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[from the ufpj-activist mailing list]<br>
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<blockquote type="cite">
<div><b>Subject:</b> <b>Throwing Out the Master's Tools and
Building a Better House:</b><br>
<br>
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<blockquote type="cite">
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 5pt 0in; text-align:
center;" align="center"><span style="font-size: 11pt;
font-family: Baskerville;"><b>Throwing Out the
Master's Tools and Building
a Better House:</b></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 5pt 0in; text-align:
center;" align="center"><span style="font-size: 10pt;
font-family: Baskerville;"><b>No Room for Violence
in the Occupy
Revolution<span style=""> </span></b></span><span
style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Baskerville;"><i>Rebecca
Solnit</i></span><span style="font-size: 10pt;
font-family: Baskerville;"></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 5pt 0in; text-align:
center;" align="center"><span style="font-family:
Baskerville;"><b>Violence Is Conventional</b></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 5pt 0in;"><span
style="font-family: Baskerville;">Violence is what
the
police use. It's what the state uses. If we want a
revolution, it's because we
want a better world, because we think we have a
bigger imagination, a more
beautiful vision. So we're not violent; we're not
like them in crucial ways.
When I see a New York City policeman pepper-spray
already captive young women
in the face, I am disgusted; I want things to be
different. And that
pepperspraying incident, terrible though it was for
the individuals, did not
succeed in any larger way. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 5pt 0in;"><span
style="font-family: Baskerville;">In fact, seen on
Youtube
(704,737 times for one posted version) and widely
spread, it helped make Occupy
Wall Street visible and sympathetic to mainstream
viewers. The movement grew
tremendously after that. The incident demonstrated
the moral failure of the
police and demonstrated that violence is also weak.
It can injure, damage,
destroy, kill, but it can't coerce the will of the
people, whether it's a
policeman assaulting unarmed young women or the US
Army in Vietnam or Iraq. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 5pt 0in;"><span
style="font-family: Baskerville;">Imagine that some
Occupy
activists had then beaten up the cop. That would
have seemed to justify him in
the eyes of many; it would've undermined the moral
standing of our side. And
then what? Moral authority was also that young
Marine veteran, Shamar Thomas,
chewing out thirty or so New York cops in what
became a Youtube clip viewed
2,652,037 times so far. He didn't fight them; he
told them that what they were
doing is wrong and dishonorable. And brought the
nation along with him. Which
violence wouldn't do. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 5pt 0in; text-align:
center;" align="center"><span style="font-family:
Baskerville;"><b>Violence Is Weak</b></span><span
style="font-family: Baskerville;"></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 5pt 0in;"><span
style="font-family: Baskerville;">As Jonathan Schell
points out in his magnificent book <i>The
Unconquerable World: Power,
Nonviolence, and the Will of the People,</i></span><span
style="font-family: Baskerville;"> violence is what
the state uses when its other powers have
failed, when it is already losing. In using violence
the state often loses its
moral authority and its popular support. That's why
sometimes their visible
violence feeds our victory, tragic though the impact
may be. It's also telling
that when the FBI or other government agencies
infiltrate a movement or an
activist group, they seek to undermine it by egging
it on to more violence. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 5pt 0in;"><span
style="font-family: Baskerville;">The state would
like us
to be violent. Violence as cooptation tries to make
us more like them, and if
we're like them they win twice -- once because being
unlike them is our goal and
again because then we're then easier to imprison,
brutalize, marginalize, etc.
We have another kind of power, though the term
nonviolence only defines what it
is not; some call our power <i>people power</i></span><span
style="font-family: Baskerville;">. It works. It's
powerful. It's changed and it's changing the
world. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 5pt 0in;"><span
style="font-family: Baskerville;">The government and
mainstream-to-right media often create fictions of
our violence, from the myth
that protesters were violent (beyond property
damage) in Seattle in 1999 to the
myth of spitting in returning soldiers' faces in the
Vietnam era to generally
smearing us as terrorists. If we were violent, we'd
be conventionally dangerous
and the authorities could justify repressing us. In
fact, we're
unconventionally dangerous, because we're not
threatening physical violence but
the transformation of the system (and its violence).
