Figure 2.1 Hand Signals of the New York City General Assembly. Credit: Aaron Carretti.
May 12–September 16, 2011
On May 12, 2011, three days before the opening act of the “#SpanishRevolution,” the Financial District of Lower Manhattan is overrun, quite unexpectedly, by the rest of the city. Moved by the call to “bring Wisconsin to Wall Street,” tens of thousands of New Yorkers are on the march in a “day of rage” against Mayor Bloomberg’s austerity budget and what organizers are calling the “crisis of inequality” in the city.
Urged on by texts and tweets promising a big day in the streets, I make my way downtown from New York University. I have traveled this road before. Nearly ten years ago, I had walked out of my public high school and marched on City Hall to oppose the mayor’s last bout of budget cuts; in February 2011, I had joined in a massive rally here in support of the occupiers of the Wisconsin State Capitol. But today’s “day of action” has a radically different look, sound, and feel than any downtown rally in recent memory.
There are more of us than usual, an estimated 20,000 in all, assembling at eight separate sites, issue by issue, constituency by constituency. Spirited public school students converge around the Charging Bull, chanting, “They say cut back? We say fight back!” Indignant schoolteachers, facing up to 6,000 layoffs, gather in a ring around City Hall. Public service providers assemble at South Street Seaport, immigrant workers at Battery Park, transit workers at Bowling Green.
The breadth of the coalition is matched only by the depth of the discontent—which, amid the fallout from the financial crisis, is increasingly directed at “the top 1 percent,” “the bankers” and “the millionaires.” The most common signs I see are stenciled with the words, “MAKE THE BANKS PAY,” along with an image of the Big Apple being consumed by a worm named “Wall Street.” The second most common signs identify their bearers with those communities hardest hit by the crisis and the austerity agenda—among them homeless New Yorkers, underserved youth, overlooked seniors, and the long-term unemployed.1
As the marchers spill into the streets and feed into a single, raging stream bound for Wall Street, rumors ripple through the crowd that civil disobedience is in the offing. They say that the May 12 Coalition, backed by the United Federation of Teachers, has planned a wave of sit-ins under the guise of “teach-ins” to “take Wall Street to school.” Coalition members have already set a militant tone in the run-up to the day of action, with HIV/AIDS activists disrupting meetings of the Real Estate Board of New York, homeowners marching on the Bank of America Tower, and anti-austerity campaigners crashing a private party featuring House Speaker John Boehner.
Today, the coalition’s radical core appears poised to disrupt “business as usual” in the very epicenter of financial capital. At the last minute, however, the teachers’ union, under intense pressure from the NYPD, will pull the plug on the planned “teach-ins.” Upon reaching Water Street and Wall, we will find ourselves “kettled,” then dispersed by a phalanx of police with batons drawn. The would-be occupiers of Wall Street will have to wait to occupy another day.2
Mayor Bloomberg will respond to the democratic rabble with characteristic disdain: “I would think that while they have a right to protest, they’re probably doing it in the wrong place. . . . We have to make sure that people come here, businesses come here, wealthy people come here and buy apartments and create jobs and pay taxes. . . . We need everybody to pull together and find ways to do more with less.”3
Across town, however, New Yorkers Against Budget Cuts (NYABC) was pulling together in the opposite direction, looking for ways to do more for those who had less, and to give less to those who had more. The May 12 day of action to “make the banks pay” was but the opening shot in the contest over who could claim the right to the city, who would bear the costs of the crisis, and who would reap the benefits of the recovery.4
Although May 12 had come and gone, leaving the Financial District unoccupied, the day of action put the tactic of mass occupation on the table for the first time in recent memory. The more militant members of the anti-austerity coalition now saw fit to escalate their campaign against the budget cuts. If Mayor Bloomberg prevailed, the cuts could cost the city 105 senior centers, housing and child care services, and thousands of teachers—all at a time when, in the words of the organizers, “the richest 1 percent [paid] less in state and local taxes than anyone else.”5
Within days, the militants would find fresh inspiration in the actions of their counterparts across the Atlantic Ocean, as they occupied public plazas from Puerta del Sol to Syntagma Square (see Chapter 1). Galvanized by their example, the organizers behind NYABC and its Beyond May 12 committee, despite their deep political divisions, would soon come to a consensus on the uses of the tactical toolkit of the acampada, or encampment. For two weeks, as the budget vote approached, they would deploy this newfound tactic on the sidewalks around City Hall. It was to be a sort of dress rehearsal for the Wall Street occupation to come.
In the days and weeks leading up to day 1 of the encampment—June 14, 2011—NYABC set out to build a base of support among constituencies on the receiving end of municipal austerity. They held “action assemblies” in all five boroughs, hoping to reach “every school, union and community affected by the cutter’s knife.” They secured the endorsements of sympathetic unions such as the Transit Workers and the Professional Staff Congress, as well as front-line nonprofits such as Community Voices Heard and Picture the Homeless. From the latter, they learned of their right to “sleep out” on city sidewalks as an act of public protest, a right that local housing activists had won a decade earlier in the case of Metropolitan Council v. Safir. With the law on their side, the planners pledged to make the camp safe, accessible, and above all, sustainable.6
The organizers christened their encampment “Bloombergville,” a term of art derived from the “Hoovervilles” that had dotted U.S. cities during the darkest days of the Great Depression.7 In recent weeks, the “Hooverville” model had been adopted and adapted by the prolabor protesters on the grounds of the Wisconsin State Capitol, who took to calling their tent city “Walkerville” (in honor of Governor Scott Walker). At the same time, closer to home, a string of smaller camps had taken root across the region. In the five boroughs, “Cuomovilles” had been erected by angry tenants, demanding affordable housing and stronger rent regulation from Governor Andrew Cuomo. In Trenton, New Jersey, union workers had constructed a tent city called “Camp Collective Bargaining,” in protest of proposed legislation restricting their right to bargain over health care coverage.
