the Occupiers never left, that the Occupiers are still right there Occupying. The same websites and meeting places still announce, and organize, and then report the aftermath of the efforts and events in which they are still palpably participating.

Excerpted from Dale Carrico:

“As you might have guessed by now, what might have seemed a long misplaced digression into queer politics in a post about Occupy is actually a first effort to remind us about the relationship in politics between guiding ideals and actual progressive accomplishments, about the need of radicals to know how to walk and chew gum at the same time and not to look gift horses in the mouth. These reminders will come in handy sooner than you think. Let us return to Occupy.

Occupiers know that when conspicuous media narratives endlessly ask the question “Where did Occupy go?” these days this rather joyless ritual of narrative repitition is an expression of a kind of willful blindness, it is a question that functions less to solicit an answer than to efface the obvious answer right in front of the questioner that the Occupiers never left, that the Occupiers are still right there Occupying. The same websites and meeting places still announce, and organize, and then report the aftermath of the efforts and events in which they are still palpably participating. This questioning that is really an ignoring isn’t exactly a surprising strategy for Occupiers, of course, but a tired re-run, for where media trolls now ask “Where did Occupy go?” not so very long ago they were asking instead “What is Occupy for?” “What has Occupy accomplished?” and these questions operated in the same way, not to solicit answers but to obliterate the obvious.

Anybody who devoted five minutes’ attention to any Occupier knows what Occupy is for, to protest the anti-democratizing concentration of wealth, privatization of commons, and corruption of governance across all of our normative and institutional landscape. Anybody who observes that prevailing public discussions of the national deficit and macro-economically illiterate and cruel recommendations of austerity at a time of a crisis of massive unemployment, underemployment, and precarity became instead at the height of the Occupy movement last year a discussion of economic injustice and the jobs crisis knows very well what Occupy accomplished. The necessity of passing jobs bills for the 99%, as well as the most forthrightly feminist calls in a generation to defend women’s health and choices and celebrate queer equality, are themes that now suffuse and invigorate the terms of 2012 election campaigns and the Democratic National Convention. Occupy and the Republican War on Women are the reason these themes have become so central in the public imagination even as they have been crucial for so long however ignored.

I do think, however, that many Occupiers will feel discomfort about the turn this happy birthday message is taking. Even as they ruefully recognize media mischaracterizations of their messages, efforts, and accomplishments, I suspect that many Occupiers will disdain the extent to which the Obama administration suffers the same mischaracterization with precisely the same effects: as when Obama is blamed by the media for failing to raise the tone of public life and change the way politics is done even as he made strenuous efforts to do so and was met with literally unprecedented obstruction and derangement at a time of historical crisis by Republicans who seek to benefit from the failures they themselves ensured (“Where has Hope and Change gone?” “Where did Occupy go?”), as when so many accomplishments of the Obama administration are systematically ignored by many even as they cry out for outcomes that are actually already realized or underway (“What has Obama actually accomplished?” “What did Occupy want? What has it actually accomplished?”).

For me, Occupy is a beautiful and necessary and long longed-for mass movement, changing the terms of public discourse to better reflect real and shared problems and possibilities long silenced and deranged by plutocratic broadcast media forms and government by crony credentialism. There is a way in which its provocation to more relevant public discourse on the one hand and its ongoing production of spaces of conviviality, resistance, cross-pollination, testimonial exchange on the streets is an end in itself, democracy realized in the flesh.

But for those Occupiers who fancy that Occupy is instead an embryonic alternative society, it appears that parochialism and selective filtering has mislead yet another cohort of would-be radicals into fancying that the edifications to be found on dance floors and in public festivals can be sustained indefinitely and scaled nationally, even planetarily. Those who seek in Occupy yet another hammer to smash the state, were they to manage to make their facile misconstrual of the phenomenon in which they are caught up the prevalent understanding of it, would only manage to derail the actually indispensable part Occupy is actually playing and can — and must, in my view — continue to play in the ongoing democratization of the state. The vital political work of creating and maintaining institutional spaces for the non-violent adjudication of disputes (including disputes about what will count as violence) and for the equitable solution of shared problems (where the diversity of stakeholders to those problems will have actually different ends in mind) still needs doing as ever. Progressive reform and democratic struggle through, and over, the state remains indispensable, and Occupy is most indispensable in my view in its work in that very ongoing democratization of the state.

Occupy has functioned together with the tattered remains of organized labor to push the terms of actually shared concerns into public view and to push the organized partisan left from the left into a greater acknowledgment of these concerns and more organized effort to address them. It is my deepest hope that Occupy will continue to do this work.

People can and absolutely should not only occupy, but vote. People educated and empowered by Occupy can and absolutely should become candidates for public office and will be supported not by plutocrats but by occupiers in their journeys into and through public service (as others can become or become changed as teachers, artists, researchers, professional activists and organizers, policy makers, social workers, volunteers). Occupy can and absolutely should remain more than an exhortation to vote or an organizational tool for party politics, it should remain separate, critical, provocative, radical.

But to the extent that Occupy fancies itself a substitute rather than a supplement to the state it will inevitably be domesticated into harmlessness to the status quo even as it congratulates itself on its autonomy and radical purity.

While radicalism is almost always born in frustration at the inadequate and inequitable terms of the incumbent order, whenever that frustration is not transformed through education, agitation, and — crucially! — organization into actual resistance, then it becomes an empty ritual expression of frustration that ultimately testifies not to change but stasis, it remains a narcissistic how of infantile distress the satisfaction of which replaces the fraught and always frustrating effort to address that distress in collective action.

It is not only ignorance or injustice that stands between our ideals and our reality, but an ineradicable measure of the diversity of those with whom we share the world, our histories, our hopes, our problems, our possibilities. (This is a point that should be remembered when people try to pretend that to support Obama to his actually existing alternative is somehow to embrace all of his policies, including for example the many shocking and awful forms his militarism has taken, rather than to recognize the executive branch actually exists whether we disapprove of it or not and that we have a non-negligible measure of power as citizens in the determination of who will fill that branch, for comparatively better or worse, not to mention simply to affirm the reality of accomplishments that really are real and wouldn’t have been otherwise just as we protest the reality of injustices that should have been otherwise.)

No one ideal will prevail over the diversity of our peers, nor should we want it to even as they cherish that ideal so bound to fail. Democracy is the idea that people should have a say in the public decisions that affect them, and democratization is the struggle through which ever more people have ever more of a say in those decisions (including struggles over what constitutes such a say and such a decision and such a public).

The effort to translate our ideals into more material realities in contestation and collaboration with the diversity of our peers is the substance of the political.

That this contestation and collaboration be democratic, nonviolent, consensual is indispensably indebted to the maintenance of a democratic state as the arena in which ongoing social struggle takes place, an arena funded by progressive taxation to create institutional alternatives for the equitable and nonviolent adjudication of disputes, to maintain a legible scene of informed, nonduressed consent to the terms on which we engage in general commerce with our peers, and to circumvent the exploitative mismanagement of common and public goods.

Occupy and other nonviolent radical movements for equity-in-diversity (like green, feminist, queer, labor, secular movements) are indispensable to our society on their own terms as well as to the work of spurring progressive partisan reform politics to its greatest possibilities and keeping all of us both inspired and honest.

Speaking of keeping us honest, walking and chewing gum at the same time is politically possible and also necessary. It is in the context of those truisms that I wish Occupy a happy first birthday and hope that there will be many more to come.”