We’re passing through a low phase in Northern California – a lull that partially parallels those facing organizers from Madison to New York. The rebellious energies so evident recently seem scattered these days, dormant. The universities are quiet. And the forces that had gathered in city parks and squares, most massively at Oakland’s Oscar Grant Plaza, are largely absent. The encampments are broken up, the assemblies dissolved.

It’s hard to know whether this is simply a period of incubation, from which another, similar wave of class struggle will soon emerge, or if this moment of relative inactivity is allowing for the recomposition of our forces, our alliances, the ways we take action together. If the terrain of struggle we now encounter has been remade by the past year of action – by our effective acts of opposition, by new forms of state repression and co-optation, and by our own missteps – how can we most effectively intervene in the shifting political force fields we’re coming to inhabit?

As we offer ourselves a bit of relief from the intensities of the past year – as we heal, maintain ties, and work through it all – it’s worth collaboratively thinking through these questions. Struggles against austerity in California, which I’ve participated in and tried to think critically about, can provide a concrete context for this kind of reflection.

While many of us have been taking a rest, politicians have been active as ever. The recently passed California state budget is, as in previous years, crushing. It shortens the amount of time people can remain in the workfare program, reduces the program’s work exemptions for people with young children, cuts payments for and limits access to childcare, reduces funding for in-home supportive services, and guts public health care programs. In combination, these cuts constitute a severe attack on working-class women, and therefore on the class as a whole. The undoing of welfare, childcare, and in-home service programs further privatizes and devalues caring labor, and thus imposes increasingly impossible burdens of domestic and waged work on all those, particularly women of color, who have been denied financial reserves.

Austerity is still the order of the day. For all the class struggle that’s been staged in the streets, plazas, and universities this past year, and despite what we’ve accomplished, those who govern and manage capital are still effectively making it harder for working people to survive. And no partial, uncertain victories in the educational sector should allow us to lose sight of this stark reality.

There are a number of ways to make sense of the effects this year’s state budget will have on students and campus workers. The basic story is that, rather than simply cutting once again the budgets of schools and universities, the state has made these cuts contingent upon the potential failure of the compromise tax initiative this November. If the initiative passes, we’ll have a tuition freeze in the Universities of California, and a year without significant cuts in other sectors of public education.

That we may have another year without undergraduate fee hikes in the UCs, and without cuts to schools and colleges, should be understood as an effect of recent rounds of uncompromising student protest, including the cascading strikes and encampments that shook California’s universities last fall. These protests demonstrated to the state and to the UC Regents that further fee increases would come with a cost, and helped build support for the original Millionaires’ Tax, of which the current tax initiative – formed out of a compromise between the governor and the president of the California Federation of Teachers – is a pale copy.

While we might be inclined to consider the possibility of a year without cuts to public education as a victory, albeit an uncertain one, there are other political dynamics shaping the current situation that make for a murkier picture. Governor Jerry Brown, in tying the fate of students to his tax initiative, is working to co-opt and neutralize student movements – movements that otherwise could further delegitimate state institutions enacting and enforcing austerity, and even potentially set off, as in Quebec, a period of generalized social unrest. This fall, it will be incredibly difficult for those active on campuses to resist pressures to put our energies into campaigning for the tax initiative, despite the fact that relatively little of the revenue would go to education (much is slated to “pay down the deficit”); that the initiative includes a temporary, regressive sales tax; and that electoral campaigns force us to engage on a terrain and in a mode of struggle that work to our disadvantage, in comparison to campus-based direct action and mass organizing. As we recently saw in Wisconsin, social movements that allow themselves to be entirely diverted into electoral politics risk massive demoralization, defeat in both electoral and non-electoral domains, and the fraying of bonds forged through collective struggle.

Still, the pressure to participate in the initiative campaign will be intense, since the effects of a defeat would be so severe. In addition to the cuts that would be triggered, the initiative’s defeat would make educational privatization appear all the more inevitable, allowing those pushing fee hikes and pension reductions to invoke the “will of the voters” in support of their efforts. The UC Regents, for instance, are rumored to already be considering a 20% fee hike (approximately $2,500/year), which they’d try to implement in the event that the tax initiative failed. And the initiative very well could fail, especially if, for instance, the European debt crisis intensifies, and the economic depression in the States subsequently deepens.

While we have little control over broader economic dynamics, we can still prevent our movements from being co-opted and neutralized by the governor. We could, for instance, explicitly reject the electoral process as a primary terrain of struggle; along the lines of the movement of the Indignados in Spain, we could organize a series of walkouts and occupations in October tied together by the slogan: “There’s no vote against austerity.” Alternatively, we could prioritize local struggles whose outcomes will not directly be affected by the fate of the tax initiative. At UC Berkeley, for instance, the administration is attempting to move up to six hundred staff members to a building located miles away from campus – a move explicitly designed to spur workers to resign rather than endure degraded and isolating conditions of employment. In solidarity with workers organizing against their displacement, we could hold disruptive actions at the building to which they would be relocated. We could also link up with the movement to defend City College of San Francisco, which appears to be taking shape in response to the threat of dis-accreditation and closure levied by a recent audit – an audit performed by a body with ties to educational privatizers and for-profit colleges. Given how imbricated the various sectors of public education are in California, all students have a stake in the fight at CCSF, which has the potential to generalize struggles against tuition hikes and course reductions.

Even if student movements successfully avoid getting directly caught up in electoral campaigning, it’s conceivable that their more rebellious edges might be worn off by the specter of the November election. There’s a danger that students might be haunted by the imagined judgment of “the voting public,” that we might take on this phantom as a kind of superego, avoiding actions that could upset a projected voter or make them less sympathetic to the cause of public education. And there’s plenty of reason to think that voters in California are inclined to be unsympathetic: in recent decades, they’ve passed a number of reactionary propositions, including 13, 209, 8 and 36.  While Governor Brown may be confident that voters’ presumed classification of students as members of the “deserving” middle class will ensure passage of this year’s tax initiative, student activists ultimately have little to gain from attempting to fill the role of respectable defenders of existing educational institutions.

While higher education has historically been understood, with some validity, as a marker and reproducer of middle class status, college is no longer a guaranteed ticket to a stable, decent paying job. Increasingly, it offers to the degree-holder little more than decades of indebtedness and precarious employment. Our generation of students is facing a process of proletarianization; and rather than clinging to a fantastical “middle class” status, definitively refuted by economic transformations, we should act in solidarity with, and with an eye towards, the working class from which many of us hail and into which we’re headed. As we plan another round of protest, let’s concern ourselves with the perception of the broader class, those facing another devastating round of austerity, rather than with the sanctimonious vision of those who fear and resent the pleasures and possibilities of working class struggle and mutual aid – pleasures that many of us experienced last fall at the Occupy Oakland encampment, and during strikes on our campuses.

While things have been slow this summer, we’re still here; and if the recent past is any indication, another upsurge is likely imminent.  As we attempt to determine the shape coming struggles will take, the experience of the past year can give us confidence that direct actions, coupled with mass organizing, have the potential to generate widespread participation, open up new centers of gravity, and offer us lives less consumed with the anxieties of debt, work, and uncertain futures.

Amanda Armstrong is a graduate student at UC Berkeley and an editor at Reclamations Journal.  She has participated in recent anti-austerity movements in California, particularly those emerging from the universities.

It took a little while for the student struggle in Quebec to gain traction with activists outside of the province. The strike began in February, but it probably wasn’t until late March that activists in Ontario paid it much mind, and not until late April or May that large numbers of people began pouring across the borders into Quebec to demonstrate alongside the Quebecois, to talk to Quebec activists, and to learn from their organizing tactics and struggles so that we could push the movement beyond the confines of the Francophone province and into the rest of Canada.

The current strike in Quebec has been a long time coming. We can realistically say that activists there have been organizing for this strike not only since 2010, but since 1968, when the first student strike took place – demanding free tuition, the democratic administration of educational institutions and policies, and an expansion of the Francophone university system. Eight more student strikes were to follow, of varying degrees of success, and in each of these student activists consciously worked to learn from their experiences, from their successes and failures, and altered their organizing accordingly. Tuition fees in Quebec are directly related to this history of militant organizing and striking. There is absolutely no other explanation. Quebec students organized, Quebec students fought, and Quebec students won.

It was in 2001, with the formation of the Association for Student-Union Solidarity (ASSE), that a strategic perspective for effective mobilization developed. ASSE studied the history of the Quebec student movement and took on a radically democratic activist approach to student unionism, which has been carried forward by the Broad Coalition of the Association of Student-Union Solidarity (CLASSE) in the 2012 mobilization. This form of student unionism sees that students, like workers, have collective interests, and possess a collective power that must be harnessed and organized in order to defend these interests. It operates with direct democracy as its core, with general membership meetings and general assemblies as the site of decision-making for the union. Students gather together, debate, discuss, vote, and pass motions on the direction of their union. It is in this way that students themselves, not student leaders or representatives, decide the best direction for the student movement, the campaigns to adopt, and the strategies to enact in pursuit of these goals.

These directly democratic organizing structures simply don’t exist outside of Quebec in any official or organized capacity in the student movement. Student unions and broad-based student associations exist, primarily the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS), but the structure that these student unions and federations have taken has been far less directly democratic and grassroots-oriented than the trajectory of the student unions and organizations that eventually gave way to ASSE and CLASSE. Much of what could be called a student movement in the rest of Canada has been, since its founding in the 1980s, coordinated and directed by the CFS. The CFS has strong ties to provincial and federal political parties (primarily the social-democratic New Democratic Party), and uses the lobbying of parliamentary representatives as the best way to achieve aims of lower tuition and more accessible education – a path that has for 30 years seemed woefully inadequate and has proven to be a terrific failure. Tuition fees in Ontario are wildly out of step with those in Quebec, with students paying an average of $6640 annually, compared to the $2519 annual tuition rate in Quebec, despite years of CFS campaigns to “drop fees,” an annual Day of Action in February (seemingly more and more sparsely attended each year), repeated “occupations” of provincial and federal politicians’ offices (ending at 5pm!), and lobbying efforts by CFS representatives. Obviously none of these tactics have worked, and something, it is clear, must change.

Based on my own experience in Ontario, I can speculate on some of the reasons for this disjuncture, and the delayed response to the current strike. One is that there is a significant language barrier between Quebec and Canada’s other provinces. Although Canada is an officially bilingual country, what this means realistically is that eight of the ten provinces are primarily English speaking, Quebec is primarily French speaking, and only New Brunswick is officially bilingual. Students in Anglo-Canada study French throughout elementary school and high school, but that does not mean in any way that the majority of Canadian students are able to read, let alone speak and understand, French. Initially, there was little coverage in English media – even alternative media – about the strike organizing, strike votes, and strike preparations that were happening in Quebec. A few mentions would trickle out, of course, but Translating the Printemps érable, a website that translates important documents and new stories from Francophone media, was not yet in constant operation. Because of linguistic barriers that have prevented strong collaborations between Francophone and Anglophone activists over the years, the strike initially stayed below the radar for student radicals outside of Quebec. Of course, the eventual participation of Anglophone students and organizers in the strike movement has helped to accelerate the process of expanding the struggle across linguistic boundaries.

A second reason for the slow uptake in Ontario is that at the time the strike broke out, we were engaged in a series of labour and community battles of our own – mostly in Toronto, but also throughout the Southwestern Ontario region. In Toronto the municipal government was going up against labor in a significant way, targeting indoor and outdoor workers and working to pit the public against them. The municipal budget was also being voted on in Toronto, and that budget was seeking to make cuts to many important services across the city, affecting thousands if not millions of people. Caterpillar – the owner of a locomotive assembly plant in London, Ontario – had decided to offer workers a near 50% wage and benefit cut in their recent round of contract negotiations, and on New Years’ Eve unceremoniously locked out workers. Many activists, including student activists, were engaged in both of these struggles, and so our minds were elsewhere.

Finally, and this is pure speculation on my part, we have all witnessed the decline of the university over the years, and the continual defeat of student and even faculty resistance movements. There is almost a mini-industry in protracted internal critique lobbed at “the university” these days, from students and professors alike, not to mention food service, maintenance, and custodial workers. I think that many people in Ontario heard that there would be a strike in Quebec and, unfamiliar with the history of Quebec student militancy, presumed it would go much like the tuition increase protests in England in 2010. Massive crowds, lots of energy, rage in the streets, smashed windows, a recalcitrant government, and ultimately a crushing defeat.

All this being said, there was only, relatively speaking, a minor lag for Ontario students. By the 22nd of March, when the massive protest against tuition strikes hit Montreal’s streets, Ontario students were fully aware of what was happening, if not already in Montreal providing support.

Of course, the desire to expand the struggle is great, but the landscape of the student movement outside of Quebec is very different. First of all, the student movement outside of Quebec could hardly even be said to exist in recent years, prior to the 2012 uprising, and second, we do not possess the institutional structures for organizing and channelling dissent into a collective strike across campuses in the same way that Quebec does. Much of the student movement in Ontario has been centered around the CFS, and other major events in campus organizing have tended to circulate around labour union struggles.

For example, in 2008 there was a long and bitter strike at York University in Toronto – but this was a labour strike. The teaching assistant, graduate assistant, and contract faculty union, which has always been one of Canada’s strongest academic unions and certainly has one of the best contracts in the country, went out against the employer. Lasting 85 days, this strike was the longest faculty strike in Canadian university history. That said, a labour strike is fundamentally different in shape, form, and structure than a student strike. For one thing, as officially recognized workers, members of labour unions have to abide by the Labour Relations Act, and wait to be in a legal strike position. The institutional structures for labour unions and student unions are very different; while labour unions have (some) coordination between locals and larger provincial or national bodies, outside of the reformist CFS, Ontario students have nothing of the sort. This is exactly the kind of coordination, organization, and institutional structure that Quebec students have. Finally, as radical as York University’s union is (Canadian Union of Public Employees 3903), it does not operate on CLASSE’s principles of assemblies or direct democracy. So while the York militants and the York strike serve as an interesting example of campus organizing and pushback in Ontario, structurally this example is fundamentally different than the grassroots student organizing and striking happening in Quebec.

