Sign held up in New York's Bryant Park on May 1. By bdogmac, via Flickr.

The fallout from May Day can be felt in every sector of Occupy Wall Street. Some people say it was one of the greatest days since the movement began and are excited for what comes next. Others left with a sour taste in their mouths, whether by the lack of aggressive actions, or by the police state erected in Lower Manhattan, or by simply being worn down from overwork. In some cases, relationships with one another have strained and frayed. Having helped see the project through from conception to reality, my own feelings are mixed. I’m burnt out, taking a break to get perspective, and scared for what might come next. But I also saw May Day as a project that fulfilled the main objectives we had for it and meanwhile created a model for how to organize long-term projects in the future.

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May Day flowchart by Rachel Schragis. Click for larger, legible version.

On May Day, Occupy Wall Street is supporting calls for a general strike. This in itself involves a lot of no’s: no work, no school, no housework, no banking, no shopping. To participate in the strike means withdrawing our consent from an oppressive system by refusing to make our individual contributions to economic production and weakening the dominance of capitalist exploitation. But what do we say “yes” to on May Day? What is the alternative to obtaining our basic needs for life — such as food, clothing, shelter, health, education and fun — if we no longer wish to rely on institutions like Monsanto, Pfizer, Harvard University, LiveNation and the U.S. government to provide them?

Enter: mutual aid.

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From StrikeEverywhere.net's "Efforts of the General Strike Public Redecoration Committee."

“So are we in solidarity with each other, or are we united?”

This question came up yet again on Monday night, at the final coalition meeting for May Day that included people from organized labor, immigrants’ groups and Occupy Wall Street. It came in the midst of a debate about whether or not we should designate separate zones for various coalition partners during our joint evening march. Trying to mash everyone into one giant group might create a sense of unity, but then the groups’ individual needs might not be met. Occupiers whispered to each other about how the lack of a defined OWS zone would mean the unions would end up marshalling our contingent. In the end, everyone agreed that separate zones were most appropriate; true solidarity with one another meant recognizing our diverse methods of organizing and tactics for resistance.

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The "Raging Bull" in New York's Financial District being barricaded on the first day of Occupy Wall Street. By David Shankbone, via Flickr.

On March 24, after yet another wave of violence against the Occupy movement, Occupy Wall Street and allies staged a march through Lower Manhattan, targeting both New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly specifically and the police in general. We demanded the resignation of Ray Kelly because of his involvement with a sustained campaign of violence against Occupy, surveillance of Muslim communities and widespread corruption. But it is our belief that any coherent analysis of poverty in this country must also critique the institution of the police as a whole. Regardless of your position on police officers as individuals, the existence of an armed paramilitary organization at the disposal of the state — and therefore the corporations and wealthy elites the state is beholden to — should be incompatible with any work related to economic or social justice. The often-stated idea that “the police are the 99 percent too” is an erasure of the open war that the state has waged against the poor and people of color in this country for hundreds of years.

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A recent Occupy Wall Street meeting being facilitated by an organizer in a tiger suit.

For those closely involved in Occupy Wall Street, it seems fitting that the words “take me to your leader” are conventionally said by an alien; they’re about that hard to process, and that weird. Yet one hears this sort of thing a lot. It remains a common refrain among sympathetic well-wishers outside the movement that leaders in the traditional King-Gandhi-Chavez mold are necessary for civil resistance movements, or even that they’re inevitable. But within OWS, leaderlessness — or horizontality, or, as it is sometimes said, being “leader-full” — is non-negotiable. It’s at the very core of why many people in Occupy find the movement so revolutionary, and so empowering, and so right. This doesn’t mean, however, that it’s clear how exactly one is expected to behave in a leaderless movement. What does truly leaderless leadership look like?

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

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

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

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

The text approved by the GA is as follows:

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

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

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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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