This Changes Everything Part 3

Those who extol nonviolent discipline might be disappointed to learn that Occupy Wall Street has officially embraced "diversity of tactics," a phrase that often serves as a byword for condoning acts of violence. However, the way that the Occupation movement has carried out this policy might lead us to think of this concept differently. For the occupiers, it is less a license for violence-which they have generally avoided-than a broader philosophy of coordinated, decentralized activism.

Since the early stages of the movement, those taking part have been in a deadlock on the question of nonviolence. At a planning meeting in Tompkins Square Park prior to September 17, I recall a young man in dark sungla.s.ses saying, knowingly, "There is a danger of fetis.h.i.+zing nonviolence to the point that it becomes a dogma." In response, a woman added, quite astoundingly, that "nonviolence just means not initiating violence." The question of nonviolence was ultimately tabled that night and thereafter. "This discussion is a complete waste of time," someone concluded.

Property damage and self-defense, therefore, have remained on the table. The relevant points of the march guidelines later promulgated by Occupy Wall Street's Direct Action Committee are these: * Don't instigate physical violence with cops or pedestrians.

* We respect diversity of tactics, but consider how our actions may affect the entire group.

This language, again, might seem like a way of saying that individual protesters are free to use violence, especially in self-defense. But in practice the occupiers have kept nonviolent discipline quite well. Their self-defense against police violence has been mainly with cameras, not physical force (though when tensions escalate during confrontations with the police, one sometimes sees a few protesters coming very close to the precipice). There have been no cases of intentional property destruction that I know of.

One reason for this is surely common sense: When facing an essentially paramilitary inst.i.tution like the NYPD, there's little hope that a few hundred or a few thousand protesters could stand much of a chance with violence. Another reason is the point made in the second guideline quoted above, which acknowledges that an act of violence would reflect on everyone in the movement, many of whose partic.i.p.ants would not condone it.

So far, at least, what "diversity of tactics" has meant to the occupiers is not so much an openness to violence but a whole approach to direct action that comes out of anarchist thought. In this, "diversity of tactics" shares the heritage and logic of the open a.s.semblies that are the heart of the occupation movement. Take this pa.s.sage from a pamphlet on hand at occupied Liberty Plaza (also known as Zuccotti Park), Anarchist Basics: Affinity groups ["of 5 to 20 people"] decide on their own what they want to do and how they want to do it, and aren't obliged to take orders from any person on top. As such, they challenge top-down decision-making and organizing, and empower those involved to take direct action in the world around them...Affinity groups by nature are decentralized and non-hierarchical, two important principles of anarchist organizing and action.

Operating this way reflects the kind of values that many in the occupation movement insist on: individual autonomy, consensus decision-making, decentralization, and equality.

Consider, for instance, the two main events that brought public attention and sympathy to the movement: the arrest of nearly a hundred people on a march near Union Square on September 24 (which included an infamous pepper-spraying incident), and the approximately seven hundred arrested a week later on the Brooklyn Bridge. In both cases, the arrests directly followed instances of autonomous action by small groups, which splintered away from the plan established by the Direct Action Committee. (At Union Square, there was a dispute about whether to take the march back to Liberty Plaza or to the United Nations; at the Brooklyn Bridge, hundreds of marchers chose to spill onto the roadway rather than remaining on the narrow pedestrian walkway.) In both cases, too, the police responded to such autonomous action with violent overreaction, which in turn garnered tremendous interest from the media.

I have previously called for the movement to adopt more orderly kinds of civil disobedience actions, ones targeted specifically at the laws they oppose-on the model of lunch-counter sit-ins in the civil rights movement, for instance. However, I've been forced to recognize that the messy stuff seems to work.

My sense of the dynamics at play here is something like the following: The NYPD, as a hierarchical, highly structured organization, operates according to certain plans and procedures arranged in advance. Its commanders gain the best intelligence they can about what protesters intend to do and act accordingly. When the protesters act outside the plans police prepared for, or their plans aren't unified, the police feel they have no choice but to resort to a violent crackdown, which in turn highlights the protesters' own nonviolence in the media reports, and their movement grows. The net effect is that it almost seems as if the police are intentionally trying to help the movement, for that's what their every action seems to do.

