Over the last few weeks an informal working group of five of us has come together looking at what we can do in service to #Occupy.
Two workshops coming up in February are the result:
Leadership in a Leaderless Movement. Feb. 23rd
(Thanks to Peggy Holman for the name of the workshop)
and
Occupying San Diego: celebrations and mournings. Feb. 29th
Details here.
and also on Facebook here and here.
Two months ago the little known Ekaterinburg (Russia) rock group RabFak came out with a searing, hysterical, and shocking anti-Putin song, Our Nuthouse Votes for Putin. (Note: the video is NSFW in parts; I make the choice of posting this kind of link here because I think the core message captures our global zeitgeist impeccably.
This song has particular resonance for me as I lived for ten years in Russia, was witness to the USSR’s collapse…And I share the grief of many Russians for what has taken place in the Russian Federation.
The song has touched people so much that people were looking to see it entered into the annual Eurovision contest.
I wonder if this song may serve as a source of inspiration for the US Occupy movement to put out a “Our Nuthouse Votes for Obama?”
As one American pointed out, perhaps we Americans are even nuttier than Russians if most of us still believe we have a democracy?!
– soon it will be legal to detain indefinitely Americans suspected of terrorism
– he now has the right to order the killing of any American suspected of terrorism
– he has been a consistent apologist and enabler for Wall Street
To be clear, I don’t hold significant hard feelings against Obama. He seems to be the sharpest president I’ve seen in my life. And probably has tried his best.
I am grateful for the power of song to convey the spirit of our times.
However, the amount of continuity there is with his predecessor in the sheer number choices and decisions he has made as president leaves me at a loss for words. An Obama version of this Russian song perhaps could express this?
Any songwriters out there???
http://12160.info/profiles/blogs/president-obama-just-stated-that-he-can-have-any-american-citizen
at 16 min. into video:“President Obama Just Stated That He Can Have ANY American Citizen Killed!” Jonathon Turley . Constitutional law expert on CSPAN
Jonathan Turley (George Washington University Law School Professor) talks about his recent Washington Post piece looking at the issues of surveillance and privacy and U.S. citizens’ loss of privacy protections. He responded to telephone calls and electronic communications.
Zen teacher Elizabeth Hamilton in the December issue of the Zen Center of San Diego Newsletter:
“It’s probably easier to see corporate greed than our own “Inner Wall Street” of entitlements, particularly when our grasping is socially condoned. Our Inner Wall Street includes our strategies for seeking comfort and avoiding discomfort: addictive approach to substances, attitudes, and emotion-based thoughts. Then there’s our baseline addiction, the attempt to maintain a carefully crafted identity for public consumption. Even if this identity is well received, it can’t heal the fear in the belly, or the deep-seated belief that we don’t measure up.”
Consultant and Speaker Peter Block just came out with an article, “Changing Our Thinking About Action,” that I think is especially relevant in the Occupy context.
Here are some of the gems:
“Authentic change in the quality of our experience, of our culture, change which shifts rather than reinforces the ground we stand on, is of a different nature than what grows from decisive decision making and pointed problem solving. If we want to not only fix the symptom, but also revise our part in creating the conditions that trouble us, then problem solving and quick action change nothing.
We might make a distinction in our conception of what we call action. Something shifts when we differentiate between decisive action and what we might call profound action. Profound action is about our way of thinking, our way of being with those immediately around us, and the nature of the conversations we engage in. Profound action exists in contrast to decisive action, where we choose to spend or save money, build or eliminate a structure, pick or refuse a destination…
In a culture that values decisive action, relationships are viewed as a means to an end. Every time we meet it is for a purpose other than simply meeting. We want to “decide” something. It is almost illegal to end a meeting without summarizing what we have decided to do. Real change, though, comes when authentic commitment, passion, and whole heartedness are released. These are social phenomenon and are created from the nature of how we come together. They are an outgrowth of the quality of our relationship with each other.”
Block’s Community: the Structure of Belonging is one of the most significant books I’ve read in the past few years.
Starhawk’s new book is out. I think it might be of interest to all those who are looking to get work done within #Occupy. I recall seeing a printout of the “bonus chapter” at the info table at Occupy San Diego in the beginning. I’ve been impressed that she’s been in the thick of it, offering her help on the ground at a number of occupations around the country.
Below is her message:
My new book, The Empowerment Manual: A Guide for Collaborative Groups is out in the bookstores now, as well as online, and I’m very excited to be able to share it with you all! Click on the link http://www.starhawk.org/writings/empowerment_manual.html to get a peek inside and to download the free supplementary chapter: The Five-Fold Path of Productive Meetings. I’m off on a whirlwind tour, doing workshops and trainings on the book and support for various Occupy movements–to see the whole schedule, scroll down below.
