A Talk at Occupy Oakland

Thanks for inviting me here. While they’re getting the mic working, we can use the “people’s mic” and I’ll go through a little background about where I’m coming from.

I was raised in Missouri, went to college in Illinois, and came to Berkeley in 1965, where I’ve lived ever since. I took part in all the sixties things you’ve heard about, and as far as I’m concerned it was really great! I was immersed in the hip counterculture as well as the New Left – civil rights, Vietnam war protests (including evading the draft, but that’s another story).

Toward the end of the sixties I started becoming disillusioned with the more authoritarian and even Stalinist tendencies in the New Left, and in 1969 I became an anarchist.

That led me to explore various historical movements I hadn’t known much about, including the May 1968 revolt in France. I had vaguely heard about it when it was happening, but at the time almost none of us in America had had any idea what it was really about. So I read a book about it and there were mentions of this little group called the Situationist International that had played a significant role in triggering the revolt.

I was intrigued, and managed to find a few situationist pamphlets in a Berkeley bookstore. I read them and was blown out. They seemed kind of like anarchists, but much more coherent, much more incisive, much more intelligent [laughter], much more effective.

But their writings were mostly in French. There were just a few pamphlets in English. So I started learning French, and in 1971 I went to France and met some of them. Little by little my French got better, and eventually I was able to translate their writings. In 1981 I published this book, the Situationist International Anthology.

Meanwhile I and a few friends in the Bay Area had been doing some similar writings and actions of our own. Among other things, I wrote a pamphlet called Double-Reflection. It’s about the subjective process of revolution. What goes on in you when you’re doing something radical? It could just be writing, talking, a riot, a strike, any number of things. But I noticed that when I was doing that kind of thing I became a different person. And it puzzled me that very little had been written about that sort of thing. During revolts people go through dramatic changes, yet the history books mostly just talk about external events. Such-and-such political leader said this, the government reacted this way, and so on. You have to read between the lines to wonder: What must it have felt like to take part in something like that?

Later on, in the ’90s, I wrote another text called The Joy of Revolution, which goes into all sorts of aspects of revolution, including the pros and cons of different kinds of tactics in different kinds of situations.

After a short introductory chapter, it has a second chapter that talks about “ordinary” conditions, which is what 99% of our lives are like, when only very limited things are possible. Then the third chapter is about radical situations. Those are situations or events where people make some kind of a breakthrough. You can’t really predict when that’s going to happen. Sometimes conditions are such that you would think something radical would happen, but nobody does anything. At other times nothing much is going on but for some reason a radical movement just bursts forth. Maybe because of a miscalculation by the rulers, maybe they stupidly overreact to some protest. Anyway, whatever the reason might be, it triggers something like a critical mass where lots of people rally around some issue.

Frequently, as in this Occupy movement, it’s a matter of people coming together in a public space. In a strike it’s a little different, they’re coming together in a factory or workplace. But radical movements often start with people coming together in a public square or someplace like that, which enables them to get away with more things, because if there are thousands of people there together, there’s not much even the most brutal regime can do. It waits to get you separately, when you’re alone.

When a popular movement throws the ruling system on the defensive, it opens things up. It’s as if we’ve been living all our lives in a closed building with no windows, and suddenly there’s a little crack in the wall you can peek through, and you see that there’s another world out there. Maybe you had suspected there was something out there, but now you can actually see it. “Hey look, there’s something out there! Maybe we can open the crack a little wider and go out there.”

When people get that kind of feeling, strategy and tactics change very drastically. That’s why I wrote those two different chapters: to show that in the usual “ordinary” type of situation you might be limited to doing rather modest things, whereas when this new type of situation pops up you can think bigger. Instead of assuming we have to follow the usual rules, we can say, Hey, shall we take over this building? and it’s not completely unrealistic.

At a certain point in these situations, they’re either going to expand or decline. They can’t just stay as they are. And in the extreme cases you get what I call the Potemkin moment. As those of you who have seen Eisenstein’s film Potemkin may remember, it’s Russia in 1905 and there’s been a mutiny. The sailors who mutinied have been defeated and captured. They’re lined up and put under a tarp, and there’s a firing squad of guards that’s going to kill them all. (They’re put under the tarp to make them seem more anonymous, so the guards don’t have to look them in the face.)

The guards aim their rifles, but just before an officer gives the order to shoot, one of the sailors under the tarp shouts, “Brothers! Who are you shooting?” The guards hesitate. One of them lowers his rifle, and then some of the others do the same. The officers are of course freaking out, shouting “No! Shoot them!” But that split-second interruption has broken the usual mindless flow. Once the guards lower their weapons, the sailors under the tarp rush out, they grab the guns, they raid the armory to get more weapons, then they overpower the officers and the ship is theirs.

