Protesters in Malaga, Spain, on May 12. By Jon Nazca, via Reuters AlertNet.

Last June, after leaving the encampment in the center of Madrid, people in the 15M movement would say, “We moved from Sol square, but we know the way back.” The day of action on May 12 this year exceeded the expectations of many people who thought the 15M movement was dead, who didn’t recognize that it had only moved to neighborhood assemblies. The one-year anniversary of the movement brought hundreds of thousands people to the streets again in nearly 80 Spanish cities. There were 50,000 in Madrid, 44,000 in Barcelona, 11,000 in Vigo (a northern city with a population of less than 300,000) and many more.

As people from around the country converged on Madrid, various neighborhood assemblies gathered in squares to prepare banners for the demonstration and to share tips for avoiding police repression. At 7 p.m., there were five columns of demonstrators marching toward Sol square, where they planned to arrive at 9 o’clock. But by 8 p.m., the first column had already arrived, filling almost half of the square. Other groups of marchers arrived within minutes, but many people could not enter and had to stay in nearby streets. Sol square was completely full before the meeting time. There, thousands sang “Happy Birthday” to the 15M movement and released balloons.

As Sol square transformed into a party celebrating a year of protest and organizing, the question remained of whether the party could last all night. Some weeks before, the government had announced that it would not allow an encampment in Sol at all, but, last Thursday, it granted the movement a right to stay in the square during “office hours.” When the government’s 10 p.m. curfew came, there were more than 15,000 people in the square, surrounded by about 2,000 police officers.

At 10 p.m., too, the first tent was erected. “Now we have more reason than last year,” said a man named Emilio, the first camper in Sol of the night. “I’m not afraid to be the first one. If the police arrest me, they will have to go through many more people.” A half hour later, above where a dozen police vans were parked, a huge white panel was deployed, on which were projected videos created by the movement.

After midnight, preparations began to hold an assembly. Dozens cleaned the paper and bottles littered across the square, while others placed cardboard on the ground for people to sit on. When the assembly started at 1 a.m., nearly 2,000 participated. “I was worried,” said one of the first people to take the microphone. “This was very much a party, and we have a lot of work to do.” The first question was whether to stay in Sol for the night, and debate continued for more than an hour and a half. Many wanted to remain, but others said that doing so would only be a provocation to the government and that it didn’t make sense.

The assembly ended at 4 a.m., but hundreds of people remained in Sol. An hour later, 30 more police vans arrived, and officers cleared the square. Eighteen people were arrested. Meanwhile, police swept the squares in Valencia, Palma de Mallorca and other cities where activists tried to spend the night. Catalunya square in Barcelona is the only place where the movement has been able to remain, thanks to authorization by the Catalan government.

May 12 was just the first day of mobilization, and the most festive. Leading up to May 15, the movement has planned actions across the country focused on housing rights, employment, economy, democracy and other issues. These are busy days for the movement, and they will certainly be instrumental in shaping its goals and the strategies used to achieve them.

Poster from madrilonia.org.

“We don’t want May 12 to be a celebration of our anniversary, or a one-day demonstration,” one often hears activists in the Spanish 15M movement saying lately. “We want it to be a new milestone.” For months now, many of them have been taking part in local and international meetings to prepare. Through online conference calls using the open-source platform Mumble, organizers from Occupy, 15M and movements all around the world chose May 12 as a day for a global mobilization, leading up to another on May 15.

After its birth with occupations in public squares across Spain last May, 15M has been a model for movements around the world, many of which have reached a critical mass and brought to the fore issues of austerity, wealth inequality and political corruption. Yet, in Spain and elsewhere, governments continue to respond with more budget cuts and increased police repression. Activists hope that this latest round of mobilizations will help turn the tide.

In Madrid, work on mid-May started among the movement’s various collectives in January, and, over the course of weekly meetings, a group was formed to put all their ideas together and coordinate citywide actions. Although the pace was slow during the early months, by April there was a basic outline for the mid-May mobilization. On May 12, Madrid will probably look much like it did last October 15: Four marches will depart from the four cardinal points of the city and join in Sol square at 9 p.m. for a dinner together until midnight. People in cities across Spain will also be in the streets. But, this time, the day of action will be only the beginning.

The night of May 12, or early the next morning, people will move from Sol to 12 nearby squares. Then, until May 15, each square in the center of Madrid will represent a particular issue: education, employment, health care, democracy, economy and so on. The 15M working groups will organize workshops, conferences and assemblies dedicated to sharing ideas and finding solutions related to each issue. The conclusions reached during a given day will be brought to a nighttime general assembly. Other initiatives are being discussed as well, including the formation of a people’s tribunal on May 13 to hear evidence presented by activists who have been collecting data on the practices of the banks. That day, also, housing groups are planning to occupy banks while demanding a collective renegotiation of mortgages.

A big question, however, is whether 15M will be able to camp again in the squares at all. In Madrid, the movement has announced that, from May 12 to 15, Sol square will be the space for a permanent assembly, without using the term “camp.” But news that 15M would be creating another encampment in Sol was quickly announced by the Spanish mass media, and the government responded quickly and firmly that no such thing would be allowed. In Barcelona, the movement secured a permit to camp in Catalunya square from May 12 to May 15, possibly to alleviate the city’s reputation for harsh repression, especially after the police violence of the recent general strike. In Madrid, however, repression against 15M has hardened in the last few weeks, although without physical violence.

After an announcement of further fare increases on public transportation in Madrid, for instance, the collective Yo No Pago organized a new protest in Sol square on April 20. Nearly 200 people marched from Sol, walking through several streets in the city center, until they were surrounded by riot police in Gran Vía. The activists were identified, and all of them may receive a €300 fine. The following week, there were more actions related to public transport, including one in which activists pulled the brake levers of 13 subway trains, causing a halt in service for 10 minutes. Within hours, police had arrested three suspects, who now face five years in prison. Last Friday, hundreds of people went to Sol square to show their support for those who were arrested, and, again, police surrounded the protesters, together with bystanders, identifying them in order to charge them further fines.

These precedents in Madrid are troubling, but if the movement is able to bring hundreds of thousands of people into the streets as it did on October 15, all the police of the city will be not able to prevent Sol square from being reoccupied and turned once again into the space of public debate and resistance that it was a year ago.

Photo by The Eyes of New York, via Flickr.

I’ve been attending Occupy Wall Street planning meetings for May Day since they began in New York four months ago — twice as much time as there was to plan the initial occupation itself — and I still went into the day feeling like I had no idea what would come out of it.

All along, May 1 has been talked about among Occupiers in apocalyptic, beatific terms, which was what got me so addicted to the meetings in the first place. In the process of getting my fix, I also became witness to the politics of assembling a coalition of Occupiers, labor unions, immigrants’ groups and community organizations — not always pretty, though occasionally it actually was. Much the same could be said of the day itself: Come for the dream, trudge through the reality.

