The Occupy Tents were Great, but It’s Time for Something New

[Better Believe It]

Where the Occupy Movement Heads
By Josh Healey
November 21, 2011

The Tents were Great, but It’s Time for Something New

I’m all for direct actions that may not be technically legal, especially occupations of banks, schools, and homes. But we need actions that speak to people, that invite them to come on in, rather than scare them away.

For this to happen, folks are going to have to step up and demand the Occupy movement take some clear principles. So far, many people have resisted the idea that there are, and should be leaders, in the movement. Sorry if this breaks your non-hierarchical bubble but, formally or informally, there already are many people who have taken a lead in one form or another. The question is whether that leadership is as democratic, accountable, and collective as possible.

Direct democracy is more than just repeating “Mic Check!” at a general assembly and then approving every resolution that comes forward. It’s making tough decisions, and sometimes confronting your comrades.

It’s time for individuals and community organizations within the movement to step up and do just that. Not for the sake of division, but for long-term unity. We have way more to gain than to lose.

Please read the full article at:

http://www.progressive.org/where_occupy_movement_heads.html

[brooklynite]

1. Guessing this won't go over well around here...

[EFerrari]

8. It's well meant but wrong headed.

This author doesn't really understand the deep logic of the camps and so he strings together media fallacies and his own mostly shallow evaluations that skim over his basic lack of understanding as a way forward, which is therefore ungrounded.

Then, he conflates "we are the 99%" with "we are all the same", a very different statement. Looks like he needs to get out and learn for himself the diversity of this movement and mic check his own assumptions.

His last point about coordinating efforts is also based on a false or at least shaky assumption. What is the value in announcing to the police that we are coordinating actions? Does he know that co-ordination isn't already a strategy? Of course, it is but it isn't trumpeted all over the net.

It's fine if people feel impatient and want to move to something new. But before urging others to follow your unsolicited advice, it might be a good idea to know what you are moving on from and if that impatience is only a desire for novelty for the sake of novelty and grounded in confusion that is your own, not the public's or the movement's.

/typos

[October]

2. Several state that there "already are people who have taken a lead" but no one can name them. /nt

[Better Believe It]

7. I've seen at least a dozen OSW leaders interviewed on news programs.

You haven't seen any of the interviews at the encampments?

Press relations committees have even been formed at some encampments with public spokespeople!

There are leaders and organizers at all OWS protests. Demonstrations and actions just don't happen out of thin air here or in Egypt or Greece.

Proposals and resolutions are presented and adopted at General Assembly meetings. Aren't these resolutions written by someone or some committee? They just didn't drop out of the sky!

And what was wrong with leadership in other mass movements such as Savio in the Free Speech Movement, Milk in the Gay Rights movement, Dr. King in the Civil Rights Movement or Gene Debs in the Labor Movement?

Were they bad leaders or is leadership inevitably bad? Of course not.

The problem isn't leadership, the real problem in past movements has been either the lack of a competent leadership or mis leadership!

Now if you don't trust yourself or lack leadership ability, definitely exclude yourself from any leadership in this new movement!

[inademv]

10. You've seen but not payed attention

The individuals giving interviews (typically) are selected my committee at or following a general assembly. There is no leader and there are no heads. The fact that you failed to grasp this fact does a good job to illustrate exactly why you're wrong in your OP.

The only leadership derived in the Occupy movement is from direct democracy at the general assemblies. The problem, especially in the world we live in now (with regards to the media structure and the prevalence of character assassination) is that a leader can be singled out and attacked as a proxy for attacking the movement as a whole, which greatly GREATLY diminishes the resilience of the movement in the minds of the public.

The direct democracy of the movement is what will give it its staying power and its appeal to the people, people who have had their voices taken away by the monolithic corporations that have bought out politicians and bought our government. Leadership in this regard isn't needed and would only serve to limit the potential of the movement.

[EFerrari]

15. It's also the case that in fighting the corporate structure

we have to mind not becoming what we resist, or more clearly, not participating in what we are resisting as a matter of course. Not mirroring that structure with vertical organization, sound bites, short term goals, and so on.

[nadinbrzezinski]

13. Spoke wheel, read on it

they are not truly leaders in the conventional sense of the word.

[EFerrari]

14. The movements you name weren't horizontal as #OWS is

or, as it's trying to be. You might take at look at the Solano movement in Argentina which is a nearer cognate to this one:

Neka, a participant in the unemployed workers movement of Solano, outside Buenos Aires, Argentina, described horizontalidad as:

"“First we began learning something together, it was a sort of waking up to a knowledge that was collective, and this has to do with a collective self-awareness of what was taking place within all of us. First we began by asking one another, and ourselves questions, and from there we began to resolve things together. Each day we continue discovering and constructing while walking. It is like each day is a horizon that opens before us, and this horizon does not have any recipe or program, we begin here, without what was in the past. What we had was life, our life each day, our difficulties, problems, crisis, and what we had in our hands at the time was what we used to go looking for solutions. The beginning of the practice of horizontalidad can be seen in this process. It is the walk, the process of questioning as we walk that enriched our growth, and helped us discover that strength is different when we are side by side, when there is no one to tell you what you have to do, but rather when we decide who we are. I do not believe there is a definition for what we are doing, we know how it is done, but we are not going to come across any definition, in this way it is similar to horizontalidad. More than an answer to a practice, it is an every day practice.

