Happy New Year! Thoughts on OWS and Rawls

After the city of Boston (along with many others) broke up the physical encampments of the Occupy movement, it has largely fallen out of the consciousness of the population at large. Even before the final crackdown though, there were signs of decay. A greater emphasis on the problems of maintaining the encampment and negotiating with the city, never-ceasing debates, and an ever growing list of small projects all lead to polarization and marginalization. As many were wont to remark, a movement without official leaders, designed to register discontent but not to organize explicit policy proposals, is prone to fracturing and ultimately to accomplishing little.

But Occupy Wall Street resisted traditional models of organization for a good reason. It was always intended as a systemic critique. When dissenters from outside the movement told the protestors to pick an issue and go to Washington, they hoped to end the annoyance of an endless protest by reducing it to a conventional movement that fit within the frame of contemporary politics.


What the Occupy was protesting, and to an extent still is protesting, is what John Rawls called the "basic structure" of society. Though I never heard his name invoked in a General Assembly, his spirit was in the air in the demands for a movement that attacked the structural divides between rich and poor that are becoming ever harder to traverse.  I am not alone in noticing this, Steven Mazie advocated that the movement openly embrace Rawls in a New York Times Op-Ed in October.

What Mazie did not directly address, however, is the degree to which embracing a structured, philosophical critique would add legitimacy to a movement that needs it. It is not just that Rawls would add focus to the movement, he would add a sufficiently broad focus to encompass a diverse set of complaints, while closing off distractions from single issue protestors. Indeed, Rawls might well prove a moderating influence, as adopting his "Theory of Justice" would implicitly rule out out some of the socialist and anarchist ideologies which have little chance of influencing mainstream opinion. At the same time, Rawls would be a powerful critic to bring to bear against the received political and economic wisdom, which largely takes an inversion of the "difference principle" (i.e. that differences in welfare may increase regardless of the harm of the least fortunate members of society) for granted.