Meanwhile, a network of online activists affiliated with Anonymous had called for an encampment of their own, demanding an end to the “campaign finance and lobbying racket,” the break-up of “Too Big to Fail Banks,” and the resignation of Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke.8 The “occupation” had been planned for a certain “privately owned public space” called Zuccotti Park (see Chapter 3). In the event, however, a grand total of sixteen supporters showed up for the “Empire State Rebellion,” and only four of those sixteen came prepared to camp out overnight. For all of Anonymous’s online cachet and its subcultural clout, its brand of hacktivism, it seemed, was no substitute for on-the-ground organizing.9 The “Empire State rebels” quickly abandoned their plan of attack; some of them opted to join NYABC instead at its nascent encampment uptown.10
Bloombergville kicked off on the night of June 14 with a modest turnout of fewer than a hundred occupiers. Under the arches of the Municipal Building, they assembled for a rally and “town hall meeting,” bearing blankets, sleeping bags, conga drums, and handmade banners, and chanting to keep their spirits up:
“We will fight! We will win! Cairo, New York, Wisconsin!”
The campers appeared to represent a multiracial, cross-class alliance, drawing in some of the most disaffected sectors of urban society. Here were public sector workers in matching hats and T-shirts, some with little children in tow, who came to the camp with their “union brothers and sisters.” Here, too, were homeless activists familiar with the exigencies of sleeping on the street. Perhaps most numerous were college students and college graduates, many of them members of Far Left political formations—from Marxist-Leninist cadres like the International Socialist Organization to New Left offshoots like the Organization for a Free Society. The division between the dual political poles would become a fixture of the occupations of 2011.11
It was here, at Bloombergville, that many of the would-be occupiers of Wall Street would first get to know each other, as they learned to live together, work together, and make decisions together in daily sidewalk assemblies. Many of the campers I talked to found in the encampment a longed-for political home, which they would later reinvent in Liberty Square. In the beginning, however, most of them shared little in the way of collective identity or political ideology. What they did share, they will later recall, was an aversion to economic injustice, a commitment to structural change, and a source of common inspiration in the Arab Spring and the Mediterranean summer.
From Far Rockaway came Messiah Rhodes, a soft-spoken, outspoken young black man of radical persuasion. After years living on the streets of New York City, he had gotten a job at a nonprofit but grown disillusioned with the world of “corporate philanthropy.” In early 2011, Messiah saw the glimmer of an alternative in the Egyptian Revolution and the indignado movement. He decided to quit his job at the Robin Hood Foundation and dedicate himself full-time to documenting local street activism: “I got my camera and got my mic and went out in the streets and started filming stuff. . . . I saw that people were serious about bringing the movement from overseas to here, somehow.”
With Bloombergville, Messiah tells me, “we pretty much just got the 411 on what it means to have an occupation in New York City, and that it is possible.” Yet he reminds me that class divisions were characteristic of such camps from the first: “I was unemployed at the time, so I was able to be down there, sleep there every day, blog, do all kinds of media stuff. But working people, they’re not gonna be able to occupy.”
From Oklahoma, by way of North Dakota, came Isham Christie of the Choctaw Nation. After years of rural poverty and “juvenile delinquency,” Isham had been politicized by books and by the U.S. invasion of Iraq, eventually joining the New Students for a Democratic Society, before going on to participate in Bloombergville. Isham vividly remembers what it was like for him. “When you’re in an encampment together,” he says, “you develop close personal relationships with people. Because you’re living together. I think that was really important. It was nasty and dirty, literally sleeping on the street, grit under your fingernails. But that was something.”
From North Dakota, too, came Mary Clinton, a young white union organizer from a family of farmers and soldiers. Mary had worked for the Democratic Non-Partisan League on the 2010 elections before realizing she wanted to “organize to affect people’s lives in a more direct way.” She moved to New York City and went to work for the local labor movement. “The global austerity fight was coming to New York . . . so I started going to NYABC meetings. . . . It was a coalition of a lot of different organizations, and there was a ton of experience in the room. I learned a lot.” Mary also learned from the stories of occupiers in other places: “We were skyping with people in Madrid, and in Madison. We shared best practices, like ‘keep everyone caffeinated!’ But it was this moment when it was like, oh wow, we’re part of something bigger.”
