progress notes

• 2013-02-06

  Interview with Chepe Pt. V

  L: So, what do you do for money, to, you know, feed yourself?

  
  C: I’d like to give a bit of backstory, I’m really into intersectional feminism and that kind of shit. You know, my parents were working class, so I was raised poor, and then my parents in the 90’s were middle class - my mother made it into academia, my Papa went from working in the factories to being a union organizer - so you know, we still have some struggles but we’re doing better. My mother’s still a woman in academia, so you know… there are still realities. And then, as an adult, I was always more politically and socially engaged, and then I realized how you have to grow up and live in this society to some degree - as a form of self-care. You need to have a certain level of comfort so you can be politically active for the rest of your life, rather than being really politically active in the short term. 

  L: So did you get burnt out?
  
  C: No, I mean what happened was partly I got physical injuries, partly I got a criminal background, and so I couldn’t get employment. I spent years getting part time jobs, temporary jobs, mostly under the table, desperately looking. I applied to thousands of jobs that rejected me. This co-op is not a small deal to me. There’s a real emotional gravity to this place for me, because I just… I toiled for a long fucking time. I was involuntarily homeless for four and a half years. I tried to work my way out of it. I gave up where I was living and I came back to New York. I went back to school - because I had a full scholarship but I didn’t finish it the first time. So since I’ve been back in New York - it’s an expensive city - I’ve just worked as many temp and part-time jobs as possible. I try to find as much paying work as I can, and I will drop most political work, because I don’t have a lot of choices. I can only go to dinner at my parent’s place so many times. So now I work about two or three jobs. I dogsit, I used to work moving, but then I got injuries, I work as an assistant for a little old man in the city, I do temp work for a non-profit on Wall Street… and now, I’m in a worker’s co-op where the intention is to pay ourselves a living wage. It has meant more than a thousand hours of mine… and we pay ourselves five bucks a day. Seven to twelve hour days. That’s about how much it costs to take the subway here and back. I don’t like the word ‘precariate’, I think it’s too scholarly, but like, you know, it’s fucking rough. It has a huge impact on me, it hits me hard. The sense of labour, even if this fails and we don’t even get a minimum wage out of this, the sense that I’ve engaged in labour, and that I’ve learned through it, has been incredibly important. There’s a certain dignity to labour. And, we’re all developing our skills together. Plus, it’s direct democracy; I really am a firm believer in that… I grew up in the counter-globalization movement, the anti-police and anti-prisons movements, the immigrant movement and lots of other movements that use consensus models of participatory democracy and direct democracy, so this is a different experiment in it.

• 2013-01-29

  Interview with Chepe Pt. IV

  L: When you were talking about the “niche”, you used the metaphor of the city - you spoke about a little community, a physical community. The one thing that came out in Occupy Montreal was that, if nothing else, if we couldn’t come together on any other point, we were all pissed off that there was no public space for gathering. So it became a sort of “right to the city” discussion. So, thinking about the political city, and filling niches in a community, how much does living in Brooklyn play into your organizing/educational work?

  C: One quick point, on the question of the commons and the privatizing of the commons, that was one thing I was asked often… “what is the central focus of Occupy?” and I had my little theory of the pillars, of what kept us together, and I completely agree, that was one of the three or four that I always brought up. So, about where I live. I think we’re a transient generation, and there have been transient generations in the past. The transient people that moved from the countryside to the cities, that moved along with migrations west-ward, or south in some countries, that moved with industry… so we’re not the first transient generation, but we may be the most. With cell phones, you can be in two places at once, with planes and everything else. So it’s a very complicated question. We have to be politically involved in a different kind of way. We have to understand our social struggles in a different kind of way. I left NYC for another part of the country, and when I was a kid we moved around a lot, so I had a sense of being transient. At the same time, I live in a neighbourhood where my entire family lives, my parents, my brother, my baby nephew, aunt uncle and cousins… I moved away from it but I returned there, and it’s very much my home, it’s a real place to me. So when I meet these activists or others who come from outside New York, or are very transient and have no roots, and their head is completely in the clouds about various political and social movements, there’s a certain level of resentment that a ‘townie’ gets. So the political work that I would do, I would like to think, would be far superior if I stayed in the same place. It would be more powerful, in a local area, to be able to build a real community of resistance. One that was capable of fighting for unions, one that was capable of being feminist and fighting for LGBTQ struggles, fighting racism, fighting imperialism, being anti-military… you know, I’ve been a part of building that kind of thing in lots of communities, but the reality is that being a part of this transient generation has kept me from that.
  
