Withdrawal of Official Demands and Adoption of a No Demand Policy

[greggoodman]

I propose that the General Assembly withdraw its two official demands ( 1: Repeal the Bush Tax Cuts for the wealthy; 2: Fully investigate and prosecute the Wall Street criminals) and vote to eliminate the further proposition of any demands from our agendas until such a time as our collective body deems it necessary to reconsider this position. While demands benefit our movement by giving it focus, they also challenge our movement’s growth by alienating potential allies and narrowing our imaginative horizons. I, for example, find it impossible to extend my support to our demand to identify and punish the so-called “Wall Street criminals”. This has left me in a dilemma wherein my personal relationship with and loyalty to the movement are in constant question. I want to support the Occupation whole-heartedly. But when I consider the truly great social movements of the last century, and I am speaking here specifically of Dr. King’s Civil Rights Movement and Mahatma Gandhi’s movement for Indian Independence, I am reminded that the leaders of both of these movements insisted that a struggle for justice must never concern itself with revenge and the settling of scores of the past, but must instead embrace a spirit of generous forgiveness and look toward a better future. Those social movements which have instead sought to punish those groups identified as not belonging among the true owners of a society – in our case the 99% as opposed to the 1% – have never been celebrated in later history, but only remembered as moments of deep and collective shame. I see this particular demand as nothing more than a rallying call for a witch hunt that ignores our collective complicity in enabling the creation of the system which we now work to overthrow. This is only my personal opinion, but I hope it is illustrative of the alienating impact of all demands and the problems posed by any demand which claims to represent the 99%. I do not think we should throw away the lists of demands we have been aggregating over the last several weeks. Instead, I propose we cease to think of them as demands, and instead consider them as “subjects of discussion and collective inquiry”. At a time when we seek to build our movement, this sounds to me like a much more inviting way to address these issues. I have no demands to make to a system that is broken. I only have an invitation to everyone to help us build a better world.