Photo: Stacy Lanyon
I got more involved on a day-to-day basis after the eviction. I was in working groups. I was part of the Education and Empowerment Working Group from early on. I was involved with Occupy Student Debt when that began. Once the eviction happened, a lot of people just fell away. There seemed to be this possibility that it would just disappear really quickly. That was when I really got involved. That was when I started doing it on a daily basis because I thought, “This isn’t something I want to just disappear. This is such an important possibility that you’ve got to give it your best shot, even if it means that it only lasts another few months.”
I felt like it was really worthwhile, not just the idea of Occupy, but the idea of a different kind of politics, different way to approach how we do things. It’s really setting down roots in the US for the first time in a long, long time, that we have a different way of doing something, that there’s a space. We held that space. That’s what the park was about to me. It was tiny. It didn’t seem tiny at the time, but it really was. It was a tiny little space, but we held that tiny space open against the massive engine of neoliberalism and its insistence that there was no possible alternative of any kind. What we have actually been able to do over the course of the last fifteen months or so is just hold that little space open and say, “Actually, there is an alternative.” It really makes a difference, even if it’s only tiny, that that has survived and that continues to develop and to produce new ideas and new practices because it shows to the rest of the world that even here, right at the heart of the belly of the beast, right within spitting distance of Wall Street, there’s an alternative.
I’m very interested in climate and the environment, and
here was a social movement that was really aware of that, and doing things at a practical level - recycling the grey water and later on using
the bikes to generate power. That really struck me, along with the sense that it was
about caring for each other. Here was the first political project that I had
seen in a long time that wasn’t just about money, giving money, raising money,
doing things with money. It was about doing things with each other, and allowing
you, almost expecting you, to change yourself before anything else. It wasn’t like you knew something and you had to go out
and tell all of these "ignorant" people, “You don’t understand this. You don’t
understand that.” It was rather, "How could you actually change the way
that you live?" or in the jargon of the movement, "prefigure how you would
like things to be?" That seemed to be so appealing. It was so refreshing. It was
so unlike everything else that you get bombarded with all of the time. In
a sense, the energy was just energizing. It was like waking up.
We’re at a particular moment where the options that we had
in the past don’t apply anymore. We find ourselves massively, personally,
internationally in debt. I’m in debt. Everybody that I know is in
debt. 76% of the American population is in debt. Another 22% are too poor to be
in debt. You have to have a certain amount of money to be allowed to be in
debt. We’re
either too poor to be in debt, or we’re in debt. That's the 99%. What’s the traditional way of
dealing with debt? To grow the economy, to make more stuff, have new employment,
new industries and so on. We can’t do that. Why? Because if we do, we’ll
generate more carbon emissions. The more carbon emissions, the more stuff like Sandy, more climate change, more of this weird weather where it’s
fifty-two degrees one week and minus twenty the next, where you have
floods all over the world. We have this enormous conundrum. We can’t deal with
the economic crisis in the way that we traditionally
have been told that we must. In order to find some different way of dealing with it,
you actually have to change everything in order to allow people to find
a new way to live.
We can’t just pay back this debt. It’s an impossibility. We have to abolish it. Abolishing debt would mean a totally different form of social life. It’s what the old radicals used to call root and branch. It means you have to change everything. This is one of the reason that the movement spoke to me fundamentally from the beginning. You can’t just fix some regulations to do with Wall Street or the way the actual campaigns are financed, which are perfectly good things in and of themselves. I’m not opposed to any of them. If those things happen, that’s beautiful. But to actually move from the totally messed up place that we’re in to a place where there’s a possibility that things might be sustainable in the longer term, that requires things to change in a major way. That is what I think this movement is about. The reason it’s important is that it’s not just happening here. If it was just happening in New York, it wouldn’t matter. It’s happening in Egypt. It’s happening in Greece. It’s happening in Latin America. It’s happening in pretty much every part of the world you can think of. A network is emerging where we’re talking to each other, and we’re thinking about what each other are doing. This is really the first time we’ve seen this since the Sixties, that there’s been a concerted global attempt to rethink how we might live, not just how we do politics, but how we might live, and that’s what we need.
One of the things we’ve learned is that our traditional political system is beyond hope. We had an election, which was centered around the idea of hope and change in 2008. Then, we had the global financial crisis, and we had nothing. We had paralysis. We had absolute paralysis, and we continue to have that in the most ludicrous way. Again, it’s not just the United States. You look at Britain. You look at France. You look at any of the major democracies, let alone the developing nations, and you see this happening. It’s become impossibile to use the representative democratic system to get anything done. So what I’m interested in is how would we invent something that was actually a direct democracy, not representative, that actually involves the participation of what you would call the people, all of them, not just certain segments of them. We have never, ever had that. That has not existed.
