moments of rupture, people find themselves members of a “we” that did not exist, at least not as an entity with agency and identity and potency, until that moment; new things seem possible, or the old dream of a just society reemerges, and for a little while it shines not just as a possibility but as how people live with one another. Utopia is sometimes the goal, it’s often the moment, and it’s a hard moment to explain, since it usually involves hardscrabble ways of living, squabbles, and eventually disillusion and factionalism—but also more ethereal things: the discovery of personal and collective power, the realization of dreams, the birth of bigger dreams, a sense of connection that is as emotional as it is political, and lives that change and do not change back to what they were before, even when the glory subsides.
Sometimes the earth closes over these moments, and they have no obvious consequences—sometimes they’re the Velvet Revolution and the fall of the Berlin Wall and all those glorious insurrections in the East Bloc in 1989, and empires crumble and ideologies fall away like shackles. Occupy was such a moment, and one so new that it’s hard to measure its consequences. I have often heard that Freedom Summer in Mississippi registered some voters and built some alliances, but more than that, the young participants were galvanized into a feeling of power, of commitment, of mission, perhaps, that stayed with them as they went on to do a thousand different things that mattered and joined or helped build the slow anti-authoritarian revolution that has been unfolding for the last half century or so. It’s too soon to tell.
Aftermaths are hard to measure and preludes are often even more elusive. And one of the great strengths of this book is its recounting of the many people who laid the fire that burst into flame on September 17, 2011, giving light and heat to many of us yet. The drummer girl of that moment in Paris walked into a group where many people were ready to ignite, to march, to see the world change—injustice and difficulty as well as hope and devotion make these conflagrations. We need, with every insurrection, revolution, and social rupture to remember that we will never know the whole story of how it happened and that what we can’t measure still matters.
Early in this superb book, Nathan Schneider cites Mike Andrews talking about how the general assemblies of the group by that name, the General Assembly of New York City, with their emphasis on egalitarian participation, respect, and consensus decision making, retooled him: “It pushes you toward being more respectful of the people there. Even after General Assembly ends I find myself being very attentive in situations where I’m not normally so attentive. So if I go get some food after General Assembly, I find myself being very polite to the person I’m ordering from, and listening if they talk back to me.” This is the kind of tiny personal change that can be multiplied by the hundreds of thousands, given the number of Occupy participants globally. But there have been quantifiable consequences too.
Everyone admitted almost immediately after Occupy Wall Street (OWS) appeared in the fall of 2011 that the conversation had changed—the brutality and obscenity of Wall Street was addressed, the hideous suffering of ordinary people crushed by medical, housing, and college debt came out of the shadows, and Occupy became a point at which people could testify about this destruction of their hopes and lives. California passed a homeowners’ bill of rights to curtail the viciousness of the banks, and Strike Debt emerged as an Occupy offshoot in late 2012 to address indebtedness in creative and insurrectionary ways. Student debt came up for discussion, and student loan reform began in various small ways. Invisible suffering had been made visible.
Occupy Wall Street also built alliances around racist persecution, from the Trayvon Martin case in Florida to stop and frisk in New York to racist bank policies and foreclosures in San Francisco, where a broad-based housing rights movement came out of the Occupy movement. It was a beautiful movement, because the definition of “we” as the 99 percent was so much more inclusive than almost anything before, be it movements focused on race or gender, or on class when class was imagined as the working class against a middle class that also works for a living (rather than against the elites that were christened the 1 percent in one of Occupy’s most contagious memes). Though the movement abounded in young white people, many kinds of people were involved, from kids to World War II veterans and ex–Black Panthers, from libertarians to liberals to insurrectionists, from tenured to homeless to famous.
And there was so much brutality, from the young women pepper-sprayed early on at an OWS demonstration and the students famously pepper-sprayed while sitting down peacefully at UC Davis to the poet laureate Robert Hass, clubbed in the ribs at UC Berkeley’s branch of Occupy, to eighty-four-year-old Dorli Rainey, assaulted by police at Occupy Seattle, and the Iraq War veteran Scott Olsen, whose skull was shattered by a projectile fired by Oakland police. The massive institutional violence made it clear Occupy was a serious threat. At the G-20 economic summit in 2011, President Dmitry Medvedev of Russia warned, “The reward system of shareholders and managers of financial institutions should be changed step by step. Otherwise the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ slogan will become fashionable in all developed countries.” That was the voice of fear, because the 99 percent’s realized dreams were the 1 percent’s nightmares.
We’ll never know what the drummer girl in Paris in 1789 was thinking, but thanks to this meticulous and elegant book, we know what one witness-participant was thinking all through the first year of Occupy, and what many of the sparks and some of the tinder were thinking, and what it was like to be warmed by that beautiful conflagration that spread across the world, to be part of that huge body that wasn’t exactly civil society but was something akin and sometimes even larger, as Occupy encampments and general assemblies spread from Auckland, New Zealand, to Hong Kong, from Oakland to London, and to many small towns and counties in 2011. Some Occupy encampments lasted well into 2012, and others spawned things that are still with us: coalitions and alliances and senses of possibility and frameworks for understanding what’s wrong and what could be right. It was a sea change, a watershed, a dream realized imperfectly (because only unrealized dreams are perfect), a groundswell that is still ground on which to build.
PART
ONE
SUMMER TO FALL
ONE|SOME GREAT CAUSE
#A99 #Bloombergville #Jan25 #SolidarityWI #NYCGA #OCCUPYWALLSTREET #October2011 #OpESR #OpWallStreet #S17 #SeizeDC #StopTheMach #USDOR
Under the tree where the International Society for Krishna Consciousness was founded in 1966, on the south side of Tompkins Square Park in the East Village, sixty or so people are gathered in a circle around a yellow banner that reads, in blue spray paint, “general assembly of nyc.” It is Saturday, August 13, 2011, the third of the General Assembly’s evening meetings.
“No cops or reporters,” someone decrees at the start of the meeting. Others demand a ban on photographs.
From where I’m sitting in the back, my hand inches up, and I stand and explain that I am a writer who covers resistance movements. I promise not to take pictures.
Just then, a heavyset man in a tight T-shirt, with patchy dark hair and a beard, starts snapping photos. He is Bob Arihood, a fixture of the neighborhood known for documenting it with his camera and his blog. People shout at him to stop; he shouts back something about the nature of public space. Soon, a few from the group break off to talk things through with him, and the discussion turns back to me.
The interrogation and harrowing debate that follow are less about me, really, than about them. Are they holding a public meeting or a private one? Is a journalist to be regarded as an agent of the state or a potential ally? Can they expect to maintain their anonymity?
After half an hour, at last, I witness an act of consensus: hands rise above heads, fingers wiggle. I can stay. A little later, I see that Arihood and the people who’d gone to confront him are laughing together.
