“I was in Iraq in ’03, and what I saw there crushed me,” former U.S. Army sergeant Ash Woolson told thousands of people last Sunday afternoon from a makeshift stage at the edge of the security perimeter around Chicago’s McCormick Place Convention Center, where the NATO summit was being held.

As the international meeting was getting underway that day, thousands marched for peace through the city’s downtown. They were led by contingents of U.S. veterans like Woolson organized by Iraq Veterans Against the War, 40 of whom eventually mounted the ad hoc stage, where they brought the symbolic and tangible purpose of the week’s protests into sharp focus by attempting to publicly return their service medals, including their Global War on Terror awards.

Just before Woolson lobbed his medals in the direction of the NATO gathering (the organizers had requested that an official accept them, but this was turned down), he added: “I don’t want us to suffer this again, and I don’t want our children to suffer this again, and so I’m giving these back!”

This was the largest organized medal return since April 1971, when more than 800 veterans deposited their medals on the steps of the U.S. Capitol to dramatically repudiate the Vietnam War. Like that event four decades ago, Sunday’s ceremony was moving and powerful. It crystallized in a clear but visceral way the realities of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. At the same time it spelled out the critical importance of undertaking deliberate and potentially risky resistance for healing and nonviolent change.

This riveting event could well have become the indelible image of this week’s NATO protest. Even more importantly, it might have prompted a renewed national focus on the realities and costs of the last dozen years of war-making.

So far, neither has happened. Although there was some media coverage of the medal return ceremony (including a piece on local television and extensive reporting on Democracy Now!), it was largely overshadowed by the clash between police and protesters that took place almost immediately after the vets exited the stage. The march permit expired and most of the thousands of marchers drifted away, but a couple of hundred people stayed put in the streets. Hundreds of police in riot gear then flooded into the area. As an Associated Press story reports:

Some of the most enduring images of the event were likely to be from the end — when a small group of demonstrators clashed with a line of police who tried to keep them from the lakeside convention center where President Barack Obama was hosting the gathering. The protesters tried to move east toward McCormick Place, with some hurling sticks and bottles at police. Officers responded by swinging their batons. The two sides were locked in a standoff for nearly two hours, with police blocking the protesters’ path and the crowd refusing to leave. Some protesters had blood streaming down their faces.

This description conveys little of the ferocity of the tense confrontation that erupted after the permit expired and a huge police contingent swarmed into the space, intent on pushing people out of the intersection and keeping them from moving toward the convention center. News accounts and video clips from the scene show that the police tactics were hugely confrontational and aggressive; the police attacked and pummeled many protesters. At the same time, video clips show objects being hurled at police officers, including a police barricade, and protesters pushing police. Both sides were confrontational, as this raw video indicates.

My spouse Cynthia and I brought our two-year-old daughter Leah to this march. (The coalition website said that this event would be “family friendly,” and we took it at its word.) We were one block from the stage, but left a couple of minutes before the permit expired because Leah was getting hungry and thirsty; it had been a long, hot day. As we walked north, a long phalanx of police officers in riot gear were trotting single file toward the intersection, where only a few minutes later they would be swinging batons at marchers unwilling to budge. Some would be bloodied; others arrested.

There is no excuse for the actions of the police. At the same time, the lack of nonviolent discipline among the remaining protesters contributed to escalating this confrontation. The media frame on this story shifted almost immediately from “peaceful march” to “street fighting,” and the powerful action of the Iraq and Afghanistan vets was largely lost in the inundating shuffle.

Well before all of this, Suellen Semekoski and I were asked by Iraq Veterans Against the War to co-facilitate the nonviolent action training that would support the vets in preparing for their medal return. We were happy to do so, and on Saturday afternoon and evening we plunged into this process with them.

In our six hours together, we sensed the depth of hope that this public action was generating for them as individuals and as a community. Throughout the day the participants repeatedly stressed that nonviolence was going to be crucial to this event and that they were committed to maintaining this spirit. In addition, we were joined by three members of Afghans for Peace who were collaborating with IVAW on this event. They were also resolute about the importance of nonviolent discipline. The success of this action, they said, depended on it.

These survivors of war — U.S. veterans and Afghan peaceworkers — were creating a rare public space where they sought to call on the nation and the world to reflect deeply on the reality of this past, present and future destructiveness. They were very clear that nonviolent strategies, tactics and atmosphere would be vital to achieving this.

Unfortunately, there was little infrastructure in place to support that possibility. While many of us led numerous nonviolence trainings in the Chicago area in the run-up to the NATO mobilization, there were no agreed-upon nonviolence guidelines to serve as a foundation for nonviolent action. (The “Chicago Principles” did not serve this function.) Nor were there adequate numbers of peacekeepers prepared to intervene in order to maintain this nonviolent atmosphere. (In January, some of us had offered to train 500 peacekeepers, who would be equipped to respond to outbreaks of violence. This was based on the experience some of us had had in Seattle in 1999 at the World Trade Organization meeting, where 200 peacekeepers had been an inadequate number. We were told that the coalition was already training peace guides.)

There are many reasons such infrastructure was not in place, including a sensitivity to the now classic debate between nonviolence and diversity of tactics. Nevertheless, I suspect that we are at a crossroads as a movement for change and, at some point, we must make a difficult but important choice.

From my perspective, people power depends for its lifeblood on nonviolent discipline.

Nonviolent action is more effective than violent action — including the kind of heated scrum that took place in Chicago this past Sunday — because it keeps us on message (focused on the issue, rather than the tired tit-for-tat narrative), it is more likely to alert, educate and mobilize the population (the lynchpin of successful movements), and it communicates a vision of the kind of society we want (veterans creating the space of transformative healing and social change rather than the push-comes-to-shove dynamics of retaliatory violence).

If these things are true, then we must engage in nonviolent struggle with those for whom nonviolent struggle is dispensable. The challenges our world is facing are too grim to move forward without the strength and effectiveness of disciplined nonviolent people power. There are lessons everywhere — even from what went down in Chicago on Sunday.

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.

May Day had a few primary purposes. The first goal, to bring out enough numbers to show that Occupy Wall Street is vibrant and thriving, was more than achieved. Following a winter and early spring that saw the General Assembly and Spokes Council disbanded and attendance at actions topping out at around 500, May Day brought as many as 30,000 protesters into the streets, joining New York’s November 17 actions and Oakland’s ”general strike” on November 2 as among the largest actions in Occupy’s short history. It should be considered a more than adequate kick-off for our summer offensive. And, unlike N17 here in New York, the unions did not drive turnout for May Day. There were many union contingents on the march, but none other than the Transportation Workers Union had more than a few dozen marchers each; even TWU fell well short of the 3,000 people they estimated that they could turn out. Occupy mobilized the overwhelming majority of protesters. Nevertheless, the tens of thousands who took part showed that a model is being created in which Occupy assemblies, labor unions, immigrant worker justice organizations and other groups can collaborate and begin to jumpstart the catatonic left.

In the past, large OWS actions with sizeable labor contingents, like those on October 5 and November 17, have left many Occupy activists feeling disempowered. Union marshals would stand between police and protesters, telling activists where to go and making sure they didn’t get “out of line,” ostensibly doing the job of the police for them. Collaborating with the state is against many core principles of the Occupy movement, however, and for May Day great pains were taken to ensure this would not happen again. All unions and community groups specifically directed their marshals to stay with their union contingent and not to marshal anyone else. I marched under a giant blue tarp which read “No Bosses, No Borders, No Bullshit!” and nary a marshal or “peacekeeper” was to be found.

May Day has set a precedent for working with unions and other groups, helping to ensure that our unique methods and comfort levels with various tactics of resistance are respected. In order to reverse decades of decline, the labor movement must begin to adopt the more aggressive resistance Occupy has made commonplace, and not censoring or policing us is a start. Maybe next time we can have marches splinter into “red” and “green” risk levels, pulling off some rank-and-file with us to the more aggressive actions. As David Graeber wrote, by aligning our movement with May Day’s rich history of radical resistance, we may have finally distanced ourselves from the ineffective habits of so many reformist institutions. It’s time for unions to start doing the same, and helping unlock their own revolutionary potential.

Perhaps the most important lesson from May Day, though, is the organizing effort itself. On this project I worked alongside liberals and radicals, reformists and anarchists, labor organizers and hackers — a broad range of voices that represent the diversity of the Occupy movement. Without the GA and Spokes Council, inclusive and open projects like May Day can build solidarity and bring us together. Unlike a lot of other OWS actions, including many that I have worked on, May Day had buy-in from across the Occupy community. It belonged to all of us, and everyone felt it. People did what they could, whether that was organizing their workplace, making stickers, organizing autonomous actions, wheatpasting posters or talking to their church group.

Future long-term organizing efforts should follow this open, inclusive model. By connecting everyone’s unique skill sets and tactics, while being in solidarity with those who may choose to adopt different approaches, we can begin laying the groundwork for establishing alternative institutions. Over time, people will begin to have more faith in the alternatives than in the old order, which will cease to be relevant and fade away. If Occupy Wall Street is to survive as a radical movement, it must strive to produce tangible results, making life better for people across New York, outside of capitalism. This means focusing on tasks like foreclosure defense, successful home occupations, mutual aid and — finally — establishing a new home base for the movement.

We have now spent six months without a central place for our movement to thrive, for us to work and meet one another, for new people to know where to come to get involved, or for us to provide services to the community. Those long, hard months have taught us that the police state will never tolerate public occupations again, having seen the strength of our alternatives. Like the model for an Oakland Commune emerging out of Occupy Oakland, a New York Commune would be a way for the movement to live, grow and thrive. For this, we need to find a way to acquire space, whether it’s by defending a new indoor occupation, or purchasing one through a fundraising campaign, which OWS is more than capable of mounting.

In a New York Commune, we can practice mutual aid by providing a place for a free school, a really really free market, meeting spaces, food-banking, time-banking — the possibilities are endless. Renovating a large building would give us an ongoing community project to which thousands of people can apply their unique skills and talents. We can offer rent-free workspace to a variety of horizontal worker co-ops emerging from the Occupy movement, like the OccuCopy print shop. Our community center can put on display alternatives to the state and capitalism, and give people a way to envision a world without these forces of oppression, as Liberty Square once did.

Alternative institutions and sources of dual-power cannot just exist in one building, however. We must work actively to promote and support community assemblies, encourage the formation of new worker-owned cooperatives, and proliferate similiar community centers and projects all over the city. When communities begin to see that they, themselves, can create alternatives to the state, we may very well see a wave of resistence and mutual aid that makes last fall look like practice.

It’s time to absorb the lessons in the successes and frustrations of May Day, and move on toward new long-term projects and goals. It’s time to begin building real power that challenges the legitimacy of state and capitalist institutions, putting the very reason of their existence into question. Let’s continue the feeling of solidarity we had with each other during the May Day organizing process and use our combined strength to begin challenging the state head-on. I can think of no better way to start than by securing a new home for Occupy Wall Street and working to keep people all across New York inside of theirs.

Walter Wink, via Wikipedia.

Fifteen years ago I attended a talk by Walter Wink. Like a growing number of people who knew his work on nonviolence I was a fan, and told him so. He demurred, saying he was just a writer. “It’s the activists who are doing all the real work,” he said.

It was my turn to demure.

