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.

She shared her anguish at the violence of Indonesian sweatshops that produced Nike shoes. In the light of that injustice, smashing a window counted as nothing. In fact, from her perspective, it was a good thing—it would directly identify the company as a human rights violator and would challenge business as usual. Most of all, it would help panic the powers that be into changing things in the face of this growing unrest.

It has been over a dozen years so I don’t remember verbatim everything I shared with my impromptu conversation partner, but it was something like this.

I let her know that the two of us were in agreement about this injustice and that it must be challenged and stopped. This is why I had traveled to Seattle—and why, for 15 years, I had been part of movements working for justice. To me, though, there was a better way than property destruction to achieve this goal—and the 70,000 people marching that week in Seattle were illustrating it.

Gathered from around the planet, they were dramatizing a growing movement for change using nonviolent people power. These thousands were alerting and educating the public in a way, from my perspective, that violent action would not. Violent action will not panic the power-holders but it will push away the general populace. Power-holders, in fact, love it, because it gives them an excuse to delegitimize and destroy movements. In the end, social change depends not on creating the sense of chaos and social disorder, but on mobilizing the populace to remove its support for such injustice and to exercise people-power for change.

As we talked, she put down the box. She did not hurl it through the window and eventually she melted back into the crowd. Then, when I went off to engage another person poised to hurl a different newspaper box through a window further down the block, someone else scooped up the first one and pitched it through the window.

Bandana-clad activists (estimated at only 100 to 200 people) managed to break enough windows and spray-paint enough buildings to dislodge the primary focus from the police rampage in the morning to the image of marauding anonymous activists wreaking chaos throughout downtown Seattle in the afternoon.

The criminal behavior of the police—in which thousands of peaceful protesters, sitting in the streets outside the convention hall where we engaged in nonviolent civil disobedience, were shot indiscriminately at close range by rubber bullets and blinded for a time by relentless waves of tear-gas (for which the City of Seattle years later paid out financial settlements to some protesters)—exposed the violence that the state will inflict to protect injustice. Now, however, this narrative had to share the stage with a competing one. Hence the frame that ultimately prevailed: “The Battle of Seattle.” After all, it takes two sides to make a skirmish.

In Seattle, an ambiguity was built into the action itself. We were told at a pre-action gathering the night before that the organizers had just decided that the nonviolence guidelines would be in force only until 2:00 p.m., after which they would not apply. And almost to the minute, this is what transpired: the window smashing, the spray-painting, and the clashes with the police began like clockwork in the early afternoon.

The WTO protest was a watershed event, which was immediately noticed by the press. “Protest’s power to alter public awareness,” read the December 3 headline of the San Jose Mercury News, while the December 5 edition of the Los Angeles Times declared, “WTO is Humbled, Changed Forever by Outside Forces.” It definitively put the hazards of globalization on the social radar screen.

This success was due predominantly, from my point of view, to the nonviolent and creative people power of the mobilization and not to the attention-getting property destruction of a handful of activists. In fact, had the police not engaged in their even more media-genic violence (made all the more glaring by the fact that it was launched, not as a reaction to protest violence, but as a first-strike against peaceful demonstrators), the WTO protest would have likely been assessed very differently.

Unfortunately, though, the wrong lessons have often been drawn from the Seattle mobilization. In the anti-globalization and other movements since then, Seattle has often inspired strategies that provide ample wiggle room on property destruction and even what amounts to street-fighting, enshrined in the now famous “diversity of tactics” principle.

Which brings us to the conversation we are having in 2012 about violence and nonviolence in the Occupy movement.

In sorting out the two tendencies at the heart of the present discussion—“nonviolent people power” and “diversity of tactics”—it is helpful to see how they share at least three points of agreement:

• Social change is imperative
• The goal is justice
• Powerful action is key

They diverge, however, on the question of how each of these is achieved. From my perspective, enduring social change does not flow most effectively from violence-generated social disorder. Such action is typically seized on by power-holders to destroy movements and it often frightens or alienates the public. This seems to be borne out by much of the recent work of Erica Chenoweth and others that quantify how violent campaigns are often much less successful than nonviolent ones.

Instead, social change (as social movement activist and theorist Bill Moyer writes in his book Doing Democracy) flows from social movement that builds nonviolent people power. “Social movements,” according to Moyer, “are collective actions in which the populace is alerted, educated, and mobilized, over years and decades, to challenge the power-holders and the whole society to redress social problems or grievances and restore critical social values.” In short, this means removing the pillars of support for injustice, including the direct or indirect support of the populace and often other economic, political, cultural, or media pillars. Nonviolent action is more likely to nurture this process because:

• It maintains a focus on the issue rather than the violence/counter violence cycle (e.g., the Occupy Oakland action on January 28);
• It is more likely to raise the visibility of both the injustice being challenged and the justice that it seeks. Violent action is more likely to obscure the issue and the outcome it is working for; and
• When nonviolent action is met by violence, the focus is likely to remain both on the issue and on the violence of the state (e.g., the police attack on Occupy at UC Davis on November 18), which can increase rather than decrease public support for change.

But the effectiveness of such nonviolent action often depends on the third point of agreement: the need for powerful action.

Those supporting violent tactics often feel that nonviolent action is not powerful—and, truth be told, it is often not as powerful as it could be. Nonviolent action needs to be commensurate with the injustice one is struggling to change—which means that it needs to powerfully accomplish its goals, including dramatizing the fundamental need for change; illuminating a vision of the alternative; inviting the public to re-think this issue; and offering concrete steps for people to withdrawing consent from the status quo and to support a more life-giving alternative.

The good news is that it can be this powerful.

This power depends on creativity, clarity, strategic planning, training, discipline, execution, interpretation, and follow-up. Occupy itself is a good example of this. When it has maintained a nonviolent spirit, it has been an effective and historic force for highlighting the problem of inequality and laying the groundwork for being a force for change. Its scattered violent actions, however, have been less powerful than its nonviolent ones, because they have often muddied the issue and reframed the conversation from inequality to the violence of Occupiers. This has likely cost support for the movement within Occupy and among the larger populace.

For those of us who are committed to nonviolence in challenging massive and structural inequity, the answer (as George Lakey so eloquently stressed on this site) is not to demonize those who are committed to a variety of approaches, including violent ones. We are called to relentless dialogue with those with whom we disagree—as I attempted to do on the streets of Seattle twelve years ago. Most importantly, we are called to build a movement that demonstrates the power and effectiveness of nonviolent people power.

In the end, this will be more effective than all the arguments in the world.

The question for all those, whether using black bloc tactics or not, who consider adding to the Occupy movement tactics of either property destruction or violence: Do you want the issues of injustice to be talked about, or your bricks? In my own definition, property destruction is not the same as violence—there can be very significant differences between the two. But in this historical-political situation, the impact of either is similar; they give an easy out for people who don’t really want to talk about injustice.

I don’t, however, recommend Chris Hedges’ recent essay, “The Cancer in Occupy,” as a model for how to respond to the black blocs. Demonizing, calling people names, using the giveaway metaphor of “cancer” (I’ve had cancer) is about as far away from effectively opposing a tendency one disagrees with as it’s possible to get.