When I began writing The Empowerment Manual: A Guide for Collaborative Groups, I wanted to offer some of the benefit of my experience, including my many mistakes, to groups who were organizing without a top-down, hierarchical structure. I’ve been living and working in such groups for more than forty years, and I felt like the many dreadful meetings I’ve endured, the in-fights and the painful conflicts, as well as the glorious moments of collective creativity and spiritual ecstasy, should all count for something. I saw so many groups struggling with the same issues, whether they were spiritual circles, working groups, communities struggling to organize or activists planning a protest. And I had a few insights that I felt might be helpful.
I didn’t know that half the world would decide, right when the book is coming out, to go sit in the public square and organize leaderless Occupations governed by consensus-based General Assemblies. The Occupy movement springs from many of the same sources that inspired the book—the horizontally organized global justice movement of the last decades and its antecedents, the anti-nuclear and anti-intervention movements of the ‘seventies and ‘eighties. But now more people than ever before are suddenly immersed in the joys and challenges of organizing non-hierarchically.
Groups without formal hierarchy are potentially empowering on a mass scale. Unfortunately, we come into them from a lifetime of exposure to hierarchy, with its patterns internalized. We have few models and fewer guidebooks to help us learn how to do it a different way. There are thousands of books on how to be a manager or a CEO of a corporation, virtually none about how to walk the delicate line of stepping up to a leadership role in a leaderless group.
Collaborative groups are a different species from hierarchical groups, and understanding those differences can help us make them work more effectively. As kids, when we get in a fight Mom or Dad can step in and say, “You two, break it up!” In a top-down group, the boss or leader steps in for Dad. But when we remove that authority, there’s no one to say, “Okay, time out. Now apologize to each other, kiss and make up.” Conflicts can be harder to resolve, unless we realize that the group itself must find clear agreements on how to handle conflict and how to support one another in directly and creatively solving our disputes.
Communication is more complex in a collaborative group. In a hierarchy, there’s a chain of command. You know whom to report to, and who reports to you. But in a collective, ten of us might make a decision—forgetting that member number eleven is home sick with stomach flu. Maybe we also forget to inform Number Eleven of our decision—and then forget that we’ve forgotten. Number Eleven discovers we’ve set a key policy without her, and feels hurt and slighted. It’s clear to her that we’ve deliberately left her out of the loop, as we always do! Painful meetings and hours of mediation could all be avoided if we’d simply thought to ask, at the end of our meeting, “Who else needs to be informed of this and who is going to tell them?”
The Occupy movement faces some of the greatest challenges I’ve ever encountered around group dynamics and group process—it’s so huge,grew up so fast and so spontaneously and found itself smack in the middle of some of society’s worst unsolved problems. Former student body presidents are encamped in the midst of raving drunks, trying to come to consensus in large groups. It’s fascinating, often exasperating, and that’s why I’m spending as much time as I can offering trainings.
I also offer the book as a resource. I recommend it because it contains insights and a framework that can help groups function, whether they are unwieldy Occupations or tight circles of friends engaged in a project. I know this because it has helped me—although presumably I already knew what’s in it. But reading, researching and pulling the lessons together into a coherent form has helped me become a better group member and a more effective mediator.
If you’re working in any sort of collaborative group, you’ll find valuable insights in The Empowerment Manual. I say this not just to get you to buy the book—although of course I want you to buy it, that will help a very wonderful small, political publisher stay in business and will buy me some time to write a sequel to The Fifth Sacred Thing, my next project. But far more than that, I’m hoping you’ll read the book, work with it, use it, improve on it, and find your own groups working more effectively, and our common work to build a better world will thrive.
“To choose a positive future, we need the imagination, the commitment and passion that can never be commanded but can only be unleashed in groups of equals. Those groups need to work and function well. That’s why I’ve written this book.”
The book is out in bookstores now, and available online through my website, New Society, and of course, on Amazon and elsewhere. Check out the New Society blog about it here.
Some of my older books have also become newly relevant with the rise of the Occupy movement, especially for anyone interested in its antecedents. In particular, Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex and Politics and Truth or Dare: Encounters with Power, Authority and Mystery look at the internal wounds we carry from millennia of war, hierarchy and patriarchy, and reflect some of the horizontal organizing in the antinuclear and anti-itntervention movements of the ‘seventies and ‘eighties. Webs of Power: Notes from the Global Uprising tracks the global justice movement from the Seattle blockade of the WTO in 1999 through September 11, and contains nuanced discussions of nonviolence, diversity, and spirit. Find them all here!