Walter Wink died this week. The world has lost a gifted diagnostician of the dilemmas and potential of the human condition. Though the terrain he mined for decades was Christian theology, his work offered insights potentially applicable to all of us. Why? Because his research and imagination relentlessly bore down on the mechanics of systemic violence and nonviolent transformation. While this was assiduously framed in a Christian key, his work offers clues broadly pertinent to understanding the cloying functionality of domination — and the ways we can resist it.

Wink’s universal insights, though, emerged out of his patient exhumation of the often suppressed nonviolence of Jesus. By training he was a scripture scholar whose work was to unpack and referee the conflicting meanings of ancient texts, but by inclination he was committed to discovering and teasing out a new big picture, especially an alternative to the prevailing paradigm of violence. For decades, he managed to put his considerable interpretive skills at the service of this alternative vision.

In his book Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination, Wink offers a series of incisive propositions. One, drawing from his studies as a theologian, is his judgment that violence is not episodic or capricious but the result of a violent belief system. Just as religious traditions are rooted in a set of beliefs, the phenomenon of violence flows from a belief in its power to save us. Wink said that the greatest religion on the planet is not Christianity, Islam, Hinduism or Judaism but the pervasive faith in violence.

The contemporary epidemic of violence stems from our acknowledged or unacknowledged belief that violence ultimately is just and necessary. Wink named this “the myth of redemptive violence.” This myth — in the sense of the foundational story by which we live — permeates our consciousness and our culture. Hence our age’s greatest temptation: to cling to a belief in the effectiveness and preeminence of violence, the conviction that it is “the bottom line,” that violence is the final answer.

For Wink, nonviolent resistance is a critically important process for challenging violence, but, even more deeply, it is an embodied practice that can help to free us from our faith in violence forged in the furnaces of fear, hate, greed, ambition, resignation and capitulation. Creating nonviolent alternatives is a spiritual practice and a way of being at the service of the transformation of our selves, our communities and our world.

For Wink, this vision did not come from abstract speculation. Instead, it flowed from his wrestling with the Christian Gospels. For two thousand years, these accounts of the life and work of Jesus have nourished the convictions of a handful of peace churches like the Bretheren, the Anabaptists and the Quakers, but the vast majority of the Christian tradition have, willfully or not, watered down or stifled the message of radical nonviolence. Like a series of 20th-century scholars — including Andre Trocme, John Howard Yoder, Howard Thurman, Roland Bainton, Ched Myers, and John Dominic Crossan — Wink was unsatisfied with the centuries-old take that had muffled the nonviolent Jesus and that had left much of Christianity colluding with systems of violence, including theological justifications of war. So he turned his exegetical skill on the Gospels to see what they would reveal.

He did this in many ways, but one of the most memorable — and likely far-reaching — was his interpretation of Jesus’ saying to “turn the other cheek” and other sayings in the Gospel of Matthew:

You have heard that it was said, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” But I say to you, Do not resist one who is evil. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also; and if anyone would sue you and take your coat, let him have your cloak as well; and if any one forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. (Matthew 5:38-41, Revised Standard Version)

These exhortations has been used for 2,000 years to breed submission and complicity, especially since they were linked in the same passage to the admonition: “Do not resist an evildoer.” Wink began his research by wondering about this phrase. When he went back to the Greek text, he found that the original meaning was quite different. While the verb antistenai has been almost universally translated as “resist,” it is in fact a military term that means “resist violently or lethally.” Rather than encouraging passivity, Jesus was saying, “Don’t be a doormat. Resist violence, but not with retaliatory violence.”

Wink’s work on “turn the other cheek” helped sharpen his point. Jesus’ audience would likely have had firsthand experience with being degraded and treated as an inferior, including being cuffed with the backhand by a social superior, including the Roman soldiers occupying first century Palestine. The typical options in the face of this violence were cowering submission or violent retaliation, which likely would have been suicidal. To maintain one’s position and offer one’s left cheek creates in the cultural and political context of the time a dilemma for the oppressor. As Wink writes in The Powers That Be:

By turning the cheek, the servant makes it impossible for the master to use the backhand: his nose is in the way… The left cheek now offers a perfect target for a blow with the right fist; but only equals fought with fists, as we know from Jewish sources, and the last thing the master wishes to do is to establish this underling’s equality. This act of defiance renders the master incapable of asserting his dominance in this relationship … By turning the cheek, then, the “inferior” is saying, “I’m a human being, just like you. I refuse to be humiliated any longer. I am your equal. I won’t take it anymore.”

Wink makes a similar point about other sayings in this passage (giving up one’s cloak and going the extra mile): an active, courageous, and creative third way exists between passivity on the one hand and counter-violence on the other.

This alternative seizes the moral initiative, explores a creative alternative to violence, asserts the dignity and humanity of all parties, seeks to break the cycle of dehumanization and faces the consequences of one’s action.

Building on these are numerous other rigorous re-readings of the Gospels. Wink offered a revealing illumination of the origins of Christianity rooted in a vision of inclusion, even as this vision has been systematically distorted and devastated by the tradition over these two millennia. Nonviolent resistance, as the examples cited above stress, is key to actualizing vision.

Wink wrote from his theological perspective and has influenced many of us working for justice and peace from that stance. But there is much in his work that illuminates the dynamics of violence and nonviolent change far beyond his particular tradition. As we engage with monumental systems of injustice, Walter Wink’s work can offer us frames that can be adapted to many contexts and settings as we struggle on for the well-being of all.

Thank you, Walter, for illuminating the power of nonviolent change for us in these times of peril and opportunity.

London student protest, via Bowalley Road.

For the better part of a century, some visionaries have been trying to break out of the dominant belief that there are only two means of forcing change: reform through elections and revolution through violence. The rigidity of that binary choice still strangles thinking today.

A Norwegian, for instance, once wrote to me that there simply wasn’t enough direct conflict in the country to use the word “revolution”; as I have described in detail before, the Labor Party got enough votes in the 1930s so it could finally create a coalition government. An election seems to have made the change. But that view focuses on politicians and electoral forms and overlooks the main scene of the conflict, which was mass direct action in the economic arena. To say that the change happened through elections is to mistake the effect for the cause.

The Norwegian owning class fought for decades to maintain domination against the rising militancy of workers’ strikes and other forms of direct action. The 1 percent — through its instrument, the Conservative Party government — called out troops repeatedly to keep workers in line. My Norwegian father-in-law refused military service as a young man because he personally might have to shoot fellow workers rather than a national enemy. The owning class also recruited tens of thousands of people into an organization devoted to violent strike-breaking.

The Labor Party was not the polite, consensus-seeking party of today’s Norway; it was the electoral representative of — and controlled by — the workers. One couldn’t even be a member of the Labor Party in the old days if one wasn’t a worker. The action that counted for Norway’s future was not in the Storting (the parliament) but in the deadly fight between the 1 percent and the trade unions. And the stakes were very high: Who would lead Norway, the super-rich and their bourgeois allies or the working class?

The stakes were so high, in fact, that a young Vidkun Quisling tried to put together a military coup against the government that was run by the Conservative Party in an attempt to suspend parliamentary forms and create an efficient dictatorship. After all, the German and Italian 1 percent supported a fascist solution to “labor unrest,” so why not the Norwegian?

One reason, I believe, is that the Norwegian working class, although inspired by Marxism and even Leninism, was not inspired by violence. “Yes” to a workers’ (and farmers’) state, but “no” to armed struggle.

Here’s where we need to open the space to think freshly when we think about power and revolution. Smart nonviolent strategy influences the choices available to ruling class. Nonviolent struggle constrains the options of the opponent.

In Norway, the largely nonviolent struggle of the 1920s and 1930s made it impossible for the 1 percent to go “all the way” with violent repression. In Norway, 1 percenters ruled out — as far as I have found — even considering the option of asking the British 1 percent to intervene in the Norwegian struggle, as it might have had there been an armed conflict. (The British empire was highly experienced in meddling in the affairs of other countries and had sent troops to Russia after its violent revolution. Norway was considered to be in Britain’s backyard.)

The lack of a fascist response by the Norwegian 1 percent in the 1930s to the workers’ prolonged nonviolent direct action doesn’t tell us there was not a revolution. What the workers (and farmers, in their own dimension of the struggle) did was show the 1 percent that it could no longer run the country. If the owners did not make a giant compromise, they might end up without any ownership stake in the country at all.

In light of what happened later, it is to the credit of the owning class and the workers that they made their historic compromise of 1936. But their decision not to go over the brink doesn’t give us reason to paper over the conflict. Labor decided it would not escalate further but instead take the reins of government (postponing the issue of ownership of the means of production) in order to alleviate the worst depression in Europe and set the ship of state onto a new — and fundamentally different — course.

Now we come to the heart of the matter: What defines revolution? The Norwegian Labor Party and its farmer and middle class allies could fundamentally change the country’s course because they forced a power shift. The super-rich no longer ruled, as they had for centuries (sometimes in collaboration with the Danes and Swedes).

That power shift is what didn’t happen in the 20th century in the U.K., in France and in Germany, although the working class in those countries gained more concessions than were gained in the U.S.

How significant was the power shift? The crisis in the financial sector that is still wrecking Europe reveals the difference dramatically. When, in the 1980s, Norway took a temporary detour by flirting with neoliberalism, the economy headed toward the cliff: speculation on housing, a bubble, a crash. But the fundamental power arrangement re-asserted itself: The government seized the three biggest banks, fired the senior management, made sure the shareholders didn’t get a krone and told the other private banks that they could either recapitalize on their own or go bankrupt. No bailouts — period.

The Norwegian bottom line: When the capitalists act out, they must pay for their spree, not the people.

It couldn’t be more different from what we now see in most of Europe (and the U.S.). The 1 percent rule, and the people pay. As the European giants began to totter in 2008, the Norwegian (and Swedish) financial sectors remained secure because they had won their fight with the 1 percent previously. If the Norwegians and Swedes had not fought their nonviolent revolution, they also would have been at the mercy of their 1 percent and in just as big a mess as the rest of Europe.

It thus seems especially wise that Norwegians successfully resisted their own internationalist sentiments when asked to join the European Union. Twice voting “no” for a variety of reasons in national referenda, many realized decades ago that international capital uses the EU for its own agenda. The class struggle continues in Norway, as it must everywhere because it is a fundamental historical reality. But the playing field inside Norway is different because they won their most important battle in the 1920s and 30s — nonviolently.

Labor’s strategy was this: to use widespread direct action, accept compromise, change the union/management rulebook, lead the government, massively regulate capital, redistribute wealth, and take controlling shares of major corporations. It has unmistakably shifted the entire society. In Norway’s political spectrum, a leading Norwegian Conservative told me, Barack Obama would be considered right-wing.

I’ll share two of the more light-hearted signs of the continued hegemony of working class values like solidarity and equality. Poverty has been largely wiped out in Norway, but a bit stubbornly remains; during a recent election the Labor government found that fact being used as an attack by, of all groups, the Conservative Party, under whose rule an estimated majority of Norwegians had once been poor!

The brand-new national opera house in Oslo, an architectural gem built by the government for a traditionally elite art form, has been such a success that seats are often sold out months in advance. Nevertheless, the opera house refuses to put a price premium on its best seats because that “just wouldn’t be the Norwegian way.”

