Figure 7.1 “Occupied real estate,” East New York, December 6, 2011. Credit: Michael A. Gould-Wartofsky.
December 6, 2011–May 1, 2012
On December 6, I ride the rails from the Financial District of Lower Manhattan to the foreclosure-riddled far reaches of East New York, in outer Brooklyn. My journey begins at Park Place, where the census records a median income of $205,000, and ends at Pennsylvania Avenue, a place with a median income of $25,000.1
As I descend from the elevated tracks, I take in the landscape of vacant lots, police vehicles, and empty town houses, with the “For Sale” signs taunting passersby from their porches. Here and there, a different sort of sign can be seen perched in a window: “FORECLOSE ON BANKS NOT ON PEOPLE.”
Down the block, some 400 occupiers are assembling beneath the elevated tracks. Most are white, and plainly out of place in the segregated streets of East New York. Some of them come bearing furniture and other housewarming gifts for the homeless family that is set to occupy a home today. Others gaze about them as if visiting a foreign country. They are joined by a more diverse contingent of housing activists, alongside clusters of local supporters, largely black and Latino, wisth histories in these streets.
“Our homes are under attack,” intones the crowd. “We’ve come to take them back!” Then, on a note of optimism: “Evict us, we multiply. Occupy will never die!”
Moments later, we will kick off a “Foreclosure Tour” of East New York—ground zero in the city’s foreclosure crisis—visiting five homes recently vacated by their residents and repossessed by the banks. At stoop after stoop, beneath banners reading, “OCCUPIED REAL ESTATE,” we hear first-person narratives, spoken into the People’s Mic, attesting to the suffering that crisis had wrought (see Figure 7.1).
Figure 7.1 “Occupied real estate,” East New York, December 6, 2011. Credit: Michael A. Gould-Wartofsky.
“I cannot take it anymore. Enough is enough,” cries Jocelyne Voltaire, a Caribbean American homeowner who lost her son in Iraq in 2008 and is now facing foreclosure for the second time in three years. “I used to pay $1,500, and they switched me from bank to bank until the payment was $3,800 per month. How will I pay that? How many families suffer like me?”
Others have no homes left to lose. Among them are Alfredo Carrasquillo, twenty-seven, and Tasha Glasgow, thirty, who have been sleeping in shelters and squats, together with their nine-year-old daughter and five-year-old son, since losing their housing vouchers to municipal budget cuts. Three days ago, volunteers from Occupy’s Direct Action, Media, and Sanitation working groups had shown up at the doorstep of a humble, two-story townhouse at 702 Vermont Street (which had been foreclosed by Countrywide and vacated by its owner three years earlier). They had promptly broken in, gutted the interior, and set to work making the house habitable.2
Now, the “Foreclosure Tour” reaches its finale with a “housewarming party” at 702 Vermont Street, as Alfredo emerges to a hero’s welcome. A chorus of cheers is interspersed with chanting (“Housing is a right”) and singing (“We shall not be moved”). Meanwhile, occupiers in masks and hardhats pitch tents in the front yard, hang Christmas lights from the windows, and drop giant banners from the rooftop.
As they do, Alfredo ascends a ladder and addresses these, the otherwise occupied: “Mic check! I wanna thank, first off, this community. . . all the people who live in these houses . . . all you people who came out today in the rain. . . . This moment is really special.” Here, he pauses to collect his thoughts, before concluding: “This is just the beginning. There’s still a lot more work that needs to be done. I hope that all of you will be here, and that that work continues.”
Such work would, no doubt, continue throughout the American winter. The occupiers no longer had a square to anchor them or a GA to assemble them. Hence, much of the real work fell to the working groups, the movement groups, and other offshoots of Occupy. Many of these now sought ways to bring Occupy home to the places where other “99 Percenters” lived, worked, learned, and struggled to make ends meet. It was here that they occupied, this time not for the sake of occupying, but in the service of organizing, embracing low-wage workers and student debtors, the homeless and underwater homeowners, citizens and undocumented immigrants.
Occupy Our Homes was one of the earliest such offshoots. Seeing the “new frontier of the Occupy movement” in the “liberation of vacant bank-owned homes for those in need,” this loose network of exiled occupiers, embattled homeowners, and housing organizers set out to redirect movement resources and media attention—from the “capitals of capital” at the epicenter of the financial crisis to the communities of color at the epicenter of the foreclosure crisis.3
Long before Occupy, such constituencies had fought pitched battles with the banks they held responsible for the crisis. From lenders, local activists had demanded loan modification and principal reduction; from elected officials, they had sought a federal moratorium on foreclosures. Yet despite the breadth of popular support, underwater homeowners had won little relief, with near-record rates of foreclosure persisting through 2011 (see Figure 7.2).4 With their hopes fading fast in other avenues of action, and with veterans of OWS promising to elevate their concerns to a national scale, these “home defenders” now moved to escalate their battle for the block.
