Photo: Stacy Lanyon
Leading up to the occupation at the park, I was writing
pretty much the same social critique as Occupy would later come to. A lot of
people were. I was especially drawn to class divisions in this country. Also, I’m
very interested in the total corporate take-over of reality and what that
means. For me, all of those concerns initially came out of writing about the art
world in New York. Within that, I found my social outlook or social critique
and had begun to apply it to society at large thinking about the 1% and the
99%, and thinking about our police state. It just so happened that I had left
New York for a bit, and I had moved back and had moved into a little $600 studio
on Broadway below Canal. A lot of my friends were involved leading up to the
occupation. I got invited to go to Tompkins Square Park for the early meetings.
All of my friends were working and thinking in that direction, so when it
happened, a lot of my friends were there.
I found myself there a lot the first month being a really big cheerleader and getting the news out. People were already reading my stuff as someone who mostly wrote about art at the time, so I used that to get the word out. I went down on the second day. The first day, I was leaving to go see it with a girlfriend at the time, and a friend of mine called and said, “Well, we can’t occupy Wall Street.” For me, being new to activism and not understanding the possibilities, I just wanted us to be on Wall Street and to occupy it. I decided not to walk down. Then, a friend called and said, “Well, we’re going to go to this park over here. We’re going to set-up there and figure out what to do.” I followed that, and then I was there the first thing in the morning.
I found myself there a lot the first month being a really big cheerleader and getting the news out. People were already reading my stuff as someone who mostly wrote about art at the time, so I used that to get the word out. I went down on the second day. The first day, I was leaving to go see it with a girlfriend at the time, and a friend of mine called and said, “Well, we can’t occupy Wall Street.” For me, being new to activism and not understanding the possibilities, I just wanted us to be on Wall Street and to occupy it. I decided not to walk down. Then, a friend called and said, “Well, we’re going to go to this park over here. We’re going to set-up there and figure out what to do.” I followed that, and then I was there the first thing in the morning.
The first week or so, there was a lot of hope, but there was
also a bit of exaggeration. There was hope for more than what was there. At the
same time, what was there was fascinating. I remember a photograph I took,
which was everybody very neatly dressed in black and packing up their
backpacks, getting around the rules, so that they could sleep there at night
and doing it in a very minimalist way. That
high sense of order in the park to keep it going was interesting. For me, what
was fascinating was this idea of taking over a common space. My concerns are the police state and class divisions, and I think the common space is the front line
in the loss of those. I went on some of those early marches late at night,
down into the canyons of Wall Street. There were guys with giant tear gas guns.
It was pretty wild. I saw the police state for the first time. I was always
kind of locked away in art school. That became my focus - as the momentum
built, what the system did to try to contain it or subvert it. A lot of that
had to do with a growth in people and horrific or oppressive police tactics,
and the two bouncing back and forth. Within that, the people were trying to clear a
space and come up with new ideas for a better world, while all of this was going
on around them in that space.
Then, I was pushed into the middle of it when my girlfriend
and I got pepper sprayed. We were two of the people who were pepper sprayed by officer Bologna, which was pretty traumatic, not compared to what I’ve heard other
activists have gone through, but it was new to me. We were just on the sidewalk.
In fact, we were leaving Union Square. I found myself in the middle of that. Then, the
next weekend, we marched onto the Brooklyn Bridge. These moments that we’d take
the streets or march onto the bridge, they were very beautiful moments. For a
while, nothing could really go wrong. The whole group seemed to be moving
together and making the right decisions together, everything from the
self-created media, to the signs, to what people were saying. It was beautiful.
For a while, there was this unbelievable suspension. It was a perfect little
movement.
