Hey Folks,
Yesterday, I stumbled across a recent article entitled Reflecting on Occupy Wall Street, Thirteen Years Later, which was posted on the Crimethinc. blog on September 17th, the anniversary of the famous occupation of Zuccotti Park in New York City.
The essay begins with an introduction by an anonymous editor who quotes an anonymous writer (possibly her- or himself), who wrote back in 2014 that Occupy failed first and foremost because it “offered almost no analysis of racialized power”.
Here’s the full quote:
What limits did the Occupy movement reach? Why did it subside without achieving its object of transforming society? First, it offered almost no analysis of racialized power, despite the central role of race in dividing labor struggles and poor people’s resistance in the US. Second, perhaps not coincidentally, its discourse was largely legalistic and reformist—it was premised on the assumption that the laws and institutions of the state are fundamentally beneficial, or at least legitimate. Finally, it began as a political rather than social movement—hence the decision to occupy Wall Street instead of acting on a terrain closer to most people’s everyday lives, as if capitalism were not a ubiquitous relation but something emanating from the stock market. As a result of these three factors, the majority of the participants in Occupy were activists, newly precarious exiles from the middle class, and members of the underclass, in roughly that order; the working poor were notably absent. The simplistic sloganeering of Occupy obscured the lines of conflict that run through our society from top to bottom: “police are part of the 99%” is technically true, economically speaking, but so are most rapists and white supremacists. All of this meant that when the police came to evict the encampments and kill the movement, Occupy had neither the numbers, nor the fierceness, nor the analysis it would have needed to defend itself.
Do I even need to critique that? Maybe I would have thought these were good points in 2014, but this is 2024.
The editor goes on to introduce an excerpt from a book called Organizing Occupy Wall Street, which was by someone named Marisa Holmes.
Around to a blurb describing the book:
This book is the first study of the processes and structures of the Occupy Wall Street movement, written from the perspective of a core organizer who was involved from the inception to the end. While much has been written on OWS, few books have focused on how the movement was organized. Marisa Holmes, an organizer of OWS in New York City, aims to fill this gap by deriving the theory from the practice and analyzing a broad range of original primary sources, from collective statements, structure documents, meeting minutes, and live tweets, to hundreds of hours of footage from the OWS Media Working Group archive. In doing so, she reveals how the movement was organized in practice, which experiments were most successful, and what future generations can learn.
Now, that sounds like a great premise for a book, and one I would be very much interested in reading.
But I definitely won’t be reading it, because the author makes it clear that she thinks Occupy failed because it wasn’t woke enough.
Get a load of this:
During Occupy Wall Street, we practiced a coalitional politics that wove together individual identities into a collective one—the 99%. We, the 99%, were those who had lost homes to foreclosures, those who faced long-term unemployment, or were buried under student debt. We, the 99%, were day laborers, prison workers, domestic workers, and sex workers. We, the 99% were brutalized and killed by police and stopped at borders. We, the 99% were disciplined along gender binaries and roles. We, the 99% were denied healthcare. We, the 99% were all of those long oppressed and exploited, who had simply had enough. There was a common enemy, and it was right there in front of us—Wall Street. It was the solidarity between us that was powerful. It was multi-racial, multi-national, and multi-gender. It had a lot of potential, but it fell apart.
The [Global Justice Movement] and OWS faced many of the same internal challenges around race and gender. Elizabeth Betita Martinez reflected on the racial composition of the convergence against the World Trade Organization in Seattle, 1999. In her widely cited article, “Where was the color in Seattle? Looking for reasons the Great Battle was so white” (2000) she argued there were multiple factors that led to a lack of people of color participating in the event. The solution Betita Martinez proposed for addressing the demographic problem of Seattle, and the GJM more broadly, was for POC to get more organized themselves. She wrote, “There must be effective follow-up and increased communication between people of color across the nation: grassroots organizers, activists, cultural workers, and educators. We need to build on the contacts made (or that need to be made) from Seattle.” Manissa McCleave Maharawal reached a similar conclusion.
After the GJM there was more of a commitment on the radical left to address oppression more seriously. Some of this work was specifically centered around accountability.
Much of the work done in OWS around community accountability by the Safer Spaces Committee (SSC) was inspired by INCITE! (2006) and driven by members of Support New York (2016). The SSC consistently took a survivor-centered and intersectional approach that acknowledged the many ways power operates. It’s not as if this work wasn’t happening. It was. It just wasn’t prioritized or valued by everyone in OWS. If more people had listened to the Safer Spaces Committee, and they had been more influential, then our spaces would have been better equipped to deal with harm and conflict.
Really, Marisa? The reason Occupy failed was that people didn’t listen to the Safer Spaces Committee? Did that committee have a plan that would have prevented people from being attacked by police? If so, what was it? And did you just say that 99% of people are brutalized and killed by the police? Then why does the Earth’s population keep increasing?
Marisa Holmes makes favourable mention of the “direct democracy” practiced in Occupy General Assemblies, but doesn’t attempt to explain why so many people who participated in them found them aggravating, dysfunctional, and surreptitiously dominated by passive-aggressive power-tripping leadership cliques who manipulated process to prevent decisions they disagreed with from being approved.
