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Title: Dear Occupiers
Author: CrimethInc.
Date: 2011-10-08
Language: en
Topics: Occupy Wall Street, Occupy, liberals, the left
Source: Retrieved on 2021-06-04 from https://crimethinc.com/2011/10/08/dear-occupiers-a-letter-from-anarchists

CrimethInc.

Dear Occupiers

Support and solidarity! We’re inspired by the occupations on Wall Street

and elsewhere around the country. Finally, people are taking to the

streets again! The momentum around these actions has the potential to

reinvigorate protest and resistance in this country. We hope these

occupations will increase both in numbers and in substance, and we’ll do

our best to contribute to that.

Why should you listen to us? In short, because we’ve been at this a long

time already. We’ve spent decades struggling against capitalism,

organizing occupations, and making decisions by consensus. If this new

movement doesn’t learn from the mistakes of previous ones, we run the

risk of repeating them. We’ve summarized some of our hard-won lessons

here.

Occupation is nothing new. The land we stand on is already occupied

territory. The United States was founded upon the extermination of

indigenous peoples and the colonization of their land, not to mention

centuries of slavery and exploitation. For a counter-occupation to be

meaningful, it has to begin from this history. Better yet, it should

embrace the history of resistance extending from indigenous self-defense

and slave revolts through the various workers’ and anti-war movements

right up to the recent anti-globalization movement.

The “99%” is not one social body, but many. Some occupiers have

presented a narrative in which the “99%” is characterized as a

homogenous mass. The faces intended to represent “ordinary people” often

look suspiciously like the predominantly white, law-abiding middle-class

citizens we’re used to seeing on television programs, even though such

people make up a minority of the general population.

It’s a mistake to whitewash over our diversity. Not everyone is waking

up to the injustices of capitalism for the first time now; some

populations have been targeted by the power structure for years or

generations. Middle-class workers who are just now losing their social

standing can learn a lot from those who have been on the receiving end

of injustice for much longer.

The problem isn’t just a few “bad apples.” The crisis is not the result

of the selfishness of a few investment bankers; it is the inevitable

consequence of an economic system that rewards cutthroat competition at

every level of society. Capitalism is not a static way of life but a

dynamic process that consumes everything, transforming the world into

profit and wreckage. Now that everything has been fed into the fire, the

system is collapsing, leaving even its former beneficiaries out in the

cold. The answer is not to revert to some earlier stage of capitalism—to

go back to the gold standard, for example; not only is that impossible,

those earlier stages didn’t benefit the “99%” either. To get out of this

mess, we’ll have to rediscover other ways of relating to each other and

the world around us.

Police can’t be trusted. They may be “ordinary workers,” but their job

is to protect the interests of the ruling class. As long as they remain

employed as police, we can’t count on them, however friendly they might

act. Occupiers who don’t know this already will learn it firsthand as

soon as they threaten the imbalances of wealth and power our society is

based on. Anyone who insists that the police exist to protect and serve

the common people has probably lived a privileged life, and an obedient

one.

Don’t fetishize obedience to the law. Laws serve to protect the

privileges of the wealthy and powerful; obeying them is not necessarily

morally right—it may even be immoral. Slavery was legal. The Nazis had

laws too. We have to develop the strength of conscience to do what we

know is best, regardless of the laws.

To have a diversity of participants, a movement must make space for a

diversity of tactics. It’s controlling and self-important to think you

know how everyone should act in pursuit of a better world. Denouncing

others only equips the authorities to delegitimize, divide, and destroy

the movement as a whole. Criticism and debate propel a movement forward,

but power grabs cripple it. The goal should not be to compel everyone to

adopt one set of tactics, but to discover how different approaches can

be mutually beneficial.

Don’t assume those who break the law or confront police are agents

provocateurs. A lot of people have good reason to be angry. Not everyone

is resigned to legalistic pacifism; some people still remember how to

stand up for themselves. Police violence isn’t just meant to provoke us,

it’s meant to hurt and scare us into inaction. In this context,

self-defense is essential.

Assuming that those at the front of clashes with the authorities are

somehow in league with the authorities is not only illogical—it

delegitimizes the spirit it takes to challenge the status quo, and

dismisses the courage of those who are prepared to do so. This

allegation is typical of privileged people who have been taught to trust

the authorities and fear everyone who disobeys them.

No government—that is to say, no centralized power—will ever willingly

put the needs of common people before the needs of the powerful. It’s

naïve to hope for this. The center of gravity in this movement has to be

our freedom and autonomy, and the mutual aid that can sustain those—not

the desire for an “accountable” centralized power. No such thing has

ever existed; even in 1789, the revolutionaries presided over a

“democracy” with slaves, not to mention rich and poor.

That means the important thing is not just to make demands upon our

rulers, but to build up the power to realize our demands ourselves. If

we do this effectively, the powerful will have to take our demands

seriously, if only in order to try to keep our attention and allegiance.

We attain leverage by developing our own strength.

Likewise, countless past movements learned the hard way that

establishing their own bureaucracy, however “democratic,” only

undermined their original goals. We shouldn’t invest new leaders with

authority, nor even new decision-making structures; we should find ways

to defend and extend our freedom, while abolishing the inequalities that

have been forced on us.

The occupations will thrive on the actions we take. We’re not just here

to “speak truth to power”—when we only speak, the powerful turn a deaf

ear to us. Let’s make space for autonomous initiatives and organize

direct action that confronts the source of social inequalities and

injustices.

Thanks for reading and scheming and acting. May your every dream come

true.