deficits are not necessarily good over the long term.

Argentina’s Economic Growth and Recovery: The Economy in a Time of Default reflects a deep appreciation for the political culture, the economic history, the geographical complexity, the class differences and the international pressures that Argentines have struggled with over the past two decades.  It is an important treatise in political economy and Cohen tells it in detail and with a lot of passion and even, at times, frustration.  My sense is that these two sentiments – passion and frustration — are conventional sentiments for most Argentines.

I want to make sense of resistance, and more: to inform it and take part. This has been a central thread of my intellectual and political life.

My latest projects examining this have taken place in new and old forms, Deliberately Considered and my most recent book, Reinventing Political Culture. This Monday at 7pm, we are having a party for the book at The New School, 6 East 16^th Street, Room 1103, the Wolff Conference Room, co-sponsored by the New School’s Sociology Department and its Transregional Center for Democratic Studies, my two primary intellectual homes. It will mostly be a party, with opportunities for guests to buy the book, at a discount, signed, if you like, but as we gather, my dear friend and colleague, Elzbieta Matynia, and I will also use the occasion to publicly discuss some of the implications of the Reinventing Political Culture, especially as it addresses two related questions. What scholarship can contribute to critical political life? And, what is a public sociology?

I hope the readers of Deliberately Considered who are in and around New York come to enjoy the party and take part in the discussion. The wonders of the Web allow for the circle of discussion to be much broader, for New Yorkers and for those who can’t make it on Monday.

Actually, the discussion started last Wednesday. Elzbieta and I met to talk about the book and the plans for the party over a delicious cappuccino at Taralluccci e Vino on 18^th Street near Union Square. She was in a notable self-reflective mood. What is it that we do? How does it relate to what other more professionally oriented scholars do and to what those who are more involved in direct political action (in power and resisting the prevailing powers) do? She talked about some presentations she has coming up: one in a conference at Harvard on women and the Arab Spring, the title of her talk will be “Revolution and its Discontents.” The other talk will be at Scranton University, her topic, “the greening of democracy.”

I told her that I have just turned down two attractive invitations I received to lecture in Poland in May, one to the Wroclaw Global Forum, to speak in the presence of the powerful, and the other to go to the remote town of Sejny, to speak to the remarkable Borderlands Foundation, a center of resistant sensibilities and creative activities, at their 21^st anniversary celebrations. For different reasons both offers were attractive, but for the same reason, I turned them down. I need time to teach and think. I am incapable of being a jet-setting intellectual non-stop. To work, I need to be closer to home, in my study and at The New School.

Over the years, I have gone out into the world, actively protested injustice and tried in my modest ways to support people who attempt to repair an imperfect world. My sociology has attempted to explain their repair work, as I supported it. How did young people in Poland manage to be independently creative and live according to their own ideals at the margins, in student theaters in a totalitarian political order? (The Persistence of Freedom) How is cultural independence sustained despite the workings of the market and state? (On Cultural Freedom) What does the sustained independence say about the alternatives to a decaying empire? (Beyond Glasnost: The Post Totalitarian Mind). How can we avoid in America the enervating false identification of cynicism with criticism? (The Cynical Society) How will democracy be constituted in totalitarian shadows? (After the Fall) What is the special role of intellectuals in supporting democratic life? (Civility and Subversion) And what are the alternatives to unthinking terrorism, anti-terrorism and anti-anti terrorism? (The Politics of Small Things)

Reinventing Political Culture continues my exploration and engagement. It underscores that my answers to the questions I have been addressing in my previous books are predicated upon the support and cultivation of a free and diverse public life, and that a central issue is the relationship between the powers and culture. I work to reinvent the concept of political culture in these terms and to show how the reinvention of specific political cultures, of specific configurations of the relationships between power and culture, has been a significant goal of creative political action in Central Europe, North America and the Middle East (the case studies of the book).

This is the way I began to answer Elzbieta’s concerns about public and more academic sociology over our coffee on Wednesday. We will continue the discussion on Monday. And I should add that this discussion will help inform my understanding of the amazing social movements of the past couple of years, from Tahrir Square to Zuccotti Park and beyond. I was invited to speak about these movements in May in Poland, invitations I unfortunately had to turn down. But I am committed to make sense of the resistance and reinvention of the activists in these movements, and in my modest way to support them, as has been my custom.

Occupy’s six-month birthday celebration last Saturday at Zuccotti Park was first spent in celebration: the scene was joyous with friends reuniting after winter hibernation. “Spring training” regimes were conducted. The drum circle was back, and mic checks once again created a collective voice.

But when protestors undertook a spontaneous, albeit brief, reoccupation, they were met with the most violent and unrestrained NYC police force to date. MTA buses were commandeered and over seventy arrests were made. The significance and power of the park was clear once again.

Police violence was immediately challenged with solidarity marches in New York and throughout the country on Sunday. In spite of a winter predicting our demise, Occupy is alive again this spring. Not that we were ever really dead, but since the cops evicted Zuccotti the first time last fall, OWS has been struggling to find a way of staying meaningful without the spectacle of the park. Liberty Park offered a sense of commonality, a point of access, and a feeling of empowerment that has been difficult to replicate.

In fact, as the winter approached, the occupation had already started to weaken. Social problems appeared within the park. The influx of those bearing the stigmas of long-term homelessness, substance abuse and mental illness had already created divisions, cutting across the usual lines of class, race and “mental status.” Neighborhoods and maps developed to segregate social groups, restricting movement within what was established and claimed as a space of “openness.” Just after the fall storm, a woman pushed past me rushing from one side of the park to the other, and I heard her say to a friend, “Oh noooo, we don’t want to get caught in that part of the ‘hood.’ ” That comment stuck.

