[The "Metamovement" is Umair Haque's collective name for the various global pro-democracy, anti-corporatist movements that have sprung up all over the world this year: the "Occupy" movements in over 400 cities, mostly in the Americas, the parallel European "Indignant" movements that began with the  15M protests in Madrid, Spain attended by over 100,000 people last May, and the "Arab Spring" movements in the Middle East nations.]

METAMOVEMENT ORGANIZATION AND OPERATION

Monday evening I attended the General Assembly of Occupy Portland. The group there now consists of about 600 people, with perhaps 200 camping in the “occupied” park, 150 (including both campers and non-campers) showing up for the daily General Assemblies (decision-making and information meetings), smaller numbers attending a host of educational, planning and protest events, and the full number attending less frequent marches and other high-visibility events.

Last evening (Tuesday) I attended the General Assembly of Occupy Eugene (Oregon). The group is about half the size of Portland’s, though attendance at their General Assembly was almost as high. The Eugene group is in close communication with the Portland group and have adopted a number of the same operating protocols.

It’s amazing to see the self-organization and self-management of the Occupy groups. Rotating groups of skilled facilitators have come together and voluntarily convene and facilitate the General Assemblies. They are using established facilitation processes (consensus decision-making and rules of procedure that are vastly more inclusive than the rules used in meetings convened by the 1%), but they have had to tweak and evolve the processes on the fly to suit large groups of people who don’t know each other and which change day-to-day. They have also had to educate the large number of attendees at General Assemblies on how the process works — a huge challenge — and also make clear to both participants and media that they are neutral facilitators, not leaders or spokespeople for the groups (in fact the groups have no ‘leaders’ or ‘spokespeople’, much to the exasperation of media, police and authorities). Occupy Portland, like other Occupy cities, has posted their evolving General Assembly consensus process on their website, so that other Occupy groups can adapt and learn from them.

The self-organization and self-management extends far beyond meeting and decision processes. Each Occupy group has evolved committees that look after food (that must conform to local health regulations, so that there is no excuse for police or other authorities to shut them down), cleanup, water and sanitation, first aid, mental health, education (some Occupy groups offer child care facilities), police liaison, safety and security, recreation, arts and entertainment, engineering, maintenance (there is a plan and a fund for repairing any damage done to the occupied premises in Portland), information collection and dissemination, outreach, event planning and all the other essential functions of a small possibly-permanent human establishment.

It is amazing to watch the groups use the so-called ‘human megaphone/microphone’ to get the attention of a large and dispersed Occupy group quickly. If there’s an urgent announcement, the announcer will shout out “Mike Check!” and everyone in the vicinity will immediately stop talking and repeat, 5 words at a time, what the announcer is saying, so that everyone in the area can hear it. The privilege is not abused. I have seen it used effectively to alert the group that there is an angry dispute occurring (“Mike Check Peacemaker!” tells the members of the Peacemaker committee where the altercation is and that their presence is needed), and I have also seen it used to alert the group that there is a police presence in the area (“Mike Check Legal!” tells the members of the Legal and Safety committee that they need to get there immediately to witness and mediate any interaction between the group and police).

Equally impressive is the education that is occurring, with daily training in subjects like conflict resolution (especially dealing with people with mental disturbances or under the influence of alcohol or drugs), facilitation, first aid and legal rights, the degree to which low-tech workarounds are emerging to deal with situations as they arise (e.g. hand signals to convey a sense of a large group’s response to what is being said), and some of the technologies (like livestreaming) being used to broadcast, track and record events as they occur.

THE CHALLENGE OF BALANCING GROUP AUTHORITY AND INDIVIDUAL AUTONOMY

From what I have seen, the major challenge the Occupy groups are dealing with is about who is authorized to do what on behalf of, or binding upon, participants, without infringing on individual participants’ autonomy. For example, if someone wants to organize a march, does it need to be put forward as a proposal and agreed to by consensus of the whole? Since it only needs to be agreed to by consensus if it is put forward as a proposal at a General Assembly, does this encourage people to circumvent the collective decision-making process by just saying “I’m going to do this — who’s with me?” instead of putting forward a proposal to the group?

