From Occupy to Wikileaks, the anarchist spirit of leaderless
resistance, decentralized decision-making and autonomous self-governance, is
rising.
Photo: Tess Scheflan/Activestills.org
In the fall of 2011, as the autumn leaves were turning
color, America’s largest metropolitan city was about to grab the world’s
attention. On September 17, the first occupiers descended onto lower Manhattan
and marched on the stock exchange, eventually settling in Zuccotti Park. Wall
Street, the center of capitalist wealth and power was now under siege. As the
word ‘Occupy’ indicated, it was not a one day protest. They were there for the
long haul.
“The Occupy movement just lit a spark.” Noam Chomsky spoke of its
historical significance as creating something that never existed before and
bringing a marginalized discourse to the center. At Zuccotti Park, with a
library and kitchen, a cooperative community arose with open spaces for sharing
and mutual aid.
In a time of rampant apathy and weakening civic power, the
Occupy movement came as a surprise to the status quo. In the wake of the Arab
Spring, some may have seen a rising tide on the horizon. From the indignados movement,
an iconic picture of Anonymous holding the sign “Nobody
Expects the #Spanish Revolution“ went viral around the globe. The
spirit of the uprising on Wall Street was similarly unexpected. Once the wave
moved beyond the East Coast, Occupy inspired the nation and spread across the
world.
Yet, after the winter’s slowdown and the brutal police
crackdown of the encampment, the movement lost momentum and the waves of change
seemed to be evaporating. Is it true that the Occupy movement is weakening? Are
people not yet ready to truly challenge the corporate greed that is exploiting
the majority of population for the benefit of 1%? The truth is, the tidal wave
of world revolution is far from over. Just because it is less visible doesn’t
mean Occupy is dead.
Occupy’s Anarchistic Impulse
Despite police efforts to dismantle it, Occupy has already
changed the direction of society. It brought a new impulse that many felt was
urgently needed. Mic check and consensus decision-making arose as a new style
of communication that offered alternatives to traditional hierarchical modes of
communication.
David Graeber — an anarchist, anthropologist and author of Debt: The First
5,000 Years – was one of the activists involved in the creation of the
General Assembly (GA) at Zuccotti Park, which was the gestation of the Occupy
movement’s model of horizontal decision-making. Graeber has describedanarchism
as a form of social organization that embraces direct democracy and a form of
self-governance without hierarchy. In Graeber’s vision, “anarchism is a
commitment to the idea that it would be possible [to build] a society based on
principles of self-organization, voluntary association and mutual aid.”
Graeber has shown how
anarchist principles are at the very heart of the Occupy Movement, particularly
its commitment to the leaderless, consensus-based decision-making model
practiced in the GA. He has pointed in particular to the movement’s effort to
stay autonomous and independent from the extant institutions of representative
democracy. This autonomous spirit manifests itself through direct action, which
Graeber characterizes as “the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already
free.”
In his Fragments
of an Anarchist Anthropology, Graeber offered a historical context by
showing how anarchism inspired the early waves of global resistance against the
WTO and IMF and also, prior to this, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation
(EZLN) and their revolt in Chiapas. The Zapatistas’ rejection of the idea of
seizing power and their creation of an autonomous self-government inspired
movements throughout Mexico and the rest of the world.
Graeber deliberately connects the dots, showing how the
democratic practice of the Zapatistas led to the “This is what democracy looks
like” moment in the Battle of Seattle, providing a glimpse of
anarchist-inspired direct action:
All of this has happened completely below the radar screen of the corporate media, which also missed the point of the great mobilizations. The organization of these actions was meant to be a living illustration of what a truly democratic world might be like, from the festive puppets, to the careful organization of affinity groups and spokes councils, all operating without a leadership structure, always based on principles of consensus-based direct democracy (2004:83).
A decade later, OWS felt like a revival of the Global
Justice Movement and the 1999 uprising in Seattle. Occupy’s spirit of
horizontal decision-making and decentralized mobilization emerged spontaneously
instead of being the result of centralized coordination or the guidance of a
single charismatic leader. The culture of Occupy is a leaderless one, something
which profoundly worries the authorities and their Conservative and Liberal
intelligentsia in the press.
“If there is no leader, then that’s chaos — that’s
anarchy!” exclaimed Stephen
Colbert in a mock-debate with Carne Ross, author of The Leaderless Revolution.
