Figure 1.1 Corporate profits vs. workers’ wages, 1947–2011. Credit: Aaron Carretti.
Source: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, “Corporate Profits After Tax” (1947–2011), “Nonfarm Business Sector: Labor Share” (1947–2011).
September 15, 2008–June 14, 2011
In the early hours of the morning on September 15, 2008, a steady stream of investment bankers could be seen filing out the revolving doors of 745 Seventh Avenue, weighed down by boxes of belongings. Just before 2 a.m., Lehman Brothers, the world’s fourth-largest investment bank, had informed its employees, contractors, and creditors that it would be filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, having failed to secure a bailout from the Federal Reserve. The bank, we would soon learn, had been brought low by hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations, accrued at the height of the housing bubble.1
Hours later, down on Wall Street, stockbrokers and i-bankers from rival firms staggered into work, crestfallen at the news, as here and there, a lone protester could be heard calling for their heads. That day, stock indexes went into freefall, registering their steepest declines since September 17, 2001.2 Investors saw more than $700 billion disappear from their portfolios overnight. A run on the banks ensued in mutual fund money markets, while the credit markets seized up as lenders stopped lending. The liquidation of Lehman would shake the foundations of the global financial system and the fundamentals of national economies the world over.3
On September 18, U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke went on to propose a $700 billion bailout of the surviving banks and brokerage firms, known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). Under the terms of the program, the Treasury would be authorized to “inject capital into financial institutions,” to “purchase or insure mortgage assets,” and to “purchase any other troubled assets. . . [as it] deems necessary to promote financial market stability.” Socializing the risk and privatizing the gains in the name of “relieving the stresses on our financial institutions and markets,” the T.A.R.P. would amount to the single greatest transfer of public assets into private hands in U.S. history. The Federal Reserve also agreed to buy a 79.9 percent stake in American International Group, to the tune of $85 billion in taxpayer dollars.4
That weekend, I received an indignant e-mail from Arun Gupta, editor of the radical New York rag The Indypendent, calling on New Yorkers to turn out in protest of the bailout: “This week the White House is going to try to push through the biggest robbery in world history with nary a stitch of debate to bail out the Wall Street bastards who created this economic apocalypse in the first place. . . . Let’s take it to the heart of the financial district. . . . There is no agenda, no leaders, no organizing group, nothing to endorse other than we’re not going to pay!” Soon, the call to action was circulating through cyberspace, forwarded among friends, fellow travelers, and professional networkers from groups like TrueMajority.org and United for Peace and Justice.5
In the event, only a few hundred malcontents would show up to the demonstration on September 25, many of them the usual suspects of New York City street protests. As I emerged from the 6 train, I pushed my way past the throngs of embattled suits, fresh from the closing bell at the Stock Exchange up the street. Ahead, I could hear the chanting reaching a fever pitch: “You broke it, you bought it! The bailout is bullshit!” “We pay, we owe! Foreclose Wall Street, not my home!” I followed the chants to their source, on the south side of Bowling Green Park, and then joined in the march down Broadway—past the infamous Charging Bull, past the gates of Wall Street itself, to its destination at Federal Hall, the site where the Bill of Rights was passed by the First Congress on September 25, 1789.
The rally had the feel of a political ritual, a dramatic performance of collective catharsis. Massed at the feet of a larger-than-life likeness of George Washington, the protesters sought to shame the bankers and give voice to their rage. As some chanted slogans in unison or beat makeshift drums and maracas, others staged “die-ins,” falling to the pavement in spectacular fashion. One group held a tongue-in-cheek counterprotest on behalf of “Billionaires for Bailouts,” with an older man in a top hat and a pig’s nose holding out a collection cup for the bankers.6 Meanwhile, many of the younger activists in attendance resorted to inchoate expressions of anticorporate ire. “Jump! Jump!” they howled at hapless stockbrokers. “Kiss my ass!” “Go to hell!” “Bail out this!” Others urged passersby to vote Nader or to join the Revolutionary Communist Party.
Despite the depths of public discontent the bailout had called forth, open opposition remained largely confined to the political margins. Here in New York City, it was the radical Left leading the charge. In other cities and other states, it was the libertarian Right. Petitions continued to make the rounds on the Web, from calls to “Bail Out Main Street” to “American Taxpayers against Wall Street and Mortgage Bailouts.” And scattered street protests persisted throughout the fall, with many of those in economic distress demanding a “People’s Bailout.”
Yet the populist moment soon passed. A social movement failed to coalesce. After a short-lived “No” vote, attended by distress signals from a swooning stock market, the TARP passed overwhelmingly in both houses of Congress and was signed into law by a lame-duck President George W. Bush on October 3, 2008. A bipartisan consensus had emerged in the halls of power: to avert “systemic failure,” the federal government had no choice but to give the banks their due. Three years later, Americans would descend by the tens of thousands on the nation’s financial districts, having arrived at a different conclusion: “Banks got bailed out. We got sold out.”