This is something that I find annoying about Leftists - they won’t admit it when they’re wrong.
The form of “direct democracy” that was briefly popularized during Occupy Wall Street DID NOT WORK. And part of the reason that it didn’t work is because activists who think they know better than everyday people weren’t willing to meet people where they were at.
Part of this probably did have something to do with infiltrators sabotaging the process, and the susceptibility of consensus process to sabotage is one of its main weaknesses. But the problem goes beyond that. The problem is bad theory. Talking about race and gender all day long involving focuses on our differences, rather than what we have in common.
The goal of revolutionary activism should be to build unity amongst people who have similar class interests and political goals. Focusing on our differences doesn’t build unity. It divides people. And that’s why the Powers That Shouldn’t Be love to get us talking about race and gender all way long, but we’re not allowed to talk about class, which provides an actual basis of unity for a revolutionary movement.
Today, I am sharing an excerpt from David Graeber’s Direct Action: An Ethnography, which describes in vivid detail a disastrous meeting in which a group of women attempt to impose their wishes onto an activist group.
Note that despite the fact there is clearly no consensus amongst the members of the group vis-a-vis the women’s proposal, they force it through anyway. This is known as “Consensus by Attrition”.
This kind of thing happens more than anyone would like to admit. But because it’s often done by identity politicians who seemingly have a “get-out-of-following-process-free” card, people don’t talk about it, and hence we can’t learn from our mistakes.
I think that it’s great that Crimethinc. is still reflecting on Occupy, but if you ask me, their analysis leaves a lot to be desired.
‘What do you think? Do you have any “Consensus by Attrition” horror stories? Do you agree or disagree with Crimethinc.’s analysis? Do you agree or disagree with mine? Are we both partly right and partly wrong?
Let me know in the comments!
Solidarity,
Crow Qu’appelle
THE SAGA OF THE THIRD FACILITATOR
by David Graeber, excerpted from Direct Action: An Ethnography
Let me reproduce some bits, reconstructed from my notes, of what was probably the rowdiest DAN meeting I ever attended. In designing this chapter I was at first a bit hesitant to give it so much prominence, since it will mean that the only DAN meeting I’m reproducing in anything like its entirety was also an uniquely divisive one, full of accusations of sexism, class bias, and at least one participant who seemed to be a total lunatic. Still, it serves very nicely to bring out the tensions I’ve been describing, and to give the reader a sense of how they can—in worst-case scenario—play out in an actual meeting.
The meeting started around 5PM, with Lesley and a media activist named Ernest as facilitators. It started with about thirty people in the room and peaked at around fifty-five. Mike, a graduate student in a green cap who began the meeting clinging to an enormous copy of The Grundrisse, was the official scribe. Tim, a transsexual activist with a group called Church Ladies for Choice, was the timekeeper. This particular meeting was also graced by a number of guests, who had, somewhat unfortunately, been put at the end of the agenda—notably, a fortyish union organizer named Nathan from Local 1199, in a UNITE cap, and a younger activist named Jack Griffin who came with a female partner and two ISO escorts to ask our support for a Laundry Strike on Long Island.72 By the time I arrived and sat myself on the ground in the circle, we were deep into the discussion of the agenda.
My notes begin somewhat schematically:
DAN General, Charas El Bohio
Sunday afternoon, June 19, 2000
We begin with a review of the agenda. Items on the agenda include actions in Windsor (placed under New Business), proposals for a teach-in, and Griffin’s proposal about support for the Laundry Strike. After allocating time for each item, several people put up their hands to announce a series of emergency events:
Tim announces the 7th Annual Drag March, “celebrating drag culture, whatever that is.” This is, he explains, an event put on by the people excluded from the Gay Pride Parade, including his group, the Radical Faeries. “Go in whatever drag you want whether it’s corporate realism, suits, garters and pea-pods, whatever. We’re also looking for marshals, who’ll be wearing beads and bows.”
Chris from Police & Prisons announces three important upcoming demos.
Cindy from Wetlands announces a big demo at The Gap, whose owners are also tied to the destruction of old growth forests on the West Coast.
Ana from IMC wishes to talk about actions being organized around the Millenium Summit at the UN. We add 5-10 minutes for this item at the end of New Business.
WORKING GROUP REPORT-BACKS
NUTS & BOLTS
Brooke: I’ll just explain one change in “word doctoring insanity”…
Lesley: for those new, Nuts & Bolts does a lot of the…
Brooke: …the boring stuff…
Lesley: …that must, nonetheless, be done. Structural things like who actually keeps the basket with all the sign-up sheets, what are the rules for writing down proposals. Um, what’s next? Financial?
FINANCIAL
Rebecca: We had $91.00 in the hat last time we checked.
Jordan: We really need some ideas on fund-raising. Passing the hat once a week is just not a viable long-term approach.
Ernest: Is anyone actually from the fund-raising working group here?
[Apparently not; Zosera is late, no one is sure if anyone else is in it.]
Jordan: Well, anyway, people should think about the problem.
