How We Can Keep Civil Disobedience Meaningful
The question is not if we should practice civil
disobedience, but how we can do it in ways that push the struggle
forward in effective and healthy ways.
Protester arrested by NYPD. Via @NYCRevMedia on Twitter.
Photo Credit: @nycrevmedia on Twitter
“The Tombs” is the less-than-endearing nickname for New
York City’s Central Booking, the jail you get sent to if you are
arrested in Manhattan and set to be arraigned before a judge. This
spiraling dungeon below the courthouse at 100 Centre Street is about as
ominous as it sounds. Above, the court itself is pristine and
immaculate, adorned in mahogany and full of quiet, proper, well-dressed
people. But all you have to do is open a door to the back of the
courtroom to reveal an underground complex made up of filthy jail
cells, violent correctional officers and hundreds of (mainly) poor
people (mainly) of color, awaiting their arraignment for anywhere
between 10 and 72 hours.
Everything about the Tombs is awful. It’s cold even when the weather
is warm and summery outside. The lights maintain their piercing,
head-splitting fluorescence even at night, and the bars jut out just so
you can’t lean on them comfortably. You eat stale cheese sandwiches
and drink milk, though dairy is probably the last thing you want during
a 40-hour stay in a mass cell with one toilet. You are stripped of
most things about you that make you human — your ability to manage your
own affairs, to move around, to communicate with the outside world, to
be productive, to identify yourself. And of course, as you sit there,
you realize this is only the tip of the iceberg of the kind of
repression the state is capable of, or the kind of violence it heaps on
working class communities of color every day. All the while, you are
still supposedly presumed innocent.
From occupying Liberty Square and marching in the streets without
permits, to carrying out targeted acts of direct action against the
banks that crashed the economy or the courts that auction off people’s
homes, winding up in places like this has been an integral part of the
Occupy Wall Street’s life since its birth. Yet we’re only at the very
beginning of understanding our civil disobedience — the ways in which it
grows but also shrinks the movement, the positive and negative impacts
it has on the movement’s internal culture, and the challenging but
ultimately vital role it plays in the struggle for liberation.
The whole world is watching
The mass arrests and pepper-spraying that took place in New York City
on September 24 drastically changed the course of the movement. The
NYPD dragged us kicking and screaming, in handcuffs, into the headlines.
It won sympathy and solidarity from a lot of people who were — until
then — watching from the sidelines, trying to decide if the movement was
worth supporting, identifying with and joining. The arrests on the
Brooklyn Bridge a week later did even more of that, catapulting the
movement into the national and international arena. Those events
dramatically inflated our numbers, deepened our resolve, and won us
tremendous popular support. We were unstoppable. The whole world was
watching. We were winning.
Many of us in the movement have gotten used to thinking that it’s
always a good thing to appear in the paper getting arrested in large
numbers, as long as we can practice nonviolence and come out of it
looking innocent. But there’s another side to it. What if the
politicians and bankers don’t actually care if we are in the news? What
if the NYPD doesn’t care if the violence looks like it’s their fault or
ours? Maybe to them it doesn’t matter whose fault it is, as long as
what is being communicated is that anyone who sets foot in the streets
with the Occupy movement has a good shot at ending up in the Tombs, or
worse. In fact, they might be thinking that the more people who see
those gruesome images on the cover of the
Daily News, the better.
Getting arrested is difficult for anyone, but some of us are
privileged enough to emerge from our 40 hours in the Tombs without much
damage done, feeling even more die-hard, confident that we will be
greeted and taken care of by fellow activists, friends and the National
Lawyers’ Guild. But, of course, we all have different calculations to
make –based on race, class, gender, sexual identity, educational
background, access to systems of support, family obligations and other
things — that put us in a better or worse position to take risks in the
movement. Make no mistake about it: The people most affected by the
injustices we fight have always been the backbone of any mass movement
for social change. But the consequences aren’t the same for everyone,
and people are most inclined to lay it on the line when the things at
stake are real, critical and pressing. So while the images of activists
being beaten and arrested might win sympathy, even solidarity, they
might just as well prevent many people from actively participating.
On the one hand, it’s incredibly important to be drawing connections
between Wall Street and the police, between capital and the state. When
police drag indebted students out of a bank lobby they are occupying,
or when a family is forcibly evicted from a foreclosed home so it can
be handed over to a bank, it drives home the point that the state plays
a very particular role in this economy, and vice versa. We need to
unmask that, to show the system’s nakedness, its willingness to resort
to violence to maintain order and profit. Civil disobedience is one way
to shine a spotlight on the struggles people face under systems of
oppression, the ways these systems are intertwined and the things ruling
groups do in order to protect them.
