#occupy(oakland) and legitimacy #4 (or: #occupybureaucracy, inside and out)
this is #occupy post #4.
(previous post from 10/26 for reference: http://www.amyleblanc.com/2011/10/occupyoakland)
let me preface this with a few caveats:
1. this is totally my subjective opinion and a place for me to dump my thoughts and i don’t claim to be either fair or balanced,
2. i do welcome feedback/debate (many thanks to everyone who has written/said to me that they’ve appreciated my input/POV, but i also welcome people to constructively respond to anything they feel i’ve misrepresented),
3. this post was written over several days since last Tuesday and my mind is a bit overwhelmed by this and things keep happening/changing so bear with me if it seems fragmented or inconsistent, and, finally,
4. some personal context for those who don’t know where i work: since 2000 (11+ years), i have worked in the field of collaborative public policy as a neutral. this means that i am steeped in the methods of consensual dialogue, trained to try to take a neutral point of view in order to hear and respect all sides, and have witnessed and documented dozens and dozens of highly contentious public policy and community disputes. i note this not to say that i know more than others about what should be done in this situation but because i think some people think i am being contrarian just to be contrarian. i am speaking from a point of view of having seen many dialogues and efforts fail because stakeholders refused to work with government, and so yes, maybe i am being overly cautiously pragmatic. i do not want to see this fail.
someone i don’t know posted a comment to my last blog on facebook that said:
“at school, there was this sort of ongoing joke. there were feminist studies majors and there were community studies majors. generally speaking, both majors = super leftist if not radical in beliefs, but you could generally count on a feminist studies major to prefer sitting around all day and theorizing on the most strategic and thoughtful possible actions you can take for resistance… the jargon was “what are the conditions of possibility for ______ situation?”/usually not ending up doing much but talk, read and discuss and you could generally count on a community studies major to be like “WE HAVE TO ACT! TAKE IT TO THE STREETS! THIS IS MY OVERSIMPLISTIC SLOGAN AND COPS ARE PIGS!” and spend less time wondering if it’s the best way and just going for it. Pros and cons in either place. I think it’s just an eternal thing probably says more about personality types than whatever the ‘right’ way to peace is.”
so first, let me say that that is totally true, and i will always agree that there are many paths and methods for achieving change, and if i don’t feel like taking to the streets, i should be thankful that someone else will and support their right to do so. that said, i am not inclined to cheerlead for actions that i don’t agree with just to continually support the movement. this is where we get into trouble and lose legitimacy, and the key to any successful grassroots movement is LEGITIMACY.
i have been a part of organized community efforts where 48 out of 50 people representing very divergent views/interests were working collaboratively to resolve a problem, and the 2 people who decided they didn’t like the “process” or thought they wouldn’t be getting what they wanted via the process tried to use more direct action/activist methods. and you know what happens? then no on gets what they want, nearly every time, because the whole thing was delegitamized and everyone has to go back to the drawing board. i know some people would point to this example as a sign of the failures of bureaucracy, and some of the anarchists/zero-government people will never agree that working with the government is necessary. but i hope they are also resigned to a long battle on the fringe.
Jon Stewart’s segment on the daily show Wednesday night aka “What the Fuck Happened in Oakland?”, showed peaceful Occupy protests in other cities, and then the tear gas/riot situation from Tuesday night in Oakland. to me, What the Fuck Happened in Oakland isn’t just about the police. it’s about how the Occupy community is interacting with the police and City Hall.
last week the #occupyoakland General Assembly booed Mayor Jean Quan and would not let her speak. someone responded to my query about this that she “didn’t wait her turn” and that if she wants to speak she needs to follow the rules like the rest of the Assembly. (news article says she was “standing in line”, #occupyoaklanders say otherwise).
i have been to/been following both SF and Oakland GAs, and i hear a lot more “fuck the police” and “tear down the walls” vocalized out of oakland and talk of plans of continuing to do/say/post antagonistic and agitative things. PROVOKING VIOLENCE is nearly as bad as committing it, IMO, and pushing to see how hard someone shoves back is not in my pacifist repertoire. so yes, the OPD and City Hall mismanaged that situation Big Time. but i think you can also need to look at how this group of Occupiers is functioning compared to others.