We have such good models in the tradition of nonviolence. Dr. King, James Lawson, John Lewis and so many others in the Civil Rights movement who had to respond to those willing to advocate violence showed us how to do it. They were themselves mentored by people like A. J. Muste whose largeness of spirit in dealing with defenders of violence went all the way back to the 1919 Lawrence, MA, textile strike.

Dr. King, for instance, famously had a public dialogue with Malcolm X, and I myself was involved in a radio broadcast debate between Malcolm and Freedom Rider Albert Bigelow. But less well-known to the public were the thousands of hours spent by SNCC and SCLC organizers dialoguing with advocates of violence wherever they found them: bars, pool halls, on the street, in church basements.  Bayard Rustin seemed to have unlimited patience in going into the wee hours of the night over whiskey with black comrades who believed the time had come to include violent tactics. Rev. James Orange, a strongly-built staffer for the SCLC, was given the job in the Chicago campaign of winning over the largest and toughest African American gang, the Blackstone Rangers; Jim was beaten up repeatedly by gang members to test his courage and sincerity before he was finally led to the gang leaders who agreed, in the end, to join the campaign and be nonviolent “peacekeepers.”

The issue of the appropriateness of property destruction and/or violence is, like any other aspect of community organizing, not settled by blanket statements or posturing but by getting in there and dialoguing, over and over again.  Advocates of nonviolent action need to learn from the Civil Rights movement and the field of community organizing in this way—there really aren’t any shortcuts.

I personally am as furious as anybody about the oppression that’s dealt out by the 1 percent, and my background as a working class gay person give me plenty of stories I can tell about injustice. But my hope for those now devoting themselves to Occupy is to keep your eyes on the prize. We already have in this country the model provided by heroic African Americans of how to stand up to violence—whether from the police or the KKK—in a way that keeps a city’s or nation’s attention on the real issues.

If, in good conscience, you just can’t stand for what looks to you like ineffective nonviolent struggle, then launch your own campaign with your preferred tactics and see how it works out for you. The public debate between Ward Churchill and me might be useful as you think about strategy. And if anyone else would like to debate me publicly on this subject, let me know.

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.

I drove to San Diego on October 6th to meet with their General Assembly’s facilitation team as they marched around downtown, eventually settling in Children’s Park. We talked about the idea of having a team of people ready to keep the peace and teach horizontal democracy. Then, a week later, after moving the camp to the Civic Center and doggedly resisting pressure to leave, OSD was given an eviction notice. Occupiers were pepper-sprayed when they decided to defend one lonely tent in the middle of a public space. I raced down to San Diego to help arrange bail funds that night. Curiously, another person, a young man dressed in a Tommy Bahama shirt, also showed up and claimed to be from Occupy Wall Street.

He suggested that remaining members of OSD break off into smaller groups and spread out around the city. He disrupted the General Assembly several times to say that the cops were going to move in soon, but that OWS was sending “1,000 people to OSD to fortify their camp.” I was perplexed, because if this person was really from OWS, he should know how to build consensus rather than cause disruptions. On my way back from San Diego, I stopped at Occupy Long Beach to check in with them. There, one occupier mentioned that his girlfriend at Occupy San Francisco heard 5,000 people were coming from OWS to OSF to prevent eviction. Infiltration was afoot, but I had no direct line to OWS to confirm or deny these rumors.

I went back to OLA dismayed, eager to find someone with a connection to OWS on the ground. I thought about sending an email—but to whom, and how would I know their information was reliable? At that time, most emails that were sent around occupations went unanswered for a variety of reasons, including inability to access computers and Wi-Fi at the camps. Fortunately, the brother of someone at OLA, Jackrabbit, was at OWS. Jackrabbit was patient with my paranoia and assured me that there wasn’t a plan from OWS to send anyone to California. In fact, they don’t even have 5,000 people at OWS. I relayed the info back to San Diego, and the infiltrator’s response was to further divide the General Assembly by stating that OWS was going to denounce OSD as an occupation. He disappeared from OSD the next day and never returned. Crisis averted, with just a simple phone call.

The last week of October, I received notice that the OWS Movement Building Working Group would be hosting a conference call with other occupations on October 24th. The OLA Occupation Communication Committee set up a speakerphone in the media tent at our camp and dialed in. There were over one hundred people on that call and nearly 40 occupations represented. At the end of it, OWS asked for volunteers to help set up the next call—and thus began the early makings of InterOccupy. The first “Call Planning” meeting happened via telephone the following Thursday, when we decided on some protocols for rotating the hosts of the Monday night general call and soliciting agenda items. Occupy Philadelphia led the charge on the second general call, and OLA took up the third—albeit with technical support from OWS when the bomb squad showed up at OLA that night. After much debate, this small call-planning group settled on registering the domain name InterOccupy.org and started a call calendar.

Before the encampments suffered eviction, the calls provided a sense that the movement was much bigger than any one camp. It felt truly global when I heard an occupier say “Goodnight, from Italy” on a call in November. OLA hosted a call for sharing advice on peaceful resistance among occupiers all over the country. By December, InterOccupy was arranging calls for large-scale actions such as the West Coast Port Shut Down—but most of its organizers still had not met one another.

After the evictions, we decided that it would be important to meet in person to improve our services. I bought a plane ticket to NYC in mid-December, as did an occupier from Portland. Occupiers from Philadelphia drove up, while members of OWS arranged places for us to stay. Others from Kalamazoo, Stanford, and Reno called in to the three-day meeting. In a sunny apartment in Manhattan, we established some best practices for getting new voices on the calls, set up a series of subgroups for administration and expanded our call services. InterOccupy evolved from a group of distributed occupiers to an organization intent on providing a platform for truly horizontal communication. Clay Shirky, the New York University professor and author of Here Comes Everybody, attended the meetings, where he talked with us about decentralized communication and described the structure of Occupy as “loosely connected clusters of tightly connected groups” united by “satisfying and effective ties.”

InterOccupy is able to put horizontality at the forefront of its mission to foster coordination across general assemblies and working groups. It’s meant to expand the way rhizomatic plants mature, with growth spreading out, rather than up. Any occupation can ask for a call, and no one agenda is given priority. The content of the calls, therefore, is up to the movement itself, with the goal of aligning strategy and actions, not to efface the autonomy of local assemblies.

Because many of us started out traveling and connecting with other occupations face to face, we knew that the virtual network is strengthened, both emotionally and effectively, by physical encounters with one another. Modeled on the communication networks in the American revolution, Occupy Philly designed a network model called Committees of Correspondence. CoCs are encouraged to spread information about the actions of other occupations, inform local working groups about upcoming calls through InterOccupy and arrange face to face regional meet-ups. This model greatly increased the density of ties between occupations and, in doing, the volume of calls through InterOccupy.

Using this model, Occupy So Cal in Long Beach recently hosted the first regional gathering with 50 occupiers from 10 occupations attending. We discussed how to better facilitate our communication, how to work together towards the proposed May 1st general strike and how to combat corporatism nonviolently. A second meet-up for Occupy So Cal is in the works for February 11, and InterOccupy is helping to coordinate it. Currently, others working with InterOccupy are on an OWS bus tour, spreading the model of CoCs around the northeast.

Because face-to-face communication is as central to this movement as the latest technology, InterOccupy seeks to provide channels that amplify voices and ideas of the Occupy movement, while simultaneously deepening regional networks. As InterOccupy organizer Nate Kleinman says, “We lay the tracks, someone else has to drive the train.”

