OccupyTV

Consensus: How the Occupy Movement has Become a Danger to Itself.

By Horner Lang

San Francisco

It was in the wee hours of the morning of October 17^th that we first came face to face with the strange, snarling animal lurking in the shadowy recesses of the Occupy Encampment.  We were in San Francisco, having made our way north for the national joint on the 15^th—the Big Day of Action that had encampments across the country marching. That had, admittedly, been an awesome spectacle, and had put us in a righteous and optimistic mood about the whole affair. Trepidations raised at other Occupy campsites had been quickly brushed aside as we marched along Market, and stood on the steps of City Hall (just like that one scene in Milk), and at one o’clock in the AM that Monday morning, we were still riding the high that had swept us up not a day earlier.

As we departed Chinatown for our crash in the Dogpatch, we found ourselves edging on the Embarcadero, not far from Occupy SF’s camp at Justin Herman Plaza. Our ride had yet to see first hand the strange goings-on of an Occupy encampment, and thus we suggested dropping in on SF.  “It’s just around the corner,” said my partner, “and they’re up all hours.”

As we pulled up Washington toward the bay, we were presented with a relatively unusual sight: rows upon rows of cops in full riot gear, formed up and marching across the Embarcadero, a crescent of protestors following them and chanting one of the Occupier’s favorite refrains: “The whole world is watching!”

What ensued was absolute madness. The whole line broke into a sprint as we approached, cameras ready to capture hideous abuses of the police against a small cadre of dedicated, nonviolent protestors. By the time we caught up with the action, the cops had reformed a square formation in the middle of the Embarcadero, the commanders at its center, as protestors hurled abuse at them. “Nazis!” they shrieked, “Pigs! Fuck you!”

Yet, at the same time, they were hardly a unified force. As the night dragged on, two distinct groups emerged, with fundamentally opposing views: those who clearly believed that the police had committed an unpardonable offense of some kind and therefore deserved to be utterly vilified—if not taken out back and shot—and those purporting to be “nonviolent,” who repeatedly chastised their fellow protestors for behaving in a belligerent, and ultimately intimidating manor. Arguments broke out amongst some, physical altercations amongst others as tension mutated into animus, and the breach between the two sides grew more glaring and more unbridgeable.

One of the most antagonistic protestors wandered in and out of the crowd, shouting “Bullshit!” each time one of his more dovish counterparts took the bullhorn. A young woman in an Abercrombie hoodie made an issue of his tactic, choosing to confront him. “Please do not yell at me,” she said repeatedly as he lambasted her with a profanity-laced diatribe before concluding, “the revolution is on! Don’t tell me not to get in your face, it’s a public fucking street.” Her only response was to shove him.

The police, for their part, remained calm and patient as protest organizers insisted that the removal of equipment required a “group decision.” Their only physical interactions with the protestors came as they tried to push back a throng blocking the exit of a vanload of arrestees. Of course, there was the fact that we had arrived late on the scene. At the time, the possibility remained that we had missed some horrific incident—the hideous, unwarranted beating of a wheelchair-bound veteran, perhaps.

Later viewings of raw video from the first half of the raid that were posted to YouTube reveal nothing so offensive. The police had come in, confiscated some tarps and equipment, and arrested a few protestors who had attempted to cross their line. The arrests appeared to have been conducted in a reasonable manner, and there were no subsequent reports of any serious injuries or fatalities that resulted from the encounter. We had been told that the protestors had sought to block the truck carrying their equipment, and had slashed the tire of an SFPD vehicle before it drove away. That vehicle was, in fact, a Department of Public Works vehicle—you know, the guys who clean the park.

We walked away from that encounter feeling not just uneasy, but fundamentally disgusted with the behavior of the protestors. They had been so eager to engage in, or more to the point, become victims of cop-on-citizen violence of the kind that plagued the Civil Rights Movement and the protests against the Vietnam war, that they had escalated what should have been a routine, if annoying run-in with the local cops into a full on standoff. And in so doing, they had divided their own camp in much the way they accuse politicians of doing to the general populace.

Los Angeles

Our venture into the world of Occupy had started on September 31^st, with that evening’s General Assembly in downtown Los Angeles—an effort that was meant to precede and anticipate the ultimate erection of an encampment outside of city hall, much like the one already established in Zucotti Park. We arrived just as the meeting began, as a young man looking very much like Jeff Lebowski—a fact compounded by the slogan on his T-shirt, which read in bold letters, “abide”—gave a lecture on the process of what he called “Consensus.”

It was a long, convoluted explanation of what appeared at a glance to be a bottom up legislative process. “Remember,” Lebowski announced to the assembled crowd, “we aren’t going slow, we’re going far.” It was clear, half way through his brief explanation, that he had lost huge sections of the crowd, leaving them somewhere behind in the labyrinth that is Consensus. We must admit, we count ourselves among them. The sheer number of steps involved in the undertaking, the hand signals, the points of process, the blocking—it was impossible to walk up and feel involved, an impression reflected in much of the crowd.

