Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt

by Chris Hedges

  We may feel powerless in the face of the ruthless corporate destruction of our nation, our culture, and our ecosystem. But we are not. We have a power, as the Occupy encampments demonstrated, that terrifies the corporate state. Any act of rebellion, no matter how few people show up or how heavily it is censored, chips away at corporate power. Any act of rebellion keeps alive the embers for larger movements that follow us. It passes on another narrative. It will, as the state consumes itself, attract larger and larger numbers. Perhaps the full-blown revolution will not happen in our lifetimes. But if we persist, we can keep this possibility alive. If we do not, it will die.

  The process of defection among the ruling class and security forces is slow and often imperceptible. And the protestors can encourage and invite defections by rigidly adhering to nonviolence, refusing to respond to police provocation, and showing verbal respect for the blue-uniformed police, no matter how unbearable they can be while wading into crowds and using batons as battering rams. As the Polish dissident Adam Michnik correctly observed: “A revolution that begins by burning down Bastilles, will in time build new Bastilles of its own.”23 Some of the first cracks in the edifice may have opened in Oakland, California. When Oakland Mayor Jean Quan ordered police to clear the encampment of Occupy Oakland, mayoral deputy Sharon Cornu and the mayor’s legal adviser and longtime friend, Dan Siegel, resigned in protest. What the media initially saw as a victory for establishment political forces turned out to be a major embarrassment for the Quan administration. “Support Occupy Oakland, not the 1% and its government facilitators,” Siegel tweeted after his resignation.24

  The Occupy Wall Street activists in New York and the encampments that soon followed across the country and in foreign capitals had internalized what Czechoslovakian dissident Havel articulated in his 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless.” Havel wrote a reflection on the mind of a greengrocer who, as instructed, puts up a poster “among the onions and carrots” that reads: “Workers of the World—Unite!” The poster is displayed, Havel writes, partly out of habit, partly because everyone else does it, and partly out of fear of the consequences of not following the rules. The greengrocer would not, Havel writes, display a poster saying: “I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient.”25

  . . . that one day something in our greengrocer snaps and he stops putting up the slogans merely to ingratiate himself. He stops voting in elections he knows are a farce. He begins to say what he really thinks at political meetings. And he even finds the strength in himself to express solidarity with those whom his conscience commands him to support. In this revolt the greengrocer steps out of living within the lie. He rejects the ritual and breaks the rules of the game. He discovers once more his suppressed identity and dignity. He gives his freedom a concrete significance. His revolt is an attempt to live within the truth . . .

  This attempt to “live within the truth” brings with it ostracism and retribution. But punishment is imposed in bankrupt systems because of the necessity for compliance, not out of any real conviction. And the real crime committed is not the crime of speaking out or defying the rules, but the crime of exposing the charade:

  By breaking the rules of the game, he has disrupted the game as such, he has exposed it as a mere game. He has shattered the world of appearances, the fundamental pillar of the system. He has upset the power structure by tearing apart what holds it together. He has demonstrated that living a lie is living a lie. He has broken through the exalted façade of the system and exposed the real, base foundations of power. He has said that the emperor is naked. And because the emperor is in fact naked, something extremely dangerous has happened: by his action, the greengrocer has addressed the world. He has enabled everyone to peer behind the curtain. He has shown everyone that it is possible to live within the truth. Living within the lie can constitute the system only if it is universal. The principle must embrace and permeate everything. There are no terms whatsoever on which it can coexist with living within the truth, and therefore everyone who steps out of line denies it in principle and threatens it in its entirety.26

  Those who do not carve out spaces separate from the state and its systems of power, those who cannot find room to become autonomous, or who do not “live in truth,” inevitably become compromised. In Havel’s words, they “are the system.” The Occupy movement, by naming corporate power and refusing to compromise with it, by forming alternative systems of community and society, embodies Havel’s call to “live in truth.” It does not appeal to the systems of control, and for this reason it is a genuine threat to the corporate state.27

  Movements that call on followers to “live in truth” do not always succeed. They failed in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, triggering armed insurgencies and blood-drenched civil wars. They have failed so far in Iran, the Israeli-occupied territories, and Syria. China has a movement modeled after Havel’s Charter 77 called Charter 08. But the Chinese opposition has been effectively suppressed, although its principal author, Liu Xiaobo, currently serving an eleven-year prison term for “incitement of subversion of state power,” was awarded the Nobel Prize.28 Power elites that stubbornly refuse to heed popular will and resort to harsher and harsher forms of state control can easily provoke counterviolence. The first Palestinian uprising, which lasted from 1987 to 1992, saw crowds of demonstrators throw rocks at Israeli soldiers, but it was largely a nonviolent movement. The second uprising, or intifada, which erupted in 2000 and endured for five years, with armed attacks on Israeli soldiers and civilians, was not. History is dotted with brutal fratricides spawned by calcified and repressive elites. And even when these nonviolent movements do succeed, it is impossible to predict when they will spawn an uprising or how long the process will take. As Timothy Garton Ash noted about the revolutions in Eastern Europe, in Poland it took ten years, in East Germany ten weeks, in Czechoslovakia ten days.29

  Karl Marx wrote that bourgeois revolutions, despite their drama and even ecstasy, are by nature short-lived. They reach a zenith and then are absorbed back into the society. Proletarian revolutions, however:

  . . . constantly criticize themselves, constantly interrupt themselves in their own course, return to the apparently accomplished, in order to begin anew; they deride with cruel thoroughness the half-measures, weaknesses, and paltriness of their first attempts, seem to throw down their opponents only so the latter may draw new strength from the earth and rise before them again more gigantic than ever, recoil constantly from the indefinite colossalness of their own goals—until a situation is created which makes all turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves call out: “Hier ist die Rose, hier tanze”30—[“Here is the rose; dance here”].