Processes are already underway to create some sort of new model of organizing in Ontario. Meetings have been held to launch the formation of the Ontario Students’ Mobilization Coalition, but this does not seem to extend beyond a Facebook page. The CFS has tried to hold solidarity demonstrations in Toronto, but they have been only marginally successful and low on attendance, primarily because they were organized by the CFS and not by students themselves, and they were not decided upon in a directly democratic manner by any recognized group of students and student activists. The first obstacle to overcome, then, in expanding the student struggle beyond the borders of Quebec, is to begin the difficult process of pulling ourselves away from the top-down, bureaucratic structures that will impede our progress and have proven ineffective in consolidating and acting upon our demands, whatever those may be. Overcoming an adherence to bureaucratic and authoritarian modes of organizing will be difficult, certainly, but steps are already being taken. Students and activists from all across Canada have converged upon Quebec in recent weeks, meeting with CLASSE and ASSE organizers, with student radicals in various universities, colleges, departments, and faculties. Conversations that have started in Quebec have been carried back to our home provinces, and the slow process of instituting truly democratic structures within our universities slowly begins.

Already there are plans for some activists, primarily from the Anglo universities in Montreal (McGill and Concordia) to host a weekend workshop in Ontario to train student activists in the art of pushing for general assemblies at the departmental level, and forming mobilization committees within faculties to obtain broad participation in these assemblies. And activists within departments are already planning to call general assemblies in September, inviting all students out to begin the discussion about what campus mobilizing in Ontario would look like, and whether or not we want to organize towards a strike. Networks are developing, slowly and quietly, outside of official channels, between Quebec students and those of other provinces.

But simultaneously there is a small power struggle underway between these more autonomous activists and the already constituted (and more bureaucratic) organizers of the CFS. Entryist activists in Toronto – namely Fightback – have set themselves the task of reforming the CFS, encouraging the Federation to “organize strikes.” Meanwhile, other activists struggle to set the stage for directly democratic organizing, which may or may not result in a strike. But it is only through the development of an assembly process within university departments and faculties that activists and students can decide how and when to deal with the CFS, and whether or not the Federation should be abandoned altogether. Those who, like me, are grounded in decentralized modes of organizing and struggle, see the method of directly democratic assemblies as a necessary element of this process. Striking the balance between these two constituencies and learning to work together, and occasionally around each other, will be of utmost importance in the coming year.

After all, in Ontario there is much to organize and struggle around. Each year, 5% tuition increases are quietly instituted at the majority of Ontario universities, and each year Ontario students have a harder and harder time finding paid work upon graduation. Displeasure rumbles beneath an otherwise placid surface. The most powerful form of solidarity that we can show to our comrades in Quebec is to learn from them and effectively mobilize our own struggles – to organize ourselves and spread the movement. With new modes of organizing being slowly introduced into Ontario student unions and student federations, the possibility persists that the 2012-2013 school year will see the burgeoning and bursting forth of student discontentment across the entirety of Canada.

May Day 2012 was another kind of transition – to what, nobody knows. We have witnessed dramatic shifts in the Occupy movement, fragmentation into factions, and confusion and constant debate about tactics. Yesterday permitted marches took place alongside street confrontations, as though both were in separate worlds. The Mission in San Francisco saw a peak in property destruction the night before, and Seattle partied like it was 1999.

The state, unsure of the nature of this movement and puzzled by the popular disgust at police brutality, has managed to respond with an unusual combination of incompetence and efficiency. Emergency orders in Seattle allowed police to confiscate any item they deemed to be a weapon. In Oakland, some of the most dedicated militants of the movement were targeted for violent arrest throughout the day. The crowd managed to “de-arrest” their comrades on one or two occasions, but this victory was short-lived. The police must have been disappointed to find that the rhetoric is true: their captives were not leaders, and didn’t have the battle plans in their pockets.

We walked up to 14th and Broadway yesterday afternoon, to see the army of cops that had driven Occupy Oakland out of the plaza. What we saw behind this army was clearly a tank – though an anarchist medic, a former Marine, explained that it was technically an armored personnel carrier. Meanwhile, an FBI agent provocateur has entrapped anarchists in Cleveland, and this morning police raided the San Francisco building occupation, which, against all odds, held 888 Turk for the night.

The polarization of the movement has a material basis. Intellectuals go back and forth on Twitter about the police, the black bloc, the best procedure for an illegal building occupation (as though any of us knew!). These debates have very little real content, but they work very well to displace our anxiety: nobody actually knows how a movement can grow and develop today. The classical patterns are out of reach: we don’t have mass left-wing parties, our unions have little influence, and most of our factories have more machines than workers – they remain untouched by general strikes.

I did not see major signs of union participation in the streets of Oakland yesterday, though some did participate in the permitted march. This should not be misinterpreted as a facile opposition between reformist labor unions and radical Occupy activists. The proposal to occupy the Golden Gate Bridge originated with a picket planned by the Golden Gate Labor Coalition. This union group received sanction to strike from the San Francisco Labor Council and the San Francisco Building Trades Council, largely over healthcare costs for bridge, bus, and ferry workers. In the days leading up to May 1st, they withdrew this plan, opting instead to picket the ferry in Larkspur, CA.

The relationship between unions and confrontational anti-capitalists should not be oversimplified. My mind turns to another May, another general strike, and others are surely turning with me. In May 1968 a spirit of wildcat refusal started in Paris and spread throughout France, shutting down the economy and nearly toppling the government. It is sectarian to criticize today’s general strikes as betrayals of tradition, as though past general strikes unfolded according to an angelic pattern framed by union procedures and regulations. The French May was activated by a new conception of political struggle. Student activists had invented new forms and alliances, with their spontaneous action committees and aesthetic insurrections. They opened the language of politics to social groups – women, gays, immigrants, youth – whose demands had so often been excluded from the workers’ movement.

This reinvention of revolution took a paradoxical course. When student occupations of the Universities of Paris were attacked by police, the powerful bureaucracies of the French Communist Party (PCF), and its union, the General Confederation of Labor (CGT), were forced to recognize that rank-and-file sympathies were with the students; they permitted an initial mobilization in protest of police repression, sending 800,000 workers on a one-day strike. The CGT was unable to contain the avalanche that resulted from this encounter. As May continued, ten million workers went on strike, without permission from the union, sometimes occupying their workplaces and kidnapping their bosses.

In June the union’s reluctant acquiescence gave way to an open alliance with the bosses; it would do its best to turn workers against students, and assist the state in returning France to work. In spite of their disgraceful conduct, the role of the PCF and the CGT was contradictory. They did everything they could to block the development of a real class struggle – but against their own intentions, they provided an institutional basis for class solidarity and mass political activity.

In Italy, 1968 lasted for an entire decade. It was again this linking of new social actors, who introduced new demands and political practices, that spurred the traditional workers’ movement – struggling to break free from its own reformist bureaucracies, the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and the General Confederation of Italian Labor (CGIL) – into action. When the factory worker Alfonso Natella was invited to meet with student activists, in Nanni Balestrini’s novel We Want Everything, he said: “what the fuck, I’ve got nothing to lose, I’ll go and see what these turds have to say.”

Perhaps he was prepared to go because he knew that the students themselves had gone through a dramatic evolution, which is traced in Paolo Pietrangeli’s song “Valle Giulia.” It recounts the student clash with the police during the occupation of the architecture department of the Sapienza University of Rome – the same street battle that Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote about in his poem “The PCI to the Young,” siding with the police.

The students start by chanting – loosely translated – “No to the school of the bosses, throw out the government!” But after fighting with the police, they realize that “something new” happened during the skirmish: “we didn’t run anymore.” By the end of the song, their slogan has changed: “No to the class of the bosses! No conditions!”

A revolutionary sentiment was spreading, across different sectors of the class, as Andrea Righi recounts:

In 1968, on a chilly December night, after the police opened fire on farm laborers in Avola in Sicily, Milan students stormed the La Scala theater shouting, “the farm laborers of Avola hope you enjoy the show,” and threw rotten eggs against the wealthy audience.

This change in consciousness was only realized when the students struck their match in the auto factories, and the “Hot Autumn” was ignited – an enormous wave of mass strikes attacking bosses and union bureaucracies alike, giving way to a new kind of social movement in the 1970s. One participant, Sergio Bologna, who had urged “the whole of the students’ movement to measure itself with workers’ struggles,” recalled: “It was in 1969 when the whole movement found itself in front of the gates of FIAT that we had won.” And it was this initial explosion that laid the ground for the famous experiments in social centers and autoreduction often invoked by contemporary activists, peaking in the creative revolt of the autonomous movements in 1977.

But it is hard to find the gates of FIAT today. Where are the massive factories, with workers grounded in the traditions of solidarity, strike, and sabotage? A defection from the workplace at the scale of France and Italy seems utterly unimaginable today, with our marginalized labor movement. We can’t ignore the fact that the decline of reformist social democracy has made it difficult for us to expand beyond a militant minority. However, we also can’t just take the easy way out by ignoring everything that’s changed.

After all, these struggles were firmly situated within cycles of crisis and restructuring – changes in the regime of accumulation that both heightened class antagonisms and reacted against them. One of the crucial theoretical premises of the student movement was that the line between students and workers was getting more and more blurry. The university was becoming a business that generated human capital, rather than a monastery for traditional intellectuals; it shaped a labor-power appropriate for an increasingly technological production process. The classical conditions of full employment, so conducive to strikes, were in decline, giving way to heavily automated factories and creeping joblessness. Social movements had to extend outside the factory, and in Italy they did with some success. But as capital shifted from the Keynesian compromise to neoliberalism, laying off workers, financializing itself, and moving labor-intensive production out of the country, it also imposed new forms of control on workers who were still tied to manufacturing.

This is exactly what happened to the Italian struggles in 1980, after a bitter 35-day strike at FIAT was finally defeated. The state had already violently destroyed the movement and arrested its militants – 5,000 in jail or driven abroad. A hundred workers committed suicide; after mass layoffs, the employers, in alliance with the managerial staff, broke the residual power of the mass worker. The student movement had tried to bring technicians and white-collar workers into the struggle, but now they betrayed the dream of proletarian unity and opted for competition over solidarity. Their ideology of a “right to work” was a justification of managerial power over manual laborers, whose control of the production process was compromised by the introduction of a computerized chain of command. The story is repeated everywhere: subcontracting, multi-tasking, job rotation, temporary and part-time work, stagnant wages – and the decimation of the protection that workers did get from unions and the welfare state.

Now while students look forward to waiting tables to pay off their loans, manufacturing workers – and the service workers who facilitate the “logistics” of manufacturing, like transportation and telecommunications – are still subjected to this labor regime, with severely compromised protection. This is a crucial political difference between our struggles and those of the 1960s and 1970s. While students and workers entered that crisis within the framework of the postwar compromise, we’ve entered our crisis after that framework and its material conditions have been mostly dismantled.

So we have to turn our attention to the conditions, sometimes paradoxical, for the expansion of a genuinely radical struggle to a mass scale capable of a total social disruption. In the past, these conditions were themselves established by struggles before they ossified into reformism – the PCI, after all, came into being after the biennio rosso, the two “red years” of worker-organized factory occupations from 1919-1920. There is no reason to exclude the possibility that pressure from the streets will force institutions like unions to loosen their grip, and get out of the way of an autonomous rank and file. My own graduate student union, UAW 2865, was the site of an electoral battle against the incumbent bureaucratic slate; the winning reform caucus, Academic Workers for a Democratic Union, has gone on to play a vital organizational role in every radical action on the UC Santa Cruz campus.

But a strategic engagement with these contradictory existing institutions can only succeed if we also put forward new ideas, which take the restructuring of the global economy into account, and construct new political practices that can force capital into ceding the historically specific space in which a contemporary movement can explode. These ideas can’t be abstract; they must be actively generated by the real activity of the exploited, as they take the lead and organize themselves. We may have organized ourselves in the public squares, in the tents, but if we simply impose this form on those who are not yet with us, we prevent them from acting.

May Day 2006 saw over a million undocumented workers withdrawing their labor and participation. Starting as demonstrations against the racist bill HR 4437, it built into an immigrant’s strike, what some have called the largest strike in US history. Truckers completely shut down the logistical hub of the Los Angeles/Long Beach port complex. I remember seeing truckers cheering in Oakland during the November 2011 general strike; I saw less enthusiasm during the second port shutdown a month later.

But in 2006, immigrant workers had acted within independent organizations. The troqueros who shut down the port – independent contractors who have to buy their own gas and can’t be unionized by the Teamsters – had started illegally striking and shutting down traffic in late April. The North Carolina meatpacking factory Smithfield had been shut down by workers who organized in Latino “workers’ centers,” outside of the unions, adapting the model of community centers to workplace organizing. Their call for a May Day walkout spread to meatpacking plants across the state. If mass strikes once rolled from factory to factory, can we imagine a chain of actions today that links one sector of the proletariat to the next, waves of self-activity articulated in radically different organizational forms?

It means taking risks. But that’s the only way that our movement can begin to discover the possibilities of emerging forms of struggle – like the bums of the Industrial Workers of the World who jumped on a moving train, to see where it would take them.

Asad Haider is a graduate student at UC-Santa Cruz and an editor of Viewpoint.

In a report called “Activists and Anarchists Speak for Themselves at Occupy Oakland,” Susie Cagle reminds us that the recent major instances of street-fighting, which have been cited by liberals critical of the black bloc, force us to abandon the stereotype of ski-masked vandals breaking windows. She writes:

The buildings Occupy Oakland marched toward were not targeted for destruction, but for squatting, for organization and for political and community building. And the protesters who came armed with plastic, wood and metal shields, who both moved on and defended others from the police, were not a bloc, were not dressed in black and did not move as one unit.

