Figure 0.1 “We Are the 99 Percent,” Sixth Avenue, October 15, 2011. Credit: Michael A. Gould-Wartofsky.
Allow us to introduce ourselves: We are the 99 Percent. We are getting kicked out of our homes. We are forced to choose between groceries and rent. We are denied quality medical care. We are suffering from environmental pollution. We are working long hours for little pay and no rights, if we’re working at all. We are getting nothing while the other 1 percent is getting everything. We are the 99 Percent.
—Introduction to The 99 Percent Project
That night, the skies opened up over Lower Manhattan, letting loose dramatic claps of thunder and a driving rain. By the time I made it downtown on October 13, little was left of the elaborate infrastructure of Occupy Wall Street. To be sure, the Media Center was still aglow with the blue light of laptops, the sanitation station filled to overflowing. Yet the contents of the People’s Library were already on their way to a safe house across the Hudson River, and those of the People’s Kitchen had been relocated to a church property on the other side of the East River. After twenty-seven days of occupation, the occupiers were set to be evicted from Zuccotti Park, the privately owned public space a stone’s throw from the gates of Wall Street.
Figure 0.1 “We Are the 99 Percent,” Sixth Avenue, October 15, 2011. Credit: Michael A. Gould-Wartofsky.
By dawn, the storm clouds were lifting and Liberty Square was teeming, all electric with anticipation, as some 3,000 supporters flooded the space and spilled out onto the adjacent sidewalks: union hardhats, community activists, and civil libertarians, activated by word of mouth, by text or by tweet. Their handmade signs testified to their motivations and aspirations: “Wall St. Needs a Good Cleanup”; “Wall St. Is In Debt to Me”; “Save the Middle Class”; “Freedom of Assembly”; “We Are Too Big to Fail.” As a new day dawned dark and lowering over the Financial District, the occupiers readied themselves for nonviolent civil disobedience, preparing to “lock down,” link arms, and stand their ground in the park. But as the appointed hour approached, there were no riot police in sight, and the only sounds were the singsong voices of the occupiers and the click-click of camera shutters. Half an hour later, the news was echoing from one end of the square to the other, in the peculiar cadence of the People’s Microphone:
“Mic check!” (“Mic check!”)
“I’d like to read a brief statement. . .” (“I’d like to read a brief statement!”)
“From Deputy Mayor Holloway. . .” (“From Deputy Mayor Holloway!”)
“Late last night, we received notice from the owners of Zuccotti Park. . .” (“Last night, we received notice from the owners of Zuccotti Park!”)
“Brookfield Properties. . .” (“Brookfield Properties!”)
“That they are postponing their scheduled cleaning of the park!”
Elated at the unexpected reprieve, the crowd erupted in chants, cheers, song, and dance. The occupiers had, for the time being, outmaneuvered the administration of the wealthiest man in New York City, along with the largest commercial real estate corporation in North America—with a little help from their friends, that is, in the labor movement and in city government. Some would set out on a victory march from Zuccotti Park to City Hall. Others, brooms in hand, would go on to march on the New York Stock Exchange, sweeping the streets as they went.
Occupy Wall Street (OWS) burst, unannounced and uninvited, onto the stage of history in the fall of 2011. Amid this “American autumn,” people of all ages, races, and affinities rallied behind the banner of Occupy, railed against the power of the wealthiest “1 Percent,” and pledged allegiance to the other “99 Percent.” First by the tens, then by the tens of thousands, they filled the streets and laid claim to the squares of nearly 1,500 towns and cities. The occupied squares became flashpoints and focal points for an emerging opposition to the politics of austerity, restricted democracy, and the power of corporate America. In the space of the square and beyond, a new, new Left was beginning to find its voice, using it to call for a profound democratization of social and economic life.
