As movements move beyond the anarchist lens of Occupy, they must face hard questions of bureaucracy and cooptation.
In 2002, in the midst of a wave of global resistance to corporate globalization that would produce major protests at trade meetings from Seattle to Genoa to Hong Kong, a book appeared that captured much of the spirit of the period’s activism. Written by John Holloway, an Irish-born political theorist who had long made his home in Mexico, it was entitled “Change the World Without Taking Power.
There is certainly cause to celebrate this shift. And yet, a move toward insider politics cannot be undertaken lightly. While writers with anarchist orleanings such as Graeber and Holloway may have been unduly fearful of cooptation and overly pessimistic about the possibilities of creating change through entering the system, they also voiced some valid concerns.
In the U.S. context, Bill Clinton’s implementation of “welfare reform,” his pursuit of corporate deregulation, and his championing of neoliberal trade deals dispelled any notion that, in the wake of the Cold War, the Democrats would reverse the advances of Reaganism. For David Graeber, Barack Obama’s subsequent failure to push radical policies was perhaps even more galling.
While the anarchist sensibility retained influence into the Obama era, a shift away from it became pronounced by 2016. As journalist and popular podcaster Daniel Denvir, Occupy, immigrant rights protests, and Black Lives Matter had energized the left in the years prior. And yet, “the idea that we might and must win state power didn’t become clear until Bernie Sanders’ 2016 Democratic primary challenge.
Specifically, these thinkers raise three challenging points about the costs of cooperating with the system: that movements aspiring to inside influence have a track record of muting their radical vision and critique; that they over-rely on the power of official players; and that they fail to grapple with the challenge of bureaucratic cooptation.
The call to be realistic and work within the constraints of status quo institutions stands in tension with the scream’s disgusted rejection of our current predicament. For hard-headed realists who follow Machiavelli in concerning themselves “only with what is, not with things as we might wish them to be,” the urgent questions raised by the scream quickly become regarded as naive and utopian.