Occupy Wall Street meets winter

2 January 2012: Yotam Marom finds the Occupy movement hoping that the winter of austerity might give way to the flowering of real alternatives

On September 17^th, we took Liberty Square, used it to begin to create the social norms and institutions of a society to come, and became the Occupy Movement. We hit the streets fiercely, abandoning the metal barricades they once contained us in, rejecting the marching permits they offered us, refusing their sidewalks. We were dragged, handcuffed, into the front pages of people’s minds, and brought with us a story many were trying to silence – a story about the profit of the tiny few through the exploitation of the many, a story about deep and systemic economic, political, and social injustice. We danced in the streets and parks we reclaimed, and then in the jail cells they took us to when they realized we weren’t going home. We were confident, invincible; it’s hard to be afraid when the sun is out.

 But the season has changed. Autumn has ended and winter is upon us. We’ve lost Liberty Square, and each day brings news from across the country that another occupation has been evicted. Winter is here, and with it the cold; but it’s more than that. Winter brings the sober understanding that we won’t be in the headlines every day, that we need to be more than a string of events or actions or press releases, more than an endless meeting. Winter is the nagging truth that the next decade of organizing must be more sustainable than the first months we spent in the sun; that this is a struggle for the long-haul, that burn-out and martyrdom are no good for anyone and no good for the cause. Winter tells us to see our families and take a day off when we are sick, because the movement has to be healthy if it’s going to last. Winter is here to remind us that revolution is not an event but a process, and that social transformation means not only harnessing a moment, but building a movement.

Winter is here. But winter is not sad, and it’s not tragic; it’s just real. We do not fear the cold, and we will not hibernate. We will use the winter to become the movement we know is necessary.

We Will Not Hibernate: A To Do List for the Winter

Grow. We will continue to build relationships with communities who have been fighting and building for decades already, from tenants organizing eviction defense in Bed-Stuy, to AIDS activists in the Staten Island. We will grow by joining struggles that protect people from the daily assaults they experience – from austerity to police brutality – and by waging struggles to meet peoples’ needs, like reclaiming foreclosed homes. We will transcend the open calls to action and the expectation that they are enough to build a movement; we will organize the hard way, because the hard way is the only way. We will have the million one-on-one conversations it takes to build a movement, door to door if we have to, and we will do it out in the open, because we have nothing to fear and nothing to hide.

 Deepen. We will finally take the time to learn how to do what we are doing better, from those who have been doing this for so long – from the land liberation movements in Brazil to the women on welfare building community power in Yonkers. We will also teach, because we are reinventing the struggle as we go, and we have learned a lot already. We will ask each other difficult questions we never had time for: How do we organize in a way that is inclusive and liberating? How do we build a movement led by those most marginalized and oppressed? How do we use decentralization to actually empower people and address the imbalances we face in society? We will think radically about what systems and historical processes led us to where we are now, dream deeply about the world we want and the institutions we will need in order to live it out, and plan thoroughly for the building and the fighting it will take us to get there.

 Build. We will continue to build systems for de-centralized coordination and decision-making, because liberation means participation, and participation demands structures for communication, transparency, and accountability. We will take our cue from the neighborhood assemblies in Sunset Park, and the university assemblies at CUNY, who are pioneering a shift from general assemblies to constituent assemblies – assemblies in neighborhoods, workplaces, and schools. We will build there, because that’s where people actually live and work, where we have direct, concrete, and permanent relationships with a space, the institutions in it, and the people around us. We will create stable platforms for organizing and growth, and the foundations necessary for a concerted long-term struggle – from complex things like participatory decision-making forums and systems for internal education, to simple things like office space and phone trees. We will create mechanisms to meet people’s needs using the skills we honed at Liberty Square to provide things like food, legal aid, shelter, education, and more. We will do it all in a way that is in line with the values of the world we are fighting for.

 Liberate. We will take new space, indoors and outdoors. We will do it because the movement needs bases in which it can create the values of a free society, begin to build the institutions to carry them out, meet peoples’ needs, and serve as a staging ground for the struggle against the status quo. We will take space for the movement to have a home and workplace, but we will also take space back for the communities from whom it has been stolen, and for the families who need it in order to survive. We mean not only to take space for its own sake, but to liberate it; we will transform foreclosed houses into homes, empty lots into gardens, abandoned buildings into hospitals, schools, and community centers. We will use the space we win for dreaming up the world to come.

