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<DIV class=entry-date>April 05, 2012
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<DIV class=subheadlinestyle>The “99% Spring” Brings Co-optation into Full
Bloom</DIV>
<H1 class=article-title>Counter-Insurgency as Insurgency</H1>
<DIV class=mainauthorstyle>by MIKE KING</DIV>
<DIV class=main-text>
<P>As the Occupy movement begins to come into full bloom across the country this
Spring – with plans for massive days of action and demonstrations on May
1<SUP>st</SUP>, new campaigns for transit justice on both coasts, continued
organizing against foreclosures and police violence, and a slight chance of a
bank protest or two – there are several weeds sprouting in the prefigurative
garden. Not least of which is the “99% Spring” campaign, led and funded by
every corner of the modern Democratic Party machine. One might ask
themselves “What is wrong with non-violent direct action?” or “How effective
could the ‘Democratic Party machine’ actually be, anyway?” There is
nothing inherently wrong with civil disobedience and it surely remains to be
seen if this campaign can train 10,000 people let alone the 100,000 they plan
to. The campaign director at MoveOn.org, Ilyse Hogue, an
organization that seems to be the key player in the 99% Spring, has recently
written in the Nation that “Occupy is Dead” and that the 99% Spring will succeed
where Occupy has failed – while mimicking their slogans. What they lack in
actual knowledge of Occupy’s health, they certainly make up for in co-optive
obviousness. Fertilized by decades of expanding inequality, Occupy needs
to bloom and transform in the coming months, without getting mired in conflict
with the various failed institutions of the organizational Left. However,
those flowers of resistance will have to rise above the weeds of a dying order,
including the 99% Spring dandelions.</P>
<P>The <A
onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://the99spring.com']);"
href="http://the99spring.com/who-we-are/">organizations</A> comprising this
effort are a litany of individual trade unions, both trade federations,
environmental groups, and a range of non-profits, including groups who have done
very respectable work, such as Jobs with Justice. There likely isn’t
unified intent on behalf of every actor in this campaign. In Oakland, I
have heard of some local participants in the training having serious
reservations about the effort, but are participating in it nonetheless.
The (potential) intent of these organizations, or the people they will train who
will choose to lie down and get arrested, over some other tactics, isn’t the
issue. What matters is the effect of this effort in the existing political
context of counter-insurgency, the dismissive, patronizing and divisive terms in
which this is being put, and the timing – right before the presidential
election. If successful, this will undoubtedly serve as a wedge over
tactics, exacerbating the “good protester / bad protester” trope that is always
used, and that we have heard in the last few months already – from liberal
Mayors to Fox News and everywhere in between. This attempts to bring
organizations with sordid histories into Occupy, who will invariably try to
wrestle legitimacy from a popular, radical movement, into political groups that
are reformist at best, wholly complicit with the current order at worst.
Hogue has stated that the plans for this effort pre-dated the formation of the
Occupy movement in the U.S. The original goal, likely, to generate
systemically non-threatening actions to draw attention to inequality and
injustice – not to stop it, but to gather votes for Democrats, who, ostensibly,
address those issues. Now that the Occupy movement has already done that,
inadvertently, they seek to employ the same campaign to contain and defang that
movement while preserving their positions as mostly poverty pimps and lazy labor
bureaucrats that think strikes have lost their usefulness.</P>
<P>The existing powers, who some of these same progressives have consistently
stood against (from their political position), deeply need to weld a safety
valve on Occupy. Homeland Security, who has been “advising” police and
city governments nationally and who coordinated the mid-November 18-city raid on
the Occupy movement, released an <A
onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://www.hstoday.us']);"
href="http://www.hstoday.us/blogs/guest-commentaries/blog/the-occupy-movement-rising-anarchy/3a87bb57b44e5779f7d087472df92af2.html">article</A>
this week entitled “The Occupy Movement: Rising Anarchy” which states:</P>
<BLOCKQUOTE>
<P>“So far, Occupy protests in the United States exhibit a mostly peaceful
nature. However, certain elements within Occupy that have been seen both here
and abroad have the potential to inflict major damage to governments, people
and the private sector. If not carefully monitored and mitigated, these
elements pose a significant threat to modern democracies.”</P></BLOCKQUOTE>
<P>The existing order needs an institutionalized, liberal super-hero-on-a-leash
to be used (whether the organizations involved all intend to or not) disrupt,
discredit and destroy, from the inside, those elements who organized the
November 2<SUP>nd</SUP> General Strike in Oakland, the militant demonstrations
against police violence in New York in recent weeks, or community-led,