Coming from Austin, Texas, by way of the City University of New York, was Conor Tomás Reed, a radically minded graduate student, educator, and organizer of Puerto Rican descent. Conor recalls that 2011 “was a big shift for me politically,” as he sought to build a “vibrant, nondogmatic, and ultimately effective social movement” in the city by “combining different radical traditions.” Like Isham and Mary, he cites the example of revolutionaries in other countries: “I don’t think it began here. . . . That democratic impulse people got from the Arab revolutions, people got from the Latin American revolts.” At Bloombergville, Conor tells me, “[We were] able to connect small struggles with international ones. We were able to not only talk about the pains of living under capitalism, but also the joys of making community within it.”
Over the course of the next two weeks, Bloombergville’s numbers and fortunes would fluctuate wildly from morning to night, and from one day to the next. Much of the time, the occupiers would find themselves outnumbered and outmaneuvered by the NYPD, which made a practice of pushing them further and further away, out of sight and out of sound of the targets of their message: first, from One Centre Street to the gates of City Hall Park, and thence, westward across Broadway, to the sidewalk abutting the old Woolworth Building at Park Place.
Here, surrounded by scaffolding, police pens, and the blue glow of a nearby Citibank, a hard core of three dozen activists attempted to hold their ground. They followed a set of simple ground rules: “Do Not Talk to Police.” “No Alcohol or Illegal Substances.” “Share Food and Consider Others.” Some of them marked their turf along the sidewalk with their own “public library” as well as a panoply of picket signs: “Fight Like an Egyptian.” “Mind the Income Gap.” “Class Size Matters.” “I Want My Job Back!” Their ranks would swell after work hours and on weekends, sometimes into the hundreds, as they were joined by fellow New Yorkers for evening teach-ins, nightly assemblies, and free meals provided by the Transit Workers Union.
In the end, the encampment would fall well short of its ultimate goal, failing to forestall all but a handful of the proposed cutbacks. While the occupiers were rallying behind a politics of “No Cuts—No Layoffs—No Compromise,” local legislators, labor leaders, and the Bloomberg administration were cutting back-room deals behind City Hall. While the mayor agreed to save the firehouses and the senior centers, the City Council conceded to the loss of thousands of teachers from city schools. The budget deal was sealed on the night of June 25, to chants of “Let Us In!” and “Your Job Next!”
Three days later, thirteen of the most committed occupiers entered the offices of the City Council and zip-tied themselves together. The “Bloombergville 13” were promptly placed under arrest and carried out one by one. It was to be the last act of Bloombergville, the conclusion of the dress rehearsal. Yet that night, from behind bars, the occupiers were already plotting their next act.
In June 2011, the word on the street finally reached Adbusters’ headquarters, outside Vancouver, British Columbia. Founded in 1989, the sleekly made, slickly marketed magazine by 2011 boasted a circulation of over 60,000 and an e-mail list of over 90,000. Like many other independent media platforms that played a formative role in the uprisings of 2011, Adbusters had come into its own in the heyday of the alter-globalization movement, ten years earlier, when it had claimed the mantle of a “global network of culture jammers and creatives working to change the way information flows, the way corporations wield power, and the way meaning is produced in our society.”
It was Adbusters Magazine that would be credited, in some quarters, with the invention of the movement, as if from scratch, beginning with its incendiary “tactical briefing.”13
This tactical briefing went public online on July 13, two months after the opening act of M-15 in Madrid, and just two months before day 1 of the Wall Street occupation. The Occupy meme first made the rounds by way of the magazine’s online subscribers, “friends,” and “followers,” who were addressed by the authors as “you redeemers, radicals, and rebels.” In a fantastical style replete with biblical allusions and other rhetorical flourishes, Adbusters called on its readers to “flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades, and occupy Wall Street for a few months.”
Once there, would-be occupiers were instructed to “incessantly repeat one simple demand in a plurality of voices.” What started with a call for “a fusion of Tahrir with the acampadas of Spain” ended as a call to “all Americans” to “start setting the agenda for a new America.” The Occupy meme achieved its syncretic appeal in this way, linking local grievances to global revolts, and global revolts to a national political program.14
The co-authors of the call were the co-editors of the magazine: Kalle Lasn, an Estonian-born adman turned anti-corporate provocateur, who had founded the magazine over two decades earlier and now operated it out of a basement in British Columbia; and Micah White, a self-described “mystical anarchist” who worked closely with Lasn from his home in Berkeley, California. This dynamic duo did not invent the 99 Percent movement, as has been claimed, for its existence predated their intervention. But together, they managed to brand the Occupy meme in their own image.
First, they conceived a time and place for its next convergence, using a tactical toolkit they had appropriated from the occupiers of Tahrir, Sol, and Syntagma squares. Second, they marketed this tactical toolkit with a viscerally appealing logo and a visually attractive aesthetic. Their quixotic call to action was accompanied by a striking image of a ballerina poised on the back of the Charging Bull, a sculpture long seen as a celebration of the power and prestige of Wall Street. Behind the ballerina and the bull stood a line of protesters, wading through a cloud of what appeared to be tear gas. Above it all was a simple question: “What is our one demand?” Below it was a pithily worded invitation: “#OccupyWallStreet. September 17th. Bring tent.”15
When I later asked Kalle Lasn about the part he and Adbusters had played in the genesis of OWS, he himself acknowledged that it was a limited role indeed: “We just did our bit, you know? We used those culture jamming techniques that we pioneered over the years. [But] I don’t know how important that actually was. We were able to catalyze something, but the real core impulse behind this youthful resurgence of the Left was—it was a feeling in the guts of young people . . . that somehow, the future doesn’t compute. And I think that’s the reason it took off.”