Soon they had segued out of an explanation of the process and into the day-to-day maintenance of it. It did not take long, however, for the conversation to become mired in disagreement. The main issue raised was the possible intervention of LAPD officers in the establishment of a camp. The first clashes between protestors and police in New York had just occurred—namely Tony Bologna’s pepper spraying of a group of kettled young women. Further, with the LAPD’s recent history, particularly with the violent handling of the May Day ’07 protests, it wasn’t hard to see why the protestors might be nervous.

Nervousness, however, soon turned to obsession as they discussed to exhaustive lengths how they should respond to a police incursion. Should we sit down or stand up? What hand signals should be used? Should we cover our faces? Every time an agreement seemed to have been reached, someone raised a point of clarification or blocked the proposal, and the decision had to be reviewed. Soon, outside arguments had spun off in various directions. One group of young Latino women charged that they were being specifically discriminated against by both the group and the facilitators. Others stood up and attempted to steer the conversation away from the entire discussion of “police brutality.” They were either shouted down or ignored by the group as a whole, and the discussion resumed its course.

One particularly strange, and ultimately disturbing aspect of the proceedings was what appeared to be a manipulation of the Consensus process by it’s “Facilitators,” a term used to describe a (supposedly) rotating managerial position—the person who essentially keeps the meetings on track. Any time someone who represented an outlying or unpopular position (especially with the Facilitators) would stand and speak, the Facilitators would almost immediately start giving the hand signal indicating that the person had overrun their allotted time. By the same token, they themselves would regularly abuse and ignore the time limits—in the interest of maintaining the process, of course.

Something to keep in mind: this meeting was advertised as an organizational meeting preceding the first major actions in Los Angeles on October 1^st. Many of those in attendance, like ourselves, were new to Occupy and to the GA. We went expecting a rundown on logistics: where we were to meet the following day, when the march would start, that sort of thing. What we got was an argument over a hypothetical situation that has only now, almost two months later, come to fruition. We walked away from that meeting—much like we would later do in San Francisco—scratching our heads. The movement purported to be completely horizontal and leaderless appeared to have de facto leaders who, even while deploring the very notion, were carefully orchestrating the action from somewhere behind the scenes.

Oakland

Our next big outing took us to Oakland for the November 2^nd General Strike. This, in our minds, represented the first truly substantive effort on the part of the west coast Occupy encampments. Labor unions and teacher’s unions were jumping into the fray, and in the wake of the first round of tear-gassing—and the shooting of Iraq war veteran Scott Olsen—all eyes were on Oakland. Adbusters, the anti-corporate magazine that issued the initial call to Occupy Wall Street even published an article, entitled “The Future of #Occupy,” in which they identified the power center of the movement as undergoing a shift to the west coast. We were ready for the movement to truly start living up to its own promise.

Anyone who has been following the Occupy movement likely knows what happened next: the vandalism of the Whole Foods and the banks, the fights (not at all unlike what we had witnessed in San Francisco) between the protestors identifying themselves as “nonviolent” or peaceful, and those garbed in all black. What many likely remain unaware of were the Black Bloc protestors’ repeated attacks on journalists and documentarians. Our last post detailed our own experience being harassed and intimidated, but the summary was this: our equipment was tampered with, we witnessed multiple instances in which our fellow photographers’ and videographers’ equipment was tampered with, we were singled out and harassed both physically and verbally by the Black Bloc contingent, and we witnessed numerous acts of physical violence against persons and property alike.

When you no longer feel safe with either the police, or with the protest, it’s time to go home—a sentiment that weighed heavy on our minds in the days that followed. We had been more than prepared to produce a video proclaiming the remarkable success of the Port shutdown. Instead, we wound up in the middle of what amounted to a riot. As reports rolled in that night of protestors being tear-gassed, all we could think was “Good. Fuck them.”

We watched both the reports of Occupy Oakland’s disassociation with the Black Bloc protestors, and those of Occupiers from around the country denouncing “outside agitators” involvement in the movement. At the same time, we watched as the self-identified anarchists praised themselves on their own forums, and insisted that they not only were Occupiers, but that it was from anarchist theory that the deepest of Occupy’s roots sprang.

It was with a rereading of the Adbusters “Tactical Briefing: The Future of #Occupy” previously mentioned that we finally began to truly question the movement. “Across the nation,” Adbusters declared, “there are clear signs that the #OCCUPY movement is simultaneously maturing and growing more militant.” This was news to us, and clearly news to the thousands of Occupy sympathizers online condemning the militant tactics employed by the Black Bloc protestors in Oakland. “Within the movement,” the article states farther down, picking up the train of thought, “there is a sense that this may be a turning point as militant tactics come to the fore and direct confrontation with the structures of the corporate-state becomes the norm.”