My personal perspective has to do with the idea of freedom, this idea of discovering that we have collective knowledge that brings us together, that give us strength, that bring us to processes of discovery. This is beyond revolutionary theories, theories that we all know and have heard so often, theories that are often converted into tools of oppression and submission. The practice of horizontalidad can give the possibility of breaking with this and creating something that gives us the security that we can self-organize, and do it well, and do so far away from those that try and tell us politics must be done in a particular way.

Constructing freedom is a learning process that can only happen in practice. For me, horizontalidad, autonomy, freedom, creativity, and happiness are all concepts that go together and are all things that both have to be practiced and learned in the practice. I think back to previous activist experiences I had and remember a powerful feeling of submission. This includes even my own conduct, which was often really rigid, and it was difficult for me to enjoy myself, which is something sane and that strengthens you, and if you do it collectively it is that much more so. Like under capitalism, we were giving up the possibility of enjoying ourselves and being happy. We need to constantly break with this idea, we have life and the life that we have is to live today, and not to wait to take any power so that we can begin to enjoy ourselves, I believe it is an organic process." (Quoted in Horizontalism, Sitrin, 2006)
In anti-globalization politics

As a specific term, horizontalidad is attributed to the radical movements that sprouted in Argentina after the economic crisis of 2001. The related term horizontals arose during the anti-globalisation European Social Forum in London in 2004 to describe people organising in a style where they "aspire to an open relationship between participants, whose deliberative encounters (rather than representative status) form the basis of any decisions,"<1> in contrast to "verticals" who "assume the existence and legitimacy of representative structures, in which bargaining power is accrued on the basis of an electoral mandate (or any other means of selection to which the members of an organisation assent)".<1>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontality

And here's an interview (I'm just working through it myself):

Popular Struggle In Argentina The Movement Of Unemployed Workers In Solano
Thursday 25 March 2004, by El Topo

http://www.solidaridadesrebeldes.kolgados.com.ar/spip.php?article56

[JDPriestly]

16. Anyone from OWS who stepped forward as an official leader

would risk ruining any chance to get a job in the future and maybe a serious "accident" or assassination.

Leaders of movements that stand up for the American people have this funny way of dying young.

That's why the movement should have no "leaders."

They don't need leaders anyway because they are not trying to achieve a specific agenda. They are trying to awaken the American people to the reality that we live in a Fascist state that pretends to be a democracy.

[Gold Metal Flake]

3. So do it.

Get off the internets.

[October]

4. It will evolve on its own. After all, it didn't start out with tents, OWS hashtags, etc.

Movements grow, evolve.

It has been doing fine -- globally -- without one leader.

[Better Believe It]

6. Read the article. Who is calling for one supreme leader?

[mmonk]

5. Nope. Not until there are people in power that will listen and do something.

So far, they are going in the opposite direction.

[blindpig]

9. Already efforts at co-option have been made.....

http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2011/levich221111.html

Shit like this wouldn't fly in an organization which had people responsible for checking things out.

[Uncle Joe]

11. Should McDonald's give up the Golden Arches just because some of its' product isn't nutritious?

The tent encampments were the birthplace of the movement, both a powerful symbol of public outrage in front of the banks and city halls and a 24/7 organizing center where people could come to plug in, get information, and even grab a hot meal.

Over time, however, the battle came to be about municipal camping policies, rather than the corporate dictatorship of our politics and economy.

Some encampments, inclusive of all who walked through their open doors, came to include too many drugs and other harmful activities that hurt the effort to welcome more people into the ranks.

The symbol of the tents are strongly supportive of both the message and the name of the Occupier protest movement.

Though out history "occupations" have been symbolized by the world's armies' use of tents for encampment.

Tents are a fragile, temporary shelter and this is in synchronization with the most extreme victims; that being the homeless of modern society and this ties in to our outrageous, out of whack levels of income disparity; and its' devastating effect on U.S. society at large.

In the late 1980s CEOs were making on approximately 29x the salary of their average worker, today they make over 400xs.

Income disparity and corporate supremacy over the people have been prime messages of he occupier protest movement, Bloomberg and the antagonistic PTBs know this and they also knew the tents were a potent and effective symbol in and of themselves because it tied in strongly with the message, the name of the movement and the concept of public community in general.

Furthermore the foreclosure crisis and subsequent bailout of the villain banksters while the social safety net for the people gets shredded, has been a prime message of the occupy movement and ties directly into to the tent (fragile shelter) symbol as well.

Thanks for the thread, Better Believe It.

[nadinbrzezinski]

12. I hate to point this out

but they are not in this publication's timeline either.

Read Greenwald on attempts to co-opt this movement and how well this will go.