Dear Occupiers: A Letter from Anarchists

On the one hand, there’s Chris Berg and Sophie Mirabella. On the other, CrimethInc. “A two-sided flier intended to be folded down the middle, longways” is available from the conspirators’ website.

Dear Occupiers: A Letter from Anarchists
CrimethInc
October 7, 2011

Starting with the occupation of a park next to Wall Street on September 17, a new movement is spreading across the country in which people gather in public spaces in protest against social inequalities. We’ll present a full analysis of this phenomenon here shortly; in the meantime, here’s an open letter to the occupation movement, engaging with some of the issues that have arisen thus far. Please forward this widely and print out versions to distribute at the “Occupy” events!

Support and solidarity! We’re inspired by the occupations on Wall Street and elsewhere around the country. Finally, people are taking to the streets again! The momentum around these actions has the potential to reinvigorate protest and resistance in this country. We hope these occupations will increase both in numbers and in substance, and we’ll do our best to contribute to that.

Why should you listen to us? In short, because we’ve been at this a long time already. We’ve spent decades struggling against capitalism, organizing occupations, and making decisions by consensus. If this new movement doesn’t learn from the mistakes of previous ones, we run the risk of repeating them. We’ve summarized some of our hard-won lessons here.

Occupation is nothing new. The land we stand on is already occupied territory. The United States was founded upon the extermination of indigenous peoples and the colonization of their land, not to mention centuries of slavery and exploitation. For a counter-occupation to be meaningful, it has to begin from this history. Better yet, it should embrace the history of resistance extending from indigenous self-defense and slave revolts through the various workers’ and anti-war movements right up to the recent anti-globalization movement.

The “99%” is not one social body, but many. Some occupiers have presented a narrative in which the “99%” is characterized as a homogenous mass. The faces intended to represent “ordinary people” often look suspiciously like the predominantly white, law-abiding middle-class citizens we’re used to seeing on television programs, even though such people make up a minority of the general population.

It’s a mistake to whitewash over our diversity. Not everyone is waking up to the injustices of capitalism for the first time now; some populations have been targeted by the power structure for years or generations. Middle-class workers who are just now losing their social standing can learn a lot from those who have been on the receiving end of injustice for much longer.

The problem isn’t just a few “bad apples.” The crisis is not the result of the selfishness of a few investment bankers; it is the inevitable consequence of an economic system that rewards cutthroat competition at every level of society. Capitalism is not a static way of life but a dynamic process that consumes everything, transforming the world into profit and wreckage. Now that everything has been fed into the fire, the system is collapsing, leaving even its former beneficiaries out in the cold. The answer is not to revert to some earlier stage of capitalism—to go back to the gold standard, for example; not only is that impossible, those earlier stages didn’t benefit the “99%” either. To get out of this mess, we’ll have to rediscover other ways of relating to each other and the world around us.

Police can’t be trusted. They may be “ordinary workers,” but their job is to protect the interests of the ruling class. As long as they remain employed as police, we can’t count on them, however friendly they might act. Occupiers who don’t know this already will learn it firsthand as soon as they threaten the imbalances of wealth and power our society is based on. Anyone who insists that the police exist to protect and serve the common people has probably lived a privileged life, and an obedient one.

Don’t fetishize obedience to the law. Laws serve to protect the privileges of the wealthy and powerful; obeying them is not necessarily morally right—it may even be immoral. Slavery was legal. The Nazis had laws too. We have to develop the strength of conscience to do what we know is best, regardless of the laws.

To have a diversity of participants, a movement must make space for a diversity of tactics. It’s controlling and self-important to think you know how everyone should act in pursuit of a better world. Denouncing others only equips the authorities to delegitimize, divide, and destroy the movement as a whole. Criticism and debate propel a movement forward, but power grabs cripple it. The goal should not be to compel everyone to adopt one set of tactics, but to discover how different approaches can be mutually beneficial.

Don’t assume those who break the law or confront police are agents provocateurs. A lot of people have good reason to be angry. Not everyone is resigned to legalistic pacifism; some people still remember how to stand up for themselves. Police violence isn’t just meant to provoke us, it’s meant to hurt and scare us into inaction. In this context, self-defense is essential.

Assuming that those at the front of clashes with the authorities are somehow in league with the authorities is not only illogical—it delegitimizes the spirit it takes to challenge the status quo, and dismisses the courage of those who are prepared to do so. This allegation is typical of privileged people who have been taught to trust the authorities and fear everyone who disobeys them.

