Dating the beginning of Occupy is not as easy as it might seem. Many use September 17, 2011—the day of actions and assemblies that ended with the first night of the occupation of Zuccotti Park. We agree with this, but also see the need to place it in the context of the preceding weeks, as well as the history of movements in the US. Since one of the authors was a participant in Occupy—as well as in the assemblies and organizing leading up to it in the New York General Assembly—what follows is based on recollections and contemporaneous notes.
Adbusters, a Canada-based culture-jamming media group, made the first call to “Occupy Wall Street” in July 2011. In response, people got together to discuss the call and what sort of mobilization might take place in response. After a few gatherings—one in which people who had prior political experience in more horizontal groups won the argument for an assembly and not a traditional rally or speak-out—it was agreed that there would be an attempt to “Occupy Wall Street,” and decide what that might mean. From there began the first assemblies of what became the New York City General Assembly (NYCGA). Each week the general assembly would meet, usually in the Lower East Side of Manhattan’s Tompkins Square Park. There were generally a few dozen people participating in the assemblies, with facilitation initially provided by a few people who had some prior organizing experience in more horizontal, consensus-oriented groups. Soon there were facilitation training sessions, and an attempt was made to train others in the facilitation process. Since there were only a few dozen people, and since many had no prior political experience or experience with the consensus process, there was a sufficient base of agreement to determine that decisions would be made with consensus, striving for a full consensus minus one block—or, failing that, a 90 percent vote. This form of decision-making carried over into Zuccotti Park, with none of the initial participants ever imagining that, only weeks after the initial assemblies, the New York City General Assembly would become Occupy, with thousands sometimes participating and attempting to make decisions together. There was a great deal of criticism of this approach, as described in Chapter 2, but little could be done to depart from it once thousands had been involved in making the decision.
The early NYCGA rapidly organized working groups and a training structure that was then easily adaptable as the early framework of Occupy—specifically, in August and early September. Of course, while the NYCGA had around a dozen working groups, covering legal, medical, food, art, media facilitation, and so on, Occupy had hundreds by early October. They covered issues like mediation, library services, structure, kitchen services, people of color, Occupy en Español, as well as including a variety of women’s and queer groups.1 This prior organizing structure, though little known, helped a great deal in establishing a mood of trust and consensus-seeking. This was evident the day of September 17, which was organized as both a day of action and a day of assemblies—though the second of these was little known. The Tactical Working Group was to decide what park or plaza we would occupy and inform people on the day. We had already trained teams from the NYCGA to facilitate smaller group discussions. The questions that were initially proposed for discussion, as agreed at an assembly in early September, were, first: What is the crisis, and how do people experience it? And, second: What can we do about it? Many of the dozens of assemblies that gathered in Zuccotti on September 17 did address these questions, but most, if not all, eventually moved the discussion to the question of occupation and what it would mean.
Those people who were involved before September 17 often joke with one another about how we were the only people not to bring sleeping bags with us that day. While we did want to occupy, we were so focused on that day and night, and honestly many of us thought we would be repressed by the police, as is the history and custom in New York City, that we did not believe it would happen—much less last as long as it did. Thus, we were not totally prepared for almost 3,000 people who participated in the evening general assembly and wanted to occupy. The facilitation team for the night assembly on September 17 comprised NYCGA facilitators, armed with a few bullhorns. Soon after the facilitation began, however, the police made it clear they would not permit the “amplified sound,” and a quick decision was made. It was also not very effective to speak to almost three thousand people only with bullhorns. In a facilitation training session only the night before, one of the many role-playing exercises that was conducted addressed how to communicate on the street with many people if your communication systems (phones, radios, and so on) went down. We practiced the “People’s Mic”—something that had been used on the streets of Seattle during the anti-WTO protests to communicate which blockades needed support. In Seattle, phrases were shouted and then echoed by people farther down a block, and then the next one, and the next, forming a massive human chain of communication. In the same spirit, we decided while facilitating to try to use the power of our voices in repetition to amplify one another. It worked, and became a powerful tool not only for communicating with large groups, but also as a way to encourage active listening, with each person repeating what they heard. The use of the People’s Mic took off not only in New York, but later around the US, and even in other parts of the world. Together with “twinkles” or “jazz hands”—the American Sign Language sign for applause, it became emblematic of the global movements for real democracy.
Almost everyone who participated in the assembly of the evening of September 17 recalls it with a sort of wonder, and speaks of having chills at the time. The assembly went on for hours that night, with the main focus being whether there would be an occupation. The vast majority of the people there did want to occupy, but there was not yet a full consensus when the police announced that the park was to be closed. It was ultimately decided that we would occupy, but that all decisions that were to pertain to the occupation would be made by those people who were staying to carry it out. Later that night, the first assembly of the occupation was held.
Much has been written about the economic conditions that precipitated Occupy, but these have not been discussed to quite the same extent as in Greece, Spain, and other parts of Europe. It is true that the crisis was felt more severely in other parts of the world, but there are other reasons for this—including the culture of individualism and pride in boot-strapping one’s way out of all predicaments, which can prevent people from even acknowledging that they have a problem, much less seeking help. For example, it is uncommon for people to reach out to one another when they lose their jobs; in fact, it is more common for someone to pretend it is temporary, or even lie outright about it and take out loans to survive. The same is true of losing one’s house, trying to repay student loans, or paying for medical care.
Occupy turned this on its head. Beginning by putting into the public conversation the 99 percent and the 1 percent, in a country that has not talked about class in any substantive way—much less a confrontational way—for decades. It is now commonplace for people to talk about those with economic power and wealth and those without them. This empowering shift has resulted in increased sense of dignity in many realms of society. No longer is it an individual’s fault if her job has been cut and she loses her home—there is another explanation. Thus, instead of feeling guilty, hiding the facts, moving into a car or van, and feeling unworthy, people have begun to organize and fight back. This can be seen most powerfully in the Occupy Homes movement that began almost immediately after Occupy, and continues all over the US to this day. It is also growing with the Strike Debt movement, with increasing numbers of people discussing how debt is acquired, and beginning a movement to refuse to pay it, as well as collectively working to support people who are losing their homes due to debt.
Upon examining the distribution of wealth in the US, it becomes clear that Occupy was quite close to reality with its slogan: “We are the 99 percent.” In 2010, the top 1 percent had a 35.4 percent share of all privately held wealth, and the next 4 percent had a share of 27.7 percent. The top 20 percent owned 88.9 percent of the wealth. The crisis exacerbated this inequality, reducing the share of the bottom 80 percent from 15 percent in 2007 to 11.1 percent in 2010. The percentage of households with no marketable assets at all rose in the same period from 18.6 percent to 22.5 percent. In total, official US Census data for 2012 lists 46 million Americans—15 percent of the population—as poor,2 and the number of US residents depending on food stamps rose from 26.3 million in 2007 to 47 million in 2013.