And what about committees?: Since anyone can form a committee, what authority does a committee have, if any, and if it has no authority (except as granted at a General Assembly through the proposal process) what is the point of its existence (it would seem in that case to have accepted responsibility without commensurate authority, which can quickly become untenable)?

The general sense seems to be that matters that affect the entire group should be subject to discussion and agreement by proposal at a General Assembly. But what exactly does “affects the entire group” mean?

There have been cases in the Occupy movement of marches and other actions that have been approved by consensus at a General Assembly, others that have failed to achieve consensus (in large Occupy groups, there is a fallback to 90% approval if consensus cannot be achieved, but that means if only 85% of a group agrees to an action, it is not approved), and still others where a march or other action was just announced at a General Assembly or elsewhere, without being ‘proposed’ for consensus discussion at all. And some of these ‘unproposed’ marches were ‘endorsed’ by a committee of a General Assembly. If the march or other action turns into a debacle, does it really matter whether it was ‘proposed’ (and agreed to) or not?

Similarly, there are committees that have received recognition by General Assemblies (in that they are announced there, and make regular committee reports there), but there is no clarity on where the authority of these committees begins and ends. Communications committees have been approached by media for comments on various matters, for example, and have (inappropriately, in my opinion) sometimes proffered comments that they believe consistent with the principles of the group. The correct answer to “Is Occupy (name of city) opposed to the use of violence?”, for example, is “Occupy (name of city) has not expressed a consensus opinion on that subject”.

It will be interesting to see how the Metamovement evolves processes and positions on matters of authority, responsibility, representation and power. These are issues, after all, that are at the heart of the Metamovement’s dissatisfaction with the de facto rule by the corporatist 1%.

FRAMING THE MOVEMENT

George Lakoff has suggested a ‘frame’ for the Metamovement, which he argues is necessary to prevent the media and others framing it for us. His frame: “We love America. We’re here to fix it.”, with the subordinate message “The Public is not opposed to the Private. The Public makes the Private possible.” The main message is to deflect accusations that the Metamovement is selfish, negative, unpatriotic and destructive. The subordinate message to is deflect accusations that the Metamovement wants something for nothing, that government is not inherently part of the problem, and needs to be part of the solution. This is the message that Elizabeth Warren has been pounding home in her Senate seat campaign.

BROADENING ENGAGEMENT

It is encouraging to see thousands of people in hundreds of people cities around the world marching in the streets in solidarity for the 99% of the population disempowered and disenfranchised by despots and corporatist elites, pulling the strings of government and making all the key political, economic and social decisions in our world.

But in order to convince the despots and elites that we really are the 99%, we need to engage those who are unable, because of fear, or lack of access or opportunity, to join us in the streets. More than that, we need to engage the large number who have given up on reforming the system, or been so beaten down by illnesses, or by the dysfunctional education system, the propagandizing media, and endemic political oppression in their countries and communities, that they are not even aware of our message.

How do you think we can do this? I’d welcome your thoughts and will share them with the Metamovement groups.

Here are a couple of ideas I came up with:

• Create Michael Wesch-style videos of the stories, feelings and ideas of the 99%: Create a list of Metamovement questions such as “How has the disempowerment of most citizens by the political and corporate elite affected you?”; “What actions of governments and big corporations have made you most angry?”; “What do you think governments should do to re-empower and improve the welfare of the 99%?”; “What do you think we, the 99%, need to do ourselves, things we cannot expect the government to do for us?” Then ask people to download a blank “99%” poster, write their answer to one of these questions on it, add their first name and city, and then send a photo or short video clip of themselves holding the poster to the answer compiler, who would craft them into a series of videos.
• Create “virtual marches”: Use some kind of social/meeting software tool that can track and log the number of people signed in. Use meetup or some similar online scheduling tool to schedule a virtual march. At the scheduled time, people would sign in on the designated site, text in their expressions of solidarity, and perhaps watch Metamovement-related videos or livecasts together. If done on a community-by-community basis, those physically marching and occupying could then legitimately say they represented a group ten or a hundred or a thousand times greater.

