When the Wall Street protests began a few weeks ago I took notice, but didn’t expect it to amount to much. I figured it would be like the occasional demonstration against the World Bank or other globalization meeting: a little unrest, some anarchists throwing stones, cops dispersing the bunch.
But this proved to be different; the protest is growing, and getting a lot of sympathy from outside the activist community. Two days ago union members and ordinary citizens by the thousands marched with the generally young protesters. At last count “Occupy” events have occurred in some 800 cities nationwide. Indeed, it seems to have tapped a deep unrest in the country at large. Even one of my blue collar coworkers, who a year or two ago was enamored of the Tea Party movement, expressed a wish that he could be there.
In fact, I sense a greater receptivity to a radical critique of this economic system than I have ever seen in my life. The movement of the 60s and 70s was largely fueled by anger at the war in Vietnam, and radicals for the most part had a hard time convincing many that there was something more fundamentally wrong with society. A student about to graduate from college with little or no debt and a good job waiting is unlikely to feel oppressed. And SDS folks who went to work in the factories in an attempt to garner worker support for their revolution did not get far. A man with a good union job that enables him to send his kids to parochial school, to drive a new car, and to buy a cottage on a lake for vacations is going look at you like you are crazy when you try to tell him that he must throw off his shackles.
But things have changed. We have had thirty years of the State acting in cahoots with Capital, of good jobs shipped overseas to exploit low wages, to maximize profit in places where there are no unions or environmental laws. And thirty years of deregulation, of promises that the more unfettered the capitalist the more wealth will flow to everyone. But only the hardiest of ideologues still believes that; even Alan Greenspan, Ayn Rand acolyte and former chairman of the Federal Reserve, has expressed doubt about his former faith in light of the disaster he oversaw.
Today, if you have a union job you are seeing your wages and benefits cut every contract, and in many states collective bargaining itself is under attack. And for those who work non-union jobs it is far worse. Not to mention the vast numbers of men and women who can find no employment. And that student? Today he or she graduates with a huge debt and little prospect of anything but serving coffee or toiling in some other thankless job without a future.
Meanwhile, of course, you know the rest of the story: the affluent have grown richer, CEO wages are obscene, the government bails out reckless investors and companies going broke because they were manufacturing inferior goods. Income disparity is at the highest level since the 1920s.
It seems we have reached a breaking point, and the folks in the streets may be the vanguard of a new populism, one worthy of the name.
Of course people are quick to criticize the young radicals; they do not have a 10 point program, their prescription is inchoate, they present a real mish-mash of ideas and instincts. But careful analysis and cogent planning have never been what young people have brought to any social movement. Are some of their ideas naive or confused? Of course. They are young; give them a break. What they do bring is passion, energy, and a basic grasp of a few moral truths.
When I look at what is being said on the streets of New York and other cities, I am hopeful, albeit with a few caveats. NPR yesterday reported that these young people are making decisions in a “new” way, by consensus. Of course that is nothing new at all; rather this recalls the participatory democracy of the New Left when that movement was fresh, when it was led by working class guys like Carl Oglesby, before the authoritarian Trostkyites, Maoists, and PLP punks- born of privilege one and all- ran it into the ground. What I am hearing- decentralization, hostility to corporate welfare, localism, cooperatives, etc- sounds like nothing else but distribut
Richard Aleman of The Distributist Review thought so too. Yesterday I posted the flyer he had composed to distribute on Wall Street. Later in the day he took to the streets to pass it out. He reports that he was warmly, even enthusiastically received, that there was much interest in the third way- neither capitalist nor communist- that he was proposing.
A vibrant, non-ideological movement, critical of capitalism and corporate rule, decentralist and democratic in its instincts? Could this be, at long last, the Distributist Moment?
Richard Aleman, from “The Distributist Review”, has been in Wall St. handing out some 600 Distributist flyers [http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1492294526]
Let’s hope so.
No.
Look, anybody handing out flyers proposing just about anything that is neither capitalist nor communist is going to be well received in that environment. Thus far there is a sustained sense of broad solidarity at OWS events. There are even libertarians there (here in Memphis one of the leaders of the local Occupy movement is a Ron Paul fanatic – which makes no sense to me, but I digress). But the original working groups of OWS were make up of people who were mostly anarchists, anarcho-syndicalists, or anarchist inclined. When one considers the first official statement that came out of OWS this week, one can see the clear anarchist influence. The consensus building approach – with no center to the movement and completely democratic working groups is Anarchism 101, and has already been analysed by the famous anarchist anthropologist David Graeber, who has been a part of OWS since the planning stages (see http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/youre-creating-a-vision-of-the-sort-of-society-you-want-to-have-in-miniature/2011/08/25/gIQAXVg7HL_blog.html ).
