So you want demands do you?

Occupy is a MOVEMENT people! Relax and take a chill pill.

I'm writing this post tonight in answer to the many questions I get regarding why the Occupy Movement has no demands. Having attended a General Assembly @ Occupy Oakland I understood the point right away, but here is an explanation from the Brookings Institute.

Occupy Wall Street represents a public outcry over the voicelessness and disempowerment of the 99 percent. Implicit in these complaints is a simple demand: the status-quo is simply unacceptable.

Over a month after a motley crew of demonstrators set up camp in downtown Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park, the question of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protest movement’s “demands” persists.

What do the Occupiers want? What should they want? What good is a protest if it does not demand explicit redress?

Members of the "Occupy Wall Street" movement march near Zuccotti Park in New York.

Within the movement itself, the lack of demands is a point of pride. The General Assembly of the New York City occupation has explicitly denied the Demands Working Group’s claim to speak on behalf of the movement. While the Demands Working Group has struggled to delineate a list of specific policy demands, the broader movement has firmly resisted this effort. “We are our demands. This #ows movement is about empowering communities to form their own general assemblies, to fight back against the tyranny of the 1%. Our collective struggles cannot be co-opted,” proclaims the Occupy Wall Street homepage in a statement disavowing the Demands Working Group.

As one New York occupier explains, “The notion of demands connotes disempowerment, or hostage-taking. That’s not what we’re about. We’re about empowerment. The government shouldn’t need us to make ‘demands,’ because it should be of us.”

Washington policymakers accustomed to receiving an “ask” from an interest group (or a wealthy donor) have been flummoxed by the movement’s refusal to fit into the traditional way of doing business. Media outlets accustomed to covering the micro-contests that make up much of the day-to-day business of policymaking in Washington have struggled with Occupy Wall Street as well.

Yet, Occupy Wall Street’s lack of explicit demands is smart movement politics for the time being, advantageous for the movement itself and for savvy politicians alike. For a month-old movement with solid popular support, OWS’s demand-free stance makes good sense.

The movement’s absence of specific demands is advantageous to the movement itself. Occupy Wall Street’s meta-demand that government policies serve “the 99 percent” has protected the movement from becoming tangled in the weeds of legislative requests, a strategic move that has allowed the protests to gain energy and popular support.

Enumerating specific demands only to have them left unmet would leave the movement looking weak, and vulnerable to losing the energy it has generated around its motivating message of economic and political fairness.

It remains to be seen whether, eventually, Occupy Wall Street will channel its raw power and broadly-resonant message in order to achieve specific policy objectives. For now, however, the broad-message movement has dragged issues of economic justice to the forefront in a way that decades of academic study of rising economic inequality and the occasional policymaker’s focus on distributional issues have not been able to accomplish.

Other commentators have noted the above point, i.e. Occupy Wall Street movement’s absence of specific policy demands is smart movement politics. Less noticed has been that the same point holds for the progressive “establishment.” Occupy Wall Street movement’s lack of demands is actually a boon to Democratic policymakers and their allies in Washington, for several key reasons.

First, the absence of specific demands gives policymakers and their allies the ability to craft their responses in free-form, rather than having to give specific thumbs-up/thumbs-down responses to a laundry list of policy choices. Policymakers have the opportunity to channel the frustration and anger streaming from the Occupy protesters into specific policies of their choosing, rather than having to shoehorn Occupiers’ “demands” into the policy process.


The loose-to-non-existing relationship between the movement and political leadership gives politicians an opportunity to do what they’ve been elected to do—to channel the inchoate will of the people into specific policies. 

Occupy Wall Street has given the establishment an opportunity to show leadership and political skill. President Obama has, to a certain extent, already done this—his executive actions revamping the student loan debt repayment program, for example, speak directly to the concerns of many of the debt-laden college graduates at the helm of the Occupy encampments across the country.

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