Rad Occupier

The framework that might best serve the Occupy movement is one of strategic nonviolent direct action. Within that framework, Occupy groups would make clear agreements about which tactics to use for a given action. This frame is strategic—it makes no moral judgments about whether or not violence is ever appropriate, it does not demand we commit ourselves to a lifetime of Gandhian pacifism, but it says, ‘This is how we agree to act together at this time.’ It is active, not passive. It seeks to create a dilemma for the opposition, and to dramatize the difference between our values and theirs.

If your goal is to destroy something evil, your focus cannot be on creating something good. You end up with military strategy, military victory and militant minds in control.

That is why we do not need enemies. We need allies who can help us co-create our new systems. We need to work together with people of all kinds, not against those we disagree with. That is why Occupy is different. We don’t need to “Smash Capitalism” – Capitalism is doing a fine job running itself into the ground. We just need to be ready to build and support whatever it is that comes next in our strange and winding history.

Moments like this don’t just come around every couple years. Don’t wake up tomorrow and be teaching philosophy to shitty college kids, wishing you did more back in 2011. Realize how precious this is” (Paul Nadeau, advice to radical occupiers, 11/9/11)

Setting aside questions of morality or definitions of ‘violence’ and ‘nonviolence’ – for no two people define ‘violence’ in the same way – we ask the question:

What framework can we organize in that will build on our strengths, allow us to grow, embrace a wide diversity of participants, and make a powerful impact on the world?

‘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.

Consider too the role played by the U.S sponsored military in a capitalist and imperialist world-order: the military exists in large part to protect corporate interests, and is fueled by and fuels a turbo-masculinity. With the spread of U.S military bases around the world, so spreads the brothels at these bases for sexual appropriation of local women. These populations of women are targeted for the express purpose of servicing military men and their ejaculatory racial fantasies of the colonized women at their disposal. The sex industry, primarily fueled by demands of men to put women on the market for sale, sustains neoliberal capitalism in other ways. In the most basic sense, as Eve Ensler has pointed out, the poorer women become, the more women become sexually commodified. She reminds us that women can be sold cheaper than a cell phone the world over. Consider then that developing nations under the yoke of austerity policies imposed by the World Bank and IMF in the service of the corporate interests have turned to the sex industry for a percentage of their GDP. Women’s non-sexual trafficked labor as migrants is also part of this percentage and another pattern in neoliberal capitalist patriarchy. The systemic appropriation of racialized and colonized women specifically is at a dense nodal point of intersecting systems of exploitation.

I am talking about patriarchy here as a world-order, and feminism as the movement which contests and opposes this world-order. While this understanding of feminism was common twenty or thirty years ago, it has been eclipsed by an identity-politics-view of “women’s issues” smugly ratified by the male white dominant left.