From day 1 of the occupation, this author joined the occupiers in Liberty Square—as they called their base camp in Zuccotti Park—listening to their stories, observing their everyday practices, and occupying in my own right as an embedded researcher, ethnographer, and photographer. This book was written from the front lines, not the sidelines, of the battle of the story and the battle for the streets. It is the product of a year of participant observation, and another year of investigation, involving forty interviews with the occupiers in New York City and forty more in seven other cities (Oakland, Atlanta, Chicago, Philadelphia, Athens, London, and Madrid).
My own perspective was informed by ten years of participation in Occupy-style street activism; as many years writing about it for a public audience; and five years spent studying social movements and the state-capital partnership as a doctoral fellow in sociology at New York University. As a graduate student with a fellowship, and one at a private university in the midst of a historic union drive, I was privileged with the autonomy and the time to participate in a way that many others could not. As a veteran activist and a peer of many of the leading occupiers, I was also fortunate to have a privileged vantage point on the people, events, and practices in question.
I had grown up in New York City, where I was surrounded by the everyday reality of inequality, but also steeped in the critique of capitalism and the tradition of democratic socialism. The grandson of immigrant sweatshop workers, I came of political age amid the anti-sweatshop campaign and the broader global justice movement at the turn of the 21st century. It was in this context that I first learned the ways of horizontal democracy, consensus decision-making, and nonviolent direct action. Over the next ten years, I would continue my studies in the school of practice, by way of public school walkouts and student strikes, union offensives and housing defenses, anti-war marches and immigrant rights rallies, summit protests, and police riots. I also lived with and learned from popular movements in Argentina, Mexico, and the Middle East.
Then came the Great Recession of 2007–2009, which hit my generation with the force of a bomb. Like millions of Millennials, I experienced wrenching periods of underemployment. For a time, my social activism gave way to political pessimism. But while I was able to scrape by on my earnings as an educator and a freelance writer, I knew many of my peers were not so lucky. More than a few of my friends would lose their jobs, their homes, and their health. It was first and foremost this social reality—and not academic study or political ideology—that led me back to the streets of the Financial District. I returned this time with a camera and a notebook, and with the intent to document the stories, troubles, and struggles of the children of the crisis.
When Occupy finally erupted in the fall of 2011, I approached the occupation from the perspective of a participant observer. My purpose in occupying was not just to occupy, but to record, represent, and critically reflect upon what was unfolding around me. In the first instance, I focused my lens on everyday life in the occupied square, and on the sources of solidarity, strategy, and creativity I observed among the occupiers themselves. I then turned my lens outward, to the alliances they had forged, the enemies they had made, and the imprint they had left on the larger political landscape.
I set out to contend with four sets of questions, which I found either unaddressed or inadequately addressed in the existing literature. First, I wanted to know what were the origins of the Occupy idea, the sources of the 99 Percent identity, and the dynamics of its political development. Who were the occupiers, and where did they come from? Who or what were their political models? And how did OWS explode as it did, from a meme into a mass phenomenon?
Next, I wanted to know more about the politics of the occupiers. How did they conceive of the 99 Percent and the 1 Percent? How did they deal with their differences in respect to their underlying issues, identities, motivations, and capacities? What did they make of capitalism, democracy, and the prospects for social change in the 21st century? We have seen some intriguing survey results, but surprisingly little qualitative data on such questions.1 The evidence gathered in my eighty in-depth interviews, conducted with occupiers in eight cities, offers a richer and more nuanced view than can be derived from descriptive statistics alone.
Third, I set out to grapple with the challenges of direct democracy in the occupied square. Were power and resources equitably distributed among its citizens? How did their everyday practices measure up to their principles of horizontality, transparency, and radical democracy? In taking up these difficult questions, I would draw on my own observations of the occupiers’ general assemblies, spokescouncils, and other decision-making bodies, as well as the working groups, affinity groups, and organizational offshoots that made up the infrastructure of the movement.