“Feelings in the guts of young people” may have been necessary, but not sufficient, conditions for the success of the Occupy meme. Why else might it have taken off as it did, when it did? Any answer to this question is bound to be partial and provisional, pending further sociological study and comparative historical analysis. Yet it is possible to pose some working hypotheses, along with an invitation to further inquiry.
First, I would suggest that Occupy spoke urgently and eloquently to its time, resonating with audiences fed up with the trickle-down economics that had failed to deliver on the promise of prosperity, and the top-down politics that had failed to live up to the principles of democracy. Second, occupation represented an easily replicable tactic, based on a popular prototype that had already been battle-tested in other places. Third, the #OWS meme promised a platform within which many platforms could fit, one that would make space for a multiplicity of messages, identities, and ideologies. Finally, the meme contained the rules for its own reproduction.16 Some were specific to cyberspace: share this meme, make your own; use this hashtag; use this graphic. Others were oriented toward urban space: “Seize [a space] of singular symbolic significance,” then, “put our asses on the line to make it happen.” Everything else—strategy, demands—would be left to the would-be occupiers to decide for themselves.17
It took thirteen days, from July 13 to 26, for the #OccupyWallStreet meme to attain “viral” status on the Internet. The meme circulated first among a closed network of activists, but quickly filtered out to a wider virtual world. The public face that was presented to this wider world was not that of Adbusters, but that of OccupyWallSt.org.
Colloquially known as “Storg,” the website was founded and edited by Justine Tunney, a white, working-class, transgendered anarchist programmer from Philadelphia, alongside a collective of fellow travelers known as the “Trans World Order.” “We mostly knew each other already, both in real life and online. There was always that mutual trust and understanding,” Justine remembers. “We were unaffiliated [with anyone else]. We very much viewed ourselves as a workers’ collective. People in our group would just take initiative and get things done.” Their initiative was infectious. Within days, Priscilla Grim, a Latina media worker and single mother from New York City, was posting the Adbusters call, with links to OccupyWallSt.org, by way of social networks and Indymedia news feeds from coast to coast.18
Because the call to action was born of an online meme, it found its earliest and most enthusiastic constituency in a loose network of virtual activists. Later that summer, the meme would again “go viral” when it caught the eye of electronic civil disobedients affiliated with Anonymous. On August 23, a group of “Anons” released a one-minute video, addressed to “fellow citizens of the Internet,” featuring their signature masked men, headless suits, and computerized voices. Offering a full-throated endorsement of the call to occupy, the Anons concluded, “We want freedom. . . . The abuse and corruption of corporations, banks, and governments ends here. . . . Wall Street: Expect us.”19
Meanwhile, in the city that was to play host to the occupation, the online meme would remain radically disconnected, for some time, from organizers and organizations in New York City. All the online networkers had to offer the would-be occupiers were a site, a schedule, and a measure of social media exposure: a Twitter handle here, a Facebook page there. Yet veteran activists knew that there was no way such an ambitious action was going to materialize out of cyberspace, as if out of thin air.
At first, NYABC greeted the call to occupy with more skepticism than enthusiasm, more reservations than endorsements. Who was Adbusters to call an occupation in their city without consulting them—and without dedicating any resources to organizing on the ground? Even if the masses did show up that day, how were they supposed to sustain an occupation in the most heavily policed place in North America?
“The idea that you could set up a camp on Wall Street seemed immediately improbable, impossible, in fact,” says Doug Singsen, a young white socialist and a student of art history at CUNY, who brought the Adbusters call to the attention of NYABC. “You know what Wall Street looks like . . . a militarized zone. But also, it’s like, they wanted [us] to generate one demand that they would present to President Obama. When I mentioned it at the meeting, it got a big round of laughter. They [Adbusters] were totally out of tune with what was happening on the ground. . . . I don’t remember anything they said actually being discussed in an organizing meeting.”
By the first week of August, the occupation had been well publicized, but it remained to be organized. Its infrastructure had to be assembled in person, and in public. The meme had to be made real by means of face-to-face interaction within the frame of an already living, breathing movement. As we have seen, this movement was already many months in the making, from the February occupation of the Wisconsin State House to the May march on Wall Street, and from Madison’s “Walkervilles” to New York City’s “Bloombergville” and “Cuomovilles.” Between the deepening opposition to the austerity agenda and the halting economic recovery, New York City radicals and their Canadian counterparts now sensed an unprecedented political opening. In the repertoire of occupation, they believed they had found a tactic whose time had come.
I had just returned from the seething streets of Spain, that last week of July, when I found in my inbox a call for a “People’s General Assembly and Speakout,” to convene on the afternoon of Tuesday, August 2. The assembly was timed to coincide with the date of the “debt ceiling deadline”—the last day for the U.S. Congress to strike a deal to raise the federal borrowing limit and avert a default on the national debt. Pro-austerity forces were on the warpath, as the House, the Senate, the White House, and the private sector haggled over just how many billions of dollars were to be trimmed from Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Many in NYABC hoped the upcoming People’s General Assembly would stir up local anti-austerity sentiment in New York City:
It’s time for the people to meet and take the bull by the horns! [The members of NYABC] have called for an August 2 General Assembly/Speakout . . . to protest the ongoing pro-bank, anti-people cutbacks and gather into working groups to plan for the September 17 occupation of Wall Street. Come to Wall Street—the scene of the crimes now being perpetrated on the people—and make your voice heard!20
It would prove to be quite the challenge for anyone to make their voice heard that day.
