A tent held up on a pole over re-occupied Liberty Plaza at 10:30 p.m. on March 17.

Occupy Wall Street celebrated its six-month anniversary yesterday in Zuccotti Park with a fast-forward replay of last fall: re-occupation, carnival, violent eviction, defiance. A morning chalk-in for families and an early afternoon march around the Financial District (actually, two: one silent and one rowdy) began a day of reunion at the movement’s New York home. As re-renamed Liberty Plaza (or Square or Park) became full once again with hundreds of people, the hardy organizers who’ve spent the winter in meetings and arguments were drowned out by joiners, curious visitors, drummers and reporters. A 24-hour re-occupation was called, and new nonviolent defensive formations were rehearsed en masse. They danced, chanted and held a General Assembly. Numbers swelled to close to a thousand when marches from the nearby Left Forum conference joined later in the evening. The whole day was a welcome reminder that in occupation a magic dwells.

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When The Nation assigned me to do a story about questions of violence and nonviolence at Occupy Wall Street early last month, I had no idea how much the subject would explode. Occupy Oakland’s “Move-In Day” on January 28 and a subsequent article by Chris Hedges (as well as some heated discussions on my articles at Waging Nonviolence in between) triggered a national identity crisis in the movement. I followed the controversy as it played out in the OWS Direct Action Working Group, one of the movement’s most active and radical corners during the relatively quiet winter. Over the course of the month, I found yet another example of what “diversity of tactics” really means for Occupy Wall Street — the overcoming of challenges through raw creativity. In particular, I wrote about the birth of a new undertaking called the + Brigades:

The urge for this first came from a frustration with the same old tactics that Natasha Singh had been feeling for a while. “The marches were pointless,” she says. Then, just after the incident in Oakland, her friend and artistic collaborator Amin Husain returned from a World Social Forum meeting in Brazil, where he learned about the Chilean student movement’s creative tactics. He wanted to bring some of that home. The two of them recruited others and settled on a name: “+ Brigades.” They scoured photographs of movements through history at the New York Public Library. The goal, says Husain, is “addition and supplement rather than negation, opposition and subtraction.” Thus their answer to all the worry about black blocs: create blocs of your own.

Husain, who with Singh was one of the earliest OWS organizers, took part in the first intifada as a teenager in the West Bank. But he identifies neither with principled nonviolence nor, for instance, anarchism. The movement’s problem, he and Singh thought, wasn’t a matter of violence or not; it was a lack of imagination. There was too small a repertoire.

“Don’t negate the things you don’t like,” said Austin Guest at that inaugural + Brigades meeting in the church basement. “Add the things you do, so we can get a real diversity of tactics.”

Read the rest of the article at The Nation.

Photo from Occupy Auckland, New Zealand, by Simon Oosterman.

If you ask most people who’ve been watching from the sidelines what the Occupy movement has accomplished, they’ll probably say something about “changing the national conversation.” But if you ask someone who has been more closely involved, having spent weeks or months in tents and meetings, they’re more likely to talk about a conversation that changed them—a case in which a painful disagreement, perhaps, was forced by the proximity of the occupation to turn into a useful dialogue.

In the days before Chris Hedges’ polemic against “The Cancer in Occupy” created a firestorm in the movement by stoking fears of “Black Bloc anarchists” hijacking it from the outside, we lit a bit of kindling here on this site with a post of mine about rising tensions around the diversity-of-tactics framework. My report spread through Occupy Wall Street email lists, resulting in an extended exchange in the comments that included several of the people I’d written about. Like most exchanges in online comments, it wasn’t especially constructive.

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At the General Assembly meeting last night, Occupy Wall Street’s dreamer contingent got a very special valentine: the GA endorsed the Direct Action Working Group’s proposal to call for a general strike on May Day—May 1, 2012. Occupiers celebrated with cheers and Valentine’s Day balloons.