Ernest: And meanwhile, come to think about it, does anyone actually have a hat they’d like to contribute to pass around this week? At the very least we’d like to be able to offer something to Charas for the room. [Someone offers their baseball cap. It starts going around the circle.]
Lesley: All right, Communications? [Not here.] Legal?
And so it went. After a word from Marina in Legal, and Ernest on media issues (Wolfensohn, the head of the World Bank, had appeared at a press conference in Amsterdam, accusing the Ruckus Society of teaching kids to make molotov cocktails; Ruckus might sue, but it’s not clear if Dutch law allows it.), Brooke provided an update on work on the CDAN principles, and Jordan of DAN Labor announced news of their support of the strike at the Museum of Modern Art.
Jordan: It’s a rowdy, really wild picket line. We’ve brought puppets, always brought numbers, played a really positive role in radicalizing people, but at the same time respecting their attitudes. Two weeks ago, we managed to shut down the MoMA bookstore for forty-five minutes with a piece of guerilla theater. No one was arrested. Last week, Andrew managed to affix strike stickers on a half dozen partygoers at a party for David Rockefeller. (laughs) We’re always threatened, but never arrested.
Remember, folks: there’s people fighting capitalism on a day-to-day basis and they’re called labor unions.
Bob: Remember, we have some new people here. Perhaps you can take a few seconds to explain why the MoMA workers are on strike?
Jordan: Sure. There’re basically three issues: the lack of a contract, attempts to bust the union, and there are health care and salary issues, too. DAN Labor meets every Tuesday at ABC No Rio, a former squat and community center on Rivington. Everyone should come. (Is that okay?)
We continue through Police & Prisons, the August 1 Coalition preparing for the RNC protests, until we finally get to what everyone knows is going to be the real bone of contention—the “facilitation proposal.” Two women from the Women’s Caucus, sitting in the northwest corner of the room near the facilitators, present it:Marina: A lot of the women in DAN have been talking informally, and there have been a lot of complaints about the way things have been going over the last couple of months. There were points where the gender balance at meetings was two-to-one, three-to-one, even four-to-one in favor of men. It’s begun to get a little better over the last couple weeks, but, there’s still something very wrong here. So we’ve been trying to brainstorm some ideas on how to create a climate which women will find more inviting or comfortable.
Miriam: One way we came up with was to create a Women’s Caucus. The idea would be to make it as diverse as possible (we especially want to reach out to transgendered people); and that it could be a space where people could talk about new approaches to facilitation, about how to ensure more dialogue in meetings about sex and race and gender.
We’ve come up with a few suggestions:
First, we’re proposing facilitators make it a habit to place people from under-represented groups at the top of the stack.
Second, we want to put more emphasis on greeting and encouraging of new people.
Third, we’re proposing DAN get what’s loosely called a “vibes watcher,” someone who can constantly monitor the numbers—how meetings break down in terms of race, and gender, to alert people if the numbers drop, and who will be able to use certain tools to intervene if there are serious problems.
Lesley: Well, my vibes watch tells me this corner of the room (gesturing towards the north) is speaking far more than any of the others.
Okay, maybe we’d better take this proposal piece by piece. What’s the first part?
Miriam: Putting under-represented groups at the top of the queue.
Lesley: Any discussion?
Tim: You know, you can also do the same thing sometimes just by calling on people who haven’t spoken before.
Some Male: I think it will hardly help very much.
Lesley: So are you registering a serious objection?
Male: I’m just skeptical.
Lesley: Any more discussion? [Silence] If not, I’m just going to move straight to consensus. All right: any stand-asides? [No]. Any blocks? [No].
Bob: I have a point of process. Can you quickly explain these terms—stand-asides, blocks—for people who might not understand them? We have a lot of new people in the room.
Lesley: Oh, yes, good idea. [Does so] All right, that was easy. Any discussion on #2?
David: I really think having a greeter would be extremely important. You don’t know how alienating it can be to just show up to one of these meetings cold. And I’d say that most people who just show up out of curiosity don’t come back because, unless they already know someone, there’s almost no chance they’ll get to meet or talk to any DANsters.
Marina: Another thing we were thinking of is having orientation literature to hand out.
Ernest: This issue sounds like something it would be good to discuss over the listserv.
Lesley: Actually, I’d say that anything having to do with gender issues is something we shouldn’t be discussing over the listserv.
Brooke: You know, it strikes me this whole proposal should be for the creation of a new working group.
Miriam: We’ve been thinking about it more as a caucus. In which case, we really don’t need to have the group consense on its creation.
Lesley: Shall we talk about this issue after we finish with the business at hand?
Brooke: Well, you know, if you meet on a weekly basis, you essentially are talking about a working group—whatever you call it.
Miriam: No. It’s a caucus. So far, we’ve mainly been meeting informally.
Brooke: Well, okay, I guess it hardly matters. Though if you’re going to be conducting a training for facilitators, that’s technically the domain of Nuts & Bolts. Maybe we should work together.
Mac: I really don’t think it’s a good idea that we set a precedent that everyone else should have to agree before women (or for example queers) are allowed to form a caucus.
Sam: I’ve had my hand up for a while.
