During this period the level of violence involved in arrests increased dramatically. Even during the most peaceful protests, marchers who strayed off the sidewalk, or even seemed like they might be about to, found themselves tackled and having their heads repeatedly smashed against concrete. Police began deploying new, exotic tactics of intimidation, some of which appear to have been imported from abroad. For instance, in Egypt, when some revolutionaries attempted a renewed occupation of Tahrir Square in November and December 2011, police responded by a systematic campaign of sexual assault against female protesters; female arrestees were not only beaten, but stripped and groped, often ostentatiously in front of their male counterparts. Egyptian friends told me the aim seemed twofold: to maximally traumatize women activists, but also to provoke male activists to violence in their defense. Similarly, when attempts at reoccupation in New York began again in March, we saw a sudden intense spate of police sexual attacks on women protesters—something that had happened, at best, only very occasionally before. I met one woman who told me five different police had grabbed her breasts during one evening’s eviction from Union Square (on one occasion, while another officer stood by blowing kisses); another screamed and called the policeman fondling her a pervert, whereupon he and his fellow officers dragged her behind police lines and broke her wrists. Yet even when one well-known Occupy spokeswoman appeared on Democracy Now! displaying a large hand-shaped bruise across her chest, the media simply refused to pick up the story. Rather, the new rules of engagement—that anyone showing up at a large protest, however peaceful, should just understand that this might mean being arrested, or put in the hospital—were simply treated as a kind of “new normal,” and any particular instance of police violence as no longer newsworthy. Media sources did, dutifully, report the dwindling numbers who showed up to such marches, which for obvious reasons soon came to consist principally of hard-core activists willing to accept beatings and imprisonment, now almost entirely bereft of the flocks of children and old people who had accompanied, and so humanized, our earlier actions. While reporting the decreasing numbers at marches, the media refused to report the reasons why.
So the real question is: how did these rules change, and why was the effective repeal of the First Amendment (at least as it applies to freedom of assembly) simply allowed to stand un-contested? As every experienced activist knows, the rules of engagement on the streets have everything to do with the quality and effectiveness of one’s alliances.
One reason Occupy got so much attention in the media at first—most of the seasoned activists I talked to agreed that we had never seen anything like it—was that so many more mainstream activist groups so quickly endorsed our cause. I am referring here particularly to those organizations that might be said to define the left wing of the Democratic Party: MoveOn.org, for example, or Rebuild the Dream. Such groups were enormously energized by the birth of Occupy. But, as I touched on above, most also seem to have assumed that the principled rejection of electoral politics and top-down forms of organization was simply a passing phase, the childhood of a movement that, they assumed, would mature into something resembling a left-wing Tea Party. From their perspective, the camps soon became a distraction. The real business of the movement would begin once Occupy became a conduit for guiding young activists into legislative campaigns, and eventually, get-out-the-vote drives for progressive candidates. It took some time for them to fully realize that the core of the movement was serious about its principles. It’s also fairly clear that when the camps were cleared, not only such groups, but the liberal establishment more generally, made a strategic decision to look the other way.
From the perspective of the radicals, this was the ultimate betrayal. We had made our commitment to horizontal principles clear from the outset. They were the essence of what we were trying to do. But at the same time, we understood that there has always been a tacit understanding, in America, between radical groups like ourselves, and their liberal allies. The radicals’ call for revolutionary change creates a fire to the liberals’ left that makes the liberals’ own proposals for reform seem a more reasonable alternative. We win them a place at the table. They keep us out of jail. In these terms, the liberal establishment utterly failed to live up to their side of the bargain. Occupy succeeded brilliantly in changing the national debate to begin addressing issues of financial power, the corruption of the political process, and social inequality, all to the benefit of the liberal establishment, which had struggled to gain traction around these issues. But when the Tasers, batons, and SWAT teams arrived, that establishment simply disappeared and left us to our fate.
This might seem inevitable in retrospect, but it’s not the way things have tended to work in the past. Obviously, the violent suppression of social movements is hardly new. One need only think of the Red Scare, the reaction to radical labor movements like the IWW, let alone the campaigns of outright assassination directed against the American Indian Movement or black radicals in the 1960s and early 1970s. But in almost every case, the victims were either working-class or nonwhite. On the few occasions where even much milder systematic repression is directed at any significant number of middle-class white people—as during the McCarthy era, or against student protesters during the Vietnam War—it quickly becomes a national scandal. And, while it would be wrong to call Occupy Wall Street a middle-class white people’s movement—it was much more diverse than that—there is no doubt that very large numbers of middle-class white people were involved in it. Yet the government did not hesitate to attack it, often using highly militarized tactics, often deploying what can only be called terroristic violence—that is, if “terrorism” is defined as attacks on civilians consciously calculated to create terror for political ends. (I know this statement might seem controversial. But when Los Angeles police, for example, open fire with rubber bullets on a group of chalk-wielding protesters engaged in a perfectly legal, permitted “art walk,” in an obvious attempt to teach citizens that participating in any Occupy-related activity could lead to physical injury, it’s hard to see how that word should not apply.)
