Sar ah Resnick

Nov. 15
Courtroom

ANN SNITO W
Greenham Common

page 7page 20

Geoffrey Wildanger

Kathryn Crim

OCCUPY UC DAVIS

page 30

Bulldozers of the
Mind

Kathleen Ross

page 14

Arrested!

OCCUPY!
page 14#3

Daniel Marcus

page 30

Occupation to
Communization

An OWS-Inspired Gazette

Marco RothMayor
Bloomberg’s
Language

Women,
Austerity,and theSomeunfinishedissues with feminist
horizon- revolution
talismpage 2

page 32

SIlvia Federici

CHRISTOPHER HERRING AND ZOLTAN GLU CK

page 22

Re-Articulating the Struggle for Education

Marina Sitrin

Nicholas Mirzoeff

page 30

page 32

Eli Schmitt

page 18

Occupy Climate The best Years
Change!
of our lives

Mark GreifOpen Letter

page 2COMPLETE TABLE OF CONTENTS

INSIDE THE BACK COVER

ZUCCOTTI RAID & AFTER
Astra Taylor

the eviction
Last night, in what seems to be part of acoordinated crackdown on occupations
across the country, Zuccotti Park was
raided. Thousands of us who had subscribed to the text alert system, or who
got emails or phone calls or panicked
Twitter messages, went to Wall Street.
But we could not get near the camp. Twoblocks south of Liberty Plaza on Broadway, blocked by a police barricade thatcircled the whole area, I found myself partof a small crowd straining to see what
was happening. In the distance, ZuccottiPark was lit like a sports field, glaring
eerily, and I could make out a loudspeaker,
blasting announcements and threats.
Sounds of people chanting and screaming floated towards us. While we paced
the street, seething and sorrowful, tents
were trampled, people’s possessions piled
up, and occupiers arrested. Later I would
come across a camper I had met earlier
in the day sobbing on the sidewalk. A few
blocks west, maybe thirty minutes after I
arrived, the police line broke so two huge
dump trucks could pass through. So thatwas it: we, and everything we had madeand were trying to make, were trash.
The authorities must be ashamed,
because they so badly did not want anyone
to see what happened last night. First they
attacked the senses, flooding the park withbright light and using sound cannons.
Then they corralled the press into pens,arrested reporters, and shut down airspaceover lower Manhattan, so that no news
stations could broadcast from above. As
we strained our necks over their barricades they kept telling us that there wasnothing to see. But clearly there was! We
knew they were lying. And when we told
them so, they, with batons in hand, forced
us away. We were herded like sheep, andI felt like one, meekly following orders,a terrible coward. Those who resisted—those who stood their ground on a public
sidewalk we all have a right to standon—got maced in the face, right in theeyes. The authorities so badly did not wantanyone to see what happened last night
they were willing to temporarily blind us.
As the hours wore on, a single menacing helicopter hovered overhead, ominously tracking impromptu marches,
which raced from Foley Square to Astor
Place and back. At 3 AM I got separated
from friends but realized I could use that
helicopter as a beacon. I followed it up
Centre and then crossed Houston just intime to see the cops, who had come inand filled maybe ten large vans, arresting a women, twisting her arms painfully
behind her back. “They’re hurting me!”she screamed, and I winced. An officer
told a group of us, who were gawking
from across the street, to “get a job.” As I
approached Bleeker, the protesters werebeing forced east by a swarm of police;2

they were outnumbered, easily, two toone.
“What are they so afraid of?” my companion asked when we first arrived at WallStreet just after 1 AM, and as I watchedthis excessive use of force the question
kept ringing in my ears. But the answer isobvious: they are afraid of us. “This peaceful uprising against our sickening plutocracy has them quaking with fear,” a friend
remarked later, proud and surprised. Theysay we are just a bunch of hippies ineffectually camping out. But if that’s really
what they think, why do they need guns
and nightsticks and Long Range Acoustic
Devices and paramilitary aircraft? Weshould take heart. If we make them so
afraid, we must not be as weak as I often
worry we are.

Mark GreifOpen Letter
Dear Police,
You keep inserting yourself and distracting OWS. Could you please stay home?
The conflict is between American citizens
and concentrations of wealth, and thegovernment hangs in the balance between
them. But you keep pushing in and trying
to fight, or beat people up, as I saw you
do last night, or just throw your weightaround, needlessly, and waste our time.
It’s narcissistic. It’s tiring to even think
about you. What last night’s wastefulness reminded me is that I need to stop
defending you, or worrying about yourhumanity and underlying goodness, oryour possibility of recognizing your places
as citizens, too. All that would be nice tothink about. But I was reminded, looking
at you, that every one of us is still responsible, and everyone has a choice finally,
to obey or disobey, to do wrong or right.
You abdicate that choice; that doesn’tmean you have to ruin it for the rest of
America. I believe that when your Officer
Cho was leaning on my chest last nightwith a plastic police shield, to clear room
for pedestrians who didn’t exist, on an
empty sidewalk at 1 AM in the Financial
District, pushing hard with a line of his
coworkers on a crowd of us, all of whom
actually were pedestrians on that sidewalk,as he and I were locked in place, he said tome, from behind his plastic visor, where
he could watch us all as if on television, orin his car, so he didn’t have to think, thisphrase: “It’s a game.” “What?” I said. “Wepush you back, you push us back. We’reboth doing our jobs. A game.” No. It’s not.
So get out of the way.
Incidentally, I saw two chants give
you pause last night. “This—is—a peaceful—pro-test” was one; you all stopped
shoving us and stood there like blue
clad mannequins. Why did that paralyze
you—because you’re telling yourself inyour head that you’re fighting violence,
to do what you do? The other was sad:

“Police—protect—the 1 per-cent.” You
were standing, twenty of you, defending
an empty street with bank skyscrapers
rising out of it. You don’t belong in thoseskyscrapers. You knew it too.

M ARC O ROTH

Mayor
Bloomberg’s
Language

A massive police action undertaken in the
middle of the night against an unarmed,
defenseless, and mostly sleeping group,with the aim of their forcible removal
and the incidental destruction of most of
their personal property was ordered, welearned, ostensibly in the name of “guaranteeing public health and safety.” Why inthe middle of the night? “This action was
taken at this time of day to reduce the riskof confrontation, and to minimize disruption to the surrounding neighborhood.” By
the same logic, a thief breaks into a houseat an hour when its residents are least
expected to be home, or least ready for
confrontation, so as not to raise the alarmand bring out the neighbors. A surprise
attack by an overwhelming force is not
the action of a brave man, nor of a man
entirely sure of himself. Surprise is theweapon of the weak, but has been chosen
by the strongest in the name of minimization and harm reduction, the language ofrisk management, imported into a politicalarena, an arena for the struggle of ideas
and concepts, from the realm of economics, the household, where the financial
sector’s failure to minimize risk andreduce potential harm led us directly tothe crisis that caused the mayor to call out
the armored might of the NYPD to quash
a bunch of campers, kick over their tents
like sandcastles, destroy a library of over
5,000 books, and throw away countless
personal possessions, each of which had astory of its own, all so that a neighborhood
may not “be disrupted.”
But what is a neighborhood? Who
decides what belongs there and what
doesn’t? The mayor knows and the mayor
decides: “There have been reports of businesses being threatened and complaints
about noise and unsanitary conditions
that have seriously impacted the quality of life for residents and businesses inthis now-thriving neighborhood.” Vague
reports, vague threats: this does not evenrise to the level of the terrible phrases
foisted on the public in recent years, like“credible intelligence.” And oh, the noise,the “unsanitary conditions,” that havemade businesses unhappy, “quality oflife,” a phrase popularized by Bloomberg’s
precursor, Rudy Giuliani, but remains noclearer today than in 1993: it’s a phrasethat simultaneously encapsulates andoccludes the very struggle at issue inZuccotti Park. What does it mean to live

a life of qualities? Is quality, by definition
immeasurable, only describable, something that can be charted by the cleanliness of a street, the absence of certain
smells, certain people? Is the absence ofdirt, smells, noise, and people what the
mayor means by “thriving?” Is there reallya right not to see certain things, and canthe mayor of New York City destroy individual property in its name?
Alas, this property was erected on a
too-fragile foundation: “The law that created Zuccotti Park required that it be open
for the public to enjoy for passive recreation 24 hours a day.” “Passive recreation,”
another phrase that sums up Bloomberg’s
New York. This is bureau-speak to say thatyou can’t play a game of touch football in
Zuccotti Park, but why not apply it more
broadly, for instance, to the making ofspeeches and the holding of assemblies?
Is that a violation of the passivity or therecreation, or both?
“Ever since the occupation began, that
law has not been complied with, as thepark has been taken over by protesters,
making it unavailable to anyone else.” Here
begins a litany of charges against the protesters, which, as they multiply, become
increasingly incoherent and contradictory. This first count is purely tendentious:
the park was not “unavailable to anyoneelse” until the police themselves erectedbarricades around it. Maybe it was a less
nice place to walk your dog or take a lunch
break than it used to be. There were funnypeople and they smelled funny, and they
had to shout over the drum circle, but theCity of New York has no problems telling
people where they can and cannot walktheir dogs and where they can and cannot
have lunch, smoke cigarettes, make out, etcetera. The protesters barred no one entry
to the park, a fact that the police would
use against them to encourage drug users
and drinkers, as the New York Daily News
reported, to “take it to Zuccotti,” helping
to create the very conditions the mayor
cites in his brief; the protesters threatened
instead what the City of New York views
as its sovereign right to control the use of
space.
But that’s not the real reason thatthe riot gear and the bulldozers and thehelicopter and the floodlights were calledout at 1 AM on November 15th. “I havesaid that the City had two principal goals:
guaranteeing public health and safety, andguaranteeing the protesters’ First Amendment rights. But when those two goals
clash, the health and safety of the public
and our first responders must be thepriority.” No, no . . . it was all about healthand safety first! Not, however, the healthand safety of the protesters, who weresomehow seen as alien to the public. One
way to correct the prospective imbalance
between First Amendment rights andthe nebulous right to public safety would
have been to allow the protesters to erect
winterized structures and ensure they
had adequate access to clean bathrooms
and did not have to rely on the strained
good-will of local businesses. That would
have minimized the risk of disease, of atubercular protester, god-forbid, spitting

near an area where a resident of a thriving
neighborhood might walk.
The city did not do this. Instead, themayor explains, in the interest of publichealth and safety, “several weeks ago theCity acted to remove generators and fuelthat posed a fire hazard from the park.”
Recall that they did this several hours
before a snowstorm had been forecast. To
cause people to freeze in the name of public health, to cry fire when the danger isfrom cold, that’s humane and responsible
governance.
The mayor’s final justification, however, rests simply on a diktat, “make no
mistake—the final decision to act wasmine . . . ” followed by another round of
confusing double-speak, “I could not wait
for someone in the park to get killed or
to injure another first responder before
acting. Others have cautioned against
action because enforcing our laws might
be used by some protesters as a pretext
for violence—but we must never be afraid
to insist on compliance with our laws.”
First the mayor says that he could not
wait for an actual law to be broken, forinstance manslaughter or homicide, so heacts preventively on the suspicion that a
law could at any moment be broken. Thisis the logic that leads to thought-crime,
unless of course one believes that there’s
an imminent menace. True there havebeen sexual assaults and theft and drug
use in the park, but this is true of otherneighborhoods in New York as well. The
city does not raze a city block because arape occurs in a building. Zuccotti Park,
however, became the most-policed groundin the country. From the beginning it was
treated as an enemy zone, subjected to alevel of scrutiny that most of us only havenightmares about. But then the mayor
insists the midnight assault was all aboutcompliance with existing laws, presumably the one enforcing “passive recreation,”or the various anti-homeless statutes.
Hero of crime prevention or bureaucratof enforcement, both sides are present,
neither convinces. What emerges between
the lines is the invocation of “pretext
to violence.” Bloomberg attributes theviolence to the protesters and the thought
to some mysterious, unnamed “others,”
but to anyone who has been following
the city’s campaign against the protesters
from the beginning, it’s clear that what the
mayor was casting about for was precisely
a pretext, and a pretext to do exactly what
he did last night: raze the park in the mostaggressive way possible, through maximum force projection, and under a media
blackout, staking everything on the hopethat the protesters would behave peacefully, in exactly the opposite way that hewould later characterize them. Why was
the media blocked? Says Bloomberg, “[Wehad to] protect the members of the press.
We have to provide protection and wehave done exactly that.”
The overall tone of Bloomberg’s statement takes us back directly to the chaotic
and terrified New York after September
11, 2001, and what only a handful of
principled civil libertarians then fearedin that peculiar state of emergency haslargely come to pass: a police force swollen
by Homeland Security investments nolonger knows how to deal with citizens
as citizens, visualizing them instead as
threats; a national security godfather state
has replaced the language of law with therhetoric of sovereign “Public Safety,” apolitical idea rooted in Jacobin paranoia
and the Terror; and when disputes overlaw and the public good arise they are
increasingly settled by the arbitrary decisions of an executive power simultaneously terrified of appearing weak and of
showing its might in the fair light of day.
What the press and the public at large
have been protected from, in fact, is an
opportunity to participate in understanding their own history. Last night’s action
was not an attempt at law enforcement
or protection: it was an effort to erase thelast two months in Zuccotti Park. The
midnight raid wasn’t just cowardice, it was
the fantastical act of a tyrant who believes
he can wipe the slate clean, and so exact
revenge for slights to his power. To lookat images of the park as it appeared after
the cleanup, or with the army of orangevested sanitation workers with theirpower-hoses, is to glimpse Bloomberg’s
utopia, a semi-public space that is meant
to be always and utterly vacant of meaning
and content and individual associations, aplaything put away for the night.

Kathleen Ross

Arrested

The night before the two-monthanniversary of Occupy Wall Street on
November 17, an activist emailed ourOWS listserv with information about adirect action scheduled to begin at 7 AM
the next morning. In an effort to delay the
opening bell, protesters would block theentrance to the New York Stock Exchange.
Some would form “soft barricades” nearparticular police gates. Our correspondent described a training session in which
participants role-played protester andcop: she locked arms with her neighbors
while another volunteer made the arrest.
“I went limp as she yanked me up and overand dragged me across the floor. So now I
know what that’s like!” I read through the
instructions—wear running shoes, dressin layers, consider carrying a 1:1 solution of water and Mylanta (to counteract
pepper spray)—and set my alarm for 6:30
AM.
Our group met in Zuccotti Park andmarched together to the Exchange. We
made our way down the sheltered oneways, weaving around metal barriers
and parked police trucks. A line of traffic
tried to inch past the protesters. I hurried further down William Street—there
was promise of a dance party around thecorner—but a friend called us back to theintersection of William and Pine. People
had formed a standing barricade blocking
traffic in front of the police gates. Keithand Eli had linked arms in the crosswalk.
I hopped off the sidewalk and joined themin the street. Another member of thegroup, Sarah, appeared at my side, breathlessly apologizing, “Sorry! I got swept awaywith some anarchists.”
You shift around a lot in a crowd. At
first, I was further forward, in the middleof the street, but after some reshufflingfound myself standing in the crosswalk
with Sarah. When the cops approached inhelmets and with bundles of zip cuffs inhand, we linked arms and sat down. “Copstake off your riot gear / I don’t see no riot
here.”The guy in the blue windbreaker playing the drums and leading occasional mic
checks was the first to be arrested. He

struggled—more than others would—andflipped over, kicking a woman in the facein the process. the group scooted forward together. (Who knew there would
be scooting in the revolution?) Since wewere sitting in the fourth or fifth line back,I couldn’t see a protester once he or she
was on the ground. I took cues from thecrowd to understand how serious eacharrest was (did people scream at the cop?
did reporters take photographs or raise
their TV cameras?) and to gauge if thepolice officers’ moods were deteriorating,
if we were in danger of a cop losing it. I
did watch as a woman reared back andspat in an officer’s face as they loaded her
into one of the higher security paddywagons. Within fifteen minutes, the first lineof the barricade was broken. Orphaned
cardboard signs littered the pavement.
Keith and Eli walked into the middle of thestreet and sat down. The police separated
them, pulling Keith away and cuffing him
face-down on the ground. As the two were
led to separate police vans, I ran througha mental checklist: I had no priors. I
wouldn’t need to call into work—one of
my bosses had just been arrested andanother was a bystander on the curb. I wasahead on my work for the day. I had eaten
a good breakfast! I texted my co-worker
that it was likely I would be arrested andscrawled the Lawyer’s Guild telephone
number on my arm.
“Who do you protect? Who do you
serve?” We watched and waited. Cops
slowly picked off people, one by one, two
to four cops surrounding each protester.
The crowd chanted “Shame!” at every
rough arrest. A few of the people with us
scurried away, to find siblings or catch a
train, because they had prior arrests or
carried records from underage drinking. I
stayed with Sarah. Slowly, the street began
to empty as the people around us were
pulled up A woman in a wheelchair witha flag—a disabled activist who frequently
shows up to protests explicitly to getarrested—stayed next to Sarah and said,“Hold onto my chair. It makes the cops
really nervous.”
Finally I was approached
and asked if I wanted tocomply. “We can do this theeasy way,” the cop promised.
I didn’t answer and kept myhead down. “Okay,” he said
and pulled my arm. I was
flipped onto my stomach andzip-cuffed. I didn’t know how
to struggle or put up a fightbeyond that initial resistance.
Where should my arms flail?
Two officers lifted me to myfeet.
My arresting officer took
my information (“You’re from
Maine? What are you doing in
New York?”) and kept tellingthe other policemen that hegot my name and “pedigree.”
Sarah and I were grouped
together, and an officer took a
Polaroid of us with our arresting officer. I think they wereusing the photos to keep the
paperwork straight—easier tomatch faces than names andbadge numbers. Again he said
“pedigree,” and I had to assume
that was code for “nice” and“non-threatening.” Our arresting officer told us he’d been
awake for over 24 hours.

Somehow, Sarah managed to tweet “Ina police van” with her hands still cuffedbehind her back. We zoomed down Canal
Street, using sirens to blow through stoplights. When asked by a protester in theback of the van what the police thoughtof Occupy Wall Street, the officer in thepassenger seat got annoyed and flashed usa picture of his kid on his phone, whose
school parade he was missing.
Sarah, the anarchist, and I were someof the first twenty arrestees to be processed that morning. At the women’s cell
block, our cuffs were cut off. We were
patted down, my earplugs falling to theground as they cleaned out my pockets.
A trash can was filled with zip cuffs andwater bottles. Male arresting officers, theirhands full of paperwork, were sent awayby the female officers to fetch more anddifferent forms. “Did you get the…?” “Wasthere a…?” “Did she…?” It was early in the
day—a day with more protests planned—
and already they seemed overwhelmed by
the sheer amount of administrative work.
Sarah and I had a holding cell—number 4—to ourselves. We were lucky: othergirls were packed six to a cell, each one
containing only a single cot, a sink, and a
toilet.
“Mic-check!” a girl started down thecell block.
“Mic-check!” we responded, women’svoices echoing off the concrete.
“Does anyone need...”“Does anyone need...”“The Lawyer’s Guild Number?”“The Lawyer’s Guild Number?”“Yes!” replied a women in the neighboring cell.
The mic-check proceeded for several
more rounds. We asked if anyone knew
the time, we questioned later arrestees
what news there was from outside, andfinally sang OWS “Happy Birthday” (“andmany more...” tacked sweetly to the end).
I got out that day. Back at my office,I wrote an email, encouraging friends tojoin us at Foley Square that evening, closing: “As my arresting officer said, see youat the bridge.”

PHOTO BY CHLOE ROSSETTI3

JEREM Y K ESSLER

This is what
Nonviolence
Looks Like
Just after 7 AM on Thursday, November
17, hundreds of protesters marched from
Zuccotti Park, the scene of a massive
police eviction two days earlier, into
the warren of streets that surround the
New York Stock Exchange. It was thetwo-month anniversary of Occupy WallStreet, and an entire “Day of Action” wasin the works. For the early morning event,marchers hoped to reach Wall Street itself,
or as near to Wall Street as they could get
given the metal barricades, police vans,
motorcycles, and riot police that haveeffectively privatized that narrow strip ofland. It was perhaps the movement’s mostcarefully orchestrated nonviolent action—
though you might not have known it fromwatching the news that day.
For many days prior to November
17, occupiers had met to map out themultiple stages of the action, noting theintersections where police would try tobottleneck marchers and devising routesof retreat that would allow them to regroup when faced with overwhelming
police force. In order to spread out thepolice presence, they planned to stagger
the march; sections would leave minutes
apart and aim for different access points toWall Street. With these general contours
in mind, over a dozen affinity groups—
self-organizing sets of volunteers—met
to plan actions within the action: somewould break off from the main march toproceed directly to Wall Street through aDuane Reade on Pine; others planned actsof civil disobedience at strategic locations.
The unpredictable movements andthe “diversity of tactics” employed by theoccupiers—from traditional civil disobedience to absurd dance routines—frequently
cause police, spoiled by total compliance, to become panicked or enraged.
As a result, the police did as much as themarchers to block access to Wall Street,manhandling pedestrians and “freezing” intersections in order to stanch theunpredictable flow of protest. Perhaps
the chief breakdown of police control
occurred around 10 AM at the intersection of Broad and Beaver, where several
strands of the march met after earlier
sit-ins on Pine Street. Unprepared for thissecondary flow, the police initially allowed

OCCUPY ON
CAMPUSR achel Signer

The New
School in Exile,
Revisited

I arrived at the New School in the fall of 2008 to do a master's degree inanthropology. Tuition was $23,000 per year—this did not include roomor board—but the opportunity to be in a great intellectual community
appeased my anxiety about the cost. A little bit.
Tuition was high for a reason: the school, I soon learned, was on shaky
financial footing. Founded in 1933 as a refuge for scholars fleeing Fascism
and Nazism in Europe, it wasn't the sort of place that produced the sort ofpeople who turned around and gave their alma mater millions of dollars.
The endowment was meager, and the school relied on tuition for revenue.
The New School needed to improve its financial situation and its status,
and it was going to do it, like any New York institution, through real estate.
They were going to tear down one of the original 1930s buildings and replace
it with a state-of-the-art gleaming sixteen-story tower, home to studios for4

the marchers to take to the street, dancing
and singing. Then some creative officers
transformed a metal barricade into aplow, using it to sweep up or knock down
protesters.
Although this carnival of nonviolent
force and violent counter-force attracts
media attention, reporters have not quite
come around to the stark imbalance
between the nonviolence of the protesters
and the oppressive reactions of the police.
On Thursday afternoon, press reports
became surreally fixated on a single actof violence that occurred back at Zuccotti Park, hours after the morning action.
Apparently a lone protester threw a mysterious “star-shaped glass object” at a police
officer. At some point in its flight, the star
cut Officer Matthew Walters’s hand, andhe went to the hospital for twenty stiches.
Sharp, if vague, the glass weapon soared
above the hundreds of thousands of words
written about the “Day of Action,” as if itwere a premonition of future assaults.
As Mayor Michael Bloomberg stoodflanked by white-coated doctors at Bellevue Hospital to update the press on
Officer Walters’s hand, photos circulatedof a protester with blood pouring down
his face. Reporters quickly explained why
the 20-year-old boy deserved a cracked
head: he had thrown an AAA battery at
one police officer and stolen the hat off

another officer’s head. If a bloody face iswhat you get when you throw a battery,
one shudders to imagine what will happen
if the police find the elusive star-hurler.
+++
The over-reporting of protester violence
has many causes, but two have loomed
largeduring the last several weeks: thedivergent organizations of policing andprotest on the one hand, and the professionalized relationship between the police
and the press on the other.
First, any instance of protester violencecreates the illusion of an easily grasped,
symmetrical conflict: person versus
personone with a glass star, the otherwith a polymer club. There is somethingmuch more difficult to capture about aprolonged yet asymmetrical conflict—anentire police force, with military armaments and intelligence operatives, enacting a strategy of suppression over several
months against a shifting, unarmed
collective. While there has been someinsightful coverage of the composition andthe tactics of the occupation (for months,
all reporters had to do was go down to the
Zuccotti and ask around), reporting fromwithin the corridors of One Police Plaza
has been almost non-existent. The secrecy
and complexity of police operations—
symptoms of an increasingly militarized

designers and artists studying at the New School's profitable design institute, Parsons, and laboratories (for whom, no one could tell you; the New
School offers no courses in hard sciences), retail food vendors, apartments,
and—most insulting of all, I think, to the symbolics heirs, as we liked toconsider ourselves, of refugees from fascism—a fitness center. At the time,
the building, at 65 Fifth Avenue, was a multi-purpose meeting place where
graduate students could read quietly, have lunch in the café, or find books inthe basement library. There had been classrooms upstairs, but at that point
they had already been relocated to the Minimalist-style building a few blocks
away where my department, Anthropology, was crammed together with
Sociology.
Nobody liked the idea of a new building; we thought the old building was
perfectly fine, for one thing, and for another we thought the money could
be better spent on fellowships for debt-saddled students (like me!). The
campus was in an uproar already after the faculty senate, enraged that theuniversity's president, Bob Kerrey, had, after his fifth successive provost left
the job, simply assumed the post himself, passed a unanimous no-confidence vote against him. Shortly after news got around about the faculty vote,an unofficial student meeting was called. There were fliers posted aroundcampus by the Radical Student Union. About fifty of us gathered in the basement of the new graduate building on 16th Street. A piece of butcher paper
was thrown up on the wall, and a list of demands was produced: we wanted
Kerrey and his vice-president, Jim Murtha, to resign; a new provost selectedby the student body; a transparent academic budget; and, later, we added
one demand that propelled us to action: that the demolishing and "capital
improvement" of 65 Fifth be cancelled.
Most of the meeting's attendees were graduate students in the Social
Research division, notably more interested in radical politics than, say, students at Parsons. The meeting was led by a tall, skinny Philosophy graduate
named Jacob, and a chain-smoking Politics student with deep bags under
her eyes named Fatuma. Before the meeting started, Jacob passed around apamphlet he'd written about direct action as he munched, ostentatiously, onsome dumpster-dived bananas. "I think it's time," he said, as we convenedin the basement, "for an action." Another of the leaders was Tim, a gruff,
shaggy-haired guy from the Poli-Sci department, who sneered a bit whenpeople's comments seemed too moderate.
At this meeting, two actions were proposed. The first was directed at anupcoming meeting Kerrey had convened with the faculty, presumably to try
to convince them to reverse the no-confidence vote. We, the students, had
not been invited, and our plan was to show up wearing duct tape over ourmouths. The next action would be some kind of sit-in, or occupation. We
wrote down our emails and walked back out into the night— revolutionaries.

urban security apparatus—are major
obstacles to reportage.
Not only is the decision-making centerof police operations resistant to investigation, but so is the experience of the beatcop on the line. The intensely hierarchicalstructure of policing means that low-level
police officers are both operationally inthe dark and chronically afraid of being
disciplined. The average protesteron theother hand, is empowered and talkative.
She may be about to lead an act of civildisobedience or go on a rant about corporate power. This volatility makes it easy
to cover the protester, but it also makes it
easy to blame her: it is tempting to trace
the eruption of violence on the street tothe energetic protester rather than thedour cop. Yet it was the police whose dourwave of billy clubs confronted protesters’
nonviolent antics.
Another obstacle to clear-headedreporting of police violence is the formal
relationship between the police and thepress. At a protest, the reporter witha police-issued press pass is often the
only American citizen who can expect
robust First Amendment protections.
Traditionally, a press pass has emancipated the beat reporter; it gives her akind of official dignity, indeed, a badge.
As many First Amendment scholars havepointed out, there is something bizarre
about this phenomenon. The freedomof the press should not attach to a kindof employment, but to a kind of activity. The professionalization of freedomof the press, in this sense, is one more
example of the privatization of the publicsphere that occupiers protest. Indeed, it isanti-democratic for one group of citizens,in virtue of their private employment, togain a whole slew of extra rights vis-à-vis
the police. This anti-democratic distribution of rights may well distort reporting,as it makes the ability to report a function of the order created by police power.
The more the police control a crowd, theeasier it is for the press to cover it, as longas reporters retain their privileged status
above the masses, a privilege the police
itself provides.
In recent weeks we have seen the
NYPD correct this peculiar inequality on
the streets of Manhattan, as they knocked
down and locked up reporters, press passor no. What’s more, the police department clarified that it would not hand out
press passes for the purposes of covering
Occupy Wall Street. Such preemptive
denial of the freedom of press to everyone—even to that special breed of citizen
called “journalists”—was a striking example of the de rigueur denial of basic civilrights that some Americans experienceon a near-daily basis. In treating reporters
like protesters, the police seemed to havelifted the professional veil that generally keeps their more violent tactics outof the papers. Four days after Thursday
morning’s march, the New York Times
and a dozen other news outlets fired off a
protest to the NYPD: “The police actionsof last week have been more hostile tothe press than any other event in recent
memory.” The letter recounted a scenefrom Thursday when police officers used
a metal barricade to beat a photographer
trying to snap a picture. Perhaps they had
mistaken the flash-bulb for a flying star.

