Sign of the Times - Part II

The second installment of a two part blog post about Occupy Wall Street by Hannah Arendt Center Associate Fellow, Kieran Bonner.

On the website of Occupytogether is the following statement:

“The beauty of this new formula, and what makes this novel tactic exciting, is its pragmatic simplicity: we talk to each other in various physical gatherings and virtual people’s assemblies … we zero in on what our one demand will be, a demand that awakens the imagination and, if achieved, would propel us toward the radical democracy of the future … and then we go out and seize a square of singular symbolic significance and put our asses on the line to make it happen.”

There is much in this statement that coheres with the spirit of Arendt’s work and mission, the focus on talking to each other, a demand that awakens imagination.

While she would welcome the interest in radical democracy, she would be very suspicious of the language of ‘propelling,’ as though moving forward was subject to an inhuman force rather than the result of persuasion through human speech. My Arendtian ambivalence is located in the need to separate social concerns from political concerns and economic matters from matters of democracy.

If the focus of the protest is primarily on economic inequality and not on reviving democracy, on political economy and not politics itself, then it is in danger of being absorbed by the social. Arendt distinguished between life concerns and political concerns and said that politics, and therefore democracy, become at best corrupt and at worst disappears when dominated by urgent life concerns.

It is precisely for this reason that Arendt saw the American Revolution as politically far more successful than either the Russian or French.  She admired the American Revolution because it put political matters, especially democracy, first. An act of citizenship, in Arendt’s sense, is more than voting for someone else to act and speak on one’s behalf. It requires the full experience of acting and speaking; it is this criterion that Arendt would use to assess whether acts were either social or political and so acts of citizenship.

The Boston Tea Party was not a rebellion against taxation per se, as the contemporary Tea Party tends to emphasize. It was not a movement to ‘get government of the backs of the people.

It was against taxation without representation. It was against government without participation and not government per se. That the American Revolution led not to a completely fair taxation system but rather to the first modern democracy is its great achievement. The promise in OWS, therefore, is not just whether correct economic legislation is enacted, but whether a re-invigorated democracy can be re-imagined. This is the hard work of envisioning alternatives, a work that has become unimaginable despite a consumer culture that always invites us to imagine the impossible. Is it not paradoxical that today we can easily imagine the end of the world but not the end of capitalism, as Slavoj Zizek stated to the occupiers last Sunday. That is the promise of the OWS initiative, the beginning of the hard struggle to restore a lived experience of political freedom to America and to the world.

-Kieran Bonner