Photo: Stacy Lanyon
I’ve been doing social justice work fairly consistently
since 2004, first in Austen, Texas and then in New York City when I moved here
in 2005. I was a student at the City College of New York in Harlem and continued on at the CUNY Graduate Center, and have been involved with many
struggles both on and off campuses in New York City. When I heard in mid-2011 that
people were attempting to hold an indefinite sit-in at Wall Street on September 17th, to create a space and gather and express their critiques of the government and mislaid
priorities in society, and to also present an alternative for what they would
like to see in both discussion and also practice, I wanted to be a part of it.
I had been involved in the Bloombergville outdoor sit-in near City Hall, which tried
to pressure the Bloomberg administration not to inflict cuts on a variety of social programs, salaries and so forth. Bloombergville, which had
been largely coordinated by a coalition called New Yorkers against
the Budget Cuts, was really an exciting proto Occupy Wall Street involving a
lot of people from New York City sleeping outside on sidewalks and raising social issues. This was a unique and valuable experiment in organizing.
With Occupy Wall Street, we saw the possibility of creating something like a Bloombergville, but much larger, to directly take on economic social inequalities that Wall Street and everything connected to Wall Street are responsible for. I felt having an occupation that directly targeted Wall Street would be something to support. I was involved in some of the earliest assemblies in different parks before September 17th. Automatically, it seemed like this was a new kind of project with people who were anti-capitalists of many different stripes—socialists, anarchists, communists, people who identified as being critical of the system but maybe didn’t have a specific name for their set of ideas. A lot of different people were coming to these meetings, trying to create something that on this scale hadn’t been done before, so the kind of experimentation and desire to create something exciting together was really palpable.
Seeing the September 17, 2011 occupation actually come into existence was one of the more exhilarating experiences that I’ve had in my life. I remember that day vividly. Organizers had passed around a map of several different locations at the beginning of the day near Bowling Green. When we saw the outside of Chase Bank had been cordoned off by the NYPD, we finally gathered at Zuccotti Park. It was exciting to see how quickly people adopted these public assemblies that we had been practicing in the lead-up to September 17th, a dialogue that had been practiced in a whole range of different ways of organizing here in New York City as well as in different organizing spaces here in New York City and around the world. People were sharing ideas with each other from which it seemed like there had been a very long incubation. Participants immediately got to work with creating the encampment. Very soon after the park was occupied, people renamed it Liberty Square.
Admittedly, during the first week and a half, the occupation was very lean. It was a small group of people who stayed and kept trying to blow on the kindling. A lot of established radical groups—revolutionary groups, unions, community organizations—weren’t there. It seemed like they were adopting a wait-and-see attitude. There’s a really funny element here of the creation of Occupy Wall Street being something really outside of the comfort zone, out of the political familiarity zone of a lot of different people who had been established organizers in New York City. It took an unpermitted march from Zuccotti Park to Union Square, during which several people were pepper-sprayed and about 80 people were arrested in a mass kettling, to add more fire to the kindling, but it wasn’t until the march on the Brooklyn Bridge that people in New York City, as well as around the country and around the world, saw this as something that people were quite fearlessly enacting, that this was not just a regular kind of protest experience where people would just try something familiar and go home. People were really wanting to seize the opportunity to show what transformative organizing could look like, and what a group of people moving in public space can do.
A lot of people have in hindsight talked about Occupy being something that was an distinctly anarchist activity. I think that actually mischaracterizes and whittles down what was in fact an incredibly diverse, incredibly vibrant, incredibly heterogeneous gathering of people. It was the combination and at times the tensions between these different radical political traditions that produced something so effective as Occupy, galvanizing hundreds of thousands of people in New York City in a very concentrated two-month period, producing over a thousand different occupations throughout the country, and literally being like a shot heard and reproduced around the world. I think that’s something to remember, not to scrub from the record as people begin and continue to make sense of Occupy.
With Occupy Wall Street, we saw the possibility of creating something like a Bloombergville, but much larger, to directly take on economic social inequalities that Wall Street and everything connected to Wall Street are responsible for. I felt having an occupation that directly targeted Wall Street would be something to support. I was involved in some of the earliest assemblies in different parks before September 17th. Automatically, it seemed like this was a new kind of project with people who were anti-capitalists of many different stripes—socialists, anarchists, communists, people who identified as being critical of the system but maybe didn’t have a specific name for their set of ideas. A lot of different people were coming to these meetings, trying to create something that on this scale hadn’t been done before, so the kind of experimentation and desire to create something exciting together was really palpable.
