stirred up and mobilize it into a political force.
“The years in which the hegemony of neoliberalism was unchallenged have fortunately come to a close.”
—Chantal Mouffe28
November 15, 2011, 1:36 a.m. EST
A massive police force is presently evicting Liberty Square, home of Occupy Wall Street for the past two months and birthplace of the 99% movement that has spread across the country.
The raid started just after 1:00am. Supporters and allies are mobilizing throughout the city, presently converging at Foley Square. Supporters are also planning public actions for the coming days, including occupation actions.
Two months ago a few hundred New Yorkers set up an encampment at the doorstep of Wall Street. Since then, Occupy Wall Street has become a national and even international symbol—with similarly styled occupations popping up in cities and towns across America and around the world. The Occupy movement was inspired by similar occupations and uprisings such as those during Arab Spring, and in Spain, Greece, Italy, France, and the UK.
A growing popular movement has significantly altered the national narrative about our economy, our democracy, and our future. Americans are talking about the consolidation of wealth and power in our society, and the stranglehold that the top 1% have over our political system. More and more Americans are seeing the crises of our economy and our democracy as systemic problems that require collective action to remedy. More and more Americans are identifying as part of the 99%, and saying “enough!”
This burgeoning movement is more than a protest, more than an occupation, and more than any tactic. The “us” in the movement is far broader than those who are able to participate in physical occupation. The movement is everyone who sends supplies, everyone who talks to their friends and families about the underlying issues, everyone who takes some form of action to get involved in this civic process.
This moment is nothing short of America rediscovering the strength we hold when we come together as citizens to take action to address crises that impact us all.
Such a movement cannot be evicted. Some politicians may physically remove us from public spaces—our spaces—and, physically, they may succeed. But we are engaged in a battle over ideas. Our idea is that our political structures should serve us, the people—all of us, not just those who have amassed great wealth and power. We believe that is a highly popular idea, and that is why so many people have come so quickly to identify with Occupy Wall Street and the 99% movement. You cannot evict an idea whose time has come.
Most of us had been anticipating an imminent police raid of Zuccotti Park (a.k.a. Liberty Square), so I wrote the first draft of the above press statement about ten days before the eviction. Initially, the draft was received less than enthusiastically by some of my colleagues in the OWS Public Relations working group, so I decided to abandon it and repurpose some of the language for another article.29 However, as the eviction unfolded in the middle of that November night, members of the PR team asked me to adapt the draft as quickly as possible and post it to OccupyWallSt.org and blast it to the press.30 I raced over to Patrick Bruener’s apartment, we gave it a final look-over, and we hit “send.”31
Beyond the radical fringe
Two months earlier, I was living in Providence, Rhode Island, and I was quite skeptical about Occupy Wall Street. When I first read Adbusters magazine’s call for a Tahrir Square–style uprising in New York City’s financial district, the lack of appreciation for context annoyed me.32 Wall Street is not Tahrir Square. And though I was inspired by the Arab Spring, I didn’t think you could neatly transplant its tactics. Moreover, as Occupy Wall Street kicked off, it looked to me like the brave radicals initiating it were making the classic mistake of putting their counter-cultural foot forward first, thereby dooming the action to be locked onto a predictably lonely path where so many Americans who agreed with their populist sentiments would be inoculated against them as the messengers. It seemed to me to fit a pattern I had long been critical of, where self-selecting “activists” connect with each other at the expense of connecting with the broader society. A week into Occupy Wall Street, I even wrote a post for my blog with this critique titled, Occupy Wall Street: Small Convergence of a Radical Fringe.33
That was the experienced grassroots organizer in me. That’s the thing about experience. When you hear about an idea, you can instantly foresee a million things that could go wrong. And when your concerns repeatedly play out, it is easy to grow a little cynical and even a little bitter. It is easy to forget that revolutionary moments require an ingredient that you may now be running low on: a drive that once consumed you, but now pulses through the veins and brains of people younger than yourself, whom you are tempted to condescendingly dismiss as politically naïve. Can’t they see that to mobilize masses of people, you need more than a militant call to action and a Twitter account? Sure, just about everyone was furious with Wall Street, but turning latent discontent into coordinated collective action requires strategies to organize people and build alliances, and an appreciation for context.
Sometimes what you really want is to be proven wrong. That is how I started to feel when the occupation of Zuccotti Park persisted and the story started to significantly break into the mainstream media cycle; when labor unions and longstanding community organizations started to endorse and to plan actions under the new frameworks of “occupy” and “we are the 99%”; when GOP strategist Frank Luntz said he was “frightened to death”34 of the effort and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor decried the “growing mob”35 of Wall Street protesters, while House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi expressed her support,36 and the New York Times also endorsed the protest.37
Overnight, it seemed, a new political force had emerged; one that had the potential to frame the national debate and finally create popular pressure—a counterforce to the formidable power of capital. Despite my doubts, the thing had started to go big.
Grassroots movements for change are more often than not rife with all kinds of clumsy missteps. Thankfully the concerns that I was stuck on were not enough to stop the rapid growth of this audacious new movement. I realized that I myself had to get unstuck. If I were to wait for the perfect movement—one that I had no critiques of—I would wait forever. History would pass me by.
I heard that my friends Beka Economopoulos, Brooke Lehman, and Han Shan were involved, and I called them up. Then I freed up ten days from my schedule and took the train from Providence to New York City.
Ten days turned into the better part of a year.
Occupation as tactic and as symbol
By the time I arrived, Occupy Wall Street had already broken into the mainstream media and was profoundly changing the national narrative about wealth, power, and democracy in the United States. Occupy’s initial success in recalibrating the mainstream discourse about politics and the economy is remarkable. It was as if a 30-year spell had suddenly been lifted, as a new “common sense” was unveiled about what is at stake and who is to blame. It behooves us to retrospectively examine why this particular tactic of occupation struck such a nerve with so many Americans and became such a powerful catalyzing symbol. To do so, we have to make a distinction between Occupy’s broad audience and its core actors, and between the meanings that resonated popularly and the meanings that the physical occupation held for the dedicated people who were on the ground occupying. Zuccotti Park was home to a thriving civic space, with ongoing dialogues and debates, a public library, a kitchen, live music, General Assemblies, more meetings than you can imagine, and all varieties of high-energy, creative activities. In this sense, occupation was more than just a tactic. Many participants were consciously prefiguring the kind of society they wanted to live in.38
But it was also a tactic. A tactic is basically an action taken
