Occupied with Class: The Middle Class in the Occupy Movement

This article appears in LBC Books new collection of essays on the Occupy Movement, "Occupy Everything: Anarchists in the Occupy Movement 2009-2011".

Occupied with Class:  The Middle Class in the Occupy Movement

Phoenix Insurgent

By any measure – unemployment, foreclosures, the rise in food stamp dependency, homelessness,etc – the US middle class has taken a beating over the last several years. And although I'm always hesitant to start an essay off by quoting Zizek, I haven't heard a better metaphor for both the current economic situation and the shock many Americans feel at what they see as the death of the “American Dream” than the iconic scene recounted by Zizek of a cartoon cat walking over a cliff who proceeds confidently for several paces into thin air before pausing and looking down. Seeing the gaping chasm beneath him, it is only then that he begins to fall.

After three decades of neo-liberal attacks, much of what we consider middle class life is really debt. That is, it is a fantasy, a placeholder filling in for the stagnation of wages that was the '80s, '90s, and '00s. Many other anarchist and Marxist authors have pointed this out (David Graeber and David Harvey come to mind) but it's interesting how the entire language of debt and crisis has shifted over the years of the Great Recession. While today the media discusses it in terms of austerity, sovereign debt and debt to GDP ratios, early on there was a lot of talk of underwater mortgages and massive credit card debt owed by individuals to financial institutions. Briefly this popped into the media consciousness, as the sheer scale of resistance forced the media to pay attention to the rapidly spreading underground debt refusal. People walked away from houses, mailed the keys back to the bank, and stopped paying on their credit cards. Just as now the occupy movement routinely violates capitalist notions of public and private property, then there was a similar rejection of commonly held relationships and debt culpability. Whereas before default and bankruptcy had been shameful in the popular consciousness – with bankruptcy services ads run late at night or sandwiched between afternoon talk shows - all of a sudden everyone was doing it.

In 2009 the New York Times reported that six percent of credit card debt had been written off by banks. Faced with a population in revolt, banks and collection agencies were offering large discounts to customers willing to pay something – anything – of their outstanding balance. Many of my friends and I participated in this silent strike, netting massive discounts on the debts we had run up over many cash-strapped years. For most of us, it wasn't just that the debts had gotten too high to maintain, but also that credit card companies had engaged in a series of interest rate increases, often for petty reasons or no reason at all. Just like the balloon payments and interest rate hikes on millions of mortgages, our credit cards were designed to encourage us to miss payments, to accrue fees and, when it came down to it, to keep us paying large payments for life on even modest debts.

Phoenix PD mass arrest occupiers on the first night.

In my own case my interest rate jumped from around ten percent to 34.9% for no reason at all. It was at that moment that I joined the millions of Americans who had come to the obvious conclusion that, even if we wanted to, we couldn't repay our debts. That decision, for the fist time, put us and the banks on the same page. In an odd congruence, we couldn't pay it off and, given the jacked up interest rates, the banks obviously didn't want us to either. Interviewed in that same Times article, Don Siler, chief marketing officer at a major collection firm said, “You can’t squeeze blood out of a turnip. The big settlements just aren’t there anymore.”

In September of 2009, Ann Minch of Red Bluff, California posted a video to Youtube announcing her debt strike as a call to action nationally. "There comes a time when a person must be willing to sacrifice in order to take a stand for what's right," she said. "Now, this is one of those times, and if I'm successful this will be the proverbial first shot fired in an American debtors' revolution against the usury and plunder perpetrated by the banking elite, the Federal Reserve, and the federal government." Many have forgotten, but Bank of America interceded directly in her case, fearing the implications of the debt revolt breaking out into the open.

This was a time when the first bailout was fresh in everyone's minds. In 2008, following the collapse of the banks and a popular revolt that scuttled the first attempt at a bailout, the ruling class suspended politics during the height of the presidential campaign in order to flood the financial institutions with taxpayer money. John McCain and Barack Obama put both their campaigns on hold and flew in a panic to Washington, forcing a highly unpopular recapitalization bill through Congress, complete with threats of martial law, collapse, and social upheaval. It was at the peak of a historic election in which the first black president stood on the verge of victory, riding on promises – believed by many very fervently – of hope and change, that the American ruling class revealed itself for all to see as a monolith, united in its objectives, and willing to dispel the mirage of partisanship in defense of its wealth and power. This lesson was not lost on people, emerging later in the occupy movement's denunciation of party politics.

