Amongst other things, Occupy Edmonton media spokesperson Katie Nelson confirms that no decision about whether there was to be an encampment had as yet been taken by Occupy Edmonton. Yes, Occupy Edmonton had announced its “occupation” of the University of Alberta. But “occupation” means many things. Occupy Edmonton intended to take its decision about what its relationship with the University of Alberta might be at a General Assembly to be held on campus late yesterday afternoon. And Occupy Edmonton had invited members of the University’s administration to join them at this Assembly.

As all decisions made by Occupy Edmonton are taken by consensus by those present at their General Assemblies the University’s administrators could have been present to influence the decision. What an interesting event that would have been! What a wonderful opportunity it would have been for the University to demonstrate what an enlightened institution this is.

Occupy Edmonton has already held at least one other General Assembly at the University of Alberta — on a quiet Sunday in November, right in front of University Hall.

Rather, however, than welcoming members of the public to join U of A students, if they wished, at a student rally against tuition fees, the University of Alberta “Risk Management” team arranged for the City of Edmonton police to block the entry of students and Occupy Edmonton members onto campus.

Students claim that they were turned back not because they wished to be part of any encampment, but because they wished to be part of a rally. See, for example, this statement issued by students who wished to be part of the rally because of their concern about cuts to the Faculty of Arts: https://www.facebook.com/groups/staffsolidarity/. 

Hopefully Edmonton’s journalists will be able to get to the truth of the matter by talking directly to the students who were kept from walking onto campus yesterday. Edmonton’s journalists have an important role to play here in ensuring that the public understands what was actually said in exchanges between police, University spokespeople, students, and members of the peaceful protest movement Occupy Edmonton. Presumably the University administration also wants the truth to be told. The University’s motto is, after all, “Quaecumque Vera” (“All Things That Are True”).

More recently, the University has been using the “tag” “Uplifting the whole people.” The phrase is drawn by a speech by the University’s founder, Henry Marshall Tory, in 1908. Tory said “The modern state university has sprung from a demand on the part of the people themselves . . . . The people demand that knowledge shall not be the concern of scholars alone.  The uplifting of the whole people shall be its final goal.” Whatever the University may now be claiming about the status of the land on which its buildings sit, the fact remains that the University of Alberta is a public university founded at the “demand” of “the people,” for the betterment of their interests. The rhetoric is certainly old-fashioned, but it should translate into something urgently important, still: as a public university, the University of Alberta should be a place where all Albertans can gather, if they wish, to discuss whatever they social issues they deem important to them.

Here post-doctoral scholar Marija Cetinic responds to a policeman’s claim that the University is a “big house” that belongs to the University, who can’t just have any old body sitting down in a chair on its lawn. If the University is a “big house,” Cetinic noted, it is one that belongs to the people. The whole people.

The “whole people” includes “Raging Grannies” and people playfully wearing masks.

It also includes graduate students of social theory who wish to put their learning to work to address pressing inequities in the culture and transform society.

And let’s not forget that it includes people currently without jobs because of the irrational and unjust ways in which we manage the earth’s resources and its wealth.

And, yes, amongst the “whole people” are also those who work full-time as activists because they wish to use their many talents to bring into being a better world, whether or not anyone else deems them “productive.”

The official University statement says that “Occupy” is a “subject of interest” for the University community. With its actions yesterday, the University has suggested that it it may study protest movements important to “the whole people,” without actually welcoming their members to the University so that members of the University community may engage with them. With this decision, the University sadly reinforces perceptions that, despite its proximity to Edmonton’s downtown, and despite the fact that it is a public institution, it is a secluded place whose researchers are cut-off from “the whole people” who must be held off at their “gates.” 

As a result, a somewhat farcical scene unfolded yesterday, in which University students had to walk off campus in order to join other students and members of the public who wanted to join them in a conversation about an important social issue, how we fund post-secondary education.

The University is supposed to be the place for free assembly, free speech, and the free circulation of ideas. The primary responsibility of the University’s administrators is to advance the interests of the University. (This differs crucially from “selling” the University.) Couldn’t the University have made a choice yesterday that would have seen it advancing the interests of the University and “the whole people” by demonstrating to Edmontonians, Albertans, Canadians — indeed, the world — that it puts the principles of higher education, along with rights to free speech and free assembly, above other concerns? Is this not in fact part of its duty as an education of higher learning? And surely, in fulfillment of that duty, it would not dream of suggesting that anyone who wishes to participate in the free circulation of ideas can be, at its demand, arrested “without warrant”?

The word is that Occupy Edmonton will be joining forces with university students at this event.

If you’re interested in these issues, please see the petition “Sustain the University of Alberta & Freeze Tuition Fees” at  http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/854/477/873/. The Petition is to Premier Alison Redford and the Government of Alberta, and it is meant to benefit all Albertans. Please stand up for public funding of post-secondary education in Alberta and affordable education for Alberta’s university students! And spread the word about the Rally and the Petition!

The full “Background & Rationale” for the Petition may be found at http://artssquared.wordpress.com/petition-to-the-government-of-alberta-background-rationale/.

