Part of the 99% Spring messaging.

Something rather unusual is happening today: all around the country, people are getting trained to do nonviolent direct action. The 99% Spring — see Jake Olzen’s recent report for background — is an effort put on by a wide range of left and progressive and issue-based groups, from SEIU to the Ruckus Society and more, to train 100,000 people this week in the tactics of protest. Meanwhile, however, there’s a lot of anxiety running around the Occupy movement’s organizer email lists and in articles being published about the trainings in Occupy-friendly outlets, from CounerPunch to Adbusters. The fear is of course that the movement and its “99%” meme are being co-opted.

This is not the first time co-option has been an issue. I’ve warned about it myself here, here and here. Remember when Jay-Z started an Occupy fashion line? Or when Occupiers had to shut down the filming of a Law and Order episode that used actors to depict them? The 99% Spring, though, is a little different. Who’s co-opting whom, here? And what’s at stake?

Read the rest of this article »

The Goldman Sachs Tower in Jersey City.

Just about in time for Occupy Wall Street’s half-birthday last month, there was what might ostensibly seem to be a fitting reason to celebrate: Goldman Sachs executive Greg Smith quit his job and, to massive fanfare, penned a New York Times op-ed denouncing what his company has become. With those 1,300 words, Goldman’s stock price dropped 3.4 percent, vanishing more than $2 billion from its worth and necessitating a commiserative house call from the mayor of New York.

The trouble is, Smith didn’t really echo any of the Occupy movement’s concerns. There was no mention of the company’s habit of self-serving market manipulation, contributing to downturns from the Great Depression to the Great Recession, or its present hijacking of the very political system tasked with regulating it. The word “bailout” does not appear. What really seemed to disturb Smith, rather, was that this institution was putting its own interests before those of its obscenely wealthy clients. (He had personally worked with “two of the largest hedge funds on the planet, five of the largest asset managers in the United States, and three of the most prominent sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East and Asia.”) The company from which he’d once learned that obscenely wealthy clients come first was betraying that solemn trust so as to enrich its obscenely wealthy self. This was unconscionable, in Smith’s view, so he decided to give his longtime employer a big kick in the shins — all, it seems, in the service of a hope that Goldman Sachs might once again defraud the universe in a more gentlemanly fashion.

Read the rest of this article »

Photo by Marcus Demery, all rights reserved.

Eager Occupiers — with flowers, signs, costumes and high spirits — descended into downtown Chicago from all directions of the city and suburbs for the April 7 Chicago Spring kickoff. The Occupy Chicago event marks the re-emergence of the economic and political justice movement that was mostly dormant over the winter. On Saturday, though, Chicagoans came out in droves for speakers, workshops, concerts, teach-ins and community-building events that took place all over the city.

Read the rest of this article »

Occupy Chicago panel on nonviolent direct action

Even at this stage of the game, I wonder what my actual job is. I’ve meandered through life patching together a potpourri of duties that mostly arrived without warning. Thirty years ago, when I was ensconced in graduate school, there was little inkling that I would soon begin zigzagging across the thin ice of the next three decades, following the scent of one social cataclysm after another, and hiring on with a series of social movements, nonprofits, and schools that seemed to be on the right track.

To say that I had no sense that activism was ahead, though, overstates the case a bit. Even before finishing college I became addicted to the writings of the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, who in the last decade of his life wrote voluminously on the apocalyptic challenges facing the world — and on our calling as human beings to join in the monumental task of creating a new direction. Merton provided both the nudge and the terminology for an activist life, including the vision and principles of nonviolence.

Read the rest of this article »

This Saturday, April 14, Occupy Wall Street groups and assemblies from neighborhoods around New York City will join with allies in labor unions and community-based organizations for a “Spring Awakening.” Discussions about this citywide assembly began in December. Now, it is being billed as the kickoff for upcoming actions — especially May Day — and an opportunity for collaboration between Occupiers, older organizations and the public.