No government—that is to say, no centralized power—will ever willingly put the needs of common people before the needs of the powerful. It’s naïve to hope for this. The center of gravity in this movement has to be our freedom and autonomy, and the mutual aid that can sustain those—not the desire for an “accountable” centralized power. No such thing has ever existed; even in 1789, the revolutionaries presided over a “democracy” with slaves, not to mention rich and poor.

That means the important thing is not just to make demands upon our rulers, but to build up the power to realize our demands ourselves. If we do this effectively, the powerful will have to take our demands seriously, if only in order to try to keep our attention and allegiance. We attain leverage by developing our own strength.

Likewise, countless past movements learned the hard way that establishing their own bureaucracy, however “democratic,” only undermined their original goals. We shouldn’t invest new leaders with authority, nor even new decision-making structures; we should find ways to defend and extend our freedom, while abolishing the inequalities that have been forced on us.

The occupations will thrive on the actions we take. We’re not just here to “speak truth to power”—when we only speak, the powerful turn a deaf ear to us. Let’s make space for autonomous initiatives and organize direct action that confronts the source of social inequalities and injustices.

Thanks for reading and scheming and acting. May your every dream come true.

About @ndy

I live in Melbourne, Australia. I like anarchy. I don't like nazis. I enjoy eating pizza and drinking beer. I barrack for the greatest football team on Earth: Collingwood Magpies. The 2024 premiership's a cakewalk for the good old Collingwood.
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18 Responses to Dear Occupiers: A Letter from Anarchists

  1. Derek says:

    Maybe I’m just the ghost at the feast, but poorly-informed idealists piss me off. I can’t even conceive of being idealistic about something that has no properly-defined objectives.
    It’s like being really excited because a movie studio have promised that their next movie will be THE BEST MOVIE EVER, but that’s the only detail they’re willing to release.

  2. @ndy says:

    Ah c’mon Derek…

  3. LeftInternationalist says:

    Y’know, I usually have an eloquent point flowing straight from my head to the keyboard, and as my fingers fly like a beautiful dove across the keyboard, I generally tend to form phrases of wonderful significance and wit. But this time, I’m afraid, I must go for the blunt, but truthful. FUCK YOU CHRIS BERG. You dumbass right wing pygmy. Go spill your sickness somewhere else- and try to write in a fashion that doesn’t resemble the text version of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I know ‘solidarity’ is a word Chris could never understand, but the people in Egypt and elsewhere actually involved in toppling dictators have been expressing support and solidarity for the Occupy Wall Street movement, just as they did for the Wisconsin Rebellion (Part I, that is) because they share a fundamental desire for freedom, justice, equality, solidarity, and emancipation, whether in a big step or small step, locally or internationally- because liberty respects no borders. And neither do plutocrats, autocrats, and the legions of intellectual courtiers who act both as an apologist for them and for a global system premised on theft, violence, exploitation, class rule, authoritarian states, and market madness. These people struggling for their rights are supportive of the ideas, structures, institutions and movements which could facilitate greater freedom- and clearly, neoliberalism (as an ideology and as a reality) is failing to deliver, on a massive scale.

  4. @ndy says:

    I think you’re being a bit harsh on Berg. Sure, he’s a bit silly, but really, he’s just doing his job.

  5. LeftInternationalist says:

    Yeah I understand. But if he’s working at IPA, one must assume he has an ideological commitment to that institution and its particular ideas- and his article is clear evidence of that. The IPA is an institution that denounces people like us not merely as dreamers, but as rabid totalitarians intent on imposing our ideas upon an unwilling public. And gives ideological legitimacy and support to policies which attack living standards and basic human dignity. If they could, they would just privatise democracy altogether, and strip away the last remaining shreds of democracy and make it more like it actually is- those with the power and wealth monopolise the political outcomes. It just seems a little strange that as all the ideological pretensions of his particular belief system fall apart and prove themselves to be hypocritical and inconsistent even on the basis of what this ideology views as important (i.e. DRILL BABY, DRILL!) he merely chooses to reinforce his ideology rather than question some basic assumptions, which is the mindset of a Stalinist. And this is no longer a nice debate over ideas for a more free, cooperative, democratic and libertarian society- we’re talking about pure survival now, if we don’t do something about this environmental crisis. And people like him are going to oppose this every step of the way, so we must argue against them armed with superior knowledge, better intellectual/practical justifications, and in moral appeals. If we don’t win out, I cannot imagine the world we live in being a good place for anyone, even for the billionaires and bureaucrats, to live.