I doubt I’ll have time to blog in the next few weeks, but I’m sure I’ll have lots to ponder from my travels. Hope to see some of you on the road!
I’ve been spending a fair amount of times with the folks at Occupy Cafe (OC). OC’s aim is to be a place to support, sustain, and deepen conversations on #Occupy. It does this through the text-based forum conversations online, through weekly-twice weekly well-facilitated small and large group teleconference conversations, and by supporting on-the-ground dialogue initiatives, like last week’s in Portland.
Offline there have been a number of interesting conversations on process.
Below is some thinking by Kenoli Oleari, one of the US’s leading facilitators of large groups.
His words carry a lot of weight for me as his background comes from many years of community organizing stretching back to the 60’s. This experience includes eight (!) years of trying (unsuccessfully) to work in GA’s.
It is my belief that we need to avoid creating hierarchical structures ourselves, structures based on representation. There is excellent evidence that a core reason we are in the pickle we are in within his country is because our representative structure of governance has fallen to the weakness built into it. When the power and right to participate is taken away from the population at large and given to a small group of representatives, the system falls prey to those who have the power to influence and control those representatives. “Radical” democracy needs to find a way to include ALL voices, continually and repeatedly. (The situation we are in, incidentally, was predicted by visionaries among the founders, including Jefferson and Franklin, both citing the representative system as the weak point in the constitution.)
We have new large group technologies that make full participation possible. It is both difficult and not difficult. It is difficult as we have internalized the fear of large groups which drives us to try to control voices that scare us and because we have internalized “representation” as the only way to deal with large groups. This means we have to get past lots of our own issues to imagine possibilities where every voice is included. It is not difficult if we use known principles of large group engagement with which we have a growing pool of experience. Unfortunately, one of the things that also makes this difficult is that even among those working on the cutting edge of process, people have tended to gravitate to one process or another and see that process as offering THE solution. This has served us in some ways, as that focus has helped deepen the understanding of various “defined” processes and allowed us to start to see principles and practices that merge between these approaches. Within all of this, however, there is a deeper understanding of group engagement we need to embrace that allows for a huge diversity of process approaches, of all sizes and in all contexts that we can miss by thinking that this process or that is the solution. It is my experience that the skill for working from these deeper principles is very nascent and not that widespread.
In this, too, I think technology, including the internet is a double edged sword. In some dimensions, it has the capacity to include more voices, in others it excludes some and it greatly limits the possibilities of interaction inherent in face-to-face engagement.
The big trap, always, is our hope for a “magic bullet” that will solve all of our problems.
I’m not sure what all these thoughts mean practically. Among some of us who have lots of experience working with and designing process for large diverse groups, it is easy to want to be able to apply what we know to things we care about like Occupy. On the other hand things have a way of rolling out historically with a life of their own. One thing we can do is to hold to as many deeper values and principles as we can and the one I am suggesting is key here is to avoid falling into the trap of representation and hierarchy. At each juncture think about how we can best include the broadest number of voices at every step and at every stage.
Most of our organizing experience is around issue politics that focus on an issue or wrong we want to address or interest politics that represent the voice of one constituency or another. It is my belief that radical democracy needs to move away from these perspectives and toward a focus on inclusion, on including all voices and trusting in the wisdom that can arise from that rich pool of human experience. Working with large diverse groups takes the hard work of good planning, good planning done by a broad range of voices from among those that will be brought together utilizing real experience with and a people who have a real understanding of the principles and practice of large group engagement. There is no shortcut.
It is my sense is that if movement matures, its process will mature with it, as long as we keep our focus and values in the right place. Just now, I think a critical principle to cling to is inclusion as opposed to exclusion.
Like a lot of us, I continue to follow (and share with others) what is happening with the Occupy Process with great interest and continue to remain a supporter, in some ways an opponent, and in other ways wildly agnostic about this phenomenon.
I’d like to share some of the thinking and action on #OWS that I’ve found most inspiring.
First off, the Occupy Cafe dialogue initiative is encouraging. OC aims to be a place for respectful conversation for everything connected with the movement. My hope is that wiser and more compassionate action might emerge as a consequence of this space.
There are online conversations, highly engaging teleconference conversations weekly, and as of today the first in-person/on-the-ground Occupy Cafe event taking place (in Portland)! The conversation on what Occupy 2.0 could be gives a taste of what’s happening over there.
