The Localist Manifesto
section 2
the idea of occupation
A decade ago, a small group of activists captured the public imagination by occupying a public park in the financial district of Manhattan. Polls at the time registered widespread support for the action and copycat occupations proliferated rapidly from coast to coast. Clearly, the Occupy movement tapped into a vital current of political sentiment. Americans responded favorably to the message that wealth inequalities in the United States now exceed any reasonable standard of fairness and that the wealthy are using their riches to control the machinery of government, but this reaction also exhibited a seemingly instinctive sympathy for the way the Wall Street occupiers delivered that message. The movement was democratic to a fault – leaderless, unscripted, animated in every particular by a determination that each participant have a say in decision-making. It was visibly warm-hearted, as it made demands upon the generosity of strangers and saw those demands readily and repeatedly met. In its democratic faith and neighborly good will, the Occupy movement dramatized in real time values central to the national self-image and thus revealed in plain terms just what was put at risk when wealth and authority were concentrated in the hands of a few.
This helps explain a paradox. However short-lived as a movement, Occupy left a lasting impression upon the image many Americans conjure up when they try to visualize their current predicament and the options available for escaping it. Terms from the movement’s political lexicon (“the 1%”) persist in the thinking of writers and activists spanning a wide spectrum of opinion. Its horizontal style of activism is now the norm at the grassroots, where it blends harmoniously with the loose egalitarianism on display in campaigns by indigenous people to protect land and water.
The rapid demise of Occupy as a movement has allowed us to overlook its effectiveness as a ventilator of political thinking. Direct democracy, a ghostly presence in rhetoric and myth, looks again like a tangible option for civic activism and local governance. The careful tailoring of means to ends, a skill fallen into disuse during the era of vanguard politics, is now presumed to be a critical undertaking for anyone who favors foundational change. Our actions in the present, we seem to have decided, must embody the kind of changes we wish to make and the kind of society we wish to see emerge with those changes. If our aim is to create favorable conditions for peacefulness, joyfulness, and dignity, then such work must begin immediately, not in some glorious future that never seems to arrive or after a period where we obey some theory-prescribed injunction to act violently or coercively.
Amidst the tumult of a fleeting historical moment, something momentous had occurred. Consider the specifics. Occupy did not gather in Washington to pressure the appropriate political institutions to address a specific grievance or injustice. It assembled on Wall Street to announce its intention to wrest a bit of territory from those who are currently ravaging the planet for their own gain and to live on it humanely and democratically. Occupy was not made for reform. It remained indifferent to those who hoped it might supply Democrats with the grassroots leverage that the Tea Party provided for Republicans. Signs sprouted within it demanding that someone “tax the rich” or “restore Glass-Steagall” but no plans were made for translating those sentiments into a program. The media knew how to read those signs but appeared lost in its efforts to discern the meaning of the movement as a whole. Journalists and commentators condescendingly awaited the emergence of specific demands that they might evaluate, thereby missing the big scoop – this was something new. The meaning of thismovement did not reside in the effect it might have on institutions already in existence and external to it. The meaning of Occupy was internal to the movement and resided in the act of occupation itself – in the way the occupiers established a communal kitchen and a serviceable library, created working groups and relaxation spaces, revived the spirit of free and democratic assembly and devised new procedures for maintaining it. An act of occupation signals an intention to take over and live differently so that onlookers can respond sympathetically and, while in that open-hearted mood, acknowledge yearnings within themselves for better lives of some kind.
New ideas typically do not fare well the first time around. We can only approach them with what we already know, can only apprehend them by first translating them into familiar terms. Confusion thereby creeps, unbidden and dimly sensed, into the process of change. Those who want to advance that process usually try to gain clarity by studying what has been tried already. This turn to the past shifts the motion of events into reverse at the very moment when fresh prospects are coming into view on the horizon.
Occupy proved unusually susceptible to this kind of wheel-spinning, hence its near disappearance as a force to be reckoned with only months after it first appeared. The movement’s vulnerability flowed from an error of judgment made at the outset – it chose the wrong kind of place to occupy. Public spaces can only be occupied temporarily. When the government sends in the SWAT teams, several hundred or even a few thousand occupiers will not be able to do a damn thing about it. The impact of such an occupation, for that reason, can only be symbolic. As a symbol of resistance, Occupy was powerful indeed, but it was doomed from the beginning by its inability to morph into something else. Because it could not secure the space it occupied, it could only become a protest movement. At that point, the refreshing newness of the idea of occupation quickly got lost in the crush of protest politics as usual. Procedures designed to stimulate democratic discussion became disconnected from the real work of social reconstruction. Discussions in the assemblies bogged down in procedural issues because there was nothing substantive that could be planned and accomplished. Some of the more visionary activists began to drift away, public support waned, and police agencies that had been itching all along to crush the occupations got the green light to do so.
It is too late for symbolic gestures. All the basics of life on this planet – water, soil, air – are being squandered. Our food and water supply have been contaminated, water reserves and soil are being depleted, and the air is filled with all manner of pollutants. Animal and plant species are rapidly disappearing. Climate change is increasing the stress on the natural systems that supply the basics of life.
