First Building Occupation Assembly

On December 21, the Occupy Oakland GA voted to approve a proposal to occupy a building that would serve as "a social center, convergence center, and headquarters of the Occupy Oakland movement":

We propose to occupy and hold a large building that will serve the purpose of becoming a social center, convergence center and headquarters of the Occupy Oakland movement on Saturday, January 28th, 2012. The building will have sufficient office space for all of the Occupy Oakland committees and an auditorium large enough to hold Occupy Oakland general assemblies and adequate sleeping space. It will be a vacant building owned either by a bank, a large corporation of the 1% or already public. The occupation of the building will take place in daylight and on a weekend to ensure more safety and aim for maximum participation. The building will be the destination of a mass march, promoted as a “Move-In Day March” starting at Oscar Grant Plaza at 1pm and finishing up in the new building. Together we will enter the space, clean it, set it up and occupy it.

Having learned from the previous attempts at occupying spaces or buildings where we weren’t able to hold space because of police crack-downs and/or poor planning we know that the only way for this to work is having massive participation and when the time comes, effective defense of the building. To work out numerous details we propose having Building Occupation Assemblies that meet at Oscar Grant Plaza on Wednesdays at 5pm and on Sundays at 1pm with representatives from the Occupy Oakland committees and individuals. The working groups of this assembly will meet to discuss the plans necessary to make the move-in successful and create a vibrant social center. The strategies for the defense of the building will be decided collectively in these meetings.

We further propose a 2-day festival at the start of the occupation which would include cultural events, workshops and strategy sessions to generate community support and participation to further the occupy movement. The Building Occupation Assembly will coordinate this weekend festival. They will plan a full schedule of events, as well as coordinate outreach.

Those writing this proposal are in full agreement that keeping the address of the building a surprise is necessary when planning an action of this scale, so that the building proposed doesn’t have a preemptive shutdown by the city. On the other hand, to make this an all-inclusive action by Occupy Oakland, the authors of this proposal have been in touch with various individuals from committees regarding the particular address of the building. These include: the Kitchen Committee, Events Committee, Supply Committee, Sound Committee, Medics, Free School, Library, Finance Committee, Occupy Legal, Anti-Repression Committee and the Facilitation Committee yet we hope to expand this list. These individuals know the exact address of the building in order to help organize this action in a coordinated yet decentralized manner.

To conclude, in talking to members of our community and upon consulting committee members, many feel strongly that it is time to get Occupy Oakland indoors. The winter and rainy season is upon us and has taken its toll on our numbers, our strength, and our will to continue. We know there is much more to do, and we are excited to see our projects and political endeavors through by fighting for a new space seized from the 1% without permission that will suit our needs, and become something cherished by Occupy Oakland, residents of the Bay Area, and beyond.

As expected, the first meeting to start planning for the occupation will take place at 5pm on Wednesday, December 28th at the North Steps of Oscar Grant Plaza. The invitation we received via email reads as follows:

Recently, the GA passed a proposal to take a large building as a social center for Occupy Oakland. The date for this action is January 28, 2012. The intention is that this space will become the new home for Occupy Oakland, providing ample space for all of our committees and activities, room for assemblies, and sleeping space. (It must be added, however, for those who are concerned about it, that there was much support at the GA for retaining a presence at Oscar Grant Plaza, and even re-encamping at the plaza at a later date, projects which many in attendance at the GA did not think were in opposition to each other). This is a huge, exciting and important step for Occupy Oakland, one that many have been talking about for a very long time -- at least since November 2 -- and we expect that success in this regard will likely be very inspiring for other cities. In order to succeed, we will need this building to be as vibrant and full of activity as the camp was. Therefore, we want to have the full participation of all the committees, groups and individuals who have so far made this experiment so powerful. The first meeting will be on Wednesday December 28 at 5pm on the north steps of Oscar Grant Plaza, and we strongly encourage everyone who can to attend.

Future Meeting Schedule: Until January 7th, the Building Occupation Assembly will meet Mondays and Wednesdays at 5pm (in accordance with the modified GA schedule). Starting Sunday January 7th we will meet Sundays at 1pm and Wednesdays at 5pm. If needed the frequency of these meetings will be increased by the assembly.