Crisis and economic restructuring has destroyed $19.2 trillion in household wealth, according to the US Treasury Department, with noticeable differences along race lines. The median white household’s net worth in 2007 was $151,000, while the median black household’s net worth was $9,700, and the figure for Latinos stood at $9,600. By 2010, the median white household’s net worth was down one third, at $97,000, with the figures for blacks and Latinos standing at $4,900 and $1,300—representing respective declines of 50 percent and 80 percent.3
It is on the topic of debt that Occupy was really able to shift mainstream debate. The US is a nation of debtors. In 2011, 69 percent of US households were in debt. That share had dropped from 74 percent in 2000, but the average debt rose from $50,971 (inflation-adjusted) to $70,000.4 While in the early 1980s the average household debt was equal to 60 percent of the average annual income, by the time of the 2008 financial crisis, that share had “grown to exceed 100 percent.”5
Households of thirty-five-to-forty-four-year-olds saw the biggest increase in debt, with an average of $108,000. The crisis has also hit seniors hard. Their median debt doubled to $26,000, and the share of seniors owing money grew from 41 percent in 2000 to 44 percent in 2011.6 This meant that people could not maintain a decent standard of living based on work and income, but had to acquire debt. Increasingly, pensions do not provide enough income to meet basic needs, as retired people were forced to live with family and other elderly people, go back to work, acquire more debt, and sometimes go without basic services such as medicine or heating.
The figures are even more alarming if concrete debt is considered. The Federal Reserve reported in the first quarter of 2013 an outstanding mortgage debt of nearly $13.1 trillion, of which $9.86 trillion was on one to four family residences; outstanding student loan debt totaled $1.2 trillion in the US,7 with 40 million US residents are affected; and the average student loan debt for those who graduated in 2013 was $31,509.8 Meanwhile, credit card debt volume was slowly shrinking,9 but this was due to credit card companies writing off increasing amounts of debt as uncollectable.
It is no wonder, then, that out of Occupy grew Strike Debt. It is now operating in a number of cities and towns around the US, and is incredibly popular with almost anyone who hears about its mission and politics. While Occupy made inequality and class issues to be discussed, and poverty something to be angry about rather than ashamed of, Strike Debt has increasingly changed the conversation on debt. Through material such as the Debt Resistors’ Manual and other forms of popular education, as well as workshops and actions including burning student debt forms and organizing public testimonials on personal debt, the conversation has moved from one around guilt and individual blame to one that points to the banks and the system of lending as unfair and predatory.
With the official number of homeless people in the US in 2012 reaching 633,782, approximately 38 percent (243,627) of whom were unsheltered,10 it is also no wonder that every Occupy encampment had homeless people coming for shelter and food. In some cities, such as Philadelphia, there were often hundreds of homeless people, mainly women, at any given time.11 This large number of homeless people—often not in the encampments for the same political reasons as other occupiers, but rather for reasons of survival—created various challenges, and sometimes conflicts. With the foreclosure crisis prior to Occupy, it is no wonder that Occupy Homes became a central part of the movement.
We conducted fifteen interviews in the US with participants in Occupy and the various Occupy-inspired groups that existed at the time of writing, such as Occupy Homes and Strike Debt. One of the authors was also an active participant in Occupy Wall Street in New York, and therefore the relationships with the interviewees in New York, as well as some of the individuals in California, has been ongoing and often quite close. We decided to select only a few cities for our interviews, to be consistent with our investigations of Greece and Spain, though Occupy was and remains in many hundreds of locations, and perhaps more than a thousand at its peak. Having traveled to many locations throughout the US in 2011 and 2012, often sharing experiences from Occupy as well as the new movements globally, we were struck by the sheer number of Occupy and anti-foreclosure groups in existence. Almost every town or city had one.
The majority of the people interviewed were non-white, coming from various backgrounds—Palestinian, Bolivian, African-American, and Indian—and half were women. Three were union workers, and half come from a working-class background, while one was formally homeless and incarcerated. Seven individuals did not have regular work, and could be identified as precarious workers, while eleven had university degrees. This demographic might not be fully reflective of that of Occupy—but we selected interviewees based only on our relationship to them and their leadership in the movement. It is also important to note that New York and the Bay Area of California are much more diverse than many other parts of the US. All of the people interviewed had some prior political experience. A few had experience in horizontal organizing, such as in the Global Justice Movement and the new Students for a Democratic Society.
New York’s Zuccotti Park remains the main reference point in discussions about Occupy in the US. But the phenomena of occupation and directly democratic assemblies took place in more than a thousand towns and cities around the country. The descriptions below are from New York, but people everywhere have stories of empowerment and transformed subjectivity due to their participation in real democracy.
Matt Presto, twenty-five, is an elementary school math teacher, and was part of the safer spaces and conflict resolution/mediation working groups, New York.
Matt, OWS, New York: I think a lot of people who recount the evening of September 17 attribute this mystical quality to it all. That it just was this otherworldly experience. When I look back I certainly feel that way. I remember first arriving there. I had also gotten to the park earlier, before everyone else had, and wasn’t sure what was going to happen next—if people were gonna stay, if this was something that would be engaging enough for people. And then … people came and some of us spoke up and encouraged people to form these breakout groups and talk about what they identified as problems right now, and it just happened. People formed these breakout groups with complete strangers and had these amazing conversations. I remember just being on the periphery, walking from one place to the next and listening to people speaking, and it was amazing to see people take ownership and self-organize. And that evening we had the massive general assembly, which presented its own series of problems. But it was the beginning of this incredible experiment.
Marisa Holmes, twenty-six, is a filmmaker, and was in the structure and facilitation working groups of OWS, New York City.
Marisa, OWS, New York: We didn’t anticipate it at all—that we’d go down and that we’d actually even occupy. I thought, “Of course the police were going to disperse us, right?” but that didn’t happen, so we just kept going. And there was this problem with the megaphone. It was this sort of makeshift rig, so we started using the “people’s mic.” And it just kind of happened organically. I don’t remember having a conversation with all of you where we decided to use the people’s mic—it was just something that made sense intuitively. So we tried to communicate to the crowd, but we were in the middle and surrounded by this circle, so most people couldn’t hear us—we’d have to sort of repeat it from one side to the next. So logistically it was hard. But we got through this conversation about whether or not to occupy the space. There were legal questions raised, and then, in the end, most people seemed to not care about the legal questions and wanted to stay. Because they came to occupy, right? And so we decided to stay, just stay in the park.
And then, throughout the night, there was music, dancing … People were reading poetry, and just connecting with each other. It really was this kind of mind-meld experiment. And it felt really safe, despite the fact that we were surrounded by cops—it felt really, really safe to be there …
The night before I felt isolated, afraid, and just on edge, anticipating the power of the state. And then, the night of the occupation, I felt completely at ease, and at home. Even with people that I’d never met before. That was an amazing shift.
