-Gabon’s main opposition leader Andre Mba Obame in July 2012

After 14 months of exile the leader of Gabon’s outlawed Union Nationale (UN) party Andre Mba Obame, returned to Libreville on August 11^th to be greeted by a few hundred supporters at Leon M’ba International Airport. His arrival marked the return of an opposition party in the Central African state, as since the death of Pierre Mamboundou in October 2011, leader of the UPG (Union of the Gabonese People), politics had been dominated by President Ali Bongo Ondimba. Son of Omar Bongo who ruled Gabon for 42 years until his death, Ali Bongo’s first term as the new leader of the Parti Démocratique Gabonais (PDG) began in September 2009 after a controversial electoral victory. The outcome was challenged by his opponent Mr. Obame claiming widespread fraud, but even after the constitutional court affirmed the result, violent protests broke out across the nation. A longtime powerful minister in Omar Bongo’s regime, Obame switched sides after the PDG rejected his candidacy for succession and chose the president’s son to lead the party, thus solidifying the political and personal divide between the two Gabonese policymakers.

A year and a half later and the creation of his new Union Nationale opposition party, Mba Obame declared a stolen election proclaiming himself the victor and the rightful leader of Gabon, complete with a formal inauguration and the selection of a parallel cabinet. These actions led to charges of “disturbing public order” and “threatening state authority,” leading Obame to seek refuge in the local United Nations compound.  In his final days in Gabon before flying to France for “heath reasons,” his Union Nationale party was banned and diplomatic immunity removed, leaving Mr. Obame vulnerable to arrest and prosecution. Therefore the stage was set for a dramatic political clash at the capital airport.  But surprisingly the opposition leader’s landing was undisturbed, and he returned home comfortably.  The army observed from a far and PDG authorities proclaimed that Andre Mba Obame’s return was simply a “non event.”

This semblance of calm was short-lived as on the 15^th of August Andre Mba Obame’s supporters took to the streets.  They were met with tear gas and batons, as police were quickly called upon to disband an outlawed party’s unauthorized demonstration.  Protestors threw rocks and bottles and after an afternoon of confrontation, one woman had died, dozens were injured, and over 63 people were arrested.  The crackdown continued after the streets had settled, as masked gunmen burnt a TV station transmitter[1] owned by Mr. Mba Obame, heightening tension between rival party members.

Political posturing followed as the public prosecutor for the Gabonese capital reiterated her firm intention to arrest the “public nuisance,” to which Mr. Obame defiantly responded to the government challenge “Go on. I dare them.”  Union Nationale representatives have reiterated the calls of the Gabonese Diaspora for a sovereign national conference[2] and sweeping reforms, which Ali Bongo instantly rejected, dismissing the notion of a political crisis in Gabon.

Yet on the 25^th of August, ten days after their initial demonstration, 1500 Union Nationale supporters held an official rally in party headquarters where Andre Mba Obame addressed his followers and his accusers in a determined and passionate speech.  This time the police stayed back, following the interior minister’s guidelines that the rally would be allowed if they remained within the confines of their reopened office in Libreville.  The attendees obliged, and returned home without incident, passing the mobilized gendarmes on their way.

In addition to the party’s rally, other segments of civil society have also begun to voice their concern. The influential movement Ça Suffit Comme Ça released a damming communiqué calling for the release of the political prisoners from the August 15^th demonstrations.  According to their report, the incarcerated 63 have been subject to torture and degrading treatment over the past few weeks, contrary to Gabon’s international treaty obligations.

These developments all speak to impact of Obame’s return, helping to invigorate a previously disillusioned opposition party and reviving voices of discontent.  The interior minister’s decision to stand down and to allow the banned Union Nationale the right to assemble seems to reflect an understanding by the PDG that an arrest of Obame may no longer be politically feasible. To do so would almost certainly reignite the violent post-electoral clashes of 2009, and perhaps an even broader political crisis. With soaring food prices, a completely oil-based economy, dissatisfied unions and high youth unemployment; this is an additional problem that Ali Bongo would be smart to avoid.

As of the 7^th of September the standoff continues, as the government has yet to engage the banned opposition and their growing calls for dialogue.  Today in the southern city of Mouila, Union Nationale party members and new opposition voices have begun to draft a common declaration to submit to the government on the terms of a sovereign national conference.  Ali Bongo’s response will dictate the trajectory of this political confrontation. On the one hand he could help pacify the resistance by providing political space for the opposition and reinstating the banned party, perhaps in return for their recognition of his ruling status. But if the violent crackdown of the 15^th of August is the chosen reply, the President of the Gabonese Republic may have helped inspire a threat truly worthy of his concern.

American-educated President Faure Gnassingbe, who came to power in 2005 after the death of his father President Gnassingbe Eyadema, was re-elected in 2010, continuing the family’s 43-year rule. Faure’s coming to power in 2005 was marred with heavy violence in the country.  UNHCR estimates that between 400-500 protestors were killed, and that human rights abuse of opposition supporters, mainly the Union of Forces for Change (UFC), was widespread. In comparison, the 2010 elections were relatively calm except for some protest from supporters of the UFC when party leader and presidential candidate Jean-Pierre Fabre claimed victory, despite the counter-claim by the Togolese electoral commission that Gnassingbe had won. Since he has been in power, the tiny country of 7 million has experienced little growth and hovers around the rank of 162 on the Human Development Index.

The “Lysistratic non-action” form of protest, currently being used against the Togolese regime, has short roots in Africa. Most notably, this form of protest was used in Liberia in 2003 by the organization Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace, headed by Leymah Gboweewho. Gboweewho. In her mobilizing speech for the swift disarmament of fighters and for the end of rape women and young girls at the end of the country’s brutal 14 year civil war, she poignantly told the media, “Our bodies are their battlefield.” In 2009, a sex strike was initiated in Kenya by the Women’s Development Organization in an attempt to draw attention to the country’s “bickering leadership,” which threatened to reignite the post-electoral violence that characterized 2008, during which over 1,000 people were killed.

But why a sex strike? In Liberia, where the strikes centered on sexual violence against women, sex had a symbolic appeal as a tool of protest.  In Kenya in 2009, supporters of the strike admitted to using sex as their protest weapon because sex gets people to listen and to talk. The issue in Kenya was fighting between the president and the prime minister and a fear that the country would relapse into violence. In Togo, it seems that the use of the sex strike follows the same reasoning as the Kenyan protest. By abstaining from sexual interaction it is their hope to spark widespread media attention and spread the message that CST demands a change of power, rather than being directly related to women’s issues.

However successful the strike is in garnering support for the cause, even the state-owned Liberté media site sees the humor in it.

Street protests in Senegal did not translate into full-scale uprisings.

High unemployment and expectations among a bulging youth population, cost of living pressures, aging long-time rulers and government that is unresponsive and unrepresentative. The coexistence of these factors helped drive the 2011 uprisings in North Africa. In varying degrees and combinations, they are also evident across much of the rest of the continent, generating, over the last year, a mini-literature on the prospects for equivalent protest movements and moments in sub-Saharan Africa.

Broadly speaking, and perhaps with the possible exception of Sudan, it will remain too simplistic to argue that by analogy to the Arab Spring or some more direct “contagion,” sweeping social protest and political change are inevitable and imminent in sub-Saharan countries. This is even true—and in some cases especially so—in those settings with very little pluralist democratic space. Drivers of unrest and avenues for unrest are distinct; the fact that all the ingredients for mass discontent are ostensibly present in Cameroon, for example, does not make popular revolution there a foregone conclusion. Moreover, Mali’s experience in 2012 provides a caution against blank assumptions about popular resistance to autocratic elements: there we have recently seen a crowd demonstrate in support of a military coup against a democratic and relatively benign administration.

 Compare or contrast?