Two years and one president later, Wall Street was well on its way to recovery, with leading financial corporations recouping their losses and executives reaping handsome rewards. Even as economic growth flatlined, total profits in the financial sector soared back into the stratosphere, rising from $128 billion in 2008 to $369 billion in 2010. The greatest of gains accrued to the greatest of banks, which saw their profits more than double in 2009–2010. Over time, the recovery would reach the rest of corporate America, with profits in 2010 growing at the fastest clip since 1950 (see Figure 1.1). Corporations would capture 88 percent of all national income gains from the second quarter of 2009 through 2010. Concomitantly, in the first year of the economic recovery, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans would capture fully 93 percent of all national income growth.7
Figure 1.1 Corporate profits vs. workers’ wages, 1947–2011. Credit: Aaron Carretti.
Source: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, “Corporate Profits After Tax” (1947–2011), “Nonfarm Business Sector: Labor Share” (1947–2011).
For the other America, the effects of the crisis would continue to be felt for years, as the fruits of the recovery remained out of reach for most.8 Unemployment remained at historic highs, surpassing 9.3 percent throughout 2009, while the proportion of young workers without work neared 20 percent (see Figure 1.2). At the start of 2011, 26 million were unemployed or underemployed, among them disproportionate numbers of African American and Latino youth. For those lucky enough to find work, average real wages declined during the recovery. Almost 60 percent of all new hires would be concentrated in low-wage jobs. Many in my generation, with or without a college degree, would find themselves struggling to pay the bills, working minimum-wage jobs as care workers, cashiers, cooks, custodians, drivers, waiters, or temp workers.9
One of those who joined the ranks of the unemployed was Heather Squire, a working-class white woman from South Jersey, who had worked her way through Brooklyn College: “I graduated in December 2007,” she would later tell me. “Since that time, I applied for hundreds of jobs. I got maybe one or two interviews. It was just a really frustrating process over the years, and it really wore me down a lot. I was feeling really depressed and hopeless. . . . You end up internalizing it. Like, what’s wrong with me? Why can’t I find a job?” But the experience ultimately galvanized her, first to anger, then to political action: “At that particular time in U.S. history, lots of people [like me] were really pissed. Lots of people were unemployed, and the banks getting bailed out. . . . It was like, how do you tap into that anger and move it somewhere?”
Figure 1.2 Growth of unemployment and youth unemployment, 2007–2011. Credit: Aaron Carretti. Sources: Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey” (2013); OECD, “Country Statistical Profile: United States,” Country Statistical Profiles: Key Tables from OECD (2013).
Along with the crisis in the labor market came the calamitous collapse of the housing market, which had begun long before the crash of 2008 and only deepened in its aftermath. Over $17 trillion of household wealth was wiped out during the Great Recession, much of it in the form of home equity and savings. As a consequence, Americans’ median net worth fell by 39 percent from 2007 to 2010, with the greatest pain felt by “younger, less-educated and historically disadvantaged minority families.” Between 2007 and 2010, more than 9 million homes went into foreclosure, 2.8 million of them in 2010 alone. Many millions more would see their families threatened with the prospect of losing their home to a commercial bank or mortgage lender.10
Among those affected by the foreclosure crisis was Rob Call, a working-class white man from Snowville, Georgia, and a recent graduate of Georgia Tech: “All this stuff hits home for me. My parents, foreclosure proceedings started against them. . . . My mom was a schoolteacher. . . she had arthritis flare up, and she needed to pay toward medical expenses. So she talked to Wells Fargo, and they said, ‘We’re gonna need to prove that you’re having financial difficulty . . . by missing three payments in a row.’” In Georgia, it takes just ninety days for a missed payment to end in an eviction. So Rob and his family would be forced to leave their home—an experience that would later lead him to Occupy Our Homes: “I was really interested in keeping that from happening to other folks, and breaking down the wall of shame that exists around financial difficulty.”
Meanwhile, as more and more young people sought a higher education, universities both public and private raised their tuition to once unthinkable heights. Tuition and fees for the 2010–2011 school year were 8 percent higher at public four-year institutions, and 5 percent higher at private nonprofit institutions, than they had been just one year earlier. Thirty-six states slashed spending on higher education, leading public institutions to shift the burden onto students and their families. Amid the toughest labor market ever recorded for college graduates, two in three would now be saddled with debt, with the average student carrying $25,000 in such obligations. By the end of 2011, total student debt would surpass $1 trillion, leaving a generation in the red.11
Nelini Stamp, a young woman of African American and Puerto Rican descent and a New York City native, was one of those who had been dissuaded from going to college by the $30,000 price tag, along with a measure of legal discrimination. Because she had two mothers and “because marriage equality wasn’t legal,” says Nelini, “I couldn’t get financial aid. I was gonna take out loans, but none of the banks were giving me student loans . . . I just couldn’t afford it.” Compounding it all were her experiences with Bank of America and its “predatory lending practices” in New York City, which had led her loved ones, too, to lose the house they lived in. Motivated, in part, by her own struggles with the banks, Nelini decided to devote herself full-time to political organizing in 2008, going to work, first, for New York State’s Working Families Party, and then, in 2011, for Occupy Wall Street (OWS).