Gopal Dayaneni, forty-three, is a member of activist collective Movement Generation: Justice and Ecology Project, a trainer and board member of the Ruckus Society and the Center for Story-Based Strategy (formerly smart-Meme), and an advisory board member of the International Accountability Project, and Catalyst Project.
Gopal, Occupy Farms, Berkeley: There’s three aspects of the occupations: one is the political space it creates for people to gather, come together, plug in, and organize, and all of that—which I think is really important. And that’s typified by the general assemblies, the workgroups, the organizing that comes out of it—the marches, the demonstrations, all of that, the general strike. So that’s one piece of it and that’s absolutely essential. And having a base to work out of is critical. And I think that’s one of the huge values of the Occupy encampments.
A second aspect of occupations is the prefigurative politics of it. Occupy Library, Occupy Kitchen, Occupy Gardens, Occupy Clinic. And it’s the idea that we are going to model a better way to be in the world—we’re going to meet our needs better together. And I think those were hit-and-miss, and they were different in different places, with some aspects being better than others. The Occupy medics and Occupy clinics have been some of the most successful, because people with real skills set up shop. There was Occupy Social Workers, and things like that, trying [to] meet people’s needs. Occupy Library was also a piece that was very popular, because anybody could come and give books, anybody could figure out how to organize it, so it was a model.
Those aspects of it were very interesting, but again, that is one of the places where the self-governance challenge comes, or our ability to do anything at scale becomes a problem. So, born out of that idea is some of the kinds of things that I think are the new face of Occupy, like Occupy the Farm. People who were in the Occupy Gardens take the three to six months it takes to find that destructive development project happening in your community on arable land, and do it at scale. Occupy at scale. Plazas are pathetic—we should be occupying at scale. What’s that vacant building? What’s that bank that closed and that building’s still vacant? Occupy it and start something at scale, that models the democratic process, the horizontal structures, the participatory nature of it. All of that. So that was the second aspect.
And then the third aspect, and I think the most vulnerable aspect, was the encampments. The failure of the encampments are about scale, about people not understanding the scale of human activity, and what it takes to create a high-density environment in a small space. I think folks, especially folks in the city, who have no idea what it takes to grow food for people, and no idea what it takes to provide water for people, and no idea how much human waste is produced in a single day, could not self-govern these encampments effectively. What happens when you create an environment with a high concentration of people, many of whom will have special needs, where the tyranny of the eccentric, and infiltration, and toxic group processes can quickly train-wreck your self-governance?
The encampments create the double bind of “We can govern better than you.” That is the action logic of the encampment—we can meet our needs better than you are meeting our needs. And the moment we don’t do that, we eliminate the decision dilemma for them. The moment somebody gets hurt in the encampment, we have proved that we “cannot provide safety as good as they can.” Obviously it’s not true—they cannot provide safety through policing either, in fact it’s worse—but that’s not the popular narrative of safety and security: people assume the police can keep you safe. So unless we create a situation that clearly disrupts the assumption, and that creates a vision that’s better, then they don’t have a dilemma.
So Occupy the Farm, for us, was: What does it mean to do it at scale? What does it mean to address some of the issues around the self-governance questions around the encampment, but still use the Occupy tactic and strategies around this idea of urban land reform? What does an urban land reform movement look like in the United States? That’s the question this collective here has been asking itself for four years. What does an urban land reform movement look like in the United States, one that’s based on agro-ecology and principles of ecological resilience and all of that? What does that look like? So this was an opportunity for us to engage in that.
Everyone we spoke with, from the occupations in the US to those in other countries around the world, talked about how incredible it was to have so many people living and making decisions together in the park, and shared some of the same challenges. One of the most prominent of these was internal conflicts that arose without any definite method of conflict-resolution. In the most severe cases, this took the form of physical violence, from sexual assault to physical harassment. In Spain a security team was set up, later called “respect,” and in the US there was Safer Spaces, as well as mediation and sometimes conflict resolution. All participants agreed that this was one of the weakest areas of the encampments and one of the most open to infiltration and political police disruption.
Matt, OWS, New York: A lot of people ask about early on why we didn’t have some kind of accountability, or some kind of community agreements, or some of these other things that seemed kind of logical. We just hadn’t anticipated actually staying in a park for more than an afternoon or evening. So once it became clear that this was going to be more long-term, we had to address the inevitable problems of a large number of strangers sharing a space together. And from fairly early on, people—particularly women and queer and trans folks—were expressing that they didn’t feel safe sleeping in a park at night. There was a lot of rampant misogyny and heterosexism going on. So out of that came Safer Spaces, to address that issue, but also broader issues of oppression that manifested within the park.
Safer Spaces was initially concerned with designating safer sleeping spaces for people, where within that particular space there would be a group of people who would take shifts overnight to just keep an eye on things, as well as have clearly stated intentions on a sign of what that space was about—that it was queer/trans-friendly, and feminist, among various other things. The group also helped develop a community agreement, the intention of which would be a list of ideas from the entire community of what would make them feel safer in Zuccotti, and then synthesize information into a document that once consented upon, everyone entering that space would have to agree to—certain principles about respecting boundaries, basically.
Unfortunately, that didn’t get finalized until after the eviction. But we were also doing what was called Community Watch, so we were working with this mediation group that had been formed, with a de-escalation group, as well as with the medics and the mental health support people, to just keep an eye on things at night, and to de-escalate situations when they arose—and, once the instances of sexual assault happened, figuring out approaches to preventing certain people from coming back into the park. The very difficult question was how to do that, and respecting the wishes of the person who had been harmed, and not bringing the police in, which would exacerbate the situation and put other people at risk.
Zuccotti in many respects is this microcosm for society, both current society and an experiment for the society we’d like it to become. And the notion of prefigurative politics is very important to us, and thinking very deeply about how our principles could be consistent with our actions. So if the world we want to see is one without police, without these punitive measures, and without the prison-industrial complex, then how are we going to resolve issues in a way that is directly democratic and horizontal and all these other things? And I think for us it wasn’t about arriving at definite answers, or having a blueprint of how to approach these issues, but an ongoing experiment to see what works and what doesn’t, and how to constantly adapt to changing circumstances.
While forms of direct democracy and the use of consensus are not without precedent in the US, and in fact were widespread within the global justice movement in the early 2000s, the use of assemblies rather than meetings, and face-to-face discussions of all people involved rather than delegation or representation, is new—especially in terms of its reach, with hundreds of thousands of people around the United States being involved, most of whom had little or no prior political experience. In many ways, the use of assemblies and direct democracy was a reflex, and not a political decision.
Matt, OWS, New York: On August 2, initially, when I arrived, there was a group of people speechifying and it just seemed very much like the kind of traditional politics I was getting tired of—having people talk at me, and then going on a march for an hour or two, and then going home and feeling good about ourselves for having done nothing. And so once people started to call for something different, to have this horizontal assembly, to organize for Occupy Wall Street in a directly democratic fashion, it seemed much more enticing to me, and slowly but surely other people began to join this circle. What that signified for me was that I think there was a much larger disillusionment with politics as usual. That people were looking for a break from this framework of politics solely within this electoral framework, within parties. And they wanted to take control of their own lives—they wanted to organize without trying to relegitimize these existing power structures, but rather to disrupt them.