The duct-tape action was a smashing success; many of our faculty members threw their fists up at us, and a buzz went around campus. Meanwhile,
our planning meetings for the occupation continued, as quietly as possible—which later would be cause for our fellow students to accuse us of
exclusivity. The truth is we didn't want to get busted. Then, late in the afternoon on December 17th, about sixty of us gathered in the cafeteria at 65
Fifth, a room with glass walls on three sides and, in the back, a little deli thatsold terrible sandwiches and coffee. Round tables and chairs were strewn
throughout the room. We lounged casually, as if having coffee with friends,
as we knew that the administration had, through some whistleblower,
caught wind of our scheme. Then, at a designated time, I think around 6pm,
we stood up on the tables, taped banners with "NEW SCHOOL OCCUPIED"
to the walls, pushed chairs against the main entrance, and probably beganchanting something, or cheering.
+++
I'm not sure at what point we came up with the name "New School in Exile,"
but it stuck. It was, of course, a reference to the proud history of the institution, its birth as a place of exile. And not only that. When I'd told my parents
that I was planning to go do a master's at The New School, I learned that my
grandparents had taken continuing education courses there, and my grandmother had also been a secretary for one of the deans.
They were both mostly self-educated. My grandfather had been expelledfrom City College in the nineteen-thirties for protesting against Fascismin Europe, then gone on to become a journalist for The Daily Worker; mygrandmother, who knew Italian and Spanish, had been a union organizer. In
Specters of Marx, which I read in my second year of graduate school (by which
point I was about $30,000 in the hole), Derrida talks about the ghostly natureof politics, how it moves in cycles. That night, as hundreds of New School,
CUNY, and NYU students gathered outside the building, on Fifth Avenue,
sending us tweets and text messages of solidarity, and as we huddled inside,writing our list of demands, I felt my grandparents' ghosts inside me, in thatbuilding, likely the very same one where they had read philosophy and sociology and tried to channel those ideas into creating a better world.
That night we put up our new "New School in Exile" banners, and a blog
was created in that name by a politics student named Scott. Scott, it mustbe said, was a Leninist, which pissed everybody off and made us worried,

Keith Gessen“n17”
Was there any point to trying to shut
down the NYSE? Most of the really nefarious stuff, the credit default swaps andoptions and so on, is not traded publicly.
That’s the whole problem with it, andthe big investment banks fought toothand nail to keep it that way during thefight over financial regulation. If it’s being
traded in public, in fact, it can’t be thatbad.
And most of the people making their
way to work that day, whose progress weslowed a little bit—these were not themasters of the universe. If you have toshow up at 8 am at the NYSE and spend
the day yelling orders at a broker, chances
are you’re not the guy who breaks national

currencies and shorts entire economic
sectors.
After we were arrested and taken to
the Tombs, we got periodic updates, overthe phone, about what had happened
outside. One of the drug dealers we werein with called his girlfriend, who works
for the MTA—we occupied the subway,
he said. People cheered. And one of theprotesters called a friend: The opening
bell of the stock exchange was fifteen
minutes late! We cheered some more andhigh-fived.
It turned out not to be true. The stock
exchange opened on time, and shares ofcompanies were exchanged, short positions taken, options called—and good forthem. But you have to start somewhere.
Some of what Wall Street does is valuable and important; some of it, as in mostindustries, is neutral and irrelevant andjust wheel-spinning; and a certain portionof what it does should be illegal. Everyone
on Wall Street knows this. I think what wewere saying is that we now know it too.

because he was our media guy. But for the moment, things were great.
Someone from the New York Times came in to report on us—at this point theadministration was letting people enter and leave the building at will—andan organization from Harlem sent food. Jim Murtha, our vice-president,
showed up, with alcohol on his breath, and we booed him. Some NYPD
entered and hovered in the lobby near the front door, chatting with thesecurity guards. As the morning hours approached, we played music on our
laptops, made signs about neoliberalism and student debt, and worked on
our final papers, which were due that week, and most of which were probably
about Marx. Some of us slept, a little, on the floor.
+++
The next day, people began coming from all over campus and other universities to show their support or just check us out. A sign saying "New School:
OCCUPIED" had miraculously appeared on the outside of our building, acouple of stories up; people sent us photos via cell phone. I also learned thatmany of my fellow students in the Anthropology department were unsure
what to think. There was a sense that our faculty were not enthusiastic about
the occupation, and grad students concerned about keeping good relations
with them (who wasn't, really?) were hesitant to align themselves with the
New School in Exile. Regardless, some of my colleagues, and students fromother departments and the undergraduate divisions, showed up at 65 Fifth
for the afternoon meeting on the second day.
We proved to be totally unprepared for this. As a large group of students
gathered chairs in a circle, expecting to learn our plan for getting the administration to cave in to our demands, I looked around and realized that I was
the only organizer in sight. Where were Jacob, Fatuma, Tim, and Scott the
Leninist? Gone. I looked at the gaggle of bright-eyed but uncertain students,
threw up some butcher paper on the wall, ripped off my sweater as I began tosweat profusely with anxiety, grabbed a marker, and began to solicit agenda
items from the crowd.
Thankfully, someone sensed my confusion and stepped in to help: it was
the anthropologist David Graeber. Many New School students knew him
through his previous work with the New York Direct Action Network, and they
had called him in to help. He gave us a brief workshop on democratic consensus-building, and then stepped aside. And then we were doing it. I facilitated, and people wiggled their fingers, and we moved through our agenda
items. We talked about the cafeteria workers, who we wanted to make sure
were not losing a day's wages because of our protest, and decided thisshould be high on the list of our demands. We discussed other things. It was
exhilarating to be using this new language, with our hands, to hold a discussion. Soon, meetings were popping up throughout the day in that room, allusing the consensus procedures. Graeber moved in and out silently, hardly
making his presence known.
Finally, the missing organizers from earlier returned to join the rest of
us. They told us they'd learned that, all over the city, anarchist networks had

5Karen Smith

The Legal
Issues of
Zuccotti Park
In the early morning hours of November 15, 2011, the New York City Police
Department, under the direction of New
York City’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg,
carried out a stealth attack to evict theoccupiers at Zuccotti Park. Soon afterward, lawyers on both sides fashioned
arguments as to whether the eviction of
the occupiers—and the banning of tents,
sleeping bags, or any other items which
would make it possible for the occupiers
to remain through a cold winter—violated
their First Amendment rights.
By 6:30 a.m., the lawyers representing OWS were able to obtain a temporary restraining order (TRO), issued by
Justice Lucy Billings, that prohibited theCity from barring the protesters from thepark and permitted them to reenter with
their tents and sleeping bags. The Orderwould remain in effect until 11:30 a.m. atwhich time a hearing would determine if
the TRO should be continued. The casewas then reassigned, allegedly, to the next
judge “on the wheel,” a practice followedby the Courts when a TRO is obtained
after-hours.
At approximately 12:00 p.m., Justice
Stallman heard oral arguments fromlawyers representing both sides. Laterthat afternoon, Justice Stallman issued adecision granting the protesters the rightto continue their protest in the park, butdenied them the right to bring their tents

and sleeping bags with them or to remain
overnight. Justice Stallman held that theFirst Amendment does not include theright to have the accoutrements (sleeping
bags and tents) which enable people toexercise their first amendment rights. It
appears that he may now even be preparedto hold that the First Amendment does
not apply to Zuccotti Park as it is not a“public” park.
Between the time the City was servedwith Justice Billings original TRO and thetime Justice Stallman issued his decision,
the City refused to follow the directivesof Justice Billings’ order, denying protesters the right of re-entry to the Park. After
Justice Stallman issued his order, theCity, without any authority, co nstructedbarricades around the park and searchedanyone attempting to enter it, a practicewhich continues to this date.
In all likelihood the lawyers representing OWS asked the legal working group
what they hoped to accomplish with thelawsuit. Questions about how important
it was to get OWS back into Zuccotti Parkand how soon they needed that to happen
were probably discussed. The attorneys
probably analyzed the likelihood that such
relief could be won (in light of previous
decisions made by the New York and federal courts which define the area of First
Amendment law), the prior decisions by
Justice Stallman, and the slowness of thelegal system.
Lawsuits take time and money andare a drain, especially when the deck is
stacked against you. Before entering into a
law suit, people should be clear about thesuit’s aims. Is it: publicity, re-dress of somewrong, financial recompense, to buy time,
to gain allies, to isolate your enemies, or to
expose contradictions?
In the Zuccotti Park case, given all
the elements just mentioned, focusing on

mobilized and were ready, were near the school even, waiting, to join us.
They wanted to come in that night. We discussed it; I remember not liking
the idea, but I can't remember why. Eventually we voted it down. It didn't
matter. At around 1 AM on the second night of the occupation, about one
hundred and fifty people, with Mohawks and patched-together cargo pantsand Doc Martens, came pouring into the building. Graeber had found a side
entrance unguarded by the security guards. As the students ran in, the guards
attempted to stop them, throwing them up against the wall or grabbing attheir limbs, but the anarchists pushed through and nearly every single one ofthem made it into the cafeteria, where we were cheering. We hadn't liked theidea, but now, we felt, we were stronger. There were over two hundred of us.
The negotiations were continuing with the administration. We felt that it waspossible we would succeed.
+++
Eventually the security guards in the lobby, outside the cafeteria, stopped
letting people enter and leave the building. We had enough food and waterto last us awhile, and we were energized by our recent growth in numbers.
Negotiations were going on in a reading room off the cafeteria between, on
our side, Fatuma and some of the other main organizers, and a few selected
representatives from the administration and the faculty. Even as the policegrew stricter, though, we were still fairly casual about venturing out of thecafeteria to the bathrooms, which were located right outside the cafeteria
doors. Then, on the third night of the occupation, the police walked over tothe bathrooms, and planted themselves in front of them. There would be no
more free pass to the bathrooms. This had not occurred to us. They'd foundour blind spot.
People immediately began talking about building a compost toilet withpaper walls in the back of the cafeteria. Hey, it was more eco-friendly, anyway! Other people, however, looked sick at the thought. We still had lots offood, donated by supporters, but everyone immediately stopped drinking
and eating. It got tense. People grew quiet.

6

the illegality of the City’s enforcement of
Brookfield Properties’ private property
rights would have been a good way togo forward. I am not suggesting that thisargument would have “won” the day, orthat Justice Stallman would have held thatthe de facto lockout was illegal, but in thecontext of a political lawsuit, the goal of“winning” must be re-examined. Focusing on the illegality of public enforcementof private property rights would serve tosupport OWS’s message about how the
99% has been systematically screwed byexposing a Mayor serving the interests of
the 1% (he himself being among the 10
richest people in the country, in a percentage smaller than the 1%).
The City maintains that it stepped in
to remove the protesters pursuant to its“general police powers” to protect thehealth and safety of its citizens, whichwere threatened, among other things, by
the alleged unsafe and unsanitary conditions in the park, and to enforce the parkrules issued by Brookfield Properties attheir request.
The City has to argue that its actions
fell within their general police powers
to protect the public as there is no otherlegal basis for the City’s actions. If an
owner wishes to evict someone from theirproperty, they have to bring a proceedingor an action. If it is a squatter (a legal, notmoral term), as in this case, the ownerhas to bring an “ejectment action” in State
Supreme Court (as there is no landlord tenant relationship. If there were alandlord tenant relationship, the landlord
would have to commence a proceedingin Housing Court.) Even if Brookfield hadcommenced the appropriate action, the
NYPD probably could not evict. It would
be the City Marshall who would evict, andthen only after there had been issued adecision by a Court, after a hearing or trial
was held, and then, only after a warrant
was issued and served on the Marshall.
Even more importantly, the law of thisState has been settled for over sixty years:
no violence can be used to carry out aneviction.
So we are left with the City’s claim that
it was authorized to remove the protesters pursuant to its general police powers.
However, an examination of the facts inthe case shows otherwise. We must notignore the Mayor’s admission, on prime

time television, that Brookfield did not ask
for the City’s intervention until after the
Mayor and his Police Commissioner had
already decided, over the November 12th
/13th weekend, to evict the protesters andthat the “request” to intervene was solicited by the Mayor. Also, not to be ignored
is that the so called “rules” allegedly issued
by the owners of Zuccotti Park, which
the City offered to enforce, were changed
after the occupation started but before
the eviction, possibly in anticipation of
the eviction. The entire rationale by theCity is questionable when one considers
that after the attack at the World Trade
Center on September 11, 2001, when
the conditions in lower Manhattan wereundisputedly unsafe and unsanitary, theCity encouraged people to return to theirhomes and work despite the deplorable
conditions resulting from the attack.
One of the most curious aspects ofthe case, however, is Justice Stallman’s
failure to hold an evidentiary hearing on
the allegation that there were unsafe andunsanitary conditions in the park sufficient to justify the City’s actions. WhenI retired as an Acting New York State
Supreme Court Justice (in September2010), I was the senior judge in the City
Part, handling cases to which the City wasa party. I handled many TROs against theCity, as did the two other judges who wereassigned to that Part. While there are no
hard and fast rules, the vast majority of
us would have held a hearing to determine if the allegations of “unsafe” and“unsanitary” conditions were supported byevidence. Such evidence would be in theform of documents and sworn testimony
where each side would be given the rightto call witnesses and cross examine theother side’s witnesses. The submission ofsworn written affidavits alone, would nothave been enough. Absent such a hearing,the claims are merely unproven allegations, and thus insufficient to justify theCity’s actions.
Nor is there any justification for theCity and its police to have totally ignored
Justice Lucy Billings’ TRO. The City waslegally served with the order, but blatantly ignored it claiming that “The City
was seeking clarification of the order.”What the City was apparently seeking
was the reassignment of the case to a
judge more sympathetic to its position.

As the negotiations continued in the next room, little by little news camein: they were granting the student government the power to e-mail theentire student body, something they hadn't previously been able to do; asocially-responsible investment committee would be formed; no one who
had occupied would be expelled. We were mostly getting what we wanted,
except a few things, such as the opening of the university's accounting
books, the immediate resignation of Kerrey and Murtha, and, most importantly, the building. There would be no compromise. The building was going
down. And we, too, were on the verge of going down. Standing in front of theglass windows, peeking out from behind the butcher paper that read "NEWSCHOOL IN EXILE" and "EDUCATION IS NOT ABOUT PROFIT" at the numerous
police officers and large-bellied security guards prohibiting our access to thetoilets, we knew that our occupation was over.
The administration did, however, offer to create of an interim study spacefor students (which became the site of the recent, also brief, New School
occupation in November of this year). They also said that a group of students would be allowed to be on the committee that was planning the newbuilding.
So it was that I found myself a few weeks later, drinking bad coffee at ninein the morning next to our new provost, Tim Marshall, alongside architects
and administrators—who nervously eyed the other student representatives
and me—looking over various blueprints that the venerable architectural

The subsequent denial by Justice Stallman of essentially the same relief granted
by Justice Billings earlier in the day, did
not render Justice Billings’ original orderinvalid during those morning hours on
November 15. At the very least, any andall arrests of persons who tried to reenter
the Park after the City was served or madeaware of Justice Billings’ Order, should bevacated and dismissed.
While Justice Stallman ruled that theFirst Amendment did not require thatthe protesters be given a right to bring intents, sleeping bags or other items which
would enable them to remain in the Park
overnight, nowhere in Justice Stallman’sOrder does he authorize the City to put
up barricades around the park or searchpeople coming into the park, yet this iswhat’s happening. If someone were toviolate Justice Stallman’s order and bringsleeping bags or tents into the park, there
are legal steps the City can take to address
such a violation. Instead, the City hastaken an inappropriate short-cut by placing the barricades and searching all who
try to enter, once again flaunting proper
legal channels—all of this to protect theprivate property rights of the owners of
Zuccotti Park.
These illegal actions by the Mayor, aretaken directly out of the playbook of the
1%, serve the 1% and are done in behalf ofthe 1%. What better service can movement lawyers provide than to carry thismessage on behalf of the 99% to the hallsof the 1%.
Karen Smith is a recently retired New YorkState Acting Supreme Court Justice. Justice
Smith is not serving on the legal teamrepresenting OWS before Justice Stallman.
This article is offered only for discussion purposes and not to second guess or
criticize any of the legal work which has sovaliantly been done to date.

Sar ah Resnick

November 15,
Courtroom

The Protesters have had two months to
occupy the park with tents and sleeping
bags. Now they will have to occupy the
space with the power of their arguments.
—Bloomberg
Last night, police descended on Liberty
Square with an all-out assault on thesenses, employing tear gas and pepper
spray, blinding lights and sound cannons
and rubber batons. With brutal force
they arrested nearly two hundred protesters, trashing the protesters’ personal
belongings and items collectively owned
by OWS. These included tents, clothing, computers, cameras, and the morethan five thousand books that formed thePeople’s Library. Some of these items werecarted off to a Department of Sanitation
garage on 57th St. where they were later
available for pick-up.
All this in the name of “public healthand safety.”
Of course the eviction was not reallya surprise; that it hadn’t happened sooner
was perhaps more surprising. For theirpart, the OWS legal working group, in
collaboration with a team of lawyers fromthe National Lawyers Guild, had long
been preparing for this moment. The firstthing they did was call a judge—in thiscase, Justice Lucy Billings, who, as themedia were quick to point out, had spenta few years working at the ACLU. Despite
the late hour, Justice Billings drew up a

firm SOM had prepared for the "University Center" that would replace thebuilding we had occupied. I blinked at the designs, which I knew would be
realized long after I'd left the New School, and felt the gloom of compromise. I offered the suggestion that a rooftop garden might make the building more sustainable, and its residents could eat from it, too; I received
weird, patronizing looks in response. A rooftop garden was not entered into
the SOM design.
+++
On October 5, 2011, when Occupy Wall Street called for a Day of Action forstudents and unions, the entire New School faculty signed their name to an
online pledge in support of OWS. They all walked out of the university andmarched, alongside thousands of students from The New School and NYU,
down to Zuccotti Park (or, to Foley Square, where the police boxed them inand let them trickle out little-by-little). Atop the ledge surrounding ZuccottiPark on its north side, as the march went by, people were holding an enormous banner that read, "ARAB SPRING, EUROPEAN SUMMER, AMERICAN
FALL." In the bottom corner, it said, "NEW SCHOOL IN EXILE." It had been
resurrected.
Our December 2008 occupation received letters of support from Greek
labor unions, from the Chicago factory workers who were striking, and fromstudents everywhere, particularly UC Berkeley, where students were gearing
up for their own occupation in protest against a 33 percent tuition hike. We
received emails from people like Clemson University philosophy professor
and anarchist Todd May, who wrote: "Too often, in our world, we are told thatpolitics is dead, that resistance is useless, and that public action is nothing
more than an exercise in nostalgia. We are told that we live in a post-politicalworld, where we must compromise with those who would oppress us andmust subordinate ourselves to those who would manage our lives for us.
These past few days you have shown, as others in Europe, in Latin America,
in Asia and Africa seek to show, that politics is not dead, that resistance is

Temporary Restraining Order barring
the police from evicting protesters who
were not breaking any laws, and also fromenforcing rules made after the protests
started. This meant the police could notprevent protesters from reentering thepark with tents and other personal belongings. At around 4:45 AM, the application
for the Temporary Restraining Order was
faxed to the City and the OWS legal teaminvited representatives from both Brookfield and Bloomberg’s office to discuss the
proposed order. They failed to respond.
(“It was in the middle of the night!” theywould argue later in court. But so too was
the eviction attack.) The order was signed
by Justice Billings sometime around 6:30
AM. The city was served with this order at
7:50 AM.
A little after 11 AM, I arrived at thepark to find it defended by three successive lines of security. At the outermost
layer, metal barricades surrounded theperimeter; directly behind them stooda row of police in riot gear; and further
back still, toward the center of the park, anunfamiliar genre of yellow-vested officers
were spread out like pieces on a checkerboard. On Twitter a joke was circulating:
The police are occupying the park! But it
was also not a joke. The NYPD were incontempt of a judge’s order and there wasseemingly no recourse. Who do you callwhen the police disobey the courts? Since,
after all, it is they who ostensibly enforce
the law.
Outside the barricades, protesters
and onlookers convened, and many werequick to taunt the police: “What are yourdemands? When will you provide them tous?!” Others held up printed copies of theTRO (which had circulated online earlier
that morning), and shouted accusations ofbreach and legal disregard, accusations towhich the police seemed mostly impervious. Those few brave enough to test theorder’s legitimacy, usually by jumping thebarricades, found themselves restrainedin zip-ties and hauled off to jail. Later I
would read that the City acknowledged
having received the order, but claimed
they were “seeking clarification” prior to
implementation. Whatever that means.
Being temporary, as it was, there was atime limit on the TRO, which asked that a“show cause” hearing take place by 11:30
AM the same morning. And so a hearing
was scheduled. Were the City to demonstrate that it had legal grounds to evict theprotesters, the order would be nullified,
and the eviction upheld. The City selecteda different judge to hear the case, reportedly via randomized computer software.
He was Justice Michael Stallman. As afriend later explained to me, this didn’t

bode well for the protesters: As a judge in
the City Court system, Stallman had foundin favor of the City time and time again.
During the hearing, he revealed that heis a resident of the financial district andhad for a long time served on Community
Board One.
I thought about going home to rest. I
also thought about going to my office; I
did have work to do. But instead I went tothe courtroom. I’m not sure why. Partially
I was confused, and wanted to understand:
How could a restraining order be brought
against the police? I thought the police
enforced restraining orders. And then I
had big-picture questions, too, questions
that troubled me a bit. By seeking an
injunction, would OWS be accused (andpossibly guilty) of political incoherence?
From its inception, the movement had
refused to issue demands. This decision
may have been partially tactical, but for
many it was theoretically and politicallyrooted: Making demands legitimizes thestate and why legitimize a system you
wish to replace? And yet here, in the act ofseeking an injunction, OWS had turned tothe state for help. It seemed worth thinking about this incongruence. Maybe you
use the state when you can: its a tacticaldecision, a strategic maneuver to further
the movement at the cost of momentary
political disjointedness. But who wasbringing this suit to the courts? And who
had made the decision to do so on behalfof the movement?
That afternoon the courtroom wascrowded. I recognized a few people I’dseen around the park or at meetings or
actions, but most were unfamiliar. Before
the hearing, those of us without official
press credentials lined up outside thecourtroom and waited. We weren’t surewhether we’d be allowed in at all, but westood patiently all the same. In front ofme, a few people squabbled over the useof an electrical outfit. Everyone needed
to charge something or other and one
woman in particular seemed unwilling toshare. More than one insult was launched
her way. I don’t remember how long I
waited in that line, but I know I was oneof the last three people allowed in the
courtroom. I sat in the very last row andlooked at my fellow observers. We weretired, ragged. Many of us had been up allnight, or most of the night anyway. And
as we waited for the proceeding to begin,
several heads around me nodded, lulled
to sleep by the first moment of inactivity,
an excuse finally to sit in repose. We weretold we would not be permitted to use
electronic devices; those who did would
be asked to leave. I heard whispering

not useless, and that public action is precisely what our world requires anddemands."
The letter made us proud to be students of the New School, and confirmed our belief that we were not merely complaining about our particular,
isolated situation—we were participating in a broader critique of neoliberalism, of which our corporatized university was just one instance.
But, for the most part, The New School in Exile did not have the support ofour own faculty and fellow students. Only two faculty members, Tim Pachirat
and Simon Critchley, publicly announced their support of the occupationand visited it. In my department, people accused me of participating in an"elitist" and "exclusionary" movement—too secretive for all to have been
involved, too time-demanding for students with jobs to participate. Our
department chair, Hugh Raffles, read a statement to us expressing his belief
that direct action was not the way to go in this situation. Students nodded inagreement. The New School in Exile had also, during the occupation, been
associated with some fairly questionable acts: a group of students literally

7about the judge. Was anyone familiar withhis career history? Apparently not. I had
left anything resembling paper at homeand pulled out a brown paper bag—remnants from breakfast— on which to takenotes. The girl next to me pulled out aspiral-bound notebook and tore off a few
sheets for me. They were tiny, but theywould do. It was now nearly 1PM.
Soon thereafter Judge Stallman, a slight
man with a soft white beard and almost
goofy grin, entered the courtroom andarguments began. OWS was represented
by nine counsel from the National Lawyer’s Guild. The petitioner was a woman
named Jennifer Waller. There were others,
too, but they were unnamed. Additionally,
counsel representing the Transit Workers’
Union and Working Family Party madean application to participate in the oral
arguments—they were intervening on
behalf of themselves and in support of theprotesters. So first there was a questionof standing: Could a union and politicalparty legitimately petition on behalf of the
movement? (I couldn’t help but think thatat least some people in the movement felt
the same way.) The NLG lawyers argued
they could—members of both groups had
been actively involved in OWS even if
they didn’t sleep in the park. In the end,
they were met with no opposition fromthe City, and their arguments were heard.
At issue was whether the eviction of
Liberty Square impinged on the protesters’ First Amendment protections. The
lawyer who spoke most eloquently onbehalf of OWS was Alan Levine. I only
ever saw the back of his head. He had afull head of white hair and wore a suit.
I think it was olive green, it might havebeen gray. Brookfield was trying to makethis into a camping case, he argued. But
it is one of free speech. This was not thefirst time that First Amendment rights
and camping were linked and other cases
were cited. For instance, Clark v. Community for Creative Non-Violence. In 1984,
CCNV argued that National Park Service
regulations which prohibited camping in
conjunction with a proposed demonstration were unconstitutional. The court
disagreed. But, according to Levine, thiscase was different: The demonstration
had captured the world’s attention due
to its round-the-clock nature. He noted:“The power of the symbolic speech resides
in the fact that it is a twenty-four-hour
occupation…. It is an essential part of theirspeech that they are able to protect themselves from the weather.” And as symbolic
speech the use of tents is therefore also
fully protected by the First Amendment.
Discussion turned to whether the park
itself could be considered a public forum.
As has been well documented, ZuccottiPark is a special case of privately owned
public space—an amenity in exchange fordevelopment rights. The City argued thatas this space has not been traditionallyused for public activity (it has no historyof demonstrations), First Amendment
rights are limited there. The park’s statusas public forum would also bear on whatkind of rules could be implemented by
the park owners, and when. In this case,there had been no particular rules at Zuccotti prior to the start of the occupation;some weeks in, a sign went up prohibiting
camping.
Judge Stallman asked whether theabsence of pre-existing rules should
prevent Brookfield from establishing themnow. Alan Levine argued that the very
presence of the occupation claimed thespace as protected by the First Amendment at the time the rules were established. “They created rules after the fact
in order to limit activity. Those rules weremade six weeks ago. This is a profoundresponse to speech activity.” If the park
owners wanted to implement rules, theyshould impinge on speech as minimallyas possible. If the concerns were reallyover fire hazards (the presence of fuelbased generators and cigarette butts;
also, the tents were blocking park exits)
and sanitation (human waste, mostly;
trash too), were there no other means toaddress them? Why were the protesters
not afforded the opportunity to addressthese grievances? For one, they had
already shown a good faith effort to deal
with these issues responsibly: They had
new restroom facilities (a nearby groundfloor space with rented Port-a-Pottys) anda new bike-powered generator to replace
the fuel-based one. There was no particular emergency that morning, the NLG
lawyers argued. The protesters had done
nothing to provoke the police to enter enchased Bob Kerrey down the street in the West Village, near his home,screaming at him as he ran. Kerrey, a Vietnam War veteran, had had partof his leg taken off by a grenade in the Nha Trang Bay. When we inside theoccupation heard this had happened, some people cheered, and our blogger, Scott, condoned it in a blog post titled "See Bob Run." Others wondered
if it was ever really okay to chase and threaten a late-middle-aged, hobblingman.
What was it three years later that suddenly made it okay to Occupy? Was it
the occupation itself—more dramatic, more clearly connected to the broad
impact of the economic crisis beyond the context of our private university?
Was it that people had become angrier about the inability of Congress to deal
with the recession? Was it that radical politics finally seemed justified in asituation where no other form of politics was effective? Perhaps, if we want
to be self-congratulatory, our New School in Exile movement shook things
up a bit and created the space for that radicalism. Or maybe it just has to
do with the simple fact that, thanks to the convenient location of a 24-hour
McDonald's down the street on Broadway, the occupiers of Zuccotti Park had
the one crucial element that our movement never possessed: a bathroom.
Having finished my master's, I'm no longer at The New School, so I don't
know what prompted my faculty to support this occupation, when the previous one had seemed out of bounds. Maybe it's just easier to accept criticism
when it isn't in your own backyard.

8

masse, in the middle of the night, and withsuch violent means.
Throughout the hearing, Brookfield’slegal counsel, Douglas H. Flaum, remarked
again and again: We would like to enforce
our rules, but we will not prevent protesters from asserting their First Amendment
rights. They can continue using the spacetwenty-four hours a day. We will not
impinge on their right to speech. We want
for nothing but that the space be used asintended—a space open and accessible toall. And we ask merely that the protesters
follow the rules, as stated:NO
Camping and/or the erection of tents orother structures.
Lying down on the ground, or lying down
on benches...
Placement of tarps or sleeping bags or othercovering on the property
Storage or placement of personal propertyon the ground, benches, sitting areas orother walkways which unreasonably interferes with the use of such areas by others.
The proceeding adjourned and the judge
left to deliberate. I left thinking that thejudge’s line of questioning had seemed fairand lucid. But I had no sense which way
he’d vote.
Later that afternoon, the OWS text
alert system sent out a message announcing victory: The judge had decided in favorof the protesters, and the restraining order
against the City and the NYPD would be

upheld! Hooray! This turned out to befalse. What Justice Stallman did say—andthe double negative is confusing—was that
OWS legal counsel “did not demonstratethat the rules adopted by Brookfield Properties are not reasonable time, place andmanner restrictions permitted under theFirst Amendment.” The ruling was madeunder the assumption that the park was infact a public forum and thus that upholding the First Amendment must be considered. And so: that was that. No moretents or sleeping bags. No more sleeping
at the park. No more twenty-four-hour
occupation.
The judge also affirmed that the “ownerof Zuccotti Park has represented that,after cleaning and restoration of Zuccotti
Park, it will permit the Occupy Wall Street
demonstrators to reenter the park andresume using it again in conformity withthe law and with the owners’ rules.” And
yet since the time of the ruling, park use
has been continuously limited. Twentyfour hours a day, the park is surroundedby police and private security guards.
Barricades limit entry except in designatedlocations and park users may be subject torandom bag inspection with no cause or
warrant. Police instruct protesters not tosit on concrete partitions. Protesters carrying books, food, musical instruments,and extra warm clothing have all beendenied access to the park. Brookfield andthe City have failed to live up to their wordin court. And it seems now we now who
the police serve and protect.

Student
Power
Rebecca Nathanson

It was a chant I’d heard many times over the previous four weeks, a simple
call-and-response to which I’d become quickly accustomed. I’d rehearsed
my impassioned answer in general assemblies, at rallies, and on marches,
and the rhythm of my steps and clapping hands synched perfectly with thetiming of my words. At every event people would scream, “Show me what
democracy looks like!” and at every event I’d screamed back, “This is what
democracy looks like!” The only difference was that this time, on a warm
Saturday afternoon in Washington Square Park, I was on the other side of
the conversation, offering the prompt rather than the response.
It was October 15, and Occupy Wall Street had not yet reached its onemonth anniversary. Moments after my chant, NYPD officers would arrest
twenty-four people—many of whom were students—in the middle ofan action at a Citibank down the street. Hours later, thousands would fill
Times Square, chanting, “The whole world is watching,” and looking up attheir own faces on the JumboTron. But it is that moment, standing on topof a bench that I pass everyday on the way to class and leading a familiar
chant for the first time, that sticks out in my memory two months later.
That afternoon, as people in cities around the world protested together
in recognition of an international day of action, New York City students
held their first assembly in Washington Square Park. Students from
Columbia, CUNY, New School, and NYU talked about the organizing taking
place on their own campuses and we broke out into working groups andexchanged emails. It felt much like the beginning of Occupy Wall Street
had: full of unknown potential and, for a lot of us, completely unfamiliar.
A week and a half earlier, students from schools across the city had
walked out of class and marched to Foley Square in support of OWS andthe labor unions. Nobody had known what to expect when the call went

EVICTIONACTION, EASTNY
Erin Sheehy

Neighbors
I was on my way to the Occupy ourHomes event in East New York whensomeone started a human mic on the
subway platform at Broadway Junction,
announcing to everyone else awaiting the next L train what the occupiers would be doing that day: marching
through the neighborhood, stopping at
foreclosed homes – East New York has
the highest foreclosure rate in Brooklyn, about 16 out of every 1000 homes– and throwing a housewarming party
for a homeless family that was moving
into a house that had stood vacant eversince Bank of America took over theproperty three years ago. I joined in thehuman mic, repeating the organizer’s
words, but I didn’t raise my voice or
look people in the eye the way I’d done
at so many marches and protests before.
In and around Zuccotti Park, chants
and human mics directed towards
non-participants always felt more like adisplay than anything else; I’m not sure I
ever meant it when I yelled, “Join us!” topassersby, mostly because I didn’t thinkthey would. The point, at times – likewhen we chanted while blocking the
NYSE on November 17th – had been toout for the walkout; students as a group unto themselves had not yet
begun to organize across schools. Student activists had been a presence
in some universities for a long time: The New School had had previous
occupations, various activist groups had already existed at NYU, and CUNY
students had already been organizing for a walkout. But those groups had
been isolated on those individual campuses—and lying dormant on manyothers, especially at smaller schools such as Juilliard, Pratt, and some of
the CUNY campuses.
Those early days were about coming together around our support forthe movement and finding common ground with people from different
schools and backgrounds. Now, two months later, we have experienced
much of what the rest of the movement has gone through: organization
and reorganization, success and disappointment, peaceful demonstration, and police violence. We know each other’s names and schools. We
know who to talk to about what issues. We know how to organize marches
and deliver inspirational speeches.
Because of OWS, many of the student activists on larger, more dispersed
campuses have found one another and formed organizations or general
assemblies. We now have the infrastructure necessary to make our presence—and our anger—known to the greater community, and we have a
network of allies at schools across the city who are willing to lend support.
The question is which route to take: Do we focus on actions at individual
schools, on cross-university issues, or on our connection to the larger
Occupy movement? We’ve had experience with all three options, and there
is debate about which one is the best use of our time and resources.
There were weeks when only ten people came to the all-city student
assembly and I found myself questioning the purpose of that organizing
structure. But there were weeks when our assembly drew a large crowd,
when Florida natives spending the semester in New York came to participate, when students from Pennsylvania and Connecticut drove in just tolearn more about our organizing practice and brainstorm tactics to use
at their own schools. At those times, when we were able to connect withstudents from other areas and coordinate ideas, the purpose of the all-citystudent assembly was clear.
There were instances when individual schools were facing problems andthe connections that had been made through the assembly paid off in theform of cross-university solidarity. On November 21, when the CUNY Boardof Trustees met at Baruch College to hold an open-forum about upcoming

disrupt people’s day. But now we werecrowding a subway station, imploring people to come along on a marchthrough their own neighborhood. It was
the first time, at an OWS event, thatI’d really been worried about annoying people; we needed them to like us.
Turning attention toward foreclosuresand keeping people in their homes – orplacing them in empty ones – seemed
like the right direction for Occupy WallStreet to take. But I feared that without
community support it would feel like thewrong kind of occupation – less a model
for a better world than an invasion.
“Whose block? Our block!” wechanted as we marched towards thefirst abandoned home. But it wasn’t ourblock – I overheard a woman saying thiswas the first time she’d been to East New
York – and something about a groupof mostly white people taking a “foreclosure tour” through a predominantly
black neighborhood rubbed me thewrong way. However, as more and more
onlookers voiced their support – “I
commend you, I commend you, I commend you,” an auto mechanic repeated,looking each of us in the eye as we
passed – my worry faded away.
When we arrived at our final destination, we found out that the family was
already inside their new home. Despite
the cold and the rain, it really did feellike a block party: huge bunches ofmulticolored balloons tied to the front
gate, a Christmas tree – complete withlights – in the yard, a band playing in thestreet. “FORECLOSE ON BANKS NOTPEOPLE,” read the bright yellow poster
above the front door. A cleaning crew indust masks filed towards the house, andpeople carrying furniture, houseplants,
and presents huddled around the gate.
I began to wonder if the family would
come out at all; considering the legal
ramifications of what we were doing, I
thought perhaps they would prefer tostay anonymous and out of sight. But
finally they emerged, to an eruption ofcheers. Alfredo Carrasquillo, the fatherof the family, addressed the crowd. His
speech wasn’t a rallying cry, nor was ita tale of woe, but there was something
about it that was incredibly touching.
Perhaps it was just the moment – in acity where waves of gentrification continue to sweep poverty into more distantcorners or more concentrated pockets,here was someone insisting that he beseen, and that his neighborhood be seen,
too. Later, volunteers unfurled anotherbanner from the roof: BANKS STEALHOMES. Above the words was a skyline
in silhouette, the outline of a city. Roofs
and walls were traced in blue paint, theactual houses nothing but blank spaces
on white fabric – left, in other words, toour own imaginations.
+++
Although the day had seemed like a
success, I couldn’t help feeling regretful when I came home, passing the four
abandoned houses on my block in Bedford-Stuyvesant. For a year and a half,
my next-door neighbor was a squatter
who entered his home through a makeshift plywood door; the rest of the doors
and windows had been mortared over.
I’d been wary of him initially, thinking
you couldn’t fully trust someone who
lived their life by breaking and entering,but over time we developed a rapport.
I gave him blankets and furniture, andfood for the cat that followed him at
his heels. We didn’t chat much – I was
always worried that the neighbors would
disapprove of my helping him out. I
was out of town when he was forced toleave the premises this past August, his
belongings dumped into a pile in thefront yard, but sometimes I worry thateven if I’d been there I wouldn’t have
known what to do, or done it if I did.
The house is sitting empty now. I always

tuition hikes, members of the all-city student assembly were there, standing with their CUNY peers to protest the increasing cost of public education. As a student at NYU, I had never had any contact with CUNY students
until the October 15 assembly, but I was at Baruch that night. I stood with
my nose pressed to the glass windows of the building, watching as NYPD
officers beat and arrested my fellow students for staging a peaceful sit-in.
And when the Board met again a week later, I returned, this time to find a
noticeably larger crowd composed of students from an even more diverse
collection of schools.
The events at CUNY brought the movement into our schools in a very realway. It is one thing to occupy a park or to illegally take the streets during amarch; we expect police repression in those cases. But it is another thing
to meet that type of repression in school, in a place in which you have aright to not only be, but also to have your voice heard.
Those protests took place just about a week after the November 17 Day
of Action, on which thousands of students had rallied in an over-capacity
Union Square. That rally demonstrated the power of the student movement and helped bridge the gap between students from public and private
universities. Together we listened to stories of personal experiences withstudent debt and high youth unemployment rates, and together we took
the streets all the way down to Foley Square. It was on the heels of thatinspiring day that students from different universities protested together
at Baruch College.
But now that we have the connections and the organizational structure,
we need to figure out what to do with them. Occupy Wall Street is responsible for creating many different groups and general assemblies, and thestudent assembly is one of them. Before September 17, there was no student movement, but our connections to Zuccotti Park have lessened since
it first brought us together.

