Looking back at the Occupy Pittsburgh commune

Ten years ago as winter came, I was sleeping in a tent, in a park between corporate skyscrapers, living some of the best days I’ve spent in Pittsburgh. Joining the revolutions known as the Arab Spring and the “movement of the squares” in Spain, Greece and elsewhere, our occupations claimed public spaces to build spontaneous, popular resistance. Their victories and sacrifices gave us hope and inspiration and soon the world saw the fire spread to the USA! Aside from my own unforgettable experiences, I believe the Occupy movement had tremendous success in many cities and in the historic world-wide movement we joined from the Steel City. Today many former Occupiers and others consider the movement to be a failure because it didn’t create a lasting institutional presence or shift, much less a revolutionary situation. While this sentiment is understandable, it’s hard to deny that successful revolutions are failures in some ways and vice versa. We can learn best by seeing all sides of social movements without making all-or-nothing judgments. Our movement was an expression of the best of the traditions of the European Left, and as a result it also revealed some of the limitations of those traditions. Here I want to celebrate some of our successes and describe certain weaknesses, as there are valuable lessons all around.

The Occupy movement represented the shift in resistance in this country from building organizations, parties, and even movements in the traditional sense into an embrace of autonomist practices. Since the 1970s, European autonomists have built numerous self-organized militant workers’ groups, squats, communes, and occupied autonomous zones, rejecting social democratic reform movements, labor union cooptation, and revolutionary vanguard parties. These movements are still a vital reality, such as in the longstanding occupations of La Zad, where rebels built a thriving community without coercive authority while successfully blocking construction of an airport in France, and in the No Tav campaign to block a destructive big-money construction project in the mountains of northwest Italy. There are also still numerous collectives and squats and where people meet their needs together while building further resistance to Power, including for example, a queer and feminist semi-squatted apartment complex with a small bar and cafe in Berlin. There are social centers, often squatted or gifted, in Copenhagen, Cologne and many other places that have created real free spaces amidst the degradation and eco-destruction of “dominator culture.” These specific examples are real manifestations of surviving autonomist movements that I was fortunate to be able to see while backpacking around before the Occupy movement began. We Occupiers were in good company.

I was able to observe an Occupy Wall St. spokescouncil assembly of working groups in November, spend time in Zucotti Park and then participate in the blocking of Wall St. on “N17” - locking arms and refusing the police orders to clear the streets. That action delayed the opening of the stock exchange for a short period of time while the police physically forced us out of the streets, showing how powerful this kind of disruption could be if it were maintained and expanded. These were some of the most exciting and inspiring days of my life, but joining the occupation in Pittsburgh in late November topped those days in New York before I made it back to the ‘Burgh.

I missed quite a bit while I was away from Pittsburgh for the first five weeks of the occupation, and I didn’t camp there for another 2 weeks while I was driving in from outside the city to attend meetings and try to meet some fellow rebels. I met some truly kind, passionate, courageous, brilliant, and hilarious people from the first time I went to the park. Another Occupier who had been camping there from the beginning welcomed me into their survival space and we are still close comrades to this day. There was still a fire in the air, even as I kept hearing about the problems that had led to many people leaving the park since the initial explosion on Oct. 15. That day over 3,000 people marched to Mellon Green and celebrated their unified resistance, with numerous people spending the night in tents and other temporary structures. Many people experienced real love in those first days, I could tell, and it was still in the air for many Occupiers. Many of us who didn’t already know anyone else who was participating made powerful friendships and alliances and at least learned a great deal from our bold experimentation.

