Occupy Doesn’t Have a Platform — It is a Platform

by Kevin Carson on Dec 16, 2011
Center for a Stateless Society

The Occupy movement comes under frequent attack from the institutional Left & Right (and, it goes without saying, from the liberal & conservative establishments) for not offering a clear list of official demands — for, in other words, not offering a platform.

But that criticism misses the point. Occupy doesn’t have a single platform, in the sense of a list of demands. But it is a platform — a collaborative platform, like a wiki.  Occupy isn’t a unified movement with a single list of demands and an official leadership to state them.

Rather, Occupy offers a toolkit and a brand name to a thousand different movements with their own agendas, their own goals, and their own demands — with only their hatred of Wall Street and the corporate state in common, and the Occupy brand as a source of strength and identity.

Although the ends are quite different, the model of organization is much like that of al Qaeda: An essentially leaderless organization, a loose network of cells, each of which adopts the al Qaeda brand or franchise for its own purposes. It’s a much more effective use of resources to provide a common platform and then let a thousand flowers bloom.

A conventional, hierarchical activist institution wastes enormous resources on administrative apparatus and endless negotiations just to get everyone on the same page, before anyone can do anything.

A common platform allows any number of movements, made up of voluntary aggregations of individuals with shared goals, to build on it on a modular basis, and to act without waiting for permission from the headquarters of the One Big Movement. And whenever they do anything that seems to work well, any other node in the network can adopt that tactic as its own without asking anyone’s leave.

That’s why the glocal Occupy movement is throwing off innovations like a fission reaction throws off neutrons. If anything, it’s done so even more since the wave of shutdowns in the U.S. divorced it from occupation as a primary tactic and scattered its seeds to the wind.

But let’s go back a ways. The Pentagon Papers weren’t published pursuant to an official decision by a nationwide anti-war movement, and Woodward and Bernstein didn’t try to found a national political movement to impeach Nixon. In both cases, the immediate actors simply published the information, and allowed anyone who would to leverage that information. They thereby created a free platform that could be developed by any number of antiwar and anti-Nixon activists for their own ends.

Fast forward to Summer 2010. Julian Assange simply published the cable dump at Wikileaks.  Every single activist movement that piggybacked on that platform, starting with the uprising in Tunisia, did so on its own initiative, making — its own judgment — the best use of the free, common platform offered by Assange. So it’s gone from Tunisia to Egypt, to the Arab Spring, to Madison, to the demonstrations in Britain and Spain and Greece, to Occupy Wall Street, and back out to the global Occupy movment in hundreds of cities around the world.

Now, with the Occupy movement (thanks to Bloomberg et. al) no longer wedded to occupying public squares, the wave of innovations seems to roll in on a weekly basis. First Occupy Our Homes, and now Occupy the Ports.

According to Lester MacGurdy at Oakland Occupier, Occupy Oakland has begun to deal with police evictions by retreating, waiting until the cops are gone, then going back. Police are essentially heavy infantry who move slowly and ponderously into place, and can move only as quickly as their bloated logistical train moves with them. Protestors are light infantry who can disperse and reconcentrate on short notice. ”The tactical evolution that evolved relies on two military tactics that are thousands of years old — the tactical superiority of light infantry over heavy infantry, and the tactical superiority of the retreat over the advance.”

You can bet this will be standard procedure for every Occupy group in America in a week’s time.

The corporate state and its thugs in black uniforms and kevlar are big, impressive, and make lots of loud noise — just like a T. Rex blundering into a tar pit. The resistance is small, agile and resilient — just like a swarm of piranha. And in the end, we’ll hang their bleeding heads on our battlements.

In the immortal words of Bob Marley: “The stone that the builder refused shall be the head cornerstone.”

Deliver Occupy From Its “Friends” & Dumb Reasons NOT to Support Occupy

A Leaderless Movement

by KEVIN CARSON

 

Mainstream liberals and the Institutional Left frequently criticize the Occupy movement for its lack of public spokespersons and its lack of clear demands. But according to David Graeber, it came very close to having those things — and to being just another protest that fizzled out after a few days.

