Photo: Stacy Lanyon
The first
politically radicalizing moment I had was during the Bloombergville occupation.
I witnessed my friends from North Dakota participate in a civil
disobedience direct action. They got arrested in the administrative offices of
the city council. I don’t think I was prepared for how witnessing that moment was going to affect me, just seeing the energy all around me. Everybody was
mobilizing against the city budget cuts that were disproportionately affecting
social programs. We all walked up to the front of this building, and all of the
doors of this building were open plexiglass. You could see straight in, and
they were all standing there, staring out at us, basically silent, looking very scared but
committed as they ziptied their hands together, then sat down and refused to leave. Everyone was outside cheering in support. Watching them getting arrested was a really affecting moment.
That was June 28, 2011. It was only a couple weeks after that
that Adbusters announced this call for Occupy Wall Street, and my friend I was
living with at the time said, “Oh yeah, Adbusters just announced a call to
Occupy Wall Street.” I remember asking at the time, “Is that going to work?” He
said, “I don’t know.” He was one of the initial organizers at the first
assembly on August 2nd, 2011 at Bowling
Green. I went to that meeting because I thought there was
something to the wave of protest coming out of 2011. I had been
in New York for the Egyptian overthrow, and I had participated in some solidarity marches
around that. I was starting to feel carried on this wave of solidarity around people
rising up together.
The way the general assembly begin was it was just people sitting in a circle talking to each other and
really struggling to maintain taking turns in the process of trying to construct
this potential event that nobody was really in charge of, and nobody was going
to tell anyone what to do. That was the initiation of my activist archival practice. I saw all of these things being passed around and realized that a lot of this stuff was not thought to be important at the time. I wanted to collect as much as I could and record as much information as I could about this thing because it felt like it could be important. I took notes at that first assembly. I was the minute taker.
Eventually, I found myself in the Arts and Culture Working Group. One of the things that I found at Bloomburgville was the desire to have events that weren’t necessarily just protests or marches or shouting or angry confrontations with police and pedestrians. I wanted to build what I like to call a culture of resistance. Culture was in opposition but not necessarily defined by the typical protest of opposition where there are angry people and their opponents and police pinning them in. That became the thing I worked most in leading up to the occupation. It had this sense of power and autonomy to do public art performance that was political and thoughtful and critical in ways that I think I had always had an imagination for but had never been in a group of people who had helped actualize that.
I got arrested with a number of people with the Arts & Culture group on September 1st during our test run of the occupation. I had believed based on the success of the Bloombergville at maintaining an encampment by just sleeping on public sidewalks that we would be successful as well. There was a court decision that had ruled to protect public sleeping as a form of free speech. I was just really committed to the idea that that would apply in our case. I did some research. I went to the first precinct and was trying to determine the legal territory of the area on Wall Street. I believed there would not be a confrontation with police at the test run, but the police came in and tried to remove us pretty quickly, and when I got arrested with eight other people, it changed something in me, especially because it wasn’t intended to be a civil disobedience where we were expecting to get arrested. I think it revealed my naivety about what was legal and not legal and how political activity just wouldn’t be protected under certain circumstances.
Eventually, I found myself in the Arts and Culture Working Group. One of the things that I found at Bloomburgville was the desire to have events that weren’t necessarily just protests or marches or shouting or angry confrontations with police and pedestrians. I wanted to build what I like to call a culture of resistance. Culture was in opposition but not necessarily defined by the typical protest of opposition where there are angry people and their opponents and police pinning them in. That became the thing I worked most in leading up to the occupation. It had this sense of power and autonomy to do public art performance that was political and thoughtful and critical in ways that I think I had always had an imagination for but had never been in a group of people who had helped actualize that.
