This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Port Huron statement, the founding statement for Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).  MIT hosted Tom Hayden, one of the leading authors (see the recorded talk here).  He commented on the contents of the statement, the feeling and the actions of the movement, and a few questions came to mind for me:

How will the occupy movement look in retrospect?  How did SDS look in the moment?
crickets

How do we count victories of social movements?   How do we regard “winning” over time?

Tom Hayden had this to say, that the changes your movement is advocating for will not always seem revolutionary if they come to pass.  Over time, you will notice that “your victories are the in the hands of others unless you fight the battle of memory.”

He spoke of this in the context of needing to maintain that your movement was responsible for the changes.  While I think showing that mass movement can bring about change is important, it seems like it’s actually a victory when once-radical policies become mainstream, if this is followed by space and agitation for the new radical.  I suppose that sometimes, there is not continued agitation for the new radical ideas.

Here’s some wisdom from an article by, Marco Giugni on measuring outcomes of the Occupy Movement on mobileizingideas.wordpress.com:

…”perhaps the most crucial impact of social movements resides not so much in provoking some immediate reaction from political leaders apart from increased repression, but in providing a fertile ground for what would come later. If this is true, the most significant impact of the Occupy Movement is perhaps seen in the cultural rather than in the political sphere. I am speaking of a cultural impact here to the extent that some of the movement’s demands, once they have entered the public domain, gain legitimacy and may change the way institutional actors frame a given issue. This does not mean that the political impact of the movements is nonexistent, but that it is at best an indirect one.”

And leads me to more questions like:

What was France like after the revolution?
What was the US like?
When and how did the victories of the Civil Rights Movement get counted, celebrated, implemented?

Continuing on, unschooling myself in the history of revolutionary movements.

That last post hung around for a while.  Occupy had a busy fall, a long winter, and is starting a big spring.   I moved up to Boston where I’m now working with the Center for Civic Media at the MIT Media Lab.

2 neat follow-up points from that last post.

1. Jordan Kraemer (twitter: @jordanisme), signator, just a little after that event, taught the Winter 2012 course, “Resistance, Rebellion, and Popular Movements” at UC Davis.  Not surprisingly, it was oversubscribed to start.  I love the idea of Davis students taking this in academically especially post spray!
2. A neat project that emerged from the UC Davis pepper spray incident — created at the Dec 2011 #OccupyResearch hackathon, including instructions for how this was created!

Saddened and outraged by recent violence on UC campuses, we sent an email as alumni, appended below, to our respective chancellors.  We are writing to invite you to do the same and have included chancellors’ names and contact information at the end of this email.  Please feel free to forward and to cut and paste if you want to use all or parts of our letter.

Please also consider supporting this online petition calling for the resignation of Chancellor Katehi: http://www.change.org/petitions/police-pepper-spray-peaceful-uc-davis-students-ask-chancellor-katehi-to-resign

In solidarity.

Dear Chancellors Katehi and Birgeneau:

As alumni of the UC system, we are writing to express our disgust and condemnation of the unnecessarily violent attacks on peaceful protesters on the UC Berkeley and UC Davis campuses this month.  On a UC campus, as elsewhere, both the students and the police deserve to be treated with respect.

We stand with UC campus protesters in their nonviolent attempts to occupy space where they can constitute themselves as political people. And we stand in solidarity with their attempt to put an end to and raise awareness around the policies that have both created and continue to deepen inequity in the U.S. and abroad.

We demand that you respect and protect the rights of free speech and assembly and that you allow only nonviolent response to nonviolent protest on all UC property from this moment forward.  In short, we demand that you uphold the standard expected of you as caretakers of public universities — the most respected institutions of open thought and free expression in the United States.  And if you cannot uphold these values, we demand that you step aside.

Sincerely, UC Alumni:
Whit Bissell, UCLA School of Law, JD,1998
danah boyd, UC Berkeley iSchool Graduate, PhD. 2008
S. Naomi Dabby, UC Berkeley Graduate, BS, 1996
Rebecca Hurwitz, UC Berkeley iSchool Graduate, MA 2010
Maryann Hulsman, UC Davis, BA, 2002
Jordan Kraemer, UC Irvine, Anthropology PhD candidate
Ilya Kushnirsky, UCLA Graduate Division Graduate, MA 2001
Archana Sahgal, UC Davis Law School Graduate, JD 2004
Heather Smith, UC Berkeley Journalism School Graduate, MA 2007

