The best thing I've seen on Nuit Debout
This is Occupy taken to the next level. We're not likely to see it here until we get past out current preoccupation with electoral politics -- which always suck all the air out of the room -- but it's going to happen.
https://roarmag.org/essays/from-paris-with-love-and-lessons/
Paris is alive with democracy. Real democracy. Overflowing the streets and squares. People speaking and listening to one another in assembly after assembly. Growing in number, geography and diversity. The movement that first began with high school students rebelling against the police killing of a student, and then mass resistance to a potential rollback of long-held labor protections, spread to people speaking in squares, trying to occupy them at night, being repressed, and coming back the next day, and the next, and the next.
This is not a protest. People here are creating something different. They are not making one demand — they are speaking to one another insisting on “real democracy”, meaning face-to-face discussions about their own lives and things that matter most to them. And when and if they do come up with demands, it will have been out of these sorts of discussions — decided horizontally and together. There are now dozens of squares holding assemblies nightly in France alone. Many more dozens of similarly organized movements are springing up in other parts of Europe and Canada as I write. . . .
So many things are consistent in Paris with the other movements for real democracy, from the importance of the face-to-face discussions, the exclusion of political parties, the striving for horizontal relations, the breaking down of hierarchy and the care of and for one another as much as possible — even if only in those hours of togetherness.
And of course the contagion of the hand signals to make one’s feelings known in a mass crowd, such as the twinkling of fingers in the air for agreement or the crossing of one’s arms in the air to show dissent. The Feminist Commission has added a new sign, reflecting the evolution of the movements, which is two fists meeting above one’s head to call out a sexist remark.
