Thoughts on #OccupyWallStreet

I. Occupy Wall Street

In Warren Beatty's epic film Reds, there is a scene where journalist and communist activist John Reed debates the course of the still infant Bolshevik revolution with the anarchist Emma Goldman. While Reed has plunged into the work of aiding the Soviets, Goldman already recoils at the horrors being perpetrated by the Bolsheviks. Pensive and tired, Reed eventually answers her critiques by saying:

"It's just the beginning E.G. It's not happening the way we thought it would, it's not happening the way we wanted it to, but it's happening."

While Reed was dramatically wrong about the Soviet Union, his sentiments have something to say about responses to the ongoing mobilization known as #OccupyWallStreet. For progressives who have been hoping for some kind of public mass uprising against our financial overlords since the onset of the Great Recession, a couple hundred young, "activist-y" types camping out on Wall Street may seem far from the dream of a mass uprising by everyday people. Yet, this is what is actually happening, and it appears to be gaining momentum as local unions and other activist groups join in. As Mark Engler details in a very thoughtful piece at Dissent magazine, the protestors have done a number of things "right" - especially on point I would say is how protestors have made their general youth into an advantage. Rather than seeming like spoiled kids, they are pointing to how the finance-led, deregulated economy and the Great Recession are betraying the implicit notion in the U.S. that the nation's society and economy will build opportunities for subsequent generations.

A lively debate continues to rage over the protests, particularly over what their demands are and should be. This is a vital dialogue to have and I appreciate the urgency of those demanding more concreteness from the protests. That said, looking historically, often more important than demands has been momentum. Such mobilizations have long been a target of frustration and scorn from sympathetic observers and activists. In the lead up to the American Revolution, street protests became commonplace, but members of the Revolutionary elite typically viewed with apprehension such actions. Similarly, the first major street actions after the crash of 1929 were not run by wholesome grassroots activists, but were organized by cadres of the Communist and Socialist Parties. While it would have been preferable to have marches not organized by people (in the CPUSA case) looking to Stalin as their model, it was the communists who had the energy to get out and so something. If progressives want to shape the protests, they should do it directly - after all, this is an action emphasizing its internally democratic character!

II. A Modest Protest and History Suggestion

Given the Tea Party loves to reference history, it couldn't hurt for our side as well. One off the top of my head that is completely unoriginal, but counterintuitively might make a splash, is to have protests dress like the Tea Party. After all, why should conservatives have a monopoly on the Revolution? The American Revolution is all our inheritance - it is an event distant and distinct enough from today that for anyone to claim a direct political lineage is rather silly. Certainly, progressives and radicals have as much claim to the American Revolution and its ideals as anyone.

This is especially the case with the actual event of the Boston Tea Party. For one, the original action in Boston was essentially a demonstration against the collusion of government and high finance - the acts being protested were designed by the British crown to prop up the faltering British East India Company. Furthermore, the first post-Tea Party protest in U.S. history to explicitly reference that event came with demonstrations in the 1840s against foreclosures of New York farmers by banks - a slightly relevant historical dynamic for today.

The Fight for Reaction: Reconstruction and the Franchise

A new front in the modern Republican Party's effort to depress voter turnout has emerged from Pennsylvania, where the party seeks to alter the way the electoral college vote is counted to strengthen their hand. This comes along with a concentrated effort to restrict voting in a number of other key battleground states through restrictive voter ID bills (among other measures).

Such measures certainly fly in the face of the (generally agreed) U.S. consensus, built over our history, that democracy means people have easy access to the ballot. It also points to the way that reactionary forces in the nation's history have worked diligently to limit the vote to promote their agenda. No more dramatic example of this exists than the massive disenfranchisement of African-American voters that came as a core element of the rollback of Reconstruction in the 1870s and onward.

When discussing the fight and justice of African-American voting rights, we tend to disassociate access to the franchise from the political implications of its use. Civil rights leaders in the 1960s did not make partisan advantage a mainstay of their case; they rightly emphasized the basic immorality of denying people the right to vote in a nation which sees that power as core to its national identity. Yet, in pondering the implications of African-American men winning the right to vote in the late 1860s, and then losing it over the course of the next several decades, we should not only emphasize the basic civic and moral outrage, but the way these transformations affected the shape of American politics.

Put succinctly, it is certainly plausible, and I would say likely, that African-Americans' loss of the ballot box helped ensure an enduring and powerful conservatism at the heart of our politics. Counterfactuals are of course riddled with challenges. However, in the case of Reconstruction, we do not have to rely on pure speculation. After all, for several years in the late 1860s through the 1870s we can see how, particularly at the state level, politics would develop with the franchise available to African-American men. What one finds is a starkly different and certainly more progressive United States. Consider some of the programs and policies implemented by Reconstruction governments which included substantial African-American representation (this is all taken from pages 156 of Eric Foner's A Short History of Reconstruction):

• Public schools, hospitals, enitentiaries, and asylums for orphans and the insane were either established for the first time or whose funding was increased
  
• South Carolina funded medical care for poor citizens
• Alabama provided free legal counsel for indigent defendants
• Laws were changed expanding divorce rights, property rights for married women
• State legislatures excluded all manner of small farmers and workers from having their basic livelihoods upended by debt collectors
• Progressive taxation, primarily of large land holding implemented
  

Of course, not all policies passed by the Reconstruction governments were progressive or as extensive as one could hope. Republican governments in the South often did much to encourage big business investment through massive subsidies and cases of corruption were rampant. However, compared with the white-dominant governments that came after Reconstruction, it seems hard to argue that the trajectory of state politics in the South would have been as conservative with continued African-American enfranchisement. Remember the strength African-Americans as a voting bloc had in the South at this time; where they represented either major minorities or majorities in most of the former Confederacy (South Carolina during part of Reconstruction had a majority African-American state legislature, reflecting the state's demographics). At the national level, Reconstruction saw the election of a number of African-American congressman, as well as one Senator.

The massive step forward Reconstruction represented would never be fully reversed and to push affairs backward required a multifaceted effort. Examinations of the Civil War sometimes raise the question of why the Confederates did not adopt a guerrilla warfare approach near the conflict's end. Yet, in the late 1860s they did, only targeted specifically at African-Americans. The Ku Klux Klan was a domestic insurgent group, in some ways like a U.S. version of al-Qaeda in Iraq. KKK violence was often quite targeted, for example intensifying around election time to scare African-American voters from the polls. As reactionary elements in the South started to regain power, they moved to more "legal" means such as literacy tests and poll taxes. And thus, to this day, we still live in the shadow of a bright shining moment in our history, followed by a horrendous descent into darkness, one which took decades of struggle and blood to overcome.