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Occupy Wall Street and the

Question of Hegemony: A
Gramscian Analysis
Jan Rehmann
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Hegemony: A Gramscian Analysis, Socialism and Democracy, 27:1, 1-18

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Vol. 27, No. 1, 1– 18, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08854300.2012.759744

Occupy Wall Street and the Question of

Hegemony: A Gramscian Analysis

Jan Rehmann
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Several books and articles have already been published on the

emergence, dynamics and defeat (at least temporary) of the Occupy
movements in the US. To date, Gramsci’s theory of hegemony has
not played a major role in the evaluation of this political trajectory.
In regard to Occupy Wall Street (OWS) this is certainly no coincidence.
It is indeed easy to list several reasons why a Gramscian approach to
OWS is problematic. Isn’t it obvious that OWS’s claim to be a “leader-
less movement” clashes with Gramsci’s description of leadership in
terms of educating “organic intellectuals”? Gramsci’s perspective of
uniting the industrial proletariat and forging class alliances with the
peasants and other subaltern classes through a political party, which
meant at the time the Communist Party of Italy, part of the Third Inter-
national, would be rejected by many of those involved in OWS as
reflecting an outdated centralist model of representation. For David
Graeber the left is neatly divided into “verticalists” and “horizontal-
ists” so that OWS becomes a case in point to demonstrate the virtues
of anarchism as against the failures of the Marxist left.1
A similar dichotomy, though in reverse, is put forward by critics
who argue that OWS is a fundamentally “anarchistic” movement
without any realistic perspective on social change. This is the view of
Barbara Epstein, who argues that the movement’s “insistence upon
egalitarianism, its suspicion of the state and aversion to mainstream
institutions and culture, and its emphasis on the creation of alternative
communities, intended to be, as far as possible, beyond the reach of the
state and mainstream society” clearly demonstrate its “anarchistic”
character (Epstein 2013: 66). By this classification, Epstein hands over
crucial components of many progressive protest movements to one
single tradition. This surrender is in turn based on an undialectical
opposition between “resistance” and “social change,” according to

1. Graeber 2012: 27, 122– 23.

# 2013 The Research Group on Socialism and Democracy

 2 Socialism and Democracy

which the former “calls for drama, performance, spectacle,” whereas

the latter “calls for thinking about how to get from where we are to
the society that we want” (Epstein 2013: 81– 2). Epstein’s dichotomy
misses the strategic importance of a “revolutionary Realpolitik”
(Rosa Luxemburg, GW 1/1, 373) designed to mediate the contradic-
tions between short-term and long-term goals, reform and revolution,
parliamentary and extra-parliamentary practice.
I consider the fixation of such ever fluid contradictions into a rigid
dichotomy of “anarchism versus Marxism” superficial and outdated.
A social analysis that looks at what people are actually doing (not just
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what they are saying) shows immediately that what in fact was done
by a supposedly “leaderless” movement was to educate good organi-
zers, new “organic intellectuals,” who can be described using Gramsci’s
concept of “leadership” as opposed to “domination,” i.e. in a non-
hierarchical sense of building processes of consensus. Cornel West
might have had this dialectic in mind when he described the movement
as both “leaderless and leaderful.”2 Suspicion of political parties in the
US is of course primarily directed against the two-party-system and
the attempts of the Democratic Party to co-opt the movement in order
to revitalize the presidential campaign of Obama – a sort of co-optation
conceptualized by Gramsci as “passive revolution” and “transformism,”
by which the wider perspective and stamina of the movement would be
sucked dry. The real problem from a Gramscian perspective, however, is
why the movement did not try to construct its own independent political
formation of a new network type so that the temporary achievements
can be consolidated.
I am particularly interested in two questions: (1) how OWS was
able to break into the predominant hegemonic framework, to effec-
tively intervene in the symbolic order, and to stir the make-up of
people’s common sense; and (2) how to grasp the limits that blocked
the construction of a political alternative and a sustainable counter-
hegemony.