I got arrested with a number of people with the Arts & Culture group on September 1st during our test run of the occupation. I had believed based on the success of the Bloombergville at maintaining an encampment by just sleeping on public sidewalks that we would be successful as well. There was a court decision that had ruled to protect public sleeping as a form of free speech. I was just really committed to the idea that that would apply in our case. I did some research. I went to the first precinct and was trying to determine the legal territory of the area on Wall Street. I believed there would not be a confrontation with police at the test run, but the police came in and tried to remove us pretty quickly, and when I got arrested with eight other people, it changed something in me, especially because it wasn’t intended to be a civil disobedience where we were expecting to get arrested. I think it revealed my naivety about what was legal and not legal and how political activity just wouldn’t be protected under certain circumstances.
In the park, I focused mostly on the Information Working Group, initially. The side project that became much more important
during the existence of the park was the Archival Working Group. It had been something I was thinking about during the early assemblies, wanting to
collect things produced out of this whole event. That first day, I remember
running around and picking up every single thing that I possibly could. I
couldn’t believe how many people had produced autonomous publications or
posters, just bringing amazing things to share with other people. I wanted to
record all of those things. In the early days of the
occupation, there was internal conflict over the signs that people were making
being attached to trees or being laid out on areas of the sidewalk that were "prohibited" according to te police. I have a video where police marched
through the camp in the middle of a general assembly picking up signs and grabbing things, basically
disregarding everyone. It was this really intense moment of fear of the police and anger at the
police. Right
after that, there was this collective confusion and everyone was angry, but there was a women who asked everyone to come back together and participate in a collective Om that brought the energy back together. It was an amazing moment.
There was this whole area of the park in the early stages. It was a shifting mural of protest signs, people taking pieces of cardboard and creating their sign. They would go on a march, and then all of these signs would start to collect in this big collage of different messages or demands. It was amazing, autonomous and anonymously created art. There were so many people creating these really beautiful representations of things, and there were no names whatsoever. It became this exhibition that people would stop and collect around. It was really effective. It was really arresting for people to see this plethora of demands, plethora of messages and ideas.
The Archives Working Group focused a lot on those signs being the things that were really important objects. They weren’t being preserved. There were actually so many that, ultimately, they became trash. People had to get rid of them because there wasn’t enough room for all of the signs. Rain would come through and wet all the signs, and they’d get torn apart. On days it would rain, we’d go around and collect signs. We still have between 500 and 800 signs. They haven’t been digitized yet or exhibited. That’s a really important project we need to work on. There was some internal conflict in the Archival Group. I know I was a major instigator for some of it. I had to break from the group and not participate in it. I think that stalled the project in some ways. I’m starting to connect the people who have these signs, and I’m hopeful that we will create some kind of exhibition of them in the future.
There was this whole area of the park in the early stages. It was a shifting mural of protest signs, people taking pieces of cardboard and creating their sign. They would go on a march, and then all of these signs would start to collect in this big collage of different messages or demands. It was amazing, autonomous and anonymously created art. There were so many people creating these really beautiful representations of things, and there were no names whatsoever. It became this exhibition that people would stop and collect around. It was really effective. It was really arresting for people to see this plethora of demands, plethora of messages and ideas.
The Archives Working Group focused a lot on those signs being the things that were really important objects. They weren’t being preserved. There were actually so many that, ultimately, they became trash. People had to get rid of them because there wasn’t enough room for all of the signs. Rain would come through and wet all the signs, and they’d get torn apart. On days it would rain, we’d go around and collect signs. We still have between 500 and 800 signs. They haven’t been digitized yet or exhibited. That’s a really important project we need to work on. There was some internal conflict in the Archival Group. I know I was a major instigator for some of it. I had to break from the group and not participate in it. I think that stalled the project in some ways. I’m starting to connect the people who have these signs, and I’m hopeful that we will create some kind of exhibition of them in the future.