On August 2, as soon as we began this horizontal meeting, breakout groups were formed, and we thought very consciously about the decision-making process, and more broadly how we would operate—if we’d empower working groups to operate in this decentralized fashion, if we’d use consensus and take into account, using progressive stack. The emphasis from the start was on being horizontal and directly democratic. A lot of the early language was very specific about that.
Marisa, OWS, New York: At the second meeting, after August 2, we finalized this modified consensus model. So there is a sort of conflation of direct democracy with consensus. Consensus I think is a form of direct democracy. People wanted to engage with each other directly outside existing social and political institutions, because those institutions had become illegitimate—not only the government, also the social left had become illegitimate. So it was sort of a break with both of those trajectories.
Matt, OWS, New York: Since the crash of 2008, there were numerous attempts to organize some sort of movement or series of actions against Wall Street, and they’d all been very top-down, and controlled by various political parties, or some of the institutional left. And all these efforts had largely failed, up to and including Bloombergville. And so I think people were ready to try something refreshing. And what we were seeing happening in Greece and Spain and elsewhere was an inspiration for us for a different way of organizing.
At the first meeting there were members of left parties there, but they were simply outnumbered. There were more people interested in a horizontal way that came early on, so people who had been working under a different framework had to adjust to the zeitgeist. I guess it was surprising because there’s usually this dominance of the old left, and very hierarchical ways of working. And usually anarchists are the ones pushing against that, in the margins. In this instance, it seemed like the right moment—anarchist and autonomous ways of doing things were part of the zeitgeist, and people had to just accept it.
Gopal, Occupy Farms, Berkeley: It was hard, and it was never totally perfect. There were a couple of things that happened. One thing is that we made a proposal around decision-making, and that took several meetings to land. And the thing that was truly transformative about the farm was there were a lot of people, a lot of young people, from Occupy Oakland. They’d found their place, and there was something about it that wasn’t really right, and they didn’t know what it was. And the farm answered that question, which was a purposeful productive activity and a goal—a real outcome, that you could imagine winning, as opposed to an oppositional framework. Very, very few people who were involved in Occupy Oakland and Fuck the Police protests imagine that they’re going to dismantle the state through Occupy Oakland’s confrontations with the cops. I do not believe that the vast majority of them deep down believe that that was the way forward. But it was the first place to offer the political space to have a robust analysis and a broader critique, and to offer this sort of idea of democracy, that there’s more to democracy than voting and shopping. That idea was exciting for folks …
There are a lot of folks here who have never been part of a direct action spokescouncil. Their idea of direct democracy is this idea of everybody sits in some massive circle and twinkles their fingers. Folks have not been engaged in scaled interventions of thousands of people organizing mass mobilizations, let alone long-term governance structures, like Direct Action to Stop the War in San Francisco. We ran that for years on the spokescouncil model. And it dissolved after a point, but the idea that it could grow and contract, and it was scalable, and all that … people just don’t know the history. I’m forty-three—I’m one of the oldest people involved in the project. And people think of me as a liberal, ’cause I’m trying to think about strategy, as opposed to just like, let’s fight with the cops.
Sandra (Sandy) Nurse, twenty-nine, is a political scientist and was in the Direct Action working group of OWS. She now runs a youth empowerment project, BK ROT (a compost collection service in Bushwick), New York.
Sandy, OWS, New York: It’s really strange how we organize—at least, it’s something I’ve never experienced before, coming from a big institutional background. I think the way we organized, at least in the first week, was like, “Who’s gonna do the food?” And we were like, “Somebody needs to get together and organize for food,” and so people were like, “I know how to do that” or “I’m interested in it.” Then they started working together—people were like, “We need to go disrupt what’s going on down on Wall Street,” “I want to do that.” So we got together, and now we have an action committee. So it is kind of like needs- and issues-based, and people coming together based on what they like to talk about, and what they want to organize for, and maybe what kind of skill sets they already have, and what skill sets they’d like to learn …
In this situation here, you can find someone who has been homeless, who maybe doesn’t have any strong formal education, can come off the streets, step into a space, and suddenly become involved in something that really impacts a lot of people. I find that to be the most creative and meaningful way of organizing and working, and it’s been the most inspiring thing to see so many people that have found meaning in doing work. It’s pretty wild, actually.
I don’t know what this process should be called. There are a lot of words, from being a student of history and political science. People can call it direct, people can call it liberal, people can call it electoral. This is not electoral—it’s not institutional. I think it’s … I don’t know, it’s just like, my voice is heard, everyone’s voice is heard, and we come together and we decide what to do with that. I don’t even know what that is actually termed. It just is something that’s powerful—if it’s direct democracy, if it’s localized democracy, localized direct democracy. I’m not really sure. I think what’s happening is something completely different.
Anthony Leviege, in his thirties, is a dockworker and member of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union in Oakland, CA.
Anthony, ILWU, Oakland: I think that everyone should have a say in society. That would be a more fair system—that society should be run to meet the needs of the people, and not profit. My idea is that society should be here to take care of Mother Earth, all of our home. No borders, so some people can control that.
Nobody really cares about American Airlines, United Airlines, you can just have one airline, then people would say, “It wouldn’t be fair competition.” Well, shit, I always say, the flight’s still the same, even though it’s competition, but they spend so much money on advertisement, and competing with each other for the market, that it’s ridiculous. I just think that workers and people must have way more control and we need a system where we produce for what we need, instead of profit. That would be something that I’m for.
I’ve been on both sides. I grew up in the ghettos, and struggled, and went to jail, and gang-banged, and all that stuff, and now I make a decent life. I married my wife, and I get to travel and all that, so I get to see both perspectives. But I understand that it was luck that happened to me. And a lot of people think it’s hard work, because of what we see on TV, and “If you work hard …”; but the reality is that for some people it’s like Vegas—yeah, some people are gonna win, but the majority of them are going to lose. And, just me personally, I realize that now. I was lucky—my mom lived out here, so I was able to get out of LA, and get a different start. And then some people didn’t have that.
For many in the Occupy movement, the rejection of representative democracy, similar to the use of direct democracy, came as a sort of reflex or reaction. People often saw the “system” as the problem, and tied in with that was the use of representation. Person after person would tell us how they wanted to speak for themselves, that there was no way that any politician could represent them—and that, even if they could, they want to speak and be heard directly.
Amin Husain, thirty-six, is a Palestinian-American lawyer-turned-artist, involved in Occupy Wall Street Direct Action working group and Facilitation, New York, and is the co-founder of Tidal: Occupy Theory journal.
Amin, OWS, New York: People don’t want to be represented. People don’t want to have someone tell them what is and what isn’t. That’s the time we’re in.
