Should sex offenders be allowed to participate in the Occupy movement?
This post is not a direct response to, but was informed and inspired by this post on Daily Kos. If you are concerned with knowing exactly what I am referring to, it is recommended, but not absolutely necessary, to read it first.
Essentially, though, you need to know this: during the time when the Occupy Boston camp was active (it is now gone), there was a level 3 sex offender staying there. This information was known to organizers within the movement but was not shared during the period when the camp was active, despite the presence of children. At a recent GA meeting, the issue was taken up in a proposal that stated:
- identify and verify a Level 3 sex offender
- have someone approach the person and let him know that we’re aware and we think it would be best if he didn’t participate in Occupy Boston
- denying the person Occupy Boston resources such as food, clothing, shelter, etc.
This did not pass. This decision is controversial. The points of complaint are obvious: this is harboring a sex offender, it is a callous indifference to misogyny within the movement, it creates a threatening atmosphere which is contradictory to the stated purpose of the Occupy movement, etc. The rebuttals are also obvious: we don’t ‘shun’ people, criminals are also marginalized groups that need support, etc.
I do not think that this is an easy argument beyond a certain point. This much is without a doubt: this information should have been openly conveyed to everyone within the movement. That it was not is a huge breach of responsibility for the coordinators of the movement.
I think we should begin with the arguments that I think are persuasive, but maybe not persuasive enough. First—convicted criminals are a marginalized group and Occupy claims to speak for the marginalized. Also, the decision to dismiss convicted criminals from the movement seems to contradict a certain essential tenet of our belief in the justice system (if we have one): that once a person has completed their prison sentence, they have effectively ‘done their time,’ and are no longer to be held to account for their crimes upon their release. In effect: if you against felony disenfranchisement (as most leftists are), then why can’t a convicted rapist vote in your GA?
Here, we also run into something of the radical politics version of Blackstone’s formulation: whether it is better to let 10 guilty persons escape than one innocent suffer. In other words, if we leave the Occupy Boston setting for a moment, we are forced to interrogate how we feel about known rapists escaping prosecution or imprisonment due to legal technicalities. The standard rebuttal to Blackstone is that letting a guilty person go free is letting innocent people suffer, on the expectation that they are now categorically less safe. But most leftists don’t think that moral argument holds water: we have certain safeguards that are in place, not because they have a one-hundred percent success rate, but because without them our legal system would operate only whimsically. The argument against Blackstone, and the argument presented against allowing sex offenders inclusion in the movement, both, to an extent, rely on a visceral feeling of wrongness, in a moralism that seems to preclude any tactical or strategic thinking; insofar as this is the case, I believe both arguments are fundamentally conservative.
So then, let me frame the conflict differently: is it tactically necessary to include certain people in political movements that may be aesthetically undesirable or openly threatening or hostile to other members in the movement?
And now we must parse ‘the left.’
The Occupy movement is built around a certain ideology that is anathema to many traditional leftists; namely, its love of ‘autonomy,’ ‘consensus,’ etc. What we mean, when we get down to it, is that the so-called ‘old left’ really dislikes the ‘anarchists’ and vise versa. Yes, we all have our hearts in the right place, but after that initial caveat, there are a lot of seriously fundamental disagreements that stall our cooperation. The left, to start, thinks consensus is all but completely incompatible with mass politics. Without getting too far off track, let’s just point out the key flaws inherent in consensus. It leads to lowest-common-denominator proposals that have to be vague enough to discourage serious dissent. Most of all, it too easily allows a small group of people to hijack and veto proposals that are desirable to a much larger portion of the population and in fact could do wonders in creating public support for the movement (examples of this: OWS rejecting the OWS demands working group’s ‘jobs for all’ proposal; and the blocking of a provision in the Occupy Boston charter that specifically endorsed ‘non-violence.’ It should be duly noted that the main antagonists to the passage of these proposals were the strong anarchist contingent). In fact, the author of this Daily Kos piece has another piece on the same website called “Consensus doesn’t fail. People do.” If that title isn’t the goddamn exemplar of ultraleftism eating its own tail, I don’t know what is.