The first point to make is thus a general one: the limited utility or viability of making comparisons between regions and countries, whatever the shared ostensible drivers of discontent. The context for political mobilization and its forms differs markedly between sub-Saharan African countries. Niger and Nigeria have entirely different dynamics and democratic currents; insights on Mali are not necessarily of much use in anticipating outcomes in Malawi. It is true that ideas and examples now spread more quickly, and that the Arab Spring certainly both unnerved less legitimate authorities and inspired activists across sub-Saharan Africa. However, country-by-country analysis will continue to be more useful than broad-brush comparative efforts—including the present one.

 Technology of change

The second point to make is that prevailing claims that many African polities face an inevitable “Tahrir Square” phenomenon overlook the fact that despite ongoing rapid urbanization, most African populations remain predominantly rural. Meanwhile, educated, newly “middle-class” urban dwellers, are not necessarily interested in what it takes to displace incumbent governments. Like the middle classes, social media played an important role in Egypt’s revolution. However, while mobile technology has spread exponentially in sub-Saharan countries, average Internet penetration rates are still generally very low (below or around 10%).

Although mass access to the growing fusion of mobile and Internet technology will steadily transform African political landscapes, radio broadcasts are still the primary source of news for most people on the continent—and relatively easy for more autocratic regimes to control. It is too simplistic to assume that Africa’s exponential growth in mobile phone-based banking—and the financial inclusion it portends—necessarily translates into similar advances in communicating political ideas or in greater political inclusivity.

Initiatives to increase Internet access—such as the World Bank’s Kenya Open Data Initiative launched last year, or Google’s 2011 Orange deal across Africa—will not necessarily promote Egypt-style protest movements for at least two reasons (other than the time it will take for more universal access to these services). Such initiatives may make it easier to view government information, empowering civil society groups and political parties to make more coordinated campaigns—but if so, this trend would point to formal rather than street politics as the main avenue for growth in political expression. Moreover, authoritarian forces can also use the new technologies to monitor or discredit opponents. Where this fails, blunt and more familiar techniques still work in physically smothering dissent without provoking further outbreaks.

 Already—or not yet

A third important, perhaps obvious, distinction is that unlike the North African countries, democratization of one form or another had come to much of sub-Saharan Africa in the 1990s: in general, although there is widespread dissatisfaction with corruption, poor service delivery and infrastructure, and growing social inequality, there is not the same long-term democratic deficit or ready constituency for change as that which fuelled the Arab Spring.

Take South Africa: its youth unemployment rate suggests that in theory the country should be ripe for widespread, sustained mass protests. This time last year, many local commentators made the too-easy leap from “joblessness” to “imminent unrest”. Yet a much-publicized “economic freedom” march last year on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and Chamber of Mines yielded a crowd only a fraction of the size and intensity that black South Africa’s massed public is historically capable of. This is partly explained by the particularities of ANC politics and personalities (and municipality-level protests are increasing), but it also reflects that South Africa is a democratic country with ample party, union or other avenues for free political expression. African democracies from South Africa to Senegal (where robust youth-led street protests in 2011 did not translate into full-scale uprisings, despite some analysts’ predictions), the multiparty landscape is different, but there is still sufficient faith in public institutions that the medium-term prospects of any wider popular uprising are weak.

In autocratic countries, other examples show that for reasons other than (often very real) fear or futility, sub-Saharan populations make different calculations that do not necessarily point to Arab Spring-style uprisings. Angola’s democracy is highly dysfunctional and its social inequalities are highly visible—yet memories of its long civil war are still one important factor preventing recent urban protests from spreading into Luanda’s slums; many urban Zimbabweans appreciate the existing political compromise and understand that mass protests could provide a pretext for overt military rule in the name of “restoring public order”; the reason Swaziland’s 2011 fiscal crisis did not lead to mass uprisings in Africa’s last absolute monarchy is not only that the authorities tolerate no dissent, but also because most Swazis are socially conservative and reluctant to challenge the royal household and traditional leaders in overt ways. (Attempted) revolution of some sort may be a matter of time in more politically austere settings from Ethiopia to Equatorial Guinea, but if this occurs it will not necessarily manifest as popular uprising; since independence Uganda has never experienced a peaceful transfer of power, but when the current president finally leaves office, it is far from obvious that the mass popular will (through the street or ballot box) will be the cause.

 An African ‘Occupy’ movement?

2011 was marked not only by the Arab Spring but also by the “Occupy” movements in many major Western cities. The phenomenon sparked few, if any, analogous events in sub-Saharan Africa. Social protest in Africa is more likely to revolve around land or extractive sector schemes (in rural areas) or cost of living, electricity and other services, and high-profile instances of corruption or abuse (in urban centers) than around the more structural reform agenda discernible in the “Occupy” movement.

Even so, as I argued elsewhere, Tony Blair’s claim that Africa is now entering a “post-ideological age” is surely wrong. The terms on which national wealth is extracted and exported, and the role of the state in the national economy, remain deeply politicized issues in more mature economies like South Africa’s. The overall ‘national idea’ for how countries should grow and share their wealth is far from resolved in other evolving export-driven African economies. In this sense a generalization is possible: political change in many settings in sub-Saharan Africa will continue to revolve around contests, democratic or otherwise, for control of the state apparatus and, through it, economic opportunities. Social protests, sometimes becoming paralleling political ones, are likely to revolve around unmet expectations of populations who do not perceive a fair or sufficient socio-economic dividend from the prevailing political order.

Campaigning in Saint-Louis, Senegal

In March, following a campaign season rife with state-sponsored violence, intimidation, and suppression of protests, former president Abdoulaye Wade of the Senegalese Democratic Party (PDS) peacefully handed power over to Macky Sall, an ex-PDS politician who now heads the Alliance for the Republic party (APR). Senegal’s recent mobilization is rooted in Wade’s pursuit of a constitutionally questionable third term. In summer of 2011—roughly six months after the Arab Spring began, and two months following strikes in Burkina Faso calling for the resignation of president Blaise Compaoré—Wade proposed a law allowing presidential candidates to win the election with only 25% of the vote. He also sought to establish a president-vice presidential ticket, allegedly in order to run with his son, Karim.

Wade’s propositions generated opposition, especially in Dakar. Alioune Tine, President of the African Assembly for the Defense of Human Rights (RADDHO), organized opposing parties, movements, and unions into a group called Touche Pas à Ma Constitution! (Don’t Touch My Constitution!) Citizens’ movements like Y’en a marre (Fed Up With It) also protested independently. These groups became the “June 23 Movement” (M23). As the National Assembly considered Wade’s amendment, PDS elites evacuated the downtown area of Dakar and protesters faced police and tear gas. Soon afterwards, Wade retracted his propositions. The M23 had saved the constitution, but Wade still insisted on running for a third term.

The one-year anniversary of June 23 arrived during Senegal’s campaign for the July 1, 2012 legislative elections. The M23 sponsored gatherings at Independence Plaza and the National Assembly. Y’en a marre’s rapper-leaders ended their one-year musical “sabbatical” to protect the constitution, holding a concert and promoting future projects like “pharmacies for the people…one house-one tree, and…peace in Casamance” (the latter is a region in Senegal with a long-standing separatist movement)¹.

What might the June 23, 2011 mobilization mean for Senegal’s democratization in the long-term? The electoral transition will not necessarily deepen democracy.

Senegal has a longer history of elections than most other African countries, yet its leaders have still been quasi-autocratic. Under Wade and his predecessors, the government packed state institutions (like the Constitutional Court) with supporters of the president. It harassed opponents, journalists, and protesters. Wade’s Division of Criminal Investigation functioned like a secret police, interrogating and detaining “threatening” individuals. His victory in 2000 ended forty years of Socialist Party rule, but this turnover did not prevent him from subsequently employing heavy-handed practices.