I arrived at the Charging Bull to the sight and sound of what appeared to be two warring tribes, holding dueling assemblies on opposite sides of the pedestrian plaza off of Broadway and Morris. On one side, standing in a circle around the Bull, were the democratic centralists, composed of several socialist factions that had played lead roles in the activities of NYABC. Chief among these was Workers World, a Cold War-era political party with a long history of power plays and sectarian squabbles. The party faithful had gotten there first that day, equipped with a sound system, a speakers’ list, and a ten-point program, with which they sought to rally the masses.
On the other side of the pedestrian plaza were representatives of the opposite political pole—that of the anarchists, autonomists, and horizontalists—who adhered to nonhierarchical decision-making as an article of quasi-religious faith. Since the days of the global justice movement, such activists had loudly opposed the “authoritarian” style and “vertical” structures of the democratic centralists. Many of these “anti-authoritarians” were convinced that the People’s General Assembly had fallen prey to a kind of old-school socialist coup—even though, as I would later learn from the facilitators, the meeting was already set to transition from a party-line rally to a more open-ended assembly. One of the anarchist circles then moved to stage a countercoup, interrupting the other speakers and declaring the gathering null and void.21
“This is not a General Assembly!” cried Georgia Sagri, the anarcho-autonomist artist we met in Chapter 1. “It is a rally put on by a political party! It has absolutely nothing to do with the global general assembly movement!”
“I find the previous speaker’s intervention to be profoundly disrespectful,” countered one of the official speakers, an older, African American woman affiliated with the Bail Out the People Movement. “It’s little more than a conscious attempt to disrupt the meeting!”22
Many of those generally assembled, however, in the plaza appeared to be caught between the two political poles, identifying neither with the Workers World Party nor with the party of anarchy. Having weathered years of such sectarian warfare, I felt let down and put off by the spectacle before me. There was no way an occupation could be born of such rancor (or so it seemed at the time).
Amid the internecine war of words, I walked away in dismay. Expecting to see more of the same, I would sit out the remaining assemblies of August and early September. At the same time, I resolved to keep my eye on my e-mail and my ear to the ground. According to Messiah Rhodes, “You can’t predict the moment of revolution.”
After the fractious first assembly came six weeks of equally contentious convergences, as New Yorkers Against Budget Cuts gave way to the New York City General Assembly (NYCGA) as the planning body for the upcoming occupation. The second assembly was held on the evening of August 9 at the Irish Hunger Memorial, in the shadow of the World Financial Center. Subsequent assemblies would convene every Saturday beneath the canopy of a giant elm tree in Tompkins Square Park, an East Village venue with a storied history of open-air political meetings.
These early general assemblies were often epic affairs, beginning before sundown and stretching late into the night. First, the participants would seat themselves in one big circle to discuss matters of general concern and major points of contention. They would then “break out” into smaller circles, self-organized as semi-autonomous “working groups” and oriented toward specific tasks in preparation for the occupation to come. By mid-August, there were six such committees in the works: Logistics, Outreach, Food, Internet, Process, Students. Each of the committees had its own social and political life outside of the GA. Many of the most important decisions were made after hours and offsite, in local bars, cafés, and twenty-four-hour diners.
Before they could decide on a plan of action, however, the would-be occupiers had first to decide how they were going to decide. The two rival camps advocated distinctive modes of decision-making. Anarchists and horizontalists pushed for a process of unanimous consensus, while democratic socialists, populists, and pragmatists favored some form of majority vote. With the secession of the NYCGA and the subsequent demise of the NYABC, the horizontalists now found themselves possessed of a degree of political hegemony within the planning process.
In the end, a model of “modified consensus” was introduced (some say “imposed”) by members of the Process committee, who also served as the facilitators for the general assemblies at large. In principle, the modified consensus process worked as follows (see Figure 2.1 for illustrations):
• Guided by a duet of “facilitators,” the assembly would take up proposals, one by one, from participants. Proposals were encouraged to address items already on the agenda—generally, questions of a practical or tactical nature: “What do we need?” “How do we get it?”
• The facilitators would go on to ask for “friendly amendments” to the proposal, followed by “clarifying questions” and “concerns.” Participants could also interject with “points of information” or, if others were believed to be violating the rules, with “points of process.”
• Participants would raise their hands to speak, but would be obliged to respect a “progressive stack,” which gave the floor first to those who had not yet spoken and those who were identified as “traditionally marginalized voices” (that is, women and nonwhite participants).
• The facilitators would then ask for a “temperature check”—an initial assessment of the proposal—with approval, disapproval, or indecision signaled with one’s hands (“up-twinkles” for approval, “down-twinkles” for disapproval, a “so-so” gesture for indecision).
• In the event of perfect consensus, the proposal would be passed without further ado, and its implementation delegated to the relevant individuals or groups. In the event of controversy, the floor would be opened up to further concerns, and to arguments for and against.