Seeing the September 17, 2011 occupation actually come into existence was one of the more exhilarating experiences that I’ve had in my life. I remember that day vividly. Organizers had passed around a map of several different locations at the beginning of the day near Bowling Green. When we saw the outside of Chase Bank had been cordoned off by the NYPD, we finally gathered at Zuccotti Park. It was exciting to see how quickly people adopted these public assemblies that we had been practicing in the lead-up to September 17th, a dialogue that had been practiced in a whole range of different ways of organizing here in New York City as well as in different organizing spaces here in New York City and around the world. People were sharing ideas with each other from which it seemed like there had been a very long incubation. Participants immediately got to work with creating the encampment. Very soon after the park was occupied, people renamed it Liberty Square.
Admittedly, during the first week and a half, the occupation was very lean. It was a small group of people who stayed and kept trying to blow on the kindling. A lot of established radical groups—revolutionary groups, unions, community organizations—weren’t there. It seemed like they were adopting a wait-and-see attitude. There’s a really funny element here of the creation of Occupy Wall Street being something really outside of the comfort zone, out of the political familiarity zone of a lot of different people who had been established organizers in New York City. It took an unpermitted march from Zuccotti Park to Union Square, during which several people were pepper-sprayed and about 80 people were arrested in a mass kettling, to add more fire to the kindling, but it wasn’t until the march on the Brooklyn Bridge that people in New York City, as well as around the country and around the world, saw this as something that people were quite fearlessly enacting, that this was not just a regular kind of protest experience where people would just try something familiar and go home. People were really wanting to seize the opportunity to show what transformative organizing could look like, and what a group of people moving in public space can do.
A lot of people have in hindsight talked about Occupy being something that was an distinctly anarchist activity. I think that actually mischaracterizes and whittles down what was in fact an incredibly diverse, incredibly vibrant, incredibly heterogeneous gathering of people. It was the combination and at times the tensions between these different radical political traditions that produced something so effective as Occupy, galvanizing hundreds of thousands of people in New York City in a very concentrated two-month period, producing over a thousand different occupations throughout the country, and literally being like a shot heard and reproduced around the world. I think that’s something to remember, not to scrub from the record as people begin and continue to make sense of Occupy.
It was thrilling that there was a public space at Zuccotti Park where people would come and immediately jump into projects without a sense of
pedigree, or that they had to have read a certain amount of radical texts to be relevant. Instead, people were actively encouraged to jump in, create something,
participate in something. Being involved in the City University of New
York with education organizing, I loved how the entire thing was a big radical education experience. It
tested the capacity of a lot of people. It was often in the multiplicity of voices and sometimes the
differences between all of the people who came to Zuccotti Park that
made Occupy what it was. The decision, then, to employ a consensus model in the
assemblies seemed like it was an
ideological scaffolding that didn’t actually fit how the park was moving.
The park was an incubator space that had this kind of charged electricity about it where people would be able to communicate, "There’s a teach-in happening in this corner of the park. People are making art in that corner of the park. people from a variety of different unions in the city are strategizing how to galvanize their workplaces in this corner of the park. Meanwhile, there’s an assembly. After that, we’re going to have a musician come here and share some songs with us." It was a wonderful way that people were opening up a lot of new ground to try things with each other politically. The value here is when you experiment and actually see the results of your experimentation, more people get excited and inspired, which encourages you to do more of that, instead of briefly broadening out your wings and then getting fearful that you won’t be able to fly. People’s ideas and actions were actually taking into the air. This was a tremendous learning experience for people—one that validated both their critiques of how the world was being misgoverned, and what they were doing to counteract this.
