by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

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By: Robert Meeropol Friday January 6, 2012 11:30 am

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International Socialist Review  Issue 57, January–February 2008

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SHARON SMITH argues that identity politics can’t liberate the oppressed

FIGHTING AGAINST oppression is an urgent issue in U.S. society today. Racism, sexism, and homophobia have all reached appalling levels—that seem only to rise with each passing year. White students in Jena hang nooses, and Black students end up in prison.¹ Squads of Minutemen vigilantes patrol the Mexican border with impunity, for the sole purpose of terrorizing migrant communities.² College campuses across the U.S. commemorate “Islamo-fascism awareness week” as if it were just another legitimate student activity.³ Fred Phelps and his Kansas-based Westboro Baptist Church congregation regularly picket outside funerals of gay soldiers killed in Iraq, proclaiming that they belong in hell.⁴

To be sure, the problem extends way beyond the extremist fringe. Media pundits barely comment on the outrages described above, while mainstream discourse regularly heaps contempt on those attempting to fight against oppression—including young women organizing against date rape (which is assumed to be a figment of their feminism-charged imaginations) and immigrants demanding basic legal rights (as if they are out to steal jobs from native-born workers). If the “playing field is level,” as so many in the mainstream media assume, those who object must therefore be seeking an unfair advantage.

It is no wonder, therefore, that so many people who experience oppression feel so embattled in the current political climate. Only a movement aimed at fighting oppression in all its forms can challenge the victim-blaming ideology that prevails today. The pressing need for such a movement is acknowledged here. Indeed, this article is intended to address the issue of how to most effectively fight back, since different political strategies lead to quite different conclusions about the kind of movement that is needed to challenge oppression. The bulk of this article is a critique of the theory behind what is known in academic and left circles as “identity politics”—the idea that only those experiencing a particular form of oppression can either define it or fight against it—counterposing to it a Marxist analysis. My central premise is that Marxism provides the theoretical tools for ending oppression, while identity politics does not.

Personal identity versus the politics of identity

It is important to make a clear distinction between personal identity and identity politics, since the two are often used interchangeably. But there is a substantial difference between these two concepts.

Possessing a personal “identity,” or awareness of oneself as a member of an oppressed group—and the anger associated with that awareness—is a legitimate response to experiencing oppression. Racism is, of course, experienced on a very personal level—whether it takes the form of institutional discrimination (racist hiring practices, police brutality) or social interaction (racist jokes, violence from an acknowledged racist). Personal experience, furthermore, helps to shape one’s political awareness of oppression. It makes perfect sense that experiencing sexism on a personal level precedes most women’s political consciousness of sexism as a form of oppression that degrades all women.

Indeed, no white person can ever understand what it is like to experience racism. No straight person can understand what it is like to experience homophobia. And even among people who are oppressed by racism, every type of experience is different. A Black person and a Native American person, for example, experience racism differently—as does a person from Mexico versus a person from Puerto Rico. A gay man and a lesbian have quite different experiences.

At the same time, personal experience is quite separate from the realm of politics, which involves strategies to affect society as a whole. Personal identity only becomes political when it moves beyond the realm of life experience and becomes a strategy for fighting against oppression. Every set of politics is based upon a theory—in this case, an analysis of the root causes of oppression. So the analysis of oppression informs the politics of social movements against oppression.

There are clear differences in strategy between Marxism and the theory of identity politics, which will be examined below. It is first necessary, however, to make clear which facts are not in dispute. Both theories are in agreement that all oppression is based on genuine inequality. Men and women are not treated as equals in society. Whites and African Americans are not treated at all equally. Oppression is not a matter of perception, but of concrete, material reality.

Nor is there any doubt that struggles against oppression should be led by the oppressed themselves—women themselves can and will lead the struggle for women’s liberation. This has always been the case historically, from the struggle for women’s suffrage to the fight for abortion rights. The same dynamic is true of the struggle for Black liberation. Former slaves and other African Americans led the battle for Reconstruction aimed at transforming Southern plantation society in the decades following the Civil War. African Americans led the mass civil rights movement that finally struck down Southern segregation in the 1950s and 1960s.

During the late 1960s, the powerful civil rights movement inspired the rise of movements for women’s and gay liberation, while the struggle for Black Power emerged from the civil rights movement itself. All of these new movements were, in turn, inspired by the armed struggle of the North Vietnamese resistance against the forces of U.S. imperialism. The Gay Liberation Front (GLF) chose its name as a formal identification with the National Liberation Front (NLF)—the Vietnamese resistance.

