Author: john mcgowan

Micah White’s The End of Protest: A New Playbook for Revolution

Micah White was one of the people who inspired (?)/initiated(?) Occupy Wall Street.  He certainly can’t be said to have organized it since he did nothing beyond publicizing the idea and setting a date for its occurrence.  He never visited the site and made no effort to direct how it unfolded or what it demanded.  He thinks the Occupy movement was a “constructive failure.”

I was drawn to his book The End of Protest (Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2016) because White is adamant that “change won’t happen through the old models of activism.  Western democracies will not be swayed by public spectacles and mass media frenzy. Protests [especially marches and other mass demonstrations] have become an accepted, and therefore ignored, by-product of politics-as-usual.  Western governments are not susceptible to international pressure to heed the protests of their citizens” (27).  That last statement is a little odd, but is explained (somewhat) a bit further on.

“We have been acting as if people have sovereignty over their governments when they act collectively.  Now it is clear that the people’s sovereignty has been lost.  We were wrong to believe that bigger and bigger street protests could force prime ministers and presidents to heed the wishes of the people. . . . [T]ese ritualized spectacles of tens of thousands in the streets are only effective when applied against autocratic regimes that are vulnerable to international pressure.  It seems that popular protest functions only when it is aligned with the pre-existing Western geopolitical agenda” (36).  We must recognize that we live a “precarious historical moment of broken democracy and the rule of the wealthy” (43)  Having lost “faith in the legitimacy of representative democracy” (38), an entirely new set of tactics must be developed to ferment change in our plutocratic and oligarchic condition.

There is a lot here to unpack—and I will be doing that work over the next few posts.  But, today, I just want to hone in on White’s commitment to revolution.  “[R]evolution’s chief characteristic,” he tells us, is “the transfer of sovereignty and the establishment of a new legal regime” (60).  But those two things are not the same at all.  “Revolutionary activism,” he asserts, “is any attempt to make the illegal legal or the legal illegal” (60).  I like that claim a lot.  I have nothing at stake as to whether one instance of political activism is deemed revolutionary while another is not.  Worrying about whether something is reformist or revolutionary does not interest me.

But I do think it very useful to focus in on this question of legality.  Segregation was legal, was the law, in the Jim Crow South.  The civil rights movement worked to change that.  Domestic abuse was not specifically illegal, and was almost entirely deemed outside the law’s purview, until feminism changed laws and attitudes toward violence in the home.  We know, of course, that reforming the law is only half the battle; cultural change—a change in attitudes—is also required to have fully successful social transformation.  But pinpointing the legal change that is desired gives social movements a focused goal, a clear message, and a benchmark for progress, even for success.

Hypothesis #1: Where social movements do not have an unjust law to focus upon, they have much more trouble gaining traction.

The second point for today is to think about transfer of sovereignty.  Only very fringe social movements in today’s US imagine overthrowing the government.  So it is not clear to me what a “transfer of sovereignty” means in our context right now.  It is absolutely true that power has been concentrated in the hands of the few—and that it strains credulity to call the US a functioning democracy at the present moment.  But the concentration of power is very different than the legal apparatus of sovereignty.  It does not appear that anyone is interested in undoing that legal apparatus.  Instead, as White himself says, “activists may use one law to overturn another” (61).  The prevailing strategy is to work through the legal means afforded by the system to alter, rewrite, or abolish the laws and practices that undermine our democracy, that keep it from truly representing the will of the people.  (Let me get away with that solecism for the moment.  White has a very bad tendency to believe in Rousseau’s “general will.”  Let’s just note for the moment that, when it comes to gun control and the tax code, the legal and governmental status quo is demonstrably not in aligned with the view of the majority.)

But, and this is where I will end today and resume tomorrow, what if we no longer have any faith that the current legal and institutional system afford any possibility of reforming it back into the direction of making government responsive to the people?  In other words, if we accept that we no live in an oligarchy, what alternatives do we have for fighting that reality.  I fully agree with White that marches and petitions are not going to get the job done.  They are ignored with impunity.  So what should we be doing?

The Script for Dismantling Protest Sites, or Fool Me Once . . .