This article is published in collaboration with the Social Science Research Council’s Possible Futures project. Learn more about Possible Futures here.

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.

Here’s why. Over the past couple of years, as Anons became lulled—pun intended—into politics through their Scientology, Wikileaks, and Arab Spring operations, the lulz ethos has turned into a mode of movement-building. And it’s a movement that appears singularly scary to the powers that be, from globalized corporations to the governments of superpowers, despite (or perhaps because of) the Anons’ apparent disorganization and probably in excess of their actual capacity:

Political operations often come together haphazardly. Often lacking an overarching strategy, Anonymous operates tactically, along the lines proposed by the French Jesuit thinker Michel de Certeau. “Because it does not have a place, a tactic depends on time—it is always on the watch for opportunities that must be seized ‘on the wing,’” he writes in The Practice of Everyday Life (1980). “Whatever it wins, it does not keep. It must constantly manipulate events in order to turn them into ‘opportunities.’ The weak must continually turn to their own ends forces alien to them.” This approach could easily devolve into unfocused operations that dissipate the group’s collective strength. But acting “on the wing” leverages Anonymous’s fluid structure, giving Anons an advantage, however temporary, over traditional institutions—corporations, states, political parties—that function according to unified plans.

This bears striking resemblance to the activist framework of “diversity of tactics” that has prevailed in the Occupy movement, which emphasizes fostering dexterity and decentralization (as well as, relevantly, permissiveness toward “black blocs” of masked crusaders). But Anonymous’ allergy to unified planning isn’t limited to tactics; it extends to overall strategy and even ultimate purpose. Continues Coleman:

While Anonymous has not put forward any programmatic plan to topple institutions or change unjust laws, it has made evading them seem easy and desirable. To those donning the Guy Fawkes mask associated with Anonymous, this—and not the commercialized, “transparent” social networking of Facebook—is the promise of the Internet, and it entails trading individualism for collectivism.

In fact, Anonymous bespeaks a collective recognition that’s fueling uprisings from Lagos to Bucharest: the kinds of governments we have in place actually have little capacity for addressing the longings we have for freedom and collectivity in a globalizing, digital age. The reason both Anonymous and Occupy Wall Street don’t put forward “any programmatic plan” that existing institutions could follow is that there isn’t one. Or, rather, the movements themselves are their own programmatic plan, parallel institutions unto themselves.

One of the things that amazed me during the first weeks of Occupy Wall Street was that, as the movement spread to occupations all around the country and the world, they were so similar to one another; all took direct democracy as the basic unit of political legitimacy, and prided themselves on a decentralized, horizontal structure, and discouraged credit-taking and self-aggrandizement. How did people all over the U.S. and the world know how to Occupy, and so quickly? Their preparedness can at least partly be attributed to the veterans of the global justice movement of a decade ago who flocked to the occupations. But perhaps even more significant an influence among the younger occupiers was the experience some of them had had with Anonymous and groups like it online.

Coleman explains the resemblances:

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

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

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

The teach-in also revealed a misunderstanding. Several participants indicated that they thought Occupy Wall Street had a statement of nonviolence, and that there was an underlying presumption that all movement actions would operate under such an assumption. (Hence the often-heard chant, “This! Is! A peaceful protest!“) To an extent, this is true; just about every major document passed by the General Assembly includes some mention of nonviolence. Many other Occupy groups have issued much more explicit commitments to nonviolence, and the Alliance of Community Trainers has eloquently called for the movement as a whole to do so more. But New York’s Direct Action group has in its GA-passed guidelines a nod to respecting “a diversity of tactics”—which opens the floodgates. It means that, effectively, in an Occupy Wall Street action, you can’t assume that nonviolent discipline will be maintained by everyone in the movement. And this teach-in was a reminder that nonviolent tactics are not favored by some of those most influential in Direct Action.

A diversity of tactics can be a good thing. A lot of the movement’s success stems from creating a framework that smaller, autonomous sub-groups can fill with their own creativity and instincts, as well as their sense of what tactics are appropriate. Gandhi would be the first to add that willingness to fight violently is preferable to mere passivity. And to the credit of their common sense, Occupy protesters have overwhelmingly left the violence to the police.

But the diversity of tactics framework might have other consequences as well. For a movement that still hasn’t managed to mount a demonstration in New York as well-attended as a single sold-out game at Yankee Stadium, the prospect of vigilantes doing dangerous things on behalf of a larger crowd could make even fewer people feel safe taking part. Such a framework can also mean that the media attention is unduly monopolized by a violent few, rather than the effect of a peaceful—even militantly peaceful—many.

When the afternoon teach-in was over, a small group of participants stuck around, many of whom seemed to be concerned about what they’d just heard. (The demographics among these stragglers would have deflected accusations of racism or sexism.) Some were coming to terms with the realization that Direct Action, as it stands, is not planning its marches and demonstrations with nonviolent discipline in mind. And they knew that truly nonviolent action and destructive tactics don’t easily mix.

Therefore, if people in the Occupy movement want to infuse their resistance with a fuller spirit of nonviolence, they will have to organize new kinds of direct actions themselves, whether within or alongside the Direct Action group, and ask outright that those who take part in these particular actions do so nonviolently. All the better if trainings can be provided in advance. Those who believe that nonviolent force is really more powerful and more revolutionary than hateful or destructive force should find ways to prove it. The burden, as it stands, is on them to carve out new space even within the diversity of tactics framework—as well as on their comrades respect these tactics in turn.

In Beautiful Trouble, seasoned pranktivist Andrew Boyd assembles the accumulated wisdom of decades of creative protest in order to place it in the hands of the next generation of change-makers. Part manifesto and part reference guide, Beautiful Trouble is the anti-textbook—a dynamic, 21st century how-to that brings together ten grassroots groups and dozens of seasoned artists and activists from around the world. Among the groups included are Agit-Pop/The Other 98%, The Yes Men/Yes Labs, Code Pink, SmartMeme, The Ruckus Society, Beyond the Choir, The Center for Artistic Activism, Waging Nonviolence, Alliance of Community Trainers and Nonviolence International.

The book will be officially released on April 1 by OR Books, an innovative new print-on-demand publisher. But if you pre-order between now and February 15, you get a 20% discount.

It’s also much more than a book. BeautifulTrouble.org says that it “will soon include the core content of the book as well as a growing array of additional modules, resources, profiles, debates and much more. With your help, the site will evolve in real time with new social movements and their latest tactical innovations.”

Rest assured, you’ll be hearing more about Beautiful Trouble on Waging Nonviolence. This is an extraordinary contribution to the work that’s our mission: to make the stories of creative, courageous struggle for a better world more accessible than ever.

They were a hit. But I had not studied my guide very carefully, and once they started clamoring for dog and cat and dragon balloon animals, I was deeply out of my element.

“A wand, what about a magic wand?” I improvised with the first little boy who asked for a dog balloon. I whipped it up quick and handed it to him with a Harry Potteresque flourish. “There, now you can do magic.”

“Cool,” he replied, “a sword!” and he dashed off to engage his little brother.

