The Democracy Project

by David Graeber

  It was around 4:30 on the day of the General Assembly and I was already slightly late for the four o’clock meeting, but this time, intentionally. I had taken a circuitous route that passed directly down Wall Street just to get a sense of the police presence. It was worse than I’d imagined. There were cops everywhere: two different platoons of uniformed officers lounging around looking for something to do, two different squads of horse cops standing sentinel on approach streets, scooter cops zipping up and down past the iron barricades built after 9/11 to foil suicide bombers. And this was just an ordinary Tuesday afternoon!

  When I got to Bowling Green what I found was if anything even more disheartening. At first I wasn’t sure I had shown up for the right meeting at all. There was already a rally well under way. There were two TV cameras pointing at an impromptu stage defined by giant banners, megaphones, and piles of preprinted signs. A tall man with flowing dreadlocks was making an impassioned speech about resisting budget cuts to a crowd of perhaps eighty people, arranged in a half circle around him. Most of them seemed vaguely bored and uncomfortable including, I noticed, the TV news crews, since, on inspection, the cameramen appear to have left their cameras unattended. I found Georgia on the sidelines, brow furled, as she looked out at the people assembled on stage.§

  “Wait a minute,” I asked. “Are those guys WWP?”

  “Yeah, they’re WWP.”

  I’d been out of town for a few years so it took a few moments to recognize them. For most anarchists, the Workers World Party (WWP) was our ultimate activist nemesis. Apparently led by a small cadre of mostly white party leaders who at public events were invariably found lingering discreetly behind a collection of African American and Latino front men, they were famous for pursuing a political strategy straight out of the 1930s: creating great “popular front” coalitions like the International Action Center (IAC) or ANSWER (an acronym for Act Now to Stop War and End Racism), composed of dozens of groups who turned out by the thousands to march around with preprinted signs. Most of the rank-and-file members of these coalition groups were attracted by the militant rhetoric and apparently endless supply of cash, but remained blissfully unaware of what the central committee’s positions on world issues really were. These positions were almost a caricature of unreconstructed Marxism-Leninism, so much so that many of us had from time to time speculated that the whole thing actually was some kind of elaborate, FBI-funded joke: the WWP still supported, for instance, the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and Chinese suppression of democracy protests at Tiananmen Square, and they took such a strict “antiimperialist” line that they not only opposed any overseas U.S. intervention, but also actively supported anyone the U.S. government claimed to disapprove of, from the government of North Korea, to Rwandan Hutu militias. Anarchists tended to refer to them as “the Stalinists.” Trying to work with them was out of the question; they had no interest in working with any coalition they did not completely control.

  This was a disaster.

  So how did the WWP end up in control of the meeting? Georgia wasn’t sure. But we both knew as long as they were in control, there was no possibility of a real assembly taking place. And indeed, when I asked a couple of bystanders what was going on, they confirmed the plan was for a rally, to be followed by a brief open mic, and then a march on Wall Street itself, where the leaders would present a long list of pre-established demands.

  For activists dedicated to building directly democratic politics—horizontals, as we like to call ourselves—the usual reaction to this sort of thing is despair. It was certainly my first reaction. Walking into such a rally feels like walking into a trap. The agenda is already set, but it’s unclear who set it. In fact it’s often difficult even to find out what the agenda is until moments before the event begins, when some man announces it on a megaphone. The very sight of the stage and stacks of preprinted signs and hearing the word “march” evoked memories of a thousand desultory afternoons spent marching along in platoons like some kind of impotent army, along a prearranged route, with protest marshals liaising with police to herd us all into steel-barrier “protest pens.” Events in which there was no space for spontaneity, creativity, improvisation—where, in fact, everything seemed designed to make self-organization or real expression impossible. Even the chants and slogans were to be provided from above.

  I spotted a cluster of what seemed to be the core WWP leadership group—you can tell because they tend to be middle-aged and white, and always hovering just slightly offstage (those who appear on the actual stage are invariably people of color).

  One, a surprisingly large individual broke off periodically to pass through the audience. “Hey,” I said to him when he passed my way, “you know, maybe you shouldn’t advertise a General Assembly if you’re not actually going to hold one.”

  I may have put it in a less polite way. He looked down at me. “Oh, yeah, that’s solidarity, isn’t it? Insult the organizers. Look, I’ll tell you what. If you don’t like it, why don’t you leave?”

  We stared at one another unpleasantly for a moment and then he went away.

  I considered leaving but noticed that no one else seemed particularly happy with what was happening, either. To adopt activist parlance, this wasn’t really a crowd of verticals—that is, the sort of people who actually like marching around with pre-issued signs and listening to spokesmen from somebody’s central committee. Most seemed to be horizontals: people more sympathetic with anarchist principles of organization, nonhierarchical forms of direct democracy. I spotted at least one Wobbly, a young man with dark glasses and a black Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) T-shirt, several college students wearing Zapatista paraphernalia, and a few other obvious anarchist types. I also noticed several old friends, including Sabu, there with another Japanese activist, who I’d known from street actions in Quebec City back in 2001. Finally, Georgia and I looked at each other and both realized we were thinking the same thing: “Why are we so complacent? Why is it that every time we see something like this happening, we just mutter and go home?”—though I think the way we actually put it at the time was more like, “You know something? Fuck this shit. They advertised a General Assembly. Let’s hold one.”

