September 20 2026 Anniversary of Occupy Wall Street

Let us celebrate and bear forward into the future the glorious hope of a free society of equals which has been renewed for us all in the Occupy movement which began this week in 2011 as Occupy Wall Street.

Why do we need leaders, rulers, masters? If we begin with the premises that no one is better than any other by reason of birth, and that the subjugation of some of us by others is always unjust, there is no justification for elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, nor for hierarchies of membership and exclusionary otherness, nor identitarian divisions and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil which weaponize fear and hate in service to power, nor for the centralization of authority and power in the carceral state and its use of force and control by those who would enslave us.

Are humans good or bad by nature?

I believe that humans are primarily social constructions wherein our uniqueness is an unfolding of historical processes and the struggle to become human versus systems of oppression, that our souls are ephemera among a sea of universal being in ceaseless processes of change, and that the negative emotions such as grief are a biosocial tax on individuals whose purpose is to drive us together to meet threats collectively and distribute the costs of survival, that we are mutually interdependent and therefore by our nature each of us is our brothers keeper.

I do not believe in the theory of the innate depravity of man which is the basis of all law, derived from the doctrine of original sin, that without the restraining force of law we become degraded to a subhuman state driven by barbarian atavisms of instinct and the most ruthless becomes king. Nor is this a desirable or just end; for authority maximizes disparity and inevitably collapses, as our civilization did in World War One and is now falling and being recreated.

There is no good or evil in the universe, not as universal principles by which real things exist, for these are human words, and require human acts to make them real.

When I hear the word good, I wonder; Good for who?

Masters are superfluous to the needs of the slaves who do the work; let us be done with them, and with their carceral states of police, prisons, borders, and laws; with the tyranny of other peoples ideas of virtue, the authorization of identities, the limits of normality, and the boundaries of the Forbidden. Let us renounce the use of social force and the praxis of law and order, for law serves power and order appropriates both power and freedom.

Order appropriates; Chaos autonomizes. As Guillermo del Toro wrote in Carnival Row; “Who is chaos good for? Chaos is good for us. Chaos is the great hope of the powerless.”

There is no just authority; it is nothing but a con game. Patriarchy, racism, and capitalism are a harmony of elite power which serves no interests but its own, and its lies and illusions are songs of enslavement, falsification, commodification, and dehumanization. As Dorothy spoke truth to the Wizard, “You’re just an old humbug.” Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain; he is lying, for he is the enemy, and everything the enemy says is a lie.

In the words of Max Stirner; “Freedom cannot be granted; it must be seized.” As we reach toward the future possibilities of becoming human and a free society of equals, let us begin as we intend to end and achieve our vision of liberty and equality by practicing it in all that we do.

As written by Andrew Anthony in The Guardian in an article entitled We are the 99%; “Ten years ago that unifying slogan travelled around the world. Some attribute its origin to the economist Joseph Stiglitz, who first popularised the distinction between the 1% of people with great wealth and power and the rest of us. Others say that it was the late anthropologist and anarchist David Graeber who coined the phrase. But everyone agrees that it went global when it was voiced by demonstrators who gathered in lower Manhattan’s financial district on 17 September 2011.

What took place that day, and the two months to follow, would become known as Occupy Wall Street, a protest movement against economic inequality and injustice that spread to 28 other US cities, to European capitals and financial centres, including London, Paris and Berlin, as well as parts of South America and the far east. In total it’s said that there were more than 750 Occupy events around the world, featuring demonstrators ranging from a few tens in some places to many thousands in others.

Inspired by the Arab spring protests that had toppled several dictators in the Middle East, OWS was also a delayed reaction to the global financial crisis of 2008 that had ushered in an era of austerity.

“The one duty we owe to history,” said Oscar Wilde, anarchist and Irish rebel, “is to rewrite it.” In the limitless leisure of retrospect, any particular moment in time and space can become imbued with pivotal significance or be consigned to the dustbin of historical dead ends. A decade on, opinions about OWS remain starkly polarised among both observers and participants.”

For myself, the Occupy Movement is “a transformative event in contemporary US history, a popular uprising against the power of corporate America that helped shift the Democratic party leftwards, enable Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign and the election of self-proclaimed socialist politicians such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. By this reckoning, it was also the original leaderless social media-organised movement on which #MeToo and Black Lives Matter would be modelled.”

Progenitor of nonhierarchical social movements whose object is the reimagination and transformation of whole systems, Occupy Wall Street was a watershed moment in human history which reframed public discourse as a Forum of Athens and centered that discourse in the context of a free society of equals.

Leaderless revolution also deauthorizes narratives of human being, meaning, and value and evades the central problem of revolution itself; the centralization of power under a charismatic authority figure and the reproduction of power as social force and control. The substitution of tyrants changes nothing in the nature of power itself; and this is what we must change if we are to become free.

