Occupy Wall Street continues to be very interesting. (On the economic side, see also.)
I previously mentioned that non-violent protests can only win by being economically or politically disruptive, but there are a few ways to achieve that goal:
Consumer Siege: Cut someone off from funding by refusing to do business with them (boycott) is the typical example. Indirect boycotts can sometimes work (for example, see Color of Change’s successful campaign against the Glenn Beck Show, which worked by convincing advertisers that being associated with Glenn Beck was not a good idea for their brand (or at least that it would be better to spend their advertising budget’s elsewhere). Divestment can also work, since the people running an institution tend to also be investors. Of course, that only works if equity in the institution is publicly held and the protesters have a lot of it (not usually the case).
In the case of OWS, this is why I’m interested in this story in which a bunch of protesters who were Citi Bank customers tried to close their accounts, only to be locked in by guards and arrested by police. Bizarre. A question: In the actual bank runs of the 1930s, did banks ever try to get police to arrest customers who were closing their accounts?
Disruption of Business: Protesters prevent the institution from doing business with anyone. This either involves discouraging customers or actually preventing institutional activities from happening. The strike is an obvious (and fairly mild) example of this type. So is the picket line, in which customers and/or replacement workers are discouraged (but not actually prevented) from entering a place of business.
Given the name “Occupy Wall Street”, I’m surprised there isn’t more action of this type. While seeing the protesters “occupy” Times Square was impressive, it’s a far cry from actually occupying, you know, Wall Street. There’s no indication that OWS has been at all disruptive to the business activities of anyone working on Wall Street.
Petition: In general, just expressing one’s grievances, no matter how publicly is pretty useless unless you can effectively turn that to recruiting people for one of the activities listed in this post. Getting arrested is only great if you emerge from jail with your numbers doubled. (The IWW was great at this, Anonymous not so much. (That topic might be worth its own post, but in the meanwhile, read this, which also includes some very good speculation about the possible outcomes of the protests.))
There’s one exception, though. If your grievances are expressed directly, in person, to an institution itself, then the actions the institution takes against you can effect the institution’s reputation enough to be disruptive. That only works if the institution is considered to be in control of the action taken against protesters and the institution is perceived to have some sort of obligation to listen to protesters. Here, that’s likely to be just government, and maybe not even that.
That tactic can also work as the political equivalent of “disruption of business”. If hundreds of people are showing up in person to present their grievances at each congressional office every day, it does give Congress a bit more personal motivation to resolve the situation.
Elections: In a democracy, if you can mobilize enough support to actually get incumbent legislators replaced with legislators loyal to your position, then that’s one way to change things. To do this at a large scale, you really need to establish an effective political party. Specifically, it must be able to do two things effectively: Get candidates elected, and ensure that candidates who don’t toe the party line on important issues (the platform) are not reelected (and preferably are left with their careers in total ruin, such that they actually fear defecting).
I’ve heard suggestions that OWS needs a “non-partisan political party”, which is nonsense. To the extent that the concept is coherent, we already have a non-partisan political party, the Democrats, which is wildly ineffective at whipping their members into going along with even the core of the party platform. The Republicans, on the other hand, are wildly effective whips, at least on the limited platform of opposing Obama (or whatever non-Republican is in power at the time). (They’re less effectively partisan when actually in charge, but you don’t really have to coordinate much on how to burn the place down in order to do so effectively.)
You also need a lot of political power to push around the bureaucracy, but I don’t think that’s an intractable problem in the case of OWS. (At least not compared to the difficulty of getting legislators elected in the first place.)
ComplexMeme 