Surviving Capitalism (Not) : Meet Occupy Wall Street’s ‘outside agitators’

We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Friday, March 9, 2012

Meet Occupy Wall Street’s ‘outside agitators’

Click here to access article featuring a fairly lengthy interview with two activists, from Waging Nonviolence.

The activists are "among the most vocal and respected advocates of anarchist ideas in Occupy Wall Street’s Direct Action Working Group [in NY City]."

Sparrow: Quite frankly, I view every article that has come out—Chris Hedges, and Rebecca Solnit to a slightly lesser degree, but in other ways more insidiously in my opinion—as playing into that strategy of divide-and-conquer, where we are pitted against each other and put in the position of having to reaffirm the solidarity that we have taken for granted. We’re made to be accountable for the actions of people that we don’t even know because we support their overall struggle. Also, we’re wasting our time on constantly bickering about whether or not Oakland should have brought shields while they were being shot with flash bang grenades.

That narrative, first of all, is incredibly statist. It reaffirms state power. It is allowing the state to set our agenda for us. It is allowing the state to manipulate us and tell us who our friends are and are not. ...It also in many ways erases the real conversation that we should be having, which is that the police are brutalizing people. Every single day. Not just in the context of Occupy, the police brutalize people constantly. And, by talking about whether or not Oakland should have brought shields to this march is absurd in the extreme. We should be talking about the fact that they were being shot at in the first place.