Contextualizing Certain Actions that Took Place during the General Strike

Last Wednesday, tens of thousands of demonstrators marched in the streets of Oakland, shut down the center of the city, and paralyzed the Port of Oakland. With so many people, affinity groups, and organizations involved, things are bound to happen that not everybody agrees with. In the aftermath of the day of action, many folks have stepped up on Facebook, Twitter, and even the Occupy Oakland website to criticize and condemn a couple of these actions: the property destruction at banks and a Whole Foods that took place during an anticapitalist march in the afternoon; and the occupation of the former Traveler's Aid Society, which occurred late Wednesday night and was violently repressed by hundreds of riot police with tear gas, flashbang grenades, rubber bullets, and arrests (including a number of journalists and legal observers). What we want to do here is to provide a few important pieces of background as a way of helping to contextualize Wednesday's actions.

To begin with, one of the very first decisions the GA made was to approve a statement on diversity of tactics. As of October 30, it was collected with a series of other decisions (including a statement to the media which we mentioned and started to discuss here), formatted into a single document, and distributed at the GA as the "Occupy Oakland General Assembly Decisions and Practices":

Occupy Oakland encourages diversity of tactics for actions that occur outside the camp. For example, during marches:

• when confronted by police, some people may want to attempt to have calm conversations with them, urging them to be non-violent
• some people may want to sit down in front of lines of police
• some people may want to express their anger by yelling at the police
• some people may want to attempt to remove police barriers
• some people may want to disrupt traffic or banks
• some people may prefer to remain on the sidewalk

We should be tolerant of each other’s approaches and respect different forms of protest, while being aware of our privilege or lack of it, especially when engaging with the police.

The second decision we wanted to share has to do specifically with the building occupation. Many have criticized the occupation for being "secretive," for purposefully "provoking" the police, for circumventing the General Assembly and therefore constituting an "undemocratic" form. Most of these attacks strike us as simplistic and moralistic, although some have laid out much more thoughtful critiques that are worth seriously reflecting on (e.g. zunguzungu). In any case, what is missing in the majority of cases is any reference to the GA's declaration explicitly endorsing and offering material support for autonomous building occupations. It was approved by the GA with a vote of about 95 percent prior to the general strike:

Declaration of Solidarity with Neighborhood Reclamations

Occupy Oakland, in solidarity with the Occupy movement and with the local community, has established the principle of claiming for open use the open space that has been kept from us. We are committed to helping this practice continue and grow. Here in Oakland, thousands of buildings owned by city, banks, and corporations stand idle and abandoned. At the same time social services such as child and healthcare, education, libraries and community spaces are being defunded and eliminated.

Occupy Oakland supports the efforts of people in all Oakland neighborhoods to reclaim abandoned properties for use to meet their own immediate needs. Such spaces are already being occupied and squatted unofficially by the dispossessed, the marginalized, by many of the very people who have joined together here in Oscar Grant Plaza to make this a powerful and diverse movement.

We commit to providing political and material support to neighborhood reclamations, and supporting them in the face of eviction threats or police harassment. In solidarity with the global occupation movement, we encourage the transformation of abandoned spaces into resource centers toward meeting urgent community needs that the current economic system cannot and will not provide.

The occupation of the former Traveler's Aid Society building fits very well into these guidelines. A quick look at the half-sheet that was distributed in the moment, as well as the full statement that was posted later on, is all it takes to understand that the occupation was meant to "transform[] abandoned spaces into resource centers toward meeting urgent community needs."