Norway is not a utopia, and in my forthcoming book I’ll share ideas from radical Norwegians as they continue to envision a more carbon-neutral, egalitarian, decentralized and liberated society than the one they have. Whether or not they break new ground in coming decades, Norwegians have already shown us that people power can overcome money power, that the dominance of the super-rich can be overcome through nonviolent direct action and that democracy can flourish. I’m willing to call that a nonviolent revolution.

Bhutan's Prime Minister Jigme Thinley (left) and Costa Rican president Laura Chinchilla at the UN, via AFP.

The monks of South Asia have been chanting on behalf of the happiness and well-being of all creatures for 2,500 years. Now, the spirit of those mantras has marched out of the monastery and into the streets, even into the halls of the United Nations.

Calling for nothing less than nonviolent resistance against the failed global economic system, the tiny Himalayan nation of Bhutan, sandwiched between India and China, took to the world stage last month by leading a “High Level Meeting on Happiness and Well-Being.” Its recommendation: Replace the Bretton Woods economic paradigm, imposed on the world by the United States in the wake of World War II, with an entirely new and inherently more just system.

The prime minister of Bhutan, Jigme Thinley, called on the people of the world to demand a change. Scholars, Nobel laureates, political actors, U.N. officials and staff, and spiritual and civil society leaders, many from the Global South, affirmed that the current system serves neither the human community nor other creatures on the planet.

“The GDP-led development model,” Thinley told the gathering, “compels boundless growth on a planet with limited resources.” Moreover, “it no longer makes economic sense. It is the cause of our irresponsible, immoral and self-destructive actions.” Finally, the prime minister concluded, “The purpose of development must be to create enabling conditions through public policy for the pursuit of the ultimate goal of happiness by all citizens.”

Most of the 600 in attendance shared Bhutan’s vision. Indian activist Vandana Shiva emphasized the importance of such a basic human need as food, the source of profit for a few and misery for many. As she has noted before, “The poor are not those who have been ‘left behind’; they are the ones who have been robbed.” The current paradigm creates a flow of financial, social, human and natural capital to the United States and other rich nations at the expense of everyone else.

Although Bhutan has faced criticism in the past for its treatment of Nepalese immigrants and the jailing of smokers, it has made considerable progress in recent years by establishing a new democracy and implementing creative efforts to measure its citizens’ well-being and happiness. The concept of Gross National Happiness was coined by the former King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, who abdicated in 2006 and set the democratization process in motion. To its credit, Bhutan is setting high standards for itself that may be difficult to reach, but the country is not alone in this endeavor.

Costa Rica’s President Laura Chinchilla gave the keynote address, sharing the experience of her country, noting, “In 1948 we decided to consolidate the best of our civic values, and abolished the army. We chose to solve our disputes through the ballots, not the bullets; we decided to invest in schools and teachers, not garrisons and soldiers.” Rather than decreasing the national security, “This uninterrupted path turned Costa Rica into the most stable and longest living democracy in Latin America.”

Interfaith spiritual leaders at the meeting, including the moderator of the Church of Canada and the Buddhist supreme patriarch of Thailand, as well as representatives from major religious traditions, issued their own statement calling for a new economic paradigm “based upon compassion, altruism, balance, and peace, dedicated to the well-being, happiness, dignity and sacredness of all forms of life.”

Meanwhile, economists John Helliwell, Richard Layard and Jeffrey Sachs distributed copies of the World Happiness Report. They argue, “We live in an age of stark contradictions. The world enjoys technologies of unimaginable sophistication; yet has at least one billion people without enough to eat each day.”

The official statement that came out of the meeting calls for a new paradigm with four pillars: ecological sustainability, happiness and well-being for all, fair distribution, and efficient use of resources. An unexpected 200 participants remained at the U.N. for two additional days to clarify what the new paradigm would look like, to propose new solutions, and to strategize how to mobilize a global movement in civil society to resist the current one and implement the change. Relevant civil society, educational, spiritual and activist organizations worldwide are being informed about the process, with an eye toward a 2014 convention that would replace Bretton Woods.

Widespread civil resistance movements would be a vital component in bringing about a shift toward so radically different a paradigm as this. Yet the meeting suggests that insufficient use has been made of the United Nations as a venue by change activists. Despite the U.N.’s obvious shortcomings — for instance, OWS recently protested the influence of corporations on environmental proceedings — it is nonetheless an infrastructure where every nation has a voice, at least in theory. Paradoxically, Global South elites who are also victims of the current economic paradigm provide an entrée into the system for grassroots activists, and this meeting demonstrates that the U.N. can offer a venue for radical critique. But the U.N. will only work on behalf of the people if the people insist that it does and begin to explore the possibilities that it might offer as a space for challenging injustice at a global level.

Dutch Rabbi Awraham Soetendorp, a long-time veteran of international meetings, observed that this one had “a different spirit” and that the time was ripe for unprecedented change. His call for a 0.01 percent donation of everyone’s income, especially from the rich nations, was received with enthusiasm by the civil society working group, which is creating a World Happiness Bank (a tentative name) that would promote and model the new economic paradigm.

This change will not happen, of course, without the mobilization of a nonviolent resistance movement. That’s where we come in; we have a new opportunity to act against a system that is robbing humanity and its fellow creatures through what the meeting’s statement calls the “private capture of the common wealth.” And we can do so by following the lead of the marginalized.

Spirit Affinity Group's action at Livermore National Laboratory in March, 1983. Courtesy of author.

A longtime co-worker of mine became committed to nonviolence during a demonstration he attended many years ago as the movement to end France’s brutal war in Algeria was gearing up. In the midst of a chaotic scene in Paris, he saw a man sitting contemplatively in the street as a military vehicle bore down on him. Rather than running him over — as it seemed very likely just a moment before — the vehicle came to a stop. The driver then nudged the vehicle up to the demonstrator, coaxing him to get up. But he didn’t. This went on for a while, but the protester remained in his fixed position. Finally the driver gave up and swerved around the man, leaving him in the street.

There are no guarantees with nonviolence. This scene could have ended very differently (as it did when I saw my friend, Vietnam veteran Brian Willson, run over by a Navy munitions train nearly 25 years ago during a protest against arms shipments to Central America). But this vignette from a half century ago unfolded as it did because this anonymous man in some unnamed French street had, as Thich Nhat Hanh puts it, become like a mountain: centered, poised, relentless. He didn’t rant. He didn’t run. He was here. He was now. And because of this, he transformed a highly mechanistic and objective operation (a military vehicle sweeping away an obstacle in its path to establish preeminence and to reestablish order) into a highly interpersonal and intersubjective one. Despite the roles each person had been assigned in this play, they engaged with one another in a way that was no longer found in the script.

By being here and now, not only did the military vehicle relent — thus dramatizing concretely and symbolically an end to the military barrage being used by his nation to hold on to empire — it succeeded in irrevocably changing someone who was watching. Watching this simple, firm act managed to circumvent my friend’s deeply entrenched defenses and, in an instant, to reframe things. He understood for the first time that we have a power which had previously been only vague and theoretical.

In these days of accelerating movement building, it is useful to reflect on the power of action that is centered, poised and relentless. Just as this long-ago scene on a Parisian street communicated a new way of being to my friend, so all nonviolent action is a form of communication, a specific type of discourse, designed to provoke a new kind of conversation with one’s larger society.

Social movements change the world by changing the conversation. Injustice succeeds by monopolizing the chat, dominating the airways, laying down the law. Social movements rush headlong into history fueled by the conviction that such a one-way monologue is death. They are always dreaming up methods to muscle their way into the room, to pull up a chair, and to flick the discussion in a very different direction using a very different lingo.

While injustice hinges on controlling the semantic universe to manufacture consent — so that money becomes speech and corporations become people — social movements succeed by crashing the party and challenging the chatter. They do this using the most powerful language we have at our disposal: the creaky, resilient and three-dimensional profundity of the human body — whether in Selma or Cairo or a forgotten street in Paris.

Nonviolent action is about stoking a serious, jaw-dropping conversation with one’s society. As the late Bill Moyer’s book Doing Democracy stresses, the goal of a movement is not to convince the policy-maker to change. Instead, it is to alert, educate, win and mobilize the populace on whom the policy-maker depends for her or his power. The aim of nonviolent action is to spark and sustain a conversation with one’s larger society about grievances and their remedies. It seeks to pry open the doors of dialogue, so that whatever injustice we’re pitted against can be seen for what it is and we can finally all sit down and hash it out.

To do this, though, one’s action has to find a way past all the implacable guards posted to keep these doors locked: fear, cynicism, apathy, powerlessness, hate.

The genius of nonviolent action is that it carries within its beating heart the capacity to slip past these defenses. Where violent action can often harden opposition and increase polarity, nonviolent action has the power to circumvent — and sometimes even to short-circuit — the willful knot of emotional and political obstacles a society erects to defend itself against transformation. No one action will create change, but each has an opportunity to advance the society-wide conversation on which change will ultimately rest.

At least three dimensions of nonviolent action help to do this: vulnerability, creativity and a commitment to the larger good. The more these are expressed, the greater the potential that a given action will reach a society’s soul, or at least its “right brain.” The language of bodies in action — vulnerable, creative and implicitly desiring the good of all — speaks to us in a peculiarly poignant and clear way.

Over the years I have seen this embodied power in action. I have seen people bring their deepest selves to critically important conversations, delivering their piece of the truth in person and in public: at federal buildings, at weapons facilities, in the streets, in the public square. Not always, but often, they have changed the atmosphere, opened possibilities that weren’t there before and extended a conversation that seemed stuck.

Sometimes creating embodied power is a conscious process: remembering to breathe, recalling why we are taking action, walking with intentionality and purpose, anchoring ourselves in our heart and our deepest longing, noticing what we are feeling. In nonviolent action trainings, I invite people to choose six words that capture why they are taking this step, a phrase to which they can return again and again during the action. Other times this power comes from the form of the action itself. For example, for many years I participated in “die-ins” to symbolize the destruction that various policies mete out. Being horizontal and silent and immobile in this way induced a focused, contemplative intentionality.

In the 1980s I took part in a die-in at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as a member of Spirit Affinity Group. Some of us decided that we would not cooperate with being arrested (to symbolize our unwillingness to cooperate with the lab’s design of nuclear weapons). When I refused to get up after a police officer had placed me under arrest, he started tugging at my arm. “Don’t fool around with him!” his superior yelled from across the street. “Just break his wrist.” The officer grabbed my wrist and I suddenly felt a piercing jab of pain as he started to break it. With no premeditation, I leaned up and calmly whispered, “You don’t have to do that.” We were now looking in each other’s eyes. There was another stab of pain — then it stopped. He had decided not to go through with it. He had just given me a gift by sparing my wrist. I then decided to give him a gift by getting up and walking with him. As we trotted over to the police bus, he abruptly said, “Thank you for telling me that I didn’t have to do that. They brought someone in last week to teach us to break wrists. I didn’t feel right about this at the time, but when my commanding officer told me to break your wrist, I had to follow orders. Something about what you said woke me up. I’m glad I didn’t do it.”