Soon all the kids were crowded around my knees demanding (politely) swords in all the colors of the rainbows. “I will make you a magic wand,” I insisted to each, manipulating the top of the long balloons into fanciful wand like shapes. “Okay, but I am going to turn it into a sword,” they said again and again, undoing my handiwork at the top of the wands and swashbuckling their ways across the church hall. It went on like this all morning. The only child I could get to request a magic wand was my very own Rosena, and even she used it like a sword the minute it was in her little hands.

My brother and sister and I grew up in a pacifist anti-nuclear community, conversant in the dark corners of Mutual Assured Destruction and nuclear winters from an early age. Living with so many different people over the years, we were exposed to all sorts of ways that good hearted, radical, thoughtful people interact with children.

At nightly prayer there were a number of women who insisted on saying “awoman,” instead of “amen.” I was so influenced by this that I took to calling mayonnaise “womanaise.”

At dinner, we were exposed to your garden variety vegetarians and vegans (and a lot of lectures about same), but also raw foodists, people who only drank juice and those who weighed all their portions. We also sat down with people who used kelp instead of salt and who railed against white sugar as though it were a tool of Satan himself (or herself?). Everyone took turns cooking, and we’d watch our dad carefully. If he got out the peanut butter at dinner it meant that he did not like what was being served—he would never say anything—and we could eat just peanut butter sandwiches too.

A lesbian woman who lived with us taught us to say “directly forward” when we were giving directions, instead of “straight.” Her point was that the dominant (male) culture prioritized straight over other directions and made us think that straight was the only way to live. I think that was her point, anyway. Whatever it was, it must have worked, because our sister is a lesbian. (Ha.)

By way of contrast, our own parents—as a former nun and priest and often at least a decade older than other community members—were fairly conventional (strange to say) in their child-rearing techniques. Please, thank you, eating all one’s dinner so as not to thumb one’s first-world chubby nose at the starving children of Africa, may I please be excused, long lectures about one’s behavior (differentiated from other kids’ long lectures only by the frequent, learned, biblical references and occasional diatribe against morally corrupted American consumer culture), occasional spankings.

You get the picture. They were kind of normal—at least compared to the other people we lived with, and if you set aside the whole protesting and getting arrested and going to jail and talking about one’s faith all the time stuff. They ate meat, drank alcohol (though it was seldom on hand at home), enjoyed classical music, cursed with passion and imagination when provoked, and enjoyed detective novels.

We were not allowed to watch TV (morally corrupted American consumer culture). The worst thing we could do was fight with one another (which my brother and I did constantly; a peace accord was signed in high school). The second-worst thing we could do was lie, which my brother and I did all the time to cover up for our TV-sneaking and our fighting.

I learned a lot from the people I shared the dining room table with growing up—but less about healthy eating than about obsession and fixation and control. I learned to work around my parents’ prohibitions on TV and gorged myself on it when I could. (To this day, if a TV is on in a room, I can’t not watch it.) I learned to lie to be able to do what I wanted and still be an appropriate peace activist kid. I’m not proud of learning all of that. I don’t like it… but I did it.

Disclaimer Needed, though: Food obsessions and lying is not all I learned from my parents and all those other good folks. My point is that the lessons adults want to impart are not always what is learned by the kid.

I have been thinking about all of this because now I live with a five-year-old wonder half of every week. Does it really matter if she plays with magic wands or swords? Why do I want her to call it a wand when she wields it like a sword? If she is having fun and not hurting anyone, does my politically-correct overlay do anyone any good? Or is it just a semantic absurdism like womanaise?

What do we teach children by our words and actions? What do we want children to learn? What happens when what we teach and what they learn are not the same thing?  How can I be a parent who is learning right alongside this marvelous five-year-old rather than imposing my vision of the world on her little shoulders? How can I be a parent who makes the world safe, beautiful and governed by some logic (while still being honest about its morass of problems and our responsibility for all of that) for the tiny four-month-old being growing inside of me?

Children are little insurrections. They turn our lives upside down and they insist we see it through their eyes—and they care more than anything about fairness and friendship. Maybe we have more to learn than to teach.

Martin Luther King, Jr. beside a picture of Gandhi. © Bob Fitch, all rights reserved.

How does one learn nonviolent resistance? The same way that Martin Luther King Jr. did—by study, reading and interrogating seasoned tutors. King would eventually become the person most responsible for advancing and popularizing Gandhi’s ideas in the United States, by persuading black Americans to adapt the strategies used against British imperialism in India to their own struggles. Yet he was not the first to bring this knowledge from the subcontinent.

By the 1930s and 1940s, via ocean voyages and propeller airplanes, a constant flow of prominent black leaders were traveling to India. College presidents, professors, pastors and journalists journeyed to India to meet Gandhi and study how to forge mass struggle with nonviolent means. Returning to the United States, they wrote articles, preached, lectured and passed key documents from hand to hand for study by other black leaders. Historian Sudarshan Kapur has shown that the ideas of Gandhi were moving vigorously from India to the United States at that time, and the African American news media reported on the Indian independence struggle. Leaders in the black community talked about a “black Gandhi” for the United States. One woman called it “raising up a prophet,” which Kapur used as the title of his book.

While a student at Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, King was intrigued by reading Thoreau and Gandhi, yet had not actually studied Gandhi in depth. A friend, J. Pius Barbour, remembered the young seminarian arguing on behalf of Gandhian methods with a reckoning based on arithmetic—that any minority would be outnumbered if it turned to a policy of violence—rather than on principle.

The more that King read Gandhi, though, the less he doubted the validity of a philosophy based on “Love,” which in turn was central to his preparation for the Christian ministry. “As I delved deeper into the philosophy of Gandhi,” he later wrote, “my skepticism concerning the power of Love gradually diminished, and I came to see for the first time its potency in the area of social reform.” His serious contemplation of Gandhi’s fundamental approaches for organizing a movement began in Montgomery, soon after becoming pastor at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in April of 1954.

When Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to yield her seat on a public bus to a white man on December 1, 1955, JoAnn Robinson, a leader in the Women’s Political Council, worked through the night to organize an action of mass economic noncooperation. King was unanimously elected to lead the Montgomery Improvement Association, which would sustain the boycott of city buses.

With the start of the Montgomery boycott, a number of activists, pacifists, reformers, radical Christians and socialists arrived in town. Elated by King, they believed that he could take the fight for justice to a new order of magnitude unlike anything the United States had seen since the abolition of slavery. Among them was 44-year-old Bayard Rustin, 17 years King’s senior, who went on to help King build the Montgomery boycott into a mature campaign. The War Resisters League let Rustin work for King full-time for this assignment.

The black community in Montgomery, as elsewhere in the South, was armed, and there was concern that it could turn to violence in the struggle. Rustin was worried that King himself might falter without deeper foundations. Plying him with books at night, he helped him to analyze Gandhi, and was the first tutor to teach King the essentials of nonviolent struggle systematically.

The boycott’s success—recognized when the Supreme Court ruled on November 13, 1956, that local laws obliging segregation on buses were unconstitutional—raised hopes for comparable abolition of other discriminatory practices in the South. That the U.S. civil rights movement of the 1960s would be based on Gandhian strategic nonviolent action partly resulted from the success of the Alabama city’s exquisitely unified black community. “While the Montgomery boycott was going on,” King said, “India’s Gandhi was the guiding light of our technique of nonviolent social change.”

