The Democracy Project

by David Graeber

  Hence the deadlock of American politics.

  Now think of all the women (mostly, white women) who posted their stories to the “We Are the 99 Percent” page. From this vantage, it’s hard to see them as expressing anything but an analogous protest against the cynicism of our political culture: even it takes the form of the absolute minimum demand to pursue a life dedicated to helping, teaching, or caring for others without having to sacrifice the ability to take care of their own families.p And after all, is “support our schoolteachers and nurses” any less legitimate a cry than “support our troops”? And is it a coincidence that so many actual former soldiers, veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, have found themselves drawn to their local occupations?

  By gathering together in the full sight of Wall Street, and creating a community without money, based on principles not just of democracy but of mutual caring, solidarity, and support, occupiers were proposing a revolutionary challenge not just to the power of money, but to the power of money to determine what life itself was supposed to be about. It was the ultimate blow not just against Wall Street, but against that very principle of cynicism of which it was the ultimate embodiment. At least for that brief moment, love had become the ultimate revolutionary act.

  Not surprising, then, that the guardians of the existing order identified it for what it was, and reacted as if they were facing a military provocation.

  QUESTION 7

  Why did the movement appear to collapse so quickly after the camps were evicted in November 2011?

  Pretty much the moment the camps were evicted in November 2011, the media began reporting Occupy’s demise.

  According to the narrative that soon became established in the U.S. media, things were already beginning to fall apart even before the evictions. Supposedly, what had once been idealistic experiments began to fill with criminals, addicts, and homeless and crazy people; hygienic standards broke down; there was an epidemic of sexual assault. The famous photograph of the homeless derelict with his pants down, apparently preparing to relieve his bowels on a NYPD police car near Zuccotti Park, became the counterimage to the famous Tony Bologna pepper-spray video and was widely held out as an icon of just how low things were descending. (The fact that there’s no evidence the person in question even was an occupier was treated as immaterial.) Most of these claims dissolve away the moment one examines them. For instance, despite claims of an epidemic of rape, the total number of occupiers accused of sexual assault—among hundreds of occupations—appears to have been exactly two. As Rebecca Solnit has pointed out, the United States has the highest rate of sexual assault against women of any country in the world, and the media hardly sees this as a moral crisis. Yet somehow the news story on Occupy was not that activists had managed to create an environment in the middle of the most dangerous American cities where the rate of assault against women had clearly precipitously declined, but a scandal that they had not eliminated such incidents altogether.

  What’s more, as she goes on to report of Oakland, California:

  Now here’s something astonishing. While the camp was in existence, crime went down 19% in Oakland, a statistic the city was careful to conceal. “It may be counter to our statement that the Occupy movement is negatively impacting crime in Oakland,” the police chief wrote to the mayor in an email that local news station KTVU later obtained and released to little fanfare. Pay attention: Occupy was so powerful a force for nonviolence that it was already solving Oakland’s chronic crime and violence problems just by giving people hope and meals and solidarity and conversation.19

  Needless to say, no newspaper headlines loudly proclaiming “Violent Crime Drops Sharply During Occupation” ever appeared, and police continued to insist, despite the evidence of their own statistics, that exactly the opposite was the case.

  Insofar as some camps did begin having internal troubles, it was not because of a lack of police—in fact, all were surrounded by police 24/7, so in theory they should have been the safest places in America—but precisely because police did everything in their power to bring it about. Many of the homeless ex-convicts who ended up settling in Zuccotti Park, for instance, reported having been actually bused to the location on release from Rikers Island by officers who told them that free food and lodging were available in the park. This is a common tactic. In Greece, just about everyone I talked to who’d been involved in the General Assembly at Syntagma Square told stories of pickpockets and drug dealers who’d been informed by the police that they would not be prosecuted for carrying out their trade among the protesters. In a way, the remarkable thing is that, under such pressures, most camps did remain relatively safe spaces and did not break down into the kind of Hobbesian chaos that the media, and municipal authorities, invariably claimed they were.

  What was really happening here?

  First of all, I think we have to understand that what happened did not occur in isolation. It has to be understood in its global context. Occupy is, as I’ve repeatedly stressed, simply the North American manifestation of a democratic rebellion that began in Tunisia in January 2011, and by the end of that year was threatening to call into question existing structures of power everywhere.

  One could hardly imagine that existing structures of power would fail to be concerned by these developments, or try to contain the danger to the established order, and clearly they did not fail to do so. In fact, the United States sits at the center of a whole apparatus of political, administrative, and “security” mechanisms that have been put into place over the last generations largely to contain precisely this sort of danger, to ensure that popular uprisings like these either do not occur or at least do not make much difference and are quickly demobilized. In the Middle East the United States performed a complex balancing act, allowing some democratic movements to be violently suppressed (Bahrain is the most famous example) and attempting to co-opt or neutralize others through aid and NGOs. In Europe there was a series of what can only be called financial coups, with the political elite of the wealthy, northern countries effectively ousting elected governments in Greece and Italy, and imposing “neutral technocrats” to push through austerity budgets, accompanied by increasingly sophisticated police operations against those gathered in their public squares. In the United States, after two months of hesitation, police began systematically clearing the encampments, often using overwhelming militarized force, and, even more crucially, made it clear to occupiers that from that time on any group of citizens who intended to re-create encampments, anywhere, would be subject to immediate physical attack.

