© Edward P. Morgan
For a time at least, 2011 seemed one
of those historic turning points when grass-roots struggles ignite and spread
throughout much of the world. From Arab
Spring to the Wisconsin protests to anti-austerity campaigns in Europe and
South America to the rapid spread of Occupy Wall Street, the groundswell of
sustained protest demonstrated that much of the world’s population was no
longer willing to put up with the destructiveness of the neo-liberal world
order or the autocratic regimes tied in to that system. The tensions that came to the surface
continue to fester.
While the initial occupation phase of
the Occupy movement ended, participants in Occupy have continued to organize
and carry out a range of political actions, largely under the radar of mainstream
mass media. At the same time, of course,
activists continue to mobilize against manifestations of the planet’s deepening
ecological deterioration produced by world capitalism, and there is growing
public opposition to the latest expansion of American militarism, drone
warfare. It remains to be seen if these
movements can converge in a mass movement capable of effectively challenging
both the ideology and reality of the world historic system we live in while ushering
in a far more democratic future.
I would suggest that much may hinge
on whether or not these movements can learn from history and from the role the
corporate mass media have played in ushering in and sustaining the neo-liberal
world. Along with the social movement
literature, my own work on 1960s-era social movements points to two crucial
factors contributing to the rise and spread of mass movements: sharpened
contradictions between the world as it is and the world as people want it to be
and a sense of possibility or hope
that things could be different. A range
of factors —the catalytic example of activists challenging the status quo,
political events, inspirational leadership, and the like— can help to awaken a
sense of possibility, as other factors –police violence, a political reversal,
or a government or corporate action that violates public sensibilities— can
provoke an acute sense of outrage that demands action. Collective action, in turn, can unleash
exhilarating feelings of empowerment and solidarity, as well as generating hope
that change is possible. Media images
and stories have played a significant role in these dynamics.
Outside of the brief but massive
surge of global protest against the impending U. S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, it
could be argued that the last time massive global protest erupted with profound
implications for the globe’s future was in 1968.[1] As Immanuel Wallerstein has argued, 1968 “was
one of the great, formative events in the history of our modern world system,
the kind we call watershed events.”[2] Others have made more explicit reference to
that year’s rapid-fire spread of youth-oriented revolt. Mark Kurlansky wrote, “At a time
when nations and cultures were still separate and very different – there
occurred a spontaneous combustion of
rebellious spirits around the world.”[3]
Particularly in the United States,
the events of 1968 grew out of the trajectory of the “long 1960s,” the era of
awakened activism tracing back to Brown
v. Board of Education in 1954 and the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-6 and
continuing forward through the rise of women’s liberation, the early
environmental movement, and the end of the U. S. war in Vietnam. Following five consecutive “long, hot
summers” of urban uprisings and the debacle at the Democratic National Convention
in Chicago, the election of “law and order” candidate Richard Nixon in 1968 proved
to be a significant step in a progression of campaigns that fed off public
disenchantment with 60s turmoil to move the nation’s political agenda to the
right. Capitalism’s crisis of the 1970s triggered
a concerted, well-oiled campaign to rescue the economy from what the Trilateral
Commission termed the democratic “excess” of the 60s era.[4] Persuasively combining the rightist rhetoric
of resentment with an attack on what came to be labeled a “Vietnam Syndrome” of
public resistance to U.S. military interventionism, Ronald Reagan’s election in
1980 ushered in the neo-liberal regime that persists to this day. Comparable patterns of public unrest in 1968-1972
were followed by rightist, neoliberal regimes in Britain, France, and West
Germany.
What role have the corporate mass
media played in this history? I would
argue, first, that the public disenchantment with 1960s-era turmoil that proved
so central to electoral campaigns from the Right was to a significant degree a
response to the images the public encountered in the nation’s media,
particularly as these were defined and explained through the media’s
discourse. Second, I contend that the
combination of two structural traits of corporate mass media – an ideologically
boundaried discourse and commercially-driven attention to imagistic drama—
produced a media dynamic that, along with state repression and the U. S. war in
Vietnam, influenced the trajectory of the era’s social movements towards an
increasingly “expressive politics.”