Hence, it is paradoxical that the media presented Wade as a committed democrat when he accepted defeat in 2012. If we use a more exacting definition of democracy—one which includes not just competitive elections but unfettered civil liberties, opportunities to meaningfully challenge incumbents, and little presidential abuse of state resources­—Senegal has not yet made the cut. It is still too early to gauge democratization under Macky Sall, who is approaching his hundredth day in office.

What we do know is that since 2007, Senegalese citizens have accessed new means of political participation. Citizens’ movements increasingly compete with political parties for the moral authority to ensure government accountability. And everyone was invited to attend town hall meetings by the Assises Nationales, a group of opposition parties, movements, and unions that discussed Senegal’s problems with citizens throughout the country and issued a detailed report suggesting economic, political, and social reforms that future governments should implement². The results now shape platforms of key politicians, including President Sall.

Despite all the changes that Senegal has experienced over the past year, one thing remains the same: the general conviction that the president deserves a legislative majority to implement his program. Although voter participation in the legislative elections was low (about 37%), those who turned out did so largely in favor of Sall’s Benno Bokk Yakaar (United in Hope) coalition, which will now enjoy a significant majority in the National Assembly. Senegal’s upcoming legislative session will certainly prove to be a test for the country’s increasingly visible citizens’ movements, which will be under pressure to show their willingness and ability to hold politicians accountable. If they succeed, Senegal could chart a pathway to better government that, unlike some of the Arab Spring uprisings and recent African coups, entails mobilization without violent regime change.

Photo from the Visions for the Future Series by Robert Rippberger

In late June of this election year, a short YouTube video entitled “Beyond Obama” rocked the political media and blogosphere. In the eight-minute clip, a besuited and bespectacled man sits grasping the edge of his chair, as if his intensity would carry him away, and with the unwavering stare of a prophet unloads a radical critique of the American political system that ends with a call for the defeat of Obama and a progressive takeover of the Democratic Party. The message was delivered from the far left of the president, and the program espoused implies nothing short of a fundamental rethinking and reformulation of our social, political, and economic institutions. It is no wonder that both Democrats and Republicans were bewildered. What has been somewhat surprising, however, is the failure of progressives to engage with this imperative to drop the false hope of a lesser of two evils and develop a real progressive program that expands economic and educational opportunities to empower regular men and women.

The speaker was philosopher and Brazilian politician Roberto Mangabeira Unger. As the Roscoe Pound Professor of Law at Harvard University, Unger has tutored many of the American and world elite, including Barack Obama. He is the author of over two dozen books on social theory, legal thought, economic thought, political alternatives, and philosophy, in which he develops a profound theory of self and society that can only be likened to Hegel, Marx, and Weber—combined. Politically, Unger has long been at the forefront of the opposition movement in his native Brazil. He authored the founding manifesto of Brazil’s main opposition party in the 1980s, ran the presidential campaigns of Leonel Brizola and Ciro Gomes in the 1980s and 1990s, ran himself for president in 2000 and 2006, and from 2007 to 2009 served in the Lula cabinet as Secretary of Strategic Affairs, receiving a presidential medal of honor for his work on revamping the national defense strategy.

At the heart of Unger’s thought and activity is the conviction that the world is made and imagined. There are no natural social, political, or economic arrangements upon which our individual or social behavior must be based. Property rights, liberal democracy, wage labor—these are all historical artifacts that have no necessary relation to the goals of free and prosperous human activity. In fact, for Unger, only by seizing the ideals of social, political, and economic activity and freeing them from their institutional chains can the full extent of human potential be released and, as he puts it, “make us more god-like.” The market, the state, and human social organization should not be confined to certain rigid and predetermined institutional arrangements but need to be left open to experimentation and revision according to what works for the project of the empowerment of humanity.

I spoke with Professor Unger in his Cambridge office on June 27. What his proposed program means in political terms—and how exactly to bring it about—was the subject of our conversation.

THE SITUATION

One of the interesting things to observe in the eruption of debate over your “Beyond Obama” video was the disagreement about the problems we face today, not to mention the solutions. This extended from local commentators to figures in the two major political parties, all of whom threw out ideas about special interests, about congressional deadlock, about tax cuts, and so forth. But all this is bickering about the top line while leaving the bottom line untouched. In your estimation, what are the major problems that we face today?

Over the past two centuries, a certain ideology has aroused the idea that the ordinary man and woman need not just be a cog in the machine in this grinding system of entrenched social division and hierarchy. That he can rise to a higher life. But that is not how the world is organized today. There is a systematic compression, a humiliation, a sterilization of all of this human potential. Seven aspects of this problem accentuate the failing of the promise to raise humanity up to a higher level of capability and of experience.

One aspect of this problem is that all contemporary societies remain classicized, including the most egalitarian European social democracies. They are based on the division of society into classes that are reproduced with the differential transmission of wealth and educational opportunity by the family. Social mobility is limited, and a person’s life span is shaped by the accident of their birth.

A second aspect is that a vast majority of people in the world remain consigned to economically dependent or oppressive wage labor and condemned to do repetitious work that could in principle be done by a machine.

A third aspect is that as science and technology relentlessly evolve and help form revolutionary methods of production and of learning, they are relatively isolated from the rest of society and the economy. The division between the vanguard and rearguard has become a new source of inequality and exclusion.

A fourth aspect of this problem is the immense trouble and threat created by finance. Under current arrangements, the vast amount of the savings of society that is concentrated in the banks and the stock markets is spent in trading activity that has only an oblique or episodic relation to production. The production system is largely self-financed by the savings of large firms—and finance, rather than being a good servant, becomes a bad master.

The fifth aspect of the problem is the reorganization of labor. The whole form of protection, representation, and organization of labor that developed in the world from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century was based on the concentration of large numbers of workers in large productive units under the aegis of large corporate entities. Labor is increasingly being reorganized on a worldwide basis around decentralized contractual relationships, such as offshoring. The result is economic insecurity and the weakening of labor in relation to capital.

The sixth aspect is education. Take the United States. There are two different educational worlds. There is the world of top private schools, which teach people the doctrines of John Dewey in analytical problem solving, and there are the rest, which offer a kind of vast babysitting, in which people are abandoned and not equipped to rethink the dominant ideas in their situation.

A seventh problem is that all democracies of the world are relative and weak democracies. They are organized in a way that makes change depend on crisis. The general rule is “no crisis, no change.” The practical result is that democracy is impotent to alter basic institutional arrangements and class structures, except in the cases of extreme crisis.

These problems you have just laid out are problems that every society and country in the world faces today. Is there a more specific situation in the United States?

The United States is an extreme case of this universal problem because no country is more of a cauldron of vitality and ingenuity. The American political religion continues to be the religion of the constructive genius of ordinary men and women associated with the idea that everything is possible. But what has happened in the United States is that Americans have exempted their institutions from the experimentalist impulse that is otherwise so vital in American culture. Thinkers from Jefferson to Dewey, who were in rebellion to this exemption, have failed to persuade their fellow Americans to lift this exemption and subject institutions to democratic experimentation in the service of these higher ideals.

THE POLITICS

How do the current politics fail to address these issues?

Progressives in the world, and in the United States especially, do not contribute to the objective of social and inclusive economic growth. They do not work for a form of national development based on a sustained broadening of educational and economic opportunities. Instead they accept the present arrangements and seek to humanize them through compensatory redistribution, that is, entitlement programs. Thus, the progressives become the humanizers of the supposedly inevitable. They don’t have a program. Their program is the program of their conservative adversaries with a humanizing face. The practical result is that the talents and the energies of the vast majority of ordinary men and women are squandered.

This is not simply a problem about how resources are allocated by the government. It is a problem about the way things are organized. Thus my focus falls on institutional reimagination and institutional reconstruction.

Has not the Democratic Party attempted to address these issues?