 Fight. We will continue to use direct action to intervene in the economic, political, and social processes that govern peoples’ lives. We will use our voices and our slogans, our banners and our bodies, to shine a spotlight on the classes and institutions that oppress and exploit. We will make it so that the tyrants who are ruining this planet cannot hold conferences or public events without our presence being felt. We will fight in a way that is not only symbolic, but also truly disruptive of the systems of oppression we face. We will block their doorways and their ports, interrupt their forums, and obstruct the systems of production and consumption they depend on. We will do it until they will have no choice but to disappear.

Spring Will Come

The conditions that brought us here – the brutal and systemic oppressions we face – aren’t going to disappear on their own. The window we have opened to the world being born can’t be closed. Now winter is here, but we are not afraid. We will face the cold with intention and wisdom, using it as an opportunity to grow our movement, deepen it, and build structures that can carry it forward. We will continue to build the world we want while fighting to topple the institutions that stand in its way.

It will take some time for the seeds we have planted to grow into the beautiful flowers they are meant to be. Patience. Spring will come.

Yotam Marom is a political organizer, educator, writer, and musician based in New York. He has been active in the Occupy Wall Street Movement, and is a member of the Organization for a Free Society. Yotam can be reached at Yotam.marom@gmail.com.

This article first appeared on Z Net.

Competition: Just Do It essay contest

11 December 2011: Enter our short essay competition on direct action

Join us in celebrating the DVD release of Just Do It: A Tale of Modern-Day Outlaws, the quick-witted documentary about climate activism, by entering our short essay competition on direct action.

The winner will receive a free copy of the film - and will have their essay featured on the Red Pepper website!

Essay question

In no more than 650 words... 'Describe your most empowering experience of direct action'.

Deadline: 31 December 2011

Send all essays to office@redpepper.org.uk

The editor's decision is final.

The Camp is the World – An open letter to the occupy movement

11 December 2011: Luis Moreno-Caballud and Marina Sitrin on connecting the occupy movements and the Spanish May 15th movement

We write this letter as participants in the movements, and as an invitation to a conversation about which we write. We hope to raise questions about how we continue to deepen and transform the new social relationships and processes we have begun … to open the discussion towards a common horizon.

The evictions and threats to the physical Occupations in the United States have again raised the question of the future of the movement. That the movements have a future is not the question – but what sort of future is. For example, should our energy be focused on finding new spaces to occupy and create encampments? Should we be focused more in our local neighborhoods, schools and workplaces? Is there a way to both occupy public space with horizontal assemblies yet also focus locally and concretely?

A look at the recent history of a movement similar to Occupy - the Spanish indignados or 15M movement can shed some light on the opportunities and urgency of this new phase.  It is a moment that we see as a potential turning point, and one with an incredible possibilitiesy and potential turning point.

There are three key elements that have made the global movements of 2011 so powerful and different.  The extraordinary capacity to include all types of people; the impulse to move beyond traditional forms of the protest and contention, so as to create solutions for the problems identified; and the horizontal and directly participatory form they take.

Let’s look at the first element.  Unlike other movements that have strongly identified with concrete social groups (workers, students, etc.), both the indignados and Occupy are movements that anyone can join, just by choosing to do so.  Again and again in Madrid as in New York we have heard the demonstrators chanting solidarity slogans to the police: “they’ve also lowered your salary” and “you too are the 99%”.  In both places the movements have been able to bring out many people who had never been to a demonstration before and made them feel welcome and useful.  It is a culture and politics of openness and acceptance of the other.

The second element, the capacity to create solutions, is consistent with this non-confrontational aspect of the Spanish and American movements.  Like their predecessors in the Arab SpringEgypt and Greece, both movements began with the occupation of a public space. Rather than reproducing the logic of the traditional “sit-in,” these occupations quickly turned to the construction of miniature models of the society that the movement wanted to create – prefiguring the world while simultaneously creating it.  The territory occupied was geographic, but only so as to open other ways of doing and being together. It is not the specific place that is the issue, but what happens in it. This is what we could call the first phase of the movement.  Solutions began to be implemented for the urgent problems of loneliness, humiliating competition, the absence of truly representative politics, and the lack of basic necessities, such as housing, education, food, and health care.  In Spain and in the United States this first phase saw the creation of two problem-solving institutions: the general assemblies and the working-groups.

The ways in which we organize in these spaces of assemblies and working groups is inextricably linked to the vision of what we are creating. We seek open, horizontal, participatory spaces where each person can truly speak and be heard. We organize structures, such as facilitation teams, agendas and variations on the forms of the assembly, from general assemblies to spokes councils, always being open to changing them so as to create the most democratic and participatory space possible.