Colbert pontificated on how he wanted stability and certainty about the next
day’s profits. His tongue-in-cheek comment summed up the mainstream response to
an imagination that moves beyond the current free-market-winner-takes-all
social structure. In response, Ross noted how the status quo is itself
profoundly unstable and that it is capitalism which produces
chaos.
A similar sentiment arose within the movement itself,
creating some internal conflict. Mark Binelli of the Rolling Stone has
shed light on the tensions within OWS between those holding firm to
anarchist principles by refusing to allow top-down structures of coordination
and decision-making. Binelli highlighted the story of Marisa Holmes, a
25-year-old anarchist who had been one of the core organizers of Occupy Wall
Street. While facilitating a GA meeting, the well-known figure of Russell
Simmons came by Zuccotti Park to participate and wanted to bump up the speakers
list. He was not allowed to because this went against the egalitarian form of
assembly.
“Anarchy is the Mother of Order”
Historically, the word anarchism has often been portrayed in
a negative light for political aims. The term anarchy has long been
associated with chaos and violence, depicted as mob rule with no coherent
demands except for a chaotic dismantling of the existing social order. With the
general state of ignorance surrounding the idea of anarchism, the very word
itself has become susceptible to extensive government and media manipulation.
Sean Sheehan, the non-anarchist author of the book Anarchism,
has elucidated how anarchism’s re-emergence in Seattle at the end of 1999
helped propel it onto the world stage. With the media focusing on broken
Starbucks and Nike windows, sensationalizing the vandalism of a tiny minority,
the massive peaceful rallies in downtown Seattle were overshadowed by negative
and false media portrayal. The mainstream perversion of the word anarchism was
widely disseminated.
Once again, in the rise of Occupy, peaceful protesters were
regularly portrayed in this negative light by the press. The media deliberately
generated an ungrounded fear of the movement within the general public, despite
the fact that its true nature and aims were precisely to peacefully resist the
systemic violence and market chaos of contemporary financialized capitalism.
After all, as Proudhon always emphasized, the “O” in the anarchist symbol
stands for “Order”.
The FBI has also been attempting to brand occupiers with
this demonizing image of violent anarchists, a term now treated by the US
government as virtually synonymous with the term terrorist. In Chicago, during
the NATO summit in May, Chicago police entrapped
activists by having FBI informants provide bomb-making materials
to them. In Seattle and Portland, agents raided
homes, seeking ‘anarchist’ literature and black clothes.
Using eerily similar rhetoric to the manufactured ‘war on terror’
of the Bush-Cheney years, the crafted image of ‘violent anarchists’ has become
a pretext for police to justify their militarized abuse of power. Recently, new
evidence has surfaced of police
infiltration inside the Occupy movement. In Austin last December, an
undercover police officer was involved in setting up occupiers with felony
charges by distributing devices that were later considered weapons.
A recently disclosed data sheet from a company
called Ntepid outlined a secret spying software product called Tartan. It
revealed a high level of surveillance on Occupy and other protesters, and
clearly displayed the establishment’s cognitive framework of being involved in
a witch-hunt on activists. The case study document entitled
“Tartan Quantifying Influence” spoke of data mining software meant to enhance
‘national security’, enacted through a kind of political profiling that clearly
lumped together all progressive activists with the new bogeyman label of
‘anarchist’ that assumes, a priori, a certainly predisposal
towards violent and/or illegal actions. The Tartan data listed the
activists of Occupy Oakland, citizen journalism networks like Citizen Radio,
and even a PBS station as “influential leaders”.
The concocted image of a ‘black bloc’ using the word
anarchist to describe violent street gangs that vandalize store windows is
repeatedly drummed into the public mind, as they are told they need to be
afraid. But we must ask, what does the word actually mean? Is an anarchist
someone who incites violence and wants bring about chaos through the overthrow
of ‘democratic’ government? Anarchist Susan Brown (1993) demystified some
of these misconceptions:
While the popular understanding of anarchism is of a violent, anti-state movement, anarchism is a much more subtle and nuanced tradition than a simple opposition to government power. Anarchists oppose the idea that power and domination are necessary for society, and instead advocate more co-operative, anti-hierarchical forms of social, political and economic organization (p. 106).
Sheehan (2003) traces back the word anarchism back to its
Greek roots:
The etymology of the word – anarchism meaning the “absence of leaders”, the absence of a government — signals what is distinctive about anarchism: a rejection of the need for the centralized authority of the unitary state, the only form of government most of us have ever experienced (p. 25).