People saw that direct democracy was not only a bright idea, but was being attempted and practiced. It wasn’t dizzying. It wasn’t intoxicating. It wasn’t this kind of thing where you have a mass amount of people and everyone loses a sense of orientation. No, it was more of an acute focused kind of orientation with each other, a carnival of people in a variety of different colors performing a variety of different songs but moving in a direction together. That is something that I really saw as an exciting part of the park itself. I also enjoyed that Zuccotti Park gained a lot of ground within the first month and then continued on with these massive days of action in the city drawing tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands of people together. We also saw a boomerang effect occur where people started to differently occupy and hold general assemblies in their work places, their schools, their neighborhoods. We worked to manifest Occupy around New York City instead of it being reduced to this little utopian enclave in Zuccotti Park.
A lot of the unpermitted street marches demonstrated the fearlessness and sense of heightened direction within Zuccotti Park that would then flow out into lower Manhattan. These marches weren't just a sense of adventurousness. They were a slow, repeated dress rehearsal to break down fear of the police and break down fear of reclaiming and transforming public space. I remember this one march where several hundred people moved lower Manhattan, practicing direct spacial democracy. A huge cordon of police officers were a hundred or so feet in front of this large body of people, and all of the sudden some people started chanting, “No fear! No Fear! No Fear!” Now, at the very beginning of Zuccotti Park, people were worried about what it would mean to step out off the sidewalk and into the street, but within a very, very short period of time, people were having a much more heightened sense of awareness of who the police were. These cops were trying to protect property and power of the wealthy elite, the ruling class, the 1%, whatever you want to call them. So here was an important consciousness-raising experience where a lot of people had a much clearer stance against the police and the wealth inequality that they protected.
The park was an incubator space that had this kind of charged electricity about it where people would be able to communicate, "There’s a teach-in happening in this corner of the park. People are making art in that corner of the park. people from a variety of different unions in the city are strategizing how to galvanize their workplaces in this corner of the park. Meanwhile, there’s an assembly. After that, we’re going to have a musician come here and share some songs with us." It was a wonderful way that people were opening up a lot of new ground to try things with each other politically. The value here is when you experiment and actually see the results of your experimentation, more people get excited and inspired, which encourages you to do more of that, instead of briefly broadening out your wings and then getting fearful that you won’t be able to fly. People’s ideas and actions were actually taking into the air. This was a tremendous learning experience for people—one that validated both their critiques of how the world was being misgoverned, and what they were doing to counteract this.
People saw that direct democracy was not only a bright idea, but was being attempted and practiced. It wasn’t dizzying. It wasn’t intoxicating. It wasn’t this kind of thing where you have a mass amount of people and everyone loses a sense of orientation. No, it was more of an acute focused kind of orientation with each other, a carnival of people in a variety of different colors performing a variety of different songs but moving in a direction together. That is something that I really saw as an exciting part of the park itself. I also enjoyed that Zuccotti Park gained a lot of ground within the first month and then continued on with these massive days of action in the city drawing tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands of people together. We also saw a boomerang effect occur where people started to differently occupy and hold general assemblies in their work places, their schools, their neighborhoods. We worked to manifest Occupy around New York City instead of it being reduced to this little utopian enclave in Zuccotti Park.
A lot of the unpermitted street marches demonstrated the fearlessness and sense of heightened direction within Zuccotti Park that would then flow out into lower Manhattan. These marches weren't just a sense of adventurousness. They were a slow, repeated dress rehearsal to break down fear of the police and break down fear of reclaiming and transforming public space. I remember this one march where several hundred people moved lower Manhattan, practicing direct spacial democracy. A huge cordon of police officers were a hundred or so feet in front of this large body of people, and all of the sudden some people started chanting, “No fear! No Fear! No Fear!” Now, at the very beginning of Zuccotti Park, people were worried about what it would mean to step out off the sidewalk and into the street, but within a very, very short period of time, people were having a much more heightened sense of awareness of who the police were. These cops were trying to protect property and power of the wealthy elite, the ruling class, the 1%, whatever you want to call them. So here was an important consciousness-raising experience where a lot of people had a much clearer stance against the police and the wealth inequality that they protected.
The actions of ordinary people produce the world every
single day. Our work, our family connections, our friendship connections, the
kinds of collaborations we do with people in all different walks of life
literally produce the world every single day. And yet, we have very little control over
our lives. We have very little control over how terms like justice, democracy, equality and the good life are defined. So the
experience of people grabbing control and meaning over their lives is something that’s worth dedicating one’s life to. The
project of social revolution is something that’s worth dedicating one’s life to.
