The Question of Violence

Feb. 12, 2012
The violence debate has come to the Occupy Movement.
Last week (February 6) journalist Chris Hedges published “The Cancer in Occupy.” He didn’t mean “cancer;” he meant masked people dressed in black marching in a block and committing acts of vandalism, such as breaking store windows. The comparison to out-of-control cells in a body is disturbing. A loosely organized egalitarian movement is open to variety in tactics, as the black blocs are characterized; as tactics they’ve been used since the Seattle demonstrations of 1999. In Oakland, where 400 people were arrested January 28th, a black bloc, a small group with more than its share of attention, promoted the idea that Occupy was turning violent. Hedges writes: “The corporate state understands and welcomes the language of force. It can use the Black Bloc’s confrontational tactics and destruction of property to justify draconian forms of control and frighten the wider population away from supporting the Occupy movement. Once the Occupy movement is painted as a flag-burning, rock-throwing, angry mob we are finished.”
That’s true. Of course violence-prone hypermasculine actions play into the excitable hands of the media, the police and city governments who want the occupiers to be discredited, who are making new first-amendment-violating rules about where and how citizens can assemble.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist, a war correspondent in the Middle East, the Balkans, Central America, and Africa. He was arrested with others in Occupy Wall Street. He also has a Master’s from Harvard Divinity School. But there he is on radio being challenged by Kristof Lapaur, an activist with Occupy Oakland. Lapaur thinks Hedges should have said more about the actual organizing tactics and policies of Occupy Oakland. He sort of accused Hedges of doing what Hedges doesn’t want the media to do: focus on a small off-kilter group that performs random destruction of property. The detail was dizzying: the Occupy Movement has grown huge and complicated, though it’s still what I would call a participatory democracy (the phrase on the New York General Assembly website is “direct democracy”) anti-heirarchical, “open, participatory and horizontally organized”. Also consensus-seeking. So a great many people are doing a lot of things—many many small decisions, a lot of complex organizational rhetoric (both Hedges and Lapaur are fluent), plenty of disagreement—to keep it going on a nonviolent trajectory.
Nonviolent tactics include long frustrating meetings, complex rhetoric, many leaders, and lots of disagreement that must be worked through to resolution. That much I know.
Todd Gitlin, author of The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, issued a call (in The Nation, Feb. 27th) for Occupy to explicitly adopt a policy of “strategic nonviolent direct action”: “By renouncing violence against persons or property, Occupy would enhance its appeal to the disabled and people of color, who have good reason to stay away from volatile confrontations. By isolating those who seize the spotlight by smashing things, it can prevent them from trampling the ethos of a brilliantly leaderless movement.”
Gitlin, a founder of Students for a Democratic Society and co-author of the Port Huron Statement of 1962, reminds The Nation readers of the Weather Underground and other groups from the New Left Movement of the late sixties who grew violent and brought down SDS. The agonized section of his book is titled “The Implosion.”
Which brings this commentary around to my fear.
My novel, Riders on the Storm, takes place in one corner of the movement going through Gitlin’s “implosion.” It’s based on events that warped my life in an amazingly short time. Among other things, I learned from experience that tactics such as the Weather Underground’s Days of Rage and the black blocs’ anarchist window-breaking are obvious, tempting, and intuitive. They transform fear and anger into a sort of wild joy, an illusion of power. I can readily imagine wanting to break a huge plate-glass window in an imposing building that serves the ruling class.
Chris Hedges reminded the radio audience that in the Balkans and El Salvador, the police and the military eventually came to side with the protesters. The police, he points out, are obviously not part of the 1%. I wonder if waiting for the police to wake up as city administrations become increasingly dictatorial is a way of martyring your constituents to retain the moral high ground.
Another non-violent tactic: incredible patience.
I learned, in passing (a news clip? a brief email mention?) that Occupy has been urging nonviolence since last fall and is conducting nonviolence training across the country. Nonviolence does not film well. It’s not exciting until the nightsticks come out, the campsite is trashed, and a woman screams bloody-murder.
After the Chicago ’68 demonstrations at the Democratic Convention (determined by federal commission to be a “police riot”), I remember a sort of constant hysterical excitement: we were afraid, and we were attracting a lot of public attention. It felt as though the general public was finally ready to listen to our discourse on the Power Structure or University complicity with the war machine. We got aggressive. Our accusations were salted with street language. Some of us got into explosives.
I had what I suppose was a crisis of conscience that led me away from the Movement and was followed by guilt about leaving. You could say the book I wrote 40 years later was one way to come to terms with that guilt.
When I join Occupy, I will need non violence training.