My
school experience and my work experience was usually one of getting an
assignment and needing to fulfill the requirements of that assignment in order to get a passing grade, and there were other authority directed processes in my life where there was someone in change,
and they were trying to teach me to do it a certain way. In my conversations with other
people, I’ve heard reflections of similar situations they have been in around work and other aspects of life. Most people who grew up in the United States really don’t have as much control as they would like. They are not put in creative positions. They don’t feel like their own unique attributes and abilities can necessarily be activated in their education and work. The need to "Occupy" places, or your life, or any specific activity that you do is to get that sense of autonomy, to
create a space where you have that kind of creative control over what you do, where you are able to invest your values into the activity that you do.
There are
a number of things that suck in the world. Certainly, the type of social organization that
works by coercion is something I think that a lot of people in Occupy Wall
Street were reacting against, as well as this desire to create spaces where
people can act autonomously, feel like they’re acting self-directedly and where they're encouraged to do so. That's something that was desirable because we live
in a culture that has this disciplinary mentality where you’re expected to find
a job or fill a position where somebody is directing you on what to do. That
whole process of labor that comes out of a coercive mentality is
reaching this breaking point.
In my analysis of capitalism, the really effective, efficient production of commodities comes from having willing slaves, people who are willing to be directed, so that they can survive. It kills people both metaphorically and literally. It’s driving humanity out of people. It’s making people into something more like robots, more like machines because that’s the efficient thing. There was this need for something like Occupy Wall Street, which was an encouraging, autonomous activity where people were organizing as individuals and relating to each other horizontally, as opposed to this hierarchical structure where orders were just coming from the top and where people were just telling each other what to do all the way down. That as a system for getting things done can be very efficient, but it also is extremely detrimental to society, to people, to the environment.
In my analysis of capitalism, the really effective, efficient production of commodities comes from having willing slaves, people who are willing to be directed, so that they can survive. It kills people both metaphorically and literally. It’s driving humanity out of people. It’s making people into something more like robots, more like machines because that’s the efficient thing. There was this need for something like Occupy Wall Street, which was an encouraging, autonomous activity where people were organizing as individuals and relating to each other horizontally, as opposed to this hierarchical structure where orders were just coming from the top and where people were just telling each other what to do all the way down. That as a system for getting things done can be very efficient, but it also is extremely detrimental to society, to people, to the environment.
In
resisting this economy and this economic model of coercion and domination, I think we’re trying to bring about an economy that’s based on
autonomy and liberty and empathy. I don’t think it’s all reducible to
economics, but my view of economics is that it should ultimately be based on some kind ethical view
where the concepts of value and what gets produced in society under an
economic model is strongly defined by the people’s values who participate in
that model. The capitalist model ultimately encourages this kind of
domination of people. Some part of it has these values in it even though they
are unspoken. To speak of a specific example, the protection of corporations as
people, which extends a level of protection to a legal entity that doesn’t have
the value of empathy and prioritizes the value of profit, of monetary profit. That’s what’s going on. It’s creating a value system that’s not based on
social value. It’s based on abstract monetary value.
What I would hope to see is some kind of economic model that's based in some kind of ethical realm, some kind of set of values that people share, a model that values things like autonomy and collective liberation and empathy. A very ironic thing that I learned from my philosophy professor about capitalism is that Adam Smith, this person that’s seen as the big progenitor of capitalism, was also an ethicist and a moral philosopher, and his moral philosophy does not inform capitalism at this moment. His economic model was removed from the context of this moral system, which is ultimately based on empathy and the idea of a scenario in which the people who are trading with each other and are trying to do the normal processes of an economy are based on their mutual trust and care for each other. That’s been so distorted at this point. It has been turned into this thing that protects legal entities more than people. I think, ultimately, we have to work for our liberation. In order to do so, we need to look at all the issues of racism and patriarchy and these other really important systemic issues that get looped into this umbrella of capitalist domination. When people are able to interact on this individual basis and recognize the value of each other’s autonomous contributions, we will be much closer to attaining that liberation.