There will be no more money, and no more bank accounts. Capitalism will no longer establish any one’s “worth.”

Everyone will shop, instead, with credits they acquire contributing to the common good (and they will continually shop not just for themselves, but for others).

Under this system, some of those who are currently poor or not well paid will be wealthy, and the wealthy — well! They should think now about a certain difficulty associated with getting a camel through the eye of needle. For the idea is for “heaven” to be achieved on earth.

The meek will not have to wait to inherit anything. There will be no exploitation of others — no matter how indirect, no matter how seemingly minor. Everyone will act for the good of all, or find somewhere else to go. For as one Occupier in Edmonton writes by way of signature on his listserv posts, “I hear a new world coming.”

What a leap! I was hardly endorsing Lady Macbeth as a revolutionary figure. The revolutionary figures of Shakespeare’s Macbeth are the weird sisters. But thanks for the laugh.

And thanks for the second one that comes with your choice to identify with Cleopatra. Perform the same illogical leap with that statement that you have done with mine about courage, and you’ll find yourself identifying with a Queen with a tendency to rage who hits someone below her in the social hierarchy for delivering her a report to her that she doesn’t want to hear. Well done!

To be clear, one last time, at no point was I attacking your character. I drew your attention to the discrepancy between a claim you were making about your character and actions and your actions themselves.

It’s true that I am not familiar with your body of work. And your latest comments on my website, which truly surprise me with their lack of intellectual generosity and fixation on purported wrongs to you, show me that every time I read something other than your column in the Edmonton Journal I am making the right choice.

A few of Edmonton's Raging Grannies drop by the square at 102nd Street and Jasper Avenue to offer their support to Occupy Edmonton

As for the Raging Grannies, I was fully expecting you to tell me that you have met them often, and interviewed them, and reported on their activities because one “ferocious advocate of social justice” would of course be meeting up all the time with others in her city. You have given me all the evidence I need to see just how unwarranted the claim you were making for yourself in the article to which I was originally objecting.

Perhaps one day you will recognize the possibilities that you so lightly threw away, in not engaging with the Occupiers at 102nd Street and Jasper Avenue — who were a good many more than nine! — and people who dropped by for visits, such as the Grannies. And perhaps you can also think about what it has meant for you to have found it so important to identify with a Queen who does not wither from age when the entire planet is withering from the choices we are permitting our governments to make on our behalf. There is a word for the relationship to ego that led you to that choice. Some acute political analysis of the choices that Peter Kent is making in Durban on behalf of Canadians might redeem you.

Yours sincerely,
A doctor of humanities

To be clear, anyone who is calling me a “coward” is simply showing that they don’t understand as much as I would like them to about the politics of certain kinds of writing. My choice to write under a pseudonym has nothing to do with cowardice. As I have already explained, I was writing to David Staples and Paula Simons, who are (in my view) journalists as a professor – that is, writing from them in from my role (“doctor of humanities”) to them in theirs (“columnists”). I am truly surprised to hear that they are defining themselves on Twitter not as journalists but as “opinion writers.” I suppose that simply points us towards a larger issue, that we have people writing for local newspapers who feel they are free to offer their opinions on matters of momentous importance to the public without lodging their work in established journalistic processes and ethics.

I hope to God that I am misunderstanding what they are saying on Twitter! But thank you for giving me an opportunity to reiterate this all important point. As a professor, I know only too well how important it is to reiterate key ideas. Research has proven that it sometimes takes several “hearings” for an idea to get properly “heard.”

I’m sorry that you feel that the exchange that I’ve been having with David and Paula is nothing more than a “silly blog debate.” We are actually discussing important things. This isn’t a bear baiting, or a dog fight, or a gladiatorial battle in the Coliseum, or a hockey game. It’s an exchange of ideas.

And speaking of ideas: it would be a very sorry world indeed if I had to be “scared of what [my] employers might think.” University professors are protected by academic freedom, and I am confident in that protection. My choice of the signature “a doctor of humanities” has nothing to do with any fear.

You raise a really important issue, though, and you are not alone in raising it. I have had others ask me, in person, at Occupy events, whether I have any such fear. They’re asking in part because there has been a certain very unfortunate development in relation to academic freedom in Canada.

On 25 October 2011, the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (AUCC) issued a new statement on Academic Freedom to replace its earlier 1988 statement. In addition to other changes that have disturbed many, the 2011 AUCC statement involves no explicit wording about Academic Freedom extending to things that a professor may say or do outside the classroom. As the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) has noted in its official response, the statement does not protect “extramural speech.” It thus fails in its protection of Academic Freedom, as this was one of the most pressing reasons for which, as the CAUT statement notes, the American Association of University Professors wrote, in 1915, its influential “Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure.” Academic freedom in regard to extramural speech and activities is designed to ensure that professors, despite their public roles, have as much right to freedom of speech and freedom of expression as anyone else.

The statement has been found alarming by many, especially in light of its appearance a few weeks after the occupation of Liberty Plaza in New York by members of the Occupy movement. (As you may know, many professors have gotten up and given speeches at Occupy Wall Street.)