What had changed? One answer is that this was the first American social movement to emerge since 9/11. Did the war on terror really change the rules?
I must admit that when we first began the occupation, I was somewhat surprised that the emotional aftermath of 9/11 wasn’t something we had to deal with. Zuccotti Park might have been two blocks away from Wall Street, but it was also only two blocks away from Ground Zero, and I remember anticipating all sorts of charges of sacrilege and disrespect for the victims of terrorist attacks. These never materialized. But as we were ultimately to discover, 9/11 changed the ground we were working on in other, much more subtle ways. Yes, there was a brief window where the Gandhian formula—delegitimating power by maintaining scrupulous nonviolence, and then allowing the world to witness just how brutal the state’s reaction would nonetheless be—did, actually, seem to work. But it was very brief. It’s not enough to note that, after the evictions, liberal organizations seem to have made a strategic decision not to make an issue of the violence. One also has to ask why they could get away with it—why their constituents were not sufficiently shocked by the violence to demand some sort of accounting. It’s here where I think the real psychological effects of 9/11 can be seen.
The immediate wake of the terrorist attacks saw a major militarization of the American police. Billions were allocated to providing “anti-terrorist” equipment and training to police departments in otherwise underfunded municipalities like Dayton, Ohio, that clearly did not face terrorist threats of any kind. This helps explain the sometimes bizarre overreaction to many of our actions, as when a few dozen activists attempted to occupy a foreclosed home in New Jersey, or when we attempted to make our speeches on the steps of Federal Hall in Manhattan and were greeted by heavily armed SWAT teams. In another age, such overkill would have provoked outrage. In 2012, it went completely unremarked. How did middle-class liberals beco
me so accepting of the militarization of the police? Largely, by their absolute, steadfast rejection of anything that might even suggest the possibility of violence on the part of protesters. Even if police executed what was clearly a preplanned assault on peaceful protesters, say by firing tear-gas canisters directly at occupiers’ heads—as did indeed happen several times in Oakland—the first response by both media and liberal commentators was always to ask whether any occupier, at any point, responded to that assault with anything other than passive resistance. If even one person kicked a tear-gas canister back in the cops’ direction, the story would no longer be “police open fire on protesters” or even “marine veteran in critical condition after being shot in the head by tear-gas canister,” but rather “protesters engage in clashes with police.”
In one of the great ironies of history, the invocation of the spirit of Gandhi and Martin Luther King became the prime means of justifying the newfound militarization of American society, in a way that would surely have left either man, had they been alive to witness it, both astounded and horrified. Occupy is an extraordinarily nonviolent movement. It may well be the most nonviolent movement of its size in American history, and this despite the absence of peace codes, marshals, or official peace police. In the fall, there were at least five hundred occupations, with participants representing remarkably diverse philosophies, from evangelical Christians to revolutionary anarchists, and thousands of marches and actions—and yet the most “violent” acts attributed to protesters were four or five acts of window-breaking, basically less than one might expect in the wake of one not particularly rowdy Canadian hockey game. Historically, this is an extraordinary achievement. Yet has it ever been treated as such? Instead, the handful of windows themselves became a moral crisis. In the immediate wake of the evictions, when Americans first had the opportunity to process the full extent of what had happened—the mass arrests, beatings, the systematic destruction of homes and libraries—the liberal blogosphere was instead almost completely dominated by arguments about a piece called “The Cancer in Occupy,” written by a former New York Times reporter turned OWS supporter named Chris Hedges, who argued that one or two incidents of window-breaking in Oakland were actually the work of a violent and fanatical anarchist faction he called “the Black Bloc,” and that the most important thing the movement could do was to expose and exclude such elements lest they provide a pretext for police. The fact that almost no statement in the piece was factually accurate (Black Blocs are in fact a formation, not a group, and probably 95 percent of occupations hadn’t even seen one) only seemed to give everyone more excuse to argue about it. Before long, liberal commentators had formed a consensus that the real problem with Occupy was not any act of actual physical violence that had taken place (these had pretty much all been carried out by police) but the fact that some occupations contained some elements that, while they had not committed any acts of violence, felt that acts of damage to property could be justified. To give a sense of the disparity: even in New York in March, there was still endless discussion of a single café window that may or may not have been broken by an activist associated with a Black Bloc in Oakland during a march in November; as a result, there was virtually no discussion of the first OWS-associated window-breaking in New York itself, which occurred on March 17. The window in question—it was a shop window in lower Manhattan—was broken by an NYPD officer, using an activist’s head.
