People's Collective University at Occupy Los Angeles

Now that the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon has achieved a level of respect from the mainstream media (by which I mean it’s no longer an object of knee-jerk ridicule), all the smart people are demanding that it shape up, identify some leaders and publish a list of demands.  Without these, we’re to understand, the movement will drift into insignificance or, worse, mob violence.

As an institutionalized intellectual, I too am favorable to manifestos, lists of demands and organizational structure.  But at this point, the demand for demands and leaders misses something important about the political dynamic at hand, and about social movement dynamics generally.

1. The Public Sphere was Dead.  There really isn’t a “left” movement in the U.S., nor is there a “progressive” movement.  There are many organizations and information outlets, but no movement.  Obama’s success in 2008 relied on a youthful upsurge in participation, but this was largely mobilized within his campaign apparatus. When he turned off the money at the close of the election cycle the phantom “movement” disappeared.  But this reality was only a symptom of something worse: a huge deficit of organizational capacity in the population at large.  Very few people understand even the basics of how to organize.  It’s not taught in schools, of course.  The collapse of union density means that millions of people who might otherwise know something about how a collective action works, never get the opportunity.  Only on the political right, and within right-leaning religious groups, are people systematically introduced to the mechanics of organizing.  Why this happened is a big question with many answers:  corporate media, test-driven schooling, dying labor movement, broken links between generations of activists, economic despair. But the deficit is real.

2. Process not Project.  The sad reality of the moribund public sphere is the starting point for this maybe-movement, and that’s why expecting it to act like the Debsian Socialist Party is wrongheaded.  The strong social movements of the 20th century took decades to build, and they began in scattered conversations, debates, and disagreements–dare I say consensus building.  There are leaders in the occupations, there are organizers.  So the critique is more about leadership style.  And the grievances of the Occupy movement are pretty obvious, if diffuse, to anyone who is really listening:  things are bad, the government isn’t doing anything about it, and we’re finally fed up.  Granted that isn’t particularly sophisticated on a political level and, more importantly, generalized grievances are hard to build action around in the long run.  But it’s hard to argue with success.  Do we really think having clearer demands would have done a better job sparking the political imagination?  For all the gripes about the Occupiers being too mushy, the demand for demands has its own mysticism.  It imagines that great manifestos actually make movements.  So let’s be patient, and be part of this movement in the making.

3.  Healthy social movements are multiple.  The occupation of Zuccotti Park in Manhattan sparked this phase of our political life, but it’s worth reminding ourselves that it is just one node in a wider conflict.  The genius of Occupy Wall Street was to set an example of resistance, and offer a model of community-in-action.  This model is spreading.  But it can’t be the same in every location.  When we ask, “Will the occupations become a movement?” we seem to be expecting, literally, the occupation of Zuccotti Park to morph into some post-modern political party (readers can substitute their favored party: Communist, Socialist, Progressive, etc.).  This, I think, misses the point.  We don’t need a unified movement and in any case total unity is impossible to achieve when we get down to the level of factional politics.  So criticism, suggestion, strategic intervention and parallel action are all completely reasonable and healthy.  More is more.

By way of example, one of the best recent actions in Los Angeles was organized not by Occupy L.A., but by the post-ACORN community organization ACCE.  They spent a week focusing on the impending foreclosure of one family home in South L.A.  The took their people to the bank that holds the mortgage, they protested on the front lawn of the CEO of that bank, and they lobbied Fannie Mae.  In the end, they won.  Rose Gudiel, who missed on payment, and was facing foreclosure and eviction, won a mortgage modification and can keep her home (see Peter Drier’s account here).  This was a well-executed series of actions, but here in L.A. as in other places well-executed actions don’t always get traction.  It helped immensely to have the occupations in the news, changing the overall flow of public discourse.

And so the Occupation Non-Movement may well remain a non-movement and still be  successful.  Zuccotti Park may be cleared out by the police and the occupation will still be successful.  It has sparked a million conversations that otherwise would have been muted.  And it’s the conversations, rather than the manifestos, that make movements move.  That’s not to say it doesn’t matter what direction the occupations go, only to say particular modes of development are not required to make the occupations worthwhile.

Until something gains traction.