The Democratic Party, at least since the time of Lyndon Johnson, has failed to propose to the American people a program that would be responsive to the needs and aspirations of the broad working class of the country—a program of education and economic opportunity, of equipping the vast vitality and dynamism of the American people by innovating in policies and in institutions.

To be clear, the Republican Party and the Republican candidate are much worse than their Democratic equivalents in every respect and in all the dimensions that we have been discussing. However, all the Democratic Party has offered, at least since the presidency of Johnson, is a sugarcoating, a dilution, a humanization of the Republican program. It has allowed conservatives to exercise power in the United States by combining concessions to the material interests of the moneyed classes with concessions to the moral anxieties of the moneyless classes.

THE TASK

Here you have outlined a set of dire problems. Similarly, in the “Beyond Obama” video, you issue a devastating critique of the American political system, ending with a call to defeat Obama in November. You offer more than critique, however, and in many places you have articulated at great length a program. In the context of the American political situation today, what should the progressive do?

The most important task is to form a vision of the national future. What matters most in a programmatic statement is to mark a direction and then to define the first steps to move in that direction. The first task of the progressives is to have such a vision.

The second task is to form movements and to ensure that some of these movements engage what has been the chief instrument of progressive politics in the United States, the Democratic Party. The movement should be to form a position within the Democratic Party, to seek power within the Democratic Party, and to change the course of the Democratic Party.

You go quite far in laying out such a vision for the United States in chapter nine of your book The Left Alternative. Can you expand upon this for the current situation in light of the problems we now face?

There are six families of initiatives to address the problems at hand:

1. Production. Propagate through large sectors of the economy and society the advanced practices of production that now flourish in relatively isolated productive vanguards, like Silicon Valley. The vast majority of the American economy is locked out of those advanced practices. It can only have access through the development of a form of coordination between government and firms that is decentralized, pluralistic, participatory, and experimental. State governors are beginning to experiment with such initiatives, not just the Democratic governors but the Republican governors as well.
   
   
2. Finance. Enlist finance in the service of the real economy. Finance should serve the real economy rather than being allowed to serve itself. For example, institute tax and regulatory changes that encourage speculative finance that has a direct relation to the enhancement of productivity and the expansion of output. At the same time, discourage speculative finance that does not.
   
   
3. Labor and its relation to capital. Increasingly, in the United States and throughout the world, labor is being organized in decentralized networks of contractual relationships. The question is, will this mean general economic insecurity? We need to develop a form of legal protection, organization, and representation for labor performed under these conditions and do so always with a view of the long-term objectives—the twin long-term objectives of the realization of self-employment and cooperation and the construction of a world in which people are not condemned to do the formulaic and repetitious work that can be done by machines but rather the time of our lives is reserved to develop that which we do not yet know how to repeat.
   
   
4. Taxation. Understand that what matters in taxation in the short term is the aggregate level of the tax take. The country needs to increase its tax base but do so through a neutral tax that mitigates the effects of high taxation on economic incentives. Use this capital to invest in people.
   
   
5. Education. There are two great priorities in education. The first is to overcome the dualism between the two worlds of education that exist in the United States: the Deweyian world of analytic and problem-solving education in the private schools and top-tier public schools and the regressive educational Fordism, the superficial information-orientated, encyclopedic learning, and the social control that prevails in the public schools. To develop a form of education that is analytic rather than informational in its focus, that introduces information selectively as a device for the acquisition of analytic capabilities, that favors cooperation in teaching and learning over the combination of individualism and authoritarianism, and that approaches every subject from contrasting points of view. Furthermore, in the secondary schools, to create a continuum between technical and general education—a form of technical education that is focused on generic capabilities rather than on job-specific and machine-specific skills and a form of general education that is focused on dialectical and analytic learning rather than on the encyclopedia.
   
   The second priority is to reconcile the local management of schools with national standards. This requires not only a national form of assessment and a mechanism to redistribute resources from richer places to poorer places but also a procedure for corrective intervention to take over local failing school systems, fix them, and return them fixed.
   
   
6. The organization of politics. Here is something very difficult in the United States, and difficult in part because of the extreme case of the exemption that the Americans give to their institutions from the reach of the experimentalist impulse. What we should desire is a high-energy democracy that increases the level of organized public engagement in politics, creates a mechanism to rapidly overcome impasse between the branches of government, exploits the capacities of the federal system to create countermodels of the future in particular localities or sectors, and enriches representative democracy with features of direct democracy, especially at the local level.

On this last point, you have painted the horizon, but what is the point of departure?

The point of departure is to sever the link between politics and money—to take politics out of the corrupting shadow of money. If there are legal and constitutional obstacles to the restraint of the use of private money in politics, this influence of private money can be greatly diminished by increasing the public funding of political activity and extending the access of political parties and social movements to the means of mass communication. There is no reason why political parties and organized social movements should not be able to get free media time on the broadcast networks.

These six sets of initiatives you outline appear to be the rudiments of a progressive program with a structural content. Nothing like this exists in the United States . . .

The Democratic Party has defined itself ever since the late 1960s by the absence of such a program. It has thus allowed the political initiative in the country to be seized by its conservative adversaries. Its whole posture has been to propose to the American people a softer and more humane version of the project of its conservative adversaries.

How will the defeat of Obama help realize and implement such a program?

The defeat of Obama is not a sufficient condition for this change, but it is a necessary condition. It is a condition that is admittedly attended by significant risks, such as the loss of judicial and administrative appointments, but it is the indispensable preliminary to the struggle over the Democratic Party—and more generally over the progressive vision. Otherwise, the United States and the progressives in the country are going to continue indefinitely in the situation in which they find themselves: they come to power, they delegate the formulation of policy to people who are entirely pliant to the interests of the financial plutocracy, they persist in this worldwide military adventurism, and then all progressives have to be silent and play along with them for fear that were it not for them things would be even worse. This is the bargain progressives have made. What I am arguing is that this bargain puts the progressives and the American people in an impossible situation.

Impossible the situation may be, but it is almost a gamble to revoke our political support for Obama.

The decisive issue is whether the Democratic Party and its candidate for the presidency will stand for an alternative. There is no prospect of a vital contest over the redirection of the party so long as it remains in the presidency, bereft of a structural vision or of a transformative impulse. Such a contest is much more likely to occur in the sequel to a loss of the presidency, as American political history has repeatedly confirmed.

This is really a question of whether progressives should continue to resign themselves to the lesser evil or to forge a new path altogether.

For progressives to continue having as their program the humanization of the program of their conservative adversaries—while justifying their abdication as realism—is to concede and to ensure defeat before the fight has even begun. There has been no attempt to develop a program of institutional innovation responsive to the interests and aspirations of the broad working-class majority of the country. The Democratic Party has continued to rely on a modicum of regulation and compensatory redistribution through tax-and-transfer as a substitute for any structural vision, and it hopes that the courts and the bureaucracy will make up for the failures of democratic politics.

If I believed that the paths taken by the Democratic and the Republican parties in power, with regard to either domestic or foreign policy, were fundamentally different, my conclusion would be different. The issue therefore is not political purity, the handwashing of Pontius Pilate. It is, on the contrary, the willingness to confront, unflinchingly and without illusion, the tragic character of political choice while sustaining a much higher level of hope than American progressives have generally been willing to allow themselves.

It is thus important to have a comprehensive vision of what we want and a developed program on how to get there. Otherwise we find ourselves chasing after immediate gains, such as health care, or fighting against repeals, such as labor laws.

I do not dispute that differences between the parties about issues such as health care are real and important. I do deny that they are as important as success or failure in the formulation and advancement of a program to democratize the market economy and to deepen democracy in the United States. And I do not believe in change without cost and without struggle.