We have technological means to make it possible now. One of the things that’s really interesting that’s happening in Spain right now that the Indignados have set-up a political party called the Party of the Future. It’s a performative thing. They claim to be a party that exists in the future that’s sending messages back to the present about how a participatory democracy might be formed, through what they call wiki government, transparency and involvement. Those kinds of things seem more in tune with the world that we live in than celebrating a two hundred and something year old document that was written by a bunch of slave-owning white guys in the 18th century, and saying, “Hey, this is perfect. Can’t ever change it because it’s just so fabulous.” Every time we have an inauguration, or an election, everybody just pretends that this piece of paper is just the best piece of paper anybody ever wrote. And there was perhaps a time it was great, at least for some, but it has so little to say to the conditions that we now live under.
You can learn more about Strike Debt at http://strikedebt.org/.
Interview by Stacy Lanyon
http://buildingcompassionthroughaction.blogspot.com/
https://www.facebook.com/stacylanyon
https://instagram.com/stacylanyon/
https://twitter.com/StacyLanyon
http://stacylanyon.com/
We can’t just pay back this debt. It’s an impossibility. We have to abolish it. Abolishing debt would mean a totally different form of social life. It’s what the old radicals used to call root and branch. It means you have to change everything. This is one of the reason that the movement spoke to me fundamentally from the beginning. You can’t just fix some regulations to do with Wall Street or the way the actual campaigns are financed, which are perfectly good things in and of themselves. I’m not opposed to any of them. If those things happen, that’s beautiful. But to actually move from the totally messed up place that we’re in to a place where there’s a possibility that things might be sustainable in the longer term, that requires things to change in a major way. That is what I think this movement is about. The reason it’s important is that it’s not just happening here. If it was just happening in New York, it wouldn’t matter. It’s happening in Egypt. It’s happening in Greece. It’s happening in Latin America. It’s happening in pretty much every part of the world you can think of. A network is emerging where we’re talking to each other, and we’re thinking about what each other are doing. This is really the first time we’ve seen this since the Sixties, that there’s been a concerted global attempt to rethink how we might live, not just how we do politics, but how we might live, and that’s what we need.
One of the things we’ve learned is that our traditional political system is beyond hope. We had an election, which was centered around the idea of hope and change in 2008. Then, we had the global financial crisis, and we had nothing. We had paralysis. We had absolute paralysis, and we continue to have that in the most ludicrous way. Again, it’s not just the United States. You look at Britain. You look at France. You look at any of the major democracies, let alone the developing nations, and you see this happening. It’s become impossibile to use the representative democratic system to get anything done. So what I’m interested in is how would we invent something that was actually a direct democracy, not representative, that actually involves the participation of what you would call the people, all of them, not just certain segments of them. We have never, ever had that. That has not existed.
We have technological means to make it possible now. One of the things that’s really interesting that’s happening in Spain right now that the Indignados have set-up a political party called the Party of the Future. It’s a performative thing. They claim to be a party that exists in the future that’s sending messages back to the present about how a participatory democracy might be formed, through what they call wiki government, transparency and involvement. Those kinds of things seem more in tune with the world that we live in than celebrating a two hundred and something year old document that was written by a bunch of slave-owning white guys in the 18th century, and saying, “Hey, this is perfect. Can’t ever change it because it’s just so fabulous.” Every time we have an inauguration, or an election, everybody just pretends that this piece of paper is just the best piece of paper anybody ever wrote. And there was perhaps a time it was great, at least for some, but it has so little to say to the conditions that we now live under.
I'd like to see a world where people are able to
live lives, not just to live to work, not just to live to pay back their debts. As I calculated during the course of my own involvement with this
campaign to strike debt, the way that my life is set up now is that I work
until I’m about seventy-eight or eighty, at which point, given the average
statistics, I die. That gave me some real pause. That’s really what all this
is about? You’re here for an amount of time, and all you end up doing is taking
out an enormous amount of debt as a young person, working for four or five
decades, repaying it, and then you check out. Surely, without being
metaphysical about things, there has to be some alternative way.
