by Chris Hedges
“We are trying to sort this out, how to work together in a more holistic approach versus just security-checking someone—you know, like tackling them,” he says:
Where else do these people have to go, these street people? They’re going to come to a place where they feel cared for, especially in immediate needs like food and shelter. We have a Comfort committee. I’ve never been to a place where there’s a Comfort committee. This is where you can get a blanket and a sleeping bag, if we have them. We don’t always have the resources. But everyone is being taken care of here. As long as you’re nonviolent, you’re taken care of. And when you do that, you draw all sorts of people, including those people who have problematic behavior.
“This is a demand to be heard,” he says of the movement. “It’s a demand to have a voice. People feel voiceless. They want a voice and participation, a renewed sense of self-determination, but not self-determination in the individualistic need of just-for-me-myself. But as in ‘I recognize that my actions have effects on the people around me. I acknowledge that, so let’s work together so that we can accommodate everyone.’”
Friesen says that digital systems of communication helped inform new structures of communication and new systems of self-governance.
“Open-source started out in the ’50s and ’60s over how software is used and what rights the user has over the programs and tools they use,” he says. “What freedoms do you have to use, modify, and share software? That’s translated into things like Wikipedia. We’re moving even more visibly and more tangibly into a real, tangible, human organization. We modify techniques. We use them. We share them. We decentralize them. You see the decentralization of a movement like this.”
Revolutions need their theorists, but such upheavals are impossible without practical revolutionists like Friesen, who haul theory out of books and shove it into the face of reality. By the end of the nineteenth century, practical anarchists such as Mikhail Bakunin were as revered by revolutionists as Karl Marx. Bakunin’s entire adult life was one of fierce physical struggle, from his role in the uprisings of 1848, where, with his massive bulk and iron determination, he manned barricades in Paris, Austria, and Germany, to his years in the prisons of Czarist Russia and his dramatic escape from exile in Siberia.32
Bakunin had little time for Marx’s disdain for the peasantry and the Lumpenproletariat of the urban slums. Marx, for all his insight into the self-destructive machine of unfettered capitalism, viewed the poor as a conservative force, those least capable of revolutionary action. Marx saw them as a social force that would be made irrelevant by the growth of capitalist forces and caustically referred to them as a “sack of potatoes.”33 Bakunin, however, saw in the “uncivilized, disinherited, and illiterate” a pool of revolutionists who would join the working class and turn on the elites who profited from their misery and enslavement.34 Bakunin proved to be the more prophetic. The successful revolutions that swept through the Slavic republics, Russia, Spain, and China, and those movements that battled colonialism in Africa and the Middle East as well as military regimes in Latin America, were largely spontaneous uprisings fueled by the rage of a disenfranchised rural and urban working class and dispossessed intellectuals. Revolutionary activity, Bakunin correctly observed, was best entrusted to those who had no property, no regular employment, and no stake in the status quo. Finally, Bakunin’s vision of revolution, which challenged Marx’s rigid bifurcation between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, carved out a vital role for these rootless intellectuals, the talented sons and daughters of the middle class who had been educated to serve within elitist institutions, or expected a place in the middle class, but who had been cast aside by society. The discarded intellectuals—unemployed journalists, social workers, teachers, artists, lawyers, and students—were for Bakunin a valuable revolutionary force: “fervent, energetic youths, totally déclassé, with no career or way out.”35 These déclassé intellectuals, like the dispossessed working class, had no stake in the system and no possibility for advancement. The alliance of an estranged class of intellectuals with dispossessed masses creates the tinder, Bakunin argued, for successful revolt. This alliance allows a revolutionary movement to skillfully articulate grievances while exposing and exploiting, because of a familiarity with privilege and power, the weaknesses of autocratic, tyrannical rule.36
“It’s funny that the cops won’t let us use megaphones, because it’s to make our lives harder, but we actually end up making a much louder sound [with the “people’s mic”] and I imagine it’s much more annoying to the people around us,” Ketchup says of the first day in the park:
I had been in the back, unable to hear. I walked to different parts of the circle. I saw this man talking in short phrases and people were repeating them. I don’t know whose idea it was, but that started on the first night. The first general assembly was a little chaotic because people had no idea . . . “a general assembly, what is this for?” At first it was kind of grandstanding about what were our demands. Ending corporate personhood is one that has come up again and again as a favorite and. . . . What ended up happening was, they said, “OK, we’re going to break into work groups.”
“People were worried we were going to get kicked out of the park at 10 P.M.,” she goes on, speaking of the first night. “This was a major concern. There were tons of cops. I’ve heard that it’s costing the city a ton of money to have constant surveillance on a bunch of peaceful protesters who aren’t hurting anyone. With the people’s mic, everything we do is completely transparent. We know there are undercover cops in the crowd. I think I was talking to one last night, but it’s like, what are you trying to accomplish? We don’t have any secrets.
The people’s mic at work in Washington Square Park.
“The undercover cops are the only ones who ask, ‘Who’s the leader?’” she says. “Presumably, if they know who our leaders are, they can take them out. The fact is we have no leader. There’s no leader, so there’s nothing they can do.