Occupy’s ambitious calls for a general strike and mass economic noncompliance appear to have gone mostly unnoticed. The financial markets followed a trapezoidal journey over the course of the day — apparently unperturbed by the movement’s threat to shut down the flow of capital with “99 Pickets” across Midtown — spiking in the morning and crashing back down to where they started by late afternoon. The mainstream press has been predictably, conspiratorially silent, which may or may not have anything to do with the morning pickets at News Corp. and the New York Times Building. But when has the U.S. media ever done justice to big days of popular protest?

A few hundred people slogging their way through pickets on a rainy Midtown morning swelled into closer to a thousand filling Bryant Park at midday. There, hard-boiled eggs, first-aid and the movement’s latest publications were on offer, while across the park Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello led a rehearsal for the Occupy Guitarmy, a hundred-strong orchestra of guitars that played old protest songs, a Morello original, and a particularly hypnotic arrangement of Willie Nile’s “One Guitar.” By early afternoon, the Guitarmy steered the crowd at Bryant Park in a march downtown. Picking up students from the Free University being held at Madison Square Park, the first wave of marchers defied police attempts to keep them on the sidewalk and took over Broadway before arriving at Union Square, where they were greeted by a maypole topped by a sign proclaiming, in the words of last September’s Declaration of the Occupation of New York City, “All of our grievances are connected.”

The May Day coalition had secured permits for actions in Union Square and the subsequent march down Broadway to the Financial District, ensuring that the whole area was surrounded by locked metal barricades, preventing bystanders from entering or marchers from exiting except at designated points. Police protected these pens with zeal and occasional arrests. They also managed to split the OWS contingent, trapping thousands of marchers in Union Square and refusing to let them enter Broadway.

Still, it was during the permitted march that the day’s numbers reached their peak of around 30,000. The unions themselves didn’t seem to turn out great masses of their own, nor did they even try to mount a general strike. But, by arranging for a permit (as Occupiers would never do themselves), these more institutional allies did provide the space for a considerable show of support for the Occupy movement’s concerns, which Occupy itself hasn’t been able to even approach since the fall. The vast majority of people came for the permitted portion of the day and left after it was over.

While most recent Occupy Wall Street actions have been peopled by the movement’s hardened regulars, this march brought out of the true breadth of Occupy’s base of support. Down Broadway, I walked alongside two elder marchers — a nun and a priest — together holding a pillowcase marked with the words “Bread Not Bombs.” Beside us was a gigantic blue tarp covering a hundred or so of OWS’ rowdier troops, threatening, in so far only theoretical chants, to burn banks and smash the state. Undocumented immigrants, often reluctant to take part in Occupy’s usual unpermitted actions, led the way ahead of us.

The nun, no stranger to the front lines of protests, couldn’t believe the level of police presence. “When did it become like this?” she kept asking. We were followed all the way by a line of NYPD scooters and watched from overhead by four NYPD helicopters. The department’s taste for pageantry was on display downtown, where multiple rows of officers and a line of horses blocked the entrance to Wall Street. Those under the tarp shouted “Fuck the police!” and the priest thanked individual cops for their service — a diversity of tactics.

As dark came, Occupiers’ plans to hold an after-party in Battery Park were foiled by police blockades. Text-message alerts guided those who wished to stay to a Vietnam veterans’ memorial tucked along the East River waterfront between buildings that house Morgan Stanley and Standard & Poor’s. The memorial includes a space that served as a perfect amphitheater for a thousand-strong “people’s assembly” — so named because OWS’ General Assembly is currently defunct — and it became one of those moments of collective effervescence and speaking-in-one-voice that won so many discursively-inclined hearts to the movement in the fall. People of other inclinations danced to the familiar sound of the drum circle on the far side of the park.

The topic of the assembly was whether to stay, to try and occupy. At first it seemed that maybe people would. (What better place to spend the summer than by the water?) Members of the Veterans Peace Team, a uniformed bloc of military veterans and allies, volunteered to stand at the front lines. So did two clergymen from Occupy Faith. They received cheers, but as the discussion wore on, the assembly seemed less and less inclined to stay after the park closed at 10 p.m. and repeat another sequence of beatings and arrests. Even after being told that the Occupiers would retreat back to the streets, though, the Veterans Peace Team members and the clergymen — including Episcopal Bishop George Packard, a Vietnam veteran — stayed at the memorial as an act of disobedience and were apprehended by police.

For the next two hours, the improvised after-party dissipated as police chased black-masked marchers through the area’s narrow streets and clubbed some of them bloody. Mini-assemblies formed on sidewalks to plan what to do next, and were broken up, too, when discovered. All roads eventually led to Zuccotti Park, where the 200 or so people remaining assembled, and rested, and left. What might have become an occupation, or something similarly prolonged, was in the end just a day of action.

If there was value, finally, in the call for a general strike, it was in the aspiration. Like the initial call to occupy Wall Street last summer, it probably matters less whether people follow through on the proposal than how they will creatively respond to it. The very idea of a general strike, or comparable mass disobedience, has been unheard-of for decades in the U.S. and is increasingly being heard of now thanks to Occupy. In the process, Occupiers are building better working relationships with labor and community organizations. Even if they’re not always cozy, these relationships increase the movement’s capacity to mobilize supporters, whether for a day of action or for something more serious.

“I’d say this was the best day of the year,” I heard one person say in a small circle of Occupiers near Zuccotti Park, debriefing over kebab from a street vendor. “Just this year, though.”

This article appears through a partnership with YES! Magazine, where it was simultaneously published here.

It was a great action. Three years ago, seven activists went to the Alamance County Detention Center in Graham, North Carolina. Two were dressed like ICE agents (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and a third looked like Lady Liberty. In a bold and creative action aimed at drawing attention to the unjust, unfair and racially biased immigration practices, the activists tried to convince jail officials to take Lady Liberty into custody. The rest of the activists blocked the doors to the jail facility.

Immigration is a hot button issue in this area of North Carolina, which has one of the fastest growing Latino populations in the country, mostly because of labor needed in poultry processing plants and agricultural fields.

Alamance County Sheriff Terry Johnson has taken a tough stance on undocumented people. Local authorities are part of 287(g), exercising authority as federal immigration agents under the Immigration and Nationality Act. The program is justified by its intent to pursue violent criminals and terrorism suspects. But in North Carolina, it has meant a lot of traffic violations for Latinos.