• After further discussion, facilitators would check for consensus, asking if there were any “blocks” from those assembled. A block—signaled by crossing one’s arms over one’s chest—represented the strongest form of opposition, to the point that a participant who “blocked” consensus would no longer participate were the proposal to pass without amendment.
• In the event of a block, the assembly, as a last resort, would move to vote on the proposal. The proposal could only be passed with a super-majority of 90 percent of those assembled. In the absence of such a supermajority, the proposal would have to be withdrawn. It would then have to be reworked and rewritten to the satisfaction of the next day’s assembly.
Figure 2.1 Hand Signals of the New York City General Assembly. Credit: Aaron Carretti.
In principle, then, what the occupiers were hoping to enact, in the midst of the Financial District, was a radically and directly democratic mode of decision-making, in which anyone could participate and no one could dominate. The GA was envisioned as an “open, participatory, and horizontally organized process” through which participants would “constitute [them]selves in public as autonomous [and] collective forces.” Modeled on the assemblies seen in the squares of Argentina, Tunisia, Egypt, Spain, and Greece (see Chapter 1), the GA also spoke to Anglo-American notions of government “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” It was a sort of democratic practice that articulated neatly with the imaginary of the “99 Percent.”23
In practice, from the first, the implementation of the consensus process was fraught with contradictions. The heterogeneity of the crowd, and of the interests and aspirations it embodied, often made consensus difficult, if not impossible, to achieve. The constant turnover was a constant challenge, as was the recurring presence of disrupters and interrupters, who had little respect for the rules of the process. What’s more, as we shall see, the unequal distribution of capabilities, political capital, and time—for what participation demanded, more than anything, was time—lent this “leaderless movement” an informal leadership, despite itself, made up of those with the experience, those in the know, and those with the time for three-hour meetings.
The democracy question was but one of many fault lines that made themselves felt in the early days of the NYCGA. Consensus would break down around matters of demand-making, messaging, and tactical planning, in addition to the decision-making process itself. Although such disputes could almost always be traced to diverging ideologies or dueling personalities, their resolution was more often a matter of practical exigency than one of principle. Thus, the would-be occupiers came to a decision, early on, to eschew any and all demands, not because they knew better, but because they could not come to a consensus on what demands to make.
“What is our one demand?” Thus was the question posed in the Adbusters call to action. Lasn and White had proposed an appropriate and timely tactic—but to what end did it aim? The constituents of the newly formed NYCGA would not be satisfied with a simple answer. They rejected, out of hand, the one demand proposed by Lasn and White: “A Presidential Commission tasked with ending the influence money has over our representatives.” The organizers also dismissed the most popular candidate to appear in Adbusters’ online polls and discussion forums: “Revoke Corporate Personhood.” Throughout the month of August, a dizzying array of alternative demands was circulated on e-mail lists, in committee meetings, and at the weekly assemblies in the park: Drop the debt. Repeal Citizens United. Reinstate Glass-Steagall. Get money out of politics. Pass an economic bill of rights. Respect the freedom of assembly.24
In the end, the would-be occupiers were unable to settle on a single demand. Their interests and ideologies proved too far apart for anyone to agree to meet in the middle. The anarchists opposed any demands that addressed themselves to states, parties, or elected officials. Many believed the demands of the dispossessed would emerge organically, from below. Conversely, the populists, pragmatists, and democratic socialists opposed demands that did not address themselves to what they saw as the root causes of the crisis; namely, neoliberal economics and the top-down politics of the “1 Percent.” While the reformers demanded the intervention of the federal government, their revolutionary peers rooted for its overthrow. While the former cheered the unions’ calls for “jobs, not cuts” and “jobs, not wars,” the latter took up the student movement’s call to “occupy everything, demand nothing.” On the whole question of demands, at least, common ground was nowhere to be found between the two warring camps.
In the absence of demands, the occupiers knew it was imperative that they come up with coherent, consistent “messaging” with which to reach out to prospective participants. Yet even this would prove an enduring challenge. Members of the Outreach and Internet committees would come to the Tompkins assemblies with otherwise noncontroversial proposals for the wording of websites, flyers, and posters, only to discover they were “not empowered” to speak, write, or code in the name of the GA. As Isham Christie tells it, “we, as the Outreach Committee, wanted just two sentences to say what OWS really was. We proposed it to the GA three weeks later, debated the thing for three hours, and it was voted down. We quickly found out we couldn’t pass two sentences to put on a flyer.” Rather than allowing themselves to be muzzled, however, organizers like Isham went on to make their own literature, while programmers opted to create their own websites, with or without a consensus in the GA.
A final point of contention centered on the tactical choices that would define the contours of the occupation: Would it be a legal or an illegal action? Would the organizers seek a permit from the police? Would they make an explicit commitment to nonviolence? These were well-worn debates among veteran activists, but they took on new urgency in the run-up to September 17. On the question of legality, permits, and the police, there was no consensus to be had. The NYCGA was forced to fall back on a straw poll, in which a majority opted to oppose negotiating with the NYPD.
