Book Review: Occupying Political Science: The Occupy Wall Street Movement from New York to the World
Occupying Political Science: The Occupy Wall Street Movement from New York to the World, edited by Emily Welty, Matthew Bolton, Meghana Nayak, and Christopher Malone. New York: Palgrave 2013. 297 pp, £61 hardcover 978-1-137-27739-8
Like many of us, the Occupy movement prompted the editors of Occupying Political Science to confront big questions about the boundaries between academics and activism.
In an era where much of the discipline of political science claims to study the world through value-free and objective methods, is it feasible to be both a scholar and an activist? Is it acceptable to research protests and social movements that we might feel sympathy towards or are even participants in? If so, is there something special that we can offer those movements as scholars of political science? If, as Robert Cox once famously declared, ‘knowledge is always for someone and for some purpose,’ then who is research and writing about movements like Occupy for—the 99% or the 1%, or another audience entirely? (1)
Unlike many of us, however, the editors of Occupying Political Science had little space—geographic or otherwise—in which to ponder these questions. All four editors teach political science at Pace University in New York City, a short walk from Zuccotti Park, where Occupy Wall Street was based before being evicted by the New York Police Department. This proximity meant that Occupy unfolded on the editors’ actual doorsteps, embroiling the University within the movement, as its buildings were used to host activists at events, and as staff and students floated between classrooms and the Occupy encampment, or at least caught glimpses of it on their way to school.
Unsurprisingly, when the editors set out to research and write a book about Occupy during the height of its momentum, they found they ‘could not remain cold, distant scientists if we ever were’ (p. 3). They had ‘neither the luxury, nor perhaps the desire, to build the ramparts one has traditionally observed between town and gown’ (p. 276).
Much of this book is centered around the consequences of the editor’s proximity to Occupy and its implications for their scholarship: as much as the book is an exploration of how political science can help us understand the Occupy movement, it is also a reflection on how academics’ positionality shapes their lens into the world. The book describes the intellectual and internal journey that this group of academics and activists took as they observed, taught about, and participated in Occupy Wall Street—some from up close and within the movement, and others from a greater distance—and it analyzes what studying Occupy taught them about social science and the city in which they live. As the editors describe it, ‘this book is not only about Occupy Wall Street but also about us’ (p. 3). It is a story about the internal and collective struggle with boundaries that this group and their collaborators underwent as they navigated the lines between activist and scholar, researcher and member of the 99%, direct action and elected politics.
Beyond its reflections about scholarship and activism, the further contributions of the book lie in both documenting Occupy Wall Street’s inner workings, and in using Occupy as a lens to ask crucial questions about the nature and potential of activism today. Through ten chapters, the book provides a detailed documentation of Occupy Wall Street, including: the movement’s organizational structure, tactics, and divisions of labor; internal debates about demands, the use of violence, and interactions with more institutionalized activism like NGOs and political parties; the importance of free/libre/opensource (FLO) technology; and the spatial dynamics of the Occupation and its interaction with the wider spatial politics of New York City. As the editors note in their introduction, many of these dynamics have been documented in previous accounts of the Occupy movement, but the detailed accounts offered in this book are nevertheless welcome additions to the literature.
Where this book really shines is in its efforts to use Occupy as a lens into the challenges confronting activists today, and as a gauge of activists’ power to transform politics. For instance, the book provides important insights into the challenges that decentralized organizing presents to the power of contemporary social movements. While many activists and commentators have celebrated Occupy’s commitment to decentralization and a ‘leaderless movement,’ as the book rightly points out, these commitments had important implications for the movement’s impact at the level of policy and its ability to change institutionalized politics. The refusal by large swathes of the Occupy Wall Street to articulate demands meant that, in Susan Kang’s words, it ‘missed its chance to make a significant and immediate impact on policy debates and outcomes’ (p. 83). Christopher Malone and Violet Fredericks’ chapter provides further insight into these tensions between decentralization and strategy by analyzing the ‘rift’ that Occupy exposed between participatory movements and the institutionalized left.
On balance, the book leans towards introspective analysis of Occupy Wall Street’s internal dynamics, and away from analysis of the external momentum and forms of structural power that spread the movement from New York to over 1000 cities and towns worldwide and eventually led the movement to fade. What broader political, economic, social, and cultural dynamics were behind this global upsurge? And what was the role of states, corporations, and other social forces in Occupy’s speedy decline from 2011 to 2012? The book offers little sustained analysis of such dynamics, in spite of authors’ repeated noting that Occupy was a global movement. The editors assert in Chapter Ten that ‘to be a Downtown political scientist requires acute awareness of the meaning of Manhattan as a metropole, as a node in the circuits of global power and resistance’ (p. 278). Sharper and more sustained analysis of these global circuits would have deepened the book’s insights.
It would have also been useful, and directly relevant to the book’s goal of examining Occupy through the lens of political science, to answer in each chapter the question: what is new here? Although at times—and especially in Chapter Eight— the book includes historically integrated analysis, situating Occupy in relation to previous and overlapping social movements, historic analysis is sparse and intermittent. The danger of neglecting history in a book about activism is that it might reify the present, and lack in clarity regarding the specific challenges and opportunities that activists face today. Greater historical insight throughout the book would have guarded against these risks.
Nevertheless, as the editors clearly point out, the book is only partially a study of the Occupy movement. It is also a study of what happens when academics who study power and authority suddenly are immersed in an anti-authority movement. It is in this second arena that the book makes its strongest contribution to the discipline, and especially to students of methods in politics.
Dr. Genevieve LeBaron is Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow in the Department of Politics at the University of Sheffield.
Notes
(1) Robert W. Cox (1981) ‘Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory.’ Millennium: Journal of International Studies 10(2): 126-55, p. 128.