We already know that power structures that rely on violence can be highly vulnerable to coordinated nonviolent action. During the civil rights movement, a structured and disciplined action in a segregated city, like a sit-in or Freedom Ride, had the capacity to confront the system in a very direct way, presenting to the powerful a choice between violent overreaction and capitulation. Such actions have since become ritualized and generally ineffective in American protest movements.

Occupy Wall Street commends to us the anarchist insight that, in much the same way, hierarchical command structures are vulnerable to non-hierarchical action. If this is true, the real strength of the 1999 Seattle mobilization against the World Trade Organization-after which "diversity of tactics" entered activist parlance-was not so much the particular tactics used, least of all the window-breaking antics of "black blocs." It was the decentralized way in which such tactics were organized and deployed.

A major reason why traditional forms of civil disobedience aren't well-suited to Occupy Wall Street is the fact that the occupiers aren't even capable of breaking the relevant laws in the first place. While those in the civil rights movement could sit in the wrong part of a segregated bus, the occupiers at Liberty Plaza can't exactly flout campaign finance laws, or laws regarding the regulation of banks. Such laws are simply beyond the reach of most Americans-which is exactly the problem. Consequently, the movement is being forced to resort not to civil disobedience but to what political scientist Bernard Harcourt has proposed we call "political disobedience": Civil disobedience accepted the legitimacy of political inst.i.tutions, but resisted the moral authority of resulting laws. Political disobedience, by contrast, resists the very way in which we are governed: It resists the structure of partisan politics, the demand for policy reforms, the call for party identification, and the very ideologies that dominated the post-War period.

"Diversity of tactics" is a form of political disobedience par excellence, since its emphasis on autonomy rather than authority represents a direct contradiction to the kind of order that ordinary politics presupposes.

"Don't mistake the COMPLEXITY of this movement for CHAOS," warns one of the many handmade cardboard signs at Liberty Plaza.

If it is true, as I've come to think, that a "diversity of tactics" has been meaningfully practiced by the Occupation movement even while remaining nonviolent, then traditional definitions of the phrase are in need of revision. Rather than merely granting permission to use violence, respecting a "diversity of tactics" is in its own right a robust approach to conducting resistance-and one that is arguably all the more powerful when it remains non-violent. This was highlighted in the part of Naomi Klein's recent speech at Liberty Plaza that earned the loudest applause: Something else this movement is doing right: You have committed yourselves to nonviolence. You have refused to give the media the images of broken windows and street fights it craves so desperately. And that tremendous discipline has meant that, again and again, the story has been the disgraceful and unprovoked police brutality...Meanwhile, support for this movement grows and grows. More wisdom.

The data seem to support her. A widely cited Freedom House report from 2005 found that movements which rely on nonviolent methods are considerably more likely to result in democratic outcomes, rather than simply replacing one authoritarian system with another. This, especially, should carry weight for the Occupation movement, which strives so much to embody the ideals of a more democratic society in the means it uses to achieve one. If a permissive att.i.tude toward violence is not a feature of the world one is working for, it should not be welcomed in one's movement.

Meanwhile, Erica Chenoweth and Kurt Schock have found through statistical studies that the effects of having a so-called "radical flank" in a resistance movement-having a violent minority-include a slightly lower success rate and a significantly lower level of public involvement. Canadian activists Philippe Duhamel and David Martin recognize this in their call for "a diversity of nonviolent tactics." They argue that "some tactics don't mix"; once violence enters the picture, it monopolizes the landscape of the conflict, co-opting other tactics and alienating potential partic.i.p.ants. This certainly was the case on October 15, when a small number of people doing property destruction in Rome caused headlines like "Protests Turn Violent" to dominate the perception of an overwhelmingly nonviolent day of action in cities all over the world.

Only a month into the occupation, and less than three months since planning began in earnest, Occupy Wall Street is just beginning to have the robust affinity groups that a "diversity of tactics" approach requires. Some have led targeted actions like the disruption of a Sotheby's auction and a sit-in at a JPMorgan Chase bank branch. It is tactics like these-rather than ma.s.s arrests for obstructing traffic-that will begin to directly undermine the legitimacy of the powers the occupiers seek to target. And when causing such disruptions, remaining nonviolent will be crucial to ensuring that the disrupters keep their own legitimacy in the public eye.