  L: So the neighbourliness is a big part of it then, you think?
  
  C: Incredibly important. I’ve done a lot of anti-police organizing. It’s one of the main thoroughfares of my adult life, and the best anti-police organizing is done by someone who lives in the same precinct, and has plans to stay in that precinct, and is willing to take the risks of police harassment and violence that is equal to anybody in the community that they are asking to join them. If I have the capacity to uproot myself and just move to another neighbourhood, or if I create a copwatch program in a neighbourhood that I don’t live in… I’m not going to the bodega and getting harassed by the cops. So it’s incredibly important. These aren’t the kids, the youth in my neighbourhood who are being harassed because they’re coming to my Know Your Rights trainings, and cops know that. There’s a need for people who are transient to learn and then to go back to where they’re from, to go back and build. At the same time you’ve got a city like New York, the complete other side of it, which is the media center, the globalized city, it’s the city that more people are gonna be coming through…
  
  L: The center of the empire!
  
  C: Right? It is the belly of the beast. So the other question is, how do we engage in media production? Because we happen to live here, we happen to have the resources, how do we help build up the actions in Chicago and Minneapolis, Idle No More, places that are not in the media centers, how can we help build them up? How do we use our infrastructure to help people who don’t live in this center, who don’t have a million designers on hand, that don’t have a million videographers on hand, that don’t have all these studios and non-profits on hand…

• 2013-01-26

  Interview with Chepe Pt. III

  C: I don’t have the technical aptitude for [anonymizing online communications], and the feds have visited me, I’ve gotten in trouble with various other governments, I don’t do drugs that are illegal, I don’t do illegal things online, I don’t engage in petty theft, because frankly - somebody else can do that.

  
  L: It’s not worth the risk.

  
  C: Yeah, I’ve got far too much attention on me and I’ve got plenty of work that I’m good at that is perfectly lawful. So, that’s all to say that if even if I had risky things to do online, I wouldn’t know how to do it, and even if I knew how to do it, I probably would stay away from it because I’ve got enough other work to do. But, I will support my comrade whether or not he’s guilty, and I will support anyone else who engages in that kind of stuff. 

  
  L: Who do you service here? Who are your clients?

