Beginnings

“Are you ready for a Tahrir moment?”

—Call from Adbusters, July 13th 2011

Occupy Wall Street is part of a global movement that has reached nearly every continent in the last year. Although the protests in disparate nations have taken place under different forms of government and have varied in the specificity of their demands, all have expressed a similar outrage with the inequities of unfettered global capitalism. In the first months of 2011, North Africa and the Middle East saw a myriad of popular protests. Unrest in Tunisia broke out on December 17, 2010, after a 26-year-old street vendor, Mohammed Bouazizi, lit himself ablaze because the police kept confiscating his wares to extort money, and he couldn’t support his family of eight. Photos and videos of Bouazizi went viral on Facebook, igniting the rage of a generation of Tunisian youth and sparking colossal street demonstrations that led to the January 14 ouster of Tunisian president Ben Ali.

Next, protests erupted in Algeria, Lebanon, Jordan, Mauritania, Oman, and Saudi Arabia. The first Egyptian street protests took place on January 25, and by January 31, more than 250,000 had swarmed Cairo’s Tahrir Square. In the mild winter weather, tens of thousands pitched small private tents and large open-air tents–canvas or transparent plastic sheets draped over beams. Visitors donated food to the “tent city,” which brought together people of all ages, ideologies, and fashions. Popular committees were formed—a volunteer security service, trash collectors, medical services, a “Painters’ Corner” for literate protesters to make signs, outdoor exhibitions of revolutionary banners, a makeshift stage for poets to recite their poems, even an open-air space for weddings. These committees and specially designated spaces would serve as a template for later movements in Europe and the United States.

Three days later, on February 14, the first wave of popular unrest in the U.S. shook the Wisconsin State Capitol in Madison and quickly reached nearby college campuses and the cities of Milwaukee, Green Bay, and Columbus, Ohio. The revolt had a specific target—the Wisconsin Budget Repair Bill, which also limited collective bargaining rights–but some protesters brandished Egyptian flags. On February 20, Egyptian union leader Kamal Abbas posted a YouTube video encouraging the “workers in Wisconsin.” “We stand with you as you stood with us,” he said.

By summer, the uprisings had spread to Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, Asia, and Europe. All of these protests influenced the people who were to participate in OWS. Senia, from OWS’s Press Working Group, noted, for example, that Latina/o occupiers got “a really big inspiration” from less-publicized but recent protests in Chile, Colombia, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Venezuela. But of all the protests of 2011, the massive Spanish encampments of Los Indignados, “the idignants,” had perhaps the largest impact on the form and strategies of OWS.

Coordinated through Facebook and Twitter, the Spanish May 15 or 15M movement marched in roughly 60 Spanish cities and set up camps in highly visible public squares–giving the occupiers another name, Las Acampadas, or “camp-outs.” Spain’s public broadcasting company estimated that 6.5 to 8 million people joined the movement to protest welfare cuts, 20-percent unemployment, and other results of corporate greed.

Forming General Assemblies and working groups that reached decisions through a consensus-based process, the Indignados, even more than the Tahrir Square protesters, created structures that Occupy Wall Street would recycle and repurpose. Willie Osterweil, an activist involved in some of the earliest planning sessions for OWS, as well as the New York City General Assembly (NYCGA) and an earlier occupation called Bloombergsville, described the Spanish encampments he visited in June: “These camps became centers of information, protest, and revolutionary life: Indignados set up kitchens distributing free food, council booths focused on individual issues (the environment, the military, women’s rights, etc.), and held meetings, teach-ins, and public discussions. This was a different kind of democracy, in which work, resources, and decisions are all shared. They cover the camps with placards displaying revolutionary slogans, and everywhere they go they leave behind cloth banners, cardboard signs, and graffiti.”

The Spanish occupation electrified Willie. “In Spain, I gained renewed urgency and actually (rather than just intellectually) recognized the nature of the historical moment and the possibilities available to us here in the U.S.,” he wrote in a blog. “The camp feels magical, but it’s also totally jerry-rigged, improvisation built upon improvisation; tape, string, tarp, cloth, metal tent poles holding up a sagging canvas roof, plastic sheets propped up on three long bamboo rods taped together. A truly massive storm could take the whole thing down–but can’t the same be said of the status quo? This camp, if joined by enough like it around the world, could be that storm.”

