Photo: Stacy Lanyon
At some point, there were all of these compromises that you had to make to realism, “Well, you can’t do the thing that you actually want because this is what’s possible. If you actually want to actually change anything, you have to only change half of the thing that you want.” I think that’s important, and I think a lot of good work goes on under that rubric, but I have never really liked authority, and I’ve never really liked being realistic. Last fall, there was this explosion of people saying, “We want what we actually want, and we want to speak for ourselves.”
My office was just down the street from Zuccotti, and there was just something so magical about the energy. It felt like a place that was free. It felt like a liberated space. Anybody could be welcomed there. If you had a vision of some way, if you wanted to feed people or make a kitchen, you could make a people’s kitchen. You could make a people’s library.If people wanted to actually make decisions for themselves, they could be part of a general assembly, and that felt really good to be a part of a space where people were being protagonists in their own life.
I came. I wound up quitting my job in the institutional left, and it’s been a wild and crazy ride since. I learned a lot about the limitations of what it takes to actually organize in a horizontal space. With the freedom to speak in your own voice comes the responsibility to figure out how to do that efficiently and equitably, and I think we made a lot of mistakes along the way, but the learning process and the relationships that I’ve developed, that a lot of people have developed have been priceless, and I wouldn’t give them up for anything in the world.
I first went down to the park on September 18th.
I was in San Francisco visiting my family on the first day of the occupation,
and I was reading all of these tweets and Facebook posts. It was amazing that I
could find out that much. Most of the tweets at that time were about how the
main stream media wasn’t paying any attention to it. People were telling each
other about it, and that was inspiring too. I worked partly in communications
at the time, and I remember a friend of mine who was a PR flack saying, “I
tried to go down there and tell everyone how they needed to be doing PR and
having talking points, and everybody just laughed at me and said, “We make our
own media,” and he said, “They’ll never make it anywhere.” Then, a week later,
he was trying to study what they were doing to be more successful. There’s just
something about that complete utter faith in people’s own ability when trusted
to speak for themselves, not told what to say, not told what was going to be
right, to really follow through and do amazing things.
When I first did make it down to the park, I went with a friend of mine who I had done campus organizing with who had occupied the president’s office at our university for a long time, so he knew something about how to do this. We were both like, “This is so unorganized and crazy. How would anybody ever plug in? They need a greeting table or something. There’s just no structure here. They’ll never figure it out.” We came back the next day, and there was a greeting table that somebody had made on an ironing board with a cardboard sign, and that helped me to start understanding. The professional organizer in me was like, “Someone needs to take charge here and tell people how it’s done,” but what was proved to me was that when people are left to figure it out, they’ll figure it out on their own. They did figure it out on their own in this really charming homespun way. The more I continued to come back, that kind of way of self-empowering and building through the tools that you have available, expressing your own voice and visioning of the world you want to see, I was able to see how powerful that could be.
When I first did make it down to the park, I went with a friend of mine who I had done campus organizing with who had occupied the president’s office at our university for a long time, so he knew something about how to do this. We were both like, “This is so unorganized and crazy. How would anybody ever plug in? They need a greeting table or something. There’s just no structure here. They’ll never figure it out.” We came back the next day, and there was a greeting table that somebody had made on an ironing board with a cardboard sign, and that helped me to start understanding. The professional organizer in me was like, “Someone needs to take charge here and tell people how it’s done,” but what was proved to me was that when people are left to figure it out, they’ll figure it out on their own. They did figure it out on their own in this really charming homespun way. The more I continued to come back, that kind of way of self-empowering and building through the tools that you have available, expressing your own voice and visioning of the world you want to see, I was able to see how powerful that could be.
Occupy Wall Street and the many offshoots it has spun were
and are important because the institutions of power will never change
themselves. They’ll reform themselves and throw people crumbs here and there,
but ultimately, people who are alienated from the system that currently exists,
people who are oppressed by the system that currently exists, will only get change if they organize themselves on their own terms. The eruption of
Occupy is one of the first spaces we’ve seen in decades were people felt
entitled to do that, to say, “We might not know. I might not have ever
organized anything in my life, but I am a person who is upset about something
or directly affected by corporate rule of my planet. I bet I know something.” So there's this popularization of the idea that people affected by problems can be their
own experts in knowing how to solve it. Obviously, it took hold throughout the
world. It changed the conversation, as we hear so much. There was a spreading of that
ethic to people of the world over, whether they participated in Occupy
directly or not, an idea that they have the power and ability to change the
systems they don’t like, not by asking the system to get better, but by
asserting the things that they want directly, through direct action, through
direct democracy, for lack of a better word, citizenship of their own lives.