Figure 7.2 Home foreclosures and the housing crisis, 2007–2011. Credit: Aaron Carretti. Source: RealtyTrac, “Year-End US Foreclosure Market Reports” (2007–2011).
According to Michael Premo, a young artist and activist of color originally from Albany, New York, the strategy of Occupy Our Homes was “to use this opportunity to bring the fight to Main Street. And to really, clearly articulate Wall Street’s impact on our homes and our lives. When Occupy happened, it provided the opportunity to bring together a bunch of different groups who had been working on those issues, in a way that we hadn’t been previously able to. . . . The goal was to be able to reach out to other homeowners . . . as well as very directly throw a wrench in the system.”
December 6 marked Occupy Our Homes’ inaugural day of action, coordinated by conference call between organizers in at least twenty-five cities, with occupations and other actions planned in Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Oakland, and St. Louis, along with New York City. On that day, occupiers would turn out by the hundreds to move homeless families into vacant properties, to help homeowners stay in foreclosed homes, and to storm foreclosure auctions on the steps of county courthouses, preempting the proceedings with mic checks, “noise demos,” and nonstop singing.5
Nowhere were these battles harder fought than in the historically black neighborhoods of Greater Atlanta, where one in every twenty-seven housing units was in foreclosure in 2011.6 “The idea was that we’re doing this because we want to fight the banks . . . and we want to put a face on the crisis,” says Tim Franzen, a young white activist from the area who worked closely with Occupy Atlanta and Occupy Our Homes. “You get tired of fighting on principle,” he admits. “We need to go after the small wins.”
Occupy Our Homes–Atlanta kicked off with twin occupations of two family-owned homes, both of them facing imminent foreclosure by JPMorgan Chase. The first was a house in the Old Fourth Ward, occupied by four generations of the Pittman family, and recently driven underwater by a predatory loan. On receiving a notice of foreclosure, Eloise Pittman had stopped eating, succumbing to pancreatic cancer shortly thereafter. Led by Eloise’s teenage granddaughters, the occupation commenced seven days later, and continued around the clock for the next three months, culminating in the shutdown of five bank branches in one day, and finally eventuating in principal reduction for the Pittman family.
The second home to be occupied was that of Brigitte Walker, an Iraq War veteran from Riverdale, Georgia, set to be evicted along with her girlfriend and three daughters. Left partially paralyzed by a mortar attack, the former platoon sergeant had been discharged from the service without the means to make her mortgage payments. “It just became very difficult to try and stay afloat,” she would later tell me. “So I contacted my bank, and I asked them for assistance, and they kept taking it back.” When she read about other home occupations in the newspaper, Ms. Walker determined to occupy her own home, then turned to Occupy Atlanta for support.
Ms. Walker recalls the scene on her block during the three-week occupation: “They had set up the tents in the front yard. There was a lot of cameras coming around, trying to bring awareness to my situation. Once my story got out, and the press was coming through the neighborhood, it kind of forced [Chase] to take responsibility. It put the spotlight on them. . . . You know, these companies got bailed out, but they weren’t helping out homeowners the way they should have.”
The campaign to save Ms. Walker’s home won a decisive victory on December 22. “We did a march to Chase Bank,” she recounts, “and by the time I got home, one of the executives left a message on my phone saying they could work with me.” The result was a reduction in her principal and a more affordable mortgage to her name. “The greatest moment,” Ms. Walker continues, “was when my house was saved. And my family didn’t have to worry about where we were going and what we were gonna do.” In the end, she believes, “You can fight just like they can fight. . . . You just have to be willing to roll up your sleeves and stay in the trenches.”
Yet not all home occupations ended happily. The success of the strategy was anything but assured against such powerful adversaries as JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America (see Figure 7.3).“What an uphill battle it could be,” observes Toussaint Losier, a Haitian-American educator and housing activist with the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign, who trained local occupiers in the art of the home takeover. “One of the more frustrating things about home occupations is, you don’t necessarily have a battle plan in terms of the banks. You spend a lot of energy, and a lot of resources, to put a handful of families in homes. But the bank can pretty easily take a lot of them away.”
Figure 7.3 Targets of Occupy actions: banks and financial firms. Credit: Aaron Carretti.