During his visit, Willie built contacts with the Indignados and later conferred with them as he and other activists planned the occupations in New York City. “My experience in Spain was incredibly important in influencing my participation in Bloombergville, the NYCGA, and ultimately OWS.” His interactions with the Indignados also show how organizers on different continents communicated and synced with each other, sharing ideas and tactics.

Among other commonalities, protesters across the world occupied spaces of symbolic importance and built an intentional community–attempting to create, in miniature, the kind of society that they wanted to live in–a society that took care of all its members’ needs for food, clothing, shelter. The encampments gave them a sense of community and family, as well as a set location to talk to one anther and to the press. And while Facebook and Twitter were unevenly censored in some of these countries, many of the protesters carried smartphones–allowing highly organized movements to quickly mobilize massive numbers of people. This partly explains not only the wildfire spread of the 2011 protests but also their preference for non-hierarchical organizing and “horizontal” decision-making–which resembled online social networking, rather than traditional governing structures.

When Willie returned from Spain and the Indignados protests, the New Yorkers Against Budget Cuts (NYABC), the International Socialist Organization (ISO), and a few other groups were staging a much humbler occupation against Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s proposed budget cuts. They had dubbed this three-week occupation Bloombergville. If the city council approved the mayor’s proposal in its original form, 4,000 public school teachers would be laid off and 20 firehouses would close. Starting on June 16, several dozen protesters occupied the corner of Broadway and Park, near City Hall. The warm June nights made tents unnecessary, so the core group slept in sleeping bags under scaffolding. Major municipal and teacher’s unions provided food, and the occupation also featured a small library and teach-ins by CUNY professors. The occupiers stayed until a few days after the June 29 city council approval of a modified budget.

Like the protesters who later took part in the early General Assemblies and Occupy Wall Street, the Bloombergville occupiers spoke of the strong sense of community they experienced through these occupations and meetings. The people who were there “forged very close and comradely relationships,” said Jackie Di Salvo, 68, a Baruch professor and longtime labor organizer. “It was remarkably easy for me to sleep there. People stayed up all night to make sure everyone was okay.” Jez Bold, 27, who joined Bloombergville in its second week, had long avoided more conventional forms of political protest, but he was “amazed by the idea of this community forming around this political act.”

Jez explained that the sense of community came partly from the movement’s atypical form: “It was not a protest or march in any traditional way. It certainly was not a rally in any traditional way. It was all these people who just planned to sleep there, so they all had to work together to sleep there.” Jez watched Bloombergville inhabitants plan meals, create a library, lead teach-ins and even brainstorm a Bloombergville opera. These projects created an atmosphere Jez described as “sort of like a porch. Like everybody had a porch in New York and you could go down and hang out on your collective porch on Park Place and Broadway. ”

Jez also witnessed the arrests of the “Bloombergville 13,” who ziptied themselves together in the lobby to prevent the city council from voting on the budget deal. “They all sat down, ziptied their arms together and sat down in a circle and refused to leave. Police came in, told them to leave, they refused,” Jez recalled. “They started cutting off zipties, someone re-ziptied themselves to each other, and eventually just pulled them off one by on and took them into the back,” arresting all of them. The following day, the city council voted. “Everyone was pretty disappointed,” he said, when they learned that a large budget cut had been approved. But some took heart from the fact that the city council had modified Bloomberg’s proposal and deleted most of the layoffs and firehouse closures.

***

The NYABC had just finished the Bloombergville occupation when, on July 13, the Vancouver-based, ecological, anticonsumerist magazine Adbusters released its call to action:

#OCCUPY WALL STREET

Are you ready for a Tahrir moment?

On Sept 17, flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street.

On the magazine’s Web site, a blog post below the ad urged its readers to catch the Zeitgeist and fashion themselves into a movement that was “a fusion of Tahrir with the acampadas of Spain.” The post’s author envisioned a crowd of 20,000 descending on Wall Street “for a few months,” in order to “incessantly repeat one simple demand in a plurality of voices.” For a movement that would later be lambasted for lacking clear demands, it’s ironic that the blog post suggested that the occupation should revolve around just one: “we demand that Barack Obama ordain a Presidential Commission tasked with ending the influence money has over our representatives in Washington.”