Graeber, an anarchist University of London anthropology professor, showed up for a preliminary meeting held in early August to prepare for the next month’s Occupation. As he recounts, it was shaping up as a typical top-down movement controlled by the usual suspects of the Institutional Left. Adbusters, which posted the original call for a September 17 Occupation, New Yorkers Against Budget Cuts, and the Workers World Party (which created the International ANSWER coalition at the outset of the Iraq War in 2003), between them pretty well had things sewn up.

My guess is that had those groups kept control, Occupy would have had all the public spokespersons and demands anyone could want — and would have been in the news for maybe a week.

Fortunately, Graeber and some friends began talking with other “horizontals” — Wobblies, veterans of the Greek and Spanish protests, etc. — who, like him, had been hoping for something on the libertarian model of the Spanish indignados’ protest. They quickly coalesced into a General Assembly and bypassed the power grab of Workers’ World et al.

Those who object miss the point. A large share of those participating in OWS have learned that playing by the normal rules of “progressive” politics — getting out the vote and organizing pressure groups — doesn’t work. They tried that in 2008, electing the most “progressive” president of a lifetime with the biggest majority since LBJ, and a Democratic super-majority in Congress. And then they were betrayed as Obama revealed himself to be either totally ineffectual or, worse yet, a conscious stooge of Wall Street.

As Graeber says, “Clearly, if progressive change was not possible through electoral means in 2008, it simply isn’t going to possible at all. And that is exactly what very large numbers of Americans appear to have concluded.”

So this time they’re not playing by the old rules. What, exactly, are they trying to accomplish? I believe their significance has to more to do with their form of organization itself — a distributed, self-organized network — as a model of the society they hope to build, than with any concrete demands. In Rowan Wolf’s elegant phrase, “the organizational model … is the carrier wave of the movement.”

As Graeber points out, it’s their lack of specific demands that gives them strength. Despite op-ed jabbering to the contrary, it’s hard to miss what their main focus is: Hatred for Wall Street, for the concentration of wealth, for crony capitalism, and for the unholy alliance between Big Business and the state.

That common set of values is the basic operating platform of the movement. Beyond that, the specific agendas built on that platform are beyond counting. It includes everyone from libertarian communists to social democrats and conventional liberals to left-wing market anarchists like me, and quite a few Paulistas who want to abolish the Fed.

Occupy, with its organizational style and the cultural memes it propagates, is a source of strength for all those individual agendas. The loosely allied subgroups are modules operating on a common platform. The very fact that so many different groups share a common brand, united only by their enmity toward plutocracy, is the movement’s source of power.

That’s the same stigmergic model of organization used by the open source software community.  The basic platform can support as many modular utilities as there are developers. The utilities themselves reflect the needs and concerns of individual developers. Likewise, there are as many sub-movements piggybacked on Occupy as there are reasons for hating Wall Street, ways of being affected by it, and walks of life among the Occupiers.

In Occupy, like other stigmergically organized projects ranging from Linux and Wikipedia to al Qaeda, nobody needs “permission” from “leadership” to try out ideas. And whatever idea works for one node instantly becomes property of the whole network. “Occupy Our Homes,” which sprang up almost overnight, is one example of such stigmergic innovation. Other groups are likely to arrive independently at innovative ideas, like flash-mobbing the homes and country clubs of politicians, CEOs and plutocrats. As they used to say in the civics textbooks, Occupy is a “laboratory of democracy.”

If you want to see “leadership” and unified agendas, go back fifty years and look at GM or the CBS evening news. We don’t need it. “Leadership” is so 20th century.

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Five Dumbest Reasons Not to Support the Occupy Movement

by DAVID Ker THOMSON

My God, what’s happened?
—Princess Diana

*We could alienate the very people who might be our supporters.

