The man with the megaphone was getting a response. Standing in front of the Wells Fargo Bank at the corner of Broad and Bank in Newark – a Wachovia branch until the subprime mortgage crisis at the beginning of the Great Recession – he was calling out to everyone in earshot. He exhorted passing motorists to honk their horns if they agreed with his oration and the slogans on the placards carried by his compatriots.
“I’m going to make a citizen’s arrest,” he announced defiantly, gesturing to the Wells Fargo Bank, the Prudential headquarters across the street and the Bank of America at the corner of Broad and Market a block away. “I’m going to walk in there and arrest the criminals.” Motorists honked. “It’s time we stopped giving our money to the people who have all the money,” he shouted. “It’s time to stop the foreclosures. It’s for change!” Motorists honked.
“The only thing stopping us is complacency! We’re not going to be complacent anymore!” Motorists honked.
***
A little over a year before, in the summer of 2011, I was sitting in the quad at Rutgers-Newark with a colleague after teaching our Summer Session morning courses. Our mood was despondent. In Wisconsin, Governor Scott Walker had passed a draconian budget stripping public employees of their collective bargaining rights over protests and political and legal challenges. Congressional Republicans were playing chicken with President Obama over the debt ceiling. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie signed the state budget into law in July, after repeatedly using his veto to trim it Austerity-lean against the wishes of New Jersey’s legislature and against the interests of the vast majority of the state’s citizens.
“It looks like the bad guys have won,” I said, staring out into the distance in the direction of Bleecker Street. My colleague took a drag on a hand-rolled cigarette and considered for a moment. “Yup,” he replied, uncharacteristically laconic. What else was there to say?
We had turned out for a labor demonstration at City Hall Park in New York that summer to protest the escalating war on unions – particularly public teachers’ unions – but it felt like an exercise in nostalgia. The few hundred unionized workers and supporters who turned out that sunny afternoon sang “Solidarity Forever” and repeated the tired catchphrases of a movement that seemed to have lost hope.
“If we’re ever going to win,” he said, invoking the broad, progressive left that had gone from defeat to defeat in the last few decades, “we’re going to have to come up with some better slogans.”
***
I heard the noise from Zuccotti Park in the third week of September 2011. I was downtown with my partner, shopping for necessities for her upcoming research year in Paris. I had read about Occupy Wall Street, seen some of the flyers and the social media memes. Part of me wanted to walk a block down and see what was happening, but a bigger part of me wanted simply to enjoy the last few days that Molly and I had together before she left for Europe.
She flew out on 30 September. I visited Zuccotti Park two days later.
Most people who remember the early days of OWS recall a feeling of joy and hope. Only a month before, I had been sure that all was lost and Walker, Christie, and their allies had won. Yet, change seemed in the air. It was not possible to resist being swept along in the enthusiasm of the moment and believe, even if only briefly, that we were not a tiny ragged band of political dejects chanting tired slogans; we were a community, a society… Maybe even a movement.
I started visiting the park at every available opportunity. I didn’t camp out, and felt some guilt over that, but like so many of my friends, I did what I could. I called friends and urged them to come down. I circulated a message among my academic colleagues: “Zuccotti Park is the site of a truly extraordinary, protean moment in American history. It is sometimes chaotic, a bit ragged around the edges, but you can’t come away from the park without feeling that there is something important happening there,” I wrote. “Whatever you can, or choose to do, you will be part of an event that we will be teaching our students about in the years ahead. Together, we can make it the moment when things started to get better.”
I helped arrange teach-ins at Rutgers University, and led one at Rutgers-Newark, with representatives from Occupy Newark, Occupy Rutgers and OWS. My friends Mark and Senia, who had been in it almost from the beginning, braving pepper spray and the elements, made brilliant, impassioned contributions.
By the middle of October, I had become involved with the OWS Education and Outreach Working Group. There were some impressive and exciting ideas, but it was as part of the working group that I began to see the occupation start to go off the rails. The great strength of OWS was, in some ways, its greatest weakness. It was a largely spontaneous expression of discontent that sought to mobilize a vast range of Americans in a non-authoritarian, decentralized and inclusive movement. Consequently it eschewed the politics-as-usual explicit goals that could be easily co-opted by a corrupt political establishment.
That was the source of its strength: It promoted ideas of social and economic justice without dictating their content. It made justice and equity themselves the issues. But that was also a weakness.
Anti- and non-authoritarian movements can be enormously difficult and slow-moving. Consensus takes time, and even when achieved, there is always dissent. That’s not a bad thing, but it does often give the impression that nothing is happening. And invariably those activists with more time to devote to the movement – for example, those with personal wealth or sinecures – emerge as a cadre, paradoxically directing the flow of consensus.
This is what happened in the working group. I can’t say that I disagreed with most of what came out of the meetings, but I realized that it would have been accomplished without my presence. Moreover, with classes to teach and final papers about to come in, I found my participation dwindling after the eviction from Zuccotti Park on 15 November, until I just wasn’t directly involved anymore.
I had also become somewhat disenchanted by what I saw as a battle for the OWS “brand,” for the want of a better term. One of the members of the Education Working Group had become involved with a progressive publisher in a project to produce a street-level history of the occupation. The result was a rather good book but, at the time, it excited enormous controversy.
She was an OWS participant from fairly early days, and she believed deeply in the message. But the project looked like a crass commercialization of the movement and, to be honest, it probably was; but books were being written and have been written. I was unprepared for the vehemence of the debate over who has the authority to represent a movement that eschewed authorities.
