Anarchist Principles, Prefigurative Politics, and Occupy Wall Street
Mainstream Media Narratives and the Origins of Occupy Wall Street
Mainstream Journalist Critique: Journalists interviewing organizers of Occupy Wall Street frequently presented a series of standard criticisms:
Questioning how the movement could make progress without establishing a leadership structure.
Demanding a practical, explicit list of demands.
Dismissing anarchist organizational practices—such as consensus decision-making and manual signals like "sparkly fingers"—as alienating nonsense.
Asserting that radical terminology and methods would prevent the movement from reaching regular, mainstream Americans.
Failure of Traditional Approaches:
Following the financial crash of 2007, dozens of attempts to launch a national movement against the United States' financial elites failed.
These failed initiatives followed the exact recommendations of mainstream journalists by adopting traditional leadership structures and formal lists of demands.
The Turning Point of August 2:
On August 2, a small group of anarchists and anti-authoritarians attended a planning meeting convened by a traditional activist group.
The anarchists persuaded attendees to abandon a planned march and rally in favor of creating a genuine democratic assembly based on anarchist principles.
This shift established the foundation for a movement embraced by citizens across the United States, from Portland to Tuscaloosa.
Core Definition and Philosophical Foundations of Anarchism
Definition of Anarchism:
A political movement aimed at creating a genuinely free society.
Envisions human relationships that do not require enforcement through the constant threat of violence.
Historical Realities of Coercive Power:
Vast inequalities of wealth, debt peonage, slavery, and wage labor can only exist when sustained by state enforcement mechanisms, including armies, prisons, and police.
Anarchists seek human relations completely detached from state force.
Core Values:
A society grounded in absolute equality and solidarity.
Social relations existing solely through the free consent of all participants.
Theoretical Divergence: Anarchism versus Marxism
The Marxist Strategy:
Traditional Marxism shares the ultimate vision of a free society, but differs fundamentally on the means.
Marxists insist that revolutionaries must first seize state power and its bureaucratic violence mechanisms to transform society.
They argue that state mechanisms will ultimately become redundant and fade away.
The Anarchist Critique of Marxism:
Anarchists have argued since the 19th century that state power transformation is a delusion.
Peace cannot be built by training for war.
Equality cannot be established through top-down chains of command.
Human happiness and self-fulfillment cannot be achieved by becoming grim, joyless revolutionaries who sacrifice personal development for the cause.
Means must reflect the ends: revolutionaries cannot reach the desired world unless their methods serve as a direct model for that world.
Prefigurative Action:
Anarchist principles demand "building the new society in the shell of the old."
Historical examples of egalitarian prefigurative experiments include free schools, radical labor unions, and rural communes.
Historical Evolution and Eras of Anarchist Thought
First Heyday (roughly 1875–1914):
Emphasized individual conscience and individual initiative as a revolutionary ideology.
Some practitioners carried out bombings and assassinations directly targeting capitalists and heads of state, giving rise to the popular stereotype of the "anarchist bomb-thrower."
Anarchism became perhaps the first political movement to realize that terrorism—even when targeted exclusively at rulers rather than innocent civilians—does not achieve its goals.
Exponents of anarchism have consistently avoided blowing anyone up for nearly a century.
Mohandas K. Gandhi served as the prominent 20th-century leader who drew most extensively from the anarchist tradition.
The Eclipse Era (1914–1989):
Characterized by continuous global preparation for, or engagement in, world wars.
Political movements were deemed "realistic" only if they could organize armies, navies, and ballistic missile systems.
Marxists excelled at state-backed military organization, whereas anarchists refused to adopt militarized state structures.
Post-1989 Resurgence:
Following the end of global war mobilizations, a global revolutionary movement grounded in anarchist principles—the global justice movement—reemerged.
Four Fundamental Anarchist Principles of Occupy Wall Street
1. Refusal to Recognize the Legitimacy of Existing Political Institutions:
Issuing demands acknowledges the power or legitimacy of the authority being petitioned.
Protest versus Direct Action: Protest appeals to existing authorities to change their behavior. Direct action acts as if existing power structures do not exist.
Examples of Direct Action: Communities building their own wells, making salt in defiance of law (Gandhi's example), shutting down meetings, or occupying factories.
Direct action represents the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free.
2. Refusal to Accept the Legitimacy of the Existing Legal Order:
Early planning meetings held in Tompkins Square Park in New York deliberately ignored local ordinances requiring police permits for public gatherings exceeding 12 people, on the principle that such laws should not exist.