But it is also the case that women and African Americans were not alone in fighting against their oppression—thousands of men took part in the women’s movement in the 1960s, and many thousands of whites actively supported the civil rights movement. The gay liberation movement was the first of its kind—erupting in the Stonewall Rebellion in 1969, when New York City police raided a gay bar and touched off a riot among gays that lasted for three days. Although the gay movement won little support in its early stages, movement leaders soon convinced the Black Panther Party to formally endorse gay rights. In 1970, Black Panther leader Huey Newton announced his solidarity with the gay movement: “homosexuals are not given freedom and liberty by anyone in this society. Maybe they might be the most oppressed people in the society,”⁵

Who’s the real enemy?

As the experience of the 1960s shows, it is not necessary to personally experience a form of oppression to become committed to opposing it. Yet the central premise of the theory of identity politics is based on precisely the opposite conclusion: Only those who actually experience a particular form of oppression are capable of fighting against it. Everyone else is considered to be part of the problem and cannot become part of the solution by joining the fight against oppression. The underlying assumption is that all men benefit from women’s oppression, all straight people benefit from the oppression of the LGBT⁶ community, and all whites benefit from racism.

The flip side of this assumption, of course, is the idea that each group that faces a particular form of oppression—racism, sexism, or homophobia—is united in its interest in ending it. The theory of identity politics locates the root of oppression not with a capitalist power structure but with a “white male power structure.” The existence of a white male power structure seems like basic common sense since, with rare exceptions, white men hold the reigns of the biggest corporations and the highest government posts.

That is true, but it only tells half the story. It would be highly inaccurate to assume that all oppressed people are powerless in U.S. society today. Since the movements of the 1960s and 1970s, a significant number of women, gays, Blacks, and other racially oppressed minorities have managed to climb up the corporate and political ladder and become absorbed into various power structures. These individuals have achieved a fair amount of power in their own right. In the upcoming 2008 presidential election, the two Democratic Party frontrunners are a woman (Hillary Rodham Clinton) and an African American (Barack Obama). The speaker of the House of Representatives is a woman, Nancy Pelosi. The U.S. secretary of state is a Black woman, Condoleezza Rice. One of the most powerful politicians in Washington is openly gay Congressman Barney Frank.

Whose interests have these women, gays, and African Americans represented once they have achieved some power within the system? The answer is fairly plain to see—not necessarily by believing their rhetoric, but by judging their actions. Rather than fighting against the racist, sexist, and homophobic policies of the system, they become part of enforcing them.
For example, when the city of San Francisco began handing out same-sex marriage licenses in 2005, did openly gay Barney Frank embrace it as a step forward for civil rights? On the contrary, Frank called a press conference to attack gay marriage as “divisive.”⁷

Nor does Condoleezza Rice hesitate to perform her duty as she wanders the globe in her role as U.S. imperialism’s key international enforcer—traveling to the Middle East, for example, to enforce Israel’s racist apartheid policies against its occupied Palestinian population. Iranian people will be no better off if and when the U.S. decides to bomb them if Clinton or Obama occupy the White House than Iraqi people were when the Bush administration decided to invade their country.

What all of these examples show is that there is no such thing as a common, fundamental interest shared by all people who face the same form of oppression. Oppression isn’t caused by the race, gender, or sexuality of particular individuals who run the system, but is generated by the very system itself—no matter who’s running it. It goes without saying that we must confront incidents of sexism, racism, and homophobia whenever they occur. But that alone is not going to change the racist, sexist, and homophobic character that dominates the entire system.

Class inequality and oppression

The entire element of social class is missing from the theory of identity politics. The same analysis that assumes Barack Obama shares a fundamental interest with all African Americans in ending racism also places all straight white men in the enemy camp, whatever their social class. Yet, the class divide has rarely been more obvious than in the United States today, where income and class inequality is higher than at any time since 1929, immediately before the onset of the Great Depression.¹⁰ It is plain to see that the rich obtain their enormous wealth at the expense of those who work for them to produce their profits, a process known as exploitation in Marxist parlance.

Class inequality is not a side issue, but rather the main byproduct of exploitation, the driving force of the capitalist system. Class inequality is currently worsening by the minute, as the economy edges its way toward a deep recession. Yet the theory of identity politics barely acknowledges the importance of class inequality, which is usually reduced to a label known as “classism”—a problem of snobbery, or personal attitude. This, again, should be confronted when it occurs, but such confrontations do not change the system that relies upon class exploitation.

