Occupy Wall Street, Re-energized

Occupy Wall Street, Re-energized: A Leaderless Movement Plots a Comeback





Excerpted from What Is Occupy? Inside the Global Movement, a new book from the editors of TIME. To buy a copy as an e-book or a paperback, go to time.com/whatisoccupy.

In a society in which we're used to taking direction from Presidents and CEOs, captains and quarterbacks, Occupy Wall Street's leaderless structure seems like a formula for chaos. And yet nearly a month after protesters were evicted from the movement's birthplace in Zuccotti Park in downtown Manhattan the exercise in organized anarchy is still going strong. On Tuesday, Occupy Wall Streeters in 20 cities across the country marched in neighborhoods that have been hardest hit by foreclosures. In East New York, Brooklyn, about 400 protesters broke into a foreclosed vacant property and moved in a family that was homeless after losing their house to a bank.

Since the Nov. 15 eviction, much of New York Occupy Wall Street group's day-to-day activities have moved inside. Occupy Wall Streeters have moved in to a donated small office space in downtown Manhattan, with desks for about 50 workers. Crowds have dwindled, particularly at Zuccotti Park, where protesters are allowed to gather, but no longer sleep. Organizers say a smaller but more dedicated group is now doing much of the work of planning marches and deciding Occupy Wall Street's next moves. (See pictures of the Occupy Wall Street movement.)

Nonetheless, as it has been since the beginning of the movement, the leaderless structure appears to be working. Crowds come together on cue. Messages go out to the media. Lawsuits are filed. Funds are raised (more than $500,000 by the end of November). And the silliest ideas, like building an igloo city in Central Park, get voted down. "There have been challenges, but generally the group has been effective," says Marina Sitrin, a sociologist who has written a book on leaderless movements and is an active member of Occupy Wall Street. "The lack of leadership has been able to get more people engaged in the process, which I think shows how effective it has been."

So how does Occupy Wall Street make all this happen with no titles and no corner offices? By organizing as a network of dozens of working groups, Occupy Wall Street keeps its participants focused on particular tasks they can perform with autonomy and attention to detail. A look at the division of labor:

Idea Generation
The only power at first was the power of suggestion. Kalle Lasn, editor of the Canadian anticonsumerist magazine Adbusters, coined the name Occupy Wall Street and called for protesters to fill the streets of lower Manhattan. Catchy idea, but how to organize this? In August 2011, about 100people showed up in lower Manhattan to talk about it, on the same day that Washington faced a government shutdown deadline because of gridlock over the federal budget deficit. Activists gave windy speeches calling for a list of demands, like a massive jobs program. According to Bloomberg Businessweek, David Graeber, an anarchist and influential activist, didn't like what he heard. He and a few others broke off from the group, formed a circle and started organizing the Sept. 17 march on Wall Street. Graeber proposed the slogan "We Are the 99%." (See a video from Occupy Wall Street's "Day of Action.")

By the end of the afternoon, nearly everyone had abandoned the original rally for Graeber's less formal discussion group, which became the model for Occupy's governing system. Meanwhile, untitled leader Lasn maintained the flow of ideas from up north. In early November, Lasn told a Canadian radio program that it would be a good idea for the Occupiers to leave the park before frustration and violence erupted. "Now that winter is approaching, I can see this first wild, messy, crazy Occupation phase kind of slowly winding down." He was right about the Occupation phase ending, but not slowly.

The People's Congress
Occupy Wall Street makes its decisions by consensus at what started as a nightly meeting called the general assembly. The group now holds general assembly meetings every other day, which are sometimes in Zuccotti Park or in an indoor public space on Wall Street. Attendance, though, has significantly shrunk to around 100 people a night, from as many as 1,500 before the police cleared the park. Facilitators run the meetings, but anyone is allowed to sign up to make proposals. Crowd members show approval by holding their hands up and wiggling their fingers. Downward wiggling fingers means you don't approve. Anyone can raise a finger to make a point. Rolling fingers means it's time to wrap it up. Since no bullhorns are allowed, the crowd repeats everything every speaker says, a technique dubbed the "people's mic," which has become a signature of the movement. (See "On Scene: The Night the Police Cleared Occupy Wall Street.")

While the general assembly gets decisions made, a by-product is recruitment. At a time when many people believe government isn't working, the general assembly gives a sense of true democracy. A bit too much, in fact, as the group grew larger, the meetings began to drag on and become more about fund distribution than what the movement was about. "General assemblies need to go back to what they first were, which was a movement-building body," says Chris Longenecker, an original member. "They get people excited." In October 2011, when the general assemblies were pared back to every other night, a smaller spokescouncil was created to make some of the group's decisions.

