Virtually anyone who has been even remotely involved in social justice work in recent history cannot help but smile just a little bit, as for the first time in a long time (in my lifetime) a real radical, social movement is afoot. The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement, or simply the Occupy movement has captured most major US and World cities in a brilliant attempt to stop the ruling class from decimating what’s left of the world’s economy, culture, and environment; what some people would call “the end of the world.” By occupying these public squares, activists and organizers have not only gained mass-media attention, even from the corporately run mainstream media, but have begun organizing in a way that sows the seeds for what could be a worldwide revolution. By promoting the ideas of non-hierarchal organizing, including consensus, and utilizing direct democracy, this movement has also set itself apart from major non-profit, humanitarian and social justice organizations, giving it a more viable chance to succeed and not be co-opted by the capitalist system. But now, two months into the Wall Street occupation, important questions are arising about where the movement is heading, and in the upcoming chilly winter months, activists must seriously address some questions about the movement or it will stall indefinitely.
First, however, it’s good to point out some of the things that OWS has done right. It picked an excellent target: Wall Street: the world’s biggest capitalist casino, one of the most ludicrous and destructive forces on earth, that holds the power to impoverish entire nations at the whim of investors. It is not simply greed that these protests are speaking out against, but rather the clear inequalities that have arisen from this institution. This is class struggle, and there’s no doubt about it. Second, of course was the rhetoric. Radical activists have been struggling for years to create slogans that actually appealed to the masses, who aren’t yet on the same page. By using the 99% vs the 1%, OWS has clearly labeled itself as a movement for everyone, devoid of affiliation with any sort of single-issue campaign or party politics.
By using consensus as it’s method for decision making, OWS has built a movement with a very diverse group of speakers, and has made it hard to be co-opted by external forces. Consensus has of course been used for years, especially by worldwide anarchist movements; it was not an invention of OWS (despite some claims I’ve heard). It has simply highlighted these tools of horizontal organizing and made them more accessible to anyone who is interested, but maybe never considered themselves anarchists or joined any anarchist organizations. The occupations are doing a great job of teaching people consensus, although there have been a lot of issues in the way consensus has actually been used (more on this later). Most important, OWS is showing that consensus decision making, as a form of direct democracy, is successful. For years critics of consensus have claimed that it is simply inefficient, and just doesn’t work. But in this case, the consensus model helped spawn a worldwide movement. So it clearly can work despite the fact that it is “not easy,” as some would say.
It is also worth noting the exceptional amount of media coverage garnered by these protests. It would be a mistake to attribute this to a brilliant media campaign by occupiers, with tons of outreach to the mainstream media. Rather, these major media sources simply haven’t been able to ignore it. This goes hand in hand with the quick dissemination of information through the various occupations’ websites. It has captured the public imagination. It is a “story” that people want to hear. This demand has outweighed the disgusting amount of corporate influence over the media, and they have more or less, been forced to cover it. The success of the movement in general with good messaging has generated the media response, not necessarily a calculated “media strategy.”
Finally, a beautiful synthesis is underway with the occupation of public space and using it for direct democracy and movement building. Public space was once the cornerstone of building movements. It gave people real-live (not virtual) space to meet in and discuss the issues of the day. The ruling class has strategically eliminated these spaces, to make it more difficult to engage in dissent. Furthermore, they have criminalized in the most basic human activities in the remaining public spaces, such as outlawing sleeping in public parks. The effects are most noticeable for members of the houseless community perhaps, but one cannot help but feel alienated by the overwhelming amount private property that surrounds them in the heart of modern cities. Even a public restroom, is a rare thing. This is a movement about transforming our public space, and this adds to the very inviting nature of the occupy movement that welcomes people from all over to come to public squares and organize.
So the Occupy movement has done some things right, and it has come on the heels of a number of exciting uprisings in the world. The inspiration for the original call-out to OWS made by the magazine Adbusters was no doubt inspired by the Arab Spring: the series of uprisings that occurred and still are developing in the Middle East. Egypt is the most notable example of a public square occupation having led to a revolution. When Hosni Mubarek stepped down the whole world saw that this type of organizing could indeed work.
However, there are some key differences between what happened in Tunisia, Egypt, Lybia, and the rest of the Middle East and Occupy Wall Street. First off (and the mainstream media loves to point this out), the occupations of the Arab Spring had clear goals: they wanted to remove their despotic rulers and have democratic elections. This is distinctly different from the American movement. There have been no calls for Obama or any members of his cabinet to step down. Thus, the mainstream media has consistently portrayed the movement as disorganized and without a central goal. In some ways this is true, in other ways not. The lack of verbalized goals reflects the incredible diversity within the movement and the fact that hopefully, this is just the beginning of what’s to come.
