http://harpers.org/archive/2011/10/hbc-90008270
October 7, 12:16 PM
Harper's Magazine (blog)
Generally Assembled at #OccupyWallStreet
By Nathan Schneider
The nightly meetings of the General Assembly at occupied Liberty Plaza
(officially, Zuccotti Park) in New York have been treated by the media
mainly as a quaint footnote to the mass arrests and alleged police
brutality attendant to the occupation. In fact, though, the open,
non-hierarchical assembly has been at the center of the movement.
Starting with the planning meetings that took place in parks around the
city prior to September 17, it was instrumental to bringing the
#OCCUPYWALLSTREET Internet meme created in July by Adbusters magazine
into real life. And as the occupation movement has caught on and spread
from city to city, open assemblies have been spreading alongside.
Participating in the assembly process can take some getting used to.
"It took me a while to figure it out," a gentleman from Brooklyn
confessed to me one day. A TV cameraman by trade, he had already made
several impressive speeches to the GA at Liberty Plaza, to the effect
that the occupation needed to send a clear, relevant message if it was
to reach urban black people like himself. All this sitting around in
meetings, he was saying, wouldn't do. But now he'd changed his mind a
bit. "I realized that this isn't just about making some point out
loud," he said. "It's about learning how to go back to your own
community and organize there." I heard almost exactly the same thing
from a Nordic-looking college student an hour later--and again, and
again.
Each night at Liberty Plaza since the occupation began, a few hundred
people have clustered in loose, semicircular rows to attend the GA. The
meetings always begin with a primer -- amplified, like every other
public pronouncement at the plaza, through the "people's mic," in which
those who are nearby echo the speaker's short phrases so those further
away can hear. (The police officers who perpetually surround the plaza
have arrested occupiers for using megaphones.) One of the facilitators
explains the hand signals: flutter your fingers upward for applause,
and downward for discontent; touch your index fingers and thumbs in a
diamond for a point-of-order; hold up an index finger for a
point-of-information. New signals can be added or old ones changed, as
needed.
The meetings proceed with oral reports from the occupation's various
committees (Food, Direct Action, Sanitation, Arts & Culture, and more,
with new ones invented daily), then general announcements of a minute
or two each, then agenda items and proposals, which cover topics from
schedule changes to public declarations. Throughout, someone takes
"stack" -- a list of those who wish to speak -- and adjusts its order
if necessary, to favor those representing traditionally marginalized
races, genders, and ages, as well as those who haven't spoken yet. When
someone makes a proposal, others can counter with questions,
amendments, concerns, and, finally and most seriously, "blocks" --
vetoes, essentially. In the absence of a serious concern or a block,
the assembly reaches consensus (or close to it, if necessary), and the
proposal passes. Then the human amphitheater typically bursts into
applause and perhaps a chant, effervescent that hundreds of people have
just reached agreement. The GA usually lasts a couple of hours, but it
could as easily go on all night.
While the occupiers take their time, the outside world keeps wondering
why the "one demand" Adbusters called for hasn't materialized yet, and
whether it ever will. "This is not about the demands," said facilitator
Amin Husain at a recent Liberty Plaza GA. "The demands will come. It's
about the beautiful thing we're doing here." The demand, for now, is in
process, and the process isn't easy. It takes practice to work well,
not to mention time, which is why duration is a crucial feature of the
occupation: it's not only a sign of commitment, but a practical
necessity.
Open assemblies like the GA have roots in classical anarchism, Native
American tribal councils, Quakerism, and the post-World War II
feminist, civil-rights, and anti-nuclear movements. Ask those who have
been at Liberty Plaza since the beginning, and you'll probably hear
about the influence of the assembly-based May 15 movement in Spain,
which a few members of Occupy Wall Street witnessed or participated in.
In turn, several Spaniards have been helping out at the plaza,
especially at the media center -- watching, offering advice, and
reaching out to assembly movements around the world.
The General Assembly's most direct antecedent in the United States,
though, is probably the "spokescouncil" model used in the mobilization
against the 1999 WTO talks in Seattle. Marina Sitrin, a lawyer and
activist who facilitated the inaugural GA of Occupy Wall Street, first
encountered the process there. She went on to edit an oral history,
Horizontalism, about the assemblies that formed in factories,
neighborhoods, and occupied spaces after the 2001 economic collapse in
Argentina. These assemblies scrupulously rejected the hierarchies that
had helped lead to the crash, and they became -- and in some cases,
remain -- a significant political force in the country.
In an alluringly titled book, Freedom Is an Endless Meeting,
sociologist Francesca Polletta argues that movements adopt assemblies
not simply out of principle but because they're effective and efficient
methods of managing a diverse grassroots organization. Their
egalitarianism fosters individual initiative, she writes, while their
emphasis on consensus helps to secure everyone's full commitment,
especially when the risk of arrest or injury is present. Assemblies are
also flexible, allowing for division into independent but potentially
politically cohesive assemblies of assemblies -- as with, say, the
congregationalist model that prevails among American churches. And
they're resistant to being co-opted by charismatic individuals or sold
out to moneyed interests -- unlike, say, the Tea Party movement.
The General Assembly has thus far held together Liberty Plaza's
world-unto-itself, with its food for all, incessant music, and
celebrity drop-ins. But the occupation's fate will likely be akin to
the "temporary autonomous zone" imagined by the anarchist author Hakim
Bey. "The TAZ," he writes, "is a guerilla operation which liberates an
area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to
re-form elsewhere/elsewhen." Even now, as the occupation movement
disperses, grows, and spreads, the assembly process is having to adapt.
"It's untenable, especially with so many new people, to have both real
consensus and the possibility of a block," Marina Sitrin told me.
Monica Lopez, who had been traveling back and forth between Liberty
Plaza and her home in Madrid, cringed and smiled as she watched
Americans repeat the same trial-and-error process the May 15 movement
went through. Even the beloved people's mic, she prophesied, will get
old before long and need to be replaced somehow.
In the first few days of Occupy Wall Street, those gathered would
sometimes chant, "This is just a practice!" Three weeks on, with
assembly-driven occupations beginning in cities and towns all over the
country, many more people seem determined to get the hang of it.