Prepared and not-prepared: overdetermination of the initial event

The emergence of a social movement is obviously not something
that can be planned beforehand on a drawing board; nor is it a pure
“event” breaking into the chain of being, as some formulations of
Alain Badiou might suggest. What is so difficult to grasp is the way
that it is both prepared and not-prepared. Althusser has tried to

2. West 2011: 1.
 Jan Rehmann 3

capture this enigma with his concept of overdetermination, which

describes a phenomenon as shaped by multiple determinants.3 Move-
ments emerge from different overlapping initiatives and dynamics, but
it is exactly the intersections that cannot be fully planned. There were a
lot of well thought out and organized preparations behind OWS
ranging from the Canadian website Adbusters’ appeal for an occupation
in mid-July 2011 to the demonstrations under the umbrella of
New Yorkers against Budget Cuts. Both the peace movement and the
trade unions were preparing actions for the fall. There were also a lot
of objective and subjective conditions that provided a strong sounding
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board for these initiatives: soaring income polarization from the late
1970s onwards, rising poverty levels, increasing numbers of foreclo-
sures, skyrocketing student debt leaving graduates as prisoners in
their own country, disappointment about Obama’s broken promises,
crisis of neoliberal hegemony and of political representation. OWS
obviously did not fall from the sky, but emerged as part of a “new
cycle of movements,” kicked off by the “revolution of dignity” in the
Arab World and taken up by different movements like the indignados
in Spain, the student revolt in Chile, and the labor movement in Wis-
consin, to name just a few. “It is crucial for an understanding of the
protest movements to look at the ways old and new forms of mobiliz-
ation interlock, regroup and are recombined spontaneously.”4
But the question remains what particular interventions or attitudes
were able to bring about a specific overdetermination that produced a
synergy effect, by which the result became greater than the sum of the
individual components. Different accounts of the initial event agree on
the observation that OWS emerged from a split within the movement
against budget cuts. A fraction did not want to go on with the usual
rallies and protest marches, which are the convenient forms provided
by the system for the voicing of dissent and demands. A traditional
progressive rally was taken over and transformed into a General Assem-
bly, which then in turn decided to prepare for the occupation of a place
near Wall Street.5 On September 17, the activists settled in Zuccotti
Park until the place was cleared by the police on November 15. What
was new and surprising was first a symbolic act of re-appropriation
of the commons, and this in the midst of the Wall Street sanctuary of
private property. A combination of boldness, inclusiveness, and inven-
tiveness, of nonviolent militancy and the creation of new forms of

3. Althusser 1979/1965: 209.

4. Candeias 2013: 2 –3.
5. Cf. Kroll, in Gelder 2011: 16ff; Taylor et al. 2011: 3; Graeber 2012: 26– 29, 33.
 4 Socialism and Democracy

democratic participation made it a successful and provocative inter-

vention. In addition to the initial event, there was the capacity to stay
there, to persevere against all the odds. Both the chuzpe of the occu-
pation and the resilient stubbornness to hold the ground for two
months were crucial to the hegemonic struggles, which tapped into
popular anger and freed up aspirations for revolt and change.

Visible display, spatial practices and rhizomatic networks

In order to grasp the appeal of OWS one has to differentiate
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between: (a) the visible display of the occupation and its general assem-
bly; (b) the constitutive hegemonic practices in space; and (c) the
mostly invisible rhizomatic networks underneath. Most theorists
focused on the first aspect and neglected the second and third.
Graeber came to the conclusion that it was the concrete experience of
direct democracy and of community that fundamentally changed the
notion of politics and of life as such. Slavoj Žižek invoked the “holy
spirit” in the sense of an “egalitarian community of believers who
are linked by love for each other.” Judith Butler referred to Hannah
Arendt’s concept of “space of appearance” (Erscheinungsraum) and
highlighted the importance of “bodies in alliance” that constitute
public space.6 Inspired by Antonio Negri, some observers have inter-
preted the occupations as the emergence of a “constituent power,”
which manifests itself as an “exodus” from the parliamentary
system.7 For David Harvey, the Occupy movements showed “that
the collective power of bodies in public space is still the most effective
instrument of opposition.. . . It is bodies on the street and in the squares,
not the babble of sentiments on Twitter and Facebook, that really
matter.”8
Each of the interpretations contains elements of truth, but the one-
sided emphasis on what is visible conveys an illusion of immediacy.
Harvey obviously has a point when he argues against a technocratic
overestimation of the “social media,” but his opposition between
bodies in space and the “babble” on Twitter obscures that there are
manifold concrete practices of connection and organizing that enable
the functioning of both the “real” collaboration in Zuccotti Park and
the “virtual” communication over the net. Instead of fixating one’s
attention solely on the “space of appearance,” it would be more