Deborah Weissman, a law professor at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, testified before the House of Representatives in April 2009 that:

In Alamance County, approximately seventy percent of immigrants detained through 287(g) were arrested on routine traffic offenses; another sixteen percent for driving while impaired charges, and only fifteen percent for felony charges. Furthermore, local law enforcement have set up roadblocks for the purpose of checking licenses outside of Latino markets on the weekends and on Sundays, they have stationed themselves at roads that provide access to Latino churches. Because these roadblock checkpoints are excluded from racial profiling data collection, it is difficult to know the statistics of individuals arrested pursuant to these tactics; however, their location is indicative of an effort to target Latinos as they go about their family shopping and worship.

That testimony is confirmed by a study from Elon University political science Professor Laura Roselle who reviewed Alamance police records and found that sheriff’s deputies stopped and cited 1,344 Hispanics over the same five-year period, or 850 more stops than the sheriff’s office reported to the State Bureau of Investigation. Professor Roselle concluded that “I believe the sheriff’s department is unfairly targeting Hispanics.”

All of this means money for the Sheriff Terry Johnson. It is a perverse engine of economic growth for the region. The federal government paying local authorities $66 per undocumented per night in detention. In February 2008 alone, “bed rentals” to ICE brought in $400,000 in federal money, the sheriff boasted.

But it is not just about dollars, it is also about bias, ignorance and prejudice. In a 2007 local newspaper interview, Sheriff Johnson complained that immigrants just aren’t like us: “Their values are a lot different — their morals — than what we have here. In Mexico, there’s nothing wrong with having sex with a 12-, 13-year-old girl… They do a lot of drinking down in Mexico.”

But getting back to Lady Liberty. The police eventually did arrest her and the six others and local courts put them on trial.

But, justice was not swift, because the last two defendants just reported for their jail sentences yesterday. Lady Liberty (aka Audrey Schwankl) has already served her sentence, another was convicted in district court, the cases against two defendants were dropped, and the last defendant — Juan Montes — died following heart surgery in October 2009. He was 44, married with two daughters.

The small drama of two men headed off to jail — Patrick O’Neill and Francisco Risso — is happening against the backdrop of a national furor over immigration as the Supreme Court hears the case of Arizona’s draconian immigration law — SB 1070, which requires that law enforcement personnel question people about their immigration status if they have a reasonable suspicion that person is an illegal immigrant.

Patrick and Francisco refused to pay fines stemming from their cases. They were sentenced to eight months unsupervised probation, ten-day suspended jail sentences, $200 fines, and more than $300 each in court costs. As O’Neill, a Catholic Worker and father of eight from Raleigh, told the court “On moral grounds with all due respect and good conscience, I cannot pay fines and court costs to a system that’s mistreating my Latino brothers and sisters.” We wish them luck as they begin their jail sentence, and say thank you for their nonviolent witness.

ACT UP's 25th anniversary demonstration on April 25 in New York City. Photo by author.

Long before the red ribbon became an innocuous symbol of AIDS “awareness” and celebrity philanthropy, there was the pink triangle and there was ACT UP and there were thousands of people taking to the streets for their lives. Once a symbol used to mark suspected queers for death in the Holocaust, ACT UP appropriated the pink triangle for themselves, now flipped on its base, pointing upward on a black field, away from the grave, signed with the call to arms, “SILENCE = DEATH.” 

Death didn’t just come in the form of a virus, even and maybe especially in the early days of AIDS, when ACT UP (an acronym for AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) was founded in New York. Government neglect and corporate greed made AIDS an epidemic, and they also gave birth to a raucous and creative network of direct action activists. For ACT UP, death was the drug maker, and the drug profiteer, and the drug regulatory bodies who refused to release them. When ACT UP’s members first laid down their bodies in protest, therefore, it was against the already-booming business of AIDS, and for their debut action in 1987, they brought their rage and their grief straight to Wall Street.

On the morning of April 25, 2012, ACT UP took back those same streets, alongside activists from the Occupy movement, itself aspiring to be the kind of umbrella that can gather and propel young queers and allies to work together. Hundreds of people carried those trademark ACT UP banners (with some homemade signs for that Occupy touch) in a march down from City Hall to the New York Housing Administration to Trinity Church. A break-out action took the intersection at Park Street, where activists set up house with sofas and chairs, chaining themselves together with the cry, “Housing saves lives!” Another group dressed in Robin Hood green locked down an intersection at Wall Street, demanding a 0.05 percent tax on financial transactions to funnel to AIDS relief. I imagined each person I saw in a fading ACT UP shirt — the seriously garish image of Ronald Reagan in neon branded AIDSGATE, and countless pink triangles now on a field of soft grey — to be a surviving elder, or standing in the garment of a lover or friend who should have lived to walk alongside them.

Reclaiming that story — of greed and neglect, and also of resistance and loss — is what drove Sarah Schulman and Jim Hubbard to produce their film United In Anger, using footage drawn from their joint archive, The ACT UP Oral History Project. Schulman recalls that the film’s origins were in her visceral response to an NPR story on the 20th anniversary of AIDS that she heard while driving a rental car through Los Angeles:

“At first America had trouble with people with AIDS,” the announcer says in that falsely conversational tone, intended to be reassuring about apocalyptic things. “But then, they came around.”

I almost crashed the car.

She didn’t crash. She did call up Hubbard, though, and their work began. The film premiered this February at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, coinciding with the 25th anniversary of ACT UP.

Now, just a few months after the birth of another direct action protest movement on Wall Street, it is difficult not to connect these familiar images through a quarter-century-long struggle. Here are the throngs of young people linking arms along Broadway, the high sheen of cop uniforms as police push their way into crowds, locked arms being wrenched apart in the grip of twice as many cops as there ever are activists, and the way — as he’s being loaded into a cop wagon — one of the activists turns his head to call back to the others, to the cameras. It’s a performance, and a sincere one, that’s become part of so much protest, and it’s captured here well before the YouTube age.

ACT UP hit the streets just as cheap consumer video did, defining the visual and tactical conventions of activist video. Through the late 1980s, ACT UP spawned several activist video crews, like DIVA TV, or Damned Interfering Video Activists. In addition to serving as witnesses at actions, DIVA produced compilation tapes to educate and inspire ACT UP activists around the country and the world, who then shared them with each other at parties, bars or through the mail.

Captured in all that glorious 80s footage is a raw, life-affirming anger. For all the comparisons drawn between Occupy and ACT UP,  Occupy has yet to fully embody this urgency, or this rage, that transforms pain into action and back again. The most moving sequences of United In Anger are set to a funeral march, a low drumbeat that carries through political funerals in Manhattan and Washington, culminating in a group funeral procession to the White House, where several ACT UP members requested their remains be delivered as a final demand.

As powerful as ACT UP’s tactics are to observe — banner drops at Shea Stadium and Grand Central Station, storming the Centers for Disease Control and the Food and Drug Administration — it’s the testimony of ACT UP members that provides real depth, humor and contradiction to these victories and contentious setbacks.