Finally, I argue that the media images, personalities, and stories
produced via that dynamic became the raw material that has long been exploited by
both commercial and ideological media to distort the past and usher in and
reinforce the neo-liberal world.[5]
Somewhat tempered by the spread of
social media, these same mass media dynamics exist today. Because mass media are the vehicle through
which mass movements can inject themselves into a society’s common discourse,
and because media images can be potent means of engaging wider audiences’
sympathies and spreading agitation, the mass media remain a highly significant
force affecting the political efficacy of mass movements. Indeed, I argue, in part through interaction
with mass media, the Occupy experience replicates many of the dynamics that
occurred in the 1960s era.
Mass Media and the Trajectory of 1960s-Era Protest:
Long documented by the work of Noam
Chomsky, Ed Herman and others, political discourse within the national mass
media is confined to a range of “legitimate” views expressed by “credible
sources.” While Democrats may spar
with Republicans, liberals with conservatives, and doves with hawks, all
perspectives that are taken seriously by the mass media embrace foundational
beliefs about American political and economic institutions along with the
mythologies of American exceptionalism.
In his well-documented study of media coverage of the war in Vietnam,
Daniel Hallin distinguished three “spheres” of media discourse about the war: a
sphere of consensus reflecting those beliefs not regarded as
controversial by journalists, politicians, and much of the public; a sphere
of legitimate controversy covering the range of debate among those credible
sources within the consensual framework; and a sphere of deviance in
which the media make reference to those “actors and views which journalists and
the political mainstream of society regard as unworthy of being heard.”[6]
The rise of television in the 1950s
and 60s greatly strengthened a second structural trait of news media, namely
the attention to drama, evocative imagery, conflict and colorful personalities
as a vehicle to attract and hold the attention of media audiences. Indeed, the drama of political events in the
60s era was an important catalyst not only for the spread of protest activity
but for the increasing centrality of imagery, drama, and celebrity culture that
now dominates mainstream news media.
Because protest generally arises when
a group’s grievances are not being addressed by conventional political
institutions, protests are themselves a form of deviant activity in the eyes of
much of mainstream media. As Taylor
Branch wrote of media coverage of the Southern civil rights movement, the media
“stressed non-partisan calm as the essential pre-condition for racial progress
–much like the clergymen who criticized [Martin Luther] King in Birmingham.”[7] Typically, protesters become the story –what they look like, how they act, and
how many of them there are –not the issues the protesters raise. Beyond this media reflex, moreover, movements
that challenge the sphere of
consensus find that their views are reflexively dismissed or mistranslated by
mass media speaking what William Gamson and Gadi Wolfsfeld have called
“mainstreamese.”[8] Outside of a few protest signs, sound bites,
or chanted slogans, protesters’ arguments and the kinds of evidence they
present to support them— are essentially excluded from mainstream
discourse. They are ideological outsiders
in the nation’s political conversation.
In effect, then, mainstream media exclude serious consideration of the
views of outsiders at the same time that media cameras invite the kinds of colorful or expressive behaviors they seek out. Mass media substitute being seen for being
heard, thus creating a kind of “exit and voice” dynamic for protest
movements. Angered by their exclusion
and perhaps radicalized by the system-sustaining boundaries of mainstream
discourse, protesters seek out convivial communities of other like-minded
outsiders, often creating their own alternative media. Yet, for those committed to agitating for
change, protest behaviors become vulnerable to the pull of expressive deviance
or militancy as the latter becomes the only form of “radicalism” recognized by
mainstream media. Police violence and state
repression only sharpen protesters’ level of anger and militancy, as did
continued escalation of the U. S. war in Vietnam during the 1960s. Throughout this media dynamic, powerful
forces with favored access to the media denigrate the movements by equating
them with the most extreme behaviors visible in the media.
In
sum, then, mass media during the 60s era helped the era’s social movements
spread and grow, while at the same time they helped to shape, marginalize, and
ultimately contain protest movements and the threat the 60s posed to the
established order.
Media imagery played a particularly
significant role. Since image meanings often
reflect a degree of subjective interpretation, media images convey different
meanings to different viewers, potentially transcending the meanings given to
events by mainstream reporting. For
example, while media discourse about the war in Vietnam was invariably framed
in terms of the United States “defending” the people and “nation” of South
Vietnam against Communist “aggression” from North Vietnam, images that conveyed
sensory realities of the war suggested the opposite meaning to some American
audiences, especially once the war was being contested throughout much of the
culture. Similarly, while protest images
could provoke hostile responses from some quarters, they also evoked
sympathetic responses from other audiences.