Financial firms, for their part, had their own public relations departments, private security services, and public-private partnerships at their disposal, and they appear to have made liberal use of these services when their properties were threatened with occupation. The former head of security at Bank of America later likened the movement to “a big forest fire that was suppressed and put out,” but expressed concern about the potential “for spontaneous fires to spring back up again.”7 One early internal memo, also attributed to Bank of America, worried that Occupy Our Homes “could impact our industry. . . . We want to make sure that we are all prepared. . . . While in neighborhoods, please take notice of vacant [bank-owned] homes and ensure they are secured.”8
In some cities, police officers enlisted private citizens to foil the occupations. The morning after the “housewarming” in East New York, a day trader named Wise, who had abandoned the property in 2009, showed up at the doorstep to inform its newest occupants, “You guys are in my house. I need you to guys leave this house.” Wise would later reveal that NYPD officers had come to his present residence and pressured him to denounce the occupiers in public for stealing his property.
For the next month, the home occupiers would be tarred as home invaders in the local press.9 At the same time, they would lose control of the space itself to a growing population of squatters, many of them homeless exiles from Zuccotti Park who had come to replace the Glasgow-Carrasquillos in the occupied house. “This was the worst time ever,” recounts Max Berger, who was intimately involved in the effort. “Folks started living in the house and thought it was theirs. . . . They were like, ‘This isn’t about politics. We want this house’. . . . It totally showed the dysfunction of the Occupy movement. We had no way of getting them out of the house. . . . We totally lost control.”
Home occupations, like park occupations, were unmade not only by the threats posed by the authorities, but also by the challenges posed by structural inequalities. The color line remained an enduring line of demarcation, especially in segregated neighborhoods such as East New York, with their long histories of institutional racism, political paternalism, and planned abandonment.10 There were other, more fine-grained divisions at work, too, within Occupy Our Homes: “occupiers” against “organizers,” urban natives against newcomers, homeless squatters against homeowners.
It was one thing to camp out in the financial districts of America’s urban centers, but it was another matter entirely to set up “temporary autonomous zones” in the middle of its most marginalized ghettos and barrios. To its critics, the home occupation was no more than charity work, at best. At worst, they claimed, it was a kinder, gentler form of gentrification. A form of gentrification or colonization, at worst. To its supporters, however, the effort held out the promise of a more meaningful partnership with the communities that comprised what they called the “lower 99 Percent.” Meanwhile, the remnants of the Direct Action Working Group, now dominated by the Occupy “Ninjas,” had announced their intention to seize some of the most expensive real estate in the world.
One blustery day in December, two signs graced the chain-link fence surrounding the vacant lot on Sixth Avenue and Canal Street. The first sign read, “Open to the Public.” The other warned, “Private Property, No Trespassing.” The next day, the first sign was gone, and sixty-five occupiers found themselves behind bars for violating the terms of the second. The parcel in question was the property of Trinity Real Estate, the commercial arm of the eponymous Episcopalian Church and one of the largest landholders in New York City, with $2 billion in assets and $158 million in revenue in 2011. Though Trinity Church had professed its support for OWS throughout the fall, Trinity Real Estate had repeatedly vetoed the occupiers’ pleas for “sanctuary” on its property.11
Many of the occupiers placed more faith in the churches than they did in the state. Some looked to the example of Occupy London, which had taken up residence on the steps of Saint Paul’s Cathedral for the past two months—if not always with its blessing, then at least with its forbearance. “Saint Paul’s was an incredible place,” recalls Clive Menzies, a former investment banker turned Occupy London activist. “We were far luckier in the U.K. than you were in the U.S. We didn’t suffer the daily harassment. . . . They were a lot more subtle about closing down dissent.”
While Saint Paul’s Cathedral would play host to one of the longest-running occupations, Trinity’s would prove the shortest-lived of them all. The Ninjas and their allies in the Direct Action Working Group had planned the takeover for Occupy’s three-month anniversary, December 17 (or “D17”), vowing to “liberate space,” to “take back the commons,” and ultimately to “open it up to the community.”
“December 17 was actually a months-long process,” notes Sandra Nurse, a multiracial occupier from a military family who had abandoned a career in international security to join the occupation. “We [had] tried to take it over two times prior. It was probably the biggest attempt at a land grab in New York City in a long, long time, . . . But nobody in New York was going to let you take a piece of land.”12
The days and nights leading up to D17 saw heated debates around the politics and practicality of such a “land grab,” with the Ninja faction in favor and the Recidivist faction, among others, bitterly opposed. “The big division happened in December,” remembers Isham Christie, of the original NYCGA. “Whether we wanted to take another space, occupy somewhere else, . . . or to make revolutionary reforms. That difference was instantiated in two affinity groups: one did D17, and the other did Occupy Our Homes. Personalities got involved. People were shit-talking.” Despite the naysayers, the Ninjas and their allies went ahead with their plan of attack.