Reality check: That’s the kind of people you want to suck up to—people who would be offended by a peaceful occupation of a park?  With friends like these…

*It’s divisive. It sets up a separation between some kinds of human beings and others, between the 99% and the 1%.  It’s not Buddhist enough.  It’s not Zen.  It’s not spiritual.  

Reality Check: The super rich don’t want you.  They don’t like you.  They don’t need your sympathy.  They’ve hired guys to beat you up.  They’re not impressed by your attempt at brotherhood.  You have lice.  That limo coming at you?  It isn’t going to slow down.

*They think they’re the first people to ever do this?  Where were they back in [whenever] when we were [young].  They have no sense of history.  We’ve been slogging away in the trenches all these years.

Reality check:  Seriously?  You want to emphasize how humorless and old you are?  As they say on the television machine, “can I ask you a question? Shut up!”

*I feel left out.

Reality check:  Go to a general assembly and tell everyone you need a lot of hugs.

*The Occupiers don’t have clear demands that a capitalist society can enter in a concise capitalist-style checklist and present on TV.

Reality check:  Yeah.  And yet there they are.  Kind of unnerving, isn’t it?

*Dirty hippies.  Who’s going to pay the costs of throwing out the personal belongings of the Occupiers?  Hazmat suit deployment isn’t cheap.

Reality check:  Nazi eugenicists shared your pain in the 1920’s.  Obsession with cleanliness, ja.  Racial hygiene, check. Nordic purity, check.  Dirty Jews, jawohl.  Everyone’s dirty who isn’t on our team.  We’re pure, and the blond hair with highlights doesn’t hurt.  Zer iz uh poopie in ze toilet and vee must scrub it and retain zee anal formation.

*Supposed to get a permit.  Supposed to tell your Congressperson.  Supposed to get approval.  Supposed to think about votes.  Supposed to do it the way it’s always been done.  Supposed to have leaders.

Reality check:  Daddy said no.  Now what, little boy?

*Occupying land as an expression of free speech is a non-starter in the courts.

Reality check: Occupying a seat in the front of the bus was a non-starter in white courts.  And yet we have all these black people in the fronts of buses now.  Funny thing happened on the way to the front of the bus.  The most important point about leaders and people who think they’re allowed to judge others is that they’ll follow when they have to.  We occupy the space because it’s ethical, not because some rich judge surrounded by lackeys or because some politician surrounded by suitcases of cash from K Street gives permission.  You think your soft-palate little democracy ga-ga goo-goo arrangement is the only arrangement of human affairs that exists?  We didn’t sign on to yours.

*I want a different percentage number than 99.  Some of those 99 are jerks too, you know.
Reality check:  Yes dear.  Thank-you for sharing.  69 isn’t quite the same somehow.

*OWS is a joke. More bleating. It will fail miserably. Nothing will change. The reason is obvious: the whole point of OWS is to further reinforce the idea that the real power is with the 1%. We have to beg them to change things. We have to demand change from them. They have to agree to it. But it is not the 1% who are bruising us with batons, burning us with chemical sprays, electrocuting us with stun guns, and worse. Who are these cops hiding behind the armor and masks? Are they not our brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, nieces and nephews and mothers and fathers and cousins? Are they not us?

My response: Ouch.  This is the sleeper embedded here in the middle of the article. 

Hopefully the difference in font size will come through to indicate “sleeper.”  Embedded in the article.  Embedded, perhaps, in the middle of the movement.  The words are those of a man in Argentina with the middle initial F, and the words aren’t dumb.  Personally I take the 99/1 split to be about wealth distribution and spectacular greed, but if the movement means that the 99/1 split is that we’re the 99 kids and we have to supplicate the daddy leader, then Middle-F’s right and the power of the movement will be neatly diverted back to the belief in daddies and voting.  Back to K Street.  Back to the belief that it was Hitler who actually killed people rather than his willing executioners.  Back to the belief that Bush was pure evil and tremendously important and we have to get the big O (as Lacan might say) to save us. 

