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Occupy Wall Street Protest Reaches a Crossroads
Cara Buckley and Colin Moynihan, New York Times
THE signs seemed to point toward the end of Occupy Wall Street. The day after the city stripped the protesters encamped in Lower Manhattan of their generators and fuel, the Northeast was hit with a bone-chilling snowstorm that blanketed their tents and tarps with sleet and ice, and left at least one protester hospitalized for hypothermia. Yet the encampment at Zuccotti Park endured.
Seven weeks in, the protest has become a fact of life in New York City, a tourist draw to rival ground zero, and a teachable moment for parents. Its slogan, “We are the 99 percent” is a staple of the popular discourse.
More than $500,000 in donations has flowed to the protesters in Lower Manhattan, while labor unions and elected officials have come to their aid. Marches and occupations that have sprung up nationwide have served as a national microphone for the cause.
And yet, winter looms and authorities in other cities have been cracking down on encampments, sometimes violently. The mayor’s patience with the occupation seems to be wearing thin, and local residents have tired of the headaches associated with the protest. An influx of outsiders to the park, meanwhile, has threatened the protesters’ ability to organize.
More broadly, the protest’s leaderless and nonhierarchical structure raises the question of how effective it can be.
(4 November 2011)
Occupy Wall Street Ads Hit TV This Weekend
Sarah Kessler, Mashable
Occupy Wall Street could be occupying your television this weekend.
Supporters chipped in more than $6,000 to a crowdfunding campaign that will put a video of protesters explaining their objectives in the commercial lineup of cable television channels.
“It’s sort of an occupied version of advertising,” crowdfunding site Loudsauce’s co-founder Colin Mutchler says. “It’s about occupying ad space with what citizens think is important for the country.” …
(5 November 2011)
The Audacity of Occupy Wall Street
Richard Kim, The Nation
… But then in these grim times, something unexpected happened: at first scores met in parks around New York City this summer to plan an occupation of Wall Street, then hundreds responded to their call, then thousands from persuasions familiar and astonishing, and now more than 100 cities around the country are Occupied. In the face of unchecked capitalism and a broken, captured state, the citizens of Occupy America have done something desperate and audacious—they put their faith and hope in the last seemingly credible force left in the world: each other.
Sometime during the second week of the Occupation, Joe took that leap. Within his first hour at Liberty Park, he was “totally won over by the Occupation’s spirit of cooperation and selflessness.” He has been going back just about every day since. It took him a few days to find the Arts and Culture working group, which has its roots in the first planning meetings and has already produced a museum’s worth of posters (from the crudely handmade to slicker culture-jamming twists on corporate designs), poetry readings, performance-art happenings, political yoga classes and Situationist spectacles like the one in which an artist dressed in a suit and noose tie rolled up to the New York Stock Exchange in a giant clear plastic bubble to mock the speculative economy’s inevitable pop.
Alexandre Carvalho, a Brazilian doctor who worked in Rio’s favelas and was one of the original organizers of Arts and Culture, explains that the group’s praxis revolves around two principles. “First—autonomy, horizontalism and collectivism. We’re nonhierarchical, self-regulating, self-deliberating and self-organizing. Everyone is creating their own stuff, but we’re connected to a larger hub through the Arts and Culture group.” The second principle is something Alexandre calls “virgeo,” a mashup of “virtual” and “geographical.” “We try to have both an on-the-ground conversation and an online conversation so that people all over the world can send their ideas and respond to our work.” The same concepts apply, more or less, to the other culture working groups at OWS—from Media (which shoots video for OWS’s livestream, documents direct actions and produces educational videos) to the Library (which has received more than 3,500 books, all logged in an online card catalog, from the nearly complete works of Noam Chomsky to Creative Cash: How to Sell Your Crafts, Needlework, Designs and Know-How).
… it’s creative types, either shoved into crisis by the precarious economy or just sick of making things under the corporate system, who have responded most enthusiastically to Occupy Wall Street’s call. It’s not where one might have looked for a revolt to emerge organically. In subsequent Occupations like the one in Oakland, anti-racist organizers have been a dominant force; and in Rust Belt towns across the Midwest, blue-collar types have led the way. But the first spark, here in New York, was generated when artists, students and academics hooked up with activists from Bloombergville, a three-week occupation near City Hall to protest the mayor’s budget cuts. This unlikely mix has proved to be a tactical boon, says Alexandre: “Artists are in a privileged position to take the terrain without too much repression. It’s harder for the police to move against you when you are clearly doing something nonviolent and artistic.”