One of the most inspiring pieces I’ve read thus far is a post by an occupier at Occupy Philly, framing their occupation (if it is still ongoing) as a “commons.” I think of re-creating the commons as a form of hyperlocal placemaking, essential to recreating the village we lost. And I’ve wondered if reclaiming and rebuilding the commons is one of those absolutely essential actions to take ourselves (in the West, at least) forward. This inspiring video, Transforming Space into Place, says more about placemaking.
Also, author and consultant Sharif Abdullah has written a number of provocative and constructive blog posts outlining what needs to happen for Occupy to go forward. He writes these out of many years experience– including internationally- of doing transformative peace work. In a conversation, recently, he offered five essential elements for a social movement to be successful:
1. Directly address the issues of the current paradigm
2. Offer a compelling, positive paradigm-busting vision.
3. a focused, disciplined core of activists
4. actions, campaigns that are positive in tone.
5. attuned to the transcendent (spiritual, but not religious)
What do you make of this list? How many of those elements are present in Occupy today?
I’ve been in email conversation with my primary process arts mentor/teacher Birgitt Williams and others about the Occupy Process. Birgitt has written two blog posts that might be of interest to those who wish to think more deeply about the relationship between personal leadership grounded in wise, compassionate action and the Occupy Process.
To get a sense of the perspective she is operating from, I recommend reading a few pages from her e-book, Genuine Contact Way that tell you about her journey:
see pp. 23-27 of this book– for the excerpt.
The two blog posts (excerpt below):
Sustainable Change in Division Situations
In thinking about this current Occupy movement and the pockets of social unrest, I think back to a time when I was still living in Canada, a country that I love very much. The history of the country is that it was first colonized by the French and by the English, a war between France and England had a profound negative effect on the colonies, and there are still strong feelings of upset. Although Canada claims to be a bilingual country, French and English, this doesn’t hold true. Yes, products must be labeled in both official languages, schoolchildren in the dominant English speaking Canada attend classes in French, and yet historically the French-speaking province of Quebec has had to take some strong measures to preserve the French language and culture in their Province and in parts of the Country. I have looked up my notes from that time and share a summary with you of what happened in early 1996. I wish that someone would organize something similar now. I feel it would be more sustainable than this Occupy movement. We cannot create a line between what we did to assist in a divisive situation to the results that the country did not break up. However, to this day, I believe that the work we did then was what resulted in a country remaining whole…still with problems, but with the opportunity as a country to solve them instead of having divided.
The Occupy Movement: Using Our skills for real empowerment
…This takes me to the most important point of my note. The most dangerous point comes when the protests are done if there is nothing sufficient in place to create the new world that is desired. The most important thing that I can think of doing at this time aside from spending more and more of my day in compassion and unconditional love, is to teach others how to lead participatory meetings that use circles such as Open Space Technology, Whole Person Process Facilitation, and Circle Work…
What I am sure of, is that none of the grass-roots initiatives or movements currently on the scene have any hope of changing anything. In fact, activist energy is increasingly being channeled and managed by the very system we are hoping to change. As with Obama, who managed to fool all of the people some the time, and even now is fooling some of the people all of the time. ‘Hope you can believe in’, if you’re dreaming.But someone like Obama can only channel those who see hope in the political system. More and more people are realizing there is no hope in the political system. So we are getting things like The Zeitgeist Movement and Anonymous, that cater to those who have given up on politics, and give them something to ‘join’ or ‘follow’ so they can pretend they’re ‘doing something’…The latest of these vehicles of co-option is the Occupy Wall Street movement. This one’s really a humdinger. It has all the right slogans, and an appealing internal process. Its success is not surprising, because it is the latest version of a formula that has been thoroughly tested and refined ‘on the ground’. We might call it the ‘twitter formula’, and we’ve seen it in the ‘colored revolutions’ that were used to bring about various desired regime changes, and more recently in the ‘Arab Spring’ movements, that soaked up lots of energy and prevented unwanted regime changes.Four years ago progressives found hope in Obama. This time around they’re finding hope in the Occupy Wall Street movement. In both cases, this ‘hope’ became available all too easily, was accompanied by all the right mainstream publicity, and offered easy ways to join in and become not only a follower, but an active participant. This is what co-option looks like.
Thursday last week I decided to go on an extended hiatus from involvement with Occupy San Diego.
I think the last straw for me was really being affected by behavior at Civic Center Plaza that was simply loopy. That day, there was one woman in orange-red body paint whipping the air with a garland. Later, she tried to set fire to some of the protest signs and was arrested. There was more that I saw that day that I’m not even ready to mention in this blog post.