The statement is sufficiently alarming that the president of the University of Toronto, David Naylor, has resigned from the AUCC in objection to it. Specifically, he has resigned from the AUCC because it aims to make this new statement on Academic Freedom a criterion for membership. In other words, to be on the board of the AUCC you would have to affirm that you believe in its statement on Academic Freedom. This is not acceptable to Naylor, who has asserted that the University of Toronto will be governed by the much stronger principles of Academic Freedom enshrined in the University’s “Statement of Purpose” approved by its Governing Council in 1992.

Given that the University of Alberta aims to be amongst the “Top 20″ universities in the world by 2020 — that is, aims to be a university of the same stature as the University of Toronto — I assume that it will want to follow the University of Toronto’s lead in affirming much stronger principles of Academic Freedom than that contained in the AUCC statement.

I am not aware of any recent statement by our president, Indira Samarasekera, on the matter, but as you know, I have been otherwise Occupied. I look forward to hearing her make such a statement. The “fear” that you speak of may be something some of my colleagues are experiencing as a felt thing, and it would certainly be a great help if our President did what is necessary to set these fears, and the public’s concerns about them, at rest. But to be clear, she would be speaking not as my “employer,” or the employer of anyone else at the University, but as our colleague.

In the meantime, if anyone wishes to read the three documents to which I’ve referred, you can find the links for them here:

AUCC statement. http://www.aucc.ca/media-room/news-and-commentary/canadas-universities-adopt-new-statement-on-academic-freedom
CAUT response. http://www.caut.ca/uploads/CAUT_to_AUCC_Academic_Freedom.pdf
Letter to AUCC by University of Toronto President David Naylor.

http://www.president.utoronto.ca/presidents-comment-on-aucc-statement-on-academic-freedom.htm

Yours sincerely,

A doctor of humanities

Postscript: I’m not sure that I understand the post you have sent to my website while I was writing about this. I’ll assume that it’s sincere, but how am I a 1%’er?

P.S. Paula, I am sorry that you feel that you can’t afford the time for what you call “illusions.” You attribute this to 25 years on the job, so it seems as if your cynicism has something to do with age. How about having tea with the Raging Grannies? One of them spoke quite passionately at yesterday’s General Assembly at the University. Perhaps the Grannies could rejuvenate your faith in the power of political dreaming from the bottom-up.

As for your idea that “democracy” has to do with “being elected,” how about doing some reading on the origins of democracy in ancient Greece (you could start with Aristotle’s Politics) or anything amongst the wealth of literature about direct democracy, which differs radically from representative democracy? I am certainly not going to limit my idea of democracy to the very narrow one to which you are committed, and I wish you could expand yours.

You’ll have to forgive me, but I’ll have to keep this short. Like almost all of the people currently involved with Occupy Edmonton, I already have one full-time job. My commitment to Occupy Edmonton means that I in effect now have a second. That doesn’t leave me with a lot of time to respond to journalists, but let me quickly offer something by way of response to your respective replies to me, Paula’s “My response to my anonymous Occupy Edmonton critic” and David’s “Some critiques are brilliant.”

I am familiar with reactionary public voices. I write about them in my academic work. The first chapter of the book that I am currently working on, The Literary Commons: The Law and the Early Modern Writer, 1528-1628, deals with an exchange between two famous early sixteenth-century writers, Christopher St. German and Thomas More. The exchange has been dubbed, by a prominent twentieth-century historian, John Guy, “the battle of the books.” St. German and More went back and forth in print for a couple of years, and their exchange is fascinating for what it shows us about how challenging it is to persuade people of privilege (More’s role in the exchange) of the necessity of opening their ears, with tolerance, to others (what St. German was urging) so that their complaints can be fairly dealt with. That was absolutely necessary, in his argument, because sixteenth-century English culture was supposed to be a ‘commonwealth,’ or a culture politically organized to support the well-being of all.

More was, indisputably, on the wrong side of the ‘battle,’ which started out as an argument about whether the clergy had the right to conduct heresy trials by taking oaths from complainants ‘ex officio’ — that is, in secrecy, so that the person on trial for their religious opinions would not know who had brought a complaint against him or her for a legal process that could result in that person’s death. Now, that’s where anonymity is a truly awful thing, indeed obscene. We should all be abhorred at the idea that an anonymous complaint to legal authorities could be used to help bring about someone’s death. St. German, who was a very old man and a devout Catholic, engaged in his battle with More on behalf of those people. The idea that one person could die because someone who did not agree with her could report, covertly, on her ideas to legal authorities was chilling to him, and he tried to convince Thomas More, then the Lord Chancellor of England, to use his authority to do away with “ex officio” prosecutions.

That battle was never properly concluded — Thomas More was executed in the middle of it, for refusing to take the Oath of Supremacy that Henry VIII was demanding of him — but St. German kept fighting the fight to keep people from being put to death by the clergy. In his battle, St. German wrote anonymously.

St. German’s choice to write anonymously enraged More, who was full of sardonic quips, in print, about it, quips in which he targeted his opponent as “the Pacifier.” More was so busy trying to be wittier than his opponent that he didn’t actually listen to a word he wrote, and was not struck, it seems, by what his own choice of nickname for St. German implied about the role he was choosing for himself. As the ‘Pacifier’ St. German would be the peacemaker.