We understood that there had been Diversity of Tactics agreements in many major Occupy encampments, namely Oakland and the first camp at Zucotti Park. This meant that protestors were to protest in the manor they saw fit, as autonomous groups. It protects the right of one group to break windows, provided they not claim to do so in the name of Occupy. The statement from Adbusters, on the other hand, seemed to indicate a desire amongst those most actively involved in the movement to push toward an aggressive, fundamentally violent stance. And thus the question was raised: Where the hell did #Occupy come from, and who was now pulling the strings?

New York

The incept date of Occupy Wall Street is a thing of much discussion. There was, of course, the first major action on September 17^th, which itself had roots extending as far back as the June 9^th registration of the OccupyWallStreet.org domain name by Adbusters. That publication put out the first call for a peaceful demonstration some four days later, which included the first mention of September 17^th as a day of action. The true moment of genesis, however, can be found in an article written by anthropologist and radical anarchist David Graeber:

“On August 2, I showed up at a 7 PM meeting at Bowling Green, that a Greek anarchist friend, who I’d met at a recent activist get together at 16 Beaver Street, had told me was meant to plan some kind of action on Wall Street in mid-September… But as I paced about the Green, I noticed something… I quickly spotted at least one Wobbly, a young Korean activist I remembered from some Food Not Bomb[sic] event, some college students wearing Zapatista paraphernalia, a Spanish couple who’d been involved with the indignados in Madrid… I found my Greek friends, an American I knew from street battles in Quebec during the Summit of the Americas in 2001, now turned labor organizer in Manhattan, a Japanese activist intellectual I’d known for years… My Greek friend looked at me and I looked at her and we both instantly realized the other was thinking the same thing…“You know something? Fuck this shit. They advertised a General Assembly. Let’s hold one.”

Right wing bloggers have made much of this fact, accusing the movement of being a radical, left-wing grift to con angry, vulnerable Americans into becoming pawns in a backdoor anarchist plot to overthrow the American government. This indulgence in conspiratorial fantasy is an easy, if lazy means by which to dismiss the movement wholesale. It also betrays a fundamental lack of journalistic ability that verges on gross incompetence. Graeber was indeed instrumental in the initial introduction of the Consensus process, but his involvement in the NYC-GA had soon diminished as other, often younger activists began to pick up the slack. He’s hardly the wizard behind curtain.

That being said, Graeber does represent a similar ideological position to that which Adbusters itself takes. Graeber describes what he terms “Revolution in Reverse,” in a 2007 essay of the same name. “Rather than a dramatic confrontation with state power leading first to an outpouring of popular festivity,” he writes, “the creation of new democratic institutions, and eventually the reinvention of everyday life, in organizing mass mobilizations, activists drawn principally from subcultural groups create new, directly democratic institutions to organize ‘festivals of resistance’ that ultimately lead to confrontations with the state.”

There can be little doubt that Occupy Wall Street does fit rather neatly into this vision of resistance through direct action. Further, Graeber’s outspoken support of the Consensus model can be found in publications going back to 2002. Yet, that is hardly surprising, given the fact that his father was a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, during which Consensus saw one of its first major deployments as a mechanism of organization by Spanish anarchists. If anything, Graeber overstates his contribution, a fact that becomes apparent with his attempt to take credit for the now ubiquitous phrase, “We are the 99 percent,” a slogan generally credited to independent journalist David DeGraw of AmpedStatus.

Graeber is hardly alone in his advocation of the Consensus model. He was, by his own admission, assisted in creating a true General Assembly by a small group of compatriots on August 2^nd. Besides which, New York is hardly the hub of Consensus. Numerous other like-minded activists with few, if any ties to Graeber or his circle have helped in the spread of Consensus to cities across the country.

What is Consensus?

Consensus purports to be a horizontal, leaderless model of organization that pushes a given agenda forward through cooperation, rather than coercion. Ideally, it empowers individuals to become integral, necessary parts of the group decision-making process, while simultaneously preserving the right of those individuals to remain autonomous. It relies on a complex system of procedural checks and balances intended to prevent any one person or group from wresting control of the proceedings from the overall whole, preserving an absolute vision of democratic rule in which each individual’s voice is as important as the next. It is, without question, an admirable enterprise in many ways, and can, under the right conditions, be an incredibly effective organizational tool. For Occupy, however, it has become something of a cancer.

How It Works:

Consensus comes as the result of the meeting of the General Assembly (GA), a gathering of all Working Groups (WGs) and the individuals of which they are composed. The agenda is set, items are introduced, and then run through the process illustrated above (which has often been amended in one way or another—for example, many of the Occupy GA’s have introduced a 90 percent consensus rule, allowing for a passage of proposals with a ten percent minority dissent).

