Complexity and the art of starting a revolution

It was a surprise to me that the origins of the movement were actually in Vancouver, where Adbusters publisher Kalle Lasn and his friends brainstormed on the idea that occupying Wall Street could bring attention to the depth of resentment about wealth inequity in the world. Reading this article in The Tyee, it is clear that Lasn has both a clear thought about what the movement could demand (a one percent tax on financial transactions) and a sense that there never was a guarantee that this thing could work.

It is a complex world and small interventions can make a difference. Nothing is guaranteed, but there are a few characteristics of #OccupyWallStreet that are worth pointing out. If an idea like this is to propagate and spread it requires a few key things to take it beyond a brainstorming session:

An invitation.: “To me it was a sublime symbol of total clarity. Here’s a body poised in this beautiful position and it spoke of this crystal-clear sublime idea behind this messy business. On top of the head it said, ‘What is our one demand?’ To me it was almost like an invitation, like if we get our act together then we can launch a revolution…There’s some idea there, and the power of it comes from the fact that most of the time you’ll never be able to answer what it is. It’s just there. It’s just a magic moment that you can feel in your gut that it’s there, and you’re willing to go there and sleep there and go through the hardship and fight for it. Once you start answering it too clearly then the magic is gone.”

What is our one demand? The poster above is not a manifesto, it is an invitation to co-create, to show up and deliberate together. While Lasn has an idea, the process is important.

Connectivity. “We have a network of 90,000 culture jammers who are tuned into us at various levels. The biggest brainstorms happened between myself and Adbusters senior editor Micah White, who lives in Berkeley. We were the two key people who got excited, and more and more excited, morning after morning, and eventually decided on that hashtag, #OccupyWallStreet. When we launched that hashtag, the twittering came on so hard and fast that it drove us. We suddenly said, ‘Hey, this could actually happen.”

Adbusters has a massive network of people who are in constant communication with each other. Such a network makes it possible to share and propagate ideas, and ensures that the medium for transmitting the idea is already in place. If you have to build a network to get your ideas out, you a already behind the times.

Sponsorship.. “I’ve felt like this all my life and even though I’m kind of an old guy now, I must admit age doesn’t seem to come into it. I feel like this is the first time in the 20-plus year history of Adbusters that we really have a chance to pull something off, and it’s we. Let’s face it, most of the people, probably 90 per cent of the people camping out on Wall Street are young people, and even though I’m not sleeping there I still feel it’s we. It takes old people like me and theoreticians like Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, who are writing for our next issue, and people like David Graeber, the anarchist, and Saul Newman, the guy who recently wrote a book about anarchism. It takes all kinds of people to launch a revolution, but the cutting edge is young people who put their asses on the line.”

Kids get together all the time. But without patronage and sponsorship, and in some cases the protection afforded by a piece of open and private land in the middle of Manhattan, nothing can go very far. The powers that be may yet crush this whole thing, but it is currently more than an idea, and as power begins to not just endorse, but actually support the movement, its chance for survival increases.

A light plan with few expectations. “It has grown beyond anything I thought was possible in the early days. The mood changes every day, and this realization that all of a sudden it’s a nationwide movement in the United States and now it’s even creeping into Canada. That’s — what can I say? It’s beyond anything I imagined early on. I’ve been sort of running with it day by day, and now it feels like anything is possible. It’s a good lesson for me. I’ve always been reticent and careful and doing a lot of planning and stuff. For me personally it’s told me, don’t hold back. Just go for it. You never know what’ll happen.”.

A concrete strategic plan with a fail safe strategy is too rigid and brittle for this work. In order for self-organizing behavior to have a chance, you need to step back and let things unfold as they will. And if it fizzles, let it go. But if it works, throw everything you have at it to keep it going.

A shared purpose aligned with the times.. “The most remarkable thing that inspired me, when I first started looking at the original videos that first started appearing on Russian TV, and other videos that were made, and they went up to people in Zuccotti Park and asked people, I just couldn’t believe how articulate and how tuned in these people actually were. I’d gone along with this feeling that a lot of the political left is just a loony left, and there’s a bunch of granola people running around saying, “We want to overthrow capitalism,” and that sort of stuff. Here we are brainstorming, trying to come up with slogans, and all of a sudden they were spontaneously saying things in the street that inspired me. They said it better than what we could come up with in our brainstorming sessions! That told me that maybe the political left isn’t as loony as I’d been thinking for the past 10 years. Maybe there is a spark of revolutionary fervor there after all.”

This is not a diffuse love-in. There is a clear purpose at the core of this work and that is to address the economic and social inequalities that plague the world. The time for analysis is over. We know what the problem is. Even those who clamor for the movement to be clear know deep down that the protesters are right about something. You can sense it. There is a need and the movement is providing a focus for the despondency that many people feel. This is not a small issue that only a few people can relate to. The 99% is real, and invites each of us to find our own relationship to the core. And isn’t it interesting that some of those celebrity journalists that are decrying the movement are actually part of the one percent, or very close to them?

A view of possibility. “I know it sounds kind of grandiose, but it seems like on Nov. 3 and 4, when the G20 meet, it is possible to have millions of people marching around the world, all demanding one thing. And we believe that one thing could be the Robin Hood tax. The Tobin Tax, what we’re calling a one per cent tax on all financial transactions. And this could be a tipping point moment where we the people tell our politicians and our leaders what we want to happen to our economy, rather than having to listen to their bullshit about shall we have a stimulus or shall we not, or shall we do this or shall we not. Let’s slow down fast money with a Tobin Tax, and we feel that over the next one month we may be able to instigate a global movement where the young people of the world stand up and say, ‘We want to have a Robin Hood tax.'”

This is not aimless. This is action that is undertaken with the idea that something is possible. A tax on financial transactions – slowing down fast money – is brilliant. It slows the flow, and doesn’t hurt anyone, and it addresses the revenue issue faced by almost every country on earth. It’s possible, it’s relatively straightforward and it might work. Who can’t get behind that?