The truly sad thing, I think, is that More, a humanist who wrote the book that is still taken as the most important early modern articulation of what we would now call ‘communism,’ found it so difficult to respond to St. German intellectually. He insisted on construing St. German’s challenge to ‘ex officio’ prosecutions as a challenge to Authority in general, and his own authority in particular. To put it bluntly, ego kept him from hearing what St. German had to say, and in one book the anti-intellectualism of his response runs so deep he actually goes so far as to call for others to ‘stop up their ears’ against the Pacifier’s ‘heresies.’ And that’s what it was, for More; it was heresy for St. German to ask for a change to a legal process that would have kept people from being put to death by the state in a process he deemed morally abhorrent. (I trust everyone knows only too well about the bloodbath of the English Reformation. Its many martyrs are immortalized in one of the most famous books of the century, John Foxe’s monumental Acts and Monuments.)

What does that have to do with the exchange we’re having?

Well, St. German kept calling for “charity” from More, and what he meant was that he wanted More to listen sympathetically to what he was saying. Somewhat amusingly, for our purposes, More’s response (which was so vitriolic that his words in print against More do serious damage to his reputation as a humanist) centers on accusing St. German as writing anonymously for “the swarm.” More’s position is clearly elitist. He goes so far as to accuse St. German of aiming to educate “tinkers” in how to argue back to the law. (A tinker, who gathered bits of scrap metal from others and restored them, was the humblest role one could fill in Tudor England.) More accuses St. German of betraying his own class (like More, St. German was a lawyer). In one of More’s more amusing metaphors, St. German is a cow kicking over a pail of milk — someone not willing, that is, to preserve for a few precious commodities that ought to be controlled only by the ruling class.

When I wrote to you both last Wednesday, my principal objective was to ask both of you to open up your ears and your minds (if not your hearts) to the Occupy movement to understand what is about on its own terms, rather than yours, and to do what you can to communicate that to your readers. Paula claims that’s what she’s been doing, and others can of course judge that for themselves. I was talking about the ramifications of claims that she was making in one specific article, and contrasting what she was doing with what people who are truly “ferocious advocates” of social justice are doing.

It is quite the surprise for me to discover that my choice to put my skills and my education at the service of this movement, would cause any idea of ‘elitism’ to enter the discussion. Over and over again, academics hear from the public, the government, and their own administrators that everyone wishes them to make more of a connection with public concerns, or with the world beyond the classroom. And that’s what I’m doing, as a member of Occupy Edmonton. I offered you both a rejoinder to your pieces about Occupy Edmonton’s press conference on 22 November 2011 because I have what it takes to write such pieces. Many others of those involved do not. It took me from 9 am until midnight the following day to write my posts, so I can only howl with laughter when anyone shouts at an Occupier, “Get a job!” One of the things that so impresses me about other Occupiers is how dedicated they are to dealing, on-line, with every reactionary quip uttered against the group on Occupy Edmonton’s Facebook page. Every time a member of Occupy Edmonton does that I’m cheering. When I wrote to you both, I was simply doing what a lot of them are doing on a larger scale. And, believe me, the support I have gotten from them more than outweighs any criticism you wish to send my way.

But here’s the thing I most want to say in this post: I truly believe that if either of you had devoted a 15-hour stretch of writing time to the concerns of Occupy Edmonton after spending some time at the square at 102nd Street and Jasper Avenue you would have been eager to write something else. Why? Because you would have experienced the magic of what was going on there for yourself, and you would have wanted to share it. I find it so strange that neither of you thought to engage in a form of journalism that would have seen you down at the square, perhaps for an entire 24-hours, so that you could write a “day in the life” piece.

Let me turn to the question of my anonymity around this point. Both of you have your knickers in a knot over my anonymity, with David in particular having posted four messages to my website about it. I must say I can’t help but find this agitation amusing.

I wrote to you as a “doctor of humanities” in part because I was writing from a certain professional position. I was writing from that position to criticize what you were doing from your professional position. A doctor of humanities, I was writing to you as journalists: role to role. It didn’t occur to me for one moment that you would be bothered or concerned about my anonymity because I was writing to you to share ideas. Ideas are what matter to me as an intellectual. And ideas are one of the most important things that matter to me about this movement. I was standing up for ideas, and standing up against David’s so evident reluctance to entertain the ideas of Occupy Edmonton, and Paula’s desire to see the ideas of the group contained within the institutions of representative democracy. I was giving you the credit that as journalists you would understand this. I am sorry to discover that I over-estimated you both in this regard.

I truly hope that as the movement grows and flourishes in Edmonton you will both start paying attention to and reporting on its ideas not from the perspective of the privileged who, because they have no particular interest in specific demands, cannot be bothered to give them a proper hearing, on their own terms and in whatever arenas Occupy Edmonton chooses to deliver them. There is so much for every Edmontonian both to gain from and contribute to this movement. Please, everyone: consider what you might give, and the world we might all gain, if you could screw even a little bit of sympathy, courage, and imagination to the “sticking place” to join us.