For Occupy Sandy, I worked at 520 Clinton at St. Luke &
St. Mathew. I had two roles. I was one of the people who was around a lot to make
sure everything was going okay, but my main role was to organize and train the volunteers. Hundreds if not thousands of people came
through. That was great to do. I talked to them about classic anti-oppression principles, how to relate to each
other and how to relate to people in hurricane affected areas. Then, there was my own definition and breakdown of mutual aid or how to attempt it as
we were working together and what that might look like and what it means for
society in general. I used to say it was like growing the grass between the
bricks. The bricks were the top down power structures, and what Occupy Sandy
was doing was growing the grass from the ground up through the bricks, to make
that harsher system disappear or become less relevant. I talked and talked for
two months straight. That was a beautiful experience too, to spend so much
time, which I wasn’t able to do at the park because I lived nearby. I didn’t
stay there. Here, I spent all of my time with people who were organizing and
people who were experienced in activism as well as people who weren’t. I got deeper
into it. Whereas before, I had approached
it as a writer and an artist and a photographer who was part of Occupy as a
body, but more importantly would tell people about it.
I was spending so much time at the church, fourteen hours a day or more, or sometimes the whole day or night. I was around so many great, beautiful people. We were building a great relationship with the fathers there, and we knew that there was an opportunity to continue using the space, so we started coming up with this plan to do a community center there, which has turned into what we called The People’s Network. It was an idea to experiment in mutual aid, trying to build on what we learned there with Occupy Sandy, some of it having to do with just co-working together and coming together, some of it having to do with having to negotiate in real time what mutual aid means or what it doesn’t mean, trying to figure out what we can do for an alternate economy with a concern for the local, "What does Clinton Hill need that we can do utilizing this space?"
We had a fire at 520 Clinton in December, which was set by an arsonist, so we weren’t able to move in right away. We were going to start in January. I held onto the idea as long as I could with other occupiers. We spent time out of the church letting this evolve, writing a community agreement, writing a mission statement and thinking through how things might work. I helped organize a summit on grassroots hurricane recovery work at the church during this time. Within the People's Network, there was an idea for a people’s library for the local area and the broader Occupy network. We also talked about the idea of helping organize workers. The other part of the People’s Network was something called the co-working space. We’re still trying to work out what it can offer people, but the basic idea is that all these working groups and all of these breakout groups that have come out of Occupy could come in and work together on scheduled days, and their paths could cross, and they could share resources. It is structure to give people a space. If people wanted it to be, that whole church could be an interface for Occupy. We wanted to help facilitate that happening. The idea has been passed off. Hopefully, some incarnation will take shape.
I have gone back to my own work as an artist and writer. My writings online, both in blogs and daily on Facebook, may have the most impact of any work I have done towards social justice. Although I have backed away from the People's Network, I believe these ideas of mutual aid and collective living are the way forward. I have a desire to start an artist collective in middle America, smaller but based on the same ideas.The ideas are floating through the Occupy circles, and there is infinite promise. One topic that I may organize resistance around is the growth of Amazon warehouses in the United States. One has been built in Chattanooga, Tennessee where I grew up and where my friends and family live. I have thought about taking what I've learned from my time with Occupy in New York and bringing it to Tennessee, specifically this Amazon warehouse. New Amazon warehouses are appearing across the country in areas with high unemployment. The Amazon distribution plant in Tennessee has a really high level of security. It 's like a corporate police state. Now we have maximum security high schools and maximum security work places. There's low pay, hard work, an impossible work load, a high level of competition for work. The workers don't make a living wage. It's like Walmart, but as bad as Walmart's work environment is, these are worse. It's much worse.
I was spending so much time at the church, fourteen hours a day or more, or sometimes the whole day or night. I was around so many great, beautiful people. We were building a great relationship with the fathers there, and we knew that there was an opportunity to continue using the space, so we started coming up with this plan to do a community center there, which has turned into what we called The People’s Network. It was an idea to experiment in mutual aid, trying to build on what we learned there with Occupy Sandy, some of it having to do with just co-working together and coming together, some of it having to do with having to negotiate in real time what mutual aid means or what it doesn’t mean, trying to figure out what we can do for an alternate economy with a concern for the local, "What does Clinton Hill need that we can do utilizing this space?"
