Complementary comment (from a former Occupy Berkeley resident).
And - From the Alliance of Community Trainers
Open Letter to the Occupy Movement: Why We Need Agreements
Excerpts:
‘Diversity of tactics’ becomes an easy way to avoid wrestling with questions of strategy and accountability. It lets us off the hook from doing the hard work of debating our positions and coming to agreements about how we want to act together. It becomes a code for ‘anything goes,’ and makes it impossible for our movements to hold anyone accountable for their actions….
Just as we call for accountability and transparency, we ourselves must be accountable and transparent. Some tactics are incompatible with those goals, even if in other situations they might be useful, honorable or appropriate. We can’t be transparent behind masks. We can’t be accountable for actions we run away from. We can’t maintain the security culture necessary for planning and carrying out attacks on property and also maintain the openness that can continue to invite in a true diversity of new people. We can’t make alliances with groups from impacted communities, such as immigrants, if we can’t make agreements about what tactics we will employ in any given action….
Because we organize openly, we can invite new people into our movement and it can continue to grow. As soon as we institute a security culture in the midst of a mass movement, the movement begins to close in upon itself and to shrink….
A framework of strategic nonviolent direct action makes it easy to reject provocation. We know what we’ve agreed to—and anyone urging other courses of action can be reminded of those agreements or rejected.
We hold one another accountable not by force or control, ours or the systems, but by the power of our united opinion and our willingness to stand behind, speak for, and act to defend our agreements.
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The Consensus process that’s
The Consensus process that’s been used in Occupy is a distorted, massified version of the affinity group/spokescouncil organizational model that’s been practiced and improved over the last two or three decades. The fact that it’s held up as well as it has is a testament to its strength. I don’t think the Occupy movement can easily convert to being based on affinity groups, but people might form them out of the wreckage of it. Occupy might die but that would give it real staying power afterwards.
"distorted, massified"?
I don't understand that, thanks. Examples of what is not distorted or massified?
First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win. -- Mahatma Gandhi
Consensus process isn’t
Consensus process isn’t supposed to work with a giant, indistinct mob (a “mass”). The GA model used in Occupy is a distorted version of Consensus process, which has been built around the idea of affinity groups and spokescouncils. Basically the idea is that the main unit of organization is a group of ~5-15 people who know and trust each other and are working on a specific project or have some other long-term interest together; that’s an affinity group. Unmodified Consensus works extremely well for decision-making in that kind of group. If a bunch of these groups need to work together, they can form a spokescouncil which is basically a larger affinity group with members of each member group appointed as delegates to relay decisions.
That’s how Consensus is supposed to work. Instead, thousands of random people showed up to Wall Street without affinity groups (since they didn’t know what they were) and you get this awful ‘modified consensus’ 90% supermajority voting crap just so it would work at all…
Edit: sorry, my point was that Consensus is supposed to be built on a foundation of people who know and trust each other coming together for a specific purpose with clear goals and agreeing to stated principles such as nonviolence and/or separation of different levels of danger, anti-racism/sexism/patriarchy etc. Occupy had none of that, which is why it has a lot of these problems and why IMO it was/is doomed to be a flash in the pan if it doesn’t reorganize to a more sustainable structure; but even if it dies there are probably going to be a lot of de facto affinity groups coming out of it, which will do a lot of good in the long run.
Edit2: There’s this fetishization of number of people involved, but that’s not how to build a sustainable and effective movement. Organization is a matter of just that, organization… you can either have an organized and effective movement, or you can have a big gray goo. Consensus is designed for a very organized and I would almost say private movement, in the sense that random schmoes can’t just walk in one day and expect to be included right away. So a movement based on Consensus has to either forget about being a ‘mass’ movement, or it has to ditch Consensus; Occupy has managed to heavily modify Consensus in order to become a large movement, which is neither, resulting in paralysis; considering that mass-based movements seem to either collapse or get taken over by people who simply appoint themselves (see also: The USA, a mass-based system if ever there was one), I’ll give you two guesses which way I think Occupy needs to go.
Ah. I need to return to this
That's interesting.
However, I don't "fetishize" numbers. I'm going on Egypt (and Chenoweth's work, though I haven't gotten through the methodology). All walks of life participated. There's a lot to be said for that idea.
Gotta run. You're not being ignored. I'm just overwhelmed.
Oh, and trust has an awful lot to do with this. If anybody thinks a non-transparent process is going to win that, I doubt it very much. From what I'm told, Oakland just made the decision process in the GA less transparent than the US Congress with CSPAN, by not keeping records and not streaming. To put it mildly, that's a process that doesn't scale. Why on earth would I trust a process like that?
First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win. -- Mahatma Gandhi
By “fetishization of numbers”
By “fetishization of numbers” I mean thinking sheer quantity itself has any value, that it’s itself a ‘thing’ worth acquiring; like how in some animist cultures a representation (fetish) of an animal or person or natural force is thought to give real power over the actual animal or person or natural force, even though it’s really just an inert doll or a carving or a painting on a wall.
I don’t know the details about Occupy Oakland but, yes, if they’re going to use the Occupy name they should probably be completely open. OTOH those not involved in an action or organization don’t have a right to be privy to its inner workings.
I don't believe that sheer quantity is the issue
so perhaps "mass movement" is a misnomer, but it seems the only phrase that comes to hand for movements of great scale.
For example, I dislike the term "the masses" (just as much as I dislike the phrase "sheeple and for the same reasons) because it can't treat the individuals within the mass as moral agents, can't account for why different classes and groups and collections of culturally marked individuals come together, and also because it (to me) implies a vanguard manipulating the mass, and the results of that model in the 20th C were very, very bad and led to millions of deaths. So.
It's not the sheer numbers that are interesting. The numbers are a consequence of how the ____ is constructed or created, and that is the interesting part.
First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win. -- Mahatma Gandhi
Agreed. Holy shit,
Agreed.
Holy shit, common ground.
'Training for Change' is the org
we are fortunate enough to have available to Occupy Philadelphia!
George Lakey is the Director Emeritus.
It is one of the many reasons we have not had some of the problems, of other groups, here.
btw, There is a lot more going on behind the scenes than people realize - groups working and planning, training, neighborhood outreach, etc.
Lakey
Strategizing for a Living Revolution
(a five stage model)
by George Lakey