DJ Pangburn, editor of the online magazine Death and
Taxes, cautioned the
public regarding the government’s active promotion of hysteria through the
prediction that violent anarchists would disturb the Republican and Democratic
Conventions. Pangburn reminded the people of who have historically been the
real anarchists:
People seemed to quickly forget that it was anarchists who were attempting to bring a modicum of sanity to America’s ethically and morally-bankrupt hyper-capitalism, in the form of the weekend and the eight-hour work day, as well as fair pay for the people who actually did a company’s manual labor.
When current misrepresentations of the word anarchism are
dismantled, something more nuanced and vital emerges. Anarchy does not refer to
chaos or the absence of rules. It simply indicates a society in which authority
is not defined by hierarchy and power over individual autonomy. It calls for
the direct participation and the ongoing engagement of citizens with creating
an inclusive form of decision-making and an egalitarian form of social
organization.
Internet Revolution
The Occupy movement opened up a space for public discourse
that, in the last 20-30 years, has gradually been taken over by corporate
actors. In these liberated spaces, a delicate tension arose between the
familiar frame of reference for social change such as electoral systems and the
more egalitarian and largely unknown or misunderstood idea of anarchism. This
new movement has struggled to keep the horizontal space open and growing in the
midst of a mental and physical battle that is orchestrated by those in power,
desperate to keep things as they are.
People often ask how a society could be organized without
centralized control and hierarchy. But once the initial, highly stylized and
negative image of anarchism is debunked and the nonviolent and decentralized
nature of the model is understood, some might still feel that the world
imagined by these free thinkers is simply impossible or unrealistic. And yet
the core principles that anarchists try to bring about in society already exist
all around us in our everyday lives.
As we move deeper into the new millennium, many sensse that
historical social change is imminent and are excitedly imagining a different
world. The truth may be that inwardly, a revolution has already taken place and
people’s perception of the world and each other has fundamentally changed. It
is a revolution of consciousness brought about in great part by the internet,
an inherently decentralized communication platform that has led to a networked
revolt.
The very existence of the internet signifies a triumph of
connectivity over isolation, free flow over the control of information, and
sharing over ownership. Before the Occupy movement emerged in the streets,
squares and parks of the world, millions already occupied the global square of
the internet. The miniature culture based on egalitarian ways of collaboration
that blossomed in the early stages of Occupy, had already been thriving on the
web for many years.
This is the generation of the internet, connected to a world
that is now just a click away; a generation that saw its reality captured in
the metaphors and images of the Wachowski brothers’ film, The Matrix. As
Morpheus explained to
Neo:
You are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else, you were born into bondage, born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch. A prison… For your mind… You take the blue pill — the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill — you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Many might have seen in Neo their own struggles. The Matrix
that he was born into is much like the modern corporate state we all live in,
where the biopower of commercial interests has taken over so much of our lives
and torn the delicate interconnectedness out of the fabric of life itself.
Intellectual property rights are
used to protect and promote the hegemony of Western market
values. Corporations like Monsanto genetically modify and attempt to
control life itself. Trade agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)
and the Trans-Pacific Partnership
Agreement (TPP) are all part of an artificially-made world order in
which a tiny minority quite literally feeds parasitically off the vast majority
of humanity.
Just like Neo, we have already taken the red pill and chose
not to go back to ‘reality’. By plugging into a universal online network, each
and every culture has collectively gone through a kind of virtual rite of
passage without realizing what they were getting into — or just how deep the
rabbit hole might go.
From screen to screen across the vast internet, the
centralized structures of outer society are rapidly melting away. Here is a
world free from traditional boundaries and rules. In the digital space, this
new field of pure potential is paved with online connections and shared visions
among human beings from all corners of the globe.
Revolutionary Cypherpunks
At first, this digital space appeared as a lawless Wild Wild
West without borders. Nobody owned the Internet. It was a field of potential
that could evolve in countless unknown directions.
Over time, digital pioneers created their own rules of
coding and programming that stretched traditional boundaries and limitations.
In this early stage, computer programmers were like the first settlers of an
online borderless land. Richard
Stallman, the programmer and cyber-guru, worked with other computer-savvy
fellows to develop a set of principles through which new forms of coding could
be designed to ensure that the digital commons stayed open. Stallman later
instigated the Free
Software Movement to maintain a stream of source code outside of the
realm of proprietary licenses.