“Black bloc is not a lifestyle choice, but a tactical one,” Cagle argues. She points out that the only recent manifestation of the black bloc was during the November 2nd “general strike,” when bank windows were smashed, “STRIKE” was spray-painted on a Whole Foods, and the Travelers Aid Building was briefly occupied, all by a group clad in black.

But somehow, even though all sides acknowledge that the real issue is street-fighting as such, the black bloc has become the representative figure of the debate, summing up the tension between “nonviolence” and “diversity of tactics,” property destruction and legal marches, anarchism and liberalism.

This is no accident. The history of the black bloc reveals a great deal about our current moment – it can even help us to understand the nature of squatting. But before tracing this history, we should deal with definitions.

Strategy and Tactics

Since much of the contemporary debate over the black bloc has revolved around the meaning of a “diversity of tactics,” a concept which actually emerged nearly a decade ago, let’s take a moment to define “tactics.” This means defining “strategy” as well, since the two terms have no meaning outside their relationship with each other.

A tactic, it is often said, is a specific set of maneuvers used to win a localized engagement. A strategy, on the other hand, is the way these discrete engagements are coherently strung together to realize a broader objective. The two therefore form a reciprocal relationship in practice as well as in theory. Without a strategy, tactics only produce isolated skirmishes; without tactics, a strategy is only an unfulfilled dream.

Militant confrontation through street-fighting, which has been personified by the black bloc today, is a tactic, since it represents a specific way to win a specific encounter. It can stand alone or be complemented by a number of other tactics, such as peaceful marches, boycotts, or even voting, to name just a few. Calling for a “diversity of tactics” just means that all such tactics should be left open for future engagements. But this innocuous and seemingly obvious position, which, in theory, could refer to every imaginable tactic, has now come to adopt a highly specific meaning. The phrase no longer refers to the need to pursue a plurality of positions, but rather to the question of the continued viability of a single tactic: street-fighting, especially within the black bloc paradigm.

The obsession over the black bloc in the past few months is a distorted reflection of the very real predominance of this tactic in contemporary struggles. This is somewhat odd, because in our current cycle of struggle, the black bloc has genuinely appeared in only a few areas, mainly the Northwest United States. But while the tactic’s geographic reach is somewhat localized, its presence in the movement’s collective imagination has grown to immense proportions. It seems like the black bloc is everywhere, a palpable reality, something everyone has to take a side on – even, and perhaps especially, those who haven’t actually seen it in action firsthand.

But it’s precisely the continued obsession with this single tactic that prevents us from seriously interrogating the necessary other term in this relationship: strategy. The discussions over the so-called “diversity of tactics” indicate the problem: by focusing all our energies on disputing the merits of a tactic, we end up neglecting strategy altogether. A “diversity of tactics” has little to do with strategy; in fact, it seems to replace strategy with liberal pluralism. The question isn’t whether to pursue a “diversity of tactics,” but rather: what kind of strategy allows us to effectively incorporate a diverse range of tactics?

It soon becomes clear that the hypertrophy of this tactic is actually a direct result of the atrophy of any corresponding strategy. As Alberto Toscano has recently written, “if something marks out the contemporary resurgence of theoretical interest in communism, across its various species, it is the almost total neglect of the question of strategy.” We might also add that since strategy and tactics can only exist in a reciprocal relationship, the deformation – or perhaps even absence – of former can only lead to a destabilization of the latter.

The symptom of this destabilization is the compulsion to repeat. The tactic of street-fighting is now being repeated obsessively, overcompensating for the shortage of strategy. At its crudest, this just means repeating the same thing over and over again in the hopes of forcing some kind of breakthrough; some claim that the repetition of a tactic will in itself generate a strategy.

Others suggest that a tactical defeat might produce a strategic victory. On the one hand, this position implies the conceptual collapse of two distinct categories into one; on the other, it seems to represent the very essence of teleological thinking. Though they’re related, strategies don’t organically emerge out of tactics. Suggesting that the repetition of a single tactic will naturally and spontaneously give birth to a strategy does not do justice to the complexity of their relationship.

We have a militant tactic without a correspondingly militant strategy, locked into compulsively repeating the bloated tactic in order to miraculously produce the absent strategy. And since this whole impasse is being represented by the dramatic image of the black bloc, we should trace the history that led us here.

A Genealogy of the Black Bloc

The roots of today’s black bloc reach back to the experiences of the European “autonomist” movements of the late 1970s and early 1980s. At that time, capitalists in a number of states were consciously undermining the militancy of the mass worker by shifting to a new regime of accumulation. This restructuring was characterized by systematic decentralization, flexibilization, and territorial disarticulation of the production process. This shift, which has somewhat simplistically been regarded as a move away from industrial factories towards the more dispersed production of services, information, and knowledge, involved a transformation of the terrain of the city. On the one hand, public spaces once used by the proletariat – such as youth centers, parks, and meeting places – were destroyed. On the other hand, spaces once used by the great industrial companies – such as warehouses, factories, sheds – were being abandoned as capitalists reoriented their business practices. In Italy, for example, Pierpaolo Mudu notes that by the late 1990s, “industrial property across a total area of 7 million sq m had been vacated in Milan alone.”

The Italian working class responded to this restructuring by launching another cycle of struggle in which these abandoned buildings were seized all over the North, once the heartland of Italian heavy industry, and antagonistically transformed into bases of autonomous proletarian power. In fact, the first of these bases, or what would later be called “social centers,” arose in the vacant spaces of Milan in 1975. Though the social centers, which began to cohere into a kind archipelago of liberated spaces, or what would later be defined as “Autonomia,” engaged in a broad number of activities – facilitating political debates, offering legal advice, organizing solidarity actions for marginalized groups, establishing libraries, holding concerts, reaching out to surrounding neighborhoods, and so on – their significance for the Italian communists was in their role as “modern-day soviets,” or centers of autonomous power developed in direct opposition to the state.

The revolutions of the twentieth century were sparked by the challenge of syndicalism, which advanced the idea of self-management in workers’ councils – in Russia called soviets. Paolo Virno, who participated in Autonomia, has tried to theorize the general logic of the soviet form, no doubt strongly inspired by the social centers of his own time. Virno describes soviets as “the organs of nonrepresentative democracy,” the space in which the cooperation and creativity that capital increasingly relies upon for production can take on an independent public existence. Their goal is to “emancipate virtuosic cooperation from its present connection with waged labor.” In this regard the social centers are recasted as historical attempts to reanimate the soviet form for a context marked by “post-Fordism,” and the visible importance of knowledge and communication in the rapidly expanding service sector.

Soviets have historically been the foundation for revolutionary explosions; Virno writes that they “interfere conflictually with the State’s administrative apparatuses, with a view to eating away at its prerogatives and absorbing its functions.” This does not mean reproducing the state – for Virno, the soviets break totally with the the “normativity of comand,” the bureaucratic ideals of “representation and delegation”:

Whether it is a question of the distribution of wealth or the organization of schools, the functioning of the media or the workings of the inner city, the Soviets elaborate actions that are paradigmatic and capable of blossoming into new combinations of knowledge, ethical propensities, technologies, and desires.

The social center form of soviet power, though made famous early on by the Italians, was by no means limited to them – a very similar phenomenon took place in Germany. Though there was a “German Autumn” of militancy in 1977, the movement only really picked up a few years later, when the squatters first began to consolidate. Soon after 1980, the squatters movement took the initiative, retaking hundreds of homes throughout West Germany, and the “Autonomen” brought the soviets home. They began to form their own councils, organize national congresses of squatters, and, as in Italy, used their social centers to eat away at the state.

It became clear, however, that these militant spaces could never escape state repression. From the very beginning, in fact, the Autonomen were on alert, knowing themselves to be under attack, prime targets for the police. After the “Free Republic of Wendland” – a liberated space in Gorleben – was violently dispersed in 1980 by the largest deployment of police in Germany since Hitler, and after a wave of systematic attacks on squatters in West Berlin in December of that year, it became obvious that if they were to survive, the Autonomen would have to protect themselves in more militant ways. Groups of armed Autonomen, whose power was rooted in the social centers, quickly emerged to defend these spaces. A necessary task, no doubt, but one which would eventually consume all the energies of the movement, polarizing the Autonomen and weakening their solidarity.

“As their militant actions became attacked even by their allies,” notes historian George Katsiaficas, “radicals became increasingly autonomous – some would say isolated – from mainstream protesters and came to constitute their own source of collective identity.” These militant groups, who now engaged in offensive strikes as well strictly defensive maneuvers, began to forge a collective identity through the monopolization of a single tactic: militant confrontation through street-fighting. By the mid-1980s, as repression continued to escalate, these militant groupings solidified their cultural identity, sometimes in opposition to the rest of the movement. “The black leather jackets worn by many people at demonstrations and the black flags carried by others signalled less an ideological anarchism than a style of dress and behavior,” Katsiaficas writes. Black clothes, black flags, ski masks, helmets, and punk became “symbols of a way of life.” It is here that the modern black bloc was born.

But it was precisely at this point, when the black bloc began to fuse itself into a distinct entity, that the autonomous movements that originated it actually began to decline. This was the historical reality underlying the ideology of the black bloc. The tactic, in fact, emerged in large part as a way to stop this internal disintegration. Many activists believed that their instability was purely the result of state repression, and they assumed that the organized defense of the social centers would actually reverse this process of decomposition.

In truth, the autonomous movements, in both Germany and Italy, were on the verge of collapse. As they developed a strongly internal and oppositional identity, they found themselves increasingly incapable of reaching beyond the hegemony of a single proletarian figure. They failed to link with different layers of the working class, and were unable to form a coalition with the broader masses. Earlier in the century, when soviets were first born, this had meant linking the proletariat to the peasantry. In the late 1970s and 1980s, it meant linking the “advanced” sector of the proletariat, in this case the “social worker” – or less contentiously, a kind of amalgam of students, youth, and precarious workers that drifted through a disintegrating welfare system – to the rest of the working class. Unable, or perhaps unwilling to link the different segments of the class together, the black bloc became nothing but the rudiments of a defensive military force.

The eventual disappearance of the social centers, however, did not necessarily entail the disappearance of those militant groupings that were originally created to protect those besieged spaces. In fact, they lived on, but their function grew more and more ambiguous. In the mid-1990s, for example, some activists in Italy decided to form Tute Bianche, or the “White Overalls,” as a direct response to the disintegration of the surviving social centers. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri describe the grouping:

The youths in the social centers began to recognize the new paradigm of work that characterized their experiences: the mobile, flexible, precarious work typical of Post-Fordism… Rather than the traditional blue overalls of the old factory worker, white overalls represented this new proletariat… They claimed they were the ‘invisible’ workers, since they had no fixed contacts, no security, no basis for identification. The whiteness of their overalls was meant to represent this invisibility. And this invisibility that characterized their work would also prove to be the strength of their movement.

The White Overalls represented a final attempt to revitalize the social centers in light of changed historical conditions. When it became clear, after 2001, that the effort had failed, that their social basis could not be resuscitated, and that their particular form of struggle had reached its historical limits, the White Overalls decided to disappear.

The fate of the black bloc would be different. The tactic was reborn, and in fact truly came into its own, only after being transplanted to the United States – specifically Seattle in 1999 – where a movement comparable to the German Autonomen had never existed. This geographical distance powerfully represented the historical distance between the reborn black bloc and its constituting organs in the earlier cycle of struggle. The American black bloc, unlike the White Overalls, was not born in the social centers.

It was really with the eruption of the anti-globalization movement, stretching from around 1999 to 2003, that the black bloc tactic, now totally disconnected from the very idea of the social centers, began to survive independently by refashioning itself into something other than just a tactic. The vast majority of those who formed the ranks of the black bloc in Seattle had no direct memory of the German Autonomen of the early 1980s, separated by a sharp generational divide, and so had little choice but to reconstruct a new identity for themselves. The rebirth of the black bloc came at a price: the insurmountable contradiction between its existence as a tactic and its existence as an identity. Though the defeat of the anti-war movement, the onset of the Bush years, and the decline of an organized Left, forced the black bloc to more or less disappear as a material tactic, it paradoxically consolidated its identity, granting it a mystical afterlife that is being resurrected and fetishized today.

A Floating Tactic

After decades of capitalist restructuring, there are no longer squatters to defend. With the definitive dismantling of the welfare state that once provided the conditions in which autonomous movements could emerge, and the violent repression of the social centers that remained, the squatters who once formed the social basis for the black bloc have disappeared.

Separated from these foundations, the black bloc has continued to live on as a kind of floating tactic. Now in its afterlife, the idea of the black bloc explicitly reproduces a single tactic in the hopes of rediscovering the strategy it emerged from. At a superficial level, it was a street-fighting tactic that used black clothes and masks to anonymously confront the state, and occasionally destroy property. But after its death and rebirth, the black bloc has become a particular ideology of street-fighting: the use of confrontation with police to displace contradictions internal to the movement. And the movement is left to oscillate between two supplementary ideologies, two unconscious strategies, in the name of the “diversity of tactics.”

The first involves deliberately planning police confrontations in the hopes of spectacularizing the movement for liberal consumption. More of a formula than a strategy, it is applied indiscriminately, with little concern for the specific context, and paradoxically makes the survival of the movement dependent on getting the state to listen.

The second involves trying to force the social centers, once the base of the black bloc, back into existence. Cut adrift, without the social centers that first called them into being, the black bloc ideology now tries to institute them by force. The extraordinarily hostile legal situation, and the overwhelming military power of the state, turn the taking of the building into a framework for street-fighting. And to a certain extent, it’s difficult to think past the performative gesture of reconstituting a social space, which seems to be the goal in itself, rather than the actual construction of the center. We have no reason to believe that a social center can be constructed in the context of street-fighting. The armed Autonomen never created the squatters’ centers; it was the archipelago of autonomous spaces that created the armed Autonomen. And recent experience indicates that in the context of an advanced neoliberalism, social centers probably won’t be the form that organized proletarian self-activity will take today.