***
Perhaps inevitably, OWS was crushed, and the occupiers dispersed on 15 November. The idealism of the moment – that people from all walks of life could come together and stand against oppression and greed – was matched by a certain amount of naivete. Occupiers would regularly chat with the police officers ringing the plaza, patiently explaining to them that they, too, were the 99%, and that they should throw in with us, their natural allies. If the last night of truncheons and pepper spray demonstrated anything, it was that the message did not get through. At the end of the day, the cops were cops, no matter how much we might have wished otherwise.
By the following year, when the dust cleared and the unrealistic hopes of a “second occupation” faded, the conservative media crowed, and the liberal commentariat wrung their hands over the perceived defeat of the Occupy movement. It was the same reporting with slightly different spin.
By the standards of American politics-as-usual in the 2012 election season, OWS had indeed failed. American politics was still owned by billionaires; we seemed no closer to social and economic justice now than we had been a year before. Barrack Obama’s Democratic Party expected its left wing and progressive fellow-travelers to obediently line up and do what they were told. Most did, although a fair number of disaffected occupiers did cast their ballots for the Green Party’s Jill Stein, whose share of the popular vote was four times that of the party’s 2008 candidate.
What the commentators – and, indeed, a good number of jaded veterans – missed in the aftermath was that OWS was never meant to be politics-as-usual. Even though it began as a crazy idea floated by Adbusters magazine, and even though all kinds of talking heads from Micah White to Naomi Klein have claimed ownership since, it was never one thing. Everyone who came out to Zuccotti Park, whether they were trade unionists, anarchists, skate punks, poets, the pair of Libyan activists from Arab Spring, intellectuals, or anyone else was there for both the same and different reasons. How can a movement that had no explicit goals and had no intention of assuming power have failed to accomplish its goals or assume power?
***
What has only become apparent in the decade since is that something important did happen in Zuccotti Park the fall of 2001, even if it defies easy categorization and description. At the time, austerity capitalism was draped in the robes of “common-sense;” political leaders from Washington, to Tokyo, to Berlin insisted that we needed to cut back and tighten our belts to keep the machine moving and, not incidentally, preserve the socio-economic practices and relations that created the need for Austerity. OWS called austerity capitalism’s bluff by providing, even if for only a moment, a focal point for people around the world to spontaneously exhale a frustrated “no more!”
I doubt that anyone was thinking about it in such rarefied terms at the time, but it was the first really significant move in what Antonio Gramsci called a “war of position” that would interrogate “common-sense,” and subvert the terms of engagement, not a “war of manouevre” to seize power or effect specific policy changes. It was the opening through which we began a conversation that asked whether, if these socio-economic practices and relations require austerity, privation and exploitation in order to preserve themselves, we shouldn’t change the way we think and what we believe about them?
In that sense, OWS marked a kind of cultural turn in our politics. A decade later, the notion that billionaires are “job creators,” that corporations are people, that the concentration and consolidation of capital by a tiny elite of these “people” is good for “growth” and benefits us all seems so absurd that even conservative republicans like Mitt Romney (who, one might recall, once insisted that a $250,000 annual salary represents “middle income” in America) have abandoned the rhetoric.
We have new villains today, of course. The third decade of the 21st century is a new Gilded Age, when billionaires parade their unimaginable wealth and power like the grandees of 1897 at Cornelia Bradley Martin’s costume ball at the Waldorf Astoria. “The power of wealth with its refinement and vulgarity was everywhere,” Her brother Frederick Townsend Martin would recall. “It gleamed from countless jewels, and it was proclaimed by the thousands of orchids and roses, whose fragrance that night was like incense on the altar of the Golden Calf.” Only today, the jewels are spaceships and the pageant is played out every day on the Internet and in social media.
This is the age of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Richard Branson, but it is also the age in which their grand gestures of plutocratic superiority, like yee-hawing like Slim Pickens astride a phallic rocket booster, seem increasingly ridiculous. The emperors have no clothes, and the politics unleashed by OWS a decade ago gave us license to see it. We have lost our complacency.
***
Correlation is not causation, but the political conversation did shift that fall a decade ago, as activists camped out in New York, London, Buffalo, Montreal, and in cities around the world. A broad international coalition of the same kind of people who had crowded Zuccotti Park – students, workers, clergy, pot-smokers, anarchists, unionists, and suburban mothers – emerged from that season talking about “the one percent” and basic humanity.
In the years since, a self-described democratic socialist has come within a hair’s-breadth (twice) of winning the Democratic Party nomination, condemning “the billionaire class” and advocating for government investments in infrastructure and social programs that would have been anathema to the sober-minded austerity proponents who dominated our politics in 2001. Even President Biden, hardly a champion of the left, has made made a multi-trillion-dollar infrastructure plan the make-or-break centerpiece of his agenda. The progressive left, whom the Democratic Party always assumed would simply step in line, has become restive and has eloquent representatives in Congress and deep traction in the grassroots.
Perhaps most dramatic of all, the generation of young people who have grown to political maturity since 2011, and who face a future clouded by the specter of environmental catastrophe, have embraced a new politics that is unashamed to call itself socialism, and which holds their sober elders to account. “How dare you!” Gret Thunberg thundered, as if speaking for her whole generation. “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.”
There is peril ahead, as there has always been. A reaction from the right tapped into the same discontent that produced OWS, giving rise to a violent White Christian nationalist totalitarian movement that grew from the Tea Party and the rotting corpse of Bush-era neoconservatism. But following the great watershed of the fall of 2011, we are at least able to recognize the enemy and prepared to defeat them.