I defintiely see where you are coming from. The danger of these movements is that in our passion and our crusade to do what we feel is right we often forget that we are being oppressive by not allowing diversity in and working through it. The Feminist Movement had the same issues. It often ridiculed and alienated straight women, ultra feminine women or women who enjoyed a more traditional role like stay-at home mothers.  And, to be honest, Los Angeles is sort of known for it's pseudo-liberalism really. LA has always had an element of doing things for show, kinda like the movie industry that has made this city what it is. There is a front stage and a back stage and it looks like you can see it right here in the OLA camp. I was down there today and on one hand I was proud that this was in my city, on the other hand I was slightly disappointed that everything is being done with the blessing of the LAPD and City Hall. It takes something important away from civil disobedience when you aren't actually being disobedient at all.

I see that everything you are saying has some truth. But every revolution, every social movement has had incredibly f***ed up aspects, havent they? But people just have to keeping fighting on, against the system, and against the way we have internalized the system? I just hope that this movement grows and lasts, and everyone involved can learn a lot, and we may even be able to turn around some of these bad things you bring up, and maybe a lot of people will learn how to take possession of the consensus process and make it work the way its supposed to as an instrument of equality.  The American Revolution kept slavery. The end of slavery did not enfranchise women. The French Revolution turned on its own. Anti-colonial revolutions ushered in neocolonialism. The 60s, as they say, were not the 60s. The Civil Rights movement was very top down in some ways, with the Ella Bakers who promoted bottom up direct democracy overshadowed by leaders like MLK. The black power movement was organized mainly around black male leaders, the women's movement focused on white women. It's sad that we have to learn the same things over and over and over again. But the fight for social justice is always worth having, right?   Or, I won't erase all this, but maybe I should instead just ask you, so what do you think we should do? 

First of all, Who told you about me being a CSULB student? This is not accurate. 

Secondly, in respose to the "shadow government" case. The mission of the Cross-Committee Coordination meetings are to ensure accessibilty of all committees and make sure they communicate with each other. Before this committee was made, no one know where to go or who to go to coordinate with committees..and by no one i mean no one! it was way worse than it is now and its gotten a lot better for this reason: establishing Point Persons has been important, for we can have someone to contact for we can contact a committee. Without a reference person, theres no way to contact a committee effectively! They have no more power than anyone; They are not anonymous, go to any meeting and ask who is the point person! Some committees rotate point persons. They are established by the committees themselves!  We have never ever never discussed key actions, as you say we have!  There are a lot of problems at the occupation. Numerous problems. Problems of assault, disrespect for working class folks, and I have stood up against these problems and have been shut down by others as well. But truly, your articles just contributing to this problem because of its misinformation.

RL you're right, but Federica is right in pointing out (both explicitly and albeit unintentionally ostensibly) how everything will be spun.  Federica's larger points about shadow leadership as well as the amorphousness of process, machinations, etc. are central issues to grapple with, and Lee and invictus are spot on.

Federica is also right on target in pointing out that these issues were faced before. But one thing I'd like to ad is this:

THE TYRANNY of STRUCTURELESSNESS

and a response, which also makes a critique with valid points. (The point is not so much the -isms directly addressed therein but rather to point out that just about all of the movement issues we confront have been thought about in critical depth before.)

I'll also point out that part of what is being described has been called "natural heirarchy" and that's only necessarily a problem if it's exploitative, cynical, oppressive, defeats the goals of a movement, or excludes anyone from making an equally valid contribution that adds to the cause.  People involve themselves with different levels of committment, different skills and experience--including those directly concerning working in a movement, and find themselves in different roles with different resources and facing different challenges.  The tradeoff is between learning how to live with this or harness it or modulate it--but in any event making it transparent and accountable, or getting even less done as everything goes to meetings in which hundreds of people have to consent and many have to say their peace, it being entirely up to them to decide whether or not something is tangential.  And I'll pose to you this question, say you have much to offer a movement and are willing to make a very high level of commitment...would you really want to totally submit yourself completely to a process that can often be painfully inefficient and self-contradictory and by virtue of trying to embrace everyone's views starts to count yours out in order to not have leaders...at some point, if you stuck with it, doesn't this become exploitative?  (My own little history with this runs roughly like that with the postscript that a couple of years later things turned out nearly exactly according to the strategy I laid out, but well after I'd moved on and they spent lots of time an money on an unnecessarily protracted fight.  The tangential point here being that sometimes it's necessary to process things outside a collective framework to sort out what's really going on and how to deal with it, and people who haven't done that won't see it right away or reject it as insufficient--i.e. that both sides of this are in a certain sense natural.)  None of which is to argue for authoritarian power structure but rather that unless a collective decision is going to be implemented and more specifically worked through by everyone in the collective, there develops a gap between the deciding and the doing, which can further develop into a disconnect.