My fourth and final set of questions concerned the occupiers’ interactions with the established institutions of social and political life. How did they get along with their institutional allies, such as labor unions, not-for-profits, and political parties? Why and how did these alliances break down? How were the occupiers answered by their institutional adversaries on Wall Street and in City Hall? I would take up this last question by way of the power players’ own words and actions, culled from public sources, but also by way of firsthand observations of the urban police forces tasked with their protection.
Much ink has been spilled on the occupiers since they first appeared on social media feeds and television screens in the American autumn of 2011. Yet, with notable exceptions, we find that pundits, political commentators, and some leading activists have left their audiences with an impoverished understanding of their acts, ideas, and interactions with institutions of power.2 Some have tended to mythologize the occupiers, either by romanticizing them or by demonizing them.3 Others have tended to objectify or even to commodify them, as if they were no more than the sum of their squares, the size of their social networks, or the value of the “Occupy brand.”4
Social and political scientists, for their part, have tended to be more attentive to Occupy’s causes and consequences, as well as the logic of its political processes and social practices.5 Many scholars, however, have been obliged to study the movement from the outside looking in, or from the end of the process looking backward, relying on retrospective reconstruction on the part of a few participants, or on the reinterpretation of the evidence in terms of their own theories of social movements. The present volume is intended neither to confirm nor to disprove existing theories, but rather to help the study of this 21st-century movement to catch up to its subject. Before I proceed, let me sketch the contours of my own account, which has emerged in conversation with eighty occupiers and organizers, as well as fellow authors and analysts.
My own view is that Occupy Wall Street was not in itself a social movement—certainly not in the traditional sense of a collective actor engaged in contentious, goal-oriented action. Rather, Occupy was but one moment in a longer wave of mobilization, which did not begin with its inception and did not end with its eviction. This was no isolated moment in time—just as Zuccotti Park was no solitary site of protest—but one that connected and helped to constitute the larger 99 Percent movement as a political potentiality—and periodically, as a lived reality. In the space of the occupied square, the 99 Percenters found a locus for face-to-face convergence, and in the power of the “1 Percent,” they found a focus for collective action.
The occupiers, and this larger movement of which they were a part, spoke to the big and as yet unanswered questions posed by the economic and political upheavals of the day: Who was to bear the costs of the financial crisis? Who was to reap the benefits of the economic recovery? And in the third year of the Obama presidency, where was change Americans could believe in? For a time, many of the nation’s dispossessed, its disaffected, and its disenfranchised—and even some among its upper echelons—found an answer in Occupy Wall Street.
Taken in its totality, there was more to the Occupy phenomenon than the occupiers or the occupations. I would argue that it is impossible to understand OWS without a grasp of the power relations in which it was embedded. On my view, the bigger picture encompassed three distinct ensembles, which I will call the power players, the counterpower players, and the mediators. Each ensemble had a clear stake in the outcome of this critical juncture in American history, defined as it was by a confluence of crises: first, the financial crisis, which had rippled outward from Wall Street itself; second, the extended slump that had followed, hitting all but the wealthiest Americans where it hurt; and third, the crisis of representative democracy, which had wrought political paralysis in Washington and an age of austerity in states and municipalities.6
The first ensemble was a duet of power players, comprised of leading corporate actors and municipal state managers. The corporate actors tended to represent critical sectors of the U.S. economy (such as finance, insurance, and real estate), sit on the boards of other big institutions, and bankroll the campaigns of elected officials. Municipal managers, for their part, were obliged to play local politics, to enforce law and order, and to control the public purse strings. Over the past thirty years, these power players had formed strong public-private partnerships, and nowhere were they stronger than in America’s financial districts. These partnerships enabled them to mount a coordinated and collaborative response to the challenge of Occupy Wall Street.7
The second ensemble was a quartet of counterpower players, who came together in alliance against the austerity agenda, the trickle-down economics, and the top-down politics of the power players. This broad-based coalition counted among its constituents, first, downwardly mobile Millennials, who tended to be highly educated and “horizontally” networked; second, older, unionized workers, “vertically” organized and newly vulnerable to the long arm of austerity; third, middle-class professionals working in the nonprofit sector and organized labor; and last, but not least, the homeless, the jobless, and the working poor, for whom the streets and the squares were destinations of last resort.8 Despite the action potential of such a coalition, the very real differences within its ranks rendered it internally unequal and inherently unstable.
