ACTA, or the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, has united hundreds of thousands of people around the world in protest, both on the Internet and in the streets. Across Europe, activists in more than 20 countries called for a day of action on February 11, demanding that this treaty—which would set new international standards for intellectual property controls—not be ratified by the European Parliament.

Although the numbers in the streets on Saturday were larger than some past protests against ACTA, poor weather meant that there were fewer than organizers hoped. 300,000 people were expected to take part throughout Europe, but the total number was probably only a third of that—including just 8,000 people here in Romania. The protests also failed arouse much interest in the media. The next day of action has been scheduled for the 25th of February, which may be enough time for more people to become informed about the issue and for the weather to clear up. Organizers, in any case, are confident that the treaty will not pass, that they will not be forced to give up their virtual freedom.

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The acrid fumes of tear-gas hung in the air as a young woman, her face swathed in black fabric, readied to heave a newspaper box through the plate-glass window of the Nike Store.

It was the afternoon of November 30, 1999 and the “Battle of Seattle” was on. Tens of thousands of people had traveled from across the globe to the Northwest United States to protest the World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference, which was on track to reinforce the injustice of corporate globalization and the perils it posed to indigenous societies, labor standards, human rights, civil liberties and the environment.

I had been asked by Global Exchange (a San Francisco-based organization that has long been a proponent of fair trade) to join in as a peacekeeper during the multi-day protest. Moving through the increasingly chaotic streets, I spotted the woman with her conscripted newspaper box and, just before she hoisted it through the glass, I trotted over and asked her what she was doing.

For the next half-hour, we had a heart-to-heart.

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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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• Just after the National Park Service’s noon deadline Monday, by which protesters in Washington’s two Occupy D.C. camps were required to decamp, protesters fought back by stringing up a giant blue tarp in the middle of McPherson Square, which they called the “tent of dreams.”

• Belgium’s first general strike in almost two decades brought parts of the country to a halt on Monday in an anti-austerity protest aimed at the new government and at EU leaders meeting in Brussels.

• Hundreds of Romanians protested on Saturday against a plan to set up Europe’s biggest open-cast gold mine in a small Carpathian town, joining a wave of anti-government rallies.

• Three topless Ukrainian protesters were detained Saturday while trying to break into an invitation-only gathering of international CEOs and political leaders to call attention to the needs of the world’s poor.

• Thousands of cars flying white ribbons or balloons circled central Moscow on Sunday in a show of protest against Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

• Argentina’s powerful truck drivers’ union blocked postal distribution centers in several cities on Monday to protest the firing of 200 workers.

• About 200 Indonesian Christians held a prayer vigil in Jakarta on Sunday urging President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono to re-open their church and stop intimidation by Muslim hardliners.

• Last Sunday, dozens of Detroit’s undertakers drove a motorcade of hearses through the city’s most violent neighborhoods to protest the high murder rate.

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 »

A couple weeks ago, a group of activists working with Rainforest Action Network’s Energy and Finance campaign hit the streets of San Francisco to bring a little truth about Bank of America’s misdeeds to its customers—not in the lobbies of the bank’s local branches, but at its ATMs throughout the city.

The group designed special non-adhesive stickers that looked exactly like Bank of America’s ATM screen, but with a few important differences, that were then put on all 85 of the bank’s ATMs in San Francisco.

Rather that offering the standard options, the sticker’s new menu options allowed customers to select whether they wanted their money to be invested in coal-fired power plants, foreclosures on homes, bankrolling climate change or padding executive bonuses. At the bottom, there was also a button that said, “Stop doing business with Bank of America until they start behaving responsibly,” and offered the URL of a new blog, Bankrupting America, that is targeting the bank.

Given the positive response to the action, RAN online organizer Mike Gaworecki wrote on The Understory that they have now “made the design available as a high-res PDF. It’s available here. We ARE NOT suggesting you do anything with it.”

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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For too many expatriate Africans living in the West, the phrase Occupied Nigeria raises scary images of U.S. or NATO warships bearing down in AFRICOM-commando fashion, reestablishing Eurocentric hegemony over the worlds’ fifth largest supplier of crude oil. Before these early days of 2012, we had barely heard news of the spreading Occupy hashtag on the continent that helped re-popularize mass nonviolent civilian resistance around the world last year. Now #Occupy Nigeria in just two short weeks has mobilized thousands in cities across the diverse West African country, along with support demonstrations (including some of those ex-pats) in London, Los Angeles, New Jersey, and elsewhere. The widespread strike by Nigerian oil workers continues to grow, as calls for an end to economic and political corruption gain momentum.

The short-term issue which birthed the network now being called Occupy Nigeria was the hastily-announced January 1, 2012 end of the federal fuel subsidies which had enabled average Nigerians to afford gas pumped from oil reserves on their own land. This resulted in an overnight 120 percent price increase, and an outburst of fury at decades of governmental collusion with the multi-billion dollar oil industry. The initial demands of the movement—to simply return to the status quo before 2012—were quickly followed up with calls for an end to the nepotism of politicians and an improvement in infrastructure. By the end of the first week of local protests, Nigerian police had killed at least ten activists, and a call went out for a nationwide, indefinite strike which would halt the Nigerian economy. Many mainstream professional associations joined the call, including the Nigerian Labour Congress and the Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association. Ongoing and intensified shut-downs promise to paralyze international oil supplies.

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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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Occupy Wall Street's "Declaration Flowchart" by Rachel Schragis. Click to see an enlarged version.

The question of demands has been contested ever since Occupy Wall Street began last September. Do the Occupiers have any? Should they? Does making demands confer undeserved legitimacy on the powers that be? The word “demand” can mean something different for every ear that hears it. It may be clarifying, therefore, to make a distinction between two different kinds of demands a movement might make, transactional and transformational.

Transactional goals are immediate and concrete achievements that can be won relatively rapidly: saving a home, or reaching agreements with banks about certain reforms. They are changes that take place in the here and now, benchmarks, successes that can propel a movement forward, unifying and sustaining the involvement of participants. Transformational demands, on the other hand, are longer-term, aspirational and transcendent.

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