As the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement gains momentum across the world many observers and participants excitedly wonder just where this new movement will lead.  The truth, of course, is that nobody knows.  Will internal tensions and differences within the groups fragment the energy of the movement, or will solidarity broaden with each successful protest?  Will police repression destroy the vibrant spaces of protest or will they galvanize and increase support?  Will the 2012 elections siphon off the energy as political candidates try to capitalize on a split populace’s hopes and fears about what the movement represents, or will the politicians continue to be one step behind the real power in the streets? What could a tough winter do to outdoor protests in the American northeast?  Unlike some commentators on the OWS movement, I am not going to attempt to predict the movement’s future, or label what the movement ‘really’ is, or what its demands are or should be.  Instead what I want to do here is map some of the threads and tendencies of the movement to show a possible future that could emerge.  

To begin with, there is a central dichotomy in the movement.  These protests are both against particular processes (the skewed accumulation of wealth and power in the hands of a small elite), but they are also for other processes (the production of inclusive ‘occupied’ social spaces organized according to the ideal that local decisions made through consensus trump immoral government laws- i.e “autonomous zones” or “Free Communities”).  These aspects of the movement are not in opposition, but rather mutually reinforce each other.  The movement speaks out against issues of inequality which brings people together to explore alternatives in the spaces of protest.  These experiences of alternatives, in turn, harden people’s resolve that business-as-usual in the larger society must be changed.

What OWS is against: Critiquing capitalism and the government.

The ‘against’ aspect of the protests have been obvious to all who observe and participate.  The movement is a protest against the unequal distribution of power and resources caused by corporate capitalism and their allies in government.  It has become abundantly clear that most developed countries have become run, economically and politically, for the benefit of a small elite class and to the detriment of most everyone else.  For the vast majority of people the current system offers little.  Instead of an economy, it offers exploitation.  Instead of a meaningful political process, it offers a slim choice of out-of-touch servants of the elite society.  Instead of culture, it offers alienation.  Instead of love, it offers spectacle.  

OWS is a response against this shell of a society.  The forms of that response, however, are not uniform and come from a number of different perspectives.  There are simultaneously liberal and radical critiques of the government and economy that run through the messaging of the movement.  Some people hold signs extolling the virtues of a more progressive taxation policy, while others walk under banners questioning the whole system and calling for the end of capitalism. A lot of the media questions about “what are the demands?” come from a misunderstanding of the multiple critiques that are embedded in the movement.  While some have opined that a lack of ‘demands’ makes the movement meaningless, or an exercise in hippy free expression and cultural performance rather than serious politics, these people are mistaken. 

The lack of demands is the radical heart of the OWS movement.  The positions of OWS are not ‘demands’ because nothing is being asked of anybody.  In the place of demands there is instead a crystal clear expression of a powerful political position: “Capitalism (at least as it is being practiced) is unacceptable.” By making a statement rather than a demand the occupy movement is doing what other powerful political actors do.  They are clearly stating what they believe.  This is what the Democratic Party and the Republican Party do (and all the other parties, and the banks, and lobbyists, and police, and pentagon, etc).  None of these groups ‘demand’ anything from anyone else and nobody ever criticizes them for this lack.  It is a very telling thing that people criticize a social movement for behaving as having power.  For some reason people expect that social movements are supposed to beg, hat in hand, to the ‘real’ purveyors of power (the corporate elite and their allies in government). 

Well, that is the center of the occupy movement’s critique of government and economic power.  They are basically saying, “The strategy of making demands of the government and corporate world has been tried for a long time, and it has failed.”  That is the radical core around which some rather not-so-radical ideas orbit.  Let’s face it, saying the wealthy should have a modest increase in their tax rate, or that investment banks and commercial banks should be separate, or that corporate donations to campaigns should be slightly curtailed are pretty tame demands (and I think we can expect the Democratic Party to try and placate the Occupy movement by pursuing those relatively benign liberal policies).  That said, there is still a radical heart to the movement.  That radical heart is that citizens don’t have to ask anyone to ‘give’ social change, we can make it ourselves. 

