Interdependent power: Strategizing for the Occupy Movement

I study American protest movements. I write about them, sometimes critically, and I also participate in some of these movements. When I am a participant, I try to bring what I have learned from my research on historical movements and my close observation of contemporary movements into my discussions with movement activists and into my writing as well. So, maybe what I do is a kind of public sociology. My own preoccupation is not so much with questions about the origins and biography of movements that have dominated much of the academic literature. I am more interested in movement strategy, in the question of how people at the bottom sometimes exercise power. Inevitably, this is a question that has also preoccupied many movement activists.

It is also the right question for our historical moment. Across much of the world, societies caught in the grip of the aggressive form of capitalism that we call neoliberalism have witnessed large and strident protests by masses of people. These people are reacting to so-called austerity policies that mean rising inequality, lowered earnings, higher unemployment, cutbacks in funding for education and the gutting of the welfare state programs that were the great achievement of the movements of the last century. Taken together, these policies mean that the promises of prosperity and upward mobility that characterized capitalist democracies have been broken, or in the language of sociology, expectations frustrated, and the result is often characterized as a lost decade, even a lost generation. Moreover, the broken promises’ deep roots in the dynamics of neoliberal capitalism suggest that there will be no quick remedies.

In the United States, the more riveting of the resulting protests were called Occupy. They began in the fall of 2011 with an encampment in a small park in downtown Manhattan that the activists named Occupy Wall Street (OWS)! The crowds of largely young people announced their slogan, ‘We are the ninety-nine % They are the one percent!’ The encampment idea and the slogan caught fire, and encampments spread to perhaps 300 cities across the country, attracting not only the young but also some unionists and some poor people as well. For two months, the Occupations were in the news, and their issue, extreme inequality caused by the excesses of the financial sector, actually made its way into mainstream political discussion. Then local authorities ordered the police to clear away the tents, along with the sleeping bags and the makeshift kitchens and libraries, and it seemed to be over. The protestors had succeeded in doing what protest movements usually try to do: they had used street drama, bravado and clamor to bring their issue of extreme inequality into the limelight. Even the speakers at the Republican convention endlessly repeated the mantra of jobs and economic recovery. Of course, those were just words (and words intended to mislead by promoting pro-business policies as the solution to unemployment and economic slowdown). Obviously, neither the protest messaging nor the political rhetoric that responds to messaging was enough to advance the goals of the movement.

I should try to characterize the motley crowds of the Occupy Movement, because they did not fit entirely comfortably into our usual movement descriptors based on class or gender or race, for example. Its participants tended to be young, which made sense if only because this moment in capitalist development has hit the young hard. In the United States, young people now finish school with high debts and narrowed employment prospects. So maybe it was a youth movement. But young people are generally in the forefront of protest movements, if only because the advantages of biology and fewer social responsibilities make them more mobile and maybe more hopeful as well. This movement surely seemed intent on portraying itself as new and different. ‘Occupy everything; demand nothing,’ they proclaimed in an effort to show themselves as the agents of total and uncompromising transformation. While the tactic of occupation was not exactly new – the labor movement in the 1930s had occupied factories, and squatting on land or in houses is a familiar form of collective action in the United States and elsewhere – it was a break with the usual movement repertoire of marches and demonstrations, tactics that have the disadvantage of posing only very short-term inconvenience to the authorities and seem mainly aimed at affecting public opinion and electoral politics. In this respect, Occupy was different, partly because it was less familiar and partly because the protestors were not going to board the buses and go away at sundown. While they lasted, the occupations marked a physical space, a place where you could find the movement.

All this contributed to the movement’s attention-getting in its early weeks and its media splash. The phrase ‘we are the 99 percent’ became familiar. The Occupiers had succeeded in thrusting their issue, extreme inequality, into the political limelight. Republican contenders denounced the ‘growing mobs occupying Wall Street and other cities’ and condemned President Obama and the Democrats for sympathizing with Occupy (Friedman, 2011). But across the country the conversation changed. For example, the rather staid journal of the American Federation of Teachers now featured articles about ‘Watching inequality grow’ (Neuman and Celano, 2012). So I think Occupy should be counted as a communication success. This is the first hurdle a new political movement must surmount: it must command attention in the midst of all the chatter and static. It must communicate its issue to a wide audience, including its potential constituents. Notice, after all, that this is what movement marches and rallies and banners are all about.