Lesley: Okay.
Sam: I think it would be helpful for newcomers to define the difference between a caucus and a working group.
Lesley: Well, it’s not completely clear. Caucuses are kind of a new idea. We’ve never explicitly discussed what a caucus would be. But my guess would be a group of people who feel an affinity of some kind, who want to get together to discuss their issues and affinities. That’s pretty much it.
Ernest: [responding to a signal from Tim] The five minutes we’ve allocated for this discussion is over. I think we should go to New Business.
Miriam: I understand that but I think this discussion is important.
Marina: We’re discussing this because more and more women have stopped coming to meetings. So I’d say this is pretty important for the group as a whole.
Ernest: Shall we extend the time five more minutes then?
[Various people twinkle]
Lesley: Well, technically, we’re still on the second point, greeting new people. I haven’t heard any serious concerns about that part. Maybe we’ll just get through that so we can move on to #3. Any stand-asides for the greeters? Any blocks? [No].
Okay, we have consensus. Miriam, maybe you should restate the proposal about the vibes watcher.
Miriam: Sure. Normally, the role of a vibes watcher is to monitor the emotional dynamics of a meeting—if people are getting bored, or irritable, or if there’s someone who feels alienated, they point it out, and there are various tools they can use to intervene, ranging from opening windows to get more air in the room, or asking people to speak louder so someone with a hearing-aid can participate, to, in an extreme case, stopping discussion and having thirty seconds or a minute of silence for people to calm down. If there’s someone in the group who’s acting systematically disruptive, they might try to talk with that person, draw their attention to the effects of their behavior. Or even, if nothing else works call a time-out specifically for them. We felt that training a vibes watcher to pay particular attention to gender and racial dynamics might help to create an atmosphere here that would not turn so many women and people of color off.
Lesley: Clarifying questions? [No]. Concerns?
Tim: Myself, I would prefer not having a specific person named to this function, because, well… everyone has their own issues and priorities. A straight person might not be able to detect a homophobic vibe. Or someone like me, who’s thirty-eight, might not be the best person to perceive ageism. Shouldn’t we all be monitoring this sort of thing? And all be empowered to intervene if something needs to be pointed out to the group?
Miriam: Sure, in theory, that should be the way things work. The problem is people haven’t been doing that. That’s why we had to develop this proposal in the first place.
Sara: I think this is extremely important. A couple weeks ago, some of us tried to point out an example of blatant sexist behavior at the meeting—guys talking over women, cutting them off. But, when we tried to point out that women were being stepped on, there was a huge push in the room to drive the conversation back to issues of class. As if coming from a working-class background somehow justifies this kind of behavior. Now, I agree we shouldn’t dwell on this sort of thing so much that we bring our real work to a standstill, but I want to have someone at the head of the room who I know is an advocate for people like me.
Lesley: I see three more hands and we’re almost out of time. Oh, four.
Stuart: I have an idea for a specific proposal, or, hopefully, this can be a friendly amendment. Why don’t we try using a vibes watcher for, say, four meetings? And after that we can set aside some time to assess if it’s working, if it should be continued, how it can be improved.
It was at this point Dennis stood up. I should explain something about Dennis. Dennis was a man who looked a bit, and sounded almost exactly, like Robert DeNiro. Except that he was substantially larger. He was about forty-five years old, stocky, with the manner of a bus or subway conductor, which, rumor had it, he had actually been before going on mental disability some several years before. Dennis had a very loud voice, his own personal megaphone, and a tendency to be extremely confrontational (though never quite actually violent) at demos. He also seemed to be entirely oblivious to the principles of consensus and was almost certainly the man Sara was referring to in her complaints about making excuses for supposed working-class behavior.
Dennis: This issue is a result of, from my point of view, if this is happening, what I think is it’s because the facilitator didn’t do his job. This whole vibe concept sounds crazy to me. If you make one person’s subjective point of view binding on everybody else, well, isn’t that the definition of oppression? What we really need to do is to employ Robert’s Rules of Order, which could provide a certain level of organization to the meeting.
This was typical Dennis. He tended to start with what might seem a perfectly reasonable point, then fly off into total cluelessness. People try to remain pokerfaced until he finished his elaboration on the advantages of Robert’s Rules.
Cindy: I agree it’s everyone’s responsibility to monitor these things. Technically, it should be possible to offer points of information or points of process without having to wait through the stack, and while DAN doesn’t do that very much, maybe we should develop that as a way to deal with these kind of issues as well. Develop a specific hand-signal for instance.
Mike: What we really need is an ongoing discussion. We’ve been discussing solutions here without ever discussing the problem itself. The thing that makes sexism, or racism, so insidious is that they can often be incredibly subtle. We’re talking about forms of power and oppression so deeply internalized, they often linger in the background, informing what we say and do in ways we’d never be able to detect. Could we really train people to reliably pick up on such things? Seems to me, we need to figure out a way to get more at the root of the problem—not that I’m sure exactly what that would be, but I’m just not sure these tools would really be adequate to the task.