Personally, I don’t think the question is as easy as it is sometimes assumed to be. To this Daily Kos writer, to refuse to kick out the sex offender is tantamount to endorsing and joining with the forces of misogyny. To her opponents in the GA, the denial of support for this person because he’s a sex offender is tantamount to selling out the communist promise of all-inclusion to the culture war. In not so many words, we have arrived at something of a restating of the question that tore at the early Women’s Liberation movement: who is the “real” enemy, man or capitalism? Is it misogyny in the form of a sex offender, or is it capitalism in the form of refusing support?
I don’t like answering this question because I don’t think it is satisfactory. After all, we can have several enemies, all of them real. The chicken-and-egg nature of how this question is posed only allows for a simplistic answer: it’s me or him.
So here’s the trick: how do we allow for an answer that asserts that both capitalism and misogyny are the enemy of our movement and yet still allows for the possibility that the dual nature of this struggle occasionally leads to friction between them, including the problem of raising contradictions?
I think the inability to grasp that dilemma is what has led the left to a constant process of self-immolation. In the absence of a mass left movement (besides the Democratic Party, which we all know is not left in any compelling sense), certain segments of the left-wing population become enamored of ideas of prefigurative politics. They begin to isolate themselves from the mass public and begin to talk only amongst themselves. The longer they are only talking to themselves, the more precise the lines among them can be drawn: this is how we end up first with anarchism and then with the innumerable ‘strains’ of anarchism. The doctrine of ‘acceptable’ leftism narrows. To quote Adolph Reed, with reference to the ‘self-conscious left:’ ‘Ultraleftism is a maximalist politics. It’s much more about taking positions that express the intensity of one’s commitments than about organizing or building anything. Rather than crafting language to build broad support for a substantively radical program, for instance, ultraleftists prefer potted rhetoric that asserts their bona fides, without concern for communicating outside the ranks of belivers.’
This is what I find striking about this case. The left these days often does communicate only within the ranks of believers. The limits of this style of politics should be self-evident. The left perspective I would argue for, not completely comfortably but with confidence, is that disallowing a member of the working class to participate in a movement dedicated above all to the assistance of the working class is ineffective and strategically detrimental. Critics may say that Occupy isn’t dedicated ‘above all’ to issues of class, but is in fact dedicated to all sorts of intersecting issues; or, again, man and capitalism. I’m okay with that—but as a basis for political organization, I believe we should fight capitalism first, and not because it’s more “real” an enemy that misogyny or racism or heterosexism, but because tactically it is what can build an effective mass political movement where the others cannot. To quote Adolph Reed again, from a provocative essay called ‘the limits of anti-racism:’ ‘My position is—and I can’t count the number of times I’ve said this bluntly, yet to no avail, in response to those in blissful thrall of the comforting Manicheanism—that of course racism persists, in all the disparate, often unrelated kinds of social relations and “attitudes” that are characteristically lumped together under that rubric, but from the standpoint of trying to figure out how to combat even what most of us would agree is racial inequality and injustice, that acknowledgement and $2.25 will get me a ride on the subway. It doesn’t lend itself to any particular action except more taxonomic argument about what counts as racism.’
I believe it is not unreasonable to argue that the question posed in the title of this post ‘does not lend itself to any particular action except more taxonomic argument about what counts as misogyny.’
I believe a central fallacy of the left these days is that they can narrow down their ranks to the strictly virtuous; that it is possible, if not in fact absolutely necessary, to create a movement without any bad apples, without any contradictions within its ranks. I am afraid that I believe the political world is not amenable to such views, as valuable as they may be as benchmarks.
I agree it is uncomfortable and unenviable to be put in the position of allowing a sex offender amongst the ranks of a political movement; and I agree that the kneejerk reaction to the question would be ‘no.’ But, it seems that contradictions have to be allowed if movements are to move forward. Otherwise, we turn inward, constantly purging our ranks, and we eat our own tail: only collapsing inward, never moving forward.
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NOTE: There is an argument here that I am not engaging with that clearly makes this a special case. There is an obvious safety issue present because of the unique nature of the Occupy protests. Because this involves a non-policed tent city, the bar to entry should be higher. In this post, I am grappling with the larger debate: should these people be allowed to be counted as part of the movement at all, not simply should they be allowed to camp out, a question I think is more easily answered in the negative.