But communication is not enough. Successful movements have to go beyond raising issues to exercising power; in particular, they have to summon the distinctive form of power that belongs to movements: the power of disruption or the threat of disruption. Elsewhere I have sometimes called this interdependent power, and I will explain what I mean by that in a moment. But back to Occupy, because I want to use the strategic dilemmas of that movement to illustrate my argument about interdependent power.

In the months after the encampments were cleared, the Occupy protestors ruminated and discussed, convening in their working groups to decide what they should do next. Then in the late summer of 2012 they announced a new campaign they called ‘Strike Debt’ that built on an earlier ‘Occupy Student Debt’ campaign and announced itself with the now familiar Occupy antics. A New York City Debtors’ Assembly formed, meeting in Washington Square Park, and protestors marched in the ‘Night of the Living Debt.’

Antics aside, at root, the idea behind the campaign was simple but awesome. The financial system (‘Wall Street’) had entangled tens of millions of Americans in debts, often on usurious and deceptive terms. These debts were carried on the books of the banks and other creditors as assets, of course. But what if people mounted a challenge to predatory lending and refused to pay? This could be a powerful blow to the financial sector. Student debt had reached the trillion-dollar mark that summer, while millions of homeowners held mortgages worth more than the market value of their houses, and credit card debt was rising sharply, reaching US$700 billion. ‘Debt is the tie that binds the 99 percent, the Occupiers chanted’ (McKee, 2012). And in numerous working groups and the assemblies, the idea of a debtors’ strike began to take hold.

Of course, there are lots of problems that have to be confronted for a debtors’ strike to grow and wield real power over the financial sector. I will turn to some of these strategy problems in a moment. But first I want to argue that OWS has identified a distinctive kind of power. It is a form of power that is rooted not in the control of coercive force, wealth, prestige or formal authority, but in the webs of economic, political and social cooperation that constitute social life. It is a kind of power that is often summoned by dominant groups in social relationships, as, for example, when employers threaten to move a plant overseas, but it is sometimes mobilized by subservient groups as well. Moreover, it is a kind of power that increases and spreads as the division of labor increases and spreads; as societies become more complex and more intertwined; and as patterns of cooperation become more extended and fragile. I call this interdependent power.

Usually when sociologists consider power abstractly they assume it is rooted in the control of resources, especially control of wealth and force or control of the institutional positions through which wealth and force can be deployed. ¹ The sorts of understandings that result from this perspective are familiar. The factory owner controls investment and jobs and so dominates the workers; the general deploys troops, and civilians cower and run; the large landholder squeezes the peasants; the rich dominate the poor, and so on. Moreover, wealth and force are typically used together, as when the general’s troops are deployed to aid the factory owner or the landholder, or more generally to defend the institutional bastions of wealth against challenges from below.

This is the usual view, and it explains most of our historical experience. But it does not explain all of our experience. Sometimes peasants rise up against landlords, workers rise against factory owners, the poor rise against the rich. Sometimes people with little wealth or institutional authority and minimal control over coercive force do exercise some power, at least for a time, against those who have ample wealth, authority and the means of force. Merely to list the resources of the contending parties in the customary fashion gives us little understanding of these episodes, because the power sometimes wielded by subordinate groups does not arise from wealth or control of the militia or the army. Rather, their power is rooted in the occasional ability of people at the bottom end of economic or political or social relationships to refuse, to strike, to withdraw or threaten to withdraw from systems of institutionalized cooperation.

In fact, while the familiar lists of power resources grounded in wealth, force, prestige or institutional authority seem to be consistent with the accelerating inequality of power in the United States and elsewhere, other features of neoliberal capitalism may have increased the potential of interdependent power. Distinctive features of contemporary capitalist economies make them exceptionally vulnerable to the withdrawal of cooperation; in other words, to the strike power in its many forms. These features include extended chains of production, reliance on the Internet to mesh elaborate schedules of transportation and production, and just-in-time production doing away with the inventories that once shielded corporations from the impact of the production strike. Contemporary economies rely on dense and fragile interactions, often over long distances. Many groups have appointed roles in these interactions. Therefore, many of them also have the potential capacity to disrupt the interactions by exercising interdependent power.

This is what Strike Debt intended to do. Of course, the resistance would have been enormous and the obstacles formidable. Strike Debt might not have succeeded; indeed, so worrisome were the obstacles that, so far at least, there has been no debtors’ strike on a scale that generates enough power to test its underlying proposition about potential power. But the idea nevertheless deserves our attention. The OWS activists were asserting that just as industrialists depend on workers for production and profit, so do the financial titans who have extended vast sums of credit – to homeowners and students and credit card holders and government agencies that float bonds – depend on these borrowers, whose loans constitute a good portion of the capital of the financial industry.