The most dramatic of these was ACT UP’s legendary Sunday-mass protest at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, which turned even some of their supporters against them. For many in ACT UP, that was no failure. “We said for years in ACT UP that our job was not to be liked,” said Ann Northrop, an early member. “We were not doing what we were doing to get the public to like us. We were doing what we were doing to accomplish something about particular issues, and I think we did that, enormously successfully.”

What cannot be ignored, in this film or in our attempts to make sense of the early years of the epidemic, is the power of people to organize in the face of death, to claim expertise, to lead. As the gatekeepers in medicine and government struggled to catch up with the virus, ACT UP took caring for their communities into their own hands and took their fight to the doors of those in power. Through United In Anger, we meet activists who worked to redefine AIDS, to take account of their lives and what could be done to preserve them, and to hold those who abandoned them to death accountable. “In my view as a witness, people did not die of AIDS,” Shulman said in a recent interview. “They died of government neglect and indifference. These are political deaths.”

"Testimony of Zea Maize," via the Midwest Radical Culture Corridor.

On April 21, approximately 100 people came to a courtroom in Iowa City to attend a mock trial called the Monsanto Hearings, the second of five such events scheduled nationwide. The trial was modeled after a preliminary hearing, an attempt to collect stories about harm caused by agribusiness giant Monsanto and determine if further public scrutiny is warranted.

The court’s five presiding judges — including a professor, a graduate student and an organic farmer — made no pretense of impartiality. “We are under no obligation to be even-handed,” they announced early on, “because in the court of public opinion, Monsanto is not even-handed. They have money for lobbyists, advertisements, corporate-funded research and media campaigns. The influence of this hearing, by contrast, depends on the power and truth of what is said.” The court, they explained, would not be considering legal violations, but rather violations of nature, ethics and human rights.

Untraditional as it might be, the hearing had an air of formality — the judges looked smart in their black robes, and witnesses swore to the truth before testifying, some in person and some over video. The first witness was a Vietnam veteran, trembling in a Hawaiian shirt, suffering from Hepatitis C linked to exposure to Monsanto’s Agent Orange (of which an active ingredient, 2,4-D, is a common lawn pesticide today); then a small farmer whose neighbor lost acres of organic crops due to pesticides drifting on morning fog; later, a garden and soil educator who brought a wooden box of soil and worms to the witness stand.

Other witnesses included professors, farmers, scientists and local activists. Their testimonies ranged from personal to technical, from stories of the approximately 200,000 Indian farmers who, indebted after Monsanto’s cotton seed prices rose from 7 rupees to 17,000 rupees/kg, committed suicide by drinking pesticide, to explanations of the influence of corporate agribusiness on U.S. land-grant universities and how minute manipulations of chemical structure have allowed Monsanto to sidestep health regulations. One man came dressed as a “superweed” — a plant that developed pesticide resistance after exposure to the chemical glyphosate — and lounged with his feet on the edge of the witness box. “I don’t give a fuck about Monsanto,” he said, swigging from a bottle marked “Roundup,” “though they do make a good drink.”

One common theme throughout the testimonies was the importance of adhering to the precautionary principle, which dictates that if an action (or, say, a pesticide or a genetically modified crop) has the potential to cause significant harm, it should not be implemented until it has been proven safe. The European Union mandates use of the precautionary principle when regulating chemicals and biotechnology, but the United States doesn’t, instead placing the burden on consumers to prove harm once the damage has already been done.

Which is, in a way, what the activists behind the Monsanto Hearings are trying to do. By using the courtroom as a public theater, they aim to spread knowledge and conversation within a region — the Midwest — that is heavily dependent on large-scale agriculture. I talked to the event’s main organizer, Sarah Kanouse, a member of the artist and activist group Compass. She cited a groundswell in public resistance to Monsanto’s products as an impetus for the hearing. “We wanted to see what an amateur legal proceeding would look like,” she explained.

The Monsanto Hearings are based on a robust international tradition of peoples’ tribunals that dates back 40 years to the Russell Tribunal, which examined human rights violations by the U.S. military in Vietnam. Because peoples’ tribunals are not legally binding, their main goal is to bring visibility to offenses that might otherwise go unseen or unrecorded, and to victims for whom legal protection has fallen short. By specifically adopting the mantle of a legal proceeding, a peoples’ tribunal can call attention to the insufficiency of the law when it comes to fostering social and environmental justice.

A similar Monsanto Hearing was held recently in Carbondale, Illinois, and more are planned for Chicago, Santa Cruz and St. Louis, near Monsanto’s headquarters. Footage from the Iowa City hearing will be shown this summer at dOCUMENTA13, an art festival in Germany, as a preliminary documentary, and a more polished documentary is also in the works.

The sound rang out at exactly 4 p.m. last Friday: four measured chimes increasing in pitch. Ding, ding, ding, ding! Standing in concentric circles with clasped hands, protesters held the last note, and it echoed against the New York Stock Exchange. Tourists and workers stopped to stare as the people-powered bell chimed again. Inside, another bell was ringing — a mechanical, computerized sound marking the end of the day’s trading. Six months since the Occupy movement began, it was clear that the bell inside was losing its resonance, and the “people’s gong” outside was getting louder.

After last weekend, news of the “police riot” on Saturday night in Liberty Plaza made headlines. Yes, the NYPD beat, kicked and stomped on peaceful people, using the type of violence that the department unleashes daily on communities of color across the boroughs. Officers broke bones, dragged people by the hair and ignored a woman suffering from seizures induced by the attack. They did it again at Union Square early Wednesday morning — throwing medics down to the sidewalk, pepper-spraying dozens of protesters, sending many to the hospital and barricading a 24-hour public park that has stood open and unobstructed for the last 20 years. This week has been one of Occupy Wall Street’s most extreme encounters with the violence and intimidation meant to maintain order in a society characterized by extraordinary inequality.

Yet our actions were not about violence or anger. From Wall Street to Bank of America to the courthouse at 100 Centre Street, we demonstrated a renewed sense of creativity as we confronted sites of injustice with a sense of carnival.

Even after Saturday’s eviction from Liberty Plaza, we gathered outside the courthouse at 100 Centre Street on Sunday and Monday, tired but festive. More than 50 people brought coffee, cigarettes, sandwiches and their bodies to greet the 70 Occupiers who had been arrested and the others who joined our feast.

Last Thursday, hundreds marched to a Bank of America branch in Lower Manhattan. As the crowd gathered, the cargo doors of two U-Hauls flew open, revealing an entire living room set — including multiple couches, a coffee table, an armoire and a flat screen TV — that Occupiers quickly moved onto the sidewalk in front of the bank. The furniture blockade was part of a growing national campaign against Bank of America for foreclosing on hundreds of thousands of families even as it receives a perpetual taxpayer bailout: billions of dollars of low-interest loans lent through the Federal Reserve’s Emergency Lending Program.