The rally on the initial day of the ocupation.

In many ways, as I look back on those early years of the crisis, it seems to me like those quiet, often individual and isolated acts, perhaps mentioned briefly to friends and family, and negotiated through a tactic of refusal, were the true precursors to the Occupy movement. Millions participated, even as they held onto the fading hope that Obama would deliver the change they thought he promised. These people – middle class people primarily – had believed with some justification that the system would respond to them. Indeed, even though power clearly resides with a very small capitalist and political elite, the middle class in America is the foundation of almost all political and economic argumentation. All mainstream political arguments must refer back to this mythical and broadly-defined group at some point. The American ruling class depends on this fecund soil of middle class identity and ideology to reproduce the mythology and propaganda that maintains the system overall, and of course the economy and the profits that go with it. It is the middle class that votes and consumes.

But for thirty years the middle class had been reduced to a photoshopped image quite unlike its former robust self. Debt had replaced wage growth. Home prices and credit card debt rather than real assets made up its balance sheet. The suburbs, once a vast retreat to safety and “normalcy” for the mostly white middle class, began to show signs of collapse. Like mushrooms, one after another “for sale” signs and foreclosure stickers spread through the car-friendly neighborhoods. The official unemployment rate (always an undercount), doubled in the eleven months between April 2008 and March of 2009. Overnight the foundations of the middle class vanished for tens of millions of people. What once seemed like a solid foundation was revealed to have been rotting for some time, as Americans found themselves crashing towards the basement in what had seemed like an impossible reversal of fortune.

It is in these conditions of 2008 and 2009, when the dream of Obama's Hope and Change had ended and the crushing reality that politics would not respond to the drowning-not-waving middle class, awash in a sea of red, that we see the formation of what would become the Occupy movement. While anarchists are right to point to predecessors in the student occupations of 2009, and in the anti-globalization movement before that, these are merely the origins of the form of the movement, not the origins of the movement itself. In those movements the general assemblies, spokescouncils, occupations, and horizontalism have their origins, and the points of cross pollination between the young occupy movement and those movements are obvious. But the occupy movement itself had its birth in the crisis, in the moment of the cartoon cat looking down after walking off the cliff. It is a movement with a varied composition, which ranges from homeless folks to students to anarchists to workers, but more than anything else it is a movement of a middle class that is rapidly re-proletarianizing, with a collapsing standard of living and failing job prospects. In the process, it is finding itself in unfamiliar territory surrounded by unfamiliar landmarks and neighbors.

PCWC flyer

Nevertheless, vestiges remain of the many biases and privileges that came with middle class status in the US, and these contradictions play out in the occupy movement in ways that we can identify. In particular we see these assumptions – primarily reflected in the bourgeois belief that the system ought to respond to middle class people – play out in arguments around nonviolence, the police, and questions of perception and imagery. Right now, as we enter what may be the end of the beginning of the occupy movement, we see the formerly middle class working out its new identity in public for all to see, contradictions and all. It appears schizophrenic, asserting at the same time both what it sees as its fundamental right to protest, to be heard, and to have its grievances ameliorated, and at the same time finding itself open to new radical ideas and tactics. All this while also facing down a system that clearly not only no longer responds to them but actually sends against them the very same jack-booted thugs that the middle class supported as they cast their ballots for one law-and-order president after another in the last three decades.

We can lay out a few significant features of this middle class state of mind that have come into play in the occupy movement, at least as I encountered it in Phoenix (OPhx). First, as I said above, is a real sense that the system ought to respond to their demands. That, when it doesn't, the system is broken. Obviously, this simplistic view ignores the process of exclusion and dislocation central to the functioning of the system. Nevertheless, this is the view. Likewise, there is a desire for respectability, for conformity to normal bourgeois conventions, for example politeness, and a particular kind of attire. This desire also often manifests as a rejection of certain affiliations, and an insistence on maintaining or creating a particular image. Another feature of this ideology is a desire for order and an adoration of the police. Finally, one of the most important elements of the middle class view is the tendency to treat its view of the world and its experiences as normal, and to impose hegemony on the movement based on this view.

