S17 by Chris Moylan

September 17

By Chris Moylan 

From the period of the encampments onward, Occupy Wall Street has placed great emphasis on the really, really big day: the first union-Occupy gathering in Foley Square, the march across Brooklyn Bridge, the Times Square demonstration, and so on through Chicago-Nato, Mayday, and the Year 1 Anniversary on September 17. After the eviction from Liberty Square, and the dispersal of the movement, these big days assumed ever greater importance as the media turned from its reductive ‘what does Occupy want’ refrain to ‘whatever happened to Occupy?’

The simple question received the simple answer; we are here, in Chicago, in Philly at the National Gathering, in Union Square protesting police brutality, in Chelsea banging pots and pans to protest student debt, each demonstration reconstituting the public dimension of Occupy and, inevitably, disbanding it late at night, after the arrests and the emotional and physical exhaustion of chanting for hours made continuing pointless.

A news ritual of demand and neglect made for a crazy-making six months or so of enormous effort with little reward. The media paid scant attention to the largest of the demonstrations, no attention to the smaller ones. Why? The answer, if one succeeded in cornering a reporter and getting an answer, returned the circle to its starting point; whatever happened to Occupy? There was a large demonstration? Where? The reporter didn’t see it and, by the way, whatever happened to Occupy? Yet someone was paying attention; the police came out in overwhelming numbers whatever the size of the demonstration. They came with their riot gear and helicopters and paddy wagons, their sunglasses and guns. They made arbitrary arrests, brutalized anyone who showed the slightest sign of resistance, and tossed photographers aside like naughty children.

By early June it was clear that the hope for a hot summer of large demonstrations was not to be realized. College students, a large constituency for the movement, had left the city. A wet spring and the early onset of hot, humid days discouraged large turnouts. The economy was improving, and even if the improvement was largely to the benefit of Wall Street and the banks, the sense of crisis that impelled demonstrations in the fall had abated. The demonstrations, however, contributed as much as any of this to the decline in numbers. If the turnout at one demonstration was disappointing, the turnout at the next had to be much greater to demonstrate the vitality of Occupy; if the turnout was large, the expectations generated were also large; laws should change, financial practices should be reformed, the police should be ordered to stand down. If all the shouting and marching was not going to accomplish anything concrete, then why bother?

There are all kinds of reasons to bother, reasons that have nothing to do with the understandable but not very practical desire for immediate concrete results. The one year anniversary celebration of Occupy brought this home, although, ironically, this was another occasion for a much hyped really, really big day.

These reasons were brought home partly because of the psychology of the big demonstration, and partly because of the importance of Liberty Square.

First the psychology, or emotional dynamic. With all the planning that has gone into the large demonstrations, it could be argued that not enough attention has been paid to the post big-day hangover when people have dispersed and the everyday reasserts itself, with all its torpor and addled passivity.  The apocalyptic rhetoric in Occupy--talk of revolution, and not just that, but world revolution—has not not helped matters. The movement has done great things but it has inspired neither a revolution nor a general call for the kinds of measures that might result in a revolution: taking up arms, storming government buildings or offices, targeting key industries for strikes or boycotts... Just what would constitute a revolution, or ‘another world,’ has not been established. Given the diversity of views in the movement it is unlikely that a grand vision or plan will be determined anytime soon. The combination of heroic, revolutionary rhetoric and nebulous results from given direct actions has made for something like a periodic caffeine-sugar rush and crash.

What’s more, the emphasis in Occupy on individual action and responsibility makes large scale collective action seem contradictory, even a bit suspicious. For a leaderless movement made up of self-determined activists there does seem to be a lot of leading and organizing going on. In a culture that is increasingly dominated by top-down, corporate thinking it is understandable that some might suspect a guiding hand behind Occupy events. Of course, anyone and everyone is invited to take part in the exhausting process of organizing Occupy, and if some group doesn’t get together to make things happen then…things won’t happen.

In short, one could detect a tendency toward defensiveness and internal tension or division with a corresponding tendency to assert that everything was fine, the eviction from Zuccotti didn’t matter, the movement was growing… The movement had internalized a tv and web-based perception of it, a perception so literal and narrow that one could be excused for not having understood what was happening. For most people out there in tv land OWS is the encampments. That is what it does, what it is, and without the encampments how can there be anything called OWS? Clearly, OWS is not the encampments any more than the resistance in the American colonies was the Tea Party or student opposition to the Viet Nam War was the Columbia sit-in and occupation. No doubt everyone sympathetic to Occupy who spent time in Zuccotti shares some degree of nostalgia for that period. But the work has just begun.

On September 17 it appeared that everyone understood just that.

The early morning attempts to interfere with business as usual on Wall Street revealed a tactical side of the movement. After months of police infiltration, intimidation, provocation, the movement has become increasingly adaptive and canny even as its street presence, at least in New York, reduced to a disciplined core numbering in the hundreds (with a community of Occupy sympathizers and Facebook friend of exponentially larger than that).  The oppression, it seems, has conjured the street resistance it fears and, to a degree, desires, without achieving the prize: bloody confrontations. Occupy can do some conjuring of its own, and what appears tends to surprise the police and mystify the Wall Street worker bees partly, it seems, because it is there at all. The protests are supposed to be over, aren’t they? Who gave Occupy the right to persist?

