New York City subway ad for a Diego Rivera exhibition, modified for Occupy Wall Street. By Poster Boy NYC.

Occupy Wall Street is similar to many movements in contending that its opponent—for Occupy, the 1 percent—is maintaining a system whose structural, systematic violence far exceeds any violence exhibited by the movement itself. For example, movements will say that class oppression or sexism or racism hurt people in the daily course of life, pointing to statistics like each percentage point of unemployment resulting in increased suicide, homicide and domestic abuse. However, especially when the movement is still young and only beginning to get its message out, the powers that be in politics and the media will often succeed in dismissing such charges and in blaming every appearance of violence on the campaigners. Reversing this narrative in the public perception is one of a growing movement’s most important challenges.

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The author strategizing in Russia. Photo via the Fellowship of Reconciliation.

What many in the Occupy movement are now searching for is a way to think collectively about strategy. I don’t know anyone who expects that a lone intellectual will emerge with The Way Forward. What are needed are tools that help diverse activists think together about strategy, and a coherent, movement-based framework that proposes a sequence of activities that put us on a path to liberation. A framework is especially helpful when it raises questions about activities that serious activists need to answer, and puts those answers in a sequence; strategy, above all, is about timing.

Yes, alternative institutions are important, but when are they crucial, and how do they link to other work? Yes, art and theater and culture-changing education are important, but should everyone be doing only that, forever? Confronting authority is necessary, but when and in what relationship to the other strategic elements, and when we get another hundred people arrested, how do we know we’re actually getting somewhere? That is, what is the stage that follows confrontation that can actually dislocate the oppressive business of the status quo?

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The headline in the Philadelphia Inquirer told us last week that, on the other side of the country, a brick hit a police officer in Oakland and sent him to the hospital. Civil Rights organizer Jim Bevel predicted headlines like this in the ’60s when arguing about the then-current version of “diversity of tactics.” He said something like: “We want people to talk about our issues, about the suffering of our people from racism and poverty. When you throw the brick, people don’t talk about our issues, or the thousand black people on the streets that day, they talk about the police officer who was hit by the brick.”

The question for all those, whether using black bloc tactics or not, who consider adding to the Occupy movement tactics of either property destruction or violence: Do you want the issues of injustice to be talked about, or your bricks? In my own definition, property destruction is not the same as violence—there can be very significant differences between the two. But in this historical-political situation, the impact of either is similar; they give an easy out for people who don’t really want to talk about injustice.

I don’t, however, recommend Chris Hedges’ recent essay, “The Cancer in Occupy,” as a model for how to respond to the black blocs. Demonizing, calling people names, using the giveaway metaphor of “cancer” (I’ve had cancer) is about as far away from effectively opposing a tendency one disagrees with as it’s possible to get.

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Mosaic on Bamako, Mali's Martyrs Monument, commemorating the 1991 protests. Click for source.

As the one-year anniversary of the Arab Spring is being celebrated in the media, some journalists have asked, “What about the rest of Africa?” Lisa Mullins of PRI’s The World put it this way on January 24: “The pro-democracy revolts of last year … got people in sub-Saharan Africa wondering if they’d ever see an African Spring. That hasn’t happened.”

Yet it has happened before, as my research assistant Max Rennebohm recently reminded me, and it could happen again. There was a startling wave of pro-democracy struggles in Africa—seven countries with mass people-power campaigns—around the early 1990s. All seven were sub-Saharan: Benin, Madagascar, Cameroon, Mali, Togo, Malawi and Kenya. As with the Arab countries currently in the headlines, the seven from the early ’90s had varying outcomes. What is striking is that, on our Global Nonviolent Action Database’s success scale of 0 to 10, while one was rated 4 and another 7, the rest scored 9 or 10.

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A march in Ådalen, Sweden, in 1931.

While many of us are working to ensure that the Occupy movement will have a lasting impact, it’s worthwhile to consider other countries where masses of people succeeded in nonviolently bringing about a high degree of democracy and economic justice. Sweden and Norway, for example, both experienced a major power shift in the 1930s after prolonged nonviolent struggle. They “fired” the top 1 percent of people who set the direction for society and created the basis for something different. Read the rest of this article »

According to a Pew Research Center poll released January 11, two-thirds of Americans now believe there are “very strong” or “strong” class conflicts in their country—a marked increase from 2009. The Occupy movement is both a cause and a beneficiary of that change, if it can make the most of it. There is no need to start from scratch.

As the movement reflects on last fall and prepares for spring, the Global Nonviolent Action Database (GNAD) is becoming an ever more valuable resource. Since its release on the web in September, the database has surged to more than 530 cases of nonviolent direct action campaigns, available at no charge to activists and researchers everywhere. The GNAD draws on people’s struggles from over 190 countries, and goes back in history as far as 12th century BCE Egypt. Most are from the 20th and 21st century. The student researchers from Swarthmore College—aided by students at Georgetown and Tufts—have found far more cases than they’ve had time to write up so far. A hundred additional cases are underway.

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“Pop-pop?”

I tunneled up from sleep, realizing that my six-year-old great grandson was at the foot of my bed, all dressed for his school day and wanting to touch base with me before he left.

“Hi, Yasin,” I said groggily. “Come into bed if you want.”

He jumped in and crawled into my arms while I woke myself up a bit more. “Good morning,” I said as I gave him a squeeze.

“Why did you go to jail yesterday?” he asked, alert with curiosity. I could feel his worry about me ebbing as he felt the familiar strength of my arms around him.

“I didn’t think President Obama knew how strongly your Pop-pop and lots of other people felt about his letting coal companies blow up mountains,” I said. “We thought if we let ourselves be arrested it would get his attention.”

“Yasin, time to go to school.” It was Yasin’s mom Crystal at the door of my bedroom. She came further in to take a look at me; she too worried sometimes about her seventy-two-year-old grandfather.

“Have a good day at school,” I said as he wriggled out of bed.

I was one of more than a hundred people from many walks of life, from famed NASA scientist Dr. James Hansen to the son of generations of coal miners, from West Virginia’s Larry Gibson, who has spoken to the United Nations about the pillage of his mountains, to a multiply-pierced young anarchist woman from Chicago. We were there with thousands of of supporters on September 27 to participate in Appalachia Rising, the first mass nonviolent direct action in Washington, D.C. to oppose mountaintop removal. Read the rest of this article »