Yours sincerely,

A doctor of humanities

P.S. David, I would appreciate if you would note that you have taken advantage of my anonymity by republishing my photographs in your reply. You could only do that because I had not copyrighted the photographs. My philosophical commitment to a certain idea of property means that I do not believe in copyright, where it is asserted as a form of private property. I hope that you are speeding ahead with your reading of Proudhon’s What is Property? and have an understanding of how, within the very terms of private property that you are so eager to uphold, by republishing my photographs you were engaged in an act of theft. Since issues of “hypocrisy” are so dear to you, perhaps you could chew over that one!

P.S. Paula, I am sorry that you feel that you can’t afford the time for what you call “illusions.” You attribute this to 25 years on the job, so it seems as if your cynicism has something to do with age. How about having tea with the Raging Grannies? One of them spoke quite passionately at yesterday’s General Assembly at the University.

Perhaps the Grannies could rejuvenate your faith in the power of political dreaming from the bottom-up.

As for your idea that “democracy” has to do with being “elected,” how about doing some reading on the origins of democracy in ancient Greece (you could start with Aristotle’s Politics) or anything amongst the wealth of literature about direct democracy, which differs radically from representative democracy? I am certainly not going to limit my idea of democracy to the very narrow one to which you are committed, and I wish you could expand yours.

We want to speak to a few of the reasons we are here today, to the reasons why after our eviction on Friday Morning we haven’t disappeared, to the reasons why we will continue to assemble, to speak and act out against the injustices of the world we live in.

The Occupy Movement is, at its core, and when it is at its best, an unequivocal refusal of the status quo. It is an absolute rejection of the corrupted common sense that everyday seeks to coerce our consent for an economic and political system whose most fundamental operating principle is exploitation. Occupy is a rejection too of the forces that seek to discipline our bodies, to mold us merely as workers ready and willing to fill the pockets of the already grossly wealthy, and to shape us as consumers choked by false desires for things we don’t need.

The principle upon which we make our stand is equality, and the realm we rise up to defend is the Common. Our rebellion is not a new one. The revolutionary ground that we Occupy is a territory traversed and inhabited by a long history of struggle against economic and social oppression. We stand in solidarity with those who have fought, and who continue to fight, for the rights of women, for an end to racism, for the livelihoods of working people and an end to the systems of privilege, so long entrenched against us. We add our voices proudly to those of Rosa Luxemburg, Silvia Federici, Stephen Biko, Nelson Mandela, Karl and Eleanor Marx, Fredrich Engels, Che Guevara, Angela Davis, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and to the voices of the millions of people that have fought and continue to fight against oppression and for equality all over the globe.

Our revolutionary chorus calls out for a struggle beyond the confines of emancipation thought merely as an equality of opportunity, as it is all too often so narrowly defined. We emphatically reject the competitive logic, and the principle of exclusion, that characterizes the markets we are forced to exist in. Equality for us will never mean equal opportunity to exploit and be exploited, which is the corrupted ideal of the free market, the housing and labor markets—even, increasingly, of the supermarket.

In response to globalization—which is understood best as the extension of capitalist modernity to all corners of the world—we rise up as a global movement of resistance. This ruthless expansion has been enabled by the privatizing logic of neoliberalism, which for at least two decades has been cannibalizing the public in all of its guises, from health and housing services to public spaces, epitomized for us, necessarily, by the privatization of Melcor Park.  This latest recession has made apparent the way accumulation by dispossession operates: As millions of people lose their jobs and houses, we are simultaneously asked to bail out or otherwise bankroll some of the world’s wealthiest corporations, while hundreds of billionaires are spawned around the globe.

We see the symptoms of this globalized neoliberal logic at our oldest public institution: The University of Alberta.  Although this institution was originally imagined as a space for the “uplifting of the whole people”, it has more and more become a place for the very privileged few.  As an aristocratic class of central administrators grows year by year, student tuition and debt levels continue to soar and acts of austerity are directed toward the most vulnerable members of the University.  Despite Alberta being the only region in the world whose economy is not mired in debt, the share of the university’s revenue provided by the province has been frozen; the University’s administration has used this scenario as an opportunity to cut back the budgets of faculties and departments, like English and Philosophy, to name only two, whose knowledges aren’t easily instrumentalized by the logic of accumulation.  This year alone, if our challenges to these cuts are unsuccessful, fifteen people will lose their jobs and their livelihoods.  Furthermore, these tactics are made possible in part by the corrupted provincial labor laws that prevent these valued support workers and, indeed, all laborers at the University, from seeking protection from such abuses within registered unions.  This scenario is just one example among thousands that points to the terrain on which the battle we are waging must be fought. In response to neoliberal austerity, we say Occupy your university! Occupy your government, your city-halls and your courts of law! In response to the neo-conservative cynics who have told us to “Occupy” our “Jobs,” we say, good idea! Occupy your work place and demand an equal share of the wealth you help to generate!

