COVER: The 99 are coming

The Occupy Montreal movement will take over Square Victoria this weekend. What it wants is still unclear, but that just may be the point

FLASHPOINTS: Square Victoria, pre-occupation
Photos by WILL LEW

It’s Saturday, Oct. 8, one week before Occupy Montreal descends on Square Victoria and an hour before the group’s third general assembly. Slowly, by fits and starts, people are gathering in the wide, airy, open agora of UQÀM’s Judith-Jasmin pavillion, across the street from Berri Square. It’s a beautiful afternoon, as good as can be to change the world. “It’s fitting that we’re meeting in the agora,” someone tells me. And he’s right: In classical Greece, an agora was the central meeting place in a city-state, where politics commingled with the mar­ket. And considering the meeting being held here today deals in part with the relation that politics has with the markets—in particular, the financial markets—the setting is indeed appropriate.

The people gathering here are the nucleus of Occupy Montreal, the local offshoot of the weeks-long Occupy Wall Street movement in New York. Like their New York counterparts, Occupy Montreal will flood the city’s financial centre, in our case Square Victoria, home to the Montreal Stock Exchange, the Centre de commerce mondial, the Power Corporation, several banks and Quebecor (the Mirror’s parent company). And while their demands are still unclear as of press time—the general assemblies are being held to focus the group’s vision and organize the demonstration—they are pro­pelled by a palpable sense of disenfranchisement, of vanishing hopes and simmering anger at an economic and political system that places the interests of the richest one per cent of the population over those of the bottom 99.

While only about 40 or so attended previous general assemblies held last week, their numbers are swelling: on the Occupy Montreal Group Facebook page—one of the group’s primary commu­nication methods—members are flooding in. As of Monday, Oct. 10, there were over 2,500. A week before, there were barely 1,000. More than 2,300 say they will be attending. And there are many, many more people sharing their anger: similar demos are planned in over 1,300 cities and towns worldwide on Saturday, Oct. 15.

GROWING FAST, GOING SLOW

The biggest criticism leveled at the protesters, usually from the right, is their lack of a coherent message. While the demonstrators share a real anger toward the banks that took billions upon hun­dreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to avert an economic meltdown they created, critics have mocked them as naïve, unrealistic and as “left-wing nutbars” (as did Kevin O’Leary of the CBC’s The Lang and O’Leary Exchange last Thursday before he was humiliated by his guest, the journalist Chris Hedges). But these sneering, condescending critiques fundamentally misunderstand, either intentionally or not, what this movement is about.

There isn’t a list of demands anywhere, not official ones, because the Occupy movement is diffuse, leaderless and operates along lines of direct participatory democracy. This is the case in New York, Montreal, Washington DC, Toronto, Boston, you name it. The General Assemblies (GAs) are supreme, so every motion has to be debated and voted on before it is adopted. It can be a long and tedious process, and not one given to offering snappy answers to simple questions. And because a list of principles or demands has yet to be adopted, every person quoted in this article insists that they speak only for themselves, not for the group.

“There are some difficulties” in getting the movement going, says Louis-Philippe Garceau, a member of Occupy Montreal’s political philosophy committee. “The question is how to define a move­ment and come up with a discussion. Our goal is to think of a language in which we can discuss economic injustice.”

In other words, they are meeting to decide what it is they want to say. “The occupation will define the discussion,” says Louis Vinet, who like Garceau is in his early 20s and a member of the polit­ical philosophy committee. “We can build on the dynamism as it moves forward.”

At this stage, it’s easier to define what they are not. “We’re not hippies and we aren’t linked to unions,” says Garceau. “We’re completely non-partisan,” adds Vinet. “We are inclusive, not exclu­sive and we will never be affiliated to a political party or movement. We are democratizing democracy.”

“We are not anti-capitalist, we’re just against the way it has evolved,” says Garceau. “We could have a consensus that capitalism needs regulation.” Vinet concurs: “That’s an outline of our posi­tion: Capitalism should have some sort of ethics or morals.”