THE METAMOVEMENT’S NEXT STEPS: THREE TYPES OF ACTIONS BEYOND MARCHES

It seems to me that actions proposed by the Metamovement will fall into three categories:

A. Demands of Government: Actions that need to be taken by governments and regulators,

B. Street Actions: Actions that the people in the Metamovement can do physically during the occupations, both to draw attention to our message and demands, and to demonstrate our collective will, and

C. Ongoing Local Initiatives: Actions that the communities of the Metamovement need to take responsibility for ourselves, on an ongoing basis, to begin to create a new economy and society and show the way to a new, community-based way of living, in which most power and responsibility will be vested. These initiatives would be local, but coordinated with those of other Metamovement communities.

It occurred to me that it might make sense to look at the various platforms of the Metamovement to see what types of actions might emerge in each of these three categories. Looking at the various manifestos and other statements of the Metamovement’s groups, the main objectives would seem to be:

1. Re-empowerment of the people and communities (a real shift of decision-making power from the 1% to the 99% including more transparency in lobbying and less money in government decision-making, greater autonomy, and increased community self-management)
2. Reining in of corporatist rights and privileges (end to: subsidies, bailouts, tax breaks, monopolies and oligopolies, deregulation and lack of enforcement of regulations, corporate personhood, corporate concentration of media ownership)
3. Debt forgiveness (end to foreclosures, elimination of struggling nations’ debts, student loan debts, mortgages in excess of property value, usury etc.)
4. Banking and money system reform
5. Wealth and income redistribution and equalization (tax reform, break-up of excessive concentration, nationalization of industries in areas essential to public well-being)
6. Free and universal access to health
7. Free and universal access to education
8. Right to decent livelihood (employment, support for self-employment and cooperatives etc.)
9. Right to social security
10. Economic system reforms to make the economy environmentally sustainable
11. Peace and social justice (end to imperialist wars, greater equality of rights, security from unreasonable detention, surveillance and harassment)
12. End to resource waste and destruction of the planet
13. Shift in criteria used for political and economic decisions and laws from wealth and growth to happiness, justice and equality
14. Food security

If we were to use this scheme, we could start to identify actions of each of the three types (Demands of Government; Street Actions; Ongoing Local Initiatives) to advance each of the 14 objectives. These might help bring direction and focus (and sustainability) to the Metamovement.

Here’s a 3 x 14 table we might use to define and sort these various actions. I’ve filled in some of the cells with a few ideas I’ve had, or which others I have spoken with have employed or suggested.

What would you add? Are there objectives missing? What else should we be demanding, doing, and self-organizing for ongoing community-based work? How can we build on the Metamovement phenomenon to start to achieve the objectives that 99% of us believe in, that the current power structures are disinclined to pursue?

[Belated thanks to Bruce Campbell for pointing me to Umair Haque's article on the Metamovement.]

First edition of the Occupy Wall Street Journal. Full size copy and edition two here.

There have been, belatedly, attempts to connect the “We Are the 99%” Occupy Wall Street protests with the protests in the Mideast against anti-democratic regimes and in Europe against unemployment, austerity and government inaction. What is unique about the newest US protests (at least since the ill-fated anti-globalization protests of a decade ago), and perhaps the reason why it took so long for them to get media and public traction, is that they are anti-corporate more than anti-government.

Umair Haque, an economics writer (best known for his explanation of the phenomenon of Peer Production) I have written about on this blog over the years, and now a writer for HBR, has recently labelled these protests with the collective term the Metamovement. In his essay he says:

The common thread behind each and every movement in the Metamovement… [is] a sense of grievous injustice, not merely at rich getting richer, but at the loss of human agency and sovereignty over their own fates that is the deeper human price. In other words, it’s not just about inequality–but the deeper failure of institutions…

The deeper thread that runs through [these protests is] one not merely of loss of financial prosperity, but of the paring back of dignity, of the evisceration of agency, of the disappearance of that which might be said to be essential to the experience of being human…

Not every revolt ends in revolution–but every revolution begins in revolt. And make no mistake–this is revolt; insurrection against a monstrous, barbaric status quo that’s failed too many, too deserving, for too long–while serving too few, too undeserving, far too well. It is not in the nature of man or beast to stay yoked to the gleaming machines of their own economic, social, and moral annihilation.