In the first case, then, we have a liberal ideology of the present; in the second, a communist ideology of the past. One has led some of the most militant, energetic, and dedicated elements of the movement into unintentional reformism; the other has led these elements into fulfilling the directives handed down from a past that no longer exists.

Neither a liberalism of the present nor a communism of the past is adequate today. The only thing we’re after is a communist strategy for the present. Our task is to attempt to lay the foundations for an organization of proletarian self-activity, in a form that is historically appropriate. It means reinventing the “soviets” for our time, as the autonomists did for theirs; discovering, through a process of collective experimentation, a form of struggle that will resonate with the composition of our class, linking together the various layers of that class, and recomposing this disparate body into an antagonistic subject. Only then will we be able to determine the place in our struggle for the tactic of militant confrontation through street-fighting. Without that, without a coherent communist strategy, all we have is a zombie chasing its own shadow.

Salar Mohandesi is a graduate student at UPenn and an editor of Viewpoint.

For the most part, the atmosphere in my cell was not one of defeat, but rather of rigorous self-criticism. This is a necessary moment in the growth of any movement – coming up against the limits of the premises that underlie a practice – and it seemed to be getting underway just hours after that practice had collapsed on the streets of Oakland. This was decidedly not the unreflecting group of militants that Chris Hedges has recently accused of a pathological aversion to strategic thought.

Outside of jail, the conversation seems to have been somewhat different. The focus within the movement over the past week has increasingly been on the brutality that we experienced in jail. We were denied food and necessary medication, leading to seizures; we were abused both physically and verbally; we were crammed into overcrowded and inadequately ventilated cells in which the tear gas that still clung to our clothes made breathing unbearable. All of this is true. This was a traumatic experience for many of us, and the support from cheering crowds waiting with coffee and cigarettes when we were released was powerful. This collective healing is important; it builds solidarities.

But we need to be careful. The discourse about police brutality that has been disproportionately filling the Occupy echo chamber this week is an essentially liberal one, and it tends to mask other problems that surfaced on Saturday. There is always something tautological about the complaint that one was treated badly in jail. It’s jail, after all. To focus on the brutality of the experience as though this is somehow exceptional is to misunderstand the basic function of jails and police forces in society. The violence that we came up against on Saturday is the violence that is required daily to maintain and reproduce society as it is presently constituted. What we experienced for a few nights, while awful, is simply daily life for the unpaid prison laborers who cleaned out our cells when we went home.

I know that this will not strike most of the people that were arrested on Saturday as a particularly controversial point. Many of them are no strangers to the penal system themselves. Indeed, Oakland’s radical edge within the Occupy movement largely comes from the fact that the quotidian violence that is required to reproduce capitalism is closer to the surface here than in many other communities.

But there comes a point at which these conversations can hinder further thought. I don’t want to normalize or apologize for the brutality of the system, nor do I want to lapse into a debate over what constitutes an “authentic” experience of this brutality. Nevertheless, we as a movement have to stop and ask ourselves what conversations are being displaced by this exclusive focus on police brutality. More than that, we have to look at this focus as itself a symptom of deep contradictions in our practice, which we have been unable to come to terms with.

Chief among these is the fact that up until now Occupy has experienced its growth spurts as a result of confrontations with the police. The general strike in November was in large part made possible by the excessive force with which the police evicted the campers at Oscar Grant Plaza. Similarly public instances of brutality at UC Berkeley and UC Davis led to massive mobilizations on all campuses across the UC system. The basic premise underlying Saturday’s action was in keeping with this pattern. By picking a sufficiently ambitious target and casting the action in sufficiently antagonistic rhetoric, a confrontation was with cops was assured.

Organizers were ready for this. I was ready for this. If “Move-in Day” was successful, so much the better – if not, the inevitable clash with cops would unmask the absurdity of a system that would use such force to keep an empty building from becoming a community center.

The problem is that police forces can adapt. On Saturday there was no dramatic image that crystallized the brutality of the police state, just a whole lot of the standard violence that is inherent to the nature of policing. Even the teargassing of children is, by this point, more or less normal. Whether we admit it or not, we were implicitly relying on the spectacle of police brutality to catch national attention. This didn’t happen as it did in November. And it couldn’t happen, precisely because it already happened in November.

When this narrative of victimization was not immediately forthcoming, we kicked into high gear to manufacture one. This is ultimately what underlies the focus on brutality. It’s not that anything that is being said about our experiences in Santa Rita Jail is incorrect, and of course we need to denounce police brutality wherever it exists. The National Lawyers Guild class action lawsuit should go forward, and for those who had their first material encounter with the violence of the state, the lessons learned last weekend can only have a radicalizing effect. But we also need to understand why this essentially liberal discourse about reining in police excesses has become so hegemonic amongst radicals. It points to a deeper problem within Occupy: so many of our actions are premised on producing narratives for liberal consumption. Scott Olsen was one such story. The attack on students on the “Mario Savio Steps” in Berkeley is an even clearer example. These can be useful organizing tools when they present themselves but they cannot be the basis of the actions we plan from here on out.

I don’t want to gloss over the huge advances that Occupy Oakland is continuing to make. There has been a chronic problem with building occupations in the recent past. Typically, the bulk of planning goes into the actual takeover of a building, while the question of what to do with the space once it’s occupied is an afterthought. Saturday’s action marked an advance insofar as there was clearly a tremendous amount of work that had gone into “planning for success.” A schedule of events was made, materials were gathered, and it seemed like there were the numbers to sustain an indefinite occupation. But at a more fundamental level, success was not the point. It was more or less a contingency plan for what to do in case we accidentally succeeded. The romanticized confrontation was still the unconscious premise of our actions, no matter how many people outwardly believed we would win the day.

In the holding tanks of Santa Rita, we discussed these questions. Many of us were coming to grips with the recognition that we went into Saturday thinking that there was a crew of radicals in Oakland who had it all figured out. All we had to do was show up at their event and things would go off without a hitch, which is how it had worked at the general strike and the port shutdown.

This logic broke down on Oak Street. Saturday clearly demonstrated the limits of a mode of organizing that has thus far been successful. Up until now, Occupy has involved a contradictory and unstable mixture of liberal and more radical elements held together by a thin tissue of stories of injustice and violated “rights.” This fact has led to endless unproductive disputes about the role of “violence” in our movement, of which Chris Hedges is just the most recent and banal example. The problem is that if our unity can be reduced to our shared victimization, we are reliant on police and civic officials to continually give us these stories. As police tactics adapt, and as the demands we make of the system become more radical, this will become increasingly difficult. The basis of the connections we make within the movement must involve a deeper sort of radicalization. The central antagonism is not between the police state and the people, but between labor and capital. The anti-police repression marches that are now happening weekly in Oakland, while focused on a crucial issue, tend to sideline this larger point. To the extent that this discourse dominates our practice, we are operating with exactly the same limited and moralizing conception of our movement’s unity as our liberal critics. The romanticized picture of the brutal repression of peaceful demonstrators that Hedges fetishizes is on a continuum with the images of victimization in many of our own actions. We need to tell a new story.

After we experienced the material limits of this type of organizing, some very necessary conversations began in Santa Rita in earnest. The focus on the brutality has its uses, but to the extent that it stands in as a substitute for this more substantial self-criticism, it allows the tenuous alliance between adventurism and humanitarian liberalism to persist. While we are all justifiably angry at the Oakland Police Department and the Alameda County Sheriffs, what comes out of this experience needs to be more than simply a strengthened conviction that we hate the cops. If we don’t swiftly move towards the self-criticism that we need, the opportunity will be missed.

Jeb Purucker is a graduate student in Literature at UC Santa Cruz and a member of UAW Local 2865.

Yesterday these words were at the center of a material practice which brought our movement up against its limits. It’s not a bad thing to meet your limits. It means confronting the possibility and necessity of radical transformation. And this confrontation should be approached with all the courage and resolve on display when a young militant throws a tear gas canister back at a line of police.

Occupy Oakland Move-In Day was to be a historic event, an occupation of a privately owned building by a mass of people, announced well in advance. The literature indicated that “multiple targets” had been identified, and that the site would be “a vacant building owned either by a bank, a large corporation of the 1% or already public.” The goal was familiar: to establish a social center in the building for community use. And in fact a remarkable schedule of events had been planned, a “festival” which could surely have drawn in attention and support.

Every action in Oakland begins with a deceptive innocence, a rally at Oscar Grant Plaza. The numbers were impressive – the mainstream media reports 1000-2000 throughout the day – and a sign that a remarkable cross-section of the city had been waiting for this. But at the same time police were walking through the crowd with a photo album of prominent organizers, along with warrants for their arrest.

Apparently some of those arrested were returned to the rally, and the march set off in good spirits. From time to time you could look across the street and see lines of police on the next block. You could also look up and see their helicopters.

At a certain crucial intersection it became clear that police, who had a bird’s-eye view of our trajectory, were blocking the planned route. In front of us was a quagmire known as Laney College. This was the first moment in which a desperately-needed contingency plan was unavailable. Though the truck with the sound system and furniture was at an impasse, the crowd spontaneously surged onto the unfamiliar campus and had no idea where to go. It wasn’t hard for the police to block the most apparent exits.

Inevitably, there was a mic check and an attempt at a general assembly; the suggestion that we occupy a building on campus was met with appropriate derision by the already irritated crowd. We walked over an extremely narrow bridge and climbed up a hill to the street, where once again we met our friends in blue and had no idea where we were supposed to go. Eventually we walked on a large street to approach the Henry J. Kaiser Convention Center, which was surrounded by fences and cops.

The Kaiser Convention Center is a very large building. It is an obvious and excessively ambitious target. Whether it was a good idea to consider this building at all will be the subject of great debate in the future. What’s obvious is that doggedly pursuing this questionable plan after significant police interference was inadvisable. The front lines, the people with trashcan shields, took the initiative. They grabbed the fence and pulled it down to face the police, who shot off a smoke bomb. Because smoke bombs look a lot like tear gas, they’re a great way to cause a crowd to become even more chaotic. But people were already drifting away by then, trying to find some representative of the leadership to explain plan B.

Every step we made towards plan B brought us towards another line of police. The handheld garage-door barricades and trashcan shields gathered again at the front lines, with a mass in goggles and bandanas behind them. Ominous drumming on parked cars and buckets. An advance on the police, met with flashbangs and tear gas. The crowd advanced three times.

There was nothing much to do after that. A megaphone told us we were going to take back Oscar Grant Plaza, so we walked back there. After a brief moment of recuperation the organizers announced that we would be taking another building in 45 minutes.

I regret to say the atmosphere was triumphalist. It’s understandable that a clash with police has a marked effect on the adrenal glands. But there was nothing resembling a victory in this. The stated goal had not been achieved, and the police are familiar with the aggressiveness of activists in Oakland. They expect it. In fact, the Oakland Police Department is on the verge of federal receivership, an unprecedented move, because the OPD really likes violence, and seeks it out as part of a policy of state-sponsored gang warfare. And the insistence on “Fuck the Police” marches in Oakland leading up to yesterday could only shift the emphasis from the occupation itself to the clash.

Now we have to ask ourselves if we should continue to give the police what they want, which we do in ritualized form at every action. After all, it is these rituals that reproduce belief in the cops. The cops tell a lie. The lie is that their violence is autonomous and imposes its power to preserve an abstract order. What they never want us to understand is that cops are an element of the machinery of the capitalist state, and they exist within a wide network of institutions which allow the capitalist class to exercise social power. In Oakland their repression was used to evict an encampment which threatened to bring public space under proletarian control, and to drive out an attempted building occupation on a day declared to be a “general strike.” And if yesterday the OPD was forced to call upon the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office and city police including Fremont, Hayward, Berkeley, Pleasanton, Union City, and Newark, their actions were structured around the defense of private property and its social system.

But the reinforcement of private property is not limited to police violence. It happens in schools, the legal system, social welfare institutions, non-profit organizations, trade unions, and countless other spaces. Since these institutions don’t use violence to defend private property, a struggle whose assault on capitalist power is as broad as that power itself will situate street confrontations within a wide spectrum of activity. In Oakland the class war did not begin with the occupation. It happens every day when the police are used against its citizens, many of whom are sent not just for a night in jail but to prison, if they aren’t shot in the back. And it happens every day when people are evicted from their homes, when they are subjected to discipline and humiliation in the workplace, when their schools are converted into training camps for Bill Gates. For many of these people, whose entry into political practice is required for the continuation of the Occupy movement, escalating the confrontation with police may not be highly desirable. Evasion is better.

And it is the subject of evasion which brings us to the next part of our story. I can’t claim, for a specific set of reasons, to have direct knowledge of what happened then. I can certainly assure you that I took no part in any illegal activities. But someone who isn’t me was there, and experienced it.

A much smaller crowd – maybe between 200 and 500 – followed a route past the Traveler’s Aid building, the site of the November 2nd occupation attempt, again followed by police. At a certain crucial intersection someone creatively knocked open a fire hydrant to produce a water barricade. The crowd swarmed into a park containing the Remember Them statue, with depictions of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, among others.

The next time Occupy Wall Street sends money to Occupy Oakland, the general assembly may want to consider investing it in a helicopter. With their helicopters the police knew exactly where to line up to kettle the entire group, who were blocked into this park, with little left to do but admire the sculptures, erected by the Oakland Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce, of men and women who committed civil disobedience and faced police in the past.

The police recited their order to disperse. Some people probably wanted to fight again, but the vast majority did not. They approached the lines of police and informed them that they wished to disperse. This had to be repeated several times; most times it was ignored, sometimes it was met with a response that they were waiting for instructions. When the instructions arrived the police informed people who wanted to disperse that they should move to another corner of the park and exit onto the street there. The crowd moved over to that corner, where a cop told them, “stay away from us,” and refused to allow anyone to leave.

Suddenly, at the other end of the park, a smoke bomb. People started running towards a fence, which blocked the only area without police. An advanced element knocked down the fence and the whole crowd ran, coming up against another fence and knocking that one down too.