Seventy-five folks braved rain Wednesday night, for example, to occupy or Occupy the Supremes.  Oh-O—the big O again.  Reminds me of the great O-Bum in the sky, our anal savior, ja.  If these folks were occupying the street because it’s right to get in the way of car culture and its massive systemic violence, and it is, or because it’s fun to walk down the street in the rain, and it is, or they’re occupying some building because there are idiots in it who think they’re the Supremes, and apparently there are, then we have a movement.  But if they’re just off to daddy’s house to beg and supplicate, then we’ve got a problem. 

Washington is a city filled with people who never grew up.  These lesser gods are the last people to whom anyone should send pleas, petitions, supplications, or indeed any form of prayer at all.  On a purely practical note, it is for this reason that seewalk-the-ungoogleable thinks that while occupying everywhere is a good idea, Washington should be the last place where we should bother.  Now back to our regularly scheduled article:

*Plenty of these people in these Occupy encampments are on drugs, use needles, and have mental health problems.

Reality check:  Isn’t it great?  What a wonderful testimony to the kind of people who Occupy, that the downtrodden and the towntrodden and the messed up feel a sense of belonging and solace here, where there are so many people who can help direct them to social services in a supportive, caring way, or offer a bowl of soup, or just hang out.
*You people can’t count.  You said five reasons.

*I can’t walk my dog in the park.  

Reality check: Oh, you have a dog that doesn’t like kisses and getting petted?  That probably is a problem.

The Invisible, Growing Leaderless Revolution in America (3 articles)

Sunday, February 13, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
by Will Wilkinson
At first glance, the “leaderless revolution” in Egypt has nothing in common with the recent closing of Allyson’s, a local deli here in our small Oregon town. Until you hear why the bank called the note. “… the balance and payments are due.”

Quoting from a CommonDreams.org article by David Porter on Egypt:

“It is the slowly-accumulating momentum of hundreds of thousands of confrontations with local officials and elites… that slowly develop the courage, confidence and essential horizontal networks bubbling below the surface…”

How many Allyson’s stories are accumulating throughout America? How many business owners and employees, home owners and credit card users have had their lives turned upside down by banker’s decisions like this one, so utterly devoid of humanity?

The banker’s quote appeared in a story carried by our local paper and it wasn’t accompanied by any mitigating compassion. Apparently he didn’t feel it was necessary to show any. It’s the golden rule in action: he who has the gold makes the rules. Period. And, it’s happening everywhere.

A San Francisco friend tells me about his eleven months of futile communication with the bank that holds his mortgage. They lost his paperwork three times. All he wanted was to renegotiate the payments. Finally, he’s walking away. But first, he’s stopped making any payments at all. He’ll live in the house until he is forced to leave. When he does leave, the house will sit empty, tied up in red tape, while homeless people crowd the streets nearby.

A Texas couple fights Blue Cross and Blue Shield who have both denied coverage of life saving heart surgery for their newborn baby, on the basis that it is a pre-existing condition. Pre-existing? He was born with it. Reading the official responses from these companies… it’s the same story. They simply don’t want to pay. They are in business to make money, as are the banks. Providing some sort of service is an irritating necessity. The less actually provided, the more successful these businesses are.

Meanwhile, out on the streets where we live, the anger is building towards a breaking point. How many Allyson’s closing down, how many home owners walking away (or being driven out), how many of us losing our savings to pay for health care, how many “confrontations with local officials and elites” will it take to finally get us out on the streets? When will the world start watching a “leaderless revolution” here in America? We don’t have a dictator to oust. For us, it’s a ruling oligarchy immune to influence by voting. It’s bankers, corporations, multi-whatillionaires, an enabling government, those with the gold, the power and no interest in us, beyond milking us everyday like the docile sheep they believe us to be.