One of the assumptions of my view is that the United States is not a country condemned by its history and culture to a permanent antipathy to such an impulse. The Democratic Party and its presidents have consistently failed to develop a successor to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal—Johnson’s presidency was the last attempt, and a compromised one at that. They have pursued no consequential project for the sustained broadening of economic and educational opportunity. Instead, they have placed at the center of the national agenda a series of initiatives and commitments that offend the sensibilities of a large part of the country and inhibit the emergence of a transracial progressive majority. As a result, they have allowed their conservative adversaries to win and hold power by combining material concessions to the moneyed interests with immaterial, symbolic concessions to the moneyless majority. To end this situation, it is necessary to have ideas, to take action, and to stop taking the defense of the lesser evil to be the whole point of progressive politics.

Another assumption of my view is that a major transformation can take place, indeed, must take place, by small, cumulative steps. Change that is structural in its outcome can nevertheless be experimental and fragmentary in its method. As always in programmatic argument and transformative practice, what matters is to mark a direction and to envisage, in the circumstance, the first steps.

THE GOALS

What is a progressive in your view?

The thesis that defines what a progressive is today is the ideal that extending the powers and intensifying the experience of ordinary humanity is combined with a disposition to change the institutional background of society—the structure—in the service of this ideal. Someone whose position is simply the humanization of the present structure through a combination of administrative and judicial action is not a progressive. Unfortunately, this latter view is the view that is in charge in the Democratic Party and throughout the country and will continue to be in charge until there is a shakeup.

So the difference here is one of commitment to institutional transformation?

What typically defines the leftist position is a combination of a theoretical egalitarianism with an institutional or structural conservatism or resignation. Leftists say that what defines them is their commitment to greater equality, but at the same time they accept the present framework of political and economic institutions. How is it this egalitarianism can coexist with an acceptance of present structures? The practical significance is that egalitarianism means the attenuation of inequality and exclusion through the compensatory redistribution of tax and transfer.

What are the end goals of all of this? What can we hope for?

Look at what was common to the liberals and socialists of the nineteenth century. They never thought the supreme objective was equality; rather it was the ascent of humanity—of ordinary humanity—to a higher plane of life, a higher plane of capability, of experience, and of scope. The struggle against entrenched inequality was always understood as accessory to the larger objective. The aim was never the humanization of society, it was the divinization of humanity—the increase of our share in what we ascribe to the divine. The means by which to achieve that objective is a cumulative institutional reshaping of society, especially of the institutions that define the market economy and democracy.

THE OBSTACLES

What prevents the implementation and realization of this program?

What prevents the advance of the proposals I just laid out is the combination of interests with superstitions. In the present debate, every alternative is tarred with suspicion of being the advance of the state over individual freedoms. For example, I propose an alternative form of organizing the market economy. Then someone will say that it is not really an alternative form of organizing the market economy but only a way of subordinating the market economy to the state. In other words, under the established ideological vision, the existing organization of the market is represented as somehow natural, and any attempt to reorganize the market in service of inclusion and empowerment is then misrepresented as a statist intervention in the market. The chief obstacle, then, to the progress of such alternatives is the association of material interests with this discourse, with this conceptual world that has no place for such alternatives.

One way of understanding what you have said today is that there needs to be a three-pronged approach to realizing the remaking of American politics: infiltration of the Democratic Party, a continued pressure and discourse among activists, and the development of insight, ideas, and institutional alternatives. Two interrelated problems have been present in moving in this direction, however: the lack of a program and the lack of a directed movement. The Occupy Movement offered a focal point that had potential to do this. Does it still? Does the Occupy Movement still have capital that it can invest in the realization of such a program?

My impression from afar is that it is in search of such a program. In fact, a great deal that is happening in the United States today suggests that there is a search for such a program. There is no country in the world that is better placed to address these problems than the United States. There is no country in the world with greater vitality and energy, where the majority of ordinary men and women continue to believe that anything is possible and that we can become more human by becoming more godlike.

Local headlines on June 16, 2012

But even in absolute terms, the GNU glass is half full. There has been a degree of normalization–in economics, services and civics. Hospitals are no longer sending women in obstructed labor home to die. Schools are open, much of the time. There is a national human rights commission. The question now is whether this normalization is durable, or merely a lull in the country’s fratricidal politics.

The partisan shrillness of the country’s newspapers reflects the unresolved conflicts that continue to shape Zimbabwean society. Most hysterical are the headline-teasing posters pasted to trees throughout Harare, condensing fears and hopes into 60-point font screams, rendering the GNU a lurid soap: “Mugabe In Despair,” “Tsvangirai Wins,” “Mujuru Speaks From The Grave.” The posters are replaced every morning with something still more high pitched.

The high dudgeon of the headlines betrays the existential crisis beneath Zimbabwe’s thin veneer of normality. The electoral time bomb is ticking once again. Mugabe may well exercise his power to call a snap election in 2012; if not, both the presidential and parliamentary terms expire in mid-2013, little more than a year away.

The next elections are supposed to be held under the auspices of a new national constitution. The drafting process has now gone too far to be called back without considerable loss of face, though ZANU-PF is trying nonetheless¹. (It is characteristic of the party’s participation in the GNU that the left hand will reject any operational consensus even as the right hand is shaking that of its partners.)

There is no reason to believe that the apparatus of political violence has been disarmed; indeed, the Zimbabwe Election Support Network has expressed concerns that militia bases are being reactivated. Meanwhile, Mugabe’s mortality hangs over the GNU, and the country, like the sword of Damocles; ageless for so long, the official photo hanging in airports, post offices and police stations appears suddenly dated.

Is there a way to begin to normalize Zimbabwean politics? Zimbabwean analyst A P Reeler identifies the absence of “happy losers” as a critical impediment to the success of the country’s democracy². The peaceful transfer of power is considered a litmus test of democratic consolidation. Only when the defeated party yields, with a begrudging appreciation for the role of opposition politics and an eager eye on the next election, can democratic turnovers take place. “Happy losers” are fostered by strong democratic institutions and the rule of law, but this turns the problem into one of chicken and egg. After thirty years of single party rule, the emergence of “happy losers” requires a fundamental shift in attitudes, an act of imagination: the contesting parties must contemplate the possibility of their defeat, so that when it arrives it is bearable.

The 2008 election made losers of everyone. The two MDC factions jointly won a slim majority in parliament, but were unable to form an effective coalition. Tsvangirai was compelled to accept the junior role of prime minister despite having won more votes than his rival in the only election in which they faced each other. Mugabe, meanwhile, was returned to the presidency (possibly at the insistence of the so-called “securocrats”) but conceded the hollowness of this victory by acceding to the GNU. This deeply unsatisfying and unjust compromise nonetheless may, by previewing the experience of an electoral loss, help to recalibrate the expectations of Zimbabweans.

An election is not simply a pitched battle in which the stronger survives and the loser perishes; it is a contest structured by rules. (The principles and guidelines governing democratic elections laid out by the Southern African Development Community, or SADC, are a good place to start.) By setting limits to acceptable conduct, the rules also establish broad parameters for the range of legitimate outcomes. For example, the rules imply that the contest is not entirely binary, us-or-them headlines notwithstanding. The party that “loses” will still be part of government–support for the two parties, as best as can be appraised in the absence of up-to-date polling, is divided evenly enough to likely maintain a rough balance of power in the next parliament.  Both parties will survive the next election, unless one is permitted to literally annihilate the other in the process.

The presidential election, however, is categorical: only one candidate can win. After thirty-two years as head of state, Mugabe may be incapable of contemplating defeat. If 2008 shook his confidence, he appears to have since doubled down on the conviction that he alone is the legitimate leader of the country. (Many see the death of General Solomon Mujuru as a stratagem to undermine his wife, Vice-President Joice Mujuru, as a potential successor).