I think that is what already has and is going to continue to change the world. I’m most inspired by when you see that ethic taking hold in different struggles. We certainly didn’t start the idea that direct people power can change things, but you see it taking hold in East Flatbush right now over the killing of Kimani Gray by the NYPD. People from that community are upset about it and saying, “Well, we’re going to go out, and we’re not happy with all of the organized forms of dissent" that are really just in place to pacify them. There’s this real sense that that’s not quite enough. We want something more, and we can insist on that on our terms. That kind of resistance it legible now after Occupy Wall Street, broadly, popularly legible.
When hurricane Sandy hit, the fact that communities, people, just people, not from FEMA or Red Cross or experts in any sanctioned way, could say, “We’re capable of fixing this and could do that to scale and connect to each other." I think you see that in a number of different movements. It’s manifesting in lots of different ways. I think Occupy Wall Street deepened a lot of people’s faith, that when there is a problem, the first thing they need to do is talk to one another rather than petition the people in charge. As you see people start to talk to each other first to solve their own problems, there’s this incredible diversity of the faces of resistance that you see, and I think as those deepen and come to fruition, it’s going to really shift the balance of power of this country, and it’s going to be less and less the corporations and the congressmen who control how power works in this country and more and more the people who actually live in this country and are affected by its problems who have power to change.
I think that is what already has and is going to continue to change the world. I’m most inspired by when you see that ethic taking hold in different struggles. We certainly didn’t start the idea that direct people power can change things, but you see it taking hold in East Flatbush right now over the killing of Kimani Gray by the NYPD. People from that community are upset about it and saying, “Well, we’re going to go out, and we’re not happy with all of the organized forms of dissent" that are really just in place to pacify them. There’s this real sense that that’s not quite enough. We want something more, and we can insist on that on our terms. That kind of resistance it legible now after Occupy Wall Street, broadly, popularly legible.
When hurricane Sandy hit, the fact that communities, people, just people, not from FEMA or Red Cross or experts in any sanctioned way, could say, “We’re capable of fixing this and could do that to scale and connect to each other." I think you see that in a number of different movements. It’s manifesting in lots of different ways. I think Occupy Wall Street deepened a lot of people’s faith, that when there is a problem, the first thing they need to do is talk to one another rather than petition the people in charge. As you see people start to talk to each other first to solve their own problems, there’s this incredible diversity of the faces of resistance that you see, and I think as those deepen and come to fruition, it’s going to really shift the balance of power of this country, and it’s going to be less and less the corporations and the congressmen who control how power works in this country and more and more the people who actually live in this country and are affected by its problems who have power to change.
I want to bring about a world where people live in
communities where they know other people who live in those communities. I live
in Crown Heights. I want to live in a Crown Heights where the Caribbean
families who have lived there for fifty years and the white social justice
activists like me who have lived there for seven years know each other in a
deeper way than passing each other on the subway, not just the feelings of guilt or
resentment that are the first and most legible ways for us to interact. I want
us to have common projects. It could be anything, building local economies,
growing food together, community gardens, working on cop watch to control the
police and lower stop and frisk in our own neighborhood.
In my community, I want a sense of connection within the community, an economy that’s based more on the human understanding and connection that people who live together can have. I think if you have that and it’s based more on local exchange and more on human connection, it would be better for the environment, more local trade, more of a resource-based economy. I would like to see a parallel to that in governance, not only economies on a local scale but governance and decision making by the community of people who are direct stake holders being the ones making those decisions. I think that’s really hard, and I think it takes a lot of work, and then you have the problem of figuring out how that scales and how these different kinds of localized pockets can talk to each other and coordinate, but you asked me for a dream, and that’s a dream that I have.
I’ve been reading a lot of Grace Lee Boggs recently, and she talks about the difference between rebellion and revolution. She cites the riots in Detroit in 1967 as rebellion, which is a needed and necessary expression of anger. I think you could characterize the protests of last fall similarly. She characterizes revolution as people taking the extra step by saying, “We’re angry at this problem” and then saying “We want a revolution.” That means that we want to do the human work on ourselves to figure out what kind of humans we need to be to be capable of governing, to be capable of building the world that we actually want, and I think that has to happen on a small scale, where people actually have trust. I want to commit myself to that work on myself internally, “What are the challenges?” “What are the ways that I am oppressive in the communities that I interact? “How can I be less so?” How can I lift up voices that are calling out oppression?” “And if we build trust, how can we assert our right to control our own destinies collectively?” I think that the ways of talking and interacting and making decisions that we experienced in the park last fall, it looks a lot like that, so I hope that we can learn from those experiences and bring them more and more into our everyday lives and into the places that we live and see what comes out of that.
In my community, I want a sense of connection within the community, an economy that’s based more on the human understanding and connection that people who live together can have. I think if you have that and it’s based more on local exchange and more on human connection, it would be better for the environment, more local trade, more of a resource-based economy. I would like to see a parallel to that in governance, not only economies on a local scale but governance and decision making by the community of people who are direct stake holders being the ones making those decisions. I think that’s really hard, and I think it takes a lot of work, and then you have the problem of figuring out how that scales and how these different kinds of localized pockets can talk to each other and coordinate, but you asked me for a dream, and that’s a dream that I have.
