The Counterpublic Papers vol. 7 no. 3

September 25, 2021

Ten years ago this past August, Adbusters put out a call to people on the east coast to “occupy” Wall Street on Sept. 17. The date was selected idiosyncratically—it had no meaning except to one or two Adbuster folk—and I don’t think any of the people involved really expected much. But the next thing you know instead of a few leftists sitting in Zucotti park, you had 10,000. And instead of them poking around for a few hours or so….they stayed.

And then the next thing you know instead of one occupation, there were ten.

Then there were 50.

Then there were 900, scattered all over the world.

Baltimore was one of the more durable (and I think, important) Occupies, and I’m going to write about that when that anniversary comes up. (I have to look at my own records but I think Occupy Baltimore begins somewhere around the first week of October—at the very least that’s when I first visited McKeldin Square). But what I want to do here is think a bit about one of the more critical arguments made against Occupy. That argument can be boiled down to this—the movement failed because it focused primarily on spectacle and didn’t have a specific political program. This argument was made both while the movement was under way and after police and political elites dismantled the occupations.

Below I’m going to do is respond to this critique in a roundabout way, by taking a few recent pieces by Adolph Reed jr (“How Austerity Destroyed the Public Good”, Which Side Are You On?, and finally The Whole Country is the Reichstag), who was at the time one of the most prominent critics of Occupy (and later Black Lives Matter).

“How Austerity Destroyed the Public Good” returns to the scene of what was and still remains one of the greatest domestic crimes in the 21st century—the government response to Hurricane Katrina. In fact I write “government response to” when it’s more accurate to write “government response to and responsibility for Hurricane Katrina”—Katrina was so devastating because the federal government let the levees fail. Reed deftly begins the article by returning to the scene of the crime in order to connect Katrina and the government’s response to February’s deadly power grid failure in Texas, and through that to make a larger claim about austerity politics. All good, until:

Democrats have unfortunately abetted the exile of public goods from respectable political discourse. President Joe Biden recently bowed to austerity forces on the right to means-test beneficiaries in his $1.9 trillion Covid relief package, lowering the income-eligibility threshold from $100,000 to $80,000, thereby freezing out some 17 million in the pandemic-ravaged economy. Means-testing, which restricts publicly provided social benefits to the poorest of the poor, undermines social solidarity by pitting those who are eligible against those who are not and, in the process, fuels hostility to government.

Read that second sentence. Biden did reduce the income threshold 20% so Reed is technically right.

But if we were to go back in time, say a month before the presidential election, would we have imagined Biden supporting anything close to a $1.9 billion payout, which includes a monthly $250 check/per child for people like me (for real—I’ve gotten a few checks already)?

I know where I was on Biden and in my case the answer was no. I know where Reed was on this (see this interview with Reed and labor organizer Jane McAlevey) But instead of acknowledging this, acknowledging that Biden and the Democratic Party had actually moved away from the anti-government consensus of the past forty years (we used to call it the Reagan-Bush era, but it’s more correctly the Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama-Trump era) Reed places Biden within a category he doesn’t quite fit in. Before the election this made sense—many of us thought Biden would simply continue the neoliberal path laid by Clinton and followed by Obama. It didn’t make much sense when Reed was writing this.

“Which Side Are You On?” is about the Democratic Socialists of America. Around 2018 the DSA invited and then disinvited Reed to a debate around the question of “identity politics”. Although the debate itself is important—it’s more or less why I’ve been thinking about Reed’s work so much—I’m not going to go into that. Rather what I want to do is highlight the beginning of the second paragraph:

DSA, as a result of the energies unleashed around the Bernie Sanders campaign and the 2016 election, has experienced such massive growth as to have become essentially a new organization. And the current controversy within the organization condenses a larger challenge facing the left in the United States as we confront the lessons of the victory of Trumpism and the need to struggle to contain and defeat it.

Reed recognizes DSA’s transformation from a small niche group to becoming a new organization. But note what he attributes it to—the 2016 election and the Sanders campaign. I guess this is correct too, in as much as the Sanders campaign arguably generated significant energy for the DSA. But it begs the question—what force was most responsible for generating the push for a Sanders campaign itself?

"The Whole Country is the Reichstag" focusing with unfortunate laser-like precision on the Trump tendency seems to suggest that the material context itself generated this moment (apologies for the length of the quote):

A key practical reason to stress the danger on the horizon is the possibility that the national and global political-economic order we’ve known as neoliberalism has evolved to a point at which it is no longer capable of providing enough benefits, opportunity, and security to enough of the population to maintain its popular legitimacy. I am hardly alone in suggesting that we may have come to a significant crossroad. People with much greater faith in and commitment to contemporary capitalism than I have, and who have much more sophisticated knowledge of its intricate inner dynamics, also have expressed that view, though in somewhat different terms and in relation to different political concerns. And that’s in addition to a broader consensus among globalist economic technocrats that the tendency to financial crises is chronic and that the goal of management of the global financial system must center more on recognizing them quickly and mitigating their effects than on preventing them. No less decorated a Doctor of the neoliberal Church than Lawrence Summers as early as 2013 invoked, albeit gingerly, the language of “secular stagnation,” long rejected by his brand of economists, as perhaps useful for making sense of chronic underperformance of U.S. GDP.9 He elaborated further on the stagnationist tendency in the national economy in a 2019 Brookings paper. BlackRock, Inc., the world’s largest asset management firm which has a significant voice in the Biden administration, most prominently through Brian Deese, Director of the National Economic Council, also sounded the alarm about stagnation and discussed heterodox responses, including industrial policy, another neoliberal bugbear, in a 2019 report, “Dealing with the Next Downturn.” At the same time, the already astonishing patterns of regressive redistribution of wealth and income that largely have defined neoliberalism globally, and in the U.S. particularly, have accelerated since the Great Recession, and even more during the coronavirus pandemic.  How could such an order not slide into the throes of legitimation crisis?

How could such an order NOT slide into the throes of a legitimation crisis? How indeed. This read would suggest that the economists have shifted in a more liberal-left direction NOT because our common sense understanding has shifted (as a partial result of movements like Occupy) but rather solely because the material realities have shifted. When he refers to Summers’ 2013 comment he refers to it as “early”, when in reality it was two years after Occupy.

Now I do think Reed’s right on a number of other things. Anyone concerned with the near future of the country (and the world) should read the entire piece…just don’t read it before you go to bed. But he’s consistently wrong on the power movements like Occupy have had. There is no inherent reason why increased levels of inequality would by themselves generated a movement against them—rather some force has to take the material reality and then provide a set of ideas that explain and provide solutions to it that then take hold in a wider public. This is what Occupy was able to do. Biden’s supporting a $3.5 trillion spending program (along with tax increases on the rich) not because the material context called for him to do so, but rather because the Left now has more political power within the Democratic Party. And this is because of Occupy and because of Black Lives Matter.

I try to keep these newsletters at around 1000 words, so I won’t write about Charles Mills (who passed away last week), but will do so in the next issue.