“The bank foreclosed on our homes, we figured we’d move in there,” said George Machado, one of the interior designers who helped move a similar living room set inside another Bank of America branch last week in a YouTube video that has gone viral and already inspired similar actions in D.C.

Now that spring has come, the movement is once again using site-based direct action to show concretely how abstract concepts like “systemic inequality” manifest all around us. From Bank of America to Wall Street to the courthouse, Occupy Wall Street celebrated its six-month anniversary by mapping sites of injustice: a bailed-out bank that is robosigning away families’ safety and shelter, a barricaded street that is the epicenter of global economic inequality, a state with laws that are so unrepresentative that it must use violence to maintain its authority. And, after a winter filled with workshops practicing choreographed movements, learning new songs to sing and studying social movements from Chile to South Africa, we have started training ourselves to confront these sites of injustice with a sense of community and a spirit of play that is deeply destabilizing.

With each creative action, we drill a small crack in a system of interconnected power that is all-pervasive, a form of economic radiation that respects neither state boundaries nor human life. Every crack in capitalism that we create with our bodies and our performances helps tear down a system that we all know is unjust but are all afraid that we won’t be able to change. We “Occupy Everywhere” because the effects of this radiation are everywhere. Like the Zapatistas: “Walking, we ask questions.” We ask at each space, “Must it be this way?” Then, like Occupy Wall Street: Dancing, we imagine alternatives.

While making these cracks in capitalism, we are opening up wounds — revealing the millions living without homes, without enough to eat, in fear of state violence, and under constant discrimination based on race, gender and ethnicity. They are wounds because we are using our bodies, blood and voices to map this injustice, replacing fear and isolation with joy and community.

This weekend’s actions are only the beginning. Every Friday afternoon, Occupiers will gather for “spring training” marches on Wall Street to prepare for a spring of mass mobilizations. As Saturday night’s violence showed, there is much to be enraged about. Yet channeling this rage into creative energy at the very sites of injustice can be the most powerful and evocative response. Even after Tuesday’s “speak out” against police brutality — at which African Americans, Muslim Americans and other community activists testified about living under constant violence, about having their loved ones killed by the police — joy and song still won the day. As we marched past the courthouse at 100 Centre Street, calling for Ray Kelly’s resignation, the crowd burst into a version of Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog”:

You ain’t nothing but a bad cop, lying all the time. 
You ain’t nothing but a bad cop, lying all the time. 
You ain’t never helped the people and you ain’t no friend of mine.

Next weekend, we will gather once again — uniting with unions, churches and community groups for a mass mobilization against police brutality, marching from Liberty Plaza to Union Square on Saturday at noon, and then pitching tents outside the United Nations to protest dirty power and environmental degradation at 5 p.m. This spring, the city will be filled with carnivals of rage and joy. See you in the streets.

Video by Natasha Singh.

• Russian police arrested nearly 100 people on Sunday for picketing Moscow’s TV tower over footage that accused the opposition of paying anti-government protesters.

• On Sunday, after more than 150 protesters carrying signs calling for nonviolence and the rule of law began to chant the slogan that has echoed throughout the Arab revolts — “The people want the fall of the regime” — uniformed officers and men in plain clothes beat them with sticks and began making arrests.

• Argentina’s truckers called an indefinite strike on Monday to demand higher pay rates, parking their rigs in protest just as exporters were counting on them to haul freshly harvested soybeans to port.

• Thirty Palestinian prisoners have joined the hunger strike of Hana Shalabi, who was hospitalized on Monday evening after consuming only water for 33 days.

• In Cuba, three dozen members of the Ladies in White opposition group were detained on Sunday before their weekly march to press the government to free prisoners jailed for politically motivated  crimes.

• George Clooney was arrested for civil disobedience in Washington on Friday alongside his father Nick and other  protesters after a demonstration outside the Sudanese Embassy aimed at drawing  attention to the country’s president, Omar al-Bashir, and his government for provoking a humanitarian crisis and blocking food and aid from entering the Nuba Mountains from South Sudan.

• Some 200 Moroccan women staged an angry protest Saturday outside parliament a week after the suicide of a 16-year-old girl who was forced to marry the man who raped her.

• The April 6 Youth Movement declared on Saturday the start to an open-ended sit-in in front of Parliament’s offices, in which the group will demand the release of detained member George Ramzy.

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.

Around 10 p.m., tents and tarps went up in the park, among them several tents held high in the air above the crowd. Defenses went up too, including yellow police tape marked “Occupy” and a similarly rebranded roll of orange netting—just like what police have used to surround and trap OWS marches before.

Occupiers use orange police netting as a defense against police.

But, around 10:30, more than a hundred police and Brookfield Properties private security poured into the park. They seemed intent on clearing people while minimizing arrest numbers, though dozens of Occupiers were beaten and arrested for holding their ground, and were taken away in police wagons and a repurposed city bus. Not until almost 45 minutes later did two ambulances arrive for the injured, including a woman who appeared to be suffering a seizure. At least two glass bottles were thrown and shattered near police.

Some Occupiers remained, but others set out on a march to Union Square, throwing bags full of trash into the street and chanting against the police and the state, with a few arrested in skirmishes along the way. The rest arrived at Union Square, holding up a yellow “Occupy Wall Street” banner on the square’s main steps, facing a line of several dozen police officers standing shoulder-to-shoulder. The crowd began to dissipate as the early morning wore on.

Familiar feelings, all over again: courage, awe, exuberance, rage, sadness, pain, fatigue. The city succeeded once again if its purpose was to keep the protesters’ attention on the police, rather than, for instance, on the financial institutions for which it continually assures support. The Occupiers succeeded if their purpose was to celebrate, reenact and make a blip in the media. What good either success does the world outside Lower Manhattan still remains to be seen, this spring and beyond.

My brother Larry would have been 57 today.

In the winter of 2001 he died on the streets. He had spent most of his life on the road — picking fruit, working seasonally cutting Christmas trees, but mostly hitchhiking or riding the rails by clambering into open boxcars before the railway police could spot him. He once told me a harrowing story of scrambling up into the narrow opening between two freight cars and finding a rickety place to stand as the train whipped down the line. Not only was it difficult holding on, he had to avoid getting his leg caught in the steel coupling between the cars. Mostly he succeeded, and when he didn’t, he was lucky enough to extract his foot in time to come away with only some bruises and not something worse.

When Larry was thirteen he and a couple friends were arrested for stealing a six-pack of beer. His friends got off, but Larry was rocketed into the juvenile justice system. He spent six weeks in a facility thirty miles from home and was never quite the same afterward. He graduated from high school and feverishly held on to his dream of drumming in a band, but his restlessness and disaffection drove him from place to place, and often into the mean teeth of a society that has little use for poor and homeless people. As one of Kurt Vonnegut’s characters in Slaughterhouse-Five says, “It’s a crime to be poor in America.” This is a truth Larry experienced for decades.