That is so much more
dangerous to them, which is why they have to lie
about (or just cannot
comprehend) the nature of our danger. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 5pt 0in;"><span
style="font-family: Baskerville;">So when episodes
of
violence break out as part of our side in a
demonstration, an uprising, a
movement, I think of it as a sabotage, a corruption,
a coercion, a
misunderstanding, or a mistake, whether it's a paid
infiltrator or a clueless
dude. Here I want to be clear that property damage
is not necessarily violence.
The firefighter breaks the door to get the people
out of the building. But the
husband breaks the dishes to demonstrate to his wife
that he can and may also
break her. It's violence displaced onto the
inanimate as a threat to the
animate. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 5pt 0in;"><span
style="font-family: Baskerville;">Quietly
eradicating
experimental GMO crops or pulling up mining claim
stakes is generally like the
firefighter. Breaking windows during a big
demonstration is more like the
husband. I saw the windows of a Starbucks<span
style="">
</span>and a Niketown broken in downtown Seattle
after nonviolent direct action
had shut the central city and the World Trade
Organization ministerial down. I
saw scared-looking workers and knew that the CEOs
and shareholders were not
going to face that turbulence and they sure were not
going to be the ones to
clean it up. Economically it meant nothing to them.
</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 5pt 0in; text-align:
center;" align="center"><span style="font-family:
Baskerville;"><b>We Are Already Winning</b></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 5pt 0in;"><span
style="font-family: Baskerville;">The powers that be
are already
scared of the Occupy movement and not because of
tiny acts of violence. They
are scared because right now we speak pretty well
for the 99%. And because we
set out to change the world and it's working. The
president of Russia warmed at
the G20 Summit a week or so ago, "The reward system
of shareholders and
managers of financial institution should be changed
step by step. Otherwise the
'Occupy Wall street' slogan will become fashionable
in all developed
countries." That's fear. And capitulation. And New
York Times columnist
Paul Krugman opened a recent column thus:
"Inequality is back in the news,
largely thanks to Occupy Wall Street". We have set
the agenda and framed the
terms, and that's already a huge victory. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 5pt 0in;"><span
style="font-family: Baskerville;">This movement is
winning. It's
winning by being broad and inclusive, by emphasizing
what we have in common and
bridging differences between the homeless, the poor,
those in freefall, the fiscally
thriving but outraged, between generations, races<span
style=""> </span>and nationalities and between
longtime activists and
never-demonstrated-before newcomers. It's winning by
keeping its eyes on the
prize, which is economic justice and direct
democracy, and by living out that
direct democracy through assemblies and other means
right now. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 5pt 0in;"><span
style="font-family: Baskerville;">It's winning
through people power
direct-action tactics, from global marches to
blockades to many hundreds of
Occupations.<span style=""> </span>It's winning
through
the creativity of the young, from the 22-year-old
who launched Move Your Money
Day to the 26-year-old who started the We Are the
99% website. And by tactics
learned from Argentina's 2001 revolution of general
assemblies and <i>politica
afectiva</i></span><span style="font-family:
Baskerville;">, the politics of
affection. It's winning by becoming the space in
which we are civil society: of
human beings in the aggegate, living in public and
with trust and love for one
another. Violence is not going to be one of the
tools that works in this
movement.<span style=""> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 5pt 0in; text-align:
center;" align="center"><span style="font-family:
Baskerville;"><b>Violence Is Authoritarian</b></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 5pt 0in;"><span
style="font-family: Baskerville;">Bodily violence is
a
means of coercing others against their will by
causing pain, injury, or death.