A few people ran off and successfully dispersed. The others gathered and were kettled again. Part of this group made a remarkable escape through the YMCA, jumping over exercise equipment and exiting elsewhere. Another part of the group was arrested.

The action didn’t stop there. Another group, whoever wasn’t sitting in front of the YMCA with zipties cutting into their wrists, returned to Oscar Grant Plaza and simply decided to occupy City Hall, where they burned an American flag and fought with police again.

Earlier that day, as we sat in Oscar Grant Plaza waiting for the next round, I heard a number of people talk about the class war. War demands military thinking. Among the basic principles of military strategy is the one which dictates that you retreat when the enemy advances. This is as fundamental a principle as the one which dictates that you pursue when the enemy retreats. And any evaluation of the day will have to begin with the acknowledgment that up to 500 of our troops were captured.

In the 1895 Introduction to Class Struggles in France, Karl Marx’s account of the 1848 revolution and its repression, Friedrich Engels reviewed the effect of historical changes in warfare on the class struggle. “Let us have no illusions about it,” he wrote. “A real victory of insurrection over the military in street fighting, a victory as between two armies, is one of the rarest exceptions. And the insurgents counted on it just as rarely… The most that an insurrection can achieve in the way of actual tactical operations is the proficient construction and defence of a single barricade.”

Knowing that the barricade tactic was one of “passive defense,” and that the military always possessed equipment and training unavailable to the insurgents, the revolutionaries of the 19th century pursued other goals. “Even in the classic time of street fighting,” Engels wrote, “the barricade produced more of a moral than a material effect. It was a means of shaking the steadfastness of the military.”

But at a certain point street-fighting lost its “magic,” even for this “moral” effect. After 1848 the police developed their own tactics of street fighting, and a whole range of changes tipped the balance in favor of the military. Their armies became bigger, and their weapons far more effective. Engels lists the smooth-bore muzzle-loading percussion gun, the small-calibre breech-loading magazine rifle, and the dynamite cartridge. He adds that the urban terrain had been transformed, with “long, straight, broad streets, tailor-made to give full effect to the new cannons and rifles.”

To this list we can now add beanbag bullets, CS gas, and helicopters. We are lucky that, unlike in Egypt, more traditional varieties of bullets are not currently on the table. But we can’t ignore the limits of the barricades; since the Paris Commune in 1871, which the Oakland Commune now recalls, the tactic of the barricades has been linked to defeat and the possibility of vicious and bloody repression. We have not suffered such a gruesome defeat. But coming up with a long-term strategy, beyond the short-term tactics, means that we acknowledge and learn from the defeats that we experience.

The alternative to street fighting that was embraced by the 19th century socialist movement, parliamentary contestation, is absolutely useless to us now. But even in the 19th century, when universal suffrage was a new democratic right, its use for revolutionary movements was not to enter into the administration of the capitalist state. Engels wrote that it “provided us with a means, second to none, of getting in touch with the mass of the people where they still stand aloof from us.” The dramatic increases in numbers – German socialists drew 1.5 million votes while it was illegal to even have a party meeting, and nearly 2 million votes after that – could compensate for the new military disadvantages. Street fighting, Engels argued, could play a role in the future if “undertaken with greater forces,” which could drop “passive barricade tactics” in favor of “open attack.”

A century later, insurrectionary anarchists and reformists like MoveOn vie for hegemony over the movement, each advancing street-fighting and voting not as tactics, but as the ultimate goals. And we have to be clear that it is an alliance between social democrats and ultra-leftists that has driven this movement, in spite of their public scorn for each other.

Their alliance, however, has opened a space for revolutionary responses to the crisis. These responses won’t be summed up in spectacular clash. They’ll be a process that will be with us through the ebbs and flows, beyond every defeat and within every victory.

The movement is currently in a lull. Everyone looks forward to spring, but there is no need to cling to escalation in period of quiet. No need, because it is precisely the time to expand, to engage in the less dramatic work of growing and incorporating the diffuse energies of the working class.

Reformists urge coalition building, as though the union bureaucracies could somehow lead a radical movement. While some purists refuse coalitions, the revolutionary response is infiltration and invasion. When we approach the unions we don’t seek their guidance; we seek to introduce class antagonism into those institutions, to construct a broad class power, menacing and inescapable for the bosses just as it is irresistible to workers who spend each day on the defensive.

Fences were torn down twice yesterday. The first time, a panicked and impotent attempt to convert a thwarted plan into a confrontation. The second time, as a tactical maneuver which played a precise and necessary role in evading the enemy. The determination and resourcefulness which enables such an escape could play a role in the army that not only defends the working class from capitalist brutality, but also defeats capitalist power. And at every action we are reminded that our historical task is to build the mass organization capable of drafting its strategy and guiding it to victory.

Asad Haider is a graduate student at UC Santa Cruz, a member of UAW 2865, and an editor of Viewpoint.

I think we can safely say that co-optation in the classic sense, which happened when the Democrats nominated William Jennings Bryan in 1896 to outmaneuver the Populists, is off the table. Democratic mayors have joined with Mayor Bloomberg in NY and others to simply use police repression against the Occupy movement. The message sent by the occupiers was clear: we are not for sale, not affiliated with any existing party, certainly not with the Democrats or Republicans, and not here to support Obama for re-election, nor to push an only marginally more progressive legislative agenda than the Democrats currently propose. Once it was clear that co-optation was not going to happen, and that substituting Democratic groups like Reclaim the Dream and MoveOn for Occupy itself was an absurdity, out came the pepper spray and the midnight raids on tents and public squares nationwide. The largest demonstration that MoveOn and Van Jones have been able to put together has been around 700 people, which is pretty sad for groups with large budgets and access to national media.

Occupy has been able to mobilize hundreds of thousands in over a thousand cities for hundreds of different actions, and has shut down the Brooklyn Bridge, several West Coast ports and a significant part of the city of Oakland in a general strike. So, my point is this: there has always been an alternative to co-optation. It is called radicalization. It happens when in the course of struggle people acting within prescribed limits see those limits as too confining or self-defeating, and see that there is an alternative approach already in existence that is more effective and attractive.

The relationship between Occupy and workers, union and non-union, who are not yet active in Occupy, can be the basis for such a dynamic. Since I live in Italy, and though I am active here and active by long-distance elsewhere, I have not been to US territorial Occupy events or occupation sites, have not been involved in the discussions, general assemblies, and decision-making processes these entail, and make no judgment on anyone’s position who was and has been there – I come from a certain set of experiences, but write out of humility in order to raise some issues I have not seen brought up in debates so far.

Activists and Unions
The West Coast port shutdown was one action that brought the relationship between Occupy and workers to the forefront. The debate about the action posed several questions: should Occupy activists have discussed the action more thoroughly with port workers and union members? Should the latter have had a veto over whether the action took place at all? Should the Occupy activists have asked union members to vote on a strike and accepted their decision?

All of these are good questions, and from afar I am not in a place to answer them. But the general framework must be reconsidered. When thousands of people want to mobilize to fight exploitation and inequality, they are already a legitimate force and can act without having to ask anyone’s permission. This is doubly true of a movement like Occupy where democratically-run general assemblies are the decision-making bodies, making Occupy more directly an organ of the people than the already at least once-removed system of representatives that currently passes for “democracy” on behalf of the 1% of exploiters.

Having said this, it is at minimum courteous to inform and ask for the support of the workers at any site where an action will take place. This is because as a movement of working class people Occupy or any other revolt must take account of the fact that our power comes from widening the base of the movement and from the power of united people fighting together.

This can go further, and in more than one direction. Workers and unions are not identical. Unions are representative institutions at work, and while any union member can tell you the limits and negative aspects of unions, it is also true that when workers do not have a union they are in a very weak position. So workers will continue to form and join unions with all their faults.

But the question necessarily arises – is Occupy’s relationship with the union or its members? I think it needs to be with both. There is no need to be on hostile terms with any union unless its leadership and structure act in a hostile way toward people and events associated with Occupy But even then, a relationship on the ground, in the workplace, with the workers themselves, both in and out of unions, can be decisive. First because one reason unions are legally prevented from just calling for strikes: under US law a strike during the term of a contract means a big fine for the union and often jail terms for its leadership. It is true that nearly all strikes involved potential sanctions, court injunctions, and other repression up until the 1930s, (still not uncommon today either) and passage of the National Labor Relations Act (Wagner Act), and later the even more anti-democratic Taft-Hartley Act, which explicitly outlaws solidarity among workers, including strikes to support Occupy. So we can’t expect union leaders and unions as organizations to explicitly support strikes or occupations the movement decides on. But there is no reason that the union members cannot be organized, recruited, and radicalized, through common action, common struggle, and discussion to participate informally – through wildcat strikes, slowdowns at work, and absenteeism on the day in question. It is just as possible for union members to be at general assemblies, participate in them like everyone else and decide for themselves, individually and collectively, what they want to do.

This allows for two important possibilities: first, the union leadership can at the very least be convinced to tolerate, or perhaps implicitly support, actions planned by Occupy – this seems to have happened in many cases during the Oakland general strike, and in another fashion during the Wisconsin occupations and strikes earlier in the year– or else be pressured by their own rank and file into adopting a more militant leadership. Second, the general assembly can be made to function as the larger, more inclusive decision-making body for the working class as a whole in a city or region. If this happens, unions as bodies, as well as their individual members, may participate in the GA, express their view, and determine whether they can agree on a decision. But this allows a class-wide form of organization, transcending the limitations and divisions of unions separated by trade or industry, to arise.

If the latter happens, we have what in Russia in 1917 was called a soviet. A form of self-government, which I believe is already present in the GAs and their counterparts in Spain, Greece, Tahrir Square in Egypt and in the informal committees in Tunisia and elsewhere around the world, but which need to expand their base both to hollow out the already broken legitimacy of states and parties, and to build their own legitimacy as founding institutions of a new egalitarian order. If instead the unions play the part of keeping Occupy activists away from their members and out of their workplaces, they risk repeating what happened during the near-revolution of May 1968 in France, when 10 million workers occupied their workplaces as revolts occurred in the streets of every city. Workers were prevented from creating the kind of horizontal lines of communication among themselves and with students and farmers that the current movement thrives on; if this happens again today, then both activists and workers will be defeated separately. So one crucial lesson is this: the workplace is a center of working-class cooperation and power, one that even thousands of activists engaging in civil disobedience cannot match alone. But if isolated from other social forces and movements, it becomes a cage, its energy trapped and then dissipated.

Lessons from Italy
One way to recruit a wider range of workers into the general assemblies and other activities is to take a page from the book of the Italian New Left, while avoiding the outcome that later weakened that movement. Italian militants went to workplaces that they considered strategic, to engage in conversation at the gates with workers, meeting with them outside work and setting up study groups or discussion groups on workers’ problems. Groups like Quaderni Rossi (Red Notebooks) and Potere Operaio (Workers Power) built relationships with workers at the gigantic FIAT Mirafiori factory, at the Port of Marghera, and other large workplaces, holding courses together on Marx’s Capital, and making independent workers demands that went beyond what unions were calling for. They demanded equal pay raises and reductions of working hours without pay cuts, to decrease inequality among workers and build greater solidarity. Often this resulted in a regular newsletter reflecting the workers (not always the union’s) point of view on workplace struggles, and informed other movements of what was happening inside the workplaces – internal events which, if isolated, could often remain opaque to the larger struggle. At the same time longer-term relationships were developed in which the workers participated in organizations that went beyond the content and forms of unions and parties. Some of these activities, even if in a different and changed context, are analogous to Occupy Oakland’s descent on the port.

The movement in Italy was systematically repressed through mass arrests, possibly due to its division into two fronts: secure workers versus more precarious workers on one hand, and those who believed in small-scale violent actions as opposed to those who believed that revolution required large-scale mass self-governed action, violent or nonviolent. But the movement responded with a remarkable redevelopment.

Activists with the radical radio station Sherwood in Padova set up the Occupied Social Center Pedro (named for a deceased militant), and in Milan the largest social center, Leoncavallo, was created. Through much of the 1980s, even in an atmosphere of general setback for movements, these groups occupied old abandoned warehouses, factories and other structures, using them to create a whole infrastructure of social centers that engaged in political actions, forms of political education, concerts, and other cultural activities, and mobilized people for protests.

The mainstream unions, even those seen as “left,” never really warmed up to these formations. Starting in 1979 another wave of arrests followed some killings of public officials by the Red Brigades and other small, secretive armed groups. Although the mass movement had distanced itself from these, basing itself on general assemblies, direct democracy, and mass public forms of struggle, the demonization of the movement as “terrorist” had an effect on unions. Often close to political parties, unions remained reluctant to work too closely with groups tainted by the government as too radical, or prone to violence. But even with this difficulty in attracting allies, activists could themselves mobilize hundreds of thousands for demonstrations even without the unions; they could participate collectively under their own auspices with their own banners and slogans at events that more mainstream organizations and unions had organized; they could physically maintain a public space for activities, to hold assemblies and so forth.

Many of these occupied social centers still exist. But there have been two downsides: first, like the workplaces, where workers were kept from engaging more fully with movements, the social centers have sometimes also become isolated from other forces, and have had trouble expanding. This is often understood by activists who try a number of tactic to break out of the ghetto: the anti-globalization movement, for example, gave the social centers another opportunity to mobilize together with church-based activists, unions and others, in a movement that for a time gave every sign of radicalizing more mainstream left forces. But after the events in Genoa in 2001, and the attacks of 9/11, the relationships became more strained – though hundreds of thousands could still be mobilized for years around globalization issues, and then against the Iraq War, suggesting that some radicalization of the base of the center-left parties and the union membership may have taken place.

Still, the relationship between workplace organizations, especially unions – which remain close to the center-left parties – and social centers and other radical movements is not a close one. This is the outcome for Occupy to avoid today, though exactly how to this is to be done remains for those on the scene to work out in real interactions and relationships with other movements, organizations and their members.

There are three lessons to be drawn from the Italian experience.