The committee responsible for media relations for Occupy Wall Street has been preparing messaging-down to specific tweets-to use in case someone in the movement ends up using violence. Even those in the committee who aren't ultimately opposed to violence in principle recognize that such acts would be a serious challenge to the movement's credibility, both in the media and among those taking part in it. Given the commitment to a "diversity of tactics," though, just about anything can happen, and the committee often learns about it only after the fact.

Let's hope those tweets go unneeded.

Nathan Schneider writes about religion, reason, and violence for publications including The Nation, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Commonweal, Religion Dispatches, Alter-Net, and Truthout. He is an editor for Killing the Buddha and for Waging Nonviolence, where this chapter first appeared on October 19, 2011.

CHAPTER 8.

THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN THE WORLD.

NAOMI KLEIN.

I was honored to be invited to speak at Occupy Wall Street on Thursday night. Since amplification is (disgracefully) banned, and everything I say will have to be repeated by hundreds of people so others can hear (aka "the human microphone"), what I actually say at Liberty Plaza will have to be very short. With that in mind, here is the longer, uncut version of the speech.

I love you.

And I didn't just say that so that hundreds of you would shout "I love you" back, though that is obviously a bonus feature of the human microphone. Say unto others what you would have them say unto you, only way louder.

Yesterday, one of the speakers at the labor rally said, "We found each other." That sentiment captures the beauty of what is being created here. A wide-open s.p.a.ce (as well as an idea so big it can't be contained by any s.p.a.ce) for all the people who want a better world to find each other. We are so grateful.

If there is one thing I know, it is that the 1% loves a crisis. When people are panicked and desperate and no one seems to know what to do, that is the ideal time to push through their wish list of pro-corporate policies: privatizing education and social security, slas.h.i.+ng public services, getting rid of the last constraints on corporate power. Amidst the economic crisis, this is happening the world over.

And there is only one thing that can block this tactic, and fortunately, it's a very big thing: the 99%. And that 99% is taking to the streets from Madison to Madrid to say, "No. We will not pay for your crisis."

That slogan began in Italy in 2008. It ricocheted to Greece and France and Ireland and finally it has made its way to the square-mile where the crisis began.

"Why are they protesting?" ask the baffled pundits on TV. Meanwhile, the rest of the world asks: "What took you so long? We've been wondering when you were going to show up." And most of all: "Welcome."

Many people have drawn parallels between Occupy Wall Street and the so-called anti-globalization protests that came to world attention in Seattle in 1999. That was the last time a global, youth-led, decentralized movement took direct aim at corporate power. And I am proud to have been part of what we called "the movement of movements."

But there are important differences, too. For instance, we chose summits as our targets: the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the G8. Summits are transient by their nature; they only last a week. That made us transient too. We'd appear, grab world headlines, then disappear. And in the frenzy of hyper-patriotism and militarism that followed the 9/11 attacks, it was easy to sweep us away completely, at least in North America.

Occupy Wall Street, on the other hand, has chosen a fixed target. And you have put no end date on your presence here. This is wise. Only when you stay put can you grow roots. This is crucial. It is a fact of the information age that too many movements spring up like beautiful flowers but quickly die off. It's because they don't have roots. And they don't have long-term plans for how they are going to sustain themselves. So when storms come, they get washed away.

Being horizontal and deeply democratic is wonderful. But these principles are compatible with the hard work of building structures and inst.i.tutions that are st.u.r.dy enough to weather the storms ahead. I have great faith that this will happen.

Something else this movement is doing right: You have committed yourselves to nonviolence. You have refused to give the media the images of broken windows and street fights it craves so desperately. And that tremendous discipline has meant that, again and again, the story has been the disgraceful and unprovoked police brutality, which we saw more of just last night. Meanwhile, support for this movement grows and grows more wisdom.

But the biggest difference a decade makes is that in 1999, we were taking on capitalism at the peak of a frenzied economic boom. But to be honest with you, while the good times rolled, taking on an economic system based on greed was a tough sell, at least in rich countries.

