[lbo-talk] OWS: Davis, CA

[Jordan S. Carroll]

I stopped by the first General Assembly for Occupy Davis, CA, the other day and found it to be rather depressing. I had to leave about an hour in, so I might have missed some critical debate and discussion (it doesn't sound like it), but from what I saw the group has taken a rather bourgeois turn. We were repeatedly told that the movement is "bipartisan" and "apolitical," and several participants emphasized that we should reach out to conservatives and Tea Partiers. (This includes, presumably, the Federal Reserve conspiracy theorist in attendance-he got a lot of wavy hand support.) We also spent quite a bit of time talking about how we should avoid civil disobedience and court the Davis City Council and other local institutions to support our (unnamed) cause. One of the highlights of the evening was when the head organizer announced that we shouldn't antagonize University of California administrators "because many of us work there." Our campus has been the site of a number of struggles over the past few years, including numerous occupations and 50+ arrests after tuition hikes and a contentious graduate student worker contract negotiation. Indeed, as it's been pointed out here, UC system protest tactics provided one of the many inspirations for Occupy Wall Street's. But, instead of occupying buildings or even parks ("we're busy people with jobs"), the favored protest action at the meeting yesterday was to get people to switch from Bank of America to credit unions en masse.  The radical utopian horizon of NYC seems to have contracted to voting with our dollars to support local businesses and cooperatives in Davis, CA. And, in another reversal of the original protest, there wasn't really any discussion of political principles-everyone wanted to just get to concrete actions for specific goals. We were encouraged to "have our own opinions" and shy away from political debate. I'm hoping that this is a product of the people involved, or the political climate in Davis, but it does seem to portend co-optation ahead. Political commentators are already talking about Occupy Wall Street as an inchoate "frustration" and a liberal "Tea Party." I don't know if things would be any different if the occupiers had a specific platform, but the Occupy movement is starting to turn into a political Rorschach test. If more liberal Occupies start sprouting up like this, the movement is going to have to clarify itself - and risk offending our bourgeois liberal and libertarian capitalist friends - or just become a "vauge" umbrella term for more or less unrelated consensus-based protests.