It steals another's bodily integrity or very life as
property to dispose of as
the violator wishes. Since the majority in our
movement would never consent to
violent actions, such actions are also imposed on
our body politic against our
will. This is the very antithesis of anarchy as an
ideal in which no one is
coerced. If you wish to do something the great
majority of us oppose, do it on
your own. But these small violent bands attach
themselves to large nonviolent
movements, perhaps because there aren't any large
violent movements around. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 5pt 0in;"><span
style="font-family: Baskerville;">As Peter Marshall
writes
in his history of anarchism, <i>Demanding the
Impossible</i></span><span style="font-family:
Baskerville;">, "Indeed the word violence comes from
the
Latin <i>violare</i></span><span
style="font-family: Baskerville;"> and
etymologically means violation. Strictly speaking,
to act violently means to
treat others without respect".<span style=""> </span>A
violent revolution is therefore unlikely to bring
about any fundamental change
in human relations. Given the anarchists' respect
for the sovereignty of the
individual, in the long run it is non-violence and
not violence which is
implied by anarchist values. Many of us anarchists
are not ideological
pacifists; I'm more than fine with the ways the
Zapatistas rebels in southern
Mexico have defended themselves and notice how sadly
necessary it sometimes is,
and I sure wouldn't dictate what Syrians or Tibetans
may or may not do. But
petty violence in public in this country doesn't
achieve anything useful. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 5pt 0in; text-align:
center;" align="center"><span style="font-family:
Baskerville;"><b>Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of
Victory</b></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 5pt 0in;"><span
style="font-family: Baskerville;">In downtown
Oakland,
late on the evening of November 2 after a triumphant
and mostly nonviolent day
of mass actions, a building near Occupy Oakland's
encampment was seized, debris
was piled up as if to make barricades that were only
show barricades to set afire,
not defend, trash cans were set on fire, windows
broken, rocks thrown, and then
there were altercations with the police. If the goal
was to seize a building,
one witness pointed out, then seize it secretly, not
flamboyantly. The activity
around the seizure seemed intended to bait the
police into action. Which
worked; police are not hard to bait. Activists and
police were injured. What
was achieved?</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 5pt 0in;"><span
style="font-family: Baskerville;">Many other
activists
yelled at the brawlers because they felt that the
violence-tinged actions did
not represent them or the Occupy movement and put
them in danger. It was
appalling that the city of Oakland began, a week
earlier, by sending in
stormtrooper police before dawn rather than
negotiating about the fate of the
Occupy Oakland encampment. But it was ridiculous
that some people tried to get
the police to be violent all over again. And it was
tragic that others bore the
brunt of that foray, including the grievously
injured veteran Kayvan
Sabeghi -- another veteran, a week after Scott
Olson. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 5pt 0in;"><span
style="font-family: Baskerville;">Earlier this fall,
the
publishing group Crimethinc issued a screed in
justification of violence that's
circulated widely in the Occupy movement. It's
titled "Dear Occupiers: A Letter
from Anarchists," though most anarchists I know
would disagree with almost
everything that follows. Midway through it declares,
"Not everyone is resigned
to legalistic pacifism; some people still remember
how to stand up for
themselves. Assuming that those at the front of
clashes with the authorities
are somehow in league with the authorities is not
only illogical". It is
typical of privileged people who have been taught to
trust the authorities and
fear everyone who disobeys them." </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 5pt 0in;"><span
style="font-family: Baskerville;">If
nonviolence/people power is
privilege, explain this eyewitness account from
Oakland last Wednesday, posted
on the Occupy Oakland site by Kallista Patridge: "<span
style="color: rgb(38, 38, 38);">By
the time we got to the University building, a
brave man was blocking the door
screaming "Peaceful Protest! This is my city, and
I don't want to destroy
it!" He cracked his knuckles, ready to take on an
attack, his face
splattered in paint from the Whole Foods fiasco
[in which downtown Oakland's
branch of the chain store was spraypainted and
smashed up based on a rumor that
workers were told they'd be fired if they took the
day off for the General
Strike]. Behind the doors were men in badges. I
was now watching a black man
shield cops from a protest. The black flag group
began pointing out those
attempting to stop them, chanting 'The peace
police must be stopped,'<span style=""> </span>and
I was, personally, rather disgusted
by the strategy of comparing peacefully pissed
people to police"." </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 5pt 0in;"><span
style="font-family: Baskerville; color: rgb(38, 38,
38);">This account is by a
protestor who also noted in downtown Oakland that
day a couple of men with
military-style haircuts and brand new clothes put
bandannas over their faces
and began to smash stuff. She thinks that
infiltrators were part of the
property destruction and maybe instigated it, and
Copwatch's posted video seems
to document police infiltrators at Occupy Oakland.