Eight months ago I asked whether the protests in Wisconsin to oppose the radical restructuring of the state’s political economy were becoming “the movement we’ve been waiting for”? I concluded, “When the demand to protect public-sector collective bargaining becomes a demand to restore public services generally, we’ll be on the way.”  Now, clearly, we’re on our way.  Where to?  We don’t know yet, but we are rolling.

Tomorrow morning the NYPD will be rolling too.  Rolling in to Zuccotti Park/Liberty Square to remove the Occupy Wall Street encampment.  Just a cleaning say city officials, but afterwards there will be no more camping out.  As the Guardian reports it, the park’s private owners “appear to have had enough of their uninvited guests and have ordered a cleanup to begin at 7am on Friday.”  The occupiers have offered to clean the park themselves, and are ready for a showdown, perhaps any time after midnight.

Given the militarization of the NYPD, if Mayor Bloomberg wants the protesters out they’ll be out.  Afterwards, there will likely be days or even weeks of civil disobedience aiming to reoccupy the park, and the police will probably win that battle too.

But the occupation of a particular plot of ground in New York City was not really the goal.  The goal was to goad the scattered and demoralized into action.  And as of today there are nearly 1,500 cities reporting some kind of event or action inspired by Occupy Wall Street, , according to Occupy Together.  Mission accomplished.

Madison = Torque

Yet for all the drama of Occupy Wall Street, it has been much smaller and less sustained than the massive, and massively disruptive, occupation of the Wisconsin capitol building back in February.  As Tom Morello described the feeling of being inside the rotunda and on the streets of Madison: “there was so much torque, and it really seemed like it could be something that was about much more than stopping one bad law.”  So much torque, so much potential to turn the screw.  But, he goes on, the energy was dissipated into recall elections rather than a general strike.

Could that have happened?  Did labor leaders choke?  For labor historians, it’s a familiar question.  But the impact of the Madison protests was not lost on the leadership of the labor movement nationally.  After a large delegation of Los Angeles unionists traveled to freezing cold Madison last winter the returned with a renewed sense of possibility.  The vast protests, the occupation of the state capital, the solidarity between public and private sector unions, between firefighters, police, and everyone else, between union and nonunion, young and old.  All of this was inspiring.  So too was the surprising racial landscape of the protests.  California unionists had grown used to seeing angry white people as their political and social enemies.  The crowds and leadership in Madison were diverse, but they were paler by far than the typical neighborhood in Los Angeles County.  To paraphrase one L.A. union official:  if all those white people are on our side, we just might start winning again.

But it was a long summer as the Wisconsin and Ohio protests funneled their energy into state-level politics, the federal government careened toward default, and President Obama seemed incapable or unwilling to fight back.  For the left, even for the unions (who are by no means all “left”), the mainstream of American politics has been hermetically sealed, a smooth ball with zero traction.  No way to crack it open.  No leverage.  In the summer lull, the respected labor strategiest Stephen Lerner issued an appeal for labor to work more flexibly with non-labor groups: “Campaigns challenging corporate power can’t be held in check by institutions with too much to lose,” i.e., unions.  And then along came Occupy Wall Street.

Less control.  More agitation.  More torque, more leverage.  At least for now that appears to be the way forward.

During the early years of the Great Depression, working people in the U.S. organized an array of direct action responses and mounted a number of militant strikes.  Anti-eviction actions in the cities, penny auctions to save family farms, Unemployed Councils, the Farm Holiday movement, EPIC, general strikes in Toledo, Minneapolis, and San Francisco…the list goes on.  Most of it before the most important reforms of the New Deal.  These kinds of protests created political pressure, and political opportunity, that resulted in the more progressive “Second New Deal” that brought us the Wagner Act, the WPA, Fair Labor Standards, and Fair Employment Practices.

Three years into the deepest economic collapse since the 1930s, the U.S. has seen almost no popular response.  Sure, we’ve seen orchestrated “populist” outrage with the Tea Partiers.  But no popular social movement. Until now.

The news at first trickled in across Facebook and email–a friend at the Teaching Assistants Association posted that they received a fax announcing the revocation of their contract effective in 30 days.  By the end of this week it was national and international news–40,000 strong protest at the state capital, senators fleeing to Illinois, similar protests brewing in Ohio.