Occupy Wall Street brought both ideological and organizational change to people’s liberation movements; became the M-15 movement in Spain and the anti-austerity movements in Greece, then throughout Europe and the world, and found new forms in the three successive movements which challenged elite power in its triadic forms as patriarchy, racist fascism, and capitalism in the #metoo, Black Lives Matter, and Extinction Rebellion- Fridays for Future green protests. It also revitalized global democracy as nonviolent anarchy in the Autonomous Zones movement and the call to Occupy City Hall.

As I wrote in my post of June 11 2020, Utopia Now: Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone; Marvels and jubilation in the streets, a carnival of transgressions of the Forbidden and masquerades of possible identities and futures of becoming human, anarchy and chaos and joy, running amok and being ungovernable, and the frightening of the horses; come and dance with us, America. Come find your heart and be free.

Whosoever remains unconquered is free. For each of us who defies injustice and tyranny, who resists subjugation, dehumanization, and enslavement, who questions, mocks, and challenges authority, becomes an agent of Liberty who cannot be silenced, and who passes the torch of freedom as an uncontrollable catalyst of change to everyone with whom we interact, and thereby can never be truly defeated.

Each of us who in resistance become Unconquered and a bearer of Liberty are become a Living Autonomous Zone, and this is the key to our inevitable victory. We ourselves are the power which state terror and tyranny cannot conquer.

These were days of glory and of freedom, of luminous transgressions and the exaltation of the unconquerable human spirit, of truthtelling and revelation, of the performance of unauthorized identities as guerilla theatre and of communal celebrations of our diversity and the limitless possibilities of human being and meaning, of the ecstatic rapture and vision of living beyond all boundaries, in which nothing is Forbidden.

Such liberations are truly endless and without limit, unbounded in time and space, for in refusal to submit to authority we become Unconquered and free as self created beings and Living Autonomous Zones, each of us bearers of the Torch of Liberty and its Promethean Fire.

Let us question, expose, mock, and challenge authority; let us incite, provoke, and disturb; let us run amok and be ungovernable.

Let us be bringers of chaos, joy, transformation, and revolution.

As I wrote in my post of June 21 2021, The Hope of Humankind: On Becoming Living Autonomous Zones as Agents of Chaos and Transformative Change; A friend has written in despair of our significance and hope for the liberation of humankind, of the impactfulness of our lives and our struggles which balance the flaws of our humanity against the monstrous and vast forces of a system of dehumanization, falsification, and commodification; for to be human is to live in a state of existential crisis and struggle for the ownership of ourselves.

Today is the birthday of Jean Paul Sartre, and so this event finds me reading once again his magnificent reimagination of Jean Genet in Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr; Genet who set me on my life’s path with the Oath of the Resistance in Beirut during the summer of 1982.

Israeli soldiers had set fire to the houses on my street, and called for people to come out and surrender. They were blindfolding the children of those who did and using them as human shields.

We had no other weapon than the empty bottle of champagne we had just finished with our breakfast of strawberry crepes; I asked “Any ideas?”, at which he shrugged and said “Fix bayonets?”

And then he gave me a principle of action by which I have lived for thirty nine years now; “When there is no hope, one is free to do impossible things, glorious things.”

He asked me if I was going to surrender, and I said no; he smiled and replied, “Nor will I.” And so he swore me to the Oath he devised in 1940 in Paris at the beginning of the Occupation for such friends as he could gather, reworded from the oath he had taken as a Legionnaire, which France modeled on the oath of the Jesuits; not to a figure of authority like a pope or a king, not to a flag or any symbol or institution of government, but to each another and to an idea of solidarity in struggle. Churchill referenced it in his address to the team that brought down the Nazi submarine blockade and allowed America to enter the war, as depicted in the film The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare which tells the true history of the founding of the Special Air Service and all subsequent Allied special forces. Genet said it was the finest thing he ever stole; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.” So it was that I became the bearer of a tradition now over eighty years old and forged in the most fearsome and terrible conflict the world has ever known, shortly before I expected to be burned alive in the first of many Last Stands.

This was the moment of my forging, this decision to choose death over subjugation, and ever since being struck by it I have been a bell, ringing. And like the Liberty Bell, I am broken open to the suffering of others and the flaws of our humanity. This has been the greatest gift I have ever been given, this empathy borne of a sacred wound, and I shall never cease the call to liberty, nor hesitate to answer as I am able the call for solidarity with others.

This morning I awoke to a call to identify the body of a friend missing and believed killed in Gaza by Israeli terrorists in the savage street fighting which followed the rocket attacks of last week, which I was unable to do; I searched for my friend in this sad and ruined form, like the skin of a wild thing which has sung itself utterly away, and could recognize nothing.