There is something in the back of my mind constantly, which thinks that money is always scarcity-based and that there is no way to actually get the kind of collectively liberated society that we want, while still having money. I want people to recognize people’s values, not the value of money. In my understanding, the production of money and the production of money as social value is currently coming from these financial institutions, and it ultimately comes funneling down through banks, and all of the things that they reward more money to are things that they can get more money from. The radical change I'm imagining would be to throw that institution out, which is proving itself to be more and more corrupt. All of the money flow, all of the value flow in society is controlled by people who only want to accumulate more money. It’s become an addictive process for them. When a small group of elitists have the ability to determine what things get rewarded in society as a whole, it creates the problems of inequality that we now see growing out of control around the world.
The word that’s coming to my mind when I think of the world I want to see is care. In this society, we're seeing people in need and recognizing people around us in need and not being able to help each other. We are both unable to help due to lack of resources and discouraged to help through the economic model of competition. I see being empowered by society to help those around us in need as the ultimate value, where we are encouraged and inspired to take action to take care of each other. In the society and monetary system that we have right now, we’re not encouraged to do that. We’re encouraged to be selfish and only take care of ourselves. My whole idea of the future hinges on something like a reorientation of individualism towards some autonomous and cooperative practice of care and liberation.
Interview by Stacy Lanyon
http://buildingcompassionthroughaction.blogspot.com/
https://www.facebook.com/stacylanyon
https://instagram.com/stacylanyon/
https://twitter.com/StacyLanyon
http://stacylanyon.com/
What I would hope to see is some kind of economic model that's based in some kind of ethical realm, some kind of set of values that people share, a model that values things like autonomy and collective liberation and empathy. A very ironic thing that I learned from my philosophy professor about capitalism is that Adam Smith, this person that’s seen as the big progenitor of capitalism, was also an ethicist and a moral philosopher, and his moral philosophy does not inform capitalism at this moment. His economic model was removed from the context of this moral system, which is ultimately based on empathy and the idea of a scenario in which the people who are trading with each other and are trying to do the normal processes of an economy are based on their mutual trust and care for each other. That’s been so distorted at this point. It has been turned into this thing that protects legal entities more than people. I think, ultimately, we have to work for our liberation. In order to do so, we need to look at all the issues of racism and patriarchy and these other really important systemic issues that get looped into this umbrella of capitalist domination. When people are able to interact on this individual basis and recognize the value of each other’s autonomous contributions, we will be much closer to attaining that liberation.
There is something in the back of my mind constantly, which thinks that money is always scarcity-based and that there is no way to actually get the kind of collectively liberated society that we want, while still having money. I want people to recognize people’s values, not the value of money. In my understanding, the production of money and the production of money as social value is currently coming from these financial institutions, and it ultimately comes funneling down through banks, and all of the things that they reward more money to are things that they can get more money from. The radical change I'm imagining would be to throw that institution out, which is proving itself to be more and more corrupt. All of the money flow, all of the value flow in society is controlled by people who only want to accumulate more money. It’s become an addictive process for them. When a small group of elitists have the ability to determine what things get rewarded in society as a whole, it creates the problems of inequality that we now see growing out of control around the world.
The word that’s coming to my mind when I think of the world I want to see is care. In this society, we're seeing people in need and recognizing people around us in need and not being able to help each other. We are both unable to help due to lack of resources and discouraged to help through the economic model of competition. I see being empowered by society to help those around us in need as the ultimate value, where we are encouraged and inspired to take action to take care of each other. In the society and monetary system that we have right now, we’re not encouraged to do that. We’re encouraged to be selfish and only take care of ourselves. My whole idea of the future hinges on something like a reorientation of individualism towards some autonomous and cooperative practice of care and liberation.
Interview by Stacy Lanyon
http://buildingcompassionthroughaction.blogspot.com/
https://www.facebook.com/stacylanyon
https://instagram.com/stacylanyon/
https://twitter.com/StacyLanyon
http://stacylanyon.com/