9

OCCUPY REAL ESTATE MARCH, EAST NEW YORK, PHOTO BY BRENNAN CAVANAUGH

wondered who owned it; I’ve resolved tofind out.
It’s easy to absolve yourself from guilt
when you’re talking about national
economic policy and the 99%, but whenit comes to enacting change in your own
neighborhood, it’s not always so clearcut. Perhaps this is especially true in
New York: according to the US Census
Bureau, 69% of the households in New
York City are inhabited by renters, morethan any other major US city. In a town
full of renters, the fight for affordable
housing is not just about homeowners and banks; we are often fighting
amongst ourselves.
For decades now, the subtext of ourneighborhood battles has been theseemingly unstoppable process of gentrification and displacement. Whether
you’re riding the wave of gentrification
or it’s sweeping you away – or you’vebeen left bobbing in its wake – the sensethat the city is on a set path can lead you
to a feeling of helplessness. “Where else
am I going to go?” I’ve heard many ayoung gentrifier say, refusing to be held
accountable for what seems like a basic
inevitability. But to cede everything to
the wave doesn’t do you – or anyone else
– much good, because when you give up
responsibility, you also give up agency.
I’ve often wandered through New York
City with a mix of nostalgia and bitter
resignation, fantasizing about a city thatused to be, worrying about the city that’s
yet to come. But now, I see possibility.
Whose city? Not “our” city, entirely. But
not someone else’s either.

Meaghan Linick

Occupying
A Foreclosed
Home
December 6th was a national day to“Occupy Our Homes”—a day to take over
foreclosed and abandoned homes all overthe country and call public attention to the
housing crisis. In NYC OWS partneredwith community groups to organize amarch that culminated in the occupationof a foreclosed house in East New York, acommunity hard hit by predatory lending
and full of vacant bank owned properties.
Plans were made for a house to be occupied and fixed up for a family to move into
while protesters staged a large welcoming
party on the street outside. I joined theaffinity group that would be sleeping at thehouse on a rotating basis with the family
to deter eviction.
The house had three rooms on thebottom floor and two on the top as well asa basement and a little roof area that you
could go out to on the back of the second
floor. Other than some water damage andmold, which an expert told us was safe,
the house was in pretty good shape. There
was no running water, but the toilets
worked and could be bucket flushed. We
used a generator for electricity. A memberof OWS Sanitation taught me and another
woman how to refuel the generator. I felt
very proud of myself, jumping over theroof wall in the freezing rain in my dress
to pump gas into a generator throughout
the night and the next morning. OWS
Sanitation did an excellent job cleaning
up the house and setting up systems for
power and water.

Our autonomy can be a strength. Without our ability to organize eventsand see them through to fruition, none of what we have done so far would
have been possible. And yet, we cannot forget our origin. At key momentsin the movement’s history, students have mobilized not as an autonomous group, but simply as members of OWS. On days of action, at labor
rallies, when Zuccotti Park was evicted in the middle of the night, when
Sotheby’s workers picketed on auction nights, when a family re-occupied
a foreclosed home in Brooklyn, students came out in large numbers
and lent their energy, as well as their vocal chords, to struggles that weregreater than just one group of people.
Students have a place in this movement, but where that place is remains
unclear. This movement moves so quickly that I often find myself thinking
that it has been going on for years, rather than months. But we are still inthe early stages, and we are still figuring out how best to use our particular role as students while also contributing to the movement as a whole.
At NYU, a lot of the work that we are doing is still outreach—talking tostudents about why their individual problems are part of a larger issue andopening them up to the possibility of real, tangible change.
At our universities, we are faced with rising tuition, union busting, anda complete lack of transparency or fiscal accountability. Many students
will graduate with massive amounts of student loan debt, and most will
be faced with unemployment or underemployment before they are evenhanded a diploma and told to throw their mortarboard hats into the air.
These are issues that face students at every school, public or private, butthey are also issues that emphasize one of the messages of the larger
movement: We’re suffering the consequences of problems that we did notcause.

10

Our affinity group met with several
other people that had been appointed
from their working groups (medical,
security, Livestream, etc.) to support thisaction. There were about twenty of us in
the meeting and we discussed who would
be staying that night, the process for how
we would determine who would be staying there other nights, whether or not wewanted medical and security (yes) andhow many (two of each), and what was
our plan if the police tried to evict us. We
decided that if the police came to arrest
us, we would gather in the downstairs
front room and sing a song about housing
and take arrests together, with some soft
blocks and barricades potentially involved.
That first night was inspiring. Pizzas weredelivered, ordered by sympathizers fromall over the world. We sang songs, including our anthem, “Home of Our Own.”
People gave interviews, had politicalconversations, played games, and enjoyed
the high-spirited mood. That night I slepton an old mattress with a friend in a roomwith three other people who slept on floormats.
The next morning I had to leavearound 10 AM to go to work (I work as ababysitter as well as coat check in a restaurant). I arrived back on site at around9pm. A lot had changed in the housethe 11 hours I was away, The two backrooms on the downstairs were completely
blocked off because the dry wall had all
been torn out. The construction team wasplanning on installing new walls sometime
later in the week. Logistically, this meant a
lot less sleeping space. Also, the previous
owner of the house had shown up around3pm. He had abandoned the house three
years ago and has been in an ongoing foreclosure process with Bank of American.
He never lived at the property but had
rented it out. The NYPD had tracked him
down at his mother’s house to get the goahead to throw us all out. Confused andspooked, he had come to see what wasgoing on. He spoke with two members of
our group who assured him that we had
his interests in mind and pleaded with him
not to involve the cops (who repeatedly
called his cell phone during this conversation). He ended up leaving abruptly, as thewhole situation was making him nervous.
He ended up having two follow up
phone conversations with one of our affinity group members. In the first conversation he said he was hopeful we could worksomething out and did not want to involvethe cops. In the second conversation hesaid he spoke to a lawyer who told him
not to trust us and that we didn’t have
his interests in mind. He agreed to havea meeting with several of us the next day.
We were all afraid that he might give into
the cops’ manipulation or that the police
would simply arrest us anyway.
This development created an incredibly
tense and stressful mood inside the house.
Soon we were meeting to discuss thesituation and our plans for dealing withthe cops. Some people were nervous that
this complication changed the story fromus vs. bank to us vs. some guy and thatmaybe we shouldn’t get arrested for thisparticular house anymore. Others, myself
included argued that any house would
have a complicated history and that thisdevelopment didn’t significantly change
our situation and we should continue withthe original plan. Alfredo, the father of thefamily that had moved in, said that while
he heard people’s concerns and wasn’t
going to tell anyone what to do, his family
had put too much on the line to give up
now. The group regained their resolve
despite the new complications.
The
meeting continued, everyone tense knowing we could get arrested at any moment.
Seconds after headed upstairs to get mycellphone I heard:“Police approaching the door!”“Alright—everyone stay calm, staywhere you are. One person talk to them.”
The police officer told the person guarding
the door that we were illegally trespassing
and were facing arrest if we stayed. We
immediately jumped into action. Alfredo
went outside to speak with the officers(just two cars at the moment). People
began calling the National Lawyers Guildand taking down names and birthdays.
The Livestream team started reporting.
We locked our tools in someone’s van,worried that they would be confiscatedand put us out $3,000. I topped off the fuelin our generator so the power wouldn’t
cut off at an important moment. And, ofcourse, everyone was lighting up cigarettes. Most of us gathered in the frontroom where the Livestream was shooting
and began singing our anthem: We needa home, a home of our own / We gonnatake back something we own / We need ahome, a home of our own / Bankers keep
taking our homes, and we won’t let ‘emgo
The mood inside was intense, but
inspiring and hopeful. All of us were willing to be arrested at any moment for thehome, the family, and the movement—it
was a powerful feeling.
Around 1:30 AM someone announced
that Council Member Charles Barron had
been contacted. He was making phone
calls to the NYPD and ready to comedown here to make sure the situation did
not escalate, which prompted the NYPD
to agree to not to make any arrests thatnight. Of course we were all nervous that
the NYPD would change their position,
but we certainly felt safer hearing thisnews. We had a meeting figure out how
to deal with dozen or so people who had
shown up at the house to provide backup since we were running out of room.
Finally we went to bed, packed tighter
than before. I slept on the floor in an
upstairs room packed like sardines withfour others. The night had been stressful,but our determination and resolve had
been strengthened. Four nights later andthe house is still being held.

When I stood on that bench in Washington Square Park on October 15,
just learning how to lead a chant, I had no idea that the student movement
would become what it has become. This is the first time in my lifetimethat a social movement has been so resonant; what once existed only intextbooks now exists in my own life. In the coming weeks, as we begin
to address the question of what direction to take, differing opinions arebound to arise, and I expect a lot will change within the all-city student
assembly. Where we go next is important; but it is equally important tomake sure that our ties to the larger Occupy movement remain in tact
along the way.

OCCUPATION DISPATCHES
R andall Cohn

OCCUPY MN
On the unseasonably warm afternoon
of October 15, several hundred people
capped a noisy march through downtown
Minneapolis by parading to the grassy
South plaza at the Hennepin County
Government Center, and forming a circle
around a dozen hastily assembled tentlike structures constructed of thin plastic
sheeting stretched over 2x2 frames. Word
had gotten out to the Sheriff ’s office – atthat point, perhaps directly communicatedby the controversial police liaison – that
we were planning to pitch tents at 5pm, in
defiance of a strict order that structuresof any kind would not be tolerated. Halfa dozen sheriff ’s deputies were standing
with arms crossed, flanked by two or threemembers of the county building’s security
force, presumably prepared to step in andprevent the tents from going up in thefirst place. The improvisational genius of
the pre-made tents allowed the group to
march onto the lawn already in formation
around the tents and to immediately direct
its full force towards their defense.
For the next several hours, we held arally around the tents in which bullhorns
were passed among those who had chosenarrestable action as well as those whostood in the crowded outer perimeter.
Extemporaneous speakers included veterans, foreclosure victims, a union steward,
a novice catholic priest, medical andsocial service providers, and a theology

professor. Several people who had argued
against the tent action at the previous twonights’ general assemblies brought foodand water to those in the inner circle, sat
in temporarily to provide room for a quickrun to the port-a-potty, and ran messages.
Gradually, several dozen real tents rose up
in the center, and the circle pushed out toaccommodate them. Participants dutifully called and texted and tweeted andupdated their Facebook pages, and thecrowd grew steadily as the evening turned
to night. Someone announced that ourLivestream feed had been picked up by
the OWS and Global Revolution channels,
and a huge cheer rose up. That morning we had all paid close attention as themassive show of force at Zuccotti Park had
made Bloomberg flinch — and now it was
our turn, and New York was watching us.
At 9pm I called my wife to tell her that theSheriff ’s office had given us a five minute warning, and that I would very likely
be spending the rest of the night in jail.
By 1 AM, it had started to drizzle, most
supporters had gone home, and I crawled
into my tent thinking we would make itthrough the night. By 2:30, the personaltents had been confiscated, the makeshift ones destroyed, and – with nobody
arrested – a group of 50 or so had convened an emergency meeting to discuss
our next steps. Exhausted but energized,
we consensed that we should take anotherstand as soon as possible, maybe eventhe next night, and then most of us went
home to sleep in our beds.
That moment was, in my view, an earlyhigh point for OccupyMN, and marked an
important crossroads for its further development. For better or for worse, we didn’t

K ATHRY N CRIM

Bulldozers of theMind

We are the phone, a friend and I. I ask her what it might be like to write fromthe periphery. She wonders, What is the event?
A preliminary description requires I give you a time and a place. On theafternoon of November 9, I was in a seminar. We’d convened in the courtyardof the Berkeley Art Museum, not in our usual room in the French Department. This was supposed to be a gesture of solidarity, a disruption (not aninterruption—we are all trying very hard not be interrupted) of the usual
weekly pattern to recognize the problems facing the University of California,
express disagreement with the administration, acknowledge urgency, maketeaching visible. This is the language we use when we talk about a “gesturethat speaks”: recognizing, expressing, acknowledging, making visible. Thesewords recruit us before we even find the direct object of our dismay. Action
gets forestalled in the gerundive, but we are already out the door.
In the late afternoon, the courtyard is a patchwork of sun squares. The café
tucked next to the museum entrance faces south to the city and attracts
many people unaffiliated with the university. It occurs to me, we have very
well removed ourselves to the edge of campus. One student, who has apparently attended the noon rally, is wearing a bright green sign like a cape. The
professor gives a short talk on the UC budget. It is more or less the sametake another stand about the tents until
November 29, when a much smaller groupmade a noble effort to defend a groupof tents set up on the pavement of theNorth plaza. The images on Livestream
and Facebook were picturesque – snow
falling gently on an encampment covered
with signs boasting the diversity of theoccupation’s constituency – but when
the deputies were done carting away thetents in the early hours of the following
morning, it effectively marked the end of
the physical occupation as such. In theintervening weeks, OccupyMN accomplished a great deal, leading the nationin what has become an essential shift for
many cities, away from centralized camps
on public property and towards scattered occupations in defense of foreclosed
homes. We also struggled during that time
to come to grips with the limitations of theGeneral Assembly and the other de factoorganizing conventions that had gotten us
through the first month or so.
Like many of the occupations thatappeared in the weeks after OWS set up
camp in lower Manhattan, we reflexively
reproduced much of what we had seenin New York, quickly establishing a GA,
working groups for food, sanitation andteach-ins, etc., a library full of leftovers
from political economy and feminism
courses at UMN, and a Livestream

channel. Almost from the beginning, however, the Minneapolis occupation took on
a different character from OWS, insofar as
the nightly GA and most of the essential
working groups that reported to it werelargely made up of people who were not –or were only very rarely – actually sleeping
on the plaza. This, in turn, was at least
partially a result of negotiations between
the county and the group of organizers
who had chosen the site. That agreement,
which allowed the occupation use ofcity power and a permit to place port-opotties on the premises, seemed specifically aimed at restricting the possibility ofa long-term settlement, largely by layingout a strict stipulation against tents. It alsoestablished a line of regular communication between those organizers and representatives from the county, including thecommissioners’ council and the sheriff ’s
office.
By the third night’s GA, strong lines
were drawn between those who wanted tohonor the original agreement, and those
who did not recognize the authority ofthe organizers to enter into an agreement
and believed that the occupation needed
to have a real camp in order to function
meaningfully. The question of whether,and how, we should fight for the right topitch tents became grounds on which
a motley crew of activists with a broad

account I heard in his class the year before and I don’t think he used the word
privatization this time either. Instead the conversation turns to Berkeley’s
being shielded from the fiscally (and morally) sinking state of California.
Another student asks how we, as future applicants on the job market, might
be affected. My head throbs. Since before I went back to school I’ve beenreading about the diminishing value of a PhD, the cramped and competitivemarket for humanities scholars, the high attrition rate of ABDs. I am in debt
from my undergraduate years (oh, but I am also indebted to my undergraduate years): the job market is exactly what I don’t want to think about. So I tellmyself her question is too self-interested to be “in solidarity.”
Recently, I have begun to wonder if solidarity could be just this plain kind of
speaking: I wonder if it is as simple as an exchange of interests. Of course, it
is not so simple—most of us will not not stake our real interests by statingthem so baldly.
Later that night I listen to my voicemail on my way to BART: A friend has
called to see if I’m all right. He says he heard things had gotten out of hand.
It’s then that I notice the helicopters that have been hovering over campus all
day are still there.
2.
We are on the phone again. I am trying to explain how I avoid festivals andoutdoor concerts, that I sometimes feel congenitally unable to join.
She was hit with a baton. I’ll watch the YouTube videos half –a dozen times
before I make her out in the line of protesters. I recognize other people rightaway, mostly people who are particularly active in the grad-student union.
A local news blog says a professor of mine has been arrested, so I watch all
the videos again. It is both easy and hard to tell what is happening. When thepolice write an open letter, they’ll say the videos do not show other things,
like just how provocative the crowd was. Our chancellor’s first letter will
regret the protesters had chosen to be “not non-violent.”
When I send her a text that night to make sure she’s OK, I’ve started watching a Livestream of the ongoing stand-off on Sproul Plaza. The guy with thecamera keeps saying “Sprool” and I think he must be an outside enthusiast.
I wonder if I am an outside enthusiast. I send the YouTube links to my family.

11range of political and cultural commitments began to work through the often
painful process of coalition building.
At the same time, we were still struggling with the basic mechanics of the GA
process, arguing nightly about racial andgender dynamics, which hand signals touse, and how to conceptualize consensus.
Nonetheless, the tent action of October
15 was decided upon at the GA two days
before, less than a week after the occupation began, by a large group that, buoyedby mild temperatures during the meetings,
was able to reach a compromise. It was the
OccupyMN General Assembly operating at its best, improvising a process thatallowed us to come to a practical decision
about an immediate concern. It was also
the last time that the GA ever met in thatspirit.
The following night, with no tents up
and most of the participants from the previous day’s action sitting the meeting out,
the GA passed on the chance to affirm acoordinated act of defiance regarding thetents, and with the weather finally getting
blustery, started to look like the GAs thathave happened almost every night sincethen. Those assemblies, which soon began
to meet awkwardly in the ‘public’ skyways
that connect the commercial and financial
buildings of downtown Minneapolis andmake foot traffic possible during the long
winter, were usually characterized by atension between two kinds of meetings
that were trying to happen simultaneously.
One was the operations and communications meeting among working groups
concerned with increasingly contentious
details around finance, media, and messaging, largely made up of people who
weren’t sleeping downtown. The otherwas the daily logistical meeting among
the hard core occupiers who were feelingincreasingly alienated and abandoned by
the larger group. One solid decision that
did emerge from these meetings was theformation of a ‘winter survival strategies’ working group out of which grew
the committee that has now planned andexecuted three foreclosure defenses, aswell as several other affinity groups thathave organized direct action trainings
and have begun planning for other ways
to maintain and escalate the movement’s
momentum now that winter has arrived infull force. None of these groups regularly
reports to the GA.
What has happened, of course, hasbeen phenomenal, particularly aroundthe foreclosures. In North Minneapolis,
mostly-white occupiers defending thehome of an African-American woman
canvassed the mostly-black neighborhood and all parties reported remarkably
positive and open dialogue around race,
community organizing, and activism. In
South Minneapolis, 200 people showed
up to re-open a house that had beentaken from an adjunct UMN Anthropology professor and faced down the police,
refusing to allow them to approach thehouse to board it up, and holding theoccupation for 24 hours before the door
was broken down and the remaining
occupiers removed. Most recently, as
part of the national Occupy-Our-Homes
day of action, we pledged to defend thehome of a Vietnam marine veteran who
is facing eviction on a home he has lived
in since 1968 that is valued at one-fifth ofwhat he still owes on his mortgage, andwe received (mostly) positive recognition
by national and international mainstream
news outlets. Locally based US Bank has
shown signs that it is paying attention,issuing increasingly-panicked sounding
internal memos and bungling its attempts
to spin the story. People – and, importantly, different people than those who
were showing up downtown in October– are starting to get used to the idea of
defying unjust laws and standing together
in one another’s defense. Who would

I post several newsfeeds to Facebook. I check the BART schedule back to
Berkeley from San Francisco. But I stay in my room.
The cops, still dressed for a riot, are standing on the steps as if to protect
the building from seizure and pillage. They are back-lit by the floodlights
like actors on a stage; the mass of people at the foot of the stairs seems to be
growing. When I shut the computer a little after midnight, I go looking for an
essay I’ve been meaning to reread all fall:
Almost invariably, authority chooses to use force. The extent of its violence depends
upon many factors, but scarcely ever upon the scale of the physical threat offered by thedemonstrators. This threat is essentially symbolic. But by attacking the demonstration
authority ensures that the symbolic event becomes an historical one: an event to beremembered, to be learnt from, to be avenged (John Berger, 1968).
3.
Vengeance—and this is not quite the right word this time, but I don’t want
to forget that knowing-how-to-act continues to require enemies—starts
out as a circulation of angry letters, followed by more measured ones, followed by more official ones. I am consumed by this conversation. I leave thehouse later and later each morning, because I can’t seem to turn away fromthe internet. When I read news articles observing the spread of Occupy WallStreet to college campuses, I am startled by their lacunae: the arrests areeven made to sound peaceable. It is not until former laureate Robert Hass,
officially a poet, writes an editorial describing his experience being knocked
to the ground that I think the New York Times–reading public knows, officially,that excessive force was used that afternoon.
Another day of action is planned for the following week—to be called a
General Strike, borrowing on the rhetorical force of Oakland’s mass action. I
go to a planning meeting, but I also write an email to a friend saying I wasn’t
so sure about the tents. Perhaps occupying campus, as a mode –of address, was missing its mark. I realized later, sitting in another seminar, that the12

have thought it would be possible to makethose kinds of claims just a few monthsago?
Of course, none of the foreclosure
actions have been democratically or transparently organized. Their leaders havelargely abandoned the GA as part of theirdecision making process. Instead, they are
working with unions and neighborhoodorganizing groups – groups that havestaff and experience and knowledge about
how to run a phone bank, build a networkof supporters, and actuate that network
when it is necessary to deliver a crowd
to put the muscle behind a demo. Many
occupiers have expressed concern about
this reality, and some have been criticalof the actions’ focus on media spectacleor the ways in which they risk reinforcing
a problematic emphasis on single-family
home ownership. Very few would argue,
however, that the actions have not beena huge success, both by pushing public
discourse to think about the second mostimportant site of material exploitation asa site of struggle (occupy your job is coming!), and by simply giving us something to
do so that we continue to believe that we,
as a movement, exist. Meanwhile, we areworking out the details of how to have asort of constitutional assembly this winter.
Maybe it will produce a spokescouncil, ora refigured GA, or a way of thinking about
coalitions among different groups thataren’t directly accountable to one another.
Some will no-doubt mourn thepassing of the dramatic and infuriating
General Assembly as the radical organ of
democratic participation, and the utopiancommunitarian project of the centralized
occupation. It seems to me, however, thatas a people who have been out of the habitof organizing for this kind of fight forseveral generations, the only way we could
have gotten here is through the crazinessof direct, improvisational democracy –and now we are beginning to make theconceptual adaptations necessary to bringour movement into its adolescence. Now
there are all of these people who have
lived through and participated in theecstatic constitutive moment. They arepeople for whom the challenges of radical
democratic participation are no longer
only abstractions, and who are now readyto, precisely, participate in figuring out
how to become a movement. If that isbeing reproduced across the country –and how could it not be – then at the endof the Autumn of 2011, I am exhausted
but honestly excited, for the first time,about the political possibilities of the
moment in which I live.

students and professors who didn’t want to talk about the 9th didn’t agreewith the politics—or rather they considered the violence to be a consequence of political naiveté, a word reserved for idealists and crowds.
+++
There’s a California dream that goes something like this: a kid from a ruralcounty graduates from high school and goes to Merced Community College
then transfers to Cal State Fresno. He does really well and after a year or two
transfers again, this time to one of the UCs. Maybe Berkeley. He is taught bysome of the most prestigious professors in the country. He goes on to get a
PhD and be hired by a great private college on the East Coast. I like this dreama lot. It has many iterations; it has many mirrors. It’s poster-perfect, and it
carries no price tag.
There’s another dream for which you can find the film footage: The dream
isn’t of 1964, when Mario Savio stood on the steps of Sproul and called forbodies and the bodies were there—were already there—and kept coming.
The dream isn’t of these students who broke open the Free Speech Movement—even though now there is a plaque and a café. These are signposts
you forget because you’ve gotten so accustomed to thinking you know where
you are. The dream—the dream that came true—was this one: “What therailroad did for the second half of the last century and the automobile for the
first half of this century may be done for the second half of this century by theknowledge industry.” Perhaps President Clark Kerr did not know, could notsee clearly, that the production, distribution, and consumption of Knowledge would be possible only on student debt and quiet, obfuscated acts ofprivatizing what we continue to call a public university.
Here’s one more: On a warm fall Tuesday, language classes are being
held on the steps of Dwinelle Hall. Through Sather Gate, hand-drawn signs
are posted here and there on the plaza to announce various workshops andorganized conversations. Small circles of people mic-check in the round andbegin reciting poetry. A long line of undergraduates forms to receive handprinted Occupy Cal posters. I stand for a while listening to a discussion run
by the American Studies Department. When I look up, a flock of pigeons
cast fast-falling shadows on Sproul Hall. I like this dream too, but I go homeearly—before the plaza fills with thousands of people for an evening General
Assembly and the Mario Savio Memorial Address.
4.
I want to know if there will come a time when I too can set aside all my notknowing-how-to-act for the “not non-violent.” The pepper-spraying cop,
now the cut-and-paste meme of choice, is a false start. In that eight-minuteYouTube video, the one from UC Davis which I imagine you have seen by now,
the intolerable section is the middle five minutes. The camera weaves in andout among the protesters, the police turn their faces away, holding open aGwen Snyder

Campaign vs.
Encampment“EVERYONE GETS A VOICE” ILLUSTRATION BY DAVEY FIELD

When Occupy first began to take hold in
Philadelphia, it sent tremors of excitement
through the radical labor organizing community I’ve worked in for several years
now. As the director of Philadelphia Jobs
with Justice, a coalition of faith groups,
unions, student organizations, and community groups fighting for economic justice through direct action, the broad-based
participation in and militantly pro-worker
approach of the Occupy movement helda special appeal for me. Time and again,
movement elders had asked me when I
thought my generation would finally say
enough was enough and rise up in protest.
Now our moment had come, and I wasdetermined to be a part of it.
My organization quickly stepped up
our involvement, offering fiscal sponsorship to Occupy Philly, requesting material

support from local unions, and lending
as much staff time as we could to theburgeoning occupation. Caught up in
the excitement of Occupy organizing, I
also found myself in the unusual position of trying to explain to other folks in
the larger labor community why I felt sostrongly about getting involved in a political process that lacked clear demand. “Iguess I support the work you’re doing,”a friend doing service worker organizing told me, “but I don’t see the point.
What is Occupy supposed to do?” It was agood point, and I struggled to find a goodanswer. After all, like my friends, I’d been
trained to believe that good organizing
means issue campaign work. The more
intensely Philadelphia Jobs with Justicebecame involved with Occupy, the more
I believed in what we were doing—and
yet I often found myself at a loss trying to
explain to other experienced organizers
why I felt Occupy was worth the work ofmobilizing, the emotional investment ofrelational organizing, the personal challenges of getting arrested twice.
Interestingly, the younger people
most invested in the vision of a militanteconomic justice movement were often
the most suspicious of Occupy. While wepath for the arrests. A low chanting in the background can be heard: Shame,
shame. That period of calmed agitation, which is also a strange, orderly distress, seems to me to be something like a figure for the present moment. The
camera doesn’t know how it will turn out, whether the crowd will disperseor gather together again. It doesn’t know that eventually they will cometogether to avenge with a hortatory chant, that this will persuade the police
to gather, too, and retreat. It doesn’t know that the following night as Chancellor Linda Katehi walks to her car, after she has declined to comment on
the violence, silence will be used as a weapon.
5.
A feeling emerges, at a certain time and in a certain place, that something
has happened. It seems to slip backward and forward from this uncertain
space in front of me as I write. I am told a group of relatively enfranchised
people are brutalized in the bright afternoon on a highly visible college
campus because violence is an always-already possibility of institutionaland state power; I am told this violence only lies latent in particular places
of privilege, but that in other places, less visible but not far from campus, itcertainly received pushback from more
traditional leaders in the labor movement,
I also personally experienced a lot of resistance from younger, more radical organizers used to fighting directly in labor struggles on the ground and in workplaces.
Occupy simply did not look like what we
had been taught that good organizing
should look like. There’s rightly been a lotof publicity around the challenges Occupy
has posed to dominant media narratives.
Perhaps more surprisingly, Occupy has
also challenged and subverted a narrativeinternal to the professional organizing
community: the necessity of campaigndriven organizing.
Before Occupy, it was generally
accepted among most direct action organizers that strong political organization
emerges from a trained organizer agitating
an existing community into strategically
implementing an issue-based campaign
with clear, winnable, desired outcomesthat advance the long-term goals of theorganization. In labor organizing, thismight mean a campaign for higher wages
or a workplace election for union recognition; in community organizing, it mightmean a campaign to force a factory to stop
dumping waste into a local river. Tactics
exist only to further a campaign; campaigns exist to further the long-term goalsof the organization.
When organizer friends questioned thestrategic value of Occupy, I initially shared
their doubt. One of the great strengths
of contemporary organizing culture has
been our institutionalization of strategicorganizing trainings like Wellstone, Midwest Academy, and others. When you plana campaign with the Midwest Academy
strategy chart, you start with goals (longterm, mid-term, short-term); you assessyour resources, allies, and opposition; andyou focus on your target (the decisionmaker with the power to give you what
you want). Each component has clear
parameters; each term has a clearly delineated definition. Only once you have laid
this strategic groundwork do you begin toplot tactics. The methodology is exact androoted in the real life experience of movement elders. The vocabulary is sharp andwidely-known. Victory is defined clearly,
evaluation simple. The model can be stunningly effective.

For me and for many others, thesestrategic models provided necessary guidance and structure when we were learning
how to effectively fight for social change.
In my experience, however, they can also
invite a certain level of doctrinal rigidity(the title of Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals”
is fairly explicit about that invitation). Yet
here we were at Occupy, our numbersswelling, new tents popping up daily, without a winnable goal, a strategy, or a clear
target in sight. I felt incredibly motivated,
felt that I was part of something of deep
political import—and yet Occupy clearednone of the evaluatory hurdles that I
had been taught to use to assess success.
We had implemented encampment very
effectively, but to my mind, it was a tactic
if there ever was one—and what goal
was it advancing, really? If Occupy was a
campaign, it was a really bad one. And if
Occupy wasn’t a campaign, what the hell
were we doing?
And there it was: Occupy isn’t acampaign at all. It’s a community, a selfgenerated one, built from the ground up
with tears, sweat, and tarps. Encampment, I’ve come to realize, was never just atactic. It was an act of political theater, an
activist boot camp—but it also served as
an incubator of a new organizing culture.
The traditional organizing models I grewup with assume pre-existing community: a neighborhood, a student body, aworkplace. At Occupy, we created a newcommunity from a group of disparate
individual members of society—unemployed, students, union members, thehomeless. Encampment gave us the proving ground we needed to build the internal
relationships and trust necessary forcollective political effort, and it allowed us
to develop our own unique culture. In theencampment stage, Occupy could successfully break the fundamental rules of campaign organizing, including the necessityof demands, precisely because we were
not doing campaign work. We were doing
culture work.
So now, post-eviction, we move
forward from the challenges of physicalencampment—bathrooms and waterproofing, permits and sanitation—on
to the challenges of maintaining decentralized organization without shared,

has been and continues to be realized every day against, for example (and it
is only one example), young black men. I am told that the tuition hikes havebeen a long time coming; that the erosion of at least one California dream
started back when I was too young to remember. I am told nothing like anencampment on the steps of our administrative buildings is going to stop
it. And I am told there could be something like free and open education.
People are talking like this. The scene at hand, the video on my computer,is the always-already, the now, the might be. This is the closest I can get tounderstanding what they keep calling the demand-less, leaderless hope.
I still want to be able to tell you what has happened. I try to gather together
conversations that, like shells, strike me as completely different. I want
to string them together as evidence of some ineluctable change in consciousness. I am angry when people dismiss certain facts as distractions,but still too when others make declarations like “Occupy has no ideology
only a ‘poetics’.” Is this because the community is cause enough, and I was
recruited to it from the beginning? The hardest thing is not bearing with theindeterminacy, but being in disagreement with those I’ve come to respect.
Maybe we are held together in common by each of us learning to be eachother’s everyday enemies. Maybe someday we will find a different kind ofcommon ground. Meanwhile, I’ve been waiting for that bulldozer of themind, which will leave me, if not radicalized, then at least clear-headed andready.

