harpojaeger.com

Criticisms of #Occupy have often focused on its lack of a centralized agenda.  My reporting from Occupy Providence, especially during the week that I lived there, has focused on contextualizing individuals’ goals in the broader movement.  Learning more about the many issues and viewpoints that are represented at any #Occupy event has been fascinating and informative.  At times divergent, they were united by their shared space; we Occupied Together.  Occupying Together implies not just sleeping in the same park, but being part of the same movement – with people with whom you actively disagree.  As a community-building model and decision-making process, this is powerful.

But without the shared space, what does #Occupy do?

Last night, occupiers in Zucotti Park were evicted with tear gas and pepper spray.  Journalists were removed and prevented from documenting (see Josh Stearns’ excellent ongoing tracking of journalist arrests at #Occupy events everywhere).  It bears repeating: when the police prevent journalists from filming an event, it’s almost always because they or the decision-makers don’t think that what they’re doing is defensible (or legal – see below).  Furthermore, it goes without saying that denying the public information about current events is a very good tactic in preventing them from mobilizing, which is pretty clearly the motive here.

All this said, there’s been some interesting commentary on how this fiasco could end up benefiting #Occupy.  Here’s Ezra Klein:

The occupation of Zuccotti Park was always going to have a tough time enduring for much longer. As the initial excitement wore off and the cold crept in, only the diehards — and those with no place else to go — were likely to remain. The numbers in Zuccotti Park would thin, and so too would the media coverage. And in the event someone died of hypothermia, or there was some other disaster, that coverage could turn. What once looked like a powerful protest could come to be seen as a dangerous frivolity.

Now more than ever, the future of #Occupy depends on mobilizing around concrete goals.  Lots of people within the movement are going to resist that, but there’s only so long they can fight over the physical space of Zucotti Park (or any other location) without becoming irrelevant.  The occupations were an excellent way of bringing people together and getting attention.  Mayor Bloomberg has done us a favor by throwing #Occupy back into the spotlight, but it seems likely that this sort of eviction is going to occur elsewhere as well – in Oakland, it already has.  It’s time to use the renewed media attention, as well as the ongoing legal battle over #OWS’ right to occupy Zucotti Park, to organize Occupiers everywhere around a core set of political principles and achievable goals.

I’m debating on exactly this topic on Friday at 4.  If you’re in the Providence area, please come by, share your opinions, and join the conversation!

The situation at Occupy Oakland continues to deterioriate:

A man was shot to death on Thursday near a downtown Oakland plaza where hundreds of anti-Wall Street activists have camped out for a month, stoking renewed calls by some city officials to evict the protesters.

It’s not clear yet whether the victim and/or shooter were involved in Occupy Oakland, or just near it.  Either way, this is bad press – something that Occupy really needs to avoid.  That said, this is dumb (same article):

“Tonight’s incident underscores the reason why the encampment must end. The risks are too great,” [Oakland Mayor Jean] Quan said. “We need to return (police) resources to addressing violence throughout the city. It’s time for the encampment to end. Camping is a tactic, not a solution.”

Quan certainly didn’t seem too concerned about wasting police resources on October 25th.  But there’s a larger lesson to be learned here: #Occupy is running out of capital.  If the movement doesn’t translate to substantive political action very soon, it will lose steam.

“Political action?” you say?  ”Politics is messy and full of special interests.  Politics will dilute the message and subvert Occupy’s grassroots, democratic nature.”

Well, yes.  But “politics” doesn’t just mean lobbyists and committee hearings (although those are pretty important too).  Politics is the process of organizing constituent groups around issues with specific goals in mind.  Occupy brought together a lot of people with a lot of ideas, and that’s been incredibly valuable in and of itself.  Now it’s time to make the jump to issue-based organizing.  That doesn’t mean we have to give up the incredible democratic and people-powered nature of Occupy, it just means that there needs to be some serious top-down leadership to put together real, workable campaigns.

For example:

…a few minutes ago the president sent the pipeline back to the State Department for a thorough re-review, which most analysts are saying will effectively kill the project. The president explicitly noted climate change, along with the pipeline route, as one of the factors that a new review would need to assess. There’s no way, with an honest review, that a pipeline that helps speed the tapping of the world’s second-largest pool of carbon can pass environmental muster.

And he has made clear that the environmental assessment won’t be carried out by cronies of the pipeline company–that it will be an expert and independent assessment.

That was veteran environmental activist Bill McKibben on the Keystone XL pipeline, which, thanks to an ongoing campaign including over one thousand arrests and culminating in a giant protest at the White House last weekend, looks decreasingly likely to be approved.  This is one of the environmental movement’s biggest victories in an uncomfortably long time.  It came about because a) there are a lot of people who care enough about the issues to go to DC and protest in person, and b) because a few people took charge and coordinated a highly visible event, paying serious attention to strategy and media outreach.

What can #Occupy learn from this?  That it’s not enough to have passionate people on your side.  If it were, we’d never have gone to war in Iraq.  We’d never have passed the PATRIOT act.  We’d never have assassinated an American citizen on foreign soil without anything even resembling due process.  And we wouldn’t continue using unmanned drones to carry out indiscriminate attacks on uncertain targets.

So far, #Occupy’s energy has been focused on physically sustaining the occupations.  That takes a lot of work, and the amount that’s been accomplished is nothing short of incredible.  But if Occupy wants to move forward and make a real political difference (like, dare I say, the Tea Party?), we need substantive goals and action strategies.  It’s clearly possible to turn people out for actions; Occupy Providence had a really strong presence a few weekends ago in a demonstration to support their continued occupation of Burnside Park, and have also been sending folks to Bank of America in groups to close their accounts and move their money to local banks.  But actions like this have largely been invisible to the media and not coordinated at a national level.  That can’t continue.

Living at Occupy Providence for a week was a really incredible experience.  I have real faces and experiences to consider when I think about the movement – faces and experiences other than my own.  I try to see things from the perspective of the homeless, the unemployed, and those who’ve been far less privileged than I in any number of ways.  The commitment and kindness I’ve encountered at Occupy Providence has been nothing short of inspiring.

I hope that others feel the same way – and I hope that inspiration moves us to question our assumptions about what it means to be a movement.  Grassroots support and centralized leadership aren’t mutually exclusive; rather, they’re vital co-components of any successful activism strategy.

I want desperately for #Occupy to succeed.  We need to define success and articulate a clear plan of action to get ourselves there.  Complicated problems require complicated solutions, so let’s not sell ourselves short.