These would-be occupiers were, in sum, the children of the crisis of 2007–2009. With few exceptions, they tended to have one or more of these experiences of crisis in common: long-term unemployment or underemployment; low-wage, part-time work (if they could get it); the prospect of a lifetime of debt and downward mobility; and, finally, the abiding sense, in the words of one protester, that “the future ain’t what it used to be.”
“We Are the Beginning of the Beginning.” So read a hand-painted sign often seen in occupied Liberty Square. Every movement has its myths of origin. Many nonparticipant observers have tended to speak of OWS as if it emerged out of thin air, or out of cyberspace, in the summer of 2011. Its lineage has tended invariably to be traced to the actions of radical media makers and middle-class militants in North America: here, to a call to action from Canadian “culture jammers” affiliated with Adbusters Magazine; there, to the actions of a band of East Village anarchists, who broke off from a socialist rally to form the first New York City General Assembly. Since the occupiers ascended the national and international stage in the autumn of 2011, such genealogies have achieved a kind of canonical status. Yet I would argue that these narratives present a decidedly distorted picture of the real origins of OWS.
“We’re not doing anything new,” says Ternura Indignada, a migrant from Bolivia to Spain, who helped to build the digital infrastructure for OWS and for the May 15 (15-M) movement in Spain. “People want to look like they’re doing something new. But it was not like we invented the wheel. People are already struggling with the system for more than twenty years. . . . The way the assemblies work and everything was taken from [other] movements. It’s the transfer of technology, of know-how.”
It was in South America, in the wake of the 2001 economic crisis, that the tactic of occupation (known in Spanish as the toma) had taken on its contemporary form, wedding a critique of global capitalism to a radically participatory form of democracy known as the asamblea popular (or “popular assembly”). This new form of occupation came of age in Argentina, then a laboratory of neoliberalism, where the state’s efforts to restructure its debt on the terms of the International Monetary Fund had led to catastrophic capital flight and a run on the banks. Factories were shuttered, bank accounts were frozen, and millions were left without work. Argentines poured into the streets, banging on pots and pans and chanting against the nation’s political class: “All of Them Must Go!” They went on to occupy, first, public plazas, and then, private enterprises. All important decisions were made in popular assemblies, by direct democracy, in a mode of self-governance we would later come to know as horizontalidad, or “horizontality.”12
The would-be occupiers of 2011 had watched, listened to, and learned from the example of their predecessors in other places. When I ask them what inspired them to occupy, many of them cite a long list of occupations of international dimensions. Along with Argentina, they speak of the Zapatista land occupations in Chiapas, Mexico, which had reclaimed private property for indigenous peoples under the banner of “one no and many yeses”; of the Popular Assemblies of the Peoples of Oaxaca, which had seen its own movement of the squares after the brutal repression of a teachers’ strike; of the Anti-Eviction Campaign in Capetown, South Africa, which had occupied homes and roads to win a local moratorium on evictions; and of the Greek youth revolt, known simply as “December,” in which street protests, school occupations, and urban riots had raged for weeks following the fatal shooting of a fifteen-year-old anarchist. “We Are an Image from the Future,” the militants had scrawled on the walls of one occupied school.13
Even within the borders of the United States, the tactic of occupation has a far longer lineage than has been alleged. Homeless veterans had occupied public spaces in protest of their penury since the 1930 “Bonus March.” Industrial workers had occupied their workplaces to demand union rights, living wages, and workplace protections in the sit-down strikes of 1933–1937. In the 1960s, black students had occupied Southern lunch counters in sit-ins against segregation, while in the 1970s, indigenous youth had occupied stolen lands in the West. On college campuses across the country, students had staged occupations and tent cities to protest war, apartheid, and labor abuses, from the 1960s through the turn of the 21st century. And in the decades leading up to the global upsurge of 2011, the tactic had gained renewed currency in America’s urban centers, with poor people’s protest encampments periodically cropping up in cities like New York, Miami, and Minneapolis, often in the name of economic human rights.14
Many of the early occupiers and organizers of OWS had participated in the last wave of global justice mobilizations and, more recently, in the wave of occupations brought on by the Great Recession. The first such occupations took place in and around private homes, with activists organizing to block evictions, stop foreclosures, and “take back the land” in Florida, Massachusetts, Illinois, and Minnesota. In late 2008, a Chicago-area factory called Republic Windows and Doors was the site of a six-day sit-down strike, as 200 of its 260 workers, facing the closure of their plant, forced the company and its creditor to meet their demands for health coverage and severance pay. In 2009–2010, amid the latest spate of tuition hikes, student occupations took college campuses by storm, spreading across the University of California—where student radicals urged classmates to “occupy everything” and “demand nothing”—and reaching their apogee in a sixty-two-day strike that shut down parts of the University of Puerto Rico.15
Yet these militant minorities were unable to sustain such levels of activity on their own. Many burned out or moved on, while others fell back on more familiar repertoires of permitted rallies and marches. Drew Hornbein, a young white tech worker, originally from Pennsylvania, was “flirting with activism” at the time: “I had participated in a few demonstrations, and was very disillusioned by them. Kids marching down a corridor of police barricades. Holding signs. Talking about taxing the rich while using their iPhones.” Still, Samantha Corbin, a young white woman from New York City and a direct action trainer with U.S. Uncut, saw in our generation “an enormous amount of frustration, and a willingness to act, bubbling under the surface. I think we’ve been getting indicators of that for a long time. People were frustrated with the system [and] people were interested in coming out in a big way. They just needed an invitation.”