He was jailed for vagrancy numerous times and was often physically assaulted. In the 1980s he called me from a mental institution and asked me to get him out — all the drugs they were feeding him, he said, were messing up his head. I talked with the people there, who eventually released him. He came and spent some time with me and we visited a nonprofit that found jobs for poor and low-income people. I was put off by the unexpectedly harsh tone of the staffer with whom we met. I suppose it was some variation on “tough love,” but it struck me as unnecessarily shrill and condemning of someone the person had just met. Larry took off the next day. I’m one of eight siblings, and each of us over the years offered help, but often Larry’s justifiable wariness of the kind of help he experienced at the hands of the system kept him in motion — and on to the next arrest or physical altercation.

For years I wondered why I got involved in political activism. Much of this had to do with the charged atmosphere I experienced in graduate school when a number of powerful social movements were gathering momentum in the 1980s, including those working for a nuclear free future or peace and justice in Central America. But slowly I began to realize that this path was rooted most deeply in a profound poignancy and indignation I felt at the way Larry was treated in this world at every turn: the trauma of systemic disregard, disrespect and active harassment.

Larry taught me that everyone matters, and it was this primal lesson that consciously and unconsciously fueled a longing within for a world whose policies, structures and conditions reflected this most basic fact.

In 1993, after a decade of activism focused on foreign policy, I worked for several years with Religious Witness with Homeless People (RWWHP). This San Francisco coalition of 45 churches, synagogues and mosques, under the leadership of Sr. Bernie Galvin, sought to dismantle the city’s Matrix Program. In a city that at the time had 16,000 homeless people and only 1,400 shelter beds, Matrix criminalized sleeping and eating in public. Under this policy, the city police made innumerable arrests and issued tens of thousands of tickets that went unpaid (most homeless people couldn’t afford the $78.00 fine) that increasingly risked being converted into jail time.

RWWHP mounted a nonviolent direct action campaign aimed at alerting, educating, winning, and mobilizing the populace and policy-makers for change through protests, fasts and lobbying. We organized a series of sleep-ins in the city’s parks, including Union Square (at the heart of the city’s fashionable downtown shopping district) and Golden Gate Park when, usually after the late local news signed off for the night, a phalanx of baton-wielding police officers would file in, roust us from our sleeping bags, and haul us off to jail.

We also challenged the ordinance that prohibited eating in public (members of “Food Not Bombs” and other groups had been arrested ladling out soup to hungry people on the street) by organizing a banquet for 800 homeless women and men in the space considered most off-limits by the powers that be: Civic Center Plaza in front of San Francisco’s ornate City Hall. A well-planned logistical operation delivered to the site dozens of tables, chairs, linen tablecloths, china, silverware, cut flowers, and many succulent dinner courses. Three choirs provided music. Both concrete and symbolic, this meal was a momentary tableau of the world we longed for: where everyone sits down together, eats together, relaxes together, enjoys one another’s company — while disregarding and undoing the regulations designed to separate and diminish.

Faced with the dilemma that this well-publicized feast posed, the police did not swoop down and arrest people from religious communities across the city. Front-page coverage of this event in the local press accelerated the campaign. Eventually RWWHP succeeded in ending the Matrix program, symbolized by the then-district attorney shredding thousands of tickets.

This victory did not mean the end of RWWHP’s work. Versions of Matrix have crept up over the past 15 years, and activists have had to mount the ramparts innumerable times in San Francisco and also across the country. This vital tradition of struggling to end the ongoing attack on homeless human beings is one of the many important tributaries flowing into the river that is the Occupy movement as it readies to renew its work for economic equality.

After Larry died, there was a procession for him organized by the local Catholic Worker and homeless activists. The police tried to prevent us from going into the street, but there was something both gentle and firm in the crowd that changed the atmosphere, a sense of reverence for everyone everywhere as we washed into the streets that Larry loved, even though this was one of the places where he was badgered and arrested and sometimes prevented from occupying. As we moved in a determined silence, the stance of the police shifted. They began to stop traffic so we could move unimpeded through the intersections and on through the downtown area, arriving finally at City Hall, where a few people spoke, imploring the city to do more for those without homes.

Today, I mark Larry’s birthday by remembering his life and death and spirit. His ongoing presence stirs a longing for a time and place where the infinite worth of each one of us is taken for granted — and stokes a willingness to take action to help bring all of us a bit closer to that unending banquet.

I’ve often heard it stated flatly at Occupy Wall Street meetings, sometimes with a touch of exasperation, that “occupation is just a tactic.” This can be a hard idea to come to terms with in a movement called “Occupy.” But, to get technical about it, “nonviolent occupation” is #173 on Gene Sharp’s 198 Methods of Nonviolent Action, just before “establishing new social patterns.” As the + Brigades and the Singing Foreclosure Auction Blockades have been showing with aplomb, a whole litany of interesting tactics are available to the movement beyond the now-familiar one of occupying space.

On Wednesday, members of the group Occupy Faith unfurled their first “Parable of an Immoral Budget” in an action that combined a “pray-in” (Sharp’s #167) with “nonviolent obstruction” (Sharp’s #172).

Outside of Governor Andrew Cuomo’s office in midtown Manhattan, Christian, Jewish and Muslim clergy used the human microphone to decry homelessness. They called for higher taxes on rich corporations, the closing of tax loopholes and respect among decision makers for the value of human life. Next, as this video shows, Michael Ellick of Judson Church led protestors across the street. (It is illegal to protest directly outside the Governor’s office.) At that point, lay and ordained people obstructed the building’s entrance with cots symbolizing the basic right to shelter, which for so many is not being met. They sang and prayed over their neatly-made beds before the police took them away in handcuffs. Meanwhile, a crowd gathered on the street to watch and office workers peered out.

There are seeds of something big in Occupy Wall Street’s early spring actions. To be sure, occupying space can be a useful method. It gives protestors public visibility and a central location from which to plan other actions. In my view, however, a push to retake public spaces, while perhaps offering some benefits, carries a surplus of risks in the form of confrontational showdowns with police, negative media attention and the loss of public sympathy. If there is a need for outdoor places where people could wander in, pick up some materials, talk to protesters and begin to get involved, then weekly Sunday afternoon assemblies in Central Park, or regular gatherings in parks around the country, would more than meet that need without the tents or the threat of arrests.

Rather than more encampments, what now seems to be needed most are purposeful actions, like Wednesday’s pray-in, that have a well-researched message and the capacity to recruit and retain newcomers into organized units. Actions like Occupy Faith’s “Parable” cost the movement little, while making a compelling moral argument. Faith leaders — whose dress added to their credibility — presented clear policy demands and used symbols and rhetoric onlookers could easily understand.