The irony is that individuals can’t produce that, so Zuccotti Park and Occupy, for all of its flaws and contradictions, was a process of people
figuring out how to do that, not in discussion groups, not in seminars, not in
theoretical treatises, not implemented by a small group on behalf of many. It was a mass participatory project that gave us a glimpse of what
different mass social movements have looked like in the past in the United
States, and what these looked like in the past as well as
in the present around the world.
Occupy gave people a sense of courage that they could actually help shape and have a sense of purpose in their lives, and it gave people a glimpse of when the next upsurge of mass activity happens, how to do it a little more effectively next time. Now, Something that never ceases to inspire me is that a lot of older folks were involved in Zuccotti Park and the Occupy movement in New York City, and for a lot of these folks, they’re going to die before they see the social change that they’re fighting for, and a lot of them know that. There is a sense here of fighting for something that future generations will be able to enjoy and build upon. It's seeing revolution not as one single act, one vertical moment in history. We have specific moments of immense transaction, but it's not just one singular moment. To see my elders being involved in a movement where they may not be able to ultimately see the fruits of their labor and their love is extremely humbling.
I’m not even sure that I’ll be able to see the kind of social transformation in my own lifetime. I’m thirty-two, but I feel like this project is a reason to live. It’s a reason to work with other people in countless organizing meeting and countless one-on-one discussions and countless demonstrations and countless campaigns. This persistence shows that we’re worth a lot more than the kind of misery and poverty and violence that we endure on a daily basis—what we're even taught is normal by our government, by laws, by media, by dominant ideologies. I think people are a lot smarter than that and have a lot more humanity than that. The fact that this kind of conversation is happening all over the world means that it’s not just one small corner of people trying to dream big visions. It’s a whole world that’s trying to make another world.
Occupy gave people a sense of courage that they could actually help shape and have a sense of purpose in their lives, and it gave people a glimpse of when the next upsurge of mass activity happens, how to do it a little more effectively next time. Now, Something that never ceases to inspire me is that a lot of older folks were involved in Zuccotti Park and the Occupy movement in New York City, and for a lot of these folks, they’re going to die before they see the social change that they’re fighting for, and a lot of them know that. There is a sense here of fighting for something that future generations will be able to enjoy and build upon. It's seeing revolution not as one single act, one vertical moment in history. We have specific moments of immense transaction, but it's not just one singular moment. To see my elders being involved in a movement where they may not be able to ultimately see the fruits of their labor and their love is extremely humbling.
I’m not even sure that I’ll be able to see the kind of social transformation in my own lifetime. I’m thirty-two, but I feel like this project is a reason to live. It’s a reason to work with other people in countless organizing meeting and countless one-on-one discussions and countless demonstrations and countless campaigns. This persistence shows that we’re worth a lot more than the kind of misery and poverty and violence that we endure on a daily basis—what we're even taught is normal by our government, by laws, by media, by dominant ideologies. I think people are a lot smarter than that and have a lot more humanity than that. The fact that this kind of conversation is happening all over the world means that it’s not just one small corner of people trying to dream big visions. It’s a whole world that’s trying to make another world.
For the last couple of years, I’ve been having this ongoing
conversation with friends and comrades, one that has produced no easy
answers about what it means to yearn for another world, produce another world
but also not rigidly prefigure another world. I think that there are ways that
people may in trying to produce another world establish blueprints that are
a little bit too tidy for what will be a very long and complex process of social transformation. In some ways, one of the reigning mottos of
prefigurative politics, "Building a new world in the shell of the old" or "Being the change that you wish to see in the world" can sometimes produce a
kind of utopianism where people want to build capsules of a different life in the
sky and then work back downward to the earth.
In 2013 here in New York City, we don’t have the mass political power needed to be able to transform social relations. We just don’t at the moment. For people right now being in somewhat of a smaller organizational space, our horizon for what social change could look like may be a lot more limited than, say, five years down the road when there’s a student union around New York City that’s able to coordinate strikes, when there is a constellation of community defense networks that patrol around and monitor the police, when there are social justice initiatives that bring together people from a variety of faiths to support social movements. All of these are small projects that are just starting now. If five years down the road they become much more fully rendered, then the horizon of what social change could look like may be very different, may be much wider.