Within this framework, there are five primary operational positions, each held by a single individual: The Time Keeper, the person who keeps the meetings roughly on schedule. The “Vibes” Watcher, who keeps an eye on the mood of the crowd in an effort to manage tensions and prevent them from growing into animosities. The Note Taker keeps minutes while the Stack Taker takes the names of those who wish to speak and calls them when their turns arrive. Lastly, and in many respects most important of all, the Facilitator manages the meeting as a whole, ensuring that the process stays within the procedural framework.

Each of these positions is supposed to rotate at every meeting, so as to avoid the possibility of one person gaining too much control (as is the case with many features of the Consensus process).

Consensus is absolute democracy: Any individual has the opportunity to take part in the discussion, to introduce items, and perhaps most importantly, to block proposals. In theory, Consensus is democratic decision making at its finest, a system in which each and every individual feels like a valued, important part of the decision making process. In practice, Consensus is an incredibly complicated, frustrating, and for Occupy, largely ineffective organizational model. It has become the process by which Occupiers have begun to learn the lesson that governance is actually kind of hard.

So?

While in Chicago, we talked briefly with a member of the Social Media working group, who told us that, “the process is messy and frustrating, and people fight a lot, and it can take a long time… But it’s all worth it when you finally reach a consensus.”

There are a number of arguments against Consensus that you hear thrown around regularly. Critics often charge that Consensus can lead to the same kind of perpetuation of the status quo that you find in top-down leadership models. Because any individual can block any proposal, small minorities can prevent the passage of new measures with which they disagree. However, most Occupy encampments have, as previously mentioned, instituted 90 percent majority rules to prevent this kind of manipulation of the process.

Another common criticism is the long-winded nature of the decision making process. The daily GA’s regularly stretch on for hours, a time commitment that can become prohibitive to those who work or attend school, or are otherwise bound to outside commitments. However, as California organizer Esteban Gil likes to say—between reminding you that he was in Spain for the indignados and that he isn’t a leader—“we aren’t going slow, we’re going far.”

The real problems with the process are two-fold: One, the Abilene Paradox—groupthink creates a situation wherein, despite disagreeing with a proposal, no individual disagrees because they believe they are the only thing preventing a consensus, and fear “rocking the boat.” This sows the seeds of discord that soon grow into mighty barriers that prevent a group’s ability to consense. This brings us to the second, and probably most significant problem with consensus: the model’s susceptibility to disagreement, the effects of which we have witnessed firsthand.

On October 26^th, in a mostly unpublicized fit of disunity, the Los Angeles encampment experienced the ultimate breakdown of the Consensus process. For several weeks now, the camp has been plagued by disagreement over one issue in particular: marijuana. Occupy Wall Street had previously addressed similar issues by instituting what amounts to a no (if realistically low) tolerance policy on the use of inebriants. When Los Angeles’ organizers attempted to introduce a similar policy, a particularly vocal opposition erupted in anger. Organizers were quickly accused of attempting to police their fellow protestors and in-so-doing becoming the very thing they were protesting. By the time the General Assembly rolled around, things had grown so acrimonious between the two sides that they actually split. The dissenters, those opposed to the introduction of a code of conduct, declared the GA “dead,” and formed a second body they dubbed the “People’s Forum.”

Such divisions are commonplace. In some cases, these divides emerge over tactics, as was the case in San Francisco and Oakland. Oftentimes, as has become an issue in Zucotti Park itself, the divisions have more to do with class and race, with income disparities and education levels than anything else. A recent Samantha Bee bit on the Daily Show illustrated one of the largest and least talked about issues within the Occupy Movement: the development of two distinct groups of protestors easily identifiable as haves and have-nots. “Occupy Wall Street was divided by class,” quipped Bee, “On the one side, the elites with their library, apple pop up store and bicycle powered espresso machines. On the other, the downwardly mobile with their drum circles.”

Having ventured deep inside the strange animal that is Occupy, we felt the report to be quite possibly the most accurate account of the devolution of the Occupy encampment yet. Almost immediately after the camps were first erected, they began to draw local homeless populations. With promises of free food, free clothing, and various other services, it didn’t take long for the truly down-and-out to begin congregating around the sites. The camps also attracted the particularly radical: crust-punks and anarcho-punks, hippie kids, burner kids—in general, the kind of people who were probably already couch surfing, house hopping, squatting and camping anyway. That isn’t to say that they are doing anything wrong, per se, only that they aren’t really doing anything different. As one LA activist observed, “These kids legitimately think the camp is their new home.”

