Occupy Nation: The Roots the Spirit and the Promise of Occupy Wall Street
OCCUPY
NATION
The Roots, the Spirit,
and the Promise of
OCCUPY WALL STREET
TODD GITLIN
Photos by the author
Dedication
To those who ignited the flame
and those who carry it on
CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
Preface
Part One: Two Energy Centers
1. Pioneers
2. Surprise! Popularity and Polarization
3. Energy Is Eternal Delight
Part Two: The Spirit of Occupy
4. Oases and Bases
5. Rituals of Participation
6. The Evolution of Horizontalism
7. Splendors and Miseries of Structurelessness
8. And Leaderlessness
9. The Movement as Its Own Demand
10. Wonders of Nonviolence
11. Radicals
12. The Co-optation Phobia
Part Three: The Promise
13. Live-in Victories
14. Work the System? Change It? Smash It?
15. Can the Outer Movement Get Organized?
16. Is There a Global Revolution?
17. “This Is the Beginning of the Beginning”
Acknowledgments
Notes
Other Works
Copyright
About the Publisher
PREFACE
Ever since I started publishing books and lecturing about the movements of the sixties, movements that I was deeply involved in—antiwar, civil rights, the New Left—journalists have been asking me how the latest demonstration or uprising measures up to those of decades past. I would reel off similarities and differences, but in truth, the differences generally impressed me more. I sometimes thought journalists were hunting for similarities, in fact, either because of a certain nostalgia of their own—they were old enough to remember the uprisings fondly—or precisely because they had missed the fabled years and wondered if the strangeness they’d always heard about, possibly from their parents, might return.
I taught at universities, and wrote. I threw myself occasionally into insurgent campaigns—antinuclear efforts, divestment from South Africa—but, for better or worse, I never saw any prospect of the past recycling. Personally, this was all right with me, since I rather liked the post-sixties life I was living, was not much given to nostalgia, and did not believe I was getting any younger. I cautioned journalists that history didn’t repeat itself, that the whole constellation of circumstances that clicked in the sixties had been unique. Some political efforts I found rather more exhilarating than others, but not once did I think that more great upheavals were impending. America was what it was.
Then, in recent years, especially when speaking abroad, I got used to another question: In the face of the disasters that have afflicted not only your country but the rest of the world, why are Americans so inert? In the spring of 2011, after the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, I had the opportunity to lecture in Cairo about media and revolutions, and got to breathe the air of Tahrir Square after the tear gas had cleared (and before it returned). Then I gave a number of talks in Germany on the American news media and the recent, and ongoing, financial crisis, and the question of America’s somnolence kept cropping up. In truth, the reasons that there was no widespread opposition on the left in the United States were fairly obvious. The economic climate was frigid. There was oligarchy, but not dictatorship. Students—the motors of change in the 1960s—were working, sometimes more than one job, while in school, then encumbered with debt that discouraged them from stepping out of line. There was not much cultural opposition because the entire consumer culture was, in its coy way, oppositional or at least, supposedly, alternative. Anyone could buy, or upload, or tattoo the accoutrements of rebellion. Everything was sayable, so nothing much mattered. Political rebellion became uncool. The wars of the 1980s and thereafter, wars that would once have provoked mass opposition, were short wars fought by professional soldiers. The one that inspired the grandest opposition, the Iraq expedition, sputtered out because the movement hadn’t a prayer of influencing the hell-bent crusade of George W. Bush to shock and awe a recalcitrant world. The midcentury traditions had vanished. On the left, at least, sarcasm had replaced moral seriousness. And so on.
So, when I heard on the Internet grapevine, sometime during the summer of 2011, that a call had been issued to occupy Wall Street, I didn’t take it too seriously. I’d been out of the country for months and so had missed New York’s Bloombergville encampment in June and the limited fuss it caused. On a drive across the country in July, the only signs of political restiveness I saw were from Tea Party and militia enthusiasts. Back in New York, my contemporaries weren’t talking excitedly about any forthcoming occupation of Wall Street. I rather assumed the call was another one of those puffs of hope and cheerleading for good causes that blow through cyberspace several times a day. I wondered whether it had been issued by one of those tiny left-wing sectarian groups that specialize in thick headlines that rub off on your hands. Whatever might materialize in lower Manhattan on September 17 would likely discredit itself without half trying. All the reasons why there hadn’t been any such movement before would still apply.
In fact, when I started visiting Zuccotti Park, going to marches and meetings, interviewing occupiers, including people I’d been told were movers and shakers, I discovered that such skepticism and cynicism were normal reactions even among those who’d showed up first and stayed longest. This didn’t look like any rally or march, though it included rallies and marches. There were few so-called name speakers. The dramaturgy was different—and weirder, and more original. Once you hung out in the movement—and hanging out was the main way you entered it—and opened your eyes, you found that this wild ensemble was not exactly what you had thought at first. It was at once more earnest, more energetic, more frivolous, more original, and more mysterious. Disparagement and incomprehension were not hard to derive from news media who were drawn to the most garish and photogenic sights in the encampment, the outré and the scruffy, with their scatter of protest slogans, their anger at capitalism, their general disrespect, their apparent disorder.