Ten years later, it seems as if there aren't any more rich countries. Just a whole lot of rich people. People who got rich looting the public wealth and exhausting natural resources around the world.

The point is, today everyone can see that the system is deeply unjust and careening out of control. Unfettered greed has trashed the global economy. And it is tras.h.i.+ng the natural world as well. We are overfis.h.i.+ng our oceans, polluting our water with fracking and deepwater drilling, and turning to the dirtiest forms of energy on the planet, like the Alberta tar sands. And the atmosphere cannot absorb the amount of carbon we are putting into it, creating dangerous atmosphere warming. The new normal is serial disasters, economic and ecological.

These are the facts on the ground. They are so blatant, so obvious, that it is a lot easier to connect with the public than it was in 1999, and to build the movement quickly.

We all know, or at least sense, that the world is upside down: We act as if there is no end to what is actually finite-fossil fuels and the atmospheric s.p.a.ce to absorb their emissions. And we act as if there are strict and immovable limits to what is actually bountiful-the financial resources to build the kind of society we need.

The task of our time is to turn this around: to challenge this false scarcity. To insist that we can afford to build a decent, inclusive society-while at the same time, respect the real limits to what the Earth can take.

What climate change means is that we have to do this on a deadline. This time our movement cannot get distracted, divided, burned out, or swept away by events. This time we have to succeed. And I'm not talking about regulating the banks and increasing taxes on the rich, though that's important.

I am talking about changing the underlying values that govern our society. That is hard to fit into a single media-friendly demand, and it's also hard to figure out how to do it. But it is no less urgent for being difficult.

That is what I see happening in this square. In the way you are feeding each other, keeping each other warm, sharing information freely, and providing health care, meditation cla.s.ses, and empowerment training. My favorite sign here says, "I care about you." In a culture that trains people to avoid each other's gaze, to say, "Let them die," that sign carries a deeply radical statement.

A few final thoughts. In this great struggle, here are some things that don't matter: * what we wear; * whether we shake our fists or make peace signs; * whether we can fit our dreams for a better world into a media sound bite.

And here are a few things that do matter: * our courage; * our moral compa.s.s; * how we treat each other.

We have picked a fight with the most powerful economic and political forces on the planet. That's frightening. And as this movement grows from strength to strength, it will get more frightening. Always be aware that there will be a temptation to s.h.i.+ft to smaller targets-like, say, the person sitting next to you at this meeting. After all, that is a battle that's easier to win.

Don't give in to the temptation. I'm not saying don't call each other on s.h.i.+t. But this time, let's treat each other as if we plan to work side by side in struggle for many, many years to come. Because the task before will demand nothing less.

Let's treat this beautiful movement as if it is the most important thing in the world. Because it is. It really is.

Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, syndicated columnist, and author of the bestselling book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. This chapter is the transcript of a speech delivered at Occupy Wall Street on October 6, 2011, and originally published in The Occupied Wall Street Journal on October 8, 2011.

Photo by Fran Korten.

SEATTLE, October 15, 2011.

PART II.

WHAT NEEDS TO CHANGE.

When 1% of the population controls the bulk of the wealth and power, the resulting inequality poisons our entire society. That's the point Richard Wilkinson makes in chapter 9, in his interview with Brooke Jarvis.

But how do we restructure our economy so that it benefits the 99% instead of just the 1%?

A crucial step is to redesign the money and banking system to s.h.i.+ft power from Wall Street to Main Street, David Korten says in chapter 10. He elaborates six key changes to feed resources to the Main Street economy, which meets actual human needs, instead of to the Wall Street economy, which feeds greed and speculation.

Another key is to s.h.i.+ft taxes so that the wealthiest pay more. Progressive taxation allows us to invest in transportation, schools, and other public goods while preventing the cancerous growth of inequality. Chuck Collins shows in chapter 11 three immediate ways to make the tax system fairer.

We also need living-wage jobs that preserve and restore the soil, water, air, and other natural resources we rely on. We can do that by building locally rooted economies. In chapter 12, Sarah van Gelder and Doug Pibel show how to start.

These are just some of the ways to turn our unfair economy on its head and put the well-being of ordinary people, their communities, and the planet first.