Perhaps all that can be hoped is that the GNU has afforded Zimbabweans an opportunity to compare and contrast political leadership, to get an obscured glimpse of what life after Mugabe might be like. Tsvangirai’s tenure as prime minister has not been spotless–he continues to be outmaneuvered by Mugabe more often than not, and has been drawn into minor personal controversy. The election will highlight another difference between the erstwhile prime minister and the president: Mugabe now seems capable of only the bare minimum of campaigning, while Tsvangirai–almost thirty years younger–is an active and able campaigner.

Unfortunately, the GNU increasingly resembles a continuation of Mugabe and ZANU’s autocratic governance by a different name. The government has failed to undertake even the most pressing reforms (amending the draconian Public Order and Security Act, removing dead voters from the voting roll). The national broadcast media remain relentlessly partisan.

For Jacob Zuma and other SADC leaders, Mugabe has long posed a grave challenge with little or no reward: direct confrontation with such an articulate and august statesman was politically costly, with little hope of a breakthrough great enough to recoup the expenditure of political capital. It is possible that Zuma and others also believed that Mugabe provided a measure of stability in a divided country.

The circumstances have changed. Mugabe’s death is now a subject of daily speculation, while infighting in his party is at its highest levels since Mujuru’s death in August of last year. Under the status quo, Mugabe will do what is necessary to secure another presidential win, and then either retire or die in the saddle, leaving a vacuum in a party with a demonstrable penchant for violence. There are rumblings of a coup should Tsvangirai win, which would destroy the region’s democratic credibility. The status quo is not stable. SADC would do well to adjust the message it conveys to Mugabe–in public or behind closed doors-accordingly. The consequences of another brutal, stolen election will be grim, making a mockery of “happy losers” and turning shrill headlines into prescient warnings.

We all agree that we—participants, sympathizers, observers—should be thinking on how to make something of the chord that Occupy struck—the actual or potential connective tissue tying the symbolism and inner life of the movement/event/spectacle to the larger landscape of American politics. Here are a few thoughts in that vein.

Occupy made vivid two mainly neglected strands of political sentiment. First is the wish for democracy to be more immediate, engaged, and responsive. People drawn to Occupy, like those drawn to the Tea Party, tend to feel that their government, the people’s government, has been taken from them. Unlike the Tea Party, Occupy folks don’t suppose that either party, or any mainstream politician, is poised to retrieve it. At its most radical, the idea here is that representative government—government by faraway officials who are elected from time to time—is a deep compromise for democracy, and that our representation is so captured and corrupted as to be scarcely democratic at all. This only gets worse when representative government—Congress and the President—adds a layer of delegated government—the agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency, and quasi-independent entities like the Federal Reserve—that doesn’t answer directly to the people at all, and is quite imperfectly responsive even to elected officials. The spirit of conversations around Occupy was that the people’s business should be done as much as possible by the people themselves.

There’s plenty of debate about whether this can be a good idea in a sprawling, diverse, and complicated society, where many issues, from pollution to financial regulation, involve considerable expertise. At the same time, with a federal government constitutionally designed to be ineffective and unresponsive, there’s plenty of room to imagine a more democratic politics. Occupy imagined this concretely, in its General Assemblies, and more diffusely in the complaints about corruption and the failure of democracy that swirled around the movement. This sense that stronger democracy is possible is terribly important, even where it is inchoate. Our thoroughly clogged and money-sodden democracy teaches that voting doesn’t matter and political hope is futile—an awful lesson that desperately needs counter-examples and awareness of other possibilities to keep it from becoming permanent.

The impulse to stronger democracy has been around in the United States since before Thomas Jefferson, who, late in life, proposed a nested set of elections all the way down to local “wards,” in which people at each level would directly govern as much as possible of their common lives. It is not hard to imagine, today, a different political culture in which the government could not launch or sustain a non-defensive war without approval in a national referendum, at the outset and in each year thereafter. (I don’t say that this would have stopped our recent, disastrous wars, nor that it is necessarily a great idea; but it is the kind of thing Occupy invites us to imagine.)  Probably the most concrete proposal to get some wind in its sails from Occupy is the effort to reverse, by constitutional amendment, the Citizens United decision that extended strong constitutional protection to corporate spending on elections, along with the other money-is-speech decisions that preceded it. All of this goes to the idea that democracy needs to get stronger, or government will keep getting away from it.

The other idea that Occupy revived is that economic life has moral and political dimensions that we can’t afford to surrender to market logic. As Gitlin says, the voluntary, non-hierarchical, skill-pooling of the encampments is both an aesthetic and an ethic. The ethic includes the idea that our material lives—making things, using and exchanging them, doing what needs to be done to keep things going—should be organized around a greater respect for the individuality and equal freedom of each person. On the one hand, this is play, a wish for more joy in day-to-day activity, rather than its current reservation for evenings and weekends. On the other hand, it takes tremendous discipline and responsibility: in the encampments, if you saw something that needed to be picked up, cleaned, cooked, or whatever, it was your job to get on it—yours and everyone else’s. Maybe surprisingly, it often seemed to work pretty well. This is a reminder that an economy is also a form of community, which asks different things of its members and gives them different things, depending on its organizing ethic. The encampments were experiments in shaping a different economic ethic.

Economic life includes the quality of work people get to do and the kind of relationships they have around that work. These are legitimate political concerns, as much as the unemployment rate. Occupy shares these thoughts with Abraham Lincoln, both Franklin Roosevelt and his cousin Teddy, and Lyndon Johnson, as well as the great Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, to name a few. These ideas were somewhat eclipsed for much of the twentieth century, especially after World War Two, when economic policy focused much more on overall growth and the increased consumption that it brought. Concern for the quality of work remains central to American aspiration: it is just that is has mainly stopped being a political goal, becoming instead a personal hope. Whether individuals can have good work, though, depends importantly on the political decisions that shape their economy. The parade of American luminaries that trekked across an earlier line of this paragraph never doubted that. By building a movement partly around a different way of organizing work and play, Occupy is a reminder of this point—though maybe an oblique one.

Anarchist movements, not surprisingly, have trouble erecting the political movements and legal structures that could protect, even extend, their small-scale achievements in cooperation and equality. Indeed, the trouble is a matter of principle for those who reject large-scale and extensive governance altogether. There is good reason to think, though, that any political success today will have to join its local vision and experiments with a broader effort to adjust the political institutions and legal rules that shape a complex society. Otherwise, every local food movement ends up as a luxury item or a sourcing system for Whole Foods, and every effort to work together differently is a flower that blooms in spring and dies in fall.

Occupy’s aversion to this kind of politics chimes with the spirit of the age—libertarian, skeptical, personal, and reflexively oriented to “the market,” as if there were no space between the present economy, exactly as it is, and some kind of Maoist nightmare. This is a superstitious view of both economics and politics, which deeply shape each other, above all through the medium of law. Unsurprisingly, this superstition fosters other forms of magical thinking, especially the fantasy that local, personal, and voluntary creativity, like we see in Occupy, can overgrow the larger system in which it’s set—or just persist indefinitely as a kind of utopian archipelago. Partly because Occupy embodies this widespread fantasy, it is beautiful, by today’s political aesthetic, as the more traditional and realistic efforts that Smith praises are not. It can succeed on its own terms, and its playfulness can be a joy to watch and join. But, as Smith and Gitlin write, this success is a glimpse of larger and more complicated goals, not a program or a strategy, or even the beginning of either.

So let Occupy be Occupy, a reminder of radical hope and the power of imagination and cooperation, a reminder that longing for the future is legitimate and necessary, even when we can’t see our way there. And let’s also remember that part of its charm comes precisely from its forgetfulness about politics, which many more of us will have to overcome if Occupy’s reminders are going to matter.

