“Those who call for the Occupy movement to have a coherent set of demands at its birth ignore the history of social and protest movements.

Mass social movements, like the one in East Germany in 1989-91, don’t usually start out with clear goals. AAP

“Often, the coherence to the programs of protest movements is only retrospectively secured: it only “makes sense” when seen historically.

“It is not clear yet what will result from Occupy. And this uncertainty is precisely the point.

New realities

“Truly radical and revolutionary situations establish new coordinates of action, feeling and thought. They do not merely slot in with what exists.

“If successful, they forge a new language and a new grammar of political claims.

“If unsuccessful, they can lay dormant, stalking the future – their potential unrealised yet present.

“Our reality today is defined by the successful struggles of the past. And it is this reality itself that confers ‘sense’ on the actions of those previous actors.

“So too is it their role in shaping our present reality which makes these events and struggles ‘successful.’

“The conservative game of ‘what if?’ history likes to toy with these pasts. What if 1917 had not happened in Russia? What if Germany had won either of the World Wars? The progressive version of this gambles, instead, on the future: what if we don’t act now?

Openness and propriety

“The novelty of certain political protest can disrupt easy categorization. The ‘openness’ of the political situation today can make many observers uncomfortable.

“There have been derogatory reactions to the ‘meaninglessness’ of the Occupy protests, to their ‘ragtag’ make-up and their refusal to, as yet, formulate a full set of demands.

“The anxiety here reminds us of that around the London riots earlier this year. What both moments reveal — despite the many differences in their situations — is an inability for some commentators to tolerate the ambiguity of a protest that begins with no demands in a familiar and ‘proper’ form.

“The protests we see today do look different from the form familiar to us over the past half century. So critics claim that this is an ‘improper’ form of protest, that the ‘proper’ form would be different (‘better organised,’ ‘more coherent,’ ‘more realistic,’ and so on).

“This emergent form of protest has a basic message: ‘we are here’. The current occupations, for example, are concerned with assembly — gathering people together for discussion about our shared social reality, as well as literally embodying an apparently forgotten polis.

“And yet, what is often missed in the dismissal of these protests is that it is the arch contest of political dispute.

“That is, politics is grounded in the establishment of what is proper and what is improper – from this, everything else flows; the “commonsense” of the day is established.

“Similarly, the language of the ‘possible’ and the ‘impossible,’ or the ‘realistic’ and the ‘unrealistic,’ is deeply political and ideological.

“For example, we are told that the eradication of inequality is ‘impossible.’ These everyday terms harbour an ideological kernel: they are attempts to constrain action to a prescribed domain. So a politics can be formed around these limits.”

Read the remainder of this opinion at “the conversation” here