The very existence of the encampments, together with the general assemblies, was already a victory over the increasingly desperate battle of all against all that the neoliberal crisis has imposed on us.  The participants in these movements create spaces of sociability, places where we can be treated as free human beings beyond the constant demands of the profit motive.  In a city like New York where debates about our society tend to occur only in government institutions, and expensive spaces of limited access (universities, offices, restaurants and bars), the assemblies at Zuccotti provided a public forum that was open to anyone who wanted to speak.  In addition, from the very beginning the movement created working groups designed to directly address problems related to basic human necessities.  In Zuccotti, the loading and unloading of shopping-carts full of jars of peanut butter and loaves of bread on the afternoon of Saturday 17th, an initiative launched by the already-functioning food committee, was the first sign of this effort to provide solutions. By the 5th week of the Occupation in New York the food working group was feeding upwards of 3000 people a day.

In these working groups the dynamic of the second phase of these movements was already implicit.  In Spain this phase began over the summer and in the United States it is beginning now.  This phase is characterized by the gradual shift from a focus on acts of protest (which nonetheless continue to have a crucialn important role, as we must confront this system that creates crisis) to instituting the type of change that the movements actually want to see happen in society as a whole.  The capacity to create solutions grows as the movements expand in all directions, first through the appearance of multiple occupations connected among themselves, and then through the creation of—or collaboration with—institutions groups or networks that are able to solve problems on a local level through cooperation and the sharing of skills and resources. For example, Occupy Harlem is using direct action to prevent heat from being shut off in a building in the neighborhood – this action has been coordinated with OWS and Occupy Brooklyn.

In the case of Spain, this expansion began in June, when the movement decided to focus its energyies more on the assemblies and the working groups than on the maintaining the encampments themselves.  To maintain the miniature models of a society that the movement wished to create did not necessarily contribute to the actual changes that were needed in the populations that needed them the most.  Which is why the decision to move away from the encampments was nothing more than another impulse in the constructive aims of the movement: the real encampment that has to be reconstructed is the world.

Of course, it is true that the encampments continue to have a crucial function as places in which the symbolic power of the Occupy movement is concentrated.  It is also true that the efforts to defend them have produced moving displays of solidarity.  But it is also true that the viability of a movement is not only defined by its capacity to withstand pressure from the outside, but also in its ability to reach and work together with and help people outside of the movement and the space of the plaza or square.  This - the going beyond the parameters of the plaza - is what the assemblies and the working groups have already started to put into effect.

So, for example, what this could continue to look like in the US is that there are assemblies on street corners, in neighborhoods, in workplaces and universities, working concretely together with neighbors and workmates, as well as then relating together in assemblies of assemblies or spokes councils in parks, plazas and squares, sharing and collaborating the experiences from the more local spaces. All the while continuing to occupy space and territory, but seeing the territory as what happens together, with one another, in multiple places, and then coming together to share in another geographic place. This could take places on the level of neighborhood to neighborhood – to the level of city to city, all networked in horizontal assemblies.

In any case, to return to the case of Spain, what is certain is that while the indignado movement no longer has encampments, its presence is felt everywhere.  It’s a culture now, composed of thousands of micro-institutions that provide solutions through the common efforts of people affected by the same problems.  There are cooperatives addressing work, housing, energy, education, finance, and nutrition, and many other things, as well as a web of collaboration that connects these cooperatives.  Catalunya and Madrid already have “Integral Cooperatives” whose function is to coordinate the different services offered by various cooperatives within a particular locale, to the point that in some places in Spain it is almost possible to live without having to depend on the resources hoarded by the 1%.  The movement has made it possible for these institutions, which used to be dispersed and limited, to grow and grow connected, and it has provided them with a visibility that has led to much more interest, respect, and support for their functions. Also, the movement keeps coming back to the streets every so often in big demonstrations and assemblies that display its force and allow all of those working in the many projects associated with the spirit of May 15th to see each other, network together, and welcome more people.

The creation of alternative institutions and solutions has already begun in the United States.  With or without encampments, the constructive phase of the Occupy movement is here, and all indications are that it will not slow down, as it has not slowed down in Spain. Every day on the news and on youtube, we see the police removing the occupiers from parks and plazas, but the movement continues to grow – and to grow outside of these places.  While the tumult of raids and returns jolts occupiers and the public alike, thousands of working groups around the world meet weekly in libraries, community centers, churches, cafes, and offices to share their extraordinary abilities and resources.  They are already creating the schools, hospitals, houses, neighborhoods, cities and dreams of the 99%.