In late August of this year, students at UNC, Chapel Hill initiated and maintained a round-the-clock vigil at Silent Sam, the Confederate monument on campus.  The vigil, which never had tents–but did have tables, sleeping pads, and folding chairs–was left unmolested by campus authorities for eight days.  Then the students were informed on Thursday, August 31st that they had to vacate the spot and that anything they did not remove would be confiscated by the police at 6AM on Friday morning, the first.  It did not seem coincidental that the first football game of the season would be played in Chapel Hill on Saturday the 2nd.   The administration did not want football fans to be distracted with thoughts of the legacies of slavery.

I cycled over to campus at 5:30 that Friday morning in order to witness—and to video on my phone—the arrival of the police.  About fifteen students were there.  Most of the vigil’s paraphernalia had been removed.  The students did not intend to resist the police incursion or to get themselves arrested, but did plan to chant various slogans throughout the police action.

I hung around until 8:45 or so, chatting with students and colleagues on the scene.  The police did not show up.  Later that day, I learned that the police arrived around 9:00 am and did just what they had informed students they would do: dismantle the site of the vigil and threaten any students who refused to leave the site with arrest.

Now, some two months later, I discover, while reading Micah White’s The End of Protest (of which more in subsequent posts) that the Chapel Hill action followed a script devised for the dismantling of Occupy sites around the country in late 2011 and early 2012.

“The eviction in Lower Manhattan was effective, and it was no coincidence that evictions spread immediately.  Five days before Zuccotti [the Occupy Wall Street site] was dismantled, police coordinated nation-wide conference calls with mayors from eighteen cities.  An eviction script was developed to counter the tactics of Occupy.  Mayors learned to announce an impending eviction, to give Occupiers a firm deadline so that the people would gather to defend the encampment.  Authorities would then let the deadline expire so that protestors were exhausted by the state of tension and readiness.  Many protestors would return home believing the crisis had passed.  At that point, the police would strike and complete the eviction using maximum force.  The counter-revolutionary tactics developed by Bloomberg and others were quickly deployed in city after city” (The End of Protest, 30-31).

“Maximum force” was not used in Chapel Hill, nor was it needed given the students’ resigned acquiescence in the eviction.  But I was gulled by a trick used five years earlier because I didn’t know of its existence.

UNC Now Spies on Its Students

Spying on the students.  The disheartening actions of Chancellor Carol Folt’s administration at UNC, Chapel Hill just keep coming.

Last Friday, the university community learned that an undercover policeman spied on the students who participated in an eight day vigil to protest the continued presence of Silent Sam, UNC’s Confederate monument, on campus.  Claiming to be an auto mechanic named Victor, sympathetic to their cause, the undercover policeman from UNC’s Department of Public Safety, chatted up those at the vigil.  Does the university now have dossiers on students that contain information gathered under false pretenses?  What exactly was the spy fishing for?  What threat did the administration imagine these protestors—conspicuously non-violent throughout their vigil—posed?

The student vigil at the Confederate statue lasted from August 22nd to August 31st, at which point the administration intervened and insisted that it come to an end.  The vigil itself, the two mass rallies that took place during its eight days, and its dismantling (which the students did not contest) never disrupted normal operations at UNC and, apart from two arrests for very minor infractions the night of August 22nd , never involved any illegal or violent behavior. At least two uniformed police officers were on site at every moment during the vigil.  Their presence (in my view) was completely appropriate. Maybe even having a plainclothes policeman on the scene can be justified.  But to infiltrate the student group gathered around the statue?  Those are J. Edgar Hoover tactics.

These are our students! The university’s educational mission is predicated on the free and open exchange of ideas.  When there are disagreements or even more serious conflicts on campus, we address them by talking to our fellow community members with whom we disagree.  If the matter at hand is too delicate, that conversation may have to take place in private. Ideally, however, –and in 90% of the cases in actuality—the dialogue is public, starting with frank discussions in our classrooms and spilling over from there into the other spaces our campus provides for open inquiry and spirited debate.

