Photo: Stacy Lanyon
I come from a family that is made up of radicals, and for a
variety of reasons, we have very radical politics. I was afforded this amazing library with a tremendous wealth of intellectual history
and radical politics while I was a child. I wasn’t forced to read it, but it
was there, and if you enjoyed reading then you could pick and choose between Simone de
Beauvoir and Karl Marx and C.L.R James. At the same time as we had this great
amount of theory, we also had great thinkers and organizers and activists
coming through our household. I was born poor, and through the eighties
and early nineties, we moved up to the working class. The only time I went to
Panama to see my grandpa before he passed away happened to be during the US war
against the people of Panama, my mother’s homeland. That’s my personal
narrative. That’s how I tend to begin my personal narrative. There's a degree
of which it was born of struggle, and there's a degree of which it was born of
theory and a real access to information that the vast majority of the people in
this country, and most of the people I’ve met, didn’t have access to. So we were
radicals, me and my brother, and our parents raised us fighting and raised us
thinking, and thinking about how we fought.
Basically, for the entirety of my
adult life, and of course reaching back to my teenage years and childhood, we
went to everything because we want to see how we can destroy a system based on
alienation, how we can eliminate the structures within a society that oppress
and control and demolish people and demolish their humanity, and how we can
create something else, create an alternative that is based on human creativity
and the human spirit and based on our collaboration as a species with the earth
and the ecosystems around us, so we went to everything. Before Occupy happened, the left was looking
for a million ways, any way that it could to figure out how to build some kind
of alternative and also negate the darkness. We found it in the Counter-Globalization Movement a dozen years ago trying to shut down the IMF World
Bank, the WTO and these other neo-colonial institutions. It kind of went away. We found it in the Anti-War Movement and the Anti-Imperialist Movement, and
it kind of went away. Then, we found it in the immigrant rights struggle, and it kind of went away, or it dissipated, and all of
these movements continue to exist. They persist. They fight, and they learned a
lot, but being generalized struggles, they dissipated in that
way, in their mass base.
Before Occupy, there were a number of events. There
were two events in October 2010, one that was held by Jon Stewart and Stephen
Colbert and another that was held by the Union Movement. There was the May 12th
movement. There was May Day of 2011, and there were a lot of other attempts that could build something that could set it off, that could for some simply be the progressive left movement of the Tea Party, for others be a
revolutionary moment, and the left faltered. I was out of the country when
Bloombergville happened, but when Bloombergville happened, that was another
attempt, and it was a lot closer. It sputtered, but it was an attempt building
on May 1st and the October 2010 actions. So when Occupy happened,
there was no doubt that me and some of the members of my family were going to
show up.
My excitement was not high about it. I didn’t believe in it. I had these two German women who were staying on my
couch, and they were asking me what to do in the city,
and that Saturday I was like, “Oh, there’s this thing. It’s not going to go
well. It’s got something to do with Adbusters. It’s not going to be real, but it might be interesting to see." I went. I was
twenty minutes late, and I didn’t believe in it after the first day. It was
still exciting. There was a certain energy that my brother had, that I had. My
baby nephew was there the very next day. We didn’t really believe in it, but we
saw that people were still there, and we saw that despite the initial attempt
at repression, the initial attempts to belittle it, the initial elements of
silliness, that it was persistent and it was tenacious enough that a year and a
half later, you still see people sticking with people who are willing to fight and people who
are willing to create.
I think that the park was both this massive rebellion against
alienation, against control, against the division of labor, against this sense
that we have to be what the greater society has told us to be. I think that was a real rebellion, a real uprising, and I uphold it as an
uprising, similar to the things that happened in Egypt, that happened in Spain,
in Iceland, in Greece and across the planet. At the same time, it was one
without theory, so as we escaped our division of labor, we recreated one in the
park. In one way, the park was incredibly exciting. There was always something
creative and interesting happening. People would come who were just coming for
a day or a weekend, and others would come and just stay. This was it for them.
They were staying in this park and creating a sense of liberty in it. That was
really exciting. At the same time, because we didn’t do it with a great degree
of intentionality, we recreated class divisions. We recreated in some cases
racial ghettoization. We recreated divisions of labor to the point where at least
eight or nine working groups went on strike at one point or another because
they felt that their labor was undervalued. Does that sound familiar?