Sheer wackiness has been a feature of Occupy San Diego from the very beginning. There is nothing wrong with this quality per se but when it becomes one of the primary aspects of the climate at the occupation, I think we have a problem.
On top of that, we never had a very good container for collaboration, a clear frame about how to work together. Add to that the crazymaking generated by the police infiltrator presence, it is a wonder that things have been as peaceful as they have been. Asking around, I have learned why certain core functions never were satisfied completely: in all likelihood this could be attributed to sabotage coming from people working for law enforcement.
Others have been very upset by sexism, homophobia, sexual harassment- none of which I was witness to but I have heard about multiple times; one woman told me she feared physical violence (after having experienced psychological violence) from one of the other active people at the occupation.
Perhaps things have improved, but for the longest time there was no agreement, nor a shared understanding about what forms of behavior were acceptable. Is public drunkenness ok? Is drinking alcohol on site ok? Is pot smoking fine? Is it ok to be high on site? Is it ok to light a cigarette without checking if those around you are non-smokers? Is it ok to make noise well into the night? Over time there was significant movement on these questions as people realized that if these questions are not addressed it’ll be hard to attract a more diverse group of people in solidarity with the occupation.
But perhaps the main issue for me is that Occupy San Diego has felt more like an encampment for homeless people since week two. There is nothing wrong per se with a homeless encampment. I think it’s wonderful that some homeless people- as I’ve heard firsthand- feel safer camping out at Civic Center than before. I have made some good connections with some of the homeless people there, and among the homeless folks there are a number who are making a great contribution to the Occupy Process. At the same time, there are a number who have significant psychiatric disabilities or other personal issues, and we never had a conversation about how do we do the work of the occupation, make the occupation attractive to people, and decide how to integrate (if we think we can) these people on the margins.
And, by extension, since the occupation has largely a flavor of a homeless encampment- a “be-in” of sorts- I’m not confident of it ever achieving much. Indeed, this HuffPost piece by someone who from the looks of it sympathizes with OWS challenges OWS supporters in a way that might make some of us squirm. It makes us ask ourselves what indeed has the Occupy Process achieved?
I certainly don’t feel drawn to being in Civic Center Plaza. Nor can I encourage others to come down there.
I write this with some awareness of my own privilege as a white male who comes from an upper middle class family (even if I have never earned much) and as someone who has dealt with some psychiatric issues in my own life. Also, I have worked a fair amount in the disability community and in the nonprofit sector.
There is some fear in bringing up these questions. Perhaps this’ll be read that I’m anti-homeless or don’t want people with psychiatric disabilities at the site. Rather, if I’m going to put my time in something, I want to have some confidence that it’ll go somewhere.
Personally, I believe it is possible for the occupation to be inclusive for all kinds of people- people on the margins and people who are not (yet) on the margins- to successfully live together. It does, however, require a conversation (or conversations) and some planning. And, speaking truthfully, I wasn’t and am not prepared to spearhead that conversation.
My initial motivation for getting involved and for camping at the Plaza was that just being in that physical space was an act of bearing witness. I found no need- nor did I really feel connection to any of the chants, much of which reinforced a sense of separation between “us” and “them.” I think all the wisdom traditions teach us that we are all in this together. For me bearing witness means/meant that just being at the Plaza, I was saying that the current economic system is not meeting needs and it needs to be changed drastically. And that would be a beginning of a conversation.
I envisioned at a later point convening conversations with people from all over San Diego on what a more equitable economic system look like and how we could get there. I also envisioned teaching others how to convene such conversations. That work may have to wait for a later point.
For all my many criticisms of what I’ve experienced in the San Diego occupation, I continue to be moved by the dedication of those involved. It has touched me deeply to experience (again!) the power of the circle- of the equalizing, wisdom-generating, compassion-creating, community-building effects of gathering in many circles, both scheduled and spontaneous, throughout the occupation. It has heartened me to see how people have really heard each other out in those circles. How little in the way of put downs or interruptions I saw in those circles.
And no matter how things turn out for (what I prefer to call) the Occupy Process, it has given us a picture of a new and different way of mobilizing, engaging large numbers of people peacefully for the greater good. I believe that with giving care to creating a strong foundation using highly participatory tools that draw on a community building paradigm that reaches beyond consensus-based decision-making (as referenced in the books mentioned in the Occupy Wall Street library blog post), I think it is possible to create something that looks a lot like the Occupy Process but with a better chance of moving forward.
Nevertheless having had a visceral experience of Occupy San Diego is a great gift. I will continue to follow the occupations with interest.
reinhabit sandiego 