Against this ever-growing inequality, we advocate, as we declared this Tuesday past, for a radically participatory democracy, an end to cuts to public services, an end to corporate influence in politics; we demand fair wages and social supports, fully funded healthcare, free post-secondary education, just and sustainable environmental and labor laws, and the implementation of the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

We have been told that our demands are “too Utopian”—a nonsensical phrase that would be utterly perplexing if the ideology behind it were not so baldly communicated by the police who raided our camp.  We can only understand this charge of being “too utopian” as suggesting that we demand too much equality, too little exploitation and poverty. But we are not thwarted or defeated by such immoral cynicism. Rather, we greet our detractors with a fierce smile and the loving spasms of revolutionary laughter. For Occupy is nothing other than the return of the Dispossessed, the beginnings of a new Awakening of a Revolutionary Body whose Massive and Monstrous form is impervious to such petty and stupid attacks.

Today, we are here at the High Level Bridge, a symbol of the gathering together of energies by traversing the prejudices that divide us, a reminder of the necessity of—and our commitment to—expansion.  For the Occupation will not end until we Occupy Everywhere, until Everything that belongs to Everyone has been reclaimed, and the Common Wealth of the world is enjoyed Equally by All!

The Soccer Institute

High Level Bridge, Edmonton, November 28, 2011

Thank you’s

We are a pivotal moment for Occupy Edmonton. Phase I is over, and we are moving into phase II.

I want to take a moment to lead us in some thank-you’s to people who were so important to Occupy I.

Campers. The core of Occupy I was our occupation of the square at 102^nd Street and Jasper Avenue, and the symbolics of that camp were huge, and what was achieved there, unforgettable.

Let us thank every person who spent even one night sleeping at the square.

And let us give a special thank-you to those dedicated campers who stuck out night after night, especially those campers who stuck it out to the very end.

Donors. The press may not know who you are. Even people standing here today may not know who you are, but to each and every one of you, no matter how large or how small your donation, we owe you a heartfelt thank-you. We thank you for your donations of wood, water, clothing, bedding, money, and time, energy, and spirit, and we thank esecially those people who served as our legal observers on eviction nights. Please join me in thanking all of our donors and legal observers!

Occupy Wall Street. And thank you to Occupy Wall Street for giving us crucial support in the form of $7,500 for the winterizing of the camp. We couldn’t have gotten through that without them. And I assure you the equipment they have helped us buy will be put to good use. Thank you Occupy Wall Street!

Our key spokespeople. Every protest movement, even a leaderless one, depends vitally on spokespeople – people who are prepared to put themselves on the line in a special way by stepping up to a media microphone and speaking on our behalves. It’s never easy speaking for a group, especially a group like this, which is contributing to a momentous moment in history by trying to bring into being a global movement. So let’s thank our core spokespeople! Thank you, Mike Hudema! Thank you, Chelsea Flook! Thank you, Mahad Mohamed! And thank you Amy Bursey!

Thank you spokespeople!

Rob Butz. A lot of people feel that we ought to be thanking Melcor for letting us stay at the square at 102^nd Street and Jasper Avenue. The person I think we ought to be thanking in regard to the fact that Melcor let us stay at the square for 42 nights – well, 42 nights and a part of a 43^rd – is Rob Butz. Rob Butz wrote letter after letter to Ralph Young, CEO of Melcor, on our behalves. He also spent a lot of time on the phone with Melcor representatives. And we owe Rob a huge thank-you for all of his diplomacy and patience. I truly believe that we would not have been at the camp as long as we were if it had not been for Rob Butz as our bottom-liner Melcor liaison.

Please join me in thanking Rob!

Thank you, Rob!

Our marshals. We also owe thanks to our dedicated crew of marshals. I haven’t met all of the marshals, but I have met Kirk Hansen, and David Laing, and Mo Mohamed, and Alexander Miller, and Bryn MacDonald, and I have been truly inspired by the wonderful calm energy that all of you brought to the camp.

You were there, on dedicated long shifts, day after day, and night after night, to make sure that someone was always on the spot and awake to take care of any camp emergencies, and that’s included dealing with the aggression that was directed at the camp by many who wandered into the square.

So let’s thank our marshals for helping to keep the camp a safe space!

Thank you, Marshals!

Journalists. And let’s thank those local journalists who wrote a kind word about us, or who at least did their best to objective in their coverage. You know, those journalists who reported what we were doing without judging us. Those journalists who made a good-faith best effort to do their jobs. And let’s hope in Occupy 2 more journalists will try to play that role.

Thank you journalists!

[crowd not particularly enthusiastic on this front]

The police. And I think we should thank those members of the Edmonton Police Service who have treated us as if we were an auxiliary peace force upon whom they could count for some key help at night. So thank you to the police who have respected us and made it possible for us to respect them in turn.

Thank you, Police.

[crowd even less enthusiastic about this]

Our special three.

Can we all thank the three people who got arrested on our behalf in the early hours of Friday morning: Chris Dunne, Josh Sealy, and Bill Thomas?

I know there’s some feeling in the press and the wider community that the fewer people there were at camp, and the fewer people who were ‘arrestable,’ the less seriously they have to take this movement.

But that’s not how I see it at all!