The interaction between the above ensembles—the power players and the counterpower players—was mediated, behind the scenes, by three additional sets of actors. First were the elite operatives, who sought to get one or both ensembles to play to their interests. These embraced Democratic and Republican Party organs and not-for-profit organizations. Second were the fiscal sponsors who paid to sustain the players, ranging from small-scale individual donors (who funded OWS) to big-time corporate contributors (who funded the power players). Last, but not least, were the networks of media makers, from paid news professionals to citizen journalists. These worked to broadcast the action, magnify the spectacle, and amplify the story to audiences of millions—that is, until Occupy lost its novelty and was deemed no longer newsworthy.9
The conventional story, popularized by the press, holds that the occupiers and the 99 Percenters were motivated by one issue and one issue alone: that of income inequality.10 Yet the politics of the 99 Percent never fit the rubric of a single-issue movement. Income inequality was just shorthand for a much broader set of grievances, to which the existing political order had no satisfactory answer. The “Declaration of the Occupation of New York City,” for instance, alleged a litany of injustices in every sphere of U.S. society, and at every level of the power structure: banking practices such as subprime mortgages and student loans; employment practices like union-busting and outsourcing; unregulated corporate activities like campaign spending and hydrofracking; federal policies, ranging from Wall Street bailouts to foreign military interventions; and municipal and state policies, from school budget cuts to racial profiling.11
“That’s what was so cool about Occupy,” says Robbie Clark, a young African American housing organizer who was active in Occupy Oakland and Occupy Our Homes. “Some people criticized it for not being for anything, or being against everything, but in that way, it was like, whatever your issue was, you could come there and be in community with folks who want to see change. . . . Occupy gave us a glimpse of what it would look like for all those things to come together, being really clear about who’s the actual enemy—and who’s on your team.”
Yet not everyone on the same team played by the same rules, or with the same resources. Many believed Occupy to be a “leaderless,” “structureless,” “unorganized” phenomenon, which spontaneously came together in general assembly.12 In the words of an early manifesto: “Here, we engage in horizontal democracy. . . . This means we have no leader—we all lead.”13 But it wasn’t that the occupations lacked leadership structures or forms of organization (as evidenced by the profusion of working groups, affinity groups, spokescouncils, and coordinating meetings). The occupiers deployed distinctive modes of decision-making, aimed at replicating, in real time, the “horizontal” forms and “nonhierarchical” norms characteristic of online sociality.
Still, as we will see, Occupy was never devoid of leaders, for the unequal distribution of time and autonomy, of capabilities and political capital, made some more “leaderful” than others. Those who participated most actively in the decision-making process tended to be those with the time, the know-how, and the networks that were the unspoken arbiters of power and influence. By contrast, those with the most at stake in the outcome tended to be those with the least time and the least wherewithal to participate in that process. In this way, inequality was built into the very structure of the occupation, yielding a disjuncture between the principle and the practice of direct democracy. The consensus process, however, tended to paper over such difficulties, as it did the entrenched differences that obtained among the generally assembled “99 Percent.”