Let me offer a cautionary tale from South Africa to illustrate my point. In the drought-stricken Eastern Cape in 1921, a few thousand Xhosa-speaking Christians occupied land in expectation of deliverance. They were called the “Israelites” because they particularly identified with the Old Testament. After their annual Passover gathering, they refused to leave the site. Instead, they built a new state there reflective of their beliefs. Their leader was Enoch Mgijima, a preacher recently excommunicated from the U.S.-based Church of God and Saints of Christ for refusing to renounce his prophetic visions. In what were desperate times for black South Africans, Mgijima’s breakaway group found peace and hope in their encampment. They could escape punishing laws and look forward to the apocalypse that would be the prelude to a wholesale restoration of society.

The Israelites toiled to become self-sufficient. They built sturdy brick structures. They had their own craftsmen and builders. They organized a nursing brigade, a police force, and a judiciary. According to historian Robert R. Edgar, “Church elders governed village life with a court to try people for religious violations.” Children went to a special Bible school. Members prayed together four times a day and sang hymns such as Psalm 137: “By the rivers of Babylon … We cannot sing the Lord’s song in a strange land.” In this place, the poor became rich and the marginalized sanctified. Simultaneously, the Israelites withheld taxes and refused to heed government orders. Convinced that the end of the world was coming and it was the only way they would be saved, they clung to what had become their sacred ground.

Several factors contributed to the violence that followed. A fast-growing black labor movement was throwing the state’s control into question. Editorialists urged the government to make an example of this lunatic fringe by air-bombing the encampment, if necessary, to show that flouting the government’s rules would not tolerated. For their part, the Israelites declared they were following God’s law. Both sides dug in. At his wit’s end, a white official asked Mgijima to provide the names of all the occupiers. The preacher refused, saying, “Our names are written in God’s book.” Africans had recently been stripped of major land rights. Only a few Africans could vote. Still, government supporters saw the Israelites not as victims of precariousness and exclusion, but the embodiment of all that was wrong with the “native mind.” Unable to see the other side, the state felt compelled to use force.

After several failed attempts at negotiation, including one attempt by African clergy, armed troops were deployed. Israelite men shielded their women and children. After a standoff subsequently reported on in conflicting accounts, government forces killed at least 183 Israelites by machine gun fire. Another hundred were wounded. All the casualties were on the Israelite side, except for one policeman who received a stab wound. The group’s prophet-leader was arrested and the occupiers were evicted.

The end of the physical violence did not quell the psychological frustrations that motivated this movement, though. A prominent white politician admitted that a new “spirit” had arisen in the people. “By ignoring that spirit they would not kill it; they would merely strengthen it,” said National Party leader J.B.M. Hertzog. “The native had come to a consciousness of independence … to a consciousness of himself that no authority would ever be able to suppress.” Moreover, like other religious movements, the “Bulhoek Massacre” had powerful aftereffects. When weighing matters of tactics, African National Congress leaders in future generations remembered the state’s brutal reaction to poorly-armed men praying to be free. They took that lesson to heart and looked to other tactics.

Occupy is a movement about an idea — valuing people over profits — not any one place. By keeping this vision in view, by maximizing pressure on lawmakers standing in the way of a society that puts people over profits, and by minimizing the blows dealt to the movement, Occupy can win meaningful gains. As Judith Butler writes in the recent issue of the movement journal Tidal, Occupy can advance episodically and retain the trans-issue coherence that has distinguished it from other movements. By appearing here and there, by shedding light on the student debt crisis one week and mass incarceration the next, Occupy can continue to question the legitimacy of the existing social and governmental order. It can keep pressing forward with the claim that today’s urgent social ills are connected at the nodes where money corrupts democracy, human life is violated and greed goes unchecked. And, it can keep awakening people’s imaginations by insisting that equality and freedom are not outlandish formulations but possible states of being.

All of this can be attempted without claiming spaces at a high cost to the movement.

If peaceful resisters do manage to occupy new public spaces this spring, and if their legal rights to assembly are violated by government repression, over-reaction by the state may give Americans the distinct impression that their government relies on violence to silence dissent. Perhaps some spectators will feel an increased sympathy with the movement. However, the O-tactic could easily backfire, especially if protesters get into more skirmishes with the police and the movement begins to look like a smattering of pointless street battles. I’m not the first to make this point. But the point is worth repeating. The stakes are high. There are at least 197 other methods of nonviolent resistance to choose from. Why look back to September? It’s time for Occupy to spring forward.

• As part of a campaign to fight violence against women, pictures of victims were hung on walls in the Cerro Gordo neighborhood of Ecatepec, outside Mexico City on Wednesday.

• Tens of thousands of South Africans marched peacefully through their main cities Wednesday to demand the governing African National Congress do more for the poor.

• Hundreds of native Ecuadorans began a cross-country march Thursday to protest policies by President Rafael Correa they say will result in more mining in the Amazon region and threaten the environment and their way of life.

• Hundreds of Saudi women took part in a protest against discrimination and mismanagement at the King Khalid University, in Abha, on Wednesday. At least 50 women were reportedly injured when security forces and religious police moved in to break it up.

• South Korean female workers performed in penguin costumes in Seoul on Wednesday to protest growth in temporary employment.

• Thousands of Taiwanese farmers took to the streets Thursday, staging the nation’s biggest demonstration in years against the government’s plan to allow U.S. beef imports.

• With elaborate make-up depicting bodies bruised, bleeding and burned by acid, four FEMEN activists were arrested in Istanbul on Wednesday to protest domestic violence in Turkey.

On February 29, 70 actions were held across the country to mark the  “Shut Down the Corporations” day of action—or #F29. Organizers hoped the day would help reinvigorate the Occupy movement’s national profile, recapture the public’s imagination and media’s attention. And they had a secret weapon: the + Brigades.

The arrest of Monica Hunken in New York City on February 29. Photo by Griffin Lots, for Rolling Stone.

Debuting at yesterday’s “Shut Down the Corporations” action, the + Brigades is a new and growing part of Occupy Wall Street intent on supplementing upcoming protest actions with life-affirming energy, color, dance, song and costumes. A squad of dancing clowns led a rainy day of protest in Midtown Manhattan, targeting the offices of Bank of America, Pfizer and Koch Industries.

At the initial + Brigades meeting a couple weeks ago, there were cross-dressing, rollicking games, buffoonery, strategizing and one thoroughly orange man. Andy Bichlbaum of The Yes Men presented a slide show that had the 40 of us transfixed with images of Civil Rights marchers, Chilean students paint-bombing police and Abbie Hoffman pretending to burn a puppy in a bid to set America’s wartime conscience alight. Occupy organizers cheered as images of themselves appeared among those of others. Afterwards, the brainstorming began about how to drastically expand the movement’s repertoire in the streets.