This, of course, rankles local denizens, shop owners, politicians, and in many cases, the organizers themselves. In a November 4^th article by Fritz Tucker entitled “A Chill Descends on Occupy Wall Street; the Leaders of the Allegedly Leaderless Movement”, the author recounts an encounter with an NYC organizer:

“Daniel, a tall, red-bearded, white twenty-something… said that the NYC-GA needed to be completely defunded because those with ‘no stake’ in the Occupy Wall Street movement shouldn’t have a say in how the money was spent. When I asked him whether everybody in the 99% had a stake in the movement… Daniel said that he’d like to take a fire-hose and clear out the entire encampment, adding hopefully that only the ‘real’ activists would come back.”

To understand exactly why, despite all of the hostility that Consensus seems to be generating within the movement, it has become such a popular model with leftist activists, and more specifically with Occupiers, you have to look at the 1999 World Trade Organization protests in Seattle. WTO represented the first widespread, largely successful deployment of the Consensus process, a fact made obvious by the protests continued prominence not only in activist discourse, but in popular consciousness as a whole. Those protests left an indelible mark, paving the way for the now commonplace use of the tactics against not only the World Trade Organization, but also G8 conferences, the IMF/World Bank, as well as both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions.

Many would be quick to argue that the WTO protests remain famous primarily because of the violence that surrounded the actions. That, however, betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the process and the idea of a “diversity of tactics.” Ultimately, everything that occurred fell under the umbrella of the Consensus process, even if it wasn’t technically concensed upon. As mentioned, diversity of tactics preserves the right of affinity groups to engage in direct action in solidarity with the movement, provided they do not claim to speak for or act on behalf of the movement. It’s a clever way of avoiding responsibility, of approving of violent action in practice without approving of it in principle—a semantic feat worthy of the very juridical system of which many of these activists are so critical. Disparate groups acting independently as part of a larger coordinated whole is precisely what made WTO so effective.

And it is also the very thing that makes Consensus so ineffective in the context of Occupy. As anarchist writer Peter Gelderloos points out in his book, Consensus: A New Handbook for Grassroots Social, Political, and Environmental Groups,

“…It is important, before talking about specific actions in response to the problem, to define success… For complex or difficult problems, it can help to identify primary and secondary goals, long-term and short-term goals, ideal goals and compromise goals… It is almost normal, in our alienated culture, for people to put substantial energies into a campaign without ever defining success.”

During WTO, the protestors had a single, explicit goal: shut down the talks. Even if individual affinity groups acted autonomously, like the Black Bloc protestors that became the focus of much of the media coverage of the event, they were always working in concert with the overall goal of the Direct Action Network. The fact that they had clear stated objectives allowed them to organize specific actions in the interest of meeting those objectives. Further, the use of affinity groups made it much harder for the authorities to disrupt the protestors’ own disruptions. As the New York Times Magazine put it in a 2003 article, “In the eyes of many activists, the greater success of the battle of Seattle was the validation of their decentralized, leaderless model…When the police swept one group away, another took its place.”

In the case of Occupy, however, no such goal exists. The protestors refuse to give their demands, to state their objectives, or even to enumerate a basic position.  And as much as they contend that they do no want to do so, more and more it seems apparent that it would be impossible to do so. This becomes a vicious cycle wherein large decisions are set aside in favor smaller, more easily attainable, localized goals, in the interest of eventually making larger, weightier, more impactful decisions, which are soon set aside in favor of smaller, more attainable goals.

When you comb through the minutes of an average General Assembly, you rarely find discussion of how to organize mass actions, how to affect policy change, or even discussion of what policies need changing. The vast majority of the dialogue revolves around day-to-day internal operational issues of the camps—for example, whether or not to approve the $8,000 purchase of a URL, or a similarly priced demand for drums. At most large Occupy encampments—which it is worth noting are obvious, easily disrupted targets and thus diminish the agility of the Consensus model—there are dozens of working groups, all representing various degrees of organizational necessity, efficacy, and even relevance, each demanding that it have its say. It’s a lot like congress, ironically.

Furthermore, organizers (particularly in New York) have stopped involving the vast majority of the assembled mass as much in favor of the smaller, more dedicated cadre that Fritz Tucker’s Daniel alluded to. Instead of Zucotti Park, most significant meetings are held in the atrium of 60 Wall Street, well away from the rabble.

They are expending so much time and energy managing their little pop-up society that they rarely seem to actually do anything. There have been a few major actions, but even those were largely fed by the power of social media. The port shutdown in Oakland had more to do with Union politics than with Occupy, and Bank Transfer Day was a viral marketing campaign launched by an L.A. based gallery owner, rather than a product of Consensus. That isn’t to say they were ineffective, only that Consensus itself isn’t necessarily the source of their success. More and more it seems as if a small group of True Believers are having a really good time playing at revolution, while they slowly but surely squander much of the good will that was initially generated by way of a broad populist message.

What the hell is going on at Occupy Wall Street?

