#Occupy - ANALYSIS - Oct 22

How Occupy Wall Street Really Got Started; From Protest to Disruption: Frances Fox Piven on Occupy Wall Street; What ‘Diversity of Tactics’ Really Means for Occupy Wall Street; Could the Occupy Movement’s General Assemblies Replace Today’s Parliaments and Legislatures?; What can OWS learn from a defunct French avant-garde group?

by Staff | Energy Bulletin | Oct 22 2011

How Occupy Wall Street Really Got Started

Andy Kroll, Mother Jones News

Meet the international activists who lit the fuse for the populist protest movement that's sweeping the world.
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Months before the first occupiers descended on Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan, before the news trucks arrived and the unions endorsed, before Michael Bloomberg and Michael Moore and Kanye West made appearances, a group of artists, activists, writers, students, and organizers gathered on the fourth floor of 16 Beaver Street, an artists' space near Wall Street, to talk about changing the world. There were New Yorkers in the room, but also Egyptians, Spaniards, Japanese, Greeks. Some had played a part in the Arab Spring uprising; others had been involved in the protests catching fire across Europe. But no one at 16 Beaver knew they were about light the fuse on a protest movement that would sweep the United States and fuel similar uprisings around the world.

The group often credited with sparking Occupy Wall Street is Adbusters, the Canadian anti-capitalist magazine that, in July, issued a call to flood lower Manhattan with 90,000 protesters. "Are you ready for a Tahrir moment?" the magazine asked. But that's not how Occupy Wall Street sprang to life. Without that worldly group that met at 16 Beaver and later created the New York City General Assembly, there might not have been an Occupy Wall Street as we know it today

... Georgia Sagri, a Greek artist based in New York who was in the crowd that day, watched with dismay. She had also supported forming an assembly, having watched them take shape back in her native Greece. Sagri was tired of the same old rally with a single focus—the death penalty, jobless benefits, immigration reform, you name it. The general assembly, on the other hand, promised a discussion without fixating on an issue or a person. In an assembly, labels or affiliations didn't matter. There in Bowling Green Park, Sagri couldn't wait any longer, and so she and a few others "hijacked," in her words, the August 2 gathering, wrestling it away from your average protest and back in the direction of a real general assembly.

It took some time for the group to get the hang of it—Sitrin describes the early assemblies as "quite awkward"—but when they did the New York City General Assembly, the Big Apple's own experiment in direct democracy, was born. When the assembly hit a snag, members would refer to a document titled "How to cook a pacific #revolution," a how-to guide for general assemblies written by the Spanish and translated into more than a half-dozen languages. The NYCGA met on Saturdays in Tompkins Square Park in the East Village at 5:30 p.m. and lasted as long as 5 1/2 hours. Afterward, people would regroup at Odessa, Sitrin recalls, a popular diner among the activist set where, over pierogis and potato pancakes, the talk of politics and economics carried on deep into the night.

(17 October 2011)

From Protest to Disruption: Frances Fox Piven on Occupy Wall Street

Chris Maisano, The Activist (Young Democratic Socialists)

Frances Fox Piven has spent decades writing about and participating in social movements in the United States. She was gracious enough to sit down for an interview with Chris Maisano, a writer and activist in the New York local of Democratic Socialists of America, to discuss the Occupy Wall Street protests, the complex interplay between social movements and electoral politics, and the future of the occupation movement.

Chris Maisano: What have you thought of the protests so far?

Frances Fox Piven: I think they’ve been pretty terrific. And I really am hopeful that it’s the beginning of a new period of social protest in this country. I think a lot about the protest is absolutely on target, it’s so smart. It was so smart to pick Wall Street because Wall Street looms so large not only in the reality of inequality and recession policy, but it looms so large in the minds of people now because everybody knows that they’re stealing the country blind. So they picked the right place, they had somehow — I don’t know how self-consciously, maybe self-consciously — absorbed a kind of lesson from Tahrir Square of staying there, because usually we have demonstrations and marches and parades and things, and they’re over in a nanosecond. And all that the authorities have to do is wait, because they’re gonna be over.

