After this Sunday’s March, Make Central Park a Temporary Autonomous Zone

As the RNC comes closer and closer, opposition grows stronger and more
promising. The unsuccessful months-long court battles to secure a large,
meaningful, and empowering place for this diverse illustration of dissent
has set the stage for a popular battle over public space and political
participation. The energy on the streets is flowing over and catching on
wherever it goes. When an un-permitted march titled Democracy Uprising,
which left Boston’s DNC weeks ago, marched from Central Park, down
Broadway, through Times Square, received cheering and applause from swarms
of onlookers along the way, and arrived 50 blocks later at Union Square, a
feverish excitement had been actualized that forced the media’s
fear-mongering toward protestors to dissipate. Something is happening here.
Among radicals and liberals, a sentiment.is emerging that we really could
make history at this moment.United for Peace and Justice, which has fought the city for months to secure
a place for this Sunday’s massive demonstration, lost the court battles to
secure the Great Lawn of Central Park. But Central Park remains the place
of convergence in many peoples’ minds. Unpermitted marches and
demonstrations are planned to converge on the park, and everyone from
protest organizers to city council members have expressed their intention
to go to the park this Sunday following the major march. What has unfolded
in the city’s attempt to control and limit this major expression of
dissent, in the newspapers, on the Internet, on the radio, television, and
everyday conversations, is an outrage that goes beyond the Republican
Party, and begins to challenge the confines authority places on expression
and dissent. What is emerging in this discourse is a civic struggle that
resituates agency in public life. When the permitted march concludes at
Union Square, hundreds of thousands of people will be filled with energy.
They will be looking for further ways of political expression: new forms of
organizing, new ways of relating, new ways of thinking about the world, and
new ways of being political. The real question we’re faced with is, How
will this civic mobilization be articulated?

We believe that the best expression of this mobilization is to make its
vision of the world it wants to see, real right now in the present, as much
as possible. When faced with a city government that lays down the red
carpet for a party that is abusing the tragedy of September 11th to make
its disgraceful appeal for 4 more years of the same (war, reduction of
civil liberties, centralization of power, racial profiling, etc.), the
massive opposition — what some have called “the other superpower” — has got
to establish itself here in the United States. The better world that’s
possible is not only written about on placards but is illustrated in the
movement itself, where self-organized groups and networks work tirelessly
to provide food, offer housing, teach medical skills, build bicycles,
distribute literature, share computers, provide art supplies, and
contribute everything else for free. This vision, embedded in these
movements, grows with all who participate in these new relations, which
seek to do away with forms of hierarchy and commodification. Sometimes
these practices are possible by our own budgets and within our own
backyards. Sometimes we challenge the borders that capitalism and the state
impose on us, and we retake the streets, the city walls, the airwaves, the
abandoned lot, the city park. Moments arise when it becomes possible to
advance this new world. And these days in New York City, at the heart of
world commerce, and where resistance and critical thought converge, we have
just this opportunity, to take Central Park, and make it a temporary
autonomous zone.

Thus we encourage people to come to the Great Lawn in Central Park on
Sunday, following the major march, to open up public and political space
during the RNC week. Together we can make it a space for popular education,
political discussions, democratic assemblies, and the many other things we
can dream up. Spread the word. Join us!