The essays gathered together in this book are extraordinarily useful for change makers who seek to understand what it is they are up against in twenty-first-century America that has made effectively altering the status quo and rebalancing the relations of power more and more difficult to achieve. Sanford Schram’s terrific and necessary book, seemingly written in dialogue with Occupy as a flesh-and-blood movement as well as a discursive community, engages in questions and draws upon literatures that social justice activists want to explore but seldom find in digestible forms. Deploying social and political theory in an accessible way, the chapters take on epistemic questions such as what accounts for the consistency of public policy even in the face of partisan realignment (he tackles Hegelian and Marxist dialectics on p. 66, and path dependence, policy feedbacks, and policy drift on p. 21), as well as more existential questions that tackle why working and middle-class people reeling from the economic recession are turning against government rather than big business and embracing the Tea Party doctrine (middle-class melancholia à la Freud [p. 32], neoliberal governmentality à la Foucault [p. 60]). He packs in—and unpacks—a lot!

In clarifying the conceptual fuzziness surrounding neoliberalism, The Return of Ordinary Capitalism performs an important public service, boiling it down to “a new liberalism that restructures the state to operate consistently with market logic in order to better promote market compliant behavior by as many people as possible… . Neoliberalism most fundamentally is about making economic rationality the basic ethos for everyday living in all areas of life” (p. 25). Building out from this conceptual framework in later essays, Schram illuminates the radical changes that neoliberalism has wrought for social welfare programs as well as public education: “The marketization of social welfare policies actually has been the most noteworthy development under neoliberalism. In policy after policy, there has been a dramatic shift to relying on private providers, where clients are turned into consumers who get to make choices, and both are held accountable via performance measurement systems that indicate whether market-based objectives have been met” (p. 136). Under cover of seemingly benign and sensible performance measurements, neoliberalism substitutes numbers for harder-to-measure results leading to suboptimization (when outcome goals are achieved in name only and the full spirit of the goal is lost or forgotten in the process) and instrumentalization (where the performance measurement benchmark or target becomes the end in itself )(p. 120). Schram’s discussion of social-impact bonds as the final step in the marketization of welfare-state functions is harrowingly fascinating.

Over the course of these essays, Schram conscientiously wrestles with the strategy and legacy of the Occupy movement, at first strongly disagreeing with the critique that it faltered in some measure due to an unwillingness to put forth specific demands (pp. 50-55), and dismissing this criticism as a consequence of “left melancholia” over the loss of traditional class-based, organized, political action. He argues, in my view, incorrectly, that at its root, much of the criticism stemmed from Occupy’s “inability to continue to adhere to the classic standard for left anti-capitalist organizing for revolutionary change” (p. 50). He further argues that Occupy’s purpose was not to make demands but to bring together and mobilize diverse members of the precariat rather than the class-unified members of the proletariat: “In the process, its job was to resist being coopted into making public policy proposals that would only serve to undermine its main mission—to mobilize as many different people as possible by raising consciousness about the injustice of protecting the 1% at the expense of ordinary people. In other words, Occupy’s critics conflated the different roles of protest and electoral politics for achieving political change today” (p. 50). He asserts that Occupy’s most important role was to allow a broad range of participants to come together to engage in the constructive work of public mourning of their precariatization, holding external factors responsible for their plight, rather than the destructive, self-blaming, melancholic approach of the Tea Partiers, who have instead internalized the loss of the self-sufficient self, chalking it up to the moral failings of deficient citizen-subjects who could not adhere to the standard of middle-class values of personal responsibility. From my perspective, Schram is setting forth a straw man (person?) here.

Many of those who bemoaned Occupy’s unwillingness to put forward specific demands were not coming from the “left anti-capitalist organizing for revolutionary change” position, to which Schram refers. Rather, they (we) were coming from the more pragmatic branches of the movement tree that have long engaged in campaigns with specific demands. Community, labor, antiracist, environmental justice, feminist, LGBT, immigrant, antiviolence, Civil Rights, civil liberties, democracy, and other issue organizers have a long tradition, stretching from Frederick Douglas to Ella Baker and John Lewis, from Sidney Hillman, Walter Reuther, and Randi Weingarten to Saul Alinsky, Cesar Chavez, Gary Delgado, Heather Booth, and Rincu Sen, from the Grimke sisters and Harvey Milk to Alicia Garza, who have long understood and taken to heart that “power concedes nothing without a demand” (“West India Emancipation” speech by Frederick Douglass, August 3, 1857). Likewise, many movements, most notably Civil Rights, feminist, gay and lesbian, immigrant rights and most recently Black Lives Matter, have combined consciousness raising, sharing of personal stories, and public mourning with putting forward specific demands without viewing these activities as contradictory. I also disagree with Schram’s proposition that Occupy’s critics conflate the role of protest and electoral politics. Rather, it would seem that at least in this instance, he is conflating public policy fights with electoral politics—connected but quite discrete strategies.

In later chapters, and especially the final one entitled “Getting Beyond Neoliberalism,” Schram makes a dramatic shift from his earlier position, arguing that naming the problem is not enough and that strategy is what is needed. Specifically, he argues strongly for what Andre Gorz once memorably labeled “non-reformist reforms” or his own preferred moniker, “radical incrementalism,” where “we push for as much change as possible recognizing that elites will at best offer limited concessions that can nonetheless, we hope, be used to lay the groundwork for more ambitious transformations down the road” (p. 174). Is this not precisely what Occupy’s critics were arguing for when they were voicing frustration over its unwillingness to put forward concrete demands? In truth, it seemed to me that the lack of specific demands arose not out of some overarching and broadly shared philosophical principle but because participants were hamstrung by their much-observed and celebrated but maddeningly cumbersome formal decision-making process, and were simply unable to agree on what the demands should be. It is not surprising that it was through subcommittees and working groups of Occupy that more specific campaigns (with demands and targets) took shape.

Finally, Schram is overly dismissive of the enduring relevance of the labor movement even in its beleaguered state, and a little naive about the origins and foundation of the very protests he lauds, when he says: “While it is commonplace to emphasize the importance of labor unions in working on behalf of improving the well-being of ordinary people, the lack of labor militancy over time is itself a sign of how unlikely labor organizing is as a site for a sustained movement for political change today… . The most promising labor actions in recent years have been the wildcat strikes by ununionized fast-food workers, the sporadic efforts to unionize graduate students and the initiation of attempts to give college athletes the right to form unions” (p. 176). Where does he think these promising labor actions came from? There was nothing “wildcat” about the strikes by ununionized fast-food workers; they were financially supported to the tune of tens of millions of dollars as well as carefully orchestrated by Service Employees International Union. Graduate students have long organized with the support of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees and the United Auto Workers unions, and who helped those college athletes in their quixotic quest to unionize? The United Steelworkers of America! Institutions matter, and the relationship between movements and institutions has often been far more complicated-and connected-than we care to admit.