The Democracy Project

by David Graeber

  A little-known bit of history might help illustrate this. One of the inspirations for the mobilizations that led to the actions against the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 1999 was a Gandhian farmers’ group based in the Indian state of Karnataka called the KRSS (it stands for Karnataka State Farmers’ Association), which was best known for an action in 1995 where hundreds of farmers methodically dismantled a local Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise that they considered the first wave of an invasion of cheap bioengineered junk food about to destroy Indian agriculture. As the example suggests, they saw property destruction as a perfectly legitimate means of nonviolent resistance. In the late 1990s, their president, M. D. Nanjundaswamy, launched a campaign to disseminate mass nonviolent civil disobedience to Europe and America, and spent a good deal of time working with the early Global Justice Movement. The KRSS action against Kentucky Fried Chicken was one of the inspirations for what came to be known as “the ritual trashing of the McDonald’s” that came to be a regular feature of European actions, and, ultimately the attacks on Starbucks and other chains in Seattle. Yet Swamy (as he is universally known by the activists) ended up objecting strongly to such tactics. Not because he considered attacks on storefronts a form of violence. Obviously not: like the Kentucky Fried Chicken action, he felt they were perfectly consonant with the Gandhian tradition. What he objected to was the fact that the activists who damaged the buildings did not then remain in front of them until the police arrived and voluntarily turn themselves over for arrest. “You must confront the unjust law!” But the people who attacked fast-food outlets in Europe and America were anarchists; they completely agreed with the KRSS critique of fast food as a state-supported engine of ecological and social devastation, their existence made possible by a whole legal apparatus of trade treaties and “free trade” legislation; but it never occurred to them it would be possible to address this, or find any kind of justice, within the legal system.

  The original occupations were both direct actions and acts of civil disobedience. After all, we were well aware that a good case could be made that the regulations on assembly we were violating were unconstitutional. The Bill of Rights was created in part in reaction to old British colonial abuses like the banning of popular assemblies, and was essentially forced on a reluctant Constitutional Convention by popular pressure so as to protect exactly this kind of political activity. The wording of the First Amendment is also pretty unambiguous. “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” Since having to ask the police permission to speak is the definition of not having freedom of speech, and having to ask the police permission to publish something is the definition of not having freedom of the press, it is difficult to make a logical case that a law saying one needs to ask permission of the police to assemble is not a violation of the freedom to assemble.‖ For most of American history no one even tried. Permit laws were considered obviously unconstitutional until the 1880s, right around the time of the emergence of modern corporate capitalism, and were created explicitly for use against the emerging labor movement. It wasn’t because judges changed their minds about the intent of the First Amendment; they just decided they no longer cared. The laws were further tightened in the 1980s and 1990s to ensure that nothing like the antiwar mobilizations of the 1960s and 1970s could ever again take place.

  If there was any legal claim that an anarchist could actually agree with, then, it was the demand to be allowed a space to engage in self-organized political activity—since, after all, this is just a matter of asking the state to leave us alone. Even Georgia Sagri, nothing if not an anarchist, was willing to put that forward when we were initially brainstorming what to put on any hypothetical list of demands.

  The idea of occupying a public space was directly inspired by the revolutions in the Middle East—the role of Tahrir Square most famously—as well as Syntagma Square in Athens and the reclaimed public spaces in Spanish cities like Barcelona and Madrid. But the model was also perfect strategically because it allowed a common ground between liberals and others working in the tradition of civil disobedience who wished to democratize the system, and anarchists and other antiauthoritarians who wished to create spaces entirely outside the system’s control. Both could agree that the action was legitimate based on a moral order prior to the law: since those practicing civil disobedience felt they were answering to universal principles of justice on which the law itself was founded, and anarchists felt the law itself lacked all legitimacy. The peculiar thing is that the exact nature of this prior moral order—by which one can declare some laws, or all laws, unjust—is generally unclear to all involved. Rarely can anyone spell it out as a set of propositions. One might conclude this decidedly weakens their claim of legitimacy, but in fact, those who defend the legal system have precisely the same problem, and in many ways it’s even worse, since according to most legal theory the legitimacy of the entire system rests not only on a decidedly murky prior notion of justice, but also on past acts of armed insurrection. This is the fundamental incoherence in the very foundations of the modern state. It’s sometimes referred to as “the paradox of sovereignty.” Basically it goes something like this: the police can use violence to, say, expel citizens from a public park because they are enforcing duly constituted laws. Laws gain their legitimacy from the Constitution. The Constitution gains its legitimacy from something called the “people.” But how did “the people” actually grant this legitimacy to the Constitution? As the American and French revolutions make clear: basically, through acts of illegal violence. (Washington and Jefferson after all were clearly guilty of treason under the laws under which they grew up.) So what gives the police the right to use force to suppress the very thing—a popular uprising—that granted them their right to use force to begin with?