13

centralized space. Physical occupation
allowed us to develop a new, relationshipbased community—a process vital for our
movement, and one for which we had nomodel. Now, as a trusting community,
we can finally begin to focus less on thepracticality of camp maintenance, andto dream more about how Occupy can
become a force to transform the economic
realities of our world. Occupy Philly has
the potential to keep the powerful on edge
through the kind of surprise direct action
we’ve already employed, and there willbe ample opportunity and cause for such
resistance: Sunoco’s planned casual mass
layoffs at the Marcus Hook and South
Philadelphia refineries, our community
college’s demands for painful concessions from its teachers’ union, Verizon’s
refusal to bargain with its employees, andthe irresponsible behavior of nonprofit
conglomerates like the University ofPennsylvania.
As our direct action working groupsswell, bolstered by the new availability ofactivists previously preoccupied with the
day-to-day needs of encampment working groups like safety and sanitation, weare also beginning to accumulate enoughorganizing strength to contemplate thekind of sustained, targeted campaign workthat could affect change on problematic
local issues. Here, too, there are plenty ofexamples of practices that beg for change:
Mayor Michael Nutter’s racist curfew,
or Philadelphia’s embarrassing record of
cutting tax abatement deals on corporate
development projects like the Comcast

building. This is where the information
contained in strategic campaign work
trainings becomes an asset rather thana liability, with the potential to guide us
forward rather than limit our work. In
transmitting this knowledge, unions andorganizations like Jobs with Justice cancontinue to be helpful partners in thework of building Occupy. We have learned
the valuable lesson that Occupy does notneed to be a campaign, and it is energizing
and exciting to realize that this movement
is nearly positioned to run one without
being subsumed by it.

Br andon Harris

OCCUPYCINCY

On November 21st, the day before I
boarded a MegaBus in midtown Manhattan so I could spend Thanksgiving in
my hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio andexactly one month after Occupy Cincinnati’s encampment had been raided(and twenty-three arrested), McClatchy
published an article titled “Highest
income-inequality tract is gentrifying.” Itdetailed how a new Census Bureau report
revealed that Census Tract 17, made up of
the northernmost portion of Cincinnati’s
largely blighted, historically significant

OCCUPY UC
DAVIS
Geoffrey Wildanger

I write this, here at UC Davis, one week after a general assembly was attended
by about 5,000 people. One week after a press conference by Chancellor
Linda P. B. Katehi was protested by 1,000.
I write this on the day that the UC Regents will meet via teleconference
to decide whether to raise UC tuition by 81 percent. They originally planned
to hold the meeting last week in San Francisco but rescheduled due to fears
of too many protesters. Their fears were well justified. The general assemblyat Davis called for a strike on the UC campuses today. Other campuses havetaken up the challenge and are organizing for the strike, particularly Santa
Cruz and Berkeley.
But none of this is why UC Davis is in the local, national, and international news. Stories about Davis are everywhere because on Friday, November 18, Lt. John Pike pepper-sprayed seated, nonviolent student protesters(myself included) with the nonchalance one typically associates with a stroll
in the park. Lt. Pike that Friday put the banality of police violence on display.
About ten of us were pepper-sprayed and the same number were arrested;
several were taken to the emergency room and two were hospitalized—all
to remove a few tents from the quad outside the student union. What could
have been so threatening about a few tents?
I first saw the thirty-five riot police as I was leaving seminar with a friend,
Kevin Smith, to grab a coffee with our professor. It was around 3:15 PM,
and, turning to the professor, Kevin and I pointed to the cops and said we
had to deal with more pressing issues than Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick. All
three of us walked toward the tents, and our professor joined approximately
200 onlookers as Kevin and I linked arms with the seventy or so protesters

14

Over The Rhine neighborhood, had themost significant gap between its richestand poorest citizens of any neighborhoodin the country. With over two-thirds of its
321 households earning less than $10,000
a year, three percent of the households
taking in between $100,000 and $150,000
a year and another three percent taking inover $200,000 annually, there is no placein the United States where you are likely to
see crushing poverty within short walking
distance from leisurely affluence. And now
the hipsters were moving in.
I’ve spent a significant amount of timein Tract 17 over the last year and a half.
Frequently the lone person of color amonga largely white social circle, one which
stretches back to my days attending someof the city’s most vaunted schools, one
desperate summer of making a featurefilm and a series melancholy holidays
have brought me back to the apartments
and saloons of gentrification frontiersmen who’ve taken to the lower part of Mt.
Auburn or the northern reaches of Overthe Rhine, just north of Liberty Street.
That this extreme socioeconomic stratification exists in such close quarters is, ofcourse, not news to anyone who lives inor has spent significant time in the area.
And it is especially not news to me, since
I’ve routinely lived for the past decade onless than $10,000 a year in a city that ismuch more expensive than Cincinnati,
while having been educated within andemployed by institutions that give me theopportunity to make close friends andhave vague acquaintanceships with people
who make much, much more.
Visiting some of the individuals who liveon Cincinnati’s gentrification frontier the
weekend after Thanksgiving, conversation would drift to Occupy Wall Street,with a palpable drop in interest from somein attendance. Occupy Cincinnati went
unmentioned, before talk wandered backto when to go to which bar/club after how
many drinks when.... To most of thesewell-to-do young people, none of whom
had been down to the encampment, or toany of the marches, the notion that they
could or should attempt to be a part of amovement to address social problems isquaint. Certainly, for scions of some of thecity’s most well-endowed families, income
inequality was not their fight. They issued
little enthusiasm. This set was too demure,to self-consciously aligned with the statusquo, whatever their assumed liberalism (atleast on social issues) would indicate, tochallenge the great quandary of our times
in such a personal way. The mere factthat I had mentioned Occupy Cincinnati
meant I was irrepressibly square on somelevel. Political activism might get in theway of going to The Ass Ponys show thatnight.
+++
As it happens, Cincinnati is one ofAmerica’s most segregated cities, thesite of the last large-scale, racially tinged,
police-brutality-inspired major urban
rebellion among the poor and colored,
in 2001, following the shooting deathof unarmed, nineteen year old Over theRhine resident Timothy Thomas, a namethat instantly evokes a grotesque period
in the city’s recent past and its everunsolvable, but now largely ignored, race
problem. The city center leans moderately
progressive, surrounding precincts, muchless so. In the wake of former Lehman
Brothers Managing Director and current
Ohio Governor John Kasich’s stirring
defeat on SB5, which would have limited collective bargaining rights for Ohio
public sector workers, the city elected its
seemingly most progressive council in a
generation, with seven Democrats out ofnine members, and for the first time ever,a majority of blacks. Still, House Speakerencircling the tents. We began chanting as the cops marched towards us information, and we continued as they gave us the order to disperse.
A prominent poet who teaches on campus approached me and anotherfriend, Sophia Kamran, betting us a dollar we couldn’t get the crowd tochant, “Cops off campus!” We did, and he still owes us that dollar.
The cops lined up to march against us, then ran into us to start making
arrests. They were able to arrest several, starting with our longtime comrade
and unofficial “know your rights” trainer, and we unarrested a couple.
They threw a number to the ground, including Kevin, who had a cast on
his arm after a recent surgery. Incensed by this show of violence, about half
the onlookers flooded our circle; some took tents away for safekeeping whileothers stood among us and joined our chant: “Cops off campus!” Those of
us linking arms, seeing the police gather the arrested in the middle of ourcircle, stood up and reformed a large circle around the police and their prisoners. We yelled that we’d disperse when they let our friends go (an entirely
reasonable demand, considering that the police can simply cite and release
for a misdemeanor).
Pike walked up to those seated on the walkway and threatened that he andthe others would shoot us with their pepper-spray paintball guns. At least
that’s what we assumed he meant—all he said was, “Move or we’ll shoot.”
We sat tight. I lifted up my coat collar and pulled my scarf around my mouth
in preparation. Instead of shooting, however, he stepped over us, out of thecircle, and pepper-sprayed us.
Pepper spray hurts a lot. Apparently it was “military grade” pepper spray,
which causes a fatality in one out of every six hundred uses. One young
woman was hospitalized for chemical burns. An asthmatic went into shock.
One of us, sprayed in the mouth, vomited blood for forty-five minutes, andtwo more also went to the hospital where each needed an entire IV bagof saline solution per eye to stop the burning. Many of our hands burnedfor hours afterwards. For two days, my eyes burned when I took a shower(hot water activates pepper spray, so, if you do get sprayed, take a very cold
shower afterward and don’t iron your clothes).

John Boehner, who went to the same allboys Catholic high school I did in Cincinnati’s northern suburbs and years before
he became speaker was principally known
as a man who handed out checks fromlobbyists to GOP congressman on theHouse floor itself, represents the district
just northwest of the city proper.
How to move forward in a place like
this?
Occupy Cincinnati’s former encampment and current nerve center is Piatt
Park, a slender green space two blocks
long that sits between the motor lanes ofGarfield Place from Vine to Elm Streets
downtown. Swifter than most cities,
Cincinnati Police quickly and violently
did away with the budding occupation
during a late night raid, eerily foreshadowing the incidents we would see at Occupy
encampments around the country in thenext month and a half. Since then it has
become the site of a daily general assembly and a protest that begins at ten eachnight. Attendance at the assembly and theprotest actions panned by various Occupy
associated groups fluctuates due to avariety of factors. Cincinnati, for example,
is simply a difficult city to travel in. The
greater Cincinnati area has minimal public
transportation and is bloated by suburban sprawl. Roughly the same numberof people who lived in Cincinnati proper
forty years ago now take up ten times theamount of space, with only a fraction ofthem still living within the city center.
The couple of times I dropped by
Occupy Cincinnati’s general assembly
during the week of Thanksgiving, there
weren’t many more than twenty people
in attendance, although some nights theLivestream appears to reveal somewhere
between fifty and seventy-five. A thousandor so had participated in a series of recent
marches and instances of street theater, atactions directed at major local mortgage
lender Fifth/Third Bank, and in various

Fountain Square rallies. Jesse Jackson
happened by Piatt Park one evening andgave a surprisingly stirring speech, which
emboldened many to reoccupy the space.
Fifteen protesters were arrested that night
when they refused to leave after it closed.
Jackson came back to congratulate them
the following afternoon, by which time
only a few of those arrested had beenreleased.
Still, Occupy Cincinnati couldn’t
manage to stage an Occupy Our Homes
action on Tuesday December 6th. Too few
foreclosed homeowners could be foundto help reclaim their properties, despite
the preponderance of foreclosed houses
in central Cincinnati neighborhoods like
Avondale, Madisonville, Roselawn and
Bond Hill, all of which have endured longbouts of economic and infrastructural
decline. On its Facebook page, Occupy
the Hood claimed to have found “OVER
30 TRASHED, ABANDONDED, FORCLOSED HOMES IN THE AVONDALE
AREA,” but the former occupants of those
homes, the very people who need our help
reclaiming them, had long abandoned theproperties, either voluntarily or by force.
Instead occupiers teamed up to beautify
the properties, so as to restore them tolivability for the ostensibly itinerant folks
who used to live there, should they befound.
+++On Thanksgiving Day in Cincinnati, I
often find myself at a few dinner tables.
This is perhaps not so uncommon,
especially for the expatriate children ofincreasingly fractured, middle class, black
American families. There is work to do,
campaign stops to make (“Yes, we’re allfine, work is great!”), food and football todigest, but perhaps not the communion
one would think the holiday meant for. I
am frequently obliged to pay my respects
to an entire network of individuals during

No one expected UC Davis to become world famous for police brutality.
It’s a nice, land-grant university in a small town, a school more famous for
its cows than its cops. And so, when a cop here acted with the same brazen
disregard for decency that police display elsewhere—in poorer communities, against people of color—it made the news.
But how Lt. Pike behaved on Friday, with the authorization of Police Chief
Annette Spicuzza (now on administrative leave) and Chancellor Katehi, is
not exceptional. We know this in Davis, a mere hour drive from Oakland—
the memory of Oscar Grant is with us constantly.
The violence of the police on my campus has unified the community in away I have never before seen. Hundreds of alumni drove in to attend a rally.
Children from a local school baked cookies for those pepper-sprayed. Thousands of students who had never been to a protest before attended a general
assembly.
The community has unified around one serious demand: Chancellor
Katehi must resign. She must resign not only because of what happened
last Friday. That would presume that her actions last week were not part ofa larger pattern. Rather, she must resign because she has followed the pathof privatization set by University of California President Mark Yudof. This
privatization plan—let’s call it austerity—has been enforced by cops. The
police have enforced austerity in California as they have in Egypt, London,and Greece.
While November 18 highlighted the issue of police brutality at Davis (asearlier protests did at Berkeley), this brutality is inseparable from the austerity and financialization against which the global occupation movement isstruggling. Last Sunday, during an attempt to retake Tahrir Square from theviolent military dictatorship that has lost its presidential figurehead, thirtythree people were murdered. The struggle there continues. The struggle
against austerity continues in Athens. The fight against oppressive governments, against austerity, against police violence and racism and homophobia—against capitalism—continues.

these visits, some immediate family, cousins and aunts and the few living grandparents, members of a generation becoming
increasingly scarce, the last ones among
us to live significant adult lives in the
specter of the brutality of pre-Civil Rights
American racism. Yet I remain somewhatof an outsider in these parts, having fled
to the east coast as a young man, looking
for a life more open to the possibilities of
freedom (and perhaps a bit of recognition
as an artist of one sort or another) than
the strange brew of black Christian literalism, moderate African Methodist Episcopalianism and Negro middle class striver
ethic that defined our brood. This divide isnever more evident than when the discussion switches to contemporary activism.
The mere mention of Occupy Cincinnati at both my father and mother’s
Thanksgiving Day feasts were met withmild derision from some of those in attendance, less than bellicose support fromothers, and mostly blank stares from myfather, a talented baker who had ignored
his diabetes and made half a dozen pies
for less than a dozen people. My mother,once a liberation theology black radical ofsorts—one who nonetheless spent muchof her adult life not seeing the value ofunions and building suburban homes inmostly middle class black neighborhoods,
many of which were financed by subprime mortgages even when her clientsqualified for better terms—bought mycounterpoints to these arguments hook,line and sinker. But in the presence of her
Thanksgiving Day company, she sought
only to keep the piece and enjoy the rather
succulent meal she had prepared.
Still, subject should have been of great
urgency to everyone in our midst. Sixteen
years ago, during the era of welfare reform,
when subprime mortgages were being
devised at Andrew Cuomo’s HUD, andthe concept of infinite growth and the endof history were being plausibly discussed
by seemingly thoughtful individuals, myfather’s janitorial service, which has been
largely built around contracts that allowed
him and a small crew to clean the innercorridors of Proctor & Gamble’s massive
Ivorydale production site (a veritable cityof soap) crumbled. His sliding class status
was in stark contrast to my mother’s, who
lucratively built new homes in working
class black communities for a living, until
she didn’t. A business that largely thrived
because of predatory lending in previously redlined communities isn’t built tolast. She and many others, having gone
through most of the money they saved for
retirement over nearly an entire lifetime,
having lost their homes and careers, arethe human fallout. Yet many don’t see
the connection between the work of the
Occupy Movement and their own plight.
“Most of the people out there don’t
look like us,” said my mother’s friend
Cheryl during dinner, questioning whether
the Occupy movement was inclusiveof people of color. “I just didn’t see thatmany black people there,” she continued,
suggesting that this, and this alone, wasa reason to be skeptical of the mettle andintentions of the activists. This perception,that the Occupy movement is a thing by
and for white activists, however untrue,
has gained some traction within many
black communities.
Anyone who has spent ample time inblack America will tell you that grievances
toward the state run high. People know
intuitively what is going on. Often they
don’t know the exact culprits, allowing apervasive but unfocused cynicism toward
the white power structure to exist. Still,blacks here in the States have long been
privy to the fact that the powers that be
are corrupt and seek no justice on theirbehalf, with an understanding that antagonism does not just come from Republican

On the UC campuses, we do not always experience our struggle as being
against a big concept like capitalism. Right now at Davis, we see a few things
that really make us mad: the actions of Lt. Pike and Chancellor Katehi, andthe noose-referencing graffiti that appeared during the students of color
conference. Some of us see these as the problems we have to fix. We candemand that Katehi resign, that Pike be put on trial, and that the Cross Cultural Center on campus get more funding.
But of whom can we demand changes that go beyond quick fixes? The
phrase most associated with the UC struggles (and my second favorite)
is “Occupy everything, demand nothing!” We do not demand “nothing”
because there is nothing that we want. To the contrary, we make no demands
because there is no existing authority that could give us what we want. But
when we come together, we create the power to realize our demands. Insofar as these are “our universities,” “our streets,” “our public spaces,” and “ourbuildings,” it is our task to radically transform them―to transform the social
relations for which they exist.
This brings me to my favorite phrase associated with the UC struggle:“You will never be lonely again.”
We do make demands―we make demands of ourselves, as we realize newsocial relations, new types of friendship, even new types of love. We occupy
space not only to proclaim our existence. We occupy space to communize it.
We occupy space to decolonize it.
We occupy so that we can change human nature.
Last Friday, I was very mad at the cops. What they did was unforgivable.
But by the end of the day, anger was no longer my primary feeling. Instead I
felt joy and love toward all the people I’d been talking to and trying to organize for years who that day went from looking at us to standing with us.
I was happy because, after being pepper-sprayed, in terrible pain, we
stood together and marched the cops off the quad, chanting, “You can go.”I was happy because I felt proud. I felt proud to be a UC Davis student
and a member of a community that was suddenly so unified.
15

politicians and racist police forces, butalso the very white liberals that often
spearhead the gentrification of their communities. No paternalism goes unnoticed
here.
Yet most of the occupiers I talked toover the long holiday, from a queer whitegirl who grew up in the lower middle classenclave of Kennedy Heights to a lightskinned, upper middle class man of mixed
race who went to the city’s most prestigious high school and has an advanced
degree from Yale, feel and fear the samethings that the desperate-to-stay-working
class black women who eat at my Mother’s
dinner table do. They all suffer from plummeting home values, ever more expensive
health care and energy prices, and manyare pushing themselves through service
industry careers in fields that have longsince stagnated or fallen completely by thewayside.
None of them however—neither those
who make up the broad majority of theoccupiers nor my mother’s ilk—would
be risking as much as the impoverished
black men in Tract 17 to engage in civil
disobedient protest in the United States,
even passively and non-violently. In someparts of Over the Rhine, one would be
hard pressed to find a young black man
who does not have some sort of criminal
record, usually for the slightest of offenses.
The stakes for second or third time
offenders from the black underclass, whonearly never have access to their own legal
representation other than court appointed
defenders, are high. They are seen de facto
criminals by the city’s police establishment
and as unemployable by the posh new

businesses opening in their neighborhood.
Their grievances are many and they havelittle reason to believe, at present time,that protesting and civil disobedience is asafe way to navigate the troubled waters of
inner city poverty.
How to convince people in central
Cincinnati, in East St. Louis, in BedfordStuyvesant and Watts, who have been victimized by the drug war, reverse redlining,stop and frisk, the decline of Americanindustrialization (the oldest of whom still
have visceral memories of the struggle forcivil rights) to join us? They are alreadywith us in minds, if not their hearts. Thisis a time to see the limitations we have
imposed upon ourselves, conditioned byculture and habit, and sail past them. We
must be bold, we must take risks, we must
add to our ranks. If the active portion of
the 99 percent is to include men in thenorthern reaches of Over the Rhine andequally disenfranchised people of color allover this country, it will require no small
amount of courage, empathy and commitment from everyone involved in our
struggle to make them feel welcomed andsecure and appreciated.
I’d like to think that strong rhetoricand fierce determination, earnest andconsistent appeals to action, airtight facts
and courageousness, will be enough for
the Occupy Movement to change theworld. I increasingly suspect, however,after yet another melancholy trip home,that an invigorating sense of bother andsisterhood between many more of us,
from those at the very bottom of the 99%
percent to those at the very top, is the element we most desperately need.

CHRISTOPHER HERRING AND ZOLTAN GLU CK

Re-Articulating the Struggle for
Education: From Berkeley to New
York

I. New Alliances in New YorkThe space on the second floor of 90 Fifth Avenue was (and is) a fairly blandand sterile study center for the New School, but for eight days it was transformed. On November 17th, as three thousand students marched down
Fifth Avenue, a coalition of students from schools across the city stormed
the building and claimed the space as open and free for all. Political differences emerged among the occupiers immediately, and cohabitation only
deepened them, but the constant flow of teach-ins, workshops, lectures,
film screenings, meetings, and general assemblies turned the arguments
into challenges to build something together. The more fragile alliances
gave way to real political rifts when we confronted the reality of eviction.
Other alliances survived. Both the sense of collective struggle fosteredin that space and the political fault lines that emerged are instructive inunderstanding the new terrain of possible alliances within a nascent student movement during the deepening crisis of neoliberalism.
On day three, after one of the NYC Student Assemblies, I remember
someone lauding the occupation profusely: “This kind of thing hasn’t happened since the sixties!” The student was from one of the private schools
in the city, and I felt an urge to interject. I thought, No, there actually is along and important history of struggle over public education in this city;
building occupations happened at CUNY from the ’70s through the ’90s;
black and Latino students have been fighting for and defending their rightto higher education since the ’60s; and the CUNY-wide general assembly

16

K RISTIN PARK ER

Dispatch fromthe Audre
Lorde—
Howard Zinn
Library at
Occupy Boston
My phone buzzed. “They’re going toevict us by midnight” a quiet, despondent
voice said. “Fuck.” I replied. “I’ll be rightthere.” I was standing in a museum’s art
storage room (where I spend most of myprofessional life) talking to my boss. He
saw my face fall. I shared the news andtears welled up. I wanted sob angrily,
but instead swallowed hard, took a deep
breath and asked permission to leave theoffice. My boss, an understanding former
hippie, said “You go do what you have todo.” The support we’ve received at Occupy
Boston—support most of you readers havealso experienced—is incredible. All these
little contributions—my boss allowing me

to leave work without hassle so I could gosave the library at Occupy Boston—meanthat our work can continue.
+++
The first incarnation of the library at
Occupy Boston was established immediately, in the form of a small orange
and white tent, with one white painted
bookshelf full of novels and some camping blankets inside. Other tents—food,logistics, spirituality and medical—weremore established by one week into theoccupation. In roared John Ford, hearton-his- sleeve, vegan, punk rocker andBoston classic, whose more ferocious
displays of commitment were characterized as “donkey kong” by other occupiers.
He pulled up to the site in his military
ambulance, the back loaded with cranberry crates filled with books. He had
packed up a third of his personal collection out of Metacomet books in Plymouth,
MA—the shop he runs/ran—a militarytent and other supplies, and landed with
impact at Dewey Square (read his accountat therovinghouse.com), giving the library
greater presence on site.
The Progressive Librarians Guild at
Simmons College and the Boston Radical Reference Collective reached out toJohn, who welcomed the rad refs, and thestands in a long tradition of radicalism and resistance. But on this lastpoint I paused. The CUNY-wide assembly was actually going to convene in
the occupied space on the following day. How had it come to pass that thehistoric struggle over public education was now being waged alongside
students from private universities and in a shared space we were collectively trying to build? How was it that students from some of the most elite
institutions in the country, who pay more for a year of school than most
CUNY students pay for their whole education, were now seemingly fighting
the same fight? Without immediately being able to answer these questions, I realized that, whatever the fate of our experiment at 90 Fifth Avenue, Occupy Wall Street had begun to shift the coordinates of the struggle
over education.
Monday, November 21st was the last day of the Week of Action, and inmany ways the actions and events of that day captured our new sharedterrain. In the morning, members of the NYC Student Assembly and theOWS Student Debt Working Group met at Zuccotti Park to launch Occupy
Student Debt, a national student debt refusal pledge that will prompt acollective default if one million people sign on. These were for the mostpart private school students taking aim at the financial institutions thatprofit off their education. Then the pledgers converged with CUNY students
protesting the latest round of tuition hikes, and we marched together tothe board of trustees meeting at Baruch College. We stood our ground
together as CUNY campus security beat and arrested dozens of students.
Since the eviction, the New York City Student Assembly has continued toconvene and plan actions. Our alliance is not only formal or symbolic but
also very much material: our situations are the product of the same economic structures, which have simultaneously turned public education intoa privatized commodity and transformed students into highly indebted
consumers. Occupy has helped us voice our common predicament andopened new avenues for collective struggle.
II. UC Berkeley: Crafting New Tactics and Discourses
Student activism for public education is nothing new in the UC system, andthe last decade has seen a resurgence of action surrounding the system’s
disinvestment. This is largely due to the fact that privatization is no longer
encroaching upon the institution at its old glacial pace, remaining largely
invisible to rotating cohorts of students, but instead so rapidly acceleratingsnatch knitted caps off our visitors, decorating the door with a colorful woolenbunting. People often ducked in throughthe tent flaps, sigh and say “I LOVE libraries!”. Patrons checked out books on a card
catalog slip, simply writing down the title,
and walked away, beaming, with a book or
two under their arm. Our current catalog
has over 100 books checked out.
Like most reference librarians, often
day-to-day work was often shelved inorder to respond to queries. Eager highschool students would come in, wide eyedand nervous, clutching video cameras
and pages of interview questions. Families
with children would poke around curiously. Pairs of ladies, coat lapels covered
with activist buttons would tiptoe in
together, sharing their knowledge andquizzing mine. Authors would speak at
the lecture series and drop off their books.
One couple told us we were going to suffer
an earthquake and should vacate the area
immediately. I sometimes felt like some
sort of therapist, and spent a lot of time
listening to people share their ideas for

PHOTO UNCREDITED

three units joined forces to form a libraryworking group. We’re made up of at least
20 librarians, many who are Simmons College library grads with a range of skills. I’m
an archivist and bring an interest in preservation strategies, so we might actively
archive the movement as it happens).
Weekly meetings were held, donationsof books flowed in, a check out system
was established. The library became abuzzing hub of activity, while still offering
respite to the sometimes organized chaosof the camp. It was cozy space, with abraided rug on the floor, christmas lights
along the ceiling (powered by an outlet
provided by the Greenway Conservancy),
and always warm. John even constructed acoat check in a tent vestibule, so we could
hang up wet jackets. One wall was covered
with post it notes written on by visitors.
“What are your favorite resources?” weasked. People wrote on Post-It notes: partsandcrafts.org, Al Jazeera, Dharma Punx,
Crimthinc.org, old people’s stories.
The tent had one comical irritant—thetough velcro strip at the entrance wouldthat its effects are acutely felt each year. Since 2006, tuition has risen from
$6,600 to $13,360, class sizes have expanded at the same time that classes
have become harder to get into, departments and programs have been cut,and the proportion of out-of-state students has grown. In response to thisacademic restructuring—designed to convert a public good into a privatecommodity—students, faculty, and community members have gatheredin solidarity each fall to challenge the state’s privatization and disinvestment of what is widely considered the world’s greatest public university
system. But this year was different, and it is no small part due to the Occupy
movement.
The Occupy Effect first became apparent to me when I received the talking points packet given to graduate student activists who make in-classpresentations to undergrads about the cuts and planned actions. I’d given
this presentation in previous years and the script was always the same—
simply piling on the latest statistics about deepening cuts, ascending fees,and obscene salary increases for administrators. However, this year’s script
did not just calculate the latest casualties, but instead radically re-framed
the discussion of public education around the issues and discourses at theheart of the Occupy movement. First, it pointed out that the latest roundof cuts were a product of Wall Street’s reckless decisions: “Q. Does anyone
know how much funding has been cut from CA public education since 2009at the peak of the crisis caused by Wall Street?: A. $17 Billion.” Second,
it debunked the myth that there is simply no money to maintain the UC
system: “Q. Does anyone know how the super-rich have done during thistime? A. Because of our bailouts, American corporation’s average profitsrose 29.2 percent in 2010. In 2010, average CEO pay rose 23 percent, for an
average of $11.4 million.” Third, it acknowledged the cost-shift: “Q. Who

the movement. “Occupy should start anindependent party! Everyone would votefor you!” ranted one man. “This movement changed my life. I’ve been waiting
for these conversations my whole life,” saida gentle girl from the suburbs. “No one
talks about things like this where I live.”
Often, I’d be in the middle of a conversation, or giving an orientation, and someone from Media or the Free School would
come tearing in to dig through bins ofextension cords and microphones stashedunder the political history section. I don’t
think I ever sat down the entire time I
worked the tent. We were always hopping, bending, shelving, carrying, pausing,piling. John sometimes spent the nightin the library, rigging the door with bells
and wind chimes to alert him if strangers
entered looking for a place to crash. An
unfortunate symptom of the durable military tent’s thick walls was that they were
opaque, making the library an attractive
lure for drug users to light up, undetected.
+++
Librarians are disaster planners by trade.
We’re trained in preservation and understand the ephemeral in this digital era.
In this way, we’re well suited to run alibrary in a protest environment. By earlyNovember we’d created an emergency

plan of action that included a phone tree
and safe houses for the collection. After“Sinkgate” (in order to address sanitation
issues, some MIT friends designed a selfcontained sink, which the police refused
to let into camp, almost causing a riot) we
began to feel more nervous about the longevity of the camp, though we continued
our normal planning. We reconsideredcataloging, as we watched the awful raids
happening at other occupations acrossthe country. Once we learned that the
restraining order against the City of Boston and Boston Police Department waslifted, we knew how vulnerable we were.
That night, while some of us attended ahuge General Assembly, librarian Anna
Rothman sat in the tent, diligently cataloging over 800 books in a few hours. Amazing! (This quick cataloging was madepossible through Librarything.com—away of barcode scanning books). We
packed up the “vital documents”—Occupy
Boston’s organizational documents thatwe’ve been archiving, ‘zines, pamphlets
and other irreplaceable ephemera andmoved them off site. We were reluctant topack up books before an official eviction
notice, as we didn’t want to appear like wewere abandoning the camp. In fact, during some library meetings, we discussed

then has had to pay for cuts to public education? A. Us, the 99%.” Finally, it
indicted our Board of Regents, most of whom are members of the corporate elite.
In addition to changing the student movement’s discourse, Occupy has
also changed its tactics. Inspired by the Oakland, San Francisco, and Berkeley occupations, the university day of action ended with the establishmentof OccupyCal. The occupation drew thousands of students as well occupiers from surrounding cities and community members attending their firstoccupy and student movement rallies. Protest signs were no longer aimed
at the state but at the bastions of finance: “MAKE BANKS REFUND EDUCATION.” The students did not simply walk past the Bank of America branchon their traditional march up Telegraph Ave., but successfully closed it
down.
Not unlike other actions against enclosures of the commons, the university
occupation was met with brutal force. Once occupiers pitched the first tent,a phalanx of county police officers clad in riot armor, invited onto campus
by the administration, used their batons to beat nonviolent student andfaculty protesters who had linked arms around the encampment. Outrage
about the attacks only drew more public support, which culminated in the
successful reestablishment of the camp in the presence of thousands ofsupporters the next week. The encampment now hosts an open universitythat has featured prominent professors giving lectures on public educationand the underlying questions of the Occupy movement.
III. Re-articulating Education
What the Occupy movement has brought to light, in the cases of the New
York and Berkeley student movements, is that the privatization and financialization of education are connected processes at the heart of neoliberalism.This recognition has shifted the student movement discourse froma narrow conversations about tuition to a broader one about a system ofcorporate predation that makes higher education unaffordable, inaccessible, and reliant on unsustainable debt-financing and speculation. Today
both public and private institutions are complicit in the general reproduction of structures of social inequality: through privatization (shifting thecost of education from the public to “consumers”) and financialization(the increasing reliance on debt to finance education), traditionally marginalized and working class communities are further excluded from higher

17surrounding the library with our bodies
and leaving the books in place in the eventof a raid, but we knew, in the end, thatthe police would destroy our collection,
which was an unacceptable outcome. Eachworking group seemed to come to thesame conclusion—that we’d protect ouroperations in such a way that we could
re-assemble elsewhere, quickly.
***
The moment I received the call that we
had 24 hours to evict, we decided toactivate the phone tree. We thought about
leaving one book behind—American
Methods by Kristian Williams (which
describes U.S. support of torture at home
and abroad). I ran to my desk, shot off a
few emails, cancelled upcoming appointments and called my husband so he’dknow I didn’t plan on getting arrested. I
zipped up the Mass Pike to Dewey Square,anxious but focused. By the time I arrived,
about 45 minutes after the eviction phone
call, the library collection was alreadywaiting patiently on the sidewalk in its
crates. We held up the library banner
as we loaded my car and it blew proudly
over us as we packed the trunk tight.The
wooden cranberry boxes were loaded
into John’s ambulance. One carload ofbooks had already left. John was laughing
at how fast the librarians mobilized, andthe mood at camp was pretty jolly as we
packed, all things considered. I think each
Occupation probably reflects the characterof its city and Boston, well, we strap on
our boots and get shit done. We may not
be arty like New York or LA, but we’repractical and we’ve got endurance. We
built something beautiful together, andwe’d break it down together with the samecare and contribution. We were pulling
together to save our assets. We were NOT
going to let the police or the city of Boston
determine or deter our course. We felt
hopeful, despite the anger. By sundown
the library, was stashed safely across thecity, ready to be reassembled as Occupy
Boston evolves into its next phase.

education, universities are turned into vehicles for capital accumulation,and “the 1 percent” reap billions of dollars in profits from a growing student debt bubble. From this, a new political consciousness and a new
counter-movement have at last emerged.
These new alliances are challenging. They must work across class, gender, and racial divisions, must link up with ongoing struggles, and must
be aware of their variegated, rich, and often painful histories. Our distinct
histories and divisions can easily become political fissures when we do nottake them on as the heart of new alliances. At CUNY, this means learningfrom the important heritage of black and Puerto Rican student struggles in
the ’60s. It also means cultivating new alliances founded upon an understanding of the crisis of education as but one facet of the broader crisisof social reproduction under capitalism. It is in this way the struggle overeducation will to be re-articulated as one small but important aspect of thebroader struggle over the future of our society.

best yearsof our lives
Eli Schmit t

The traces of the contemporary college experience are all over the current rhetoric and tactics of OWS. In some aspect, the material conditions of the nowbereft Zuccotti Park (free place to live, free food, group meetings throughout
the day you can pop in and out of, lots of people to meet, lots of hanging out)
are a lot like college (where room and board aren’t really free, but purport tobe). And Zuccotti was also a place people went to learn, to talk to each other, toengage politically. In this way too, it acted, as others have said before me, likea free school.
But there are deeper, more elemental aspects of the contemporary college
experience in OWS. Talk, in college, can be pedagogical. Intellectual exchange
is an end in itself. Process over product. Patience. This is what you practicein humanities seminars. This is what progressive educators have been teaching for the past century, from John Dewey through Ted Sizer. The desire to
be inclusive, coupled with progressive educational values have inflected OWS
meetings, which run like long-form seminars on texts that some have readmore closely than others. We think it is important to listen to each other. We
are not worried about efficiency.
The progressive, inclusive tone that pervades humanities seminars, sociology lectures, and campus activities also dominates the movement. As 21stcentury college students, we have been taught that excluding people is bad.