But with diverse politics also comes much disagreement about what to do with the movement. So, we’re against the banks, but what are we for? Some people want to see more reforms, while others are distinctly revolutionary. Some people want to stop specific Wall Street practices while others are contemplating the total destruction of capitalism replaced with a more cooperative society. Besides the consensus model, many of the more radical ideas being put forth by the Occupy movement are being brushed aside. More compromises are being sought with ruling institutions so that these occupations can face less pressure to disband by the ruling elite.
This reformist rhetoric is nothing new and they do have some clear demands. People are looking to have social services restored. They want to fund education and healthcare. They want to prosecute Wall Street executives, and perhaps put them in jail. They want to stop the big banks for foreclosing on people’s houses and forcing them out on the street. And yeah, CEOs make too much money.
Yet, reformist campaigns rarely succeed in actually changing society, which must take place if we are to save our communities and our environment. A major cause of this failure is due to the over-reliance on representative government. It is becoming increasingly clear that our representatives cannot accurately and justly represent us. People in power rarely give in to our demands unless they are forced to do so. History has shown that real uprisings need teeth, and can’t give into weak compromises if they are to succeed. Thus, we need more than a reformist movement. We need a revolutionary one, and we need to take on our unjust economic system: capitalism.
So why revolution? Why capitalism? The short answer is to stop the end of the world. Look around at the state of our society: our communities, our environment, our livelihoods, are all on the verge of annihilation from the global economic machine. We’ve reached peak oil and Climate Change is becoming a reality endangering the survival of communities all across the world. The daily level of consumption by developed nations is simply not sustainable, while poverty, famine, and hunger plague the Global South. As resources become fewer and more valuable, the ruling class will try to seize them from the public until there are none left. The economic system they use to enact these travesties is capitalism. There is no point in fighting corruption, unfair fiscal policies, and extortion unless we also challenge the system that enables them. As radical as this sounds to some, the OWS movement supports a lot of this through its own messaging. The front page of http://occupywallst.org displays the slogan: “the only solution is World Revolution.”
So if OWS wants to live up to its claims as a “world revolution,” the reformist rhetoric should be converted to more radical demands. Alongside these demands people should start building their own alternatives. This has happened on a small-scale at each occupation, with camps providing meals, free education, free clothes, free healthcare, babysitting, etc. Yet, this new economic model needs to spread outside the occupation and become institutionalized in neighborhoods around the world. This has the potential to disarm the capitalists, because people will begin to rely on them less and less for basic services.
We also need to draft strategies for cutting off corporate power. Occupy Oakland has certainly been the most successful with this. The General Strike on November 2nd, which ended with a temporary shutdown of the Port of Oakland, was a clear victory for the movement. The call-out for a total west coast port shutdown on 12/12 will continue this trend. Then, Occupy Wall Street attempted to delay the opening of the stock exchange on the November 17, the two-month anniversary of the occupation. They failed (mostly because of the police), but the attempt displayed an effective tactic to challenge the ruling class nevertheless.
Another action aimed at direct confrontation was the national Bank Transfer Day on November 5th, when almost a million people took their money out of big banks and put it into local credit unions. While there has been a lot of debate over whether or not putting your money into credit unions actually negatively affects the banks, it clearly gave them a scare and caused a change in bank policy (e.g. Bank of dropped its fee for using debit cards to appease customers). This is another strategy that should be expanded. The more money we can remove from the big banks the better.
Challenging the banks goes hand in hand with challenging the concept of “representative” government. The “democracy” we live in lacks any real representation of even vaguely progressive politics. This should be clear to most folks who voted for Obama, who has only continued Bush-era neo-liberal policies and wars. Yet, the anti-elections idea has made little headway inside the camps. With the upcoming election in November, 2012, activists involved with Occupy need to organize against all the major political parties. Most importantly, OWS must not EVER endorse politicians, even those who claim to represent the policies of the movement. This is a quick way to disarm the movement. Rather, discrediting representative government will only further empower the movement by showing people that we can use direct democracy to undermine the ruling class politicians. There is also still lot of time until the elections, which gives the movement an advantage in that there is time to do all sorts of actions against representative government before the elections. The movement should take full advantage of this.