While the national mass media
largely reported on the civil rights sit-ins of 1960 through a narrowed frame
focusing on the immediate conflict between two parties asserting their rights
to lunch-counter service, photographs and television footage evoked a powerful
visceral response among some viewers in the North. Viewing the sit-ins from his home in New
York, Robert Moses observed, “The sit-ins, when they broke out, just grabbed
me. The pictures of the Southern
students . What I became aware of
looking at them was they looked how I
felt. And I responded immediately to
that.” Moses, of course, went South to
join the struggle and soon became an inspiring leader in the voter registration
drive in Mississippi. And as Bronx high
school senior Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) later recalled, when he first
read of the sit-ins, he found them “politically inconsequential,” but “Of
course, I would completely change my mind the first time I saw on TV young Africans calmly sitting at a counter while racist
abuse, blows, and the contents of ketchup bottles, full ashtrays, and coffee
cups were dumped on their heads. That
made a believer of me. Instantly.”[9]
Much of the Southern civil rights
movement was framed around “legitimate” constitutional values of equal rights. Yet it still took a handful of potent visual
moments in the national media to convey the full force of the movement’s
transformative meaning to a much wider national audience. Two protest events, in particular, stand out
as signal examples of effective 60s-era direct action protest: the
desegregation protests in Birmingham in 1963 and the aborted march from Selma
to Montgomery in 1965. In each case,
dramatic violence by Alabama police against non-violent protesters was captured
by still or television cameras, with a wide impact on national opinion. Indeed, both cases –the use of police dogs
and fire hoses in Birmingham and the attack by club-wielding state troopers in
Selma— epitomized the guiding principle of nonviolent direct action: protest
audiences felt more sympathetic to the protesters than to the protest target: state
authorities using violence to maintain Jim Crow segregation. Both cases compellingly revealed to Northern
audiences the sensory realities of life in the Jim Crow South. As Birmingham businessman David Vann later
commented of the 1963 protest, “It was a masterpiece [in] the use of media to
explain a cause to the general public.”[10] Birmingham and Selma provoked public responses
that ultimately led to passage of the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964 and
Voting Rights Act of 1965.
To the degree that the Southern
movement aimed at eliciting enforcement of national norms in the deviant South,
the movement’s meanings were comprehensible within the boundaries of legitimate
discourse. The remaining movements of
the 60s era –community power in the inner cities, Black power, Latino &
Chicano, student, antiwar, women’s, American Indian, and gay rights movements—
all targeted national phenomena, and each contained radical critiques of the
institutions of American life. Each
movement, then, approached the media from a place clearly outside the range of legitimate
discourse.
Yet, at precisely the point around
mid-decade when several of these movements were beginning to stir, the mass
media landed on a frame for understanding the spreading national activism. The first clue came when northern students
volunteered to travel south for the Mississippi Freedom Summer campaign in 1964. Seeking to understand this new phenomenon,
the national media seized on distinguishing characteristics of a new generation
of post-war youth. Again and again, mass
media attributed the impulses behind activism to alleged characteristics of the
baby-boom generation. It wasn’t long, in
fact, before the generational theme was picked up and popularized, especially
as the counterculture became more visible in mainstream media. It was also seized upon by those who attacked
the social movements with wild assertions about the permissive upbringing,
lawless nature, government-dependency, or even mental illness of youth. What disappeared from this discourse were the
institutions these movements targeted, unless and until those targets could be
re-translated into liberal reformism by the media’s “credible voices.”
These circumstances created a
formidable challenge for movements seeking to convey their grievances to a
wider audience through the mass media. Black
power was almost reflexively treated as “anti-white” power, if not as an
expression of black supremacy. Inner-city
conditions that reflected both racial concentration and profound class
inequality were ignored by the mass media until the explosions of rage that
began in 1964. From that point on, of
course, the images and narrowed range of media interpretation provided an
enormously distorted, and often frightening, picture of the inner city. Indeed, the early Harlem “riot” in 1964
became a significant foil in Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign. Goldwater attributed the unacceptable
“lawlessness” of the inner city population to the “disrespect for law” allegedly
fostered by the civil rights movement’s reliance on civil disobedience. Although Goldwater was swamped in a national
landslide for Lyndon Johnson, his pitch began the party realignment that
ultimately produced electoral victories for neoliberalism. For the first time since Reconstruction, four
Southern states voted for the Republican candidate. Class inequality has, of course, remained
outside the boundaries of mainstream media discourse; indeed, the dominant media
meaning of “class warfare” refers to those who object to class inequality.