On the afternoon of December 17, I arrived at Duarte Square to the sight of a smaller-than-expected crowd of about 1,000 stalwarts, including reinforcements from up and down the East Coast. There were drum circles, jam sessions, and streetside “think tanks” (or discussion circles). Finally, the Direct Action set showed up all at once, equipped with gas masks, helmets, and backpacks full of supplies, along with homemade stepladders concealed under black-and-yellow banners. We then set off on an elaborate diversion, marching up the Avenue of the Americas before circling back to the appointed target.
“We! Are! Unstoppable!” cried the occupiers, although some of us had our doubts. With brass instruments blaring and war drums sounding, the crowd pressed up against the fenced-off perimeter. I looked on in awe as affinity groups laid siege to the lot, some brazenly scaling the ten-foot-tall fence by way of the wooden ladders. Others worked to open a breach between the fence and the sidewalk.
The intruders were joined, with great fanfare, by an Episcopal bishop in a purple cassock and a colorful procession of costumed characters. The performance artist who played the part of “Miss Santa,” recalls turning to a man dressed as Santa Claus, and saying, “‘Dude! We’re going up the ladder. Everybody’s going to take our picture. And we’re going to occupy that park.’” But before she knew it, Marni found herself caught in a tug-of-war between occupiers and officers in riot gear. “With the police and the protesters, a big fight had erupted. Then somebody took the ladder away, and I was still on top. And I was like—this is actually dangerous! I could really get hurt!”
At this point, the occupiers who had made it over or under the fence beckoned to the rest of us to join them. As it turned out, few were prepared to risk their freedom for a symbolic showdown with the church and state over a parcel of downtown real estate. “I’ll never forget that moment,” says Austin Guest, the direct action practitioner we met in Chapter 5. “Being inside that lot, and lifting up the fence, and seeing maybe a hundred people coming in out of thousands. D17 really taught me that the tactic of open occupation through open confrontation is extremely difficult to do. . . . I don’t even know if we can succeed. The balance of forces is [such that] they can repress any occupation.”
Some believed they would see the second coming of Liberty Square on Sixth and Canal that day. But in the eyes of their detractors, the attempted “reoccupation” had amounted to no more than a ritual reenactment, a spectacle for the cameras, and a sideshow to the “real work.” The city, for its part, saw the incursion as an act of criminal trespass, and would go on to aggressively prosecute those arrested on D17. The courts would concur, delivering eight convictions and one jail sentence. “This nation is founded on the right of private property,” read Judge Matthew Sciarrino’s ruling. “And that right is no less important than the First Amendment.”13
Against a backdrop of external repression and internal dissension, “autonomous action” became the order of the day for many of the occupiers who remained in the trenches. “Autonomy,” like “democracy,” meant many things to many people. In one sense, it denoted the foundational principle of self-determination that had been at the heart of the occupations from the first. In a more anarchist sense, “autonomy” referred to a policy of independence from “any established political party, candidate or organization” (to which OWS had adhered, at least on paper, since the fall). In its most problematic sense, “autonomy” meant the rejection of any constraint on the actions of individuals or affinity groups, no matter what their effect on others, or on the movement as a whole.
There was, to be sure, a certain logic to “autonomous action.” In theory, it endowed its practitioners with the freedom to choose the course of action that was most appropriate to their needs and ends. One affinity group could elect to engage in “arrestable actions,” while another could decide to opt out of such actions. One working group could resolve to organize in support of Occupy Our Homes or Occupy the Hood, while another could resolve to support an occupation in downtown Manhattan.14
As Diego Ibanez of the People’s Kitchen put it to me, “We want to dream together, but we understand that our realities are all different . . . from Obama lovers all the way to smash-the-state anarchists, all coming to the table. Autonomy goes with solidarity.”
In practice, there was a fundamental tension between the logic of autonomous action—planned and executed in secret by close-knit affinity groups—and the logic of mass action—subject to the participation and direction of a diverse, diffuse group of people. In practice, too, the politics and anti-politics of “autonomy” represented an invitation to some occupiers to act unaccountably, if not downright anti-democratically, toward those who did not share their motivations, dispositions, interests, or ideology.
“I remember being in a meeting,” says Nelini Stamp, “and somebody was like, ‘This is a radical anarchist movement!’ And I was like, ‘When was that decided?’ People forgot why we were all in this together. People were just like, ‘Why am I in this?’ I’m not gonna occupy to just occupy. . . . And I don’t want to get arrested for no reason.”