The Metamovement is in essence a revolt against disempowerment, and, while government is the favourite whipping-boy, there is a growing awareness that globalization has led to corpocracy — concentration of power in the hands of the wealthy multinational business owners, who buy and sell politicians at will and hence control the laws, the regulations, law enforcement and other political decisions including when and with whom we go to war. Loathing government has always been popular and acceptable in North America (which is why most elections are about which party is hated more). Loathing big corrupt anti-democratic corporations is new, and unsettling to the corporatists and the mainstream media they own. It’s OK to howl at the puppets, but not at the puppet-masters.

As Jeff Wells explains, there is an overwhelming and global sense that the rest of us don’t matter any more in our globalized industrialized society, except as passive consumers of products. We are not needed or wanted any more for our ideas, for our viewpoints, for our knowledge and skills, for our approval at the voting booth, or even for our physical labour; the corpocracy would prefer that we just borrow more and spend more, endlessly, quietly, and uncritically, until we die.

The metamovement is short on coherence of demands (and hence was and still is dismissed as aimless and anarchic by media and politicians alike) because there is a growing sense that what is needed is not for those in power to do something different, but for those in power to cede that power back to individuals and community, and leave it up to those individuals and communities to decide on what, in their particular situations, should be done with that power.

And, as consultant-philosopher Charles Handy has pointed out in a warning to political, economic and social idealists, nobody gives up power voluntarily. This is the greatest challenge to the Metamovement, as the people of Syria, Libya and Yemen know all too well.

What makes the situation even more complex is that there is no coherent consensus among the various facets of the Metamovement on who should be ceding power, or how. In the Mideast the target is corrupt totalitarian governments, but who their power should pass to is far from unanimous, and that makes a lot of people nervous, especially those who’ve seen who has risen to fill the power vacuum in other countries.

Neither the target nor the goal of the Metamovement is clear in North America or much of Europe. To some extent the protesters are not for anything — their solidarity is in opposition, not in intention. The left-libertarians of Occupy Wall Street are opposed to global corporatism, and want it dismantled to re-empower individuals and communities (as one writer put it “We don’t want to overthrow the government, we just want it back.”). The right-libertarians of the Tea Party are opposed to government and government regulations (including regulation of corporatists), and want government dismantled through deregulation in order to — you guessed it — re-empower individuals and communities. Both believe the other is fraudulent, misguided and dangerous, but both are expressing, from their worldview and with the knowledge available to them, anger and outrage over our growing loss of dignity, disempowerment and even irrelevance to the global monoculture corporatist society in which we all live.

Meanwhile a large part of the populace, especially many young people, have pretty well given up on the possibility of any power shift occurring. Some of them think the Metamovement is ridiculous; most of them, I suspect, don’t know and/or don’t care about it. The billions around the world who have opted out of all active engagement with the political and economic system (other than continuing to support it with their purchases, their passivity and their resignation), are the real 99%.

So where is this Metamovement going? When there are no cohesive goals, demands, or measures of success, can the Metamovement ‘succeed’?

The real purpose of the Metamovement, at least in North America and perhaps Europe, is not to get the corrupt political and economic corporatist 1% to cede power, or to reform itself, or to compel political leaders to dismantle it or tax it fairly or reform it on threat of replacing them with leaders who will. Only the hapless Tea Party faction of the Metamovement is naive enough to believe that can or will happen.

The real purpose of the Metamovement, I would argue, is to re-engage the 99%, from the bottom up, community by community around the world, first to learn how things really work and what is really going on, and then to decide what actions need to be taken in response. In every nation and community the situation is different and the response that is needed will inevitably be different.