In contrast to the inconsistencies and contradictions of identity politics, a class analysis bases itself on materialism—a concrete and objective measure of systemic benefits derived from racism, sexism, and homophobia. In short, the ruling class has an objective interest in upholding the capitalist system, which is based upon both oppression and exploitation, while the working class has an objective interest in overthrowing it. For the special oppression of women, Blacks, Latinos, other racially oppressed populations, and the LGBT community actually serves to increase the level of exploitation and oppression of the working class as a whole.

So oppression is something that even most white male workers suffer to some degree. If one were to compare the self-confidence of the vast majority of white male workers to that of the arrogant Hillary Clinton or Condoleezza Rice, it would be clear that something more than personal politics is a determining factor in oppression. The problem is systemic.

The point here is not at all to trivialize racism, sexism, or homophobia—but to understand that the entire working class faces oppression and has an objective interest in ending it.

Most important among these is the Marxist concept of “false consciousness.” The definition of false consciousness is straightforward: whenever workers accept ruling-class ideologies, including racism, sexism, and homophobia, they are acting against their own class interests—precisely because these ideas keep workers fighting against each other. False consciousness is not unique to white, male workers.

One of the most obvious examples of false consciousness has occurred in recent years, as large numbers of African Americans oppose immigrant rights using many of the same xenophobic arguments as anti-immigrant racists. Similarly, many Puerto Rican people exhibit prejudice against Mexican people (which is racist). Many women call each other “sluts” (which is sexist). These are all examples of false consciousness.

Whenever the levels of racism, sexism, and homophobia rise, the working class as a whole loses out. Workers do not unite to fight back, and living standards drop. Conversely, when workers move into struggle against the system in large numbers, false consciousness is challenged by the need for class unity, and class-consciousness rises—affecting mass consciousness as a whole. This process was demonstrated at the highest point of class struggle in the 1930s and again at the height of the movements of the 1960s. And it will be demonstrated again with the next rise in mass struggle.

As Marx argued in the  Communist Manifesto, “This organization of proletarians into a class, and consequently into a political party, is continually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves. But it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier.”¹² Put differently, Marx distinguished between the working class “in itself,” which holds objective—but unrealized—revolutionary potential, and a working class “for itself,” which acts in its own class interests. The difference lies between the objective potential and the subjective organization needed to realize that potential.

Politics in a void

But identity politics does not acknowledge the potential for mass consciousness to change. For this reason, the theory of identity politics can only be accepted at the highest level of abstraction. Ernesto LaClau and Chantal Mouffe, the originators of identity politics, do not seem the least bit concerned with any practical application of the theory laid out in their book, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. LaClau and Mouffe emerged from the postmodern wing of academia that flourished in the 1980s, proposing a set of theories aiming to prove that society exists not as a unified and coherent social and economic system, but rather in a range of subjective relationships.

LaClau and Mouffe posit their theory as a step forward from Marxism. In reality, their theory is not post-Marxist at all. It is anti-Marxist. These two academics set out to prove that Marx was wrong about the revolutionary potential of the working class—that is, its objective interest in and power to transform the system. This antagonism to Marx makes sense, because if Marx is right—if the working class is capable of building a united movement against all forms of exploitation and oppression—then their theory goes out the window.

There are two key components to LaClau and Mouffe’s theory, both of which become problematic the moment the theory is put into practice. The first component is their definition of oppression. In contrast to Marx—who defined oppression and exploitation as objective and therefore unchanging, but consciousness as subjective and therefore ever-changing—LaClau and Mouffe regard oppression itself as entirely subjective.

This is a fundamental, not semantic, difference. Since oppression is an entirely subjective matter, according to LaClau and Mouffe, anyone who believes that they are oppressed is therefore oppressed. At its worst, that would include a white male who feels he has been discriminated against when his application is turned down for a law school that practices affirmative action. Conversely, even the most clear-cut instances of systematic brutality are not necessarily oppression. LaClau and Mouffe argue that even serfdom and slavery do not necessarily represent relationships of oppression, unless the serfs or the slaves themselves “articulate” that oppression.¹³

LaClau and Mouffe describe society as made up of a whole range of autonomous, free-floating antagonisms and oppressions, none more important than any other—each is a separate sphere of “struggle.”¹⁴ But this concept falls apart once it is removed from the world of abstraction and applied to the real world. Separate struggles do not neatly correspond to separate forms of oppression. Forms of oppressions overlap, so that many people are both Black and female, or both lesbian and Latino. If every struggle must be fought separately, this can only lead to greater and greater fragmentation and eventually to disintegration, even within groups organized around a single form of oppression. A Black lesbian, for example, faces an obvious dilemma: If all men are enemies of women, all whites are enemies of Blacks, and all straights are enemies of gays, then allies must be precious few. In the real world, choices have to be made.