One way to be impossible to
sabotage is to be clearly committed to tactics that
the state can't coopt. If
an infiltrator wants to nonviolently blockade or
march or take out the garbage,
well, that's one more of us. If an infiltrator
sabotages us by recruiting for
mayhem, that's a comment on what those tactics are
good for. <span style=""> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 5pt 0in; text-align:
center;" align="center"><span style="font-family:
Baskerville; color: rgb(38, 38, 38);"><b>What
Actually Works</b></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 5pt 0in;"><span
style="font-family: Baskerville;">The language of
Crimethinc is empty machismo peppered with insults.
And just in this tiny
snippet, incoherent. People who don't like violence
are not necessarily fearful
or obedient; people power and nonviolence are
strategies that are not the same
as the ideology pacifism. To shut down the whole
central city of Seattle and
the World Trade Organization ministerial meeting on
November 30, 1999,<span style=""> </span>or the
business district of San
Francisco for three days in March of 2003, or the
Port of Oakland on November
2, 2011 -- through people power -- is one hell of a
great way to stand up. It works.
And it brings great joy and sense of power to those
who do it. It's how the
world gets changed these days. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 5pt 0in;"><span
style="font-family: Baskerville;">Crimethinc, whose
logo
is its name inside a bullet, doesn't actually cite
examples of violence
achieving anything in our recent history. Can you
name any? The anonymous
writers don't seem prepared to act, just tell others
to (as do the two most
high-profile advocates of violence on the left). And
despite the smear quoted
above that privileged people oppose them, theirs is
the language of privilege.
White kids can do crazy shit and get slapped on the
wrist or maybe slapped
around for it; I have for a quarter century walked
through police lines like
they were tall grass; people of color face far more
dire consequences. When
white youth try to bring the police down on a
racially diverse movement -- well,
it's not exactly what the word solidarity means to
most of us.<span style=""> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 5pt 0in;"><span
style="font-family: Baskerville;">Another Occupy
Oakland
witness, a female street medic, wrote of the
ill-conceived November 2
late-night antics, "<span style="color: rgb(14, 14,
14);">watching black bloc-ers run
from the cops and not protect the camp their
actions had endangered, an action
which ultimately left behind many mentally ill
people, sick people, street
kids, and homeless folks to defend themselves
against the police onslaught was
disturbing and disgusting in ways I can't even
articulate because I am still so
angry at the empty bravado and cowardice that I
saw." She adds, "I want those
kids to be held accountable to the damage that
they did, damage made possible
by their class and race privilege." And physical
fitness; Occupy Oakland's camp
includes children, older people, wheelchair users
and a lot of other people
less ready to run. </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 5pt 0in;"><span
style="font-family: Baskerville;">As Oakland
Occupier
Sunaura Taylor put it, "<span style="color: rgb(38,
38, 38);">A few people making decisions
that affect everyone else is not what revolution
looks like; it's what
capitalism looks like." </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 5pt 0in;"><span
style="font-family: Baskerville; color: rgb(14, 14,
14);"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 5pt 0in; text-align:
center;" align="center"><span style="font-family:
Baskerville;"><b>How We Defeated the Police</b></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 5pt 0in;"><span
style="font-family: Baskerville; color: rgb(14, 14,
14);">The
euphemism for violence is "diversity of tactics,"
perhaps because diversity has
been a liberal-progressive buzzword these past
decades. But diversity does not
mean that anything goes and that democratic
decisionmaking doesn't apply. If
you want to be part of a movement, treat the others
with respect; don't spring
unwanted surprises on them, particularly surprises
that sabotage their own
tactics -- and chase away the real diversity of the
movement. Most of us don't
want to be part of an action that includes those
tactics. </span><span style="font-family:
Baskerville;">If you want to fight the police, look
at who's
succeeded in changing their behavior: lawyers,
lawmakers, police watchdog
groups like Copwatch, investigative journalists
(including a friend of mine
whose work just put several New Orleans policemen in
prison for decades),
neighborhood patrols, community organizers,
grassroots movements, often two or
more players working together. You have to build.<span
style=""> </span><span style="color: rgb(14, 14,
14);"></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 5pt 0in;"><span
style="font-family: Baskerville;">The night after
the raid
on Oakland, the police were massed to raid Occupy
San Francisco. About two
thousand of us stood in and around the Occupy
encampment as helicoptors hovered.