These are points of conflict in the movement not just because of the ideas that form “middle class-ness”, but also because likewise participating in the broader movement are poor people, homeless people, and political militants -- primarily anarchists-- who have quite different experiences with cops and politics, and who envision different constituencies as the optimal target audience for occupy actions and propaganda. Beyond this, “middle class-ness” in the US is anchored to whiteness, and this has caused conflicts whenever white middle class occupiers have attempted to treat their experience as normative rather than specific and exclusionary, especially around questions of policing, incarceration and justice. This makes the occupy movement not only contested terrain, but one in which the formerly middle class participants seek to impose their dominance over the rest of it. Always lurking in the dark recesses of the middle class consciousness is the idea that politics ought to be the property of the responsible classes, and rubbing up against these other populations has been the root of many of the conflicts in the early days of this movement.

An occupier speaks with a member of a NSM front group.

All in all, middle class occupiers are in conflict with themselves. They operate generally within the safe confines of middle class ideology, but their class position has collapsed. The question is how this conflicted identity will play out. With no recovery in jobs or incomes on the horizon, and therefore no way to reconstitute itself, is the emergence of a working class or other non-middle class identity inevitable? Will interaction with radicals, anarchists, poor and working class people, as well as people of color (who may challenge many of the basic values of whiteness that constitute middle class-ness) lead to a radicalization, or a rush to defend the formerly privileged class position? Obviously many downwardly mobile occupiers long for a return to the good old days of the American dream. Meanwhile, the system and all likely political candidates seem wedded to austerity in one form or another. A political response that would satisfy them all seems improbable.

Within the occupy movement, at least its Phoenix derivation, the middle class tendencies played out in a variety of interesting ways. Nonviolence, for instance, was always deployed ideologically and never defined. Most people who used the term “nonviolence” with regard to the movement seemed to move interchangeably between “nonviolence”, “nonviolent”, “peaceful”, “pacifist” and various other terms, treating them as if they all referred to the same thing. Some did this consciously (politically) and some seemed to be operating out of the generally privileged and anti-historical narratives of political movements that middle class people use to mythologize struggle. Cartoon versions of Gandhi and King got trotted out regularly, stripped of historical context or even political content.

Given its lack of definition, the demand for nonviolence was therefore applied almost exclusively to militants, and never to police. Militants are considered to be dangerous because they do not adhere to the ideological and poorly-defined nonviolence of the middle class occupiers. As a result of our refusal to toe the line, we are treated as if violence is our preferred method of struggle, or even our default setting. Our presence is perceived as dangerous. Indeed, the participation of anarchists in OPhx was and continues to be a source of much fear and debate, something police have exploited on several occasions.

The debate about the importance of nonviolence has a few main elements. One is the false history of social change that is so important to the middle class (people who value stability and predictability above all else). The collapse of their class position has turned them into disturbers of public order, and yet at the same time, they value order and civility as hallmarks (or psychoses) of their suburban lives and democracy. Tied into this is the belief that the system would and should pay attention to them if only they could make their case clearly and non-offensively. For this reason, violence is not only perceived by the middle class as disruptive and ineffective, but also as poor strategy. This is reflected in almost every discussion about nonviolence, as the most common refrain “it looks bad on tv”. We are not to appear like thugs, like criminals, like we are out of control or not respectable; all loaded language that points to middle class perceptions and fears.

At one point during the first mass arrest at OPhx, occupiers (sitting on the ground as riot cops encircled them) began to chant “We love you!” and “We are peaceful!”, “We are nonviolent!” at the cops, as if invoking an incantation of middle class desperation. In a real way what they were saying was, we are not a threat and we are playing by the rules. This is the old identity expressing itself. But it's coming up against a hard new reality. Many of these people had likely never been on the business end of a riot suit, much less been arrested.

A tent on the first night of the occupation.

Imagery and perception played out along the terrain of class as well, with many middle class occupiers exhibiting a near obsession with how their fellow occupiers portrayed themselves. In the days before the actual attempt to take over the park that was initially targeted for occupation, a Reddit post circulated online which caught the attention of the middle class elements within OPhx. The post advocated that occupiers dress well, in suits and other office- or church-appropriate attire. Supporters of this position claimed that if we looked good, we would attract more people and that we would also look sympathetic in the media. In this way, form was valued over content, which probably isn't surprising for a class that has had the foundations of its ideology yanked out from under it.

In the same way that it was alleged that if we appeared respectable we would be successful, the assumption was that if we looked bad (like poor people or unemployed people or like people who had been foreclosed on) then we would lose the support of the media and therefore of the American people. Dirty clothes and torn t-shirts, attire (including signs) that evoked anarchism, radicalism, or homelessness, or a down-trodden or downward trajectory were repeatedly singled out for being inappropriate.