If LaClau and Mouffe are correct, and the main divisions in society exist between those who face a particular form of oppression and those who don’t, then the likelihood of ever actually ending oppression is just about nil. At its heart, the politics of identity is extremely pessimistic, implying not just a rejection of the potential to build a broad united movement against all forms of exploitation and oppression, but also a very deep pessimism about the possibility for building solidarity even among people who face different forms of oppression.

The only organizational strategy identity politics offers is for different groups of oppressed people to each fight their own separate battles against their own separate enemies.

The second key problem with LaClau and Mouffe flows from the concept of autonomy that is so central to their theory. Most importantly from a theoretical standpoint, Laclau and Mouffe go to great lengths to refute the Marxist analysis of the state, or the government. Marxist theory is based upon an understanding that the government is not a neutral body, but serves to represent the interests of the class in power—which in the case of capitalism is the capitalist class. This should not be too hard to imagine in the era of George W. Bush, when the capitalist class has brazenly flaunted its wealth and power.

But Laclau and Mouffe insist that the state is neutral and autonomous. Even the different branches of government are autonomous from each other. Apparently, the Senate and the House of Representatives have no real relationship, and the White House is similarly autonomous. If that is the case, then the stranglehold of neoconservatives and the Christian Right over U.S. politics since 9/11 must have been a figment of liberals’ imaginations. Thus, there is a serious flaw in this logic. Oppression is built into the capitalist system itself, and the state is one of the key ways in which oppression is enforced—through laws that discriminate and the police who serve and protect some people while harassing and brutalizing other groups of people.

But the theory of autonomy leads to another theoretical problem as well: every separate struggle warrants equal importance, no matter how many people are involved on either side, and whether or not demands are being made against the state or other institutions. Indeed, LaClau and Mouffe carry this logic a critical step further, noting that “struggle” need not involve more than one person. It can simply denote a matter of achieving “increasingly affirmed individualism.”¹⁵ The personal struggle in this process substitutes for political struggle, leaving the system that maintains and enforces oppression intact.

Like LaClau and Mouffe, theorists who advocate the most extreme forms of identity politics do not actually aim to build a movement, large or small. They prefer small groups of the enlightened few, who remain content in their superiority to the “ignorant masses.” Marxism offers a way forward for those interested in ending oppression in the real world. As Marx remarked of his generation of smug academics, “The philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.”¹⁶

As the Russian revolutionary V.I. Lenin, put it, the Marxist vision of revolution is a “festival of the oppressed and exploited.” But he also added: “Working class consciousness cannot be genuine political consciousness unless the workers are trained to respond to all cases of tyranny, oppression, violence, and abuse, no matter what class is affected.”¹⁷

The argument here is straightforward: The lessons of building a united movement against capitalism train workers to act in solidarity with all those who are oppressed and exploited by capitalism. The battle for class-consciousness is a battle over ideas, but it is one that must be fought out in the context of struggle, not the musings of self-important academics.

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By Sarah Jaffe, AlterNet

FRONTPAGE] 

Earlier this year, long before Occupy Wall Street turned Zuccotti Park into Liberty Plaza, Stephen Lerner, a longtime labor organizer with SEIU and mastermind of the Justice for Janitors campaign, wrote in New Labor Forum of “large-scale sit-ins, occupations, and other forms of nonviolent civil disobedience that must inevitably overcome court injunctions and political pressures.”

After the financial crash, Lerner headed up SEIU’s banking and finance project, organizing labor and community groups to fight predatory lending and other abusive practices by the banks. He has also been targeted by Glenn Beck for proposing debt strikes as a form of collective bargaining for homeowners and other debtors. Beck called him an “economic terrorist,” and he received death threats.

In a year when labor and working people became the focus for political protest in the U.S. and around the world — when a new slogan, “We Are the 99 Percent” captured news headlines and changed the way Americans talk about income inequality — Lerner’s words seem prescient. So who better than Lerner to discuss the year that was, the present situation, and the future of Occupy? AlterNet recently caught up with Lerner to talk about the targeting of Wall Street, debt strikes, organizing in America, and much more.