Non UC Alumni
Benjamin Chun, San Francisco, CA
Roy Kosuge, DC
Nevada Merriman, San Francisco, CA
Marc Scheff, Brooklyn, NY

To adress your chancellor:

• UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert J Birgeneau: rbirgeneau@chancellor.berkeley.edu, Phone (510) 642-7464, Fax (510) 643-5499
• UC Davis Chancellor Linda PB Katehi: katehi@chancellor.ucdavis.edu, Phone (530) 752-2065
• UC Hasting College of the Law Chancellor Frank H. Wu: wuf@uchastings.edu, Phone (415) 565-4700
• UC Irvine Chancellor Michael Drake: chancellor@uci.edu, Phone (949) 824-5011
• UCLA Chancellor Gene D Block: chancellor@ucla.edu, Phone (310) 825-2151
• UC Riverside Chancellor Timothy P White: Phone (951) 827-5201, Fax (951) 827-3866
• UC Merced Dorothy Leland: chancellor@ucmerced.edu, Phone (209) 228-4417, Fax (209) 228-4423
• UC San Diego Chancellor Marye Anne Fox: chancellor@ucsd.edu, Phone (858) 534-3135
• UC San Francisco Chancellor Susan Desmond-Hellmann: Chancellor@ucsf.edu, (415) 476-1000, Fax (415) 476-9634
• UC Santa Barbara Chancellor Henry T Yang: henry.yang@chancellor.ucsb.edu, Phone (805) 893-2231,  Fax (805) 893-8717
• UC Santa Cruz Chancellor George Blumenthal: chancellor@ucsc.edu, Phone (831) 459-2058
• University of California President Mark G. Yudof: president@ucop.edu

I think David Byrne said it best when he wrote: And you may find yourself standing in a sea of strangers on a windy night, debating more efficient structures for decision making in your nascent consensus-driven community.

And you may say to yourself… YES omg. YESYESYESYES!
…

So, Thurs night I participated in the General Assembly (GA) with an ulterior motive of announcing the Teach In that 60 min producer Leslie Cockburn was leading on Fri afternoon on the subprime mortgage crisis and the drive-in style screening of her film American Casino we were planning for Fri night.  Instead of announcing anything, I ended up participating in the first 3.5 hours of a GA that, I am pretty certain, actually ran another hour after I left.  This conversation continued into Fri’s GA and I believe, will spill into additional subsequent GAs.  I have never loved a long meeting before, but I loved this one.

The issue at hand: #OWS is a few things — it is an encampment with day-to-day needs and it is a movement — a new way of participating in your own life and community through consensus driven democracy.  As #OWS grows, the GA — the place where anyone can go to participate in consensus building among the movement grows increasingly cumbersome with more decisions and opinions.

The NYC working groups are proposing a new method for operating that will separate some decisions from the GA for the sake of efficiency and to start using a spokes council model (proposal here).  The debate is whether this will grant additional decision-making powers to smaller groups at the expense of the consensus driven decision-making through the GA.
…

I am sharing my impressions of how consensus works at #OWS and how this is affecting me on a personal level.  These are below, they are NOT my conclusions about the costs/benefits of the spokes council system:

One of the great strengths of the GA, is that anyone who shows up IS, but the act of showing up — a participant, a member of the community, and a person who makes decisions in the community.  It feels very open and like people are equally able to represent their cares and concerns and this is crafted and nurtured consciously.  Commitment to equality and respect for individual voices builds community.  After most comments, the facilitator and/or respondent will thank the recent speaker, acknowledging that the comment was received and considered.  This acknowledgment and respect echoes throughout the community and makes a safe place to speak openly.  THIS is empowering for me on an individual level, leaves with the sense that I can participate with the same voice as anyone else.

Consensus building with strangers is extremely empowering — we broke into small groups to discuss the proposal, and 20-by-20 discussed the proposal with strangers or relative strangers.  We asked questions, made proposals for amendment, met one another.  I looked around and realized that hundreds of people around me were doing this — listening to each other, reasoning together, and would, ultimately, have participated and be bought-in to a decision that will effect the larger community, perhaps, quite significantly.  THIS was empowering on a group level, my feeling was something like, WE together are able to reason and WE together can make decisions that benefit OURSELVES.  WE can create a community that makes decisions for ourselves.

I’ve feel like I have a stronger voice, just as a result of participating in the #OWS experiment — that I should have a voice as loud as anyone else everywhere that I am, that I should stand up and participate everywhere I am.  I feel like I’m more accepting of other people and our ability to relate too — any stranger or relative stranger out there could be someone with whom I could come to an agreement with about outcomes that benefit us both.

