TO: Micah White
Hello Micah,
So I just had the strangest day. About 80 people came down to assemble near the big bull sculpture near Bowling Green at 4:30 because we’d heard there was going to be a “General Assembly” to plan the September 17 action called by … well, you guys. We show up and discover, no, actually, no assembly, it was the Workers World Party with speakers and a microphone and signs, doing a rally, then they were going to have a brief speak-out and a march. Normally this is greeted with cynical resignation, but this time, a few of us … decided to hell with it, assembled the horizontals, who turned out to be 85% of the crowd, defected, held a general meeting, created a structure and process, working groups, and got going on an actual organization. It was sort of a little miracle and we all left feeling extremely happy for a change.
One question that came up however was: “what does Adbusters really have to do with any of this? Are they extending resources of any sorts? Or was it just a call?” I said I’d check …
David
I sent that off before going to bed that night. The next morning I got this reply:
Hey David,
Thank you for this report on what happened, I’m glad that you were there to pull things around.
Here’s the situation …
At Adbusters, we’ve been kicking around the idea of a wall street occupation for a couple of months. On June 7, we sent out a listserv to our 90,000 email list of jammers with a short note floating the idea. The response was overwhelmingly positive, so we decided to run with it. The current issue of our magazine, the one that is just now coming onto newsstands (Adbusters #97—The Politics of Post-Anarchism), contains a double page poster calling for the occupation on September 17. The front cover of the American edition also has an #OCCUPYWALLSTREET mini-picture. This will be like a slow fuse getting the word about the occupation out there to the English speaking world for next month or more …
At this point, we decided that given our limited resources and staff, our role at Adbusters could only be to get the meme out there and hope that local activists would empower themselves to make the event a reality. Following the same model of Spain where the people, not political parties and organizations, decided on everything.
The “General Assembly” which you attended was put together by an unaffiliated group—the same group that was behind the No Cuts NYC and Bloombergville (an anti-cuts protest camp that lasted about two weeks). My contact has been with “Doug Singsen” of No Cuts NYC. I don’t know anything about Doug nor why the Assembly was hijacked by the Workers World Party, or if that was intended from the start …
Micah
Adbusters had just thrown out an idea. They’d done this many times before, and in the past, nothing had ever really come of it; but this time all sorts of different, and apparently unrelated, groups seemed to be trying to grab hold of it. But we were the ones who actually ended up doing the organizing on the ground. By the next day the listserv for our little group was up and all the people who had been at the original meeting started trying to figure out who we were, what we should call ourselves, what we were actually trying to do. Once again, it all started with the question of the one single demand. After throwing out a few initial ideas—Debt cancellation? Abolishing permit laws to legalize freedom of assembly? Abolish corporate personhood?—Matt Presto, who had been with Chris among the first to rally to us at Bowling Green, pretty much put the matter to rest when he pointed out there were really two different sorts of demands. Some were actually achievable, like Adbusters’ suggestion—which had appeared in one of their initial publicity calls—of demanding a commission to consider restoring Glass-Steagall. Maybe a good idea, but was anyone really going to risk brutalization and arrest to get someone to appoint a committee? Appointing a committee is what politicians usually do when they don’t want to take any real action. Then there’s the kind of demand you make because you know that even though overwhelming majorities of Americans think it would be a good idea, the demand is likely never going to happen under the existing political order—say, abolish corporate lobbying. But was it our job to come up with a vision for a new political order, or to help create a way for everyone to do so? Who were we anyway to come up with a vision for a new political order? So far, basically just a bunch of people who had come to a meeting. If we were all attracted to the idea of creating General Assemblies, it’s because we saw them as a forum for the overwhelming majority of Americans locked out of the political debate to develop their own ideas and visions.
That seemed to settle matters for most of us. But it led to another question: How exactly were we to describe that overwhelming majority of Americans who had been locked out of the political debate? Who were we calling to join us? The oppressed? The excluded? The people? All the old phrases seemed hackneyed and inappropriate. How to frame it in a way that made it self-evident why the obvious way to reclaim a voice was to occupy Wall Street?
That summer I’d been giving almost constant interviews about debt, since I had just written a book about debt, and had even been asked to weigh in, now and then, on venues like CNN, The Wall Street Journal, and even the New York Daily News (or, at least, on their blogs—I rarely got to be on the actual shows or in print editions). So I’d been trying to keep up with the U.S. economic debate. At least since May, when the economist Joseph Stiglitz had published a column in Vanity Fair called “Of the 1%, By the 1%, and For the 1%,” there was a great deal of talk in newspaper columns and economic blogs about the fact that 1 or 2 percent of the population had come to grab an ever-increasing share of the national wealth, while everyone else’s income was either stagnating, or in real terms actually shrinking.