Sarah Jaffe: Reading your article at New Labor Forum, It does seem like you sort of predicted Occupy. How did you feel when it all started?

Stephen Lerner: I don’t know if I’d say I predicted it. A lot of us have been trying to figure out for a long time how we get out of the trap we’re in –we’ve been doing the same thing for a long time and it hasn’t been working.

But it’s an exciting feeling to see something a lot of people spent a lifetime hoping for –this kind of dramatic increase in activity that targets financial capital, those who really control the country.

The Justice for Janitors campaign was a campaign where the traditional way of organizing wouldn’t work, so we had to do something totally different. We organized people that everybody said were unorganizable–part-time, subcontracted, often undocumented workers.

There were many reasons why I think it worked, but one of them was that we had an analysis of who had power. In addition to the community organizing and the many different things the campaign did, the strikes and sit-ins, none of that would’ve worked if we hadn’t directed the campaign toward those with the greatest power—the people who controlled the real estate that janitors were cleaning.

The Janitors campaign was ahead of its time, or maybe another way to look at it is that it captured many tactics and strategies from the past and put them in one campaign. We combined the idea of rights at work, the rights of immigrants, race, the way we talk about inequality into a campaign that captured the idea of the poorest workers trying to win justice from the very richest people. We both won public support and had a strategy to lift people out of poverty.

We ran, starting in 2007 for a number of years, a campaign focused on private equity. It has been a growing part of how capital is organized. Workers and other organizations have to learn how to organize around it.

Similar to the ideas behind Justice for Janitors, we campaigned to pressure private equity companies, which are now six of the 10 largest employers in the country, to take responsibility for the companies they own and how they pay and treat their workers.

In the labor movement, as I wrote in the New Labor Forum article, we are constrained by the way we’re intertwined with the very people who are in charge of the economy. It’s not a criticism, it’s a reality. So Occupy has emerged as a third force, which has identified both who the bad guys are: Wall Street. Simultaneously, because it doesn’t have ties with them, it can go at them in a more direct way that has captured the popular imagination. They’re not constrained by historical relationships.

SJ: You wrote “unions are just big enough—and just connected enough to the political and economic power structure—to be constrained from leading the kinds of activities that are needed.”

SL: When I stress that this is the importance of Occupy, it’s not a criticism of unions to say that they live in the real world. That’s part of unions’ strength, and they’re winning real benefits and protecting members. That’s why we need something like Occupy that can do the things that unions haven’t been able to do in recent years.

You know, when you look back to the first organizing of the CIO, the sit-down strikes, they partly were able to do that because they had nothing to lose. It’s hard to imagine unions taking a similar level of risk right now because the very success of unions means that there are pension funds and buildings and assets to protect and a legal system that has dramatic penalties if campaigns have a real economic impact on corporations.

So what’s incredibly exciting is to go from the theory–there’s so many problems in the country, so many people are dissatisfied with what we have that we need something new, and it wouldn’t look like what we currently had. I guess you could say Occupy is sort of theory and practice meeting.

SJ: You mentioned the sit-down strikes and the old tactics of the radical labor movement that we haven’t seen in a while. And while unions do have a lot to protect, they’ve also been losing a lot of ground. The “Protect the ground you have” strategy hasn’t necessarily helped. As somebody who led one of the more radical labor actions of the last couple of decades, do you have some thoughts about that?

SL: It is a failed strategy—which I think most in the labor movement accept–to define your work and your plans and your strategy by defending a declining base. What I’m saying isn’t new, it’s been core to a lot of people’s thinking — that unions have become isolated islands.

The hard part is, what is a winning strategy? I think a key part of the winning strategy is a deep understanding of how the economy is transforming, figuring out how to engage and challenge those who are really dominating the economy. 

On the Janitors campaign, we didn’t say this was a war with the cleaning contractor, we said this was a war with the people who control the industry. I think a big problem for a lot of us in the labor movement is that we’re ending up fighting the middleman, we’re fighting people who don’t have that much power instead of engaging those who are really controlling the economy.

SJ: Another thing you said in the article was that on the janitors’ campaign, your wins came when the whole community saw it as something that was about them, beyond the specific workers you were trying to organize.

SL: I’ll never forget in the 1990s, during the Century City police riot, when the police attacked strikers in Century City, one of the things that people in the Latino community again and again said is that “The police beat us up again and again in private; this is the first time that it was on film.”