  So I walked up to a likely-seeming stranger, a young Korean-American man looking with irritation at the stage—his name, I later learned, was Chris, and he was an anarchist who worked with Food Not Bombs. But I didn’t know that then. All I knew was that he looked pissed off.

  “Say,” I asked, “I was wondering. If some of us decided to break off and start a real General Assembly, would you be interested?”

  “Why, are there people talking about doing that?”

  “Well, we are now.”

  “Shit, yeah. Just tell me when.”

  “To be honest,” volunteered the young man standing next to him, whose name, I later learned, was Matt Presto, and who like Chris would later become a key OWS organizer, “I was about ready to take off anyway. But that might be worth staying for.”

  So with the help of Chris and Matt, Georgia and I gathered up some of the more obvious horizontals and formed a little circle of twenty-odd people at the foot of the park, as far as we could get from the microphones. Almost immediately, delegates from the main rally appeared to call us back again.

  The delegates were not WWP folk—they tend to stay aloof from this sort of thing—but fresh-faced young students in button-down shirts.

  “Great,” I muttered to Georgia. “It’s the ISO.”

  The ISO is the International Socialist Organization. In the spectrum of activists, the WWP is probably on the opposite pole from anarchists, but ISO is annoyingly in the middle: as close as you can get to a horizontal group while still not actually being one. They’re Trotskyists, and in principle in favor of direct action, direct democracy, and bottom-up structures of every kind—though their main role in any meeting seemed to be to discourage more radical elements from actually practicing any of these things. The frustrating thing ab
out the ISO is that, as individuals, they tended to be such obviously good people. Most were likable kids, students mostly, incredibly well-meaning, and unlike the WWP, their higher-ups (and despite the theoretical support for direct democracy, the group itself had a very tightly organized, top-down command structure) did allow them to work in broad coalitions they didn’t control—if only with an eye to possibly taking them over. They were the obvious people to step in and try to mediate.

  “I think this is all some kind of misunderstanding,” one of the young men told our breakaway circle. “This event isn’t organized by any one group. It’s a broad-based coalition of grassroots groups and individuals dedicated to fighting the Bloomberg austerity package. We’ve talked to the organizers. They say there’s definitely going to be a General Assembly after the speakers are finished.” There were three of them, all young and clean-cut, and, I noticed, each of them, at one point or another, used exactly the same phrase, “a broad-based coalition of grassroots groups and individuals.”

  There wasn’t much we could do. If the organizers were promising a General Assembly, we had to at least give them a chance. So we reluctantly complied, and went back to the meeting. Needless to say, no general assembly materialized. The organizers’ idea of an “assembly” seemed to be an open mic, where anyone in the audience had a few minutes to express their general political position or thoughts about some particular issue, before we set off on the preordained march.

  After twenty minutes of this, Georgia took her turn to speak. I should note here that Georgia was, by profession, a performance artist. As such she has always made a point of cultivating a certain finely fashioned public persona—basically, that of a madwoman. Such personas are always based on some elements of one’s real personality, and in Georgia’s case there was much speculation among her close friends about just how much of it was put on. Certainly she is one of the more impulsive people I’ve ever met. But she had a knack, at certain times and places, for hitting exactly the right note, usually by scrambling all assumptions about what was actually supposed to be going on. Georgia started her three minutes by declaring, “This is not a General Assembly! This is a rally put on by a political party! It has absolutely nothing to do with the global General Assembly movement”—replete with references to Greek and Spanish assemblies and their systematic exclusion of representatives of organized political groups. To be honest I didn’t catch the whole thing because I was trying to locate other potential holdouts and convince them to join us once we again decided to defect. But like everyone who was there that day, I remember the climax, when Georgia’s time was up and she ended up in some sort of heated back-and-forth exchange with an African-American woman who’d been one of the WWP’s earlier speakers and who began an impromptu response.

  “Well, I find the previous speaker’s intervention to be profoundly disrespectful. It’s little more than a conscious attempt to disrupt the meeting—”

  “This isn’t a meeting! It’s a rally.”

  “Ahem. I find the previous speaker’s intervention to be profoundly disrespectful. You can disagree with someone if you like, but at the very least, I would expect us all to treat each other with two things: with respect, and with solidarity. What the last speaker did—”

  “Wait a minute, you’re saying hijacking a meeting isn’t a violation of respect and solidarity?”

  At which point another WWP speaker broke in, in indignant mock-astonishment, “I can’t believe you just interrupted a black person!”

  “Why shouldn’t I?” said Georgia. “I’m black, too.”