In some ways, it is a hard to get your mind around a debtors’ strike. We are used to the idea that workers can exercise power through the strike, or at least they once could. Workers refuse to play their normal roles in the factories or the fast food restaurants, they walk off the job, and the assembly line ceases, the food service stops. But the idea of the striking worker conjures up in our minds the image of a muscled and belligerent fellow, while the debtor is a shrinking and shamefaced little guy. The images are of course cultural constructions. Striking workers are often beaten, muscled or not, and the bizarrely ridiculous Donald Trump was in fact a debtor, indeed a big time debtor, while he made his fortune.

This in fact brings me to the first of a series of problems in actually realizing interdependent power. Before people can try to exercise power by refusal, by ceasing or threatening to cease playing their customary cooperative roles, they have to recognize the importance of what they normally do to those above them whom they want to bend to their will. And they have to see this in the face of ruling class definitions that privilege the contributions of dominant groups. So, a kind of redefinition of the nature and value of social contributions is crucial to the emergence of protest. It was what the Wobblies were trying to do when they sang, ‘It is we who plowed the prairies, built the cities where they trade; dug the mines and built the workshops, endless miles of railroad laid.’ Their words were intended to show workers, all kinds of workers, that their bosses needed them. Note that the message is the opposite of what employers try to communicate when they demean or trivialize work and workers, when they exert themselves to preach to workers about the uselessness of the strike, or when they advertise the ease with which workers can be replaced in a global economy. The recognition of interdependent power is always the initial problem in activating interdependent power. Before people can try to exercise power by using the leverage inherent in social cooperation, they have to see that their cooperation is necessary to those who ordinarily are in charge.

Occupy was trying to tackle this problem, in Yates McKee’s (2012) words, to break ‘with the zombie-like servitude to Wall Street … [and with] debt shame.’ The Debtors’ Assembly was conceived as an occasion for debtors to find each other, to speak as debtors, to make indebtedness the focus of a political movement. ‘Millions already do not and cannot pay their debt and are in effect on strike. These de facto strikers constitute … an invisible army of defaulters with massive political potential …’ Or, in the words of Occupier Christopher Casuccio, ‘Refusal … is an empowering, collective challenge to an illegitimate and predatory debt system.’ ²

There are other important obstacles to the realization of interdependent power that help explain why it is not actualized more often and more widely. Cooperative economic and social relations are institutionalized, which means they are rule-governed. Some of those rules are embedded in custom and others are matters of law, which means their enforcement involves the majesty and coercive power of the state. Even when people recognize the importance of their contributions to their antagonists, it is hard to break rules. After all, rules and rule-abiding behavior is a basic postulate of social life, ordering human activities according to the wisdom born of accumulated experience and securing us against the unexpected and unknown. People need rules, and they share an antipathy to the rule-breaker.

But rules are also the vehicle for the play of power in human affairs, for people’s efforts to pursue their interests by subordinating others. The rules governing economic and social cooperation are important in this process, because they specify the behaviors that are permissible by the different parties to interdependent relations. Thus, there are few rules that limit how capital can be deployed but strict rules governing worker strikes. Indeed, strikes and worker ‘combinations’ were outlawed for most of American history, and even after those broad prohibitions were eliminated, job actions were closely prescribed and, consequently, their disruptive effects were limited by the laws governing strikes. Many public sector workers in the United States are still denied the right to strike by state laws.

Strike Debt is perhaps especially difficult, because it proposed to break both with the strong age-old customs and with the laws that shield the lender from defaults by the debtor. True, the lenders in this case are the banks and financial companies that have been charged in the press with immoral and maybe criminal manipulations. Even so, the cultural norms and legal sanctions that are wielded against those who default on their debts remain strong. Note that the familiar argument against writing down the principle of inflated mortgages is that this would create the ‘moral hazard’ of easing the burden on debtors. So, although lenders are obviously dependent on debtors, most of the time, the rules impede and may even prevent debtors from turning that dependence into power.