The antiwar movement was grounded in
moral revulsion at what became widely viewed as an American war of aggression
against the Vietnamese people –the very opposite of mainstream presumptions
about the war’s purpose. Yet the
movement was profoundly challenged in conveying its argument on the distant war
to the wider society. In the early years
of antiwar activity in 1965 -1966, when only about a fourth of the country
expressed doubts or criticisms of the war and the mass media and virtually all political
officials reflexively cast the movement in disparaging terms, frustrated
individual activists sought symbolic ways of expressing their sharp alienation
from the war. The first Viet Cong flags
began to appear in the fall 1965 protests in New York and San Francisco, and they
soon became a common feature at national mobilizations against the war. Needless to say, movement detractors and the
mass media in general had a field day noting how the flags were the expression
of an “anti-American” movement, and not surprisingly many Americans drew the
same conclusion. As public opposition to
the war grew, so, too, did public hostility towards the antiwar movement.
Finally, the women’s movement faced
enormous obstacles in engaging the sympathies of a wider audience steeped in
sexist presuppositions about gender. For
a long time, much of the media responded to the fledgling movement with
ridicule and reductive stereotypes. Eventually
the mainstream media began to grasp the anti-discriminatory claims of liberal
feminism, while more radical critiques of the structure of gender and its ties
with a range of social, political, and economic institutions lay well outside
conventional discourse. Instead, these
critiques were reduced to the most inflammatory meanings, often extrapolated from
protesters’ appearances, slogans, posters and the like. Angry attacks on male sexism or patriarchy
meant feminists were commonly labeled “man-haters,” while critiques of the
structure of domestic life were taken to mean that feminists rejected
motherhood and were “anti-family” –two of the many labels that over time became
received truths for younger cohorts of women who embraced the values of liberal
feminism while rejecting the feminist label.
Each of these movements was highly
decentralized, producing wide-ranging tactics and often spontaneity at the local
level. Reflecting in part the mass media
dynamic, protest became increasingly expressive. Not surprisingly, over time both the black
power and antiwar movements became increasingly militant. Not only did the unceasing horror of the war
in Vietnam continued to escalate despite growing public antipathy, but the
mainstream political agenda was shifting from the social welfare focus of Great
Society liberalism to one of law and order reaction. Furthermore, the experience of police
violence often spawned counter-attack. In
addition to these influences, the mass media themselves encouraged militancy as
it was the only way “radicalism” was recognized within mainstream discourse.
Protest militancy was, and is, a
double-edged sword. It clearly alarmed public
officials, and there is good evidence that antiwar militancy may well have
added to the pressures that hastened the end of U. S. sponsored carnage in
Indochina.[11]
As Jack Weinberg noted of Berkeley’s
“Stop the Draft Week” in 1967, “We were becoming much more alienated from
society and much more willing to be disruptive of that society, and basically
we began moving to the view that we wanted to make the cost of [the government]
pursuing the war abroad the ungovernability of the society at home.”[12]
Along with the spreading visibility in
mainstream media of a youthful counterculture, however, protest militancy was
simultaneously useful to those who sought to mobilize a public backlash against
the movements of the 60s. Indeed, one
can discern in mass media discourse in the later 60s a dynamic play between
commercially-driven media responses to 60s-era agitation and ideological
attacks on the social movements –a dynamic that over time became more generalized
and helped to produce the prevailing political discourse of the neoliberal
world.
