Participation Above All

Prior to its removal from Zuccotti Park, Occupy Wall Street had some strong intellectual support that sought to provide the movement with some academic heft. It wasn’t wasted. Despite acquiring support from artists, poets, writers, bank officials and former hedge fund managers, the need for OWS to provide some compelling research for its arguments caused it to embrace both support and resources from the academic world. In welcoming the guidance of notables like Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz and Jeffrey Sachs, the movement quickly began expanding its on-site library to include some of the best thinkers of the age and of previous eras. Its forceful removal from the park aside, OWS was starting to take on not only a more detailed message of its goals but also an openness to outside assistance to get that message across.In other communities the Occupy members experienced trouble drawing on that kind of support, and other locales remained resistant to outside influence, focusing primarily on the physical place they believed they had secured and the sense of community they had effectively established within those confines. No two OWS initiatives are the same and each form of protest has taken on its own unique character.Facebook and Twitter have revealed a movement of great diversity and opinion, and that has made it hard for outsiders to understand the overarching goals and principles of the group. In reality, such venues, along with media reports, have taken the personal understanding that comes with face-to-face conversation out of the equation, leaving onlookers and participants alike at sea when in comes to comprehending what is actually transpiring in communities where the OWS presence is felt.London, Ontario is like many other such locations. A movement by a group of citizens to take the Occupy message out to extended areas of our community has met with a very mixed result in the movement. Nevertheless a citizens panel held a press conference yesterday (see video below) in which it said it would attempt to do precisely that. Great pains were taken in language to affirm that those of us on the panel do not speak for the Occupy movement. But we do understand that its message about financial injustice in so many dimensions is one of the fundamental realities of our time. Building on the presence of the Occupy protesters in our midst, we seek to begin a larger, a broader dialogue into the far reaches of our community concerning poverty, environmental degradation, and political reform.A plan has been put in place that will seek to run parallel to the Occupy initiative but doesn’t represent it. It involves broadening a local initiative called City Symposium, which heretofore made presentations once a month concerning important developments within our community. Meetings will now be held more frequently as they pertain to this larger discussion. Keynote speakers – economists, social researchers, etc. - will be brought in to educate citizens on the larger issues that Occupy has tried to raise.  From those venues will flow smaller meetings that will draw in citizens from all parts of London to weigh in on their own concerns around poverty, homelessness, mental health developments, financial disparity, etc.This is a process that will continue right through until March, when certain deadlines naturally emerge that can be affected by the results of these citizens' assemblies. First there is the Social Assistant Revue – a provincial initiative that has been running for months and which will wrap up its finding in March in time for its final publication in June. In addition, both city and provincial budgets can be impacted by the final findings of the Symposium engagement process.Will all of this be effective? We don’t know. But this much we have learned: Thanks to the Occupy movement we are now being alerted to some of our graver financial inequities around the globe. This is a unique occasion – a revitalized social season – which is conducive to community dialogue. The Occupy movement can’t contain it, anymore than the broader community can claim to be its cause. It is the Occupy protests that have generated urgency into this discussion and they will continue to speak for themselves. But those affected by the social injustices are situated in every corner of our communities, far beyond the reach of Occupy, and it is time the broader ranges of citizenship had their own discussions on the matter.David Graeber, an early organizer of the movement and one of its key intellectual figures, made an acute observation that the ends shouldn’t justify the means in a movement like Occupy: “You can’t create a just society through violence, or freedom through a tight revolutionary cadre. You can’t establish a big state and hope it will go away. The means and the ends have to be the same … This occupation is first about participation.”And so it is – not merely the participation of protestors, but other citizens who invest themselves in their respective communities day after day. Poverty wasn’t discovered by OWS, anymore than was climate change. But the Occupy movement reminded us that such global challenges have become the dominant issues of our time, whether or not we realize it. But if this occupation really is about “participation,” as Graeber claims, then the more the merrier. It’s not just about citizens joining Occupy in one place, but also about citizens joining one another in other venues that tell the compelling story. London is undertaking that grand social experiment and could well show the way to how communities might begin the process of solving their own problems.http://youtu.be/4C4A5wGPnvI