NEW YORK—If Georgia, a 31-year-old performance artist from Greece, had not thrown a fit at a protest last summer near the famous statue of the Charging Bull, Occupy Wall Street might not have become the movement that crackled around North America.Georgia is intense. Petite, her hair pulled back in messy bun, with a knapsack and skinny jeans, a former Fulbright scholar at Columbia, she has been an activist since she was 12.
“I couldn’t stand people telling me what to do.”
When she arrived at that demonstration on Aug. 2, a dress rehearsal for the protests in September, she saw immediately it was not as advertised.
She had hoped she would be part of a General Assembly, a form of protest not well-known in North America that is at the heart of the European anti-austerity protests that have defined the summer.
If traditional organizations are vertical and exclusive, general assemblies are horizontal and participatory. They are leaderless and reach decisions by consensus, not majority vote, a process that requires heroic patience as everyone works to agree. Consent or dissent is voiced through waggling hands — up for like, down for don’t like. In vast crowds, people’s voices are heard through a simple but powerful device called the “people’s mic,” where demonstrators at the front repeat what has been said so every one at the back can hear.
Assemblies are borrowed from popular uprisings in Spain, Greece and Tunisia, on a lesser scale from the anti nuke and World Trade Organization protests, and the financial crisis in Argentina in 2001. There are precedents in Quaker meetings.
But at the Charging Bull protest in Bowling Green Park, what Georgia and fellow anarchist, David Graeber, something of a star in the world of anthropology, found, was the familiar American protest: banners, lists of demands and speakers telling others what they were going to do. They were, she says, “old thoughts”.
Georgia seized the moment and clarified the movement.
She grabbed the microphone from the protest leader. “She was disruptive, hysterical and tactical,” says Amin Husain, a volunteer with Occupy Wall Street. “She said this is not a general assembly; you’re not here to speak at people but to have a conversation.”
She had hijacked the meeting. One group of like-minded people, the kind anarchists call “horizontals,” moved to join Georgia and her friends. Georgia and other organizers asked that their last names not be used; they do not want to be singled out as leaders in a leaderless movement.
The leaders of the traditional protest asked them to come back, and promised, as Graeber, 50, a lecturer at the University of London, noted, a “real democratic forum.”
The drama ended when the original organizers joined Georgia and Graeber. They settled down to organize working groups and the movement was born.
Husain, 36, a former finance lawyer, smiles. A tall man, lightly bearded, wearing a kaffiyeh, he saw that day as the start of something he had longed for all his life. He grew up in the Palestinian uprisings of the ’90s and spent time in prison in his early teens. He links that movement to the present one:
“It was this hope we can create a better world.”
And he believes that it is now underway: “There are moments when the stars align.”
The Vancouver based anti-consumerist magazine Adbusters called for a widespread demonstration, a Tahrir moment on Wall Street to be held on Sept. 17, protesting corporate greed, bailouts for banks and rich payouts to CEOs. In other words, call corporate America to accountability.
The magazine may have chosen the date and spread the word, but it was the artists and anarchists that gave the movement its character and civility.
Luis, a bespectacled soft-spoken professor of Spanish Literature and his partner, Begonia, an artist, had been moved by the demonstrations and protests held by the indignados (the outraged) in Spain which has the highest unemployment in Europe at 21 per cent, almost double for young people. In New York, they met with other Spaniards in parks and restaurants. “But we felt the need to mix with other people,” says Begonia, who teaches at the Harlem School of the Arts.
They called a meeting at an artists’ space at 16 Beaver St., a nondescript building only blocks from Wall Street, and were joined by local activists, including New Yorkers Against Budget Cuts who had set up a protest camp called Bloombergville. Protesting reductions in city services, the group was already using some of the tools in the general assembly manual.
“A lot of the international influence was to spark our imaginations that this could be real,” says Marina Sitrin, activist and editor of a book on non-hierarchical social movements, Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina, who trains volunteers at Occupy Wall Street. She had seen how effectively citizens organized blockades during protests in Argentina. It was people on the street who brokered deals, not elected leaders.