Many of us felt relieved that the police closed the park – that the occupation went out with a bang, rather than slowly disintegrating in front of an increasingly disinterested television audience, suggesting the movement’s ideals as being fundamentally in conflict to the wider public.

Nonetheless, the movement did continue. The loss of the park meant that all activities became based in working groups. We moved inside to 60 Wall Street, but the conditions were less than ideal – especially once they shut off the heat and locked the “public” restrooms. By mid January, the numbers of attendees at the popular Empowerment and Education meetings had diminished to the point that the loss of our status as a working group was threatened. Participants, seemingly seeking social relationships more than social goals, easily disrupted meetings. The Occupy Student Debt Campaign spent hours dialoguing with the Mediation Working Group in hope of resolving an internal conflict that led to a member being asked to “step back.” Euphemisms aside, it turned more into “step out,” and I’ve never seen this person again. In spite of the challenge of moving forward with this member, the fallout of the conflict seemed equally difficult.

Some active members believed that openness was primary. We needed to relearn how to interrelate with people, undermining a key value would be counterproductive and not very OWS. Other, equally active, members believed that complete openness was impossible, and worse, an illusion. Those uncomfortable in certain environments would naturally self-select to leave, and those comfortable with restrictions on rejection would always find a way to run the show by refusing to conform. For many of us openness in practice could be a lose-lose proposition, in spite of the fact that it had all the appeal of a winning ideal. After all, we are the 99%.

It seemed that the majority of working groups were actively grappling with these questions throughout the winter. Conversations had turned to community agreements, step up/step back, authority and horizontality. The focus had shifted off of the corporate take over of our democracy, unsustainable inequality and the nefarious activities of the big banks. Increasingly, it seemed as if we were engaged in an impossible struggle over the meaning and conditions of one of the fundamental premises of OWS – namely that radical openness is both possible and desirable.

Many of us felt that the principle needed revision. Prefiguring a society of total openness seemed to deny the current existence of many very real problems that our actions toward social change were attempting to address. Prefiguring a future society often seemed incompatible with taking action toward creating a new one.

Were we hypocrites? Was this an admission of a certain kind of defeat?  And, if in theory there’s no way to think outside of capitalism, and if our conception of openness is restricted by capitalism, then why on earth have we been spending so much time talking? Many of us were becoming increasingly frustrated by endless talk, and wanted to get down to some action.

By way of compromise, Occupy University meetings were divided:  two hours for talk that had no specific purpose, but could be purposeful nonetheless, and two hours for talk that had ends in mind. What could not be resolved by conversation was ultimately resolved through attrition, as members simply drifted, and the people who simply had the wherewithal to keep showing up ended with a the consensus. Is this really openness? It felt like the best we could hope for, so we carried on, sensing that our struggle might be more important than anything we created in the end.

In many ways the distraction of the Battle of Oakland came as a welcome relief. But once a proposed solidarity statement was circulated stating support for a “diversity of tactics” strategy, the Battle of Oakland seemed to expose a new problem with openness as practiced. Many of us believed that OWS was fundamentally a non-violent movement, and even with all this talk of openness, it came as a shock that it might not be possible to denounce violence without compromising this ideal. If we’re open, then we must be open to a “diversity of tactics.” But what about the idea that if we’re open, we cannot be open to violence, since it’s the ultimate way of closing everything down? But violence comes in many forms – it can be economic and psychological; why should we focus on the form of violence used by the victims of economic violence? Maybe some of that’s true as a matter of metaphor, but as a matter of definition, violence is physical. But that’s only because of who gets to define. Such was the conversation, and it became clear that many activists would leave the movement if violence were denounced. It was equally clear, however, that many would leave if non-violence were not practiced.

The conversation continued at The Winter of our Discontent event sponsored by The New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU and The New School. Former SDS member and New School Liberal Studies Department Chair, Jim Miller, came out of the gate by challenging the panel to take a stand against violence. But instead, David Graeber, the admired intellectual hero of the movement, disclosed his own involvement with black blocs. But, I wonder if it will be David Graeber or the young black kid brave enough to participate in a march, who will be the one to do time?

What sort of openness are we really talking about? Here, class and race intersect, but end up in the pile of other easily brushed off accusations that OWS is elitist, just another version of the same old thing, a different form of special interest, and not really the 99%. When a young woman took the mic and challenged the ideology of the 99%, arguing that compassion is also needed for the 1%, as they are equally held hostage to capitalism, the audience laughed and many of the panelists who were just espousing openness scoffed. Radical openness? Not so much. Personally, I’m okay with that. Sometimes, ideas are incompatible with each other, and there’s almost always a gray zone. For me, openness seems to be an ideal that can serve different masters. Are there any ideals that automatically create freer or more equal or better material conditions in any real way?

In spite of what seems to be an ideological impasse, a sizable group of us have continued to work on projects and build important ties. For us, the problems that OWS addresses are multifaceted, sometimes indescribable, but completely necessary. For us, continuing to grapple with inconsistencies is the path toward a truly democratic society. Fundamentally, we believe that people do have power. Call us idealists, but we believe that a better world is within our grasp. Our evidence is that Occupy Wall Street has already changed the national discourse on inequality, foreclosures, student debt and democracy. Our evidence is that the movement has remained non-violent and the + Brigade emerged out of the “diversity of tactics” crisis. Occupy University has launched our first course: Studying May Day and the General Strike, and Occupy Student Debt Campaign is organizing a national day of action on April 25^th.  Surely, issues around openness will continue to arise.

Now that spring has arrived, the movement seems stronger than ever.  It seems likely that the issues around openness will be addressed in practice, as we collectively envision and challenge our future.