We don’t always choose when we are arrested, and we don’t always have
control over how it is depicted in the press, but we do have some
power over what kinds of battles we choose to wage and how we choose to
wage them. While the image of the police arresting protesters reveals
some things, it can obscure others. Sometimes we contribute to this
problem ourselves, for instance when we take the bait and narrow our
focus to fights over public space or the right to protest in and of
themselves. The interviews many activists give then become focused on
the abuse they suffer from violent cops and no longer about the issues
that brought us into the streets. People organize self-indulgent
actions, such as the recent march that commemorated the mass arrests on
the Brooklyn Bridge. In better moments, we respond to the violence
used on us with a broader stand against police brutality as a whole,
with an emphasis on its wildly disproportionate use on communities of
color. But even these long, fiery marches in solidarity with victims of
state violence eventually wind down and become, again, a tired
standoff with the cops themselves.
A culture of arrest
For many people inside Occupy Wall Street, getting arrested has
become a rite of passage. In a lot of ways that’s very reasonable;
getting arrested is an important educational experience for an activist
to go through. When we are arrested, we learn to take one for the team
in a disciplined way. We show solidarity toward people we don’t even
know. We experience the interconnectedness of the state and the economy,
race and class, patriarchy and violence. Most importantly, many of us —
particularly those of us who are younger and have lived relatively
privileged lives — learn about our place in the world. We learn to
explain ourselves to people who come from different backgrounds from us,
and we are reminded that we have much to learn from the life stories
of the others. We learn to shut up about how bad the sandwiches are,
because we will come out to an army of cheering friends bearing gifts of
all kinds, while many others in the Tombs will come out alone and
downtrodden, returning to their lives with a day’s less pay, while
others won’t come out for months or years. These remind us why we’re in
the struggle in the first place, and they’re all incredibly valuable
lessons.
But the culture of arrest in the movement has troubling aspects to it
as well. Although many people in the movement practice civil
disobedience without any ego and at great personal risk, it still often
contributes to a macho, largely hetero-normative dynamic that compels
people to constantly ante up, to compete for street cred or to want a
cool arrest picture to put on Facebook. What emerges is a
more-radical-than-thou culture that unconsciously but visibly elevates
those of us who carry out actions in the streets over those who maintain
the office or work in the kitchen, giving more power and recognition
in the movement to those willing to take a bust (or talk about it),
while leaving largely unrecognized the work behind the scenes that
makes all of it possible. It
also compels people to
take unnecessary risks, leading many young activists to rack up
dangerous police records in very short periods of time, with the
charges getting increasingly more serious. Let’s not forget that the
more successful we are, the more of a threat we will be, and the more
repression we will face — particularly those groups in the movement and
in society who are most threatened as it is.
In many ways, the civil disobedience we practice with our arrests has
left the realm of tactic or tool and has become an impulse, a
band-aid, a knee-jerk reaction, a way to define oneself, something to
cultivate for its own sake. But as problematic as that may be, still,
it must continue to be an integral and critical part of any resistance
movement. The question is not
if we should practice civil disobedience, but
how we can do it in ways that push the struggle forward in effective and healthy ways.
Know your enemies
Civil disobedience is a natural response to a world like ours; it
means refusing to be a bystander to the apparent trajectory of the
social order. We don’t think twice about the direct action of stopping
traffic to protect a child who wandered into it unknowingly; we would
practice civil disobedience any day in situations like that, never
thinking of standing by or waiting for a majority vote. The same is true
in our movement. We know this system is broken, we know it doesn’t
have to be this way and we know there is an alternative. So we stop
traffic. The question is not
whether we should use civil disobedience as part of our movement’s arsenal — but
how, for what and when.
Civil disobedience isn’t principally about the cops (unless it
is
about the cops, for instance, because they shot another black kid for
being black), although it clarifies the role police play to protect the
interests of the status quo. It’s not about public space in itself,
although public space is one of many tools for building a movement that
is capable of being both an alternative and a staging ground for a
struggle. Getting arrested isn’t the only way to be radical or
courageous, nor is it worthy of more praise than so much of the other
work that takes place in the movement. It is not always a winning media
strategy, and it does not always use our resources most effectively. It
should not come at the cost of continuing to develop and popularize a
variety of methods for struggle. It is not a good in itself.
Civil disobedience is a tool, one we employ to win real things and
push the struggle forward, as part of a broader strategy to transform
society. It should be thought-out and well-timed, carefully employed on a
worthy target and led by those people who are most affected. We must
practice it with vision and precision, and highlight the real issues
that brought this movement to life. We should use it to stand directly
in the way of the systems of oppression around us and those who govern
them — to block their roads and their ports, to shut down their
conferences and their conventions, to clog their banks and their
governments, to take back our schools, our workplaces and our homes. We
must use it wisely and intentionally, but fiercely and passionately. We
must make business as usual simply and utterly impossible, prying open
— bit by bit — space for the world we are creating.
Yotam
Marom is an organizer, educator, musician, and writer. He is a member
of the Organization for a Free Society, and can be reached at
Yotam.marom@gmail.com