The expansive, party-in-the-streets atmosphere of the Times Square gathering and other early demonstrations is probably a thing of the past. The oppression (extending from Homeland Security to the Koch brothers and their fellow proto-fascists to the NYPD) has become militarized; the resistance has become not militarized, perhaps, but certainly street-wise and passively, non-violently aggressive. It has renewed itself, re-created itself, as any art form will do.  That is the dichotomy; the police are an exercise in control and suppression, Occupy is a process of creative expression en masse.

A summer of rehearsals at the Occupational Disobedience School in Bryant Park and in the Friday evening casseroles demonstrations originating in Washington Square Park prepared demonstrators that morning to deploy quickly from different locations, to follow hand signals and relayed instructions, to keep calm in the face of provocation and violence from the police. The 99 Pickets actions in the spring demonstrated that it is better to appear in a number of places simultaneously rather than funnel everyone down one avenue and into police kettling actions. Measures have been developed to slow down, though not consistently prevent, snatch and grab arrests, the go civilian technique being perhaps the most effective (we are all civilians, after all). The movement has studied those who have watched them; it’s so postmodern it should be done in French.

All this did not enable Occupy to shut down the New York Stock Exchange, or to paralyze Wall Street, or to cause the repeal of Citizens United. But it did bring out an army of police and provoke nearly two hundred arrests for crimes like… walking… and crimes like… not looking quite right. The actions made clear, once again, what kind of country we live in. Not only are citizens exercising the right to demonstrate subject to arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, they are arrested and imprisoned in broad daylight while hundreds of thousands of pedestrians walk past as if nothing untoward were happening. This is not healthy.That point will be made again and again and again in the coming months until ordinary people start to respond—as they did for a few months in the Fall of ’11. OWS has moved past the ‘whatever happened to Occupy’ question. The real question is whatever happened to America?

Pussy Riot, Romney ascendant, bad job numbers, Iran-Israel tension, civil war in Syria, Europe tumbling from one banking fix to another, Libor, banks laundering billions in drug money without any repercussions, the war on women, fires burning out of control throughout the West and Southwest, tornadoes popping up like invasive species in Massachusetts and New York and breeding like rabbits across the Midwest, Arctic ice melting much faster than predicted five years ago when Arctic was melting much faster than predicted, drought shriveling a fifth of the corn crop, billions flowing into the presidential campaigns, Congress paralyzed by proto-fascist extremists…

That is, what does Occupy want? Doesn’t everyone want a representative government free of corporate interference and control, a fair and transparent financial industry, an approach to climate change that recognizes the magnitude of the problems that are developing around the world?

Occupy wants to be a disciplined, organized mass movement and a culture of improvisational self-expression and creativity. It wants to cohere into a formidable army of social activists and to scatter into a million self-generating monads of visionary social explorers. It wants to change completely the structure of American government and finance, and to ignore government and finance and build better, more people-friendly, flexible arrangements. It wants not to be an it, but to be an epoch, an awakening and a transformation that will improve the posture and the mood of everyone in this country. We’ll stand straighter and we’ll feel more confident. We’ll eat better, breathe better, think better, live better. Bound to happen.

About that reference to creativity and self-expression… In the evening nearly a thousand Occupiers gathered in Liberty Square. For one night Occupy, all of it, the whole teeming, beautiful, improvisational joy of it was there, where it belongs. Everywhere one looked one saw vignettes of that creative let your freak flag fly spirit that gave a glimpse of a happier, friendlier, funnier, weirder America. A pretty woman in a diaphanous ballerina dress and pedestrian top wandered past a man in a space creature mask. A street theater group enacted a cross between a marital spat and Hegelian discourse on market forces while several couples dozed under the polished wall that separated the Occupiers from an invasion force of cops backed by every manner of assault vehicle. A small crowd gathered around a poet from Nepal and gave the mic check treatment to his lines, sometimes improvising on the words when his accent got in the way. ‘Rise up people to cast off your multiple chains’ became ‘Rise up people you have the beautiful brains!’ A folk singer sporting an elaborate headdress of beads and spangles tried, with limited success, to induce others to sing along to “Imagine,” while a modified GA ebbed and flowed to her right. Drummers and musicians gathered in the southwest corner of the park and raised a wall of pulsing sound around which people clapped, danced, swirled robes, hopped up and down. Young women danced with white haired middle aged guys danced with kids. Some people played chess. Others dished out free meals. Some people marched off to do jail support. Others debated the merits of taking to the streets and getting arrested. The drumming got so loud one could rest one’s head against it. Or dance, or sing or both. The klieg lights went on. So what. This was going to continue until it turned into something else. The cops could wade through and try to impose themselves on it but that would be like trying to put handcuffs on a stream. The currents find a way…

All this dancing and celebrating was of a piece with the marching and chanting. Occupy is a civil rights movement, not yet a revolution. People have been disenfranchised, politically and spiritually. In Occupy, the process of spiritual emancipation (creative, erotic, domestic, expressive, etc.) works with the processes and structures of political opposition and emancipation. One is outflying dance and sweat and paint all over the place, and the other is marching, organization, agglutinated convergence of forces and bodies... But it is all the same art of liberation. Like any art, it will keep changing, keep surprising and puzzling, and people will become impatient and want it to settle down and become predictable. They’ll want it to stop. But it won’t stop, whether the protests are large or small, the cops are in their way or not. Why should it?