friday night i went to a halloween/birthday party where a lot of the attendees (aged approx 25 y.o, as it was a 25th bday party) had been arrested on Tuesday morning or night. one of the Occupiers stood and talked at us for a good 10-15 minutes about working together, community building, etc. i liked what she was saying. so then i asked, “where you there when the Mayor tried to speak?” and suddenly her tone totally shifted. she responded “yeah i was RIGHT THERE. and i wanted to PUNCH THAT BITCH.” and i just looked at her in disbelief for a second and then i said “do you really think that kind of thing is helping?” and she started to rant about how “we don’t need centralized government services, we can build our own schools and grow our own food and have our own libraries, and the MAYOR IS IRRELEVANT. we don’t need the mayor. we are trying to make the GOVERNMENT IRRELEVANT.” and then she huffily walked away and never talked me to again at the party.
this was the mood of the Arrested Occupiers for the evening, and while i find their romantic utopian self-sufficient decentralized fantasy charming if you live somewhere other than a large metropolitan area, i think the idea that can be true for 7 Billion human beings (the 7 billionth will be born today!) living mostly in huge cities is, frankly, ignorant. i am not defending huge government, but NO government? what are we trying to do, roll back to the beginning of time? the government structures of civilization exist and you cannot you can just wish them to disappear. if you want to build yourself a parallel universe and go live on a farm or like a gypsy somewhere, GO RIGHT AHEAD. people do it all the time! but to suggest this should be true and will work for everyone is ridiculous. if you want to live in a dense urban area that is safe and provides everything necessary for everyone living there, i’m pretty sure some sort of centralized government is necessary. having a 4 hour GA meeting every other night to decide everything where any one person can block probably wouldn’t work out when your numbers exceed a few hundred.
“As it is, the Occupiers’ brand of romantic participatory democracy can too easily render their decision-making vulnerable to a truculent few. In the most notorious example, Representative John Lewis, the revered civil-rights hero, was prevented from speaking at Occupy Atlanta—not because the crowd didn’t want to hear from him (the great majority did, as they signalled, in the movement’s semaphore language, with raised hands and wiggling fingers) but because one man clenched his fists and crossed his forearms, thereby exercising a consensus-breaking “block.”
…
“Unlike the Tea Party, which was born when the alien/socialist enemy held all three of Washington’s elected redoubts, Occupy Wall Street inhabits a different political world, one whose most prominent figure, the President, has fallen short of not only many Occupiers’ hopes but also his own—in large part because of the Republicans’ conscienceless exploitation of the perverse veto points of the congressional machine. Yes, O.W.S. has “changed the conversation.” But talk, however necessary, is cheap. Ultimately, inevitably, the route to real change has to run through politics—the politics of America’s broken, god-awful, immutably two-party electoral system, the only one we have. The Tea Partiers know that. Do the Occupiers?” –Hertzberg – “Occupational Hazards” – New Yorker 11/7/2011
at this point i will not publicly support the General Strike* but i am opening to hearing more about it as a thoughtful strategy (and will read through the comments on the OO website ASAP). you can say what you want about how oppressive/violent the American system is, but this is not taking out a single leader (e.g. Egypt) and i am frankly offended by the drawing of parallels to other world uprisings. the problem here is systemic (and most Occupiers more a part of it than they want to admit), and will take a systemic approach to resolve, and i am hoping that is where the Occupy movement evolves – to Occupying public meetings and government posts and leadership positions.
a lot of people seem to think there is only other Apathy or Anarchy wrt their feelings about organized government in the U.S. the point here is that
we need to take the government away from the 1% and make it EXTREMELY RELEVANT, not make it even more “irrelevant”.
look, i know it sounds like i am being a hater but i am not. i am for #OccupyEverything. i agree with i am taking the long-view here. I WANT THIS MOVEMENT TO SUCCEED. if OccupyOakland wants strong, broad-based community support (including the vast minority communities of oakland which are barely representing/represented), especially for the proposed General Strike on November 2, they are going to get much further approaching this with civic-minded intentions instead of a loosely-organized rebellion, which, as we’ve seen, does not go well.
*p.s. General Strikes have a super long history (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_strike#Notable_general_strikes) .
the last Oakland General Strike was in 1946 and one of the largest ever, which is where this idea came from:
“Oakland was the center of a general strike during the first week of December 1946, one of six cities across the country that experienced such a strike after World War II. It was one of the largest strike movements in American history, as workers were determined not to let management repeat the union busting that followed the first World War. Oakland, which had been racially harmonious and prosperous before the war, by the late 1950s found itself with a population that was becoming progressively poor and racially divided.” –wikipedia
Filed in politics and news | Tagged with #occupyoakand, #ows, oakland | Comment (0)Leave a Reply