6. Graeber 2012: 78, 153; Žižek, in Taylor et al. 2011: 69; Butler 2011.
7. Lorey 2012: 10ff.
8. Harvey 2012: 161– 62.
 Jan Rehmann 5

instructive to take up Lefebvre’s concept of “spatial practices” and to

re-interpret it in the framework of a theory of hegemony.9 Zuccotti
Park could thus be understood as the spatial “dispositif” (arrange-
ment) of an alternative hegemonic apparatus, which combines differ-
ent counter-hegemonic practices and functions.10 It provided a
political domain for debate and decision-making, requiring careful
work with both mainstream and movement media (the latter
powered by its own generators)11 and practices of intense education,
both by famous “public intellectuals” and in small working groups.
OWS established its own public library, which was then destroyed
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by the police and dumped as trash. It developed a large body of

Occupy imagery as part of a vibrant “social movement culture.”12
The activists who actually lived there claimed to practice a new way
of living in cooperation and solidarity (a claim which however was
threatened by inner tensions and some isolated cases of harassment).
Overall, the effective combination and condensation of counter-hege-
monic functions and capabilities created an emotional density and
made the occupation at once significant for the movement and danger-
ous for the powers that be. Otherwise the police would not have used
so much force and intimidation to prevent new camps from emerging.
When Zuccotti Park and the other occupied squares were cleared, the
movement lost the spatial centers of its hegemonic apparatus.
Most importantly, however, Zuccotti Park could only assume these
counter-hegemonic functions because it was the hub of an underlying
rhizomatic network. From the outset, OWS built relationships with
many community groups, with anti-poverty initiatives, immigrant

9. Cf. Lefevbre’s distinction between “representations of space,” “representational

spaces,” and “spatial practices” (1991: 33). The latter are fundamental for the “pro-
duction of space” (36– 38). They describe social practices projected in all their
aspects onto a spatial field (8), embracing the “particular locations and spatial sets
characteristic of each social formation,” ensuring continuity and cohesion (33).
10. The concept of dispositif has been used in different ways. Foucault employed it in the
sense of an institutionally fixed spatio-temporal arrangement, which subjugates the
subjects to the technologies of power (translated into English as “mechanism”; e.g.
Foucault 1995: 202–3). The concept has been taken up and reformulated in the frame-
work of a critical ideology theory (cf. Rehmann 2011: 147–9). Hardt and Negri use it in
the general sense of “material, social, affective, and cognitive mechanisms or appara-
tuses of the production of subjectivity” (2009: x, 126). In the context of OWS, I employ
the concept to describe a spatial arrangement that frames counter-hegemonic practices.
11. The stakes can be demonstrated by the fact that already in late October 2011, the
police removed OWS’s generators from Zuccotti Park as a “threat to public
safety.” “Activists quickly recovered from that setback and installed stationary
bicycles rigged to car batteries” (Gambs 2012: 59).
12. See the analysis by Goldstein 2012.
 6 Socialism and Democracy

rights organizations, church communities, and not least with the trade
unions. It sent its activists to the headquarters of the telephone
company Verizon to show solidarity with the communication
workers’ strike. A similar action supported the strike in Sotheby’s
auction house. In response, several trade unions supported OWS,
and this solidarity in turn protected the movement for some time
against the police, whose lower ranks, the “Blue shirts,” are unionized
as well. The relationship between the organized labor movement and a
clearly leftist and anti-capitalist movement is much closer than
before.13
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The collaboration between OWS and other initiatives was such that
it strengthened the capacity to act on either side: on the one hand, OWS
was enabled to extend itself beyond Manhattan and to emerge in differ-
ent battlefields. Despite the fact that it was itself predominantly white,
it was, in part at least, capable of overcoming the racial barrier and of
spreading to poor, predominantly black and Hispanic neighborhoods,
where it helped organize actions against evictions and foreclosure auc-
tions. On the other hand, the different movements used OWS as an
appealing label that gave their actions and demands more publicity.
This can be seen with the example of National Nurses United, one of
the most active and radical trade unions, showing up at many demon-
strations with their red-green uniforms and demanding an extra
“Robin Hood Tax for Wall Street” in the name of a new “economy
for the 99%.” Such mutual collaboration was only possible because it
followed a clear strategy of non-violence.14

Intervention into the symbolic order

Some Marxists argue that OWS was unsuccessful because “the
functioning of Wall Street was not disrupted. Occupy Wall Street
never occupied Wall Street.”15 The observation is correct, but its
interpretation is shortsighted and fallacious. It is obvious that
OWS did not succeed in occupying the power centers of society.
Its calls for a general strike in New York did not have a direct
effect; the attempts of Occupy Oakland to shut down the port of
Oakland mobilized about 20,000 demonstrators but could not be