The fewer people who endured through thick and thin, and the three who permitted themselves to be arrested, are a special ‘few’ amongst us, a special ‘few’ to which a famous Shakespeare speech that runs ‘we few, we happy few, we band of brothers,’ applies.

Let us, we happy few, thank those special three who got arrested for this ‘bank of brothers’ and sisters.

Thank you, Bill!

Thank you, Chris!

Thank you, Josh!

[crowd very enthusiastic indeed!]

* * *

Those thanks were not exhaustive.

They couldn’t possibly be.

That’s the nature of this movement.

In Occupy I, people came and people went and we may not know all of their names.

But I’d like now to talk about Occupy II, or phase 2 of Occupy Edmonton.

And ultimately I’d like us all to issue an invitation today.

But first I want to talk about some of the things that have been said in the press about us.

‘Comical demands.’

In the aftermath of our press conference at the square last Tuesday, in which we passed a list of eight demands that we would want to see met before we voluntarily left the square, we had one columnist for the Edmonton Journal call our demands ‘comical.’ And we also had a professor who is a political scientist from a local university go on one of the local TV channels’ evening broadcasts and declare our demands ‘too utopian.’

I’ve already addressed the Edmonton Journal journalist in print, and I’ve asked her to think what it means for her to dismiss our demands as ‘comical.’

But now I’d like to say a word about what it means to call our demands ‘too utopian.’

‘Too Utopian.’

I don’t know how many people know this, but the word ‘utopian’ is drawn from a sixteenth-century English book written by Thomas More, Utopia, which was about an island in a far-flung location outside Europe, where the people had organized themselves to hold all of their wealth in common.

So they would bring in the harvest together, and eat all of their meals together, and party together, and wore humble garments, and rejected gold.

‘Utopia’ means no-place meaning that More was writing about a place that did not actually exist, but which ought to.

And it has a passionate defender in the book, in a character who has the name of an angel, Raphael Hythloday. He’s the one who has voyaged to Utopia and returns to tell the tale about it.

More wrote that book at the outset of developments on the planet that saw the rise of a system that we now take for granted, capitalism, as if there were no other way of being, no other way of organizing ourselves as humans, no other way of organizing the planet.

And Hytholoday speaks passionately about Utopia because he wanted Europe to take it as a model, so it could save itself from a system in which he said sheep were ”devouring men.”

What Hytholoday was referring to was the enclosure of land by feudal landlords, who were increasingly using the land to feed sheep for wool production rather than using it to grow crops that would feed people.

This was what is known as the first enclosure movement, and it was fought, in the sixteenth century, by rebellion after rebellion in which the people consistently fought for another relationship to the land, and the commonwealth, in which all would be cared for, not just the feudal landlords who owned land and could turn their land over to the grazing of sheep because that was more profitable to them.

In my view, Occupy is continuing that battle against the enclosure of land and resources that allows a few, a very few, to benefit at the expense of the many;

a few, a very few, to live a beautiful life with wealth stolen from the rest of us, while so many suffer – so many go without homes, and without adequate food, and without a proper education, without the very things they would need to fight back against their oppression.

So when a few, a very few of us, stand up in a small square in the centre of a Canadian city to make demands that would reverse the depradations that capitalism has wrought upon the world since the sixteenth century, and is now wreaking more drastically than ever, in the form of globalization.

[Side-note: I was so grateful that Derrick from Occupy Red Deer had already spoken at length and so eloquently about how historical forms of enclosing in North America involved the seizure of Indigenous lands by Europeans.]

Globalization is letting a few, a very few take over all of the resources of the planet while the rest of us stand by gasping – and many of us, in other parts of the world, starving as a result.

And I as one of the people standing up against all of this, as an Occupier, will not accept the dismissal of our demands as ‘comical.’

Let’s make life equally beautiful for all.

Just because a way of organizing the world that would ensure that life can be equally beautiful for all does not yet exist – is currently nowhere to be found in any form – does not mean it cannot.

This is a movement that calls upon us all to believe in the possibility of another world.

This is a movement that asks us not to accept the world as it is, in its current exploitative form.

This is a movement that asks us to reject the idea that just because the world is currently one way we do not have the strength and the imagination to reorganize it.

Are our demands ‘too utopian’? Hardly!

Those who resist the demands – those who cannot say how sane and eminently necessary they are; who do not want to put their shoulder to the wheel to help bring them into being – I say they are too conservative. Too privileged. Too content to find it acceptable that others go without homes and food and education and so many other things just because of the socioeconomic class in which they were born.

I say that anyone who dismisses our demands as ‘comical’ or our ideas as ‘too utopian’ is lacking in imagination.

Idealists!

As Mike Hudema said at the press conference earlier this week, yes, we are idealists! And we are idealists because that’s exactly what we feel the world needs: more idealism! More thinking about what we might be! More commitment to what might now, in this moment, seem impossible, but which will not prove impossible if we will commit to the ideal, and do everything we can to translate our ideals into realities.

What we need to do is come together as an imaginative force to create the world that we want.

And our few needs you to join us against that other few!