I don’t understand why we can get to the moon thirty years ago but we can’t have a democracy yet. This isn’t a democracy. We don’t live in a democracy. We live in a republic. And it’s been proven for over 200 years that this myth is just that—a myth. We’re yet to have a democracy. That’s what I would like to see.
Marisa, OWS, New York: People do not trust representation. I was part of the Structure Working Group, and when we tried to move toward the use of the spokescouncil there were all sorts of criticisms as it being this representative body, which of course it isn’t. That was not the intention. But people have this idea as a result of Occupy, which is they have this great healthy distrust of representatives, and of any kind of authority figure. So I witnessed that firsthand. On a more broad level, representatives haven’t actually helped serve the basic needs of people, and there are so many glaring contradictions of bourgeois representative democracy that people are now experiencing firsthand in ways that maybe they didn’t before. Especially the middle class in America is facing these contradictions like they’ve never faced before. So I think there is a critique of that. In the last three to four decades there’s been a steady erosion of trust in government and elected officials, and Occupy is coming at the tail end of that.
Bhawin, Occupy Albany, Albany: There’s no democracy here in the United States. It’s never been a democracy. From day one the power was white male landowners—women and people of color, especially African-American people, people of African descent, had no power, had no voice. Native indigenous folks were killed off, massacred, were moved off, penned into reservations. I feel like this idea of democracy is mythology—it’s a story. And I think that myths are more powerful than truth, and that’s a fundamental part of the United States. The United States was built on a lot of myths. As a teacher I understand my role in the perpetuation of mythologies to children. Because children learn these things at a young age: the founding fathers, the constitution, all these kinds of things. And it feels like they are not changeable. You can’t touch them, you don’t feel it, you don’t feel democracy in your daily life. You don’t have power. We try to be different in the place where I work—the Free School, it’s called Democratic School. The kids have a vote—the kids have a say in how things are done. They decide the rules themselves. We don’t decide for them. We tell them all the time, “You actually outnumber the adults in this space.” We hold them accountable, and we make sure they understand the responsibility to the community, but we tell them, “You guys have power, you need to find your voice.”
And I think that’s the thing about this country right now, is that people are starting to realize that this idea of democracy is a sham. We need to find our voice. We’ve got an election coming up. It’s like bad theater to watch this stuff. You got Obama just parroting the same old lines about jobs and the economy, and you’ve got these Republicans talking about values, while they’re out there getting caught stealing and scamming and having affairs and all this kinda stuff. To me it’s actually shocking that there hasn’t been a fucking uprising in this country before! It’s crazy. This is overdue.
Beth, Occupy Homes Bernal, San Francisco: Driving to school today, I was listening to Democracy Now!, and they were talking about Julian Assange, and that he’s probably going to be extradited to Sweden so that the United States can then grab him, and bring him over here and execute him or whatever they’re going to do—and I was just thinking: What a fucking lie! There was something about how the judicial system is really set up to serve the interests of institutions. And it struck me—this is where I’m thinking about the power of metaphor, too, because the metaphor of democracy and the story that’s woven around it is I think a very beautiful thing, but it never has been put in effect. It’s really been used as a kind of decoy to keep people’s attention and their fury away from the injustices that happen around democracy.
And, at the same time, democracy has always been linked with capitalism, and so you have people who are in power, that are also getting completely rich and wealthy and dispossessing other people, and of course making their wealth on the backs of other people. I just find that very, very difficult to stomach. And I always have—it’s just that now I have sort of this pace in my life where I can become more active, and I’m doing that. My way of engaging activism is through art. I think democracy is really a beautiful utopian vision that we’ve never been able to engage. I’m always just amazed at how neoliberalism can take a term like, say, “multiculturalism,” and just turn it on its head, and use it to oppress people of color, or different genders or sexualities. Democracy has that same power, where you track this word out there, and you track these beautiful shining ideals out there, and then it’s used to extradite some guy who’s telling the truth about US military engagements.
Then you have someone like George Bush, who’s the leader of the democratic world, and he’s just such a liar, murderer, and cheat, and all he does is get richer and richer. And I find the kind of irony involved in that horrific—it’s a nightmare. It’s infuriating, because democracy is really used to enslave many, many people. And I’m dedicated to trying to attain some other kind of democracy.
Shanna, Occupy Troy, Albany, NY: The way I was trained in what activism is, where you go straight to the legislators and have an “ask”—you always have an ask—and you make sure there is a decision-maker who can give you what you need. And what really excited me immediately about Occupy was the fact that it was like, “Screw the decision-makers—they’re not doing their job,” so we’re just going to protest, and there was no ask. And I think there didn’t needed to be an ask, because it was just about letting people know it’s OK to protest, it’s OK to be angry. And so I just thought it was brilliant that they went straight to Wall Street, and skipped City Hall and skipped the Capitol.
Below is one of many examples of how the use of assemblies and direct democracy permeated other groups and movements. Many, like John, refer to it as “Occupy style.” Others who use forms from Occupy might not refer to the movement directly, but the similarities are clear—as for example when the Walmart workers began their job actions in 2012 and mic-checked managers and bosses; or, in many cities, from New York to Oakland, where more traditional groups, such as trade unions and human rights organizations, came together with Occupy and used the assembly form to decide how to work together, from May Day actions to anti–police brutality struggles.
John Cronin, Jr, twenty-nine, is an organizer with the Restaurant Opportunities Center of New York and OWS–Immigrant Worker Justice working group.
John, OWS/Immigrant Worker Justice, New York: Fast-forward a few months from the beginning of Occupy in September to February. We had a membership meeting called the Roccupy membership meeting. (ROC is the Restaurant Opportunities Center.12) So the whole membership meeting, we did it in an Occupy Wall Street–style of meeting—which means, you know, with all the hand signals, the kind of consensus thingy, which I think some of it is pretty goofy but … it made the conversation different. And we made sure that we sat in a circle, which sometimes doesn’t happen just based on space, but we made sure we had some space. We had a big round table in a conference room where we sat. And we had some people from Occupy come and sit with our Immigrant Worker Justice Group, and also some of our members. And we just opened up a conversation of what people’s thoughts were on it. One member had a son. She said, “My son’s an Occupier”—she is a woman of color. Some of the stuff the media was saying—“Yeah, they’re just a bunch of white hippies”; and our people said, “No, I’ve been down there,” and there was a real conversation about it. That’s another thing about Occupy—it’s about throwing out some of the otherization that can happen, where you can’t say, “Oh, those people,” because a lot of people are participating, so it’s not just those people, it’s my cousin … And I’ve found that when I go home—I’m from Providence, Rhode Island, the white, blue-collar section of that town—and people go like, “Oh!”—they ask me questions, and they know, “John’s down there, I know he’s normal.” So I think that’s been one of the breakthroughs, too.