As noted before, there is no guarantee that nonviolent action will always have such happy outcomes. (A police officer broke the wrist of my friend David Hartsough under similar circumstances, and of course many others have paid much more dearly than this.) But nonviolent action bears within its vision and method the potential for transforming the intractable in small and large ways, for helping to break the spell of violence and injustice, just as the two of us in front of a weapons laboratory were momentarily transformed.

Nonviolent action invites us to bring our deepest self to a heart-to-heart with those we encounter in the messy chaos of the action itself and with our larger society. And it invites us to do this through the irreducible plenitude and power of our bodies, creatively risking a little or a lot for the well being of this suffering world.

The Yes Men pose with their satirical defensive suits, the Survivaballs.

“Protection” is a slippery concept. Consider the November 2011 pepper-spraying incident on the Davis campus of the University of California, when students identifying with the Occupy movement were demonstrating nonviolently on their campus and were repeatedly sprayed with injurious chemicals. Videos of the police brutality electrified the nation, woke up uncounted potential allies who until then had been asleep and energized the movement. Sociologists call it “the paradox of repression”: the brutality is intended to stop a movement but instead gives it energy and strength.

Strategically, would we prefer that the Davis students had been protected from that act of repression, leaving no one the wiser about what the 1 percent are willing to have their agents do to protect their privilege? For that matter, would Occupy Wall Street prefer that New York activists had been protected from the police blunder of assaulting them in those early days of campaign, which caused the initial tidal wave of support for Occupy?

Obviously it’s just as true today as ever that a great strength for activists is our ability to “take it” in order to advance our cause. Nonviolent struggle in that way is the same as armed struggle — soldiers unwilling to risk suffering are of little use in combat. We cannot, however, ignore a cultural double standard. Mainstream opinion automatically honors those who risk injury and death by going to war with a gun in their hands. There is no such automatic honoring of activists who take sometimes equally high risks. We do not, while shopping in the drugstore with our activist T-shirts on, hear from total strangers, “Thank you for your service.”

Given the cultural double standard, it makes sense that the Deacons for Defense, the Black Panthers and others could believe in protecting activists while protesting so we might be exempt from suffering for our cause — even if our suffering is required for winning.

I am not advocating for a martyr complex any more than the military is looking for martyrs. I love life and have been hugely relieved each time I’ve risked my life on a direct action and gotten out of it alive. What helped me take those risks, however, was knowing that high school classmates of mine had risked their lives while wearing a uniform, and I am not entitled to an exception. Struggle is struggle. They, and I, wanted to win our cause, and it’s not about glory but simply doing what needs to be done.

On the other hand, strategically, we need to accept that people can get tired and angry and burned out from repeated punishments over time. Not everyone is a John Lewis, the SNCC member who endured dozens of beatings and jailings, and once nearly died as a result.

The key to effective protection may be a matter of timing more than whether one uses arms or not. When campaigners are fresh and protection techniques seem likely to slow down the movement or limit visible state repression, why use them? On the other hand, when campaigners are fraying and tired, protection might be necessary to keep the movement going.

Nonviolent protective supports exist — collectivity, for example.

The affinity-group mode of organizing became widespread in the late sixties in the U.S. I remember my affinity group in the mass sit-down at the U.S. Supreme Court entrance in 1986, protesting the court’s affirmation of Georgia’s criminalization of gays. The organizers wanted all participants to be in an affinity group, especially people no one knew. A young stranger joined my group, and we had little time to integrate him before the civil disobedience started. But our ties were still strong enough to ensure that we looked out for him. When the police came near the young man, he had a psychic break, making loud weird noises and looking scary. Some of us protected him with our bodies while others told the police what was happening, demanding they should leave him to us. We were able to protect him through the arrest and into the police bus, several times strongly confronting the police to let him alone once they’d put cuffs on him. A couple hours later he’d gotten through the episode and became himself again.

I once led a workshop in Thailand that consisted of activists from Myanmar, Cambodia and Thailand. I asked them what they found worked in confrontations with police and soldiers, since the three countries offered many opportunities to face very harsh repression. It was striking how much overlap there was in very different cultures and political situations. They all found that singing reduced the violence; both soldiers and police found it hard to keep cracking heads when the activists were singing, especially when activists were also trying to make eye contact. In all three countries they found that sitting down reduced the violence. Taking initiatives of all kinds, like offering the police drinks from their water bottles, helped.

Shifting out of confrontation and into another mode takes the heat off the activists for a while and gives them time to regroup. Low-risk activities can be substituted for high-risk ones. In Chile, part of the gathering resistance to dictator Pinochet in the 1980s was banging pots inside apartments and houses, leaving windows open. Whole neighborhoods and cities banged pots at agreed-upon times, making an amazing din and building strength but eliciting little repression. Another method Chileans used in that campaign was the “quickie” demonstration. Like today’s flash mobs, at a pre-arranged time a group would appear on a corner, unfold banners, demonstrate for a few minutes and disappear before the police came. These “quickies” were used to build courage and boldness at a time when most people were very fearful of challenging the dictator.

A very different form of protection was tried in Chile in 1931, when students led a nonviolent insurgency against a dictator imposing an austerity program.

Very early in the campaign, students occupied a university building. Police surrounded the building and threatened to come in with guns drawn; danger increased when some armed students fired at police from the windows. The students’ parents, professionals involved with their national professional organizations, warned the dictator that if he ordered a massacre of the students they would themselves go on strike and organize others to do so. The massacre didn’t happen, though as the campaign expanded rapidly those professionals joined the campaign anyway.

The Chilean experiment offers an example of nonviolent deterrence. Contrast nonviolent deterrence with the violent deterrence such as that of the Deacons for Defense. The Deacons were able to deter some opponent violence by showing their weapons; in those incidents, the racist side backed down. If they hadn’t, the Deacons — in order to keep their deterrence credible — would have had to shoot, and a shoot-out of some kind would have occurred, with consequences far beyond the control of the movement. The campaigners’ goals probably would have gotten lost in the dynamics of whatever would follow a shoot-out.

With nonviolent deterrence, in contrast, if the opponent isn’t deterred but instead goes ahead and injures or kills campaigners, the campaign can continue to focus on its goals, and it often expands rapidly by winning public sympathy.

Yet another approach that has deterrent effect is to invite into one’s struggle a third party that has credibility of some kind with the opponent; the nature of third party nonviolent intervention (TPNI) is not to take sides, but to monitor the situation or even to offer protective accompaniment. I was part of the initial team of Peace Brigades International (PBI) when it went to Sri Lanka to protect human rights lawyers who were being assassinated by hit squads. Our job was to be nonviolent bodyguards, going wherever our lawyers wanted us to, in order to raise the stakes for the controllers of the hit squads. In that situation, our credibility came from the fact that the PBI volunteers were recruited from countries that gave aid to the Sri Lankan government. If we were killed in the course of the hit squad’s assassination of a lawyer, our governments would become less inclined to give aid to the government. Like SNCC in its early years in Mississippi, the lawyers used their opponents’ self interest to keep themselves safe.

Peace Brigades International stayed in Sri Lanka for a dozen years of war, protecting journalists, women leaders and others standing up for human rights. Not one of those being protected by unarmed bodyguards was killed. There is a growing variety of cases of TPNI’s effectiveness in many cultures, and in my view activists have only scratched the surface of what’s possible.

One of the most surprising cases of nonviolent protection was carried out in the Philippines in 1986, during the People Power insurgency against Ferdinand Marcos, the well-established (and U.S.-supported) dictator of the Philippines. Previously, armed efforts to overthrow Marcos had failed, and a nonviolent movement was on the way to succeeding; one reason for its growing success was that it succeeded in splitting the army. Unlike last year’s tragedy in Libya, in which the rebel soldiers joined the movement against Qaddafi with guns and created a civil war, the Filipino rebel army in 1986 made a different choice. The anti-Marcos part of the army retired to a military base not far from the capitol city of Manila. Marcos sent the larger, still-loyal part of his forces to attack the rebel army.

The movement’s organizers called on civilians to come to the aid of the rebels, and a million people intercepted Marcos’ army and confronted the force nonviolently. Nuns, priests and others climbed on tanks and began praying the rosary. The people reached out to Marcos’ soldiers, offering them candy and cigarettes. The loyalist troops felt compelled to retreat. The best protectors of the rebel soldiers turned out to be large numbers of unarmed people.

Gandhi himself justified the use of violence if the person threatened couldn’t figure out a nonviolent way to mount a defense. But he also went on to assert that, with sufficient creativity, practical nonviolent tools could be found. The real question underlying the self-defense debate, therefore, is: How creative are you willing to be in exploring strategically the possibilities of nonviolent defense?

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.

Mutual aid is the voluntary exchange of goods and services in a way that is mutually beneficial. Generally, these exchanges do not include money. Mutual aid is an economy based on cooperation and support, not competition and manipulation. Capitalism has manufactured a sense of false scarcity; scarcity for food, jobs, college-admission spots and housing. The reality is that a small number of individuals — ahem, the 1 percent — horde wealth, power and access, while everyone else is left to compete over the scraps. This dynamic results in poor-on-poor crimes, self-blame, and extreme individualism. And while charity may provide immediate aid to people in need, it is disempowering for those on the receiving end, and it does not confront the root issues of inequality.

Mutual aid has been utilized by many societies throughout human history. Because it was understood in these cultures that the survival and health of the group was integral to that of every individual, unchecked greed and unawareness of suffering were less prevalent. Survival used to be tied to the land, not to a minimum wage. It wasn’t until the privatization of land and production that people became forced to pay, and often to go into debt, just to have the means to support themselves. It does not have remain this way. Practicing mutual aid allows us to break away from our society’s fatally skewed conception of what is valuable, prioritizing instead strong relationships, healthy living and direct democracy.

Since January, the Mutual Aid Cluster in Occupy Wall Street’s May Day planning committee has been preparing for and coordinating mutual aid for those participating on May 1. Much as in occupied Liberty Square, we will be creating a vibrant space for people to share their knowledge, resources and services. While our comrades are shutting down Midtown and blockading arteries into New York City that day, our direct action will be coordinating mutual aid in Bryant Park and Union Square. In Bryant Park, we’ll be supporting those taking part in the morning and afternoon actions with food and art, along with medical and legal support. We will also be hosting skill shares and workshops. In Union Square, we will be doing all of the above, in addition to a Really, Really Free Market (RRFM), which is a community event where people can bring reusable goods that they no longer need and take what they do need. In this way, clothes, books, toys, skills, tools and small furniture are shared, along with entertainment that is free to anyone who wishes to join in the celebration of a gift economy. Really, Really Free Markets have been organized all across the country and are easy to set up in your neighborhood; just pick a place and time and get the word out.

A major focus of May Day will be the Free University, which has been coordinated by college students throughout the city. They will be standing in solidarity with students from around the country and the world who are struggling for free or lower-cost education. Education is a human right, but more and more colleges and universities are raising tuition, closing off access and slashing workers’ jobs. The students in New York have been organizing for massive student walk-outs on May Day that will converge in Madison Square Park for an afternoon of free classes provided by college professors, which anyone can join.

You might not know it, but mutual aid is already part of your everyday life. Family members — both chosen and biological — take care of each other when one is sick, watch each other’s children and pets, and help with household projects. Friends share food and favorite books. Couch-surfers allow strangers to stay on their couches when they travel and then go off to adventure themselves, knowing that they will have a place to rest and a new friend at their next destination. Hitchhiking gets people to from state to state in exchange for stories and songs. Neighbors share recipes and tools. And let’s not forget that good consensual sex can be a form of mutual aid, too!