  The U.S. government line has always been that none of this was coordinated. We are supposed to believe that somehow, hundreds of municipal authorities all independently decided to evict their local camps, using the same pretexts (sanitation), employing the same tactics, all at the same time, and that all of them likewise decided that no camp would be set up after that, even if occupiers attempted to do so completely legally. This is of course absurd. Efforts to suppress the global justice movement back in 1999, 2000, and 2001 were clearly coordinated, and since September 11, 2001, the U.S. government has added several layers of new security bureaucracy with the express purpose of coordinating responses to anything perceived as a threat to public order. If those running such institutions were really just sitting back and paying no attention to the sudden appearance of a large, rapidly growing, and potentially revolutionary nationwide movement, they weren’t doing their jobs.

  How did they proceed? Well, again, we don’t know, and presumably won’t know for many years to come. It took us decades to learn the exact nature of FBI efforts to subvert the civil rights and peace movements in the 1960s. Still, the broad outlines of what must have happened are not particularly hard to reconstruct. Actually there’s a fairly standard playbook employed by pretty much any government attempting to suppress a democratic movement, and this one clearly went very much by the book. Here’s how it goes. First you try to destroy the moral authority of the
radicals who actually drive the movement, by painting them as contemptible and (at least potentially) violent. Then you try to peel off their middle-class allies with a combination of calculated concessions and scare stories—or even, if a genuinely revolutionary situation seems imminent, the intentional creation of public disorder. (This is what Mubarak’s government so famously did in Egypt when they began releasing hardened criminals from prison and withdrawing police protection from middle-class neighborhoods to convince the residents there that revolution could only lead to chaos.) Then you attack.

  Back in 2000, I spent a good deal of time documenting how this first stage worked in the wake of the WTO protests in Seattle. At the time I was often working with activist media liaisons, and we would have to deal with bursts of bizarre claims that always seemed to suddenly appear on the horizon, clearly deriving from multiple official sources, all at the same time. During the summer of 2000, for example, there was one week where suddenly everyone started saying that anti-globalization protesters were all actually rich kids with trust funds. Shortly thereafter we began to hear a list of ultraviolent forms of behavior that protesters were supposed to have employed in Seattle—use of slingshots; throwing of Molotovs, rocks, and excrement; water guns full of urine, bleach, or acid; the use of crowbars to rip up sidewalks to secure projectiles to throw at police. Warnings about such violent tactics soon began regularly appearing in the newspapers before trade summits, often on the authority of experts sent to drill the local police, creating a mood of looming panic—despite the fact that during the Seattle protests themselves, no one had even suggested anyone had done anything of the sort. When such stories appeared in The New York Times, members of the local Direct Action Network, myself included, actually picketed the paper, and it was forced to issue a retraction after calling the Seattle police, who confirmed that they had no evidence any of these tactics had actually been deployed. Yet the stories kept appearing anyway. While there’s no way to know precisely what was happening, the bits of evidence we could glean suggested they traced back to some sort of a network of private security companies that worked in liaison with police, right-wing think tanks, and possibly some sorts of police intelligence units. Before long, police chiefs in cities facing mobilizations started making up similar stories, which would invariably make splashy headlines for a few days, until we managed to establish the violent acts had never happened, by which time, of course, the entire subject was no longer considered newsworthy.

  When you look at such smears in historical perspective, certain unmistakable patterns begin to emerge. The most dramatic is the constant juxtaposition of human body waste and men in uniform. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a police slander against democracy protesters that did not contain at least one reference to someone hurling, or preparing to hurl, excrement. Presumably it all goes back to the success of the image of 1960s protesters spitting on returning veterans, one that lodged firmly in the popular imagination despite there being no evidence it actually happened, but even by the 1970s, lurid visions of hippies throwing shit had become a staple of the right-wing media, and always seemed to reappear right before the men and women in uniform are ordered to attack peaceful protesters—always, of course, without the slightest bit of documentary evidence. Videographers have caught thousands of images of police beating occupiers, journalists, and random passersby. No one has ever caught an image of an occupier hurling dung.

  The emphasis on excrement is so effective because psychologically, it serves two purposes. The first is to win over the hearts and minds of the lower-ranking police officers who will actually be asked to swing the billy clubs against nonviolent idealists’ heads,q and who, in the early days of Occupy, were often quite sympathetic on an individual basis. By January and February, when the repression had really become systematic, activists who had the opportunity to have long conversations with their arresting officers found it was impossible to convince them that occupiers had not been regularly pelting public employees with excrement.

  The second effect is of course to destroy the moral authority of the activists in the eyes of the public: to paint them as both contemptible and violent. The photo of the homeless man squatting next to the police car seemed to service the first purpose quite handily. The problem with the second was—in New York in particular—there was simply no way to make a plausible claim that activists were attacking the police. So instead the line became, the police were obliged to step in to prevent activists from being violent to one another!