  
  C: Well yeah, let me get back to that story. One of the reasons we decided to do a print shop, we were trying to say: “What’s a niche that OWS has to fill? We looked to ethnic and immigrant communities, How do you create things that everybody in the community needs - the bodega, the grocery store, the barbershop, the bar, the public transit system… so how does a community, or how does a movement, create something that’s self-sustaining? Well, what did they have to do, they had to print things constantly, and they were going to Staples and Kinkos, the big corporate companies because they were always open, they could do everything, but they were really expensive. So, I don’t think anyone who created this idea of a print shop co-op were thinking, this is their passion in life, but it has increasingly become one for us. We did think, this is a niche we can fill. So when we first started, we got loans from The Working World, which did the incubation stuff in Argentina and Nicaragua. But we needed customers so we could pay the loans back - the loans were no-interest, right, like amazing! And they won’t collect on the loans if the thing doesn’t succeed. But still, we needed customers. So for the first couple months, we got two thousand dollars a week in production, working a lot for OWS. But we undercharged, we lost a lot of money on that. We were able to pay the debt but we didn’t pay ourselves because we paid the debt too fast. We made constant mistakes. But, you know, we had a ready, huge customer. Initially we were six but it whittled down to four and now we’re six again. The dream is for it to be twenty or so. We moved from OWS into other movement and activist, socially oriented  customers, and we moved as quickly as we could into non-political stuff. So, we did a boxing match, we did promotion for a boxing match, two major ones actually. We’ll take almost any job. We’ve done electoral campaigns even though almost everyone in the shop is an anarchist, and I’m a, you know, black leaning red. So the idea is that we get lots of commercial jobs, that we up the price on, we get as many movement jobs as possible that we drop the price on. We’ve done three, four thousand dollars worth of printing for Occupy Sandy. A lot of us were active with the Sandy relief stuff. And we also want to self-publish. We have, and we will continue to push our own art and literature and various other wares. And some of that will be done for free, to send to people in the middle of nowhere who want literature, who want to start a little table at shows or something like that. Some of that is gonna be for sale too. Diversify your jobs, it’s the reality. You know what Rosa Luxembourg says about co-ops? She says, “Small unit of socialist production, within capitalist exchange.” So it’s not the solution. But within a wider context of a larger radical movement it works, it’s great. Co-ops were terrible in the Russian revolution, and in the Paris Commune they were good. There are different models from history that we can look to. Go Paris Commune!

• 2013-01-21

  

  anarcho-queer:

  This one is for Obama.

  Source: anarcho-queer

• 2013-01-20

  Interview with Chepe Pt. II : The Professional Revolutionaries

  C: On the other hand, I disparage the word “activist”, I don’t like the word - it’s true for me, it’s completely true for me - but I don’t like the word. I think there are hundreds of other words that are great. Sometimes I’m an “organizer” sometimes I’m an “agitator”, sometimes I’m a “theorist” or a Gramscian intellectual. Sometimes I’m a “militant”… there’s a myriad of things. And I think some of them don’t create walls between “the activists” and the complacent majority or whatever. 

  L: So the word ‘activist’ is not one you would choose for yourself?

  C: Well, I used it a lot more when I was younger, I came to rebel against it. I saw its continued usage as class-privileged, and it creating a wall between “us” and the rest of civil society. Obviously anybody who’s got radical politics, what we want is to generalize the struggle. They want everyone to be wearing a red square, you know?

  L: Yeah, absolutely, the red square was huge for us in Montreal. And how much work do you have to do on a regular basis, educating people? How comfortable are you with that role?

  C: Well, because I was raised in a radical household, I engage in fairly unfocused kind of political work. I’ve done tons of things - jack of all trades, master of none you know. But a lot of that is educational agitation. Right now I’m in this co-op, and eventually we will do skill shares with the actual means of production - the offset - for radicals, working class and poor people all across Brooklyn, so they can come in and learn how to use our machines and shit. We also talk to people frequently - are you interested in getting a job? or are you “entrepreneurial” ? Workers co-ops are a partial solution. But what a co-op means, and here’s an example of what I do, it means that you work together in an enclosed space that doesn’t allow me to get out into the world. I have to get jobs so that we can pay the bills, but the reality is that there’s a degree of commitment that doesn’t allow you to be on the street constantly. I prefer education. I always wanted to be a teacher and a journalist, so I’ve done a little bit of that. But I do tons of workshops and trainings, particularly around legal rights questions, but I also do civil disobedience trainings, direct action trainings, and I can do political education trainings as well, around questions of consensus, direct democracy etc. I like that stuff. Here in the print shop, we can print massive amounts of literature, and some of that literature, I’m writing. Some of it is written by people who would never otherwise have the chance to be published. We can put that out into the world. So yeah I think it’s incredibly important, via media, social media, the printed word… which we are damn well not gonna let die! 

  L: It won’t die! People are reading more than ever.

