Yesterday, there was some pretty heated discussion in the comment section to MinistryOfTruth's excellent diary on the relationship between Black Bloc anarchists and the Occupy Oakland community. At stake was the issue of whether the methods employed by the Black Blocs, who have been fixtures at many anti-neoliberal protests since the late 1990s, are appropriate to the new tactics and strategies of Occupy [whatever].
As my biased judgment ("excellent!") of MoT's diary would seem to indicate, I do not believe that the Black Bloc methods are either practical or ethical as a means of addressing the concerns of Occupy. But my diary here is not going to take the form of an attack on the Black Bloc, many of whom believe that they are doing the right thing. Instead, I want to outline in a more positive way the vision that informs my own take on the way forward for Occupy, one that embodies the values, tactics, and strategies of nonviolence. That vision is encapsulated in a phrase that was central to the approach taken by participants in the freedom struggles of the 1950s and 1960s: what I would very much like to see is the emergence of a "beloved community."
One thing that I have been thinking about a lot lately is the vision advocated by the Reverend James Lawson, a key figure in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee who Dr. Martin Luther King tasked with training the students involved in the movement. Having studied the practice of nonviolence advocated by Mahadma Gandhi, Rev. Lawson sought to introduce these concepts to civil rights activists. But what was key to the importance of Gandhi's vision (and Rev. Lawson's by extension) was that the significance of nonviolence went beyond its role as a tactic for mollifying public opinion and confronting the police. Rather, nonviolence presented itself as a comprehensive social vision that transcended the immediate terms of any one direct action or protest situation. This is why Rev. Lawson never talks about nonviolence without talking about the values, tactics, and strategies of nonviolence.
While nonviolence is sufficiently flexible to be applied anew in new movements and new situations, its ethic (as Lawson's contemporaries in SNCC, CORE, and elsewhere applied them) is centered around a few key precepts, some examples of which are as follows:
1. Nonviolence may be non-violent, but it is not non-confrontational. Its very practice is designed to disrupt or destabilize the ordinary functioning of oppressive institutions. For that reason, Rev. Lawson and others are insistent that nonviolence not be confused with pacifism, which (according to him) may often be interpreted as an acquiescent, non-confrontational approach. (I myself don't necessarily think that this is a fully accurate understanding of pacifism, but I certainly take the point.)
2. In the civil rights movement, the values, tactics, and strategies of nonviolence were pursued in anticipation of the formation of a beloved community. The beloved community, as I understand it, is the idea that the global community is gradually but inexorably moving towards a state in which the social inequalities, antagonisms, and barriers to peace that stand in the way of human fulfillment are a thing of the past. All of humanity, in this view, should be working towards the natural and preordained achievement of this end. Nonviolence, far from being simply one means among others for achieving this goal, is itself inextricable from the nature of the anticipated community itself: when attacked by a hostile figure, the practitioner of nonviolence uses her friendly, engaged response to that attack as a way of breaking down the barriers that separated her from her opponent. The opponent having been thus disarmed, the beloved community is already that much closer to becoming reality. In this vision, every human relationship is a building block in the achievement of the shared community of brothers and sisters.
3. Nonviolence is a strategy and set of values that allows radical self-control. In practicing nonviolence, you behave as if the beloved community, the desegregated movie theater, the nondiscriminatory school system, is already a reality. This behavior of "as if" places the onus back on the unjust society, challenging them to either revise or perpetuate the oppressive conditions they have created. This "as if" is also a means to make tangible and visible the new conditions that the beloved community desires.
We can already see many of these principles at work in the footage and descriptions of the OWS and other Occupy movements. The posture of protesters towards the police is often one of friendly engagement and invitation, a sense of calling them to move beyond their anointed role in the proceedings and to recognize those things they have in common with the 99% (which is, after all, nearly 99% of the population).
The human microphone and the General Assembly procedures, beyond their immediate role as practical ad hoc solutions to logistical or deliberative problems, are also visions of the shared community that Occupy wants to bring about: participants in the human microphone are bound together by their response to, and affirmation of, the things spoken by individuals. The power of the individual voice is amplified by its resonance through the body politic.
Consensus -- which, yes, has its issues as a deliberative process -- is nevertheless a means, however imperfect, of ensuring that every voice counts, and that the community moves forward only on the basis of its shared agreement and decision-making.
Even things like shared resources -- the People's Library, the stationary-bicycle-driven generators -- are themselves anticipations of what the community produced by Occupy would look like. Rather than shouting slogans about sustainability or the necessity of universal education (not that there's anything wrong with either), these values are put into practice in the present time.
I guess this diary is just a way of saying that whatever people decide to build into the practices of Occupy will come to define Occupy. And it will define it not merely as a social movement, but as a specific vision of a possible future. Occupy's participants, themselves the architects of a new community, need to be mindful of how the actions they take today anticipate the beloved community of tomorrow.