It’s time to acknowledge that the Occupy movement began as an anarchist movement.Adbusters, the magazine that started the ball rolling, describes itself as “anti-consumerist,” but it’s arguably anarchist, or at least heavily influenced by anarchists.
The hand signals now commonplace at Occupy originated with the Direct Action Network, a confederation of anarchist groups formed to coordinate WTO protests in 1999. And the whole concept of the consensus process used at the general assemblies comes straight out of anarchist organizing manuals.
Mainstream commentators are baffled, because they are trying to define how this horizontal, leaderless movement intends to influence top-down, authoritarian politics. They don’t realize that the movement was designed from its outset to replace mainstream politics with a horizontal, leaderless society — building a new society in the shell of the old, as the saying goes.
There are no demands, because the movement is the demand.
Most of the occupiers probably don’t even know this, but it was those familiar with anarchist thought who picked up on these themes and became the early adopters of the movement. Anarchists still represent a minority, but they hold many key organizing positions.
Admittedly, most of them are social anarchists, not market anarchists; but I’m still hoping that the movement expands into a full-blown autonomous anarchocommunist experiment, because nothing spoils someone on communism quite like actually trying it. (Or I could be proven wrong. Either outcome would be excellent.)
I do have one piece of advice. It strikes me as strange that the “social-justice” crowd focuses on legislativeprocesses like democracy, when justice comes from ajudicial process. The movement needs to develop a judicial branch for dispute resolution. I suggest that the Occupy movement look to the existing anarchist judicial method in Somalia, which anthropologist Michael van Notten calls “kritarchy.” It could easily be adopted with or without approval from the general assemblies.
Kritarchy is a judicial process in which justice (“krito” in Greek), rather than written law, is the ruling principle. A kritarchy does not form a court of law. It forms a court of justice, which is completely compatible with the horizontal, leaderless nature of the Occupy movement.
There are two types of justice, commonly symbolized as the sword and scales. The sword connotes punitive justice, which assigns punishment for breaking written laws. The scales connote restorative justice, which holds that a person is liable for the damages they cause another person. Kritarchy is only concerned with restorative justice, not punitive justice.
Until someone claims to have suffered an injustice, all behavior is permissible. Disputes are mediated by judges, but it’s important to understand that judges do not enjoy any special status. They serve only at the request of the disputants. Anyone in the community may serve as a judge, or request a judiciary be formed, so a court of justice is truly a people’s court.
A simple kritarchy involves just three people: two disputants and any third person they approach to help them resolve the injustice. The judge investigates the conflict and attempts to discover the justice between them — to balance the scales. This could be as simple as mediation or as complex as weighing evidence and witness testimony.
The judge decides a case based on the normative customs of the community and the reason and conscience of the disputants. This judicial model is elegantly suited for the Occupy movement, because it’s not based on written law, and it can accommodate a wide diversity of philosophies.
The seeds of a simple kritarchy are already developing in the movement. Normative customs emerge out of people’s natural respectful conduct without any written law or central coercive authority; and there are already individuals in the movement developing a reputation for diffusing conflicts. They are commonly being called “peacekeepers.”
Peacekeepers are already engaged in the first phase of the judicial process in a kritarchy, which van Notten calls “segmental opposition.” Whenever there is a physical altercation between two individuals, those around them move in to establish a stalemate so that the dispute must be settled with words instead of fists. All that would need to change to make this a simple kritarchy is to transition from having proactive peacekeepers who break up fights to having proactive disputants who seek out peacekeepers to act as judges.
A recent conflict that occurred at OccupySF (San Francisco) could easily have been resolved by a simple kritarchy. Someone left his guitar in the common area while he went to the restroom. While he was gone, another Occupant used it without permission and accidentally broke one of the tuning pegs. This erupted into shouting. Segmental opposition prevented a physical fight, but justice was never satisfied.
A court of justice might have decided that the guitar player was liable to replace the broken part, or that the guitar owner was negligent in leaving the guitar in the common area. But either way, the discussion would happen in public, which facilitates the development of normative customs.
Hopefully the disputants honor the decision of the court, but if they refuse, they do so with their own names and reputations on the line.
Enforcement of a verdict requires a more complex kritarchy...
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