  C: I really hope they are. But yeah they’re reading online! It’s killing me. And also, you know, agitation in the community. So I do “Know Your Rights” trainings for people who are predominantly middle class. And I do it in Flatbush and East New York and I do it in Crown Heights for working class black people. and I do a completely different Know Your Rights training for both. Because it’s not the same. It can’t be the same. It’s incredible that I’m able to do that, that I’m allowed to do that, that people will bring me in to do that and be comfortable listening to me, and I think that’s incredibly important. You can’t generalize resistance unless we are constantly working on “Each one Teach one” - working with what we have, offering it up and learning, developing. 

  L: So this leads me into another question, which is, how do you use the internet? What do you use it for predominantly? Do you use any anonymizing tools?

  C: I was quoted in 2002 in the Chicago Tribune saying that “email is all very well and good but the only way to get people to organize is to do it person to person” go on the street, door-to-door, go to class rooms and stuff. And I still firmly believe that. The majority of educational, agitational organizing work is face to face. I’m not a huge fan of keyboard activism. But, that said, the internet provides one way to communicate across countries, and in cities when people can’t constantly have meetings. I also use it for this co-op that we’re doing for promotion. I write articles occasionally for little websites. And I am used a lot for social media. So I have different access points on twitter… like two dozen OWS-related, and sometimes unrelated, lefty twitter accounts.And some Facebook ones. I use that shit a lot. People think I’m good at it. Sometimes I think I’m OK at it. 

  L: What does it mean to be “good at it” ?

  C: I think it means ‘growing’ it, you know, like growing your follower base. Some of this corporate marketing… it’s all about numbers and density… but there’s a degree to which that’s a reality. Just like there’s a reality, we have to pay the bills in this co-op, you need to grow your base, and you need to grow it in reasonable locations. To me the most important part about using social media, or any online media, is when I show up to an event and hear “Hey, how’d you find out about this, why are you here?” and they say, “I saw it on twitter!” Shit works! We have the capacity for a much more global, international movements at a faster rate. We were doing solidarity actions for Nigeria during their general strike because we were able to find that shit easily on Facebook and Twitter, and there’s a Nigerian community here, we started working with them. Similarly with other solidarity events we’ve done. It allows for more internationalizing, and it allows people to actually do things and that’s the hope, that people are actually active because they see something on there and actually come out and do it. I mean, I have made fun of online petitions pretty mercilessly, but the idea is that we actually get people out into the streets, or we get them thinking about collectives. And, we can get them thinking about theory that allows them to engage in practice better. I think theory is important for everybody. It’s not just important for the literate or just for the illiterate. Not just for academics or people with privilege. It’s for everyone. So media is a good way to popularize it, make it a little bit more populist.
  
  Pt. III here!

• 2013-01-19

  Reform by riot:

  “a division of labour by which a kid in a hoodie goes to prison for two years and a man in a suit gains sudden acceptance of his liberal reform plans”

• 2013-01-18

  Interview with Chepe Pt. I

  I met this guy at a meeting of Tidal  in NYC recently. He works at an OWS-affiliated co-op print shop in Brooklyn. I feel very lucky to have gotten this interview, his is a great story. Enjoy.

  C: So, basically, if I can just give you the short synopsis of this, when Occupy Wall Street [OWS] started there were lots of working groups, some of them were ones that helped the park function, others were ones that were politically based, and one of the ones that was politically based was the alternative economics working group. And I was in a little affinity group that started in the park, with one of the only people that I knew before the park, and the rest were friends we made. And two of them - one of them came from Indiana ‘cause he saw a post on reddit - a former factory worker working in Texas at the time - and the other one was this Texas, chicano anarchist. So we were in this affinity group and they were in this alternative economics working group, and after the first meeting they said “it was amazing!” And then the second meeting they come back and say “It was terrible!” So, after that, a workers co-operative working group came, and we said, we wanna make a worker’s co-operative. And I mean - the energy - you probably know from the red square movement [Quebec Student Strike] -

  L: yeah I was at occupy montreal too, and during those first couple weeks it was intense - there were a lot of connections being made. Not all of them lasted of course - although this one obviously has. I just want to describe what’s in this office: there’s a printing press, a button maker, two offset presses - 

  C: There’s a lot of button makers, but that’s the di-cut press, which is used to cut lots of paper. This is a guillotine cutter - soon we’ll have a much better cutter, we’re merging with another radical, one-man-print shop - uh, we have two laser printers, a copier, a wide-format for posters and printing, and then that’s our plate-maker for the offset. Mostly everything you see on the wall that’s not newsprint, we did. 