Just to give a sense how perverse this invocation of Gandhi to justify state violence really is, we might recall the words and actions of Gandhi himself. For most anarchists, Gandhi is an ambivalent figure. On the one hand, his philosophy drew heavily on the anarchism of Tolstoy and Kropotkin. On the other, he embraced a kind of masochistic puritanism and encouraged a cult of personality whose implications can only be profoundly inimical to the creation of a truly free society. He did condemn all forms of violence. But he also insisted that passive acquiescence to an unjust social order was even worse. I remember one conference on OWS at the New School in New York in the wake of the evictions, where liberal pacifists kept reminding organizers that Gandhi had gone so far as “suspending his Quit India campaign when there was an incident of violence.” What they didn’t mention was that the incident in question involved Gandhi’s own followers hacking twenty-two police officers to pieces and setting fire to the remains. It seems a pretty safe guess that if members of, say, Occupy Cleveland or Occupy Denver were discovered to have carved large numbers of police officers limb from limb, our movement would have stopped dead in its tracks as well, even without a charismatic leader to tell us to. In a world where such things were possible, the idea that Gandhi himself would have become worked up over a couple of broken windows is nothing short of insane. In fact, as a politician, Gandhi regularly resisted demands that he condemn those who engaged in more militant forms of anticolonial resistance—that is, when they were not part of his own movement. Even when it was a matter of guerrillas attacking police stations and blowing up trains, he would always note that while he believed nonviolence was the correct approach, these were good people trying to do what they believed to be the right thing. While opposing injustice nonviolently, he insisted, is always morally superior to opposing it violently, opposing injustice violently is still morally superior to doing nothing to oppose it at all.20
One could only wish those who claim to speak in the name of Gandhi would, occasionally, act like him.
But despite all this, was the movement indeed stopped dead in its tracks? Absolutely not. We had a rough six or eight months trying to find our footing in a radically new, and much more physically hostile, environment, without the benefit of sympathetic press. There were dramatic new campaigns: occupy foreclosed homes, occupy farms, rent strikes, educational initiatives. There were endless trainings in new street tactics, and a newfound emphasis on drama and comedy, partly just to keep spirits up in the face of repression. But mainly, there was a search for new alliances.
Once the liberals had largely abandoned us, the next step was to strengthen our ties with what we always considered our real allies: the unions, community organizations, and immigrant rights groups. In New York, Occupy’s first really large initiative after the evictions was to take part in planning a nationwide May Day “general strike.” This was always a risky undertaking since we all understood that we couldn’t really organize a general strike in the traditional sense, and the media would almost certainly announce it was a failure. But having millions of people nationwide come out in the streets, to create a forum for the development of new initiatives, seemed like it would be victory enough. And while in New York we did manage to convince the leadership of pretty much every union in the city (including the Teamsters and Central Labor Council) to endorse a call for “revolutionary transformation,” the final results were sobering. It turned out that union bureaucracies in particular are simply too vulnerable to pressure from above to make very effective allies. Just as in Bloombergville, union leaders talked enthusiastically about the idea of civil disobedience in the planning stages, then, at the last minute, balked: ambitious plans to shut down the city gradually dissolved into a simple permitted march, to which the unions didn’t even make much effort to turn out their rank and file, for fear they’d be assaulted by the NYPD.
By mid-May, most of the core organizers of Occupy Wall Street had come to the conclusion that it would be better to put aside the whole question of alliance-building and think about our base. What were the issues that had the most direct appeal to the real daily problems of occupiers, and to our friends and families? How could we organize campaigns that would take on those problems directly? We decided to organize a series of weekly open forums, each with a different theme—climate change, debt, police and prisons—to see which one took off. As it turned out, the debt forum was so enormously successful it instantly put all others in the shadows. A series of Debtor Assemblies was quickly thrown together, each bringing together hundreds of participants, many new to the moveme
nt, bursting with projects and ideas. By the time of writing, the emerging Strike Debt campaign—with campaigns with names like the Invisible Army, Rolling Jubilee, Debt Resistor’s Operations Manual, and People’s Bailout—are clearly the most exciting growth areas of the movement. Occupy has returned to its roots.
Of course, endless questions remain. Is it really possible to create a mass movement of debt resistance in America? How to overcome the feelings of shame and isolation that debt always seems to foster? Or, to put it a different way, how to provide a base of democratic support and a public forum for those millions of Americans (1 in 6, by some estimates) who are, effectively, already practicing civil disobedience against financial capitalism by refusing to pay their debts? It isn’t obvious. For all we know, by the time this book appears, some new campaign will have emerged from some other city that will ultimately prove even more inspiring.