Miriam: But that’s just the idea—to be able to alert people to subtle forms of racist or sexist behavior they might not be aware of. If you have a better way, I’d love to hear it. Oh, and in response to Stuart’s point: Sure. I’m okay with the idea of a three- or four-week test period.
Lesley: I see two more hands.
Max: Why all the discussion? Why not just propose that it can be cancelled if it doesn’t work?
Ernest: Well, this is a way we can get consensus, since we’ve been hearing a few concerns.
Brooke: We should definitely hold a meeting to train potential vibes-watchers. That way we can develop a pool of people who have some idea how to do this. Because uncompassionate calling out of others’ behavior can be really destructive.
Rachel: For me, though, it doesn’t make sense to have the Women’s Caucus itself carry out the trainings. I’d say we should set aside time in the general meeting, with the idea that it would lead up to a training we could hold next week.
Lesley: We seem to be moving to a different proposal there. Let’s just limit ourselves to the creation of the vibes watcher, then talk about trainings later. Since we’re way over time, I’m going to move to consensus. Any stand-asides?
Mike: Yeah. I’m standing aside. I mean, I’m not opposed to the idea of getting smart people to keep an eye out for this sort of thing, but it seems weird to appoint one person to monitor everyone else.
Sam: Intelligence has nothing to do with it.
Lesley: I’m just looking for stand-asides here. Not discussion.
George: I’m standing aside. It seems to me too much like a thought-police. But I’m willing to wait and see how it works.
Lesley: Okay, any blocks?
Mike: Maybe I could suggest an amendment that we work out specific guidelines, so we’ll be clear on how this will all work? I think that would help put a lot of people’s minds at rest.
Lesley: That sounds helpful, but at the moment we’re just trying to go through this proposal. Any blocks?
And, in fact, there were. Three. One was from one of the union people, Nathan, in the UNITE cap. One was from Dennis. Things started degenerating rapidly at this point.
Lesley: So that proposal is…
Dennis: I would like to make what I think would be a constructive…
Amy: Ahem. This is classic sexist behavior, to interrupt women in the middle of a sentence. Let alone the facilitator.
Ernest: We’re at twenty-five minutes now for a discussion that was supposed to take five. Shall we table this for next week?
Stuart: Or continue on the listserv?
Amy: Next week we’re not meeting because of the Gay Pride parade. Also there’s a really strong sentiment in the Women’s Caucus not to just take it to the listserv. First of all, there still are a few of us benighted souls that are not on email. Second of all, if we’re having meetings where some women don’t feel comfortable, the last thing we want to do is move the discussion to email, which as an environment is a million times worse.
Dennis had had his hand up ever since he was cut off, waving it frantically. Ernest wanted to move to the next item on the agenda, a discussion of supporting civil disobedience at the School of the Americas. Others insisted we continue discussion of the vibes watcher. A couple of people volunteered to knock their own items off this week’s agenda to make time. Someone pointed out that Zosera, one of the very few DAN regulars who’s African American, who had come in at the very beginning of the discussion, now had her hand up as well.
Zosera: You know I can’t fail but notice that those who have been the most vocal in opposing this idea—well, I don’t think it’s an accident that they’ve all been white men. Maybe they don’t see the point because they rarely feel marginalized; they always feel empowered to speak. But when you start opposing this idea in the name of democracy, talking about “oppression,” I really have to start wondering what planet you’re on. For me, democracy is about participatory parity. When a whole category of people is marginalized, and ends up unable to participate on an equal basis, that’s oppression. Not some guy having to worry that for once in his life, he might be called out on his behavior. The measure of our success is the kind of climate we create and, if DAN creates a climate that denies parity, then DAN itself becomes a form of oppression. You want to create a racist organization? Fine, go ahead. You want to create a sexist organization? Fine, go ahead. But at least don’t claim that you’re doing it in the name of democracy!
Lesley: Miriam, someone tells me you have another proposal?
Miriam: Yes. I propose that we discuss this for two weeks on the listserv, and then take it up again at the next meeting, when we come back after Gay Pride.
Rachel: I’d like to offer an amendment: that discussion starts with the need for a training on community building within DAN.
Miriam: Okay. I’ll accept that as a friendly amendment.
Ernest: Any stand-asides? No? Any blocks?
Tim: I’ll block.
Miriam: You’ll block?
Tim: I’m only blocking the part about the listserv. Because as Amy points out, we’re not all on it, and it’s not the ideal forum to discuss such things. Obviously, I wouldn’t block taking up discussion again.
Ernest: I’m seeing a second block here. Dennis?
Dennis: I am blocking in relation to what I recall having heard about the DAN belief system, which causes me to believe that this proposal is in conflict with these values. I agree with everything the lady said about oppression, but since we already have an infrastructure for this, this measure is unnecessary. This should be the job of the facilitator. Furthermore, this group needs to have open discussion without censorship.
Lesley: So you’re saying we can’t…
Rebecca: Point of process!
Lesley: Yes! Please! Help me here!
I had never seen a meeting with this many blocks. Remember the general understanding is that, if there’s a block, even if there’s a large number of stand-asides, there has probably been a lapse in process. Rebecca tried to ride in to the rescue, with a suggestion that, on any other day, Lesley would probably have disapproved of.