Most progressive critiques of Barack Obama have rung hollow in my ears because there really isn’t a progressive social movement in this country creating the kinds of political pressures and opportunities for broader change.  Practically speaking, there isn’t all that much “civil society” here either.  Some progressive bloggers out there seem to think they represent a “movement” that elected Obama.  I don’t see it that way.  No doubt Obama tapped into progressive sentiment to power his campaign.  But what we saw in 2008 was a highly effective political campaign, not (yet) a movement.  When he demobilized the campaign its potential to morph into something bigger dissipated.

What we’re seeing in Wisconsin might be the start of that social movement we’ve been waiting for.  I think we’ll know this is happening when the spirit of these protests turn  from Republican inspired state-level union-busting to the Neo-Hooverite budgets being proposed by Republicans and Democrats in Washington and by Democratic governors like Jerry Brown.  When the demand to protect public-sector collective bargaining becomes a demand to restore public services generally, we’ll be on the way.

Wisconsin is a big first step, and an inspiration.  We’ve grown used to defeat.  It looks like the crowds of protesters are getting a taste for collective action and, dare I say it, power.  Forward!

An image from "Frontier to Heartland"

Exhibit-making does not rate as highly as article- and book-writing in orthodox academic history.  That’s an unfortunate fact of life.  But as I wrapped up a long overdue online exhibit project this past summer, I was reminded of the things I find compelling about exhibit-making, whether online or in physical spaces.

First off, eyeballs. The typical exhibit gets more visitors than the journal article or book gets readers.  Fewer than 1,000 people have read Indispensable Outcasts (it being the 1.4 millionth bestselling book on Amazon), which I spent many a year crafting.  About 10,000 people visited Outspoken during its 4 month physical installation.  Concept to close, maybe 3 years.

But at the moment I’m more interested in the exhibit-making work process as a model of historical research and meaning-making for the curator.  And here my tale suggests important differences between physical and digital exhibits. Consider the image at right: a flyer from a Chicago’s Dill Pickle Club preserved at the Newberry Library. 

In the 2004 exhibit, Outspoken: Chicago’s Free Speech Tradition, we included this as part of a collection of flyers from the club.  It didn’t have its own caption, just an example of the wild and crazy times at the Dill Pickle.  Honestly, I considered it just a fun curiosity.  The combination of Mae West and two speakers from the left-libertarian labor world–to the extent that visitors got it–was meant to show the cultural crossover between the fun and the serious that was typical of Dill Pickle Club events.

Fast-forward to this year and the wrap up of an online exhibit for the Newberry featuring the library’s midwestern collections.  The project, titled Frontier to Heartland, is built on the WordPress-based exhibit-making program Omeka from the Center for History and New Media.  In Omeka every item gets its own entry, so now there is no hiding behind collective captions.

And so the research process, a very narrow research process:  Mae West’s “Sex.”  Was this real or just a joke, a come-on to get people in the door?  To be honest, I had always assumed it was a joke.  But I was wrong, and I should have known better.

In March of 1930, Mae West and the cast of “Pleasure Man” were put on trial for obscenity in New York City. As the Chicago Tribune reported it, the crime was “putting on a show that made policemen blush and brought out more patrol wagons than a communist picnic.”  In August of 1930, West arrived in Chicago with a new play titled “Sex” that promised audiences “55 people” on stage and “555 Thrills.”  And so, a burlesque review, an anarchist, and an IWW icon all in one week.  Quite something.

This is why I have an image captioning assignment for students.  The challenge of unraveling a single image always leads to other sources, other contexts.  Thankfully, it is much easy to do now that we have full-text archives.  But it is still well worth while.

If you’ve read this far, take a look at my caption here, and enjoy the collection.

Part of the paper was a quick review of the iconography of the robot, which I’m attaching to this post as a slideshow.Click to view slideshow.

So I’m back to my old friend Bughouse Square while I delete everything over at tobiashigbie.net and start over. But not until the quarter is over.

Over the last year or so my tagging and bookmarking on Delicious has slowed and practically come to an end.  The new object (or tool) of my attention is the citation management program Zotero, developed by the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University.  The two programs have very different functions, and the collective aspects of Zotero are not easy to use (or easily useful) compared to Delicious.  Zotero operates like a free and much improved EndNote, gathering and organizing research citations, and unlike other online citation managers I’ve fiddled with, Zotero was developed specifically for historians.  Zotero has been around for a few years but became useful for me only with its version 2 that introduced remote storage of citations and syncing between different computers.