13. See Wolff and Rehmann 2011: 127–28; Wolff 2011: 67– 69.
14. As Nathan Schneider reports, “some tactics don’t mix... . . Once violence enters the
picture, it monopolizes the landscape of the conflict, co-opting other tactics and alie-
nating potential participants” (in Gelder 2011: 43– 4).
15. Marxist-Humanist Initiative 2012.
 Jan Rehmann 7

sustained. To expect this to happen would however be illusory

from the outset. To set goals that cannot be realized is certainly a
risky strategy that cannot be repeated endlessly. For the time
being, it nevertheless served to re-open a space of imagination
for further struggles.
It does not make sense to set the barrier so high that the actual
strength of OWS becomes invisible. This strength was its effective
intervention into the symbolic order. The idea of symbolic order
played an important role in structuralism and in Lacanian psycho-
analysis, but has been disputed because of its claimed fundamental
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status and its “ahistorical” nature. I utilize it, however, to denote a

particular and ever-changing part of hegemonic relations. It should
therefore not be confused with the concept of hegemony in general,
which includes the actual relations of force in the economy, on
different levels of politics and even in the military, whose function
Gramsci characterized as being “not purely military, but politico-
military.”16 The symbolic order refers to the discursive formation,
the meaning-making aspect of these relations. This is also the
aspect that reflects and influences what is usually considered
“public opinion.” The symbolic order has its limits, but also its
own reality and efficacy.
The efficacy of the OWS intervention at this level can be demon-
strated using the example of the slogan “We are the 99%.” The
New York Times described it as “a national shorthand for income dis-
parity. Easily grasped in its simplicity and Twitter-friendly in its
brevity, the slogan has practically dared listeners to pick a side.”17 At
the demonstrations in which I participated, it was in fact this slogan
that was shouted the loudest and with the most passion by the most
different kinds of people. Some theorists have criticized it for its lack
of differentiation. For Jens Kastner, for example, it contradicts Gram-
sci’s theory of hegemony, which showed that the system of domination
functions in a more complex way so that financial wealth, state-politi-
cal power and social participation do not immediately coincide.
According to Kastner’s critique, the slogan also creates illusions by pre-
supposing the unity of the movement, instead of presenting it as a
goal.18 This argument implies that the demonstrators are not aware
of the performative character of the slogan and of the contradictory
relationship between particular interests and common goals in the

16. Gramsci 1971: 180–3; Gramsci 1975: Q 13, §17, 1583– 86.
17. NYT, December 1, 2011.
18. Kastner 2012: 67– 8, 72– 3, 75.
 8 Socialism and Democracy

movement.19 What is important in a slogan is not the precision with

which it depicts the social structure, but rather the degree to which it
articulates relevant dimensions of societal reality in a way that frees
up counter-hegemonic potentials and capacities.
The “truth”-value and appeal of the slogan are based on several
factors. First, it expresses a socio-economic polarization characteristic
for the neoliberal period of capitalism in the US. Shortly after the occu-
pation of Zuccotti Park, the Congressional Budget Office published its
finding that over the last 30 years the top 1% more than doubled its
share of the nation’s income, whereas all other segments went
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down.20 It is obvious that this statistic does not reflect the conflicts of
interest within the ruling class or the actual hegemonic blocs and pol-
itical majorities. It does however articulate the reality that the stagna-
tion of real wages, the precarization of labor, rising debts, and
impoverishment harmed different subaltern classes and groups
across traditional distinctions, including large parts of the “middle
classes.” Instead of bemoaning a lack of academic differentiation, a
Gramscian analysis should be interested in the way OWS picked up
a simple and statistically undeniable socio-economic ratio and trans-
formed it directly into a political slogan. The efficacy of this move
might be described as a bold and ingenious “strategic essentialism”
(Spivack), by which a fundamental deep-structural development is
translated into a mobilizing formula.
Second, OWS turned out to be so refreshingly provocative because
it clearly stood out against a long US tradition of single-issue-move-
ments and identity politics, which engendered a deeply ingrained
habitus of proclaiming social distinctions along the lines of race,
gender and sexual orientation. The 99% slogan broke down a taboo
that has dominated the political discourse on the left for a long time,
namely the postmodernist command: you shall not invoke a collective
identity. To do so was embarrassingly un-cool and old-fashioned, an