I don’t want you to be thinking in those terms now, because we’re not even remotely there. That’s an extreme case. The point is to understand that if a radical breakthrough happens, it may shift the possibilities to a different level.

When this Occupy thing started, five weeks ago, I thought: “This is great!” And I wondered if it might spread to a few other major cities. Two weeks later it had already spread to hundreds of other cities around the country! That’s when I started writing this leaflet [“The Awakening in America”]. I’m a slow writer, I started writing the leaflet back then and just finished it a few days ago — but what I wanted to convey is that this situation is like . . . words fail me, it’s so beautiful it almost seems miraculous.

As I mentioned earlier, I’m originally from Missouri, my home town was Springfield, Missouri, in the Ozarks. It’s Bible Belt country, a lot of people there still think Bush was great. Not everybody, but a majority. Well get this: there’s now an Occupy Springfield! It’s got 200 people. They aren’t occupying any specific location yet, but they’ve been having regular assemblies. As you might imagine, their ideas are much more moderate than here. One of the first projects they came up with was simply to collect food to donate to homeless people. They marched through town to deliver the food. There was no militant rhetoric or anything. But I was so proud of them. It brings tears to my eyes.

I don’t care if they’re being “reformist.” So what? They’re taking an admirable initiative under pretty unfavorable circumstances. There are all sorts of different conditions in different places, and people will make different decisions as to what they want to do. The particular decisions they make don’t matter so much as the fact that they are coming together and deciding to do something.

Part of the beauty of the original New York declaration was that although it listed a bunch of grievances, it didn’t give a solution. Instead, it says: To the people of the world, occupy public space, come together, discuss these issues, and see if you can come up with some good solutions. It doesn’t say what the solutions are.

Many of us may think we have some idea of what the solutions might be, but it’s okay that other people have different ideas. The point is that the process itself is extremely subversive. It’s much more of a solution than if you have a group of people who all declare themselves as being “against capitalism” or “against the state” or something like that. It wasn’t that kind of rhetoric that inspired people in hundreds of cities all over the country to adopt this occupy idea. They adopted it because there was this simple but subversive little proposal: Come together, occupy public space, and discuss things. Occupying public space meant that the discussions were not going to be too academic. The act of physically occupying something gives it a practical edge. The possibility of being beaten up or arrested tends to focus the discussion.

Like you right here, you’re going to have to decide what you do when the Oakland police say you have to leave. People will have different opinions about to respond to that, and you’ll have to sort it out. If you make an unwise decision, you’ll have to suffer the consequences.

But whatever you do, you’re just one occupy, and the beauty of this decentralization is that if it fails here, it’s only failing here; it’s not failing in San Jose or Denver. And if San Jose fucks up, we can say: “Hmm. San Jose fucked up—what did they do wrong? What can we learn from that?” And if Denver does something great, we can say: “Wow, look what they did in Denver! Maybe we should try that here.”

Because note this key point: Every single one of these occupies is totally autonomous. Nobody made that rule, nobody said we’re going to set up autonomous occupies. That’s just how things happened to develop, and in my opinion that’s the best and most most significant feature of this movement. The spontaneous spread of independent occupies has meant that it has been beyond anyone’s ability to control it. This is almost historically unprecedented. Revolutions have always tended to spread, but I’ve never heard of any where some people did something in one place and within two or three weeks people in hundreds of other cities all over a big country spontaneously start doing the same thing.

Now you have some of the more traditional liberals or leftists saying, “Hey that’s a good start, but now we should unite all these occupies in a national organization.” Well, obviously we should communicate and cooperate. And when it’s appropriate we can coordinate and collaborate with each other. But there’s no reason for all these hundreds of independent occupies to abandon their autonomy and submit to some would-be national organization run by distant national leaders. And fortunately, there’s no way that’s going to happen. If anyone tried to propose that, they’d be booed off the stage, and rightly so.

Different occupies will decide on different projects and procedures, moderate or radical, legal or illegal. That’s their affair. In my opinion, whatever they want to do, they should go for it! Whatever people come up with, it’s much more fruitful if they follow through and do it. Follow your passion, follow what you’re interested in. I don’t care if it’s reformist or revolutionary or whatever.

In this process, people will learn quickly. If they make mistakes, they’ll notice it soon enough and figure out how to do something different. And with the Internet and other social media, we can quickly pick up on what’s being tried in different places, including in other countries.

I could go on and on, as you can probably see. These last few weeks have been the happiest days of my life. [Laughter, cheers, and applause] If you’ve read my leaflet, you’ve probably sensed that kind of feeling. I’m so full of joy I could die happy. But I want to stay around to see what more is going to happen. [Laughter] This is what I’ve worked for and lived for for decades. Words fail me. But I’m going to try anyway.