The persistence of police repression meant that participation in Occupy actions of any kind came to carry heightened risks. The occupiers’ mere presence in the streets now implied the very real prospect of arrest, interrogation, prosecution, physical injury, and/or psychological trauma. Increasingly, this led to lines being drawn—and policed—between insiders and outsiders, with high-risk action taken to be the price of admission. This, in turn, came at the cost of excluding the “unarrestables”—that is, anyone who, for reasons of legal status, disability, job security, or family responsibility, could not risk a criminal record or time in “the Tombs.”
As for the hard core that remained in the streets through the winter, what kept them coming back, despite the rising costs of collective action? Many speak of the intense affinity and solidarity they had come to feel toward their comrades, as well as the enmity they continued to feel toward their declared enemies (which varied from the “1 Percent” and “the banks” to “the state” and “the cops”). These occupiers attest to the strong bonds of trust they had forged while “working together,” “experiencing hardship together,” “being in the streets together,” and “building that collective memory together.”
At the same time, for many of the militant young men in the movement—pejoratively known as “manarchists” or “mactivists”—it seemed that competition was as much a motive as cooperation. These young men vied with one another for personal prestige, political influence, and sexual partners among their peers. They jockeyed for position in the social order of Occupy; jostled for a place at the front lines of the action; and loudly asserted their masculinity in the guise of “radical autonomy.”
As they did, they continued to reproduce the power relations that permeated the occupied squares, as well as the society from which they had sprung. “We’re coming from the way things are,” says Messiah Rhodes. “Which is highly competitive, every man for himself. . . . It’s not like you can walk into this Occupy space and we’re all going to be new people. . . . Those problems eventually manifest if we don’t confront them.”
As the winter wore on, the tension between the logic of mass action and the logic of autonomous action was beginning to unravel the occupiers’ alliances. Nowhere did they unravel more spectacularly than in the port cities up and down the West Coast, where the occupiers had once made common cause with dockworkers, truckers, and other laborers.
Occupy Oakland had called for an ambitious day of action on December 12: “The blockade and disruption of the economic apparatus of the 1 percent with a coordinated shutdown of ports on the entire West Coast.” The call had its origin in worker-led campaigns against two giant shipping companies: the first, that of the International Longshore Workers Union (ILWU) against the Export Grain Terminal (EGT), which had locked union grain handlers out of its newest export facility in Longview, WA; the second, that of the independent truck drivers organizing at the Port of Los Angeles against SSA Marine (which, in turn, was owned in part by Goldman Sachs).15
“We will blockade all the ports,” wrote the militants ahead of the shutdown, “in solidarity with the Longshoremen in Longview. . . . The blockade is also intended to disrupt the profits of the 1 percent by showing solidarity with those who are under direct attack.” There was one problem with this epic show of “solidarity” against “Wall Street on the Waterfront”: the occupiers of Oakland, Portland, and Los Angeles had neglected to consult the very unions on whose behalf they claimed to be speaking.16
“It wasn’t just that they were shutting down ports,” says Roy San Filippo of ILWU Local 10. “They were doing it sort of in the name of this ILWU struggle . . . [yet] there was no organized attempt to work with ILWU members or the elected leaders of ILWU locals.” From start to finish, Roy tells me, “The port workers were essentially left out of the conversation. . . . For a movement that prides itself on its directly democratic process, to actively exclude the people most affected by this action from those discussions, is at the very least problematic. . . . It’s a kind of vanguardism.”
Boots Riley called a meeting in the hopes of mediating between the occupiers and their one-time allies. But the occupiers in attendance “went out to destroy that possibility. [They] repeated a rumor that the ILWU would cross the picket line—[which] is tantamount to calling somebody a cop. And it ended with yelling and fighting.” Boots believes that the partisans of autonomous action “didn’t like the idea of a mass movement in the first place. Their idea of a mass movement is a lot of people that agree with them.”
In the event, the occupiers were able to make a moderate show of force, using “community picket lines” to shut down two shifts at the Port of Oakland, as well as three terminals at the Port of Portland and one at the Port of Seattle. But attempted blockades in other cities were easily broken up with baton charges, tear gas, and pepper spray. Even in those places where the occupiers were able to claim a measure of short-term success, in the longer run the triumph of autonomous action over democratic decision-making was bound to do irreparable damage to the once promising relationships they had built.17
Elsewhere, the Occupy-labor alliance endured, even deepened, as the strategy shifted from occupying Wall Street to “organizing the unorganized.” For thirty years, organized labor had been on the losing end of the bargain, as the corporations went on the offensive, unions were beaten back, and living-wage jobs gave way to low-wage work.18
Yet for many of these workers, the Occupy moment had opened up new avenues of direct action, backed by new alliances with other 99 Percenters. Workers who elected to organize now found an expanded tactical toolkit at their disposal. For instance, they could call for a community picket line to disrupt the flow of commerce for an hour, a wildcat strike to withhold labor for a day, or a sidewalk occupation to shine the national spotlight on an offending employer or investor. Throughout the winter of discontent, such “street heat” would raise the temperature at an array of corporate targets (see Figure 7.4).
