Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Marisa Holmes

One Year Anniversary Convergence, September 17, 2012, Battery Park
Photo: Stacy Lanyon

I wanted to build a global movement in response to the economic crisis that was horizontal, participatory and democratic, and Occupy made that happen. I’m pleasantly surprised every day that this dream came true. I heard about it through Adbusters on Facebook and Twitter. Then, through mutual friends, I realized that the first assembly at Bowling Green fell apart, that there was this new assembly that was actually a horizontal assembly, modeled after the ones in Spain. I was really excited by that and realized that it was an opportunity for me to get involved and help however I could with media, facilitation, whatever was needed.

Immediately when I got there, it felt like we had come home to something, to this place that I’ve never really known before. It just felt very safe. People could talk to one another who normally don’t talk to one another. In New York, we treat each other as strangers, and we are incredibly isolated and alienated, so to come to this space that allowed people to engage with one another was really empowering, to be face to face and build community. That manifested itself in the assemblies and all of the working groups that formed. There is an amazing self-management that happened when given the space to do so.

Change is won through struggle, so if we don’t create these communities where people can feel empowered and act together collectively, then we’ll never see the world that we want to see, one that’s more just, more humane, more engaging of everyone’s capacities. I think that that world is possible. That’s why I’m doing this work. The problem is power at its most basic level, and that manifests itself in all sorts of forms of oppression, one of which is economic, and that’s what we focus on most within Occupy is this form of economic oppression that results in the stratification of wealth, the hording by the 1% at the detriment of the rest of us who are just trying to survive. The only way that we are going to be able to do so is if we work together to make the world that we want.

I’d like to see a world in which the basic needs of everyone are met, in which everyone's capacities have the opportunity to be realized to their fullest potential, one in which people determine the course of their own livelihood and their own relationships to each other, one in which we are not coerced through the violence of the state or through wage slavery or through any other form of oppression, a world that’s free. I have no idea what it looks like because we create that together. It’s really an experiment. We have to trust in people.

 Interview by Stacy Lanyon
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