The leaderless revolution in Egypt took years to develop. There wasn’t much news about it along the way. Likewise here in the good old USA. So, when it finally erupts, as it inevitably will, it may seem like a surprise. But it won’t be; it is inevitable. The only question is “When?”

But we’re innovators, at least those of us who’ve survived so far with our imaginations intact. We don’t have to wait for thousands to march together, maybe in Times Square. We’ve actually got a lot of power right now. And, ironically, our power resides in the same place it does for those who rule us: money. Imagine the day when we take our money out of those banks and begin lending it to each other? Fifty friends in our small community coming up with $5,000 each could have saved our favorite deli.

Risky? Not as risky as banks and the carnage they wreak in our communities every day. So, am I suggesting local, citizen-operated banks? Sort of. But what I imagine is more neighborly than the word “bank” can possibly ever convey now, it’s meaning forever corrupted by the heartless behavior we’re witnessing. It’s simpler, more like friends just supporting each other. Financially. What a concept. And imagine not charging interest. No interest. No taxes. Just favors between trusting friends.

Maybe some day we will be out on the streets and the world will watch breathlessly as the next American Revolution turns tables. But we can start right now without any fanfare at all, taking baby steps to regain our power, one friendly exchange at a time. We hear the stories of grief every day and it’s our friends who are telling them. How about, instead of just sympathizing and worrying that I might be next - which explains why I’m clinging to that $5,000 I’ve got stashed in the stranger’s bank - I respond in the most practical way possible? I take my hoarded wealth and put it in play. “Here, will this help?”

What have I got to lose? Well, my $5,000. So how much have I already lost to investments gone bad? To strangers? (As I write this I’m feeling a bit like I do when I wake up from a weird dream.) Why not lose mine to friends right here in my own community? But, of course, as we all know from experience, true no-strings-attached generosity always returns rewards that far exceed the value of what we offered. We do know that, because we already give and receive with each other that way. But now may be the time to start exchanging cash. It’s been the hold out. For obvious reasons. After all, it’s the symbol of what enslaves us, the currency of the middleman.

This is probably a worst-case scenario for our masters, that we make them and their paper power unnecessary. But if they aren’t going to be neighborly, why would we really want to have anything to do with them?

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Monday, February 14, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

Many Protests, One Revolution

by Jackie Smith

 

The massive rise of popular protests around the Middle East and North Africa coincided with the convening of the World Social Forum in Dakar, Senegal.  While the former were the subject of deserved and extensive media attention, the latter was virtually ignored by mainstream media. Yet all these gatherings of activists should be seen as part of a single, global movement that has been unfolding for over a decade.


While protesters in Egypt seek to topple corrupt and authoritarian rulers, activists at the World Social Forum have been doing the long-term and painstaking work of building a global movement to transform the basic structures of our world economy. It is those structures that enable the greed and brutality of individual leaders while maintaining the conditions against which Egyptians, Jordanians, Yemenis as well as Ecuadorans, Indians, and Detroiters are all resisting.

A new regime in Egypt will not fundamentally reduce youth unemployment. New leadership in Jordan will not solve the global climate crisis. Changes in local and national governments, without larger structural changes, will not end the land speculation, corporate monopolies, and militarization that plague communities worldwide.
While we must support the protests in the Middle East, it is vital that we see how they are connected to other struggles, including the massive protests last fall across Europe as well as the larger and more inclusive global justice movement that has created the World Social Forum process.

In a recent analysis of the Egyptian protests, Horace Campbell identifies the most important characteristics of these “21st century revolutions”:

1. The revolutions are made by ordinary people independent of vanguard parties and self-proclaimed revolutionaries;
    
2. They are network-based and are developing innovative tools and technologies to foster autonomous, horizontal, and cooperative networks;
    
3. They are led by ordinary people who have taken initiative and stepped up to contribute to the movement’s self-mobilization and its effort at self-emancipation;
    
4. They rely on and seek to build revolutionary non-violence for self-defense;
    
5. Their ultimate revolutionary idea is for a world where human beings can live in dignity and freedom from dictatorship and violence

What is most amazing about these features of protests in the Middle East and North Africa is that they have been part of popular struggles around the world for quite some time. Indeed, these characteristics can be found in large quantities at the World Social Forum in Dakar, and they have helped shape and sustain countless local and national social forums over the past decade.