Although it is impossible to operate fully outside of globalized capitalism today, communities can prefigure a new world by building liberating alternatives through new and existing  relationships and support networks. Many of our most organically formed communities — like neighborhoods and workplaces — have been broken down due to the isolation that capitalism fosters. The Internet, advertisements, television, drugs and other forms of diversion keep us consuming and not questioning. As long as we are unable recognize the solution in the people around us, we will be afraid to recognize these diversions for what they are and begin to resist.

Resistance is the name of the game on May Day and beyond, and it has two equally necessary components: disrupting the existing exploitative institutions and building up cooperative, creative alternatives. If all you do is disrupt the status quo, what arises afterward may be no better than what came before. Our occupation in Liberty Square was an imperfect model of both disruption and rebuilding that introduced thousands of people to the potential of mutual aid. There, we helped to meet each other’s needs while confronting an oppressive system that no longer has a place for us. On May Day, once again, we will reject the false solutions presented by those who think they are in charge and point the way to real solutions in the process.

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.

Achieving apparent unity is easy; whoever shouts the loudest or lobbies the hardest typically wins over the group. It is solidarity — respecting each other’s particular methods and skill sets — that is truly revolutionary. Trying to impose unity over the entire action would leave no one satisfied, and it would actually serve to divide us. This solidarity-versus-unity struggle has been playing out inside OWS as a whole for a while now, as well as in our May Day planning meetings. After months of trying to impose decisions upon each other, which was serving only to divide us, the May Day planning committee has quietly moved away from unity and towards solidarity. It’s about time.

The call to help organize a national general strike on May Day had no lack of interested parties in New York City from a diverse cross-section of activists. The first call to meet as an “exploratory committee” brought together around 75 people back in January, including radicals from Occupy Wall Street and across New York City, alongside seasoned labor organizers and others. This diversity has persisted throughout the planning process, resulting in some incredible breakthroughs and synergy, as well as deep reflection and sometimes painful challenges.

Anarchists like myself are accustomed to striving to create “safer spaces” where we do our best to check our privileges of every kind at the door. This compels us to develop particular strategies to raise up marginalized voices by adhering to consensus process and respecting each other’s autonomy to make our own tactical and strategic choices. Becoming accustomed to these ways of interacting with one another can make it difficult for anti-authoritarians to organize in other types of spaces, where people are more used to organizing hierarchically. The first few OWS May Day meetings were well-populated with radical feminists, queer anarchists, insurrectionists and others from the New York anarchist community. As has been happening in OWS as a whole, many of these people began feeling uncomfortable and marginalized in those meetings and, by and large, stopped attending. But many of us did remain in the project and continued working with an ever-growing coalition of OWS folks, labor and immigrant worker justice groups. This coalition, in itself, is historic.

Our coalition partners wanted to set up a “4×4” steering committee with four representatives from each of the four groups: organized labor, the May 1st Coalition for Worker and Immigrant Rights, community-based organizations and Occupy Wall Street. But since the Occupy movement tends to operate on the core anarchist principles of horizontality and consensus, having formal representatives of any kind at the 4×4 wouldn’t work for us. We informed our partners that we would feel more comfortable using a spokescouncil at these meetings. This would mean that as many OWS folks as wished to attend would be welcome, and the four people empowered to speak at a given time would act as non-autonomous spokes, reflecting to our partners the will of the group seated behind them. For large decisions, we would need to take a brief break and come to consensus as a group before reporting back to the coalition.

Our partners were very receptive to us operating in this manner, and it even seemed like a bit of our horizontally rubbed off on them. When it was time to open up the process and call large meetings to plan the details of the solidarity march, they at first suggested that each group should get only one vote — total. OWS balked at this, and an agreement was reached to use a two-thirds-majority, modified-consensus system. This means that, first, we check for full consensus from the group, and if there are people opposed, we hear them voice their concerns before moving to a vote. Whether these processes will have a long-term effect on our partners remains to be seen, but it is something of which I am very excited and proud to have been a part.

Many of the radicals who stopped attending the early meetings moved on to work with Strike Everywhere, an autonomous group of anti-authoritarians who were agitating for a general strike in New York, outside of OWS. This model of working with exclusively like-minded folks was appealing to many of the anarchists in the OWS group, many of whom had started to feel similarly disenfranchised. A lot of the remaining anarchist organizers began working almost exclusively in clusters that featured a distinctly anti-authoritarian bent, with names like Action, Mutual Aid or Strike. Over time, as the character of each became more well-defined, all the various clusters in the project began to respect each other’s autonomy, unique skills and interests. Once we stopped constantly trying to make decisions for each other, our meetings became much more cohesive, and coordination went much more smoothly.

Meanwhile, both of the main decision-making bodies in OWS — the Spokes Council and the General Assembly — gradually became non-functional and were disbanded. Movement-wide projects are now being organized in more decentralized ways, with various groups simply coordinating with one another rather than trying to make decisions together. While some see this as a failure of process, I think it’s really one more stop in the movement’s ongoing experimentation toward a directly-democratic society. Trying to impose “unity” over the movement with the GA and Spokes led to infighting and marginalization. Being in solidarity with one another allows different groups with different backgrounds to work together effectively without trying to control one another.

Despite the struggles and the experimentation, the successes of the May Day planning group and the larger coalition are undeniable. A broad coalition of labor, immigrant worker justice groups, community organizations, Occupy assemblies and students has been forged. Through a decentralized action model, there will be dozens of simultaneous direct actions across the city, creating time and space between ones that are family-friendly and others that are more aggressive. Thousands of people will be sharing resources and skills, practicing and learning about mutual aid in Bryant Park and Union Square. Students will be walking out of their schools and opening a free university. Workers will be occupying their workplaces, kicking out exploitative bosses and managing the businesses for themselves. A call for a general strike was made, and endorsed by the largest labor organization in New Jersey, the Industrial Labor Council. Ways have been found for other labor groups to participate without breaking laws against striking, by calling for a “99 Pickets” action that will aim to shut down the flow of finance capital in Midtown on the morning of May Day.

I’m proud to have worked beside hundreds of others on this project, and I am confident that the effects of May Day will bellow out across the globe. But I can’t help but wonder how much more we could have accomplished if it hadn’t taken us three long months to realize that we needed to act in solidarity with each other, not in some kind of unity. Regardless, I count this gradual discovery among the many successes of anarchist organizing models in the brief history of this movement.

The YourBofA.com landing page.

Last week, a press release was released revealing a new website apparently from Bank of America, YourBofA.com, followed by another, seemingly hastily-written press release imploring readers to ignore the “malicious website (YourBofA.com) that is fraudulently representing itself as a Bank of America re-branding effort.” The second release insisted that “Bank of America is not making plans to enter into federal receivership.”

The malicious website (and both press releases) is another creation of the activist pranksters The Yes Men — the group that has posed as World Trade Organization representatives, George Bush henchmen and many more, all in good, subversive fun. To learn how laughter can be the greatest weapon of all, I sat down with Andy Bichlbaum, one of the founders of The Yes Men last month at Scratcher Bar in the East Village. Now, in addition to The Yes Men, The Yes Lab and teaching at New York University, he has been involved in developing the Plus Brigades, a project of Occupy Wall Street meant to infuse the movement with renewed creativity in the streets.

What was your goal with the YourBofA.com action?

I thought it would be good to get people thinking about what happens when you bail out a bank. I’m presuming that when you bail out a bank, there’s probably a lot of different ways to do it. One way would be just to give it a lot of money. But another way would be to give it that money and say, “Okay, now we own you.” In general, when you pay for things you own them. But, surprisingly, in 2008 we gave them money but gained no control. And they just kept doing the same old shit.

What was your favorite part of the action?

The phishing was pretty nice. Bank of America complained, so Google put a big phishing warning on the site. But then we emailed all our friends and told them to complain to Google, so the search engine took off the phishing warning. That was a pretty good example of people power.

Let’s get to the basics: Why do more than march or hold a rally? What’s the point of these fun, creative actions?

You want a reason to have fun? That’s pretty easy: Because it’s fun. It galvanizes people. There’s that famous video of that guy dancing at Sasquatch and he’s dancing alone on a hill and beckoning people to join him. At first two or three people join him, and then after a while thousands of people have joined.

What makes people join in, besides the fact that dancing is fun?

I think it starts with having rules that are simple to follow. The other day, a Plus Brigades clowning action at a Chase bank was really well-directed. These kids happened to be passing by on the sidewalk, and one of them asked, “So, we just fall down? Is that the rule?” They totally wanted to play along. I think that’s when it’s infectious: When everyone is doing something purposefully that has some rules to it.

 But isn’t fun something spontaneous and uncontrollable?

There are always rules and structure. Even within an anarchist society there would be lots of rules and structure, but hopefully a lot more fun.

It seems like now we have a lot of rules, but very little fun. What’s up with that?

I can’t think of a time in history when fun has been normal. There probably have been times — I imagine the anarchists in Spain having fun all the time. But not in our society. It’s a pretty radical vision: a world in which fun is normal.

Since it’s not, fun is really useful politically — first, for the prefigurative reason, because it shows people that life can be fun. Second, you can communicate a simple message pretty powerfully using fun, so it’s good for getting messages into the media.

How you do work with the media?

I think of journalists as collaborators. There are a lot of really bad journalistic organizations — there’s nothing good about CNN or MSNBC — but there are a lot of individual journalists, including at CNN and MSNBC, that are really friendly and love Occupy. When you do creative actions, it’s like you’re giving journalists an extra token that allows them to say something important.

Does using fun also change the way the message is communicated?

Definitely. If you’re angry about something, you rant. But pushing facts down people’s throats doesn’t work. Humor can really sideswipe this problem. It’s like there’s a wall between you and a person, and if you make a joke, it’s a crack in the wall.

But aren’t we a society that prides itself on being rational, logical? Why don’t facts work?

Facts don’t have any emotional weight. I believe there is an objective reality, but we don’t live through facts. It’s like we’re dancing with objective reality. And some people are closer to it than others. We build these structures inside us that are much more powerful than facts because they are ours, and they are deep and emotional. Imagine it’s this big eight-legged metal thing that you’re living in that’s walking over reality — humor can knock off one of the legs so that the creature falls over, and you’re suddenly looking at the sky.

Okay… I think I’m just going to draw that monster instead of transcribe this interview.

Ha! No that probably wouldn’t work.

Okay, so then tell me more.

Well, why do oppressed people have such great jokes? The pat explanation is that they need solace, they need to laugh because they are suffering. But it also might be that they constantly need to be inventive, to reinvent their relationship to reality because it’s so inimical to them.

Making jokes pierces through the stupid logic that supports a system, and we laugh because we know that it makes no sense. It’s laughing at yourself for being so stupid as to believe in this system.

You know when you laugh so hard your sides are splitting? It’s because everything you thought was true is not true anymore. And then you’re left with nothing, which is hilarious in just the sheer hopelessness of it. When we create jokes about society and the way reality is and how it can be, it’s a way of getting past this reality and recreating the world.

Do you think power structures are derived from people believing in that power?

