Organizing Occupy Wall Street: This is Just Practice (Alternatives and Futures: Cultures, Practices, Activism and Utopias) by Marisa Holmes

Organizing Occupy Wall Street: This is Just Practice (Alternatives and Futures: Cultures, Practices, Activism and Utopias) by Marisa Holmes

 Intergenerational Dialogues

Marisa Holmes
Brooklyn, NY, USA

I came of age politically during the anti-war movement of the mid-

2000s, and the crash of 2008. This was also a period of reflection on the
Global Justice Movement (GJM). I found that many of the lessons from
previous movements, about how to organize democratically and take
direct action, were applicable to the struggles of the moment.

The Zapatistas
The Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) began as a Marxist-

Leninist guerilla organization, in the 1980s, along the mountains and
villages of Chiapas, Mexico. Through building with the local Mayan
indigenous communities, they learned about the history of colonization
in the region and how to make change through other means. Instead of
seizing state power, they sought to build power from below (Holloway
& Pelaez, 1998). Women played an essential role in this strategy and
became core to the EZLN (Klein, 2015). By the time the Zapatistas went
public in 1994, they were committed to building autonomous,
horizontal, democratic territories.
On New Year’s Day 1994, the North American Fair Trade Agreement
went into effect. The Zapatistas understood that this would be
devastating for small farmers who would be competing with large
mono crop farmers, so they decided to go public and declare war on the
Mexican government. The EZLN occupied San Cristobal as well as other
towns in Chiapas, using wooden guns when they lacked real ones

(Conant, 2010). The insurgency was comprised of one third guerilla
women, some of whom rose in the ranks to commanders, and they
won (Klein, 2015). The result was a brokered ceasefire, and the
establishment of autonomous territories.
Immediately after, they created an organizational structure from
below and to the left, with the EZLN in the service of newly liberated
Zapatista communities. On 20 January 1994, the Zapatistas maintained,
“This democratic space will be based upon three fundamental,
historically inseparable premises: democracy to define the dominant
social proposal; the freedom to endorse one proposal or another; and
justice as a principle which must be respected by all proposals.”
(Holloway & Pelaez, 1998). The Zapatistas created a horizontal space,
where people could be heard and make their own decisions. Councils
addressed sharing land, developing co-ops, running schools, and
maintaining social ties within the communities. They understood that
change happens through a genuinely relational process. This is perhaps
best exemplified in The Story of the Question, in which Marcos writes,
“‘Let’s walk,’ said the one who were two. ‘How? Said the other. ‘Where?’
said the one,” (2004). This is how the Zapatistas learned to walk by
questioning.

The World Trade Organization and Direct
Action Network
The GJM was inspired by organizing practices of the Zapatistas, as well
as The New Left, Women’s Liberation, and the Anti-nuke movements.
Writing during the period of the GJM, Francesca Polletta draws
connections with earlier organizations. She notes that many
participants had previous experiences, whether in radical
environmental groups, ACT-UP (the direct action organization formed
around the AIDS epidemic), Reclaim the Streets and Critical Mass
(which took over public space through direct action), or other anarchist
or anti-authoritarian collectives. “What links these groups is their
commitment to direct action and a deliberative style that, with varying
degrees of rigor, is nonhierarchical,” Polletta (2004, p. 189) observes.

Organizing Occupy Wall Street: This is Just Practice (Alternatives and Futures: Cultures, Practices, Activism and Utopias) by Marisa Holmes