  Ketchup, a petite twenty-two-year-old from Chicago with wavy red hair and bright red-framed glasses, arrived in Zuccotti Park in New York City on September 17, 2011. She had a tent, a rolling suitcase, forty dollars worth of food, the graphic version of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, and a sleeping bag. She had no return ticket, no idea what she was undertaking, and no acquaintances among the stragglers who joined her that afternoon to begin the Occupy Wall Street movement. She decided to go to New York after reading the Canadian magazine Adbusters calling for the occupation, although she noted when she got to the park that Adbusters had no discernible presence.

  The lords of finance in the looming towers surrounding the park, who toy with money and lives, who make the political class, the press, and the judiciary jump at their demands, who destroy the ecosystem for profit and drain the U.S. Treasury to gamble and speculate, took little notice of Ketchup or any of the other scruffy activists on the street below them. The elites consider everyone outside their sphere marginal or invisible. And what significance could an artist who paid her bills by waitressing have for the powerful? What could she and the others in Zuccotti Park do to them? What threat can the weak pose to the strong? Those who worship money believe thei
r buckets of cash, like the $4.6 million JPMorgan Chase gave to the New York City Police Foundation, can buy them perpetual power and security. Masters all, kneeling before the idols of the marketplace, blinded by their self-importance, impervious to human suffering, bloated from unchecked greed and privilege, they did not know they were about to be taught a lesson in hubris.

  In those first hours there was nothing but confusion, uncertainty, and an energy that buzzed through the streets like an electric current.

  Ketchup in Liberty Square.

  “We get to the park,” Ketchup says of the first day:

  There’s madness for a little while. There were a lot of people. They were using megaphones at first. Nobody could hear. Then someone says we should get into circles and talk about what needed to happen, what we thought we could accomplish. And so that’s what we did. There was a note-taker in each circle. I don’t know what happened with those notes, probably nothing, but it was a good start. One person at a time, airing your ideas. There was one person saying that he wasn’t very hopeful about what we could accomplish here, that he wasn’t very optimistic. And then my response was that “well, we have to be optimistic, because if anybody’s going to get anything done, it’s going to be us here.” People said different things about what our priorities should be. People were talking about the one-demand idea. Someone called for AIG executives to be prosecuted. There was someone who had come from Spain to be there, saying that she was here to help us avoid the mistakes that were made in Spain. It was a wide spectrum. Some had come because of their own personal suffering or what they saw in the world.

  “After the circles broke I felt disheartened because it was sort of chaotic,” she said. “I didn’t have anybody there, so it was a little depressing. I didn’t know what was going to happen.”

  John Friesen, twenty-seven, tall and lanky with a long, dirty-blond ponytail, a purple scarf, and an old green fleece, was also one of the first to arrive in the park. Joe and I find him sitting on the concrete edge of Zuccotti Park one morning, leading a coordination meeting, a gathering that took place every morning with representatives of each of Occupy Wall Street’s roughly forty working groups.

  “Our conversation is about what it means to be a movement and what it means to be an organization,” he says to the circle. A heated discussion follows, including a debate over whether the movement should make specific demands.

  We look for him later and see him on a low stone wall surrounding a flower bed in the park. He decided to come to New York City, he said, from the West Coast for the tenth anniversary of 9/11. He found a ride on Craigslist while staying at his brother’s home in Champaign, Illinois.

  “It was a television event when I was seventeen,” he says of the 2001 attacks. “I came here for the ten-year anniversary. I wanted to make it real to myself. I’d never been to New York. I’d never been to the East Coast.”

  Once he reached New York City, he connected with local street people to find “assets.” He slept in parks and on the street. Arriving on the first day of the occupation in Zuccotti Park, he found other “traveler types” whose survival skills and political consciousness were as developed as his own.

  In those first few days, he says, “it was the radicals and the self-identifying anarchists” who set up the encampment. Those who would come later, usually people with little experience in Dumpster diving, sleeping on concrete, or depending on a McDonald’s restroom, would turn to revolutionists like Friesen for survival. Zuccotti Park, like most Occupied sites, schooled the uninitiated.

  “The structure and process carried out by those initial radicals,” he says with delight of the first days in the park, “now have a wide appeal.”

  The park, like other Occupied sites across the country, became a point of integration, a place where middle-class men and women were taught by those who have been carrying out acts of rebellion for years. These revolutionists bridged the world of the streets with the world of the middle class.