Where is my friend, agile, lithe, mercurial, fearless, insightful, quick and quick witted, who always had four scenarios running and three escape routes, who survived against impossible odds through improvisation and leveraging chaos, whose vision could discern true motives within the secret chambers of the human heart and play them like an instrument as songs of rapture and terror, who chameleon-like and protean could shift identities as needed and behind their masks move among her enemies unseen?

I never knew her true name; perhaps she no longer had one, as is true for so many of us who play the Great Game of futures and the possibilities of becoming human. She first entered my orbit during the victorious struggle of Hamas against al Qaeda for dominion of Gaza in August of 2009 in Rafah, an Egyptian Palestinian drawn into the maelstrom of war like countless others by family duty and vendetta.

Yet she said no to authority at great peril when she could have said yes and with relative personal safety become a slave, stood in solidarity with others when she could have run; this was a choice, one which confers agency, autonomy, and self-ownership as a seizure of power in a limited and deterministic context. Refusal to submit is the primary human act, one which cannot be taken from us, wherein we become Unconquered and free, and able to liberate others.

So it is that we may escape the wilderness of mirrors in which we wander, a realm of lies and illusions, captured and distorted images, falsification and the theft of the soul. For the authentic self, the image which we seize and claim as our own, flies free of its mad circus of seductions and traps. Hence we achieve our true selves and form, in rapture and exaltation as beings of our own uniqueness.

Impossible that such grandeur could be reduced to its material form, like the abandoned shell of a fantastic sea creature which has moved on.

The lines spoken by Hamlet while holding the skull of his friend Yorick came unbidden to my thoughts; “Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now, to mock your own grinning?”

For twelve years you danced with death, and danced away laughing, until today.

Farewell, my friend; I’ll see you in the eyes of the defiant ones, who bear your fire onward into the unknown, and with it I hope your laughter. Our successors will need both fire and laughter, if the future we win for them is to be equal to its price, and worth living in.

Our lives are like the dragon’s teeth sown in the earth by the Phoenician prince Cadmus from which warriors arise; from each, multitudes. For we live on as echoes and reflections in the lives of others, in the consequences and effects of our actions, in the good we can do for others which gathers force over time, and in the meaning, value, and possibilities we create.

How can choosing death and freedom be better than submission to authority and its weaponization of fear and force?

My experience of accepting death in confronting force and violence finds parallels in the mock executions of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Maurice Blanchot, and I’m not done challenging state terror and tyranny and forces of repression. I’m going to stand between people with guns and their victims in future, as I have many times in past, and here I find resilience among my motivating and informing sources; Sartre’s total freedom won by refusal to submit, and Camus’ rebellion against authority which renders force meaningless when met by disobedience, give me the ability to claw my way out of the ruins and make yet another Last Stand, beyond hope of victory or even survival.

And all who are mortal share these burdens with me.

We are all Nikolai Gogol’s hero in Diary of a Madman, caught in the wheels of a great machine he services, like Charlie Chaplin in his film Modern Times. But we know that we are trapped and enslaved, and we know how and why; we know the secrets of our condition which our masters would keep silent, and in refusing to be silent we can free ourselves and our fellows. This Michel Foucault called truth telling; a poetic vision of reimagination and sacred calling to pursue the truth which bears transformative power.

So here I offer all of you words of hope for moments of despair, the horror of meaninglessness, the grief of loss, and the guilt of survivorship.

Your voice has defied our nothingness, and resounds throughout the chasms of a hostile and dehumanizing world; gathering force and transformative power as it finds a thousand echoes, and begins to awaken refusal to submit to authority and to heal the pathology of our falsification and disconnectedness.

The voice of even one human being who bears a wound of humanity which opens him to the pain of others and who places his life in the balance with those of the wretched of the earth, the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, who in resistance to tyranny and terror, force and control, becomes unconquered and free, such a voice of liberation is unstoppable as the tides, an agent of reimagination and transformation which seizes the gates of our prisons and frees the limitless possibilities of becoming human.

Despair not and be joyful, for we who are Living Autonomous Zones help others break the chains of their enslavement simply by condition of being as well as action; for we violate norms, transgress boundaries of the Forbidden, expose the lies and illusions of authority, and render the forces of repression powerless to compel obedience.

This is the primary revolutionary struggle which precedes and underlies all else; the seizure of ownership of ourselves from those who would enslave us.

Such is the hope of humankind.

Occupy Wall Street: the story behind seven months of protest, film

“In September last year, anti-corporate activists descended on a small park in lower Manhattan and Occupy Wall Street was born. As protesters ready for a spring resurgence, film-maker Kat Keene Hogue looks back at more than six months of Occupy, a movement that spread from Zuccotti Park to over 100 cities around the world”