From the 1960s “Democratic Distemper” to Today’s
Neoliberal World:
Whether by favoring expressive
youthful protest with media coverage, hyping the generational frame to explain
social turbulence, or explicitly seeking to convert the youth culture to a
youth market, commercial forces fostered what Lawrence Grossberg has termed
“affective empowerment” –feelings of
being significant or empowered by virtue of commercial media attention to
rebellious youth.[13] Especially as movement hopefulness began to
fade, expressive politics and affective empowerment become increasingly significant,
and this was particularly relevant in the relatively apolitical counterculture,
as media-hyped events like the “Summer of Love” drew new cohorts of younger
runaways into hippie communities like Haight-Ashbury. As writers like Thomas Frank and Mark Crispin
Miller have documented, the worlds of commercial advertising and entertainment
media responded to the growing alienation of skeptical youth in the 60s by
incorporating irony, “hipness” and self-satire into these respective
domains. As Frank put it,
The Sixties are more than merely the homeland of hip,
they are a commercial template for our times, a historical prototype for the
construction of cultural machines that transform alienation and despair into
consent…. Every few years, it seems, the
cycles of the sixties repeat themselves on a smaller scale, with new rebel
youth cultures bubbling their way to a happy replenishing of the various
cultural industries’ depleted arsenal of cool.
New generations obsolete the old, new celebrities render old ones
ridiculous, and on and on in an ever-ascending spiral of hip upon hip.[14]
In
the neoliberal market society, as people feel less and less able to shape their
world through civic engagement, the imperatives of advertising and
entertainment –as well as the phenomenon of being noticed in the media— lure
people into the depoliticized world of affective empowerment.
Market forces also drove commercial
media to respond to the fracture of 1950s monoculture produced by newly
assertive minorities, youth, and women in the long-60s era. The growing need to pitch commercials,
television shows, and products to distinct targeted audiences produced
centrifugal pressures that were eventually accommodated through cable-TV,
satellite TV, and digital media (e.g., the internet). These innovations, in turn, destabilized
media markets, reducing predictable media profitability until deregulation at
the behest of the industry facilitated both the horizontal and vertical
integration of media ownership in huge conglomerates.
For some audiences, these media
provided more than enough evidence of a world spinning out of control, thus
handing the forces of reaction persuasive foils for their propaganda
campaigns. From the law and order
campaigns of Goldwater, Reagan, Nixon, and George Wallace in the 1960s, to
corporate backlash in the 1970s and the Reagan presidency in the 1980s, to the
so-called “culture wars” and endless echoes on the far Right down to the
present moment (e.g., the “socialist” Barack Obama), the forces of backlash
created a “populist” pitch to those who felt aggrieved by or left out of the
rebellious and liberal 60s (and increasingly those left behind in post-60s
capitalism). Typically, this pitch has
contained two elements. It has typically
blamed the offending phenomena in the
media on liberalism –Great Society liberalism (“Big Government”), liberal or
“permissive” parenting, and/or an elitist “liberal media.” And it has decried the erosion of social
order, valued traditions and institutions endlessly apparent in the mass media
–again, blaming these on liberals when they have largely been the product of
capitalism’s consumer-driven culture and the accumulation of wealth in fewer
and fewer hands.
Together, these forces helped to
usher in the neoliberal world of today.
However, they could not have done it without the very conscious and
lavishly funded efforts of corporate elites increasingly concerned about the
decline of profitability in the 1970s and determined to transform the political
discourse. While Lewis Powell’s
memorandum to the U. S. Chamber of Commerce in 1971 laid out an agenda for
recapturing public allegiance to the world of business, the Trilateral
Commission provided a more thoroughgoing rationale for reviving the world’s
leading capitalist economies by reversing the “democratic distemper” of the 60s
era. The Trilateralists argued that the new
assertiveness of “previously passive or unorganized groups in the population …
blacks, Indians, Chicanos, white ethnic groups, students, and women,” had
produced strains on the economy via a “welfare shift” (away from the post-World
War II “defense shift”) and growing public hostility to defense spending and U.
S. military interventionism.[15]
The perfect pitchman for
neoliberalism was Ronald Reagan who, with the aid of his media handlers,
combined folksy nostalgia for an idealized past with three basic themes drawn
from the playbook of the Trilateral Commission and a host of newly active
foundations and think-tanks funded by private and corporate wealth: liberal
(“big”) government was the problem, the market was the solution, and the United
States needed to reassert its aggressive “defense of freedom” in the
world. With the Democratic Leadership
Council pushing leading the Democratic party into the corporate center, the
neo-liberal regime became entrenched.