At the same time, middle class occupiers treated their assumptions about who was being appealed to and who would be offended or attracted by certain attire or messaging as a given, a natural fact beyond dispute. In a real sense, they were talking about their former selves, or perhaps their former employers. The idea that perhaps a movement of the excluded and disempowered might not want primarily to target middle class people made absolutely no sense to these middle class occupiers, and their ideal presentation bore a striking resemblance to a job interview.

In a media world, driven by the consumption of the middle class, the middle class naturally has its own image reflected back to them over and over all day. Middle class-ness is treated as normal and correct and even as large sections of the middle class found itself abruptly and increasingly poor or working class, the ideology continued, like sensations from a phantom limb. Likewise, the point that the media itself was owned by the 1% and as such had no class interest in portraying the movement positively (a fact that had been clearly borne out up to that time by the coverage), was rejected wholesale by middle class participants, despite the fact that they themselves broadly felt disappointed and disillusioned by the media. For the current and former middle class occupiers, the movement was as much an appeal to conscience as anything else and the main vehicle for that appeal, initially, was the media.

Beyond this was the attempt by occupiers to impose on the movement a rigid, hetero-sexual, anti-subcultural, and white suburban set of standards, mimicking not so much the promise of the consensus-based general assemblies that had excited them from far-off Zucotti Square, but instead functioning more like the neighborhood or homeowners associations that stifle all threats of diversity or difference in the far-flung outer developments, now collapsing and emptying at an astounding rate. This even though their class position had changed drastically, even if they no longer lived in those suburbs or had that good job and access to the easy credit that had made it all possible. This raised the inevitable question of just what kind of change these people wanted? Was it a break with the old order – the failure of which had been the motivating factor for so many participants in the first place – or was it to replicate or shore up and reconstitute the old middle class life so many had believed they enjoyed in the decades before the crisis? Was the occupy movement to be the gravedigger or the defibrillator of the current order? How deeply had middle class occupiers interrogated the realities of middle class suburban life?

Anarchist interventions.

Whatever the answer to that question, OPhx inevitably came into conflict with the police, who were another point of extremely heated debate. At the beginning and to this day (though less so now than then), a large majority of people have clung to the notion that cops were part of the 99%.

In order to discuss OPhx and the cops we have to temporarily accept the idea of the 99%, which I think most anarchists believe is a clumsy and inaccurate way to approach class composition of society. Many in the occupy movement are in serious danger of reifying what is merely a sometimes useful, albeit limited, tool, and this comes out nowhere more obviously than how they talk about cops. In a way, however, it makes sense that in the US, where almost everyone thinks of themselves as middle class, when a class analysis finally broke through to popular consciousness it would be ridiculously broad, almost uselessly so. Either way, since “the 99%” was the terminology being used, the discussion remained largely stuck within it and vulnerable to its many limitations.

Early on those political militants, working class people, and people of color who had altogether different experiences and perspectives on the police, came into direct conflict with those largely middle class people who asserted that “cops are part of the 99%”. In an echo of the conversation about image and perception, middle class occupiers asserted that if we looked respectable, the cops would treat us that way. Or if we were polite, the cops would have no reason to attack us. Indeed, looking good, using good language, and mouthing the movement's poorly-defined mantra of “nonviolence” were used not only as some talisman of protection, but also repeatedly deployed as criteria for singling out the dreaded “violent provocateurs” who haunted the dreams of middle class participants, agitators they believed were always ready to infiltrate and disrupt, thus making the movement “look bad” and leading inevitably to failure. The further one strayed from these core values, the more likely it was that one would be attacked as an infiltrator. Thus, these three criteria were used to reinforce middle class hegemony over the movement.

People who pointed out that the cops themselves were violent, and that our relationship to the police was dictated not by our behavior, appearance, or language but by our relationships to power and capital, or that police were generally right wing reactionaries who would dislike us no matter what we did or acted like, got attacked themselves for being violent. That is, opponents or even mild critics of the police were labeled violent for maligning the police or remarking on police violence. This bizarre reaction was perhaps natural given the fact that most middle class people's contact with cops up until their participation in the occupy movement was limited to getting tickets, asking for directions at public events, getting directed in traffic, getting help after a crime, and generally being made to feel safe and protected.

The composition of OPhx was complicated at times.