The New York Times Magazine article previously quoted was in fact the second part of a profile entitled “Them Against the World,” of long time activist Lisa Fithian; who, rather unsurprisingly, attended the September 17th actions in New York and has since become something of a force within the Occupy movement.

According to her website, “Lisa Fithian has been working for nonviolent social change since the mid-1970’s.  Over the years she has been a student, labor and community organizer on a broad range of issues.  From environmental justice to student and worker rights, from peace and global justice to immigration and housing, Lisa continues to use a wide range of strategies and tactics and encouraged nonviolent direct action as one of the most effective strategies for change.”

“For want of a better word, I’m a professional at this,” she told the NYT magazine. The thing is, despite her implication to the contrary, she actually is a professional “at this.” According to the same article, “Fithian pays her rent via short-term consulting gigs, helping to ‘escalate’ laundry-worker strikes in Las Vegas and public-service shutdowns in Boston to, as she says, ‘create the political climate for settlements.’”

Fithian utilizes spectacle-oriented tactics designed to address small, localized issues. She can be extremely effective in her way, but like Consensus, her focus is simply to narrow to be of real help in something as broad as Occupy. She’s really good at doing banner drops and getting arrested, and organizing others to do the same. However, She has scarce little experience doing real policy work, a fact that should ring alarm bells amongst young activists critical of the establishment. The existence of that establishment is no less prevalent in the world of the professional protestor than it is everywhere else, and Fithian is chief amongst its custodians. She has also become a roving advisor to Occupy encampments around the country. She’s done teach-ins at San Francisco, Chicago, DC, Los Angeles, Austin, and of course, New York.

In the same Fritz Tucker article that featured hose-master Daniel, the author describes his foreboding entré into the world of Occupy Wall Street’s de facto leadership. Tucker attended one of two teach-ins held at 60 Wall Street on the then proposed Spokes Council—an amended version of Consensus designed to cope with the strain that many bodies and voices place on the standard Consensus model. The Spokes Council organizes representatives from all of the approved working groups into an assembly similar to the GA, but significantly smaller. Each representative, or “spoke,” is supposed to rotate at each meeting.

As with all facets of Consensus, the Spokes Council is intended to act as protection against top-down hierarchy. What Tucker describes, however, seems somewhat different—and it seems as if Occupiers themselves are well aware of this. In a blog posted to Commonstruggle.org, under the sub-heading “ANTI-POLITICS,” contributor Gray writes, “There is great possibility that informal leaders could end up taking over the movements[sic] media outlets or over the General Assemblies, in fact this has already happened in some places.” New York is no exception. 

The proposed Spokes Council model was eventually accepted by the GA (albeit after being voted down four times), in large part due to the teach-ins that Tucker describes, “Six leaders discussed what to do with the half-million dollars that had been donated to their organization, since, in their estimation, the organization was incapable of making sound financial decisions. The proposed solution was not to spend the money educating their co-workers or stimulating more active participation by improving the organization’s structures and tactics. Instead, those present discussed how they could commandeer the $500,000 for their new, more exclusive organization.”

Within Occupy Wall Street, there exists a small, devoted cabal whose membership is spread across several working groups: Facilitation, Structure, and most importantly, Finance. These three committees, along with the Spokes Council they created, represent Occupy Wall Street’s newly unappointed leadership. All have been plagued by charges of discrimination, and have been repeatedly cited as lacking in transparency.

Finance is generally regarded as difficult to find, and almost impossible to join. It is composed of professional and semi-professional Businesspersons, clerks, accountants and lawyers. Of these, five reportedly have access to the Friends of Liberty Plaza accounts at Amalgamated bank and the Lower East Side Credit Union, a fact which remains difficult to confirm. Most importantly, Finance represents a system that nobody ever consensed upon.

According to a member of the Social Media working group in Chicago, the Organizers in New York sent a representative to help Chicago handle it’s own donations. The representative explained the system being used in New York—how Alliance for Global Justice is accepting donations on behalf of Occupy Wall Street and funneling the money into the Friends of Liberty Plaza account—and how Occupy Chicago was at somewhat of a disadvantage because New York had set out a plan for accepting monetary contributions months ahead of the September 17^th actions. Soon after donations began pouring in Finance sized control of the money, and officially put into action the already established the system necessary to managing the funds.

Facilitation and Structure both organize around keeping the process moving efficiently, and their membership represent the core interests behind the introduction of the Spokes Council. Even a relatively cursory scan of the GA and Spokes Council minutes reveals the hold these groups have on the operation of Occupy Wall Street. The same names appear repeatedly in Facilitation positions in the minutes of the GA and the Spokes Council. You have public faces like camera-whore cum fart-in-elevator Justin Wedes—who appeared alongside Ketchup, another Facilitation regular, on the Colbert Report—and Marisa Holmes acting as mouthpieces for the movement, presenting the case for a leaderless model following absolute democratic principles. At the same time, they seem to be undermining those very principles. All three are regular Facilitators at the GA, and both Ketchup and Marissa were present and acting as Facilitators at the Spokes Council teach-in.