A newer trend in the OWS movement is the reclaiming of buildings and the solidarity with tenants and homeowners who are being evicted from their homes by banks. This is very promising. Occupations should align themselves strongly with tenants’ rights organizations in their communities (and with most progressive community organizations for that matter). Many of these groups have been working on housing issues for years and have been fighting the big banks. They are crucial allies in this struggle. Also, with their support, the Occupy movements can begin to revitalize neighborhoods through initiatives to improve public spaces, create gardens, open free-schools, and fix up distressed buildings.
Reclaiming buildings for the movement is also beginning to happen. Yet again, activists in Oakland were the first to do so, but the trend has spread to other cities including Chapel Hill, Washington DC, and Seattle. Squatting needs to be put on the table at all occupations as a crucial step forward to achieve revolution. Particularly in northern climates, where people might freeze to death this winter if they try to live in tents, getting indoor space for the movement is essential. (It is important to realize that houseless people are at the forefront of this, as they could benefit the most from permanent indoor housing this winter). Occupying buildings would also be a more symbolic step towards revolution as it is a total denial of the notion of “private property,” which is central to the capitalist machine.
Once we occupy buildings the horizon expands. We can make community centers, free housing, childcare, free-schools, health clinics, free-stores, community store houses (for excess goods), food pantries, workshop spaces, libraries, art and cultural centers, performance space, radical media workspaces, and spaces for general assemblies. The possibilities are literally endless. These institutions will also help the movement grow in every neighborhood they are in by giving them a tangible, public face.
Another strategy that is only starting to be put on the table is to spread the assemblies into the neighborhoods. Perhaps because of the centrality of many of the camps in the heart of cities, little thought or initiative has gone to moving the assemblies to each neighborhood, to engage a wider audience in the conversation and to tackle specific needs of each community. Of course, various neighborhood assemblies would also need to coordinate and meet with each other at some downtown location from time to time. This would decentralize the movement, so that if the camps are taken down, there are already important decisions being made in each neighborhood.
Neighborhood Assembly initiatives have begun popping up. Many cities have Occupy the Hood movements, which arose out of mostly black communities to deal with neighborhood issues, and are not focused on the mostly white and middle-class constituency of central occupations. Also, Ocuppy El Barrio, has similarly focused on Latino/a communities. A new website was recently started for rural occupations too. It is important that rural communities begin to address their concerns and begin to have solidarity with their urban counterparts. The relationship between rural areas and cities will be crucial in the future, because most food is produced in rural areas and most people live in and around cities, so when the heavily fossil-fuel dependent capitalist food system collapses, we will have an alternative system already in place. Still, these centralized occupations have not pushed forth the idea of neighborhood assemblies, and it has been lacking from the overall strategy of a movement, which has tended to put its energy into specific camps and large-scale actions.
Another major issue with the Occupy movement is its reliance on these big actions to carry its message, while discrediting smaller, often more confrontational ones. Of course, groups all over the country have carried out small, autonomous actions, but these receive little recognition within the movement. In fact, there has been a sentiment of distrust from the occupations about autonomous small-scale actions. There have been proposals to ban them from the movement. The main concern is that these actions, if done in solidarity with an occupation, would give the camp bad press, or even get them raided. This is absurd. First off, the press already uses random occurrences of violence in a city (even if they are only “near” an occupation) as a condemnation of the movement (using “public safety” as its justification). Would we rather be evicted because someone in the area was assaulted or would we be willing to take the chance of eviction for taking actions against the system? The occupations must endorse or at least re-open the option of taking small-scale direct action as part of the overall campaign. Individuals who decide to engage in these actions must have support and solidarity from the camps.
Along with the dismissal of autonomous actions, the Occupy movement has become entangled in the ceaseless attempt by some activists to label the movement as explicitly “non-violent.” This does more harm than good, and wastes a lot of time creating a dichotomy that, by in large, doesn’t exist. In Boston, the occupation I’ve been most involved in, a diversity of tactics statement was endorsed near the start of the occupation, supporting a variety of forms of resistance. Many longtime activists brought this proposal from the radical community. Yet, now, six weeks later the debate is still dominating general assemblies. A new proposal to outright ban all acts that might be perceived as violence against “all beings” was recently brought to the GA. This proposal had a very broad definition of “violence” and has for the moment been blocked. It did not propose a way to deal with “violent” individuals, or indicate who would decide if they were and were not being violent. This dispute points to a crucial difference between the OWS movement and the Arab Spring uprisings. Despite the incorrect assumptions of some who claim that the Egyptian uprising was nonviolent, protestors in the Arab world, who face daily retribution for everything they do, were forced to defend their camps with force. Why? Because if they didn’t their movement wouldn’t have succeeded. They would’ve been crushed by police and the military and driven out of public squares.