First, there is a great potential of radicalizing large numbers of working people on and off the job through the example and common action of movements like Occupy. Contact and cooperation with mainstream organizations is worth the risk so long as the latter are not attempting, as MoveOn did, to gain control of, or shut down, the movement.

Second, any physical place can become isolated, as can any movement or organization if cut off, or if it cuts itself off from other forces in the broadly-defined working class. Movements thrive by expanding their communications, contacts and relationships.

Third, as an already functioning form of direct democracy, and one open to the widest possible interpretation of who is part of the working class (99%), the general assembly is a better place and forum for the debates, discussions and decisions to be collectively worked out by workers of all kinds – employed or unemployed, unionized or not – than any union or organization representing a particular sector, industry, trade, ethnicity, neighborhood, or identity group. This does not mean that there will not be conflicts, contradictions, even inequalities to work out. The point is, democracy is two things at the same time: the power of the people, that is to say, a form of popular or proletarian or working-class government, but also the way that inevitable diversity, differences, and conflicts can be worked out among ourselves, without the interference of the undemocratic forces of the 1%.

There is a strange twist these days, emerging from the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries, in which not the Democrats but a faction of the Republicans, and one very hostile to collective forms of democracy and working-class interests, seeks to coopt leftists and to have a disproportionate say in Occupy and other movements: the libertarian wing around the candidacy of Ron Paul. Working people need a place to participate directly and engage in self-government, which inevitably means that people most of us disagree with will be involved – as indeed they should be. The democratic dynamic of working out our divisions means precisely this, and in my view takes us beyond the often obsessive focus on the First Amendment, however necessary it may be for self-defense – expressing yourself is one thing, governing collectively is quite another. This is our answer to the individualism of the libertarians. They are welcome, but the general assembly, along with other movement bodies and activities, is precisely where to demonstrate that there are alternatives to every form of capitalism, including the small-proprietor, market-driven vision of the libertarians. So here, we move beyond even autonomy as a perspective: self-government means radicalization of those in struggle together and the logic of it is full, collective self-government, at work, in the economy, in our own organizations, and in political life. I am confident that a worker attending a union meeting, and a libertarian engaging in “free choice” in the marketplace, even if they continue in these activities, will be attracted to the greater power over their lives offered by real, full democracy, which they can now find in a real movement for a different world.

Organizations, unions, and other groups or associations, perhaps even parties (not Democrats and Republicans!) can participate in the Occupy movement, to the extent of putting forward their point of view. Though they cannot dominate assemblies through organizational power and discipline, their members can participate fully in the general assemblies while remaining members of those groups that represent their partial interests at work, in defense of civil rights, or other issues. The general assembly can work to bring these fragments together into a whole, a constituent power greater than its parts.

Steven Colatrella has participated in the Midnight Notes Collective for over 30 years. He is the author of Workers of the World: African and Asian Migrants in Italy in the 1990s and has written for Counterpunch, New Politics, Socialism and Democracy, Wildcat, Journal of Critical Education Policy Studies, and London Progressive Journal. He lives in Padua, Italy.

“The prevalence of vacant and abandoned property in U.S. cities has reached crisis proportions despite efforts to foster reuse of these sites.”
-The Lincoln Institute

Following the recent four-day occupation of an empty bank building at 75 River Street in Santa Cruz and the attempted occupation of an empty warehouse in Seattle, the controversial tactic of attempting to seize and hold vacant private property has been taken up as a new front of a sprawling social movement. These actions move beyond protesting the enclosure of public space and stifling of free speech; they aim to expand the scope of critique to the role that private property plays in our current crisis. This change in scope has not been lost on the landlords. “I’m definitely not in agreement with this group taking over private property,” a local property owner told the Mercury News.

Any understanding of property laws must first acknowledge that these are agreements between human beings. They have had different meanings for ancient Sumerian kings, early Roman jurists, Chinese peasants, and the CEO of Chase Bank, and they change when the general assumptions of a given society no longer match up with reality. Given the pervasive misinformation about private property in the United States, let’s introduce some distinctions about what property is, and take a look at the legal frameworks that place conditions on the ownership of property.

What is Property?

First, it should be noted that the ideological defense of “private property” is both vague and misleading. The seizure, or even abolition of private property doesn’t refer to the water bottles or homes that many of us have purchased; private property in the context of anti-capitalist politics refers to the ownership by bosses and landlords of the resources people need to survive. Most people have no access to the tools and supplies required to build their own furniture, provide all their own food, or maintain a home entirely on their own. In a capitalist society, we depend on the market to provide these for us in exchange for money. We work waged jobs, where we receive only a portion of the value we add to the commodities we produce, and go into debt in order to afford them. When anti-capitalists talk about private property, they’re not referring to the possessions consumers have purchased in order to live; they’re referring to those possessions that the wealthy have accumulated in order to rent or sell to those who must work a waged job to survive.

According to the latest US census, last year there were 15 million homes – over 11% of all US houses – that are now empty year round. Some groups have begun occupying a miniscule fraction of these buildings, or moving to protect dwellings threatened by foreclosure. An Occupy Our Homes National Day of Action took place on December 6 in order to protect or claim these properties from the predatory banks that have already destroyed millions of lives. These groups have a lot of support, since they’re only obliquely attacking the notion of private property. Their legitimation rests on the visceral appeal of communities supporting their members – even though, according to US property law, the property does belong to the banks. The argument centers on the idea that the welfare of people is more important than the profit margins of banks. Current United States law disagrees, and sheriff’s departments around the country have supported the law against people in need. The state has judged this form of occupation to be revolutionary, however surprising or dismaying that may be.

Many autonomous groups have decided that a more open and frontal assault on the notion of private property is also necessary. In the actions in Santa Cruz, Seattle, and other locations, vacant buildings owned by private entities have been seized by activists in order to liberate them for public use. In Santa Cruz, occupiers of 75 River attempted to use property laws themselves to denaturalize the current rights of property owners, invoking “adverse possession,” a legal category by which trespassers can claim ownership of property. By claiming possession of the building and the land, the occupiers took an important first step towards an argument – in action and word – against the way that we in the United States think about and value private property. After all, as I argued to the press at the time, many people consider negligent disuse of empty structures immoral in the face of rising homelessness and poverty. Following the evacuation of the former bank, some community activists, in solidarity with Occupy Santa Cruz and 75 River transformed a vacant lot into a community garden and park. The “liberated” space has since been bulldozed replaced by a fence.

That many in Santa Cruz opposed the action was not a surprise: the ruling class of this small beach town are land owners, whose power and wealth comes from rent and tourism. However, some in Occupy Santa Cruz had also opposed this action on two grounds: first, they’d been led to believe that the march was to occupy a foreclosed home and they were not prepared for or supportive of the occupation of an empty bank; second, while they thought the occupation of foreclosed homes was justified, they considered the occupation of empty “private property” unjustifiable. While the distinction seems strange – they’re both, after all, private property – it was argued that a family could immediately use a foreclosed home, while claiming 75 River just provoked the cops and the ruling landowners. Indeed, soon after 75 River was ceded to the authorities and the police made it known that they would be pursuing the lead organizers of the action for arrest, the encampment of Occupy Santa Cruz, tenuously tolerated for months, was trampled and cleared on December 7.

The dispute is interesting since it reveals an ideology about types of private property that will have to be subjected to scrutiny. For some, dormant commercial private property is to be respected; only if that property was zoned residential should it be available to the people. Empty and vacated buildings, even if they were built by seizing and razing the homes of the working class, should be off limits. This disagreement is fundamentally about how best to “create a new relationship between land and communities, so communities can control resources to serve people rather than just create profit,” as Occupy Our Homes coordinator Michael Premo put it in an interview with Mother Jones. The implicit argument of these new occupations is that communities comprise not just residences, but also the skylines and buildings sloughed off by the 1%.

Strategy and Consensus

If these buildings are ever going to be more than good photo-ops and anxious hours spent waiting for police eviction, occupiers should consider the strategic and practical purposes of each action. If the buildings are to be opened, defended and made to  flourish, occupiers must think through at least three issues: the use of general assemblies in illegal and possibly dangerous situations, actual uses of buildings, and their relationship to the law.

Activists today run the risk of fetishizing general assemblies. While it’s a necessary means by which large and diverse bodies make decisions, there is little room for deliberation in the critical first days and weeks of an illegal occupation intent on creating public space. Those who plan an occupation must instead have clear plans for a number of contingencies. There is no room for indecisiveness. It’s no secret that a particular aggregation of individuals has planned and initiated the action – that group must determine how to communicate directions based on developing conditions. Plans for defense or evacuation of the space in response to inevitable confrontations with police should be made available to occupiers and sympathizers. Those who were less involved or aware of the action then have a chance to gauge their own level of support, and can plan their own actions based on clear information. If the planning stage of the action was not accomplished within the space of a general assembly, use of the general assembly to legitimate the action seems to miss not just the opportunity, but also the point.

Generally, these building occupations have made overtures towards opening the space to the community. At 75 River, an announcement claimed that the space would be used “to organize humanitarian efforts, house a library, and provide a forum for discussions.” This is all good rhetoric, but very little was actually done to build such institutions in the space. I have been told that this is partly because no one thought it could actually be held, and partly because openly looking for organizations to use the space – such as Food Not Bombs/Lawns, homeless organizations, among others – could alert the authorities to the action. What’s more, these groups risk losing their scarce supplies in the event of police repression. While the 75 River action remains an important moment in our collective attempt to rethink private property, if communities around the world are to see these occupations as beneficial, the occupiers themselves must take steps to make this a material fact.

Had the occupation immediately tilled the front yard and planted it, the cops would still have come. Had the occupation passed out flyers throughout town announcing a dance party the next night, the cops would still have come. Had the occupation immediately set up a feast to celebrate, or invited the Food Network to rework their space, the cops would still have come. But the occupation would have made a claim on that space. As I spoke with people in Santa Cruz over the following few days, I encountered resistance to the idea that the occupiers could have done anything constructive. Many people, after all, don’t consider graffiti and furniture barricades much of an improvement.

Others continue to feel that those who plan these occupations are themselves either elite youths rebelling against their privilege, or mindless hippies incapable of building anything. Within the movement we can dismiss these judgments, but only action to the contrary can actually dispel them. This is not to say that we’ll change every mind; we don’t need to do that. We do, however, need to stop expecting “the masses” to automatically understand our ideas. Making serious strides toward intelligibility doesn’t just mean writing articles or re-tweeting pithy observations, but actually taking the steps necessary to build a mass movement.

Breaking the Law

If we are to actually transform the relations that constitute society, this new stage of occupations needs to articulate its opposition to the current configuration of private property in the US. By citing “adverse possession,” the 75 River organizers gave a legal justification for rethinking the sovereignty of private property. While neither US nor California law allows “adverse possession” to be used for the immediate seizure of land, they do place this action along a continuum of other private appropriations of private property. As a lawyer for an East Coast economic justice group, who asked to remain anonymous, told me in a phone conversation, “pushing the envelope of the permissible is one of the things that has gotten the movement such media attraction, and appears as one of the main goals – a hugely successfully achieved one at that.” Since “the permissible” relies on social agreement, radical actions create the space within which our historically recent idea of “private property” can be interrogated.

In this case, the only use that the legal category of “adverse possession” allows is the ideological challenge. As currently written, “adverse possession” laws are of no legal use to the movement. A friend at Harvard Law School told me,

Unlike Europe, where there is a premium on space such that a party that occupies an empty dwelling/building for a brief period of time has rights to that space, we have a complicated system that takes time. We also have such an emphasis on personal property in the legal code, that property is almost never adversely possessed in urban areas.

However, this law does have an ideological and political valence that helps to illuminate the transitive nature of private property. It takes into account the popular conception that the public good is a condition for the ownership of private property, and arguments about the laws can take this as their starting point.

Sections 315-330 of the California Code of Civil Procedure deal with this issue, though the matter is specifically taken up in beginning in Section 321. Here, California code establishes that legal owners of property have the right to repossess their formerly vacant property, “unless it appear[s] that the property has been held and possessed adversely to such legal title, for five years before the commencement of the action.” There are conditions, then, on the “recovery of real property” by legal owners. Sections 322 and 324 also make a distinction between “claim of title” through written instrument, such as a property deed or court injunction, and non-written instrument – adverse, or hostile, possession without the permission of the deed owner. Section 325 lays out the specific conditions under which “claim of title” can be used without written instruments: land must have been claimed, occupied and managed for at least five continuous years; state, county, and municipal taxes must have been paid during those five years; and records of that payment must appear in official records.

Given that these political occupations have been both very open and very illegal, there is little reason to think that any of them would last the requisite five years. What is of crucial importance right now, however, is that the law recognizes a means whereby the legal owner of property can lose it through inattention or lack of use. There are conditions upon the ownership of property!

Adverse possession is often used in rural areas where property boundaries might be difficult to maintain or notice. As California law states:

Questions about ownership often wind up in court after an absent owner of rural property discovers that someone is living on his land or, when a piece of urban property is sold, a title insurance company refuses to issue insurance because the neighbor’s garage is found to be standing squarely on the property. If the people involved can’t work something out, the property owner may sue the trespasser, or the trespasser may bring a lawsuit to quiet title – a request for the court to settle who owns what.

Here, “adverse possession” appears related to the Preemption Act of 1841 and the Homestead Act of 1862, which allowed for squatters to take possession of “empty land.” After improving it and living on it for five continuous years, they could gain possession of up to 160 acres.

Today, in most states, trespassers can take legal ownership of property if the following conditions are met: the trespass is hostile, actual, open, notorious, and continuous. (Indeed, some enterprising real estate agents have made this their business.) In California, the payment of property taxes is also required. “Hostile,” here, doesn’t mean bandanas and linked arms; the legal definition is that the occupiers know that they’re taking possession of land that isn’t their own. (In some states, there’s also precedent for merely possessing the land without knowledge that it belongs to someone else). It should be noted that while the requirement to maintain continuous open possession applies to occupiers, it doesn’t appear to apply to the legal owners.