anti-capitalist efforts against foreclosures in Chicago, or those that set
barricades aflame in Seattle on December 12, 2011, or the scores of
lesser-reported militant action that have taken place in the last half-year, out
of nowhere. They also want to suck the tens of thousands of young people
all over the country, hoping to be able to do the same thing in their cities,
into a more palatable strategy. Those in power would like to see nothing
more than for 100,000 people to be trained to chain themselves to local bank
branches for 6-9 months, hooting about their “greedy side,” get disillusioned at
how fruitless that is, and go back to playing video games and downloading
pirated music after Obama’s re-election.</P>
<P><STRONG>Counter-Insurgency by any other name</STRONG><STRONG></STRONG></P>
<P>This is not primarily about tactics, it is about politics. MoveOn.org
and reactionary unions are not spearheading this for no reason. Are we to
believe that the same unions that discourage their members from taking
non-violent direct action during labor disputes, have found both the time and
the energy to do a solid favor for the radical Left, by resuscitating a movement
they have mistakenly diagnosed as dead? This is primarily about co-option
and division, about sucking a large cross-section of Occupy into Obama’s
reelection campaign, watering down it’s radical politics, and using these mass
trainings as a groundwork to put forward 100,000 “good protesters” to overshadow
the “bad protesters” (who actual take personal risks and/or have radical
politics), to ease the State’s ongoing campaign to pick us off one by one.
In the words of MoveOn.org’s own campaign director, it is unabashedly and
overtly a campaign of clear co-optation. This is not a riding of the
coattails of a hip social movement; this will be a form of
counter-insurgency. This will be used to disrupt, divide, discredit and
destroy the Occupy movement. The parameters of acceptable protest will be
imposed, not by some local non-profit starving for funding or wanting to remain
relevant, but by city officials, the police, the major media, Homeland Security,
Chambers of Commerce, police front groups like “Stand for Oakland,” and on down
the line.</P>
<P>The Occupy movement has broken with the Left’s long-standing, self-defeating
tendencies of meaningless, police-choreographed marches, 1-day pageant strikes,
movement discourse that thinks the logic of the lowest common denominator that
wins elections will win social justice (99% frames not withstanding), and
non-violent civil disobedience designed to curry favorable media attention that
gets de-contextualized and buried in the sea on nonsense entertainment that is
the media. This scares the hell out of capital and the State. 99%
Spring is not part of some nefarious conspiracy theory with Homeland Security or
“the illuminati.” 99% Spring is not Wall Street. But they sure as
hell are doing their work, whether some of them want to realize that or not.</P>
<P><STRONG>“Just Say, No” (to government-sponsored co-optation)</STRONG></P>
<P>A New York lawyer and some folks from OWS have made an attempt to turn the
direct democracy of Occupy into a representation democracy of elected “Occupy
politicians” who would have a new-Constitutional Convention this July
4<SUP>th</SUP> weekend in Philadelphia, comprised of elected officials from the
Occupy Movement (“rising anarchy,” be damned). In short time Occupy Wall
Street, from which these charlatans emerged, publicly denounced this attempted
event at a General Assembly, along with Occupy Philadelphia. We have
(imperfect) emerging direct, democratic institutions in our cities that reflect
the will of the movement. We should use them. We should address the
Operation 99% Spring Co-optation initiative the same way that New York and
Philadelphia dealt with the “new founding fathers.” It is time to weed out
our garden, so that real, social justice efforts can bloom.</P>
<P>My knowledge of the Occupy movement is derived primarily from my experience
in Oakland. We have seen counter-insurgent efforts of this type before:
when Mayor Quan’s Block-by-Block campaign organization tried to set up a “peace
camp” right before the raid of the second Occupy Oakland encampment; when the
one singular thing reporters wanted to know from press contacts before the
December 12<SUP>th</SUP> Port Shutdown was <A
onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://www.sfgate.com']);"
href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/12/04/MNIG1M6ELS.DTL">“How
can we get the protesters to obey police orders?”</A> or their myopic fixation
on the property destruction that they consider “violence;” to Quan’s unheeded
call for the “leaders of the Occupy movement” to condemn said “violence” (by
which she means people carrying shields who were hit with projectiles and
beaten, while groups of children were tear-gassed): or how permits, taken out
behind Occupy Oakland’s back, were used to arrest people for possession of
blankets in Oscar Grant Plaza – some of whom are facing prison time; to Quan’s
use of non-profits as a palatable alternative to a violent, discredited, and
costly movement in a press-release and subsequent “volunteer fair.” All of
this counter-insurgent misrepresentation, baiting, discreditation, and
divisiveness is wearying and something we need to get better at combating.
