The Democracy Project

  As a result, our numbers grew dramatically. What’s more, union support materialized† and rallies became larger and larger—instead of a couple thousand people coming to Zuccotti to rally or assemble for marches during the day, the crowds swelled to the tens of thousands. Thousands across America began trying to figure out how to send in contributions, and calling in an almost unimaginable wave of free pizzas. The social range of the occupiers also expanded: the crowd, which in the first few days was extremely white, soon diversified, so that within a matter of weeks we were seeing African-American retirees and Latino combat veterans marching and serving food alongside dreadlocked teenagers. There was a satellite General Assembly conducted entirely in Spanish. What’s more, ordinary New Yorkers, thousands of whom eventually came to visit, if only out of curiosity, were astonishingly supportive: according to one poll, not only did majorities agree with the protests, 86 percent supported the protesters’ right to maintain the encampment. Across the country, in just about every city in America, unlikely assortments of citizens began pitching tents, middle-aged office workers listened attentively to punk rockers or pagan priestesses lecturing on the subtleties of consensus and facilitation, or argued about the technical differences between civil disobedience and direct action or the truly horizontal way to organize sanitation.

  In other words, for the first time in most of our living memories, a genuine grassroots movement for economic justice had emerged in America. What’s more, the dream of contaminationism, of democratic contagion, was, shockingly, starting to work. Why?

  Enough time has passed, I think, that we can begin to piece together some of the answers.

  QUESTION 1

  Why was the U.S. media coverage of OWS so different from virtually all previous coverage of left-wing protest movements since the 1960s?

  There has been a lot of discussion about why the national media treated Occupy so differently from protest movements of the past—really, almost any since the 1960s. Much attention has been paid to social media, or perhaps a felt need for balance to compensate for the inordinate attention paid to relatively small numbers of Tea Partiers in the immediate years before. No doubt all these were factors, but then again, the media’s initial portrayal of the Occupy protests was as airily dismissive as their portrait of what they dubbed the “Anti-Globalization Movement” in 1999: a collection of confused kids with no clear conception of what they were fighting for. The New York Times, the self-proclaimed paper of historical record, wrote absolutely nothing about the occupation for the first five days. On the sixth, they published an editorial disguised as a news story in the Metropolitan section, titled “Gunning for Wall Street, with Faulty Aim,”† by staff writer Ginia Bellafante, mocking the movement as a mere pantomime of progressivism with no discernible purpose.

  Still, the media’s eventual decision to take the protests seriously was pivotal. The rise of Occupy Wall Street marked, for perhaps the first time since the civil rights movement in the 1950s, a success for Gandhian tactics in America, a model that depends on a certain degree of sympathy from the media. Gandhian nonviolence is meant to create a stark moral contrast: it strips bare the inherent violence of a political order by showing that, even when faced by a band of nonviolent idealists, the “forces of order” will not hesitate to resort to pure physical brutality to defend the status quo. Obviously, this contrast can only be drawn if word gets out about what’s happening, which has in the past rendered Gandhian tactics almost completely ineffective in the United States. Since the 1960s, the American mainstream media has refused to tell the story of any protest in a way that might imply that American police, acting under orders, engaged in “violence”—no matter what they do.‡

  One flagrant example was the treatment of tree sitters and their allies protecting old-growth forests in the 1990s in the Pacific Northwest. Activists attempted a campaign of classic Gandhian nonviolence by sitting in trees and daring developers to cut them down and “locking down”—that is, chaining themselves together, or to bulldozers or other equipment, in ways that made them extremely difficult to remove, but at the same time left arms and legs incapacitated. When one tree sitter was killed and local police refused to order a murder investigation, activists locked down to blockade the scene to prevent evidence being destroyed. Police reacted by taking cotton swabs and rubbing cayenne pepper concentrate—otherwise known as pepper spray—directly in their eyeballs in amounts calculated to cause maximum physical pain. Apparently, however, the torture and murder of pacifists was not enough to convince most of the American media that police behavior was necessarily inappropriate, and local courts declared the application of pepper spray to eyeballs an acceptable tactic. Without coverage or legal recourse, the contradictions that Gandhian tactics are meant to bring out in the open were simply lost. The activists were tortured and killed without furthering Gandhi’s aim of “quickening the conscience of the public” in any meaningful sense. In Gandhian terms, then, the protest failed. The next year other activists planned a campaign of lockdowns to blockade the WTO meetings in Seattle and veterans of forest defense campaigns warned them, correctly as it turned out, that police would simply attack and torture those in lockdown, all with an approving media looking on. And indeed this was precisely what happened. Many of the forest activists, in turn, played a key role in creating the famous Black Bloc that, after the predicted attacks had begun, struck back by a calculated campaign of smashing corporate windows—an act the media then used to justify the police attacks on nonviolent activists with batons, tear gas, plastic bullets, and pepper spray that had begun the day before. Yet as Black Bloc participants were quick to point out: they would have justified it anyway. Breaking some windows didn’t hurt anyone, but it did succeed in putting the issue on the map.