Stallman described free
software as that which users develop and operate without restrictions other
than keeping it free of propriety. It was created to respect the rights of
developers and users to maintain control, both individually and collectively,
over the invention and improvement of software that cannot be locked-down by
vested interests. The goal is to fight against surveillance, digital
restrictions management (DRM) and backdoors activities that serve private
interests by making changes to a program or installing intentionally malicious
software.
What drove Stallman’s endeavor was part of the
so-called ‘Hacker
Ethics’ – the commitment to unlimited access to computers and
internet, free flow of information and a general sense of mistrust of
authority. These hacker ethics are fundamentally anarchistic in their
commitment to decentralization and in their deeply anti-authoritarian views.
Stallman’s work influenced individuals like Julian Assange
of Wikileaks, especially through his association with a group known as
the Cypherpunks,
which originated with an electronic mailing
list set up to tackle the challenges of internet security and the
development of cryptography.
Episode
8 and Episode
9 of Assange’s syndicated interview show, The World Tomorrow, focused
on three of the seminal figures of the Cypherpunks: Andy Müller-Maguhn, member
of the German hacker association Chaos Computer Club; Jérémie
Zimmermann, co-founder of the Paris-based group La Quadrature du Net; and
Jacob Appelbaum, American independent computer security researcher and activist
working on the Tor project. Together they
explored a wide range of cyber-activities such as online threats, internet
privacy, censorship bills, repressive anti-piracy laws, and the future of the
internet as such.
As a result of the sophisticated discourse that emerged from
the information revolution, unique philosophical views arose on the meaning of
freedom, forms of governance, and the individual’s relationship to society more
generally. In Episode 8 of his show, Assange described how Cypherpunks worked
to provide the cryptographic tools with which one can independently and
effectively challenge government interference, to help people take control
their own lives.
In Episode 9, Jérémie Zimmermann spoke about the
recent tendency towards centralization in cyberspace and showed how censorship
and privacy issues are really about exploitation of people’s power:
When you talk about internet censorship, it is about centralizing power to determine what people may be able to access or not. And whether it’s government censorship, or also private-owned censorship, they are changing the architecture of the internet from a universal network to an organization of small sub-networks.
The Cypherpunks were like pioneers of the open internet
model that works to preserve freedom online. It is interesting to find so many
anarchistic principles at work in their actions. One thing that guided the
Cypherpunks is an ethos of independent control of networks and a general
distrust of governments, as well as the value of individual privacy and
freedom. The methods developed to secure these values were inherently
non-violent. By expanding the laws of mathematics, these cyber-activists
developed encrypted code that no level of state violence could break.
In the process, these frontier hacktivists inspired and
empowered an entire generation. Jacob Applebaum talked about
how the Cypherpunks radicalized and empowered people with the idea of open
software:
… I mean, that’s what started a whole generation of people really becoming more radicalized, because people realized that they weren’t atomized anymore, and that they could literally take some time to write some software that if someone used it they could empower millions of people.
This trend continues. In August, the idea of CryptoParties
was born from a Twitter discussion. A Wiki-page was set
up recently that defines CryptoParties as “Interested parties with computers
and the desire to learn to use the most basic crypto programs. CryptoParties
are free to attend and are commercially non-aligned.”
Asher Wolf, an Australia-based privacy activist who played a
key role in its inception, described how CryptoParties came about: “A lot of us
missed out on Cypherpunk (an
electronic technical mailing list) in the nineties, and we hope to create a new
entry pathway into cryptography” (as cited in SC
magazine, Sept, 4, 2012). Two weeks after the term was coined,
CryptoParties found their way all around the world. From one movement to
another, this anarchist spirit revealed its diversity, crossing generations and
boundaries.
Anarchy in Action
Just as the Occupy movement was initiated by anarchists, the
social habitat of networking in cyberspace appears to have been inspired by
this same spirit. Creative manifestations of anarchy-in-action are found
everywhere online. Without even knowing it, millions of people are already
participating in this flow.
The Open Source
Movement, an offshoot of the Free Software Movement, emerged to promote the
collaborative production and free dissemination of information. Examples of
important manifestations of Open Source Software that have benefited millions
of people are projects like Linux, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia and web
browser Mozilla.
Wikipedia is unprecedented as a space where everyone can
participate in developing the foundation of historical knowledge. Through
voluntary collaborative processes, there emerge a horizontal surge of
creativity directed toward a common goal with no personal profit motive. This
collaborative action of Wikipedia evolved and inspired many different movements
such as crowd-sourcing and crowd-funding used
to fund other non-profit projects.