  L: Amazing. So it’s been just over a year that you folks have been here?

  C:  Yeah, we’re thirteen months old. So basically, the worker’s co-op group is meeting, and I’m peripherally involved. Occasionally my affinity group will have to pause our meetings because some of our members will then be on the phone with the people in the worker’s co-op. And we supported them trying to ask for money from OWS General Fund, which was… I hated the General Fund. I thought they shouldn’t exist.  And the fact that it existed meant that it should have been used - spent as quickly as possible so that people couldn’t fight over it. So, the General Assembly [GA] agreed to put the money towards this co-op, but the money stalled for a bit… we got it after a fight, three months later. We made sure everybody knew that we were coming back for the money we had asked for, that the GA has supported. Anyway, I don’t wanna spread the drama too much unless there’s lessons to be learned. 

  L: There are always lessons to be learned. But we won’t dwell on that. I’m more interested in what kinds of people go into activism and keep it up. What it’s meant for their personal lives, so on. When would you say you first began considering yourself an “activist”?

  C: So, on the one hand, I’m a red-diaper baby. My parents were in a Marxist-Leninist-Maoists group. So, they were involved in strikes, labour solidarity stuff. My mother was working on her grad degree in philosophy. So we grew up with a lot of theory. We grew up with massive amounts of pamphlets, and interesting radical people coming through our home, and being on picket lines. We also grew up with my Papa, who was a factory worker and a taxi driver. My mama was dirt poor but working on her grad program. She was a Latina in a field of white men. And, my mother’s from Panama, so when I was a kid, the Unites States invaded Panama. It was the one opportunity I had in my life that I ever got to see my grandfather - we had already booked the tickets - and so we went. In the midst of a war. To be on the other side. I was a child thrown  in on the other side. So when I construct my personal narrative that’s… my understanding of how I came to be who I am. We really were raised to be critical thinkers. We were raised with lots of different perspectives. And of course, when you’re a kid, me and my brother, we expanded on the things our parents are thinking, we we hopefully developed as well, and learned from their mistakes. And we got to see it, we got to physically see what it’s like to be poor and working class. And to see what it’s like to deal with empire. What it’s like for my mother to deal with the patriarchy in academia and in other circles. So, I was born and raised in radical struggle. I’m interested in what I call “radical genesis” stories, I’m really interested in other people’s stories, because my story is: this is all I’ve ever known, this is all I will ever know , I had no choice in this matter, and I am perfectly happy with it. 
  
  CLICK FOR PART TWO 

• 2012-12-05

  Subtle Pretension: "On the Risk of a New Relationality:" An Interview with Lauren Berlant and Michael Hardt

  subtlepretension:

  In May 2011, we sat down with Lauren Berlant and Michael Hardt to ask them about their use of love as a political concept. They each use the idiom of love to disrupt political discourse, as a means of thinking through non-sovereign social and subjective formations. Love, for both these thinkers,…

  Source: reviewsinculture.com

• 2012-11-14

  

  pieto:

  The greatest difficulty confronting groups that seek to create a new type of revolutionary organization is that of establishing new types of human relationships within the organization itself. The forces of the society exert an omnipresent pressure against such an effort. But unless this is accomplished, by methods yet to be experimented with, we will never be able to escape from specialized politics. The demand for participation on the part of everyone often degenerates into a mere abstract ideal, when in fact it is an absolute practical necessity for a really new organization and for the organization of a really new society. Even if militants are no longer mere underlings carrying out the decisions made by masters of the organization, they still risk being reduced to the role of spectators of those among them who are the most qualified in politics conceived as a specialization; and in this way the passivity relation of the old world is reproduced.