The reason that people reacted, that there was such incredible support for the union after the police riot, is not that people became pro-union or cared for the wages of janitors, it’s that it became symbolic of how Latinos felt they were treated.

Where we had campaigns that have captured people’s imagination about the demands and needs of those workers, we become enmeshed with what people are feeling more broadly about the loss of wealth and power.

Everybody knows they’re getting zapped by banks, and what’s so good about Occupy is that it’s put that front and center. The fact that they were in Wall Street, I think everybody forgets. It was not Occupy a park somewhere, it was the fact that it was in the middle of the financial district. And I think on an intuitive level, people all over the political spectrum understand that those guys are at the center of how the economy is organized in a way that doesn’t work for most people.

SJ: It’s interesting because, again, a lot of people who consider themselves middle-class probably don’t think about standing in solidarity with janitors. But the 99 percent statement includes the janitors, includes teachers, includes kids graduating from college $60,000 in debt, includes literally everyone but the people at the very top. Do you think we’re seeing a new kind of class consciousness in this country?

SL: That is the brilliance of it, I think it captures so vividly how the country is divided.

If it had been rolled out as a result of polling or focus groups, I don’t think it would’ve caught on the same way as “We Are the 99 Percent” linked in people’s minds with people bravely and heroically doing something about “We Are the 99 Percent.”

I would say that is a really important point — that folks got arrested, were filmed, got pepper-sprayed, the attacks on people in New York City — all of that brought it to life in the same way that the Civil Rights movement, the sit-ins at the lunch counters did. It wasn’t that people hadn’t been saying for years, Jim Crow and segregation were wrong, it was the image of people being attacked for saying it..

I think there’s been something brewing under the surface for a while. More and more people are disaffected, folks don’t know quite where to put their anger and their energy. Some people go to the right, some people embrace scapegoating, but what’s so beautiful about this is it’s not just “We are the 99 percent, it’s “We are the 99 percent and there’s something called Wall Street that’s a key part of the 1 percent.”

I still think that most people are not opposed to folks having money, I think we’re opposed to people having lots of money that they get unfairly. I think that’s a critical piece.

I don’t think people are mad at somebody who invented a product or founded a company. It’s that people see that Wall Street is not productive. Their wealth and their riches, they do not come through any normal means — they come through cheating and gambling and ripping us off, which I think troubles us in a different kind of way.

SJ: Last weekend at the Netroots New York conference you were talking about the multiple prongs of strategy that could help bring the crisis, as you said, back to the ultra-rich, who created it. You talked about foreclosures, student debt, shareholder activism. Can you talk a little more about those individual things and then how you see them fitting together?

SL: Occupy Foreclosure and Occupy Our Homes are a piece that I think is organically linked to the movement — it goes to the heart of a lot of what I think Occupy is about. Wall Street and big banks caused the crisis and that’s why people are getting thrown out of their homes. It’s a combination of physically defending people who are losing their homes but in defending those people, they’re challenging the power of Wall Street in a very real way. It’s a wonderful nexus of occupiers, people in poor communities, and established community groups. It’s tied to ongoing work.

Students, I think there’s three pieces to that. There’s the current situation, with the general cutback of education funding, which is central to how we ended up with such massive debt.

I think what’s really exciting on the student front, is that more and more students are tying the student activity directly to the 1 percent, to Wall Street, that is profiting off of their education.

“Move Your Money,” I think is a wonderful 99 percent piece. Moving money, individually is step one, the hundreds of thousands of people who’ve said “I don’t want to get robbed by big banks anymore.” What’s really exciting now is that in Minneapolis they’ve delivered 11,000 petitions to the school board saying that they need to divest from Wells Fargo. LA saw an ordinance proposed for responsible banking, getting people to move public monies, both to get them out of big banks but then also to put them in places that create jobs. It’s a simple fact that if you invest your money locally, it turns over into the local economy, while if you give it to Wall Street then 40 percent of it goes into compensation for CEOs.

That work all ties into the bigger principal reduction campaign.What we need to do is reduce people’s mortgages to the real value of the house, which would put an average of $400 a month in every homeowner’s pocket. It would create a million jobs if banks had to reduce principal to current value and address the $700 billion in negative equity homeowners have.

One of the untold stories of the financial crisis is the disproportionate impact on communities of color. So the fight about foreclosures, Occupy our Homes, and principal reduction is really about how to return the wealth that’s been sucked out of communities of color.