The purpose of the Metamovement is education and then organization. That means countering the official propaganda and refusing to support, with complacency, with tax dollars, with consumer dollars, with obedient wage-slave labour, or with the acceptance of crushing debt, the existing political and economic systems that are currently run for the benefit of the corporatists. It means curing the epidemic of anomie that has infected so many of us, everywhere. It’s a hugely ambitious goal.

In much of the Mideast that means for the moment deposing despots, and then struggling to avoid allowing either other ideologues or global corporatists to fill the power void. In North America and Europe that probably means both starving the system (by refusing to support it politically or economically), and smartly and strategically sabotaging it (where it is weakest) — blocking it, breaking it, or taking it at every turn, without causing suffering and without getting caught (at least until we are far enough along as a popular movement that the enforcement authorities will refuse to arrest us, and will instead join us).

This is and always has been the dream of revolutionaries. It has succeeded, sometimes, in the past, and it may succeed again, in some places and situations at least, for a while.

But look at where we stand now, the larger picture. Real democracy is, for all our efforts, rare in the world, and power inequality is staggering, growing by leaps and bounds, and almost unprecedented in human history. And we are headed towards a series of catastrophic and cascading energy, ecological and economic crises and no one is in control — no one, not the 99%, not the 1%, has the power to avert them. We have unleashed the sixth great extinction of life on Earth and it’s been accelerating unimpeded for thirty thousand years. We have created a political and economic industrial growth civilization monoculture that is unsustainable, out of control and unstoppable.

This is part of the learning that the Metamovement will have to internalize, relate to the local situation in every community, and decide how to act upon. So, of course we need a Metamovement to work to restore the balance of power in our political and economic systems, and to restore dignity and purpose to our lives. But such a movement will take a long time, will be fiercely opposed by powerful interests, will entail huge risks, and will have to play out across a backdrop of growing crises, the imminent train wreck of our global industrial growth civilization, for which we must all share the blame.

My sense is that, in the short run, the situation is simply not bad enough in most of the affluent nations of the world to engage sufficiently large numbers of people to learn and commit to what is needed and stick with it long enough to achieve the power change the Metamovement will discover is required to achieve their ends.

And every failure, like the recent failure of the anti-pipeline demonstrations in Washington DC (despite evidence of unethical and possibly illegal activities by both US and Canadian governments and regulators working with Big Oil), will only serve to demoralize the Metamovement and sap its energy.

And in the longer run, I believe that the massive and chronic crises we will all be facing will consume so much of our time and attention that the Metamovement will fall by the wayside.

In the meantime, I applaud the Metamovement and its hard-working members, especially those who are informed and not naive about what is really going on. I hope they succeed. I fear they cannot.

Last Sunday I went for a long walk in the woods.

I am fortunate to live on a hill overlooking mountains and ocean, in the only house on the street, adjacent to a municipal park which is in turn adjacent to a large piece of forested crown land called Block 6. Block 6 is included in plans for a National Park on Bowen Island that would include almost 40% of the land area of the island.

Block 6 is not “old growth” (>175 year-old trees) forest. The Sḵwxwú7mesh, the Coast Salish peoples from whom the Island and 2500 square miles of adjacent mainland was stolen by Europeans in the late 1700s, did not harvest much of Bowen’s temperate rainforest. Logging on Bowen by Europeans began in earnest in the 1870s, peaked in the 1890s, and continued until the 1950s.

Predominant Block 6 tree species are Douglas Fir, Western Hemlock, Red Alder and Lodgepole Pine with undergrowth of a wide variety of ferns, moss, grape and berries, and an average tree age of 90-150 years (meaning no logging since the end of the 19th century). Ecologists report a “significant” part of the area is “old growth” forest — never commercially harvested. Huszar Creek runs from Fairy Fen, a diverse wetland in the centre of the Block, to the Salish Sea on the south coast. The eastern part of the Block features Radar Hill, site of a military base during WW2 (lookout for Japanese warships) and, from then until now, communications towers and a gravel pit operation.

The picture above shows what I saw (and regularly see) for the first part of my walk. Even though much of the adjacent area remains undeveloped, you can see on the Google Maps satellite view precisely where Block 6 begins — from the park you walk through a veritable tree ‘curtain’ and suddenly the landscape becomes wild rainforest; and you can really imagine what this land looked like before the arrival of humans.