Therefore, police were not perceived at all as violent, but rather as well-meaning members of the 99%, just doing their jobs, and only prone to violence when provoked by people who deserved it. With seven million people in prisons or jails or under state supervision at any particular moment in the US, only the head in the sand NIMBYism of the middle class could insist to a movement of the formerly middle class that a small armed gang that puts so many 99%ers in jail every year was part of the 99%. And, naturally their weak analysis of the police led to consternation and surprise amongst middle class occupiers each time the police broke with the presumed social contract and resorted to violence and arrests against those perceived socially as undeserving of such treatment.

So the question remains. What will become of the formerly middle class occupier? Many contradictions have yet to work themselves out. It seems natural that a shift out of the comfy middle class wouldn't come without its problems. Will the second phase of occupy, with the election looming ever closer, display a more nuanced and advanced understanding of American capitalism, politics, power, class and resistance? One of the most inspiring things about the occupy movement is its willingness to transgress conventional protest tactics in surprising ways (even as it reinforces others), its willingness to be disruptive and take over public and private space and its (so far) rejection of the dominant politics. It shows a lot of potential to being a creative, critical and confrontational movement moving in a general trajectory that ought to make anarchists happy. But will the former middle class occupiers, ejected so summarily from their positions of privilege, find a new identity that reflects their new conditions, or having wakened from the dream briefly, will they instead seek to roll back over and recapture the comforting fantasies of days gone by? Right now they are in a sense doing anarchism without anarchism. But is that good enough?

#Occupy Phoenix reading roundup for 10/30

The text of the Oakland general strike solidarity statement approved by the Occupy Phoenix General Assembly, 10/28/11


The latest news of interest in our continually updated readings regarding the #occupy movement:

Oakland on Strike! For a Radically Democratic Oakland without Cops, Politicians, or Bosses! (Counterpunch)

Three Nazis Kicked Out of Occupy Seattle (The Stranger)

Phoenix police chief: Occupy Phoenix demonstrations cost city over $200,000- Councilman Sal DiCiccio to suggest charging protesters (Arizona Republic)

Portland police arrest 25 Occupy Portland demonstrators overnight (The Oregonian)

Denver Anarchist Black Cross update from 3 weeks of social war in Denver, Colorado (Denver ABC)

Don't Assume those who confront the police are agents provocateurs (Joaquin Cienfuegos)

Occupy Denver: Police using rubber bullets and teargas (Censored News)

Our Lives Are Not Negotiable!

 

OUR    LIVES   ARE   NOT   NEGOTIABLE!

We are at the beginning of a great shift. We are in motion, all of us, experiencing new ideas, trying out new ways of living, organizing and relating to each other. The old ways of doing things, which have had the feeling of going through the motions for some time now, are finally fading away. Soon they will all be gone.

The truth is we have been tired of this world for some time. It isn't organized for our benefit, which makes sense because it isn't organized by us. It's organized by capitalists and bureaucrats, politicians and technicians. So-called “experts”. The institutions, all of them, have revealed themselves as servants of power, not broken but functioning normally as part of a giant profit- and power-driven machine. It hasn't changed, it's just easier to see it now.

American democracy isn't broken, we are witnessing the logical conclusions of its internal nature. Likewise with American capitalism. We don't need to “fix” it because it isn't broken. Neither was it ever meant to respond to us. In capitalism we produce and consume, but the profits go elsewhere. In democracy we validate capitalist domination over our lives. This is the normal functioning of the system.

This crisis goes beyond “corporate greed” or “getting corporate money out of politics”. It wasn't some character flaw that led to this calamity. And it isn't any particular mechanism by which elite power influences politics that is the problem. It's that elite power controls politics regardless. This is because we live in a dictatorship of money, of capital. Just like you can't get money out of capitalism, you can't get capitalist power out of government because government exists to perpetuate capitalist power.

This crisis goes deep. It's not just foreclosures, it's also the vacuous suburbs themselves. It's not just unemployment, it's the meaninglessness of our jobs. It's also being worked to death in an era of massive technological advancement. It's a system that moves so fast that we never get any time to slow down. We exist for the system, not the other way around. Meanwhile the system throws so many of us away, locking us in prisons, poverty or powerlessness. It eats up the Earth with an insatiable appetite, foisting the costs unto us.