  Internationale Situationniste #6 (August 1961)

  (via lolabc)

  Source: pieto

• 2012-10-01

  S17 OWS

  New York - Occupy Wall Street

  September 15th-18th 2012

  For some reason, I always spend the first 12 hours after arriving in NYC the same way: tired, pissed off and buzzed on bad coffee. Last weekend was no exception as my bus pulled in at 1:30AM and deposited me in the brightly-lit, swirling centre of capital.
  
  
  Nothing triggers my misanthropy quicker than seeing people “go shopping”, and nowhere are people more prone to “going shopping” than downtown NYC. By the time I had navigated the fetid, rat-infested subway line to my friend’s place in Brooklyn, I was ready to burn Manhattan down. I slept for six hours and headed out again, my mood only marginally improved by an artisanally crafted, yet sadly watery americano and a quick flirtation with the skinny, mustachioed, heavily-tattooed barista. Brooklyn, baby! It struck me on the ride to Canal St. that these feelings of despair, hatred, discomfort and worthlessness are so intimately tied up in the quotidian life here that no one even bothers to point them out any more. So I was, in fact, being quite gauche by complaining. The struggle continues regardless. Suck it up etc. 

  My purpose in going to NYC was  to participate in the one-year anniversary celebrations of Occupy Wall Street. Ever since September 17th last year, I had been variously camping, debating, attending lectures and demonstrations, organizing, studying and hosting in the name of this amorphous movement. You could say that OWS ‘radicalized’ me. I thought of this anniversary celebration as both an opportunity to collectively demonstrate the continued strength of anti-capitalist/anti-neoliberal sentiment in North America, and as a personal milestone, a moment for reflection on what I have learnt and how I have grown as a citizen and as a human. As soon as I got to the Town Square celebration at Thomas Paine Park, I could see that many others shared this double motivation

  

  There were politics and soul-searching in equal measure; an abundance of artistic and personal expressions of OWS’s impact side-by-side with tactical planning committees, union and political organizers, prominent intellectuals etc. 

  

  There was a stage set up at one end of the plaza, and in keeping with the day’s theme of “Celebration”, musicians and comedians were rousing the crowd with chants, rants and tunes. Jello Biafra MC’d which was pretty entertaining.

  

  At one point, someone took the mic to announce a walking tour of the Financial District in preparation for - what I considered the ‘real’ point of all this - tomorrow’s direct actions. Naturally I tagged along, and I’m so glad that I did. In those ninety minutes, I learned more about economics, activism, and urban warfare than I had in one month of Quebec student strike actions. The tour began with a run-down of the plan for S17, which was brilliant in its simplicity and faithfulness to the nature of OWS: the entire Financial district was separated into four zones designated “Education”, “Debt”, “Eco” and “99%” respectively. Folks were encouraged to form affinity groups according to whichever ‘zone’ they identified with, and carry out spontaneous disruptive actions in those regions. 

  I have to emphasize how perfectly deadly this plan was: even if the cops knew the plan, (which they did, because it was posted all over the web and on thousands of pamphlets), there would be no way of knowing who, or where, the targets would be. It is a fantastic strategy, merely providing a structure for individuals or groups of provocateurs that allows them to decide what to do. It allows for tactics to be cohesive yet open, adaptable and impossible to infiltrate ahead of time. 

  All this was explained while we walked along Broadway, towards Wall Street. Our guide shared some simple tricks for directing a large group through NYC streets - hand signals, pacing and attentiveness to traffic lights being the most important. Within two minutes, we had acquired a police escort of two on motor scooters and three on foot. This caused some indignation and tension at first - after all, we were just on a walking tour! - but our guide kept his sense of humour, mentioning that he didn’t want to get arrested yet so we better be careful not to jaywalk.
  