“There was a woman [in the medics unit],” she says. “This guy was pretending to be a reporter. The first question he asks is, ‘Who’s the leader?’ She goes, ‘I’m the leader.’ And he says, ‘Oh yeah, what are you in charge of?’ She says, ‘I’m in charge of everything.’ He says, ‘Oh yeah? What’s your title?’ She says, ‘God.’
“So it’s 9:30 P.M. and people are worried that they’re going to try and rush us out of the camp,” she says:
At 9:30 they break into work groups. I joined the group on contingency plans. The job of the Bedding group was to find cardboard for people to sleep on. The Contingency group had to decide what to do if they kick us out. The big decision we made was to announce to the group that if we were dispersed, we were going to meet back at 10 A.M. the next day in the park. Another group was arts and culture. What was really cool was that we assumed we were going to be there more than one night. There was a food group. They were going Dumpster diving. The direct action committee plans for direct, visible action like marches. There was a security team. It’s security against the cops. The cops are the only people we think might hurt us. The security team keeps people awake in shifts. They always have people awake.
The working groups make logistical decisions, and the general assembly makes large policy decisions. Working groups blossomed in the following days. The Media working group was joined by a Welcome working group for new arrivals. There was a Sanitation working group that included members who went around the park on skateboards as they carried brooms. A Legal working group was formed with lawyers, along with an Events working group, an Education working group, Medics, and a Facilitation working group, which trained new facilitators for the general assembly meetings. There was a Public Relations working group, and an Outreach working group, for like-minded communities as well as the general public. There was an Internet working group and an Open-Source Technology working group. The nearby McDonald’s became the principal bathroom for the park after Burger King banned protesters fr
om its facilities.
Caucuses also grew up in the encampment, including a “Speak Easy caucus.”
“That’s a caucus I started,” Ketchup says. “It is for a broad spectrum of individuals from female-bodied people who identify as women to male-bodied people who are not traditionally masculine. I was just talking to a woman named Sharon who’s interested in starting a caucus for people of color.
“A caucus gives people a safe space to talk to each other without people from the culture of their oppressors present,” she says. “It gives them greater power together, so that if the larger group is taking an action that the caucus felt was specifically against their interests, then the caucus can block that action. Consensus can potentially still be reached after a caucus blocks something, but a block, or a ‘paramount objection,’ is really serious. You’re saying that you are willing to walk out.
“We’ve done a couple of things so far,” she says:
So, you know the live stream? The comments are moderated on the live stream. There are moderators who remove racist comments, comments that say, ‘I hate cops’ or ‘Kill cops.’ They remove irrelevant comments that have nothing to do with the movement. There is this woman who is incredibly hardworking and intelligent. She has been the driving force of the finance committee. Her hair is half-blond and half-black. People were referring to her as “blond-black hottie.” These comments weren’t moderated, and at one point whoever was running the camera took the camera off her face and did a body scan. So, that was one of the first things the caucus talked about. We decided as a caucus that I would go to the moderators and tell them this is a serious problem. If you’re moderating other offensive comments, then you need to moderate these kinds of offensive comments.
The heart of the movement became the two daily meetings, held in the morning and the evening. The assemblies, which usually lasted about two hours, started with a review of process, which was open to change and improvement, so people were clear about how the assembly worked. Those who wanted to speak raised their hand to get “on stack.”
“There’s a stack-keeper,” Ketchup says. “The stack-keeper writes down your name or some signifier for you. A lot of white men are the people raising their hands. So, anyone who is not apparently a white man gets to jump stack. The stack-keeper will make note of the fact that the person who put their hand up was not a white man and will arrange the list so that it’s not dominated by white men. People don’t get called up in the same order as they raise their hand.”
When someone spoke, their words were amplified by the people’s mic. The crowd indicated approval, indifference, or disapproval silently through hand signals.
“Putting your fingers up like this,” she says, holding her hands up and wiggling her fingers, “means you like what you’re hearing, or you’re in agreement. Like this,” she said, holding her hands level and wiggling her fingers, “means you don’t like it so much. Fingers down, you don’t like it at all; you’re not in agreement. Then there’s this triangle you make with your hand that says ‘point of process.’ So, if you think that something is not being respected within the process that we’ve agreed to follow, then you can bring that up.
“You wait till you’re called,” she says:
These rules get abused all the time, but they are important. We start with agenda items, which are proposals or group discussions. Then working group report-backs, so you know what every working group is doing. Then we have general announcements. The agenda items have been brought to the facilitators by the working groups because you need the whole group to pay attention. Like last night, Legal brought up a discussion on bail: “Can we agree that the money from the general funds can be allotted if someone needs bail?” And the group had to come to consensus on that. [It decided yes.] There’s two co-facilitators, a stack-keeper, a timekeeper, a vibes-person making sure that people are feeling OK, that people’s voices aren’t getting stomped on, and then if someone’s being really disruptive, the vibes-person deals with them. There’s a note-taker—I end up doing that a lot because I type very, very quickly. We try to keep the facilitation team one man, one woman, or one female-bodied person, one male-bodied person. When you facilitate multiple times, it’s rough on your brain. You end up having a lot of criticism thrown your way. You need to keep the facilitators rotating as much as possible. It needs to be a huge, huge priority to have a strong facilitation group.