Achievements

I want to describe several ways those of us who occupied People’s Park succeeded wildly in
creating a free communal space in the middle of a downtown area dominated by corporations and concrete. Occupy Pittsburgh was a commune in the truest sense. We shared nearly everything, from tent space in the park to the free clothes, food, basic medical care, knowledge, passion for revolutionary change, love, stories and many laughs. No one had to present any credentials or show up to assemblies or working group meetings to share in whatever resources we could gather and buy and that others would graciously give us. What some would call an occupation of a city park became so much more. It was an active, fluid and changing group of people and activities without a central committee or hierarchy of roles. We were based in a physical space but organized together through working groups and general assemblies (GAs) that didn’t have to have any connection to the camp or contain any members staying there. While our lack of specific identity and boundaries came with certain problems, the openness and radical freedom in the air was real success. For example, some organizers started offering radical teach-ins and other events as Occupy the Hood, working to ensure the influence of people of color in the movement and to build on their own in their communities.

One way to understand our achievements is to see the ways we lived without the rule of money, property and the state when it came to land, resources and activity or work. We overthrew the domination of money and authority and instead treated them like practical obstacles that we had to deal with but which were secondary in taking the lead, taking power and asserting our own authority from within, where it all originates. The park itself was treated as a commons and we lived there together without anyone or even the GA in charge of who got to move in or where. No rent, no Communist Party bureaucracy, no tax for any authority. It was the same with all of our material resources, from food to clothing to camping supplies and basic medical items, whatever the community had was shared with all who asked. An Occupier who was in the Food Working Group from the very first days assured me there were never any restrictions on who could eat, whether you had to be camping in the park, no requirement of being in a working group, no money charged - these barriers standing between people and what they need weren’t even seriously discussed. We all had a few private possessions and had to find food for ourselves for many meals, but the food donated or cooked in our massive food tent belonged to everyone and no one. The spirit of sharing and mutual aid was overflowing so triumphantly that in our limited way we realized the guiding dream and final goal of the Left - “from each according to ability, to each according to need.”

In our collective action, the working groups were an admirable example of voluntary or free association in action, which is what “from each according to ability” means to me. Instead of wages, bosses, state orders, the “nonprofit industrial complex” or a political party to submit to, we formed groups based on affinity to freely solve problems and work together. We self-organized working groups to meet basic needs, plan further action outside the park, make art, facilitate assemblies, communicate with media - really whatever we wanted to do, we could start a working group and start doing it. This platform model of open organizing was one of the deep foundations of the movement that shaped and allowed for all of the other fruits and developments.

Fulfilling these (small-c) communist principles of free creative work and the free access to basic needs allowed us to experience an unmistakably higher and more genuine degree of freedom. It’s difficult to communicate the openness and opportunity that arises in that kind of space when most of us are used to disempowered lives fulfilling roles and taking orders from bosses, cops, spouses, religions, compulsions... The real existential weight and pressure of having some autonomy in moments like these is crushing for those of us used to the depressed comfort of feeling small and powerless, but the soaring, intoxicating hope of the times was unforgettable. It seemed like we were rising up with the rest of the world and becoming invincible together. For some of us, it was the first time we felt like our words, our ideas, our actions actually mattered in shaping our collective future - we’re in the drivers’ seat for once, so what are we gonna do?!

Limitations

The elephant in the room here in the middle of my praise for the aspects of real communism that made up Occupy Pittsburgh is the obviously limited nature and lifespan of this sharing. The park occupation lasted as a little microcosm of transformation for nearly four months and was certainly a temporary commune, though some of us continued organizing under the Occupy banner for some time after the eviction. We did de-commodify the living space, the food and other supplies we had, as well as our work, however we were still dependent on the global extraction economy for our jobs and sources of goods. We didn’t have enough or consistent supplies of basic necessities to be self-sufficient. We were far from sharing all of our individual money with the whole, which was natural considering the loose ties and commitments most of us had to each other. Our occupation didn’t have access to the means of survival - our voluntary association and “unalienated labor” was not occupying or controlling the fields or factories that make the goods we need.