Legally, California property owners can’t prevent the seizure of their property just by posting “No Trespassing” signs. If, however, owners give permission to occupiers to be in that space, and give that permission in writing, ownership will never transfer because the occupiers have been invited to use the land. It is no longer hostile. If “adverse possession” is being claimed, owners may have to file a lawsuit to eject. But again, since meeting the five-year requirement is an extraordinary challenge, it seems unlikely that any occupiers will be able to use the legal definition of “adverse possession.”

There are also a variety of “easements” through which the use or possession of another’s private property might be granted, though these typically revolve around issues of use of land and require continuous and hostile use of that land for between 10 and 20 years. Since there is no transfer of ownership, easements will never require the payment of property taxes. Another important difference is that easements do not require solitary possession: even if the owner has used the property, an easement can still be granted because its specificity relies on use, not ownership. Easements, again, can be avoided by simply granting permission, in writing, for the use of property, which eliminates the necessary “hostile” element. Like adverse possession, easements denaturalize the idea that one person or corporation ever has exclusive and permanent use of land, if there are legitimate reasons for others to have access to that land.

Beginning to See the Blight

There are, of course, other ways that private property is open to de-possession. In cases of blighted and dilapidated property, states and municipalities have found it expedient, the Center for Community Progress writes, set up “land banks” in order to take possession of “problem properties” and “dispose of them in a manner consistent with the public’s interest.” In this way, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy explains, “vacant, abandoned and tax-delinquent” properties can either be put to use or bulldozed: “The properties are acquired primarily through tax foreclosure, and then the land bank develops or, more likely, holds and manages the properties until a new use or owner is identified.”

An Ivy-league law professor who wished to remain anonymous informed me that ownership of these properties must be proven, and that this is not always as simple as merely providing the title. In his words,

Maybe a good defense attorney could show that the owner cannot prove ownership and then cannot claim trespass. This has worked in many foreclosure cases where the banks, because of numerous bundling of mortgages, can’t find the original paperwork and can’t proceed with the foreclosure because they cannot prove rightful ownership.

Such a situation might, at the very least, remove the police from the equation and send the case to civil court – allowing occupiers crucial time to make repairs and improve the these buildings for community use.

Community Development Corporations (CDCs) have also been organized to act on behalf of communities to repurpose vacant and derelict properties. As the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy notes, however, there are often difficult barriers to pass before CDCs can repurpose property, and they all rely on existing property laws. Municipalities can sometimes force absentee landlords to sell, though this is typically only in cases of abandonment and requires the persistent use of municipal issuances for code violations. Municipalities can also place liens on properties and thereby force foreclosures; often derelict properties will have several liens, purchased by several different corporations, and ownership can be extremely difficult to sort out. Alternatively, if a building is a “clear nuisance,” municipalities can sometimes be petitioned to either hand the property over to a CDC through receivership or, if the owner is amenable, force payment for improvements to the lot. This is both rare and controversial. Furthermore, title is usually unclear in these situations. Finally, cities can claim property for the public good through “eminent domain.” This has been used to seize blighted properties and convert them to “community” use – usually shopping malls and expensive condos. Following a recent New London, CT case, where non-blighted property was seized for economic redevelopment, state and municipal entities have been very wary of using eminent domain.

While many of us no doubt picture “blight” as dilapidated, ramshackle, or dangerous, the legal definition is a bit more slippery. A lawyer based in California, who also requested anonymity, alerted me to the malleable definition of “blight.” According to a Daily Transcript Article from 2005, which followed in the wake of the New London, CT case, “blight” can exist only where “80 percent of the land in the area has been developed for urban use, or has irregular and inadequate sized lots in multiple ownership; or is an integral part of an urban area surrounded by development parcels.” After establishing this as the base, a structure must be deemed unsafe or unhealthy or exhibit signs that “hinder economic use of buildings and lots” or be made up of incompatible bits such that economic development is hindered. If the structure meets these criteria, it must further be deemed an economic blight: there must be either “depreciated or stagnant property values” or “high business vacancies, low lease rates, high turnover rates, or excessive vacant lots” or too many residences for the land to support or high crime in the area. Once these conditions are met, it must further be established that only redevelopment could alter the present situation: “meaning the blight cannot be reversed or alleviated by: private enterprise; or government action; or both private enterprise and governmental action.”

Given the current state of economic depression, the sagging property values of structures in many urban areas, and the vast number of vacant buildings throughout the country, blight might actually be a useful category for such appeals. As eminent domain scholar Tim Sandefur notes, California law “means that virtually anything short of pure speculation will qualify. And while it speaks of ‘specific conditions,’ these ‘conditions’ are the ones already listed in section 33031 [of the California Health and Safety Code].” Of course, it is notoriously difficult to claim eminent domain (even, these days, for developers) and few city councils appear to have the interests of the poor and the working class in mind when they act. Again, however, built into US property law is the idea that private property is regulated by historically specific social agreements that establish a public good, and that the sovereignty of private property is therefore not an immutable fact of life.

All of these are long processes, and entail respecting property laws that will always give precedence to the whims of landowners over local communities. While the struggle to possess empty and abandoned buildings in the name of communities will certainly require dedicated and innovative lawyers and legal tools, this can only follow the action of the movement. Direct action to oppose and confront the enclosure and misuse not just of space, but of entire communities, has become a legitimate front in the struggle.

SQUAT Team

It’s important to note a difference in squatting between the US and other countries. In England, which has a robust squatting community, squatting is a civil matter and doesn’t require the same level of police enforcement that it does in the US. Some states have more lenient laws: in Florida, squatters can post notices that a property is under siege, and if they manage to hold it for seven years, they may take possession.

Still, it appears that most squats that survive do so by avoiding notice by police and landlords. There don’t appear to be any mechanisms in the United States to shift these actions from the realm of criminal trespass into the realm of civil litigation. There are several squatters’ rights organizations that make an immediate impact on people’s lives, though they have not yet been able to make much of a dent in the properties controlled by absentee and predatory owners. Homes Not Jails has opened up “hundreds of buildings for use,” though most of them last no longer than six months. Take Back the Land hopes to “elevate” housing to the level of a human right and has seen an enormous amount of publicity within the months since occupations burst onto the scene.

There are no inalienable rights to own private property. Private property means different things in different countries and communities, and the limits and responsibilities of its use are constantly changing according to political pressure. It took statutory laws, the Preemption Act and Homestead Act, to make public lands private.

Claiming private spaces by a social movement is illegal within a legislative and juridical framework that equates the “public good” with gross domestic product. Notions of the “public good” in the United States have tended to rely on the perceived ability of commercial activity to make life better for for the majority. For this reason, blighted property can be seized by “public servants” and handed over to “private enterprise”; chambers of commerce have more importance in local politics than associations of community gardeners; and the stock market is the bearer of US economic wealth, rather than the number of unemployed or homeless. The last forty years, however, have demonstrated that all of these assumptions hide the reality of a class society. Arguments about what constitutes the “public good” in the United States have been increasingly revealed to be arguments about what is good for “job creators” – the wealthiest men, women and corporations in the world.

Against this ideology, the strategy of occupying dormant private property articulates the interests of the working class. Public-space occupations have presented themselves as the establishment of new forms of community, based on the mutual exchange of voluntary labor. But for the masses of people whose time is in short supply, whose days are entirely structured by work, it is clear that labor remains the fundamental element of a system of exploitation. By attacking private property itself, a strategy of illegal occupations – which nevertheless takes advantage of the gaps and openings of the existing laws – can move us past the “public good” to the foundations of working-class power.

Mark Paschal is a graduate student at UC-Santa Cruz, a member of UAW 2865, and an organizer within the UCSC General Assembly.

Some called it a skirmish, others an experiment, but I think we have to recognize that it was a defeat, albeit a necessary defeat – one that, if confronted directly, might paradoxically prove to be our greatest success. Part reflection, part autocritique, what follows is my attempt to think through the events of that night.

State of Emergency?

An announcement was made, before introducing the proposal to move to Thomas Paine Plaza, reminding everyone to stay calm, to avoid spreading rumors, and to stymie the circulation of fear. Immediately afterwards we were told that eviction from Dilworth Plaza was imminent. “They could come at any moment: tomorrow morning, tonight, or even right now.” Indeed, the City had posted ambiguously-worded yellow posters at the occupation reminding us that our permit will expire as soon as construction begins, that construction was in fact “imminent,” and that we should all take this opportunity to vacate. So an abridged General Assembly hurriedly met earlier in the day to draft a proposal, the evening meeting was – perhaps unwisely – dubbed an “emergency session,” and we were repeatedly reminded throughout that we would have to vacate the room in which we were gathered (generously made available to us by the Friends Center) by 9PM. Little surprise that a pervasive atmosphere of urgency, alarm, and even distress filled the air.

But the rumors about immediate eviction were just that. It was the city itself that had deviously circulated the threat of an imminent confrontation, falsely announced that it had already given the notice, and connivingly spread the assumption that any such crackdown would be legally justified. And we bought it. The looming sense of ominous disaster set the tone for the entire assembly: we rushed through the proposal, truncated the stack, tabled amendments, encouraged speakers to be brief, reverted heavily to straw polls – in short, we did everything in our power to move as quickly as democratically possible that night. And this would have all been justified had the rumors been true. But they weren’t.

There was no conflict around the corner, no official notice of eviction, and no legal legitimacy for such an action. After the whole affair, we finally learned – much to our chagrin – that those yellow posters were not really official eviction notices. The city had lied. Of course, we didn’t know, so the spectre of eviction weighed heavily on us all that whole night. It was used to shoot down a friendly amendment postponing the move until the next morning, when we would have more support, organization, and visibility. It was used to justify the argument that if we failed to move immediately we would forefeit the initiative. It was used, in sum, to convince us that the only thing we really could do was respond as quickly as possible – even if that meant responding without any real preparation.

To Ground Our Politics on Revenge?

A few days prior it was discovered that the so-called “Reasonable Solutions Working Group” had entered into secret negotiations with the City. The group, which already had a rather sordid history of red-baiting, collaboration, and general uncooperativeness, made it clear that they would no longer accept the decisions of the General Assembly. So in direct opposition to the decision made last week to hold our ground, “Reasonable Solutions” chose to act alone by asking the city for a permit for Thomas Paine Plaza. The sovereignty of the General Assembly was immediately undermined and the weakness of the occupation itself as a form of struggle was made painfully apparent. Now everyone knew for certain, without the shadow of a doubt, that there were not only enemies in our own ranks, but there were serious contradictions at the heart of the movement.

This, of course, was on everyone’s minds as they walked into the Friends Center Thursday night to discuss the emergency proposal. But more than confusion, disappointment, or even anger, there was a palpable desire for revenge. Several occupiers made the explicit connection: voting to occupy Thomas Paine Plaza tonight would preempt “Reasonable Solutions.” They undermined us, now we will undermined them. Wild applause. To tell you the truth, I can’t say I wasn’t among them. We felt betrayed. But instead of interrogating this betrayal further, instead of trying to rationally understand what this said about the cohesiveness of our movement, or the political effectiveness of the General Assembly, or the nature of the encampment as a viable tactic, we let our instincts take over. Too afraid to find a solution to the deeper causes of this betrayal, we hoped to simply efface it by smothering the affair as quickly as possible.

For the Union Makes Us Strong?

The move to Thomas Paine Plaza was in part motivated by the admirable desire to build stronger connections to the unions. As we have mentioned elsewhere, for the movement to succeed, it is obvious that it will have to form deeper ties with other sectors of the working class. This means both the hyperexploited workers that always go unrepresented as well as those more traditional sectors of the class that continue to be organized in the trade unions. It was argued that holding Dilworth Plaza, and therefore indefinitely delaying its proposed renovation, would actually prevent thousands of jobs for unionized workers. If we moved, the argument went, it would show our solidarity with those workers in way that might bring them closer to Occupy Philly.

The same argument reappeared Thursday night, but this time, it was formalized in a letter read aloud by the Labor Working Group, and supported by several union representatives in attendance. We were now told that the unions would not only support the move, but that they would even be willing to help us move, and that they might even call a march in solidarity. This, of course, was never a guarantee. But many of us took our desires for reality by assuming that the unions would all be behind us when we made the move. As though all we had to do was shine the bat-signal into the sky for all the unions to triumphantly appear in the middle of the night. Predictably, of course, there were no unions in sight when we did make that move later that night.

First, while we must draw ourselves closer to unionized workers, we must bear in mind that the rank and file is not the bureaucracy. While we might be able to trust our fellow workers in the unions, we should never delude ourselves into trusting those who manage those unions. Second, we have to ask ourselves what solidarity really means. Is it enough for the unions to issue a statement supporting our move? Is it enough for them to tell us that they would be open to speaking with us about future actions? Or must we somehow try to make solidarity material again? We have to clarify the wording of our proposals. And this was, in fact, done that night. We would make the action not with the unions, as was falsely stated in the original, but we would do so with the expected support of the unions. Sadly, this was passed off by everyone, including the facilitators, as a mere changing in wording, one that would not in any way make a substantial change to the content of the proposal itself. But, in reality, this was a first step toward rethinking the practice of solidarity. The unions will support us only when they bring their workers out in union colors to stand by us. Until then, all we have is our words, not real solidarity. Why should we give so much weight to the arguments in support of the unions when the unions have not given any support to our arguments? We need to stop fetishizing the unions.

What Are Our Enemies Thinking?

After the proposal to move was passed we all set to work. I joined the Library Working Group in filling crates with books, moving bookshelves, and securing all the literature. A few of us made a kind of library caravan from one plaza to the other, victoriously crossing the street, to the other side, filled with a sense of general excitement. Just as we got there we saw a police van drive up, sirens ablaze, and stop right in front of the Plaza. We all stared. Then came the frenetic cry for the Legal Working Group. Legal ran over, spoke with the police, and we stood by as more policemen began to amass on the Plaza. There was general confusion when it became clear that the Police were going to destroy everything we had just moved to Thomas Paine Plaza. Some said we should hold the new Plaza, some said we should return, some thought we should escalate the conflict by storming City Hall. In brief, the mere presence of the police was enough to throw the entire operation into disarray.

