By: Anthony Dent
Walk past the Peace and Justice Plaza on the corner of Franklin Street and Henderson Street any weekday around six o’clock and you will likely see a crowd numbering between twenty to thirty people, making hand signals and discussing animatedly, yet respectfully. This is Occupy Chapel Hill, the local manifestation of the national Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement. While it lacks the fervor of Occupy Oakland or the original OWS, Occupy Chapel Hill still reveals the ultimate futility and pointlessness of the OWS movement. A bunch of people in tents is just a bunch of people in tents if participation in the wider community is renounced in favor of creating a parallel community based on a different—and, at times, contradictory—value system. There are fewer than ten tents, so it’s hardly Zuccotti Park transposed in North Carolina, but they are making their presence known around town. Their posters announce their positions on a wide array of issues from the Iraq War to income inequality to the death penalty. The literature they pass out includes statistics on income disparity, anarchism, and common defenses against police (dealing with police covers about half the literature in their library, ironically enough). Asking occupiers about their signs or why they are there elicits a fairly lengthy—though, frequently, superficial—discussion about the half-dozen issues that compelled them to occupy.
But none of this is expressed in the political sphere. Individual members of the community are politically aware and, presumably, involve themselves in the political arena. But, collectively, the Occupy Chapel Hill movement has abdicated any involvement politically in favor of creating a space for discussion, to use their words. Many times, when asked, occupiers said they weren’t in favor of taking collective political action. This made more sense after talking with individual occupiers at length. After attending two general assemblies, browsing the available literature, and listening to as many of the conversations as I could, I decided it would be worthwhile to sit down for extended interviews with some of the members of Occupy Chapel Hill. One afternoon, I sat down and interviewed every occupier present in the plaza. What I heard was a cacophony of views frequently at odds with one another that could in no way be molded into a coherent political agenda.
Zein M. from Kenly joined Occupy Chapel Hill because he couldn’t find a job and was tired of competing with immigrants who were willing to work in construction for half the price he was. His was concerned “with all the people coming here and sending our wealth back to God knows where.” His solution to the problems facing our country? Post “Occupied” signs across all our borders because our jobs are filled for many years to come. No immigration—legal or otherwise—should be permitted. Hunter M. from Hillsborough joined Occupy Chapel Hill shortly after it began. He noticed the movement after a short stint providing security during the recent Humans v. Zombies game. Even though he’s young and healthy, he’s been unable to find a job for a year and a half. He vaguely agrees with the wider OWS movement’s demands regarding higher education and income inequality, but primarily stayed because he thought he community was good-natured, open-minded, and cared for the public good, rather than themselves.
Charles G. is a Chapel Hill native who has worked as a nursing aid for over twenty years. He is the cook for the Occupiers, which he does in his spare time. Cooking for around fifty people a day is difficult, he says, but he’s been fortunate to have “lots of donations” from the local community. When asked why specifically he is participating in Occupy Chapel Hill, he says he doesn’t have a specific goal. He just wants to see lots of change. John K. from Buffalo, New York—a self-described anarchist (“I’m somewhat of an anarchist, I guess, probably a Marxist”) who is banned from Canada due to previous activities—also stressed the fact that there are no specific goals for the movement (“One solution won’t solve our problems”), but offered several problems like the claim that jailers earn more than teachers or that a debt-based economy is simply unsustainable. Personally, however, he admitted to a few ideas he’d like to implement. Inspired by Ron Paul, Barack Obama, the Founding Fathers, and Nikola Tesla, he wants a “one world government.” In the short-term, he’s “all for taxes: tax, tax, tax.” He doesn’t believe in complete confiscation or abolition of private property (“if you build it, you’ve earned it”), but he wants a “wealth cap” with an undetermined limit. At the end of the day, he wants the government to “put power back in people’s hands.”
You can already see how difficult it would be for these four members to coalesce around a coherent political agenda, even if they preemptively refused to even attempt to do so. The first three didn’t have any plans for the future besides continuing to occupy the plaza, but John used a question about the occupation of the Yates Motor Co. building to discuss future possibilities for Occupy Chapel Hill. He described the blatant occupation of someone’s private property as a “brilliant idea” that gave the movement “good publicity.” He said that he was wary about “breaking the law to prove a point” but he thought that violence was a definite possibility in the future for OWS since “there’s nothing else we can do.”
To an outsider, this conclusion makes absolutely no sense. Certainly, to the Tea Party, the natural conclusion was to channel their frustrations into a political agenda used to win elections. But OWS refuses to work within the current system since they see it as perpetuating the very ills against which they are protesting. Instead of participating in the pre-existing community and political arena, they create a parallel community based around a system that is supposed to prevent inequalities from occurring. Hence the need for the widely derided consensus-based system which has even been mocked by Stephen Colbert.
But this just goes to show how pernicious rejecting the current system would be. As liberal commentator Anne Applebaum pointed out, when Occupy groups around the world chant, “This is Democracy!” they’re wrong. Encampments or even discussion rooms aren’t “democracy.” Democracy is found and expressed in elections which can symbolically be represented by the U.S. Capitol (or, in her case, Westminster Palace). As many commentators have pointed out, OWS is only the most recent manifestation of the anarchist strain that sees destruction of the current order as its only solution. Thinkers like Noam Chomsky are, at the very least, sympathetic to this idea.
The manpower, let alone the intellectual power, of the occupiers could be used for good. They could participate in a Habitat build, for example, if they want to continue to be apolitical. But they refuse to do even that. The only collective action they have taken besides the initial occupation was to protest on behalf of a petition to create an independent review of how the Chapel Hill police department handled the Yates Motor Co. situation- hardly earth-shattering. Unless Occupy Chapel Hill turns into a political or social force, it will rightly be written off as a waste of time. Currently, it is purely parasitic, living off the donations of productive members of society, while pretending to be creating a separate community. If this continues, Occupy Chapel Hill will wither at the vine and become a rather uninteresting footnote in the history of political action in Chapel Hill. Or it could turn violent like Occupy Oakland. Either way, it will change nothing substantively because the occupiers have refused to enter the political arena.