The text approved by the GA is as follows:

May Day 2012 Occupy Wall Street stands in solidarity with the calls for a day without the 99%, a general strike and more!! On May Day, wherever you are, we are calling for: *No Work *No School *No Housework *No Shopping *No Banking TAKE THE STREETS!!!!!

The prospect of an Occupy general strike has been circulating for a while already. One of the several Facebook event pages devoted to it has more than 10,000 attendees. Occupy Los Angeles began calling for a May 1 general strike as early as last November, and Occupy Oakland joined at the end of January. Occupy Wall Street’s Direct Action group tried to take a strategic approach to the idea; though many of its members had little hesitation about calling for it, they took steps to ensure there was consultation, and therefore buy-in, among some of those whose participation would be vital. Since the beginning of the year, they’ve been holding twice-weekly meetings—with as many as 150 people crowded into a church or a union-office basement—which included labor organizers, immigrants’ rights groups, artists and anarchists.

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Image borrowed from Triple Canopy.

The enigmatic Internet-driven collective Anonymous, thank goodness, has an anthropologist in its midst. For a few years now, Gabriella Coleman has been arduously participant-observing in IRC chat rooms, watching Anonymous turn from a prankster moniker to a herd of vigilantes for global justice. In an extraordinary new essay at Triple Canopy, “Our Weirdness Is Free,” she summarizes what Anonymous is all about this way:

Beyond a foundational commitment to anonymity and the free flow of information, Anonymous has no consistent philosophy or political program. Though Anonymous has increasingly devoted its energies to (and become known for) digital dissent and direct action around various “ops,” it has no definite trajectory. Sometimes coy and playful, sometimes macabre and sinister, often all at once, Anonymous is still animated by a collective will toward mischief—toward “lulz,” a plural bastardization of the portmanteau LOL (laugh out loud). Lulz represent an ethos as much as an objective.

The more I learn about Anonymous, especially in light of the offline, on-the-ground praxis of the Occupy movement, the more I’ve been wondering whether we’re seeing a glimpse of the future for all of us.

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The photo from Occupy Oakland used to advertise "Solidarity Sunday" on OccupyWallSt.org.

Occupy Oakland got rough on Saturday night, when an attempt to occupy a vacant convention center resulted in police using tear gas and other weapons, as well as, reportedly, protesters throwing rocks back at them. Some of the most widely-circulated photos depicted the burning of an American flag that had been removed from Oakland’s City Hall. On Sunday, other Occupy groups around the country took to the streets in solidarity marches. In New York, there were reports of potentially dangerous actions, including a bottle being thrown. Entrepreneurial live streamer Tim Pool, as The New York Observer anxiously reports, noted that there was more of a black bloc presence than usual. The night before, an OWS-er allegedly used pepper spray on a police officer.

Those who had been at the afternoon’s Occupy Town Square beforehand might have seen this coming. Members of OWS’s Direct Action Working Group—which oversees the planning of most marches and other actions—gave an impromptu teach-in about the idea of “diversity of tactics,” which was in many respects insightful, but ultimately became an apologia for undertaking, or at least tolerating, what might be construed as violent actions. The villains of the presentation, perhaps even more so than police, were those within the movement who denounce or try to stop others who want to do such things. They were described as likely to be sexist and racist for trying to insist on nonviolent discipline.

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As we approach the first anniversary of the Egyptian revolution on January 25, a lot of us could stand to refresh our memories of just what happened. Maybe, while being under our various rocks, we even missed some of it the first time around. That’s why I was grateful to come across Ashraf Khalil’s Liberation Square, hot off of St. Martin’s Press. The book makes the revolution about as exciting as one would think a revolution should be, and perhaps almost as much as this one actually was. Pick it up, and you’ll find yourself engrossed in “movement time”—which is to say, regular time seems to go on hold until you’re done. But the book also inadvertently serves as a reminder that, in such “movement time” euphoria, even a person apparently right in the middle of it all might not quite understand what’s going on.