I feel like prefigurative politics doesn’t take that into account, that here in 2013 in building a capsule of another world that's possible and then working down from the sky to the earth, a lot of things may actually change in that process of building another world. My own sense of things is, “What do we have right now?” “What can we create right now?” “What are the conditions of our living and organizing right now?” We enact anti-oppression. We enact intersectionality, welcoming difference as a strength rather than something to elide through consensus and otherwise, that we are very careful in our practices with each other to not be violent, to not be condescending, that we try and care for one another as we live in a very difficult world.
Being a student and an educator, I think a lot about radical pedagogy and the transformation of schools, the transformation of what it means to do education, what it means to do sharing. My involvement in Free University is in large part trying to take critical conversations outside of the university and bring them into public parks, decenter the teacher, show that everyone who’s walking around interacting with each other is producing knowledge—on the street corner, in the barber shop, in the church pew, in the break room at work. All of these different places are also classrooms. When people ask me, "What kind of education do you want to see?" I answer along the lines of what I’ve been talking about here. In part, I can’t even fathom what a transformed educational process would look like, but that’s exactly the kind of dynamic tension I want to have with my future, with our collective future.
It’s about not having everything all mapped out. It’s about having key principles and goals for sure, as well as key demands that are about caring for people, sharing resources, providing things like food, medicine, health care, housing—things that under the system that we live in, capitalism, are withheld from people. Scarcity is something that’s engineered. Unemployment is an artificial creation. But to really transform all of those things doesn't mean you have to have a fully fleshed out idea of what another world would look like. I’m willing to hold out for some mystery and some magic along the way. I think that that approach will make it a much more dynamic process and one that I hope to be in conversation with people about for the rest of my life.
To find more about StudentBlockNYC, you can visit http://studentblocnyc.org/.
To find more information about Free University, you can visit http://freeuniversitynyc.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/
In 2013 here in New York City, we don’t have the mass political power needed to be able to transform social relations. We just don’t at the moment. For people right now being in somewhat of a smaller organizational space, our horizon for what social change could look like may be a lot more limited than, say, five years down the road when there’s a student union around New York City that’s able to coordinate strikes, when there is a constellation of community defense networks that patrol around and monitor the police, when there are social justice initiatives that bring together people from a variety of faiths to support social movements. All of these are small projects that are just starting now. If five years down the road they become much more fully rendered, then the horizon of what social change could look like may be very different, may be much wider.
I feel like prefigurative politics doesn’t take that into account, that here in 2013 in building a capsule of another world that's possible and then working down from the sky to the earth, a lot of things may actually change in that process of building another world. My own sense of things is, “What do we have right now?” “What can we create right now?” “What are the conditions of our living and organizing right now?” We enact anti-oppression. We enact intersectionality, welcoming difference as a strength rather than something to elide through consensus and otherwise, that we are very careful in our practices with each other to not be violent, to not be condescending, that we try and care for one another as we live in a very difficult world.
Being a student and an educator, I think a lot about radical pedagogy and the transformation of schools, the transformation of what it means to do education, what it means to do sharing. My involvement in Free University is in large part trying to take critical conversations outside of the university and bring them into public parks, decenter the teacher, show that everyone who’s walking around interacting with each other is producing knowledge—on the street corner, in the barber shop, in the church pew, in the break room at work. All of these different places are also classrooms. When people ask me, "What kind of education do you want to see?" I answer along the lines of what I’ve been talking about here. In part, I can’t even fathom what a transformed educational process would look like, but that’s exactly the kind of dynamic tension I want to have with my future, with our collective future.
It’s about not having everything all mapped out. It’s about having key principles and goals for sure, as well as key demands that are about caring for people, sharing resources, providing things like food, medicine, health care, housing—things that under the system that we live in, capitalism, are withheld from people. Scarcity is something that’s engineered. Unemployment is an artificial creation. But to really transform all of those things doesn't mean you have to have a fully fleshed out idea of what another world would look like. I’m willing to hold out for some mystery and some magic along the way. I think that that approach will make it a much more dynamic process and one that I hope to be in conversation with people about for the rest of my life.
To find more about StudentBlockNYC, you can visit http://studentblocnyc.org/.
To find more information about Free University, you can visit http://freeuniversitynyc.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/