It has also only been partially effective. An Oakland Tribune poll found
that <A
onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://occupyoakland.org']);"
href="http://occupyoakland.org/2012/02/bay-area-news-group-poll-finds-94-support-occupy/">94%</A>
of Oaklanders support Occupy Oakland, even after all of the efforts I outlined
above. We shouldn’t find a false complacency in this. It should be
noted that even though most of these were attempts at co-optation, most came
from clearly demarcated enemies.</P>
<P>99% Spring is attempting to graft itself to Occupy and hollow it out from the
inside out, imposing rigid norms of non-violence and deference to police
authority, while watering down our politics and introducing well-funded and
trained institutions that are either fully invested in, or dependent upon, the
exist power structure – and have the resources, connections and will of
self-preservation to navigate the Occupy ship into a doldrums from which it will
never emerge. Despite the undemocratic and self-defeating norm of
consensus, we, as an Occupy movement, still have a sense of what we came here to
do. We didn’t come here to sign petitions or to get Obama reelected.
We didn’t come here to “have a voice in the system”; we came here to flip it on
its head. We will not be co-opted. We should not have our tactics
determined by the Democratic Party. We should not let ourselves be
undermined from within. We have the capacity to call the 99% Spring out
for what it is – a deluded attempt by the Obama campaign to kill two birds with
one stone, to take the hundreds of thousands in the street demanding real
democracy (laying bare the utter failure of the Obama administration and the
American State) and turn it into a vehicle to re-elect him. So that he can
bomb Iran with impunity, or continue to deport more undocumented immigrants than
any other president, or <A
onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://articles.cnn.com']);"
href="http://articles.cnn.com/2012-03-29/asia/world_asia_afghanistan-killings_1_afghan-investigators-panjwai-crime-scene?_s=PM:ASIA">cover-up</A>
more massacres in Afghanistan, or think that half-baked rhetoric about
inequality coupled with more tax breaks for businesses represents “Change we can
believe in.”</P>
<P>The Occupy movement may not have the power to change the talking points of
duplicitous, liberal Mayors. It may not have the capacity to change the
preoccupations of the mainstream media. It certainly doesn’t have much say
in the manner in which the police try to suppress it. But we do have
control over what goes on in our own house. These people only become part
of the Occupy movement if we let them continue to say that they are out of one
side of their mouth, while the other side says we are directionless,
un-strategic and “dead.” Every single Occupation that doesn’t want to turn
into nothing more than an ample pool of chumps registering people to vote for
the same Obama administration that has declared an all-out war against us,
should bring forward a resolution at their General Assembly to condemn this
clear attempt to destroy our movement. This isn’t about violence versus
non-violence; this is about autonomy versus co-optation. History will not
forgive us if we let the 99% Spring Trojan horse into out movement so that the
injustices we rose up against can be perpetuated with our own sanction, in our
own name.</P>
<P><STRONG><EM>Mike King</EM></STRONG><EM> is a PhD candidate at UC–Santa Cruz
and an East Bay activist, currently writing a dissertation about
counter-insurgency against Occupy Oakland. He can be reached at
mking(at)ucsc.edu. </EM></P></DIV></FONT></FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>