  For anarchists the answer is simple: nothing. This is why they hold that the idea of a democratic state based on a state monopoly of force makes no sense. For liberals, the idea of a state monopoly on force creates a real problem. For starters, it’s a practical problem. If we grant that the “people” have a right to resist unjust authority, which is, after all, how the United States came into being in the first place, then how do we distinguish, in any given instance, “the people” from a mere rampaging mob? Historically, the answer has tended to be: “retrospectively, depending on who won.” But applied consistently this would mean that if those being cleared from the park successfully resisted the police with automatic weapons, they would have more right to it than if they did not (at least, if in doing so they sparked a national uprising)—a formulation that might appeal to many Second Amendment purists, but whose might-makes-right implications would hardly be appealing to most liberals. Unsurprisingly, they take the opposite direction.

  But this creates a secondary moral problem. Liberals tend to object, on moral grounds, to anything that even looks like a rampaging mob, under any circumstances. So how do the people resist unjust authority, which, we all agree, they must and should do and have done in the past? The best solution anyone has come up with is to say that violent revolutions can be avoided (and therefore, violent mobs legitimately suppressed) if “the people” are understood to have the right to challenge the laws through nonviolent civil disobedience. Those with the courage to confront the legal order on matters of conscience thus become “the people.”a As liberal constitutional scholars like Bruce Ackerman point out, this is how fundamental constitutional change has typically come about in the United States, and presumably in most other liberal democracies as well: through social movements willing to break the law. Or, to put it in more anarchist terms: no government has ever granted a new freedom to those it governed all of its own accord. Such new freedoms as have been won have always been taken by those who feel they are operating on principles that go beyond the law and respect for duly constituted authority.

  From this perspe
ctive, one can begin to understand why the strategy of occupation became such a stroke of unintentional collective genius. It was an act of defiance that could appeal to anyone, from liberals to anarchists. Like the great convergences of the Global Justice Movement—in Seattle, Prague, Washington, Quebec—it aimed to juxtapose an image of true democracy against the squalid power system that currently wished to pass itself off as such (back then that implicated the world trade bureaucracies that no one was supposed to even know about). But there was a crucial difference. The great mobilizations of 1999–2001 were essentially parties. That’s how they framed themselves, anyway: they were “carnivals against capitalism,” and “festivals of resistance.” For all the dramatic images of the Seattle Black Bloc breaking Starbucks windows, what most people remember from the movement is the giant puppets, which came accompanied by clowns, brass bands, pagan priestesses, radical cheerleaders, and “Pink Blocs” in tutus armed with feather dusters tickling the police, comicopera Roman armies waddling along wrapped in inflatable armor tumbling through barricades. Their aim was to make a mockery of the pretentions of the elite to any kind of sober wisdom, to “break the spell” of consumerism and provide a glimpse of something more enticing. Compared to the current round of mobilization, it was both more militant, and more whimsical. OWS, in contrast, is not a party, it’s a community. And it’s less about fun, or not so much primarily about fun, as it is about caring.

  Each camp quickly developed a few core institutions: if it was any size, at least there would be a free kitchen, medical tent, library, media/communications center where activists would cluster together with laptops, and information center for visitors and new arrivals. General Assemblies would be convened at regular hours: say, every 3 P.M. for general discussion, and every 9 P.M. for technical matters specific to the camp. In addition there were working groups of every sort meeting and operating at all times: an Art and Entertainment working group, Sanitation working group, Security working group, and so on. The issues that came up in organizing were so endlessly complex that one could (and I imagine someday people will) write whole books on this subject alone.

  It’s significant though that the very center of everything tended to consist of two institutions: the kitchen and the library. The kitchens got a lot of the attention. Partly this was because, inspired by the example of the Egyptian labor unions who had sent pizzas to fellow union activists occupying Wisconsin’s statehouse some months before, hundreds of people across North America and beyond reached for their credit cards and began phoning in orders for pizzas. (By week three, one local pizzeria had already created a pie especially for us: dubbed the “Occu-pie,” it consisted, they said, of “99 percent cheese, 1 percent pig.”) Much of the food was Dumpster-dived, all of it was offered free. But the libraries that cropped up everywhere were if anything even more potent symbols, especially for a population whose core was indebted former students. Libraries were immensely practical but also perfectly symbolic: libraries provide free loans, no interest, no fees—and the value of what they are lending, of words, images, above all, ideas, is not based on a principle of limited good, but actually increases with their dissemination.

  It’s a difficult business creating a new, alternative civilization, especially in the midst of the coldest and most unfriendly streets of major American cities, full of the sick, homeless, and psychologically destroyed, and in the very teeth of a political and economic elite whose thousands of militarized police are making abundantly clear they do not want you to be there. There are any number of sticky issues that came up quickly. There were questions of communal versus private space: when a park becomes dense with personal tents, communal space often vanishes. There are questions of security, of course, but also of how to deal with the inevitable strategies of the authorities of encouraging dangerous elements of the criminal classes to take residence in, or prey upon, the communities. And then there’s the question of the relation of such liberated spaces to the surrounding communities, and using them as a platform for much broader projects of political action. So many of these variables shift case by case that it seems best, in a book like this, to focus instead on questions that will always crop up in some form or another.