I’ve been reading a lot of Grace Lee Boggs recently, and she talks about the difference between rebellion and revolution. She cites the riots in Detroit in 1967 as rebellion, which is a needed and necessary expression of anger. I think you could characterize the protests of last fall similarly. She characterizes revolution as people taking the extra step by saying, “We’re angry at this problem” and then saying “We want a revolution.” That means that we want to do the human work on ourselves to figure out what kind of humans we need to be to be capable of governing, to be capable of building the world that we actually want, and I think that has to happen on a small scale, where people actually have trust. I want to commit myself to that work on myself internally, “What are the challenges?” “What are the ways that I am oppressive in the communities that I interact? “How can I be less so?” How can I lift up voices that are calling out oppression?” “And if we build trust, how can we assert our right to control our own destinies collectively?” I think that the ways of talking and interacting and making decisions that we experienced in the park last fall, it looks a lot like that, so I hope that we can learn from those experiences and bring them more and more into our everyday lives and into the places that we live and see what comes out of that.
Once we get to that place, I would hope that we’d work a lot
less in jobs. I would hope that we’d reevaluate what work means, that we’d
think of work as worthy human endeavor, humans putting themselves toward projects
that mean something to them, that we decrease the amount of time that is spent
to produce money in the form of exchange value for the value of our labor and
more time into producing use value for what’s good for ourselves, our families,
our communities. I think we would place a lot more emphasis on youth, and that they
would learn not just to be better workers or better cogs in the capitalist
machine but would learn to become better protagonists in their own lives, to
actually affect the things that are shaping the community that they’re growing
up into.
I think that we would have less stuff. I think we have to eventually have less stuff. There’s this notion that American capitalism is so addicted to, that just endless growth, producing more and more and consuming more and more is the way for prosperity. When we talk about combating inequality, we talk about getting more stuff for people who don’t have things. In the world that I want to live in in the future, we’ll think more about, “Well, maybe that’s the wrong stuff that we’re talking about making more of and giving to people." What if all of us had a little less, and life was a little bit more about the value of our interactions and a little bit less about the goods that we produce and consume, so I think that there might be less economic activity, and there is going to have to be for the world to not shrivel up and die, so less economic exchange and more human exchange, more locally grown food, more trading of work for other work, more communities taking ownership of the children, so as a person who lives in a neighborhood, you would feel that the raising of children in that neighborhood wasn’t just the parents responsibility but yours.
I think we would look at violence and say, “I don’t want police to come and solve this problem for me.” We would say, “I want to understand why it is that violence is happening. I want to try and heal those conflicts. I want to be an active protagonist. I want to seek out other people who live here who also want to act as stakeholders.” It’s that responsibility of governing, of decision making that I think is part and parcel of freedom, so I think if we do have a world in which people are generally more free, we would spend a lot more time in the decision making process of that world. I think we would actually work in the good sense more, but work would look a lot different, and a much higher percentage of our time would be given to things that we actually care about, things that produce real value on our terms and not the terms dictated by money and the market.
I think that we would have less stuff. I think we have to eventually have less stuff. There’s this notion that American capitalism is so addicted to, that just endless growth, producing more and more and consuming more and more is the way for prosperity. When we talk about combating inequality, we talk about getting more stuff for people who don’t have things. In the world that I want to live in in the future, we’ll think more about, “Well, maybe that’s the wrong stuff that we’re talking about making more of and giving to people." What if all of us had a little less, and life was a little bit more about the value of our interactions and a little bit less about the goods that we produce and consume, so I think that there might be less economic activity, and there is going to have to be for the world to not shrivel up and die, so less economic exchange and more human exchange, more locally grown food, more trading of work for other work, more communities taking ownership of the children, so as a person who lives in a neighborhood, you would feel that the raising of children in that neighborhood wasn’t just the parents responsibility but yours.
I think we would look at violence and say, “I don’t want police to come and solve this problem for me.” We would say, “I want to understand why it is that violence is happening. I want to try and heal those conflicts. I want to be an active protagonist. I want to seek out other people who live here who also want to act as stakeholders.” It’s that responsibility of governing, of decision making that I think is part and parcel of freedom, so I think if we do have a world in which people are generally more free, we would spend a lot more time in the decision making process of that world. I think we would actually work in the good sense more, but work would look a lot different, and a much higher percentage of our time would be given to things that we actually care about, things that produce real value on our terms and not the terms dictated by money and the market.
Interview by Stacy Lanyon
http://buildingcompassionthroughaction.blogspot.com/
https://www.facebook.com/stacylanyon
https://instagram.com/stacylanyon/
https://twitter.com/StacyLanyon
http://stacylanyon.com/
http://buildingcompassionthroughaction.blogspot.com/
https://www.facebook.com/stacylanyon
https://instagram.com/stacylanyon/
https://twitter.com/StacyLanyon
http://stacylanyon.com/