18

Lili Loofbourow

December
12 PortShutdowN
I’ve learned while following the Occupy
movement that no one—including seasoned journalists—can count. The same
crowd will consist of 300 in one account,
30,000 in another. So when I say that I
joined between 500 and 700 people at theWest Oakland BART station at 5:30 a.m.
on December 12 to march on the port, I
hereby disclose that I was once badly miscast as the Weights and Measures “expert”
on a Science Olympiad team. I lost theevent, badly, and authorize you to salt myestimate accordingly.
As we were about to set off, a sizeable
motorcade of police cars, SUVs, and buses
turned left, lights ablaze, down Mandela
Parkway. We didn’t know it then, but theywould amass at Middle Harbor Shoreline
Park and congregate around the mast of
the USS Oakland, the first ship named forthe city of Oakland in 1943. (It only lost 3
crewmembers during its service in WorldWar II, earning it the nickname “the lucky
ship.”)
We watched the lights fade silently
into the distance and started marching. The Port of Oakland is a futuristic
cementscape, and the walk down 7th
Avenue prepared us for it with its unrelenting lines—the BART rails, the rowsof mail trucks, the interlaced overpasses,
the geometric figures on the cement walls.
Sometimes you’d come across a steel cablethat had broken free of the cement andcurled madly. What a relief! I thought,
which testifies to the mild lunacy that setsin when marching on deserted roads inthe early morning dark. Roads strippedof erratic drivers are uncanny artifacts,
mainly because they’re so perfect without

us. Imagine a human artery, then imagine
an artery that functions optimally in theabsence of blood.
The crowd that had supplanted whatever traffic normally goes down theseroads at 5:30 in the morning seemed
tentative. Chants weren’t really taking
off. Some drummed on paint cans, whichsort of helped (anything to interrupt theindustrial silence). A man behind me
was reading “Howl” out loud. Someone
had made a life-size cardboard cutout of
pepper-spraying policeman John Pike,and they waved him around. People were
trying.
That we got to the tunnel. Anyone
who’s been in a crowd in a tunnel knows
what happens next: people howl andscream and sing and cheer, drunk on
acoustics. That was the case with us, only
more so. People shouted in relief, happy
to be amplified in this tiny underground,since the surrounding area was so vastand so empty and so silent, except for the
BART trains which occasionally roared byoverhead. An inhuman microphone, but awelcome one.
From that point onward the pace wasa little brisker and the energy was a littlebrighter, a little less lonely.
We started passing the fields of coloredcontainers—branded, like cows sleeping
in the dark: Hamburg Süd, Hapag-Lloyd,
Mediterranean Shipping Company. On
the right we passed the U.S. Customs andBorder Protection building, a derelict
white shack partially obscured from viewby a Port-A-Potty (brand: United), andsurrounded by rusted-over machinery.
The DHS seal had partially peeled off thebuilding, beheading the eagle, so that it
looked like a crazy chicken with its headcut off was laying a “Homeland Security”
egg.
By this point, the police were behindus, bringing up the rear.
The crowd split in two: one group went
to cover the Total Terminals Internationalterminal (berths 55-56), while the otherbroke off to join the bicyclists who hadgone earlier to start a picket line aroundthe TraPac terminal, berths 30-32.

Trying to be too efficient can exclude voices, but so can many other, more
subtle things. We have been taught the word privilege to loosely describe anarray of discrepancies between people, from how much money our parents
have to our sex to our skin color. These, largely, are not the anxieties of middle
America, with its soupy conception of a “fair playing field.” Nor are they especially the anxieties of the professional leftists, ever a boys’ club. They are anxieties that you learn to have during a postmodern liberal education. They are theconcerns of the rarified undergraduate, or recent grad.
One might respond here that colleges are definitionally exclusive, simply byvirtue of costing money and having limited enrollment. While this is true, it’salso true that at the college I graduated from a six months ago, a group of students spent a while petitioning the administration to make the nearly 250-yearold school tuition-free, with a lottery for admissions. The self-reflexivity one
learns in a comp. lit. class (‘the text instantiates the reader’) or an anthro lecture(‘there is no such thing as an objective observer’) carries over into one’s experience as a student. Thus, even when one is selectively admitted and paying (orborrowing) to be in college, one learns quickly to count one’s self “privileged,”and, if one is so inclined, to rail against that privilege from time to time.
There is an intellectual tradition which gave us these anxieties about privilege and exclusion, which seem to me to be traceable back to when the American political movements of the 1960s drifted into the academy. Many of thosepolitical movements took up the mantle of identity politics as a way of remaining relevant to the public sphere. Multiculturalism and its detractors both had
their moments. Arguments about diversity and affirmative action raged. We
had the still-weirdly named “culture wars.” In this day and age though, it seems
these debates have cooled off a little bit. Universities are expected to havediversity quotas, special programs for minority students, and affinity groups
for anyone who feels affinity. The French philosophers, the critical theorists,brought vegetable soup and coffee for theprotesters. It drizzled.
A minor power struggle arose overthe question of how “public” the publicbathrooms were. They had been open to
us earlier, although I talked to two maleprotesters who were waiting outside
because the men’s bathroom was full ofpolice, and he was uncomfortable going in
until they left. We joked about the police
occupying the bathrooms. Later, it seemed
like less of a joke: when I came back, thebathroom was suddenly closed. The park
security guard, who worked for a private
security firm, reported that the bathroom
was closed because the park was closed,
and the park was closed because the port
was closed.
(This, I’m not proud to say, is how I
found out that the port was closed.)
We asked him whether the park being
closed meant that he got to go home. He
said no, and told us that the bathrooms
ordinarily opened at 8:00 AM (it was 9:00

“ALL DAY EVERYDAY” ILLUSTRATION BY CANNON DILLVIA OCCCUPRINT.ORG

What follows, in terms of official encounters between protesters and police, isunremarkable: the police lined up in frontof the terminal at 55-56 and watchedwhile the protesters marched in a circle.
At berths 30-32, the police poured outof a bus and stood in front of a thin lineof protesters guarding the road, behind
which two circles of protesters marched in
front of the two berths. Some protesters
were concerned that this was a recipe forkettling, but at no point did this happen.
A man meditated in front of the police.
Protesters (all of whom seemed to have acamera) filmed.
Then, for no clear reason, the police got
back in the bus and returned to the mastof the USS Oakland.
Three women dressed in red and posing together in solemn silence like three
Statues of Liberty refused to break character, even when word came about the port
closures in other cities. A man flew a kite.
Someone brought a tent. Food Not Bombs

and the psychoanalysts gave us a vocabulary, whereby we now can interrogate
the oppression coded into various discourses.
This is why OWSers worry about shuffling women, and people of color to
be first on the list of speakers (a.k.a. progressive stack) or whether a person ofcolor has recently been a facilitator of the spokes council, or whether we are
adequately reaching out to queer people. The concern is not for fairness. It
is past fairness. Rather we are concerned about justice. The belief is that justice is achieved by a kind of affirmative action, the displacement of oppression
through deliberate and systematic redress. And while OWS is not perfectly
just, it is something. Compare Jo Freeman’s account of bringing a resolution
about women’s issues to the NCNP convention in 1967 with Manissa Maharawal’s account of trying to change the wording of a declaration at OWS (seeOCCUPY Gazette #1). It’s not that everyone came to OWS totally well-versedin the conventions of identity politics and political correctness, but unlike in
1967, a few interested minorities today are taken as seriously, if not more seriously, than their historically privileged (read: straight white dude) counterparts.
The effect of this anxiety about exclusion (and concomitant intense desire
for inclusion) is not exactly philosophically grounded, however. There is a fearof taking an ideological hard line because it will disenfranchise our people.

AM). Then the police saw him talking to
us and called him over.
The long and the short of it is that
we were referred to a Port-A-Potty on
the other side of the park. The issues the
Occupy movement are addressing arenested (hilariously) in this story: a private
security guard posted a sign on a publicbathroom in a public park redirecting us
to a Port-A-Potty owned, like the one presiding over the US Customs and Border
Protection building, by United, a private
corporation. (The name even fits seamlessly into our collective move from public
to private—all we need is for United tomerge with a company called States, andwe won’t even have to change the signs.)
Hovering over the bathroom-struggle
and the cowlike-containers and the ocean
and the barbed wire and the cement andthe tiny police and the tiny protesters are
the huge still dinosaurs that have become
the most recognizable part of the Oakland skyline: the cranes. A friend and I
were walking toward the cranes, past thepolice, when we noticed that they were
donning their riot gear. Several had somekind of long-barreled gun (possibly bean
bag guns—I really have no idea). As wewalked by, we heard a female police officer
say, “We’ll get our helmets on and we’ll getthem into the terminal.”
We worried, and we warned the others.
I agonized over the strange fragment I’doverheard. What did it mean—“We’ll getthem into the terminal”? How would they
do this? How could it be legal? Why did
they want us in the terminal?
It looked like they were heading toward
berths 30-32. We watched as they formeda huge phalanx. I videotaped them for
fifteen minutes as they marched to thepicket lines. They slipped behind theprotesters, single-file, and formed a line
between the protesters and the gates tothe terminal.
I glanced behind me to see if a secondline was coming to surround the protesters. Nope.
They stood there for some time, andthen half of the officers (I’d venture there
were about 100) went inside the terminaland shut the gate behind them, and stoodon the other side of the gate.
And there they remained, until a bus
came by later and picked them up.
I’m still mystified by this action, andthe part of me that would have enjoyeda career in espionage despairs that the
fragment I overheard was about the police
strategizing on getting their own people

into the terminal. Especially since they
could have gone another way (and did—several buses came in and out carrying
police, without going past the protester
picket line).
The end of the story is this: the port
was shut down. It reopened again briefly,
but protesters came back for the evening
shift. No longshoremen were called in towork that shift, and the occupiers decided
to stay until 3 a.m.
The bigger story here—the one that’s
really worth telling, but isn’t mine totell—belongs to the truckers, who aren’t
unionized, and who sat there for hours
and lost money that day, and the longshoremen, who stood to lose money too,
my solidarity notwithstanding. I have no
way of assessing the truckers’ response asa whole; what I can report is that somewaved and joked with us. Others, as theyturned their trucks around and drove
away, honked. And there is a semantics
to honking, just as there is to screaming
in a tunnel, or doing anything that makes
sound in the sonic machine desert of theport: one trucker leaned on his horn as
he drove out, making a long never-ending
wail. He seemed to be waving as he drove
by. Another one honked in a short violent
blast at some protesters in the road, tiredof having his way blocked. According
to Gavin Aronsen of Mother Jones, one
kicked at a sign demanding a truckers’
union. Two blew me kisses.
Most of them, though, drove away
quietly. Having seen the grey fields where
they work, abutting the gorgeous bay with
its twinkling bridges and skylines, I can’t
decide if they’re the shepherds or the
cowboys of our lives. Or whether herding
those huge branded metal cows acrossthe country is the noble stuff of myth ora post-industrial nightmare. But they are
the opposite of those roads I walked in theearly morning, those efficient roads which
work best unpeopled. They’re the inconvenient strain, the part an engineer would
like least because of wear and tear, andinefficiency, and the need to eat and drink
and rest. They’re the best part of all thisand I apologize, personally, if my actions
hurt them. My hope is that this small story
is part of a bigger one that will reframe thetruth—that they are among the few living
things in that inanimate vastness—assomething good and right and marvelously alive, with all that implies and yes,demands, rather than a stumbling-block to
profit and progress.

Though postmodernism has offered up many critiques of “tolerance” as a political position, the left-leaning, identity-politics-inflected conscientiousness of
today’s undergraduate tends to address the problems of privilege and exclusion through tolerance. If the Social Democrats are the voice of the movement,
the radical anarchists will be pissed, and vice versa. People from across theleft-leaning spectrum came together for OWS, but even over the course ofthis fall, so-called “ultra-leftists” have expressed disgust with the movement,
while moderates have wondered if OWS was “too radical.” What remains of
the movement’s cohesiveness—as a group of people (a loose crew of hundreds,
maybe more) that hangs out, works together, marches together—is sustainedby avoiding possibly alienating leadership and possibly divisive demands. The
reality of a heavily college-inflected OWS is that at some very basic level, inorder not to exclude anyone, the only thing the group can demand is “take usseriously, let us talk to each other and you, don’t be a jerk.” Much in the waythat it is hard to get kicked out of college, it is pretty hard to get kicked out of
the OCCUPY movement.
Much like, dare I say it, a college campus, where you are constantly meeting people and running into acquaintances by virtue of proximity, Zuccotti
fulfilled a social function for the fledgling Occupy movement. The November
14th raid not only destroyed an external public face (which many have noted19

was beginning to show signs of deformity) but also denied us an internal space,
where, as on the green or quad of a college, you would meet your friends, theirfriends, talk about what you were up to, and make plans. OWS wants you tocome over and hang out and talk about that thing we read. It wants to smoke
weed and watch the cars drive by. It wants to eat pizza. And it wants to do soin a way that doesn’t make anyone feel bad. And while these are not necessarily
rigorous impulses, they can be generative, as we have seen
How has the movement proceeded without its campus? It is hard to say. Like
most schools these days, OWS is plagued by endowment woes, not so muchbecause we are running out of money as because we have so much and we are
eager to listen to what everyone has to say about what to do with it. This isscary. Sometimes it seems like, if there was no money, there would be no movement. After all, so much of meetings now involve arguing about the merits ofsome or other expense. Then other times it seems like if there was no money,
we could finally get important stuff done. Thus the meetings drag on and on,even in the supposedly refined spokes council. The OWSers are patient, or try
to be. In most cases, it seems like things get done even if the wider deliberative
body’s discussion was derailed.
There is a certain luxuriousness to this patience. It would be easy to readas the luxuriousness of the privileged, of people whose parents have enoughmoney to keep them in low-stress, high-expectation pedagogical environmentsfrom birth ‘til death. But I think it is also out of a desperation that this patientdeliberative impulse comes. Anyone who has seen their peer grow impatient ina slow seminar, or been rebuffed by a university administrator knows that theworld is not like the academy, that the relative ease of life the academy is a delusion. In the real world, people are excluded. Detractors are brushed off (andwhile some of us have certainly seen detractors brushed off at OWS, it does
not come lightly). Thus, the internal world of OWS imagines itself as utopian.
Especially without Zuccotti, the movement tries embrace itself.
If it’s not clear already, I write about the traces of the collegiate in OWS withambivalence because I find them both compelling and off-putting. College, in
itself, is something to be ambivalent about: when we think of the failures of theacademy, student debt immediately comes to mind, as well as the occlusion of
the mentally ill, the homeless, and the other members of the true American
lower classes from pristine University campuses. Further, we must acknowledge the people who work really hard in OWS who have not gone to college,
won’t go to college, don’t really care about college (and who whom we ought
not to exclude from our argument).
Collegiate OWSers have a lot of energy but are also tremendously impressionable. Their impressionability makes ‘grown-ups’ anxious, on the right andthe left. I talked to a cop who said he was worried about young kids getting“converted” into believing in violent, anarchist tactics. A panel of older organizers were very concerned about the movement being “co-opted.” But the
OWSers impressionability is also preferable, in my mind, to the cool condescension of the seasoned activists and academics, who purport to know what
the “kids” should or shouldn’t do.
Many of the college tropes of OWS are not necessarily exclusive to college
students though.
So while attempting to avoid shoulds or shouldn’ts, I will say that OWS now
lacks a campus, but also has no university administration. Its organizers are

not vetted by search committees, its pedagogues don’t undergo peer-review.
What has been impressive about the movement is its ability to mobilize noncareer leftists, to get, for example, average recent college grads, to come torallies, and accordingly, generate a lot of media attention. But these things are
not givens. As the media gets bored, the non-activists will feel less enthused(and will simply know less). College students, and especially college activists,have somewhat of a captive audience for their projects and actions. As many
who have attended smaller protests and political events know, OWSers are
not so blessed. So while the tendency of moderate OWSers to “tolerate” theirmore radical counterparts strikes me as somewhat relativist, it is also strategic.
Without administrators to decisively adjudicate conflict, it’s wiser, for stability’s sake to avoid it. Furthermore, if the OCCUPY movement is to become(and sustain itself as) a mass movement in America, it will probably swallow ahealthy dose of American anti-intellectualism (manifest often as an aversion tocomplexity). This will not necessarily disenfranchise the collegiate OCCUPYers
because college does not do enough to protect us youngsters from American
anti-intellectualism. Thus, we are likely to concede the points of various stripesof leftist, whether they are more or less radical, because a) we don’t want to
exclude anyone, b) arguments against such general concession will become toocomplex for our fledgling movement, and c) because such hedging will keep the
movement as broad as possible. An undergrad-driven OWS has shown itself
more inclined towards wide palatability as ia strategy, rather than divisive scrutiny of positions. (Ironically, the oft-professorial ultra-left, with their academic
investment in taxonomy and obscurity, have tended to be averse to any kind ofwider palatability, preferring to instead scrutinize and reject).
If the impulse towards palatability and inclusion is ultimately a strength, it
is in part because America (and the American media) really likes youth culture.
Ray Kachel (a middle-aged OWSer who appeared in pieces by Keith Gessen andGeorge Packer) is an OWS celebrity for the New Yorker crowd, but the rest of
the country is more excited about zanier, younger OCCUPYers, like Ketchup.
If the inherent appeal of the younger set will sustain the attention of the media
without sabotaging the movement entirely (people on the Internet like to talkshit about Ketchup) the moderates and fence-sitters will keep coming out. And
the kids will stay in the spotlight, and stay excited. We hope. In this early stage,
it seems like size and momentum are twinned, so we can work towards one andcount on the other. This may not sustain the movement into old age, but hopefully it will at least get us through this early phase of our education.
The college experience is often defined in opposition to the quote-unquote
real world. College students are told they live in a bubble, that they are having the best years of their lives. Yet it’s also true, as a friend pointed out to me,that college students often seem like they are waiting around for something tohappen to them. OWSers, no matter how fresh from college they are, seem tobe a little bit cannier than this. The media attention has made the movement
seem real, but so has the violence of the police, the support of the unions, thepalpability of economic inequality in the so-called Land of the Free. The college
experience, no matter how much gear you buy from the campus bookstore, cannever belong entirely to the students. College is administrated, mediated, andpolished for the sake of organization and profit. OWS can belong to us, andthus can be as compleicated and authentic as we allow it to be. If we claim it,
OWS can be the real world.

HISTORIES

the credit. A vast, international public, cowed by nuclear fear for decades, made a radicalturn, refusing to continue passive support for the specious idea that nuclear arms are asource of security.
It’s taken a long time—and the shameless and obscene greed of a few—to stir the
many to outrage once again. But here we are, joining in what we hope will become a massrefusal.
How important was it that Greenham, however rural, sprawling and unmappable, wasan ongoing symbolic place, able to inspire others all over the world to occupy spaces too?
To make the inconvenient journey to Greenham Common was to participate, to protest.
Was this physical, visible endurance central to Greenham’s power? I and thousands ofothers visited, year after year, until the Cold War was over and the base was abandoned.
What does place mean now in our era of dematerialization, virtual closeness, speedof connection? I still see literal space as amazingly powerful and am ready to take a turnsitting in the drizzle at Zuccotti Park. But perhaps the Greenham model of a years-longprotest in a fixed place is now approaching the impossible? We had fires when it got cold.
Today, police techniques for surveillance and control are far more sophisticated andvicious, and the legal nets around public space have continually tightened in the so-called
war against terror.
If we can’t hold on to even a tiny tract of permanence, we’ll simply have to find otherforms of relentless presence. Anyway, Greenham was never meant to be static; the goal
was always proliferation, rhyzomic development. When you were there you would hear
the chant “Greenham women are everywhere.”(At Christmas 1986, artist Susan Kleckner decided to bring Greenham to New Yorkwith her “Window Piece.” A different woman camped in a storefront window on West
Broadway each week for almost a year. Women’s Peace encampments also cropped up in
those years and lasted several days in Madison Square Park and Battery Park. I remember
being on rat patrol, so others could sleep.)

Ann Snitow

GREENHAMCOMMON
This piece written in 1984 about the occupation of the U.S. cruise missile base at Greenham Common, England, is not meant as a direct model for Occupy Wall Street but as areminder of an encouraging past. I have no doubt that the mass popular mobilizationsof the 1980s, mostly in Europe, were an essential element in the collapse of Cold War
militarism, though of course politicians continue to pretend otherwise, giving Reagan all

20

Finally, a word about the expulsion of men from Greenham after the first nine months.
Among other things, this move essentialized violence as male. With the men gone fromthe occupation, the map of violence could be unambiguous. Peaceful female demonstrators outside the base confronted a male death machine on the other side of the wire.
It would be a great misunderstanding of how much good work feminist and queer
politics has done in the almost 30 years since Greenham to think that we can or shoulddraw such a simple diagram of good and evil again. But the fact that Occupy Wall Street
is meant to include everyone doesn’t offer any closure to the gender drama. Many haveexperienced OWS as a largely male space. Some women feel like tokens, less heard, lesslikely to be insiders in making decisions. Others have experienced sexual harassment.
Because the kinetic OWS keeps changing its population, its mores, its structures, its
locations, no generalization about sexism can hold. But, dear friends, “men” and “women,”since we’re not going to take the short cut of gender separation this time around, constant vigilance is in order. Sexism can be subtle. Sexism can seem normal. At Greenham,
discussion of sexism and violence was unceasing, and these discussions should remain
urgent for us now.
Whatever their differences, Greenham and OWS are alike in freeing political imagination, in setting loose an expressive, hopeful politics. No tents allowed on the ground? Let’s
hang them from helium balloons in the sky, as they did at Occupy Berkeley. Suddenly, thehorizon is limitless.
—Ann Snitow December 10, 2011
I made my first trip to the women’s peace encampment at Greenham Common last
May partly to assure myself it was still there. After mass evictions in April, the press hadannounced with some glee that the continuous vigil at the U.S. cruise missile base wasover at last. Certainly on my arrival in the freezing rain there seemed little enough evidence to contradict these reports.
When I reached the prosperous town of Newbury with a friend who had given me a liftfrom London, we couldn’t at first find even the base, which our map said was a misshapen oval just outside the town. How could something nine miles around, bounded by a
10-foot fence, guarded by large contingents of the U.S. Air Force, the Royal Air Force, andthe police be so quietly tucked away?
Finally a scrawled woman’s symbol painted on the road gave us a clue. We went up to theplateau of land that was once “common” to all. And suddenly, the fence was right in frontof us in the fog. The Greenham fence looks very serious—thick wire mesh topped by several feet of rolled barbed wire, all supported at frequent intervals by cement pylons. Tenfeet farther inside are more rolls of barbed wire, forming a tangled second barrier rather
like those on the battlefields of World War I. Inside the fence, we could just make out—
through sheets of wire and rain—concrete runways, small bunkerlike buildings, a treelesswasteland. One structure, rather like a giant, half-buried two-car garage, was, as I learned
later, a missile silo.
But there were no women. Here was a gate, certainly, one of the nine where the women
live, and before it several little humps of plastic, but the only people on view were a few
policemen. A mile farther along and, finally, two women, standing beneath a twisted
umbrella that they seemed to be holding more over the struggling fire than themselves.
Two smallish women in the rain. Impossible. In silent agreement we drove on to yet
another gate with again a huddle of plastic, an extinguished fire, a forlorn dereliction.
I finally understood: this was it. I asked to be dropped off back with those women withthe umbrella and the fire. (You can’t imagine what a depressing idea this was.) We drove
back. I struggled into the waterproof boots my friend had lent me—absolute necessities as
I soon discovered—and joined the women.
They were Donna and Maria. They were very, very wet. Maria’s face was hidden under
her sodden hood, though one could just manage to see she had a bad cold. Donna wishedthe world to know she was “fed up.” Neither was interested in talking much. They seemed
faintly aroused to hear that I had just come from New York, but as the day progressed I
came to understand their lack of surprise. We stood there in the stinking nowhere andpeople stopped by in cars, visiting us from all over the world. If Greenham feels like theworld’s end, it is also a mecca, a shrine of the international peace movement.
Inventive, leaderless, a constantly rotating population of women have blocked the smoothfunctioning of this cruise missile base for three years now. In the great traditions of pacifism, anarchy, and English doggedness in adversity, they have entered the base, blockaded
its gates, danced on its missile silos, made a mockery of its security systems, and inspired
other people to set up peace camps elsewhere in Britain and all over the world—in Italy,
for instance, and Australia, Japan and the United States.
The camps were empty that first day because some of the women were exhausted; somein jail; some in New York suing Ronald Reagan; some at the cruise missile base in Sicily,
helping the beleaguered women’s peace camp there; some in Holland for a big government vote on NATO. After a few hours, Donna, too, left with one of the circumnavigating cars, off to Reading for a bath and a drink. Maria and I stayed where we were, which
proved to be Indigo Gate; (The women have named their homes for the colors of the rainbow.) Although most of the women were gone, the Greenham peace camp was not shut
down: at each gate several women were sticking it out in the rain. In fact, you can’t reallyshut Greenham, even if you drag all the women away from all the gates. They come backor they go home, explaining that it hardly matters: “Greenham women are everywhere.”+++
Back in 1981 when I first heard about the women’s peace camp at Greenham Common,
I was impressed but a little worried, too. Here was a stubborn little band of squattersobstructing business as usual at a huge military base. But the early media reports celebrated these women as orderly housewives and mothers who would never make this vulgar noise just for themselves but were naturally concerned about their children, innocent
animals, and growing plants.

My feminist reaction was: not again. I had joined the women’s liberation movement in1970 to escape this very myth of the special altruism of women, our innate peacefulness,
our handy patience for repetitive tasks, our peculiar endurance—no doubt perfect forsitting numbly in the Greenham mud, babies and arms outstretched, begging men to keep
our children safe from nuclear war.
We feminists had argued back then that women’s work had to be done by men, too:
no more “women only” when it came to emotional generosity or trips to the launderette.
We did form women-only groups—an autonomous women’s movement—but this was
to forge a necessary solidarity for resistance, not to cordon off a magic femaleness as
distorted in its way as the old reverence for motherhood. Women have a long history ofallowing their own goals to be eclipsed by others, and even feminist groups have often
been subsumed by other movements. Given this suspiciously unselfish past, I was uneasy
with women-only groups that did not concentrate on overcoming the specific oppressionof women.
And why should demilitarization be women’s special task? If there’s one thing in thisworld that won’t discriminate in men’s favor, it’s a nuclear explosion. Since the army is adense locale of male symbols, actions, and forms of association, let men sit in the drizzle,
I thought; let them worry about the children for a change.
But even before going to Greenham I should have known better than to have trusted its
media image. If the women were such nice little home birds, what were they doing out
in the wild, balking at male authority, refusing to shut up or go back home? I’ve been to
Greenham twice now in the effort to understand why many thousands of women havepassed through the camps, why thousands are organized in support groups all over Britain and beyond, why thousands more can be roused to help in emergencies or show up
for big actions.
What I discovered has stirred my political imagination more than any activism sincethat first, intense feminist surge 15 years ago. Though I still have many critical questions
about Greenham, I see it as a rich source of fresh thinking about how to be joyously,
effectively political in a conservative, dangerous time. Obviously this intense conversion
experience is going to take some explaining.
+++
When, in the summer of 1981, a small group of women from Cardiff in Wales decided touse their holidays to take a long walk for peace, they could choose from a startlingly large
number of possible destinations. Unobtrusive, varying in size and purpose, more than 100
U.S. military facilities are tucked away in the English countryside, an embarrassment ofmilitary sites available for political pilgrimage.
One U.S. base distinguished itself as particularly dreadful. Enormous, centrally located,but quietly carrying on incognito, the site was Greenham Common, outside the town of
Newbury, where the U.S. Air Force was then preparing for 96 ground-launched cruise
missiles to be deployed in the fall of 1983. To protest this new step in the arms race, theWelsh women set out to walk 120 miles due east to Newbury, only 60 miles out from
London. They were a varied bunch, mostly strangers to each other—36 women from very
different class and political backgrounds, four men in support, and a few children. Theirnine-day walk, which was ignored by the press, filled them with excitement and energy,
and they were greeted warmly in the towns along the way.
By the time they reached Greenham, however, the media silence had become galling.
Four women decided to chain themselves to the main gate of the base to force the world
to take notice. This act of protest has had children and grandchildren undreamed of by
the original, quite humble, and politically inexperienced Greenham marchers. Teachers,
farmers, nurses, and—yes—housewives, they had had no intention of staying at Greenham. But first the media took their time; then tents had to be set up and people informed.
A few days spent in support of the chained women lengthened to a week, then two. Some
campers had to leave, but others were just arriving.
The summer days began to give way to the chill damp of English winter. Per­haps it
felt callow to give up protesting against nuclear disaster just because the afternoons weredrawing in. Gradually, as the peace camp persisted—a small cluster of tents and caravans
at the main gate of the base—one fact became plain: Greenham was tapping a great, hidden energy source for protest. There were enough women who were willing to give bits oftime stolen from the work-that-is-never-done to keep a campfire perpetually burning on
Greenham Common.
After initial amusement and tolerance, the missile base took alarm. Winter came but
the women did not go away. On January 20, 1982, the nearby town of Newbury served
notice on the camps of its intention to evict.
If ever the women had considered packing it in, this evidence that they were a real thornin the side of the American military and its English support systems must have clinchedmatters. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher told the world the women were irresponsible;
she didn’t like them one bit. The women began telling reporters, “We’re here for as longas it takes”—the “it” left menacingly unspecific. Some may have meant only the local
rejection of U.S. cruise missiles. But by this time even the opposition Labour party was
beginning to consider the far more ambitious goal of unilateral dis­armament as a serious
English option.
The long-threatened eviction didn’t come until late May 1982, when the camp wasnine months old. By this time the women’s community was firmly en­trenched. Individual women came and went, but the camp endured. The shifting population made evenhonest generalizations about the women difficult, while the press had long ended its
romance with docile housewives and now made more insulting efforts to stereotype them
(just middle-class ladies, just lesbians, just green-haired punks). The women themselves
refused self-definition, other than to say that they were unified by their double commitment—to nonviolence and to direct action. Since they eschewed leaders as well as generalizations, there was no spokesperson to mediate between the world and the spontaneousacts of the group.
It is no doubt this very amorphousness that has made evicting the women so difficult. The police are taught to arrest the ringleader, but here there is none. Campers
evicted from the Common land simply cross over to Ministry of Transport land, a strip