19. On the relationship between singularities and the common, see Hardt and Negri 2009:
338–41. That OWS did not perceive itself as a homogenous unity but was aware of its
manifold contradictions can be seen by the intense debates on the opening sentence of
the founding declaration “As one people, formerly divided by the color of our skin,
gender, sexual orientation, religion, or lack thereof. . .” which was finally modified in
the sense of acknowledging the existing discriminations: “As one people, despite the
divisions of. . .” (see Ashraf, in Gelder 2011: 33-5; Beeman 2012: 52f). See also the dialec-
tics between singularities and the common in the personal narratives published on the
website http://wearethe99percent.tumblr.com/.
20. In 1979, the top 1% took 8% of the cake, in 2007 it grabbed 17% of it, and it was in fact
the only section of the income-earning US population to experience a rise in its share
of total US income (see Wolff 2011).
 Jan Rehmann 9

“essentialism” that projects a collective standpoint where there is

nothing but fragmented selves traversed and produced by shifting sig-
nifiers. Let us note that Gramsci started out from a plural composition
of the personality as well, whose “common sense” is contradictory and
“strangely composite,” containing “Stone Age elements and principles
of a more advanced science, prejudices from all past phases of
history. . . and intuitions of a future philosophy.”21 Unlike the predomi-
nant tendencies in postmodernism, however, he did so from the
perspective of a philosophy of praxis that develops strategies to render
common sense more coherent. The stronghold for such a critical inter-
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vention can be found in what he called “good sense” (buon senso), the
“healthy nucleus” of common sense, characterized by a sense of
“experimentalism” and of attentive observation of reality so that the
philosophy of praxis “coincides with ‘good sense’ that is opposed to
common sense.”22
The slogan “we are the 99%” can thus be interpreted as a successful
initiative to work on the coherence of people’s common sense by con-
necting with their “good sense.” One of OWS’s main achievements was
that it unhinged the different ideologies of “plantation politics” (Du
Bois) and fragmentation. The form of the slogan is utterly open and
inclusive: like the Arabic “revolution of dignity,” it focuses not on
what separates us but rather on what connects us. Remarkably, this
is at the same time the form that brings the long repressed socio-econ-
omic class-divide back on the agenda, which in turn explains to a large
degree the shift from the Tea Party Movement to OWS.

Common sense as a battleground

Let us look back a few years. When the economic crisis hit the US in
September 2008, neoliberal ideology with its holy trinity of deregula-
tion, privatization, and free trade seemed completely discredited. As
the US government started huge bailouts of big banks and financial
institutions, public wrath turned immediately against both the finan-
cial heroes of previous years and the politicians that bailed them out.
Thomas Frank, in his book Pity the Billionaire, described this as a “popu-
list moment,” which however was missed by the new president Obama
who followed the bailout course of his predecessor and turned econ-
omic policy over to Wall Street friends Larry Summers and Tim

21. Gramsci 1971: 324; Gramsci 1975: Q 11, §12, 1376.

22. Gramsci 1971: 328, 348, 380; Gramsci 1975: Q 10.II, § 48, 1334–35; Q 11, § 56, 1483; Q
12, §12, 1378; Q 16, § 21, 1889.
 10 Socialism and Democracy

Geithner.23 The successful rhetoric of activation of Obama’s “yes-we-

can” campaign therefore had no chance to materialize as a new historic
bloc based on a social and ecological New Deal, but led to the disman-
tling of its own social base and finally to a state of paralyzing dyshege-
mony.24 Since there was (and still is) no independent and viable leftist
formation that could articulate the popular anger, the terrain was
immediately occupied by the Tea Party, which redirected people’s
resentment from “Wall Street” to “Washington,” i.e. against govern-
ment and taxes and federal directives. The Tea Party movement embo-
died the authoritarian radicalization of a neoliberalism in crisis, but
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despite the fact that it was organized by leading conservative insti-

tutions, it was able to portray itself as a popular uprising from below.
Up to mid-September 2011, it seemed to be set in stone that the Tea
Party was the only vibrant and expanding social movement in the US.
Liberals and leftists could not imagine that a mass movement like OWS
could emerge and develop in such a short time. One month later the
hegemonic landscape had changed considerably. According to a poll
of late October 2011, 43% of US citizens agreed with the views of the
“Occupy Wall Street” Movement,25 compared to an approval rating
of 9% for Congress at the time.
This rapid shift can be better understood if we examine it in terms
of Gramsci’s concept of common sense, with its contradictory and inco-
herent composition of which people are usually unaware. Without sim-
plifying too much, one can say that there are two major ways by which
experiences of the current economic crisis are being translated into
popular common sense: the predominant neoliberal version is that
the fiscal debt is not sustainable; that the government is driving the
country to ruin by spending too much, in particular for the wrong
people, namely the urban poor, blacks and other minorities, as well
as “privileged” unionized employees in the public sector; that Hispanic
immigrants are taking our jobs etc. A second layer of common sense,
more akin to Gramsci’s “good sense,” manifests itself as awareness
of the income polarity between rich and poor, which it sees as unsus-
tainable and morally scandalous – a view which usually sees the
main culprit as the speculative part of capitalism, its financial sector.
Underneath, there is a growing suspicion that capitalism itself might