In the pages to come, we will see that the Occupy moment was made not just by the occupation of public-private parks, but also by the cultivation of strategic alliances with labor unions and nonprofit organizations. We will see how vital these allies were to the activation of Occupy’s action potential, from the resources contributed to the camps to the thousands of union and community members who mobilized in their defense. For a time, the movement unfolded at the nexus of these two axes—horizontalist assemblies, on the one hand, and “vertical” organizations, on the other—with all the tensions, frictions, and contradictions that this entailed.14 Ultimately, the horizontalists, the trade unionists, and the nonprofit professionals would go their separate ways, effectively splitting the 99 Percent movement down the middle.15
Another version of the conventional story asserts that Occupy was an “autonomous” movement, operating outside of the political system.16 While OWS was relatively autonomous from the major parties (especially when compared, as it often is, to the Tea Party), it was also bound up from the beginning with the larger political process. It was no coincidence that the movement emerged at a time when the federal government was facing a profound crisis of legitimacy, while state and municipal governments were introducing deeply unpopular regimes of austerity.17 Nor is it a coincidence that the politics of the 99 Percent found broad support among those who felt either unrepresented by any party, or deeply disenchanted with their own.18
Among the political class itself, the occupations, perhaps unsurprisingly, proved exceedingly unpopular. One by one, the occupations faced forcible eviction by municipal managers and quasi-militarized police forces. The raids were publicly justified with reference to the crisis within the camps, which had proved to be anything but immune to the pathologies of the society from which they had sprung. The crackdown intensified on October 25, amid a cloud of tear gas and a near-death in the streets of Oakland. Mass arrests and midnight raids soon spread from coast to coast.19 On November 15, the occupation of Zuccotti Park came to an abrupt and violent end, as riot police descended in the dead of night, rounded up its residents, and declared the area a “frozen zone.” Throughout 2012, those occupiers who remained in the streets would face wave after wave of police action, with more than 7,000 arrests reported in some 122 cities.20
I would argue that the tactic of occupation was bound to have a limited half-life. In addition to the brute force of the police batons, the occupiers came up against other, less obvious constraints: the high threshold for participation in twenty-four-hour occupations; the demobilization of their institutional allies in organized labor and the nonprofit sector; and the deeply entrenched divisions among the “99 Percenters” themselves. Although these obstacles proved in some ways insurmountable, the occupiers did not simply pack their sleeping bags and call it a day. Rather, they channeled their energies toward the places where the other 99 percent of the “99 Percent” lived, worked, and struggled to make ends meet. In the process, the movement spread out from the financial centers, across an America still struggling to recover in the aftermath of the crisis.
Laid-off workers teamed up with occupiers to win their jobs back through “wildcat” strikes and community picket lines. Students mobilized en masse against tuition hikes and skyrocketing debts. Others occupied homes in support of families facing foreclosure; staged sit-ins at public schools and health clinics slated for closure; and organized to rein in racial profiling and abusive policing. Against the backdrop of the 2012 elections, and across a country still in crisis, it seemed the politics of the 99 Percent was alive and well. The storm of protest may appear to have passed, but many would argue that it had left a changed landscape in its wake.21
OWS was about more than Occupy and Wall Street, or the protesters and the police. It was about more than income inequality, or anarchy, or the Democratic Party. It was about the nexus between state power and corporate power, public authority and private wealth, and their encounter with an assemblage of countervailing forces at a critical juncture in our history. In the course of this encounter, we can see, alongside scenes of police repression, the emergence of new forms of collective action, new sources of class identity, and new forces in American politics. In the coming pages, the reader will be invited to join the author in the course of his investigation, and to determine whether the claims presented here are borne out by the evidence.
Understanding the Occupy phenomenon as a lived reality required participant observation in the fullest sense of the term.22 In the context of an occupation, this meant the observer had to become an occupier. And so I did: I was on the ground at Liberty Square from September 17 on, and I returned for daily, nightly, and sometimes overnight visits over the course of the occupation. I attended many of the nightly general assemblies, spokescouncils, and select working group meetings, both in the space of the square and at satellite sites beyond it: among them, meeting venues, such as art spaces and union halls; social spaces, such as eating and drinking places; and street actions and “pop-up occupations” stretching from Lower Manhattan to outer-borough outposts.
I knew my investigation was going to require more than direct observation alone. I therefore sought to record all that I saw and heard using all the documentary modes and media I had at my disposal. I filled the pages of journals with detailed notes and anecdotes from my time in the field, along with the stories, theories, and testimonies of the occupiers I met. I snapped thousands of photos and recorded hours of footage, from general assemblies to direct actions to the more mundane stuff of everyday life in the square. These multiple modes of documentation allowed me at once to record observations in real time; to enrich the textual with the visual and the visual with the textual; and to cross-check critical observations against each other.