It's a system determined to eat up everything in sight, invading and colonizing everywhere, including our minds and relationships to each other. Always accumulating at our expense, and backed up by the army and the police, it's a system that doles out petty privileges to some while it systematically attacks others, all the while keeping the lion's share for those at the top. And, as we have seen, if it wants to it can take those privileges away. The laws do not protect us so why should we respect them? In this system we have very little control over the fundamental questions of our lives. Picking between brands of ketchup isn't freedom. And neither is working in the ketchup factory. Nor studying at ketchup university.

At such an important point in our history, now is not the time to seek to restore normality. Now is no time to be conservative. Do not hold back! We must resist the temptation to try to return to the way the system functioned in the past. Not only isn't it possible, but it would be a betrayal of this amazing moment. And things weren't so great back then anyhow. Don't beg for reforms. Insist on your dreams. Think big. Look around you for inspiration of how things could be. Now is the moment to ask yourself how you would like the world to be, not what you would settle for. It can be different. It can be totally different.

DEMAND   EVERYTHING,  INSIST  ON  YOUR  DREAMS  AND  RESIST   THE  URGE   TO COMPROMISE  IN  THE  STRUGGLE!

This Saturday at Occupy Phoenix, a discussion on "Defending Self-Defense from Militant Nonviolence"

 "I am not the 99%! I am me, you are you. In different ways the rulers of this society have screwed us over. Each of us, in different ways, autonomously (but perhaps interweaving what we do), have to respond. To hell with moralistic condemnations of other people's choices in this regard. To hell with imposed guidelines and programs. That guarantees a "movement" that cannot move!"
-Apio


As seen last night in Oakland and Atlanta, police agencies continue to clamp down on the surge of anti-capitalist, anti-bank, and anti-corporate protests around the country, and Phoenix has been no exception.  Phoenix police made dozens of arrests during the first night of Occupy Phoenix, as people sat down in the park after it closed at 10 PM and refused to leave.  Many of those arrested chanted that they "love the police" and reaffirmed their commitment to non-violence, while riot cops methodically pulled them behind their lines. Notably, one person was grabbed by her head and yanked behind the police line, while another person reported that he received a light beating after he was snatched. Still loving the police?

Anyone in the park who shouted back at the police advance, who had the nerve to challenge the state's attack on a peaceful gathering, was labeled as being "violent", or accused of trying to "provoke the police" by some of the "non-violent" protesters.

There's already a couple of other posts on here in the last few weeks about the role of the police as antagonists to social movements amidst all the cop loving going on, as well as the dead end of a non-violent movement that polices anyone who oppose the presence of armed white supremacists and neo-nazis at Occupy Phoenix.  Furthermore there have been a number of different groups and individuals advocating for some type of "peace police" that will marginalize and even physically isolate any person(s) who may be engaging in "violent" behavior, like defending oneself from a physical attack, or yelling at a cop who is being violent towards others. The Occupy Phoenix encampment will not survive if militant non-violent advocates continue to insist on a "head down" mentality that shames individual or collective self defense, the politicians, cops, and/or nazis will make sure of that.

In addition to some of the problems with the organized non-violence presence, there is also a popular, if factually inaccurate, narrative of non-violent movements (Gandhi, MLK, the civil rights movement) that says they were victorious simply because of the virtuousness of their non-violence.  This one sided understanding of social change throws history and facts out the window in favor of a mythologized interpretation of struggle, one that ignores any context that becomes inconvenient or clashes with the dogma of non-violent protest in the United States.

So, with all the contention over the question of tactics in this current struggle, I was happy to see that a friend of PCWC has organized an event for this weekend to challenge the dogmatism of militant non-violence, and to invite attendees to explore the histories of direct action, movement self defense, and diversity of tactics through a public discussion.  This event will take place this coming Saturday from 2-5 PM, at the Occupy Phoenix camp at Cesar Chavez Plaza (201 W. Washington Street) in downtown Phoenix, I encourage all interested to attend.  The summary for the event is reproduced below:


"Defending Self-Defense from Militant Nonviolence"

From day one of Occupy Phoenix it has been made clear that Kingian nonviolence is the acceptable means of protest, demonstration and direct action.

Nonviolence is a tactic, but it is one of many. It is important to remember that those who defend self-defense as a tactic are likewise not discounting the efficacy of nonviolence.

The purpose of this teach-in is to give a historical account of self-defense and direct action from the abolitionist movement and the Civil Rights era through to the present day.

It would also be extremely important to listen to our Native brothers and sisters, whose land we continue to live upon, on their ongoing struggles against U.S. state oppression and the tactics they employ.