In February 1957, at Oberlin College in Ohio, King met a black Methodist minister named James M. Lawson, Jr. Lawson had served 13 months in U.S. federal prison for refusing to cooperate with conscription during the Korean War. While locked up, the Board of Missions of the Methodist Church successfully petitioned the court for Lawson to be handed over to them. They assigned him to teach at Hislop College in Nagpur, India. Arriving there four years after Gandhi’s death, he spent the next three years teaching. He also met numerous individuals who had worked with Gandhi and learned of the Indian campaigns firsthand from participants. King was impressed by Lawson’s background and experience, especially considering they were both just 28 years old. He asked Lawson not to wait to finish his studies to come South: “Come now! You’re badly needed. We don’t have anyone like you!” As I have documented elsewhere, Lawson became a human bridge, connecting knowledge from India to the fledgling U.S. civil rights movement and contemporary struggles.

James Lawson and Martin Luther King during the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Strike. Photo by Jack E. Cantrell.

After Lawson met King in 1957, he contacted A. J. Muste, a foremost Christian pacifist then still at the helm of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. Muste offered Lawson the position of southern field secretary of FOR, and by January 1958, Lawson was settled in Nashville. Upon arrival, he discovered that the Reverend Glenn Smiley, another of King’s tutors and national field director of FOR, had arranged for Lawson to conduct a full schedule of workshops—including one arranged for early that year at the first annual meeting of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in Columbia, South Carolina. There, King enthusiastically introduced Lawson. “Be back promptly at 2:00 p.m.,” he declared, “for Brother Lawson’s workshop on nonviolence!” Before the agreed time, King seated himself in the first pew, waiting attentively for the three-hour session to start. Lawson once recalled in an interview with me:

Martin did that at every SCLC meeting as long as he lived. He would ask me to conduct an afternoon workshop, usually two or three hours, and he would arrange for it to be “at-large” so that everyone could attend, with nothing else to compete. He put it on the schedule himself.  A few minutes early, he would show up and sit alone, as an example, in the front row.

In Nashville, throughout the autumn of 1959, Lawson led weekly Monday-evening meetings in which he and interested students analyzed the theories and techniques that he had encountered in India. His workshops scrutinized the Bible, and writings of Gandhi, King and Thoreau. They practiced test-cases, including small sit-ins. Lawson’s workshops lasted for several months before news broke on February 1, 1960, of the Greensboro sit-ins. Hearing of the Greensboro actions, seventy-five Nashville students followed suit, creating the largest, most disciplined and influential of the 1960 sit-in campaigns. In working with Lawson—who was always calm and self-effacing—the Nashville students were not only being trained by one of King’s own instructors, but they were benefitting from direct acquaintance with Gandhi’s experiments. The sit-ins would give the overall movement its regional reach, and the Nashville students would become a cornerstone of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, of which I was a part.

In commemorating Dr. King’s birthday, it is worth remembering that everyone can learn nonviolent action as he did. King may not have invented the nonviolent strategies that he advanced, but he was an apt student, and his understanding of them would in the decades to come encourage other movements on the world stage. He became one of history’s most influential agents for propagating knowledge of the potential for constructive social change without resorting to violence. How he himself learned the theory and practice of civil resistance is a reminder to each of us that these methods are neither intuitive nor spontaneous; they’re a system of logic, skills and techniques that must be learned.

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

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

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

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

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

A recent Occupy Wall Street Spokes Council meeting.

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

There was no lack of confidence to go around—just the kind of infectious naivete that drove some of these same people to take and hold Zuccotti Park back in September. They reviewed their favorite things about what they’d done since then: moments that captured the world’s attention and, especially, the ones in which they shed their own fear and had enough fun to want to continue. For better or worse, a lot of this still fixated on defying the police, rather than really challenging the economic order.

“We’re somewhere between a movement and a revolution,” concluded Austin Guest, a 31-year-old with sideburns on only one side of his thick, brown beard. He added that, if they wanted to, they could bring down Bank of America in six months. Whenever there was a break, someone would jump up on a chair and start telling radical jokes. Why do anarchists only drink coffee? How many feminists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Somebody else would already know the punchline and shout it out, while others burst into laughter until they could hardly breathe. This was not the mood one would expect to find in a bygone movement.

Nor would one expect the litany of upcoming actions reeled off by a woman named Tammy, who, as part of the Interoccupy project, was helping to coordinate occupations nationwide. There would be “Occupy the Dream” protests on MLK Day. On January 20, Move to Amend would be organizing actions throughout the country against corporate personhood. There was Occupy Education on March 1, a global day of action on May 12 and actions against the G8 and NATO summits in Chicago later that month. Other people added more: an Egypt solidarity march on January 21, a day recognizing violence against women on February 14 and a mobilization in DC marking King’s assassination on April 4.

In the minds of many, the crown jewel was the global general strike slated for May Day—if they could pull it off. “I’m totally in love with the general strike,” said one middle-aged man, describing himself as an artist who for years has lived below the poverty line. “To me it’s analogous to seeing the face of God.” He also suggested bringing 10,000 people to watch the sun set on the Summer Solstice in Battery Park, led by Native American shamans.

After the open brainstorming, the facilitator, a tall man with a blond rattail named Sully, tried to guide the meeting toward specific “throughline projects.” These, he explained, are big ones that the whole group can put its energy behind, that would string the isolated days of action into an overarching story, disrupt the pillars of support for corporate power and liberate more space that a new kind of world could fill. Breakout groups discussed what these projects might be.

One group centered its discussion around mounting occupations of foreclosed homes and defunded schools. The group that attracted the most people was devoted to shutdowns: banks, ports, malls, you name it. A New Jerseyan named Chris, who started the famous We Are the 99 Percent blog, called for balancing these disruptive actions with also making the movement “a healing force.” Lots of fingers wiggling high in the air—this went without saying. People had already been talking about setting up childcare centers, schools, kitchens, free clinics and worker-owned co-ops.

From start to finish, there was almost no talk of the presidential elections—what virtually everyone else in this country thinks of when they think of politics in the year ahead. The closest those at the meeting came was one quick mention of protests at both parties’ conventions and a call for voter noncooperation.

By omission, it seems, this movement intends to create a countervailing narrative to the election-year joust among the powers that be, to get people thinking about a whole different kind of politics. It’s no small task to compete with an election that will have more money spent in it than ever before imaginable; the movement will need to be able to offer people something more hopeful, more compelling and more tangible than any presidential candidate can promise to deliver.

In order to do so, some believe that the movement needs a national coming-together, an Occupied convention to hammer out points of unity. A group working to develop what it calls the “99% Declaration”—controversial for its embrace of legislative demands and representative politics—has called for a “National General Assembly” in Philadelphia on July 4, with delegates elected through its website. The General Assembly at Occupy Philadelphia has countered by passing its own “National Gathering Process Proposal,” which insists that it would only host such a convention if it were planned and peopled by the other Occupy GAs.

One of that proposal’s drafters, Nathan Kleinman, explained to me at the January 8 meeting, “This is not about the gathering itself, this is about how to organize one.” As always in the movement, process takes precedence.

An even earlier national convergence is also in the works, with the same organizers as the occupation at Freedom Plaza in Washington, DC. (Though it has now joined the Occupy fold, Freedom Plaza was actually being planned months before Occupy Wall Street was first called for in July.) Dubbed “NOW DC”—the National Occupation of Washington, DC—it’s supposed to begin on March 30 and to run for as long as a month. Several of those behind it met in New York on January 7 to start setting NOW DC in motion. They also came to 16 Beaver the next day. While Occupy Wall Street was still deciding what to do for the next few months, this group was well into discussing how to do it.