Halfway around the world, another wave of occupations was about to set revolutionary events in motion.16 The catalyst came from the periphery of economic and political power, in the Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid. It was there that a young street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself alight on December 17, 2010, in protest of his humiliation by state officials. Within days, his act of self-immolation would ignite a youthful insurgency against the ruling regime of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.
Over the next twenty-nine days, the insurgency would spread to other urban centers throughout Tunisia, fueled by longstanding grievances: the sky-high price of bread, youth unemployment, police violence, state terror. On January 14, 2011, tens of thousands joined in a general strike, braving tear gas and bullets to occupy the streets of downtown Tunis. Ben Ali was forced to flee the country that very night.
“Revolution in Tunisia. Tomorrow in Egypt,” read the texts and tweets exchanged by young Egyptians in the weeks leading up to January 25, the date they dubbed a “Day of Rage” against the regime of Hosni Mubarak. The April 6 Youth Movement, an alliance of students, workers, and pro-democracy activists, hoped to tap into popular discontent over the unaffordability of basic staples and the brutality of the regime.
They could not have expected 300,000 Egyptians to answer the call, as they did that day, surging into the streets of Cairo and chanting, after their Tunisian comrades, “The people want the overthrow of the regime!” In defiance of a longstanding ban on public protest, they converged from all directions—from the city’s vast slums and from its working- and middle-class quarters. Their demands were elegantly simple but uncompromisingly radical: the fall of the regime; the end of martial law; a “new, non-military government”; and the “constructive administration of all of Egypt’s resources.”
Three days later, on January 28, an occupation was born in the midst of Tahrir Square, in the hours following Friday prayers. The occupiers set up a tent city-within-the-city, organizing their own kitchens, clinics, media centers, and security checkpoints. The square served as a convergence point and a base camp, from where the revolutionaries could launch mass marches on the Presidential Palace, the headquarters of Mubarak’s political party, the Radio and Television Building, and other symbolic loci of state power.
Their larger strategy was one of civil resistance, aimed at mobilizing the broadest possible base of support, and posing the most direct possible challenge to the pillars of state power. Their strategic goals were threefold: first, to “take over important government buildings”; second, to “attempt to win over members of the police and army”; and third, to “protect our brothers and sisters in revolution.”17
What followed were eighteen days that shook the world, which awoke daily to images of nonviolent resistance in the face of deadly repression. Despite repeated charges by police and plainclothes thugs, using clubs, tear gas, and live ammunition, the occupiers held their ground in Tahrir, with Muslim Brothers fighting side-by-side with Revolutionary Socialists, liberals, feminists, and other secularists—standing together, they said, as “One Hand” against the regime.
On February 9–10, hundreds of thousands of workers went on strike all at once, effectively paralyzing the economy. The next day, the “Friday of Departure,” millions surged into the streets of cities across Egypt, as the occupiers marched from Tahrir to the Presidential Palace to demand that the dictator step down. At 6 p.m. on February 11, Mubarak was forced to do just that, tendering his resignation to the Council of the Armed Forces after two decades of dictatorship.
The “Arab Spring” had an electrifying effect on young people around the world, from the other side of the Mediterranean Basin to the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Marisa Holmes was a young white anarchist from a middle-class suburb of Columbus, Ohio, who would go on to become an occupier with OWS. In early 2011, she recalls, “I had all these utopian visions, and I wasn’t satisfied. I just needed to do something really extreme. I bought a ticket to Cairo and went to learn from organizers there.” There, Marisa was electrified by what she saw. “There was just this kind of euphoria. . . . There was a political conversation everywhere you went. It was full of possibility.”
“I remember very clearly when, in Egypt and Tunisia, the revolution happened.” says Isham Christie, a Native American revolutionary from the Choctaw Nation, who went on to play a vital part in the formation of OWS. “I was in all the solidarity demos in New York. I was watching Al Jazeera constantly. It just really felt like, oh yeah, this is possible. So that was really defining. And then when it started to spread to other countries. . . . We were like, we need to rise up in New York!”