23. Cf. Frank 2012: 34, 39, 167–68.

24. See the neo-Gramscian analysis of Obama’s politics in Haug 2012: 175ff, 197ff.
25. http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20125515-503544/poll-43-percent-agree-
with-views-of-occupy-wall-street/ – from October 25, 2011. Seven in ten Americans
say they have heard or read at least something about “Occupy Wall Street.” 46%
say “Occupy Wall Street” represents the views of most Americans.
 Jan Rehmann 11

not be sustainable. This layer of common sense, however, remains

mostly latent, blocked from consciousness by fear of being ostracized
as radical lunacy, and by the lack of an appealing democratic-socialist
alternative.
The inherently contradictory make-up of common sense is further
complicated by the intermingling of different, even opposed, narra-
tives within the same social groups and individuals, where they
build inconsistent but tenacious “compromise formations.”26 The fact
that OWS was able, at least temporarily, to shift the inner composition
of common sense, reflects at least two characteristics: first, contrary to
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exaggerated assumptions of complete manipulation by the Culture

Industry or to Baudrillard’s “hyperreal” speculation that the US is
actually nothing but Disney World writ large, popular common
sense harbors enormous potentials for a possible leftist alternative;27
second, in times of crisis, the relations of force within common sense
are much more volatile than in times of stability. This however can
be true in both directions, which leads us to note some of the limits
and weaknesses of OWS.

Corporatist limits and weaknesses

Nobody knows whether or in what forms the Occupy movement
will revive – or its successor emerge. The clearing of Zuccotti Park
was obviously a hard blow. The loss of the spatial “dispositif” for
counter-hegemonic practices has discouraged and disoriented many.
It became clear, on the other hand, that the connections with trade
unions and other civil-society organizations helped OWS to live on
in many local actions, e.g. against student debts and foreclosures.
Malik Rhasaan and Ife Johari Uhuru founded the “sub-movement”
Occupy the Hood (OTH), which focuses on articulating the voices of
racial minorities and tries to anchor the movement in poor neighbor-
hoods. In April 2012, a broad coalition launched The 99% Spring, a
training program for economic education, nonviolent direct action,
and organizing. On May 1, 2012, OWS re-emerged in New York City

26. The originally Freudian concept of “compromise formation” has been taken up and
employed as an ideology-theoretical concept signifying “a condensation of antagon-
istic forces. . .in the framework of the structure of domination.” It is a contradictory
form, “in which the dominated forces are compelled. . .and in which the system of
domination concedes them an outlet” (Haug 1987: 72; cf. Rehmann 2011: 160– 64).
27. In a poll in April 2011, 20% were of the opinion that the US would fare better with a
socialist system than a capitalist one; among young people between 15 and 25, the
preference for socialism was 33 % (Graeber 2012, 80).
 12 Socialism and Democracy

with a demonstration of about 30,000 people. The swift and effective

relief activities of “Occupy Sandy” showed that the Occupy networks
in New York are still alive. Even if OWS doesn’t find another point of
coalescence, there has been a learning process that might safeguard the
movement from falling back to the level of single-issue campaigns and
identity politics.
The flipside of OWS’s successful intervention into the symbolic
order is of course that the symbolic order is itself just a volatile dimen-
sion of overall hegemonic relations. OWS has altered the public dis-
course, but not the structure of the economy and the state, nor the
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inner composition of the hegemonic apparatuses. The political