“The Occupy movement isn’t really into planning the way we are,” said Kevin Zeese, a onetime Ralph Nader campaign manager, during the NOW DC discussions. And he’s right. Even while meeting to plan and strategize, those at 16 Beaver weren’t ready to do away with the improvisational, reactive free-for-all that had brought Occupy Wall Street to the world’s attention in the first place. An organizer with a red, white and blue bandana over his long, curly hair pointed out that their most carefully-planned marches had tended to stay on the sidewalks, where police wanted them. “We took the road only when we didn’t plan ahead,” he said. “Let’s just remember that.”

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.

To Jeffrey A. Ordower, director of Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment, if some of the groups with whom he works could win $250 billion in principal reduction for homeowners, he would consider it more transactional than transformative—because as he put it, “we are still applying arbitrary pricing to a bundle of bricks and mortar.” Some transactional wins might look like less of a transaction. Take, for instance, Rosa Gudiel’s success in putting her story onto the front pages of Los Angeles newspapers for several days, as she fought for a reduced monthly loan payment after her brother died in the midst of recession. A catchy slogan was heard in southern California: “Let a thousand Rosas bloom.”

While students organizing for reductions on their tuition are making transactional demands, they may simultaneously be working toward the transformational demand of a universal right to free or affordable education. Similarly, while the Occupy movement’s anti-foreclosure actions make the transactional demand that a given family not be evicted from its home, such actions are motivated by the goal of transforming the mortgage system as a whole.

Let me reflect on further examples for each.

Nonviolent independence movements in the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania became visible in the late 1980s. In 1939, Hitler and Stalin colluded in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, containing a secret protocol that provided for the partitioning of Poland, Finland and the Baltic states between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. In June 1940, the Red Army invaded the then-independent republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, putting them under military occupation. The Soviet Union’s forcible annexations were never recognized by international powers. Established national flags, traditional songs and symbols were banned. Of a total Baltic population of 6 million, more than half a million disappeared with deportations eastward. Almost five decades after the pact was signed in Moscow, Baltic citizens began to organize against it.

As I have documented elsewhere, in parallel movements moving at different paces and interacting with other forces, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania would win independence from and take civil resistance into the Soviet Union, beginning its dissolution.

A transactional moment came about soon after November 18, 1988, when local officials in Lithuania’s communist party-state legalized their old national anthem and historic flag. The Lithuanians went on to grant themselves the freedom to commemorate Christmas for the first time since the shroud of Stalinism had descended. When darkness fell on Christmas Eve, the people of Lithuania doused their houselights and lit candles in their windows. In unlit cities and villages across the country, hundreds of thousands of tapers flickered with a symbolic Christmas unification. A referendum in every way but name, this coordinated action made clear their desired independence from the Soviet Union. Pulling together, they aroused their energies to continue, while indicating that further mobilization followed. Enacting freedom of worship signaled noncooperation with Soviet hegemony. The transformation of Lithuania could be said to have begun on March 11, 1990, when it became the first Soviet socialist republic to declare its independence.

Years before the Lithuanian candles sputtered, at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., Martin Luther King, Jr., on May 17, 1957, spoke on the third anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision desegregating public schools. He said that by giving the vote to African Americans, who had been legally disenfranchised in the southern U.S. states, the entire region would be transformed: “Give us the ballot and we will transform the salient misdeeds of bloodthirsty mobs into the calculated good deeds of orderly citizens.” In referring to the white-supremacist vigilantes and terrorists whose random violence could strike at any time, terrorizing whites or blacks, he discerned that the entire southland of the United States would thus be changed and bettered for all of its citizens. While the civil rights movement was transactionally seeking basic constitutional reforms for black citizens, the South as a whole could be transformed, reconstituted in another form, so that all of the parties could benefit.

Within SNCC, in our endless debates on strategy and policy, we often talked of how ultimately (despite severe reprisals meted out to local black communities) racism could one day be more effectively lifted in the South than elsewhere in the nation. Although it took a decade to achieve the most elementary reforms and codification of rights for African Americans, whole states across the southern map ultimately profited, as did finally the entire nation. Certainly, white southerners such as Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton could never have been elected from an un-altered South.

Nonviolent action is intrinsically transactional and interactive, changing the power relationships between the parties, and under certain circumstances it is capable of substantially transforming a conflict. It had the capacity to aid the ending of military occupation in the Baltics and the Eastern bloc, and it can help people to avoid what Martin Luther King, Jr., in the Lincoln Memorial speech, abhorred as “the temptation of being victimized with a psychology of victors.” Successful nonviolent action often depends on having both transactional and transformational demands working in concert; all the better if the difference is internally debated.

This distinction may be useful for Occupy and its countless spinoffs. Each specific group may need to make its own definitions. Seeking transactional steps could mean fortifying networks of co-ops, adopting local currencies and strengthening other alternative economic systems; prosecuting those who have created situational poverty and made a Dante’s inferno of housing and mortgage markets; or testing whether legislated regulations work. Transformational calls may be harder to articulate: when one grows accustomed to injustice, the words with which to hope for even basic rights can seem elusive.

Vaclav Havel, the Czech poet and politician, who died on December 18, 2011.

Václav Havel often said we should live life “as if”—as if there is no oppression, as if we must set an example of life well-lived even under the weight of a coercive regime. His belief in the power of exemplary actions undertaken by ordinary people—as opposed to the more formal political acts of revolutionary leaders—set Havel’s approach to resistance apart. He did not ask for heroics. He recognized the revolutionary force of everyday examples: not bowing your head, not putting the picture of a tyrant on your wall, not voting in farcical elections, not hanging the party sign in your shop window. Havel’s hero was the greengrocer, the powerless, the everyday casualty of oppression. He insistently resisted the epithet “dissident” because he did not like the idea of recognizing only one or two people of extraordinary courage and repute. Instead, he felt that there are no small acts of resistance; any act, by anyone, has the potential of reverberating—of being absorbed and replicated, and leading to meaningful change. Of course, the context dictates the significance of the act, and an awareness of that environment makes for true political consciousness and authentic acts of resistance.

To paraphrase Jan Palach, the Czech student who died from self-immolation in protest against the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1969, the purpose of “living in truth,” of acting out one’s own life choices against the imposed existence of an oppressive power, is to not give up and not give in. The parallel with Tunisia’s Mohamed Bouazizi should not be lost here, and it leads to the core of Havel’s point: it is the reverberation of a given act that makes for revolutionary change. Havel’s story of resistance centers around the active observer who sees, internalizes and interprets the act. Exemplary acts can be replicated in a different form, at a different time, with a different audience. They become a springboard for the observer’s own actions. Sarcastically invoking Marx’s opening lines of The Communist Manifesto, Havel called this “the specter of dissent.”

