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AN AUTOPSY OF THE OCCUPY MOVEMENT
It's been 12 years since #OccupyWallStreet. Let's revisit it.
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Hey Folks,
Twelve years ago this week, a ragtag band of anarchists from New York Street set out to occupy Wall Street, the beating heart of Global Capitalism.
This movement started strong, capturing the imagination of millions before fizzling out, leaving a bad taste in everyone’s mouth.
Because of how disappointing the movement ultimately was, many people who participated in it don’t like to talk about it. I am one of those people.
Now that it’s been 12 years, though, I think that it’s high time we did a post-mortem.
Why, you ask? Well, for one thing, because it’s the last mass movement in the U.S. that everyone can agree wasn’t a psy-op. Although this might seem unbelievable to many of you, I think that the Occupy Movement already scared the shit of the Powers That Shouldn’t Be…. for about fifteen minutes.
This makes sense when you consider the fact that many powerful U.S. think tanks were predicting widespread civil unrest following the banker bailouts of 2008. After all, many formerly-middle-class Americans were hopelessly indebted, poor, unemployed or underemployed, and precariously housed.
Soon enough, it became apparent that the Occupy movement suffered from a lack of vision, a lack of strategy, and a lack of basic political literacy.
To be fair, I can’t speak knowledgeably about Occupy in general - I can only speak about my experience, which was just with one encampment, Occupy Ottawa.
I know that other people had different experiences. Occupy Toronto is very fondly remembered by many people, and I do not mean to portray the whole Occupy movement as one big failure.
That said, as a political movement it fizzled out pretty quickly. I personally feel like there was a concerted part on the part of the U.S. national security state to disrupt the movement, using ideological subversion, weaponized rape accusations, delegitimizing narratives promoted by mainstream media, and many other tactics. This are all part of what I call the New COINTELPRO.
THE SECRET HISTORY OF ANTIFA, THE ANARCHIST INQUISITION & THE NEW COINTELPRO | ||||||
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The Death of Aziz Choudry | ||||||
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AN AUTOPSY OF THE OCCUPY MOVEMENT
So what went wrong? It really did seem like a window of possibility had opened up in September 2012. What could we have done differently? And how can we learn from both the successes and failures of the Occupy Movement? How can we best prepare for the next mass movement which aims to challenge the Empire on its own turf?
As I have said before, I think that there are two possibilities for the near-term future of America - Revolution or Civil War.
AMERICA AT A CROSSROADS: REVOLUTION OR CIVIL WAR | ||||||
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I also think that we need to understand that the death of the Occupy Movement was also a key moment in the slow death of the U.S. left, which suffered a debilitating stroke on 9/11 and gave up the ghost in March 2020.
Partly, my message will be directly to those who still identify as leftists. It’s time to face the truth. The U.S. Left is dead as a doorknob. If we want to organize mass movements in the New Normal, that means we’re going to have to take the whole idea of the Left-Right political divide and chuck it in the “Fuck It” bucket.
There are many different lessons I think that we can draw from Occupy. Some of the ones I can think of are unlikely to be popular. But I don’t want for this to just be about my ideas. I am hoping to inspire others to write about their experiences with Occupy. I know that Occupy meant a lot to a lot of people.
So I’m inviting everyone reading this to please get in touch if you’d like to share your experiences. Or you can just post in the comments. I can be reached at nevermorezine@gmail.com
It’s time to do a proper autopsy of the Occupy Movement..
WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO START RAMBLING ON ABOUT DAVID GRAEBER?
Chill out. I was getting to that.
As my regular readers will be aware, I’m a huge fan of David Graeber, and I believe that he was assassinated in 2020.
I’ve made it my mission to continue his life’s work, and I am currently making my way through his oeuvre. It’s quite voluminous, and it will take me some time to read it all. He left behind over 5000 pages of published material, and from what I’m seen, every bit of it is worth reading.
Okay, okay, fine, maybe Direct Action: An Ethnography could have been tightened up a bit. But that was specifically written for posterity. Let’s check in about that one in 50 years.
By now, I’ve probably listened to The Democracy Project three or four times. It i is not one of his more acclaimed books, which I think is both strange and unfortunate. Indeed, I came to it not knowing anything about what it was even about. The one thing that I did know about it was that the exceedingly milquetoast title was not his first choice. He wanted to call it As if we were Already Free. Oh, the irony.
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It’s a shame this book isn’t better-known, because it’s actually amazing. Seriously, go download it now. You won’t regret it. If it were written by anyone else, it would be considered a minor masterpiece. Sadly, all of David Graeber’s books must forever live in the shadow of Debt: The First Five Thousand Years, one of the finest books of political philosophy ever written. Hey, there are worse fates that having written so many great books that some of them get forgotten about!
As if we were already free is about the events leading up to the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011, which Graeber basically started.
David Graeber would often brush away accolades and downplay his own importance. To hear him tell it, you would think that he just happened to be in the right place at the right time. But if you listen to As if we were Already Free, it becomes apparent that David Graeber was largely responsible for starting the Occupy Movement.