One of the things many in the left have commented on is the newfound cooperation between labor unions and the radical left. This warming up between mainstream labor and the radicals has been going on for about the last 18 months – a lot was made of the fact that in several major cities, including NYC, on May Day of this year the mainstream labor unions and the radicals marched together in one parade, instead of having their own parades, as had been the case for decades prior. But this rapprochement remains tenuous and will only last so long as the mainstream labor unions don’t attempt to push Democratic Party machine politics into events like OWS – the radicals hate Obama and want nothing to do with the Democratic Party. Part of the reason this recent rapprochement is possible is the fact that there has been an increased radicalization of mid-level union bureaucrats in some of the big unions, and the active union membership in the big unions has become increasingly pissed off since the recession, and that anger is now directed at Obama and the Dems as Obama has so clearly been seen to have been a huge letdown to the labor movement and is so obviously a pawn of Wall Street. Further, you have major unions like the Communication Workers of America currently engaged in major actions, and when you show up to a picket line and find out that your company has hired Blackwater mercenaries to protect its managers and properties, well, that tends to radicalize you a bit.
I offer this brief summary of the new labor/radical rapprochement in order to ask the question – where do the distributists fit in? I have read and heard distributists (I suppose “right distributists”) who were very critical of the big unions – not for their lack of radical action and their collusion with capital (which is of course the critique of big labor by radicals), but for their mere existence and for things like forced union membership in union shops, etc. Belloc was quite critical of unions, and seemed to think his guild model would provide means of labor association not given to the pathologies seen in large unions.
It would seem like Distributivists fit in more on the radical side of things, but then I ask this: why would a given young person shopping for a political/economic/social worldview go Distributivist unless his religious commitments already incline him to read Belloc? If the kid is not intellectually minded, he is going to hook up with people he meets and experiences solidarity with, and let’s face it, the anarchists have a lot more feet on the ground for young kids to connect with than do the distributists. If the kid is at all intellectually minded, with anarchism you have a much more developed textual tradition of political economy, social theory, and the like. From Proudhon to Déjacque to Bakunin and Guillaume down to contemporary anarchists like Naomi Klein and Noam Chomsky and David Graeber (all are anarcho-syndicalists). Not to mention that anarchism has a more developed and successful history than distributism – they usually claim the Paris Commune as “theirs” and they have the Spanish Civil War to provide an example of a hugely significant anarchist movement in the 20th century and to provide some romance.
I think a left distributism, like the Catholic Worker movement with its love of Ammon Hennacy and Jacques Ellul and the like, could find a little niche corner within much broader anarchist circles, but I don’t see any way distributism could rival outright anarchism in terms of the recruitment of young radicals.
So they are anarchists at 18. So was I. Young people are running on instinct, no,t generally, clear thought. Distributism addresses those instincts with greater clarity than anarchism, though I admit that as a movement it has only just gotten moving. For 50 years it was more of a relic than anything else. The last decade and a half have seen a new vibrancy emerge, and the potential is there.
What you call “right distributism” Tom Storck with some justification says is not distributism at all. Certainly hostility to labor is foreign to genuine distributism, though as in Belloc’s case, one can certainly view the current structure of organized labor as lacking.
Daniel,
Again, no. And for the record I don’t say any of these things out of a loyalty to anarchism – I am not an anarchist. I’m just quite familiar with anarchist organizations and literature and tactics. I also like the distributist flyer you link to and would rather youth read that than other things out there.
The people behind OWS are not 18 year old anarchists. They are attracting 18 year olds to anarchism, but they are not that themselves. The original working groups were made up of seasoned WTO protesters, who were in their 20s 15 years ago when the WTO protests started getting more serious and are now in their 40s, as well as well established anarchist intellectuals in their 40s-60s.
The anarchism you flirted with as a kid is nothing at all like what is going on here. You have multiple overlapping anarchist organizations, some clear and distinct, others more informal, and all of them now very experienced in working together and recruiting. They have a lot of feet on the ground, they offer solidarity, and they offer a political and social tradition that is truly vibrant and viable, and they are growing at a faster rate than other radical organizations and have been for the last decade.
Distributists can show up with one or two guys and hand out flyers connecting youth to a journal. If those youth are “lucky” they will find there is a distributist group that meets in their town, but once they go there they are not going to find many young, working class, underemployed or unemployed members, and they are going to have to inevitably listen to some faith talk that most of those youth are not going to be keen on – if they do encounter young people at a distributist meeting chances are high that young person will be a very religious, very socially conservative person from a solidly middle class background, who is a chesterbelloc geek and loves Tolkien and the like. Good luck with that.