Then the final piece that we’re seeing more energy around is “occupy the shareholder meetings.” Increasingly corporations control our government, but corporations in theory have these meetings where decisions are made about their governance and their investment. People should buy shares and we should be visiting key executives, we should have demands of these companies, we should show up at the shareholders’ meetings and say we want a say in how the corporations that are running the country should be run.

So you add all those things together and they end up being the streams that when they flow together, they end up creating a mighty river which can win really fundamental and transformative change and in doing so set the stage for ultimately rebuilding the labor movement. Which is what we’ve done at other points in our history, to really confront corporate power—by occupying work sites.

SJ: Glenn Beck called you an economic terrorist for proposing debt strikes as a tactic, yet we’re seeing campaigns launched around debt strikes this year. What role do they play in the coming fight?

SL: Right around a year ago, I argued that corporations have always had a way, whether it’s through bankruptcy or walking away from deals or renegotiating, to get out of their debt. So what I said that got Glenn Beck so cranked up was, what if we as consumers, as workers, behaved in the same rational way corporations did? What if we said, ‘we’re not going to pay back debt, especially debt that we got tricked into having, we’re not going to pay it back until we get to renegotiate the terms?’

I think what was so fascinating about why the right-wing went so berserk, is that I really nailed their biggest fear, which is if regular people join together and acted in the same way corporations do, we could challenge their power.

SJ: I think the language you used was collective bargaining for homeowners or students or whomever the debtors might be.

SL: After the economic crisis, the banks are more consolidated than ever. The top five banks control something like 40 percent of all banking in the country. You have a tiny group of people who basically are making decisions that control all of our lives. So it’s a very simple notion: why don’t we bargain with them collectively? They like it when we bargain as individuals, but they work together. They all meet and decide they’re not going to reduce principal, and what chance do you have as one lone homeowner?

So one idea for students or homeowners is what we do with unions. It’s not that one person goes on strike — you say, “if we get a critical mass, we’ll go on strike.”

The key idea for homeowners – or it could be for students — is can you get a critical mass? I’m not going to do it by myself, but if millions of other people did it, then we’d say we want to negotiate a better deal, and we’d actually have a lot of power to do that. If we all refuse to pay at the same time, it would put enormous financial pressure on them.

SJ: In the New Labor Forum piece, you said “If our goal is to offend no one, we’re in danger of doing next to nothing.” How do we balance the need to build a real majority with the need for escalating tactics?

SL: It goes back to the need for different streams of work. I think we need ways that people can enter at their comfort level. That’s why “Move Your Money” is so exciting — it’s not that hard to do, it actually creates a wonderful discussion about what’s going on with wealth in this country, why in the world the Federal Reserve gave trillions of dollars of low or no-interest loans to the banks while cities and states then had to pay high interest rates to borrow it.

The key is that you’re doing many things on multiple levels simultaneously. Some of those are majoritarian tactics like “Move Your Money” or some, like the shareholders’ meetings, will really excite a lot of people. When people realize they can buy a share of Bank of America stock for $5 and go to a shareholder meeting, I think that will attract a whole other group of people. I think it would be a terrific mistake to think it was all about getting arrested. Most people aren’t going to do that.

But you want to continue to tap into that emotion, communicate to people that we’re not doing this just for fun, we’re doing this because it really is what the problem with the country is.

The principal reduction piece is how we talk about solutions. When you say to somebody, “If we wrote down mortgages to what they’re really worth, which is just what corporations do when they go into bankruptcy or they walk away from properties, it would put $400 a month into the average person’s pocket at no cost to anybody but the banks,” people will go “Wow!”

Those are the kinds of things we have to look at, and very consciously avoiding polarizing just for the sake of polarizing. It’s a delicate dance, I think.

One thing that is critical with all of this is the commitment to nonviolence. When people are willing to risk arrest, and where it’s around people sacrificing or doing something out of high moral cause, there is huge tolerance for that even among people who may not agree. The use of violence is devastating to the majoritarian concept. That’s a huge challenge for the movement, the commitment to nonviolence and how that permeates everything that we do.

That’s what we learned again and again on the janitors’ campaign. We did things that were massively disruptive, on the janitors’ strikes. The response was totally different, when it was poor workers who were willing to go to jail to try to make a better life than when somebody in a more traditional strike engaged in something that was thought of as violence, even against property.