Tucker writes that one of the main points under discussion was the movement’s access to their treasury, and whether the Spokes Council and the General Assembly should have access to the funds, or just the Spokes Council. According to Tucker, Holmes stated that “while the NYC-GA is the “de facto” mechanism for distributing funds, it has no right to do so, even though she acknowledged that most donors were likely under the impression that the NYC-GA was the only organization with access to these funds. Two other leaders of the teach-in, Daniel and Adash, concurred with Holmes.” 

This is largely supported by the minutes from the meeting. However, it should be noted that there are inconsistencies within the notes: Tucker’s report bares a much closer resemblance to the minutes listed as being from the 22^nd than they do to those labeled as being from the 23^rd. Further, in reviewing both it is unclear just how fastidious the note-taker was in copying everything, particularly compared to the notes from the GA: sentences are clearly incomplete or heavily truncated and sometimes go unattributed. In the case of the notes purported to be from the 22^nd, there is a notation indicating that two minutes and forty seconds of the meeting went unrecorded. Furthermore, they do not seem to cover the entire length of the meeting. Rather, they just sort of stop mid-thought, as if the note taker got bored and began doodling in the margins.

Regardless, when we cross referenced Tucker’s account with our own, we could not help but notice striking similarities: Tucker describes the circuitous discussion of Occupation for the sake of Occupation, accusations of discrimination, abuses of the process such as the manipulation of the speaker time limit rule, and most of all activists operating from de facto positions of leadership and controlling much of the dialogue—members of the Facilitation and Structure working groups apparently gaming the system to maintain minority control over both the Friends of Liberty Plaza account funds and access to them, as well as the establishment of a monopoly over the NYC-GA’s decision making powers.

In amongst all of this, there is one odd little element that could easily go unnoticed, a recurrent anomaly in the minutes of the teach-in and the General Assembly that approved the Spokes Council—in attendance at both there is a woman identified as Lisa. “For the last thirty years,” the woman announced to the GA on October 28^th, “I’ve worked for many movements that used the Spokes Council model.  The anti-nuclear movement, which shut down nuclear plants, and none have built since the 70s.  This is how ACT UP organized to bring justice to people with AIDS.  Throughout the 1980s, using the Spokes Council model, 100,000s stopped the US invasion of Nicaragua using the Spokes Council model.” This closely mirrors the biography listed on Lisa Fithian’s own website. What’s more, it turns out that Fithian and Marisa Holmes have some history together: Fithian did contract work Holmes and the Students for a Democratic Society in 2007.

“This is a way to organize effectively using direct democracy,” Fithian continues, “I know you have a lot of questions, but I urge you to move to consensus for this movement.” Perhaps this is all innocent; just Lisa Fithian being the right person in the right place at the right time. Who is to say?

As with Graeber, this isn’t to imply some grand, national conspiracy to control the movement as a whole. New York’s problems remain New York’s problems. They have yet to fully infect the rest of the movement as a whole, especially when it comes to financing and monetary distribution. Rather, it’s more the appearance of a small group of activists dedicated to the spread of Consensus forcing their vision of radical action on a group and pretending as if everybody asked them to do so.

Fithian in many ways represents the true ill that plagues the Occupy Movement as a whole: the impending danger of becoming exactly that which you seek to criticize. Those who most fervently adhere to and encourage the use of the Consensus model all seem to operate under a single, unifying conception of the fundamental nature of human beings based on the concept of “mutual aid” as enumerated by Peter Kropotkin, the founder of anarcho-communism: that everyone, given the opportunity, can rise above the petty divisiveness and conflict of a competition oriented culture, and come to consensus through rational discussion.

Because they themselves are able to do so, they see no reason why others shouldn’t do the same. The argument presented in Peter Gelderloos’ text Consensus holds that the animosities that sometimes arise out of Consensus are really a product of the capitalist, competition culture from which they originate, and further that they will eventually dissipate as individuals learn to cooperate within the process. When, however, they find themselves at the mercy of a group (or set of groups) that cannot, or even more vexing, simply will not agree their attitude becomes one of elevation and enlightenment. Suddenly a small portion of the crowd seems to be looking down upon the rest. Exclusion becomes one of the primary tools of Facilitation as they fetishize the process at the expense of the democracy they claim to advocate.

Fithian is one of these people. She has become so caught up in the drama of her own private revolution, and has spent so many years heavily involved in the system she’s targeting, that she seems incapable of recognizing that she herself has become a casualty of it.

