Thank You, Anarchy. Nathan Schneider

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СКАЧАТЬ groups that are made up exclusively or mainly of anarchists, as long as they operate on anarchist principles. I see anarchism more as a way of doing things, a broad series of ethical commitments and principles, rather than an ideology. So people like that, there were a lot of them.

      In lieu of anything else, small-a anarchy was an acceptable enough common denominator for the anarchists and everyone else. On that basis, the General Assembly would continue to meet about once a week.

      The second meeting I attended was on August 20, the fourth in all. It was relatively productive at first, even if short on consensus. The group didn’t, for instance, make any outright commitment to nonviolence, largely because its members couldn’t agree on what it would mean to do so. No text for the Outreach Committee’s fliers could be passed. But people wiggled their fingers in the air when they liked what was being said and wiggled them down at the ground when they didn’t, so through these discussions everyone got to know one another a little better.

      Soon, even that modicum of process started to fail. Georgia Sagri, a performance artist from Greece, paced around the periphery of the circle with a large cup of coffee in her hand, making interjections whether or not she was “on stack” to speak. She seemed less interested in planning an occupation than in the planning meeting itself. “We are not just here for one action,” she declared. “This is an action. We are producing a new reality!” The pitch of her voice rose and then fell with every slogan. “We are not an organization; we are an environment!”

      Georgia’s powers of persuasion and disruption were especially on display when the discussion turned to the Internet Committee. Drew Hornbein, a red-haired, wispy-bearded web designer, had started putting together a site for the General Assembly. Georgia thought he was doing it all wrong. She didn’t trust the security of the server he was using—not that she knew much about servers—and wanted to stop depending on Google for the e-mail group. Her concern was principle, while his was expediency.

      As Georgia and her allies denounced Drew publicly, he apologized as much as he could, but then he eventually got up and left the circle with others who’d also had enough. “I’m talking about freedom and respect!” Georgia cried. “This is not bullshit!”

      She continued to hold the floor, proposing every detail of what the website would say and how it would look, reading one item at a time from her phone and insisting that the General Assembly approve it. The facilitators seemed exasperated. A passerby began playing Duck, Duck, Goose on the shoulders of those sitting under the Hare Krishna Tree.

      The thrill I’d felt the previous Saturday turned to pretty thoroughgoing disappointment. I abandoned my reportorial post: I left early, after three and a half hours.

      On the way out, I ran into a couple I knew from the October 2011 Coalition, Ellen Davidson and Tarak Kauff, who were just arriving from another gathering in Harlem. They had met each other at protests over the past few years, in jail after an action at the Supreme Court in DC, and in Cairo during a mobilization against Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip. I updated Tarak—who had served in the army in the early 1960s and could still do a hundred push-ups—on what had been going on. None of it appeared to surprise or trouble him.

      “It’s really, really hard,” he said in his Queens accent, as the Internet Committee proposals ground through consensus a few steps away. “They’re doing fine.”

      Micah White of Adbusters said, when I called him on August 12:

      The worst outcome would be to get there and they just fumble it by doing this whole lefty game we always play, which is self-defeatist. We go there, make some unreasonable demand, like, we want to abolish capitalism and we won’t leave until we do. And well, that’s like the war on terrorism; that’s an impossible dream. Or they just squander it by being some hipster, anarchist insurrection like, we’re gonna smash some stores and make a spectacle. And everyone’s like, “Why?”

      Because we have something beautiful going here. So we’re trying to rise above the sectarian clashings of whether or not US Day of Rage is tweeting too much or whether or not the libertarians are—you know? And reach out to the Tea Party too. This is a moment for all of America.

      I don’t see why this has to be a lefty moment or a righty moment, because this is a moment for us to reinvent democracy in America, because it’s getting to be too late. If we don’t do it now, we are reaching the end.

      In the NYC General Assembly, as well as on the Internet, the idea of “one demand” that Adbusters had promulgated was a topic of perpetual discussion. Some of the proposals that were being suggested:

       Impose a Tobin tax (or a “Robin Hood tax”) on financial transactions, a popular proposition among some economists for simultaneously bringing the most speculative markets a bit more under control while generating revenue for social programs. This idea was described in one of the planning GAs on a photocopied sheet of paper signed under the activist pen name “Luther Blissett.”

       Restore the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which was repealed by Bill Clinton in 1999. It prevented investment banks from gambling with money deposited in their commercial affiliates, putting a further brake on speculation and lessening the public’s exposure to the banks’ risk.

       Overturn the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which massively deregulated the campaign finance system.

       Demand universal employment in New York, with the accompanying socialist mantra “A job is a right!”

       “End the Fed.” The various libertarian contingents (and fans of the online documentary sensation Zeitgeist) were especially insistent on this proposal for the abolition of the Federal Reserve.

       “End the wars, tax the rich.” This slogan of the antiwar movement tended to come from older voices, and it figured prominently in the October 2011 Coalition.

      None of these was to win out. “One demand is dangerous,” I remember someone saying in Tompkins Square Park. “This is for the long haul.” Another added, “Personally, I’m not asking anything of Wall Street.” And another: “Once you get pigeonholed into one demand, it becomes easy to be just about winning or losing.”

      At first the “one demand” was simply hard to agree on. But gradually its absence seemed to make more and more sense.

      The August 27 GA meeting didn’t happen because there was a hurricane that weekend—weird for New York City, just like the earthquake a few days earlier. I missed the following weekend’s meeting because I went to the October 2011 Coalition’s retreat at Ellen and Tarak’s house up in Woodstock, where a dozen organizers holed up for two nights and a long day of planning the DC occupation. They were eating well, singing protest songs, and debating the theories of Gene Sharp, the scholar who from his home office in Boston helped inspire revolutions as far away as Serbia and Egypt. Everyone in the group came with some deep well of experience—a Ralph Nader presidential campaign manager, leaders of major antiwar groups, and the gruff Veterans for Peace, whose youthfulness returned to them with any talk of tactics. After decades of trying leaderless activism, they affirmed to one another that identifying leaders is really okay. It was conspicuous that only the very youngest—a sober-minded, thirty-eight-year-old Israeli who managed their website—had any real Internet expertise.

      The goal of the occupation was to create a space for people to come into their own, explained Margaret Flowers, a pediatrician and a mother of three teenagers, who became radicalized while fighting for single-payer health care. She was among those who first conceived of the plan for October 6, but Margaret and the other organizers realized that the moment they succeeded—if they did, by some definition СКАЧАТЬ