domain is still monopolized by the two-party system; power relations
in the corporate media did not change a bit, so that media coverage fell
sharply after the clearing of Zuccotti Park and also turned predomi-
nantly negative. It seems that this has already had an adverse impact
on public opinion. Gramsci once pointed out that the Catholic
Church could reiterate its doctrines again and again so that they got
firmly anchored in the common sense of its believers. He concluded
that “each cultural movement. . .striving to replace common sense
and the old worldviews” must relentlessly “repeat its own arguments
(while altering their literary form).”28 Even though leftists might not
feel flattered by the comparison with the Catholic Church, they
should recognize that Gramsci’s observation applies to a progressive
counter-hegemony as well. Without some stable positions in civil
society which allow us to spell out the critique of capitalism again
and again, the “good sense” elements in common sense risk subsiding
after a while, drowned out by the prevailing ideologies.
I see two main areas where OWS (and/or its successors) should
develop. First, I would argue that direct democracy and the consensus
principle in occupied spaces are not only impossible right now, but
also, even if implemented, will soon become relatively pointless
unless they can be translated into tangible and convincing projects of
economic democracy. Since OWS in fact articulates the fundamental con-
tradiction between democracy and capitalism, it is actually a move-
ment for Economic Democracy, but has not developed this
perspective in an explicit way. To do so would have several strategic
advantages. Economic Democracy is part of various progressive tra-
ditions that are in one way or another involved in OWS: e.g.,
anarcho-syndicalist movements oriented towards building workers’
associations; social-democratic traditions culminating in the co-

28. Gramsci 1975: Q 11 §12, 1392.

 Jan Rehmann 13

determination model of the Swedish Rudolf Meidner Plan of 1982;

communist movements for council democracy, including the factory
occupations in Northern Italy at the time of Gramsci’s Ordine Nuovo.
It is no exaggeration to argue that whenever radical movements were
attractive to broader masses, it was because they were movements
for a more encompassing democracy. By contrast, as soon as they jeo-
pardized economic democracy, they started undermining their own
hegemony. Drawing lessons from the failures of both Eastern state
socialism and Western social democracy, Economic Democracy has
the potential to become a key-concept that allows the left to reformulate
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and redefine what a new democratic-socialist perspective in the

twenty-first century is about. It is also not just a pipe dream but
belongs to what Marx in The Civil War in France described as “elements
of the new society” within bourgeois society that need to be “set
free”:29 an estimated 13.7 million Americans work in 11,400 so-called
Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs), in which employees own
part or all of an enterprise.30
Second, in regard to the problem of building counter-hegemonic
strongholds in civil society, it is impossible to circumvent the question
of a political party. Due to the undemocratic electoral system in the US,
this is of course a thorny question, prone to create splits before a critical
mass is even constituted. I certainly cannot present any ready-made
solution. It is important however to note that Gramsci did not
employ the term party in the superficial electoral sense in which it is
often used today. In the framework of his theory of hegemony, he
used the concept in relation to the fundamental task of organizing, con-
structing, educating an “entire active social bloc.”31 The “political
party” is described as a collective intellectual, by which social groups
“elaborat[e] their own category of organic intellectuals directly in the
political and philosophical field”; it is “responsible for welding
together the organic intellectuals of a given group . . . and the tra-
ditional intellectuals.”32 The phase where “previously germinated
ideologies become ’party’” marks the moment of “catharsis,” by
which the articulated interests “transcend the corporate limits of the
purely economic class, and can and must become the interests of
other subordinate groups too.”33 In short, the “party” in a functional

29. MECW 22: 335.

30. Cf. our analysis in Economic Democracy Manifesto Group 2012.
31. E.g. Gramsci 1975: Q 15, §55.
32. Gramsci 1971: 15–16; cf. Sassoon 1987: 146–50.
33. Gramsci 1971: 181– 2, 366–7; Gramsci 1975: Q 10.II, §6, 1244; Q 13 §17, 1583– 84. On
Gramsci’s concept of “catharsis,” see also Thomas 2009.
 14 Socialism and Democracy

sense coincides with the process of overcoming corporatism, by which

Gramsci characterized a social group’s limitation to its immediate
goals, cut off from any wider perspective of social emancipation and
transformation.
I am not pleading, of course, for the nostalgic or rather dystopian
project of rebuilding a centralized and top-down vanguard party.
Gramsci’s theory of hegemony must be reformulated and concretized
for the current stage of High-Tech Capitalism. Already in 1981,
Wolfgang Fritz Haug developed the concept of a “structural hege-
mony,” i.e. a hegemony without a pre-determined vanguard party
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and developing as a result of an “activating arrangement” (Aktivierungs-