Just four days after the fall of Mubarak, a storm of unrest swept the American Midwest. Three years had passed since the onset of the Great Recession and the bailout of the banks. The change many had hoped for, worked for, and voted for in 2008 was proving ever more illusory. The nation’s political class had an answer to the crisis—austerity—but the cutbacks only added to the unemployment rolls. From August 2008 through 2010, state and local governments laid off more than 426,000 employees. This trend accelerated with the expiration of federal stimulus funds and the extension of the George W. Bush-era tax cuts, portending a deep fiscal crisis for many states and municipalities.18
At no time in living memory had the American labor movement appeared so demoralized, so demobilized. Many in its ranks had hoped the Obama presidency would usher in an era of union revival. But by 2011, they had little to show for their efforts in Washington, D.C., and even less to show in the workplace, as real wages declined, full-time work disappeared, and labor’s share of national income dwindled. Union membership, long a barometer of workers’ bargaining power, fell to its lowest level in seventy years. In many states, the public sector was organized labor’s last bastion. Now, with the triumphant march of the Tea Party Right into state legislatures nationwide, it seemed public sector unions were about to be next on the chopping block.
On February 11, as if on cue, the Tea Party poster child and newly elected governor of Wisconsin, Scott K. Walker, proposed a radical Budget Repair Bill to deal with a manufactured fiscal crisis. The legislation proposed to strip the state’s public sector workers of the right to collectively bargain over their wages, benefits, and working conditions, a right that had been enshrined in state law for more than half a century. It would also decertify the unions from one year to the next, and give the governor the right to fire any state employee who elected to go on strike. In response to a firestorm of criticism, Governor Walker replied, “I don’t have anything to negotiate” and threatened to call out the National Guard in the event of a work stoppage.19
The governor, it turned out, had made a poor choice in his timing. With Egyptian flags waving and signs calling for “Union, Not Dictatorship,” an ad hoc alliance of trade unionists, students, and other concerned citizens marched into the majestic rotunda of the State Capitol in Madison on February 15, 2011, chanting, “Kill the bill! Kill the bill!” The next night, inspired by the revolutions overseas, the Teaching Assistants’ Association of the University of Wisconsin–Madison spearheaded an overnight sleepover in the capitol rotunda. Much to everyone’s surprise, the occupation would stretch for seventeen days, culminating in the largest demonstrations in the history of the state.
“It’s like Cairo’s moved to Madison these days,” opined Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), the chairman of the House Budget Committee. “All this demonstration!” Appropriately enough, the Egyptian revolutionaries immediately communicated their solidarity from Tahrir Square. One man was photographed with a sign reading, “Egypt Supports Wisconsin Workers. One World, One Pain.”20
In the beginning, the crowds were largely composed of students and teachers, some of whom staged wildcat strikes and “sick-outs” so that they could be a part of the occupation. As the days wore on, the movement broadened its base to include workers and citizens of all stripes, regardless of whether they were personally affected by the Budget Repair Bill. Here were “non-union, Wisconsin taxpayers” singing “Solidarity Forever” alongside their “union brothers and sisters.” Here were angry members of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, offering brats to all who were hungry, and staging “solidarity sleepovers” alongside service workers, steelworkers, and even off-duty police officers and firefighters in full regalia.
“An assault on one is an assault on all,” declared Mahlon Mitchell, president of the Professional Firefighters Association. “Now we have a fire in the house of labor . . . and we are going to put it out.”21
Cecily McMillan, a student occupier of Irish and Mexican American descent, who came to Wisconsin by way of Georgia and Texas, recalls her first impression of the scene inside the rotunda. “When I got there, oh my god . . . it was the most amazing thing. The whole rotunda was filled with people shouting in unison and seeing first hand, for real, what democracy looks like, and how flawed our democracy is. I saw college students and grad students and teachers and firefighters and police officers and farmers and janitors and city workers. . . . People were waiting in line, lines upon lines, to give their own personal statements about how important unions are. . . testimonies by the thousands. We meant to go there for one day and we just stayed [for two weeks].”
The occupiers came to refer to the occupied capitol as “The People’s House.” By day, they held open-mic speakouts and sing-alongs on the first floor, while delegations of supporters hung banners from the second- and third-floor balconies above: “New York Stands with Wisconsin.” “Michigan Supports W.I. Workers.” “Baltimore Is Here With You.” “Solidarity from Texas.” Out-of-state allies called in thousands of pizza pies to feed the occupiers, with donations streaming in from all fifty states and from fans as far away as Haiti, Ecuador, and Egypt. The occupiers benefited not only from the “pizzatopia,” but also from a medical station, information station, day-care center, and other services on demand. After dark, the program continued with performances, workshops, and discussion groups. By night, upward of 400 occupiers spread their sleeping bags across the marble floors and prepared for their next day of action.22
One of those who spent the night was a young Marine veteran named Scott Olsen, recently returned from a tour in Iraq, who boarded the bus each weekend to commute to Madison from Moline, Illinois: “I could not sit idly by with a huge collective action taking place in my home state, knowing my sister, a public school teacher, could be negatively impacted by such measures in the bill. I went to Madison for three weekends in a row, sleeping under a bust of Fighting Bob La Follette, and returning home for my job during the week.”23
Outside the rotunda, tens of thousands regularly paraded up and down the capitol grounds, trooping through the snow, the ice, and the fog of the bitter Wisconsin winter. By February 24, the protests had spread to eighteen other towns across the state, while “Stand with Wisconsin” solidarity rallies had become a common sight in other parts of the country, along with garden signs and online memes featuring a map of the state in the shape of a fist. The campaign to “kill the bill” had tapped into a wellspring of working- and middle-class discontent with the austerity agenda and with the drive to dismantle the nation’s unions. Having won the backing of local and national publics, the Madison occupiers forced a dramatic showdown in the legislature, as fourteen senators fled the state to Illinois in an attempt to preempt the vote. In the end, however, despite the historic mobilization, Governor Walker and his allies were able to force the collective bargaining bill through the legislature, in the dead of night, on March 9.24
Though the occupiers failed to kill the bill, Wisconsin represented a proving ground for many of those who, six months later, would form the core of OWS. And it was there, in the rotunda, that Americans would catch their first, fleeting glimpse of the intergenerational alliance that the 99 Percent movement convened: older, unionized workers, side-by-side with highly educated, downwardly mobile Millennials. In the age of austerity, both social strata were being asked to bear the cost of a crisis they had had no hand in creating. And both strata were facing the prospect of losing the social rights and living standards that earlier generations had taken for granted.