So why should Zotero displace my bookmarking on Delicious, rather than being an additional tool for a different purpose? Two reasons.  First, Zotero automatically captures a page image of any website you add to your collection.  This was particularly important for me during the recent student protests when I wanted to capture the content of blogs (including comments) and other ephemeral expressions.  Then it became useful as I gathered images to illustrate lectures.  And finally I started capturing online news that I expect will go behind pay-per-view barriers eventually.

The second reason might be cataloged under “Web 2.0 Fatigue.”  For instance, of late I’ve pretty much stopped using Facebook, which I find an outrageous time sink, and my blogging has pretty much stalled too.  In part I’ve become a more passive user of the web–reading news and commentary, but rarely commenting or publishing.  In part, I’m spending more time online doing research with full text databases (esp, historic newspapers).  And in part I am spending a lot of time putting the finishing touches on a long overdue digital project.  With two little kids, I also have more interesting and truly interactive things to do with my spare time.  I have grown weary of so much screen time, so many programs, so many distractions.  Anything peripheral drops out, and Delicious has been one of the casualties of my overall fatigue with Web 2.0.

What am I losing in this transition?  Well, Delicious is really simple and fast.  Zotero’s online functions are really slow so I almost never interact with other users online.  I tried to integrate Zotero into a undergraduate research seminar last fall, but frankly it was too clunky for the students.  A few latched on to it, especially the ability to create instant bibliographies.  But at this point, Zotero is really more useful for me as a solitary scholar.  Meanwhile, one thing I’ve always enjoyed about Delicious was mining the tags for interesting cultural and political trends.  Given that the universe of Zotero users seems to be other scholars, I’m not getting any new insights beyond that demographic.

Given my state of Web 2.0 Fatigue I don’t imagine I’ll go back to being a heavy user of Delicious.  Only so many keystrokes and mouse clicks in a 24 hour day.  Given that, I hope the folks at CHNM are working on ways to make Zotero faster and more social. For instance, it would be great if I could save things in Zotero and Delicious with one click.

Overall, I hope for new Web 2.0 programs that actually simplify online life.  I suspect that various forms of cross-platform integration don’t actually simplify, nor are they designed to do so.  Given the commercial goals of Facebook, Google, and Apple, etc., the goal of cross-platform integration has to be more screen time, more eyes on ads.  In this sense both Zotero and Delicious (and my other favorite, Flickr) remain uncluttered with advertisement and so rank higher than many other tools in my book–it’s important enough for me to pay the annual subscription fee.

Thus unchained by mass production, the inventive spirit that should, according to definition, relieve human effort, in reality, on account of inadequate adjustment of various economic equilibriums, brings only misery to a part of mankind. It must be said, moreover, that this aspect of industry does not escape the American public, as is proved by the increasing employment of a new word that seems to denote a state of actual fear in regard to these questions. If we consider as a sign of the times the progressive entry into fiction of characters belonging to the middle and finally the working class, whereas writers in the past brought only representatives of the upper classes upon the scene, then perhaps a sign of the same order can be seen in the appearance of an entirely new character that is taking a growing place in American literature–the Robot.

On the stage and in the newspapers, this character has entered into current speech and vaguely haunts the imagination of the American, who is more accustomed than others to the constant development of mechanization.  For a long time he regarded the machine with boundless admiration.  He considered it as a specifically American creation, and in it he contemplated his own genius, for up to the present he has concentrated almost exclusively on its development the entire force of intelligence which elsewhere is expended in other directions–such as on art, literature, philosophy.  This fact must not be lost sight of in trying to judge the American and in noting certain deficiencies.  Too occupied in exploiting the lavish resources of nature, he has not yet had time to dream and consequently to discover what fecundity lies outside of material activities.  Rather, let us say that only a few have discovered it, and we cannot predict what will come from their efforts when they have attained a better disposition of their latent energies.

The American, therefore, has as yet shown to the world but one great achievement–the machine.  And he has developed its magic power to such a point that he is beginning to be alarmed at it himself.  His admiration is waning and is being mingled with fear.  For on the familiar picture of abundance, to which he is accustomed, there now appears the growing shadow of unemployment.  In the imagination troubled by fear of hunger, the myth again takes human form, and the machine, formerly admired, is becoming a malevolent Robot.