By and large, the seizure of power was strongly condemned by a broad spectrum of Malian society, as well as a host of regional and international players, most notably the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). Two days after the coup, a group of Malian political parties and civil society organizations, including L’Alliance pour la démocratie en Mali (ADEMA) and Le Parti pour la renaissance nationale (PARENA), issued a manifesto declaring the formation of FRD- Le Front uni pour la sauvegarde de la démocratie et de la République. FRD states its objectives as follows:

1. Defense of the 25 February 1992 Constitution
2. The restoration of constitutional legality
3. The immediate and unconditional release of political, civil and military prisoners
4. The return of the Armed Forces and security to their barracks in order to resume their mission of defending Mali’s territory
5. Respect for civil liberties and an end to human rights violations
6. The reestablishment of peace and security in Northern Mali with a view to the return of refugees and IDPs and the holding of free and transparent elections as soon as possible ¹

(PDF of the original French text here.)

Pressure for the junta to step down has met with little success. The coup leaders continue to hold considerable sway, despite officially handing over the reins in April to former parliamentary speaker Diouncounda Traoré, who was sworn in as interim president and charged with organizing elections. The seventy-year-old statesman is reportedly undergoing medical tests in France after being assaulted on 21 May by supporters of the junta. The coup leaders have enjoyed backing from some political camps, the most vocal of which is Oumar Mariko and his Solidarité africaine pour la démocratie et l’indépendance (SADI), which formed the Mouvement Populaire du 22 Mars (MP22) in support of the coup.

The coup leader, Captain Amadou Sonogo, is a former recipient of US counter-terrorism training. Observers have noted that the “War on Terror” in the Sahel forms an integral backdrop to the Mali coup. As scholar of West African history Gregory Mann writes in Foreign Policy, “a decade of American investment in Special Forces training, cooperation between Sahalien armies and the United States, and counter-terrorism programs of all sorts run by both the State Department and the Pentagon has, at best, failed to prevent a new disaster in the desert and, at worst, sowed its seeds.”

Regardless of the coup leaders motives, which are by all indications self-serving, it is clear that their populist rhetoric has hit a nerve with a segment of Malian society. Understanding the sense of resentment with which many Malians regard Touré’s tenure is difficult without looking back at 1991, a seminal year in Mali’s history. As Stephen Zunes writes in opendemocracy.net,

Two decades prior to similar pro-democracy uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, Malians engaged in a massive nonviolent resistance campaign that brought down the dictatorship of Mousa Traoré.  A broad mobilization of trade unionists, peasants, students, teachers, and others … created a mass movement throughout the country. Despite the absence of Facebook or the Internet, virtually no international media coverage, and the massacre of hundreds of peaceful protesters, this popular civil insurrection succeeded not only in ousting a repressive and corrupt regime, but ushered in more than two decades of democratic rule.

In a widely-circulated piece from Jeune Afrique, Malian writer Moussa Konaté cautions, however, against equating elections with democracy, and argues that in fact, Moussa Traoré’s dictatorship was replaced by a “Mafia” for whom personal gain is paramount.

Elections were mere parodies, for those who were supposedly competing for popular votes were making secret deals to put in power whoever could best defend their interests. The play was so well acted that the world praised ‘Malian  democracy’… Little by little, the Malian state became the private property of the political class and its accomplices in the civil service and in business.

(PDF of anthropologist Bruce Whitehouse’s English translation of the article here.) ²

Issa N’Diaye, a philosophy professor at Bamako University, further points out (in French) that for decades, Mali suffered from one of the lowest voter turnout rates in African elections. “Under such conditions,” asks N’Diaye, “can one honestly describe a democracy as legitimate when it is shunned by its own people?”

This “illegitimate democracy” described by N’Diaye manifested itself in the failure of the state to challenge the structural inequalities that plague Malian society, and that led to the nonviolent uprisings of the early 1990s. Gradually, thanks in no small part to the impunity with which the political class and their allies appropriated public resources for private gain, the state came to be perceived not so much as impotent, but as a driver of inequality in its own right. In an article for African Arguments titled “The Malian Political Crisis: Taking Grievances Seriously”, historian Brian J. Peterson writes the following:

Coming on the eve of elections—elections in which Touré was not even a  candidate—[the coup] is a major disservice to the Malian people and their institutions of governance … That said, the mainstream media’s reflexive response to the coup has been to cast it as a struggle between ‘democracy’ and ‘military tyranny,’ without examining the deeper structures at play, or the prevailing neoliberal order, behind the current political crisis. Indeed, beneath the surface there are deeper issues shaping the trajectories of political change in Mali. In tandem with other moving parts, these deep causes have produced the current crisis.

Peterson and fellow scholar Brandon County point to evidence of this disconnect between the ruling elites and the struggling rural communities, sketching out a “fragile economic situation that developed alongside the country’s robust electoral system.” They see these dynamics as underpinning the support of rural civil society groups such as the Syndicate of Peasants of Mali for the March coup.

In recent years … we have witnessed a transformation of the Malian economy to the benefit of foreign capital and private interests, but ultimately to the detriment of Malian peasants and workers. Much of this hasn’t made the news, and much of it has been deliberately hidden from public scrutiny. ATT’s government engaged in secretive deals at a time when Malians were growing weary of corruption and the deteriorating economic situation.

N’Diaye sees efforts by the Malian political class to rebuild the state along previous lines as futile and counterproductive. He believes that the coup disrupted “a true festival of robbers,” and that Malians, equally disillusioned with the old democracy as they are with dictatorship, are ready to take matters into their own hands through mass movement building.  In a rather optimistic reading of the political moment, he writes that “a new African spring is now enshrined in the pages of the new history of Mali. Its gestation will certainly be difficult and painful. But by wanting to stop it, to contain it, it will become more charged with pressure, more violent, more radical.”

With Bamako in political deadlock, a worsening food crisis in the North, and much of the country under the control of the Tuareg-led MNLA (Le Mouvement national de liberation de l’Azawad) and its allies, it is difficult to see how a mass movement capable of building a legitimate democracy can find expression.

As I show in Occupy Nation, the movement’s core has been more expressive than strategic from the beginning. This core, those who clustered around Zuccotti Park and other such hubs, and remain the reliables who make up the so-called Working Groups, are not the majority of the demonstrators who turn out on major occasions (Oct. 5, Oct. 15, Nov. 17, May 1)—far from it—but they are the movement’s beating heart. They take the initiative. They make plans. They act. They are not 99 percent of the 99 percent.

Much of the initiative that surfaced so volcanically last fall came from a sort of counterculture, an anarchist post-punk core—often of anarcho-syndicalist and Situationist inspiration—that proclaimed itself “horizontalist” and “anti-capitalist” and “revolutionary” and had no qualms about doing so. Its theatrical elements were not incidental; they were central. The General Assemblies, with their “human mic” rituals, were the way in which the movement’s core displayed itself to itself. What it created was, as Matthew Smith says, an aesthetic. The statement they made was: We’re here, horizontal, improvising. We want to secede, more or less, from the market economy. We abhor the capitalist organization of work. We want to pool our skills. We ourselves, the way we relate to each other, constitute our demand, our agenda, our program.

The movement, well aware of its theatrical potential, was superficially visible to outsiders, bystanders, and the media, but those forms of its visibility weren’t its central point—the movement’s most binding transaction, let’s say—and bystanders and mainstream media were not its primary audience. The movement’s primary audience was itself. It gave birth to itself as a phenomenon. It was a creation. What did it want? It wanted itself. It wanted the euphoria of its existence. It wanted to be. It wanted to be what it was.

Miraculously, for all the apparent parochialism of this desire, the movement for a while overcame—or seemed to overcome—the limits of its collective narcissism. The condition of the country (whether you measure it by the collapse of the middle class, vast inequality, unemployment, foreclosure, or the incapacity of the governing elites) was such that, during the fall, the movement, however outré its style, however exotic its rituals, “took off,” “gained traction,” won national support, intruded into popular culture (“1 percent,” “99 percent”) because its theatrics engaged a latent strain in popular sentiment—disgust with the plutocracy and with an enabling government, distrust of the political classes, and eagerness to see something happen.