My secondary method was the in-depth, semistructured interview. Such interviewing offered a way of getting to know some of the key players in the movement in their own words, on their own terms, and in a setting more amenable to conversation than, say, a street action or a general assembly.
I interviewed a total of forty individuals who had participated in the occupation of Zuccotti Park and the organization of OWS. Each was a participant in the original New York City General Assembly (NYCGA), as well as one or more of those collectives that had played a vital role in its development—in particular, the Direct Action, Facilitation, Food, Media, Outreach, Press, and Tech Ops working groups, as well as the All-City Student Assembly, the Labor Outreach Committee, and the People of Color Working Group.
My extended time in the trenches, along with my prior history of involvement in the city’s social movements, gave me a direct line of access to those individuals at the center of the action. By way of their networks, I was then able to extend my investigation to key occupations in four other cities across the United States—Oakland, Atlanta, Chicago, and Philadelphia—as well as London, Athens, and Madrid, in order to enrich my understanding of the movement as a whole. All told, I interviewed forty additional participants in these places, all of whom identified (and were identified by others) as important players in their local occupations and Occupy offshoots.
Throughout my investigation, I took care to respect my interview subjects. I also sought to be consistently cognizant of my own position as an educated white man in a blazer, which inevitably shaped my understanding of what I was seeing, hearing, and recording. I tried to correct for the biases of previous studies, and, to the degree possible, to accurately reflect the movement’s racial, gender, and political diversity.
For all that firsthand observation and in-depth interviewing can tell us about the making of the 99 Percent movement, such methods cannot tell us everything. For a sense of the bigger picture, I turned to archival analysis of Occupy’s internal communications, its online footprints, and its representations in both corporate and movement media.
First, I followed the paper trail: public declarations, private deliberations, print publications, and meeting minutes, as well as more prosaic documents, such as flyers, pamphlets, and protest signs. Next, I assembled a database of online media content, by way of the InterOccupy network, the Take the Square network, and the relevant hashtags and hyperlinks on social media. Finally, I compiled an archive of corporate media coverage of the movement, its allies, and its adversaries from 2011 through 2012. Taken together, these varied sources attest to the breadth, depth, and diversity of the movement.
This book is intended, not as the final word, but as a point of departure for further inquiry. As an exploratory study of OWS, its claims are provisional, its perspectives partial and avowedly partisan. They are not purported to be generalizable to, or representative of, the movement as a whole. They are, however, meant to be falsifiable and independently verifiable. In other words, every empirical claim contained in this work also contains an open invitation to prove me wrong.
The pages that follow will trace the narrative arc of the Occupy moment, but they will also situate it in relation to the making of the 99 Percent movement and the remaking of the American Left. The study proceeds in three parts: pre-Occupy, Occupy, and post-Occupy. Chapters 1 and 2 situate the Occupy moment and introduce the 99 Percent movement, following the winding path that led from the financial crisis of 2008 to the political crisis of 2011, by way of the Arab Spring, the Wisconsin winter, and the Mediterranean summer. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 tell the story of the making and unmaking of the occupation of Zuccotti Park. Painting a portrait of everyday life in the square, they also take up the challenges the occupiers faced, the paradoxes of direct democracy, and the dynamics of direct action and police action. Chapters 6, 7, and 8 follow the occupiers into exile as they attempt to resist, regroup, and reoccupy in the wake of the evictions, charting the movement’s evolution from its front lines to its fault lines. Finally, I explore some of the surprising ways in which the politics of the 99 Percent movement have outlived the Occupy moment, concluding with a consideration of its possible futures.
Figure 0.2 The 99 Percent Illuminated, East River, November 17, 2011. Credit: Michael A. Gould-Wartofsky.