But why should it have? Shouldn’t we have expected the police to arrive? Shouldn’t we always expect them to oppose all of our actions in some way or another? In other words, why should the presence of an expected element cause so much disorder in the equation?

In retrospect, it is simply astonishing that none of the concerns raised during the several hours of the General Assembly directly mentioned the possibility of having to face the police that night. None of them asked what we should do in case the police arrived. None of them wondered if there were any contingency plans. In fact, almost no one was seriously thinking about what our enemies might be doing at that moment. We were just staring at our own camp, deciding whether we should move to Rittenhouse or Thomas Paine, rather than talking about what might be going on the camp of the opposition, rather than thinking two moves ahead.

It should be admitted, however, that the police were themselves unusually unprepared that night. Several occupiers recall how the police seemed uncertain about how to proceed, that many of them were almost entirely unaware that we had made a decision to move the entire camp. But, at the end of the day, even though the police were relatively unprepared, the truth is that we were even more unprepared. And that cost us an opportunity.

I think it’s safe to say that in large part the peculiar police détente at Occupy Philly lulled many of us into a sense of passivity. We hadn’t experienced crackdowns like those in New York or Oakland. We were given a permit, given our space, and largely left alone. The consequence was that we simply assumed such a state of affairs would continue into the future. We were unopposed when we entered Dilworth so why should they oppose us when we move to Thomas Paine? One might say we mistakenly took an exceptional case for a general condition.

Perhaps the most important consequence of that night, however, was this changed attitude towards the police. It immediately dawned on us all that henceforth we had to think about what we would do if we were in the police’s shoes, we had to study their position, we had to plan for all possible responses on their part, and we had to prepare responses to their responses. We can’t afford to take another action without anticipating the actions of the forces of order.

Who’s Got The Map?

As we relocated to Thomas Paine Plaze we were met by various occupiers trying to help rebuild the camp as coherently as possible. With hundreds of occupiers rushing from one plaza to the other, it was imperative that we had some people organizing the whole process, to let everyone know were the new Library, for example, would have to be constructed, where the Information Working Group would have to resettle, where all the tents would have to be erected, and so on. But while some occupiers had already sketched out a map to help reconstruct the camp, few knew about it, and what’s worse, the map itself seemed to be missing. So the arrival of the first wave predictably caused a bit of confusion. “Should we send them back until we figure out where everything goes?” Impossible. So the waves kept coming, the disorder grew, and quite a number of occupiers didn’t know where to go. The library, for example, ended up in the wrong place. But before we could relocate it, the police arrived.

This situation was unsurprisingly aggravated once they entered the picture. First we decided to move everyone from Dilworth to Thomas Paine to fortify the newly captured position. Then, when the Police gave the order to disperse, many began to move everything back from Thomas Paine to Dilworth. As I already mentioned, one group stayed at Thomas Paine to decide what to do, another regrouped back at Dilworth, and the third decide to storm City Hall. So instead of coming together in a common refusal, the movement shattered into several isolated groups. Only after the dust settled, after are defeat had been confirmed, did we reconvene again as a totality.

If there is anything we learned from that night, it’s that even the most seemingly simple operation – moving one camp just across the street – requires significant preparation. A clear set of plans has to be composed before the action, it has to be distributed to all participants so everyone can operate in harmony, and it has to include contingency measures. Everyone has to agree ahead of time, for instance, that if the police arrive, we will hold our ground. Instead, that decision had to be made on the spot, within various affinity groups, and by then, everything was irreparably split. I’m not saying we shouldn’t make these kinds of immediate decisions on the spot, as it were, but only that everyone has to be prepared – and everyone must expect – to make them. In other words, we have to pre-organize the space for successful spontaneous action.

A Meeting of the Tribes?

My immediate sense is that while the occupation as a whole suffered from confusion, there was significant organization, efficiency, and celerity among the individual working groups, caucuses, or affinity groups that compose Occupy Philly. Those involved with the library, for instance, ferried books, shelves, crates, tables, and posters – in fact the entire library – from one Plaza to the other in just fifteen minutes. Then, when the order was given to disperse, we determined our options, discussed the choices before us, and quickly made the decision to move everything back from Thomas Paine to Dilworth – some of us making the move while others went to get a van in which to secure all the material in case of an immediate eviction. The books were then loaded into the van, unloaded at another site, and the group reconvened at Dilworth. A small endeavor, no doubt, but one which speaks to the effectiveness of small groups composed of individuals who are accustomed to working with one another.

The problem, however, seemed to be while there was much cohesive efficacy within each of these groups – and the library was only one of many – there was little inter-group cohesiveness. Despite its many success, Occupy Philly, it appears, has not yet discovered a way to make affinity groups work with each other in moments of tension. Perhaps we need to look to different forms of organization, like the “Spokes Council” model, which has been tested at other occupations. Or perhaps we have to look beyond the occupation as tactic. It may be that the very structure, or logic, of the occupation tactic has itself foreclosed the possibility of productive inter-group relationships. I think, in Philly at least, it may be time to move on to something else.

Lost Illusions

It seems Thursday night was a necessary defeat. It disabused many of us of certain illusions, it reframed our relationship with the state, and it changed our broader understanding of this movement, its relationship to specific tactics, and the contradictions within it. There is no question that Thursday represents an implicit rupture in the trajectory of the movement here in Philadelphia. Our task now, I think, is to make it explicit. The worst thing we can do is – to paraphrase a suggestion made Thursday night after the police withdrawal – to regroup and try to take Thomas Paine again in the morning. This would be nothing other than a doomed compulsion to repeat. It would mean ignoring our mistakes by trying to efface them, it would signify a failure to exploit the numerous opportunities that have emerged from this defeat.

On May 15, 1848 an immense demonstration was organized in Paris in response to the precipitous degeneration of the revolution that had begun just under three months ago. When the Provisional Government was declared on February 25, 1848 in the Hôtel de Ville, the proletariat saw a chance to deepen their autonomous power. Things turned sour, the revolutionary clubs were harassed, elections were invoked to undermine the momentum of the opposition, and now, finding themselves on the verge of defeat, the working class decided to make a show of their power. Confused, unable to interrogate the reasons behind their continuing defeat, unwilling to confront the changed conjuncture, and fearing an imminent crackdown, they made the last-minute decision to invade the National Assembly, storm the Hôtel de Ville, and announce a new, this time more revolutionary, Provisional Government in the very same room in which the first one was declared back in February. All we had to do, they thought, was repeat it again; this time, with new people, it will be different. It wasn’t. They lost that night, and they would have lost even if they had successfully held City Hall – the historical conjuncture had shifted in such a way that the entire tactic had to be changed.

I think it’s time we changed ours.

Salar Mohandesi is a graduate student at UPenn, and an editor of Viewpoint.

Petrograd soviet, 1917

The occupations movement is highly structured, and this structure is a focal point for political debates. Decisions are made by the general assembly (GA) through a process of democratic deliberation; it also serves as the basis for the delegation of responsibilities and tasks, which are required both to keep people participating and to organize political activity. Jodi Dean argues that in spite of the potentially individualist ideology of the consensus model (everyone speaks for themselves), it actually serves to build the kind of solidarity that can only be achieved by “hours and hours of conversation.”

There’s an intriguing resemblance between today’s GAs and the “workers’ councils” that were a dominant force in the revolutionary movements of early 20th-century Europe. The major difference, of course, is that the workers’ councils existed in factories, and their primary role was to manage the production process; they demonstrated that the only function of the bosses was to exploit, and that workers’ self-management could effectively build a society. For some, especially the German and Dutch “council communists,” the councils had an even greater role: they would not only manage production, they would also be the sole political organization in the fight for proletarian emancipation, thereby rendering the bureaucratic communist parties as irrelevant as the bosses. The original occupations, in fact, were factory takeovers that instituted workers’ self-management.

Our situation is clearly different, so it’s no surprise that the GA is different. That it takes place on the street instead of the factories is a logical consequence of the radical shift of the American workforce out of manufacturing. Service work has an entirely different mode of socialization; it’s hard to get people together into a council without a shop-floor, when employees work at different hours, when they’re deskilled, and when they need every day’s wage to make their mortgage payments. Unemployment adds to this transformation, shifting an already fragmentary socialization outside of the workplace.

The strike we saw in Oakland was a political action that grew from the GA, just as the classical general strike accompanied the councils. It was formed and organized in a space outside of the workplace, and it found ways to link up with some elements of the workforce.

However, it’s important to ask how these forms will evolve. The GA made a remarkable achievement by voting for and organizing the general strike. But anyone who’s attended a GA will understand that it’s very hard to carry out the less dramatic tasks that are required to keep a movement strong between actions. The strike came at a moment of serious radicalization, and was voted for almost unanimously. Disagreements, however, which make the GA the radical deliberative space that it is, can seriously limit its organizational capacity. Organizational tasks already occur on a different plane from mass deliberation; they are done in smaller “breakout groups” or “working groups,” or are simply “bottom-lined” by individuals who are willing to assume leadership for a specific goal. When the problems of the breakout groups leak into the GA, and when different political factions enter into argument, the structure inches dangerously towards a kind of ossification and bureaucratization. For example, liberals whose primary interest is in collaboration with the state are able to exert control by taking advantage of GA democracy and subjecting it to the powerful existing structures of administrative bureaucracies.

The debates of the early 20th century between council communists and their comrades took place because these organizational tasks used to be carried out within the communist parties. Some who were sympathetic to councilist critique of the party were still cautious about the notion of councils playing a fully political role, and they anticipated a problem that emerges today: by forcing the GA to take on the tasks of the party, it is less able to do what it should do – not merely deliberate, but also provide a space for free expression of the workers’ antagonism, and the prefiguring of a communist organization of social life.

This doesn’t mean that the council can just be an unmediated expression of political wills; Disaster Notes invokes the French theorist of “self-management,” Cornelius Castoriadis, to describe “a minimal degree of alienation involved in any political form.” It’s an interesting reference, because this is exactly the kind of problem foreshadowed in Castoriadis’s earlier exchange with the Dutch council communist Anton Pannekoek. We ran our translations of these letters in the issue on the occupations because their relevance for our moment is so profound; those who are interested in the historical context can check out our introduction to the exchange.

Pannekoek was strongly critical of any kind of vanguardist party. Though he recognized that the political process would be characterized by conflict, he still argued that the primary emphasis had to placed on the council:

Naturally, I do not claim that the revolutionary actions of the working class will all unfold in an atmosphere of peaceful discussion. What I claim is that the result of the struggle, often violent, is not determined by accidental circumstances, but by what is alive in the thoughts of the workers, as the basis of a solid consciousness acquired by experience, study, or their discussions. If the personnel of a factory must decide whether or not to go on strike, the decision is not taken by smashing fists on the table, but normally by discussions.

Not only was was this part of the process of decision-making, it was actually the working class’s form of political activity. “The true form of action of a class in struggle,” he wrote, “is the force of arguments, based on the fundamental principle of the autonomy of decisions!”

But while he reasserted the centrality of the workers’ councils, Pannekoek nevertheless argued that there was a clear need for outside bodies to supplement council activity – simply because an education in the revolutionary process could not be achieved instantaneously by deliberation. So the task of the party was “essentially theoretical.” While the party would “find and indicate, through study and discussion, the best path of action for the working class,” it would ultimately be up to the working class itself “to decide the best way to act in their factory meetings and their Councils.” In clarifying “the ideas of the workers by explaining the important changes in society, and the need for the workers to lead themselves in all their actions, including in future productive labor,” the party would make working-class decisions possible and powerful. It is an appealing perspective for those who find themselves standing on the street with newspapers and leaflets to distribute; as Pannkoek wrote,

The most noble and useful task of a revolutionary party is, by its propaganda in thousands of small journals, brochures, etc., to enrich the knowledge of the masses in the process of a consciousness always more clear and more vast.

Castoriadis agreed with the general sentiment, but voiced some concerns about the idea of a purely theoretical function for the party. He pointed to the importance of defending against elements who sought to suppress working class autonomy:

From the very moment that these organisms of the working class have been constituted, the class struggle will have been transposed to the very heart of these organisms; it will be transposed there by the representatives of the majority of these “groups or parties” which claim to represent the working class but who, in the majority of cases, represent the interests and the ideology of the classes hostile to the proletariat, like the reformists and the Stalinists. Even if they don’t exist there in their current form, they will exist in another, let us be sure. In all likelihood, they will start with a predominant position. And the whole experience of the last twenty years – of the Spanish war, the occupation, and up to and including the experience of any current union meeting – we learn that the militants who have our opinion must conquer by struggle even the right to speak within these organisms.

Despite their clear differences regarding the specific function of these supplementary forms, both Pannekoek and Castoriadis insisted on their necessity. It was actually only through the assistance of these other forms of struggle, they argued, that the councils could realize their revolutionary potential.

Of course, we can’t resurrect party forms that simply repeat what happened a century ago, ignoring a wide range of historical changes. But we do need auxiliary forms that allow the GAs to develop in the most revolutionary direction. Some are rightly cautious of the potential for a more centralized organization to become authoritarian and bureaucratic; but a mass movement is capable of learning from history and imagining new solutions. While rejecting the ossified forms of the Trotskyist and Stalinist groups surrounding him, Castoriadis reaffirmed the need for development and experimentation:

Ultimately, to refuse to act in fear that one will transform into a bureaucrat, seems to me as absurd as refusing to think in fear of being wrong. Just as the only “guarantee” against error consists in the exercise of thought itself, the only “guarantee” against bureaucratization consists in permanent action in an anti-bureaucratic direction, in struggling against the bureaucracy and in practically showing that a non-bureaucratic organization of the vanguard is possible, and that it can organize non-bureaucratic relations with the class.

Asad Haider is a graduate student at UC-Santa Cruz, a member of UAW 2865, and an editor of Viewpoint.