Similarly, social media links people together with the
spirit of voluntary association and mutual aid. Instant information sharing and
live-streams weave people in a network of citizen-led news media. This is
quickly becoming a participatory process of understanding the world as it
unfolds. People tweet and re-tweet, post and share, modifying the original
message, correcting errors before they are reported as fact. The advent of
social media, with videos and photos is empowering people to bring out their
creativity and collaborate for what they care about.
As a result, communication flows beyond borders and people
have access to multiple perspectives on unfolding events. Mathew Ingram, a
senior writer with GigaOM opined how
this development “has already become a real-time newswire for many, a source of
breaking news and commentary on live events”. The exploding popularity of
online networks in this anarchic spirit is quickly replacing traditional print
media and becoming the new global “Fourth Estate“.
As noted earlier, anarchism is often associated with chaos
and lawlessness, but it does not mean lack of order, nor does it oppose all
forms of governance. Those who cherish the idea of anarchy simply oppose the
concept of domination; one particular person, political or religious view
taking a centralized position of authority. Peer-to-peer networks are a perfect
expression of this anarchist stance. They bypass centralized control of
information and transform social relationships that in the past have typically
been formed through hierarchy of class and professions. These peer-to-peer
based connections are unprecedented in that they circumvent built-in filters in
the flow of information.
The peer-to-peer communication model is developing as a
primary mode of working with the Internet, where each person’s free choice to
become a bridge helps to build communication avenues that are so decentralized
that they are virtually impossible to censor. They are meshed together, computer to
computer, creating new pathways through which freedom and autonomy can flow.
Peer-to-peer trends are implemented in many aspects of daily
life. Circumventing the traditional centralized banking system, people at the
grassroots level are increasingly engaging in peer-to-peer
lending. Michael Bauwens, creator of the Foundation for P2P
Alternatives has revealed how
a new form of innovation is emerging out of distributed peer-to-peer networks.
He explained how P2P production is itself a byproduct of networked communities.
Unlike the corporate model of internally funded research and
development (R&D), this P2P process fully engages individuals and often has
better results as it gives them more access to the production process and more
influence on the purpose and outcome. He noted how P2P production extends to
direct action and participation, bringing the notion of democracy beyond a
vague promise in the political realm to every aspect of our daily lives. With
peer lending and production, why not create a peer-to-peer currency? Bitcoin,
digital money, is one answer to this call.
The creation of this new digital currency is at its very
core an anarchistic initiative, as it circumvents the centralized authority of
central banks and the monopolized debt-based banking system. Morgen E.
Peck summed
up the way Bitcoin works as follows:
Bitcoin balances can flow between accounts without a bank, credit card company, or any other central authority knowing who is paying whom. Instead, Bitcoin relies on a peer-to-peer network, and it doesn’t care who you are or what you’re buying.
Recently, Bitcoin gained public attention through its usage
in combating the ongoing financial blockade of Wikileaks. Forbes reported that
following the massive release of US diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks, Bank of
America, VISA, MasterCard, PayPal and Western Union stopped processing
transactions to them. In spite of this banking blockade, Wikileaks has gained
substantial Bitcoin donations. This is a good example of the effective use of
open source digital currency in counteracting private centralized monetary
control and economic censorship. Although it still requires some improvements,
such as securing real anonymity, BitCoin is a successful and inherently
anarchistic concept aimed at reshaping economic interactions and providing
decentralized avenues of exchange and money-creation.
Below the surface of the internet, a rapid transformation is
underway. Peer-to-peer connections in cyberspace found their way onto the
streets. With Mic Checks and General Assemblies, the people are coming together
to create a circle. By looking each other in the eyes, they find one another
anew as peers, equal partners and fellow citizens. It is not politicians and
self-proclaimed experts, but peers — ordinary fellow citizens — that we have
come to trust.
Wherever two or more gather in the light of cooperation,
there is the anarchistic spirit. This is the path of voluntary association and mutual
aid where an unmediated partnership is born. Now, at last, we find ourselves at
the beginning of a resurgence of the anarchist spirit.
Continued in Part II
References:
Brown, S. L. (1993). The politics of individualism:
liberalism, liberal feminism and anarchism. New York: Black Rose.
Graeber, D. (2004). Fragments of an Anarchist
Anthropology. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.
Sheehan, S. M. (2003). Anarchism. London: Reaktion
Books.
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