Rebecca: You know, it’s my understanding we do have an option for modified consensus. If you first attempt to address the blocker’s concerns, and if that proves completely impossible, you can go forward to a two-thirds majority vote.
Ernest: An important point! This is the second time we’ve been unable to come to consensus around this issue. So I guess we have here an historic moment: the first time DAN has actually moved to modified consensus…
Miriam: Wait! But I do have a proposal that would address these concerns. At least, I hope it will. Judging from the tone of the meeting, I’m proposing we discuss this informally, not on the listserv, over the next two weeks, and hold the training, and then at the next meeting take up discussion again.
Ernest: All right. We have a proposal. Stand-asides?
Dan: Are there other possibilities?
Lesley: We’ll get to that if this one doesn’t pass.
Ernest: I’m not seeing any stand-asides. Any blocks?
Dennis: Can I just ask for clarification—more detail on the proposal?
[Ernest restates the proposal ]
Dennis: No. I still block.
Now, it was the turn of Dan, a young man of South Asian descent who occasionally worked with the legal team (he was, at that moment, sitting on the ground, somewhat anomalously in a three-piece suit, having just returned from acting as legal observer at a demo in Brooklyn), to try to save the day.
Dan: Okay, well, I have an alternate proposal. Since we’ve already spent so much time on this issue, I’d say, rather than wait two weeks, let’s have the discussion right now, and come to a final decision. Because people are definitely on edge now. The issue is still really visceral. Rather than being a reason to step back, maybe that means we should talk about it now.
Bob: Point of process. Rebecca has just reminded us that it’s not the end of the matter if one person blocks. So are we moving to modified consensus or aren’t we?
Ernest: Yes. It’s my impression that there’s a certain ambivalence in the group about the idea of modified consensus. I’m feeling a certain resistance. Maybe we should have a quick straw poll to get a sense of the room regarding DAN’s use of…
Rachel & Miriam: No! No!
Marina: Anyway, what are we talking about here? How can you block a proposal to come back and discuss something? It’s like someone said “I want to discuss labor issues next week” and then somebody blocked that.
Lesley: So shall we have a straw poll to see if we want to move to modified consensus or not?
Miriam: No! We don’t have to.
Brooke: You know, regarding Dan’s proposal—there is a slot on the agenda set aside for education. We rarely use it, but why don’t we just hold the trainings discussion there?
Ernest: Let’s go two-thirds on the original proposal before we do that one. So the proposal is: that we delay discussion, talk about this informally, then get back to it in two weeks. Any stand-asides?
Marina: No! I think the point we were trying to make was that there was no need to bring this as a formal proposal in the first place. We don’t need to go two-thirds. We don’t need to consider it at all. There’s nothing in there that should need the approval of the entire group.
Cindy: I think what Marina is trying to say is that, if there’s a block, you don’t need to immediately revert to the tyranny of the majority. Normally, you either table the proposal, or you try to modify it. This is just tabling the proposal. You don’t need to consense on whether to table it or not!
Sara: I’m so confused. So… okay, we agree we don’t need to vote. I’d say, don’t just put the item in the Educational slot, because this conversation needs to be about more than just training a vibes watcher. It has to be about the basic dynamics of this group. But I’m at the point of asking myself: how can we vote on this if some people’s consciousnesses haven’t been raised enough to be able to vote on it.
Many at Once: Whoa!
This was, in fact, a challenge to the very basis of consensus—hence the shocked reaction. It was also a bit of a bad sign that Sara, still somewhat new to the group, was reverting to terms like “vote.” “Well, maybe I’m just not up enough on certain issues,” she scowled, and then fell silent. If there had been a vibes watcher, she would almost certainly have called a time-out because the tension in the room was extraordinary. This despite the fact that no one, not even Dennis, had actually raised their voice. Instead, conflict seemed to become sublimated into the kind of peculiar legalism that one usually identifies with parliamentary maneuvering, but which normally almost never occurred in consensus-based groups.
Ernest: I see five people with their hands up. I’m going to take those five and then close discussion.
Jody [a new person, punk girl, friend of Chris]: I have an idea. How about this? Why not set apart a certain time every meeting where people can all talk about the vibes, and suggest something that can be done about it. That way we can both make sure it happens, and ensure that responsibility is broadly distributed.
[several twinkles. It’s not taken up, though.]
Melissa: I’d like it if the Women’s Caucus were to meet before the next DAN meeting in two weeks, and that the time and place be well publicized. Also, we should allocate extra time in the upcoming meeting to ensure no one tries to cut discussion short.
Dennis: I’m saying this with the best intentions, and please, don’t anyone feel slighted, but as I get older, I notice that people often accuse others of what they themselves do. I have noticed this with accusations of homophobia, which I admit is a very serious problem. I don’t want to be insensitive to others’ needs, but I think we need to act with more humility here.
Miriam: Well I just want to state that, personally, this conversation has been very infuriating.
[Many twinkles]
Ernest: All right, then. We’ll set aside time for a training on diversity, and bring this back as a discussion in Ongoing Business next time.