  Thus I’m going to begin with that one omnipresent feature of American life: the police.

  TACTICS: DEALING WITH POLICE

  Tell it to the marines.

  —AMERICAN PROVERB

  One of the key decisions we made in the early planning for the occupation was not to have a formal police liaison, or liaison team. This was the decision that really locked in our direct action strategy, and set the stage for everything that followed. Other occupations took a different course, and did create liaisons. As far as I know, in every case it was a disaster.

  Why is that? One would imagine that particularly in a movement dedicated to nonviolence, there would be no reason not to open up lines of communication. But in fact in order to create an autonomous space—and this goes not just for permanent spaces like camps, but any space in which people intend to create their own form of order—certain very clear lines have to be drawn.

  Those who argue the opposite often begin by declaring that “the police are part of the 99 percent”—that if we claim to represent everyone, it is hypocritical to refuse all dealings with a specific section of the American working class. Yes, taken from a purely socioeconomic perspective, almost all police officers are indeed “part of the 99 percent.” Few of even the most corrupt senior-ranking officers pull in more than $340,000 a year. The fact that most are also among the roughly 15 percent of the American workforce that are still union members does make a difference as well. I have often observed that police officers will almost always treat pickets and street actions carried out by anyone they see as part of the labor movement quite differently than they will almost any other sort of protest. I’ve been active in the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World), which is a largely anarchist union for many years, and it never fails to strike me how the exact same young people who are immediately attacked or preemptively arrested if they so much as show up in masks during a globalization protest would be treated with kid gloves if they engaged in much more militant activity—even when wearing almost identical clothes—on a picket line. I keenly remember one occasion in the warehouse district of an American city, listening to an officer stroll up to an IWW picket line after we’d sabotaged several trucks, saying, “Hey, the owner claims one of you guys is messing with his vehicles but he says he didn’t see which. Maybe you should just take off for a half hour, come back, and that way, if he claims now he knows who did it, I can just say, ‘How do you know now if you didn’t know then?’ ” (The irony was many of the picketers on this occasion were Black Bloc veterans, dressed in largely Black Bloc clothing, some actually waving anarcho-syndicalist flags. The next day, though, the warehouse owner just paid off the commanding officer and his men drove us all off from a perfectly legal picket with sticks, resulting in several injuries.) In a company town like New Haven, even student activists are treated with kid gloves if they’re protesting the local university, because they’re assumed to be working with the unions.

  However, this is true mostly in cases when police have discretion: when protesters confront only an individual officer, or a low-ranking commander with only a few men under his charge. Occupiers in New York discovered there was a sharp class division even within the police. Many street officers, the blue-shirts, expressed sympathy and support. The white-shirts, or commanding officers, were quite a different story; many, in fact, were in the direct pay of Wall Street corporations. But even this misses the point: which is that when push comes to shove, even the white-shirts are just following orders.

  “Dealing with the police” does not mean chatting with individual officers; some protesters, occupiers, even Black Bloc anarchists will always do this and there’s no way one could stop them, or any reason, really, one would want to try. But “the police” are not a collection of individuals acting i
n accord with their personal feelings, judgments, or moral assessments. They are a group of government functionaries who, as part of the terms of their employment, have agreed to set their personal opinions and feelings aside—at least in any circumstance where they receive direct orders—and to do as they are told. They are part of an administrative bureaucracy marked by a top-down chain of command, and even the highest-ranking officers, with the most discretion, are only there to carry out the orders of political authorities whom they must obey. In such circumstances, their personal feelings are utterly irrelevant. I have spoken to many activists at the WTO protests in Seattle who saw riot police crying behind their visors, so upset were they when given orders to attack obviously peaceful young idealists. They attacked them anyway. Often they didn’t do it particularly well. But neither did they disobey orders.

  Not only are police trained and vetted so as to be reliable in this regard, the entire existing political and economic system depends on this reliability. The reader will recall what I said in the last chapter about anarchist forms of organization: that they are any form that would not have to rely, in the event of a challenge, on the ability to call in people with weapons to say “shut up and do what you’re told.” The police are precisely those people with weapons. They are essentially armed administrators, bureaucrats with guns. This role—that of upholding existing institutional arrangements, and especially property arrangements and the ability of some people to give unchallengeable orders—is much more important, ultimately, than any supposed concern with public order or even public safety. It might not seem that way, but it becomes clear when the institutional order is in any way directly threatened. When there is a political challenge to the system, a large protest or act of civil disobedience, one witnesses increasingly extreme behavior—the use of agents provocateurs to encourage protesters to attack police so they can be arrested, or even suggesting they acquire explosives and blow up bridges, police actions designed to create panic and strife, massive and violent assaults on crowds when only one or two individuals in the crowd commit some illegal act, often the equivalent of a parking violation, mass arrests that by definition must sweep up innocent passersby, use of tear gas or other chemical agents in public places. All of these acts show that when protest begins to be truly effective, police will invariably be ordered to act as a political force, with the aim of suppressing political opposition even at the expense of seriously endangering, injuring, or traumatizing members of the public.