Photo: Stacy Lanyon
I was in Pennsylvania, and I heard Occupy was happening. It
seemed like a good idea that we were going to take the space and stay. It
seemed like it might be something different. When I got there, I planned on
staying for three days, and I’m still here. It’s almost two years later. I went
down on the second day. When I first got there it was right on the eve of the
murder of Troy Davis, and I saw some people giving speeches. It seemed much
more somber than it ended up being a few days later, and that was for a reason.
It also was disorganized. It was a bunch of people sleeping in different
places, on tarps and just whatever they could find. It seemed like it was more
of an intellectual middle class crowd in the beginning, and towards the end,
once it became a viable living space, once the tents went up, it seemed like we
got a lot more of the poor and the surplus labor people who have been cast out
to the margins by society. As it evolved, it was strange to see the class
divisions, the message and then the composition of the park
itself. It led to some problems, but it led to some conversations around class.
When we started, we were sleeping on tarps and we were dismissed as radicals,
and then we started Class War Camp, which was the communist/ anarchist
unity camp to bring a more radical message than the progressive message that
was going around because I think different messages represent different
classes, and I think that the poor were underrepresented in the beginning, but
in the end people started gaining their voice.
A lot of people came to the park as an intellectual thing in
the beginning because their minds told them to and said it was a moral good to
try and fight for change, but that was more of a mind thing. Later on, people
came with necessity for revolution maybe that weren’t as politicized. They came
because there was a viable living space. As they lived there, and the
exchange of ideas got more to an acute level, people started not only
exchanging with the intellectual crowd but actually finding the power in their
own stance to disagree when it wasn’t where
they were coming from. In the beginning, there was a monopoly on who spoke
because kids that go to college and get public speaking classes are confident
doing it, whereas people who have never done it before aren’t, but after a
while, some of the stuff that was said was disagreeable to some of the poor
people, and they started to gain their own voice and become empowered, which I
think is a good thing. I think that through struggle or through disagreement
comes greater unity. You start with a basic unity that things are bad for the
lower classes or people aren’t getting a fair shake, and solutions are
proposed, and out of the solutions people have a discussion around it, and they
have a greater unity after that, or they find they can’t work with each other,
but I've found that we can usually work with each other.
It’s so important because if we don’t have a revolution than
the profit motive is going to drive the planet into extinction. There won’t be
rich or poor. There won’t be anybody. It’s very important because people need to have control over their own destiny. If you don’t have control over your food
source or where you get any of the things that you use as a material basis for
survival every day, you don't have control of your own destiny. It’s very important because the poorest of us in this
country are rich compared to people in other parts of the world. Everything
that I’m wearing and everything everyone around here is wearing, just about, is
made in a sweat shop by little kids. The relative opulence that we have here
makes us part of the problem if we’re not fighting it, even down to the person
that runs around and dumpsters food like some of us do. By getting that food
out of the dumpster, we’re still living off of the relative opulence provided
by imperialism because of the plunder that it takes from the rest of the world.
We shouldn’t be bribed by toaster ovens and modern
convenience to give up our critical faculties and to betray our fellow human
beings. If for nothing else, we should be the fifth column of the third world,
the column within the castle walls that are the US empire. If we can’t get
everyone in the US to join, if we can’t get the majority of the US to join, at
least we can make it tough for them to fight their wars abroad and maybe they’ll
have to choose to fight here or abroad, but they’re not going to be able to
choose both eventually.
Imagining the future is hard because a lot of
things are going to come into existence that we haven’t counted on coming into
existence. I just want a future where people are fed and allowed to think
freely and do as little work as possible to gain everything that they need to
live, where people relate to each other not with a profit motive in mind, so
they don’t look at everyone as a dollar sign to exploit, a world where
everything isn’t poisoned, whether philosophically or physically by the profit
motive, a world of free association. If we are able to get to that place, the
sky is the limit for humanity. The physical world affects us. We affect the
physical world back, and that in turn affects us. In a spiral upward of
knowledge, the challenges would just be to gain knowledge of the physical
territory, of what we exist in, what the universe is, and that’s always going
to be challenging. People say that, “Oh, if we don’t have capitalism, everything
will be boring.” No, we will have a greater pursuit of knowledge, and it won’t
be for profit sake. It will be for knowledge sake. We won’t have millions of
dollars of resources spent on acne medication, while we can’t cure simple
things like cholera in the third world. It will be a pure pursuit of knowledge
for humanity, and that’s always going to be interesting.
Interview by Stacy Lanyon
http://buildingcompassionthroughaction.blogspot.com/
https://www.facebook.com/stacylanyon
https://instagram.com/stacylanyon/
https://twitter.com/StacyLanyon
http://stacylanyon.com/
Interview by Stacy Lanyon
http://buildingcompassionthroughaction.blogspot.com/
https://www.facebook.com/stacylanyon
https://instagram.com/stacylanyon/
https://twitter.com/StacyLanyon
http://stacylanyon.com/