What, then, is the Robot?  The American, whose language is a mosaic of words borrowed from all races and patched on to the English that already was a mosaic, has borrowed this new word from Russia to designate the latest creation of the modern inventor–the Man-Machine.*  In reality the Man-Machine does not yet exist outside of works more or less inspired by Jules Verne, who, with Alexandre Dumas and Eugene Sue, is one of the popular writers in America.  But to a people accustomed to seeing the machine enjoined with everything, the Robot already seems to be a near reality, and they expect from one day to another to find it bearing the entire burden of labor, whereupon they will have nothing more to do than drowse in rocking chairs and smoke interminable pipes.

But if the Man-Machine is still only an invention of the pen, it is no less true that, without having human form, the machine is already assuming such a multitude of tasks that, whereas once it aroused admiration, it is beginning to inspire fear.  Around the comfortable hearth of the American workman stalks the specter of the Robot.

*In reality, the term “robot” came from the Czeck play R.U.R.: (Rossum’s Universal Robots) by Karel Capek, first performed in the U.S. in the fall of 1922.

A handful of these pictures were published in the volume Granger Country, written and compiled by then Newberry Library president Stanley Pargelis and Chicago newspaperman Lloyd Lewis.  The rest languished in the stacks of the Newberry until a few years ago when Newberry archivist Martha Briggs, librarian Hjordis Halvorson, and others secured funding to scan a selection.

The CB&Q collections makes for an interesting companion to the much larger Charles Cushman collection at Indian University (14,000 color slides by an amateur photographer). It is much more focused, as you would expect from two professional photographers who were escorted around the railway system by Pargelis and CB&Q PR employees.  There are series of “daily life” shots that focus on particular towns, workshops, and farms.  One series documents life on a family farm in north central Illinois, including a trip to Chicago by the farm wife (on the CB&Q, of course) to shop at Marshall Field’s.

A good number of the shots have a formulaic feel of corporate publicity, but there are some real gems, too.

I’m struck by the image above, of two women rail shop workers in Havelock, Nebraska.  What a story these two must have.  Their body language suggests the bonds of women working in an intensely male environment–likely as not the only women on the shop floor.  Were these two “Rosie the Riveters” who held on to their wartime jobs?  The woman who looks into the camera is wearing a wedding ring.  Is her husband working there too?  Unemployed?  Gone?

The collection is also rich in describing the work processes of a large railroad at a moment when rail travel was still quite common.  There are quite a few shots documenting work in roundhouses, loading and unloading freight and passengers, and cleaning passenger trains.  There are also a few shots of the pre-computer information technologies used by railways to set freight rates (agent with rate books and a phone), and keep track of individual train cars across their sprawling continental networks.

Like the Cushman collection, the CB&Q collection documents a peculiar moment in U.S. history.   Historian Eric Sandweiss writes that Cushman’s images captured a landscape and built environment frozen in time by the Great Depression.  Among other things, the Depression ground to a halt the massive construction boom of the 1920s.  True, the New Deal would sponsor a wide array of public works including housing and roads.  But compared to the phenomenal growth of the post-World War II period, the 1930s saw relatively little in the way of urban transformation, and much of the building during the war was temporary housing.  So the immediate postwar years are interesting in that they retained much of the feeling of scarcity held over from depression and war.  The take-off was still just over the horizon.

Unfortunately, the collection is housed within CONTENTdm in such a way that makes it impossible to easily integrate into blog posts.  No doubt this is to protect the Library’s intellectual property.  But if any of my old colleagues at the Newberry are reading, you can see that it’s easy enough to grab a low-res image from the site.  So why not facilitate blog integration?  Put the images up on Flickr?  Similarly, to save image links in Delicious or Zotero, you have to go and grab a separate “reference link” by clicking on a nearly-hidden link at the bottom left of the images catalog page.  On the plus side, CONTENTdm provides a way to save your “favorites.”  But for me, I’m more interested in saving my favorites centrally, along with my other citations.

Despite these gripes, I’m thrilled that this collection is out, and I salute the Newberry librarians and archivists who worked hard to preserve it, catalog it, and made it accessible.