THE OLYMPIA ASSEMBLY

What Is Olympia Assembly?

Olympia Assembly, a political project based in the town of Olympia in Washington State, was founded in March of 2017 in the midst of ecological and political catastrophe. It was created as a communal assembly project, coalescing around points of unity such as direct democracy, non-hierarchy, ecology, mutual aid, and direct action. The goal of the organization is to build the new world in the shell of the old by creating the building blocks of a libertarian socialist dual power project. It seeks to meet people’s needs and decentralize power, leading to a crisis of legitimacy for the state where people powered institutions are posed against hierarchical structures.

Olympia Assembly (OA) has launched a variety of collectives, mutual aid projects, direct actions, and educational projects in our city of 50,000 people. At our assemblies and general meetings, people deliberate and co-author decisions to be implemented by the group according to the principles of deliberation, direct democracy, and participatory relationships. We have embedded collectives and delegates that implement decisions within the limits of the policy made at the base of the general meetings. At meetings, people bring discussion topics and proposals to the table and we create a participatory agenda. When there are proposals, we deliberate, filter decisions through our points of unity, and then vote. During deliberation people can bring forward questions, concerns, amendments, critiques, and dissent. This lets us round out decisions, and as a result, we almost always come to unanimous or near-unanimous agreement – even during mass assemblies. When there is disagreement, we use simple majority decision making. We are working on fleshing out our bylaws.

What We Do

Olympia Assembly working groups are often ephemeral and geared towards a particular project – seasonal assemblies, mutual aid events, protests, or other periodic events – and then disappear. However, it has also created some ongoing projects such as the Olympia Solidarity Network, Mutual Aid Mondays, and Olympia Community Medics.

Olympia Solidarity network, or OlySol, is an anti-capitalist direct action working group connected to Olympia Assembly. It has had four direct action victories since starting in the late summer of 2017. OlySol won back a tenant’s stolen deposit through a demand delivery and an office picket. We won back a worker’s stolen wages through a fifty-person demand delivery. Using direct action, we won repairs for over 100 tenants at a low-income housing complex. This involved flyering door to door at the apartment complex, meeting with tenants, picketing the management office, flyering against the local management company and at the houses and neighborhoods of the management in Seattle. OlySol just won a campaign against a private security firm hired by building owners to sweep houseless people out of alcoves at night. That campaign involved everything from flyering multiple cities, picketing outside of businesses, phone zaps, mass leafleting, bank shutdowns, and disruptions of the private security force.

Mutual Aid Mondays is a weekly project that provides houseless camps in Olympia with free food, clothes, hygiene materials, tarps, tents, blankets, sleeping bags, coffee, first aid supplies, and literature. Emerging from an alliance between Olympia Assembly and four other organizations, Mutual Aid Mondays provide material assistance to those most in need and helps build relationships between radicals and the houseless population. Occupying public space, these camps provide houseless people with a place to stay –although not an ideal one – and are the vanguard against encroaching rent increases and real estate investment.

Incubated at the 2018 Spring Assembly, Olympia Community Medics (OCM) is a medic collective for street protests and houseless people. OCM has helped with multiple marches, protests, and anti-fascist demonstrations as well as providing weekly medical supplies to houseless people around downtown. The collective works closely with Olympia Assembly, OlySol, and Mutual Aid Mondays.

Olympia Assembly has also helped on several other actions and events. We have worked with Just Housing, a local houseless solidarity organization, on civil disobedience campaigns. Over twenty people from our first Assembly participated in a camp-in organized by Just Housing that broke the city’s unjust “no sitting/laying” ordinance. Throughout our first summer, we helped with weekly non-violent direct-action campaigns at city hall, providing people, promotion, and material support for the actions. We have also recently started working on creating a tenant’s assembly focused on the eastside region of Olympia. . ."

Continue reading: Reflections on Olympia Assembly: An Experiment in Popular Power | Institute for Social Ecology