Liberty Square, New York City.
“People have been yelled out of the park,” she says. “Someone had a sign the other day that said ‘Kill the Jew Bankers.’ They got screamed out of the park. Someone else had a sign with the n-word on it. That person’s sign was ripped up, but that person is apparently still in the park.
“We’re trying to make this a space that everyone can join,” she adds. “This is something the caucuses are trying to really work on. We are having workshops to get people to understand their privilege.”
But perhaps the most important rule adopted by the protesters is nonviolence and nonaggression against the police, no matter how brutal the police become.
“The cops, I think, maced those women in the face and expected the men and women around them to start a riot,” Ketchup says of an attack the first week. “They want a riot. They can deal with a riot. They cannot deal with nonviolent protesters with cameras.”
There are no excuses left. Either you join the revolt or you stand on the wrong side of history. You either obstruct through civil disobedience, the only way left to us, the plundering by the criminal class on Wall Street and accelerated destruction of the ecosystem that sustains the human species, or become the passive enabler of a monstrous evil. You either taste, feel, and smell the intoxication of freedom and revolt, or sink into the miasma of despair and apathy. You are either a rebel or a slave.
To be declared innocent in a country where the rule of law means nothing—where the poor and working men and women are reduced to joblessness and hunger, where war, financial speculation, and internal surveillance are the only real businesses of the state, where habeas corpus no longer exists, where you, as a citizen, are nothing more than a commodity to corporate systems of power, one to be used and discarded—is to be complicit in this radical evil. To stand on the sidelines and say, “I am innocent” is to bear the mark of Cain. It is to do nothing to reach out and help the weak, the oppressed and the suffering, to save our besieged planet.
Ask the environmental activist Tim DeChristopher. He was sentenced in July 2011 in a Salt Lake City courtroom by U.S. District Judge Dee Benson to two years in federal prison and ordered to pay a $10,000 fine for “disrupting” a Bureau of Land Management auction in 2008. The auction, orchestrated by the Bush administration, was held to sell federal land to the oil and natural gas industry. The auction was later overturned and declared illegal. As Bidder No. 70, DeChristopher drove up the prices of some of the bids and won more than a dozen parcels for $1.8 million.37
“The rules are written by those who profit from the status quo,” DeChristopher says to me shortly before he goes to prison. “If we want to change that status quo we have to step outside of those rules. We have to put pressure on those within the political system to choose one side or another.”
It became clear during the selection of the jury that he did not stand a chance. As the prospective jurors entered the court, activists handed them a pamphlet printed by the Fully Informed Jury Association. It said that jurors had a right to come to any decision based on the evidence and their consciences.
“When the judge and the prosecutor found that out, the prosecutor, especially, flipped his shit,” DeChristopher says:
He insisted that the judge tell the jurors that this information was not true. The judge pulled most of the jurors into the chambers and questioned them one at a time. He talked about what was in the pamphlet. He said that regardless of what the pamphlet said, it was not their job to decide if this is right or wrong, but to listen to what he said was the law and follow that e
ven if they thought it was morally unjust. They were not allowed to use their conscience. They were told they would be violating their oath if they decided this on conscience rather than the evidence that he told them to listen to. I was sitting in that chamber and could see one person after another accept this notion. I could see it in their faces, that they had to do what they were told even if they thought it was morally unjust. That is a scary thing to witness in another human being. I saw it in one person after another brought in the courtroom, sitting at the end of a long table in front of the paternalistic figure of the judge with all the majesty around him. They accepted it. They did not question it. It gave me a really good understanding of how some of the great human atrocities happened with the consent of the population, that people can accept what is happening, that it is not their job to question whether any of this is right or wrong.
“As a native of West Virginia,” DeChristopher told the court when he was sentenced,
I have seen from a young age that the exploitation of fossil fuels has always gone hand in hand with the exploitation of local people. In West Virginia, we’ve been extracting coal longer than anyone else. And after one hundred and fifty years of making other people rich, West Virginia is almost dead last among the states in per capita income, education rates and life expectancy. And it’s not an anomaly. The areas with the richest fossil fuel resources, whether coal in West Virginia and Kentucky, or oil in Louisiana and Mississippi, are the areas with the lowest standards of living. In part, this is a necessity of the industry. The only way to convince someone to blow up their backyard or poison their water is to make sure they are so desperate that they have no other option. But it is also the nature of the economic model. Since fossil fuels are limited resources, whoever controls access to that resource in the beginning gets to set all the terms. They set the terms for their workers, for the local communities, and apparently even for the regulatory agencies. A renewable energy economy is a threat to that model. Since no one can control access to the sun or the wind, the wealth is more likely to flow to whoever does the work of harnessing that energy, and therefore to create a more distributed economic system, which leads to a more distributed political system. It threatens the profits of the handful of corporations for whom the current system works, but our question is which segment of the public are you tasked with protecting. I am here today because I have chosen to protect the people locked out of the system over the profits of the corporations running the system. I say this not because I want your mercy, but because I want you to join me.