Watching the live feed for the Occupy Oakland General Assembly yesterday, I saw a woman come to the mike and assert that we need to fundamentally and innovatively rethink the way we conduct our economic relationships with each other. I’ve heard this one before, and so have you, and so has eastern Europe. I’m not naive enough to proclaim a utopian vision of socialism as a political possibility, but I’m also not so crass and cynical to naturalize the current state of affairs.

I also watched the Occupy live feed struggle with internal dissent. With their experimental direct democracy set-up, their stage, mic, and facilitators. I saw the leaders struggle to satisfy the demands of plural and contradictory factions in the crowd and verbally check people for violating protocol. I saw a proto-bureaucracy begin to take shape.

Sometimes we forget that most major hierarchical institutions began in charismatic, frenetic outpourings: Christianity was an apocalyptic movement about uprooting the established socio-political order, American democracy was, too.

Bureaucracies, however, and legal systems, codes of conduct, are necessary for social stability, for codifying the patterns of daily life. Barring life in a Hobbesian state-of-nature, humans gotta have rules. We need order. Re-ordering is an important step in seeking justice, and it usually comes with chaos upfront. But wreaking havoc is, frankly, the easier part. Does it require courage? Absolutely! Does it upset fixed notions of reality? Definitely. That is one of the crucial steps of social change, but placing something functional in its stead, after the rallies and after the chants. That’s the hardest part.

Of course, folks at Occupy don’t have a say in that process. Representative democracy is riddled with problems. And, in the aggregate, I think Occupy Wall Street is a damned courageous and timely and necessary movement. I wish it had more coherent claims about how to make substantive, institutional change. But you kind of need to have power to have a say in those matters. And the protestors are out there to demonstrate that they don’t have that power. And that their “democratic” representatives aren’t listening. The normal channels for expressing dissent are clogged.

I often feel like an iteration of the character Chip from Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. It’s an amazing characterization of a professor of critical theory who espouses feminist-Marxist beliefs in his classes, but has a hard time manifesting those ideals in his personal life. Chip is seriously a brilliant character, especially one sentence in there about how Chip had very few marketable skills, but one skill he had down was consumption: buying things, eating things. He was very qualified at that. The book is a perfect, compassionate indictment of the contradictions of academia. 

At the end of the day, I do feel a solidarity with the occupy movement and feel apologetic about my need to over-intellectualize things. As my sister put it, the movement is helping a lot of people to connect-the-dots, it’s galvanizing the left, and it’s revealing police brutality. May the experiment with direct democracy continue.