What particularly struck me in Stiglitz’s argument was the connection between wealth and power: the 1 percent were the ones creating the rules for how the political system works, and had turned it into one based on legalized bribery:
Wealth begets power, which begets more wealth. During the savings-and-loan scandal of the 1980s—a scandal whose dimensions, by today’s standards, seem almost quaint—the banker Charles Keating was asked by a congressional committee whether the 1.5 million he had spread among a few key elected officials could actually buy influence. “I certainly hope so,” he replied.… The personal and the political are today in perfect alignment. Virtually all U.S. senators, and most of the representatives in the House, are members of the top 1 percent when they arrive, are kept in office by money from the top 1 percent, and know that if they serve the top 1 percent well they will be rewarded by the top 1 percent when they leave office.a
The 1 percent held the overwhelming majority of securities and other financial instruments; and they also made the overwhelming majority of campaign contributions. In other words, they were exactly that proportion of the population that was able to turn their wealth into political power—and use that political power to accumulate even more wealth. It also struck me that since that 1 percent effectively was what we referred to as “Wall Street,” this was the perfect solution to our problem: Who were the excluded voices frozen out of the political system, and why were we summoning them to the financial district in Manhattan—and not, say, Washington, D.C.? If Wall Street represented the 1 percent, then we’re everybody else.
FROM: David Graeber
SUBJECT: Re: [september17discuss] Re: [september17] Re: a SINGLE DEMAND for the occupation?
DATE: August 4, 2011 4:25:38 PM CDT
TO: september17@googlegroups.com
What about the “99% movement”?
Both parties govern in the name of the 1% of Americans who have received pretty much all the proceeds of economic growth, who are the only people completely recovered from the 2008 recession, who control the political system, who control almost all financial wealth.
So if both parties represent the 1%, we represent the 99% whose lives are essentially left out of the equation.
David
> The next day, Friday, August 5, was the day we’d set for the Outreach meeting, at the Writers Guild offices downtown, where my old friend Justin Molino worked. Everyone seemed to like the 99 percent idea. There were some tentative concerns: someone remarked that someone had already tried an “Other 98 percent” campaign. Obviously, the idea was not completely original. Probably any number of different people thought of something around the same lines around the same time. But as it turned out, we happened to put it together in exactly the right time and place. Before long, Georgia, along with Luis and Begonia, two of the Spanish Indignados, were preparing a flyer—our first—to advertise the Tuesday General Assembly, which we were already starting to call the “GA.”b
MEETINGS
Marisa came to that next GA, and during breakout we got the idea of initiating a Trainings working group. Our group was composed mainly of young activists who had cut their teeth at Bloombergville. They were enthusiastic about the idea of consensus process and direct action, but few had any real experience with either. Process at first was a shambles—many participants didn’t seem to understand that a block (that is, a veto—normally to be appealed to only as a last resort) was different than a “no” vote, and even facilitators, who were supposed to be running the meetings, tended to start each discussion of proposals not by asking if anyone had clarifying questions or concerns, but by simply saying, “Okay, that’s the proposal. Any blocks?” Apart from trainings on democratic process, there was a shortage of basic street skills: we needed to find people to provide legal training, if nothing else so everyone would know what to do if they were arrested, as some of us were definitely going to be, whether or not we decided to do anything illegal. We needed more, still: medical training, to know what to do if someone next to them was injured, and civil disobedience training, to teach when and how to lock arms, go limp, and comply or not comply with orders. I spent a lot of the next few weeks tracking down old friends from the Direct Action Network who had gone into hiding, retired, burnt out, given up, got jobs, or gone off to live on some organic farm, convincing them this wasn’t another false start, it was real this time, and getting them to join us and share their experience. It took a while, but gradually many did filter back.
At that first GA at the Irish Hunger Memorial, we decided all subsequent GAs would be held in Tompkins Square Park in the East Village—that is, not in the relatively desolate environs of Wall Street itself, but in the heart of a real New York community, the kind of place we hoped to see local assemblies eventually emerge. Marisa and I agreed to facilitate the first of them, on August 13, since Marisa had a good deal of experience with consensus process. In fact, she was so good—and everyone else at first so uncertain—she ended up having to help facilitate the next four. She became the woman holding everything together: at practically every working group meeting, coordinating, hatching plans. Without her, I’d be surprised if anything would have happened at all.
Over the next few weeks a plan began to take shape. We decided that what we really wanted to achieve was something like what had already been accomplished in Athens, Barcelona, and Madrid, where thousands of ordinary citizens, most of them completely new to political mobilization of any kind, had been willing to occupy public squares in protest against the entire class of their respective countries. The idea would be to occupy a similar public space to create a New York General Assembly, which could, like its European cousins, act as a model of genuine direct democracy to counterpoise to the corrupt charade presented to us as “democracy” by the U.S. government. The Wall Street action would be a stepping-stone toward the creation of a whole network of such assemblies.
Those were our aims, but it was impossible to predict what would really happen on the 17th. Adbusters had assured us there were ninety thousand people following us on their web page. They had also called for twenty thousand to fill the streets. That obviously wasn’t going to happen. But how many would really show up? What’s more, what would we do with the people once they did? We were all keenly aware of what we were up against. The NYPD numbered close to forty thousand—Mayor Bloomberg likes to claim that if New York City had been an independent country, its police force would be the seventh largest army in the world.c Wall Street in turn was probably the single most heavily policed public space on the planet. Would it be possible to have any sort of action next to the Stock Exchange at all? Certainly shutting it down, even for a moment, was pretty much out of the question—probably under any circumstances, under the new security environment after 9/11, certainly, not with only six weeks to prepare.