“What’s new with this movement is that it’s not just protesting, but creating a small replica of what we want society to be,” says Luis.
Zuccotti Park, the heart of the New York occupation is close to both Ground Zero and Wall Street. The 3,100-square-metre plaza has a free kitchen, a library, a sanitation department, a newspaper named The Occupied Wall Street Journal and bedding neatly tarped and stowed. The protestors are obsessively clean. A falling leaf or a dropped pamphlet hardly has time to settle before it is swept up by a volunteer with a broom and dustpan.
Assemblies have been held every night, though there has been some discussion to limit them to weekends, when there are more tourists in New York, curious to see how they work.
At a recent assembly on a Thursday night, as a sharp wind cut down Broadway, the crowd of about 500 stood hip-to-hip under the ash trees and could still hear the speakers, thanks to the magic of the people’s mic.
“I’m Sonni,” says a young man in a red turban. “I’m Sonni,” the crowd closes to him repeats, turning slightly so their voices carry back. “I’m Sonni,” those farther away echo. He’s not a leader, he explains, but a “facilitator,” along with Dori, Leah and Steve.
The human microphones — intriguing in their own right — also bring a certain grace to the assembly. People are compelled to listen; they can’t interrupt, heckle or shout down. And the glacial pace allows time to think. As they repeat a speaker’s words, they also become the message. It has a unifying effect.
Famous visitors to the site — the Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman, rapper Kanye West and filmmaker Michael Moore — quickly adapted. “Quit looking for a leader,” Moore said, and paused while it was repeated. “Everyone here is a leader.”
“Most people think GA’s are really neat the first few times. Then, oh man, you think, ‘this is really painful,’ ” says Daniel Zetah, an environmental educator who works in Tasmania.
Don Jansma, a financial adviser from Grand Rapids, stopped by after dinner to talk about sustainability. “I’m probably one of the 1 per cent. This is almost a bit of a circus, people want to voice their opinion, but that’s America and that’s ok.”
Begonia and Luis recalled how moved they were by banners in the protests in Madrid. One read: “We are not commodities in the hand of politicians and bankers.”
Begonia stresses the feeling of belonging to a group, “dissolving” into society. “They feel they are not alone. It takes away the fear.
“It’s not about identity,” she adds. “It’s the opposite. It’s plural. It’s a process of unlearning. That you are not just yourself. At the General Assembly your identity is the entire group. In the beginning there were a lot of problems with people learning it is not about themselves, their issues, it’s for the wellness of everyone.”
It easier to hold a general assembly in a small group of activists who have worked together. It’s different on a mass scale: “I’m trusting people I’ve never met,” Husain says.
And if things got too confusing, there is a handbook, How to Cook a Pacific Revolution produced by the Spanish indignados.
The movement taps in the deep sense of disillusionment that Georgia, the Greek artist, expresses. “It was very clear that politics and politicians were corrupted by the economic elite,” she says. “We had an actual awareness that we are f…ed.
“If we don’t take our voices back, if we don’t do something to participate in every day life decisions, we let politicians and financial criminals lead us.”
These are the sentiments expressed on the periphery of Zuccotti Park, where protesters — some grey-haired in tweed jackets, a young man in a monkey costume, a stock broker unemployed since the 2008 crisis — held up signs: ‘Separate government from corporate America” or “I can’t afford to buy a politician.”
Protesters are talking about using the General Assembly more formally. A group called the 99 per cent Declaration has put out a call to hold a national General Assembly July 4, 2012 in Philadelphia with elected delegates from each of the 435 congressional districts.
The next stage in New York is to move into neighbourhoods, in the Bronx and Brooklyn, says Begonia. In Spain, neighbourhood assemblies have been effective in halting illegal evictions and dealing with matters as every day as having a fountain built in a plaza.
“You don’t have to stay in the square,” she says. “But people are very attached to it. This is Wall Street and it is very symbolic.”
Origin
Source: Toronto Star
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