Of course for the passionate the idea of persuasion is a cop-out. It smacks of dark arts, disinformation, misleading your audience. But in fact persuasion in its various forms is exactly what the Occupy Wall Street movement now needs. It needs some spin doctors.
Take, for example, Occupy London. The Press are having a field day with the camp outside St Paul’s Cathedral. The headlines cover how much the Cathedral is losing because of the protesters camped outside. And everywhere there are accusations of double- standards from activists queuing up at Starbucks (large corporate, involved in the 1%) and, most damaging of all, reports that a police helicopter took thermal images of the tents pitched outside St Paul’s overnight and found that only 20% were “occupied”. (See what spin can do with just one word…)
Occupy is in danger of losing the argument; becoming relegated to another bunch of antis. It started out much better than that and it needs go back to what it did best to begin with: making speeches.
The early speeches were passionate and engaging. From the famous “End the Fed” microphone rant (now banned), via the popular vocalism of Michael Moore to the cool argument of Naomi Klein, the first speeches set out a real argument for an alternative to capitalism. As
Now the speeches are becoming divergent, and more problematically, no longer the story. The movement needs spin doctors. It needs to control the argument if it’s to survive.
Spin doctors get a bad press. But let’s go back to the origin of the art. Athens and the birth of democracy, in the 4th Century BC. The spin doctors were right there in the ancient market place. They were called “sophists” back then and they were employed to teach the aristos how to speak better, how to use rhetoric to persuade a crowd. Plato distrusted them, but then you know what an old cuss’ he was. Closely allied to the sophists were the logographoi, the first speech writers who became founder members of the spin doctors club. The thing is that Athenian democracy flourished with their influence because they turned the rabble’s noise of differing opinions into a coherent debate, where arguments were smarter, sharper, more persuasive. Democracy took off because the debates got better.
The same needs to happen now to Occupy. It needs sophists and logographoi. Forgive me, but it needs spin to give it direction. It needs to turn from shouting to persuading; creating a more focused set of arguments. It needs Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein to get together with Michael Moore and Julian Assange and work together on a program of speeches. And maybe the only way this will happen is if a spin doctor gets hold of the movement and says “Hey guys, where’s the beef?”
As the Slovenian philosopher-scholar Slavoj Žižek, said at one early Occupy Wall Street meeting in Zuccotti Park:
“We have a nice time here. But remember, carnivals come cheap.”
He could have then said: “So now we need to get on message.”
Noa
on Oct 27th, 2011
@ 9:19 am:
Hi Simon,
I completely agree. I was really hoping that Occupy Melbourne would have a real voice and address concrete everyday social issues.Australia has the lowest welfare payment in the western world. We have public schools/hospitals scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to funding and yet we have spent $27 billion dollars on the war in Afghanistan-and the tab keeps going…
Unions all over the country ( meteorologists, police officers/airport staff/healthcare workers) are united in their fight for pay increases as the gap between rich and poor deepens at an alarming rate. We have allowed a complete media monopoly with nearly every network/newspaper being the mouthpiece of the Murdoch families political/social views… and NONE OF THIS was even mentioned by “Occupy Melbourne”…
Instead we were treated to a smoking ceremony, pointless chatter about the traditional owners of Melbourne..the Wulinjierie tribe(all relevant just not to this movement)…ridiculous signs-”Pluto in Capricorn/Uranus in Aries” or even better “Free Love”-for those guys hoping to get lucky with some easy hippie-chicks…
They made camp, declared themselves “apolitical” held silly “action-groups”(which were largely hijacked by the aboriginal community, with the end result being a unified push to get Australia to rewrite the constitution to give adequate rights to “first-nation” members).
Instead of voicing issues that are related to the global movement ,our Melbourne offshoot has gone off in a completely different direction, which the media(and for that matter everybody else) is COMPLETELY unclear on.
To add insult to injury they were then beaten up(for absolutely no reason as they never said anything to begin with) and are now in Treasury Gardens. What has been achieved in the new location? Belly dancing without deodorant, pointless speeches using the “peoples microphone”(took 3 hours of chit-chat to choose another park), a real push for multicoloured dread-locks and basically being completely marginalised/patronized by the media.
I already suggested daily rallies (like the ones seen during WW2) instead of camping. Safer,more effective and has the added advantage of not disenfranchising large sections of the population. The signs need to be relevant and meaningful, creating purpose and unity and there MUST be a clear social message
admin
on Oct 27th, 2011
@ 9:32 am:
Hi Noa
thanks so much for your comments; there’s a real danger that momentum will be lost and a great opportunity wasted. Daily rallies is a brilliant idea; it harnesses the power of speech making to spread ideas – speeches can change the world!
simon