Another problem that must be overcome to actualize interdependent power is that the numerous contributors to interdependent relations must in some sense be organized, at least to the extent of being able to coordinate their action. This is usually more difficult from the bottom than from the top of interdependent relations, partly because the contributors on the bottom are both more numerous and have fewer of the usual resources that facilitate collective action. This problem always preoccupies activists, and it is reflected in the familiar movement injunction that people must be organized. But what it means to be organized is different in different contexts. To labor organizers trying to win a union recognition election, it means winning the votes of a majority of workers in the bargaining unit. For a community organizer, it may mean simply bringing together enough people in the community to create at least the appearance of community-wide sentiment about an issue, as the Occupiers who are working with Hurricane Sandy victims are trying to do. For the operatives of a political party, it means organizing, however fleetingly, a majority of voters in a political district on Election Day. From the point of view that I am delineating here, it means organizing the subordinate groups who are tied to the target in cooperative relations and whose refusal or withdrawal will disrupt that cooperation.

From this point of view, the Strike Debt idea cast its net over an exceptionally wide range of potential constituents, just because the financial industry casts a wide net of credit and indebtedness, including underwater homeowners, credit card borrowers, student debtors and the families who have co-signed their loans. Moreover, at only one degree of separation, municipalities and local special districts also carry huge debts to the banks, some part of which may even be of questionable legality, as the result of dubious fees or the fixing of interest rates exposed by the LIBOR scandal. These local government agencies would be toughened in their dealings with the banks if local community organizations hard hit by austerity policies mobilized to demand the agencies resist banker terms.

The vast scale of the organizing task that Occupy set for itself would be daunting if not prohibitive to most ‘vertical’ organizations. So would the formidable power of the financial industry that the Strike Debt campaign idea targeted. To be sure, Occupy is part of what may well be an entirely different kind of organizing, sometimes called horizontal organizing. ‘Horizontalism,’ says Immanuel Wallerstein, ‘is the view that there are multiple kinds of justice movements, and these movements should speak to each other, deal with each other, without any one movement on top. They should be legitimating each other, rather than denouncing each other’. Such horizontalism is what Occupy espoused (Wallerstein, 2012: 110).

Both the scale of organizing or mobilizing demanded by a Strike Debt campaign and the power of the targeted financial industry suggest that the campaign was well beyond the capacity of relatively small Occupy groups. Occupy could only muster the large numbers needed for a multifaceted Strike Debt campaign if the campaign spread far beyond those at the center of the fledgling effort. If the economic downturn continues, those campaign partners may well emerge, and Occupy is unlikely to stand in the way, given its unusually relaxed stance regarding questions of organizational turf and its commitment to horizontal rather than vertical organizing. There are already student groups forming to fight student debt, and they may gain momentum from the stunning example of the successful Quebec student strike. Homeowners with underwater mortgages are mobilizing in a ‘Home Defenders League’ pioneered by former Acorn organizers. And the script of local campaigns to put pressure on government agencies to demand better terms from the banks that hold their bonds has virtually been written by the history of community organizing.

The biggest strategy problem of a Strike Debt campaign is also familiar from the history of movements. Defiant debtors have to be able to withstand reprisals, and the reprisals against a Strike Debt campaign are likely to be serious. True, some of the debts with which people have been saddled are probably illegal, and more of them are surely immoral. This may matter if the Democratic Party feels forced to choose between its financial backers and insurgent debtor-voters. Still, the movement would have to be large and threatening before Democratic politicians would interfere with the lowering of credit ratings, wage garnishments, the entrapment of movement organizers, the forced evictions of foreclosed families and the jailing of eviction resisters, all of which are reprisals now available to the financial industry. And a movement cannot become big and threatening unless it survives the early exemplary protests that show people what is possible.

Some Occupiers tried to solve that problem by creating funds capable of buying up written-down debts. I was skeptical. But that isn’t because I rule out less-than-defiant strategies. It may well be that the debtor strike can survive and grow by combining the sort of advocacy work that entangles creditors in legal procedures and slows down foreclosures and other forms of debt collection with more openly defiant action. Some groups, like City Lights in Boston, are doing this sort of advocacy now, with some success. Moreover, local activism to put real pressure on local governments and special districts to bargain hard with the banks is risk-free. Meanwhile – and there will be a meanwhile because a debtor strike is unlikely to reach its peak quickly – local campaigns to put pressure on congress people to rewrite bankruptcy laws, or to amend the Community Reinvestment Act to loosen credit terms when banks forgive local loans, could also be part of a debtors’ movement.

Still, there is probably no way a debtors’ movement can avoid risk. We should not be cavalier about those risks but assess them as best we can, adding to the usual movement analysis of the concentration of people and grievances and political opportunities an analysis of the capacity of local law enforcement and the movement’s capacity to restrain local law enforcement. Those who brave the authorities should be willing and prepared. And we should also remember that protest movements have always taken risks. The consequences can be tragic. But sometimes people win something, and sometimes they even change history.