In NYC, this is huge for me because the density here so often seems to drive me to just the opposite feeling and reaction to the world, towards alienation and competition.  Among a sea of unknown people, my feeling is often that space is limited.  I want it for my purposes — they probably do also; I will take it before they do instead of finding some way to acknowledge that we all need the space and then sharing it.  AND, in turn, I assume that every unknown person out there feels the same about me.

Some questions that remain for me:

• Are my warm fuzzies for the GA somehow a function of being in a honeymoon period with #OWS as my friend suggested last night?
• How well will the GA do with dissent/actual disagreement over issues?
• Will the equalization factor decrease as people become “veterans” of #OWS or known participants?  How well will #OWS continue to make space for additional and new participants?  Will some voices become stronger than others as certain members become more outspoken than others on certain issues or topics?
• What are the GAs like in other cities and are any other cities opting for additional decision making structures already?

Seeing images of the destruction in Tahrir today, i wanted to put this together to give you some of the recent history of the square. I was just in Cairo, left on Thursday last week. Here’s a little of what I saw and some news articles to fill in some details. Many of these links are from Al Ahram, a majority state–owned paper. Regardless of being state owned, it has been covering Tahrir this month most completely among news sources I’ve been checking.

Earlier today, the Egyptian army cleared out the peaceful sit in in Tahrir, demolished tents, beat protestors. Since Jul 8, families of martyrs (people killed in the jan-feb revolution) and other revolutionaries/activists have been occupying the square in a peaceful protest, sharing 5 demands among them. With few exceptions, this has been peaceful.
Al Jazeera on today’s army demolition of the Tahrir sit in

I was just in Cairo last week, walked through Tahrir in the heat of the day on Tues. It was quiet, an estimated 10,000 people were in the square, the but the place was quiet, people mostly seeking shade under white tents in the summer heat. Weds night, I met up with an old friend from SF. She is Egyptian and returned to Egypt from SF in Mar to be a part of the revolution. We had dinner — I chatted with her and her friend about the revolution, the square, their outlook, and after, went for a walk in the square. People were out from underneath the tents — it was cool enough to be outside. We watched a screening of interviews of families of people who have faced military trials since the revolution on a screen that this group has erected in the square (http://tahrirdiaries.wordpress.com/ – open that with chrome and click translate), walked around some more, watched a screening that another group was holding on the wall of an AUC building on the other side of the square, chatted, met some people, and eventually I went home to my apartment. My friend stayed around in the square until sunrise — she said she’s been doing that most nights — going at night, talking to people until sunrise, and then going home. The place was full of people, acknowledgement that the demands of the revolution have not yet been met, and hope that more public demonstration could lead to changes.
About the sit in, about the organization and origin of the recent sit in

There was some anticipation of violence on Friday Jul 29 because conservative Islamists had announced that they would be joining the sit in. This seemed like a threat to those already in the square, unsure of whether these new protestors, who have been hostile and violent towards the secular revolutionaries, would create violence in the square. Until last week, the protest had been peaceful. The Saturday previous, there had been a violent clash in Abbassiya. Protestors marching toward the ministry military council that is currently ruling Egypt in a peaceful protest were attacked by locals and thugs coordinating with the police. About 300 people were injured.

Friday was not violent, but was disruptive for the secular movement.

• As Islamists overwhelm Tahrir with chants calling for Islamisation, 28 of Egypt’s revolution movements announce their withdrawal from today’s protests
• Islamists win some, lose some by overwhelming Friday’s demonstrations

Today was the start of Ramadan – 27 groups including the April 6 Youth Movement (a group that was active before Jan and was one of the leading groups of activist-youth in the revolution) pledged to withdraw from the sit in until after the holiday, saying that some of their demands have been met. Some groups including the families of martyrs of the revolution pledged to remain in the square.  Many of the remaining protestors pledged to remain in the square until  Mubarak appears in court, the projected date for this is Aug 3. It was these families and the remaining protestors who were removed by force today — their tents destroyed by the military and driven from the square by force.

Not exactly sure what more to say at the moment. This isn’t a good signal that future demonstrations, even if they are peaceful demonstrations, will be met by the military council without force. The revolution is not over yet.

See Twitter hashtag #tahrir for updates, no joke, this is the place to get instant eye witness accounts. Grain of salt — people don’t necessarily wait to verify their impressions before tweeting, but over time, you get a picture of what is really happening.