Of course. No one can govern without the consent of the governed. So making fun of power enables people to see in themselves how they are the power, and how they are propping it up — how we are all propping it up. And the more you can laugh at that, the more you stop doing it.

So, if you recognize the power and how you reinforce it, and if the power wouldn’t exist unless you reinforce it, then…

Then you just go, Shit! You collapse on the ground laughing because you are the one making these crazy decisions.

You are the thing that’s oppressing yourself.

Yeah! Why do we do that?

Ha, I don’t know. So is that the reason that your work often centers on Wall Street or the government or the NYPD? Is that your political slant coming through, or is the 1 percent just the funniest group to make jokes about?

They are the only people to make fun of. Why would you make fun of anyone that doesn’t have a ton of power? That’s not funny. It’s not funny to make fun of the weak.

You do both on-the-ground actions and send out a lot of fake press releases. Why bother with the real world if we all sit in front of our computers for the majority of our lives anyway?

Because the real world is real, and the virtual world doesn’t really exist. Computers are only good for communicating simple information from one point to another, and yes they’re an improvement over the telephone, or town criers, or smoke signals, but they’re not categorically different.

And the smoke signal, or the computer thing, has to reference something visceral. In Egypt, Facebook was supposedly so important, but it was really useful only to tell everyone to go to Tahrir Square, and that only worked because everyone knew there was a reason to. Facebook didn’t give the reason; everyone knew why because of life.

The "Dog" nuclear test during Operation Buster-Jangle at the Nevada Test Site on November 1, 1951. It was the first U.S. nuclear field exercise conducted on land; troops shown are a mere 6 miles from the blast.

It remains the most bombed real estate on the planet. The Nevada Test Site — recently renamed the Nevada National Security Site — is 1,360 square miles of sprawling desert north of Las Vegas. A nuclear weapon was detonated there on average every eighteen days from 1951 through 1992. In the 1980s the spiritually-rooted Nevada Desert Experience (NDE) launched a campaign with the audacious goal of ending this practice. For the next decade its effort gained traction, with thousands of people from across the U.S. and around the world converging on the site’s southern gate to protest, pray and engage in nonviolent civil disobedience. Other organizations, including the American Peace Test (APT) and Greenpeace, joined NDE in this struggle. In 1988, three thousand people were arrested in a ten-day action organized by APT at the Nevada Test Site.

Against all odds, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) was established in 1992. NDE and many other organizations had built a global movement that mobilized people-power on every continent to create the conditions for an end to nuclear testing. One hundred eighty-two nations became signatories. Though Bill Clinton signed the treaty in 1996, the U.S. Senate has yet to ratify it. (Just today Physicians for Social Responsibility called on the Senate to take this up again.) Nevertheless, the United States has maintained a moratorium on full-blown nuclear tests for almost twenty years. While the nuclear threat is as alive as ever, the world is no longer subject to the numbing horror of this dress rehearsal for Armageddon and its environmental, political and moral fallout.

NDE just celebrated its 30th anniversary. Since the promulgation of the CTBT, people within the organization have periodically wondered if it should declare victory and close up shop. The answer has been a resounding “No.” NDE has stayed put, with a focus on the nuclear and non-nuclear projects that continue at the test site and the dramatic surge in drone warfare coordination at nearby Creech Air Force Base. At the same time, it continues to vigorously support the Western Shoshone nation in its struggle with the U.S. government, which violated the 1863 Treaty of Ruby Valley by confiscating Western Shoshone and Southern Paiute land to build the site. In addition to a weekly vigil, NDE organizes a “Sacred Peace Walk” from Las Vegas to the test site every spring, and an annual commemoration of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August.

From the vantage point of three decades, there are a couple of lessons that may shed light on the challenges and opportunities of building movements for change today.

First, this movement did not begin with a clear strategy. It was founded by a handful of people who ventured into the desert to bear witness to present and potentially future nuclear destruction. Franciscan sisters, brothers and lay people seeking a way to mark the 800th birthday of St. Francis of Assisi followed their hearts to the test site, where for 40 days they maintained a presence during the Christian season of Lent. Their witness culminated in nonviolent civil disobedience as 19 people crossed onto this top-secret nuclear facility and were arrested.

Several years ago, I published a book about this movement, and a recurring perception among the organizers I interviewed was that NDE lacked a strategy, and that this had hurt the effort. What I began to appreciate, however, was that a different kind of strategic thinking had been at work. This was one not based on a SWOT analysis or models of community organizing, but on relentless persistence: ongoing presence, action and occupation. (For example, a Peace Camp was established outside the gates of the facility where people would stay for long stretches of time, including a former defense worker, Art Casey, who spent two years there.)

This continuity established a growing legitimacy and visibility, which attracted people to this largely invisible site at a time when the emerging anti-nuclear weapons movement, stoked by the Reagan administration’s military buildup, was looking for tangible and concrete focus. Once people woke up to the fact that the government was still exploding nuclear weapons in the western part of the United States — and had not stopped in 1962 when the tests went below ground — people wanted to get involved, and a growing number of them thought about going out to the desert for themselves.

What helped translate this longing into making the long drive, boarding a plane or hitchhiking from the nearest interstate on-ramp was the peaceful atmosphere that NDE sought to create from the beginning. Nuclear weapons symbolize and embody mega-violence. What is needed, the founders reasoned, is not more violence but mega-nonviolence. This involved engaging in a Gandhian experiment with truth, which for them meant striking a balance between resistance and openness in their relationship with test site personnel and the local sheriffs.

They didn’t think of this strategically — in fact, they thought of this as a spiritual discipline — but in a strange way it turned out to be hyper-strategic. Over months and then years, an insistence on transforming “us versus them” thought and action established relationships at the test site that reduced the likelihood of violent interactions with employees and law enforcement. This, in turn, created a climate that attracted many more people to the campaign than a violent one likely would have. This relatively peaceful atmosphere, created at the edge of a nuclear firing range, emboldened a growing number of people to risk arrest and to face the consequences.

This atmosphere was not inevitable. It could have gone very differently, depending on the predilections of either side. The protesters had asked for a meeting with the director of the test site beforehand, which had turned out to be a powerful encounter. And from the very first day they took action at the site, they were scrupulous about maintaining the spirit of nonviolence. At the same time, the head sheriff who dealt with them was fairly new to police work and made it clear, through his words and actions, that he would respect the right of people to protest.

NDE had no illusions about the evil that the test site, and the larger nuclear weapons system, represented. At the same time, it held to what the late feminist writer Barbara Deming called the two hands of nonviolence: noncooperation with violence and steadfast regard for the opponent as a human being.

For the first year or two, the local county court meted out punishments in the range of a few weeks to several months, but as the numbers increased, the county threw up its hands. It did not have the resources to prosecute and jail an increasingly steady stream of anti-nuclear advocates. It announced that, except under highly unusual circumstances, it would issue citations but not act on them. This opened the floodgates. Soon, large numbers of people were making pilgrimage to the test site and engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience.

For some, this meant that risking arrest at NTS had little value. Anne Symens-Bucher, an NDE organizer, saw it differently. For her, NDE actions became a kind of school or training ground for civil disobedience. The peaceful atmosphere that NDE fostered became a place where many people risked arrest for the first time. It prepared them to work for an end to nuclear testing back in their own communities, including taking nonviolent action there.

A few years after this movement began, Symens-Bucher described the vision of NDE’s experiment in truth:

I have become wholly convinced that something is happening at the Test Site which is difficult – if not impossible – to articulate. It is, however, experienced. I have witnessed time and again, people participating in the vigil and going home changed. Something is happening at the Test Site, and it is happening not because we are organizationally efficient, but in spite of the fact that we are not. People of faith and goodwill are being drawn together in the Nevada desert and together they are bringing life and goodness and re-creation to a place of evil, death, and destruction. The location is perfect: the vastness of the desert, the desert in all its stark beauty. It is a beauty which is appreciated slowly, over a period of time … It is conducive to prayer, meditation, soul-searching, purification. It is as if people are able, in the setting of the desert, to reach down into their depths and discover what is good and what is the gift in themselves and in each other. This goodness, this gift, this power, this life-force collectively brought-forth, becomes tangible. Bonds are formed. Community happens. Love is made real. And out of this love, we are able to confront the evil in the desert. Out of this love we are able to heal ourselves, each other and the earth upon which we stand. Because of this love, nuclear weapons testing will end.

And end it did. NDE’s commitment to ongoing action, in season and out, contributed to a political groundswell, which, as I have traced elsewhere, was key to the establishment to the CBTB and a U.S. moratorium on testing. This shift was the result of many important clear and defined strategies, which are crucial to the success of all movements. But it was also the result NDE’s nonviolent “unstrategic strategy.”

When the Egyptian Revolution began, Sharif Abdel Kouddous was at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah, covering independent film for Democracy Now!, where he was a producer. Four days later, Kouddous was in Cairo, where much of his family lives, documenting the unpredictable twists and turns of the occupation of Tahrir Square. Day after day, Kouddous returned to the square, reporting from the heart of the action, often amidst outside skepticism about the movement and its strategies.

By early March, Kouddous had left Democracy Now! and was reporting on the revolution for various news outlets as a freelancer. Being a reporter for alternative media, free from the corporate media’s expectations of what he calls a “false sense of objectivity,” has been crucial to his success in telling the story of the uprising from close up. Additionally, Kouddous’ Egyptian roots — though he has lived most of his life in the States — not only helped him connect to people in Tahrir but also gave him insight into the way the revolution in Egypt was reshaping class boundaries, as people from diverse backgrounds came together to bring down a dictator.

Revolutions are messy and difficult to follow, whether you’re an active participant, an interested outsider or a journalist. The traditional way for a reporter to approach any story is to get quotes from a variety of sources, including experts and people in positions of power, so as to provide some measure of perspective and balance. But the revolutions that swarmed over the Arab world in early 2011 posed — as perhaps all grassroots politics poses — a challenge to the relevance of journalism’s standard toolkit. Could the governments of Tunisia or Egypt, so anxious to hold onto power in the face of populist revolt, really tell journalists anything that could be trusted, or anything that would help the world understand how the movements were progressing on the ground? Meanwhile, pro-government mobs were attacking foreign reporters, making it difficult for them to speak with pro-Mubarak loyalists and hear their version of things.

In our conversation, Kouddous explains why being an independent journalist proved to be an ideal position for reporting on the Egyptian Revolution. He has remained in Egypt since then, reporting with the support of grants from The Nation Institute and the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting. Kouddous was the subject of a recent HBO documentary, In Tahrir Square, which chronicles the first 18 days of the sit-in. He continues to appear on Democracy Now! and writes frequently for The Nation and The Egyptian Independent.  Kouddous’ own website is EgyptReports.net.

Journalism goes way back for you and your family. Tell me about that.

My father is always very proud of the fact that I’m a fourth-generation journalist. My great-grandmother was a renowned magazine publisher, an actress and a leading feminist. Her son was a famous journalist who exposed corruption in the pro-British monarchy and was jailed by the government for speaking out after Nasser, and he became a famous author after that. His son, my uncle, is a leading dissident in Egypt, a well-known writer and a protester as well. So, it’s an honor to carry on that family tradition, and try to speak truth to power as my uncle and great-grandmother and grandfather have done.

How did your background impact your reporting in Tahrir Square?