  
  We passed by significant buildings - banks, investment firms, political offices - making note of the ground layout, the number of doors, the nearby access to streets and subways and other spatial features that might come in handy for flash mobs or human blockades in case they need to, say, escape the cops. This exercise gave me a heightened awareness of my surroundings for the remainder of the day. I felt like a soldier, looking out for trenches, pillars, weak spots, traps and so on. The other people on the tour included just as many grey-haired ladies as bare-footed Vermont boys. We were all fascinated by the tidbits imparted, like Did You Know? Wall Street is so-called because it actually literally used to be a wall, built by the Dutch to keep Native Americans out, and protect the slave trading that was going on down by the water from infiltration by the British. 

  We wound our way through the majority of Manhattan’s vertex, mentally mapping the locations of certain corporate headquarters and hearing anecdotes about the successes and failures of sit-ins and other disruptive actions past. I recalled N17 last year, where hundreds of folks converged on the narrow streets surrounding the NYSE, and were met with military-level resistance from riot cops and horses. We were cornered several times. We quickly realized the importance of moving in small, highly-communicative groups. This way, we kept the police force dispersed, and were able to clog up checkpoints, block intersections and generally disrupt flow for most of the day. Our guide reiterated these points, and reminded us that if our goal is to block capital, then the police are our best allies: by filling downtown with their vehicles and blockades, they were doing most of the work for us. Good point. It was an excellent pep-talk for tomorrow. We were going to shut the whole district down this way.

  

  The tour ended at Zucotti park, with a brief primer in legal rights and what happens after you are arrested. I left feeling inspired and a bit terrified: so this is how you do it. Knowing that, as a Canadian, getting arrested in the USA was not a good option for me, I was nonetheless eager to join an affinity group and throw my body in front of some moving capital. Maybe I could line up for an ID check with all the other Wall Street employees, and slow the process down by not having sufficient ID? Maybe I could help stop traffic at strategic intersections? Maybe just a flash mob at the Merril Lynch building? My head was spinning and my feet were sore, so I met up with a friend and we went in search of food. 

  The rest of the day I spent exploring New York and observing the flow of human, material and virtual capital. I didn’t have much energy left for the dinner party my friends had planned, but I made it through fine enough. My misanthropy had been sublimated into something only marginally more appropriate for a dinner party:  unflinching realism. That is, I played the familiar role of the downer. Every chance I got to mention how the neo-liberal establishment perverts true value, I tackled with panache. It was probably really depressing. I was on a higher plane.

  The next morning, even though I set my alarm for 6am, I opted to sleep in. It was a decision that I have mixed feelings about. On one hand, I wasn’t able to participate in the direct actions that we had all been looking forward to so much, and I felt very guilty about that. On the other hand, I knew that getting arrested was not really an option for me as a foreign visitor to the US, and having seen what kind of force the NYPD is willing to exert in the face of civil disobedience - especially the horrifying reports of harassment and sexual abuse towards female arrestees - I didn’t think being in the vicinity of Wall Street was a wise choice after all. Besides, I wanted to save my energy for the rest of the day’s activities. 

  Now is a good time to address the phenomenon we might call “activist guilt” - that feeling I experienced by not participating in the demonstrations, a feeling familiar to any ostensible activist who finds a way to avoid demonstrations, meetings or other crucial events. I want to say: don’t feel guilty. But what I really mean is: shape up or ship out. Either you do what you say you will, or don’t bother. If you commit to organizing or participating in something, fucking DO IT And if you can’t commit, for whatever reason, don’t waste your time feeling guilty. It’s OK, we can’t all have endless energy for what is essentially a very long, drawn out war consisting of 90% losing battles. Some people seem to manage to ‘do it all’, and thank god for them. But if you are not one of those people, don’t pretend that you are. Remember: the revolution is a mass movement. You are one of the masses. Do what you can, and don’t feel bad about not doing more. Guilt is an unproductive feeling. Even worse, it is disempowering - it causes insecurity and uncertainty.