Tonight, we are Insurgents

Posted on November 15, 2011

This morning at 1am local time the NYPD descended on Liberty Plaza like a heavily armored hoard of locusts and in the space of a few hours destroyed the main #occupy camp, including thousands of peoples belongings, the People’s Library with over 5,000 donated books, solar panels and generators, and the accumulated dreams of a nation. This was on the heels of yesterdays raids of the occupations in Oakland and Portland, and a dozen other raids on camps around the country. This week it was made painfully clear to the protesters and – I hope – to the vast majority of Americans that supported us exactly who the real “occupiers” are.

The thing is, as many others have pointed out, #Occupy was mis-named from the beginning. You cannot occupy what you already own and as the song says, this land is my land, this land is your land. The real occupiers are not the thousands of anarchists, conservatives, marxists, libertarians, progressives, liberals, and independents who came out for an hour or a month to speak and be present. The real occupying army in America is the Police departments which serve the elites and always have.

It is time for us to to realize, we are not Occupiers, we are insurgents.

In all likelihood the folks here in NY (I’m writing this from lower Manhattan which is a virtual police state at the moment) will attempt to reclaim the plaza and rebuild, as we did in Oakland. They may even succeed for a while, as we did in Oakland. But ultimately – and I may be wrong – I don’t see rebuilding the camps as a viable long term strategy. The issue is that, unlike our friends in Egypt, Americans are overwhelmingly (some would say pathologically) committed to nonviolence as the only valid means of protest. That means they will not organize to actively fight back against the police and defend the camps the way the Egyptians did. Like it or not, that’s the reality on the ground. And, as our friends in Egypt pointed out to us, the Occupation model is based on the assumption that after seizing a visible public place you hold it and defend it until your demand is met. If we can’t or wont’ do that, public Occupations are not going to work for us long term. Since Americans are not ready yet to adopt armed resistance on anything even remotely resembling a large scale that means we have to find another tactic. The Occupations have been a tremendous success and done an amazing job of launching this movement but we cannot remain married to one half of the strategy while rejecting the other out of hand. And the fact is that every time the police attack us violently our movement grows so remaining strictly nonviolent may even make tactical sense, at least for now – assuming that we can adapt our other tactics to fit the limitations imposed by nonviolence.

Fortunately, as the Vietnamese proved to an arrogant empire a generation ago and as the Afghani’s are reminding us, one does not need to hold territory to win a war. The Class War that we are fighting is a real war and Guerrilla tactics can be as effective for us as they have been for people defending their homelands from occupation throughout history.

As to the form those actions can take, we need a beautiful diverse flowering of tactics in order to win. Strikes, sit-ins, flash mobs, temporary occupations (3 days, a week at a time, no more) that can move from place to place, direct action of all kinds. Our only limit is our imaginations. We have tools to coordinate and communicate that popular movements a generation or a century ago could never have dreamed of. Let’s use them.

Today, our leadership is crowdsourced, our ideas are networked, our reach is global. We are – literally – everywhere. We are no longer tied to a single geographic location, a single action, a leader to jail. That model belonged to the old methods of organizing where we relied on labor-intensive flyering and phone trees to gather our supporters together for large-scale shows of force (what else is a protest march or rally but a show of force – or potential force?). We can gather a hundred thousand people for a nonviolent strike – as we did in Oakland – and the city responded by waiting a week and evicting us again. Clearly such tactics have limits. That’s not to say they are not potentially useful, but we must recognize their limits and supplement them with other tactics to build our strengths and attack our enemies where they are weak.

I think it’s also critically important that we maintain our GA’s at least once a week. The GA is the heart and soul of this movement and in many ways it’s most radical aspect since the GA, by using direct democracy and real representation, provides a direct challenge to the legitimacy of State power. As I said in an open letter to Mayor Quan and the Oakland city council, the people of Oakland know that the only truly democratic bodies in Oakland – or anywhere else in north America – are the General Assemblies. We need to expand them and build them into real alternative institutions. A dual power strategy is critical to legitimizing our movement and de-legitimizing the actions of the jackals that hound us and the parasites they serve.

I want to see our GA’s continue in regular locations where people can find them easily (In Oakland Oscar Grant Plaza works just fine and the city has said they won’t mess with us if we don’t attempt to camp there) *at least* once a week to help anchor the movement and provide a physical location that people can drop in on and see each other. We’re social animals, we need to get that physical rush that comes with walking into a space full of thousands of friends and allies.

I want to see protest camps spring up at a moments notice only to evaporate when the riot cops show up (after the money to send them out has already been spent) and re-appear the next day in a new location.

I want to see the 3 million+ homeless folks in america self-organizing camps and using GA’s to run them, with support and solidarity from our movement.

I want to see flash mobs in every downtown on black friday, on wall street itself, at every debate during the ongoing election season, and everywhere the capitalists gather to celebrate their domination.

I want to see creative expressions of resistance everywhere – murals (legal and otherwise) popping up all across this occupied country.

I want police to find themselves shunned and ostracized wherever they go until they turn in their badges and find real jobs.

I want to see lockdowns, sit ins, and direct action of all kinds directed at the criminals on Wall Street.

I want to see workers refuse to clean or cook or serve bankers and wall street parasites. Let them do their own laundry, cook their own meals, clean their own offices.

I want a million acts of resistance in a million places, followed by a million more.

Our resistance will be everywhere. We will Rise like Lions after slumber. And WE WILL WIN.