See Front to Defend Egyptian Protestors http://egyprotest-defense.blogspot.com/ for names of arrested and efforts to provide legal assistance to protestors.

From the states, we did a lot of debating about how the Egyptian revolution was or was not a “Twitter/Facebook/Online/New media revolution.” I spent a lot of time talking about how technology is much less important than other social, political, economic, factors in making social change and I stand by that. Technology — communication technology is just a tool for people to communicate with, but I find myself weighing that statement with seeing just how active people are on Twitter, Facebook, their phones; how much people really do use these forms of communication to document, report, keep up with, spread, information and news. And how much people here are also talking about the importance of these technologies.

On my way to Alexandria Thursday, I drove past a cafe that was just being built — a couple of men were hanging a sign on it — called the Facebook cafe. My friend linked me to an article in the times about someone in Egypt naming their newborn “Facebook” and I’ve seen a fair number of graffiti images featuring Facebook or Twitter, tshirts with #Egypt and #25Jan on them. Facebook and Twitter and the internet and mobiles, these technologies, represent something more than just technologies of communication — they represent tools of change here, and so, of revolution.

So, there’s metaphorical significance even if these tools are not solely responsible for the successes of the revolution. AND, these tools of communication were key in helping people to organize and to communicate with the world outside of Egypt — even through the internet and mobile network blackouts. People found ways of communicating out — some through loopholes in networks, some through old fashioned landline calls to people outside of Egypt — and through new and old channels — Twitter, commercial news media, mobile phone, landline.

But, it’s obvious that communication technology didn’t create a revolution — in fact, most were cut off during the heat of the revolution. I wonder what were other significant factors — some people say that the sheer number of people was key. Demonstrations before drew crowds of hundreds, 25 Jan drew thousands which meant that 26 Jan drew more thousands and on and on. The inspiration of the Tunisian revolution was key in motivating people. A question I’ve been asking is — when did you know that revolution would be successful? And mostly, I’ve heard that it was a surprise — some people were satisfied with Mubarak announcing he would not run again and thought that was the end of the protests, that people had let out steam, released some pressure and the protests would be over. A turning point was when the police started attacking the protestors — protestors got angry, fought back, banded together. And, ironically, when communication was cut, this might have helped protestors to band together more, to create a reason for people to be together in one place, talking to each other instead of at home, watching from the internet.

Other questions — who has access to mobile phones and the internet? Like everywhere else, mobile penetration is high in Egypt. Smart phone ownership is not very high. Internet access is not high. Literacy even, is not high. Who has smart phones, who has Twitter accounts, internet access that is consistent enough to organize using Facebook? Wealthier people who are literate, maybe techies, maybe just people who were educated to be critical of the government and who spend most of their day near a computer that is online and can maintain a blog or a Twitter stream.

I mentioned in an earlier post that it’ll be a challenge to educate lots of people about civic engagement in a functioning democracy. The people who are maintaining Twitter streams, organizing groups on Facebook, who were talking about human rights before 25 Jan, those people are extremely well educated in civic engagement and liberal democracy. They are the ones who were calling for it and who will now be doing the hard hard work of educating lots of other citizens who did not have the chance to study this and learn about this and debate this already.

And in Egypt, one of the key places where people have gotten together and talked about ideals of democracy has been online. So, again, maybe it’s not so wise to dismiss the use of the internet in social change. Here it really did serve as a public sphere for debate and discussion and a way for people to notice that there were others who wanted and thought similar things.

Another thing to note — situations are different in different parts of Egypt and for different groups of people within Egypt. This is evident in the many protests still going on, the many demands different groups are making. So, the demands of the people blogging and tweeting are different, perhaps, from the demands of the taxi drivers, from the labor movement that is strong in Suez and Mahalla, from the demands of university students in Cairo. Changes may occur in all of these sites of protest and a large number of tactics may be used and be successful — it will not be only the groups who are using Facebook and Twitter or mobile phones who are successful.

The moral is just to look for the variety. To keep our eyes open. Social change happens through many different means and the conditions and events that give rise to the changes are complex.

What you see is dusk from a roof in Zamelak, overlooking Cairo. What you don’t hear is call to prayer from every direction. There are mosques all over the city. At call to prayer, you hear the closest one first and then gradually, calls from all around adding to each other until you are hearing so many that you cannot distinguish one from the other. It’s beautiful.