Yet no one in the administration ever approached the student protestors and asked for an opportunity to talk with them about their opinions or goals.  The only meeting of administration personnel, including the Chancellor, with the student protestors was a belated gathering on September 23rd, held in response to threats the students had received.  The students were told at this meeting that “we are not here to discuss Silent Sam, but only your safety.”

Where does the fear, the suspicion, that would motivate sending a spy to infiltrate the students camping out around the statue come from? Why should they be treated as potentially dangerous criminals instead as participants in the general conversation that is at the heart of education? These are our students, whom we work with every day, trying to give them the knowledge and skills they need to grow and prosper.

Is this the message we want to send to prospective and current students: you attend a university that instead of talking with you will accord itself the right to spy on you?

If Chancellor Folt did not authorize this over-the-top response to a student protest, then the person who did so should be fired.  The undercover police officer should be suspended, pending a full investigation, not for following orders and doing his job, but for his behavior when “outed” by students who recognized him on campus in his police uniform.  According to reports (and video of the incident), he told the students they could not film their interaction with him, a clear violation of their unambiguous rights, while also threatening them as they tried to walk away.  There should be no rush to judgment here, but what exactly happened needs to be discovered—and appropriate action taken once the facts are determined.

If the Chancellor herself authorized this undercover operation, she owes the campus community an explanation—and an apology.  What was the administration aiming to accomplish and how has it used the information collected?  The apology is for spying on students, a practice that only the most extreme circumstances could ever justify.

If neither an explanation nor an apology is forthcoming, the disintegration of our educational community, based on transparency and open dialogue, will continue apace.

Offered without Comment

“The wretched of the earth do not decide to become extinct, they resolve, on the contrary, to multiply: life is their only weapon against life, life is all that they have.  That is why the dispossessed and starving will never be convinced (though some may be coerced) by the population-control programs of the civilized. . . .  The civilized have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately, and do not intend to change the status quo; are responsible for their slaughter and enslavement; rain down bombs on defenseless children whenever and wherever they decide that their ‘vital interests’ are menaced, and think nothing of torturing a man to death: these people are not to be taken seriously when they speak of the ‘sanctity’ of human life, or the ‘conscience’ of the civilized world.  There is a ‘sanctity’ involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.  Dreadful indeed it is to see a starving child, but the answer is not to prevent the child’s arrival, but to restructure the world so that the child can live in it: so that the ‘vital interest’ of the world becomes nothing less than the life of the child” (James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work, 16-17).

“The question of identity is a question involving the most profound panic–a terror as primary as the nightmare of the mortal fall.  The question can scarcely be said to exist among the wretched, who know, merely, that they are wretched and who bear it day by day–it is a mistake to suppose that the wretched do not know that they are wretched; nor does this question exist among the splendid, who know, merely, that they are splendid, and who flaunt it, day by day; it is a mistake to suppose that the splendid have any intention of surrendering their splendor.  An identity is questioned only when it is menaced, as when the mighty begin to fall, or when the wretched begin to rise, or when the stranger enters the gates, never, thereafter, to be a stranger: the stranger’s presence making you the stranger, less to the stranger than to yourself.  Identity seems to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self; in which case, it is best that the garment be loose, a little like robes of the desert, through which one’s nakedness can always be felt, and, sometimes, discerned.  This trust in one’s nakedness is all that gives one the power to change one’s robes” (The Devil Finds Work, 79-80).

“last night I had a recurrence of that dream which, as I told Mother Sugar [the protagonist’s analyst], was the most frightening of all . . . When she asked me to ‘give a name to it’ (to give it form), I said it was a nightmare about destruction.  Later, when I dreamed it again, and she said: Give it a name, I was able to go further: I said it was a nightmare about the principle of spite, or malice–joy in spite. . . . [T]he principle or element took shape in an old man, almost dwarf-like . . . . This old man smiled and giggled and snickered, was ugly, vital and powerful, and again, what he represented was pure spite, malice, joy in a destructive impulse.  . . . And the creature was always powerful, with an inner vitality which I knew was caused by a purposeless, undirected, causeless spite.  It mocked and jibed and hurt, wished murder, wished death.  And yet it was always vibrant with joy” (Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook, 456-457).