The idea that distributism offers more clarity to anti-capitalist instincts than anarchism is just not accurate, if by clarity we mean a clear, sober, focused addressing of modern social and economic and political ills. Sure, anyone can call themselves an anarchist and go pick fights with cops and riot and the like. But the anarchists behind OWS are not that at all. What we are talking about here is the viability of gaining adherents to a political philosophy who will remain committed to that political philosophy for a period of time longer than a few months to a couple years in their youth. Kids that actually connect to real anarchist organizations and/or movements will find a much more developed intellectual tradition in anarchism than in distributism, and they will meet people of all ages and walks of life. Just to take one example, the anarcho-syndicalist Noam Chomsky has written over 100 books, at least 70 of which are politically oriented, from an anarchist perspective, and dealing with almost every conceivable issue in contemporary economic, political, and social life. And the old dodger still shows up to anarchist events and meetings, still pays his dues and carries his red card as a Wobbly, and the like. I’m sorry, but the Distributist Review is not really a competition on the offering clarity front.
Further, there are a whole lot of groups showing up to OWS and the other Occupy protests with the primary motivation of recruitment. The non-anarchist group that seems to have the most momentum in that regard is the Paulites, who are weaving their way throughout the OWS movement (http://reason.com/archives/2011/10/07/occupy-wall-street-beyond-the). Here in Memphis I fear they are 20-30% of Occupy Memphis and they came very close to getting a “get rid of the Fed” in the first working document to come out of the Occupy Memphis group. Where I fear the Paulites will gain the most ground in the OWS movement is in places like Memphis where the anarchist groups are not highly concentrated. The Occupy Memphis group started with some anarchists in the mix, and followed the anarchist models of OWS, but the anarchists don’t have as many feet on the ground here as in NYC, Chicago, Portland, LA, etc.
The Paulites have active organizations, have meetings in most urban centers that are truly vibrant and growing, etc. That is unfortunately very true here in Memphis. I don’t know that they will attract all that many unemployed and underemployed disaffected youth, but they will get some. They also can offer an established intellectual tradition which offers a metanarrative explanation of the crisis (Misis, Hayek, Rand, etc.). In other words, the competition is fierce, and there are a number of groups who are their in number and can offer a hell of a lot more than a link to the website of a journal. This is just realpolitick Daniel, the distributists are not in a position to see much growth at this time. This isn’t to say you and your friends should not go hand out flyers – by all means do! You might save one kid from the intellectual disaster that is becoming a libertarian. I would be glad if more kids at OWS events became distributivists rather than libertarians.
I say all this coming out of a meeting of communists last night in which we had to admit that we are not in a position to do serious recruitment at OWS either. We have gone and will go and “be present” at local OWS activities, if only to be a voice in the wilderness that is mostly youth adrift, operate within the overwhelmingly anarchist paradigm, and hope that our voices (which are experienced in debating libertarians) will at least dissuade any of those youth from joining the Paulites. When youth are poor or falling in economic status, worried about their future, and angry, it is rather easy to play connect-the-dots with popular libertarianisms and get those youths at least in a position to reject that.
Your points are well taken. You obviously know way more than I do about contemporary anarchism. And you are right; the distributists are no more ready than your red friends for this particular moment. But don’t misunderstand; when I call this a “Distributist Moment” I don’t mean that we are about to become a mass movement, or take the leadership of OWS. I really only meant that it is an opportunity to get the word out, to make ourselves known to folks who seem open.
And when I say that distributism is more cogent, I didn’t mean that we had written as many books as Noam Chomsky (who I like, by the way) I meant that as a non-utopian social philosophy it is preferable; utopian dreams have a way of turning into nightmares. Remaking human nature is a doomed undertaking.
And your points on distributists are perceptive; I am writing a post to address some of this, which should be up on Monday…
Daniel,
Yeah I was thinking clarity in propaganda terms or just information that is easily accessible and in abundance, not actual content – I’m not actually a huge fan of Chomsky. There is a reason I’m not an anarchist! Distributists believe in subsidiarity, which involves overlapping levels of social organization in a context which remains hierarchical (even within a guild you have a hierarchy and not a purely radical democracy) though a hierarchy that gives precedence to the lower on the ladder. Distributism shares anarchistic elements – in the sense that there is an overlap of authority – multiple organizations have a hand in things (guilds/unions, workers cooperatives or workers corporations, government, perhaps the Church, and other community organizations) but there is a structure with regard to how decisions are made that is not pure radical democracy (for instance, the guy working his first day in the shop doesn’t get an equal vote with the guy who has worked their 20 years, etc.), and this follows something of a clear hierarchy, only unlike statism or corporatism, the rule is that whenever a decision can reasonably be made locally it is – hence the subsidiarity. In this sense I consider Distributism in certain respects somewhat close to communism before communism went all wicked statist – the original soviets were to work with the trade unions and the government in a multilayered overlapping yet still hierarchical structure.