So back to the ROC thing, we had a meeting, run Occupy-style, talked about what their thoughts are, then said, “Well, how does the 1 percent/99 percent fit into the restaurant worker narrative?” We had a really great discussion on it.
Matt, OWS, New York: I guess, for me, I am a firm believer in the power of direct action and basically creating conditions where one would force the state to come to the negotiating table—and consequently making these changes, rather than the framework of demands, which is perhaps a slightly less passive form of begging or petitioning, which I think often re-legitimizes the power of the state. It is obviously a very difficult question of how you address some of the very immediate suffering without giving power to the state. And for me, I think, at least part of that answer is in the direction of direct action.
Marisa, OWS, New York: Demands are limitations, right? You can go out and take a street corner and put up a soap box, and then the police will come and attack you, and you are negotiating in that moment because they confronted you—they came to you and forced a negotiation. But a demand is going to them and recognizing their power. And I wanted to avoid that with Occupy—I wanted to avoid making demands altogether. And we had that discussion over and over again early on before September 17. And it was tabled every time—people just were not really interested in pursuing demands.
Matt, OWS, New York: The question we get asked constantly: “What do you want?” And our answer is that you have nothing that we want. What we want is from one another as people. So we were having a conversation a while ago about the case of ACT UP!, which did direct action but also it did issue very specific demands, which was access to HIV and AIDS medication, which in that particular case does make sense because these companies do have something that they need to survive, and in that very immediacy it makes sense. I think when we are talking about the context of capitalism we can’t demand an end to capitalism, for example.
Challenges with direct democracy
Considering the plazas and assemblies were mass experiments with direct democracy, there were relatively few challenges in the beginning. As the experiences progressed and the months passed, these challenges deepened. To a large extent, the challenges that arose were a natural part of the growing pains of the movement, and the forms of democracy used were seen as flexible and in need of change as the movement changed. In New York this became a tension, with those wanting to shift to a spokescouncil model, as had been used in the global justice movement and in Occupy San Francisco, and those who wanted to maintain the mass-consensus-based assemblies. In other areas, such as Occupy Farms in Berkeley, they modified their democracy, still adhering to direct democracy, but at the same time taking up the issue of disruptors and what is referred to as the tyranny of the eccentric. While not resolved, the tension reflects the depth of the experiment with democracy.
Marisa, OWS, New York: In direct democracy, everyone’s a leader—everyone’s empowered to make decisions about what affects them. The problem is the ossification of leadership and the form of institutional structure—so, having any kind of permanent position and/or executive ability to make decisions. So what we try to do is “step up, step back” rotation of leadership, so that people can take on specific tasks and if they have particular skills, and they can bring those forward, and they also share those skills, and bring new people in—and I think that’s how you maintain a horizontal movement.
The problem is with the institutionalization of leadership, and permanent leadership—[whereas] in representation, that’s what you have, representatives. But there are all sorts of informal social relations that result in some people having more influence than others, and so I think we always have to be critical of that, recognize it, and try to have a dialogue about it, change it. So it’s not a matter of just letting everything be structureless and organic—then, of course, you tend to replicate the patterns of the existing society. You’re coming from the society, so of course you’re going to replicate these patterns. So we tried to address this in dialogues over the summer, and it’s an ongoing process. It’s not so much that we’re leaderless—I like the “leaderful” framework. Also, of course, we have informal leadership, and we need to be critical of that.
Bhawin, Occupy Albany, NY: When you bring different groups of people together, there’s a lot of challenging conversations that in my opinion have to happen, and have been happening, and to me are just slow, but part of a process. I feel it’s really hard when you step into a space with predominantly white middle-class people, and also young middle-class people, who feel that they are this vanguard of some kind of revolution, without taking a step back and seeing their place in perpetuating the system actually, and how their voices that are constantly at the forefront need to step back, and we need to hear different voices. And that has been really frustrating … as a person of color organizing mainly in communities where there are people who have historically been marginalized, have not been noticed. So I think that’s been a push and pull—that’s been a struggle here in Albany, [and] I think with a lot of Occupys too. It started with a lot of homeless folks coming to the encampment. And I think it was great—it posed a direct challenge, and I think that the movement as a whole failed to really address that adequately and deal with it. They sort of shooed it around and avoided it. But I also think these are all good things. And I think if this movement’s going to keep going, it’s going to have to address these things.
Gopal, Occupy Farms, Berkeley: So this gets into the horizontalism for me. Tyranny of the eccentric and toxic group processes are the two things that crash our truly democratic-left processes—and it’s because of different trends within our movement, one of which is the thing that people are now calling the tyranny of structurelessness, or the idea that “autonomy” means lack of organization, or that “anarchist” means that we don’t believe in structure. Those of us who come out of the movement—the left direct-democracy movement—believe very much in structure and process; but if democracy isn’t structured in, then power dynamics in our society play out, and two of the worst are tyranny of the eccentric, and then the left is just prone to toxic group processes: processing the process. As soon as somebody becomes uncertain about the agenda, then we spend three hours on actually hacking the agenda, instead of trusting the facilitators to just guide us though the process.
As the Occupy movement moved away from the plazas, often due to eviction, the assembly form, together with direct action, continued, often in neighborhood assemblies and workplaces. Much of the neighborhood work has focused on anti-foreclosure and eviction-defense organizing, as in Spain, while the workplace actions tend toward supporting campaigns underway, using direct action tactics to support organizing efforts. In many cities and towns, as the example of Occupy Farms in Berkeley reflects, the assembly form with direct action permeated organizational forms. Beginning in New York, Occupy was the catalyst for anti-debt organizing, as well as hurricane relief and mutual aid work. The anti-debt organizing has now taken off in numerous cities, and the model of mutual aid with relief work has also spread to cities where natural disasters have hit.
Molly Martin, sixty-two, is an electrician. She is active in Occupy Homes Bernal. Molly was involved in the anti-war movement in the 1960s, and has been an activist ever since.
Molly, Occupy Homes Bernal, San Francisco: All of us in Occupy, we all felt like we were part of Occupy—were saying to each other, “What do we do? What do we do? What’s the next thing we do?” And I somehow got invited to go to a home defense in the Bayview neighborhood, which is just south of us. It’s the poorest neighborhood in the city, and it’s the neighborhood where most black people live. It was put on by ACCE—it used to be ACORN, it’s a community organizing organization—and they held (it was at Thanksgiving I remember) a community lunch—they had turkey and food out on the sidewalk, on this block in Bayview, where there were eleven homes in foreclosure, on the same block. And these people who were in foreclosure were there—they were all organized, and they were handing out the leaflets. I was terribly impressed. So I met another neighbor there, and he said, “What’s going on in our neighborhood? Are people getting foreclosed on in Bernal?”
So then I started talking to friends in my neighborhood, and we said, “Let’s see if we can find out what’s going on here.” So we managed to get a list of foreclosures in the neighborhood. There were eighty-eight homes in foreclosure in this neighborhood at that time.