  Really this was simply an extension of a symbolic strategy that appears to have been hatched in the very early weeks of the movement, when local authorities were struggling over how to come up with a pretext for criminalizing often largely middle-class citizens engaged in setting up tents. How could one really justify sending in heavily armed riot police against citizens who are mostly not even breaking any laws, but merely violating certain municipal camping regulations? From the beginning, the solution was clear: sanitation. The camps were to be identified with filth. (The presence of often very meticulous sanitation working groups were of course considered irrelevant in this respect.) Already in the second or third week of occupation, activists in cities as far apart as Austin, Texas, and Portland, Oregon, were being informed that since the city was concerned about hygienic conditions, the camps would have to be completely cleared each day for special cleaning—a cleaning that then turned out to take four or five hours every day. From “den of filth,” it was easy enough to carry over the imagery to “cesspool of violence, crime, and degradation.” And, of course, when the camps were evicted, though mayors generally justified their actions by the need to protect everyone, including the campers, from crime, the official reason was in almost every case the need to provide access to public sanitation crews.

  None of this directly answers the question of why the movement seemed to shrivel up so rapidly after the evictions. But it provides the necessary context.

  The first thing to emphasize here is that we are talking about appearances. To say a movement seemed to shrivel up is not to say that it actually did. There is no doubt that the attacks on the camps, the destruction of occupiers’ homes, kitchens, clinics, and libraries, the consequent creation in many cities of a refugee population of activists—many of whom had given up their jobs and homes to join the camps, and who suddenly found themselves on the streets or taking shelter in church basements, many traumatized, dealing with the psychological consequences of arrest, injury, imprisonment, and the loss of most of their worldly possessions—was sure to have its effects. At first the movement was thrown into enormous disarray. Recriminations abounded; indignation over issues of race, class, and gender that had largely been put aside during the heady days of the occupation seemed to emerge all at once. Everyone suddenly seemed to start fighting over money; in New York, more than half a million dollars had poured in; within a few months, it had all been spent providing accommodation and transport money (the churches charged us) for the hundreds who had been displaced. Some of the organizational forms, like the General Assembly, that had worked so beautifully in the camps proved entirely unsuited for the new situation. In most cities, GAs largely fell apart over the winter, though usually large working groups with some immediate practical purpose—in New York, the Direct Action working group, and various specific assemblies convoked to work on specific projects like the May Day mobilization—ended up doing most of the same work.

  In retrospect, the collapse of the General Assembly model was hardly surprising: Most of us who had experience in the Global Justice Movement considered the idea something of a crazy experiment from the outset. We’d always assumed that for meetings of any real size, certainly any meeting involving thousands of people, the consensus process would only work if we adopted some kind of spokescouncil model, where everyone was arranged into groups with temporary “spokes” who alone could make proposals and participate in discussion (though this was always balanced by breakouts into smaller groups where eve
ryone could tell their spokes what to say, or even replace them). The spokescouncil model had worked quite well during the mass mobilizations of 1999–2003. The remarkable thing about the GA approach was that it ever worked at all, which it did, when there was an actual face-to-face community to be maintained. None of us were particularly surprised when, as soon as the camps were cleared, the GAs fell apart.r

  What really slowed things down, and led so many to believe the movement was collapsing, was an unhappy concatenation of several factors: the sudden change in police tactics, which made it impossible for activists to create any sort of free public space in an American city without being immediately physically assaulted; the abandonment by our liberal allies, who made no effort to make a public issue of this new policy; and a sudden media blackout, which ensured most Americans had no idea any of this was even happening. Maintaining a public space like Zuccotti Park was full of problems and by the end many organizers actually said they were a bit relieved that they no longer had to spend all their time worrying about the equivalent of zoning issues, and could start concentrating on planning direct actions and real political campaigns. They soon discovered that without a single center, one where anyone interested in the movement knew they could go at any time to get involved, express support, or just find out what was happening, this became much more difficult to do. But attempts to reestablish such a center were systematically stymied. An effort to convince Trinity Church, an erstwhile ally in lower Manhattan, to let occupiers use a large deserted lot it was holding as a real estate investment failed; after appeals even from the likes of Desmond Tutu fell on deaf ears, several Episcopal bishops led a march to peacefully occupy the space. They were immediately arrested, and somehow, the entire story of their involvement never made it into the news. On the sixth-month anniversary of the original occupation, on March 17, former occupiers threw an impromptu party in Zuccotti Park. After about an hour, police attacked, which left several activists seriously injured and in the hospital; one band broke off and set up sleeping bags in Union Square, which, while a public park, had traditionally always remained open twenty-four hours a day. Within a few days, tables began to appear around them with Occupy literature, and a kitchen and library began to be set up. The city responded by declaring that from now on, the park would close at midnight, leading to what came to be called the “nightly eviction theater” as hundreds of riot police were assembled at eleven every evening to drive out the handful of campers with their sleeping bags at midnight. “No camping” regulations were enforced so aggressively that activists were arrested for placing blankets over themselves, or, in one case I myself witnessed, wrestled to the pavement and shackled for bending down to pet a dog (the police commander explained that in doing so the protester was too close to the ground).