The banks and corporations that control our economy are doing what they are meant to do – squeezing the last bit of profit out of whatever is left to exploit. Their well-being depends upon fossil fuels and the chemicals made from fossil fuels. As industrial methods of agriculture degrade and erode the soil, they throw more chemicals on the land and genetically engineer crops to withstand chemical saturation. As watersheds dry up and aquifers – even those essential to food production – shrink, they take billions of gallons of the good water that remains, mix it with chemicals, and propel it underground to tap remaining deposits of natural gas. The tops of mountains are dynamited so that a few coal companies can pay dividends for a few more decades. Arctic drilling, deep-water drilling, the extraction of oil from tar sands and the construction of continent-spanning pipelines so that it can be processed and sold on a global market – these are all exceedingly dangerous, environmentally devastating, and grossly inefficient methods of producing energy but they are well underway and spreading to every corner of the globe.
Think of it. They have proven themselves willing to blow up the Appalachian Mountains – one of the natural wonders of the North American continent. They seem prepared to spoil the last drop of water on the planet if money can be made doing it. Studies proliferate documenting the steady loss of soil and the rapid destruction of life systems in the oceans, yet no action follows. The government does nothing because elected officials identify the national interest with the interests of banks and corporations. We know this – it is apparent from every word they speak, every action they take. Yet we still pretend that if we elect the right ones or apply the right kind of pressure these officials can be made to act on our behalf. These beliefs have always made fools of us. They now render us incapable of responding sensibly to plain-as-day warnings of impending disaster. Our foolishness has become lethal.
We must stop pretending. We waste precious time when we try to reform a government that sees nothing wrong with fracking. We (let us speak plainly) demean ourselves when we protest a government that sanctions the blasting of mountains and the poisoning of rivers. Reform and protest reveal a lack of imagination – it is how we spin our wheels as opportunities for real breakthroughs slip away. That we continue in various ways to plead with the regime of banks and corporations only shows that we lack confidence in our abilities as free individuals working among friends and loved ones in self-governing neighborhoods to put things right.
Regaining control of our lives requires that we regain confidence and pride as inhabitants of a locality. When we localize our affairs, we release ourselves from the necessity of having to secure our rights and well-being by using institutions that were commandeered long ago by banks and corporations and that continue to serve their interests. Nationalization and privatization are competing ways to enforce that necessity: both strategies legitimize the original assertion of control and all the pillaging that has ensued. Localization restores power and property to community inhabitants. A localist revolution is based on the premises that the only genuinely free market is a small market and the only true democracy is a local democracy. Those premises entail a strategy: instead of ceding power and money to outsized political institutions – national parties, national and state governments – and then lobbying/voting/demonstrating to influence how they are deployed, a localist only cedes such power and money as is necessary to facilitate cooperation with other self-governing localities. Most wealth never leaves the locality in the first place; how it is to be generated and distributed is a matter for locals to determine. Political power is not delegated but directly exercised at the only level – rural township, urban neighborhood, suburban enclave – that self-governance can meaningfully be practiced.
We have seen localism in action when disaster strikes. The local response to a hurricane, flood, or earthquake is always timelier and more effective than a federal response because it is animated by feelings of empathy and mutuality. We act in our own communities because we care what happens there. Our caring guarantees that our efforts persist until real help is provided and everyone is safe. That spirit of empathy and mutuality is our best hope for dealing with all the troubles we now face, from racial injustice and poverty to climate chaos and ecocide. Street protests and reform politics have proven, time and again, completely ineffective in reversing the steady decline in the living standards of the 99% or in changing the way Black communities are policed. All the international conferences on climate change – 27 and counting – have done nothing to slow the release of carbon into the atmosphere. Just look at any photograph of those seated in the halls of these conferences – well-scrubbed technocrats and PR flacks in suits and ties duty bound to squash any proposal that might adversely affect the bottom lines of fossil fuel companies. It should be beneath our dignity to invest hope in meetings that reek so strongly of rotten intentions and hogwash.
Dignity is in short supply these days. The virtues that make it possible for anyone to feel worthy of respect – honesty, fidelity, responsibility – are on the same road to extinction that thousands of animal species now travel. Like those creatures, time-honored cultural values are losing habitat at an accelerating rate. Dishonesty, infidelity, irresponsibility are now dominant on every terrain – a “free market” economy monopolized by a handful of mega-corporations, a “democratic” government thoroughly subservient to those corporations, a culture of deception fabricated to sell what those corporations produce, an ethos of equality draped over a society notorious for its rampant inequalities. The honorable capacities cling to life in the margins, the outbacks, the shrinking niches not yet colonized by the mania for money, prestige, and dominion. They persevere in the small places that first summoned them for duty as tools of survival.
We bring no honor to ourselves when we mobilize to take back our country – an empty slogan designed to enlist us in rich people’s schemes for further enrichment. If it is real self-governance and self-determination we are about, then we must take back our local communities. We must seize, occupy, and defend real territory. To do that is to begin the hard but gratifying work of assuming responsibility for the things – bears and bees; cedars and sequoias; mountains, rivers, and plains – that we live among and that sustain us. A thousand people in the streets can bring down a mayor; a million people in a public square can bring down a government. They cannot change a social order. But it is a new way of ordering our relationships to one another and to the earth that we so desperately need. Our well-being requires a resettling of the land. And that requires an exercise of power.
Occupy the Hearth 