We learned a lot by knocking on doors. We put a group together and we’d go out, mostly on Sundays, and knock on doors, and find out who these people were. And the stories varied. But for sure there’s a lot of shame people have to overcome. Some people we had to go back and talk to many times. We didn’t push people. We just said, “Look, if you feel like you need help, we’re your neighbors and we’re here to help you, and we have some ideas about what we can do to keep you from losing your home.” That’s what we would do.
And we worked with them, and we found partners to work with, because most of us didn’t know anything about foreclosures. What happens? We didn’t know. You get foreclosed on, and you get evicted, and your home is sold at auction. And the auctions take place on the steps of City Hall. I didn’t know that. Every day they’re auctioning off people’s homes on the steps of City Hall.
So now we’ve stopped a lot of auctions—that’s kind of a last-ditch effort, once the home is getting auctioned off. We’re trying to stop the foreclosures before that. And now we’re starting to think about what we need to talk to people about before they even get into foreclosure, because the more time we have the better it is, if we’re really trying to save people’s homes.
A lot of people were skeptical at first, but there are people who’ve gotten their loans modified through work that we’ve done—their home would have been auctioned off, they would have been evicted. We feel like we’re doing something for our neighbors, at least.
And one thing that I found out, once we started looking at who was in foreclosure—we found out who they were: they were almost all people of color. This is a very diverse neighborhood, but I would say most of the people who live here were white people, so that people of color were the ones who the bank targeted for these bad loans. So it feels to me like—this is the main reason that I’m active in this—that the face of my neighborhood is getting changed every day by the banks, these big banks that made fraudulent loans to my neighbors. I’m just outraged. I’m outraged all the time anyway, but this is really outrageous.
Beth, Occupy Homes Bernal, San Francisco: I wasn’t the first to organize the housing group, but I helped fire the first shot. I called David Solnit, a longtime direct action organizer from the Bay area, about a neighbor of mine down the street who was being foreclosed upon. And this is an elderly African-American man—we’ve lived down the street from each other for about seventeen years, and so I’m very fond of this person. He’s someone who served in the navy as a young man, and then he worked at the US Mint in San Francisco making money, literally making money—he was a dye operator for his working adult life. And he is one of the few African-American men in San Francisco who managed to buy his home. And so he bought his house—you know, he worked really hard, he did everything right, and … it’s doubly difficult for African-American men. So he purchased his house, and he’s lived in that house, and in that neighborhood, since the ’70s. But he had a series of misfortunes happen, one of which was a fire. And when he got his insurance payment to repair the house after the fire, the money wasn’t enough money to do that, because the city came in and demanded that he bring the house up to code. And so he didn’t have enough money to do that, so he took out a home equity loan—or some kind of loan, I’m not 100 percent sure what that loan was, but it was a predatory loan … There was no way in hell that Thomas could have ever paid the loan that he has. And so it was obviously a predatory loan. And I found this very upsetting, because here was a man who worked hard all his life, and he just got screwed.
Strike Debt is building a debt resistance movement. We believe that most individual debt is illegitimate and unjust. Most of us fall into debt because we are increasingly deprived of the means to acquire the basic necessities of life: education, healthcare, and housing. Because we are forced to go into debt simply in order to live, we think it is right and moral to resist it.13
Leina Bocar, thirty-two, is an OWS artist, a participant in the Sunset Park Assembly and Strike Debt, Brooklyn, NY.
Leina, OWS/Sunset Park Assembly/Strike Debt, New York: Strike Debt is helping people escape from predatory debt collectors, working on abolishing and resisting debt and easing the burden of debt in very concrete ways. We raised $500,000 for the Rolling Jubilee, and have been able to buy approximately $9 million in distressed medical debt with that amount. The fundraising far exceeded our original goal of raising $50,000. This proves that the idea of mutual aid is alive and well in the greater population, and not merely a fringe, leftist ideal. Most of us come from Occupy Wall Street or older anti-capitalist and anti-globalization traditions. I’m thrilled that our idea of Debt Resistance is becoming more mainstream and accessible. No one should be denied medical care or face financial ruin or harassment due to unpaid debts.
Pamela Brown is in her forties. She is active in Strike Debt, OWS, and Occupy Sandy, New York City.
Pamela, OWS/Strike Debt/Occupy Sandy, New York: An inherent contradiction of the all-consuming capitalist economy we are living in is that even in the acts we take to “strike” it, we end up as participants. With the Rolling Jubilee we understood this contradiction, yet weighed the benefit of opening the conversation about debt—particularly what is legitimate debt—to a new audience more heavily. The Rolling Jubilee was never meant as a way to alter the debt economy. It was never a solution. It was a way to shine a spotlight on a predatory system, where some people profit from the misery of others—where people lose their homes and go bankrupt in order to save their lives because of our inhumane system. It was also a way to alleviate the true suffering that being hounded by a debt collector causes. And it also was a way to deprive the system of some money—since no profit can be made off the defaulted debt we purchase, and collecting on defaulted debt is a very profitable industry.
Diego Ibañez, in his twenties, is active in OWS and Occupy Sandy. He is originally from Bolivia.
Diego, OWS, Occupy Sandy: From day one, crisis mode seemed unreal—as if the shock was just settling in for the community. Slowly, people’s food in their fridge began to rot. The wet surfaces began to must [a stage before mold], and the silence of no electricity moved people into the streets looking for something—looking for anything. There was a self-imposed curfew, the community told us. Even worse than people breaking into your homes was the police, who were getting more aggressive by the hour, distrusting every person of color. They even tried to kick me out once. The first night I slept on the moldy floor of our distribution site, called YANA [You Are Never Alone], I knew that this was going to be something different. People looked at us with fear and distrust, thinking we were the government. I looked at every person in the eye, and could feel their struggle. This was more than providing food, water, and blankets—this was about providing humanity, dignity, and respect. This was about showing that community came from the heart, and about showing that power already existed amongst the people. The community soon caught on. I began thinking big. We needed an office—we asked them, and they gave us a house. We wanted a community clinic—we asked them, and they gave us a storefront to clean, doctors and prescriptions filling it the next day. Everything we envisioned was created. We expanded farther down, looking for churches, gyms, and schools. We opened huge distribution sites feeding thousands, but even better empowering the community members to run it themselves.
For over two weeks, while the electricity was out, we had the eyes and ears of the people. For over two weeks people had no choice but to plug into the community for real power. However, when the electricity came on, I could feel how some of the community disengaged from that energy, plugged back into the system and turned on their TVs. That was a hard day for me, because even though we were happy, the system was now providing comfort. But the hardest work was yet to come. Now we were moving from recovery to rebuilding, and aiming toward resistance. For many, the loyalty toward unity was still there. They saw the inequities of the system when their streets had no lights, but in the rich areas Chase Bank was installing ATMs. They saw how the Red Cross, FEMA, and the National Guard were only interested in moving supplies. They saw that the only people who could help them were themselves. On a corner of a street read a sign: “The hippies took over my town, and brought it back to life.”