Fithian knows every possible way to agitate, create spectacle, and generally generate a lot of attention for a cause very quickly. However, she offers no real solutions when it comes to creating tangible change. She represents the very behavioral indoctrination she’s trying to combat, and as a result is likely the closest thing you’ll find to the movement’s true face: a radical activist chasing her own tail in infinite circles. They have crafted their personal and professional identities around—or in reaction to—the system, and without it they would cease to exist.

By her own admission, when asked what it is that she does, Fithian tells people that she creates crisis, ”because crisis is that edge where change is possible.” The problem in applying that logic to Occupy is that Occupy is a movement that exists explicitly as a reaction to crisis—a housing crisis, a debt crisis, an education crisis. What this country really needs is a movement that not only gives people hope, but also offers them real tools to help them change the system. Abolish corporate personhood, aggressively attack campaign finance reform and regulatory practices, do away with the electoral college, make voting mandatory, institute compulsory service with a revamped Americorps, increase taxation on high-income earners, maybe create some goddamn jobs. FDR managed to do so in the 1930’s, there is no reason why we shouldn’t able to accomplish similar or even grander feats in this day and age.

These are neither new nor complex ideas, they’ve just fallen by the wayside as the American people have abdicated their responsibilities as citizens. Sure, we’ve spent the last decade getting screwed by politicians and corporations. That doesn’t change the fact that, by and large, the American people seemed relatively happy to drop trou and bend over. Yes, we have a government of the people, for the people, by the people, but that does not mean that government just runs along, benevolently tending to the needs of the people. The citizenry needs to engage, and they need to do so everyday, not just when a crisis arises. As with any living organism, our government requires tending and care, traits this entire country seems to have been sorely missing in recent years.

And this is what makes Consensus so dangerous: it posits not a new method of political engagement, but a total political disengagement. We have referenced the notion that the encampments feel like their own, micro societies. The reason for this is simple—that is precisely what they are. As Gelderloos writes,”an explicit consensus process serves as a crutch or bridge which intentionally reinforces the learning of consensus until a new, cooperative, anti-authoritarian society provides that reinforcement as a matter of course.” To the most faithful of Occupiers, Consensus represents a total break with the political system; a new form of anarchist self- government for small, self sustained groups.

It’s the same line that radical kids were spewing in the sixties—it’s a revolution that will do away with the system at large, a silver bullet for all that ails our sickened society. And it is total fucking bullshit. “Tune in, Turn on, Drop Out.” It is a waste of precious resources like time, money, and the most valuable resource of all in modern America: attention. We have a Presidential election fast approaching, and a generation of kids who aren’t going to vote because they didn’t get their way. They were told everything would get better, and when it didn’t happen over night, they apparently decided to pick up their toys and go home. Or in the case of Occupy, do a crappy job at making a new one.

Not to put too fine a point on it—but you are either leaderless or you are not, you are either nonviolent or you are not, you are either a movement that represents the so-called “99%” or you are not. Most people were swept up by the movement’s original message against corporate and political greed. The farther the movement moves away from that, the more support it seems to lose. Every time something goes awry, the local Occupiers simply hide behind what has become the movement’s all encompassing deferment of responsibility: “This is what we are fighting against,”which is precisely what one Oakland organizer told a reporter when asked about the November 10^th shooting’s proximity to the encampment.

Most people didn’t come out to protest against the police, as seems to have become the movement’s dominant target. They came out to protest the fact that the middle class is disappearing while a not-so-new American aristocracy hangs them by their ankles and empties their pockets of change. This movement needs to stop trying to cater to every possible (progressive) interest, and begin crafting the consistency in message necessary to carrying it through to the point where it actually lives up to its own ideals. Otherwise, the whole thing just plays into the same bullshit game it’s trying to expose.

Then again, perhaps we are naively optimistic when it comes to the system, and tragically cynical in regard to the Fithians of the world. We would counter that the reverse could easily be the case. Is there a difference between hope born of cynicism and cynicism born of hope? The truth is probably somewhere in the middle, but we’ll likely never know, because while we’re all engaged in this bickering, internal debate, the attention that Occupy had originally garnered has long since begun to slip away. While protestors focus on hyped-up charges of police brutality and bitch about media coverage, the systematic cancers that fomented the protests in the first place metastasize further, growing ever deeper and more entrenched. Occupiers have all of this good will and support and they are just squandering it. At some point you have to stand up and take a position, otherwise you really are just camping out in a public park.

Either way, winter is coming, and the various evictions from around the country have begun forcing Occupiers to step-back and regroup. We can always hope that the movement will slip quietly into a deep hibernation, to emerge in the spring entirely new. But from here on out, I think I would rather not write anything about the Occupy Movement. At some point the raid will come, at which point I will get out of bed long enough to go down to Occupy LA to cover the eviction. Afterwards, I will drive back to the house, lock the front door, get back in bed, and watch YouTube as long as necessary. It will probably be a while before the angst lifts.