So what they tried to do is take this classical form of the mass rally — they didn’t do it alone, obviously it happened in Egypt too — and connected it with the disruptive potential of mass action because they said “we’re staying.” And “we’re staying” is more troublesome. Not only that, “we’re staying” makes it possible for them to organize and mobilize throughout the course of the action, which is what they do. So that part of it was pretty, pretty smart.

They are smart in being very inclusive. I mean, they’re very happy to include everybody, and they’ve actively reached out to the unions. When has a youthful protest done that in living memory? A very long time since that’s happened. But they knew from the beginning — probably they were helped to learn that from Wisconsin. And they’re so happily counter-cultural, you can’t even get angry at them if you’re a stiff old person! Then you read their statements, I’m sure you do. Well, I do too. And I think they’re very thoughtful for statements issued by a general assembly sitting on the cold cement – they’re very good statements, and they really are statements that include the 99%. So it’s great.

It’s also true that when I say I think we may be on the cusp, at the beginning of a another period of social protest and [Occupy Wall Street] is the sign, I don’t think that social protest works as a little explosion and gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. It doesn’t happen that way. It’s much more interrupted, dispersed, there are periods of discouragement — 1959-1960 the civil rights movement people thought it was over, after 1962 in Albany, Georgia — this movement is going to be like that too.
(7 October 2011)

What ‘Diversity of Tactics’ Really Means for Occupy Wall Street

Nathan Schneider, Waging Nonviolence

Even as Occupy Wall Street shapes the public conversation about high finance, political corruption, and the distribution of wealth, it has also raised anew questions about how resistance movements in general should operate. I want to consider one of the matters that I’ve thought about a lot over the past month while watching the occupation and its means of making its presence felt on the streets of New York and in the media.

“Diversity of tactics,” in the context of political protests, is often treated as essentially a byword for condoning acts of violence. The phrase comes by this honestly; it emerged about a decade ago at the height of the global justice movement, especially between the 1999 demonstrations that shut down a WTO meeting in Seattle and those two years later in Quebec. While all nonviolent movements worth their salt will inevitably rely on a variety of tactics—for instance, Gene Sharp’s list of 198 of them—using the word “diversity” was a kind of attempted détente between those committed to staying nonviolent and those who weren’t.

Consider this characterization by George Lakey:

“Diversity of tactics” implies that some protesters may choose to do actions that will be interpreted by the majority of people as “violent,” like property destruction, attacks on police vehicles, fighting back if provoked by the police, and so on, while other protesters are operating with clear nonviolent guidelines.

Those who extoll the importance of total nonviolent discipline—as Lakey eloquently goes on to do—might be disappointed to learn that Occupy Wall Street has made “diversity of tactics” its official modus operandi. However, the way that the occupiers have carried out this policy might actually lead us to think of its meaning and implications in a more compelling way.

Since the early stages of the movement, it is true, those taking part have been in a deadlock on the question of making a commitment to nonviolence. At a planning meeting in Tompkins Square Park prior to September 17, I recall one young man in dark sunglasses saying, knowingly, “There is a danger of fetishizing nonviolence to the point that it becomes a dogma.” In response, a woman added a “point of information,” despite being in contradiction to what Gandhi or King might say: “Nonviolence just means not initiating violence.” The question of nonviolence was ultimately tabled that night and thereafter. “This discussion is a complete waste of time,” someone concluded.

Property damage and self-defense, therefore, have remained on the table. The main points of the march guidelines subsequently promulgated by the occupation’s Direct Action Committee are these:

1. Stay together and KEEP MOVING!
2. Don’t instigate cops or pedestrians with physical violence.
3. Use basic hand signals.
4. Empowered pace keeps at the front, back and middle of every march. These folks are empowered to make directional decisions and guide the march.
5. We respect diversity of tactics, but consider how our actions may affect the entire group.

In practice, however, the occupiers have kept nonviolent discipline quite well, even if they don’t entirely preach it. Their self-defense against police violence has been mainly with cameras, not physical force. (In fact, they have often responded to intimidation by chanting, “This! Is! A Nonviolent Protest!”) There have been no cases of intentional property destruction that I know of.
(22 October 2011)

Could the Occupy Movement’s General Assemblies Replace Today’s Parliaments and Legislatures?