My special plea (for free post-secondary education)

While I’m speaking about ideals, I want to say a word about one of the demands that was on our list on Tuesday, the call for free post-secondary education for all.

I’ve heard people speak of this as if this were one of the more ‘utopian’ ideas, and one of the least achievable.

And I just want to offer some quick perspective on that.

UN Covenant for Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (1976)

This demand seems ‘utopian’ only because Canadians have forgotten something really important, a commitment we made in 1976 when we signed on the United Nations Covenant for Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights.

Article 13.1.c of that covenant reads:

1. (c) Higher education shall be made equally accessible to all, on the basis of capacity, by every appropriate means, and in particular by the progressive introduction of free education.

If I’d been helping to write that document in 1976 I would have said, hang on, guys. We can’t qualify it. Everyone who wants a postsecondary education should at least be able to begin a degree paid for by the people of Canada. If they can’t make it through their first year, fine, but everyone, if they want it, should have a chance.

"I want to be a student! I want an affordable life!"

I would also say we can’t have a ‘progressive’ introduction of it.

The introduction of it needed to be immediate.

Half measures won’t do with this sort of thing, and they didn’t do.

You can find all kinds of statistics on-line that will show you what happened to that commitment:

From 1977 onwards, what did Canada do?

We allowed for tuition fees to increase, and government contributions to decrease.

We shifted the financial burden away from us, as the government, onto individuals.

We made the decision that it was acceptable to us for education to become a commodity like everything else that only some would have enough money to buy.

As a result, the students at our universities are treated as the customers of a corporation supplying them with a product, in the form of a degree, rather than an education, and it is increasingly difficult for students to get an education for education’s sake.

It is increasingly hard for them to get an education in the Arts and the Humanities because the corporation is acting as if IDEAS and teaching people how to think – how to think critically, and how to be imaginative about the world we might create – are not goods in and of themselves.

The Corporatization of the University and Ideas

The corporatization of the university – and this applies to all universities across Canada – is consistently saying ideas are not profitable.

Being the source of ideas will not get you a job.

Study something practical, and forget about ideas.

Well, all I want to say is in such a cultural climate IDEAS become the most precious thing we have.

And those who want to think them should be dear to us.

Thinkers & Dreamers

Those who agree to launch into an ‘unprofitable’ Arts degree are making exactly the kind of commitment that Occupy asks us to make:

They are committing to learning about the past, and learning about philosophy, and reading the texts — historical, philosophical, theoretical, and literary – through we have expressed and continue to express what ideas we should value.

And we need to make it possible for everyone who wants to to gain those ideas – to become a thinker and a dreamer – on our dime. Yes, on our dime. Because in the end we all benefit from the thinkers and the dreamers.

We should be spending our money on post-secondary education, rather than on military fighter jets or jails, because we believe in the powers of the human imagination.

We believe in the power of the human imagination and how it might bring about a planet in which there is no need for war, and in which it will nurture us all in such a way that there is no need for jails.

Join us!

And today we ask you — especially those of you who have been seated on the sidelines so far, wondering where this movement is going — to join us.

Join the campers and the donors and the marshals and the letter-writers and everyone else who was involved in Occupy 1, as we begin Occupy 2.

Join us in thinking towards and dreaming about a better world.

And do that by coming to one of our General Assemblies.

Come to our General Assembly at the University today!

General Assemblies

General Assemblies are the heart of this direct democracy movement.

They are how we contribute to radically transforming the world in a way we cannot do with representative democracy, which alienates us all from the halls of the power, and lets rich men manipulate our political leaders behind closed doors.

We’re willing to do what we can within the traditional forums of representative democracy, and we showed that by showing up to City Hall earlier this week for the public hearing on the 2012 budget.

We showed up to City Hall because the proposed $10.5 million in service cuts is not acceptable to us, especially not when the City is prepared to let one of Canada’s richest men have such a sweet deal in building a new arena here.

But representative democracy is not enough. Representative democracy has failed us. We need something different.

We need to remake the world from the bottom-up, and our General Assemblies will be vital to this.

Invitation

Come to our General Assembly and hear our ideas and share yours, and join a movement without leaders.

A movement of bottom-liners that would change the world from the bottom-up rather than exploit it from the top-down.

A movement of bottom-liners who needs you to commit to our idea and our idealism so that, idealists all, we we can govern ourselves, and order the world, in a way that makes it beautiful for all.

So please, march across the bridge with us today to the University so that we can all share our ideas at the place that is supposed to be the most important sanctuary of dreamers, thinkers, and idealists in our culture, our University.

I hope to see you there at 3.

Thank you.

Onwards, over the High-Level Bridge and to the University of Alberta

Check back for further bulletins from the Dreamers & Actors of Occupy Edmonton from one who is amongst them.

A reporter from Global TV Edmonton joined us saying Global really wants to be able to tell our story. Thank you, Global.

Of course, we’d prefer if everyone comes and helps make the story. Please join us tomorrow at Ezio Faraone Park, on the NW side of High Level Bridge, at 1p.m. for a rally in a park with a stunning view, then march with us over the High Level Bridge for our second off-camp assembly at the University of Alberta at 3 p.m.