As governments and empires use force to maintain their preferred world order, another world is being created and nurtured “from below.” We must recognize the many forms the revolution of the 21^st century takes and support it in all of its manifestations.

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Monday, February 14, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

How Wall Street Greed Fueled Egypt's Turmoil

by Paul Buchheit

 

Many reasons have been cited for the runaway food costs that have plagued Egypt's citizens: increased global demand, floods and drought in grain-producing nations, reduced supplies because of biofuel production, Federal Reserve policies. But it's becoming clear that our own dirty little secret -- risky financial derivatives, like those that spurred the U.S. mortgage crisis -- have bubbled up from the toxic Wall Street pavement as a major cause. We need to dig deeper into the dirt.

The richest 1% of Americans, unlike lower-income earners who spend mostly on consumer goods, can spend much of their annual trillion dollar windfall from tax cuts and deregulation on high-stakes investment opportunities. And this they have done, with great success and little regard to the global consequences.

One of their strategies is the "long-only" commodities index fund, by which speculators keep buying even when a rising market would normally motivate them to sell. This can put massive inflationary pressure on a commodity. According to 25-year trading veteran Daniel Dicker, these investment vehicles, which didn't even exist a few years ago, have caused such a market imbalance that it's nearly impossible to avoid a bubble in food prices.

Dicker remarks about the importance to financial traders to "capitalize on the supply shortages," and about the need by governments to stockpile basic commodities to prevent food emergencies. He also notes the speed with which these trades occur. Apparently it all happens too fast for a humanitarian response.

As a result, according to the New York Times, wheat has reached its highest price in 28 years, and the effects are being felt in Egypt and Haiti and other countries whose citizens live on a few dollars a day. Harper's Magazine editor Frederick Kaufman notes that Egypt's inflation rate on food has reached 17% PER MONTH.

The financial players, says Kaufman, are investing in "imaginary wheat." In 2008 the publication Price Perceptions said, "index funds alone now own about 1 billion bushels of Chicago wheat compared to annual US production of about 500 million." 'Fantasy finance,' as Les Leopold calls it.

Not surprisingly, unregulated free market defenders deny all this. The Economist says, "there is little empirical evidence that investors cause more than fleeting distortions to commodity prices." Resource Investor claimed in 2008 that while "commodity market speculation by long-only index funds has increased markedly...most commodity futures markets experienced an equally dramatic or even greater increase in selling by commercial hedgers."

But Frederick Kaufman counters that "speculators are outnumbering the physical hedgers by about 4 to 1 in these markets." Revenues from speculative trading at Goldman Sachs alone more than quintupled over the past two years. Way back in 2007 a Market Club Trader's Blog commented that "As money has flooded into this (Goldman Sachs Commodity Index), prices have continued higher."

In his February 4, 2011 Common Dreams essay "Food, Egypt and Wall Street," Institute for Policy Studies writer Robert Alvarez cited one of the main reasons for this sordid financial state of affairs, the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000: "Before this law, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) served as a cop on the beat, enforcing rules that prevent distortion of manipulation of prices beyond normal supply and demand. But Wall Street Banks and companies such as ENRON, and British Petroleum were determined to make a lot more money from speculation by exempting energy-derivative contracts and related swaps from government oversight."

Alvarez quotes noted hedge trader Michael McMasters: "This amounts to 'a form of electronic hoarding and greatly increases the inflationary effect of the market. It literally means starvation for millions of the world's poor.'"

We're letting a few thousand well-positioned financial experts fashion games of chance that earn them billions with other people's money. And, now, with other people's lives.