Gopal, Occupy Farms, Berkeley: With the farm, we took over this big Gill tract, which was originally 104 acres; it’s now 13 acres. We occupied the part that has the last best agricultural soil in the urbanized East Bay. And it is public land governed under the University of California, Berkeley. So we took that land and we started a farm, right away—and with 200 people, on day one, we managed to put in about forty French intensive rows as a direct action, because it was easy for anyone to plug into, as opposed to permaculture, or some other form of sustainable agro-ecology. My kids, family, and whole household were there—this was an all-inclusive direct action, and the direct action logic was farming, and the slogan was “Farmland is for Farming.”
We could have been fighting to get the University of California to put an urban agriculture farm and center there. But we are not fighting to change what the University of California does on that land—we are fighting to take the land away from the University of California, and put it in a commons. And the closest thing we have to a commons under law in the State of California is a conservation easement. An agricultural conservation easement is the only in-perpetuity easement you can get in California. There’s a very big difference between a campaign to change practice and a campaign to change power dynamics.
So with the Take Back the Land housing fights, right now housing is understood as, “There’s private property, and there’s public housing. There’s private land, and there’s public land.” And the idea is to construct that third space of the people’s. So that right now it’s public and private, and we need the people’s. And that’s where we’re trying to create common-centered housing. How do we leverage the land trust model in a way that de-speculates the soil, that takes land off the market? That’s where it becomes about contesting for power. And there are lots of ways to do land trusts that don’t contest for power—like buying the land and then putting it into a land trust. So then it’s a one-time purchase, now it’s de-speculated ideally, but it doesn’t actually change power relationships and power dynamics, and how property is held.
So Occupy for us—just getting back to that—for us it’s this very exciting moment of, Wow! Goals without demands. I can imagine all kinds of goals without demands that are truly transformative.
Anthony, ILWU, Oakland: The first shutdown, there was a lot of talk about shutting the ports down, a lot of communication, a lot of meetings going on. It actually wasn’t a port shutdown—the idea was more of a general strike. For Longview, everybody had a different reason for what it was called, but it was called by Occupy, and there were a lot of different reasons—the longshoremen of Longview [were] definitely one of the reasons. At the beginning of the day, the day shift worked. And so early with the general strike you got maybe 10,000, a good amount of people came out—it didn’t end up as a general strike, but a good amount of people came out. There were a lot of positive things—banks were forced to shut down. It was like people said, “You’re closing your doors today.” And it was beautiful, because it wasn’t a permitted thing—people did what they wanted to do that day, and so there was a lot of success. But then that evening, I mean, you know, thousands of people came out, after work, and then that led to the first port shutdown. Obama himself couldn’t have stopped that without bloodshed. You had like 40,000 people approaching the port, where you have to go over this ramp. And longshoremen were dispatched that day for jobs; but they told the longshoremen to go to a certain area, and at the terminals they pretty much said, “We can’t work—you can’t even get back there.” There was so many people—it was a huge success,
The second time the port got shut down, it was more planned, and it was going to be done all day, along with up and down the coast. At first it was just an Oakland thing, but this time it was going to be coordinated up and down the coast and in other cities all over by the Occupys. That’s when we really had a stronger tie—a few longshoremen, the union and Occupy—to make this happen.
When you think of Occupy, it’s the community of Oakland. It’s just a title that they got because of the tents, but to me it’s nothing more than the community. It’s different people—it’s the unions, the homeless people, working people, black, white, green, it’s just a whole multitude of people. Occupy met here in West Oakland—like I said, union people, workers, retired people, things like that—and to my surprise we got 2,000 people that morning, at five-thirty in the morning. And we took buses and shuttles, and we marched down to the port.
We didn’t know what to expect. We were a little nervous: Were the police going block it? The port is down this way [points], so there’s one main entrance. Were they going to block the main entrance, or what were they going to do? Were we going to have to make alternative plans? What was going to happen? Then there was a light drizzle. But you got about 2,000 people. I’m still talking about five-thirty in the morning. But, as time went, more people started to come. But the workers were aware of this, so not that many terminals were working. Only two shifts were in, so those got completely shut down, so the ports were shut down that day. And I think this had more to do with the longshoremen than the first.
And then that night you’ve probably got about 15,000 to 20,000 people, again, that came to shut the ports down that night. But the ports tried to be slick, and do like a 3 a.m. shift. So usually it’s an 8 a.m. shift, then the 7 p.m. shift, and then we also have a 3 a.m. shift.
I was out there all day—from five-thirty in the morning all the way to three o’clock in the morning, playing a buffer between my brothers … And because you have, like, white people, young white college students, and you had a lot of … predominantly black longshoremen, with this beef, “They just out here, this ain’t about us, this ain’t about that” … so I wanted to make sure that I was there to say, “No, this is about us.” Even if you don’t agree with it, let the company deal with that. Don’t you take on yourself to go and deal with it, and move them out the way—let the company deal with you getting a safe way into the port. It’s not your job; it’s not safe for you to go to work. So I was glad I was there, and I was there all morning.
1 For a full list, see www.nycga.net.
2 Peter Edelmann, “Poverty in America: Why Can’t We End It?,” New York Times, July 28, 2012.
3 Edward N. Wolff, “The Asset Price Meltdown and the Wealth of the Middle Class,” New York University, August 26, 2012, appam.confex.com.
4 Tim Mullaney, “More Americans Debt-Free, but the Rest Owe More,” USA Today, March 21, 2013.
5 Strike Debt! The Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual, Strike Debt!/Occupy Wall Street, 2012, p. 21.
6 Mullaney, “More Americans Debt-Free.”
7 Institute for College Access and Success, “Average Student Debt Climbs to $26,600 for Class of 2011,” ticas.org.
8 Tim Chen, “American Household Credit Card Debt Statistics: 2013,” nerdwallet.com.
9 Federal Reserve, “G-19 Consumer Credit Report July 2013,” September 9, 2013, federalreserve.gov.
10 National Alliance to End Homelessness, “The State of Homelessness in America 2013,” April 2013, endhomelessness.org.
11 “Occupy Philly Draws Hundreds of Homeless,” Real Change 18:43, November 9, 2011, realchangenews.org.
12 John: “Now, some of our workers have been involved in the workplace justice campaign now we have organized workers at the Capital Grille and against another workplace. It’s weird. So we do the workplace justice organizing, but we also do the job training, and honestly right now the majority of our membership comes from people going through the job training. So you have to become a member to take the training—it’s free—but you have to go through orientation classes and Team Meeting, which is about organizing workers’ rights—there’s two political education classes. So people come in looking for jobs, but there are also people who are the affected groups who should be the agents of change. So they catch on to the politics that we have, and come in. So technically, on paper, we have 5,000 members; the active membership probably will be different than that.”
13 Strike Debt, “Principles of Solidarity,” July 1, 2013, strikedebt.org.