Figure 7.4 Targets of Occupy actions: nonfinancial firms. Credit: Aaron Carretti.
“The fighting nature of unions came back out through Occupy Wall Street,” Michelle Crentsil will later tell me. “You know, labor pushed Occupy and Occupy pushed labor. I think that was a beautiful relationship when it worked. OWS really stood behind those workers, . . . and where the workers couldn’t necessarily do certain weird, risky actions, OWS organizers and activists would, in solidarity with these workers.”
When hundreds of Brooklyn-based cable technicians and dispatchers, most of them African American, voted to join the Communication Workers of America (CWA), for instance, Cablevision Systems Corp. took a hard line, vowing to keep the industry union-free. CWA noted that the company’s CEO alone made as much, in one year, as the wages and benefits of all 282 workers combined. “It’s pretty much the 99 percent versus the 1 percent here,” asserted cable technician Clarence Adams at the time.19
In partnership with the POC Working Group and the Labor Outreach Committee, the Cablevision workers effectively connected their fight, first, with the legacy of the civil rights movement, and second, with the legions of the larger 99 Percent movement. Weeks of joint protests culminated in a massive Martin Luther King, Jr. Day rally at Manhattan’s Madison Square Garden (one of many Cablevision properties). Ten days later, the “Cablevision 99” would vote in overwhelming numbers to unionize.
Around the same time, Occupy ’s Immigrant Worker Justice (IWJ) group was approached by a group of low-wage workers from Hot & Crusty, an upscale eatery on Manhattan’s Upper East Side owned by a private equity company. The employees, many of them undocumented immigrants from Latin America, were finally ready to come forward after years of wage theft, sexual harassment, and intimidation by their employer. “Where we work we are treated like slaves,” the workers would inform us.
Diego Ibanez recalls the first time the workers showed up at a meeting: “Here was a bunch of ragtag radicals in 60 Wall Street . . . and here comes a worker and sits down in the circle. And he says, ‘These are the conditions that we’re working under. I’m just trying to ask for some help.’” For the first time, Diego continues, “it was like, this movement was for migrant workers, too. And it was not just for them, but it was with them.”
When, on one of the coldest days of the year, the workers gathered to deliver a list of demands, they were joined by a spirited throng, a marching band, and a P.R. team from OWS. Together, workers and occupiers tramped through the snow, then swarmed into the bakery to assert their right to organize. After months of agitation, propaganda, and a brief occupation of the bakery, they would go on to win their campaign for recognition.20
The alliance even reached into “right to work” states in the American South. In Atlanta, for instance, when AT&T announced its intent to lay off 740 union technicians, the workers turned to the local Occupy in a last-ditch effort to save their jobs. “We decided to try to use our home occupation model on AT&T, and see if it would work,” says Tim Franzen. “The workers were in a place where they had nothing to lose.”
“I’ve watched over the years as my co-workers get laid off,” AT&T employee Ed Barlow testified at the time. “Their families affected . . . homes being foreclosed. I don’t want to be in that situation. I want to work. That’s why I’m here today to support Occupy.”
Pooling organizational resources and political know-how, the allies planned a Valentine’s Day occupation of AT&T’s corporate headquarters. Once inside, they refused to leave “until every single job cut is rescinded,” as hundreds walked the picket lines outside. Within twenty-four hours, more than twenty tents had sprouted up along West Peachtree Street.21 Occupy AT&T would hold its ground through flooding, high winds, and a legislative offensive in the statehouse that threatened to turn the act of occupation into a felony in the state of Georgia. Finally, on March 26, the company was compelled to rescind hundreds of planned layoffs. “Ultimately, 255 jobs were saved,” concludes Tim Franzen. “Good jobs. Union jobs. It was definitely the most intense political action that I have ever taken. It was 42 days sleeping on the sidewalk. 42 days out there, man.”22
On the night of March 17, the chanting and mic-checking echoed anew across the refurbished expanse of Zuccotti Park, as we gathered in our hundreds to celebrate Occupy’s six-month anniversary. With the frost melting and the mercury rising, many occupiers were returning to the squares with high hopes for a spring revival.
“Liberty Square is being REOCCUPIED! 500+ people and growing! Come on down!”