I'm certainly not segesting that we vest anyone with the authority to order people around or devalue anyone's views.  This is a movement that's about something very different than that.  Still, we have to function effectively.  My view is that a good paradigm is small, task-focused affinity groups with delegates to an assembly of affinity groups, both of which are transparent about what they are doing and why, and operate on a mutual accountability model...along with which a rotating designated responsibility scheme similar to that described in the first article linked but with an "apprenticeship" period as an assistant before having principal responsibility and a "consulting assistant" with fewer responsibilities afterwards to transfer the benefits of experience as a new designee learns by doing.  The fact that transparency and accountability are built in (the key is doing this effectively) is what prevents what we don't like about the standard leadership model...appart from the most basic fact that ultimately we all participate voluntarily, and past a certain point, anyone who doesn't like the direction in which someone would "lead" them is simply gonna walk away.

But with or without leaders, or whether by being lead by shaddow-leaders or otherwise, without tangible accomplishments, eventually this movement becomes a venting-about-the-injustices-of-the-world society and little else.  Which would be sad.

How to move forward?  Hard to say, most likely through trial and error, but the question must be regularly asked, is what we are doing advancing us towards our goals?  Which always returns us to the question of what our goals are, which, other than a certain level of generality, we haven't settled on.  But if we don't get down to specifics at some point, we'll be hippies levitating the Pentagon, with roughly the same effectiveness.

But I have to challenge Federica on one point:

There is no revolution here. There is no demand for systemic, fundamental change. OccupyLA is the mildest, the nicest of reformist movements.

There is and there isn't.  If you imagine, however much we might wish it to be so, that 99% or even 51% of this country is ready for--or even fully grasps--the idea of social and economic justice, of addressing racism, sexism, militarism, colonialism, etc.  you're wrong.  (Even about this particularly blue state, let alone all those red ones.  I'd be delighted if you could refute that with evidence.)  At best, more are waking up to only the most excessive economic injustices and plutocracy per se.  There's a long way to go; this movement is, um, roughly eight weeks old.  But it is revolutionary that there's a dialog that's taking hold a little more widely, and that these things are all being framed in a different way than they have been in quite some time.

I also have to reiterate the point that being a revolutionary movement, if that's what this ultimately ever becomes, and pursuit of immediate reforms, is a false dichotomy.  Without delving into the question of what it means to be revolutionary, in general, a revolutionary movement can work tactically for reform.  (Even the CPUSA figured that out and supported FDR, knowing full-well that from their point of view he was far from ideal.)  At the moment, and for the foreseeable immediate future, there's no clear mass resistance strategy (let alone the MANY TENS OF MILLIONS OF PEOPLE READY TO PUT THEIR BODIES ON THE LINE for it) with much prospect of accomplishing anything.  Will there ever be?  We'll have to see.  Neither will materialize over night.  But, again, at some point, we have to have something tangible--even if it's small--to show for our efforts or we demonstrate ourselves to be of limited relevance.  When we show ourselves to be effective, more people will join us.

I am finding everyone's contributions on this thread very constructive. Thank you, Federica_Lorca, for your wonderful response about what we should do. Thank you, Michael Lozano, for addressing the concerns about your committee directly. I'm also thrilled that I am seeing some new posters; I was worried that the forum was devolving to about 10 people and wondering what we can do to open it up more. 