Financial deregulation and so-called “free trade” agreements restored
corporate profitability and generated astonishing wealth for the tiny elite at
the top of the economic hierarchy, while American working and lower-middle
classes experienced the downward spiral of decline. Along with mainstream media’s culture of
entertainment and affective empowerment and the Right’s pseudo-populist appeal,
neoliberal policies by both Republican and Democratic administrations have thus
far kept the left at the margins of American politics –despite the increasingly
desperate circumstances produced by those policies.
Occupy Wall Street and Beyond:
As the political and media cultures of
neoliberalism evolved, so, too, did the approaches and strategies of social
protest over a range of so-called “new social movements” in the post-60s years. These have largely revolved around
anti-militarism/anti-imperialism and ecological targets and the concerns of
feminists, people of color, and sexual minorities. While these obviously persist to this day, two
social movements have explicitly targeted the neoliberal paradigm –the
so-called “anti-globalization” movement that emerged in Seattle in 1999 and mobilized
against meetings of global economic elites in subsequent years, and the Occupy
Wall Street movement that spread through localities across the United States
and around the world in 2011-2012, the latter overlapping with anti-austerity uprisings. Both movements have exhibited traits and
trajectories that reflected the dynamics of movement-media interaction in the
1960s era.
The Seattle protests in 1999 provided
dramatic imagery of diverse groups of people from around the world gathering to
protest the World Trade Organization –including potent media-captured “sea
turtles and Teamsters” images in a united front challenging capitalism’s “free
trade.” Mass media texts, on the other
hand, rapidly narrowed to questions of whether the protest would succeed in
blocking or shutting down the WTO meetings.
In addition to fostering fruitful exchanges among activists from all
over the world, the Seattle protest also captured public attention because of
the brutality of the Seattle “Robocops” and the window-smashing Black Bloc
tactics of young black-clad and black-masked anarchists. As the anti-capitalist-globalization movement
spread in subsequent years, “diversity of tactics” and affinity-groups became
regular features of mass mobilizations.
Committing to a diversity of tactics while rejecting binding decisions
regarding protest tactics created a dynamic which, in Stephanie Ross’s words
produced “vanguardism by default” in which “some groups emerge as a
self-selected avant garde … by deploying tactics which are not only defined as
the ‘radical’ [i.e., militant] leading edge but which, by their very nature
make the practice of other tactics next to impossible….”[16] Over time, the narrow mass media coverage of
globalization protests, and those at Republican and Democratic conventions, concentrated
on violent confrontations between small groups of protesters and the police.
The trajectory of the Occupy movement has
also echoed dynamics from the 60s era –at least through its first year of
occupations. For the most part, the mass
media ignored the initial occupation of Zurcotti Park, although patronizing,
disparaging commentaries appeared in outlets like New York Times. However,
once images of two women pepper sprayed in the face went viral on the internet
and mass arrests occurred when protesters were entrapped on the Brooklyn
Bridge, Occupy Wall Street became a mass media phenomenon subject to all the typical
boundaried interpretations. It also
began to spread across the nation and globe bringing together people with a
wide range of grievances, mobilized by the intensified contradictions of
neoliberalism in the wake of the Wall Street bailout as well as the sense that
“something is now happening.”
While this article cannot adequately
address all aspects of Occupy and its implications for strategy going forward,[17]
I will attempt to draw a few tentative conclusions that I think reflect back on
the historical antecedents I have outlined above. First, the response of the commercial mass
media stayed true to the patterns exhibited in the 60s era and in subsequent
years. In mainstream discourse, Occupy
was viewed through lenses that ranged from conventional liberal to right-wing
“conservative.” At one pole, Occupy was
drawing justified attention to profound inequalities in American life; at the
other, Occupy was populated by misfits and malcontents of many different descriptions,
all without legitimacy. Such was the
range of legitimate controversy in the media, most of which insisted Occupy
needed to generate specific “demands.”
At the same time, images played a
highly significant role throughout the Occupy experience –whether these were
mass media photographs or those generated through social media. Violence, unusual participant appearances or
behaviors, and dramatic signs and symbols were magnets for mainstream
cameras. And often the images selected
revealed mainstream preoccupations.