21

alongside the road, or to Ministry of Defense Land. Evicted from there, they move backto council land. Constant evictions—sometimes daily—have become a central, shaping
reality of Greenham life. Since no location there is legal, even the smallest acts of persistence acquire special symbolic weight. For anyone, just visiting Greenham Common,
sitting down on an overturned bucket at a campfire for a chat and tea, is an act of civil
disobedience.
+++
During my first visit, a two-day stay, I assumed that it was with grisly irony that the
women had named the gates the colors of the rain­bow. My time at Indigo was absurdly
bleak and monochromatic. We struggled to keep the fire going; Maria (who, it turned
out, was from Spain) performed a vegetarian miracle on a tiny, precariously tilted grill; wetalked to the guards five feet from us on the other side of the fence about war, peace, men,
women, weather, money; we slept in an ingenious but soaking hand­made teepee, while
outside an ever changing pair of guards patrolled with growling dogs under giant arc
lamps which sizzled in the rain and lit up our dreams.
Greenham seemed mainly a passive test of endurance, though it was obvious, too,that instead of destroying the encampment, the stream of evictions has become a sourceof solidarity, resistance, and imagination. Where once gardens were planned, now a few
flowers grow in a pram, easily rolled away at a moment’s notice. Where once elaborate
circus tents were pitched, now a cup on a stick holds up a makeshift roof. Those unprepossessing huddles of plastic I saw on my arrival were actually full of women, shelteringfrom the rain. These “benders” can look squashed and ugly from outside; but the bent
branches that support the plastic are often still covered with leaves making the inside abower. When the bailiffs come with their big “chompers,” they get a pile of soggy polyethylene, while the campers carry their few possessions across the road to safety. As soon as
the bulldozers are gone, up go the plastic shelters once more.
Familiar domestic collages of blackened tea kettles, candles, corn flakes, bent spoons,chipped plates (never paper ones) lie around as if the contents of a house had been
emptied into the mud, but here the house itself is gone. The women have left privacy andhome, and now whatever acts of housekeeping they perform are in the most public ofspaces up against the fence or road. Greenham is the ultimate housewife’s nightmare: thespace that can never be swept clean, ordered, sealed off, or safe. But as the mud blackens
hands and the wood smoke permeates clothes and hair, the women of Greenham give up
gracefully. (With thick irony I was offered the following suggestions: “Wood smoke is apretty good deodorant.” “Try washing the dishes in boiling water; it loosens things up a
bit, under the fingernails.”)
The evictions have further clarified the situation: this is life in extremis, life carried onwhere authority and custom do not mean it to be lived. There is only one source of water
for all the camps. Only small and portable Robinson Crusoe contrivances have a chance.
Greenham shreds the illusion of permanence and pushes those who live there into a
naked, urgent present.
It is hard to imagine a better intellectual forcing ground for people struggling to grasp
the full reality of the nuclear threat. Sitting at the fire, we discussed postindustrial society,postimperialist England, whether or not one should eat meat, the boundary between
useful and irresponsible technical advances. Strewn around us were mixtures of very oldtechnologies (how to make a fire with nothing but damp wood; how to cook everything
on that fire—there is no electricity anywhere in the camps; how to build a shelter frombracken) and useful new ones (plastic protects everything; some women have fancy GoreTex sleeping bags or jackets because, though waterproof, they “breathe”).
I told one woman who has lived at Greenham for two years that sometimes the camps
looked to me as if World War III had already happened, as if we were rehearsing for life
after the bomb, in a flat landscape where there will probably be plenty of bits of plastic
and Velcro but no clean water, no electricity, nowhere to hide. She looked at me pityingly:“Greenham is a holiday camp next to what things would be like if these bombs go off.”
Of course, of course. Still, Greenham is a grim reminder of how much effort the simplest
acts of maintenance take once one has removed oneself from the house, the town, the city.
People there are experimenting with self-governance in small communities; they are livingwith less, seeking new definitions of comfort and satisfaction.
+++
Certainly that less is more seemed the message of my first visit. But on my second, Greenham revealed a whole new side, a dramatic richness. I arrived my second time in delicate
sunlight for an action called “10 million women for 10 days “ timed to coincide with lastSeptember’s vast NATO maneuvers on the East German-West German border. This
time instead of a wasteland I found a carnival, a caldron of direct action, a wildly kinetic
place. Circus tents were going up for the ten-day gathering and caravans offered free food.
Strings of colorfully dressed women lined the road, walking clockwise and counterclockwise, in the great Greenham round. They had come to act.
Part of what makes the daily exhaustion of Greenham endurable for so many different
kinds of women—and in such large numbers—is that contrary to first appearances, theplace is a magnificent, exotic stage set for effective political gestures. Unlike the politicaldemonstrations I have known, peace camps are permanent frames that can give form tohundreds of individual acts of resistance. Energy flows like light because of the immediacyof everything, the constant, imminent possibility for self-expression and group solidarity.
You are not only joining something larger than yourself but something that is continuously, inexorably taking its stand of militant witness and rebuke, even while you’re sleeping, even when you’re fed up and go off to spend a night in town, even when you’re angry,
confused, or at political loggerheads with every other woman in the place. Greenham is aspringboard from which actions that would usually take months of laborious planning canbe dreamed discussed, and performed between night and morning.
Ideas for Greenham action can come from anywhere—something read in the paper, animage someone shares at the fire—and one such action made Greenham internationally
famous, the “embrace the base’’ demonstration of December 12, 1982.The precipitating
image—borrowed from the U.S. Women’s Pentagon Action—was of women encircling22

the fence, surrounding it with feelings of power and love. No one knew if enough women
would come to stretch around the nine-mile perimeter, so the nervous few who had set
the idea in motion told everyone to bring long scarves to use as connectors, just in case.
Somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000 came, more than enough to embrace the entire
round. (Whatever the press says, the women are always uncountable: Greenham has nocenter, no check-in point, no higher ground for surveying the scene. It is forced—by geography and police—to be scattered; it is elusive and invertebrate by choice.) The women
festooned every inch of fence with symbols, paint, messages. To those who were there andthe millions more who heard about it, the action seemed a miracle. The next day, 2,000
women blockaded the base, and, two weeks later, on New Year’s dawn, 44 climbed thefence and began an hour’s dance on the half-completed missile silos.
On the anniversary of “embrace the base” the women tried another, more hostile
image of encirclement. Again 50,000 came, this time with mirrors they held up to thefence, reflecting its own dreary reality back on itself. At yet another carefully planned
action, the women locked the soldiers inside the base by securing all the gates with heavyduty bicycle locks. The increasingly frantic soldiers couldn’t cut their way out and, finally,
had to push one of their own gates down.
But it is a distortion of Greenham activism to mention only these large and wellknown events, which required an unusual amount of advance planning. In fact, nothing
was more maddening for an old new leftist like me than the effort to figure out where a
Greenham action comes from—rather like trying to find out how a drop of dye travels
through a gallon of water. Women told me: Well, this one had this idea. And we all had ameeting. (“Who is this ‘all?’” “Whoever wanted to do an action.”) Then some of us didn’tlike it. And we kept talking about it. We changed it a bit. We agreed to ask all our friends
and their friends, by phone, by chain letter. We have a big network.
+++
One of the brilliant structural inventions of the peace movement as a whole is its combination of small affinity groups with large networks. In the small group you are known,valued, listened to. These are the people you choose from the heart, the ones you wantnext to you if the police get rough. The small group feels like a place you can return to.
But instead of being an isolated enclave, the affinity group is linked to others in an international network, which shares some if not all the small group’s goals. The Greenham network includes men as well as women, organized in a number of forms, in ecology groups,
local political groups, male support groups, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament groups.
Most direct action at Greenham, though, is generated not from the larger network but
within small affinity groups. An idea or image travels around the gates like wildfire. “Let’s
get up at 4:00 a.m. and shake a big stretch of fence down.” “Let’s have a vigil at the gate
at sunset and call all the names of the people who wanted to be here but couldn’t.” “Let’s
confuse them by blockading the road a mile from the gate and creating such a traffic jamthat they can’t get to us to arrest us.” Once, at Easter: “Let’s dress up like furry animals andcover ourselves with honey, and break into the base.” (No one arrested the women who
did this one—maybe because they were too sticky?)
Or take the fence, that always present reminder of an “outside” versus” inside,” araggle-taggle band of colorful women who sing and dance and watch versus a gray-andbrown squad of soldiers who march and drill and watch. My first impression of this fence
as something final and authoritative left me entirely unprepared for the women’s view of
it: they have simply rejected it as a legitimate boundary. Slipping under or cutting doors
through the wire, they enter the base constantly, exploring, painting, filching frighteningly
bureaucratic memos about nuclear war— symbolically undermining the concept “security.” Hundreds have been arrested for criminal damage to the wire, yet women continue
to enter the base routinely, in large numbers.
It is startling to learn just how much can be done by the carefully nonviolent who arealso determined and militant and bent on obstruction. One demonstration called for
women with bolt cutters (heavy wire clippers to surround the fence and take the wholething down. Thousands removed miles and miles of wire. Of course the fence is constantly
repaired, shored up, rebuilt, but at any time or place you can come on a group working
together rhythmically, like rowers, to shake it down again. Police rush over; the womenrush away, laughing or ululating or singing, only to return the minute the coast is clear.
Nine miles is a long front of vulnerability, and the police look and probably feel like fools
as they sprint here and there, defending their barrier from women who never offer themmuch resistance, but never desist.
In one exceptional foray inside the base, a symbolic gesture became a literal obstruction when a camper painted a peace symbol on the convenient fuselage of what turned
out to be the top-secret “Blackbird” spy plane. Her paint ruined its fabulously expensive
titanium shield, but she was brought up on a minor charge—no doubt to avoid discussion in court about how vulnerable high technology is to sabotage and how easily womenevade the authority of the base.
By now the fence can be quite beautiful, with its layers of history, its dense record ofrival intentions. There isn’t a yard that isn’t cut, mended, woven with webs or dragons orGod’s eyes, painted, hung with objects like teething rings, pine cones, a pair of shoes, decorated with postcards, photographs (“Libby and her dog Zach, Seattle, WA”), pinned withmessages: “To Lucy T. and all wimmin,” or “Keep Britain tidy—remove cruise”; and once,
to my shock, “To my dear son David, age 24, who gave his life in the miners’ strike,1984.”
Now the fence simply belongs to the women. They have taken it over.
+++By crude measurements—for example, polls—Greenham has made little statisticaldifference in how the English think about the nuclear threat. About half oppose thedeployment of cruise missiles; a third approve; a sixth have no opinion—statistics thathave remained fairly constant since 1981. All the same, the loose entity “Greenham” issuspiciously controversial—loved, romanticized, hated, and scorned—precisely because
it is capable of generating political experiences that are threatening, profound, andtransformative.
Conservatives try to reassure themselves that the only women influenced are thosealready beyond the pale, the hags, the dykes, the freeloaders. What is continuously+++
Although the Greenham encampment was initiated by women, for the first months
several men did live there. In February 1982 the women met separately and decided to ask
these men to leave. Nothing in Greenham’s history has caused as much furor and debate
as this decision.
Why did the women ask the men to go? At Greenham one gets a variety of answers tothis question. Some women say the first evictions were coming and they feared that thepolice would be more brutal if men were among the campers, and that the male campers
themselves might respond with violence in defense of “their women.” Others say that the
women noticed the old divisions of labor creeping in. As one camper I interviewed had
heard the story: “The men were beginning to take over the meetings but not pulling theirweight as far as the chores were concerned.” The women feared, too, that insofar as theirresistance was militant and effective, the press would assume that this power came fromthe few men in the camp. Once more, women’s acts would be invisible.
The Greenham women I talked to take great pains to point out that the purpose ofGreenham is not to exclude men but to include women—at last. Though a few women
there might still tell you women are biologically more peaceful than men, this view has
been mostly replaced by a far more complex analysis of why womenneed to break with our old, private complicity with public maleviolence. No one at Greenham seems to be arguing that the always
evolving Greenham value system is inevitably female. The women
recognize their continuity with the Quakers, with Gandhi, with theentire pacifist tradition, and with the anarchist critique of the state.
At the same time, women, the Greenham campers believe, may havea separate statement to make about violence because we have ourown specific history in relation to it.
They also reject the structures or assumptions they are likely
to find in mixed groups—where they feel their energies deadened.
Greenham is more openended. Eclectic and pragmatic, the women
are thinking on their feet.
A fast-flowing stream of ideas floods back from Greenham
toward home, transforming the movements to which the women
return on different terms. These other groups get flushed with someof the excitement of Greenham’s creative pace. A CND activist told
me that CND takes a year to change a policy, while at Greenham
political ideas can get superseded by others through intense debate ina matter of days.
Greenham is now shorthand for a large complex of activities allover Britain and Europe, where other peace camps have been set up
or where groups have formed in support. Though it is sometimes
accused of being odd, isolated, and incommunicable, and though
there’s no hard evidence that it has changed mainstream politics,
Greenhamness has made a difference in the diffuse style typical of all
its works and days.
A whole activist generation is being forged at Greenham, not ofage but of shared experience. These women are disobedient, disloyal
to civilization, experienced in taking direct action, advanced in theirability to make a wide range of political connections. The movable
hearth is their schoolroom, where they piece together a stunning if
raffish political patchwork.
+++
Before visiting Greenham, I had feared that its politics would prove
simple-minded, that those absolutes, life and death, would havecast more complex social questions in the shade. How, for instance,
could the old question “What do women want?” survive when thesubject is Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD, U.S. military slang
for nuclear deterrence). As Brenda Whisker wrote in Breaching thePeace, an English collection of feminist essays criticizing the women’s
peace movement, “I think that stopping the holocaust is easier thanliberating women.” Hard words certainly, but understandable, solidified through bitter experience. While women and children are first,
feminism continues to be last.
Elements of the Greenham intellectual environment feed such
worries, but by the time I got to Greenham, a number of the radical
feminist concerns in Breaching the Peace were already dated; Greenham consciousness had absorbed the critique and moved on.
Certainly many women do come to Greenham with no thoughtof feminism, speaking instead of quite other concerns—of God, ofnature, of their grandchildren. Many come who would never havejoined feminist groups, precisely because feminism seemed “selfish,”aggressively women-only, threatening to a treasured, familiar female
identity.

But once those women come to Greenham, a great deal happens to them there. During
my two visits, I felt a rising bubble of excitement. The place is about gender; male andfemale are both forced by circumstances to caricature themselves. Greenham is a feminist laboratory. The experimental compounds may not be pure, but the mixed results areendlessly suggestive for any­one interested in how gender works, and in how women canchange male power without seeking that power.
Some gender parables: The scene is a night at Green Gate. I am with Nesta King of the
Women’s Pentagon Action and with Janey Martin, a woman of 19 who has been to Greenham a number of times and has cleverly helped us build our bender.
The general action this particular night seems to be fence shaking. Hundreds ofwomen are gathered under the powerful lights, shaking, keening, singing, talking, strolling up and down the perimeter, which is very close to the silos just at this point.
Suddenly the police, who are usually very careful to pretend that this is all just female
nonsense and no one on the base is very worried, lose their tempers. They form a line
and walk us all steadily back from the fence. Somehow Janey, who is small and blond anddelicate, doesn’t move back fast enough. A policeman under less control than most, a verytall, hefty man who obviously feels like a lion taunted by mice, gives tiny Janey a sharp,mean push. She falls, frightened and startled, and—very much against her own politicalwishes in tranquility—springs up and gives him an angry push back. Useless, of course: heonly gives her another fierce shove.
To my utter amazement, out of my mouth comes, very loudly: “Look, everyone, a huge
man pushed little Janey. Aren’t you ashamed, a big man like you?” Is this what’s lurking in
my mind? I’m horrified to encounter remnants of this very old story inside my feminist
self. Do I really want to repeat that only a sissy pushes a girl, that girls aren’t worth pushing, that it’s only humiliating to shove them, no contest? Do I want to waste my politicaltime trying to make men ashamed?
I did want to show up brute force as cruel, irresponsible, and finally useless, but theold gender exchange there at the fence was bound to obscure this more radical intention.
Who was I—this outraged female, this moral mother hen? After all, what did I think wewere doing? In spite of the singing, we meant business. We meant to criticize pushing“LIFE UNDER OCCUPATION” ILLUSTRATIONBY JOE ALTERIO

disconcerting to these observers is how this imagery half fits and half doesn’t: women
who look “ordinary” in some respects suddenly make radical breaks with things as theyare. They are housewife-witches or mother-lesbians who insist on walking the cracks ofstandard female identities.
Because they’ve agreed to differ among themselves, to act independently or in small
bunches without having to get everyone’s approval, difference is casually celebrated at
Greenham, a live-and-let-live attitude that leaves a vacuum others rush to fill with generalizations and definitions. The women love to parody the contradictions that arise. Theysing:
We’re mostly vegetarian
Except when we’re devouringmen.

people, to restrain ourselves from pushing back, but not to ask for the old forms of female
quarter.
I wonder if women are having to learn at Greenham—with a difference—what men
learn too early and carry too far: the courage to dare, to test reaction, to define oneself
against others. Nonviolent direct action takes great courage. The big men on their horses
or machines are doing as ordered—which is comfortable for them. In contrast, it canbe truly terrifying to refuse to do what an angry, pushing policeman tells you to do. For
women particularly, such acts are fresh and new and this cutting across the grain of feminine socialization is a favorite, daring sport of the young at the fence. Such initiations give
women a revolutionary taste of conflict, lived out fully, in our own persons, with genderno longer a reliable determinant of the rules.
Certainly it is no use for women to turn self-righteous—claiming a higher moral
ground than men. On that ground we are admired but ignored. As Dorothy Dinnerstein
has argued in The Mermaid and the Minotaur, emotional women have traditionally beentreated like court jesters that the king keeps around to express his own anxieties—andthus vent them harmlessly. A woman’s body lying down in a road in front of a missile
launcher has a very different symbolic resonance for everyone from that of a male bodyin the same position. Greenham’s radical feminist critics wonder just what kind of peacea female lying down can bring. Won’t men simply allow women to lie in the mud forever
because the demonstrators themselves only underline men’s concept of what is female(passivity, protest, peace) and what is male (aggression, action, war)?
Before I came to Greenham, I shared these worries. But at Greenham at its best,
women’s nonviolent direct action becomes not another face of female passivity but a difficult political practice with its own unique discipline. The trick—a hard one—is to skew
the dynamics of the old male-female relationships toward new meanings, to interrupt theold conversation between overconfident kings and hysterical, powerless jesters. This will
surely include an acknowledgment of our past complicity with men and war making anda dramatization of our new refusal to aid and assist. (I think of a delicious young woman I
heard singing out to a group of also very young soldiers: “We don’t find you sexy anymore,
you know, with your little musket, fife, and drum.”)Perhaps some of the new meanings we need will be found buried in the old ones. If
women feel powerless, we can try to share this feeling, to make individual men see that
they, too, are relatively powerless in the face of a wildly escalating arms race. Naturally,
this is a message men resist, but the women at Greenham are endlessly clever at dramatizing how the army shares their impotence: The army cannot prevent them from getting
inside the fence or shaking it down. It cannot prevent them from blockading the gates. It
cannot prevent them from returning after each eviction.
Or, rather, it could prevent all this, but only by becoming a visibly brutal force, andthis would be another kind of defeat, since the British armed services and police want tomaintain their image of patriarchal protectors; they do not want to appear to be batterersof non­violent women. Greenham women ex­pose the contradictions of gender: by being
women they dramatize powerlessness but they also disarm the powerful.
+++
As I write, the Greenham network keeps changing, usually beyond the range of media
reports. This very week the death of Greenham was announced once more, but when I
called friends they only laughed. “Of course the women are still there.” The water situation is desperate and benders have given way to still more primitive plastic shelters, buteveryone is “quite cheery.”
When I describe Greenham women, I often get the reaction that they sound like madidealists detached from a reality principle about what can and cannot be done, and how.
In a sense this is true. The women reject power and refuse to study it, at least on its own
terms. But the other charge—that they are utopian dreamers who sit around and think
about the end of the world while not really living in this one—is far from the mark.
In a piece in the Times Literary Supplement last summer, “Why the Peace Movement isWrong,” the Russian émigré poet Joseph Brodsky charged the peace movement with beinga bunch of millenarians waiting for the apocalypse. Certainly there are fascinating parallels between the thinking of the peace women and that of the radical millenarian Protestant sects of the 17th century. Both believe that the soul is the only court that matters, theself the only guide, and that paradise is a humble and realizable goal in England’s green
and pleasant land. The millenarians offered free food just like the caravans now on the
Common: Food, says one sign. Eat till You’re Full.
But the women are not sitting in the mud waiting for the end, nor are they—as Brodsky and many others claim—trying to come to terms with their own deaths by imaginingthat soon the whole world will die. On the contrary, the women make up one of the really
active millenarian forces around. President Reagan has told fundamentalist groups thatthe last trump ending human history might blow at any time now; the women believe thatthe dreadful sound can be avoided, if only we will stop believing in it.
Greenham women see a kind of fatalism all around them. They, too, have imagined
the end, and their own deaths, and have decided that they prefer to die without taking theworld with them. Nothing makes them more furious than the apathy in the town of Newbury, where they are often told, “Look, you’ve got to die anyway. So what difference does itmake how you go?” These are the real millenarians, blithely accepting that the end is near.
In contrast, the women look very hardheaded, very pragmatic. They see a big war
machine, the biggest the world has known; and, rather than sitting in the cannon’s mouth
hypnotized, catatonic with fear or denial, they are trying to back away from the danger,
step by step. They refuse to be awed or silenced by the war machine. Instead they say
calmly that what was built by human beings can be dismantled by them, too. Their logic,
clarity, and independence are endlessly refreshing. Where is it written, they ask, that wemust destroy ourselves?

24

L.A. K auffman

After theAction:Reflections on the Global
Justice Movement
It must have been around September 17 that I glanced up at the protest
poster hanging over my desk and felt my jaw drop.
This was not September 17, 2011, the beautiful and hopeful day of Occupy
Wall Street’s public debut, and the poster was not of a ballerina poised on abull. It was ten years earlier, on a day when the air in my Manhattan apartment smelled of fire and death, when every lamppost outside was plastered with images of missing people who would never be found, when thewhole world was struggling to comprehend what the startling attacks of
9/11 might mean.
The poster over my desk came from the April 2001 Free Trade Area of
the Americas (FTAA) summit protest in Quebec City, one of a series of large
mobilizations against corporate globalization organized in the wake of the1999 World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle. Under the banner “Carnival Against Capitalism,” the poster showed, of all things, a tall, square
tower surrounded by flames and beginning to collapse. The image wasdrawn from the Tarot, and no doubt not intended literally. But gazing up
at it as I was breathing in the ash from two towering symbols of corporate
globalization, now reduced to smoldering rubble, left me feeling sick. Had
our movement really been that dumb?
The global justice movement — so inspiring and innovative for a time,and based on a sweeping critique of how global trade agreements were
undermining democracy, worker’s rights, and the environment — faded
quickly after September 11. A planned mass mobilization for late September 2001 against the World Bank and International Monetary Fundwas called off, and the handful of sizable street actions against corporate
globalization that took place in the ensuing years were dispiriting affairs,
notable mainly for police repression.
The shift in public mood after 9/11 had much to do with this rapid
decline — more, probably, than any internal movement weakness. Griefand fear dampened spirits. Everywhere were exhortations to national
unity, with the clear implication that dissent was unpatriotic. With war
first looming and then raging against Afghanistan, the issues of trade anddemocracy that had animated the global justice movement lost their senseof immediacy.
But the movement against corporate globalization waned for otherreasons, too. It had gotten locked into a single model of protest, had cometo take itself too seriously and too literally, and had lost the sense of how
much a movement’s prospects depend on how it portrays itself to the wider
world. All of this made it easier for the police to contain and neutralize
through simple force.
From the beginning, the global justice movement was drawn to thenotion of disrupting business as usual through direct action. The images
that have endured from the Seattle WTO are of tear-gas-wielding cops androving Black Bloc anarchists. But the more striking thing about the demonstration for those who were there was something else: It actually worked.
The plan was to prevent the delegates to the World Trade Organizationfrom meeting through a nonviolent body blockade. Early on the morning

PHILOSOPHIES &FUTURES
Stephen Squibb

Neo
Autonomia

About two weeks before Occupy
Boston was evicted, I called afriend for advice on how to get a
proposal through our GA, which
seemed to be growing both moreantagonistic and more tedious.
The proposal was about a potential move indoors—although we
had no serious plans to move or
concrete leads as to where wemight go. She admonished me,saying something to the effect of:Americans have a strong propensity to turn GA into a decisionmaking body, stretching the consensus process past the point ofendurance. But what GA reallywants is to be a place for conversation, where ideas are developedin common—more Quaker meeting than Town Hall. Out of this
implicit understanding, smallergroups then make consensus
decisions to pursue autonomous
actions as needed, when opportunities present themselves. Insteadof appearing at GA with a proposal
in hand, go and ask questions
lik,e ‘What would it mean for thiscommunity to be indoors? Whatparts of camp would we want totake with us? How would thingschange?’ If this conversation isof November 30, 1999, the mass of protesters completely surrounded the
Seattle convention center and occupied key intersections in the vicinity.
Linking arms, they peacefully but emphatically kept the delegates fromentering. They literally shut the meeting down.
It was this nonviolent shutdown, in fact, that led the police to begin
tear-gassing. (The Black Bloc property destruction began later, in a slightly
different location, with little initial interference from police; the violent
police tactics became linked to, and justified by, it only through subsequent media montage.)
It was, of course, amazing and electrifying to actually bring the WTO
meeting to a halt. The Seattle WTO blockade had stopped “the operation of
the machine,” to borrow from Mario Savio’s famous 1964 speech on direct
action — only for a day, of course, but in a way that contributed to thecollapse of official trade negotiations there and that could be claimed as amajor movement victory.
So activists set out to do the same thing again — and again, and again.
Protesting corporate globalization came largely to mean surrounding
summit meetings, and a disproportionate share of activists’ energies werechanneled into the minutiae of street tactics.
The large April 2000 mobilization against the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in Washington, D.C. was focused single-mindedly on
shutting it down; when the blockade encircling themeeting was less than complete and delegates got through, there was asense of disappointment, as if preventing delegates from entering were themost important measure of the movement’s success.

open and honest, the details of
how and when to move can thenbe decided autonomously.
I considered how this would
play out: Boston’s GA was typically divided into Working Group
Proposals and Announcements
and Individual Proposals andAnnouncements— there wasno
place for questions. When people
had proposed discussion, they
never asked for more than ten
minutes, and they almost never
got them. Instead, this chorus
was universal: Form a working
group! Work on this! Bring yourwork back so that we can do thework of deciding! “Work,”, in typical American determined almost
every aspect of the Occupation.
My friend identifies as an
Autonomist, which as an affiliation refers most directly to theAutonomia Operaiamilitants of
the 1977 Italian movement. This
was a movement defined by its
unwillingness to be mediated byany political party; its broad classcomposition (the unorganized andunemployed struggled alongsideunionized labor); and its refusalof work—that is, the refusal to see
work as man’s highest end, thereby
breaking with Socialists and theirhomilies about the “dignity” oflabor. It was perhaps the most virulent strain of left-wing thought
to emerge from 1960s operaismo(literally, “workerism”) which
had argued for the autonomous
capacity of the shop floor worker
to engage in revolt, without themediation of bureaucratic unions
and official left-wing parties.
+++

Autonomy as a mass movement
came out of the “Historic Compromise” of the Italian Communist Party and the Christian Democrats in the early 1970s. Much
like the debt ceiling “compromise”
this this year, it was not much of
a compromise at all, and asymmetry justified by assurances that
it would restore stability actually
had the opposite effect. As Franco“Bifo” Berardi writes, “Rather thanbeing resolved, the institutional
crisis in Italy assumed an increasingly dramatic character…. The
basic reason for the crisis was thegrowing distance between representative political institutions anda population of hopeless young
people.” By February of 1976, thisdistance had grown so great that
Luciano Lama, one of the mostimportant left leaders in Italy,
could be rudely expelled from theoccupation at the University ofRome Sapienza. Semiotext(e) published an eyewitness account of
the incident in 1980 that is worth
quoting at some length.
It was the morning of Thursday,
February 17, 1977. The university
had been occupied for over a week
by students, the unemployed, thecomrades…. The white façade of
the Faculty of Letters was covered with slogans and writings.
One warned the capitalists andthe revisionists that they wouldbe ‘“buried in a burst of laughter.”This was the work of the Metropolitan Indians, a non-organizedcultural movement of young comrades, who turned their biting wit
and sarcasm on the Government,
the Communist Party and evenon revolutionary ”leader-figures”

The movement seemed still to be growing, though, and growing bolder.
Many of us felt like we were winning, that the momentum was on ourside. Large European protests against the IMF and World Bank in Prague in
September 2000 heightened the sense that the movement was locked in a
literal battle with the forces of corporate globalization, and that activists’
job was to physically put their bodies on the line to stop destructive trade
agreements.
And so Quebec City—the anti-FTAA mobilization of April 2001—became
one big street fight. We had joy and exuberance and spirit on our side, but
our songs and street dances and papier mache puppets were no matchfor the ten-foot-high fence the authorities built to keep us away or theweapons—concussion grenades, 10,000 volt tasers, rubber bullets, andthousands of tear-gas canisters—used to contain the crowd. The violence
made what we were doing feel important; feeling vindicated, we couldn’t
perceive how off-putting it all looked from the outside.
And of course once we lost the element of surprise — the factor thatmade the WTO shutdown possible — we could never again actually prevent a summit meeting from happening. And even if we had, that inturn wouldn’t mean we had actually disrupted the forward progress of 25

who tried to assert their dominance over the mass. The qualityof this new revolutionary movement was, in fact, that the massrefused to be led in the traditional style, from above. It was, toa great extent, self-directing andself-organizing.
During the days and nights of
the occupation, the entire University seemed to be a continuous people’s party and people’s
forum. There were continuing
and endless debates in the various
commissions (the counter-information commission, the factoryand-community commission, thewomen’s commission). There werealso the (often stormy) general
assemblies, where the Movement
decided its policies….
[Lama] was accompanied at 9
AM by about 200 ICP heavies …
and about 2000 other representatives…. As he started to speak[the Metropolitan Indians] beganchanting “Sacrifices, sacrifices, wewant sacrifices!” (a parody of theState’s economic policy upheldby the Communist Party). “Wedemand to work harder and earn
less!”The irony aggravated thehumorless ICP heavies. About
10,000 students and comrades
gathered. The Autonomists started
to put on their masks.”+++
Autonomy was a clearer departurefrom business as usual in Europe
than it has been in the US, with the
Occupy movement; an indigenous
kind of autonomism has been partof American politics for decades.
The American working class has
been accused of lacking class-consciousness, but its annual massabstention from voting suggests
at the least an awareness that it
is not represented in electorial

politics. This is the significant
difference between the Europeanand American cases: here neitherof the dominant parties has everhonestly claimed to represent theinterests of the workers.. Occupy,
like autonomia, emerged fromthe large gap between a political system that only represented
a privileged minority and a fractured array of labor unions only
able to represent a small fractionof workers.
What makes Autonomy sucha useful example for the Occupy
movement is that much of the
Italian interest for autonomous
organization came from historic
struggles of American workers. As
Christian Marrazzi put it in 1980,“There is nothing ‘Italian’ aboutclass warfare in Italy. To understand Italy, one must understandthe United States; one must rediscover in the history of Americanclass warfare that political richness which today is attributed to
Italian intellectuals.” (The “Metropolitan Indians” mentioned
above, who liked to imagine that,like Geronimo, they had gone “offreservation,” reveal another aspectof this obsession with the US.)
Because they operated without
the paternal guidance of social
democratic parties, let alone thechoke-hold of a Communist Party,
the American labor movement
was a “revolt against the very conditions of production itself,” as C.
L. R. James put it. In other words,
while European workers’ parties focused on meliorist truces
between capital and labor, theAmerican worker’s freedom fromthe party meant that the radical wing of the labor movement
focused on the lived experience ofwork itself. In this way, the American fixation on “work” in somerespects became a source of radical

corporate globalization in any meaningful way. We were so filled withadrenaline from the extraordinary events that unfolded on the streets that
we missed something crucial: Just because you leave a protest feeling exuberant about your experience there doesn’t mean it was a success.
The Occupy movement has, on the whole, been more nimble than that,
more willing to shift tactics and approaches to maintain public sympathy
and sidestep dreary wars of position with the police. Mirth keeps a movement going; self-importance and sanctimony make it abrasive and clumsy.
The great success of Occupy has been setting things in motion. It will win
not because it sustains an encampment or shuts down a port or takes over aforeclosed home. These bold and inspiring actions are always, necessarily,
temporary and symbolic. Their power lies outside them, in their potential
to catalyze lasting change.