The initial chapters acquaint the outsiders among us with a gist of what it’s like to be an urban, educated and hopeless young Egyptian in the early 21st century. It doesn’t sound very appealing. Indeed, Khalil’s chief explanation for what drove so many young males over the edge was the pent-up anxiety that they’d never get to have sex; low job prospects meant low prospects of leaving their parents’ houses and low prospects of getting married. Fair enough. To an ignorant reader like myself, Khalil gives the impression that he has spent enough time haunting Cairo’s cafes to have quite fully plumbed the souls of this restive demographic. Which is illuminating. But sexual frustration alone does not make a revolution.

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The Occupy movement celebrated Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in force. There was a worldwide candlelight vigil on Sunday night, and then, on Monday, nationwide protests in front of Federal Reserve locations under the banner of “Occupy the Dream.” With the moniker “Occupy 4 Jobs,” protests in four East Coast cities called for a new initiative to counter unemployment. In New York, the vigil was a celebrity-studded success; the next day, Occupy the Dream attracted a lackluster showing in the morning cold. The several hundred who turned out at Union Square to Occupy 4 Jobs made their point by way of a maddening, roving sparring match with the NYPD, by the end of which protesters had distracted themselves from the banks and stores they were targeting with vicious verbal assaults on their police escort. What force they mustered, really, became diluted by fury.

This kind of behavior is not an exception carried out by an errant Occupy copycat, but the rule for the movement as a whole; we at Waging Nonviolence have contended with it again and again. Eventually this movement needs to grow out of its debilitating reactiveness, to grow up, to learn discipline, and to realize that its real power begins where this kind of mayhem ends. I think King would say so too.

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Occupy Wall Street organizer Austin Guest carrying a police barricade during the New Year's Eve action at Zuccotti Park. AP photo.

WNV contributor Jeremy Kessler has a new essay at The New Republic, an Occupy Wall Street-inspired reflection on the relationship between protest movements and the crafting of the First Amendment’s right to assembly in American legal history:

Only as massive labor unrest roiled the country during the Great Depression did the federal judiciary begin to put meat on the bones of the First Amendment’s “right to peaceably assemble.” In 1939, in Hague v. CIO, the Supreme Court invalidated the mayor of Jersey City’s attempt to bar labor organizers from meeting on public property. Public spaces such as streets and parks, the Court wrote, “have immemorially been held in trust for the use of the public and, time out of mind, have been used for purposes of assembly.” In vindicating the right of the CIO to assemble, the Court described a new legal space—the public forum—in which certain kinds of expression could not be restricted. Ironically, in later years, the public forum concept, and the equation of a particular act of assembly with the more general category of “expression,” would become ways of limiting rather than liberating assembly.

In the 1960s and early ’70s, however, civil rights activists pushed the boundaries of the Haguedecision, assembling out of doors and sitting where they didn’t belong, often in violation of public safety and trespass laws. The Supreme Court responded positively to these efforts, reversing dozens of local convictions, including that of five African-American men who staged a silent protest in the “whites-only” public library and eighty-five demonstrators who protested school segregation outside the home of the mayor of Chicago. The simple fact that local officials found the use of public land by civil rights activists to be a threat to public safety did not give them the authority to disperse the assembled protesters.

For more, read the rest of the essay, and see the video of Jeremy and me on a panel together at Columbia Law School.

A recent Occupy Wall Street Spokes Council meeting.

It’s bizarre how often nowadays one hears Occupy Wall Street talked about in the past tense—bizarre, especially, if one was at the strategy meeting of OWS’s Direct Action group on January 8. Around 150 of the movement’s most restless radicals sat on the hardwood floor and in folding chairs at 16 Beaver Street, a block from the Charging Bull in downtown Manhattan. The purpose was a big-picture strategic discussion about where the movement’s tactics had taken it so far and where to go next in the coming months. As if to match the scale of the conversation, huge sheets of paper were spread across the center of the room, which scribes markered up with the gist of what was being said.

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