Something happened. The disorder of what happened confronted the order of the authorities, who saw only disorder. And then, when the police cracked down, they became a most vivid, if secondary, enemy. The mayors, disdainful of the right of the people to peaceably assemble, called in the armed force that was their substitute for creativity. They answered the casting call for Blue Meanies. Over time, what was secondary became primary. Pepper-spraying cops were good for headlines and YouTube videos. The symbolism of police confrontations was vivid and galvanizing. The movement had been anointed by its enemies. Nonetheless, it remained more playful than not.

The playfulness manifest on May Day extended the prime Occupy vein. The day was indeed more carnival—much more—than strike. It felt good, to those who joined in, not because it stopped work, shopping, traffic, or anything else. It felt good because it was a restart, not a new start. It proclaimed: The movement was back. This was, in a way, a sort of victory. But it was not a victory on the field that the world recognizes as the place where politics takes place—the field of power.

Occupy, in other words, is primarily an identity movement, and identity movements face inward. They aspire to be cultures, self-sufficient and gorgeous. People don’t join Occupy, they do it. It’s a way of life, a transvaluation of values. Joining in such a life is, to a few tens of thousands of people nationwide, an intense form of disaffiliating from the main currents of American society and culture. It means not only disaffection from plutocratic control but making oneself at home with the movement’s own solidarity.

All social movements that claim a political rationale exhibit an expressive face and a strategic one. Over the course of time, one or another looms larger. The expressive wing of the movement may convince itself that there’s a strategic payoff to its theatrics, just as plutocrats under the spell of Adam Smith (but not his care for the unemployed) convince themselves that their wealth serves the common good. There continue to be actions in many metropolitan areas to resist and disrupt bank foreclosures, foreclosure auctions, and evictions. There are many nonviolent direct actions aimed at the banks that brought down the economy and escaped with impunity. But overall, Occupy’s expressive face is in the ascendancy.

Not surprisingly, then, Occupy is more than anything else a youth movement. This was true in Zuccotti Park and remains true by inspection. It was the case on May 1 in New York and it’s evident in all the footage I’ve seen of the May 9 demonstration at the Bank of America shareholder meeting in Charlotte and the demonstrations this weekend in Chicago. Accordingly, the movement’s rambunctious spirit reverberates most strongly among the population least attached to institutions, least married, most debt-ridden, most unemployed and most likely to stay so—and also most likely to have supported Barack Obama in 2008. For what it’s worth, the only poll I can find that breaks down the demographics of Occupy support, taken by Gallup/USA Today in February, displays the youth appeal clearly. Overall, Gallup found 19 percent of its sample “supporting” Occupy and 32 percent “opposing.” The only sub-populations that numbered more supporters than opponents were liberals (38 percent to 15 percent), Democrats (26 percent to 16 percent), those who earn less than $30,000 a year (21 percent to 20 percent—really a tie), and 18-29 year olds (29 percent to 26 percent—hardly a significant difference). Gallup didn’t ask about race.

For a social movement, public support of the sort elicited by telephone surveys is not everything. Revolutionaries (especially those “of the deed”) have long argued that the deeds make for popularity. Be that as it may, popularity is something, if for no other reason than that activists burn out and have to recruit. And what should be plain by now is that Occupy’s initial burst of popularity last fall has popped.

Considering that the establishment media describe movements as if they were crime scenes, leading with the bleeding, this isn’t surprising. Popularity is a matter of aura, and auras fluctuate. When the public feels inconvenienced or shocked by violent or confrontational incidents, it is most likely to associate the movement with an outcome they don’t like, and withdraw support. But even then, the movement sees mainly itself. Its euphorias are its own. Its utilities are ready at hand. Its fires are stoked. It plunges on, from action to action. The result is not a change in the ways institutions operate. The result is the movement itself.

What, then, does such a movement have to do with a reality principle? Toward what end is it a means? This question it disdains. That is a question for somebody else, not for them. But for whom, then? To quote Matthew Smith: “A central goal of most forms of contemporary democratic organizing is the development of astute, disciplined political actors who understand what it takes to make changes in an unjust political order.” Astuteness and discipline are not in short order in Occupy. The problem is that they operate in the service of the expressive impulse. This movement does not want to think in any way other than the way it already thinks. Preaching to it, much as I share in the impulse, is doomed.

Strategic clarity is more likely to come from the groups who make up the outer movement; the members of unions, MoveOn, and other groups; those who not only fill out the ranks of Occupy’s big turnouts but also turned out, with remarkable militancy, in Wisconsin, first in December, when Governor Scott Walker set out to roll back collective bargaining rights, and then in subsequent recall fights. These are people who are not especially interested in transfiguring their way of life but want reforms. They distinguish readily between ends and means. They want progressive taxation—steeper rates, a “Robin Hood” tax on Wall Street transactions (the National Nurses United have been fierce and consistent about this), taxing capital gains at the same rate as salaries, and so on. They are for job growth and against austerity budgets. They want to curb a plutocracy that has taken possession of the commanding political-economic heights ever since Ronald Reagan galloped into Washington three decades ago to deregulate big capital, gut labor unions, and roll back as many sixties reforms as possible. The unions and other groups have come to the aid of Occupy in myriad ways, mainly out of the spotlight, most recently training tens of thousands of activists in nonviolent techniques. But they, as an ensemble, as a unified political force with a unified program, have not stepped up.

All homage to the 1946 strikes, including Oakland’s, but without retreating from the requisite homage, let’s acknowledge some underpinnings. Union density in 1946 in the United States at large was something like one-third, and higher in California—compared to today’s 11 percent in the country as a whole. Unions had grown immensely during the wartime years, but had mainly adhered to a no-strike pledge. Lots of grievances had piled up.

Lord knows that is not the situation today. Unions are preoccupied with their own problems. Some are stodgy; some, bedraggled; some, the more prosperous, are in the grip of an election year, with its urgency and its narrowing. They feel, overall, defeated. Nevertheless, Wisconsin’s public sector unions have been exemplary. If they succeed in defeating Scott Walker in the recall election, they will have set out a potent line of action. We’ll know soon.

But succeed or fail, it’s foolhardy to demand of Occupy that it evolve, at least quickly, into something other than what it is. Why wait for someone else to do what needs to be done? It’s incumbent upon those of us who think like Matthew Noah Smith and myself to formulate a reform agenda; to win support for it among groups so inclined; to splice together the coalition that can work for them beyond this election year; and not to expect anyone else to do what needs to be done.

We trace the development of decidedly minoritarian forms of decision making—the “democracy of direct action,” as it is known locally—to activists’ experiences of organizing for migrant and minority rights in the face of ethnonationalism. We compare the democracy of direct action to Occupy Wall Street’s consensus-based model. In conclusion, we ask how ethnographic attention to the varieties of emergent political forms within the current global cycle of protest might extend recent theorizing of radical politics and contribute to broader efforts to reimagine democracy.

Jeffrey S. Juris offers “Reflections on #Occupy Everywhere: Social media, public space, and emerging logics of aggregation”:

Whereas listservs and websites helped give rise to a widespread logic of networking within the movements for global justice of the 1990s–2000s, I argue that social media have contributed to an emerging logic of aggregation in the more recent #Occupy movements—one that involves the assembling of masses of individuals from diverse backgrounds within physical spaces. However, the recent shift toward more decentralized forms of organizing and networking may help to ensure the sustainability of the #Occupy movements in a posteviction phase.

And David Nugent comments on the first two articles and the questions they raise “about the temporalities of capitalism and about the dilemmas of inclusion in the recent Occupy movements.”