“It’s all right,” said Marisa. “I’m pretty sure the Tactical group has a whole series of backup plans.” She didn’t know what those backup plans were—at that point she’d been working mainly with Trainings, and the Video Live-Streaming group—but was sure they existed. We poked around a bit, speculating about the viability of various open spaces, and eventually took the subway home.
The next day the plan was for everyone to start assembling around noon by the bull statue at Bowling Green, but the four of us met an hour or two early, and I spent some time wandering about, snapping pictures on my iPhone of police setting up barricades around the Stock Exchange, and sending the images out on Twitter. This had an unexpected effect. The official #OccupyWallStreet Twitter account (which turned out to have been created and maintained by a small transgender collective from Montreal) immediately sent word that I was on the scene and seemed to have some idea what was going on. Within a couple of hours, my account had about two thousand new followers. About an hour later, I noticed that every time I’d send out an update, ten minutes later someone in Barcelona had translated it and sent it out again in Spanish. I began to get a sense of just how much global interest there was in what was going on that day.
Still, the great mystery was how many people would actually show up. Since we hadn’t had time to make any serious efforts to organize transportation, it was really anyone’s guess—what’s more, we were well aware that if any large number of people did show up, we’d pretty much have no choice but to camp out somewhere, even if that hadn’t been the plan, since we hadn’t organized housing and didn’t have any place to put them.
At first, though, it didn’t seem like that was going to be much of a problem, since our numbers seemed disappointingly small. What’s more, many who showed up seemed decidedly offbeat—I remember a collection of about a dozen “Protest Chaplains” dressed in white robes and singing radical hymns, and perhaps a dozen yards away a rival chorus, also made up of about a dozen more singers, followers of Lyndon LaRouche, performing elaborate classical harmonies. Small knots of homeless traveling kids, or maybe they were just crusty-looking activists, would occasionally appear and take a few turns marching around the barricades the police had constructed around the bull statue, which was assiduously protected at all times by a squadron of uniformed officers.
Gradually I noticed our numbers were starting to build. By the time the Reverend Billy, a famous radical performance artist, had begun to preach from the steps of the Museum of the American Indian, on the south end of Bowling Green Park, it seemed like there were at least a thousand of us. At some point someone pressed a map into my hand. It had five different numbers on it: each corresponded to a park within walking distance that might serve as a fit place for the GA. Around 2:30, word went out that we were all to proceed to location #5.
That was Zuccotti Park.
By the time we got to Zuccotti Park it was clear we had so many people—two thousand at the very least—that we weren’t quite sure how it was going to be possible to hold a General Assembly at all. Someone—some said it was one of the student organizers from out of town—stood on one of the big stone benches festooned around the park to announce that we were all going to break into groups of thirty for an hour and start brainstorming ideas for a genuinely democratic society, or anything else that struck participants as their most vital political concern. This turned out to be a very good idea. Before long the entire park was a maze of little circles, which gave the Process working group—hastily reassembled—a chance to scramble up a plan.
This was, clearly, going to be the facilitation job of the century. Luckily, by this time we did have a number of experienced volunteers—Marina Sitrin, another Direct Action Network activist I’d originally called in to help with legal training, Marisa, a talented young lawyer named Amin Husain, Matt, and Lisa Fithian. We quickly settled on two primary facilitators, two backup facilitators (I was one of the backups), two stack takers, one scribe to write down decisions, one vibes watcher to pass through the crowd monitoring if everyone could hear, or if there were obvious signs of dissatisfaction, frustration, or boredom that needed to be addressed. We also decided that we would form a giant circle. As a young Spanish woman who had flown in to help out explained to us, and Georgia later confirmed, this was an extremely stupid mistake. There is actually no way that a team of facilitators standing in the middle of a circle of people that large, even if shouting at the top of their lungs, could possibly make themselves heard to more than half the assembled multitude at once. The proper thing to do would have been to form a semicircle, and then make aisles, so that speakers could walk to the front and address the assembly. By the time we’d figured that out, it was too late.
So once we’d reconvened the group into a circle, we spent the first several minutes trying to figure out how to communicate to everyone simultaneously. We managed to scare up several different megaphones, and at one point stitched three together into a single jury-rigged contraption, pointing in three different directions. But that didn’t really work. Finally, we realized we’d have to fall back on the People’s Microphone—another trick familiar to most of us from the days of the Global Justice Movement.
No one was quite sure where the People’s Mic had originally come from. It was already a familiar tool to many California activists by the time of the WTO actions in Seattle in November 1999. In a way, it’s kind of remarkable that it hasn’t been attested long before—it’s a perfect solution to an obvious problem that people in large assemblies must have faced time and time again for thousands of years. Perhaps it was widely used in earlier periods of human history but was simply never remarked on because its use was considered self-evident. The trick is very simple. One person speaks loudly, pausing every ten or twenty words or so. When they pause, everyone within earshot repeats what they said, and their words carry twice as far as they would have otherwise. It’s not only practical, but, we found, it has a curious, and profoundly democratic, effect. First of all, it strongly discourages speechifying. Almost anyone will know better than to ramble on unnecessarily if they know that a thousand people are waiting to repeat every word. Second, since anyone can speak, and everyone must repeat, it forces participants to genuinely listen to everybody else.