If I could say anything to you, it’s to encourage you to just go for it. Don’t get dragged into silly ideological debates. Yeah, sometimes you have to debate some issue; that’s part of the process. But I encourage you not to get too caught up in that sort of thing. Keep this process going and pay attention to what’s happening.

That gets back to what I was talking about earlier, in my pamphlet Double-Reflection: Pay attention to what’s going on within you as well as outside. You have a treasure inside you right now. If you look there, you’re going to see all these changes going on. You’ll start seeing things more clearly, getting a better sense of what the problems are and how to deal with them. You start getting a keener sense of tactics.

I think I’m going to stop here and go into questions.

Q. What are some of the ways to avoid the kind of massacre that happened on the Odessa steps in Potemkin?

Well, I don’t want to make a hard and fast rule about this, but in the society we live in now, even though you will see some brutality, we’re not in 1905 Russia. We’re in a society where the sort of nonviolent things like in the civil rights movement (and which we’ve seen adopted de facto by most of the Occupy assemblies) — I think that that’s usually the safest and most fruitful way to go. At some point things may come to some kind of violent confrontation. But when that time comes, you’ll know it. We’re not there now.

I’ll give you an example from May ’68. As many of you know, that started out with young people’s occupation of the Sorbonne University and other buildings in Paris, which inspired workers to occupy their factories all over the country. The workers did that despite the resistance of their unions and of the French Communist Party. But having done that, the workers were not sure what to do next. Which is not surprising – this was a whole new terrain for them. So although they had occupied their factories, they did so in a rather confused and passive way, and the union bureaucrats were able to worm their way back in control.

But the situationists, writing about this soon afterward, said: What if the workers in a few factories had thrown out all the union bureaucrats and set up workers’ councils and called on other factories to do the same thing? In that case De Gaulle would probably have brought in the army. You might think that sounds like it could lead to a Potemkin moment. But I think you can see that this wildcat general strike context is not like in the film. What could the French army have done against ten million workers occupying their factories? You’re not going to find ten million scabs. And you can’t shoot ten million people who are barricaded in their factories, to say nothing of the fact that many of the soldiers would obviously have resisted doing anything like that.

So occupying the factories was a big first step, but the next step would have been to transform what they were doing there; not just sitting in their factories, but starting them up again (assuming that they made something useful) but in a new, self-managed way. For example, they might have given away whatever they were producing. Or transportation workers might have let everyone ride for free.

That kind of thing (sometimes called a “social strike”) is just a hint about how people might transition into a new society. It might still be pretty chaotic, but once you have this kind of massive movement that keeps spreading and experimenting, these Potemkin issues don’t come up too much, because it’s almost impossible for that kind of movement to be militarily defeated. It can only be defeated from within (as happened when the French workers allowed themselves to be manipulated by the union bureaucrats).

Q. Can you summarize a little bit for us why you said that this situationist thinking is clearer and more incisive than anarchism?

Let’s put it this way: Anarchism generally is an ideology. Anarchists are against the state, against hierarchy, and so on. But often that’s about it. They come upon some situation and say, “Down with the state! We shouldn’t have to have bosses.” Well, that may be true, but it’s just a slogan. It’s not really addressing the particular situation.

The situationists were more flexible and more focused: What are the issues at stake here? What are the real options? The situationists were against the state, too, but they didn’t go around yacking about it all the time.

I’m not talking so much about anarchists who are here now – I think most of you have probably become engaged enough in what’s happening that you can see what I’m talking about. But when the Occupy movement was starting a few weeks ago, many anarchists and other radicals were at first saying disdainful things like: “Well, these Occupies seem to be pretty reformist, they’re not mentioning capitalism, they’re not denouncing the state.” They were saying stuff like that about the most amazing movement in America in our lifetime, in which all sorts of new things were happening. New things that needed to be looked at and understood – theorized in the sense of understanding what’s going on, clarifying what’s working and what isn’t. And all those radical people could think of to do was to spiel out their same old slogans. They didn’t have the humility to ask: What can I learn from this new movement?

In contrast: The situationists could rightly pride themselves as having been a key influence on the May ’68 revolt. But in one of the texts they wrote about it afterwards, they said: “We can take pride in the fact that we were not too far behind the spontaneous mass movement.” That’s so different from would-be “vanguard” groups who say, “Oh, if only this movement had followed our wise leadership it would have done such-and-such.” Anarchists may not be quite that rigid, but sometimes they fall into that same sort of self-satisfied arrogance.

