Melissa Bailey Photo
Yale Photo
Jennifer Klein traveled from Westville to Wall Street to see history unfold.
As Occupy Wall Street spawns a New Haven encampment, a local expert on social movements sees a watershed moment in American history approaching.
That expert, Jennifer Klein, traveled with her family from Westville to Wall Street to observe the ongoing demonstrations that have riveted the country’s attention and sparked similar protests in more than 100 other cities — all focused on corporate greed and an imbalance of economic and political power in the country.
“Labor has been clueless” about how to respond to the recession, Klein observed — but is now starting to unite with protesters who showed the way, and may be primed to reassert its long-shelved role in helping push for systemic social change.
And the demonstrations may be allowing a long-overdue phrase — Tax the rich — to reenter mainstream public debate, she said.
Klein, a Yale history professor specializing in U.S. labor history and social movements, made those observations in an interview on the eve of Saturday’s planned demonstrations and indefinite encampment on the Green by local supporters of the Occupy Wall Street movement. What has the movement accomplished so far? What are its historic parallels? What needs to happen next? And what will it mean for New Haven? An edited transcript of the interview follows.
Do you think there was a clear message about what is wrong with system?
They are [demonstrating] about all the things that seem to be wrong with it.
Such as?
Such as: Why is that people cannot get affordable housing? Why is it that they are loaded under so much debt trying to get a college education? Why is it that banks and elite economic interests have such a privileged position in our politics? Why is it that we have no democratic voice? Why is it that we can’t actually influence what it is that government does? There is a huge list of issues they were going through.
They have this general assembly. Sometimes it meets on just an open set of issues. Sometimes it has a particular topic.
Who sets the agenda?
I guess the general assembly group sets the agenda in the morning. We saw one open forum where it seemed there was a general set of issues to be discussed.
What was really fascinating about it: There would be a speaker. They were not allowed any loudspeaker. They were not allowed any megaphone. The person would say four or five words. “The cost of housing is out of reach.” Then everybody says, “The cost of housing is out of reach!” It makes people be part of what’s being said.
It wasn’t just a speaker imposing on an audience. It was people participating, raising issues. We have an economic crisis. And we have a democracy crisis. I see no problem that they have no “demands.” Any demands they make would just be too puny compared to what the problem is and what the solutions need to be. They’re forcing themselves to debate this.
I think of the civil rights movement and the sit-ins. The lunch counter sit-ins. Just about a hamburger and a Coke? No, as Ella Baker said, ‘This is about more than a hamburger.’ The point of the students doing that was to cast illegitimacy on the whole system. White supremacy is a system that can’t be tolerated.
I’m not saying these people [today on Wall Street] are saying “Capitalism as a whole can’t be tolerated, we’re bringing down capitalism.” There are a range of opinions. They are saying, “The majority of people are suffering under an imbalance of economic power.” I would think of it in those terms.
The other thing is, ever since the 1880s there’s been such an attempt by the courts, by the state, to just limit what constitutes legitimate collective economic action in the public sphere, to foreclose that. There used to be all sorts of forms of local economic action — boycotts, sympathy strikes, actions that communities as a whole could take to try to gain their terms in the marketplace. Those were legally suppressed by courts and the state in the late 19th century. At various moments in the 20th century, there were spurts, attempts to open up again what kind of collective action could take place in the public sphere around economic issues. It doesn’t happen that often. It happened in the 1930s.
Think about what happened to labor after World War II. Labor was increasingly backed into this form of collective bargaining that ended up being very narrow. It was about contracts with the employer. It really narrowed their sphere of action until it came to be seen as what is legitimate for labor to do is bargaining [and nothing else].
In the recent [city Democratic primary] election, the fact that labor was acting politically, everybody went hysterical about that — as though there was something profoundly illegitimate about labor unions acting politically. People said, “I support unions — if they just focus on their contract.”
Historically, what has labor done when it acted politically in this country?
Acting in conjunction with other movements, it pushed broader possibilities in terms of housing — tenement reform in the 1890s, garden public housing in the 1930s, housing policy that supported the ability [to buy] homes in the ‘30s and ‘40s. Labor was definitely involved in pushing for Medicare.
I don’t want to make it sound like this movement going on now is a labor thing. One reason it is happening is because labor has been clueless about what to do since the recession started. Organized labor has been saying, “Why isn’t there an upheaval? We have a recession like the Great Depression. Why don’t we have people hitting the streets?” They’ve been absolutely clueless about how to pry that open themselves. Part of that is they are so dependent on the state, they’re dependent on the conventional election cycle, nationally.
So how is it that they’ve now joined this movement?