  This was the kind of history we were facing even before the wake of 9/11, when police assaults on nonviolent protesters became far more systematic and intense, as in the case of the New School occupation and other events. Nonetheless, in our planning assemblies for Occupy we decided to take a Gandhian approach. And somehow, this time it worked.

  The conventional story is that the rise of social media made the difference: while activists at Seattle had made extensive use of web-based guerrilla reporting, by 2011 the omnipresence of phone cameras, Twitter accounts, Facebook, and YouTube ensured such images could spread instantly to millions. The image of Tony Bologna casually blasting two young women behind a barricade with a chemical weapon appeared almost instantly on screens across the nation (the most popular of the many camera phone uploads you can find on the Internet has well over a million views). I would hardly deny social media was important here, but it still doesn’t explain why the mainstream media did not play its usual role of presenting only the official police point of view.

  Here I think the international context is crucial. Another effect of the Internet is that in media terms, the United States is not nearly as much of an island as it once was. From the very beginning, international coverage of the protests was very different from American coverage. In the international press, there were no attempts to ignore, dismiss, or demonize the protesters. In the English-speaking world, The Guardian in England, for example, began producing detailed stories on the background and aspirations of the Occupiers almost from day one. Reporters from Al Jazeera, the satellite TV news network based in Qatar that played an instrumental role in the Arab Spring by airing videos and other testimony of state violence provided by grassroots activists through social media, quickly appeared on-site to play the same role in New York as it had in Cairo and Damascus. This led to wire stories in newspapers almost everywhere except America. These in turn not only helped inspire a wave of similar occupations as far away as Bahia and KwaZulu Natal, but sympathy protests in such unlikely places as China, organized by left-wing populist groups opposed to the Chinese Communist Party’s embrace of Wall Street–friendly policies at home, who had learned of the events by monitoring foreign news services on the web.
br />   On the very same day as the blockade of the Brooklyn Bridge on October 2, OWS received a message signed by fifty Chinese intellectuals and activists:

  The eruption of the “Wall Street Revolution” in the heart of the world’s financial empire shows that 99% of the world’s people remain exploited and oppressed—regardless of whether they are from developed or developing countries. People throughout the world see their wealth being plundered, and their rights being taken away. Economic polarization is now a common threat to all of us. The conflict between popular and elite rule is also found in all countries. Now, however, the popular democratic revolution meets repression not just from its own ruling class, but also from the world elite that has formed through globalization. The “Wall Street Revolution” has met with repression from U.S. police, but also suffers from a media blackout organized by the Chinese elite.…

  The embers of revolt are scattered amongst us all, waiting to burn with the slightest breeze. The great era of popular democracy, set to change history, has arrived again!‡

  The only plausible explanation for this kind of enthusiasm is that dissident Chinese intellectuals, like most people in the world, saw what happened in Zuccotti Park as part of a wave of resistance sweeping the planet. Clearly, the global financial apparatus, and the whole system of power on which it was built, had been tottering since its near collapse in 2007. Everyone had been waiting for the popular backlash. Were the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt the beginning? Or were those strictly local or regional affairs? Then they began to spread. When the wave hit the very “heart of the world’s financial empire” no one could deny that something epochal was happening.§

  Now, this convergence between social media and international excitement explains why the U.S. media bubble could be momentarily popped, but it isn’t sufficient in itself to explain why it actually was popped: why, CNN, for instance, eventually began treating the occupation as a major news story. The U.S. media after all has a notorious history of concluding that North American phenomena that nearly everyone else in the world considers significant are of no interest to American audiences. This is particularly true of figures on the left. Mumia Abu-Jamal is a household name in France, but relatively unknown in the United States. Or even more strikingly, Noam Chomsky’s political works are reviewed in mainstream newspapers and magazines in almost every country in the world except America.

  Twenty years ago, one suspects that is exactly what the media would have concluded—that no one in America would care. I think when the future history of OWS is told, the media attention it garnered will be shown to owe much to the almost unprecedented attention so recently given to the right-wing populists of the Tea Party. The media’s massive coverage of the Tea Party probably created some feeling that there should be a minimal gesture in the way of balance. Another factor in the media coverage was the existence of a few pockets of genuinely left-of-center media like MSNBC that were willing to latch on to OWS insofar as they thought the movement might morph into something along the lines of a left-wing Tea Party, that is, a political group that accepted funding, ran candidates, and pursued a legislative agenda. This at least would explain why, the moment it became fully clear that the movement was not about to go that route, media attention halted almost as abruptly as it had begun.

  Still, none of this explains why, even before the mainstream media picked up the story, the movement spread so quickly inside America—including to places where Al Jazeera isn’t even available.

  QUESTION 2

  Why did the movement spread so quickly across America?