  “They’re like foreign countries almost, the street culture and the suburban culture,” Friesen says:

  They don’t understand each other. They don’t share their experiences. They’re isolated from each other. It’s like Irvine and Orange County [home of the city of Irvine]; the hearsay is that they deport the homeless. They pick them up and move them out. There’s no trying to engage. And it speaks to the larger issue, I feel, of the isolation of the individual. The individual going after their individual pursuits, and this façade of individuality, of consumeristic materialism. This materialism is about an individuality that is surface-deep. It has no depth. That’s translated into communities throughout the country that don’t want anything to do with each other, that are so foreign to each other that there is hardly a drop of empathy between them.

  The Occupy movements fused the elements vital for revolt. They attracted small groups of veteran revolutionists whose isolated struggles, whether in the form of squatter communities or acts of defiance such as the tree-sit protest in Berkeley that ran from December 1, 2006, to September 9, 2008, to save an oak grove on the University of California campus,31 are often unheeded by the wider culture. The Occupy movements, like the movements in Eastern Europe, were nurtured in numerous small, dissident enclaves. Bands of revolutionists in cities such as New York, Oakland, Chicago, Denver, Boston, San Francisco, Eugene, Portland, Los Angeles, and Atlanta severed themselves from the mainstream, joined with other marginalized communities, and mastered the physical techniques of surviving on the streets and in jails.

  “It’s about paying attention to exactly what you need, and figuring out where I can get food and water, what time do the parks close, where I can get a shower,” Friesen says.

  Friesen grew up in an apolitical middle-class home in Fullerton in southern California’s Orange County, where systems of power were obeyed and rarely questioned. His window into political consciousness began inauspiciously when he was a teenager, with the Beatles, The Doors, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. He found in the older music “a creative energy” and “authenticity” that he did not hear often in contemporary culture. He finished high school and got a job in a LensCrafters lab and “experienced what it’s like to slave away trying to make glasses in an hour.” He worked at a few other nine-to-five jobs but found them “restrictive and unfulfilling.” And then he started to drift, working his way up to Berkeley, where he lived in a squatter encampment behind the U.C. Berkeley football stadium. He used the campus gym to take showers. By the time he reached Berkeley he had left mainstream society. He has lived outside the formal economy since 2005, the last year he filed income taxes. He was involved in the tree-sit protest and took part in the occupations of university buildings and the demonstration outside the Berkeley chancellor’s campus residence to protest fee hikes and budget cuts, activities that saw him arrested and jailed. He spent time with the Navajos on Black Mesa in Arizona and two months with the Zapatista Army of Liberation in Mexico.

  John Friesen in Liberty Square.

  “What I saw in the Zapatistas was a people pushed to the brink of extinction and forgetting,” he says. “Their phrases ring true: ‘Liberty! Dignity! Democracy!’ ‘Everything for Everyone! Nothing for Ourselves!’ The masks the Zapatistas wear check egos. People should be united in their facelessness. This prevents cults of personality.

  “I have no interest in participating in the traditional political process,” he says:

  It’s bureaucratic. It’s vertical. It’s exclusive. It’s ruled by money. It’s cumbersome. This is cumbersome, too, what we’re doing here, but the principles that I’m pushing and that many people are pushing to uphold here are in direct opposition to the existing structure. This is a counterpoint. This is an acknowledgement of all those things that we hate, or that I hate, which are closed and exclusive. It is about defying status and power, certification and legitimacy, institutional validation to participate. This process has infected our consciousness as far as people being allowed [to pa
rticipate] or even being given credibility. The wider society creates a situation where people are excluded. People feel like they’re not worth anything. They’re not accepted. The principles here are horizontal in terms of decision-making, transparency, openness, inclusiveness, accessibility. There are people doing sign language at the general assembly now. There are clusters of deaf people that come together and do sign language together. This is an example of the inclusive nature that we want to create here. And as far as redefining participation and the democratic process, my understanding of American history is that it was a bunch of white males in power, mostly. This is radically different. If you’re a homeless person, if you’re a street person, you can be here. There’s a radical inclusion that’s going on.

  The park, especially at night, became a magnet for the city’s street population. The movement provided food along with basic security, overseen by designated “peacekeepers” and a “de-escalation team” that defuses conflicts. Those like Friesen who span the two cultures of the middle class and the homeless and destitute, served as the interlocutors. But even Friesen, by the end, was burned out as he and the other facilitators lost control of the park. The arrival in the cold weather of individual tents, along with numerous street people with mental impairments and addictions, tore apart the community. Drug use, as well as assaults and altercations, became common. When the final assault by the police took place on November 15, 2011, Friesen, who with a few protestors had chained themselves around the kitchen, said he at once half hoped for the encampment’s dissolution. As he and the other stalwarts in lock-down around the kitchen area were cut loose and arrested he looked at the names on the police badges, addressed the officers by name, and told them that they had a choice in life about their own actions.

  “You’re dealing with everyone’s conditioning, everyone’s fucked-up conditioning, the kind of I’m-out-for-me-and-myself, that kind of instinct,” he says. “People are unruly. People are violent. People make threats.