Rachel: We’ve already coordinated all this. Lesley and I already proposed this training two weeks ago.
Ernest: So, can we move on to the SOA proposal?
Many: Yes! Yes! Please!
The SOA proposal was being brought forward by a relatively new participant named Rebecca, an affable, butchy-looking twenty-year-old who was, among other things, a union carpenter in Brooklyn. She was also (we were later to discover) an excellent facilitator. Rebecca immediately proposed a couple minute’s break for stretching and recovery, a suggestion greeted by many cheers of enthusiasm. When we reconvened, she explained the background of the School of the Americas Watch protest coalition, which had been carrying out annual CDs at Fort Benning for almost a decade now. The coalition was founded by a Catholic priest and included a lot of faith-based groups, it was a bit top-down in organization and old-fashioned in their idea of nonviolence, but they were also keen to learn from us. We agreed to form a group to see how we could liaise. Next, Bob proposed a teach-in on the Prison Industrial Complex to coincide with our upcoming actions at the Republican convention. Jason from RTS asked for our help in putting together a large festive demo to publicize the situation at Charas. An ISO person encouraged us to take part in a large permitted rally planned to coincide with the first day of the Republican convention in Philly, called Unity 2000, which had been endorsed by the city’s major unions. Then we passed to New Business. Mac and Lesley gave a report-back from their experiences at the recent actions in Windsor; Sara described her plans to create “Video I-Witness” teams to monitor police during the convention; and finally, Jack Griffin was allowed to address the group. Griffin, a man in his twenties in a union jacket and 1930s style worker’s hat, was the national coordinator for UNITE’s laundry workers’ campaign. He looked demonstrably annoyed:Griffin: I had originally intended to bring two proposals before this group, but, because of the nature of the fucking discussion earlier, I’ll just make one.
Various DANsters: Whoa!
Dan: Um, excuse my breaking in here, but this is just the kind of problem that we were talking about. Whenever women’s issues get brought up, someone becomes indignant about the fact that we’re even talking about them. And that creates a repressive atmosphere.
Griffin: Okay, I appreciate that. Calling it a “fucking discussion” was inappropriate.
I’m here to speak on behalf of four thousand union folks, who work for twenty-seven different companies here in the city and on Long Island. Most of them are immigrants. These are people who have to handle shit and blood all fuckin’ day. [pause, then softer] I don’t know, I’ll tell you what: I’ll come back here with the president of the local there, who can tell you about a series of actions we’re hoping will ultimately lead to a general strike among laundry workers in November. We’re working with Local 6 and Local 100 on that, and plan to hold our first action a week from tomorrow.
Maybe our membership should meet with y’all, as perhaps there’s a bit of a divergence in your respective experiences. I think most of the discussion I’ve been hearing this afternoon is very classist; I don’t understand half the words you’re using!
[One other union guy, Nathan from Local 1199, bursts into applause. Everyone else stays silent.]
Still, they got too much to lose if they go it alone on this. When they walk out, there won’t be any more paychecks, and there sure as hell won’t be any trust funds to fall back on. So they’re going to need all the help that we can get.
Malcolm: You said there’s going to be an action a week from tomorrow?
Griffin: Yeah, the target is going to be an as-yet unspecified hotel on Broadway.
Ernest: Could you tell some of us the details later?
Griffin: Yeah, yeah, we have a plan. It’s going to be a direct action held in a non-union hotel. But I can’t really talk about it here. I’ll be back, okay?
To say that someone stomped out of a room is a cliché, but, in this case, it seemed almost literally accurate. Ernest asked, “Um, can people make sure he’ll be there at the next DAN Labor meeting at ABC?”
In fact he never showed up, but at that meeting we did decide never again to bring union people directly to DAN General, but always to the labor working group instead.
After a brief presentation from Ana of the IMC about trying to enlist DAN’s help with upcoming protests at the UN’s Millennium Summit, we broke up for the night. On our way home, my friend Stuart remarked to me, “You know, when you actually get around to writing your ethnography, you might want to use that meeting as a case study. All DAN’s major fault lines seem to have just been exposed.” Certainly, it provided a beautiful example of the friction of gender concerns and social class.
A lot of the trouble galvanized around Dennis. It certainly didn’t originate in him. But he became a symbol. From the perspective of most DAN members, Dennis was the very embodiment of what, in activist parlance, was called a “wingnut”—the sort of person who bases his political worldview on the belief that the Pope is controlled by space aliens, or that the Parks Department’s antimosquito spraying campaign is really a front for CIA genetic warfare experiments. Dennis believed the US was under military occupation by several divisions of a secret UN army under the command of Mikhail Gorbachev: a classic version of the sort of “black helicopter” theories popular among the same, smalltown, white, working-class circles that provide most of the recruits for right-wing militias. As Rebecca was later to observe: “There are ways where the far right and far left are surprisingly similar. And all that it takes to cross that little line that separates them is to be a total fucking lunatic.”