  When she wasn’t helping with logistics and organizing facilitation trainings, Marisa Holmes spent much of her time during the early days of the occupation video-recording one-on-one interviews with fellow campers. Over and over, she heard the same story: “I did everything I was supposed to! I worked hard, studied hard, got into college. Now I’m unemployed, with no prospects, and $20,000 to $50,000 in debt.” Some of these campers were from solidly middle-class families. More seemed children of relatively modest backgrounds who had worked their way into college by talent and determination, but whose lives were now in hock to the very financial industries that had trashed the world economy and found themselves entering a job market almost entirely bereft of jobs. Stories like this struck a chord with me, since I had been spending much of that summer giving lectures on the history of debt. I tried to keep my life as an author apart from my life as an activist, but I found it increasingly difficult, since every time I’d give a talk with an appreciable number of young people in attendance, at least one or two would approach me afterward to ask about the prospects of creating a movement over the issue of student loans. One of the themes of my work on debt was that its power lies in intense moral feelings it invokes, against the lenders and, more to the point, against the indebted themselves: the feelings of shame, disgrace, and violent indignation from being told, effectively, that one is the loser in a game no one forced one to play. Of course anyone who does not wish to spend the rest of their life as a dishwasher or sales clerk—in other words, in a job with no sorts of benefits, knowing one’s life could be destroyed by a single unforeseen illness—has been led to believe that they have no choice but to pursue higher education in America, which means one effectively begins one’s life as a debtor. And to begin one’s life as a debtor is to be treated as if one already lost.

  Some of the stories I heard during my tour were extraordinary. I particularly remember a grave young woman who approached me after a reading at a radical bookstore to tell me that though of modest origins, she had managed to work her way into a Ph.D. in Renaissance literature at an Ivy League college. The result? She was $80,000 in debt, with no immediate prospects of anything but adjunct work, which couldn’t possibly cover her rent, let alone her monthly loan payments. “So you know what I ended up doing?” she asked me. “I’m an escort! It’s pretty much the only way to get enough cash to be able to have any hope of getting out of this. And don’t get me wrong, I don’t regret the years I spent in graduate school for a moment, but you have to admit it’s a little bit ironic.”

  “Yes,” I said, “not to mention a remarkable waste of human resources.”

  Perhaps the image stuck to me because of my personal history—I often think I represent the last generation of working-class Americans who had any sort of realistic shot at joining the academic elite through sheer hard work and intellectual attainment (and even in my case it turns out to have been temporary). Partly because the woman’s story brought home the degree to which debt is not only hardship, but degradation. After all, we all know what sort of people frequent expensive escorts in New York City. There was, right after 2008, a moment where it looked like Wall Street spending on cocaine and sexual services was going to have to be retrenched somewhat; but after the bailouts, like spending on expensive cars and jewelry, it appears to have rapidly shot up again. This woman was basically reduced to a situation where the only way she could pay her loans was to work fulfilling the sexual fantasies of the very people who had loaned her the money, and whose banks her family’s tax dollars had just bailed out. What’s more, her case was just an unusually dramatic example of a nationwide trend. For debt-strapped women in college (and remember, a growing majority of those seeking higher education in America today are women), selling one’s body has become a growing—last, desperate—expedient to those who see no other way to finish their degree. The manager of one website that specializes in matching sugar daddies with those seeking help with student loans or school fees estimates he already has 280,000 college students registered. And very few of these are aspiring professors. Most aspire to little more than a modest career in health, education, or social services.§

  It was stories like that I had in the back of my mind when I wrote a piece for The Guardian about why the Occupy movement had spread so quickly. The piece was meant to be part descriptive, part predictive:

  We are watching the beginnings of the defiant self-a
ssertion of a new generation of Americans, a generation who are looking forward to finishing their education with no jobs, no future, but still saddled with enormous and unforgiveable debt. Most, I found, were of working class or otherwise modest backgrounds, kids who did exactly what they were told they should, studied, got into college, and are now not just being punished for it, but humiliated—faced with a life of being treated as deadbeats, moral reprobates. Is it really surprising they would like to have a word with the financial magnates who stole their future?

  Just as in Europe, we are seeing the results of colossal social failure. The occupiers are the very sort of people, brimming with ideas, whose energies a healthy society would be marshalling to improve life for everyone. Instead they are using it to envision ways to bring the whole system down.4

  The movement has diversified far beyond students and recent graduates, but I think for many in the movement the concern with debt and a stolen future remains a core motivation for their involvement. It’s telling to contrast the Occupy movement in this way with the Tea Party, with which it is so often compared. Demographically, the Tea Party is at its core a movement of the middle-aged and well-established. According to one poll in 2010, 78 percent of the Tea Partiers were over the age of thirty-five, and about half of those, over fifty-five.5 This helps explain why Tea Partiers and occupiers generally take a diametrically opposite view of debt. True, both groups objected in principle to government bailouts of the big banks, but in the case of the Tea Partiers, this is largely rhetoric. The Tea Party’s real origins go back to a viral video of CNBC reporter Rick Santelli speaking from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange on February 19, 2009, decrying rumors that the government might soon provide assistance to indebted homeowners: “Do we really want to subsidize the losers’ mortgages?” Santelli asked, adding, “This is America! How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills?” In other words, the Tea Party originated as a group of people who at least imagined themselves as creditors.