Adbusters gave Occupy Wall Street a name, assignment, and due date–along with a nudge to model itself on the Egyptian and Spanish encampments. But subsequently, the magazine was hardly involved. According to Willie, Adbusters provided little material support for the occupation. “They provided a couple neat images, and the idea,” he said, “but people on the ground in NYC did all the work.”

When NYABC heard of the Adbusters call, the group “was extremely skeptical that something just put out on the Internet could [mobilize a protest of that size], but they decided to go along and see what happened,” said Jackie. In Bloombergville, the central structure and decision-making process had been the General Assembly (GA), so NYABC decided to “call a General Assembly, see who showed up, and go from there.”

On August 2, the first GA convened at the Charging Bull statue, A Wall Street icon located at the tip of Bowling Green Park. “Most people had had no experience with the GA,” said Jackie. “So the meeting at the Bull was being run like a rally, with speakers. There even was a discussion to immediately, at the end of the speakers, march on Wall Street.” Those who had showed up for a GA grew more and more impatient, until one activist, Georgia Sangri, finally shouted, “This is not a General Assembly,” and persuaded a group of people to move to the other side of the Bull and talk in GA format. Many who attended that first, brief GA had heard of the Adbusters call, but they quickly dropped the idea of demanding a Presidential Commission. This first, brief GA concluded with a plan to reconvene, one week later, at the Irish Hunger Memorial in Battery Park, downtown Manhattan. The August 9 GA taught this new group how General Assemblies work–the nuts and bolts of the democratic process. From then on, the GA met each week in Tompkins Square Park, in Manhattan’s Alphabet City.

The purpose of these August and early September GAs was to plan a major anti-Wall Street protest on September 17. In anticipation of this event, new committees formed: there was the Food Committee, which had raised $1,000 for supplies, the Student Committee, the Outreach Committee; the Internet Working Group; the Arts and Culture Working Group; and the Tactical Committee. Some organizers doubted that the protest would make an impact, but they still advocated for increased organization. As more and more people heard the Adbusters call, “even the people who had been skeptical at first felt like somebody’s got to organize this, because people may show up!” Jackie said. Early GAs also recognized “it could be dangerous going to Wall Street, if people weren’t prepared.” So committees formed to address participants’ fears. This preparation extended beyond safety concerns. Organizers worried that, if the event fizzled, all the momentum that had been building throughout the summer would fade. So the Outreach Committee charged itself with bringing people to GAs in order that meetings would continue, even if September 17 failed as an individual action. In addition, the Arts and Culture Working Group planned a New York Fun Exchange Carnival on Wall Street to coincide with September 17: they intended to use cultural activities to inspire political change.

Of the committees formed in the weeks leading up to September 17, the Tactical Committee, had perhaps the most impact. While the Outreach Committee worked to draw people to the GAs, and Arts and Culture sought to engage their imaginations, the Tactical Committee “determined the time and place for the first General Assembly to happen and everything that would need to be done in order for that to happen.” They experimented with a few occupations to find out if it was possible to occupy a public park or Wall Street. At the beginning of September, some tried Tompkins Square Park, but the police immediately kicked them out when the park closed for the evening. Others, from Arts and Culture, tried to occupy Wall Street itself on September 1. The cops rounded them up and arrested them. One member of the committee revealed that the group was expecting “the police to be particularly repressive” on September 17. The plan was to “attempt to have a GA at one location” and then “move to a new place and then another place throughout the weekend.” The group combed lower Manhattan for public parks and privately-owned public spaces that could hold at least 2,000 people. They wanted locations that were “close enough to Wall Street so that symbolism remained,” and that also provided multiple exits, in case the police threatened to sweep the square for arrests.

Eight spaces fit the Tactical Committee’s criteria–including Chase Manhattan Plaza, their first choice. When the Tactical Committee found out at noon on September 17 that “Chase Plaza was completely barricaded,” and protesters “would be unable to hold a General Assembly there,” members of the committee “went around to the other proposed locations–which were not released to anyone up until that point–and agreed that Zuccotti Park would be the best choice” to host that day’s events. The organizers handed out copies of their previously undisclosed map of backup locations to “fellow trustworthy organizers” at 2:30 p.m. By 3:00 p.m., Occupy Wall Street was hosting its first official General Assembly and had found a new home in Zuccotti Park.