The problem with Dennis, though, was that he just wasn’t quite crazy enough. Had he been an obvious lunatic, it would have been easy to find some excuse to exclude him. But, in fact, he rarely brought up his more paranoid theories at meetings. One of the few times he did actually was after Ana’s presentation about the Millennium Summit, during that very meeting, when he explained that the summit in question—a meeting of world leaders at the UN—was going to see the first announcement of a One World Religion. Dennis was, as we’ve seen, capable of at least paying lip service to DAN’s ideals, even though he seemed profoundly confused about its organizational principles: he blocked constantly, and no one seemed capable of explaining to him why a block was not the same as a “no” vote. He had friends among the hardcore squatter community, which included several of New York’s most longstanding anarchist activists. There, many respected him for his dedication, his willingness to take risks for a cause, his loyalty to his friends. Squatters were used to regular dealings with junkies and refugees from homeless shelters; by their standards, Dennis wasn’t really all that outré.
In facilitation trainings, one often discusses the “wingnut problem”: What to do when, in an open meeting, someone wanders in who’s disruptively insane. Normally, one tries to ease such a person out. Eventually this did happen. What really outraged most of the DAN women, however (and this came out in conversations afterward) was the idea that any DAN men would side with such a person—in this case a mentally unstable, physically threatening, right-wing conspiracy theorist—against them. Because, certainly, some did. During the meeting, the handful of union people in the room (Nathan from UNITE, Griffin and a woman he’d come in with) would often nod or express clear approval after his statements: partly, it’s clear, because they identified with his proletarian manner, mainly, I suspect, because they saw the idea of a “vibes watcher” as a means for upper-middle-class feminists to be able to shut people like that up. Granted, none of these people were anarchists or even DAN regulars.73 But even more rankling was the apparent passive acquiescence of so many of the regular DAN men. Many women noted that while only a few men had spoken against the proposal at that meeting—and this was to continue in later ones—even fewer men spoke for it. Even the male facilitator, Ernest, seemed from the start strangely anxious to move on to the next item on the agenda.74 The result was that Dennis came to seem the de facto spokesman for the unstated feelings of the rest of the group; in effect, something like the desublimated face of DAN masculinity—what many women suspected really lay behind the agreeable facade.
A similar pattern was to reappear in subsequent meetings, where Dennis found strong support from a couple other familiar faces from the squatter scene, and at least a certain level of tolerance from other participants. True, the tolerance did gradually dissolve as it became increasingly difficult to deny that his presence was disruptive. Some DAN men began to make efforts to talk to Dennis’ friends, or to approach Dennis himself informally and try to convince him to change his behavior. They were of no avail. A couple weeks later, when Dennis blocked three proposals in a row, and indignantly refused offers to work with those making the proposal to reach some kind of compromise, Brad, who had some experience with the squatter scene and was particularly effective at dealing with wingnuts, volunteered to take him aside to defuse the situation.
“The facilitators,” he explained, “suggested to me maybe we should step aside a minute—just to cool down a little. Maybe I explain to you some things about the process we’re using.”
“What? Step outside?” demanded Dennis. “You want to step outside? Yeah. Okay. Let’s step outside!”
At this point, pretty much everyone had to agree there was a problem, and the backstage conversations turned to how to convince him to stop coming to general meetings entirely. Eventually, they bore fruit.
Still, the damage had been done. Dennis had managed to put a very ugly face on a tacit male opposition to women’s concerns that, certainly, went well beyond him. Backstage talk among the men was decidedly ambivalent. Sam, for example, was going around saying he was going to quit the group if they created a vibes watcher because “it was a form of fascist mind control.” (“Yes,” Eric Laursen replied, bemusedly. “It’s a little-known fact that all SS units were equipped with vibes watchers.”) Some men were developing a satirical version of the proposal involving a giant hook and gong. Some members of the Labor group suggested part of the difficulty might lie with the language. “Maybe the problem,” one suggested, “is the New Agey, California tone of ‘vibes watcher.’ If we could come up with some new term with more of a gritty, dirty, New York sort of sensibility….” This was taken to heart, at least to the extent of changing the name from “vibes-watcher” to “third facilitator.” By the next meeting, while matters were still heated and contentious, and there were actually several middle-aged guys tied to the squatter scene backing Dennis up, many of the men were obliged to weigh in and began to publicly speak for the proposal. There was a raft of friendly amendments: limits on the third facilitator’s power, a trial period, formal written guidelines, and so forth. There was a recommendation that each meeting be followed by a general review of process, tone, and gender dynamics. There was a recommendation that DAN men create some kind of men’s group to examine their own sexism—or at least, conduct an anti-sexist training. Finally, it came down to impassioned speeches. Several of the hardcore wingnut faction made dramatic threats to leave the group (it was not clear, at this point, that everyone felt this would be such a bad thing). They argued that other men would follow. Others, including myself, argued that the meeting demographics showed many women had left the group already, if with less posturing and fanfare. If even this attempt to address women’s concerns were rebuffed, we could expect far more would. If we had to lose someone, perhaps it would be better to lose some from the other side, if only for reasons of balance.
The measure was finally consensed on, and DAN got a third facilitator. Once the role was created, it proved completely unremarkable. As far as I know, that third facilitator never did call a time-out on any individual and was never accused of censorship. But such fault lines, once exposed, are hard to cover up.