When the revolution broke out, those twin strands of covering it as a journalist and being a part of it as an Egyptian citizen — I think if you looked at my reporting at the time, there’s no question as to where my allegiances lay. But I also think there’s a false sense of objectivity that permeates the corporate media that actually hurts their coverage, where they give equal weight to both sides regardless of where the truth is.

How did you see that “false sense of objectivity” play out in the coverage of Cairo?

I think you saw that, in the beginning of the revolution, when people weren’t sure where things were going, you had the corporate TV network reporters saying, “Well, the Mubarak regime says this, and the protesters say this,” and kind of equating the two. But a few days into the revolution there was an attack on many Western reporters by the Mubarak regime, most notably Anderson Cooper. So immediately after that, their coverage changed, and they were saying, “This is a popular, pro-democracy uprising that’s being attacked by a 30-year autocrat.” That’s what is important — calling things as they are. And I don’t think that I, being an Egyptian citizen who supported the revolution, wasn’t able to also cover it in a professional, journalistic way. It was a challenge to strike that balance, but a rewarding one for me personally.

You’re from a wealthy, highly-educated family. How did your class background affect your view of what was taking place?

I was born in the U.S., but I grew up in Egypt from the age of 4 until I went to college in the States. I’ve visited Egypt every year, and I was never connected with any social movements or political circles in Egypt. This was a big opening for me to see this world in Egypt that I hadn’t been exposed to. Egypt is a very stratified society, class-wise, and I was from the upper class. There’s very little mixing of social classes. But that was the beauty of that first sit-in in Tahrir — and since then, really — it brought a lot of these stratified classes together. It was an eye-opener to be sitting, talking to people from all walks of life, from all across the country, who were united in a similar goal. It was a very rewarding experience, and I think it’s one that existed in Egypt before, just one that I wasn’t exposed to, because I hadn’t really moved in those circles. But I think the revolution broke a lot of those barriers, and those barriers would be hard to re-erect again. Reporting from the square at the time was amazing; it was amazing to get Egyptians from all walks of life in one place. People had very different upbringings, very different desires, but were supporting each other and uniting together to topple a regime.

How did you pinpoint whom to talk to when there was so much uncertainty and ambiguity?

It wasn’t hard to report during that first sit-in because all the action, all the organizing, the whole story, was very localized in Cairo, in Tahrir. If anyone was getting arrested outside the square you could find out inside the square — there was an information center. You could see the sit-in develop into people manning the outskirts of the square — until the so-called “Battle of the Camel,” when Mubarak sent in his thugs. You could see them organizing clean-up crews. It was easy to go around and just talk to people. And I think that’s one of the benefits of independent journalism: You can talk to people and hear people’s opinions, why they are there, their hopes and desires, as opposed to getting experts or so-called pundits to explain to people why they are there.

Did you try to follow key organizers?

The strength of the revolution — some say it’s a weakness now, but I don’t agree — was that it was leaderless. There were definitely key groups who had laid the groundwork, and key activists who had been struggling for years. My uncle was one of them. But decisions were very de-centralized. It was almost an organic decision-making system, where the combined intelligence of the square kind of knew what to do best, and there wasn’t really any one organizer.

How, then, did you decide which stories to tell and which people to follow? 

I did link up with some activists who had been demonstrating for many years, and were kind of at the heart of the revolution. They had their own space in Tahrir Square, and I would go visit them every day to find out whether there were any plans to do any tactics or any marches. An activist gave up his apartment that overlooked the Square, where people could go to get online and get the word out. There were different ways, different people to talk to. The square kind of became divided. There was a Muslim Brotherhood area. The Mubarak regime was trying to meet with different people from Tahrir, and some actually did go and meet with the regime, although many disagreed with their actions — so I talked to those people. There were various ways of getting in touch with those at the heart of it.

What kinds of debates were they having?

I think people forget that there was, at various moments, a lot of pressure on the protest movement to end the sit-in — that enough concession had been given, that the point had been made and now it was time to return to some kind of formal political process. My personal view was that the sit-in was the way to go.

Did you, then, feel any contradiction between having ideas about what the movement should do and reporting on it fairly?

I suppose you have to kind of distance yourself and try to assess it in a journalistic way, or speak to different people and get different points of view. But it’s a challenge to do that in any story, regardless of what you’re covering. Everyone has their personal point of view about any issue. But I think I managed to do it.

So, not objectivity, perhaps, but distance. What are you reporting on now?

There are a million stories in Egypt, all the time. There’s an elected parliament that’s dominated by Islamists. There’s a splintering of many different protest groups by strategies and ways of moving forward, because after a year of protesting and sit-ins, people are looking for different tactics. There’s also a burgeoning independent media movement in Egypt that I find very interesting and very powerful. There’s this whole issue of the NGOs that are being cracked down upon; while the Western media covers the U.S. and German organizations that have been raided and stand accused, I think the real danger is the Egyptian human rights organizations that are getting much less international attention but are also being shut down — this is a real attack on civil society. These next six months are going to be pivotal for the future of the country. And whenever there’s direct action and protest, I go to cover that, because that seems to be the front lines.

How so? From here, it seems like a lot of the action in Egypt right now is at the ballot box.

The only achievements this revolution has gained so far have been on the streets. This may change going forward. But the Supreme Council of Armed Forces has said, “We won’t respond to any pressure,” even when they’ve demonstrated that that’s the only thing they respond to. So, this has been the main tactic for revolutionaries over this past year. Now that we have what’s widely regarded as a legitimate parliament, that may change. But over the last few months there’s been a significant crackdown; over one hundred protesters have been killed, and they’re using live ammunition and rubber bullets. The stakes have gotten higher. The army issues complete denials of wrongdoing despite clear video evidence to the contrary; when they run over people with APCs [armored personal carriers], or shoot people with live ammunition, they deny it. I think it’s very important that you have credible reporters on the front lines to give an account of what’s happening.

You mentioned the burgeoning independent media there. Are people in Cairo getting the kind of news that they need about the movement? 

The vast majority of Egyptians get their news from television — 90 percent, I think — and a lot of that is dominated by the state media, which is essentially a propaganda arm of the government, and the government right now is ruled by the Supreme Council. But the independent media movement has been using video to document activism and getting testimonies from activists.

So does that provide a counter-narrative to the “false objectivity” of corporate media that you spoke of?

What’s happened is these videos have circulated so widely online, and have had such an impact, that the traditional media starts to report on them. You’ll find the private television channels, which have significant reach, speaking to the activists who are documented in a video or the ones who shot it — so there’s a trickle-up effect in journalism. There’s also been an interesting reclaiming of public space through media — because these activists are all but banned from appearing on state media. There’s been this campaign called The Generals Are Liars, where activists go to neighborhoods, set up a screen on a sidewalk and just air footage of army abuses on the sides of a building, and people gather around and watch. A lot of people have never seen this footage. Then there’s some kind of a Q&A or debate afterward. It’s really grown, and it’s very decentralized — anyone can be a part of this campaign — and there’s now a few happening each day in Cairo. It’s a creative reclaiming of public space to reclaim the media.

The 2011 Freedom to Love celebration called Pink Dot, which is held annually at Speaker's Corner in Singapore.

Singapore, a “sunny island set in the sea,” is known for many things: economic prosperity, air-conditioning, malls and underground malls linking to more malls. What it is not known for, though, is a stellar human rights record or an active citizenry willing to take to the streets.

In October 2011, a Facebook page for Occupy Singapore sprung up, asking Singaporeans to gather at Raffles Place in the heart of Singapore’s Central Business District on October 15 as part of the Global Day of Action. The movement called for more accountability and transparency in the running of government-linked corporations, particularly the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation and Temasek Holdings. In recent years, these two corporations had made huge losses on bad investments made with public money.

It was a demand close to the hearts of many Singaporeans who have been frustrated by the lack of accountability and responsibility taken by the senior management of these corporations. It was also good timing, in a year of watershed elections — when trust and accountability were hot-button issues — which saw the ruling People’s Action Party get its lowest vote share in the nation’s history. People appeared to be more fired up than they had been in years.

But when October 15 rolled around, Raffles Place was left woefully unoccupied. The space thronged with journalists and photographers (and perhaps a number of plainclothes policemen), but no protesters. Although the organizers of Occupy Raffles Place later expressed bitterness and disappointment at the turnout (or lack thereof), it is hard to imagine what they had expected. Protests, public demonstrations and civil disobedience are just not in the average Singaporean’s blood.

‘If I say this, will I get in trouble?’

Thanks to the government and the mainstream media, protests, demonstrations and strikes are often linked in the minds of Singaporeans to violence and unrest. This perception is further supported by the fact that law enforcement authorities often turn down permit applications for events by citing “law and order” concerns that would affect the stability of the country.

Restrictions on freedom of speech and the government’s willingness to make use of defamation suits have also encouraged people to constantly watch what they say. The porous and vague definition of “OB markers” (or “out of bounds markers”) make people unwilling to speak out, just in case what they say gets them into trouble.

The government has also often used Singapore’s multi-racial and multi-religious society as a justification for the curbing of freedom of expression. Singaporeans are often reminded of the race riots of the 1960s, when violent conflict broke out between the different racial groups, and told that everything must be done to ensure that we never return to such violence. People who make comments of a racial or religious nature can be charged under the Sedition Act, if said comments are deemed to have the potential of creating ill will between different racial and religious groups.

In December 2011, Singaporeans for Democracy submitted an application for a permit to hold an anti-racism rally to address a recent spate of racist postings on Facebook. The application was rejected. When a formal appeal was made, the authorities again cited “law and order considerations.”

Add to all this the belief held by many Singaporeans that we have it good — we have roofs over our heads, food on the table, there aren’t any wars or natural disasters, we have our shopping and our streets are clean. What more do you want? For most people, life is too comfortable to risk the repercussions of speaking out.

Laws, laws, laws

In 2008, around 20 people — children included — gathered outside Parliament House to protest against the rising cost of living in Singapore. The protesters, mostly associated with the Singapore Democratic Party (SDP), carried placards and wore T-shirts that read Tak Boleh Tahan, meaning “Cannot Take It” in Malay. (The phrase is also commonly used in Singlish, an English-based creole spoken by most Singaporeans.)

Eighteen protesters, including SDP’s Secretary-General Chee Soon Juan, were arrested and charged under the Public and Nuisance Act on two counts: for participating in an assembly, and for participating in a procession without a permit. Fines of up to S$2,000 (approx. US$1,588) or jail terms of up to two weeks were meted out.

In 2009 the new Public Order Act stated that “cause-related activities will be regulated by permit regardless of the number of persons involved or the format they are conducted in.”

This effectively means that even a single person could constitute an illegal assembly and be subject to intervention from law enforcement if they have not obtained a police permit for their activity. It is also up to the authorities to define the term “cause-related activity.”

The only areas in which police permits do not need to be obtained before an activity are in indoor venues, and at Speaker’s Corner in Hong Lim Park — a small green space not too far from Singapore’s Central Business District. However, organizers are required to register their names, identification card numbers and contact details with the National Parks prior to an event at Speaker’s Corner.

Non-Singaporeans are prohibited from participating in events and activities related to domestic affairs, even in indoor spaces and at Speaker’s Corner. At the annual Pink Dot (a day to celebrate acceptance of the LGBTQ community), Permanent Residents and non-citizens are not allowed to be part of the giant pink dot formed by all participants at the end of the day and are required to stand behind a cordon.