Crazy ideas were being tossed about at working group meetings and on the listserv. We were likely to be wildly outnumbered by the cops. Perhaps we could somehow use the overwhelming police presence against itself, to make them look ridiculous? One idea was to announce a cocaine blockade: we could form a human chain around the area of the Stock Exchange, and then declare that we were allowing no cocaine to enter until Wall Street would agree to our demands (“And after three days, no hookers either!”). Another, more practical, idea was to have the working group that was already coordinating with people occupying squares in Greece, Spain, Germany, and the Middle East to create some sort of Internet hookup, and then somehow project their images onto the wall of the Stock Exchange, allowing speakers from each occupation to express their opinions of Wall Street financiers directly. Something like that, we felt, would help with long-term movement building: it would actually accomplish something on the first day, rendering it a minor historical event of a sort—even if there never was a second. Minor victories of that sort are always crucial; you always want to be able to go home saying you’ve done something that no one has ever done before. But technically, given our constraints of time and money, it proved impossible to pull off.d
To be perfectly honest, for many of us veterans the greatest concern during those hectic weeks was how to ensure the initial event wouldn’t turn out a total fiasco. We wanted to make sure that all the enthusiastic young people going into a major action for the first time wouldn’t end up immediately beaten, arrested, and psychologically traumatized as the media, as usual, looked the other way. Before the action launched, some internal conflicts had to be worked out.
Most of New York’s grumpier hard-core anarchists refused to join in, and in fact mocked us from the sidelines as “reformist.” More open, “small-a” anarchists such as myself spent much of our time trying to make sure the remaining verticals didn’t institute anything that could become a formal leadership structure, which, based on past experience, would have guaranteed failure. The WWP pulled out of the organizing early on, but a handful of ISO students and their supporters, usually consisting of about a dozen in all, continually pushed for greater centralization. One of the greatest battles was over the question of police liaisons and marshals. The verticals—taking their experience from Bloombergville—took the position that it was a simple practical necessity to have two or three trained negotiators to interface with the police, and marshals to convey information to occupiers. The horizontals insisted that any such arrangement would instantly turn into a leadership structure, conveying orders, since police will always try to identify leaders, and, if they can’t find any, create a leadership structure by making arrangements directly with the negotiators and then insisting that the negotiators (and marshals) enforce them. That one actually went to a vote—or, more precisely, a straw poll, when the facilitator asks people to put their fingers up (for approval), down (for disapproval), or sideways (for abstention or to express uncertainty), just to get a sense of how everyone felt, to see if there was any point in trying to push on. In this case there wasn’t. More than two thirds strongly opposed creating either liaisons or marshals. At that moment commitment to horizontality was definitively confirmed.
There were controversies over the participation of various fringe groups, ranging from followers of Lyndon LaRouche to one woman from a shadowy (and possibly nonexistent) group that called itself
US Day of Rage, who systematically blocked any attempt to reach out to unions because she felt we should be able to attract dissident Tea Partiers. At one point, debates at the GA had become so contentious that we ended up changing our hand signals: we had been using a signal for “direct response,” two hands waving up and down, each with fingers pointing, to be used when someone had some kind of crucial information (“no the action isn’t on Tuesday, it’s on Wednesday!”) and was asking the facilitator to break through the stack of speakers to clarify. Before long, people were using the signal to mean “the group needs to know just how much I disagree with that last statement” and we were reduced to the spectacle of certain diehards sitting on the ground waving their index fingers at each other continuously as they went on some back-and-forth argument until everyone else forced them to shut up. I ended up suggesting we get rid of “direct response” entirely and substitute one raised finger for “point of information”—which I’m pretty sure I didn’t make up, I must have seen it somewhere—and which, strangely, once adopted, put an instant end to back-and-forths and improved the quality of our debate.
THE DAY
I’m not sure when and how the Tactical working group came to their decision, but pretty early on the emerging consensus was that we were going to occupy a park. It was really the only practical option.
Here, as in Egypt, we all knew that anything we said in a public meeting, or wrote on a public listserv, was certain to be known to the police. So when, a few weeks before the date, the Tactical group chose a public location—Chase Plaza, a spacious area in front of the Chase Manhattan Bank building two blocks from the Stock Exchange, replete with a lovely Picasso sculpture, and theoretically open at all hours to the general public—and announced in our outreach literature that we’d be holding our General Assembly there on September 17, they assumed the city would just shut the place down. I’d spent most of the evening of the 16th at a civil disobedience training in Brooklyn conducted by Lisa Fithian, another Global Justice veteran and inveterate organizer who now specialized in teaching labor groups more creative tactics. That evening around midnight a few of us—me, Marisa, Lisa, and Mike McGuire, a scruffy, bearded anarchist veteran who’d just arrived from Baltimore—stopped off at Wall Street to reconnoiter, only to discover, sure enough, the plaza fenced off and closed to the public for an unspecified period of time with no reason given.
The Democracy Project Page 5