Thus, for example, after police violently evicted people who had occupied
an abandoned building in Oakland in January 2012, anarchists fought back with Black
Bloc tactics. In a virtual echo of 60s
media fare, the next day’s coverage in the on-line L.A. Times featured two photographs on the front page: one showing
a coterie of police lined up to defend
a graffiti-covered building, the other showing a few protesters who burning an
American flag. Contesting mainstream imagery,
protesters photographed or videotaped acts of police violence, with the
pepper-spraying of seated protesters at U. Cal. Davis perhaps being the most
widely disseminated example.
Second, in addition to generating a
fresh sense of popular empowerment, Occupy produced two significant
counterfoils to the neoliberal regime of the last 33 years, and both are
relevant to longer-term movement building.
As reflected in increasing mainstream attention to inequality and
documented in a Pew Research Center poll, “the issue of class conflict has
captured a growing share of the national consciousness” in the aftermath of
Occupy Wall Street.[18] Occupy’s symbolism of the 1% vs. the 99% clearly
penetrated the media’s legitimate discourse, possibly even playing a role in
the 2012 election, yet, equally clearly, political institutions have been
singularly unresponsive to the issue of inequality.
In addition, while many have decried
Occupy’s lack of an explicit political agenda, as an opening salvo in a
longer-term movement Occupy revived two foundations of a democratic culture
that have become largely eviscerated in today’s neoliberal world: it reclaimed public space and its general assemblies
revived the art of democratic conversation and consensus-building. Both are crucial to the long term feasibility
of building a radical democratic future, particularly in a society in which
class solidarity has been so effectively fractured by, among other things, the
propaganda of pseudo-populism.
Yet, going forward, affective empowerment remains a potent
obstacle to building an effective movement for radical change –whether people
feel empowered through the seductions of consumption, entertainment, and
privatism via the internet, social media or more traditional institutions, or
whether that feeling of empowerment comes from street violence as an act of
symbolic resistance. Mass media culture
continues to acculturate the young in the affective empowerment of immediate
gratification. As Barbara Epstein wrote
in the aftermath of the violence in Occupy Oakland,
[I]t has been so
long since we have been able to achieve any concrete goals that radical
activism has ceased to be oriented in this direction. The aim of radical movements has come to be
understood as resistance rather than social change. The two follow different logics. Resistance, as measured by the intensity of
opposition, calls for drama, performance, spectacle; change, measured by what
opposition accomplishes, calls for thinking about how to get from where we are
to the society we want, or at least to one that is more livable and sustainable
than the present. It seems to me that
the latter question deserves more attention than it gets from the radical left.[19]
Quite clearly, resistance remains an
important strategy in a world in which global capital and militarism are so
destructive of human well-being and so ecologically erosive. Yet, as Epstein puts it, the logic of
resistance is also the logic of mass media –dramatic, performative, spectacular. This doesn’t mean resistance can’t reflect
thoughtful awareness about impacts on wider audiences, but that it remains
highly vulnerable to actions that may well be counterproductive to social
change. As 60s-era movements and Occupy
have demonstrated, the same vulnerabilities apply to other forms of direct
action that aim at raising sympathetic public consciousness about the targets
of protest; either they may spin into counterproductive action or they may pass
relatively unnoticed in the wider media.
There remains an additional, related
protest path that involves the collective withdrawal of participation in
institutions that require that participation–what Piven and Cloward have called
“defiance.” Labor strikes or collective
boycotts have been two of the most common forms of defiance. One spin-off of the Occupy movement has been
Strike Debt, an effort to build public solidarity in opposition to a variety of
forms of individual debt –student, household, medical, and mortgage debt— as
well as, potentially, forms of institutional debt that distort the public responsiveness
and agendas of the respective governing bodies–e.g., municipal, school system,
and developing nations’ debt. While
there are obviously formidable strategic obstacles to organizing collective
defiance around debt, the effort to do so offers three strategic advantages: 1)
its targets are the creditors –banks and other financial institutions, and more
symbolically the 1%-- and as David Graeber’s recent study suggests, it is
potentially counter-systemic;[20]
2) it offers the potential for building solidarity across the divides of our
fragmented neoliberal polity if students, homeowners, the elderly, and
credit-card-dependent families come to recognize they are being exploited by a
common adversary; and 3) if collective defiance proved possible, it would necessitate a response from the powerful
creditors, and at least to that extent it begins to empower the protest
movement, providing a foundation for broader empowerment.