dispositiv) of social forces, both plural and structured, that would
increase the capacity to act of each component.34 The diversity of the
subjects was then famously expressed by Hardt and Negri’s concept
of the multitude, which however did not answer the political question
of how the different components of the multitude can be brought into
a productive arrangement.35 A more substantial attempt to conceptual-
ize a new network-like form of political organization is the concept of a
connective mass party (partito connettivo di massa), developed around the
Italian Rifondazione Comunista.36 Hans-Jürgen Urban’s concept of a
“mosaic left” describes the process by which fragmented identities are
transformed into a structured mosaic-like arrangement, in particular
between trade unions, social movements, and parties, thus reconstitut-
ing the left as a “heterogeneous collective agent.”37
I mention these accounts only in shorthand in order to illustrate
that a Gramscian analysis must not be bound to the specific historical
forms coined during (and co-determined by) the period of Fordism,
in which Gramsci developed his theory. His emphasis on the intellec-
tual, connecting, and educational functions of the party can be refor-
mulated under the conditions of “heterogeneous collective agents.”
The leftist parties in “developed” capitalist countries which are

34. Haug 1981: 14ff.

35. Hardt and Negri invoke in Commonwealth a key concept of Gramsci’s political theory,
namely the “Becoming-Prince,” defined as “the process of the multitude learning the
art of self-rule and inventing lasting democratic forms of social organization” (Hardt
and Negri 2009: viii). Since they presuppose however that people are already routi-
nely engaged in an increasingly “autonomous” production of the common, they
reduce politics to a “biopolitical diagram” (2009: 364) and thus fail to acknowledge
the political as a relatively independent domain of social struggles. In the framework
of an already existing common-ism on the ground, the construction of a political
organization of the multitude can no longer be addressed as a specific task.
36. Porcaro 2012.
37. Urban 2009.
 Jan Rehmann 15

relatively successful right now, e.g., Die Linke in Germany, Izquierda

Unida in Spain, the Front de Gauche in France, and above all Syriza
in Greece, are in fact already umbrella parties or party coalitions. For
quite a time, there were strong and combative social movements orga-
nizing huge demonstrations in Greece against the imposed austerity
politics, with no direct impact however, until Syriza succeeded in
assembling the impulses of the movements into a connective political
alternative, which in June 2012 garnered almost 27% of the votes.
Obviously, such an independent, non-sectarian, and connective
leftist formation is lacking in the US. There is no network and/or
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organization both open and consistent enough to bring together the

different constituencies of a progressive bloc, to organize alternative
information and analysis, to train new “organic intellectuals,” to trans-
late the movements’ impulses into the domain of politics. Politics
should not be reduced to electoral politics, which make sense only
under suitable local or regional conditions. On the other hand,
general rejection of a parliamentary strategy risks contributing to
increased abstentionism and thus opens the way for the victory of con-
servative and right-wing parties (as happened in Spain).38 OWS has so
far not mustered the political will to initiate a leftist network organiz-
ation of a new type, by which the corporatism (in Gramsci’s sense) of
single-issue movements and identity politics could be overcome. The
“constituent power” did not yet find a way toward a “constituted
power,” which could in turn incite and combine more processes of con-
stituent power. The weakness of the 99% slogan therefore lies not in its
proclaimed construction of a broad historic bloc, but rather in the fact
that this proclamation is not backed by a coherent political and organ-
izational strategy. OWS certainly developed promising connections
with other initiatives and organizations, but it did not yet reach what
Gramsci called an “ethico-political” level and therefore relapsed
again and again into dispersion and fragmentation.
But this might change again. Rosa Luxemburg argued in The Mass
Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions (1906) against the “bureau-
cratic” notion that one needs fixed organizations as a precondition for
successful mass actions. She maintained that in Russia of 1905 the new
organizations were “born from the mass strike,” which became “the
starting point of a feverish work of organization.”39 To the extent that

38. “The point is not that we should never engage in electoral politics, but rather that our
doing so should be conditional upon having candidates who are from our midst – not
just politicians who say things that we like to hear.” (Wallis 2012: 24; emphasis in original)
39. In Hudis and Anderson 2004: 186 (emphasis in original).
 16 Socialism and Democracy

OWS is able to cooperate with the existing labor movement and anti-
poverty movements as well as to build independent and sustainable
institutions, it could perhaps become the starting point for a new
leftist formation. It is not about choosing between a “horizontalist”
social movement and a “verticalist” leftist party, but rather about
looking for a new “mosaic left” that combines different social actors
in a democratic and productive way. OWS must not be fetishized as
the promising alternative to other forms of leftist politics, to parties,
trade unions, traditional social movements, etc., but it has the chance
to become a revitalizing part of a new left.
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