One of the
things that the movement has shown is how much need there is for care. From the
park, where in the middle of one of the richest cities in the entire world,
countless people showed up in extraordinary states of need from poverty and
homelessness to hunger, and alcohol and drug dependencies. Then, suddenly, this
tiny group of ragtag people were supposed to become New York City social
services. How come New York City isn’t doing that? How have we gotten to a
state where we are so uninterested in caring for our fellow human beings, let
alone non-human life on this planet? How have we got to that state? How have we
become so disconnected from each other where the only thing that matters is a
tiny nuclear family unit, if that? Surely, we can do better. You go
to China, and you talk to people, and they cannot understand how
we warehouse old people in these anonymous factory storage units, where you go to die. What is that? You know people are going to look back on
that at some point and say, "How did people come to the conclusion that this was a great way to deal with human beings, who still have
an enormous amount of knowledge and experience to share with us?”
As a young person, you have this great energy. You think because I’m young and I have all of these great ideas, surely by the
time I'm at the age I am now, around fifty, things will have changed. They just didn’t . They
just got worse consistently for thirty years. Finally
there seems to be this widespread sense that we can do better, and what’s
really important to me is that it’s allowed us to already begin that process, without having
to change absolutely everything now. I think one of the past
failures of some radical, progressive, even revolutionary movements is that they have
assumed that everything has to be transformed, and then they will stop
transforming. That’s a mistake. There are enormously complex things we have to
negotiate from the six billion people on the planet, to the crisis in non-human life that we face, and so on. None of these things are going to be sorted permanently
and forever. It’s about creating social mechanisms that sustain you and the
group that you’re in, and it gradually expands. I don’t know where this ends. I
don’t feel that there will be an ending in the simple sense.
I think that we need to fold it in to the way that we live on a daily basis. For example, I can, as a university faculty person, stop referring to myself as a teacher and start thinking of myself more
as a facilitator. I don’t refer to the people I work with as “my students” because they don’t
belong to me. They’re people. I don’t even use the word
pedagogy because that means leading children. I don’t think of the people I
work with as children, and I don’t think of myself as leading them. I think of
myself as trying to share things with them. What I think we get to then is not a conclusion but a
different sense of possibility and a sense then that everyday life is not for
nothing, that it’s not meaningless, that it’s not redundant unless you’re one
of these tiny handful of people that we call celebrities (or whatever other name
you want to give these people) that are seen in our society as the only people that matter. We need everyone to feel a sense of empowerment, a sense that you would feel, even if nobody
knows who you are, that your life is still meaningful to you and to the people
around you, that you are doing something that helps improve not just your
own circumstances but the circumstances of others. And that becomes a reason
for living.
What it looks like
now is a life that you might call encapsulated. We’re in boxes.
We’re in a box that it an apartment, in a box that takes us to work. Then, we
sit in another box. What it looks like in the future is that we’re not in the
box. We’re in a different space. This doesn’t mean we
don’t get the opportunity to be by ourselves but that our boundaries are fluid.
Our time is controlled by ourselves, and we move at different tempos according
to different moments in our lives. When a person, or people, are caring for a
young child, then that’s their time. That’s an unbelievably time consuming
thing to do. That’s what you do. Other people take care of the other stuff that
needs to be taken care of. When you’re dealing with an elderly person who you
know, who is part of your community, who requires pretty much around the clock
attention, then that’s your job. That’s what you do until you can step back
from that.
It's a time where you can immerse yourself
in things that are of great importance to you. There’s got to be a lot less
emphasis on material goods, without saying that people are going to live in
want. It’s not about saying we’re going back to some mythical state, like the hunter-gatherers. There are too many people on the
planet. We have to have a continued division of labor, but we actually already
have technologies that make the things that we need, to share them, to distribute
them. We make so much food on this planet, and yet a third of the global
population goes hungry. In America, we throw away 45% of the food we make. It’s
crazy. With just a certain introduction of rationality, we can take care of
people without leading these lives where we feel that everything is just separated and that our possibilities are so constrained.
Then, I think
we might get to a place where we can imagine things that we can’t yet imagine. That is what really interests me. If I could imagine all of it now, than it
would be insufficiently mobilizing. But if you can imagine getting to
a place where you don’t know what’s going to happen next, but you feel like it’s
going to be very exciting, than we’ve restored to ourselves something that we’ve
lost, which is the idea of a future. That was a really extraordinary possibility that we did as humans create, this idea that things could be
improved as we move towards a different time. We’ve lost that. We’ve been told
that this is as good as it can ever be, that it’s probably going to get
worse. That’s a terrible
thing to be saying to anybody. If I could really encapsulate it, it would be
that. It would be to recover the idea of a future.
You can learn more about Strike Debt at http://strikedebt.org/.
Interview by Stacy Lanyon
http://buildingcompassionthroughaction.blogspot.com/
https://www.facebook.com/stacylanyon
https://instagram.com/stacylanyon/
https://twitter.com/StacyLanyon
http://stacylanyon.com/