Another thing they are avowedly not is violent. They are explicitly anti-violent, and any violence at the Occupy Montreal event will not be tolerated. A diversity of tactics will not be respected. “If the police decide to charge us or arrest us, we’ll be the victims,” says Garceau. “We are entirely peaceful.”

Whether the police cooperate is another matter. There is more than enough evidence online of cops around the U.S. beating up and pepper-spraying occupiers, whether it’s in New York, Seattle, Boston, San Francisco or elsewhere. And with the reputation cops here have in regards to crowd control, and the reputation of young people demonstrating in the streets, the possibility of mass arrests can’t be ignored. Occupy Montreal does have a legal committee looking into this.

As for the police, a spokesperson says that there is nothing illegal about staging a peaceful assembly, but they will be on hand to ensure the safety of the occupiers and passers-by. They do say that any signs of violence will end in arrests, however. A spokesperson for Claude Trudel, the city’s public security chief, said she knew nothing of the event and referred all calls to the police.

A WORD FROM THE SPONSOR

The movement is puzzling so many people because it’s new, and the way it’s spreading is also new, at least in North America. Occupy Wall Street was thought up by Adbusters, the Vancouver-based culture jamming magazine and embraced by its listserv readers. Reached in Berkeley, California, Adbusters senior editor Micah White says the movement is “the start of a global people’s awakening.”

Inspired by the protestors in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, White says the July call-out was the first step in a long-overdue realigning of power. “We’re trying to re-invent people’s democracy,” he says. “It’s slow, it’s messy, but it’s real. Occupy Wall Street can only be understood as a long-term revolutionary goal. In the short term, we’ll see a series of demands come out of the general assemblies, and those demands will be put to our leaders, who will say either yes or no. And then slowly we’ll move to the next stage, where we’ll be pulling more and more power to ourselves.”

It can’t come too quickly for White. He speaks of the future in biblical terms: “We are entering an apocalyptic moment,” he says. “Ecologically, financially, morally and mentally. These are des­perate end times. As recently as 2003 [in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq], we could pretend that it was going to be okay. But now, unless we change, it’s going to be the end.”

Occupy Wall Street’s strength is its visibility, taking place in the heart of North America’s media capital. And though the cops haven’t been kind, the occupation is ongoing. How long it will con­tinue, as the weather turns from blissful Indian summer to cold, dark and wet winter, and how long the authorities’ patience lasts, is anyone’s guess. White, however, is optimistic that change is here to stay. “When you have an explicitly revolutionary movement that is sweeping across America, the powers that be will either brutally suppress it or try to co-opt it,” he says. “Both strategies will fail.”

LEARNING TO SPEAK

The people at UQÀM’s agora last Saturday don’t look particularly revolutionary. Of the dozen or so people I spoke to over the course of a week, maybe a third had a background in activism. But the core members at the general assembly last Saturday swear they are committed. “I’ve never been an activist,” says Frédéric Carmel, another young occupier says. “But these last two weeks have been incredible.”

Most of them are bilingual, and at least one has told me that the language debate has absolutely no place in the discussion. Many of them are clean-cut, reasonably dressed and fair­ly articulate. Not all of them are, but that, in many ways, is the point, to attract all of the disenfranchised under a common banner to say that they have had enough of their future being compromised for the sake of a wealthy few.

“We’re opening up a discussion that asks us how we want to build something different,” says Garceau.

“We’re creating the possibility of having alternatives,” says Vinet. “We’re engaging in learning. What would be ideal would be to bring your grandfather, your aunts and uncles and their kids.” ■

OCCUPY MONTREAL TAKES PLACE ON SATURDAY, OCT. 15 AT 9:30 A.M. FOR MORE INFORMATION, VISIT OCCUPYMONTREAL.TK OR THEIR FACEBOOK PAGE

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