The slogan “we are the 99%!” encapsulates the power of the movement’s “common denominator” radical critique and also the hard limits of the Left and the urgent need to go beyond its proud but fundamentally flawed legacy. As many pointed out at the time, the bottom 99% of our society contains numerous divisions between people benefitting and oppressed through gender, race, colonization, class and more. However, for those of us steeped in the false universalism of Leftist ideologies and our civilization in general, this illusion didn’t die easily. As many of us only later realized, the land we proudly occupied in rebellion was in fact the land of various Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) peoples, as well as the Shawnee, Lenape and other nations until our colonizing British and French forefathers began the colonial occupation in the 1700s. Looking back from the lens of colonization, our occupation on top of the settler occupation showed the strengths as well as the limits of unconsciously imperialist Leftism.

When indigenous communities and their allies in Oakland, Albuquerque, Boston, Seattle and elsewhere pushed to change the name and focus of the movement from Occupy to Decolonize, they faced resistance and were generally unsuccessful. Eventually, one working group from Occupy Oakland split off and called itself Decolonize Oakland, but the group seems to have left little trace. Some anarchist people of color in Oakland apparently opposed the change of names because they didn’t trust the white people they saw advocating it and associated them with reformist non-violent activists who actually weren’t willing to take the revolutionary action necessary for decolonization today. Other excellent anarchist writers have failed to place any importance whatsoever on this effort within the Occupy movement or the need to shift anarchist strategies around the reality of colonization.

Meanwhile, the issues surrounding direct democracy, the general assemblies and consensus decision-making have received a huge amount of criticism. Many excellent critiques of the importance and authority Occupiers gave to the general assemblies, such as Crimethinc.’s book From Democracy to Freedom, spell out powerful historical lessons against creating new institutions to rule each other. I share their opposition to creating new sources of coercive authority within our movements and have learned from their sharp analysis. However, I would argue alongside these critics that the assemblies were genuinely self-created gatherings with decision-making processes that allowed for the flexibility for people actively to limit their power and ability to block action. The GAs were not rigid power structures using violence to defend their decisions - we were able to shape exactly what they were and meant to us.

The main focus of my activity in working groups was in the Facilitation Working Group. Our group was extremely vital and aside from organizing the GAs, we discussed their scope and authority, the need for discussion-only assemblies, power dynamics, emotional needs and so on. We were in the process of trying out and implementing different ways to facilitate the revolutionary energy we were part of when the BNY sued to have us removed. The flux in membership and other chaos that resulted prevented us from being able to continue the creative experimentation but the power was ours. It was constituent power in the way Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt describe and call for - we were constituting the institutions so directly in a continuous process of collective self-determination that there was no way for a “reified” institution to become its own power to take on a life of its own and act against us. Anyone could propose whatever they chose in the GAs and a near-majority would decide it; when people stopped attending the GAs, we stopped facilitating them and that was the end.

We don’t have to share the rest of Hardt and Negri’s vision to distinguish these two kinds of institutions. Sometimes movements require coordinated action - especially to share resources - and it can be limiting to see all structures and decision-making bodies as political and thus oppressive, separated, and unnecessary. Against the system’s Politics, we were practicing “our politics” in and out of the GAs - including those who publicly called out the real problems and risks of the GA and often withdrew their participation and respect. It was a little bit of power in an oasis in the middle of a desert, but it was in our hands.

The end of the commune

Of course, the systems that we were organizing against were organizing together to stop us. Though even the limited documents that have been released are heavily redacted, the FBI was working to some degree with local authorities and corporate security firms to share information, and most likely plan the suppression of the movement. When the encampment at People’s Park was threatened legally with an “injunction” - forced removal from the space - the response revealed a weak point in our approach to the threat at hand. Dozens of people camping in the park moved out and many others put a great deal of energy into the legal battle to defend our right to be in the park. Some devoted themselves to strategizing about resisting police removal or finding a new place to camp – both were discussed but not nearly as much as the legal fight. The legal fight escalated our internal policing within the camp. From the time I got to the park, there were signs made by Occupiers, reading “no drugs or alcohol,” enforcing those and other rules that BNY Mellon strongly requested. I remember some intense conflicts and angry accusations of breaking rules that BNY might use as grounds to remove us.