26

strength: because they worked as
hard as they did under the “Fordism” their country pioneered,
American radicals also thought
deeply about work itself, and thenature of labor became more central to their strategy than that of
their European counterparts.
Such thinking led to a radical
internationalism, without parties—an autonomous international, deriving from an immensely
captivating, purely literal interpretation of the phrase “workersof the world.” This internationalism motivated idiosyncratic kindsof organizing, such as that of the
Wobblies, who brought unskilled,foreign-born, and minority workers into a union as part of their
dream of creating “one big union”
to cover the globe. This antivanguard position gained a clear
articulation in James and Trotsky’s
1938 debate on the “Negro Question.” James had argued, against
Trotsky, that far from needing tobe led by the Communist Party,
blacks would themselves advancethe radical movement in America
by fighting for their own rights on
their own terms. James framed thisSar ah Schulman

ACT-UPInterviews with Larry
Kramer and Gregg
Bordowitz

From the ACT-UP Oral History Project
More at www.actuporalhistory.org
Sarah Schulman: How could you expect that [the gay community] would be able to meetthe challenge of AIDS?
Larry Kramer: That’s a great question. But I did and I still do and they still haven’t.
We were dying and it happened first – so far as I could tell – through my people
around me, my friends, our group. And you just think, Oh my God, we’ve got to save ourlives, I guess. To this day, I don’t understand. At its heyday, at its peak, ACT UP – howmany did we have across the country? Ten thousand people maybe? With how many millions of gay people in this country? How did I expect it? I did.
SS: This is kind of tough question, but if you had never been involved in fighting for anybody else, where did you get the expectation that other people should come and make astand for us?
LK: I guess I never thought of it that way. We needed help and you had to scream for it,
and I asked for it nicely, originally. We tried to be very nice to The New York Times and to
Ed Koch and you learn very fast that you’re a faggot, and it doesn’t make any difference
that you went to Yale and were assistant to Presidents of film companies, and that you had
money. You suddenly know what it’s like to feel like a faggot or a nigger or a kike. I did. I
have said that. And, I did. And I remember the day it happened. And I didn’t like it.
SS: When did you first become aware of direct action?
LK: I think we all made it up as we went along. I don’t know that we became aware of it.
There are all these terminologies for these things now.
SS: Where did you first see people doing it?
LK: In the speech I made that night in the Center, I referred to this group of Catholics thatwent up to Albany – ten or twenty thousand of them – screaming at the legislature there
and I said, why can’t we do that?
SS: So you just started ACT UP, and then people brought that with them?
LK: I remember those meetings, when we would all sit around and talk. The first action– I don’t remember how it got to be Wall Street. We were in the room. Were you there,
then? I don’t remember.
SS: No, not at the first meeting.
LK: We were in the room, and all right, what are we going to do? We knew we had to dosomething public because – because, because. I don’t know, because of the Catholics hadmarched on Albany, I guess – because there wasn’t anything else to do. How do you get
attention? And somebody said, let’s go against the FDA, because they were so slow inapproving things. Mathilde said to me – Dr. Krim – the big heavy in all of this is Frank
Young at the FDA. So I sat down, and I wrote an op-ed piece for the Times and they took
it. It’s called “The FDA’s Callous Response to AIDS.” Was it called AIDS? Yes, it was called
AIDS. They took it, and it ran on the very day that we had the demo. So we were able topass out at Wall Street these fliers. And I had gotten Joe Papp to make an effigy in the
shop at the Public [Theater] of Frank Young, and we hung him in effigy down there on
Wall Street. Where did it come from? I think it just came from all of us talking with eachother all the time, I don’t know.

independence in Hegelian terms
in his 1948 “Notes on Dialectics”:
The coming of age of the proletariat means the abolition of
the party. That is our new Universal stated in its baldest andmost universal form…. The party
as we have known it must disappear. It will disappear. It is disappearing. It will disappear as thestate will disappear. The wholelaboring population becomes thestate. That is the disappearanceof the state . . . It withers away by
expanding to such a degree that itis transformed into its opposite.
And the party does the same. The
state withers away and the party
withers away. But . . . the primarything is the withering away of theparty, for if it does not... the state
never will.
The rejection of the party andthe proliferation of revolutionary
subjects both are clearly present
in the Occupy movement. The
refusal of work, however, is almost
impossible to locate; the one belief
that protesters and their antagonists seem to have in common isthat everybody should have a job.
Cries of ‘”Get a Job!” are always met
with “I have one (or two, or three)”or “I’m trying!” The absence of astrong historical party formation
has allowed American occupiers
to embody the spirit of Autonomy
while still preserving their attachment to labor.
The environmental question
sets off the dogmatic nature ofour belief in work; it’s not justthat we might or ought to rethink
the role of work; under the current conditions, we must do so.
Given the continued industrialization of global agriculture,
twenty million industrial farmers will soon replace the work of
three billion people still living inpeasant societies in Asia, Africa,and Latin America. The historicaloutlets for such mass redundancy
have been migration or absorption into the urban economy, andboth are environmentally andperhaps economically impossible
today. The “new agricultural question”—What will we do when significantly fewer of us are required
to produce what we need?—makesreconsidering the wage-earning orsalaried consumer as the unit of
the global economy an imminentnecessity. Autonomy, which arose
in a period of great environmental
struggle in Europe and elsewhere,
anticipates many of the insights

Gregg Bordowitz
Gregg Bordowitz: We were these young gay artists who were interested in doing serious
video work about the growing AIDS crisis. That’s when Hardwick hit. I remember Davidand I started doing work around Hardwick. We started showing up to the protests aroundHardwick in the Village, with cameras, and we started documenting those. That was when
I started identifying as gay, even though I was still living a kind of bisexual life. I decided
that I was going to identify as gay, and be a part of the gay community, and make a contribution. And I started documenting the vibrant protests that arose around the Hardwick
decision.
Sarah Schulman: Had you been tested at this point?
GB: No. And I wouldn’t test for two, three more years. I tested in 1988.
SS: So how did you get to ACT UP?
GB: David and I saw a poster at the Christopher Street subway stop for a protest at WallStreet. We said, “We’re gonna go there with cameras. That’s the next step. That’s what the
Hardwick protests are leading us to. This is the most important issue that’s confronting
the gay community.” ...
SS: So you got to Wall Street.
GB: We got to Wall Street. I met Jean Carlomusto there, who I would later collaborate
with a great deal. The protest was amazing, and very moving, and scary. I remember I
was concerned because a lot of people were chanting “You could get it, too.” So here wewere, a small group by the church on Wall Street. I remember meeting Bradley Ball there,
and a few other people. Everyone clustered together. The passers-by were just like quickly
running by us. They didn’t want to have anything to do with us or what was going on. A
few people would shout some epithets, or something like that. I don’t remember exactly
what they shouted at us, but I remember at one point the entire crowd got into this chantof, “You could get it too, you could get it too.” I remember feeling very weird about thatand not knowing how to deal with the emotions around me. I was new to AIDS activist
politics. I had been doing other kinds of activism.
SS: Like what?
GB: I was involved with anti-interventionist—I was a member of CISPES. I was involved
with protesting U.S. involvement in Guatemala and Nicaragua, and was part of the antiinterventionist in Central and Latin America movement, and was part of the group thatshipped medical supplies to Sandinista hospitals on the Lower East Side. So I was very
interested in doing activism, and always wanted to do something. I joined that group, theSister Cities Project on the Lower East Side, to become more involved with my neighborhood—this white, Jewish kid from Long Island living in the East Village, a primarily
Spanish-speaking neighborhood at that time. I kind of wanted to connect with my neighborhood and my neighbors. I actually just met more Jews. I met other people, too, but it
was like I met more people like me, and realized that there was something very abstract
about what we were doing. I never really quite knew if the medical supplies we sent got tothe hospitals, and these kinds of things.

in environmental discourse overlabor and production, though
the challenges posed by climatechange and the depletion of
resources sharpen those insights,
and make their implications more
drastic.
If the content of the calls emanating from the occupations havebeen a cry for work rather thancriticism of it, the initial form of
the movement—local communes
where one really could meditate in
the morning, rally at noon, work
the food tent in the evening, andstudy criticism after supper—
tells a somewhat different story.
In living together, differently, theoccupiers struck, at the level of
everyday life, against what Mario
Tronti called the “social factory.” The space they created was,and is, expansive; as James once
claimed, it did not merely accept
individuals’ differences but in fact
was constituted from them. In a
1944 letter to Constance Webb,
he translated this dialectic into aclassically American idiom:
When the disciples asked
Christ about the world to comeand the places they were to getin it, he told them ‘The Kingdomof Heaven is within you.’ They
could not understand. They justcouldn’t. The glory of life in ourage is that this intense, individual,
personal life can, in fact, must be
lived in harmony with the greatsocial forces that are now striving to carry humanity over the last
barrier.

SS: So did you have anybody in your life who had AIDS until you came to the Wall Street
action?
GB: I did not know anyone. As it turns out, I did. But they wouldn’t express symptoms or
get sick until later.
SS: But did you know at the time?
GB: No. There is something else I wanted to say about the Wall Street action—the anger.
I didn’t know quite how to deal with that kind of anger. Actually, I was upset that people
were shouting, “You could get it, too.” I thought it was politically bad. I thought it would
be politically alienating.
SS: Did you think it wasn’t true?
GB: I did think it was true. I haven’t thought about this in years. I’m just trying to tell
everything here. So I just remember that it was my introduction to AIDS politics, andit was a kind of anger, and vibrancy, and honesty that I hadn’t encountered yet in otherkinds of activism or protest.
Bordowitz and some other activists started a group they called “MHA,” which “stood forwhatever we needed it to stand for.” Claiming they were the “Metropolitan Health Association,” they got a meeting with New York’s controversial health commissioner, Stephen Joseph,
who had suggested internment for people with tuberculosis, and other repressive measuresto halt the spread of AIDS. The members of MHA were arrested.
SS: How did ACT UP respond to you guys getting arrested?
GB: They were really into it. I remember going to the meeting. By this time, I was comfortable with being vocal. I stood up and said, “We did this,” and “Look, you can just do
this. You don’t have to go to the large group to get authorization. In fact, it’s better that thelarge group is not involved with these kinds of actions because they don’t have to be held
accountable. So you can just do stuff. ACT UP is just this place we all meet on a weekly
basis to talk about strategy and prioritize issues.” I remember just saying over and overagain, “You can just do this. Just go out and do this.” And people were very enthusiastic.
They had seen—I think there was some small picture in the newspaper, and they had
heard about it. I remember it being very exciting.
SS: Do you think that that contributed to the affinity group?
GB: Yes.
SS: Would you say that that happened right after, or consequently?
GB: I think it co-arose with that, but I think it certainly lent legitimacy to the notion of
the affinity groups. Now we learned about affinity groups—you can’t underestimate theimportance of the Hardwick decision and all the organizing that arose around that. Actually, my first arrest ever was on the Supreme Court steps in Washington at the March
for Lesbian and Gay Rights. And as part of that civil disobedience, I went through a civil
disobedience training that was run by Vicki Rovere of the War Resisters League. So the
War Resisters League did training for the lesbian and gay rights organizations that weresponsoring the demonstration. This was 1986, right? So I went through those trainings
and learned about affinity groups through the War Resisters League.

Larry Kramer
SS: This may be a bad memory, but I seem to remember one time you quit because you
wanted ACT UP to have a President. Did I make that up?
LK: I think so.
SS: You didn’t bring in a proposal? I remember you got angry, because you wanted a certain kind of structure. You had a structure proposal for ACT UP.
LK: Structure is the wrong word. We were processing a lot of people after awhile, a lot of
people – especially after we moved to Cooper Union. And to have to deal
with that size of a room got to be distressing and boring for a lot of people, too. People
were constantly looking for ways to make it all go smoother, and we used to have meetings about that – how can we make it go smoother? How can we get rid of the bullshit?

27

Cinzia Arruzza

A Road Trip
from the East
Coast to theWest Coast…
and back

Symbols matter: “mic check,” thevarious consensus-related hand
gestures, the occupation of public and semi-public spaces, thetents (where allowed), and also
the attempt to postpone the NYSE
morning bell. All this gave themovement the kind of personality and appeal it has. After threemonths however, it is time to ask
whether symbols or symbolic
struggle are enough. If they’re notenough, what should we do?
Answers or at least partial
answers come from the movement
itself; but it is not always easy to see
and name them. My suggestion:
Look at the West Coast.
On November 2, Occupy Oakland organized a general strike inresponse to their eviction, and shut
down the city’s port for a day. For
December 12, a Port Blockade wasorganized at some of the nation’sbusiest ports all along the west
coast—from Anchorage, Alaska, to
San Diego. In other words, occupations are becoming the centerof political and social initiatives
capable of attacking the direct economic interests of big companies
and speculators. This offers rank
and file workers the opportunity tojoin the struggle independently of
the support of their union officials.
I am not suggesting we mechanically apply models that are effective
elsewhere. I am suggesting that wetry to decipher the dynamic taking place in Oakland and consider
whether we should follow a similar
path here in New York, in our ownway.
The December 6 day of action
against foreclosures was an
attempt to shift the focus fromsymbolic protest against financial
capitalism to actions more concrete, taking back spaces and buildings. Considering the enormous
economic and political power ofprivate real estate interests in New
York, and its related social consequences—for instance, the continual expulsion of working classpeople and people of color fromgentrifying neighborhoods—thecampaign against foreclosurespushes in the same direction as theport blockade: We are attacking

the economic interests of capitalists and empowering those whoare exploited and marginalized.
This too explains why the struggleof CUNY students against tuition
hikes is so important: In thesestruggles there is the seed for anational student movement for
free education. Empowerment
requires more than taking part inmeetings, or having the opportunity to say what one thinks, or
breaking some rule. It is also,
importantly, a matter of gainingsome victory: ending tuition hikes;
gaining better rights and contracts
for workers; arresting foreclosures;and taking back what has been stolen from working people, students,
and all who are excluded, marginalized or disempowered at the handsof neoliberal and austerity policies.
In Italy, where I am from andwhere I have been an activist
and organizer for some twenty
years, the situation is similar. We

too have been struggling withto locate concrete strategies forgains after more than two decadesof constant defeat: privatizationof public goods and services, theelimination of labor rights, attacks
on wages, budget cuts for public
education and health care, pension reform, and attacks against
immigrants’ rights to name but
a few. These measures not only
disempower, but also contributeto the divisions and disorganization of exploited and marginalized
people and often times serve toincrease inner antagonisms andhierarchies—for example among
native and immigrant workers, or
between men and women.
This is why I think that discussion within the movement should
shift from issues of democratic
procedure to political strategy. I
say this because while the attention to horizontal democracy canbenefit the reconstruction of social

How can we cut to the chase? Whatever. And there were a lot of ideas. I don’t think a general was ever one of them. I think at some point, as things got really awful, I became much
more militant in visualizing ACT UP as an army, which didn’t go down very well.
SS: Do you think that you personally wanted the attention?
LK: I don’t look at it or that or myself that way. The whole thing about ACT UP is results.
That’s all I was interested in. I was not interested in airy-fairy theories. Results. How do
we get these fucking drugs? That’s what it was all about. How do we get them? And it wasa slow process to getting them. And if I had to go out there and yell at somebody, I mademyself able to do that. Again, you may find it hard to believe, but I am essentially a shy
person, and it became like a Jekyll and Hyde thing, and I took so much of my energy fromeveryone else. That gave it to me.
SS: I want to ask you a little bit about yourself, as a person with AIDS, in the ACT UP
context. When did you begin to think that you were positive? At what point in all of this?
LK: Theoretically, I still don’t have AIDS. I’ve never had a defining illness,
and I’ve never had low enough markers. I am the luckiest man alive. I never had to takeany HIV drugs, until I got my liver. And the only reason I had to take it was because thetransplant people insisted, to protect the liver. They wanted to keep HIV in check –whether it was out of check or not.
SS: So, you’ve been HIV-positive, asymptomatic?
LK: Since – I forgot when I was tested already – ’85, ’86.
SS: And why do you think you were asymptomatic?
LK: I am lucky. I have no idea. Not everybody, but almost everybody I knew is dead fromthose years.

Gregg Bordowitz
SS: I just want to get back to the theory/action relationship. So a committee or a constituency would have a need, and then the organization as whole would do the action tofacilitate that need?
GB: Not necessarily. Sometimes ideas came from the floor on Monday night. As thegroup got more established, it became more formal in its informal institutionalization,
meaning that the people like me and others, who went to meetings on a nightly basis,
were in a position to do consensus-building among smaller groups before the large meeting would happen. So I became aware of this, and I’m sure other people were aware ofthis as well, that if you wanted to present an idea to the group, and you wanted to win

28
PHOTO OF BROADWAY AT ZUCCOTTI PARK BY MARK GREIF

movements and dissuade co-optation, the fetishization of democratic, consensual procedures canalso have a paralyzing outcome. In
the last weeks of the occupationof Liberty Square, it often felt likedeliberation around procedures
had replaced political debate. In
such a situation, democracy risks
becoming a matter of formalities
rather than a matter of substance.
We should ask is: democracy forwhom, to arrive where, and toobtain what? In other words, can
we really separate the discussion
on democratic procedures fromthat which examines who the social
agents of this movement are, what
we want to do together, and what
we want to win?
+++
How democratic is consensus?
Can we work together only if we all
agree on what is to be done? Do werisk political homogenization if wefail to account for the possibilityof persistent disagreement? Can
we not consider the movementa process through which decisions are made despite disagreements, and with a resolve to work
together regardless? I would favora decision-making process that
relies on majority vote, but one
that combines with the consensus
proves and encourages the discussion respectful of the reciprocal
differences. Nothing prevents us
from submitting the decisions
we make to constant verification,
testing them in practice and changing them if they prove wrong. The
same holds for creating forms of
coordination that use at least somepartial elements of delegation.
Student movements in France, forexample, adopt forms of elective
coordination at the national level.
These coordinating bodies are
subject to constant control and canbe called off from below in every

moment. In this way the student
groups are capable of coordinating the struggle among different
campuses on a national level andto share and expand effective
strategies. The student movement in France is among the few
social movements of the last years
which effectively won battles—for
example, the protest against the
CPE (first employment contract) in
2006.
It is not only the insistence onconsensus procedures that may
steer the movement toward simplification and homogenization,
but also the language around the
99%. It is an effective and evocative
slogan, reminding us, as it does,of the power of numbers: We, theexploited and oppressed, are themajority of the world’s population. And although it takes thefirst step at building solidarity, weneed to go further. This requires
identifying the complexity of thegroups that make up this majority.
Capitalism does not create but twosocial classes, a homogenous 1%
and a homogenous 99%. There arein fact more than two, and they arecharacterized by inner divisions,hierarchies, and antagonisms—
among the working class, between
white people and people of color,
between women and men andthose who identify as LGBQIT andso on. These divisions and hierarchies may be structurally created
and implemented by capitalism,
but they are real.
In practice, this means identifying strategies that create connection and cooperation among
the different sectors of this heterogenous 99%. 			
Solidarity is not automatic and can
only be the outcome of our collective effort. We need to do morethan examine the ways in which we
reproduce power relations amongus by turning our efforts toward
common goals and campaigns thatcan concretely unite our struggles.

For example, the police brutality
against the students at UC Davisand Baruch, as well as the OWS protesters more generally, is making
apparent a pervasive and longtime
problem: The systematic use ofpolice repression as a fundamental
tool for the defense and reproduction of the relations of exploitation. The use of police repression
affects not only protesters, butmore significantly, it affects the
everyday life of people of colorand immigrants in our communities. The outcry over pepper sprayand other forms of police brutality should therefore be part of amore general campaign against
repression and police brutality.
The marches against the “Stop andfrisk program” in both Harlem and
Brooklyn were a first step in thisdirection, but they need be taken
further still.
Finally, politics always has
many protagonists with different
agendas and different goals. The
Occupy movement is not the only
protagonist of political discussion
and dynamic of these last months.
Other agents are not just watchingus and waiting—they are acting.
As the presidential election draws
closer, the campaign machine will
put a lot of pressure on the movement. The SEIU, who supported the
Occupy movement, has endorsed
Obama’s candidacy, and as a resulton November 17 we marched on the
sidewalk of the Brooklyn Bridge,
instead of blocking the bridge, anidea which was circulating amongprotesters and occupiers in theprevious weeks. In other words,
and this is another question weshould ask, what is a strategy forpreserving the autonomy of the
movement? Is the practice of consensus sufficient? Or should we
not be talking, as we have started in
the last weeks, about the concrete
struggles, strikes, occupations
to expand the movement fromsquares to communities, schools,

consensus, then you had to do a certain amount of campaigning within the group. You
couldn’t just come up with a speech that would sway hearts and minds on the floor on
Monday night. You had to develop that speech, you had to develop that rhetoric, and you
had to do a lot of face-to-face politicking along the way in order to gain consensus.
I don’t think there’s anything ominous about this. This is how grassroots, democratic
politics work. To a certain extent, this is how democratic politics is supposed to work ingeneral. You convince people of the validity of your ideas. You have to go out there andconvince people.
It was roiling. The feeling of ACT UP in its heyday—this was like 1988—when theroom was packed, and you could hardly get into the ground floor of the Gay Community
Center. If the weather was nice, the meeting spills out into the courtyard. There is business happening all over the place. It’s very difficult for the people who are actually runningthe meeting to get the attention of the group. There is all kinds of sexiness going on, as
well. There is all kinds of cruising going on on the sides, and eye catching, and chattiness.
There was an energy in the group that was amazing, because it was filled with people who
had ideas, filled with people who had energies, filled with a kind of erotic energy. And allthat came together. It was in some ways like a bazaar of desires. So it was amazing thatanything got done. An enormous amount got done.

29

workplaces, media, sites of production and circulation of commodities? Actions like the port blockade, the disruption of Sotheby’s
auctions, the day of action against
foreclosure—those which make us
forcibly autonomous and incompatible with institutional parties
and union leaderships—should
become the main pattern we follow
for the expansion and escalation of
the movement.
Escalation will require us togrow in numbers, to expand
outside the squares, to give an

impetus to real social struggles.
The movement must become asource of coordination and visibility for these struggles that, inthe last decade, have been isolated
and sometimes in antagonism
with each other, while also hidden away under noisy mainstream
institutional politics. Forms ofaction and civil disobedienceshould be discussed in a concreteand not abstract way, accounting
each and every time the specificcircumstances and trying to iden-

Daniel Marcus

From Occupation to
Communization
I first heard the slogan “Occupy Everything” in 2009 during the anti-privatization protests
that shook the University of California, where I have been a graduate student since 2007.
During the first weeks of the fall semester, that slogan gradually came to mean something
specific, something razor-sharp, in a way that has been diluted in the present wave of protests. On September 24th, when students at UC Santa Cruz occupied the Graduate Student
Commons, the words “Occupy Everything” could be seen spray-painted on the side of thebuilding. The same moment saw the publication of pamphlets and websites devoted totheorizing and propagating occupations, bearing the slogan, “Occupy Everything, Demand
Nothing.” But it was the slogan of a vanguard, not the broad majority of protesters, andreferred to the controversial tactic of forcibly locking down campus buildings with bikelocks and barricades without any provision of demands or benchmarks for de-escalation.
Occupations were a contentious tactic both inside and outside the organizing coalition,
especially since the point wasn’t to force a negotiation with the administration, it was rather
to block business as usual—and also, at least in theory, to wrench a parcel of space and time
free from the capitalist order. This last point proved to be an Achilles heel for the UC occupations, since the occupiers had to rely on the very structures and temporalities of student
protest they aimed to supercede. What they wanted was a commune—to communize, more
specifically—but this would remain an elusive horizon during the first two years of campus
revolt.
As far as I’m aware, the tactic of no-demands occupations originated in France during the 2006 anti-CPE protests, when the administration of the Sorbonne preemptively
blocked access to the campus in order to prevent it from being occupied as it had been in
May 1968—a decision that, ironically, prompted the students to occupy. The French roots of
the occupation movement go deep; in fact, there’s about a decade’s worth of para-academic
French Marxism woven into the tactics and ideas of the first wave of occupiers at the UC
and other American universities (the New School’s occupation predated ours by a year)—
not only The Coming Insurrection, but also writings by the less well-known (though equallyshadowy) collective Théorie Communiste, who argue against the familiar forms of classstruggle, trade unionism above all, as possible fixes for the present crisis. These were notthe only progenitors of the occupations at the UC; that list is too varied and internecine
to recount here. I only want to emphasize that circa 2009, the occupation movement wasundergirded at least in part by a specifically Marxist set of ideas about capitalism and classstruggle. These ideas seem to have vanished from the present debate over the future ofOccupy—to our loss, I’d argue.
Back in 2009, the tactical rejection of demands was meant as a vote of no confidence inthe wage system, and also in the instrumentalization of education as a means of reproducing that system. Moreover, the occupations were understood to signal, for some instinctually, for others intellectually, that the horizons of struggle were emphatically not those ofancestral socialism: there is no longer any possibility of going back to the arcadia of theworkers’ state; now, revolution will be made by piecing together the apparatus of redistribution on the outside, in the cold of the commons, without wages or benefits. If the refusal oflabor was once the endpoint of autonomist struggle, the campus occupiers understood thestakes to have been reversed: the rebels are not the workers but the jobless, the debtors, theunderemployed, the precarious, and the socially and economically marginal. These considerations may not directly animate the current wave of occupations, but they are still verymuch alive in the tactics of the Occupy movement.
As springtime approaches, it will be vital to rethink the tactic of occupations together
with the history of capitalism and class struggle. At present, some factions within the
movement seem content with an amnesiac view of the camps and assemblies, which they
regard as prefiguring a return to postwar progressivism. For example, the OWS Demands
Working Group has called for “a massive public works and public service program withdirect government employment at prevailing (union) wages, paid for by taxing the rich

30

tify the form most likely to lead to
movement expansion.
I’ve asked a lot of questions
and I don’t have all the answers. I
don’t have them, because we needcollective discussion and action tofind them. Struggling is not merely
a matter of staging big events one
after the other; it requires continuity and the sometimes more boring
work of patient organizing, weaving together different experiences,
keeping the memory of this collective experience, of what we havedone, what we have lost and what
we have won. This why the mostdemocratic forms of organizations
are, in reality, those which allow us
to think and act strategically andthose which empower us—for they
allow us to struggle, today but also
tomorrow.

MArinA Sitrin

Some
Issues withhorizontalism

Horizontalidad is a word that firstcame about in Argentina as a partof the 2001 popular rebellion. Not
having a similar word in English it
has been imperfectly translated ashorizontalism. Imperfect because
it is not an ‘ism, and in fact is moreof an anti- ism, attempting to create social relationships that breakwith hierarchy and ideologicalframeworks. As its name suggests,
horizontalism is about creating

and corporations, by immediately ending all of America’s wars, and by ending all aid toauthoritarian regimes to create 25 million new jobs.” While these are all fine things, they
have as their premise the wrong assumption that some version of the welfare state represents a timeless form of the political and economic good. But the welfare state was only
ever invented to serve a partisan set of interests—those of capitalists—and could not havebeen built save during a bygone period of capitalism’s global development, when the costsof welfare and high employment were capable of being offset by the profitability of modernizing production. Yes, the labor movement did force capitalists to internalize many of
the costs of workers’ social reproduction, but it did this in an era of spectacular growth.
Nothing could be further from the present-day scenario. Bear in mind that the greatest
expansion of the welfare state took place during capitalism’s golden age in the 1950s-60s:
the point was not to build a good, equal, or just society, but rather to draw workers further
into the system of production, extending that system to encompass nearly every aspect of
lived experience. If the 20th century was the proletariat’s utopia, it was also its hell.
No amount of wishful thinking will bring back the days of heaven and hell, though.
Now there is only hell, bleak and disastrous. Capitalism has been failing since the late1960s, when its previous temporary fix—the rapid modernization of production inadvanced economies, coupled with reasonably generous social welfare—stopped doing
the trick. If the welfare state beckons on the horizons of Zuccotti Park, it can only be amirage, a trick of the light playing on the shields of the riot police. I don’t mean this as aslight to the occupiers, though— far from it. For if anything about Occupy is encouraging,
it is that in the first weeks of the present wave of occupations, veritable communes were
set up in literally dozens of American cities, distributing food, shelter, and first aid freely
and to all comers. Regardless of whether they understood their activities under the rubricof Marxism, these new bands of occupiers have already achieved what we at the UC wereunable to pull off in the heady days of 2009, creating living breathing communism in someof the least communal places imaginable.
Critics will say that while these small acts of communism are well and good, they will
never be able to provide for the millions who depend on capitalism for daily bread. This istrue, but only if one considers the movement as an all-or-nothing gamble: either replace
the capitalist system part for part or else admit defeat. We need not cling to this false
opposition, which rests on the supposition that communism will be a change in the ownership of capitalism (from top-down to bottom-up) rather than an attack on the system
tout court. While the dictatorship of the proletariat may have seemed viable during theera of centralized industrial production, today the production and circulation of capital ismore discontinuous than ever; the forces of labor are cruelly disunited. Now, the winds ofrevolution blow not from the factories and shipyards but from outside the ranks of waged
labor. For workers in the de-industrialized world, it is now a question of surviving the lossof jobs and social services—and, along the cutting edge of class struggle, of abolishing thewage system altogether. This, I would argue, is the role played by the movement of communes relative to capitalism: not to put workers in control of the system of exploitation,
but to lay the groundwork for a retreat from that system. It should come as no surprisethat the occupations provided havens for the jobless and homeless, and that the police
called on to evict the camps are well-paid suburbanites. As the movement of the communes pushes forward, these divisions, between the waged and wageless, the self-policing
professionals and the communards, will only widen. This split must not be construed asexternal or opposed to the movement; it is the movement’s clearest form of expression.
As for the practical tasks of the communes, I defer to Théorie Communiste’s accountof what’s to be done and how: The process of communization begins, they argue, with“the destruction of exchange: this means the workers attacking the banks which hold theiraccounts and those of other workers, thus making it necessary to manage without; thismeans the workers communicating their “products” to themselves and the community
directly and without market; this means the homeless occupying homes, thus “obliging”
construction workers to produce freely, the construction workers taking from the shops
at liberty, obliging the whole class to organise to seek food in the sectors to be collectivized, etc. Let’s be clear about this. There is no measure which, in itself, taken separately,is “communism.” To distribute goods, to directly circulate means of production and raw

a flat plane upon which to communicate—but it is not only this.
Horizontalism implies the use of
direct democracy and the striving
for consensus, processes in whichattempts are made so that everyone
is heard and new relationships are
created.
As a new form of relating, horizontalism can create some confusion. We have been feeling thisquite a bit in New York, as have other
cities and towns around the country.
The idea that horizontalism canbe a thing, something that exists
simply by saying so, and therefore
by its invocation it is somehow
brought into practice, is not quite
right. We cannot become horizontal merely by declaring ourselves
horizontal, or willing ourselves into
horizontalism. This can create morethan confusion; sometimes it canlead to anger and frustration. If aperson is told that all have an equal
voice, and that there is no hierarchy,
and that our relationships are all
prefigurative, and then that person has an experience where they
do not feel heard or respected (orprefigured!), she feels betrayed.
And worse, if we collectively do notsee horizontalism as a process, weare less likely to do the hard work of
breaking down hierarchy and trying
to create power with one another.
A question often raised withregard to horizontalism and direct
democracy is that of time. Thesemeetings are sometimes very long.
And yet most such criticisms comefrom those not actively participatingin horizontal forms of assemblies.
This is not to say that the assemblies
do not take a great deal of time,
because they do, and this is a real
challenge, but that the critique that
“regular” people cannot participate
because the assemblies go on toolong ignores the fact that “regular”
people watch football games thatlast three and a half hours. Whilelong, for many the process is a partof the very democracy being created.
People speaking and being heard,
often for the first time, is incredibly
important in the formation of horizontal relationships.
That being said, not all assemblies are the same, and there is amaterials, to use violence against the existing state: fractions of capital can achieve someof these things in certain circumstances. That which is communist is not “violence” initself, nor “distribution” of the shit that we inherit from class society, nor “collectivization”
of surplus-value sucking machines: it is the nature of the movement which connects theseactions and underlies them, renders them the moments of a process which can only communize even further, or be crushed.”
Though I have difficulty imagining a scenario in which workers voluntarily destroy
their own means of subsistence, it seems right to insist that any alternative to the capitalist system will have to begin by abolishing private property. This might mean expropriating goods and spaces or blockading factories, freeways, and refineries, but it can alsomean reallocating currently existing property for the use of the commune—unlocking thefunctional capacities of money, shelter, and technology in order to secure the development and expansion of wageless society. Make no mistake, though: what is “communist”
about a commune is not the sum of radical actions carried out in the name of the collective. Feeding and providing shelter to the homeless and jobless are laudable activities,
but they are not in themselves anti-capitalist. The same goes for strikes, port blockades,
debt abolition, and the re-occupation of foreclosed homes. Whatever the merits of theseactions, the point is that they are negligible qua communism absent a general movement
toward the abolition of property and the wage system. The point is not to put the joblessback to work, in other words, but to make it possible to live without a wage or personal
wealth. To those critics who respond, “But people want jobs—and besides, without a wage
no one would be able to survive,” we should respond that it is the fundamental problem of
the capitalist system that the employment of our skills, talents, and resources is forcibly
yoked to the engine of capitalist accumulation. It is no utopia of leisure or play that we areproposing, only a society wherein our ability to work is no longer a commodity traded on
the market, but is rather the immediate support of our common sustenance.
When we speak of communes, then, we are not interested in intentional communities or retreats into the wilderness. We are simply demanding that the conditions of freelife established, if only fleetingly, within the Occupy camps be generalized and volatilized. The term communization does not describe a shift from one economic system(capitalism) to its opposite; instead, it indicates the process (communism) by which
capital is converted directly and immediately into the means of social reproduction foreveryone—that is, for all those who cannot stand anymore to live under capitalism or
who have been excluded from it. The point of the movement of communes is precisely
to develop the capacity, or capacities, for disengaging as many people as possible awayfrom the systems of wage labor and private property; this can only be done by way of anadditive process, beginning with small acts of communization by which new relations andcapacities are developed—for example, distributing food and basic services free of cost,collectivizing the wages and rents/mortgages of those with jobs and homes, establishing
general assemblies and other apparatuses of self-governance, organizing the expropriationof unused property and resources, developing and broadening a solidarity economy withlocal producers and shippers, and so on. The basic formula of communization of simple:
by abolishing property, we make free life possible, even if only locally and temporarily; bymaking free life possible, however, we make the expansion of communes inevitable.
To critics of the movement of communes, we should reply that the only limits tocommunization are those imposed by forms of thought inherited from capitalism. We arecommunists whenever we prioritize cooperation over competition, social over individuallife. Likewise, we are reactionaries whenever we retreat to the comfortable enclosures ofdifference between a long assemblythat is going in the direction of aconcrete project, and an assembly
for the sake of discussion alone.
One of the things that makes speaking and hearing one another someaningful is results. These results
do not have to be massive—they
just need to be results.
In Argentina, those assemblies
that seemed to create the least
amount of frustration and critiquewere those in the recuperated workplaces and other movements thatwere together working on very concrete and often territorially based
projects. Assemblies that createdthe most frustration were those withmore abstract points and items,
such as ending poverty. Even if
everyone agreed that we should end
poverty, the length of the discussion
around which there was no concrete
proposal resulted in frustration
and, eventually, people leaving theassemblies.
Leadership and Power
Another challenge to horizontalism is the question of leadership.
In Argentina, as with our Occupy
movements, the initial response to
the question of leadership was todeclare that there were no leaders.
But I think it is useful to be a little
more clear here. When most people
respond that there are no leaders,
they actually mean that we are trying
to create a space without hierarchy—where people do not havepower over each other. If we think
about our assemblies and spacesof organization, there are often
times when one voice is listened todifferently, and sometimes more,than another voice. This is especiallytrue when we are discussing areas

where some people might havemore experience than others, suchas media, legal, structure, medical,
etc. It is also true with some movement participants who have many
more years of organizing experience, as well as those who haveshown themselves to be especiallyclear both when speaking and whenacting. How else do we listen to one
another differently? Depending on
the circumstances I think there aremany ways we listen differently andsometimes more actively to one person over another. I see this differential listening as related to the question of leadership. If one person’s
voice is heard more, are they not aleader in some way? And if they are,how can we discuss this in a way thatis open? I believe we can still create
horizontal spaces, and yet recognizethat some people are heard differently on different subjects.
When we do not admit that there
is difference in how people areheard, an informal hierarchy canemerge.
Structure of Horizontal Decision
Making Spaces
Horizontal spaces do not simply
occur spontaneously. To create aspace where all people can speak
and be heard requires organizationand structure. How much structure
and organization depends on thegroup, how long they have known
one another, their relationships,
etc. Having structures, such as
agreements for behavior to one
another, can go a long way in helping to remind people how to act,
or not act, towards one another.
Additionally, having facilitators
who are trained and committed tosupport not only the agreements onproperty and domination. The society of accumulation will not be abolished by “taking”
and “holding” spaces or resources, it will be abolished when spaces and resources areused in a manner that permits us to live without capitalism. One need have no particular
scruples about how this should be done; for example, it is immaterial how one gathers thematerials needed to keep the commune going—whether one pays for them, builds them,steals them, or buys them on credit—so long as one enables the commune to grow, toincorporate more capital, like a phagocyte in the economic bloodstream. Nor does it matter whether or not the commune has these means from the get-go; the point is to acquirethem, after all, and that takes time. While it is certainly important what spatial form thecommunes take, the centralized model of OWS is already giving way to more dispersed
territorial arrangements. Indeed, it is foreseeable that the geography of communization
will oscillate in the coming months between centrality and dispersion, and between visibility and invisibility.
The springtime will bring many new experiments and tactics: new camps, newly
occupied homes and buildings, unforeseeable shutdowns of industry and commerce—
and too, new modes of reactionary violence directed against the movement. We should
remember, though, that we pose no real threat to capitalism if we leave untouched thebonds that tie us to it. We will fail if we merely support the reclamation of foreclosed or
abandoned homes without questioning the sanctity of our own property, whether ownedor rented. We will fail if our wages are not made into the common resource of communal subsistence. We will fail if debtors are permitted to suffer privately. There can be no
movement of communes if protest is merely an extracurricular activity of wage-earners:
workers will have to choose whether they stand with the communes or with the bosses
and administrators. Make no mistake, though: the machine of communization has merely
to be started up; its engine is already primed. The era of the Party is over—long live thecommunes!