He would want us to remember that political actions are the result of the cumulative actions of groups of people, but the fact is that Occupy Wall Street would not have happened were it not for him. The movement was completely infused with his politics and his spirit. No one who reads As if we were Already Free could reasonably think otherwise.
Basically, David Graeber succeeded in resurrecting the spirit of the anti-globalization movement, which most people had forgotten about by 2011. He was able to pass along many lessons that he learned back in the days where everyone was an anarchist and we all knew what the IMF and the World Bank were up to.
Anyway, I understand Graeber’s reasons for not wanting to hog the spotlight. For one thing, he was clearly aware that the state would target him if he was seen as a leader. For another, he was extremely committed to the anarchist virtue of horizontality.
Also, I have to wonder whether he knew that the more attention he got, the more drama would cluster around around him. Activist drama sucks.
Another possibility is that he didn’t want to take credit for Occupy because it was kind of a shitshow.
I should know. I participated. I was Occupy Ottawa’s night watchman. At the time, my girlfriend had a big Husky-Malamute sled dog named Grizz and I spent many nights quietly patrolling the camp with him. Partly I was keeping an eye out for cops and suspicious activity from outside camp, but I was also keeping an eye on the camp’s residents. Occupy Ottawa had become a refuge for a significant number of the city’s homeless population. Some of them were wonderful people, but a lot of energy went into caring for them. And we’re talking about people with severe mental health problems and/or addictions.
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I don’t know how I would feel if I started a massive international movement which quickly fizzled out. On one hand, it initially seemed like it had the potential to kick off an actual revolutionary movement. Many people were exposed to radical politics for the first time. But the whole thing left a bad taste in everyone’s mouths, and for good reason. Not only was it abundantly clear that very few people had any idea about how to organize politically, Occupy was also plagued by people with all kinds of problems. Some were insufferably self-righteous wokesters, some were Maoists, others were clueless ninnies who were too clueless to know they were clueless, and others just wanted to talk about trivial things all day long. There were also a lot of great people there, some of whom I continue to be friends with. But the main problem is that pretty much every camp was quickly overwhelmed by more troubled people than it could feasibly care for. The movement existed to challenge the system, not to be a daycare for drug addicts.
Furthermore, the consensus process which anarchists had developed during the Global Justice Movement a decade earlier simply was ineffective. Maybe it worked in some places, but from what I saw, it was a giant waste of everyone’s time. I’m not shitting on consensus process in general, but in order to have a functional consensus process you need a whole list of ingredients that were not present in hastily convened gatherings of casual acquaintances, strangers, and undercover cops. It was simply ineffective, and in the case of Occupy Ottawa ended up giving way too much space to people to air endless grievances which were never important to begin with. The end result was that the more-serious-minded people stopped attending the General Assemblies.
All this makes more sense when you understand the historical context. Anarchists back then were reacting to the top-down steering committees of the old Left, which contained a hodgepodge of Marxist-Leninists, Trotskyists, Maoists, mostly pacifist Christians, feminists, and miscellaneous trade unions with agendas of their own.
If we want to talk about forms of participatory democracy that would actually be effective, then we should analyze what was so wrong with how Occupy attempted to do consensus process.
I think that it would be tragic if people reached the facile conclusion that consensus process simply doesn’t work. To make such a claim would be to disregard innumerable cases in which it does work, such as amongst the Zapatistas of Chiapas.
Also, as critiques of electoral democracy have become increasingly widely accepted, the simple fact is that we need ways to make decisions together if we’re going to have participatory social movements.
The alternative is vanguardism.
WHAT IS DEMOCRACY?
As we get closer to the American election, I also think that it will be valuable to reflect about what democracy even is. Since Orwell’s day, “democracy” has been a worb, a word lacking a clear definition.
If you ask an anarchist whether anarchists are for or against democracy, they will most likely answer “that depends what you mean by democracy”. That would certainly be my response.
The classical anarchists, just as Bakunin, Kropotkin, Malatesta, and Goldman, were opposed to majoritarian democracy, which they saw as basically a ruling class scam to trick disempowered people into supporting their oppressors.
IS VOTING EVIL? | ||||||
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But more recent anarchist theorists distinguish between electoral democracy and “horizontal” or “participatory” democracy, as practiced by the Zapatistas and in many indigenous cultures all around the world.
Personally, I don’t like using words I can’t define, and no one on Earth can define the word democracy in a satisfactory way, because it means different things to different people.
But there are things more important than semantic preferences. How are we to organize politically in a world where everything is changing so quickly, where people have such wildly different interpretations of what’s even happening?
I don’t claim to have good answers to these questions, but I think that David Graeber’s book contains a lot of the right questions. I truly believe that the best thing that we can possibly do is pick up where he left off. Why start from scratch when you don’t have it?
Over the course of the coming days, I’m going to be posting selections from As if we were already free (a.k.a. The Democracy Project).
I also invite people to send writing about Occupy my way. I’m hoping that someone else out there agrees with me that it’s time to revisit #OccupyWallStreet, think about decision-making in groups, and start building a movement that’s actually capable of achieving real victories.
Stay tuned!
In Solidarity (with the Ghosts of Movements Past),
Crow Qu’appelle
P.S. If you want to download a PDF of As if we were already Free, you can download it here.
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