An interesting question has been raised about the meaning of "neighborhood" or "autonomous" building occupations and likewise what "community" is being referred to in the context of "community needs." Who is this collective "we"? Who falls outside of that category? For an action to be "autonomous" or be associated with a "neighborhood" does that mean it can't be an official part of the GA or of the so-called Occupy movement? That seems absurd, especially given how the movement is framed as one of the "99 percent." Furthermore, even in the overall context of the general strike, much of what took place was organized autonomously. As Jaime Omar Yassin put it, "Even the migration to the port, some two miles away, was a puzzle of pieces of self-directed groups." The march from UC Berkeley to Oscar Grant Plaza, the critical mass out to the port, the anticapitalist march, the flying pickets that shut down various banks, the feminist bloc in the march -- were each and every one of these actions voted on individually by the full general assembly? No. And for good reason. First, there's an issue of effectiveness. From early on the GA has been based on autonomously organized actions. Here's another chunk from the GA's decisions and practices:

3. Encourage autonomous actions.
In order to keep the GA from being bogged down, and in order to allow for diversity of tactics, actions other than major events (like the General Strike) should be announced as actions rather than brought forward as proposals to be voted on.

Second, there's an issue of safety. Zunguzungu writes, "We do things in the open, or I’m not part of that 'we.'" That certainly makes sense for a lot of actions. For example, the general strike would have been impossible to organize in a closed forum. In large part, that's because of the nature of the action itself -- you can't shut down the Port of Oakland with an affinity group of, say, ten people. On the other hand, a small affinity group can do other things that can be very useful and effective. If those things are illegal and require the element of surprise, it becomes very dangerous and counterproductive for people to propose them in a large, open general assembly. There are often undercover cops in the camp and the media often reports on and records the GAs. The idea that every single action has to be planned "in the open" effectively means taking a large set of actions off the table.

Hopefully these statements will help contextualize what went down on the day of the general strike. We aren't trying to present these as absolute answers and agree on the need for some serious discussions of tactics and strategies (though we also think these specific discussions should happen in the context of the GA and not on social media). Overall, it's important to remember that what we organized -- over the course of a single week! -- was amazing, an incredibly powerful show of force, and we shouldn't lose sight of that in the face of internal divisions.

Finally, as a postscript, here are a few more links that we've found helpful for thinking about questions of "violence," property destruction, tactics, and strategies. These interventions are valuable and to some extent model the kind of conversations we need to be having (and are in fact starting to have -- last night's GA was in this respect very useful).

- Statement on the Occupation of the former Traveler's Aid Society at 520 16th Street
- An Open Letter from an Anarchist Participant in Occupy Oakland
- No-one Cares about Property Damage
- For the Fracture of Good Order
- A Night of Violence... against Oakland Protesters
- The General Strike of November 2nd, and How Occupy Oakland Occupied Oakland
- Notes on Oakland 2011
- The Black Bloc, A Hopefully More Interesting Critique
- An Open Letter to the Black Bloc and Others Concerning Wednesday's Tactics in Oakland

A Call for Disassembly

From anti-capital projects:

No more General Assemblies • No more Statewide Conferences • No more Days of Inaction

The fiasco of the Oct. 7th “sit-in” demonstrates the utter bankruptcy of the General Assembly: a political form more effective than tear-gas or billy-clubs in bringing an action to a close. In our fight against the university administration, we have ceded our power to administrative mechanisms that are little better.

How is it that an institution widely regarded last year as farcical came to assume ownership over the university struggle, to assert yet again its supposed sovereign power to broker all meaningful decisions? How can we assure that the General Assembly never again comes to assume the power to neutralize, silence, and demobilize? How can we finally demystify the GA’s absurd self-presentation as a space of democracy, participation and openness?

It is tempting to think that the failures of the General Assembly are those of personality, ineptitude, and opportunism. As we all know, the GA is run by a small clique of “socialist” organizers and future politicians who follow a political script unchanged, in its unflagging failure, since 1983. These are people who have, at every turn over the last year and a half, opposed proposals for direct action, or deferred them to some never-arriving future moment when they have “built the movement.”

October 7 [Updated]

Sit-in at North Reading Room of main library.
Updates and photos at Occupy CA.

Update [Friday]: Student Activism wonders:

The sit-in broke up around seven o’clock or a little earlier. Neither the Occupy CA liveblog, the Daily Cal liveblog, nor the Daily Cal morning story say exactly why . . .

Answer:

Update [several days later]: On a related note, check out "A Call for Disassembly" from Anti-Capital Projects.

Update [even later]: See also.