Volunteers for InterOccupy.org meet at the Occupied Office in New York City. Photo by the author.

As Occupy camps spread around Southern California in early October, a small group of occupiers located at City Hall in Los Angeles reflected on our experiences setting up a camp and our first assemblies. “It’d be awesome to see what they do in San Diego,” I remember saying, sitting in the comfort of Occupy LA’s People’s Library. “Do you think the cops will even let them put down tents?”

The librarian replied, “We should help them. We should be there so that their first GA isn’t as bad as ours was.” But, as we would soon learn, both the challenges and the potential of coordinating Occupy assemblies would be far greater than that.

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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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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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As it moves into a new year, and an election year no less, the Occupy movement will likely be claimed by more and more hopefuls in the mainstream trying to benefit from it, and to sanitize it in the process. I guess that’s why I’ve found myself writing a lot lately about the movement’s radical roots, radical ambitions, and radical tactics—to remind us that if it had played by the rules some now want it to play by, it wouldn’t have gotten where it is in the first place.

For the occasion of a recent panel discussion at Columbia Law School on Occupy Wall Street and the First Amendment, I wrote this essay, subsequently published on the website of Harper’s Magazine. It argues that one should not take the movement’s appeals to the Bill of Rights too literally in legal terms, and that its tactics and aims have always been infused with an impulse more revolutionary than the law could ever accommodate. The whole discussion at Columbia, which also included WNV contributor and legal scholar Jeremy Kessler, can now be watched here:

Following that, The Nation published my essay “Thank You, Anarchists,” which explores some of what anarchist thought has contributed to the movement and why it deserves to be taken more seriously than it often is by those on the outside:

As assemblies enter our own politics through the Occupy movement, we should take care to recognize what they’re not and will never be. Even more important, though, is what they’ve already done. They’ve reminded us that politics is not a matter of choosing among what we’re offered but of fighting for what we and others actually need, not to mention what we hope for. For this, in large part, we have the anarchists to thank.

Co-opt that.

A welcome mat at Occupy Wall Street's Liberty Plaza on September 21, 2011.

Sometimes people ask me to tell the Occupy movement it should do this or that. It’s tough to know what to say, since the movement doesn’t respond all that well to advice from the outside. That’s because it’s a participatory, relationship-based community. No one person really is in control, so it’s not like I can just pass some nugget of wisdom on to the secret leader. (Believe me, I’ve tried.) If you want a certain idea to get internalized in the movement, the best advice I can give is to participate in it. Join relevant committees, be patient, and try to persuade people there. Have fun. But be warned: you’ll probably change your mind in the process.

Also, there is a lot more room now (in “Phase II”) for active collaboration between the movement and existing organizations. See my post on the Occupy Our Homes action for an example of this. So another means of having your way with Occupy is to come to the table (or, really, the working-group circle) with some resource or activity to offer through an existing organization. Chances are, unless they smell corruption, the occupiers will be happy to back it up. And, of course, the more you hang out with them, and listen to their ideas, the more invested they’ll be in doing so.

Lastly, you can always just start your own Occupy based on the idea you have. After all, “Occupy Everything.” Get a group of people together, get them talking about the idea, and listen to what they have to say. Start taking action. See where it goes. No matter what, don’t sit around and wait for others, whether in the movement or in power, to do for you what you think is right. If Occupy means anything, it means the power is already yours, and it’s up to you to occupy it.

All this is actually quite simple, though considering the upside-down way we’re used to the world working, it can seem hard to grasp.

A tree trunk in Athens' Syntagma Square graced by the Occupy movement's motto.

From a glance at a recent front page of The New York Times, you might guess that a political meeting in Athens this week would be full of talk about the resigning prime minister, bailout deals, and the Euro. The land that gave birth to European civilization now seems on the brink of sinking the whole continent’s economy. But, among those gathered on Monday in a basement in the neighborhood of Exarcheia—a kind of Haight-Ashbury for Greek anarchists—the agenda was completely different. They talked instead about parks, public kitchens, and barter bazaars. They even seemed pretty hopeful.

The lack of concern for political figureheads, in retrospect, was to be expected. Greek anarchists see no more reason to care about whether George Papandreou goes or stays than those at Occupy Wall Street are agonizing over Herman Cain’s sexual foibles. They have another kind of politics in mind.

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Occupy Oakland’s first attempt at a general strike began with press coverage that had supporters high-fiving across the country. Then came the hangover. Once again we watched as angry black bloc anarchists hijacked the media message. From the powerful pictures of protesters standing atop cargo vans, headlines of a shut down port and accounts of up to 10,000 peaceful marchers—including a children’s brigade of marching toddlers—we went to scenes of fire and chaos in the streets.

What is to be done? The story of black bloc anarchists swooping in like vultures to feed off the work and effort of peaceful activists, steal the media spotlight with angry displays and then disappear has passed the point of being tiresome. How can we use peer pressure to wage nonviolence within the movement? How can we be pro-active and take what we know about defusing anger with individuals and apply it to large out-of-control groups?

As a starting point, watch this video footage (above) of the attempted dialogue between volunteer peace keepers and rock tossing “enthusiasts” in Oakland.

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Occupy Wall Street marchers watch from the pedestrian walkway as hundreds of their comrades take to the roadway of the Brooklyn Bridge on October 1.

Even as Occupy Wall Street shapes the public conversation about high finance, political corruption, and the distribution of wealth, it has also raised anew questions about how resistance movements in general should operate. I want to consider one of the matters that I’ve thought about a lot over the past month while watching the occupation and its means of making its presence felt on the streets of New York and in the media.

“Diversity of tactics,” in the context of political protests, is often treated as essentially a byword for condoning acts of violence. The phrase comes by this honestly; it emerged about a decade ago at the height of the global justice movement, especially between the 1999 demonstrations that shut down a WTO meeting in Seattle and those two years later in Quebec. While all nonviolent movements worth their salt will inevitably rely on a variety of tactics—for instance, Gene Sharp’s list of 198 of them—using the word “diversity” was a kind of attempted détente between those committed to staying nonviolent and those who weren’t.

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By Adam Roberts.

When, in July, Adbusters called for an occupation of Wall Street starting on September 17, it asked, “What is our one demand?” Online discussions began about what that might be, in the hopes that it could be settled ahead of time, and Adbusters even suggested a few of its own, like calling for a new anti-corruption commission (a la Anna Hazare’s controversial proposal in India) or the revocation of corporate personhood. There has also been talk about a Tobin tax, or the reinstatement of the Glass-Steagall Act, or other wonky policy proposals.

After almost two weeks of occupation in renamed Liberty Plaza, the protesters have yet to settle on any one demand, or even on the idea that they want one. (This doesn’t mean it isn’t rather obvious why a bunch of angry Americans would be making a fuss at the exact center of their country’s concentrated wealth and reckless corruption.) Still, their evening General Assembly meetings—which are devoted to big-picture items like demands—have been busy. The Assembly has so far approved two significant documents about what it stands for, documents that are indicative of what the experience of the occupation is doing to those taking part. Many who came with a particular demand in mind, even, are changing how they think about what politics, and political activism, can look like.

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