  6. @ndy says:

    One would assume that Berg’s opinions are largely in accord with his employers’, yes. Even so, I think getting at all upset by his stated views is kinda pointless. That is, the IPA and other such organisations are essentially propaganda units, concerned with large-scale opinion management: a permanent feature of the contemporary political landscape. The shallowness of their (and his) critique may be apparent, but then that’s kinda typical eh. Alex Carey’s Taking the Risk Out of Democracy (UNSW Press, 1995 [audio extract]) is slightly dated now, but provides some good background material on the role of orgs like the IPA, and esp their development in response to the turmoil of early 20th C US. (Sharon Beder has also written some useful material on the subject of corporate propaganda.) Finally, I think Chris prolly does understand the word ‘solidarity’, only his version is extended chiefly to fellow yuppies: a perfectly reasonable attitude for him to take.

  7. @ndy says:

    FROM OCCUPATION TO EXPROPRIATION!
    by First of May Anarchist Alliance and The Utopian
    Oct 10, 2011

    Build on the Anarchist and Revolutionary Potentialities of the Occupy Wall Street Movement.

    The following is a joint statement from the First of May Anarchist Alliance and The Utopian: A Journal of Anarchism and Libertarian Socialism.

    1. The ongoing Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, encampment, and related actions around the country are a significant development. These events may well be the beginning of a 1960s style movement of great potential. Because of its focus on the economic crisis, the financial/corporate shenanigans that contributed to it, and, most important, jobs, the movement has the potential to strike a resonant chord in the hearts of millions of people who have been slammed by the events of the last few years and who are aching to do something about them. This is particularly true of those who have lost their homes and/or their jobs, as well as those who have little prospect of finding work.

    2. The Occupy Wall Street movement, like the movement of the 60s in its early stages, is anarchistic, that is, unconsciously anarchist in how it is structured and what its underlying goals are, in spite of the liberal populism of its rhetoric and explicit demands. The key question is: Will the movement be corralled by liberal, reformist, or authoritarian forces or will it develop in a self-consciously revolutionary and anarchist direction? The example of the 60s, in which the radical wing of the movement abandoned its original libertarian principles and embraced an array of authoritarian Marxist-Leninist politics, is instructive here. We must do our best to make sure something like that does not happen again.

    3. Consequently, we believe it is crucial for all anarchists to participate in this movement and work to build it. We also think it is essential that we explicitly propagandize and organize for both anarchist methods of struggle and for an anti-authoritarian social vision/program. We urge all of our groupings, formal and informal, while remaining free to experiment in these matters, to recognize the need for some degree of ongoing coordination and, at critical moments, the effective concentration of our forces. Weakness and disorganization in this respect will allow important events and possibilities to pass us by as well as allow attacks on the autonomy of the movement to go unanswered.

    4. We should defend the movement’s aim to be as broad and as deep as possible, to reach out to individuals of all classes, while we concentrate on drawing in workers and poor people. We want to educate everybody about the strategic importance of building a movement concentrated in the working class. Toward this end, we welcome the participation of several major unions in the protests. Their presence helps to legitimize the occupation among wider layers of people and brings unionized workers into direct contact with others in the fight for justice and an alternative society. We support bringing those unions of which we are members into the struggle as one way of getting our co-workers involved. But we also need to highlight the danger that labor’s bureaucratic/reformist apparatuses will attempt to chain the movement to their political purposes, which are contrary to the spirit and aims of the Occupy Wall Street movement. We must be both creative and energetic in our efforts to foment a subversive consciousness among participants in the movement, and to generate independent organization and radical action by the workers themselves, both inside and outside the union structures.

    5. One of the strengths of the movement at present is its concentration on direct action. We should work to ensure that the movement retains this focus: demonstrations, occupations, and strikes, up to and including city-wide, state-wide, and national general strikes. These must remain the movement’s tactics of choice. We also need to struggle to turn the general distrust of and disgust with capitalist politics and politicians into a full-blown recognition that both the Democratic and Republican parties are controlled by, and beholden to, corporate interests, and are therefore our enemies.