CHAPTER 9.

HOW INEQUALITY POISONS SOCIETY AND EQUITY BENEFITS EVERYONE:.

AN INTERVIEW WITH RICHARD WILKINSON.

BROOKE JARVIS.

"We are the 99%." It's been perhaps the strongest rallying cry of the Occupy Wall Street movement-and for good reason. Millions are struggling for food, housing, and health care, while the incomes of the richest reach new heights.

But Occupy Wall Street has become a movement not only for the 99%, but also for people who recognize the failures of our current economic system despite having reaped huge benefits from it. "Our system needs fundamental change," writes one self-identified 1%-er in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street. "If it's not working for everyone, it's not working." She's right, in fact. British epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson has found that economic inequality has a host of corrosive impacts on whole societies, harming even those at the top of the pile. I sat down with Wilkinson to discuss the surprising importance of equality-and the best ways to build it.

Brooke: You've studied the impact of inequality on public health for a long time. Did any of your recent findings surprise you?

Richard: Oh, all of them. For many years, people working in public health have looked for a link between poverty and social problems like mental illness, crime, and infant mortality. We thought that once you found the relations.h.i.+p between income and death rates, for example, you would be able to predict what a state's death rate would be. Actually, though, that doesn't produce a good prediction. It turns out that what matters aren't the incomes themselves, but how unequal they are. If you're a more unequal state, the same level of income produces a higher death rate.

In less equal societies, we find perhaps eight times the number of teenage births per capita, ten times the homicide rate, three times the rate of mental illness. We know from the findings that it's the status divisions themselves that create the problems. It's almost impossible to find any other consistent explanation.

Brooke: How does thinking about these problems in terms of inequality rather than poverty change how we grapple with them?

Richard: I think people have been worried by the scale of social problems in our societies-feeling that though we're materially very successful, a lot of stuff is going wrong, and we don't know why. The media are always full of these social problems, and they blame parents or teachers or lack of religion or whatever. It makes an important difference to people to have an a.n.a.lysis that really fits, not only in a sort of academic way, but also that fits intuitions that people have had. People have intuited for hundreds of years that inequality was divisive and socially corrosive.

Inequality has psychosocial effects-the impact of living with anxiety about our feelings of superiority or inferiority. If you grow up in an unequal society, your actual experience of human relations.h.i.+ps is different. Your idea of human nature changes. For instance, in more equal countries or more equal states, two-thirds of the population may feel they can trust others in general, whereas in the more unequal countries or states, it may drop as low as 15 percent or 25 percent.

Brooke: Once we become aware of the impact of inequality on all of these social ills, what do we do about it?

Richard: Countries seem to get their greater equality in quite different ways. Sweden, for example, uses the big government way: There are big differences in earnings, which are redistributed through taxes and benefits. It has a large welfare state. j.a.pan, on the other hand, has smaller income differences to start with, does much less redistribution, and doesn't have such high social expenditure. But both countries do very well-they're among the more equal countries and their health and social outcomes are very good.

But we can't just rely just on taxes and benefits to increase equality-the next government can undo them all at a stroke. We've got to get this structure of equality much more deeply embedded in our society. I think that means more economic democracy, or workplace democracy, of every kind. We're talking about friendly societies, mutual societies, employee owners.h.i.+p, employee representatives on the board, cooperatives-ways in which business is subjected to democratic influence. The bonus culture is only possible because the people at the top are not answerable to the employees at all. Employee owners.h.i.+p turns a company into a community. The chief executive becomes answerable to employees. You might vote for your boss to have, I don't know, three times as much income as you-but not three hundred or four hundred times more.

Embedding greater equality and more democratic accountability in our inst.i.tutions does much more than just changing income distribution or wealth distribution. And, a number of studies show that if you combine even partial employee owners.h.i.+p, you get quite reliable increases in productivity. This is about how we work better together.

Brooke Jarvis is YES! Magazine's web editor and a regular contributor to YES! This chapter is adapted from an article that originally appeared on YesMagazine.org on March 4, 2010.

CHAPTER 10.

SIX WAYS TO LIBERATE MAIN STREET FROM WALL STREET.