Impressed by the new, I set out to understand. What I found astounded me, not because it was wholly new under the sun (although, in sum, it was remarkably new), and not just because the Occupy people could make the case that they were part of a global upheaval (I had talked to revolutionaries in Cairo and so knew very well that Liberty Square was not another site of the Arab Spring, though the improbability of those heady upheavals made an American improbability seem less impossible), and not just because the Occupiers were amazingly intense, or because everything they did was, in my view, right, but in no small part because they were surprising, they made me laugh, they touched me. I was unprepared for their sheer sprawl and inventiveness. In rapid order—or disorder—they produced a social phenomenon that did not feel like a fad, because a fad is a single style and Occupy was all kinds of movements at once, some more visible and some less. And what impressed me the most, and drew me closer, was the eruption of intelligence I encountered there.
This book is an initial report on something very much in progress. In part I, I introduce some movers and shakers, trace the human, social, ideological roots of the movement, as best I understand them, and explore how they relate to the whole political-cultural ecology that includes them, including the larger organizations around them, the political parti
es, and Wall Street itself. In part II, I explore the movement’s spirit, so unusual in the annals of social movements, yet not without precedent: its leaderlessness, its nonviolence, its rituals and obsessions, its divisions over conventional politics, over reform and revolution. In part III, I make some arguments about what seem to me the most promising directions, and worry about perils. I worry with this movement, not just about it.
As I write, many moving parts of the Occupy movement are in motion. Prediction is for fools and the jaded. But give credit where credit is due. We talk a lot about entrepreneurship in America, but the glories go to those who make capital grow. Occupy is a different kind of entrepreneurship, a creative and cooperative endeavor, and it profits America by making human vitality grow. Like all such undertakings, it is not guaranteed of success. But whatever becomes of this remarkable movement once the headlines yellow and Twitter trends move on to the next reality-show–wedding-divorce two-step, America has surely become more interesting—less predictable, more open, more vigorous, thrilling, boisterous, and collaborative all at once; which is an achievement to celebrate, and an astonishment.
Todd Gitlin
February 2, 2012
New York City
PART ONE
TWO ENERGY CENTERS
1. Pioneers
Few if any of the few dozen pioneers who unrolled their sleeping bags on the stony rectangle of Zuccotti Park on September 17, 2011, expected their insurgency to bloom so quickly into a movement so vast. They didn’t dare. Daring had a way of turning treacherous. Not three years earlier, many of them dared think, or at least hope, that the election of Barack Obama was going to change the course of the nation. They had surged into his 2008 campaign feeling “the audacity of hope” but one cabinet appointment and policy shortfall after another left them disappointed, then demoralized. Others in Zuccotti Park, far fewer, handfuls of self-guided revolutionaries, dared believe in direct democracy as a guiding principle for a fundamentally revamped society, though they knew in their bones that such a society was not going to spring up in a month or a season. They might have adopted as camp epigram these words from science-fiction writer Robert Anton Wilson, picked up as an e-mail salutation by forty-seven-year-old filmmaker Michael Fix, who threw himself into Occupy Wall Street virtually full-time (and, after the eviction managed their office nearby): “You should view the world as a conspiracy run by a very closely knit group of nearly omnipotent people, and you should think of those people as yourself and your friends.”
“Something has been opened up, a kind of space nobody knew existed,” said Yotam Marom of Occupy, less than four months later. “Something just got kind of unclogged.” What took root in Zuccotti Park and then sent out lateral shoots from there was, as Anthony Barnett would write, “the combination of hi-tech networking and no-tech gathering.” The intricate human experience of face-to-face meeting—with responsibility shared and authority challenged—was galvanizing. There was a public place to go to, where attention could readily be paid, and individuals had faces and stories; there were electronic communiqués in real time and electronic summons for emergencies. These people were not demonstrating—that is, showing authorities that they wanted something in common—but creating a space where leaders and ideas could emerge. As days went by and they became used to inhabiting this space, they became a sort of new tribe.
As the weeks and months went by, the movement’s movers and shakers were astounded and overjoyed at what they had wrought. They had, first of all, endured. They had withstood scorn, busts, billy clubs, pepper spray, and evictions—and grown. They set up functional working groups and decision-making structures that, however outlandish in the eyes of traditionalist outsiders, kept their spaces running decently, for the most part. They set up live stream channels for 24/7 video images, along with Facebook pages, Tumblrs, Twitter feeds, all manner of social linkages.The movement’s live streaming was like “reality TV on steroids,” somebody said. People in and around the movement (and who was exactly in the movement anyway?) started newspapers and theoretical journals. They lived pell-mell in the grip of what sociologist Barrie Thorne, writing about the sixties, once called event time, hurtling from action to action with high fervor and much jubilation. Some burned out, others flocked in, and still others, in widening circles, took off, felt inspired. Talk about audacity, talk about hope. Something was happening, never mind that quizzical and sardonic journalists were stumbling around like Mr. and Ms. Jones not knowing what it was. In the words of a hand-painted sign held aloft in an Occupy support crowd by an intensely serious middle-aged woman in lower Manhattan on October 5, 2011: THIS IS THE 1ST TIME I’VE FELT HOPEFUL IN A VERY LONG TIME.