    6. Finally, we should strive to convince the movement that the problem in the US today is not just Wall Street or the corporations or the fact that the economic system is somehow being “gamed” or “rigged” by tricky selfish individuals. We need to explain that the cause of the crisis is the capitalist system itself, a system in which production is carried on only when it results in profits, the vast majority of which go to the tiny elite that runs the country. Correspondingly, we should work to persuade the movement that its ultimate aim should be the radical democratization of our entire society, in other words, a revolution in which the vast majority of people seize control of the economy and the country as a whole from the rich and disperse power and direct control of all aspects of social life as widely as possible. As a result, we should propose and support radical demands that both point in this direction and unite the broadest sectors of the population.

  8. Derek says:

    Hmmm… your insidious logic and charming videos have melted my heart, @ndy. What say I put the cynicism aside until after society collapses? As long as I’ll still be allowed to be grumpy after the revolution, I’ll consider it “my” revolution, too. But I’ll keep Chris Berg as a pet and have him review Hungarian literature in my basement.

  9. @ndy says:

    I think Chris would quite enjoy that Derek. Certainly, as long as you don’t murder and/or torture him–and with no college loan or mortgage to repay–he’ll have nothing to complain about. In fact, he may even volunteer to write a thesis on the subject of Why Sitting In Basements Reviewing Hungarian Literature Is Not An Affront To Freedom But Its Essential Precondition.

  10. @ndy says:

    NB. Many people imagine living in a basement must spark great social revolts. In the past few years, growth in building approvals in the Middle East has been slow but still among the highest in the world. Middle Eastern builders are angry about rising damp, not student debt and other people’s salaries. By comparing themselves with the Arab Greenhouse, all the Occupy Wall Street crowd demonstrate is that people in the First World have nothing like the problems of those living under floors in the Third.

  11. Derek says:

    Oh, @ndy. You crack me up. In that case, I’ll keep him in the wardrobe to alphabetise my collection of death masks of the 19th Century poets.

  12. LeftInternationalist says:

    Zizek at Occupy Wall Street! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEUZNfOtPlE I knew what was missing from this protest was a healthy dose of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marxist theory.

  13. @ndy says:

    Thanks for the link.

    Berg’s US kameraden are even moar upset it seems:

    Occupy Wall Street is attracting increasingly hysterical and violent reaction from the right-wing media. A column by editorialist Nolan Finley in the Detroit News vilified the protesters as a “menagerie of malcontents” and a “freak show” whose aim was “the destruction of capitalism.” Finley issued a thinly disguised justification for forcible repression, smearing the demonstrators as anti-Semitic and “violent,” although all the violence has been inflicted by police on peaceful protesters.

    In Washington, an ultra-right “journalist” working for The American Spectator took things a step further, infiltrating a protest near the Smithsonian Institution and posing as a protester, then breaking into the museum and provoking security guards there to open fire with pepper spray.

    Patrick Howley, an assistant editor with the magazine, wrote online, “As far as anyone knew I was part of this cause—a cause that I had infiltrated the day before in order to mock and undermine in the pages of The American Spectator.” He had the nerve to criticize the protesters because they did not follow his lead and make a general assault on the museum.

    The magazine later revised his account and took out the admission that he had joined the protest in order to discredit it.

    Still, I think critics are being a little harsh on Howley.

  14. LeftInternationalist says:

    For amusing banter on the American Spectator incident, listen to this episode of Citizen Radio http://wearecitizenradio.com/2011/10/11/20111011-reporters-funded-by-vulture-capitalist-smear-occupy-wall-street-karl-rove-vs-koch-brothers/ Well, at least I have the name for my new band. Menagerie of Malcontents! With their collection of famous hits: Tahrir, Tahrir! The Dance of the Anticapitalists. Zizekian Ontology. The Anarchist Who Knew Too Much. Gilles Deleuze’s Dead. The Mad Marx. And, of course, The Brushy Beard of Bakunin.

  15. LeftInternationalist says:

    Also, probably the best podcast gem I’ve ever found bored on the internet: The Diet Soap Podcast. The guy who made it is obviously very influenced by the Situationists, and topics range from anarchism, Marxism, Pakistan and the US, ecology, String Theory, the nature of democracy, philosophy, German Idealism, psychoanalysis and psychedelics, capitalist crisis, and what happens after the revolution. I cannot recommended it highly enough- it is a sustainable and intellectually engaging show.

  16. Paul Justo says:

    So you a Noamist/Chomskyite now Andy? Or just a case of the parson’s egg – that he is good in parts.

  17. @ndy says:

    I’m a slack bastard Paul.

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