The battle of Madison was no “American Spring,” as some had hoped it would be. But like the Arab Spring, it had a powerful demonstration effect on the thousands who participated and the millions who watched from afar. For many, the occupation recast the very meaning of U.S. democracy, seemingly overnight, calling its class dimension into question and reminding workers, students, and citizens of their power in numbers.25
In the days and months that followed, hope for a more democratic society, hostility toward “corporate tyranny,” and a loss of faith in other avenues of political action would combine to turn growing numbers of Americans in favor of (1) the strategy of civil disobedience, in general, and (2) the tactic of occupation, in particular.
“No One Expects the #SpanishRevolution.” So read the hand-painted sign often seen in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol, or Gate of the Sun, in the heady days of May 2011. Indeed, no one saw the uprising coming. Not here, of all places, in the center of the capital’s commercial district, where the shoppers lined up for the latest sale and multinational businessmen did their business, usually at a safe remove from the multitudes of the jobless and the homeless. Not now, at a time when the financial crisis and fiscal austerity had left a generation in a state of deep depression, and when election season brought with it an official prohibition on all forms of public protest.
Yet here they were, forty “indignant ones” in all, holding forth on one side of the square beneath the imperious gaze of King Charles III and before the historic House of the Post Office, where General Francisco Franco’s Ministry of the Interior had established its forty-year reign of terror. They were too young to remember the dictatorship or, for that matter, life before neoliberalism. Yet, they will later tell me, they were not too young to know how dearly Spain was paying for the crisis. Many of them were among the 46 percent of young Spaniards who went without work in 2011; others were semi-employed or underemployed, known as the “Youth without a Future.”
Earlier that day—later immortalized in the name of the movement as 15-M, or May 15—the Democracia Real Ya coalition had staged a 20,000-strong march of the indignados, which had converged on downtown Madrid and fifty-seven other cities across Spain, behind the banner: “We are not commodities in the hands of politicians and bankers.”26 After the march was violently broken up by the antidisturbios (riot police), this ragtag remnant of the protest had found refuge in the square, where they seated themselves on its old stone slabs and debated what was to be done. At first, they had no plans to stay the night. They had brought with them no more than their bodies to occupy the space and cell phones with short message service (SMS) to spread the word.27
Inspired by the example of the Arab revolutions, a handful of these indignados decided to make what appeared, at first, to be a wildly impractical proposal. One of their number, information technology worker Carlos Barragan, would later tell me, “It occurred to us to ask people, what if we stayed, and slept there? We had this idea of the Arab Spring in our heads, beforehand. . . . There was this energy among the people, and it appeared that it was possible, no? To do something more.”
Another occupier, physicist Miguel Arania Catania, remembers the process of deliberation that led to the decision to take the square: “We were sitting there, waiting for something, like, come on, we cannot just stop here, we should do something different. And I remember people started talking, well, maybe we can sleep in the square and wait for the elections. . . . The first two or three people who said it, it sounded like a joke, but then some more people said, ‘Yeah, why not? Maybe we can do it.’ In the beginning, it’s the idea that you are not alone . . . that makes you feel like you can do it. This idea of the collective is very important.”
By the second night, the population of the encampment had swelled from 40 to 250, as more “indignant ones” caught wind, by text or by tweet, that something was happening in Sol. When they arrived in the occupied square, they were greeted and treated as equals, and invited to participate in the “popular assemblies,” which were tasked with coming to a consensus on all decisions affecting the acampada as a whole. As for the immediate needs of the occupiers, they organized themselves into working groups or “commissions” to find new ways to meet them: “We need something to sleep on.” “We need food.” “We need a message.”
“There was a creativity going on, but also a kind of organization,” recalls Mariangela, an older migrant woman originally from Italy. “People taking things up from recycling. People organizing the dynamics of the assembly. People putting up a library for people to read. I remember seeing this sofa passed from one hand to the other, and I thought, yes! we are camping here!” The structures that they erected were improvised and ephemeral, but in the eyes of the occupiers, they offered a sturdier base of support than the political and economic system that had failed them.