By the time the breathless exclamations lit up my cell phone, the occupiers had already announced their intentions with an accumulation of blankets and sleeping bags casually strewn about the pavement. For a time, it seemed as though the infrastructure of Liberty Square was rising anew from the ruins: here, the People’s Kitchen; there, the People’s Library; here, the general assembly; there, the obligatory drum circle. Yet something was amiss. While the world was turning, as it had a way of doing, it felt as if the occupiers were standing still, in suspended animation, unable to move on from the scene of the trauma.
“When you stand in this park!” (When you stand in this park!”)
“Remember the people!” (“Remember the people!”)
“. . . and the reason why we are here!” (“. . . and the reason why we are here!”)
The People’s Mic reaffirmed a sense of shared purpose as it ricocheted among the jubilant crowds. But just what that shared purpose might be—beyond the ritual reenactment marking the passage of time—remained shrouded in mystery that night.
Suddenly, a familiar refrain sounded in the distance: “We! Are! The 99 Percent!”
As it turned out, reinforcements were on their way: they came, first, from the Left Forum at nearby Pace University, where occupiers had rallied several hundred socialists with talk of a new occupation; then, from police precincts across the city, where the white shirts had mustered a small army of blue shirts with promises of overtime.
They followed a well-worn script. As a handful of “pop-up tents”—inscribed with messages like “FORECLOSE ON BANKS NOT PEOPLE”—materialized, seemingly out of nowhere, the NYPD encircled the park’s eastern perimeter, as if preparing for war. And as the militants arrayed themselves behind a protective wall of orange mesh (in imitation of the police nets), Captain Winski read a familiar ultimatum:
“Park’s closed for cleaning. If you do not leave, you will be arrested. . . .”
Moments later, his men would charge headlong into the crowd, pulling, pushing, punching, cuffing, and finally carting their cargo into waiting buses.
The onslaught would land seventy-three occupiers in the Tombs. It would also send a young woman to the emergency room—and ultimately to jail—after her arresting officer beat her into a seizure, leaving the imprint of his hand upon her right breast. Cecily McMillan would go on to face up to seven years in prison, allegedly for assaulting the man who had been filmed assaulting her. Yet Cecily would remain a firm believer in the necessity of nonviolence. “For me, it’s a moral thing,” she would later tell me. “I think that as human beings, we need to treat other people as human beings.”23
In spite of the ongoing repression in the squares and in the streets, the ideas and practices of OWS would endure, forming a kind of connective tissue among onetime occupiers and youthful organizers. At the same time, the “Occupies” would multiply and divide along lines of affinity and ideology, with contrasting visions of what it would take to transform society. As winter turned to spring, new Occupy offshoots would continue to sprout up. But they were increasingly inclined to go their separate ways, branching off in divergent directions in pursuit of distinct aims and aspirations.
In the absence of an occupied square, the former occupiers had tended to align themselves with one of three tendencies: the first, a tendency toward autonomous action, directed against banks, business lobbies, fossil fuel companies, and other entities associated with the “1 Percent”; the second, a tendency toward partisan political action, oriented toward electoral reform and election campaigns for local, state, and federal office; the third, a tendency toward labor, student, and community organizing, aimed at winning “99 Percent power” by way of base-building and coalition-building.
The “autonomous” actors, as we have seen, sought to enact direct democracy, to “prefigure” another society, and to stay in the streets indefinitely until they had created the conditions for that society. Increasingly, they also took on more concrete campaigns of nonviolent direct action, with which they sought to confront corporate power, break up “too big to fail” banks, and disrupt “dirty power” in the name of climate justice. To these ends, they organized national days of action targeting the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a public-private partnership of conservative state legislators and corporate power players; an “F the Banks” campaign of civil disobedience targeting Bank of America and others for their role in the housing and climate crises; and an “Earth Month” of action targeting “Big Oil,” “Big Coal,” and “Big Gas,” while “connecting the dots between the 1 Percent and the destruction of the planet.”24
Partisan political activists, by contrast, pursued an “inside-outside” strategy to reform American democracy, “get money out of politics,” and elect progressive candidates to public office. Many such reformers directed their efforts toward local ballot initiatives: for the repeal of Citizens United, the restriction of corporate lobbying, and the introduction of public financing. As the presidential campaign kicked into high gear, some lent their support to third parties—from the Greens to various stripes of socialist—or to primary challenges with “Bum Rush the Vote.” Many 99 Percenters, however, eventually closed ranks behind Democratic candidates like Elizabeth Warren, Tammy Baldwin, and ultimately President Obama, mobilizing to defeat Republican nominee Mitt Romney, whom they took to calling the “1 Percent candidate.”25