We had a fire at 520 Clinton in December, which was set by an arsonist, so we weren’t able to move in right away. We were going to start in January. I held onto the idea as long as I could with other occupiers. We spent time out of the church letting this evolve, writing a community agreement, writing a mission statement and thinking through how things might work. I helped organize a summit on grassroots hurricane recovery work at the church during this time. Within the People's Network, there was an idea for a people’s library for the local area and the broader Occupy network. We also talked about the idea of helping organize workers. The other part of the People’s Network was something called the co-working space. We’re still trying to work out what it can offer people, but the basic idea is that all these working groups and all of these breakout groups that have come out of Occupy could come in and work together on scheduled days, and their paths could cross, and they could share resources. It is structure to give people a space. If people wanted it to be, that whole church could be an interface for Occupy. We wanted to help facilitate that happening. The idea has been passed off. Hopefully, some incarnation will take shape.
I have gone back to my own work as an artist and writer. My writings online, both in blogs and daily on Facebook, may have the most impact of any work I have done towards social justice. Although I have backed away from the People's Network, I believe these ideas of mutual aid and collective living are the way forward. I have a desire to start an artist collective in middle America, smaller but based on the same ideas.The ideas are floating through the Occupy circles, and there is infinite promise. One topic that I may organize resistance around is the growth of Amazon warehouses in the United States. One has been built in Chattanooga, Tennessee where I grew up and where my friends and family live. I have thought about taking what I've learned from my time with Occupy in New York and bringing it to Tennessee, specifically this Amazon warehouse. New Amazon warehouses are appearing across the country in areas with high unemployment. The Amazon distribution plant in Tennessee has a really high level of security. It 's like a corporate police state. Now we have maximum security high schools and maximum security work places. There's low pay, hard work, an impossible work load, a high level of competition for work. The workers don't make a living wage. It's like Walmart, but as bad as Walmart's work environment is, these are worse. It's much worse.
I think the idea of
self-empowerment is really important. I think Occupy really lends itself to self-empower activists,
and to even create activists, thinkers, organizers, volunteers. I think that was
missing for a long time. The very idea of resisting the status quo and
resistance in general was absent when I was growing up. "Resistance is futile" became the idea. I think the return of
resistance and the return of self-empowerment was something that was really needed, and the understanding that that is the way to fight corporate reality. The corporate reality wants to take away self-empowerment. A lot of people have been self-empowered through Occupy. The name Occupy itself is not necessarily important, but the principles are and the ideas are. People would come in and out of Occupy Sandy from California and the mid-west as occupiers and ready to occupy, knowing the principles and the processes of horizontal systems. The spreading of all of that is really important.
For Americans, we’re living in the center of the empire. We can either resist, or we’re complicit with the actions of the empire that we’re living under. We live in a country that spends 75% of its profit on war and intelligence and homeland security. We spent like 2% or 5% on education. That is a major problem. We have a lack of a free press in terms of the corporate media, which can control the narrative of the populace. We have a military state with a lack of a free press. Corporate America does everything it can to increase contemporary forms of slavery. It has consolidated the wealth to a point where we have none, really. That’s the reason we have to do this. It’s not going to get better on its own. People talk about austerity saying, "We have to sacrifice." Whatever we give to corporations during austerity, they’re not going to give it back to us. That’s the new world. All of this on top of the fact that our ability to live on the planet is dying off because of this corporate reality. We have to fight the creation of that reality and create our own reality. I think that we're approaching a giant paradigm shift, which involves mutual aid and a shift to bottom-up power structures. I think we need to push the idea that we’re at the end of top-down power structures.
I want a world where everyone can do labor that they’re in love with, a world where the predatory or competitive approach to humans is not the dominant strategy for success, where we can all be happy and share resources, not fight each other for resources and try to control as many resources as possible. I think that we’ve reached the point in society that if we try, we have the resources to create a much more egalitarian society than has ever existed. The Sony recorder you’re recording me with, that came about because of the drive in capitalism. That’s a big thing that we have to disprove, this idea that only capitalism and competition can encourage progress. We need to realize that a group can want to come together and design an audio recording gadget in an ethical way. In an ideal world, things would be radically different than they are now.