The meeting raised questions for me about what happens when people working toward changing their society tell stories about the past. What role, I began to wonder, does the creative interweaving of past and present play in supporting radical thought?  The history of West Central Africa’s Antonian movement, active mainly between 1704 and 1706, suggests that what historian Peter Burke has called “social memory” might be an especially valuable supplement for people resisting oppression and also seeking strength and inspiration.

The Antonian movement, like Occupy Wall Street, fought against unchecked greed—to limit the power of self-serving local elites, to end two generations of civil war and to deal with the problem of displaced people exiled from their homes. Affiliates briefly occupied the abandoned capital of San Salvador (Mbanza Kongo), which was a place of great symbolic importance. San Salvador had been the center of the once prosperous and stable Kongo Kingdom. After claiming that legendary spot, the Antonians dispatched messengers to enlist more people into the movement.

"Crucifix: Saint Anthony of Padua," 18th century Angola/Democratic Republic of Congo; Kongo. Brass. From the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Their leader was a young woman named Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita, trained as a nganga marinda—a healer and a medium. Beatriz had already had several visions when she became seriously ill in 1704. When she recovered, this bearded woman claimed to be possessed by the spirit of Saint Anthony. As his medium, she declared that Jesus was Kongolese and that Mary had been born a slave into a noble Kongolese family. (Kongo’s rulers, noble families and Kikongo-speaking commoners had practiced a syncretic Catholicism for over two hundred years, starting with the king’s baptism in 1491, which followed the arrival of the Portuguese at the mouth of the Congo River in 1483.)

Beatriz’s tactics were diverse but comprehensible to ordinary Kikongo speakers accustomed to asking advice of healers when facing grave personal and social afflictions. Beatriz’s anti-war movement involved purification, predictions about the obliteration of whole communities on a designated day and promises that she could cure sexual infertility. Although she came from a relatively wealthy home, her followers were poor people impoverished by the demands of the nobility, who pressured them to fund their wars. The youth flocked to her. Her “Little Anthonies” told people to abandon baptism and not to carry crosses. She instructed supporters to carry cast-metal statues of Saint Anthony instead. Beatriz also burned the cross, calling it the “instrument of Christ’s death.” Unlike the healers who worked for pay, though, she healed for the common good. And, as the avatar of Saint Anthony, Beatriz called on warring rulers to let Saint Anthony decide who should govern. Like those who took hold of Zuccotti Park last September, the Antonians accused the very wealthy of failing to uphold their end of the bargain—namely sharing their polity’s wealth and behaving honorably.

The fullest account of Beatriz’s life can be found in John K. Thornton’s The Kongolese Saint Anthony: Dona Kimpa Vita and the Antonian Movement, 1684-1706. Using dairies of Italian Capuchin monks, oral accounts of Kongolese history compiled by a French missionary and the insights of anthropologists, Thornton shows that Kongolese people developed interpretations of Christian liturgy that emphasized intentions over deeds and motives over behaviors. Put differently, the Antonian movement linked social evolution and self-evolution.

Beatriz’s movement ended—or so it seemed—when she was burned at the stake as a heretic in 1706 and many of her followers were captured and shipped across the Atlantic as slaves. Yet it had unpredictable aftereffects. Primary forms of resistance planted the seeds of secondary forms of resistance. During moments of political ferment, people who channel memories of distant ancestors or restate the teachings of newfound heroes, engage in what might look like acts of individual valor but are also acts of creative reconstruction which can tap into deep wells of meaning.

It is possible that the same ideas that animated the Antonian movement in the Kongo fired the imaginations of the group of 20 Kikongo speakers who gathered near the Stono River in South Carolina in 1739 and quickly assembled a hundred-strong posse. During the Stono Rebellion, Kongolese Catholics killed slave owners and burned farms, while sparing the life of one master with a reputation for kind treatment. Historians do not know for certain, but it seems likely that they sang songs reminiscent of Beatriz’s interpretation of the Salve Regina prayer.

The past more visibly supplemented the present in Saint Domingue in 1791, when Kikongo-speaking field hands assembled into a Kongolese “nation” and participated in the Haitian Revolution. Unlike that two-tiered revolution’s leaders, they fought for what we would today call structural change. They hoped for the creation of an equitable, village-like society, as opposed to merely replacing a white planter class with a black and mixed-race planter class.  We know that they sang about protection, deliverance and salvation using the word “kanga,” a key term for the Antonians, which spoke to their belief that their intentions would ensure their salvation and protection.

How does this relate to Occupy Wall Street? Today, organizers, strategists and activists are also assembling a mixed pastiche. The + Brigades, Occupy Faith, the Messaging Cluster and many other groups in the movement are consciously and unconsciously reworking words, images, gestures, melodies, ideas, stories and symbols pulled from the eddies of memory. What was before safely lodged in family stories and organizational legacies now bobs along in fast-moving discussions, drafts, proposals and practices. Today’s radicals are borrowing materials from the past in order make apparent to others and themselves the underlying causes of poverty, violence and corruption. Like the Antonians, who held up the ideal of harmony and reconciliation as an alternative to avarice and witchcraft, Occupy Wall Street is working to draw a cohesive constellation between the problems of various communities and the evils of a society in which personal greed is allowed to trump the duty of all people to act responsibly to each other.

Should the + Brigades include a +Archives Brigade or a +History Brigade? That might miss the point: we are already memory-makers—and never more so than in a moment like this one in which people are refusing to accept the present, fashioning heterogeneous memorials to the past and gathering into groups with the capacity to articulate bold expectations of the future. The past now supplements the present as people compose new songs about freedom, justice and human rights. If Occupy Wall Street “shall overcome,” it will partly be because the past still rises up within the present.

With the authorities in the Siberian city of Barnaul refusing to permit opposition protests since December 10, activists have deployed a creative tactic to voice their opposition to the recent disputed parliamentary elections.

According to the Guardian, rather than take to the streets themselves, and risk arrest or worse, they set up a public display of:

dozens of small dolls – teddy bears, Lego men, South Park figurines – arranged to mimic a protest, complete with signs reading: “I’m for clean elections” and “A thief should sit in jail, not in the Kremlin”.

This unorthodox action threw the police for a loop, who asked prosecutors to investigate its legality. As protest organizer Lyudmila Alexandrova said:

They tried to tell us our event was illegal – they even said that to put toys in the snow, we had to rent it from the city authorities.

It is this kind of overreaction that organizers should hope for. By revealing so clearly the absurdity of the state’s attempt to crackdown on dissent, while getting a laugh in process, actions like these will likely only galvanize the opposition.

To see more photos of the display, click here.