  I should point out here that Georgia is blond.

  The reaction might be described as a universal “hunh?”

  “You’re what?”

  “Just like I said. I’m black. Do you think you’re the only black person here?”‖

  The resulting befuddlement bought her just enough time to announce that we were reassembling the real GA, and to meet back by the gate to the green in fifteen minutes. At which point she was shooed off the stage.

  There were insults and vituperations. After about a half hour of drama, we formed the circle again, on the other side of Bowling Green, and this time almost everyone still remaining abandoned the rally to come over to our side. We realized we had an almost entirely horizontal crowd: not only Wobblies and Zapatista solidarity folk, but several Spaniards who had been active with the Indignados in Madrid, a couple of insurrectionist anarchists who’d been involved in the occupations at Berkeley a few years before, a smattering of bemused onlookers who had just come to see the rally, maybe four or five, and an equal number of WWP (not including anyone from the central committee) who reluctantly came over to monitor our activities. A young man named Willie Osterwail, who’d spent some time as a squatter in Barcelona, volunteered to facilitate.

  We quickly determined we had no idea what we were actually going to do.

  One problem was that Adbusters had already advertised a date for the action: September 17. This was a problem for two reasons. One was that it was only six weeks away. It had taken over a year to organize the blockades and direct actions that shut down the WTO meetings in Seattle in November 1999. Adbusters seemed to think we could somehow assemble twenty thousand people to camp out with tents in the middle of Wall Street, but even assuming the police would let that happen, which they wouldn’t, anyone with experience in practical organizing knew that you couldn’t assemble numbers like that in a matter of weeks. Gathering a big crowd like that would usually involve drawing people from around the country, which would require support groups in different cities and, especially, buses, which would in turn require organizing all sorts of fund-raisers, since as far as we knew we had no money of any kind. (Or did we? Adbusters was rumored to have money. But none of us even knew if Adbusters was directly involved. They didn’t have any representatives at the meeting.) Then there was the second problem. There was no way to shut down Wall Street on September 17 because September 17 was a Saturday. If we were going to do anything that would have a direct impact on—or even be noticed by—actual Wall Street executives, we’d have to somehow figure out a way to still be around Monday at 9 A.M. And we weren’t even sure the Stock Exchange was the ideal target. Just logistically, and perhaps symbolically, we’d probably have better luck with the Federal Reserve, or the Standard & Poor’s offices, each just a few blocks away.

  We decided to table that problem for the time being. We also decided to table the whole question of demands, and instead form breakout groups. This is standard horizontal practice: everyone calls out ideas for working groups until we have a list (in this case they were just four: Outreach, Communications/Internet, Action, and Process/Facilitation), then the group breaks out into smaller circles to brainstorm, having agreed to reassemble, say, an hour later, whereupon a spokesman for each breakout group presents report-backs on the discussion and any decisions collectively made. I joined the Process group, which, predictably, was primarily composed of anarchists, determined to ensure the group become a model. We quickly decided that the group would operate by consensus, with an option to fall back on a two-thirds vote if there was a deadlock, and that there would always be at least two facilitators, one male, one female, one to keep the meeting running, the other to “take stack” (that is, the list of people who’ve asked to speak). We discussed hand signals and nonbinding straw polls, or “temperature checks.”a

  By the time we’d reassembled it was already dark. Most of the working groups had only come to provisional decisions. The Action group had tossed around possible scenarios but their main decision was to meet again later in the week to take a walking tour of the area. The Communications group had agreed to set up a listserv and meet to discuss a web page—their first order of business was to try to figure out what already existed (for instance, who it was who already had created a Twitter account called #OccupyWallStreet, since they didn’t seem to be at the meeting), and what, if anything, Adbusters had to do with it or what they had al
ready done. Outreach had decided to meet on Thursday to design flyers, and to try to figure out how we should describe ourselves, especially in relation to the existing anti-cuts coalition. Several of the Outreach group—including my friend Justin, the one I knew from Quebec City—were working as labor organizers and were pretty sure they could get union people interested. All of us decided we’d hold another General Assembly, hopefully a much larger one, at the Irish Hunger Memorial nearby that Tuesday at 7:30 P.M.

  Despite the provisional nature of all of our decisions—since none of us was quite sure if we were building on top of existing efforts or creating something new—the mood of the group was one of near complete exhilaration. We felt we had just witnessed a genuine victory for the forces of democracy, one where exhausted modes of organizing had been definitively brushed aside. In New York, a victory like that was almost completely unprecedented. No one was sure exactly what would come of it, but at least for that moment almost all of us were delighted at the prospect of finding out.

  By the time we all headed home it was already about eleven. The first thing I did was call Marisa. “You can’t believe what just happened,” I told her. “You’ve got to get involved.”

  THE 99 PERCENT

  FROM: David Graeber

  SUBJECT: HELLO! quick question

  DATE: August 3, 2011 12:46:29 AM CDT