Finally, the organizers worked to build local bases of power, and to rebuild the bridges Occupy had built with poor and working-class communities. They had emerged from the Occupy moment with an expanded tactical toolkit and an extended network of support. When it came time to “escalate” against an employer, lender, or landlord, they were now more open to a strategy of nonviolent direct action, to which end they could now activate a ready reserve of allies, by way of the Occupy network. These alliances outlived the occupations that had inspired them, as the occupiers joined with residents to occupy foreclosed homes and shut down foreclosure auctions; with workers to occupy workplaces and picket abusive employers; with teachers to occupy schools slated for cutbacks or for closure; and with community activists and civil rights organizers to rein in racial profiling and racial violence in towns and cities across America.26
Meanwhile, the Occupy-labor alliance was about to stage its most ambitious act yet: the “Day without the 99 Percent.” The notion of a May Day “general strike” had originated in the Occupy Los Angeles General Assembly as early as December 2011, which called for a total withdrawal of participation in the economic system on May 1, 2012: “No work, no school, no housework, no shopping, no banking.” Occupiers everywhere were urged to strike “for migrant rights, jobs for all, a moratorium on foreclosures, and peace, and to recognize housing, education and health care as human rights.”27 They found inspiration in the “Day without an Immigrant,” when immigrant workers had struck for citizenship rights on May 1, 2006. They would now find renewed inspiration in an international strike wave that began with Occupy Nigeria in January 2012, and continued with general strikes in Greece and Spain in February and March.28
Back in New York City, plans for the “Day without the 99 Percent” came together in fits and starts. Behind the bulk of the organizing was an uneasy coalition consisting of OWS working groups, working-class interest groups, and Far Left formations. They had little in common beyond their May Day mission, which was encapsulated in three points of unity: “Legalize,” “Unionize,” and “Organize.” With the general assembly out of commission, they formed an ad hoc council known as the “4 × 4.” The council included four rotating “spokes” from each of the four coalition partners: four from OWS itself; four from the union-sponsored Alliance for Labor Rights, Immigrant Rights, and Jobs for All; four from the Workers World–backed May 1 Coalition; and, finally, four from an independent constellation of immigrant community-based organizations.29
Throughout the spring, the coalition partners clashed over questions of strategy, tactics, and rhetoric. Trade union leaders rejected any talk of a “general strike” outright, insisting instead on a permitted protest march and rally. According to one veteran organizer from CWA District 1, “A general strike . . . is when all the workers in a city decide that they’re not working. It’s not when an outside group says, ‘How about we stop working for a day?’”30“It was a really rocky relationship with the unions,” says Marisa Holmes. “We spent six weeks talking about whether to include the word ‘strike.’ The unions didn’t want it. They said you couldn’t possibly strike in New York. [But] we came up with this compromise call in solidarity with all calls to action around May Day.”
Such compromises proved unacceptable to many in the anarchist orbit. Hundreds broke off to form their own assemblies under the aegis of “Strike Everywhere,” calling for “wildcat” actions in place of permitted protests.31 Autonomous affinity groups went on the warpath, leaving a trail of shattered windows in their wake, and sparking impassioned debates on the “diversity of tactics” and the question of nonviolence.
By day, others of the occupiers sought to present a friendlier face with a series of “Occupy Town Squares” in public parks like Fort Greene and Washington Square. Still others tried to reach working New Yorkers with “99 Pickets,” which would target some of the city’s most unpopular employers in the days leading up to May 1 (see Figure 7.5). By night, artists and agitators fanned out across the five boroughs, armed with an arsenal of spray paint and the arresting imagery of the American autumn.32
Figure 7.5 “99 Pickets,” East 42nd Street, May 1, 2012. Credit: Michael A. Gould-Wartofsky.
As the day of reckoning approached, police preparations ranged from uninvited visits to the residences of known anarchists in Brooklyn to civil disorder drills on Randall’s Island, complete with mock protesters facing off with officers in riot gear. Detectives partnered with intelligence analysts and “private sector security managers” to monitor, mitigate, and infiltrate May Day organizing, surveilling planning meetings, and scanning social media networks for signs of trouble.33 The NYPD’s six-page May Day “Event Advisory Bulletin”—part of a program tasked with “countering terrorism through information sharing”—reveals the scale and the scope of that surveillance:
Elements of OWS . . . have called for demonstators to engage in disruptive activities including: A “Wildcat March” in which protestors would . . . march without a permit. . . . Attempts to block Manhattan-bound automotive traffic at bridges and tunnels. . . . A ‘NYC Hoodie March Against Police Violence’. . . . A “High School Walk Out,” in which high school students will leave class at noon. . . . Picket lines staged in front of various businesses across the five boroughs. . . . Lectures, workshops, professors asked to bring classes to the park.34