“We hope to pull new people in,” says Colby Hopkins, one of the organizers, “by creating a welcoming environment for families and interested people who have not yet taken up activism as a lifestyle.” The second half of the day, Hopkins adds, will be a facilitated assembly that helps organizers and activists “foster and strengthen networks.”

Far from just a day in the park, planners hope to plant the seeds of something new — a democratic mechanism through which disparate organizations can come together to strategize about how to combine their campaigns to attack the root causes of shared problems, including corruption and the unchecked political influence of the 1 percent.

Read the rest of this article »

Aung San Suu Kyi waves to the crowd in Burma, with her party celebrating a major victory in the by-elections. Christophe Archambault/AFP/Getty Images

The excitement on the streets of Rangoon is palpable, and who can deny their right to celebrate this moment? When I arrived on the Thai-Burma border four years ago, Aung San Suu Kyi was under house arrest, and over 2,000 political prisoners were behind bars. This week’s by-elections in Burma brings Daw Suu, as she is respectfully called, and 42 other members of her until-recently-banned party, the National League for Democracy (NLD) into the belly of the beast — Burma’s fledgling parliament.

There is real cause to celebrate — not in Burma’s apparent democratic transformation (which, for the record, remains to be seen), but in the very climate of public engagement in politics. The significance here is not the now 5 percent presence of the NLD in an otherwise military-dominated parliament, but the potential for people to move the political conversation from hushed whispers in a teashop corner to the classroom, the streets, and at the ballot box in 2015′s general election.

Read the rest of this article »

The short-lived occupation of Duarte Square in New York City on December 17, 2011.

I’ve lately been getting the feeling that Occupy Wall Street’s past successes are starting to go to the heads of some people in the movement. There were, of course, the glory days of Liberty Plaza, and now also the spurt of momentum during and following the brief March 17 six-month-anniversary reoccupation there. But as the NYPD and police departments across the country make it quite clear that occupations of any kind will not be tolerated, the mood has gotten sour. The good old days, it seems, are not coming back.

For lots of organizers, I’ve noticed, the operating presumption is that occupation — something comparable to last fall but somehow surely better — constitutes a prerequisite to further political action. Consequently, a considerable amount of the energy of the most talented organizers in New York (as well as, evidently, in Oakland and San Francisco) has been directed toward failed reoccupation attempts. Or else the movement is celebrating its own anniversaries, not making occasions for new ones. The more conversations I have with listless, frustrated organizers, though, the more I start to feel that right now this occupation-first logic is exactly backwards.

Read the rest of this article »

Next month, activists and organizers across the country are planning to train 100,000 people in nonviolent direct action for what they call The 99% Spring. But despite borrowing one or two of the Occupy movement’s favorite slogans, The 99% Spring hasn’t been called for by any general assembly. Rather, this massive and controversial effort is coming from the institutional left — a diverse coalition of labor unions, environmental and economic justice groups, community organizations and trainers’ alliances. While some celebrate what appears to be a mainstreaming of resistance thanks to Occupy, others are crying co-option.

Read the rest of this article »

During Occupy Wall Street's March 24 "Let Freedom Spring" march against police brutality, a protester's shirt is torn as police arrest her.

1. What were the objectives of the action?

2. In what ways were the objectives met, and to what effect?

3. If objectives were not met, what is the cost of not meeting them?

4. What would it really take to achieve the most ambitious stated objectives?

5. What follow-up work is being done to ensure the action has a political impact?

6. What role did the action play in what larger strategy?

7. What was the intended audience of the action? Did the time, place and messaging reflect that?

8. Was it the kind of action you’d want to join if you saw it passing by?

9. Do you think onlookers would be more likely to side with the protesters or want to be protected by the police?

10. Did participants seem to be aware of how their actions might be perceived by potential allies?

Read the rest of this article »

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

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

Read the rest of this article »