At 5 o’clock in the morning, the antidisturbios arrived with orders to evict the nascent encampment. “Get up! Get out!” they cried, rousing the denizens of the square from their slumber. The occupiers raised their hands high above their heads in a sign of nonviolence, chanting, “These are our weapons!” It would become one of the defining gestures of the 15-M movement. With arrests and beatings, the riot police quickly cleared the camp, then chased the indignados through the streets of the commercial district. The latter later reconvened at a nearby squat, where they determined to put out the call to take back the square the very next day.
“When the police came to evict . . . the networks began to work,” says Carolina, a longtime hacktivist and a founding editor of TaketheSquare.net. “The social networks, but also SMS, phone calls, and so on. It was like a snowball effect. The first day, there were 200 after the eviction. And then it was like thousands. It was happening in Madrid the first day, but the next day, it was happening in many other cities in Spain . . . this kind of replication effect. You copy, and modify, and remix. Everybody will do it in their own place, but at the same time, everybody will do it together.”
At first, the arc of the acampadas tended to follow a more or less predictable sequence: the initial toma or “take” would be planned on the fly by a hard core of seasoned activists, who would then be evicted, often with overwhelming force, by local law enforcement. The events would be recorded, “live-tweeted,” and “live-streamed” by independent journalists, then shared—posted, linked, “liked,” and “retweeted”—among a diffuse network of supporters and sympathizers, who competed with corporate news networks for audiences’ attention. Having activated these social networks, the core collectives put them to work, helping them build the infrastructure of occupation and summoning a larger mass of indignados to join them.
The indignation of the many was often catalyzed by the imagery of their peers under attack by the police, but it also had its basis in a litany of longstanding grievances, generated by lived experiences of economic suffering and political disempowerment. These gave rise to a set of concrete demands, such as those passed by the Sol Assembly on May 20: “Reform of the electoral law.” “The right to decent housing.” “Free, universal public health.” “Fiscal reform to favor equality.” “Nationalization of those banks bailed out by the state.” “Regularization of working conditions.” “Transparency.” “Participatory and direct democracy.”28
The very act of taking a square also involved a basic set of claims about public space, democracy, capitalism, and social change. The first claim the occupiers made was that the square was already theirs; that, as public space, it belonged to the people; and that the people must therefore be the ones to decide what to do with it. A second claim was the assertion, in the words of one popular refrain, that, “They do not represent us.” The taking of the square was, in this sense, a wholesale withdrawal of the consent of the governed. A third core claim was that of an “error de sistema” (or “system error”): that, if the people in the squares were not working, or working in dead-end jobs, it was not because they had failed, but because the economic system had failed them. A fourth and final claim was that there was, in fact, an alternative—that, in the parlance of the movement, “another world was possible,” and that the generation of the crisis need not wait to change the world. As one of their collective texts would put it, “We know we can change it, and we’re having a great time going about it.”29
One day, some of the Spanish indignados unfurled a banner reading, “Be Quiet, or You’ll Wake the Greeks!” At the time, Greece was in the throes of a depression, with the economy contracting for the fourth year in a row and youth unemployment topping 43 percent. Greece’s woes were compounded by a sovereign debt crisis, in which the “Troika” of the European Union, European Central Bank, and International Monetary Fund had granted the state a bailout—but only on the condition that it implement a punishing program of wage cuts, pension cuts, and privatizations. Greek cities had been rocked by riots and strikes since December 2008, but the government had continued on its path of austerity, only deepening the depression.30
In the eyes of many, the birthplace of Western democracy had fallen prey to a foreign plutocracy. “I think they [the Greek people] just couldn’t take it anymore,” says Giorgos Kalampokas, a young chemical engineer and socialist union activist from Athens. “That’s what we can call indignation. They had just seen their lives being torn apart. They saw no future . . . no future that could give [them] any kind of work. That is why the Greek resistance gained this symbolic role. The Greek people were not just fighting the I.M.F. They were fighting a whole economic orthodoxy.”
That spring, many Greeks were also discovering a new way of fighting. “The Arab Spring, the indignados in Spain . . . helped us to understand that we’re not alone in the world,” says Despoina Paraskeva, an unemployed student militant from Peiraias. “There was a common thread joining everything. . . . This whole form of uprising, taking the square, it was not a very common kind of uprising. Up to then, we knew only demonstrations. . . . So it was a new form that we saw coming from abroad. We took it, we embraced it, and that form gave us a way of expression.”
On the night of May 25, in view of the imminent signing of a second “Memorandum” with the Troika, thousands of aganaktismenoi (as the “indignant citizens” were known in Greek) decided to try another approach: an indefinite occupation of Syntagma Square. The square sits at the political and commercial crossroads of Athens, at the ascent to the Hellenic Parliament (which was built as a royal palace for a Bavarian king and later occupied by the military junta of 1967–74). While some stood before the Parliament, waving Greek flags and shouting, “Down with the Thieves,” others gathered in the square below to form Syntagma’s first “People’s Assembly.” In answer to the provocations of Puerta del Sol, they unfurled a banner in the colors of the Spanish flag, which read, “We are awake!/What time is it?/It’s time for them [the politicians] to go!” That night, the occupiers determined, “Let’s stay in Syntagma and let’s decide, right here, how we are going to solve our problems. . . . We are here to discover real democracy.”