Havel never forgot Palach’s urge to resist demoralization and the temptation to give in. He asked the question powerless people everywhere want answered: How can we prevail over oppression? How can the individual overcome the psychological, social and political barriers imposed by the experience and history of violence? Havel maintained that while individuals might have trouble overcoming such barriers, the difficulty is not insurmountable. The individual can both recognize and overcome her circumstances. Agency from this point of view relies both on the capacity of the individual to recognize her own moral compass and the moral example set by others. Since totalitarian societies destroy the web of human relations among us in order to forestall opposition, we must rebuild our mutual ties, starting with ourselves. Havel’s idea of resistance builds on a view of life as a series of layers, an environment we create together, a work of solidarity continuously in the making. “The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart,” he wrote, “in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and human responsibility.”

Havel’s work stands as a remarkable articulation of what responsible action could look like under the extreme conditions of Eastern European totalitarianism, but the value of his inquiry extends beyond that time and place. Indeed, he expected political ideas to cross boundaries of time and place. Havel the playwright and Havel the dissident intertwine in a philosophical tale of resistance and responsibility that has sparked action the world over. This is the stuff of which revolutions are made. Yet his call to political action also applies to the less extreme but equally important ways in which consumer societies with gross inequalities erode a sense of human connection. His life and work exemplify a kind of interplay between the private individual and the political world, between personal responsibility and social consciousness. Resistance can and must be reawakened within each of us. A year of revolutions has ended with the death of a true revolutionary, but we should rejoice in seeing Havel’s spirit endure in the actions of ordinary people from Cairo, to Russia, to Wall Street.

Poised on the threshold of a new year, I’m again drawn to a metaphor for the challenges and opportunities we face in this urgent time of ours: the crossroads.

Two roads intersect, and now we confront an unavoidable choice. Do we carry on as we always have—or do we, with courage and imagination and verve, make a dramatic course correction?

While it may be too early to definitively rank 2011 as the year of the Great Nonviolent Turning (even greater things may be coming in the new year or in the years that will follow it; or, on the contrary, the passage of time may reframe this period entirely), the events of the past twelve months—from Tunisia to Egypt, from Greece to Spain, from Chile to Jeju Island, from China and Russia to a more or less Occupied America—have signaled a growing determination for a qualitative shift.

Here the symbol of the crossroads is especially apt. Traditionally it signifies, not an arbitrary or simplistic decision (Coke or Pepsi?), but a momentous choice: a turning point, a decisive situation, or a set of life-altering options. The worldwide movement for nonviolent change that has been gathering momentum this year seems to be placing before us such immense choices: Radical economic disparity or sustainable equality? Oligarchy or democracy? Militarized culture or a more nonviolent civil society?

These are not minor alternatives. Real change of this magnitude will require profound structural metamorphosis. This will not appear out of the blue. Nor will it happen merely because we wish it so. Instead, it will depend on movements that derive their power from a deep transformation of personal and social consciousness and identities; a willingness to let go of certain reliable (if debilitating) assumptions about how the world is ordered; and a commitment to face the consequences for taking these still as yet unclear steps for change.

The crossroads in its deepest sense may also be useful here. Anthropologists report that the crossroads in some cultures is a symbolic space signifying both danger and spiritual transformation. Why? Because it is betwixt and between. Everything which came before, that was fixed and certain, is no longer fixed and certain. Nor have we yet arrived in the new world. At the crossroads, life and death meet, microcosm and macrocosm merge, good and evil collide. There is no safety net as we make the transition to a potentially new life, new identity, new community.

To transform an economic order that has been at least a century in the making will mean both thoroughgoing political change and a profound shift in consciousness and identity. Letting go of our deeply-ingrained self-image and worldview—and then creating new ones as individuals and as societies—is an experience of life and death. If this seismic shift begins, every effort to stop it will be used by the powers that be. We can expect this—and must be prepared psychologically, spiritually, sociologically, and politically to weather this and to use every creative, nonviolent means at our disposal to engage and transform this backlash.

When we enter this crossroads, we will know it.

We know it, for example, when the symbolic and concrete infrastructure of the dominant order is challenged—hence the strong reaction to and visibility of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

This jolt is experienced whenever we dramatically challenge the principles and assumptions of the prevailing order—when, for example, we touch the “third rail” of U.S. national security which holds that America has the right to the majority of the world’s resources and the concomitant right to use military force to defend this entitlement.

This is a deeply-entrenched (if often invisible and unconscious, at least to U.S. citizens) conviction that was codified by George Kennan in 1948. As Richard Manning explains, Kennan (who is most famous for his role in constructing the policy of “containment” of the former Soviet Union) wrote a national-security memo as the head of a State Department planning committee that laid out this assumption:

“We have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth but only 6.3 percent of its population,” Kennan wrote. “In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships, which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.”

“The day is not far off,” Kennan concluded, “when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts.”

Here Kennan forthrightly enunciates a fundamental policy position that has been at work for 60 years, even as it has been soft-pedaled and obfuscated—a policy that is as applicable, it seems, to the economics within the United States as it is to the nation’s economic dealings with the rest of the world.

As we stand at the crossroads, we long for a new direction that is at cross-purposes with such a blueprint for power.

If we truly succeed in challenging and transforming this fundamental orientation, it will mean sweeping psychological and spiritual—as well as economic and political—change. One of the steps in this direction will likely mean a reframed U.S. position in the world and a transformed national life. Increasingly, commentators are writing about the benefits of such a reduction—see these reflections by Nader Mousavizadeh, Michael Ignatieff, and Charles Kenny.

But standing at the edge of our contemporary crossroads is less about how we will fare and more about choosing a world that works for everyone.

With each passing day, the call to embark on or deepen this breathtaking journey for the well being of all grows more clear and distinct.

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.

Illustration by Piotr Lesniak, Illustrations Portfolio.

Václav Havel, who died on December 18, epitomized the power of the pen. A playwright and actor, he was born in Prague in 1936, two years before Nazi Germany militarily occupied Czechoslovakia. As I have written elsewhere, the Stalinist effort to destroy internal opposition to the Czechoslovak communist regime and its worsening economic policies led to hundreds of executions and tens of thousands of imprisonments. Millions were left suffering. Rigid communist economic views, bureaucratization of all dimensions of life, and recurring shortages meant that people could survive under communist rule only through venality and by shortcutting regulations. Those who went along with the habitual corruption—including the great proportion of managers and professionals—found themselves subjected to blackmail and entrapped by lies.

Havel’s family property was confiscated after 1948 by the regime, and he was denied access to education because of his “bourgeois” background. Yet he managed to reach the university level. In 1959, he got a job as a stagehand in a Prague theatrical group and started writing plays with Ivan Vyskocil. By the late 1960s, Havel was a resident playwright of the Balustrade theatrical company.

One of the first Czechoslovaks overtly to refuse conformity with the totalitarianism that descended after 1948, he would be in and out of prison starting in 1977. On August 9, 1969, Havel sent a private letter to Alexander Dubček, first secretary of Czechoslovakia’s communist party, urging him to oppose reintroduction of callous one-party rule, following the Soviet-led invasion by 750,000 Warsaw Pact troops in response to the reforms led by Dubček and during what came to be known as the Prague Spring of 1968. In 1969, the government blacklisted Havel’s writings and charged him with subversion.

Under Stalinism, the Havel family’s farmhouse in northern Bohemia, where he died, served as a retreat for informal authors’ conferences. There, writers and theatrical personalities found a place of calm and strength after being alienated from each other when authorities destroyed their articles, novels and plays.