This is the beginning of the occupation of an encampment that will never be dislodged: the world.

Luis Moreno-Caballud is a participant in the Spanish May 15th movement and the Occupy Wall Street movement. He collaborated in the formation of the NYC General Assembly, and works with both the Outreach and Empowerment and Education working groups. He is an assistant professor of Spanish literature and cultural studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Marina Sitrin is a participant in the Occupy Wall Street movement, and was a part of the NYC General Assembly that helped organize OWS. She is a postdoctoral fellow at the CUNY Graduate Center Committee on Globalization and Social Change, and the author of Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina.

The Real George Osborne!

6 December 2011: Miriam Ross on a new online comedy with political bite

‘New online comedy series about George Osborne,’ I said to two briefcase clutching gents as I handed them a flyer outside the Treasury. ‘Ha, yes, we need that at the moment,’ replied one. ‘Just watch parliament TV, that’s a comedy featuring George Osborne,’ said his friend ruefully as the pair hurried up the stone steps.

Quite. But perhaps these two civil servants took a little light relief in ‘The Real George Osborne’ (http://therealgeorgeosborne.com/). The series stars Rufus Jones, who recently played Monty Python’s Terry Jones in the BBC film Holy Flying Circus. Jones’s Chancellor takes street-dancing lessons, struggles with fad diets, and broadcasts Westminster secrets on his webcam after over indulging at the Bankers’ Ball.

With the help of his long-suffering adviser Vicki, George attempts to win popularity and usurp Boris Johnson as ‘the most recognised Tory’. He is torn between wanting to be seen by the public to ‘do good things’ such as regulating financial speculation on food prices, and wanting to appease his banker pal Nat (starring in today’s episode, played by Will Smith) by leaving the banks unregulated and free to carry on reaping billions of pounds from speculation.

The series, made by the World Development Movement and Hoot Comedy, draws attention to the role of investment banks and hedge funds in driving up global food prices through financial speculation. Our research shows how a dramatic rise in speculation in commodity markets has driven food prices up, and increased volatility, resulting in sharp spikes in the cost of staple foods like wheat and maize. In the last six months of 2010 alone, rising food prices pushed an extra 44 million people into extreme poverty.

Today’s episode, in which Nat threatens to withdraw his support for George’s political career unless the Chancellor abandons the idea of curbing food speculation, highlights the power of the financial lobby. The European Commission announced its proposals for regulation in October, and the coming months will see a series of debates, votes, and plenty of horse trading before the rules are put into force. But the UK Treasury, with its ear to the City of London’s lobbyists, has so far trenchantly opposed effective regulation.

The US has already moved to regulate food speculation through the Dodd Frank Act, passed last year – though Wall Street, like the City, is doing all it can to prevent the rules coming into effect. Strong regulation in Europe is essential to winning the battle on both sides of the Atlantic, since the absence of controls in Europe could see speculation simply shifting into the least regulated market.

Our campaign aims to put pressure on George Osborne to back regulation in the European Parliament to curb excessive speculation and prevent it from destabilising food prices.

It is not known whether the Chancellor has watched his alter-ego’s screen antics, and if so whether he has taken heed of The Real George’s public relations tips. But with 26,000 views so far, the series has certainly raised the profile of food speculation, and of Osborne’s role in allowing it to continue. George, we’re watching you.

#nov30 – Striking back for all our futures!

30 November 2011: On the next steps for the trade unions following the tremendous #nov30 walkouts

Today's co-ordinated public sector-wide strike action was a tremendous display of class solidarity, involving many workers who have never taken such action before.  A whole generation is re-awakening to the need for strong collective union organisation in defence of  jobs, pay, pensions and public services.

In a flagrant act of provocation yesterday, George Osborne both extended real terms pay cuts to public sector workers for a further two years and ripped up the basis of national collective pay bargaining.   He has thrown down the gauntlet.   The trade union leadership musn't be allowed to let today's success evaporate through inaction - they must set a date for further walkouts and keep up the pressure.  We must step up our opposition up another gear.

So, too, every trade unionist should take the argument out to the general public in the shape of their family and friends, teachers should make every effort to explain to parents why they are taking this stand, just as service providers must explain to the wider community.   It's not just a matter of making the case about pensions, as crucial an issue as that is.  But it must be broader - about defending the interests of the vast majority in the face of an attack on living standards scarcely without precedent.   We need to persuade wider sections of society that the fight of the trade unions is their fight too. (MC)