At that point though we were not thinking so much about the philosophical implications as immediate practical concerns. We were two thousand people in a park, surrounded by at least a thousand police. Scouts had confirmed that horses, scooters, paddy wagons, and riot gear were all assembled ostentatiously in the vicinity. Police white-shirts—that is, commanders—were asking anyone they thought might look like a leader what our plans were. It very much helped at this point that even if anyone had been inclined to act as liaison, they wouldn’t have been able to tell them.
The meeting went on till very late. We had made a point of announcing no specific plan for what to do after the assembly—partly because we didn’t want to make decisions for others, partly to ensure that rather than falling into abstract theoretical arguments, the first order of business of the GA would be the very practical question of deciding what we all wanted to do next. This worked very well in setting the tone. Any number of scenarios were broached, considered, mostly abandoned. Police kept sending out word that they were preparing to evict us—first saying they would clear the park at 10 P.M., then 10:30, then 11. People studiously ignored them, or told them we were still meeting. Before long it became apparent there were two schools of thought: a larger group, which wanted to take the park and hold it as a permanent base of operations, much like Tahrir Square in Egypt, Syntagma Square in Athens, or the Plaça de Catalunya in Barcelona, and a smaller, but equally determined, group that felt we needed to march directly to Wall Street, and if possible, take the street directly opposite the Stock Exchange. Some argued that technically it was not even illegal for us to camp there. As Bloombergville had established, it was legal to sleep on the sidewalk as a form of political expression provided o
ne left a corridor for passersby. A few intrepid souls had even tried to test the waters several weeks before, and put down sleeping bags opposite the Stock Exchange. They were immediately arrested, but after insisting on being brought before a judge had managed to secure a clear statement from that judge that their action was legal, and their arrest was not. Some insisted that with such a precedent the police would not dare arrest us for the very same act, in the very same place, a second time. Others pointed out that with the city already likely shelling out close to a million dollars for police overtime alone during an action of this sort, they were not likely to worry about spending twenty or thirty thousand more in false arrest settlements. They’d surely arrest us anyway.
When operating by consensus, a group does not vote, it works to create a compromise, or even better, a creative synthesis, that everyone can accept. So here. The pivotal point was when Mike, the anarchist veteran from Baltimore, made the following proposal.
“There seem to be two positions,” he said.
“There seem to be two positions,” the crowd answered.
“Either we stay in the park, or march on Wall Street.”
“Either we stay in the park, or march on Wall Street.”
“We don’t know if they’ll let us stay here overnight.”
“We don’t know if they’ll let us stay here overnight.”
“Clearly the thing the police want least is for us to march on Wall Street.”
“Clearly the thing the police want least is for us to march on Wall Street.”
“So I propose the following …”
“So I propose the following …”
“We make it known that we are going to occupy the square …”
“We make it known that we are going to occupy the square …”
“And if the police try to drive us out, that we will immediately march on Wall Street.”
“And if the police try to drive us out, that we will immediately march on Wall Street.”
After about a half an hour of swirling discussion, clarifications, and suggestions, we called for consensus around a proposal based on Mike’s suggestion, and the group decided to do exactly that.
The real credit for what happened after that—within a matter of weeks, a movement that had spread to eight hundred different cities, with outpourings of support from radical opposition groups as far away as China—belongs mainly to the young people who so steadfastly dug themselves in and refused to leave, despite the endless (and in many cases, obviously illegal) acts of police repression designed to intimidate, and to make life so miserable in the park that its inhabitants would become demoralized and abandon the project—for example refusing to allow activists to cover their computers with tarps during rainstorms—and, eventually, calculated acts of terrorism involving batons and pepper spray. But dogged activists have held out heroically under such conditions before, from 1990s forest defense camps to as recently as Bloombergville, and the world simply ignored them.
I couldn’t help but ask myself the same question my Egyptian friend Dina pondered after the overthrow of Mubarak’s government:
Why didn’t it happen this time? What did we finally do right?
* I am referring here to the second New School occupation, in 2009—an earlier occupation of the cafeteria in 2008 led to a minor student victory, with relatively little police violence. The second was met by instant and overwhelming force.
† There is a widespread impression that “the Black Bloc” is some kind of murky organization, given to ultra-militant anarchist ideologies and tactics. Actually, it’s a tactic that activists—usually anarchists—can employ at any demo; it involves covering one’s face, wearing fairly uniform black clothing, and forming a mass willing and able to engage in militant tactics if required, which in the Anglophone world could mean anything from linking arms to form a wall against police, to targeted damage to corporate storefronts. It’s not regularly employed: there hadn’t been a significant Black Bloc in London for years before members of the student movement decided to experiment with the approach that April and to my knowledge hasn’t been one since.
‡ There was apparently a major struggle between the Marxists and the anarchists over that particular phrase: the Marxists wanted the slogan to be “real democracy”; following the Indignados in Spain, the anarchists had insisted on “direct democracy.” They held a vote and the anarchists won.