For more than a century, those ruling in the name of Marxism maintained that theirs was the true opposition to repression and injustice. As Havel and his colleagues sought to uncover such hollow posturing with a strategy called by Havel “living in Truth,” it challenged the pretenses of the communists, who would over a period of years lose their ability to make the people obey. In due course, the erosion of the legitimacy and authority of the party-state by these activist intellectuals would be among the currents that forced the communist party to abandon its efforts to hold onto its hegemony.

Throughout the 1970s, statements and manifestoes were being posted overnight on kiosks and walls. Citizens copied or memorized them to share them with other sections of the country. In April 1975, Havel publicly criticized the government’s disdain for the principles it had accepted in the Helsinki Accords, the Final Act of which was signed on August 1 of that year. In an “Open Letter to Gustáv Husák,” general secretary of Czechoslovakia’s communist party, he voiced the deep ethical crises faced by communist Czechoslovakia and protested the policy of “normalization”—code word for re-imposing harsh Soviet control after the crushing of the Prague Spring. Doing what the party-state most detested, he violated the protocols of silence. Having sent the letter by regular mail, he simultaneously released it to international news agencies. In this, his first systematic philosophical writing, Havel concentrates on fear and moral decay. As the letter’s contents quietly spread, waves of dissent broke, followed by repression. In 1976, civic defiance groups rapidly formed.

An active figure in a dissenting community of actors, playwrights and staff of Czechoslovakia’s admired theatrical companies, and connected with university-based academicians, in 1972 he and others founded Edice Petlice, or Padlocked Editions, a semi-clandestine press that published typescripts of fiction, philosophy and literature. Photocopy machines were forbidden, but typewriters were allowed. By 1987 Padlocked Editions had available more than 400 manually-typed volumes. Havel damned the party-state “not because it was Communist, but because it was bad.” Forbidden printing presses cultivated fearlessness, as clandestine publications and journals communicated below the radar of government censorship. Musicians, rock bands, entertainers and artists spread ideas. One popular tactic was to bog down government officialdom with incessant protest letters from aroused citizens.

When musicians from the Plastic People of the Universe, an underground rock group, were arrested in 1976, it set the stage for Charter 77. The energies of diverse former party reformers, artists, theater people and Roman Catholic intellectuals congealed to defend the musicians’ right to free expression. Milan Hlavsa had created the band in 1968, soon after the Warsaw Pact’s invasion, basing its name on the song “Plastic People” by the U.S. musician Frank Zappa. On New Year’s Day in 1977, a document signed by 243 citizens materialized. The most significant occurrence since the 1968 Prague Spring, Charter 77 contested “the system of the virtual subjection of all institutions and organizations in the state to the political directives of the apparatus of the ruling party and the arbitrary decisions of the influential individuals.” In muted and studiously “antipolitical” wording, it suggested that the Moscow-imposed and Czechoslovak communist system had no popular mandate. Among the signers were leaders from the Prague Spring, artists, clergy, engineers, journalists, professors and its creator, Václav Havel. Charter 77 argued that the Czechoslovak regime must honor all international agreements, including the UN Universal Declaration on Human Rights and the Helsinki Accords that it (and the Soviet Union) had agreed in 1975 to uphold. Within two years, eleven of the foremost signers were locked up, Havel and five others receiving prison terms of two to five years.

By 1979, with Havel under a four-and-a-half year sentence, his letters and other prison writings continued to spread covertly, inspiring pro-democracy movements across Eastern Europe. His major works include four plays and three one-act dramas. Havel’s writings often ponder the justifications given by individuals who cooperate with a repressive machine and are compelled to reconcile, within themselves, their collaboration with a malicious order. Shunning the cliché of excusing individuals as impotent against state coercion, he penned essays on the origins of power and totalitarianism. His dramas enact the pressures of living under corrupt authoritarian systems of tyranny, non-accountability, unrelenting moral compromise, random violence, cruelty, police states and the necessity of living in Truth as a means of breaking a vicious cycle.

The concept of living in Truth brought Havel recognition as a moral philosopher and playwright. He never joined the communist party. The Beatles musician John Lennon was an icon of clever defiance for the growing opposition in Czechoslovakia in the 1970s; Havel said he was a Lennonist, not a Leninist.

Havel’s years in prison, and an even longer time being banned and censored, made him emblematic of those who sought to prevail despite a ruthless Eastern bloc. Deeply grasping the value of communications, he relied on underground publications called samizdat (Russian for “self-published,” as opposed to state-published) to spread his commentary and tracts on political responsibility. Czechoslovaks had been using samizdat as a means of contention since the country fell under Soviet domination in 1948. Frequently typed on yellowed onionskin paper onto ten carbon copies, samizdat was crucial for the covert circulation of ideas leading to the Velvet Revolution. Samizdat also established essential links between democracy movements throughout Eastern and Central Europe, often reaching the West. Havel’s fellow countrymen and women viewed him as a leader who prized honor and honesty.

Havel’s living in Truth concerns the ability of persons who regard themselves as powerless to understand that they possess a form of power and can act upon it. Otherwise, he argued, one mutely functions in the midst of injustice, official deception and corruption—doing nothing to produce change, while sustaining an unjust structure through one’s silence. To stop living within a lie, one must withdraw cooperation with the machinery of oppression. Living in Truth lets citizens repossess their humanity and take responsibility, in compatibility with the appreciation of nonviolent struggle for the connection between the means and ends. Havel said this in plain words: those who live in Truth “create a situation in which the regime is confounded, invariably causing panic and driving it to react in inappropriate ways.” He regularly expressed his conviction that the power that comes with living in Truth is the power to overturn repressive structures and undermine dictatorships. Such power resides within each person.

When historian Timothy Garton Ash arrived in Prague in November 1989, he said to Havel of the time required for the self-liberation of adjacent nation-states: “In Poland it took ten years, in Hungary ten months, in East Germany ten weeks: perhaps in Czechoslovakia it will take ten days!” November 17, Day One of what would be called the Ten Days, marked the start of the Velvet Revolution, which began with 15,000 students condemning the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia and honoring Jan Opletal, a student killed by Hitler’s army half a century earlier. By some accounts, the pupils numbered 50,000 when they turned toward Wenceslas Square, where police accosted them, beating some and arresting others. By Day Two, word spread to Prague’s Charles University and other universities. Students first called for strikes, but the theatrical circles soon declared support and proposed a national general strike. On Day Three, a pro-democracy Civic Forum (Občanské Fórum) emerged, many of whose members had been active in Charter 77. Over the following three days, throngs occupied Prague, as they would indeed for much of the famous Ten Days. Havel became the beacon for the Civic Forum, which used the Magic Lantern Theater for its headquarters. Speaking to multitudes in Wenceslas Square on November 24, the seventh consecutive day of massive demonstrations, he invited the police and armed forces to join the opposition.

The Ten Days in reality took twenty-four. At gatherings, processions, and rallies nationwide, popular sentiment favored Havel assuming the presidency, which he would soon do.

During the 1970s and 1980s, a proud, cultured nation that had lost its freedoms gradually re-developed a civil society, a domain not controlled by government. In this political space, the artistic, drama, journalism, literary and university communities—and those who had been obliged into manual labor washing windows or stoking furnaces, banned as authors, or tossed in jail—interacted and worked to set themselves free from the corrosion of economic, moral and political decomposition. Its guiding light was Havel.