… Since September 17, the first day of the Occupation, thousands of people have flocked to Liberty to follow this impulse to live life anew. To stay for even a few days there is to be caught up in an incredible delirium of talking, making, doing and more talking—a beehive in which the drones have overthrown the queen but are still buzzing about furiously without any immediately apparent purpose.
… Once the Occupation took root in Liberty, new working groups formed to meet its growing human needs: Sanitation; Comfort (which collects and distributes sleeping bags, tarps and warm clothes); Medics (which is staffed by nurses, doctors, therapists, acupuncturists and EMT workers, and sees up to 100 patients a day); Security (yes, there is some form of “law” at OWS, including guidelines against public urination and defecation); and Sustainability (which composts 100 pounds of food waste each day and handles Liberty’s recycling program). Each day, the race to reproduce life itself at Liberty begins, and each day it is largely met, in theory at least, without the use of two things—the money-form and hierarchy.
… As Yotam Marom, a 25-year-old organizer who is affiliated with a participatory socialist collective called the Organization for a Free Society, puts it, “We’re creating alternative models of the world we want to live in while also using those new institutions as a staging ground to fight for that world—that’s what’s radical and cool about occupations.” Academics call this “prefigurative politics,” a term that describes acting as if utopian democratic practices exist in the here and now.
… OWS organizers are, moreover, acutely aware that the movement’s extraordinary potential lies in its ability to bring together a range of participants who coalesce maybe once in a generation: anarchists and Marxists of a thousand different sects, social democrats, community organizers, immigrants’ rights activists, feminists, queers, anti-racist organizers, capitalists who want to save capitalism by restoring the Fordist truce, the simply curious and sympathetic. … But it is, in fact, the movement’s emphasis on direct democracy, derived from anarchism, that has allowed such an unwieldy set of actors to occupy the same space.
… That General Assembly exposed a clear ideological schism between anarchists, on the one hand, and Marxists, progressives and liberals, on the other, with the former predisposed to reject any demands (like jobs for all) that appeal to the state instead of directly to the people. But the meeting wasn’t particularly well attended—as many Occupiers at Liberty were milling about reading, singing or kibitzing on other matters as were clustered around the human mic—and away from the fray, in the working groups themselves, the issue seemed much less polarized and much less significant. Most organizers I spoke with were open to demands at some point but preferred to focus on movement building for now.
Richard Kim is the executive editor of TheNation.com. He is co-editor, with Betsy Reed, of the New York Times bestselling anthology Going Rouge: Sarah Palin, An American Nightmare. He has taught at New York University and Skidmore College.
(2 November 2011)
Will Extremists Hijack Occupy Wall Street?
James Miller, New York Times
… the activists have resurrected a defining aspect of the New Left of the 1960s: an overriding commitment to participatory democracy, to making decisions by deliberation and consensus and not through elected representatives. Sooner or later, Occupy Wall Street will have to grapple with the practical problems and limits of that ideal.
The first and perhaps most obvious problem is scale. It is one thing to create a participatory community of 500 or even 1,000 — or even a democracy of 40,000 direct participants, as Athenians did in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. But it is quite another thing to sustain direct, participatory interaction in large and complex societies on the scale of the United States. Even worse, many of the concerns the protesters have highlighted — about unemployment and global warming, for instance — arise from factors that can be tackled only by new forms of international cooperation.
Formulating institutions and policies may seem boring and dull in comparison with the carnivalesque intensity of marches, protests and occupations.
… the most insidious and intractable paradox of participatory democracy is generated by the unrelenting demand for consensus that pursues its aims through polarizing protest.
The paradox unfolds as follows. The success of a polarizing movement hinges on obtaining publicity and attention from outsiders. The surest way to obtain such publicity is through demonstrations that prompt a disproportionate and unjust response from the authorities. Violent confrontations can be intoxicating, on both sides of the barricades; so, a taste for street fighting takes hold among a small number of protesters.
Meanwhile, back in the general assemblies that are one hallmark of a radical democratic movement like Occupy Wall Street, the demand for consensus willy-nilly puts the most uncompromising militants in a position where they can veto the tactics and strategy proposed by the vast majority of their comrades. The moderates are inclined to compromise. So they silence their reservations about the tactics of the revolutionaries for the sake of preserving consensus and unity.
Disagreements disappear, at least for public consumption. And although everyone on the inside knows who the most articulate leaders of different groups are, none of these de facto leaders can be held accountable, since, according to the group’s utopian vision, there are no leaders.
By 1969, a version of this sort of perverse logic had led the New Left to a frank embrace of violence, and then terrorism — and the Weathermen reaped the whirlwind…
James Miller, professor of politics at the New School for Social Research, is the author of “Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago.”
(25 October 2011)