What do activists do, then?

Despite restrictions, activists often find other ways and means to carry out their activities and push their causes. As the sole outdoor space in Singapore where activities can be held without a permit, activists and campaigners often turn to Speaker’s Corner as an option for public events. Although the turnout will likely be limited to those who have actively made a point of showing up at Hong Lim Park, the benefit of having an event in the park is that there is a certain amount of visibility.

Another popular move is to hold private indoor events where attendance is “by invite only.” Although this greatly restricts the turnout to the number of invitations, and to some extent restricts the potential of new people attending, making an event private means that it will be easier for non-Singaporean citizens to participate.

That said, during investigations over a private forum organized by Singaporeans for Democracy, the police said that having a foreigner speak at a forum without clearance was tantamount to an offense. Otherwise, most activism and campaigning are done online, which makes sense in a country with about 72.4 percent internet penetration and a mainstream media that’s largely owned by the state.

Changing mindsets

Although anyone unafraid of arrest could still stage demonstrations and protests in Singapore, it’s not a move often contemplated, as civil disobedience is unlikely to gain a movement much sympathy in a society bred to consider law and order as sacred.

Many Singaporeans are quick to equate public demonstrations with violence, and are more likely to view an arrested activist as a troublemaker than as a victim of oppression. Stories of strikes in other countries are also often viewed with scorn: What a mess! We should be grateful that this would never happen in Singapore.

And that mindset is the first major hurdle for any activist in Singapore — to convince people committed to not rocking the boat that speaking out is not a form of violence but a right due to every citizen, every day of their lives.

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.

The police as an institution upholds the status quo through brutal violence, including all the racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, transphobia that the status quo entails. The police will always side with power. The wave of repression against the Occupy movement, in the context of resistance movements in this country, is neither surprising nor exceptional. The American Indian Movement, the Black Panthers, Students for a Democratic Society, and Earth First! — among many, many others — have been targeted for repression if not outright obliteration by the state with the police as its front-line protector.

We live on occupied, colonized land and the police are the occupying army. This is not just in the historical sense that they represent the state that murdered and displaced the indigenous people on this land, which continues today, but also in the sense that they keep the poor and people of color colonized. Colonial forces use fear, intimidation and forced separation to keep populations in a state of disorder and under control. Which explains the NYPD’s “stop and frisk” policy, anti-Muslim surveillance, and raids against undocumented immigrants. More black men are currently incarcerated than were ever enslaved during the North Atlantic slave trade in this country; one in three black men will be incarcerated during his lifetime, making a young person of color more likely to go to prison than college; 30 percent of the trans population of the United States is incarcerated.

These facts all shed light on our real relationship to the police. By randomly searching, intimidating and arresting people of color, by incarcerating them more often and for longer, by patrolling poor communities constantly, by dangling the threat of deportation over people’s heads, whole segments of the population are kept in a constant state of disruption. Because violence from the police is constant, it is unremarkable; it is also one of the central organizing experiences of our lives. Their authority is constantly leveraged against us, even in their absence. The police ride the subways with us, walk up and down our blocks; they can at any moment stop us and sort through our belongings.

For all the many being targeted by police violence, meanwhile, some are being protected. There are few better signs of this than JPMorgan Chase’s gift of $4.6 million to the New York City Police Foundation, which constitutes the single largest contribution in the foundation’s history. Colonialism, after all, is always about resources. The resource in question has changed over time — from bananas, to gold, to beets, to sugar, to cotton, to oil, to real estate, to ill-gotten capital. But the colonizer’s method remains the same: disruption, systemic violence, forced labor, fractured families, scattered communities and militarization. This is true whether the colony is external or internal. Which brings us, inevitably, to the prison-industrial complex (PIC), of which the police are an essential part.

The PIC is a system of privately owned corporations — the Corrections Corporation of America, for example — and other entrenched interests that house incarcerated people for profit. While incarcerated, people are subjected to forced labor, isolation, torture, sexual abuse and overcrowding. Both public and private prisons are often built in rural and poor communities, where they quickly become the only industry in the area. That phenomenon creates an economic and cultural buy-in for communities that might otherwise resist them. Because these institutions depend on mass incarceration, rather than fostering strong communities or healing, the communities that depend on them will tend to oppose liberation movements or even more humane reforms. The role of the police in that system is, of course, to continually supply people to keep those beds full.

All of this takes form in the violence visited upon people of color, the homeless, trans and queer people, and immigrant communities at the hands of the police every day. Ramarley Graham. CeCe McDonald. Oscar Grant. Sean Bell. Tawana Brawley. Duanna Johnson. Those are just some of the names we know, people who’ve had their stories picked up by the media. As victims of police violence, they are exceptional only in that we know their names. Constantly, nationwide, police forces systematically brutalize, murder and rape. The existence of the police is incompatible with an agenda of justice. This is why Ray Kelly must resign, and why his resignation is not nearly enough.

Illustration of self-defense, from James E. Homans' 1908 New American Encyclopedia of Social and Commercial Information.

We have a moral right to defend ourselves against violation; there’s no doubt in my mind about that. Persons and groups have boundaries for a reason, and integrity generally requires that we defend them. Gandhi said that this is an obligation that trumped his call to experiment with nonviolent action; if you can’t think of a way to defend yourself nonviolently, he said, use violence. I believe Gandhi would have sympathized with the Deacons for Defense, for instance, an armed civil rights group in Southern U.S.

Of course Gandhi also believed that, with sufficient creativity, there is always a way to devise a nonviolent defense. He also recognized that either violent or nonviolent defense might fail in an immediate sense; there is such a thing as overwhelming force.

I think it’s no accident that the question of self-defense has been coming up in some circles in the Occupy movement at this time. Having the discussion reflects how many people are realizing that moving the 1 percent out of the driver’s seat is a revolutionary mission. The person who doesn’t feel fear at the prospect of revolution is out of touch with their feelings. It’s only natural at such a moment to wonder if there is some way to act boldly — and at the same time stay safe.

The reality is that there is no way to guarantee safety. What we can do is to increase the chances of survival for our comrades and ourselves while building a movement that can win. Activists have for at least a century been creating methods for consciously increasing the chances for survival. Some of these methods are similar in both violent and nonviolent strategic struggle. Everyone can learn from them.

It helps first of all to accept our primal human programming: When deeply threatened, we’re driven to fight or flight. There are pacifists who want to avoid this choice, and they with others have invented the field of conflict resolution; many useful things have come out of that world. Nevertheless, when the troops or thugs are sent to kick your butt, the choices are fight or flight.

While both military commanders and nonviolent organizers believe there is such a thing as strategic retreat, participants in both kinds of struggle are trained to fight, not run away. Running away usually means the loss of the battle and a weakening of one’s forces, whether violent or nonviolent. Even though the point of running is to try to be safe, flight often increases the number of casualties for our side.

I remember Andrew Young, a key organizer working with Martin Luther King Jr. telling a group of us in the North that we were probably misreading the frequent tactic in the Southern civil rights movement of bringing a group of people to the point of violent confrontation and then having them get on their knees and pray. “You probably thought we were praying for divine intervention,” Andy smiled, “and we were, but we also knew that if those people facing the guns and dogs broke and run, more of them would get hurt! And we’d lose that battle.”

“The thing about praying is,” he said as his smile broadened, “you can’t run on your knees!”

Fight or flight. How many soldiers in combat have heard a loud voice inside them urging them to run away from a situation where they are likely to get hurt or killed? The same is true at hard moments in nonviolent movements, probably in an equal percentage of heads. Unless a strategic retreat is sensible, which means of course an organized retreat, the smart choice is to stay and fight.

I saw how unsafe the flight response can be during the first campaign in which I was arrested, a civil rights struggle in which the state police were called in to back up the local police. As the Chester, Pa., freedom struggle of 1963 escalated, more people joined who had no idea what their black sisters and brothers had learned in the South. Sometimes the Chester people met ugly police charges with courage and stood their ground, out of sheer grit. But sometimes they broke and ran, and the police went crazy, sometimes chasing them upstairs and into their apartments to beat them mercilessly with their nightsticks and guns.

A few years later I saw the largely white demonstrators in the 1968 Chicago Democratic Party convention make the same mistake. In my experience white activists are even less likely to learn from the actual experience of the civil rights movement than black activists, so I wasn’t at all surprised when the demonstrators broke and ran from scary police charges. As in Chester, but on national television, the police chased the demonstrators, even to the point of soaking carpets with blood in the lobby of the Hilton Hotel. The convention demonstrations were largely a strategic loss for the movement, as almost all convention mass confrontations have been, but at least thanks to television coverage the police behavior was roundly criticized as well.

The history of flight is not a pretty one, so let’s go on to the “fight” option. We can choose one of the most dangerous nonviolent campaigns in U.S. history, the 1961 entry of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee into Mississippi, the hardest of the hardcore segregationist states of the South. Mississippi was ruled by the White Citizens Councils and, more brutally, that long-lived American terrorist organization the Ku Klux Klan (KKK).

For readers who take seriously the question of self defense, I recommend the Danny Glover film Freedom Song, which pulls no punches as it shows what young people experienced in those early days. The staff members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) knew they would get no protection from local law enforcement; men who were police in the day could at night be wearing the white sheets of the KKK. State police were hostile. The FBI was hostile, and Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department was mostly trying to look the other way. SNCC was on its own.

The film shows SNCC workers leading training workshops for young students. At one point the trainers harassed a young man in a role-play to toughen him up. When the student lost control and attacked the harasser, the trainers held him and tried to reassure him. The young man said something like, “I can’t do this. I gotta fight back.”

The reply came quickly: “By joining us, you are fighting back.”

SNCC’s lesson in 1961 was that safety and effectiveness came from fighting back with nonviolent methods. A second big lesson for the young man came a couple of weeks later. He asks the biggest and most muscled SNCC organizer whether he has adopted nonviolence as a way of life. The organizer explains that if someone threatened him at another time he’d beat up the assailant, but he’s adopted nonviolent action as a strategy, in order to win the struggle.

This stance was typical of people I met throughout the civil rights movement; most weren’t pacifists but learned that in highly dangerous situations, nonviolent discipline gave them the best chance to stay safe — and to win.

SNCC workers said that nonviolence didn’t remove the danger – protesters would still get hurt, and some might be killed. SNCC’s first chairman, and now a member of Congress, John Lewis, was beaten dozens of times, and very narrowly escaped death. He and others in SNCC said the stakes were too high to expect racist privilege to give up easily. But the nonviolent discipline removed the pretext justifying long-term and widespread repression. In fact, the repression most often worked against the perpetrators, just as in jiu-jitsu the savvy warrior uses the violence of the opponent against him. Typically, when white racists used violence against the movement, it grew, and allies appeared, and the racists started dividing among themselves, and the campaign won in one more town.

The best-known leader of the armed Deacons for Defense, Charles Sims, was quoted in The New York Times as favoring nonviolent direct action as the best way to gain civil rights. The Deacons could be found without their guns inside demonstrations. At the same time, Sims believed that nonviolent demonstrators should be protected by guardians carrying guns, accompanying protests to deter the KKK and others, and the Deacons did exactly that.