OK, please don't misunderstand me anybody, I in fact want to support non-hierarchy and the consensus process.  But I read a summary of a study some years ago (apologies that I don't have the exact reference) that said that in a consensus and not very structured process, there is a tendancy for individuals who feel very self-empowered to dominate, and that correlates with gender, race, and class (of course! there are exceptions).So in that sense, the hierarchy is not natural. And that in a more structured situation with a formal vote, people who are quieter and/or have less social privilege are more able to affect decisions by at least being able to vote. Ultrarad's link, The Tyranny of Structurelessness makes some of these points really well. And that problem seems to be happening at OLA so I hope people of good will and commitment will find ways to make the movement as democratic as we want it to be.

I really like ultra rad's words "transparency" and "accountability"-yes, in spite of all the committee reports at the GA, we don't have that, and it would be more than helpful. In the absence of transparency, it's easy to imagine that certain people are really in control of what's going on, or the money etc, when that might not be quite accurate. For example, I don't know Mario or Kwazi well, but I think they both have a lot to offer the movement. I know for a fact that they are not on the same page, and that each of them is as frustrated as a lot of us are with the way things are going. Sure, maybe each of them would like to be the "leader" of OLA, and so would quite a few other people I could name of varied backgrounds and ideologies. But none of these folks will be unless most of us want them to be and let them be. 

I believe I heard yesterday that the portapotties are being paid for by SEIU. I could have the particular union wrong, but SEIU makes sense, since it is deeply invested (pun intended) in the Make the Banks pay movement, especially "Refund California" which I know began organizing for this series of bank protests many months ago--I think a year. My experience with SEIU is that it is very hierarchical and because of that has been subject to quite a lot of corruption, but that it currently has a strategy of mobilizing people hit hard by foreclosures etc in large direct actions and it is finally calling for the richest, especially corporations, to pay higher taxes. For example, at OLA in the last few days I have met two people who had their foreclosures reversed recently by SEIU & ACCE sit-ins and marches. So although SEIU will control these actions as tightly as it can, I am excited that this can help promote independent grass roots movement against the foreclosures and so on.

Last night Angela Davis spoke at an event where she was being honored as a historian "of the lions", and made some remarks that really impacted me. One of her main points was that the most important thing going on at the occupations (she's visited 4) is that people are learning to be together. She thought it was fine that specific demands have not yet been agreed on.She emphasized the great diversity of the participants across age, ideology, and all the other demographics. She quoted Audre Lorde on the idea that what matters is not the differences among people but that we learn to celebrate those differences. I think that is very wise. Another thing she said that stuck with me is that this is the movement that should have happened as soon as Obama was elected. When asked about the internal or strategic issues within Occupy Wall Street, she said past social movements, especially occupations need to be studied, and brought up Attica (even though it only lasted 4 days), the women's occupation against Nuclear Weapons in the UK in the 80s in which 50,000 women had a long term encampment (years!) surrounding a military installation, and then she said we really need to go back to the 1930s to the unemployment councils and sit-down strikes to study those dynamics. These are only a few of the things she said, of course.

Now, she's not as involved as many of the occupiers, but I think most people would agree that she is a genuine radical. Her main issue for years now has been calling for the "prison-industrial complex"to be completely abolished, and she discussed eloquently how prisons have become where our country and other countries lock away problems they don't want to deal with, and prisons have become alterntives to school, jobs, etc. I think she kind of modeled the best "radical" attitude, that you have to be patient, you have to expect problems, you have to be open and flexible to what new generations and movements are doing, you have to know there are no guarantees, but you also always have to be optimistic that really transforming society toward social and economic justice is always possible, and this may be that moment. I loved her excitement (after some 45 years of activism) that a day after police shut down the OWS generators, the occupiers had them up and running again with bicycle power, and that protestors have created an app on their phones "I'm been arrested" so all they have to do is press that button to get help.

PS-- I apologize if I was spreading misinformation about who is paying for the portapotties.The person I heard really sounded like they knew what they were talking about, but I will be more careful about repeating stuff in future, and I will look into it further.