The park
was incredible, but the park was an uprising, and an uprising is undirected,
and it’s imbalanced, and it’s imperfect, and it’s messy, and it’s fun. As
such, it is hopefully something that is much more dynamic, much more tight, but
varied. Sometimes very generalized movements and struggles can come out of that,
so lots of things came out of the park that never would have existed without
it. There were many people like myself that had thirty years in the struggle, with parents
who had more than that. I met plenty of people in their eighties or nineties who
were active in the park. Very few of us, almost none of us had ever experienced
that kind of magic and that kind of spirit.
In Paris
in 1871, they took over the whole city of Paris for two months , and they called it the Paris Commune, and it’s remembered ever after. It was enough that the
Prussian and French military killed 30,000 workers, massacred them, painted the
entire city of Paris red with their blood, and similar things happened for the
next one hundred and fifty years all across the planet. There have been these
moments, usually all too brief moments, where people had this
uprising that felt like something new, felt like the new world. This is perhaps
as close as a lot of us have ever gotten.
The world we live in is not one that was built by us. It was
built by the developments that happened before, and the developments that
happened before come from two principle places. One, they come from history.
They come from the past building upon itself, societies building on the
societies that existed before them, and they also come from, on the more
beautiful end, on the more hopeful and optimistic end, a sense of subjectivity,
a sense of agency, people suddenly having a moment where they can say, “We have
history in our hand, and we can help direct it." You can’t direct history
outside of the confines of where you’re at, but you do have a role to play, and
if you don’t play that role, history keeps trucking along without you. Change
is inevitable, and change is going to keep happening, but change can be
fascism. Change can be Mussolini taking power over those who were in power
before. Change can be Stalin and Hitler. Change can be monarchies subsumed and
instead fascism coming to power. Change can be, as in much of the third
world, getting rid of their colonial power, the Portuguese, the Belgium, the
French or British Colonial empires, and instead getting the neo-colonialism
that was largely controlled by the United States.
If we allow change to just
happen without us taking our fair share of it, change is going to happen, but
it’s not always going to happen in a way that builds us and builds for us.
Occupy Wall Street was absolutely a moment where a tremendous amount of people
suddenly felt like they had a historic role that they never thought possible.
It wasn’t just the people in the park, the hundred or two hundred thousand
people who were in the park at some point over those two months. Maybe it was
more than two hundred thousand. Who knows? It’s impossible to tell. It was also the people who every day I would have conversations with on the subway that
would tell me that it meant so much to them, that they’d never made it to the
park. They always wanted to make it to the park. They read everything about it. These were poor fucking people. These were working class people. They were people from a lot of different class
backgrounds, and they had a lot of different life experiences. It woke up
something in so many people who were there and who were not, people who visited
and people who were continents away, this sense that humankind has a capacity for
creativity and that each of us building together has a possibility of taking some of history, taking it into our hands and holding it a
little bit alongside our neighbors.
The world that we are trying to build is one that is not
built by me, and it’s not built by you, and it’s not built by the other
theorists or the other idealists or the other hopeful, aspiring
revolutionaries. The world that we want to build is one that has no ends. We’re
not building an ends. We’re building a means, and a constant means, one that
everyone can participate in. One of the most important elements of Occupy
Wall Street and the adjoining movements around the rest of the world is about
popular power, and that to me is one of the three or four axis of the whole
thing, this idea of popular power. The power is something that we build
together, not something that we build over each other. It’s something that we
build with each other, not against each other. Then, what we’re trying to build
is something that tomorrow or ten years from now or a thousand years from now,
it’s humankind and the earth in collaboration building that world
together. It won’t be some Utopian perfect world. It will be a world that’s
constantly changing but that people can actually participate in and know that
they’re participating in it.
I have a lot of words for the world that I’m
trying to create. Some of them are anti. I’m trying to build a world without
capitalism, without private property, without patriarchy, without white
supremacy and without imperialism. At the same time, I’m trying to build a
world that is socialist and communist in a sense of not having property and not
having exploitation, that is directly democratic, not having a state but
actually creating a situation where people don’t abdicate all of their power to
a representative. They build power together. I’m trying to build a
feminist world. I’m trying to build a world that doesn’t exist with
cultural alienation, so that everyone can engage culturally and help build
culture together. There are certain things that I know about what I’ trying to
build, and I think that if we’re not intentional about that, then where we can
be going can be some very dangerous, hateful places, but in knowing the path
that I’m trying to build and knowing the place that I’m trying to build away
from, I think that it is enough so that the people who are there tomorrow and
generations to come, they’re the ones who actually get to participate in the
construction of a better world.
Interview by Stacy Lanyon
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