Thanks to Jackson Heights Books for the paid opportunity to review Noam Chomsky’s Occupy.
Ten years ago, in the wake of one of the worst economic meltdowns in US history, demonstrators set up camp on the gray granite benches of Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan. They called themselves Occupy Wall Street, and they abhorred the influence of America’s wealthiest people and corporations over a government that couldn’t (or wouldn’t) help the struggling majority. The protest had no clear goal, and when New York mayor and billionaire Michael Bloomberg finally lost his patience with the proletariat, he ordered the police department to clear the park. Two hundred protesters were arrested.
The Occupy movement could not erase the outsized role of money in politics, but it contributed a blueprint for the “leaderless” democracy that today’s social movements exercise. This practice and the history that shaped the movement are presented in engaging detail in Occupy (Zuccotti Park Press, 2013), a collection of speeches and interviews given by linguist and historian Noam Chomsky. His contemporaneous observations on the movement are an opportunity to revisit the spirit of Occupy on its tenth anniversary, and a chance to study what Chomsky got right and wrong about its impact on American society.
Chomsky sets the tone of Occupy by offering clear insight into what sparked activists' grievances: the economic shift from manufacturing to “financial manipulation,” then the exploding influence of wealth in developing public policy. With that came deregulation in the financial industry, the erosion of labor rights and increasing isolation of the worker class, whom Chomsky calls the “precariat”: those living precariously without the safety net that wealth affords.
“It's not the periphery anymore. It’s becoming a very substantial part of the society in the United States,” Chomsky told demonstrators at Occupy Boston in October 2011. “Now the world is indeed splitting into a plutonomy and a precariat—again, in the imagery of the Occupy movement, the one percent and the 99 percent.”
Chomsky revisits economic inequality in a range of contexts in Occupy, from domestic policy and worker rights, the press and social media, gender equality and climate change, to the Iraq War and the “Arab Spring” movement that deposed Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak. His speeches and interviews are published in chronological order, which allows the reader to experience the evolution of Occupy practices with different issues. However, for Chomsky, the solutions are the same: face-to-face organization of the worker class, self-determination through civic participation, and solidarity across movements and platforms.
For Chomsky, participatory democracy is more than theory: it is a working function of labor union actions, the women’s movement and the Iowa caucuses. Through these historical examples Chomsky recreates the spirit of Occupy—consensus, solidarity and mutual aid—and makes anarchist ideas more accessible than activist Dean Spade’s guide book Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis and the Next (Verso Books, October 2020). The latter presents anarchism with more zeal than evidence, even as it offers very practical advice on managing mutual aid projects.
There is both satisfaction and disappointment in reading Occupy ten years post-occupation, as hindsight reveals what Chomsky got wrong and right about the historical impact of the movement. At the time, Chomsky would not acknowledge that racism existed without capitalism, perhaps because it meant admitting that class solidarity would not bridge the racial divide. In Occupy, he reveals this concern in the impressive detail he lavishes on the success of the civil rights movement, and in the scant mention he lends to the white-liberal blowback—what Martin Luther King, Jr called the “shallow understanding from people of good will.” Ten years later, descendants of the Occupy movement continue to debate whether racism is a symptom of capitalism or a distinct disease.
However, Chomsky knew that the principles of Occupy—interpersonal organizing, solidarity and participatory democracy—would provide a framework for other movements, including those that the initial occupation alienated. Occupy the Hood was formed during the occupation of Zuccotti Park and used the same dynamic to examine systemic racism. Around the same time, Occupy activists in California, New Mexico and Arizona incorporated racial justice to their agendas. Today, anti-government protesters in Hong Kong, antifascists and the Black Lives Matter movement follow the organizing blueprint that Occupy established a decade ago.
“One of the main contributions of Occupy, I thought, was that it brought people together in face-to-face contact,” Chomsky said in a December 2012 interview. “People were actually working together to do something in common, with mutual support, with solidarity.”
Occupy is worth reading for the historical context that it brings to contemporary activism, and to better understand the shortcomings of the socialist movement in America. Chomsky’s gentle narration makes detailed arguments easy to digest without burying them in unsubstantiated zeal, and his expertise and mistakes equally guide current political movements.
Occupy, written by Noam Chomsky. Second edition published July 2013 by Zuccotti Park Press. Paperback; 187 pages.