SJ: When I told my Republican mother about Occupy Our Homes, and when I told her specifically the story of the family at 702 Vermont here in East New York, and she said “Yeah, I approve of that.” That story worked for her, the way things like the We Are the 99 Percent Tumblr, the Occupy Student Debt Tumblr, really impact people. I think we’re seeing more willingness on the part of people to share their personal stories now.

SL: I think what’s key about that, people have been raised to feel shame if they’re a debtor or they can’t pay their bills. We’ve had wonderful experiences where multiple neighbors get together, and nobody’s had a discussion with each other that they’re all on the edge of foreclosure, or that their houses were worth so much less than they paid for them that they were every day losing money when they paid their mortgage.

People had this breakthrough when they’d say “You’re in that situation too?” Even on predatory and unfair loans, they don’t want to admit that they got suckered. People don’t want to say, ‘I’m an adult, I’m a smart person, and I didn’t see the trick in this.’ You hear people talk about penalties for early payments. Who in the world would ever think, “I get penalized if I make my payment early”?

People tell their stories in multiple forms, whether it’s online, in teams, watching videos, it gives that feeling of “Aha, it’s not me in isolation, this is something much bigger,” and I think it empowers people to take action.

SJ: We were talking at the beginning about the shrinking union base; can we rebuild the union base now that we’re no longer an industrial economy? Or are we looking at different kinds of organizing for the 99 percent?

SL: In a way it goes to the analysis question. Often when you looked at janitors one way, you’d say, well they’re all small work sites, there’s five people in the building at a time, there’s 10 people in the building, the employers don’t have that many workers, you’d say it’s hopeless. But really there’s a handful of real estate companies that control an entire city. You’re then able to think about the 1 percent.

I don’t know if there’s a country in the world that’s had a real progressive movement or the kind of change most of us believe in without a vibrant labor movement. And you can’t have a vibrant labor movement that just represents the public sector. It has to represent the private sector.

So I’m actually extraordinarily hopeful that what Occupy partly does is reawaken people to the fact that it’s not their fault that they have a lousy job, it’s not that they didn’t work hard. We’re awakening to a range of strategies and tactics, ranging from focusing on who’s really in charge to thinking about how nonviolent civil disobedience and occupations can really put financial pressure on those who are mistreating workers. And as we did with the janitors, thinking about whole geography of the industry to organize at one time rather than organizing in isolation.

When you look at labor history, you see that growth in organizing has never been incremental. There were times when there were bursts, when lots of good work paid off and it caught fire and grew far bigger. That’s the challenge for organized labor, to figure out what our relationship to these emerging movements is. How do we support them? And it’s key that they in turn are willing to do the things that unions may not be able to, that start to change the balance of power so workers can assert their rights.

SJ: Before Occupy, the first fight back in this country was in Wisconsin, around a collective bargaining bill. Not many would have thought that an attack on unions could have such a response.

SL: I think part of the reason Wisconsin and Ohio had the response is there were people to go after. These were government people, and you could un-elect them or change their behavior.

What Occupy has said and shown is that you can win the majority of Americans over to the idea, just as Wisconsin and Ohio could win people over to the idea that these government leaders were doing something bad. The key to the revival of labor is to convince the majority of people that big companies and Wall Street and bankers are doing something bad, so that when workers start to organize, it’s not seen as a campaign just for high wages for them, it’s a campaign that will make a more just, fair, and sustainable economy.

SJ: What do you see coming up this year? We talked about debt strikes, foreclosures, but is there anywhere else you see some forward motion that we haven’t discussed?

SL: I don’t think anybody should view a sort of holiday or winter lull in activity as a sign of anything. As people have said, movements ebb and flow, and whenever we look back, spring is the time that things take off again. It’s really important that people not say “Oh, everything was front page news and now it’s not.” People instead should be stepping back, saying, “In three months we did more than anybody imagined we could do, now it’s time to step back and figure out the next stage.”

To me when we marry our rhetoric and our actions, that’s when we both capture people’s imaginations but also develop the strategies and tactics that win.

In my head I always come back to this: it’s when words and acts mirror themselves that you then build real movements. If the Civil Rights movement had just said Jim Crow and all this are terrible and therefore we’re just going to do petitions, people would have said, that’s not sufficient.

I think we’re doing lots of great work, but it’s not sufficient unless when you add it all up it has the words and the tactics that really mirror each other in a way that really lets us challenge what’s going on.

Sarah Jaffe is an associate editor at AlterNet, a rabblerouser and frequent Twitterer. You can follow her at @seasonothebitch. 

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