The sort of sea changes in public conversation that took three years to develop during the long-gone sixties—about brutal war, unsatisfying affluence, debased politics, and the suppressed democratic promise—took three weeks in 2011. At warp speed, all kinds of people felt that they needed to have opinions about the movement, what it was doing and saying, and what it ought to do and say. This was especially true in Manhattan, where not only Occupy’s own electronic but local news amplified the word, and people throughout the outer boroughs heard that something interesting was going on near Wall Street, though just what it was wasn’t exactly clear. Widening circles of people showed up at Zuccotti Park, volunteering, debating, seeing for themselves. Hundreds across the country—and in other countries—planted encampments of their own. (In this book, I’ll focus on New York’s Occupy Wall Street, though with forays to other places.) On designated, coordinated days, much larger numbers marched, tens of thousands at a time. Unknown numbers of others were taking the movement to heart, taking it as a moral challenge and a personal problem. Should they apply for jobs in finance? What, if anything, should they do about the 2012 elections? This was the intense magic of a social movement: not that people talked only about the movement as something outside themselves, something that should think X or do Y or stop doing Z, but that they took to heart the moral challenge, What will you do?
However, before there was Occupy Wall Street, there was Wall Street, that vortex of human calculation and passion, portal to a vast network of connected minds and impulses, where vast fortunes are made by insiders who master the game of heads-we-win-tails-we-win-too.
Wall Street is symbolic, a whorl of opportunity-making and opportunity-breaking where anything that can be marketed is marketed. Through Wall Street and its opposite numbers in London, Hong Kong, and elsewhere, capital—that potent and mysterious intangible—circulates and cascades, ever in pursuit of the highest returns. Capital has no fixed address. High-flying traders can conduct their high-speed buying and selling and bundling from almost any node in a virtually seamless planetary web. Hunches, calculations, loans, debts, and accounting, creative and otherwise, are as borderless as financial crises, and for the same reasons. Yet still, humanity being a species that craves face-to-face company, at lunch and in bars and via water-cooler chat, a lion’s share of the core decisions that entail the fates of nations are launched from a compact terrestrial neighborhood. The human passions of greed and fear cluster in lower Manhattan’s ornamented stone high-rises and boxy glass-and-steel edifices, jammed up against one another, where the prowess of hotshots is tested and good fortune rewarded with the proceeds from other people’s money. Here, in the great investment banks, the graduates of Ivy League colleges (among others) underwrite securities, arrange mergers and acquisitions, devise extraordinary varieties of tradable paper, and invest in every quantifiable phenomenon under the sun, all the better to finance the chiefs’ Porsches and Picassos and the hulking beach houses in the Hamptons and the private jets to overfly ground traffic on the way there and the paneled, extravagant yachts in which they float free of national boundaries. The proprietors make extravagant use of the ever-replenished ingenuity of thousands of Ph.D.’s in mathematics and physics, who work for them designing financial products (as if they were tangible things), securitizing
(rendering marketable), and managing (a word designed to soothe nerves if ever there were one) risk (a word connoting the sort of danger that can be managed). But, however rectilinear the high-rise incarnations of calculation, however ornate the physical facades, however nicely carpeted the suites and well-appointed the conference rooms, Wall Street has always been a feral place: a scramble of fortune-hunters sometimes partnering to help each other forward and sometimes betraying each other as they scramble toward pinnacles of wealth, pinnacles that recede, somehow, the higher they climb. For there is always somebody on the wrong end of a winning deal, and there is always someone who possesses more than you do.
For the movers of money and the makers of megadeals who channel their animal spirits into elaborate games that they play with other people’s money, shunting it around the world at lightning speed in pursuit of the main chance, collecting huge sums in packages of compensation and fees and options and parachutes by merging, shuffling, enlarging, and breaking up companies the way some people merge lanes, shuffle cards, and break promises, and also packaging combinations of risky securities, sharing the risk by opening up lines of contagion, hooking banks in Reykjavik to bad loans in Rapid City, the value of these securities being predicated on the value of other risky securities whose risks were unknown to, or misunderstood by, their buyers if not their sellers. For these financial corporations, known collectively in the vernacular as Wall Street, the three decades since 1980 were high-octane, high-testosterone, go-go years of fortune-making and out-contracting, megamansion-erecting and name-engraving, attention-getting philanthropy, meteoric rises and high flights, succeeded by home and business bankruptcies in the millions and rescues and bailouts in the billions, punctuated by occasional crashes and burns. All the gaudy fortune hunting took place under the half-horrified, half-envious gaze of the rest of America—the supermajorities who call themselves middle class—while most young people looked forward to lives spent stringing together part-time jobs when they couldn’t get full-time jobs, and living in much more cramped style than they grew up in, and returning to nest with their parents, and scrambling to pay back their college loans, and, if they came from poverty in the first place, looking forward to the likelihood of more of the same.