Organizers occupied public park space (drawing inspiration from movements in the Middle East and southern Europe) on the principle that the public does not require state permission to occupy public space.
Established a commitment to answer strictly to a moral order rather than a legal order.
3. Refusal to Create an Internal Hierarchy / Adoption of Consensus-Based Direct Democracy:
Operated through leaderless direct democracy to ensure no formal leadership structure existed that could be co-opted or coerced.
Implemented consensus decision-making so that no majority could compel a minority to submit to its will.
Origin of Consensus: Developed through a confluence of feminism, anarchism, and spiritual traditions such as the Quakers.
Consensus is the necessary decision-making model in the absence of coercive enforcement mechanisms, requiring all decisions to be made by general consent.
4. Embrace of Prefigurative Politics:
Zuccotti Park and subsequent encampments served as live experimental spaces for building institutions of a new society.
Created self-organized bodies grounded in mutual aid, including democratic General Assemblies, public kitchens, libraries, medical clinics, and media centers.
Represented a practical attempt to construct alternative institutions within the shell of the old society.
Economic Realities, the Role of Corporate Media, and Public Perception
Public Readiness for Radical Ideas:
Mainstream Americans demonstrate a greater willingness to embrace radical ideas than established media institutions acknowledge.
Core resonant messaging: The American political order is thoroughly corrupt; both major political parties are funded by the wealthiest 1%; establishing a democratic society requires starting entirely from scratch.
Economic distress matched conditions seen during the 1930s.
The Function of Corporate Media:
Radical critique traditionally holds that media exists to convince the public that current institutions are legitimate and functional.
The primary role of corporate media is to convince individual members of an angry public that no one else shares their outrage.
This generates an official ideology that few individuals genuinely believe, while causing citizens to assume that everyone else accepts it.
Historical and Ideological Reconceptualization of American Democracy
The Official Narrative vs. Historical Reality:
Official View: US democracy is a system devised by the Founding Fathers based on checks and balances between the President, Congress, and Judiciary.
Documentary Record: Neither the Declaration of Independence nor the Constitution mentions the word "democracy."
Founding Fathers' Hostility to Democracy:
The authors of the founding documents defined "democracy" as collective self-governance by popular assemblies and actively opposed it as the "madness of crowds: bloody, tumultuous and untenable."
John Adams stated: "There was never a democracy that didn't commit suicide."
Alexander Hamilton argued that checks and balances were necessary to create a permanent body of the "rich and well-born" to check the "imprudence" of democracy.
The system established was an explicit republic modeled on ancient Rome rather than Athens.
The 19th-Century Redefinition:
The political system came to be called a "democracy" in the early 19th century because ordinary voters consistently chose candidates who identified as "democrats."
To ordinary Americans, "democracy" has always signified direct collective self-governance—the exact concept the Founding Fathers condemned as "democracy" or "anarchy."
Distrust of politicians and skepticism of government lead regular citizens to embrace movements built on direct democratic principles.
Precedents, Paradoxes in American Sensibilities, and State Response
Historical Precedents in American Activism:
Radical branches of the civil rights movement, the anti-nuclear movement, and the global justice movement all utilized direct action, direct democracy, and the rejection of existing political institutions.
Occupy Wall Street expanded with unprecedented speed because it directly targeted the core ruling pretense: the myth that the current system is a democracy.
Contradictions in Mainstream American Sensibilities:
Deep reverence for individual liberty combined with near-worshipful respect for the military and police.
Enthusiasm for economic markets combined with explicit hostility toward capitalists.
Egalitarian values combined with deep-seated structural racism.
Unfamiliarity with explicit anarchist theory, which aims to eliminate all force-backed social relations, ranging from wage labor to patriarchy.
Systemic Political Corruption:
Systemic bribery has been legalized, turning the solicitation and distribution of bribes into the primary occupation of politicians.
Prior to September 17, radical solutions to public crisis were offered almost exclusively by the political Right.
State Suppression and Ruling Class Fears:
Democratic civil disobedience produces a state reaction combining minor concessions with direct police brutality.
State authorities mobilized thousands of riot police, executing beatings, chemical attacks, and mass arrests against peaceful democratic assemblies under the pretext of enforcing local park camping regulations.
State suppression reveals a fundamental elite fear: if the public learns what anarchism truly entails, citizens may conclude that state rulers are completely unnecessary.