Q. [Inaudible question: something about mainstream media versus alternative media.]

Yes, there is indeed a lot of media falsification happening. But the mainstream media are now not as important as the alternative media. It used to be the other way around. Many people are of course still getting an erroneous impression of Occupy by watching the mainstream news, but that’s changing rapidly. Remember, the first week of Occupy Wall Street got almost zero attention in the mainstream media. But meanwhile people all over the country were seeing it in action via alternative social medias and were already starting to form their own similar assemblies in dozens of other cities.

So this mainstream stuff, I don’t even give a shit about it, it’s just stupid. Of course it still plays a role, but it’s no longer totally determining what people see or think. It’s already on the decline. And every time they lie or say something stupid they’re going to decline further. Because millions of people know what’s happening.

Q. [Inaudible question: something about occupies declining or becoming co-opted.]

I don’t think we need to worry much about being co-opted. As I said in my leaflet, politicians trying to jump on our bandwagon is a reflection of our strength, not of our weakness. Co-option happens when we’re tricked into jumping into their bandwagons. If some Democrat politicians come around and say they agree with much of what we’re doing, they’re doing this because we’re in a strong position. A month ago they would have just said, “Fuck you, you’ve got to vote for us anyway.” Now they’re not saying that, they’re saying, “Oh, these are very interesting ideas! We agree about a lot of the issues you’re talking about. If you vote for us, we promise to pass some new progressive laws.” So let them squirm. Let them try to get in our good graces, not the other way around.

We’re all heading into unknown territory and who knows what will happen? But my impression is that the momentum is still on the creative side. We have over 200 actual occupies and another thousand in the works — and that’s not even counting what’s going on in other countries. The occupies have already spread around so much, with such a rich variety of actions and demands, that everything could stop right now and the reverberations from this movement would still be going on for years.

But it’s not going to stop right now. I think it’s just begun.

Q. Do you think that we can somehow use technology and the Internet for our own purposes?

Yes. People often imagine that the situationists have some rigid party line on something. They imagine that since they’re “against the spectacle,” therefore they must be against the Internet, they must be against this or that, and this is not true. The situationists were not so simple-minded.

They were certainly not “against technology.” They were against this social system. This system is of course going to foster particular technologies that help it control people, but that doesn’t mean that all technologies are bad. Some technologies do have serious problems – nuclear power is an obvious example. But many others are more ambiguous – a murderer might use a knife to kill you, but a surgeon might use a knife to save your life.

The Internet includes all sorts of things, good, bad, and ridiculous, but using it to communicate is not in itself “spectacular.” I use it all the time and I love it. Obviously some people get sucked in and it can become a passive addition, like watching TV. But it can also be used to communicate with people all over the world. Which is one of the reasons that this movement has spread so far and so fast, since we can instantly see what’s going on in Madrid or Athens or Cairo, and they can see what we’re doing here.

For example, my leaflet, which I assume most of you have seen – if you haven’t, there are copies all over the place. I printed it last Saturday and put it online Sunday. Monday it was translated into Spanish. Tuesday it was translated into French. Thursday it was translated into Italian. And in each case I was able to check the translations and answer questions from the translators, and then the finished versions were posted and read by lots of people in those different countries, some of whom will pick up on some of the things I said there, and hopefully use them and improve on them.

I think that’s enough questions.

One thing I’d like to mention: I live in Berkeley, and there’s an Occupy Berkeley. It’s in Civic Center Park. It’s just getting under way. Last night they had 16 tents. They can use more people, goods, skills. Bear in mind that Occupy Oakland has been going for a couple weeks now, and you all have had a chance to work out a lot of things. So it would be very helpful if some of you showed up at Berkeley, whether to stay there or simply to help out and exchange experiences.

One other thing: A few days ago, during the October 15 worldwide day of protest, I saw a video that Occupy Wall Street has been reposting about Madrid. Looking down from a helicopter, there was this huge demo. An estimated 500,ooo people. It was so massive it was like a social orgasm. And then an orchestra and chorus started playing and singing Beethoven’s “Hymn to Joy.” Some of you may not know that work, but it was the perfect thing for the moment — this beautiful heartwarming music, inspiring music — and when it was over there was this immense cheer, and then people started chanting ESTA ES NUESTRA ARMA! ESTA ES NUESTRA ARMA! — “THIS IS OUR WEAPON!” I asked a Spanish friend and she said it’s like they’re saying Us being together like this is our ultimate weapon. I think it’s one of the best slogans I’ve ever heard.

When that kind of thing is going on, I’m not worried about co-option and all that. Go for the joy. This is a miracle. You don’t know how lucky you are to be alive in this moment. Or maybe you do!

Anyway, thank you again for having me. I’m so happy to have been here tonight, and I hope to see you in the weeks and months to come.

Slightly edited transciption of a talk by Ken Knabb at Occupy Oakland (Oscar Grant Plaza, October 21, 2011). For an audio recording of the talk, see www.bopsecrets.org/videos.htm.

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