Steve D'Arcy, ZNet

As the Occupy movement continues to sweep across the globe, having already toppled dictatorial governments and shaken up the political landscape in country after country, from North Africa to North America by way of Southern Europe, one cannot fail to be struck by its remarkable power and appeal.

Increasingly, it is becoming clear that the movement’s attractiveness is rooted in the one characteristic that most readily distinguishes it from the dominant protest cultures of earlier eras: the uncompromising inclusiveness and participatory democracy that it insists upon in its General Assemblies.

To be sure, this insistence on egalitarian inclusion and participatory horizontalism is often disappointed. Being a movement that reflects the personal and political failings of its diverse participants, not to mention the hierarchies that pervade our communities and distort our personalities, the General Assemblies sometimes make mistakes and exhibit imperfections; they sometimes fall short of living up to the movement’s highest ideals.

... Why have so many fallen in love with this struggle and its forms? Why does it act like a magnet for working-class people, drawing them into the streets, but also provoking thousands and thousands of them to post pictures of themselves on movement websites, holding up the now-familiar handwritten “I am the 99%” notes, in which they declare their new-found class consciousness, eagerly embracing the new language of class being forged within the movement? Why do so many participants in the General Assemblies emerge from the process, no doubt with a certain frustration at the slow pace or the occasional lack of focus, but in almost every case with a palpable sense of exhilaration and excitement that here, at last, they have been given the chance to find their voice within a social movement, contributing individually to the common project of standing up together, once and for all, against the tyranny of the 1%? What is it that they see in this movement? Why is this process so different, and so much more attractive to working-class people, than previous attempts at organizing opposition to neo-liberalism and the corporate agenda?

Could it be that they see, not just what these General Assemblies are today, but what they could be tomorrow? So far, the Assemblies have been confined to serving the pragmatic role of coordinating the ongoing Occupy encampments, along with the communicative role of letting people express their opinions to one another in public. But many of those most excited by the process seem to sense, at least viscerally if not yet intellectually, that the General Assemblies may have the potential to offer us something more: a new model of how we might govern ourselves democratically, transforming ourselves and our societies in the process.

... To those who cannot yet imagine a politics that goes beyond Demands, Programs and Parties, the very question is unsettling. And yet, given the way that the Occupy movement, and the new democracy of its General Assemblies, has begun to resonate with working-class people, from Egypt to the United States and beyond, it is not clear that we can any longer avoid asking it. Can we replace the representative-corporate democracy of the 1% with the participatory-popular democracy of the 99%?
(22 October 2011)

What can OWS learn from a defunct French avant-garde group?

Gary Kamiya, Salon

The original Mad Men
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Strange bedfellows don’t get any stranger than this. To the joy of a few dozen graduate students and culture jammers, and the utter bemusement of just about everybody else, the most significant American protest movement in years has been spending time under the sheets with an obscure French avant-garde movement whose ideas are so crazily millenarian they make Jacques Derrida look like Mitt Romney.

I’m referring to the peculiar liaison between Occupy Wall Street and the Situationists – creators of one of those whacked-out intellectual commodities that have constituted France’s most lucrative cultural exports for more than a century.

The link between Occupy Wall Street and the Situationists is the Vancouver-based anti-consumerist magazine and organization Adbusters, whose call to occupy Wall Street kicked off the now-global protests. In a recent interview, Adbusters co-founder and editor Kalle Lassn told Salon’s Justin Elliott, “We are not just inspired by what happened in the Arab Spring recently, we are students of the Situationist movement.”

This connection was odd enough that I decided to dust off my old copy of “The Society of the Spectacle” and see what, if any, help the Situationists might be able to offer the Occupy Wall Street movement. What I found would make those worthies spin rapidly enough in their graves to shake the Eiffel Tower.

... There is thus a strong connection between the Situationists and various counter-cultural carnivals, provocations and eruptions – a fact that holds both promise and peril for any political movement influenced by them.

That playfulness should be the most lasting legacy of the Situationists is ironic, for it’s hard to imagine anything less playful than “The Society of the Spectacle,” the 1967 book by Situationist founder Guy Debord that is the movement’s bible. Grim, pedantic, hectoring and, not to put too fine a point on it, mad as a hatter, it is one of those works of Grand Theory that clank along like an ideological tank, crushing everything, including logic and common sense, in their path.

(21 October 2011)

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