We followed their rules pragmatically in order to try to protect the occupation, but we risked losing sight of our own goals and the possibilities of adapting to outside pressures on our own terms. Some of the vitality of camp life was drained in this way in the two months I spent there. The shaky morale, cold weather and shrinking numbers and support from outside the camp also contributed to the decline. By the second week of February, we had lost the court case and the few dozen of us still staying in People’s Park were ready to move on and keep building the movement in some other location and through the working groups. We packed up and held a victory parade to leave the park with our heads held high and without playing into ritualized, media-seeking arrests and police violence.

At our best, Occupy Pittsburgh provided many of our own needs, self-organized and shared food, clothing, medical assistance, published our own newspaper, organized spontaneous and planned disruptions, marches and occupations, organized teach-ins and discussions, acoustic jam sessions and on and on. One committed former Occupy working group has continued to publish the excellent newsletter Occupy Pittsburgh Now year after year, shining light on stories hidden by the government and ignored by local media. There was a tremendous flourishing of creativity that I came to participate in before the decline and the finale. At our worst, we legislated over a park that we had declared liberated, demeaned our own efforts and valued our appearance in the media, in court, and to the law more than our own health and autonomy. Many of us declared that the politicians were only relevant as far as the repressive damage they can do against us – that we had any authority you could call authentic or legitimate. The police wage war on the streets to enforce the laws of money and coercive imperial US authority. The true authority lies within each of us and especially in clusters of individuals who find affinity and act together without permission, against our own despair and isolation.

Looking back, I want to emphasize two limitations of the Occupy movement. The efforts in some cities to shift the focus from occupation to decolonization highlighted a major weakness and blindspot of most of the white Left. Since that winter, some of us have taken years to begin coming to grips with our role here as settlers and figuring out how to stop participating in occupying the land of other peoples. The direct action campaigns against the Dakota Access Pipeline and Line 3 and other courageous efforts since Occupy show an encouraging shift towards solidarity with indigenous struggles. The other crucial limitation was in the modest scale of our capacities. For all our sharing, it was still “consumption communism” - we depended on our own jobs within the labor market and many donations from others, lacking the means of production or survival, which ultimately means the land and the ecosystems we rely upon. We weren’t part of a mass movement of workplace and land takeovers that could seize at least some of the means of production and coordinate to create and share what we need on a mass scale. We didn’t have the momentum to find a new space to occupy after the eviction.

Despite our many faults, we brought some magic to that mostly unnoticed little “urban green space” that people crossed in a hurry on their way to work or lunch. We helped each other survive and while this was necessary for any other organizing, meeting our needs together was itself the movement, the change, the means and revolutionary form of organization right there in all its muddy, cold, autonomous glory. The successes of the Occupy movement were not in providing recruits for any political party or organization or in any specific action or campaign we initiated. The victory was in living, sharing, falling in love and having a place and a platform to try to build a future we want to pass down to our children.

“Communes come into being when people find each other, get on with each other, and decide on a common path. The commune is perhaps what gets decided at the very moment when we would normally part ways. It’s the joy of an encounter that survives its expected end. It’s what makes us say “we,” and makes that an event. What’s strange isn’t that people who are attuned to each other form communes, but that they remain separated. Why shouldn’t communes proliferate everywhere? In every factory, every street, every village, every school. At long last, the reign of the base committees! Communes that accept being what they are, where they are. And if possible, a multiplicity of communes that will displace the institutions of society: family, school, union, sports club, etc. Communes that aren’t afraid, beyond their specifically political activities, to organize themselves for the material and moral survival of each of their members and of all those around them who remain adrift.” -The Coming Insurrection by the Invisible Committee

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