Where they’ve joined, it is fantastic. They didn’t try to take it over. They said, “We will come and support what the people who have occupied Wall Street are doing. We will listen to them. We will provide them with what they need to keep going. We let their creative ideas flow out.’”
What’s really important about what the protesters are doing, that needed to be done at this moment, is just to puncture the language and the sense of inevitability that has just hung over everyone for the last couple of years. For people who are unemployed, or people who are struggling economically, all we hear is, ‘Well, this is just inevitable. This is the economic crisis. Nothing can be done in terms of public budgets . It’s inevitable that there’s a fiscal crisis for the state [and] for the city. The bank bailout was inevitable.” At some point somebody has to step forward and puncture that.
What happens after that?
What’s happening now in these different cities where they’re starting to take action … The fact that it spread to all these cities so quickly has set in motion that first process of questioning the inevitability and opening up a space that needs to open up.
What does that mean for New Haven?
Hopefully it will also mean we can start to question the political options that we’ve been given. We’re told public services have to decline or have to be ratcheted down because there is a fiscal crisis. That’s all there is to it.
In New Haven, what would be the alternative? How can we control whether we have a fiscal crisis?
Tax the hell out of people in Greenwich and New Canaan.
So it’s a state issue?
Yes. We need to have a Board of Aldermen that is really willing to speak in unison with a lot of pressure at the state level, with the mayor. What they’re saying at Occupy Wall Street is, “We don’t want to accept anymore the option that there’s no money and there are no options, when there has been plenty of money for these bankers.”
Do you worry about the movement being co-opted — or not being focused enough for the next stage?
It seems to me the next stage is going to have to be you start putting yourself on the line and confronting the system physically.
How so?
Just like they did in the Civil Rights Movement. Blocking people from going into the stock exchange. Blocking the federal reserve buildings. Protesting in front of Bank of America. If the plutocrats are afraid, be in front of JP Morgan every day. That’s where it needs to go.
Do you need arrests?
Yes. You have to create a crisis to get a response.
How about in New Haven? Should demonstrators work with police?
For now I think the police should be joining them! You think about what’s happening in New York. The police see themselves so much in opposition to the people protesting. Yet what is the main concern of police now economically? It’s that their pensions are going to go bust. They’re worried about the rollback of collective bargaining. Well, whose fault is that? It’s Wall Street’s. The police should be getting on the barricades with them.
In New Haven, the police are working with demonstrators on plans for Saturday’s march and occupation. The parks department is giving them port-o-lets.
I think that’s great.
That doesn’t create a crisis, some people argue.
At some point if you’re going to actually push the system to change, that has to happen.
Does that mean confronting police? Protesting Bank of America? Going to Yale’s Wall Street? How do you confront the crisis in New Haven?
Them being where they are in New York [by Wall Street] is symbolic. In Chicago they have been protesting in front of the Board of Trade, the federal reserve. In Chicago it’s particularly interesting because the city recently spent an enormous amount of money to completely renovate the interior of the Board of Trade while telling people living in impoverished, devastated neighborhoods that there’s no money. Especially neighborhoods where banks have allowed vacant buildings to stand there. Where Bank of America has taken over houses that have been foreclosed and they’re sitting there boarded up, unguarded, unmonitored. They’ve created a public health hazard.
Lenders have also dawdled on properties here. We have a foreclosure crisis stemming from subprime lending and fraud. How would you confront that here?
That’s a good question. That ‘s up to the movement to decide. They should set up a process.
Should Yale be part of the picture in New Haven?
Yale certainly owes more to the city.
In what sense is Yale connected to the abandoned housing?
I think they’ve actually helped stabilize neighborhoods through their homeownership program.
Yale should be kicking up more money. This is one of the issues that came up in our aldermanic primary [in Westville’s Ward 25 — whether to] ask more of Yale [in the conflict over whether to revisit a 20-year-old deal to cede two downtown streets to the university]. “We should not be negotiating with Yale” — I assume that is the mayor’s position. We were saying this is precisely the time to renegotiate [on Wall Street]…
So should the New Haven protest be on Wall Street instead of on the Green?
I don’t see why it’s on the Green. I wonder if you can identify a couple of places — Wall Street, Bank of America .… But I haven’t been part of the process. So I would feel presumptuous making suggestions.
Previous Occupy Wall Street/ New Haven coverage:
• Whoops! Movement Loses $100K
• New Haven’s “Occupation” Takes Shape
• Occupy Branford: Wall Street Edition
• Anti-Bankers’ Dilemma: How To Process $$
• Labor, Occupiers March To Same Beat
• Protests’ Demand: A “World We Want To See”
• Protesters To Occupy Green Starting Oct. 15
• Wall Street Occupiers Page Verizon
• New Haven Exports “Free”-dom To Occupiers