§ Colleen was there, too, but escorting her mother, who was passing through town. I later learned her mom became so uncomfortable with the Stalinist-style presence that Colleen felt obliged to take her to an art gallery instead.
‖ Needless to say Georgia’s claims were the topic of much comment among her friends for weeks afterward. There was speculation. Georgia is from Greece, one of the few countries in the world where being blond can actually mean discrimination, since Greeks often assume it means one is an impoverished immigrant Albanian. When questioned later, Georgia just insisted that there was nothing to be discussed. “Yes, I’m black,” she said, as if the matter was self-evident.
a Specifics of how these consensus tools work will be covered in Chapter 4.
b As a matter of historical record, since there is so much discussion of the origin of the slogan “We Are the 99 Percent,” the answer is that—appropriately enough—it was a collective creation. I threw in the 99 percent part, Begonia and Luis added the “we,” and the verb was ultimately by added by Chris, of Food Not Bombs, when he created the “We Are the 99 Percent” tumblr page a month later.
c Though it’s worthwhile to point out this is untrue. The number would be more like 37th: New York City would come in just ahead of Tunisia, and just behind Portugal.
d Later, various occupations did acquire the technical means to beam powerful images on the sides of buildings, but the NYPD has held that doing so without permission is a form of trespassing and has forbidden the practice.
TWO
WHY DID IT WORK?
None of us was prepared for what happened next. It was surprising enough that the police did not immediately evict the occupiers. We expected the most likely scenario was for hundreds of riot cops, backed up by horses and copters, to be unleashed against us that very night. This would certainly be in keeping with the style of the NYPD, whose usual strategy is to overwhelm protesters with sheer force of numbers. Yet in this case, someone made the decision to hold back.
One reason was the ambiguity of the legal situation: while public parks close by 12 P.M., Zuccotti Park was a public-private hybrid, owned by an investment firm, Brookfield Office Properties. Technically such “privately owned public properties” are accessible to the public twenty-four hours a day. Still, by our experience, the mere existence of such a law would have been of little relevance if the authorities decided they wanted to evict us anyway, but it allowed something of a fig leaf. But why did they even want a fig leaf?
At first, the police strategy was, instead, one of constant petty harassment, to make conditions so unpleasant we would eventually leave. “No tents” became “no tarps”; power was cut off; generators were appropriated; all forms of amplification were declared illegal, but mysterious construction projects involving jackhammers began all around us. While no one was arrested for sleeping in the park, protesters were made aware they could be arrested for almost anything else: on the very first day, when a small group marched to a nearby branch of Bank of America to chant slogans outside, two were arrested for having bandanas around their necks—on the basis of an obscure eighteenth-century masking law originally created to control Irish highwaymen in colonial New York. The fact that none of the protesters were actually wearing their bandanas as masks and the arrest was clearly illegal was irrelevant—or, depending on how you look at it, the entire point. The next day, police upped the ante by arresting two occupiers for writing slogans with chalk on the sidewalk. When onlookers pointed out that in New York it is not illegal to write with chalk on the sidewalk, the arresting officer rema
rked, “Yeah, I know.”
The park continued to host thousands during the day, and hundreds remained at night. A community began to emerge, with a library and kitchen and free medical clinic, livestream video teams, arts and entertainment committees, sanitation squads, and so on. Before long there were thirty-two different working groups, ranging from an Alternative Currency group to a Spanish-language caucus. General Assemblies were held at 3 P.M. every day. Even more remarkably, other camps began springing up across America. They, too, created General Assemblies and tried to implement the hand signals and other means of operating by consensus-based direct democracy. Within a week or two there were at least a hundred, and within a month, purportedly, six hundred different occupations: Occupy Portland, Occupy Tuscaloosa, Occupy Phoenix, Occupy Cincinnati, Occupy Montreal.*
The occupiers were not only studiously nonviolent, at first their tactics, other than the encampment itself, consisted of little more than marching—though they began to expand to nonviolent civil disobedience with the famous blockade of the Brooklyn Bridge on October 2. Here is where the NYPD unleashed their traditional ferocity. This wasn’t surprising: nonviolent protesters, in New York, as in most U.S. cities, even at legal but unpermitted events, can regularly expect to be physically attacked: anyone who strayed off the sidewalk, for example, could not only expect to be arrested, but, typically, slammed against the nearest vehicle, or have their heads repeatedly smacked against the concrete. Batons were used freely on unresisting marchers. All of this is standard fare and most of us protest veterans saw nothing particularly remarkable about it. What was unprecedented in this case was that some in the mainstream media, at first largely the cable media like MSNBC, but before long, even network news, began to notice and make an issue of it. This was in part because some of the camera phone videos of the police violence went viral on the Internet; before long, Tony Bologna, a police officer caught on video arbitrarily pepper-spraying two young women trapped behind a barricade, then casually sauntering away, became very close to a household name. But in the past, even such a viral video would never have made it onto the evening news.
The Democracy Project Page 6