Deric Shannon, Anthony Nocella II, John Asimakopoulos

November 16, 2011

Over the last couple of months we’ve finished this book while watching a new global phenomenon evolve. Occupation isn’t typically referred to as a movement, but a tactic. Yet people have begun referring to the “Occupy Movement”—a movement whose primary concerns are the inequalities that are endemic to capitalist society. That is, there has never been a historical moment under capitalism that has not been typified by the wealthy largely owning and operating the world at the expense of the rest of us and this series of attempts at taking (and keeping for periods of time) public space seem aimed against exactly those organizing principles. Anarchists argue that there is nothing new in these unequal arrangements—although in a time of capitalist crisis perhaps those large-scale inequalities are exacerbated, waking people up who were previously sleeping to new possibilities. Interestingly, this movement, which began in countries like Tunisia, Egypt, Greece, and Spain and was carried into the United States by a loose collection of folks dubbed by Rolling Stone “anarchists and radicals with nothing but sleeping bags,” has gone global.

Within these various occupations one can see principles at work that are directly at odds with the present society. People come together into groups to discuss issues in assemblies where we usually remain alienated from one another—sometimes even frightened of strangers, our neighbors, and even at times our friends and loved ones. People are sharing resources within the encampments, freely distributing food, water, and other supplies where usually we are forced to purchase those things with money accessed through work. People are doing the “dirty work” of cleaning, cooking, and other menial tasks voluntarily and are acknowledged for their labor where we typically threaten a segment of society with starvation if they don’t do this work or routinely ignore that it is, in fact, work for many people who clean homes, do laundry, cook, raise children, and so on. People are innovating—at Occupy Wall Street, after Bloomberg took the protesters’ power generators, new generators were made from bicycles—and the reward for that innovation is the satisfaction of mutual aid where we are told that we need incentives in the form of wealth for innovation to exist.

But we also have seen other organizing principles at work.

Last weekend a number of the occupations were forcibly removed by the police. The reports of people being maced, beaten, stripped, searched, prodded—in a word, governed—are ubiquitous. The state has trashed thousands of dollars of tents, sleeping bags, cooking equipment, and perhaps most striking, thousands of books carefully organized into a library at Zucotti Park, bringing to mind scenes from Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (apparently ideas are dangerous after all).They’ve also destroyed those meeting points where people gathered to talk about ideas, debated the best ways forward, and engaged in the messy process of collective engagement in life without the state and capital as mediators within our social lives—even if the context was limited.

We might see this as a metaphor for our future lives. Anarchists argue that no amount of tinkering with capitalism is going to make it sustainable or bearable. No amount of toying with the mechanisms of the state are going to make it desirable. And there is no way that the diffuse and complex arrangements of domination in our institutions, culture, and our very selves can be overcome without also dismantling the state and capitalism.

So we might learn lessons from the occupation movement, whether it sustains, wanes, or changes form. First, capitalist austerity should demonstrate to everyone beyond the shadow of a doubt now that the state isn’t going to regulate capitalism to our benefit. Even “gains” that we fight for in the form of demands on the state can be taken from us as quickly as they are granted by our rulers. We keep nothing that we cannot take ourselves and, importantly, defend (as the police batons around the world have shown time and time again, particularly over the course of the last few years as the crisis has set in and an increasing number of the dispossessed have risen up in response).

Second, there is radical potential in coming together to talk. This doesn’t mean that we can talk domination away, but it does mean that capitalist society is alienating and isolating and a part of ending capitalism is ending our isolation. As we said in the introduction to this collection, “economics” presents a problem for anarchists and the relationship isn’t easy—particularly as “economics” typically assumes the separation of production and consumption from the rest of social life as some specialized sphere. But clearly capitalism, and its attendant individualist ethos, creates an alienated and isolated social body. Experiences of community, and particularly communities of resistance standing up to the state and capital, contain possibilities for building new social forms on our own terms.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, these social forms can stick if they’re not left at the public assemblies, but are diffused throughout our everyday lives. This is already being experimented with by members of various occupations and is, perhaps, what most people mean when they refer to “occupation” as a tactic. Groups connected with local movements are beginning to help protect the homes of others with mortgages being foreclosed in places like Minneapolis, Cleveland, and New York City. In Chapel Hill, a local group took a downtown building for a short period of time, complete with possible plans for using the abandoned space for local shows, a free medical clinic, a library, and more before they were violently ejected by police. Similarly, on the coattails of a successful general strike in Oakland, a group attempted to take a vacant building but was fought back by the police. Workers in Oakland, during the general strike, took and shut down the local port. Likewise, over the last few years, occupations of school buildings have become common actions in disparate places such as Berkeley, Athens, Santiago, London, Paris, New York City.

So what if we refused to stop at meeting in assemblies and camping in public squares? What might it look like if we began occupying places within our daily lives—our homes, our workplaces, our schools? What if we began taking space and food and water and distributed them freely, refusing to allow the conventions of the economy to mediate those activities for us? Indeed, since anarchists argue that we don’t need experts and bureaucrats to run our affairs and that we can create life on our own terms, the diffusion of these occupations into daily life can give us a glimpse of a world that might be and could possibly point to post-capitalist alternatives as a process out of capitalism and into a new and unwritten future.

We might look at these two different organizing methods as a crossroads. In one direction is the police truncheon, the tear gas, thousands of pairs of zip-tie handcuffs, police vans filled with the bodies of anyone with the audacity to challenge the power of the state and capital. In the other direction is an unwritten future being created in the present of assemblies, mutual aid, cooperation, and an end to the isolation and alienation that come from an economy and a social world built for working instead of living.

We have a world to win. For the occupation of daily life!