The ideology of nonviolence comes absolutely from a place of privilege. Most people in the US have a lot to lose right now. The middle class, which makes up much of the occupy movement, is still concerned about its own property, its own financial well being, and is inevitably still tied to these capitalist ideas. Thus, they are intensely afraid of the pot boiling over—of real conflict between the ruling class and the 99%. Even acts of nonviolent civil disobedience have been condemned by people who are afraid to create a volatile situation. Yet, if we continue undermine those willing to take risks, the movement will fail.
One issue that is often glossed over at most violence/non-violence debates is the idea of self-defense. In many ways, this puts the perceived dichotomy of these two concepts into question. How would someone react if an individual was being sexually assaulted in the camp and had to defend themselves? Should they react non-violently to an aggressor? I think not.
On a larger scale, how should we react when the police come to raid our camp and imprison our friends? Are we okay with them trashing all of our belongings and essentially removing people from their homes? Again privilege has a huge effect. As we decide to let the police evict the camps, those with nowhere else to go are forced back into their extreme poverty. We will only be helping the police force these folks back onto the streets.
It is this same privileged mentality that has negatively impacted the diversity of some camps, and made people who aren’t white, male, and middle-class feel less welcomed there. Fewer and fewer non-males have been staying at the camps because of flagrant sexual harassment and the feeling that they are not safe. Fewer people of color are coming to camps because they sense the same white supremacist tendencies that dominate mainstream society at the camp. Queer and trans folks are often made to feel uncomfortable as well. While the movement has openly addressed some of these issues, there is a sincere need to have working groups actively bringing proposals and enacting strategies to counter these social behaviors. As difficult as this is, it does offer an amazing opportunity for activists, especially from less-privileged communities, to tackle issues of oppression and teach valuable lessons about intersectionality. These camps are microcosms for the world at large. Oppression still exists within them, but if we can start to improve the social dynamics there, perhaps there is hope for the broader community. Furthermore, the lack of involvement from less-privileged communities, who feel endangered or belittled at the camps is already weakening the movement. However, their have been lots of experienced activists attempting to tackle these issues at camps and they deserve credit for their actions.
While dealing with internal issues, it’s also important to see how these dynamics play out in general assemblies. By and large, the general assemblies have been successful at including a wide variety of voices. However, because of often heavy-handed facilitation, and varying degrees of modified consensus, many people have left the assemblies out of frustration. Ultimately, each camp must decide what form of consensus to use, but the more modified and reliant on voting the process becomes, it also become easier to silence people. There have been some outright declarations by facilitators who wish to abandon the consensus model all together. We must make sure this does not happen at our assemblies, or face an increase of hierarchy there.
Furthermore, while the use of consensus has been successfully spreading around the world because of OWS, there is a definite lack of education around the process. This doesn’t just mean teaching people the hand signals, but stepping back and understanding the concepts. There are several consensus guides that offer different, but often tried and tested forms of consensus (Check out Peter Gelderloos, Consensus, for a good example). Radicals should be encouraged to share their favorite consensus guides and resources with facilitators and with the camp at large.
Still, even with all the resources consensus guides have to offer, it is important to look at the situations that consensus is used in. Clearly, general assemblies are a good time for consensus. However, during actions, when momentum is building towards something, forcing people to sit down and do an entire consensus process (often surrounded by dozens of cops) is not strategically a smart idea. This is why it is helpful to have clear goals and tactics before an action, so that people know what to do in certain situations. I think all concerns in the situation should be vocalized, but as soon as people start having an “assembly” in the middle of an action, things de-escalate, and often the action fails because it simply loses momentum.
And momentum after all, is what we are trying to build. Sustaining momentum will be the real test of the Occupy Movement in the months to come. There are some huge challenges to be faced, not only in maintaining the camps and the movement, but in realistically trying to foster a revolution to save the world. And for this we’ll need the 99% on our side. Only by escalating to more revolutionary strategies will people become more involved with real enthusiasm for what’s happening. We cannot stagnate. A change of heart needs to occur inside us all. When we let go of our privileges and prejudices, and realize that we have nothing to lose, our strength will multiply exponentially. Let’s not forget what we want, and not be afraid to catapult human imagination through the walls of our prison, towards a brighter future.
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