Hegemony How-To. Jonathan Smucker
a challenger social movement hits upon such a catalyzing symbol, it’s like striking gold. One might even argue that broad political alignments are constituted in the act of finding their floating signifier. Hitherto disparate groups suddenly congeal into a powerful aligned force. Momentum is on their side and things that seemed impossible only yesterday become visible on the horizon.
It is important to recognize a few things, then, about our relationship to the tactic of physical occupation during Occupy Wall Street’s brief run:
1 It accomplished more than any of us really imagined it would have.
2 A significant part of the tactic’s political value was in serving as a popular defiant symbol that shifted prevailing meanings in the culture.
3 It was incredibly resource-intensive to maintain.
4 The tactic was not going to serve us forever. Indeed, its utility was waning prior to our eviction.
5 Moving forward in the years ahead, we will have to come up with other popular expressions of the values and hopes that OWS brought to the surface.
Here it becomes important to distinguish between our tactics, our message, and our movement. Of these three, our tactics should be the thing we are least attached to. In oppositional struggle, it is critical to maintain the initiative; to keep one’s opponents in a reactive state. This is not accomplished by growing overly attached to any particular tactic—no matter how well it worked the first time—and thereby doing exactly what our opponents expect us to do. Of course, it is a lot easier to conceptualize the need to be innovative and to keep our opponents on their toes than to actually come up with the right thing at the ripe moment to make it so. Moreover, it is wrongheaded to get caught up in the elusive search for the perfect silver bullet tactic. Movements are, more than anything else, about people. To build a movement is to listen to people, to read the moment well, and to navigate a course that over time inspires whole swaths of society to identify with the aims of the movement, to buy in, and to take collective action.
The “Occupy” in Occupy Wall Street was the tactic that launched a movement for social justice and real democracy onto center stage in the United States, even if ephemerally. It served as the initial catalyzing symbol. Hopefully ten or twenty years from now, when we look back at all we have accomplished together, we will credit this mobilization as a critical moment that helped to spark and then build a longer-term movement. However, when we fail to find other successful tactics—and other popular expressions of the movement’s values—we are pronounced dead as soon as the initial tactic fades. Of course, most successful movements are first pronounced dead many times over. Still, this challenge of popular mobilization remains looming before us. Fortunately, Occupy Wall Street—and the tactic of occupation—was neither the primary message nor the movement itself.
And, fortunately, we do not have to reinvent the movement’s message from scratch, come the next rounds. What emerged in tandem with the deployment of the captivating tactic of occupation was the compelling message that “We are the 99%!” We might well consider this among our core messages in a new movement era. The framework of the 99% accomplishes a number of important feats that it is important to explicitly note:
The 99% frames the consolidation of wealth and political power in our society—the central grievance of the Occupy movement and a central crisis of our times.
The 99% frames a class struggle in a way that puts “the one percent” on the defensive (whereas the common accusation of “class warfare” had somehow tended to put a lot of people in the middle on the defensive).
The 99% casts an extraordinarily broad net for who is invited to join the movement. Most everyone is encouraged to see their aspirations tied to a much bigger public. Thus it frames a nearly limitless growth trajectory for the movement.
The meme of the 99% is a real winner. Its message and framework may prove better at helping us “weather the winter” than any single tactic could. It points the way towards a necessary expansion. It encourages us to not just act on behalf of, but alongside, “the 99%”; to look beyond the forces already in motion, to activate potential energy, to articulate a moral political narrative, and to claim and contest our culture and our future.
Of course, many critics from the left and from the academy have taken issue with the meme of the 99%, arguing that it poses a false unity that obfuscates important heterogeneity and power concentrations within an absurdly broad category. Analytically, they are of course correct, but these critics neglect to consider this framing as a power move—what Pierre Bourdieu might call a “worldmaking” operation. Here again is a classic example of the academic error of “uncritically attribut[ing] political efficacy to textual critique.”42 While we often think of elites and the already powerful as the forces that construct and wield “universality” as a tool in service of their (particular) power and privilege, I will argue throughout this book that it is just as necessary for underdog challengers to articulate differently framed “universalities,” even if such operations are rife with additional moral and strategic dilemmas. As such, I embrace “the 99%” for strategic reasons and assert that its ambiguity is necessary for the construction of an alternative hegemonic alignment. That the scope of such universalizing rhetorical moves can be expanded by subsequent movements (notably Black Lives Matter) does not negate the political value of the former move.
Five years after the gathering at Zuccotti Park was disbanded, it is abundantly clear that a still-emerging progressive political alignment has indeed taken the core of its populist language from Occupy Wall Street. The unexpected popularity of self-identified democratic socialist Bernie Sanders—unexpected by the punditry, but also by many in the left—in his campaign for the presidency is at this point probably the most notable next manifestation of the nascent alignment.
Holding up a mirror
“As we see our face, figure, and dress in the glass…so in imagination we perceive in another’s mind some thought of our appearance, manners, aims, deeds, character, friends, and so on, and are variously affected by it. A self-idea of this sort seems to have three principal elements: the imagination of our appearance to the other person; the imagination of his judgment of that appearance, and some sort of self-feeling, such as pride or mortification…The thing that moves us to pride or shame is not the mere mechanical reflection of ourselves, but an imputed sentiment, the imagined effect of this reflection upon another’s mind.”
—Charles Cooley, The Looking Glass Self43
Let us imagine a particular group imagining itself through the reflection of the perceptions of other groups or of the larger society—through the others’ impressions, associated meanings, and stereotypes about the particular group. We can also imagine the reverse: the larger society glimpsing something of itself in the reflection of a particular group (that is contained within itself). In this way, we can conceive of a powerful challenger movement as “holding up a mirror” in which society recognizes its own reflection. Society sees parts of itself that had escaped its conscious gaze, and, thereby, society re-imagines itself.
Sociologist George Mead discussed how particular “individuals stand out as symbolic. They represent, in their personal relationships, a new order, and then become representative of the community as it might exist if it were fully developed along the lines that they had started.”44 If we substitute Mead’s “individual” with an individuated collective actor, and substitute “the community” with society, we can conceptualize how Occupy Wall Street became symbolically representative of society “as it might exist if it were fully developed along the lines” that Occupy started. Thus, Occupy Wall Street held up a mirror and we recognized ourselves in the reflection—not just we the self-selecting individuals who physically took the park and the streets in New York’s financial district; “America” itself saw itself in this mirror, saw its own condition: saw the level of economic inequality and political disenfranchisement it had come to tolerate. We might compare it to waking up ten years after a traumatizing disaster, catching a glimpse of oneself in the mirror, and finally seeing oneself clearly again; reconnecting with the hint of one’s precious long-lost soul in a glimmer in one’s own eyes, after having identified for so long