Inevitably, global capitalism will
continue to generate opposition and resistance around the world. In fact, it is possible to imagine the
current moment as one in which a wide variety of forces are gradually coming together
to give birth to a new global paradigm –one that will not only allow human life
to continue but will liberate humans in ways that allow them to connect and
engage with each other to create a more livable world for everyone. In the struggle ahead, it behooves us to be
attentive to the myriad of ways the mass media divide us from each other.
Edward P. (Ted) Morgan is Professor of Political
Science at Lehigh University where he teaches classes on Social Movements and
Legacies of the 1960s; Propaganda, Media and American Politics; and Organizing
for Democracy. This article draws on his
What Really Happened to the 1960s: How
Mass Media Culture Failed American Democracy (Lawrence, KA: University
Press of Kansas, 2010) and his earlier interpretive history of 60s-era social
movements, The Sixties Experience: Hard
Lessons about Modern America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991).
[1] In
making this leap back to 1968, I don’t mean to denigrate either the so-called
“anti-globalization” movement that took off with the Seattle protests in 1999,
or the anti-nuclear movements of the 1970s and 80s –both of which were
significant social movements which influenced the course of anti-systemic
activism around the world.
[2]
Immanuel Wallerstein, “1968, Revolution in the World-System,” Theory and Society 18 (1989), 431.
[3]
Mark Kurlansky, 1968: The Year that
Rocked the World (New York: Ballantine, 2004), xvii.
[4]
Michel Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, and Joji Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to
the Trilateral Commission (New York: New York University Press, 1975).
[5]
While I map out the argument here, I document the media-protest dynamic and the
post-60s reconstruction in What Really
Happened to the 1960s: How Mass Media Culture Failed American Democracy
(Lawrence, KA: University Press of Kansas, 2010).
[6]
Daniel Hallin, The ‘Uncensored War’: The
Media and Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 116-7,
emphasis added.
[7]
Taylor Branch, Pillar of Fire: America in
the King Years, 1963-1965 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), 49.
[8]
Gadi Wolfsfeld and William A. Gamson, “Movements and Media as Interacting
Systems,” Annals of the American Academy
of Political and Social Science 528 (July 1993): 119.
[9]
Stokely Carmichael with Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael
(Kwame Ture) (New York: Scribner, 2003), 139, emphasis added.
[10]
Quoted in Juan Williams, Eyes on the
Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965 (New York: Penguin, 1988),
191.
[11]
As Immanuel Wallerstein has argued, “What those in power most feared was not
the moral condemnation of the movements but their ability to disrupt the
political arena by mass mobilization.”
Immanuel Wallerstein, The End of
the World as We Know It: Social Science for the Twenty-First Century
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 24.
[12]
Jack Weinberg, quoted in Mark Kitchell, Berkeley
in the 60s (VHS; New York: First Run Features, 1990).
[13]
Lawrence Grossberg, “Rockin’ in Conservative Times,” in Dancing in Spite of Myself (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
1997), 257.
[14]
Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool:
Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1997), 235.
See also Mark Crispin Miller, Boxed
In: The Culture of TV, 3rd ed. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press, 1989).
[15]
Crozier, Huntington, and Watanuki, The
Crisis of Democracy, 61-2.
[16]
Stephanie Ross, “Is This What Democracy Looks Like? The Politics of the Anti-Globalization
Movement in North America,” in Socialist Register
2003: Fighting Identities: Race, Religion, and Ethno-Nationalism (Halifax,
NS: Fernwood Publications, 2002), 281.
[17]
For more on this, see Leo Panitch, Greg Albo, and Vivek Chibber, Socialist Register 2013: The Question of
Strategy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012).
[18]
Rich Morin, “Rising Share of Americans See Conflict between Rich and Poor,” Pew
Research Center,
January 11, 2012, http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2012/01/11/rising-share-of-americans-see-conflict-between-rich-and-poor/
(March 14, 2013).
[19]
Barbara Epstein, “Occupy Oakland and the Question of Violence,” in Panitch,
Albo, and Chibber, Socialist Register
2013, 81-2.
[20]
See David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000
Years (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2011).
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