Getting the Word Out
The revolution has not only been televised; it has also been tweeted, Tumblred and streamed. The Occupiers, mostly in their 20s, have been heavy users of social media to get their message to friends and the rest of the world. By November the group's Twitter account had more than 125,000 followers. Occupy Wall Street has two main websites: one that makes official statements, and another devoted to the group's meetings and day-to-day activities. The latter features a calendar of events and a list of Occupy's dozens of working groups, along with chat boards. According to that website in November, the media working group had 310 members and the Internet group 365.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2101802,00.html#ixzz1gH9B4CY0


In a send-up of old media, Priscilla Grim, a former corporate social-media director, launched the Occupy Wall Street Journal, published as a newspaper by a volunteer staff of about 25, many of them working under assumed names to protect their day jobs. On the Tumblr microblogging service, the We Are the 99% site has thousands of pictures of people holding cards explaining whey they're part of that cohort.

Keeping It Legal (Mostly)
Even a group inspired by anarchists needs lawyers — a lot of them. By November, more than 1,200 protesters had been arrested in New York City alone. Early on, the National Lawyers Guild, a liberal advocacy organization, started a working group of lawyers to deal specifically with Occupy Wall Street. The guild has sent lawyers, identified by the special green hats they wear, to marches and rallies to witness arrests and take down names of those who go to jail. The guild runs a hot line that family members can call to get information. Guild lawyers have also represented many of the protesters in court, the vast majority of whom have decided to take their cases to trial rather than plea. (See TIME's dispatch from Occupy Wall Street's "Day of Action.")

Some of Occupy's most basic needs have produced legal battles, notably the necessity for portable toilets at Zuccotti Park. When police refused to allow them, lawyer Christopher Dunn of the New York Civil Liberties Union advised the group that it had to apply for a permit from the city agency that regulates street fairs. After much legal wrangling, the city finally agreed to a plan. Dunn acknowledges that representing a leaderless group has been a challenge. "It's not like you know for sure what they are going to do," said Dunn. "It makes it hard to negotiate with the other side."

Mobilizing the Marches
Occupy Wall Streeters may have no leaders, but from the beginning, the direct-action committee has had more sway over the group than others. In the argot of Occupy Wall Street, a march or protest is called a direct action. Unlike most other decisions that go to the general assembly, the direct-action committee has the power to pick and plan its event. Among the preparations the committee makes for marches is holding training sessions to teach members how to avoid violent confrontations with police and citizens. (See "Taking It to the Streets.")

Longenecker, who has been on the direct-action committee since the protest began, admits that Occupy has made mistakes. In the first Brooklyn Bridge march, Longenecker says, he and others who planned the march wanted to give some of the protesters the ability to block the roadway and ultimately get arrested, if that was what they chose. A group of many hundreds went onto the roadway, many of them perhaps unsuspecting of their likely fate. At least 700, possibly more, were arrested that day, many more than planned. "We learned from it," says Longenecker. "But that march, our mistake, also put us on the map."

Creating a Culture
When planning a protest to denounce the growing economic divide between the richest Americans and the rest of us, you might not expect an arts and culture committee to be high on your list of priorities. But it was for Occupy Wall Street, which has roots in art. A group of artists called 16Beaver, named for the address of a downtown studio where they regularly meet, had long discussed occupying a public space as a form of performance art and were some of the first people to sign on to the movement. Since then, cultural creativity has seemed to spring naturally from Occupy Wall Street: regular poetry readings in Zuccotti Park, giant Halloween puppets of the Statue of liberty and Wall Street's Charging Bull. (See Occupy Wall Street's unofficial demands.)

Most famous of all were the protest signs. In October, on the night before the mayor first threatened to remove protesters from the park, Jez Bold, Occupy Wall Street's unofficial curator, was busy packing up the signs to protect them. "Some of these are truly beautiful," said Bold. The People's Library, too, was an inspired creation. Situated in a corner of Zuccotti Park, it contained more than 5,000 donated volumes, including books from such leftist authors as Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein, all organized according to ISBN. Said Zachary Loeb, one of a dozen librarians who volunteered to care for the books: "Information matters. We are feeding people's minds." The books were confiscated when police cleared the park in November, and many were lost, but like so much of what happened in the early days, the People's Library is now a permanent part of Occupy's colorful history.

The question is whether Occupy Wall Street, which is likely to become more specifically goal-oriented now that it can no longer count its success in numbers of days in Zuccotti Park and similar spaces around the country, will start developing the kind of organization that it has so emphatically rejected so far. Dedicated office space alone is a sign that the group is becoming more like other traditional activist groups. Already, the emergence of a high-level committee has caused grumbling in the ranks.

Can the movement stay true to its grass roots and still change the country's direction? Sounds like a good topic for a general assembly.

Excerpted from What Is Occupy? Inside the Global Movement, a new book from the editors of TIME. To buy a copy as an e-book or a paperback, go to time.com/occupybook.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2101802,00.html#ixzz1gH9lAn2n


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