It is also for the purpose of pointing out what Joel Olson has recently described as the "left colorblindness" of the Occupy movement in pointing out the historically different relations that people of color have had with the state and with the police. It seems easy to dismiss self-defense as a tactic when the community you are a part of has never felt oppressive state violence through exclusionary legislation, racial targeting, criminalization, slavery, prison and the dispossession of land.

Also, it is a hope that a discussion regarding the protection of private property rights above human values under nonviolence principles can occur.

	Saturday, October 29 · 2:00pm - 5:00pm
	Cesar Chavez Plaza 201 W. Washington Street Phoenix, AZ

#Occupy Phoenix reading roundup for 10/26

Today's continually updated collection of articles we think should be of interest to the Occupy movement.

Letter from an Anonymous Friend: The Morning After the Attack on the Oakland Commune (Anti-Capital Projects)

Reports from Occupations: Oakland, Atlanta, Philly, NYC (BtR)

To the Occupy movement – the occupiers of Tahrir Square are with you (LibCom)

Occupy Wall Street's Race Problem (American Prospect)

What Police Should be Learning From the Occupy Protests (Security Debrief)

A Look at the Occupy Movement In a Manner Neither Forceful Nor Foolish (Counterpunch)


"Corporate greed," or just plain old capitalism? (LibCom)

 Inside the Shocking Police Crackdown on Occupy Oakland: Tear Gas Used, 85 Arrested (Alternet)

#Occupy Phoenix reading roundup for 10/25

The latest news of interest in our continually updated readings regarding the #occupy movement:

Occupy Tucson protesters launch satellite camps (Associated Press)

Occupy Tucson costing city thousands (KVOA)

Screw the PiggyBackers (Occupy Los Angeles)

Beyond Occupy Wall Street: 11 American Uprisings You've Never Heard of That Changed the World (BeyondChron)

Dear, Occupy Oakland: A letter on strategy (Occupy Oakland)

On #Occupy: Ryan Harvey (AK Press)

Chemical bomb tossed into Occupy Maine encampment (Portland Press Herald)

Occupy Albany: Under pressure to make arrests, police and troopers push back (Times Union)

Occupation Movement: Hactivists expose police and police brutality (Censored News)

Toward a Radical Strategy in Decolonize/Occupy Seattle (Black Orchid Collective)

Seattle: The Anarchist Anxiety (The Stranger)

Is Madagascar the model for Occupy Wall Street? (Globe and Mail)

Occupy Oakland's diversity is strength, challenge (San Francisco Chronicle)

Occupy Denver: 4 busted in police raid on squat (Denver Westword)

UPDATE: DPD Raids Squat, Support Needed (Denver Anarchist Black Cross)

#Occupy Phoenix reading roundup for 10/22

 There might not be much more added today since we're going to be at the #occupyphoenix general assembly all day.

WHY (RE)OCCUPYING WON’T WORK (Stronghold)

Despite eviction warnings, Occupy Oakland protesters revel into the night (Oakland North)

On Immanence and Occupations (Ian Alan Paul)

Occupy Oakland, Day 12, Morning of Looming Forcible Eviction by Police, 10/21/11: photos (Indybay)

A call to defend Occupy Phoenix!

 A few of the anarchists active in the Occupy Phoenix events have put this call out in response to police threats of aggression towards anyone planning on staying in Margaret T. Hance park overnight.  

All who find themselves in solidarity are encouraged to come downtown tonight.


Occupy Phoenix is moving from Cesar Chavez plaza to Margaret T. Hance park, next to the Burton Barr Library in downtown Phoenix. The move is being made because the Chavez plaza is shut down by the police at 6 PM, whereas Hance park is open until 11.

People are planning on occupying the park tonight, which officially closes at 11 PM. However, the cops have said that there is no way they are going to let anyone stay past that time, nor allow camping gear, nor would they commit to not cracking down violently when pressed by a participant at the Occupy Phoenix gathering today.

In response to the possible attack by the authorities, participants are organizing a party at the park to commence after the thousands arrive from Chavez park to Hance park. There is now an open call out for all interested to come down to Hance park this evening, and into the night.

The new movement challenging the destruction and greed of capitalism must have a space to organize from, which is why we must protect our movement from state and police repression. The wealthy and powerful want to crush the grassroots opposition before we can build our own decentralized power that could potentially change and transform society.

Come down to defend the occupation in Hance Park this evening, and stay all night!

No more banks, no borders!  An end to the era of loan officers, and police officers!