What OWS is for: creating spaces of world changing possibility.

It is this radical perspective that leads to the tactic of occupying space that gives the movement its name. The taking over of public spaces near the centers of corporate and government power says, “In here, your rules do not apply. We make the rules.”  Occupy protests are not just against business-as-usual, they are also about creating spaces that are for new ways of being.  They are places where better ways to live are attempted and showcased. They are spaces where everyone is empowered to make decisions through consensus.  They are spaces where the hierarchies of social domination (sexism, racism, elitism, etc) are acknowledged and processes put into place to minimize them (as opposed to the politics and economy of general society where these imbalances tend to be entrenched and enhanced).  This is not to say these spaces are utopias.  They are very real spaces, with real people, with real problems.  However, they are spaces where people are putting real effort into finding a way out of the mess that is 2011 America by forming autonomous spaces from which society changing ideas can emanate.  In other words, the protest camps are operating as Free Communities.

What are Free Communities?

The protest camps of OWS are only one kind of space that can be operated as a Free Community.  Free Communities can be any place and can be any size: a neighborhood, a business, a café, a restaurant, a farm, a mobile caravan, a house, an indigenous community, an island, a whole city.  Free Communities are groups whose members have declared their spaces to be autonomous.  They are spaces where the unjust economic logics and laws of the broader society are challenged.  Rather than trying to get the government to change unjust laws in the whole territory of their jurisdiction all at once –by, for example, lobbying congress or demanding change from the government- Free Communities instead take a local-first strategy.  They proclaim that unjust laws and social practices are abolished within the confines of the space of the community.  These spaces become liberated from government power and the inhabitants proclaim that they will run their own affairs locally by consensus instead of under the laws generated by the government.  This is not at all to say that Free Communities are somehow cut off from the rest of society. They are very much still embedded in, and interacting with, everyone.  They just get the opportunity to be involved in making the rules that apply to their community instead of being ruled by distant, out-of-touch governments and the corporate institutions that back them.  The political position of this strategy for social change is that the problems of economic and political inequality are so entrenched at the national scale that they cannot be changed effectively at that scale all at once.  This is not to say that Free Communities just change the policies where they are and leave the rest of the world’s people to fend for themselves.  Instead, Free Communities can confederate in solidarity with each other until their spaces merge to cover the whole territory once ruled by the government. 

As an analogy, imagine a piece of cheese as being the whole territory ruled by the government.  Their laws hold sway everywhere.  Then imagine a piece of swiss cheese.  The cheese is the area where the government’s laws are in effect, but there are now bubbles in that cheese, little spaces of air where the cheese does not exist.  These are the areas of the Free Communities.  They are islands of difference where local decisions rule.  The idea is that eventually all these holes expand their space and eventually there is no more cheese, only a conglomeration of the airy spaces of Free Communities.  The central government loses its territory bit by bit and becomes increasingly irrelevant.  Of course governments don’t like autonomous spaces in their midst.  To stretch the cheese analogy to its limit, one could say governments really don’t like being swiss cheese.  They work hard to not allow the holes of freedom to form or expand. They would rather be a solid block of cheddar where their dictates rule equally everywhere and they will send out the police to maintain the claim that their laws do hold sway everywhere in their realm.

Communities that are part of the Occupy Wall Street movement, who have organized themselves and made their own decisions by consensus, have seen this government repression first hand (how many people have been pepper sprayed simply for saying they had a right to make their own decisions about how late at night they could be in a park?!).  So what can these communities do to better withstand this repression and spread not only their message, but their spaces of self-rule?  There are two strategies: 1) expand into more spaces in our cities beyond just public parks and central squares and 2)  develop networks of solidarity and mutual aid to support Free Communities.  It is towards these two purposes that Project Autonomy has been launched.

Next blog:  Can they be with us?  - Social change and the police.