Arts and Labor. May Day signs. 2012.

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ANDREW ROSS

Occupy made its first claim on me as a neighbor (living not all that far from
Zuccotti Park), entonces, in quick succession, it drew me in as a participant and orga-
nizer. In each of these capacities, I was beguiled by the real-time attempt to give
substance to a slogan—“This Is What Democracy Looks Like”—that had been in
circulat ion for more than a decade within the global just ice movement .
Catchwords of this sort aren’t supposed to be fully fleshed out as practical proposi-
ciones. But OWS’s physical circumstances presented an ace opportunity to do so.
The most visible effort was the prefigurative micro-community that set up shop in
Zuccotti Park, guided by principles of mutual aid and self-organization. Porque
Occupy became a media darling overnight, the feat of trying out the anarchist
dream of “building a new world in the shell of the old” was given prime-time expo-
sure, both in the world press and also in the movement’s own extensive media
apparatus. At the center of it all were the general assemblies. In their heyday, ellos
were nothing short of sublime. Even if this wasn’t the kind of direct democracy
you might have hoped for, it was so joyously superior in caliber and character to
the representational model of thin governance that prevails on Capitol Hill. Nuestro
society is organized to minimize the time that people have available for open-
sided, face-to-face meetings, while it glorifies the regular intervals set aside for
watching three-hour sporting events.

Less visible, but even more labor-intensive, were the endless meetings
entailed by membership in any of the working groups in Occupy. Those on the
way to burnout could always cite Oscar Wilde: “The trouble with socialism is that it
takes too many evenings.” Certainly, the demands of my profession and my duties
to two young children cut deeply into my own participation. But I stuck out the
winter and the spring in an effort to keep up with the core OWS group of about
two hundred. By mid-summer, the work of the Occupy Student Debt campaign,
which I helped to organize, had become more central to OWS as a whole. Debt
had always been a master-theme of Occupy. But it took a while to figure out that if
this was a political movement (as opposed to a social movement, which typically
makes demands on the state for recognition), then its raw material was the
dilemma of being knee-deep in debt—the most chronic, if not universal, condi-
tion of the 99%.

Por supuesto, socialism itself, to take Wilde’s quip literally, was never in ques-
ción. If anything, Occupy has been anarchism in action from day one. Para
anarchists, group assembly and direct action are not means to some end that is
then adopted as policy and legislated. Meetings and actions—where people
practice the art of being autonomous and mutually supportive at one and the
same time—are the product. To ensure that these spaces are safe, there are

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OCTUBRE

many protocols to follow, even when the police attack. Seeking out confronta-
tion with the police may be an adventurist act for some thrill-seekers, but for
most it is a necessary showdown with the unacceptably violent and illegitimate
authority of the state.

Like many of my generation, I have always been comfortable with drawing
on multiple political traditions as opposed to a single ideological standpoint. En
my case: democratic socialist by birthright; Marxist, feminist, pro-queer, and anti-
racist by analytic training; and anarchist by inclination. Occupy had room for
everyone, but the overall tacit agreement was to play by the rules of anarchist con-
duct. To behave like free people actually takes a good deal of training and
discipline, and so the playbook is a lot different from the anti-authority counter-
culture that I was weaned on. The mind-set of youth politics today is, as always, un
amalgam of the ideas, tactics, and ideologies of the past, but it seems clear that
anarchist principles have become the primary glue for binding them all into a
more or less coherent mentality. The anti-WTO protest in Seattle in 1999 is often
cited as the “coming-out party” for the horizontal anarchist mode, after which it
went global. Occupy and its immediate antecedents, such as the Spanish indigna-
dos, have been more like the graduation ceremonies.

Can horizontalism establish a firm foothold in the institutions of civil soci-
ety? Not anytime soon, pero, from my experience, it is now a firmly embedded
generational style, and will work its way, willy-nilly, into the conduct of the future.
If this is what democracy should look like, then the Washington–Wall Street axis is
something we should call by another name.

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ANDREW ROSS is a professor of social and cultural analysis at NYU and a member of the
Strike Debt assembly of OWS. Arts and Labor. May Day signs. 2012. imagen

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