Thank You, Anarchy by Nathan Schneider

Author:Nathan Schneider
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520276796
Publisher: University of California Press

Hapless media interventions didn’t make OWS internal politics any less prickly. As Occupiers spread out from Wall Street through local neighborhood assemblies, or cross-country road trips, or the trove of online organizing tools, the problem of leadership was an undercurrent all along. It wasn’t entirely clear how best to behave in a leaderless movement, much less how those putting their time and energy into it would ever pay rent. Talented and well-connected organizers had to navigate a precarious line between taking the lead on certain initiatives and “stepping back” so as not to accumulate too much power or appear too visible. A false move could risk endangering the fragile universe they’d created.

If the demand had once been a process, the process started seriously breaking down. As the fall wore on, fewer and fewer people attended the General Assembly, and attempts to start up the more streamlined Spokes Council were on the rocks. Some thought the Spokes Council was a ruse among the “organizers” to shut the true, overnight “occupiers” out of decision making or that it was a sin against direct democracy, the only legitimate form of which was the General Assembly. It was perhaps a symptom of the failure of horizontalism that people more and more often prefaced their speeches in meetings with the declaration that they were “day-one Occupiers” or that they’d been around since the first week or some other such claim to special authority, for fear that special authority was being exercised by others. Even the most obvious cop infiltrators knew this trick and used it shamelessly.

Day after day for a week, Marisa Holmes sat in the atrium at 60 Wall Street with her hands at her temples, explaining how a spokes council works and that it was a time-tested form of direct democracy in radical movements. Her patience belied, but also grew out from, her stubbornness; eventually she and her allies succeeded. When the OWS Spokes Council finally did get up and running on October 28, though, it was the target of wrenching and persistent disruption by those who, while dominating the proceedings, insisted they were being excluded. Some of these were from the growing population of homeless Occupiers who couldn’t as easily leave the park to attend off-site Spokes Council meetings. But several of the disrupters were simply determined to make Spokes fail; at least a couple of them had been doing much the same thing, suspiciously enough, at Bloombergville the previous summer. Georgia Sagri, who had rarely been seen since the Tompkins Square Park planning meetings, reappeared for the assault on the Spokes Council. The discussions online at nycga.net were so overrun with trolls, meanwhile, that the occupation’s main logistical website became unusable.

Neither the GA nor the Spokes Council was producing much of the collective effervescence that had been the GA’s primary benefit early on. The constantly deferred promise that direct democracy would be a means of agreeing on shared political values and strategies kept losing out to daily minutiae and bookkeeping. OWS

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