Nonviolence trainers helped people prepare to
blockade. Because we had a little
political revolt against the Democratic money
machine ten years ago and began
to elect progressives who actually represent us
pretty well, five of our city
supervisors, the public defender, and a state
senator -- all people of color,
incidentally-- stood with us all night, vowing they
would not let this happen. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 5pt 0in;"><span
style="font-family: Baskerville;">We stood up. We
fought a
nonviolent battle against four hundred riot police
that was so effective the
police didn't even dare show up. That's people
power. The same day Occupy
Oakland took its campsite back, with people power,
and the black bloc kids were
reportedly part of the whole: they dismantled the
cyclone fencing panels and
stacked them up neatly. That's how Occupy San
Francisco won. And that's how
Occupy Oakland won. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 5pt 0in;"><span
style="font-family: Baskerville;">State troopers and
city
police police refused to break up the Occupy Albany
(New York) encampment,
despite the governor's and mayor's orders. Sometimes
the police can be swayed.
Not by violence, though. The master's tools won't
dismantle the master's house.
And they sure won't build a better house. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 5pt 0in; text-align:
center;" align="center"><span style="font-family:
Baskerville;"><b>People Power Shapes the World</b></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 5pt 0in;"><span
style="font-family: Baskerville;">Left violence
failed
miserably in the 1970s: the squalid and futile
violence in Germany and
Italy,<span style=""> </span>the delusional
Symbionese Liberation
Army murdering Marcus Foster, Oakland's first black
school superintendent, and
later gunning down a bystander mother of four in a
bank, the bumbling Weather
Underground accidentally blowing three of its
members up and turning the rest
into fugitives for a decade; all of them giving us a
bad name we've worked hard
to escape. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 5pt 0in;"><span
style="font-family: Baskerville;">Think of that
excruciating footage in Sam Green's <i>Weather
Underground </i></span><span style="font-family:
Baskerville;">documentary of the "days of rage,"
when a
handful of delusions-of-grandeur young white
radicals thought they'd do literal
battle with the Chicago police and thus inspire the
working class to rise up.
The police clobbered them; the working class was so
not impressed. If you want
to address a larger issue, getting overly entangled
with local police is a
great way to lose focus and support. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 5pt 0in;"><span
style="font-family: Baskerville;">In fact, the
powerful
and effective movements of the past sixty years have
been almost entirely
nonviolent. The Civil Rights Movement included the
Deacons for Defense, but the
focus of that smaller group was actually defense --
the prevention of violence
against nonviolent activists and the movement, not
offensive forays. Schell
points out that even the French and Russian
Revolutions were largely nonviolent
when it came to overthrowing the old regime; seizing
a monopoly of power to
form a new regime is when the blood really began to
flow. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 5pt 0in;"><span
style="font-family: Baskerville;">I think of the
Sandinista Revolution of 1979 as the last great
armed revolution, and it
succeeded because the guerrillas with guns who came
down from the mountains had
wide popular support. People power. People power
overthrew the Shah of Iran
that year, in a revolution that was hijacked by
authoritarians fond of
violence. In 1986 the Marcos regime of the
Philippines was overthrown by nonviolent
means, means so compelling the army switched sides
and refused to support the
Marcos regime. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 5pt 0in;"><span
style="font-family: Baskerville;">Armies don't do
that if
you shoot at them, generally (and if you really
defeated the police in
battle -- all the police, nationwide?--you'd face
the army). Since then dozens of
regimes, from South Africa to Hungary,
Czechoslovakia and Poland to Nepal to
Bolivia, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil and Tunisia have
been profoundly changed
through largely nonviolent means. There was
self-defense in the Deacons for
Defense mode in the Egyptian uprising this year, but
people power was the grand
strategy that brought out the millions and changed
the country. Armed struggle
was<span style=""> </span>part of the ongoing
resistance
in South Africa, but in the end people power and
international solidarity were
the fulcrom of change. The Zapatistas used violence
sparingly as a last resort,
but "our word is our weapon," they say, and they
used other tools in
preference, often and exquisitely.<span style="">
</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 5pt 0in;"><span
style="font-family: Baskerville;">The powerful and
effective movements of the past sixty years have
used the strategy of people
power. It works. It changes the world. It's changing
the world now. Join us. Or
don't join us. But please don't try to have it both
ways. </span></p>
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