For well over a month, the occupiers of Athens, like those of Madrid and Barcelona (see Figure 1.3), would camp out in tents and on folding beds beneath the ornamental trees of Syntagma, many of them believing, in the words of one, that “the Greek Tahrir awaits us.” Each day, they organized themselves into teams to meet their needs and the needs of others. They opened up a free canteen, set up a “health village,” offered free classes and workshops, and made their own media out of a makeshift communications center.
Those with the time to spare also spun off into “thematic assemblies” to grapple with the many issues and interests at stake: “Employment” for the unemployed, “Health” for the uninsured, “Education” for students and teachers, “Solidarity” for migrants. Indeed, solidarity was as important a concept as democracy to many of the occupiers, and they sought to link the occupation to larger struggles beyond the square. To this end, they started neighborhood assemblies, organized against the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn, and lent support to local picket lines and to the Athens Pride Parade. “Solidarity is the weapon of the people,” they would say, in the fight for “equality—dignity—direct democracy.”
Democracy, of course, meant many things to many people, and the form it took in Greece differed from the form it took in Spain. The occupiers of Syntagma and of Sol had much in common between them, claiming a collective identity as indignados, using the same hand signals and digital tools, and confronting some of the same challenges, external threats, and internal tensions. Both were led by the “invisible generation” bearing the brunt of the crisis, and seeing no alternative within the political system.
Yet the movements in Greece and Spain also emerged from very different contexts, giving rise to distinct ideas and practices. For instance, in place of the consensus process seen in Spain, the Assembly of Syntagma made decisions by majority rule and used a lottery system to select who was to speak and when. In place of the disdain many Spaniards showed toward established organizations, trade unions, and political parties, the aganaktismenoi forged early alliances with public sector unions and with sympathetic socialist parties like SYRIZA and ANTARSYA.31
As in Cairo and in Madison, the alliance between the occupiers and organized labor lent Greece’s movement of the squares an organizational muscle and a power in numbers. It also set the stage for a series of general strikes against the austerity regime. The second general strike would go on for forty-eight hours, bringing half a million people into the streets and bringing the governing coalition to the brink of collapse.
“It was a new kind of struggle combined with the old kind of struggle,” says Thanos Andritsos, an Athenian student affiliated with the New Left Current. “New kinds of rage, and new kinds of organization, were combined with some important working sectors of society: the people who collect the rubbish, the people who work in energy, the workers from the Metro, who kept the station open so we could come and go without danger.” The movement came of age at a time when Greek society had never been more divided—yet, even with the economy in ruins, it generated new sources of solidarity.32
Once the movements of the squares became mass phenomena, as they did across the Eurozone’s southern periphery that May, they tended to unfold in increasingly unpredictable ways, giving rise to unintended consequences beyond the imagination of the original organizers. And as they broadened, deepened, and joined forces with others, they threatened to spiral out of the control of state managers and law enforcers. Hence, the acampadas and asambleas would become focal points for popular opposition to austerity and restricted democracy—a system the occupiers saw as a “two-party dictatorship” disciplined by the central banks and the Common Market. In the space of the square and beyond, this opposition was finally finding its voice—and using it, for the first time in a generation, to call the entire system into question.
Figure 1.3 “Memorial Democratic,” Barcelona, July 21, 2011. Credit: Michael A. Gould-Wartofsky.
In the short term, both the indignados of Spain and the aganaktismenoi of Greece would lose their fight against austerity. The Memorandum passed in the Greek Parliament, the Right ascended to power in Madrid, and the Troika emerged triumphant. In the longer term, however, the movements of the squares opened up new avenues of political participation and empowered an otherwise “invisible generation.” Within two months’ time, such movements would come to be internationalized on a once unthinkable scale, stretching from the European Parliament in Brussels to Rothschild Avenue in Tel Aviv.
“The connection is Egypt. And Spain. And Athens. And then everywhere,” muses Georgia Sagri, an anarcho-autonomist performance artist from Athens, who was part of the occupations of Syntagma and Liberty Squares. “[But] they’re not the same thing. The connections are like echoes. . . . It’s not the form that connects them, but the issues . . . the economic crisis, of course—which is capitalism in crisis—and the disbelief in representative politics.”
“Suddenly, everything was possible,” Carolina of 15-M and TaketheSquare.net would later tell me, recalling how she felt in the wake of the acampadas. “We said, why not, let’s mobilize the whole world! A global revolution! And so, in June, we decided to make a call to cities in many countries.” The call was accompanied by a kind of how-to guide, entitled, “How to Camp for a Global Revolution.” I would later hear of this guide in many of my conversations with would-be Wall Street occupiers.
“It was just like throwing a bottle into the ocean, and saying, ‘let’s see what happens!’” says Carolina. Meanwhile, across the ocean, many Americans of my generation were watching and waiting, with bated breath, for our own wave to break.