On the question of nonviolence, there was a similar dissensus within the group, with some advocating for “autonomous action” and for a full “diversity of tactics”—that is, a contentious repertoire without restrictions, up to and including confrontations with police or property.25 Others countered that the occupiers had no choice but to practice Gandhian nonviolence—not as a matter of morality, but as a matter of strategy. They were, after all, planning an incursion into what they knew to be a highly militarized zone. And they were hoping to bring the “99 Percent” with them.
“I was like, we need to go out of our way to maintain nonviolence,” recalls Cecily McMillan, the student occupier we met in Chapter 1. “This is the way to get the 99 Percent on board. We need to make ourselves accessible as a movement, to draw in other people. . . . [If] some violent act occurs, then we’re going to go down for it. And then we’re going to have no chance of a movement.”
Amid the spring and summer overtures to the American autumn, a common theme was emerging from the chaos of disparate coalitions, direct actions, and democratic assemblies: that of the irreconcilable oppositio n between the wealthiest 1 percent—the monied minority represented by Wall Street—and the other 99 percent—the silent supermajority represented, at least in principle, by the would-be occupiers. In a matter of weeks, the categories of the “1 Percent” and the residual “99 Percent” would become foundational ones for the occupiers and their supporters around the world. Ultimately, such categories would become the most recognizable symbols of Occupy Wall Street, and among its more enduring contributions to the larger political culture.
The unity of the “99 Percent,” in particular, would appear in later iterations with all the force of an article of faith, a sort of ready-made category of the real, the truth of which was held to be self-evident and beyond question. Yet this unity did not emerge fully formed from the lived experiences or working lives of those who would take up its banner. Nor was this unity the invention of radical academics, as is commonly claimed in the existing literature.26 Rather, the language and the lineage of “We Are the 99 Percent” can be traced to a long period of gestation, preceding its eruption into public view and popular discourse late in the summer of 2011.
In the first place, the categories of the 99 and the 1 Percent were no more than statistical artifacts in the arsenal of heterodox economists such as Piketty, Saez, and Stiglitz. The “dismal scientists” had noticed a troubling trend in the distribution of America’s social surplus: over the past thirty years, as the top 1 percent had seen their share of the total income more than double, to 24 percent, the other 99 percent had seen their share plummet to levels not seen since the last Gilded Age. In the aftermath of the Great Recession and the subsequent “jobless recovery”—in which record rates of profit were accompanied by record levels of long-term unemployment—progressively inclined audiences had picked up on the theme, with many expressing concern that, absent an about-face in federal policy, the trend would continue and the wealth gap would worsen. The official response was summed up in a spring 2010 report by the Federal Reserve Bank of Saint Louis, entitled, “Income Inequality: It’s Not So Bad.”27
Figure 2.2 Growth of income inequality between top 1 Percent and bottom 99 Percent, 2002–2012. Credit: Aaron Carretti. Source: Emmanuel Saez, “Striking it Richer: The Evolution of Top Incomes in the United States,” September 3, 2013 (http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/saez-UStopincomes-2012.pdf).
The first effort to turn statistics into strategy kicked off, ironically enough, on April 15, 2009, the date of the Tea Party’s Tax Day protests in Washington, D.C. Calling themselves The Other 98 percent, a group of veteran anti-corporate campaigners from Agit-Pop Communications convened an anti–Tea Party counterprotest, calling for tax hikes on the wealthiest two percent, coupled with the preservation of federal programs for the bottom 98 percent. They promised a “political home for the silent majority of Americans who are tired of corporate control of Washington and . . . Tea Party extremism.” Yet the notion of the “98 Percent” never did catch fire, associated as it was with tax brackets, anti–Tea Party advocacy, and progressive policy circles.28
The first calls for a 99 Percent movement, rather than a 98 Percent lobby, came as early as February 2010, when a little-known blogger by the name of David DeGraw, loosely affiliated with the Anonymous network, published a rambling manifesto on the website AmpedStatus.com. For a time, however, the online agitprop would remain just that. For all the high hopes placed in the emancipatory potential of “Web 2.0” in 2010–2011, it would soon become apparent that no movement would be born of one-man manifestos circulating in the “Cloud.”29 It would fall to actually existing coalitions to give life to the “99 Percent” movement, bringing it out of the Cloud and down to earth.
The first coalition to assert a 99 Percent identity was the one that formed around the “Occupy the Capitol” day of action on March 30, 2011, in Albany, New York. Spearheaded by the Right to the City Alliance, NY Communities for Change, and NY Students Rising, this coalition planned an overnight takeover of the New York State Capitol to protest Governor Cuomo’s proposed austerity budget, demanding instead an extension of the “Millionaire’s Tax,” a strengthening of tenant protections, and a cancellation of planned cutbacks to public education. It was to be a short-lived occupation, but its strategic use of rhetoric would leave an enduring imprint on the movement.
For it is in its call to action that we find what appears to have been the first instance of that seminal slogan, which would soon be heard echoing across America:
We are the 99 percent. We represent New York—unfortunately, our Governor does not. Ninety-nine percent of New Yorkers . . . would be severely hurt by Cuomo’s unnecessary cuts and his tax giveaway to the wealthiest. Join . . . the 99 percent to demand a state budget that meets [our] demands. Mr. Cuomo, You’ve got five days to decide whose side you’re on . . . the 99 percent or the 1 percent. The clock is ticking . . . and the 99 percent will not wait in silence . . . 30
Hence, among the more seasoned activists of New York City and State, the rhetoric of the 99 and the 1 Percent was already a familiar one by the spring and summer of 2011. But such rhetoric, in and of itself, could not call forth a mass of people to “dream of insurrection against corporate rule,” as Adbusters suggested, let alone to “put their asses on the line to make it happen” that September. First, the “99 Percent” had to be transformed from a rhetorical strategy conceived by a militant minority to a class identity that could be coopted by a latent majority: a shared story about who we are, why we are in the position we are in, and what we might be and do to change it.