I think that in the real world what we have to do is figure out how to make companies run from bottom-up. The problem with corporations is that people at the top use the power of that corporation to take more power as almost a personal crusade. We need companies that are run by workers that have principles, where we are producing things that we feel good about, that are done in ways that consider the environment, that consider labor practices and equality.
One thing that I see in that kind of society is the potential growth of culture, an expansion of culture in ways that we can’t predict. It’s infinite. In that kind of world, the humanities would play a larger role again, writers and artists. All of us would have a much more sustainable society to exist in. It wouldn’t be such a cut throat capitalist system. Our potential is to surpass what has dominated the centuries, which is the existence of the king, and the potential in that is peace, unity. A more egalitarian society is perfect for accommodating multiplicity or multi-cultural ideals, which is our big challenge. How do we acknowledge multiplicity, subjectivity between people, between groups of people and let people do as they want? I think our potential is to put those two things together and bring about a common, collective humanity that can absorb any number of multiplicities.
Interview by Stacy Lanyon
http://buildingcompassionthroughaction.blogspot.com/
https://www.facebook.com/stacylanyon
https://instagram.com/stacylanyon/
https://twitter.com/StacyLanyon
http://stacylanyon.com/
For Americans, we’re living in the center of the empire. We can either resist, or we’re complicit with the actions of the empire that we’re living under. We live in a country that spends 75% of its profit on war and intelligence and homeland security. We spent like 2% or 5% on education. That is a major problem. We have a lack of a free press in terms of the corporate media, which can control the narrative of the populace. We have a military state with a lack of a free press. Corporate America does everything it can to increase contemporary forms of slavery. It has consolidated the wealth to a point where we have none, really. That’s the reason we have to do this. It’s not going to get better on its own. People talk about austerity saying, "We have to sacrifice." Whatever we give to corporations during austerity, they’re not going to give it back to us. That’s the new world. All of this on top of the fact that our ability to live on the planet is dying off because of this corporate reality. We have to fight the creation of that reality and create our own reality. I think that we're approaching a giant paradigm shift, which involves mutual aid and a shift to bottom-up power structures. I think we need to push the idea that we’re at the end of top-down power structures.
I want a world where everyone can do labor that they’re in love with, a world where the predatory or competitive approach to humans is not the dominant strategy for success, where we can all be happy and share resources, not fight each other for resources and try to control as many resources as possible. I think that we’ve reached the point in society that if we try, we have the resources to create a much more egalitarian society than has ever existed. The Sony recorder you’re recording me with, that came about because of the drive in capitalism. That’s a big thing that we have to disprove, this idea that only capitalism and competition can encourage progress. We need to realize that a group can want to come together and design an audio recording gadget in an ethical way. In an ideal world, things would be radically different than they are now.
I think that in the real world what we have to do is figure out how to make companies run from bottom-up. The problem with corporations is that people at the top use the power of that corporation to take more power as almost a personal crusade. We need companies that are run by workers that have principles, where we are producing things that we feel good about, that are done in ways that consider the environment, that consider labor practices and equality.
One thing that I see in that kind of society is the potential growth of culture, an expansion of culture in ways that we can’t predict. It’s infinite. In that kind of world, the humanities would play a larger role again, writers and artists. All of us would have a much more sustainable society to exist in. It wouldn’t be such a cut throat capitalist system. Our potential is to surpass what has dominated the centuries, which is the existence of the king, and the potential in that is peace, unity. A more egalitarian society is perfect for accommodating multiplicity or multi-cultural ideals, which is our big challenge. How do we acknowledge multiplicity, subjectivity between people, between groups of people and let people do as they want? I think our potential is to put those two things together and bring about a common, collective humanity that can absorb any number of multiplicities.
Interview by Stacy Lanyon
http://buildingcompassionthroughaction.blogspot.com/
https://www.facebook.com/stacylanyon
https://instagram.com/stacylanyon/
https://twitter.com/StacyLanyon
http://stacylanyon.com/