I decided to walk down to the sea, since I wanted to see the beach and forest in the Cape Roger Curtis area before the bulldozers changed it. CRC is a 600 acre privately-owned plot, comprising nearly one eighth of all the residential-zoned land of the island, scheduled for subdivision into 50 two-million-dollar 10-acre lots each with a multi-million-dollar monster executive oceanfront home on it. The alternative plan, which would have seen half the area set aside as parkland and the rest more intensively developed for about 400 families, was rejected by both the local politicians and islanders because of the lack of infrastructure to support so many new families (it would have increased the population of Bowen by 25%, albeit over a 20-year development period).

As it turns out, I was too late. As I walked from Block 6 into the CRC lands, what was last year an almost imperceptible change almost brought me to my knees. Although few of the lots have yet been sold (despite private helicopter trips for billionaire prospects to view the area), the roadwork has all been put in. Where there was once wilderness, now paved roads, subdivision signs, and fencing prevails. Sixty-foot-wide driveway entrances have been carved out at the edge of each of the first 14 lots to be offered. These 14 lots are not square, but long slivers 200 feet wide and 2000 feet long, allowing the developers to offer oceanfront access to all 14 billionaire owners, and hence demand the maximum price per lot. The recommended site for the monster homes is (of course) right by the ocean, and accessing it will require each buyer to construct a driveway the full length of the lot, from the access road to the house, almost a half-mile long, and requiring almost 1/3 of all the trees on the lot to be bulldozed just to build the driveway.

Close to tears, I sought to find the small pebble beach I had scrambled down a year ago at the end of my walk. This is what I found:

I guess I should have been prepared for this, but I was not. The oceanfront wilderness that was Cape Roger Curtis has been destroyed by two developers for the exclusive benefit of 50 billionaires. (I expect the developers have hived off the best lots for themselves and their friends, as invariably happens when such pristine land is subdivided.)

In the 1980s I saw this happen in Brampton, Ontario, where I lived then. Some of the best growing land in Canada was rezoned residential under the relentless pressure of developers, and, like Mississauga before it, the entire municipality was turned, in just a decade, into a wasteland of near-identical shoddy single-family homes on 20- and 30-foot lots. When I moved away to Caledon in the 1990s I saw it beginning to happen again — a developer sued the town council for a half billion dollars for not rubber-stamping their plan for a huge subdivision even though it ran contrary to the town’s official development plan.

Developers and their sleazy real estate and lawyer shills now provide over 90% of the campaign funding for candidates for municipal elections. We should not be surprised that even the anti-development candidates finally burn out from battling the relentless and well-financed campaigns to turn every square inch of ‘vacant’ land into profit. Candidates who can’t be bought off or driven off are defeated by pro-development candidates with slick and deceptive campaigns.

This is not, of course, something unique to Canada. It is happening, in various ways, all over the world.

The green areas on this map (from the Forest Frontiers Initiative) are all that is left of the world’s wild forests, the only remaining areas that are large enough and sufficiently intact to support a natural and largely undiminished ecosystem. At current rates of deforestation they will all be gone in 50 years. The light brown areas are degraded forest, fragile and disrupted and now dependent on human ‘management’. Both the light and dark brown areas, comprising half of the world’s land surface, were wild forests as recently as 8,000 years ago. And most of the world’s deserts and grasslands, shown in white, have also been, at least intermittently, wild forests since the end of the last ice age, before human civilization spread across the Earth.

As the map above shows, within 50 years the desolation of our planet will be complete. No matter that our industrial civilization is unsustainable, and will collapse soon after the worst damage has been done.

The worst is always done at the end. With eleven billion people struggling against the forces of massive energy, ecological and economic collapse, we are not going to recognize the planet we’re left with as it all falls apart.

A bulldozer. Another baby. More stuff produced, more stuff consumed. More of the land gone. More resources exhausted. More waste. More debt, to the banks, to the Earth, to future generations. None of it can be repaid, undone, sustained.

Or stopped.