This daunting task would be taken up that August, first, by the Outreach Committee of the nascent NYCGA, and in particular, by a contingent of radical Spaniards who had been activated by the 15-M movement. As one of their number would later recall, “We saw a lot of potential. And at the same time, we were thinking that this is not going anywhere. . . . We didn’t like the word ‘Occupy’ because we thought that it was not very inclusive. . . . We thought the language was very important, so we actually started promoting the idea of ‘We are the 99 Percent.’” The Spaniards and other would-be occupiers fanned out with flyers advertising the assemblies in Tompkins Square Park: “Both parties govern in the name of the 1 percent. . . . We are among the other 99 percent and we are meeting to discuss our options. . . . We are the General Assembly of NYC.”
The next step in the propagation of the 99 Percent took shape at the point of encounter between the virtual and the physical, the peer-to-peer and the face-to-face.31 The We Are the 99 Percent project, as it came to be known, began with a simple premise and modus operandi. In the words of the original e-mail announcing the project’s launch, the website was to be used to “highlight the various ways that a society which prioritizes the upper 1 percent is having a deleterious impact on, well, everyone else . . . to focus the message and really bring the human side to the fore by calling attention to the real human costs of our current economic setup.”
The first post, published on August 23, invited contributors to submit their own stories, which would speak directly to the economic injustices and indignities they had suffered, in silence, until now:
Are you drowning in debt that never goes away? Are you facing the real possibility of eviction and homelessness? Are you worried that the social programs you depend on will get cut in the name of austerity? . . . Make a sign. Write your circumstance at the top, no longer than a single sentence. Below that, write “I am the 99 percent.” Below that, write “OccupyTogether.” Then, take a picture of yourself holding the sign and submit it to us. . . . Be part of the 99 percent and let the 1 percent know you’re out there.32
Priscilla Grim had just been laid off from her job at TimeWarner Social Media when she caught wind of the project. “I found out about the We Are the 99 Percent blog, thought it was genius . . . and I started promoting it online. I feel like it’s very important [for] people who are feeling the consequences . . . [to be] speaking and advocating for themselves.” Priscilla wanted the site to reflect their raw aesthetic and populist rhetoric: “It looked kind of crappy and not polished. And the people who sent in the submissions, their writing was kind of crappy and not polished. I didn’t want it to look slick or anything. I wanted it to look like the people who were sending in their stories.”
What started, on August 23, as a trickle of submissions soon grew to a virtual flood of messages, conveyed by way of poignant self-portraits and pithy self-narratives. All of them were variations on a common theme—the lived experience of economic inequality. The Great Recession, after all, had narrowed the gulf between middle class, the working class, the poor and the near-poor, convincing many that they had more in common with each other than they did with those at the top, and creating the conditions for a cross-class alliance of historic proportions. This alliance came to life in the tales they told of lives lived on the edge, amid unstable incomes, unpayable debts, and unaffordable public goods, such as housing, health care, and education:
“Every member of my family, including myself, lost their jobs during the recession. Unemployment comp ran out months ago. We have no savings. People keep telling me, the tax cuts for job creators will eventually ‘trickle down’ in the form of more jobs. It’s not happening. I am the 99 percent. My family is the 99 percent.”
“I have had no job for over 2½ years. Black men have a 20 percent unemployment rate. I am 33 years old. Born and raised in Watts. I AM THE 99 percent.”
“I have a master’s degree and a full-time job in my field—and I have started selling my body to pay off my debt. I am the 99 Percent.”
“Joined military for money to get by—No car—No insurance—Barely make enough for food—Work at Wal-Mart <$10,000/year—Behind on rent—I am the 99 percent.”
“I am a 19-year-old single mother. I lost my mother to cancer a year ago. I work a full-time job to keep my baby fed, and still hardly make enough to do so. Some weeks, I go days without eating so I can buy my 4-month-old son formula. I am the 99 percent.”
“I raised two children as a working mother. I enjoyed being independent for many years. Today I:—am unemployed—have no permanent address—am dependent on UEI—am in need of health care. I am the 99 percent.”33
These anonymous stories of troubles and struggles proved to be powerful sources of solidarity and identity for an otherwise disunited multitude of interests. They were ways for atomized individuals to break out of their solitude, to see that their struggles were shared and need not be borne alone, in silence. Along with this sense of shared struggle, We Are the 99 Percent posited a long list of grievances against that class its creators held responsible for the present state of affairs.
Figure 2.3 “Make the Banks Pay,” City Hall, May 12, 2011. Credit: Michael A. Gould-Wartofsky.
It was in this way that the would-be occupiers helped to resurrect an American class politics without alienating American publics. And it was in this way that they posed that challenge which every would-be social movement must pose: “Which side are you on?”