31

behavior, but the collective agenda
as well. For example, if there is
disruption during the assembly, thefacilitators need to use the power ofthe group. This can mean identifying the issue, and if it is an individual causing the disruption, asking
the group if they think the person
should be able to keep speaking out
of turn, perhaps using a straw poll
to do so, and if they do not think
the person should continue, thenusing the group consensus to tell
the person they cannot disrupt andmust stop speaking. Sometimes thiscan even mean asking the group if
they agree that if the person keeps
talking out of turn they should
leave. I have seen this happen successfully in Argentina. And sometimes the regular disrupters are
silenced, and sometimes they are
made to leave. Also, in Argentina,
there were times when assemblies
would take a break when someone
tried to dominate, with the participants literally turning their backs
on the disrupter until they stopped
speaking. When disruption is so
loud and aggressive that the assembly cannot continue it is a block to
the democratic process the group
has agreed to. It is up to the group,with the help of the facilitator toprevent the disruption. Asking or
telling people to leave because they
block democracy is not inconsistent
with creating a horizontal space,and in fact, is what can help maintain it. I am not going to argue thatall people who disrupt are paid bysome nefarious source to behave inthat way (though historically many

have been), but, imagine if they
were. How easy would it be to break
our horizontal process if we let whoever wanted to talk, shout or disrupt
do so without collectively doing
something about it? Being firm andusing our democratic structures tofacilitate more horizontal relationships is key to the process and goalof horizontalism.
Neka, from the unemployedworkers movement of Solano,on the outskirts of Buenos Aires,
Argentina, reminds us that horizontalism is a process, one that we allneed to continue to adapt as we use
it.
“First we began learning something together, it was a sort of
waking up to a knowledge thatwas collective, and this has to dowith a collective self-awareness ofwhat was taking place within all of
us. First we began by asking one
another, and ourselves questions,and from there we began to resolve
things together. Each day we continue discovering and constructing
while walking. It is like each day
is a horizon that opens before us,
and this horizon does not have any
recipe or program, we begin here,
without what was in the past. What
we had was life, our life each day,our difficulties, problems, crisis,
and what we had in our hands at thetime was what we used to go looking for solutions. The beginning of
the practice of horizontalidad canbe seen in this process. More thanan answer to a practice, it is an every
day practice.”

SIlvia Federici

Women,
Austerity,and theUnfinishedFeminist
Revolution

If there was ever a doubt
about the long-term natureof the austerity programs
that have been imposed on
us in recent years, those
doubts should be put torest. It is clear austerity
measures are not just areaction to this or that“crisis” but part of an
ongoing attempt to shift
power relations. Thanks toour “sacrifices” all now
is well in capital’s land.
Profits and productivity areat record highs. Banks once
festering with toxic assets
are stuffed with money.
Nevertheless, short of amass mobilization like theone the Occupy Movement isorganizing, 2012 promises tobe a gloomy year for most of
the country, as we are facedwith more cuts in the social
spending essential to oursurvival.
Despite the enormous
hardship that people areexperiencing in theirlives, state after state ispreparing to destroy what
remains of their investment
in social reproduction. Topon the list are all those
programs that for many
people make a difference
between life and death.
Senior centers and home careassistance to the elderly
who are not self-sufficient,but struggling to remain
independent and not be
confined to nursing homes;

Nicholas Mirzoeff

OCCUPY CLIMATE CHANGE
Occupy climate change! Why? Because the transformations that Occupy
seeks in social and economic life are the same as those needed to sustain
conditions suitable for life on our planet. We can call this “prosperity without growth,” a way of life that promotes the greatest happiness without
raising energy consumption.
It is notable that Brookfield, the owners of Zuccotti Park/Liberty Plaza,
are also planning the pipeline to bring Canadian tar sands oil to the US, anaction that NASA scientist James Hansen has described as “game over” forthe atmosphere. The one percent tells us that climate is a future concern,but the present must be devoted to public austerity and private profit.
We retort: climate change is here, it is now, and it is the action of the one
percent.
Climate change is here: the climate system is planetary in ways thathumans are still learning to understand. While current predictions showthat those most responsible for emissions, such as the US and China, will
not be systemically affected as much as Africa and the Pacific Small Island
Nations, no one is escaping the rise in intense weather events.

32
ZUCCOTTI PARK, DECEMBER 2 PHOTO BY MARK GREIF

health insurance for low
income families, providing
medicines, dental care,visits to doctors; programs
to keep children safe after
school hours and school
programs themselves; andthen subsidies for family
provided daycare, funds for
shelters for battered wives
and the list goes on: todifferent degrees, acrossthe country, all are slated
to be cut. The federal
government too is doing its
share, eliminating programs
like the Low Income Home
Energy Assistance whichhelps keeping millions warm
through the winter, andcommunity block grants thatfund services for the poor.
Meanwhile Social Security ismore than ever under attack,though for many retirees
it is the only source ofincome.
What do these cuts
signify? And how will women
be affected by them?
That austerity is part of
the neo-liberal project torestore power to the elites
is generally acknowledged.
What is less recognizedis that it is an attempt
to force workers to takeon all the costs of theirreproduction and as suchit places a particularburden on women. The
projected budget cuts aredesigned to eliminate
all pockets of social
spending that do not appear
immediately productive.
Not surprisingly, thosemost targeted are lowincome children andelderly, obviously seen
as expendable, worthy atbest of jails and nursing
homes. The ideologicaljustification is thesame that has served todefend the cuts in public
education. Behind theplatitudes about a balanced
budget, the assumption
taking hold is that our
reproduction is a private
rather than a public
good, something we alone
benefit from, for whichgovernment therefore bears
no responsibility. Thatthe entire business world
profits from the activities
that reproduce us, enabling
us to reappear everyday
in millions of workplaces,
is a truth the politicalclass has exorcized frompublic discourse. One of
the crucial tasks facing a
mass movement like Occupy
Wall Street is mobilizing
a feminist “consciousness
raising” campaign, putting
the spotlight on thisissue and demystifying
the attempt to privatize
our everyday reproductive
activities or portray themas micro-enterprises.
There is another secret
implicit in the newausterity deal which makesa feminist perspectiveof the essence. It isclearly expected that in
the aftermath of the new
cuts women will make up
for the loss. This is
not simply a matter ofhistorical tendencies, nor
is it because the services
cut are those that moreeasily will fall back on
the shoulders of women.
Although women today are
the bulk of the workforce —often working two or threejobs—all social statistics
indicate that they are theones who do most of theunpaid domestic labor in thehome, and carry the main
responsibility for theirfamilies’ reproduction.
Indeed, many are alreadyliving at a breaking point,

in a state of constantstress and anxiety that no
amount of anti-depressantscan alleviate.
Under these circumstances,having to take on more work
to care for a child or anelderly parent, to keep
one’s family healthy despite
cuts to healthcare, prepare
food previously bought,
wash more clothes by hand,walk to more places to saveon gasoline or ride a bus,
all the while endlessly
calculating how to cut
costs, and calculate what
can or cannot be afforded,
is to see one’s life turninto a hell. Yet, refusal tocomply is severely punished.
Those who try to better
their living conditions byjuggling credit cards orwriting phony checks, or
numb themselves by doing
drugs have been given an
harsh treatment, as shownby the rise in the numberof women in jail which has
leaped by 700% in the last
three decades.
What has to be done thento reverse this trend?
Clearly a broad coalitionof social forces must cometogether, such as the one
coalesced by the Occupy
Movement. But what is alsoneeded is a new feminist
initiative on the terrainof social reproduction,
which the official feminist
movement in the seventies
practically abandoned byembracing waged work, on theassumption that production
for the market is theDuring Hurricane Irene, it emerged that a storm surge of only four feetover normal highs would inundate lower Manhattan. The effects of thegradual sea level rise caused by climate change render such high intensity
events likely to be annual, rather than once a century. Soon, the only way
to occupy Liberty Plaza will be to swim.
Climate change is now: 2010 saw the single greatest rise in warminggas emissions in human history. The International Energy Authority, big
oil boosters in the ordinary way, have calculated that, because of new
power plant construction already underway, we have until 2017 to stop theincrease in emissions. The rhetoric across US politics that climate change
is something we should worry about for the sake of our children or even
grandchildren is, then, disastrously misplaced.
We spent trillions on the “war on terror” based on what former VicePresident Dick Cheney actually called the “one per cent” doctrine. What
he meant was that if there was a one per cent chance of a terrorist action,
the US had to act. Ninety-eight per cent of all climate scientists agree thatclimate change is real and getting worse. Meanwhile all Republican candidates for President deny that climate change even exists, and the current
President never utters the phrase for fear of angering Fox News.

33

highest good, regardless ofthe nature of its products
and who really benefits fromit. Even today there arefeminists who hold on tothis belief, as exemplified
by a speech Heidi Hartmann,
President of the Institutefor Policy Research and longtime feminist economist,
gave in 2009 at the peak of
the financial crisis:
The United States
is a woman’s successstory in many ways ...
Women’s increased [labor
participation] reflects
their growing commitment
to paid work and acorresponding reduction intime spent on family careover the life cycle; theirincreased training andeducation tend to draw women
into the labor market andkeep them there.
It is thanks to thisconcentration on women’s
participation in the labormarket as the measure of
improvement in their social
condition that women in
the US today still lackentitlements (like paid
maternity leave) common evenin poor countries, leaving
them to function as ‘plugs’
in the gaps opened by thecuts in social services.
Ironically, however, itis the very lack of any
public investment insocial reproduction thatis most likely responsible
for the stagnation, since
1999, in the percentage ofwomen in waged employment.

Nor can we expect action from global governance. The UN Convention
on Climate Change, meeting in Durban as I write, is talking about beginning its emissions limitations in 2020 and eliminating Kyoto, the one
legally binding treaty that exists. Like the police so much in evidence thesedays, all these forms of governance say to us “move on, there’s nothing tosee here.”
In response, indigenous and First Nation peoples have joined withclimate and social justice activists to occupy the convention. This action,
Occupy COP17 (the cumbersome name of the conference), has yet to bementioned in mainstream US media. A statement by Occupy COP17 wasread at Liberty Plaza on Saturday, December 3, Global Climate Justice Day:
“The same financial, corporate and political institutions that caused thefinancial crisis are poised to seize control of our atmosphere, our forests,
our agricultural lands and water. We will fight for our survival and notallow the elite to enter into a suicide pact for future generations.”+++
Paradoxically, the moment of eviction is the perfect time to occupy climate change. The more that our ideas, rather than our encampments, arethe center of the movement, the more they need to think about the connections between the local and the global. It’s estimated that there will besome 250 million climate migrants. Across the Pacific Small Island Statesfrom Kiribati in the West to Tuvalu in the South and the Carteret Islands inthe East, people are already abandoning islands and settlements. Someare flooded, others made uninhabitable by the salination of the soil. We
stand for their right to occupy their homes, the places where they choose
to be, just as we support the right to occupy the commons.
Indeed, the political invisibility of climate change within the current system even as the actual consequences of ongoing climate change become
more and more apparent is the refusal to accept that the planetary majority has an equal claim to the right to existence. This is the first claim in the
Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth made at Cochabamba, Bolivia,
in 2008 by the World People’s Conference on Climate Change as part of thecampaign for the “decolonization of the atmosphere.”
The standard reaction to such events in developed nations is a ‘more in
sorrow than anger’ shake of the head: and then we carry on, there’s nothing to see here. What Pacific small islands, developing nations, indigenous peoples and the global majority living on less than $2 a day have longknown is that from the point of view of finance capital we are all, to cite
the Micronesian activist Juan Aguon, “disposable humanity.” It’s interesting to see the fake concern from the media about the homeless and othermarginalized groups who congregate at Occupy sites. No one seems to
ask why, in the richest nation in the world, any small encampment attracts
such a following.

34

For subsidized childcare
centers are hard to comeby, and with 15 million
unemployed, families allover the country are pulling
their children out of thosethey must pay for, whichleads to a sharp decline inattendance.
Our task, then, in
opposing this new roundof budget cuts and thedestructive impact they will
have on future generations,is to reconstructfeminism, unearthing thatrevolutionary core thatthe institutionalizationof the feminist movementin the eighties andnineties marginalized,
and yet continues to shape
the politics of women’s
grassroots activism acrossthe planet. For a start,
we need to revitalize thefeminist project of exposing
the debt employers andthe state owe to those who
perform the manifold taskof reproducing life andreproducing the workforce
in our society. For the
existence of this great poolof unpaid labor, largely
invisible and primarily
performed by women, replaces
the services the state
more and more refuses toprovide. But above all,against the misery of “thejob” as offered in thecapitalist market, we needto revalue the work involvedin our reproduction, as thefoundation for finding new
revolutionary alternatives
to the capitalist failure to
produce a life worth living,in the homes, the farms, theschools, and the factoriesof the world.

DA MION SE ARLES

Thoreau at
Zuccotti
Park

About five years back I met a wellmeaning dumbass at a cocktail
party, which was pretty much as
good as it got in those days. The
talk turned to torture, how hethought it was fine sometimes.
This time I said something back.
(Sorry about your party, Stephen!)First of all, that the “ticking timebomb” scenario never happens:
you never know everything about
a disaster about to happen except
for one crucial piece of information that someone you have incustody knows. Second, torture
doesn’t work: the information isunreliable because anyone will
say anything to make it stop. And
third, torture is evil. It’s morally
wrong and bad.
The guy said it was refreshingto hear the argument presented soforcefully, which was big of him.
I doubt I changed anyone’s mind,
but underneath the depressionthat this was even an “argument”
we needed to have, I felt somehow
better. Later I realized why.
I was editing Thoreau’s Journal. In the entry of Dec. 3, 1860,
Thoreau writes about an argument
he had about John Brown, a year
after Brown’s execution:
Talking with Walcott and Staples to-day, they declared that John
Brown did wrong. When I said that
I thought he was right, they agreed[with each other] in asserting that

By occupying the symbolic space of authority we make visible the casualties of the prison-industrial system, the refusal of mental health services
to the majority of the population, the deployment of narcotics as theliteral opiate of the masses, and all those other things we’re not supposed
to see. The paradox of Occupy is that is has been forced to organize its
pessimism in the very last spaces of “the social” as the police extend theboundary of the administrative state—which only they have authority tovisualize—to be co-extensive with what there is.
Now, after the evictions, we need to turn around and see that the space
we are contesting is an island and the waters are rising. The refusal of the
global one per cent to recognize the existence and relevance of climate
claims is not a denial or a delusion but a political strategy and a choice.
As so many have come to realize, our last best hope is the global occupy
movement. It’s the G 7 Billion and not the G 20 who can make the changes
necessary to sustain the biosphere. No election, no cleverly worded document, no demand, no image will forestall our decision to press on regardless. It’s up to us now: then again, it always was.

he did wrong because he threw hislife away, and that no man had aright to undertake anything which
he knew would cost him his life. I
inquired if Christ did not foresee that
he would be crucified if he preachedsuch doctrines as he did, but theyboth, though as if it was their only
escape, asserted that they did not
believe that he did. Upon which athird party threw in, “You do notthink that he had so much foresightas Brown.” Of course, they as goodas said that, if Christ had foreseenthat he would be crucified, he would
have “backed out.”
Such are the principles and thelogic of the mass of men. It is to beremembered that by good deeds
or words you encourage yourself,
who always have need to witness
or hear them.
I had encouraged myself at that
cocktail party: there were words I
needed to witness in those years,
and if no one else would say them
I simply had to say them myself, so
I could hear them from someone.
That’s what Thoreau was doing,
too, in his argument with Walcott and Staples, and in the many
pages he wrote and speeches hegave on John Brown, and in somuch of his writing. Doing so literally killed him, it turned out—hestayed up late that snowy December 3rd, arguing instead of recovering from the cold that instead
developed into his terminal bronchitis—but as he also wrote, about
people who said John Brown threw
his life away: what way have they
thrown their lives, pray?
Encouragement is underrated, wherever and wheneverindividual action has been madeto seem hopeless. We want to see
the results. The Onion, as always,
nailed it: Nation Waiting For
Protesters To Clearly Articulate
Demands Before Ignoring Them(“As the Occupy Wall Street protest expands and grows into anationwide movement, Americans are eagerly awaiting a list of
demands from the group so they
can then systematically disregard
them and continue going about
their business…”). That was a few
weeks ago; then the collective wisdom in the thoughtful discussionsof Occupy Wall Street seemed toconverge on their lack of demands
being one of the movement’s
greatest strengths, or at least not
a serious weakness. Cynically: it

makes the movement a blank slate
onto which anyone can project
what they want. Hopefully: it isa practice of democratic involvement, a process, something likebeing alive.
Thoreau would have been
cheered by the people living inZuccotti Park—would have written a page of bitter irony on thepeople said to be living elsewhere,
and the other occupations theysee fit to prefer. He wouldn’t havewritten much about it in his Journal, the way he didn’t write muchabout the few signs of hope in
the antebellum 1850s, though hejoined them (the Underground
Railroad, for example). Thenagain, it’s now been three months,

Yotam MaromOccupy Wall Street Meets
Winter: A to-do list
On September 17th, we took Liberty Square and then hit the streets,
rejecting the marching permits they offered us, refusing their sidewalks.
Since then, the season has changed. Autumn has ended and winter isupon us. We’ve lost Liberty Square, and each day brings news from acrossthe country that another occupation has been evicted. Winter is here,
and with it the cold, the realization that you can’t run on empty, not if you
want to last. Winter shouts that that the next decade of organizing won’t
be sustainable if it looks like the first two months that it took to light
Autumn’s fire. Winter says you we need to be more than a string of eventsor actions or press releases, more than an endless meeting. Winter brings

35

It’s a strangely Transcendentalist
movement, encouraging by example without demanding imitationor anything else—they’re not asking you to go camp out in the park
any more than Thoreau wanted
everyone to live in a cabin. As forme, all I know is that now there
is one thing I can bear to see andhear about on the news every day:domestic news bringing something new, an imaginable future
that’s not like the present.

OWS PORTRAITS BY MATTHEW CONNORS

since September 17—a season,
approaching fall to approaching
winter—and he always loved to
track the seasons.
He would savage the Walcotts
and Stapleses who complain all
around us that the occupiers aren’t
doing enough, as though doing
nothing were better. Walcott andStaples want demands, while
the OWSers, it seems to me, arethere for its and their own sakes.

the knowledge that we won’t be in the headlines every day; that burn-out
and martyrdom are no good for anyone and no good for the cause. Winteris here to remind us that revolution is not an event but a process, and thatsocial transformation means not only harnessing a moment, but building
a movement.
But winter is not sad, and it’s not tragic; it’s just real. We will use the winterto become the movement we know is necessary.
We Will Not Hibernate: A To-Do List for the WinterGrow. We will continue to build relationships with communities who havebeen fighting and building for decades already, from tenants organizing
eviction defense in Bed-Stuy, to AIDS activists in the Staten Island. We willgrow by taking on struggles that protect people from the daily assaults
they experience—from austerity to police brutality—and by waging
struggles to meet peoples’ needs, like reclaiming foreclosed homes. We
will transcend the open calls to action and the expectation that they areenough to build a movement; we will organize the hard way, because thehard way is the only way. We will have the million one-on-one conversations it takes to build a movement, door to door if we have to, and we will36

do it out in the open, because
we have nothing to fear andnothing to hide.
Deepen. We will finally takethe time to learn how to dowhat we are doing better, fromthose who have been doing
this for so long—from theland liberation movements in
Brazil to the women on welfare
building community powerin Yonkers. We will also teach,because we are reinventing
the struggle as we go, and wehave learned a lot already.
We will ask each other difficult questions we never hadtime for: How do we organize
in a way that is inclusive andliberating? How do we build amovement led by those most marginalized and oppressed? How do we use
decentralization to actually empower people and address the imbalances
we face in society? We will think radically about what systems and historical processes led us to where we are now, dream deeply about the world
we want instead and the institutions we will need in order to live it out,
and plan thoroughly for the building and the fighting it will take us to getthere.
Build. We will create stable platforms for organizing and growth, and thefoundations necessary for a concerted long-term struggle—from facilitation training to office space. We will create mechanisms to meet people’s
basic needs using the skills we honed at Liberty Plaza to provide things
like food, legal aid, shelter, education, and more, and to do it all in a waythat is in line with the values of the world we are fighting for. We will continue to build systems for de-centralized coordination and decision-making, because liberation means participation, and participation demands
structures for communication, transparency, and accountability. We willtake our cue from the neighborhood assemblies in Sunnyside, and theuniversity assemblies at CUNY, who are pioneering a shift from general
assemblies to constituent assemblies—assemblies in neighborhoods,
workplaces, and schools. We will build there, because that’s where people
actually live and work, where we have direct, concrete, and permanent
relationships with a space, the institutions in it, and the people around us.
Liberate. We will take new space, indoors and outdoors. We will do it
because the movement needs bases in which it can create the values ofa free society, begin to build the institutions to carry them out, meet
peoples’ needs, and serve as a staging ground for the struggle against thestatus quo. We will take space for the movement to have a home and workplace, but we will also take space back for the communities from whom
it has been stolen, and for the families who need it in order to survive.
We mean not only to take space for its own sake, but to liberate it; we willtransform foreclosed houses into homes, empty lots into gardens, abandoned buildings into hospitals, schools, and community centers. We will
use the space we win for dreaming up the world to come.
Fight. We will continue to use direct action to intervene in the economic,
political, and social processes that govern peoples’ lives. We will use our
voices and our slogans, our banners and our bodies, to shine a spotlighton the classes and institutions that oppress and exploit. We will make itso that the tyrants who are ruining this planet cannot hold conferences or
public events without our presence being felt. We will fight in a way thatis not only symbolic, but also truly disruptive of the systems of oppression we face. We will block their doorways and their ports, interrupt theirforums, and obstruct the systems of production and consumption they
depend on. We will do it until they will have no choice but to disappear.
And then Spring will come.

Occupy &Space
Astra Taylor

fell flat in the months leading up to it, but certainly the encampments
were crucial (crucial though not sufficient, since one protest that took
place shortly before OWS actually involved camping). By taking spaceand holding it OWS has captivated America like no protest movement inrecent memory. Yet the crackdowns on occupations across the country
have shown it will be difficult, if not impossible, to maintain these bastions of resistance moving forward: We are simply outnumbered, outfunded, and outgunned. While some groups, like Occupy Oakland, haveheroically attempted to reclaim the space from which they were ousted,
they have been rebuffed each time by overwhelming force. (And there
have been more wily kinds of subversion, too: At Oscar Grant Plaza, theoriginal site of the Oakland camp, the authorities have reportedly kept
the sprinklers on, turning the lawn into a soggy mess unfit for sleeping.)
Here in New York, though the raid on Liberty Plaza was the moment we
had all been waiting for, we were still caught off guard. Most of us had
no ready or clear answer to the question of how to move forward without the park. It turned out, though, that a small group had been secretly
devising a plan to occupy a second space. They jumped into action, weaving through the crowd, instructing everyone to meet at Canal Street and6th Avenue. A few hours later a couple hundred people amassed at asite called Duarte Square, a giant empty lot not far from the entrance tothe Holland Tunnel owned by Trinity Church. Activists cut a hole in thefence surrounding the space and moved in, carrying large yellow signs,
some attached to basic wooden frames alluding to shelter. OCCUPY.
LIBERATE. The church had been, and still claims to be, supportive of
OWS, offering office and meeting space and bathroom access to occupiers before and after the raid, but they did not appreciate the sudden
invasion of their property. By noon the police had been called and clergy
members watched, impassive, as protesters were beaten and dragged
away.
Since that morning Duarte Square has become a flashpoint of sorts,
the quixotic focus of one of OWS’s most disciplined organizing campaigns. On the night of November 20th I joined a candlelight procession
following a small fleet of illuminated tents stenciled with the movement’s
new slogan: “You cannot evict an idea whose time has come.” Thosetents, carried high on sticks, playfully reminded everyone we passed that
Occupy was not over. Waiters smoking near staff entrances cheered us
on as we paraded by, drivers honked their support, and an angry woman
outside a bar made the “loser” signal at us, her eyes locking briefly with

Even before Liberty Plaza was raided many of us were asking what was
next for Occupy Wall Street. The movement, we said, was about morethan holding a space, even one in the heart of Manhattan’s financial district. Occupation, I often heard, was a means, not an end, a tactic, not atarget. The goal, from the beginning, was to do more than build an outdoor urban commune supported by donations solicited over the Internet. We wanted to discomfit the one percent, to interrupt their goodtimes and impact their pocketbooks—or overthrow them entirely.
The dual threat of eviction and inclement weather meant next steps
were never far from people’s minds. The camp can’t last forever, we’d
say knowingly, while friends nodded in agreement. And yet, when theraid actually happened—when Bloomberg sent one thousand police officers dressed in riot gear, and paramilitary helicopters hovered overhead,
when the entire encampment was hauled off to the garbage dump andhalf-asleep occupiers were dragged to jail—it was a shock. Circling thepolice barricades that night many of the faces I passed in the street looked
stunned; some individuals crumpled on the sidewalk and wept. The lossof Liberty Plaza was experienced as just that—a real loss, a possibly profound one. By dawn photos began to circulate of the park, freshly powerwashed, empty and gleaming, almost as though we had never been there,
though the police ringing the periphery and the newly installed private
security guards gave us away.
+++
No one can really say what unique coincidence of events and factors
caused OWS to break into mainstream consciousness when so manywell-intentioned and smartly planned protests with similar messages

37

mine. The march arrived at Duarte Square, where we covered long sheetsof paper with pleas directed at church officials, and I felt conflicted. I
have no doubt the space could be put to better use by the movement(right now it’s waiting to be developed into a 429 foot tall “residential
tower”), but there was something odd about our appeals for sanctuary. If,
by some miracle, the church granted us permission to stay there, would
it even be an occupation?
In the weeks that have followed Trinity Church has not budged, whilea core group of organizers show no signs of relenting in their efforts totake the space, promising another attempt to “liberate” Duarte Square on
December 17th, soon after this gazette goes to press. They imagine a newkind of occupation, better organized, more cohesive, and in some ways
more exclusive, than the one at Liberty Plaza, and there is much to admire
about their vision. In pursuit of it they have circulated petitions, solicited
op-eds, and rallied faith leaders to their cause, consistently highlighting
the contradictions between Trinity Church’s scriptural duties and its status as New York City’s third largest landholder. “In terms of them beinga real estate company, their stance makes sense,” the Reverend at Churchof the Ascension in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, told the press. “In terms ofthem being a church, it makes no sense. The question is, where are their
obligations?” Raising the stakes, a group of three young men, former
occupiers, declared a hunger strike demanding access to the vacant lot,which they sat down next to. The church quickly had them arrested fortrespassing and, when they returned, arrested them again, underscoring
the congregation’s inflexibility on the issue. Meanwhile, many movement
sympathizers looked on in confusion. Given the various elements andissues at play—the eviction from Liberty Plaza, the lack of open space inwhich to peacefully protest in our city, the inequities of property ownership, the church’s ostensible sympathy towards OWS, the presenceof hunker strikers, and the entreaties to religious figures who were also
ruthless real estate moguls—the thread was getting hard to follow. Sill I
signed the group’s latest petition, not wanting to lose faith.

OWS PORTRAITS BY MATTHEW CONNORS+++
So far, in New York at least, energy for protest has not waned. The movement can appear anywhere at any time. There are inventive demonstrations every day, too many for any one person to keep up with, and morein the works. Yet attempts to occupy and hold space beyond Liberty Plaza
have has missed the mark more than they have hit it, from the ridiculous
and ridiculed takeover of the non-profit gallery Artists Space to the failed
occupation of a student center at the New School, which initially had
enormous promise yet quickly devolved despite the fact the building was
secure thanks to support from sympathetic faculty and administrators.

38

Without a doubt, the most successful attempt to expand the concept ofoccupation took place on December 6th during a national day of action
called “Occupy Our Homes,” an attempt to refocus attention and outrageon the havoc wrecked by the mortgage crisis—a crisis experts say is only
half over (around 6 million homes have been seized since 2007, and overthe next four years an estimated 8 million more are predicted go into
foreclosure). In Chicago, a homeless woman and her baby moved into a
foreclosed home with the blessing of the previous owner and the help of
more than forty supporters; in Atlanta, protesters made an appearance at
foreclosure auctions in three counties; in Denver, activists collected garbage from abandoned properties and delivered it to the mayor; in Oakland, a mother of three reclaimed the townhouse she lost after becoming
unemployed while another group held a barbeque at a property owned
by Fannie Mae. “To occupy a house owned by Bank of America is tooccupy Wall Street,” one activist told me, explaining the underlying logic.
“We are literally occupying Wall Street in our own communities.”
In New York, Occupy worked with a variety of community organizations and allies to host a foreclosure tour and coordinate the re-occupation and renovation of a vacant bank-owned property. When we reachedour final destination, a small house at 702 Vermont Street in Brooklyn,
the new residents, a previously homeless family of four, were alreadyinside, along with a veritable army of activists coordinating the eventand scheduling rotating teams to guard against eviction. Tasha Glasgow,
the mother, was almost too shy to speak, but managed to express her
sincere thanks to everyone assembled. Alfredo Carrasquillo, the father ofher two children, including a 9-year old daughter who is severely autistic,
held back emotion as he addressed the crowd, making sure to acknowledge the NYPD who dotted the sidewalks and could be seen on the roofsof nearby buildings. “I’m just hoping they don’t wake me up in my bed at
2 am,” he joked. As of this writing, almost a week later, the NYPD has notmade any arrests at the house, though they have repeatedly intimidated
the people staying there. The neighbors, in contrast, have welcomed theoccupiers with open arms, inviting them over for tea and to baby showers held on the block. One woman, who lives a few doors down, said they
could use her kitchen a few nights a week since the utilities in the occupied house aren’t hooked up.
Not only does the occupation of abandoned foreclosed homes connect the dots between Wall Street and Main Street, it can also lead toswift and tangible victories, something movements desperately need formomentum to be maintained. The banks, it seems, are softer targets than
one might expect because so many cases are rife with legal irregularities
and outright criminality. It’s not uncommon for customers to be misled,crucial paperwork lost and documents robo-signed. While the mortgage
crisis involved credit default swaps and securities and other complex

financial instruments, one thing that clued investigators in to the systemic fraud now known to have taken place at Countrywide (right before
it merged with Bank Of America) were the extra Wite-Out dispensers
on brokers’ desks, the tool of choice for low-fi chicanery: signatures
were forged, paperwork faked, and numbers fudged, leaving countless
people with subprime mortgages when they qualified for better ones.
This duplicity is why banks often change their tune when threatenedwith serious scrutiny; they count on cases to go uncontested, as the vast
majority do, because they often lose if actually taken to court. In Rochester, one bank called off an eviction when they got wind that a protest—ablockade and a press conference—was being planned.
It’s interesting, given the glowing media coverage Occupy Our Homes
received, that the action—billed as Occupy’s big leap forward—was notexactly innovative. Take Back The Land, which started in Miami, hasbeen rehousing people in foreclosed properties since the mortgage crisis began. Going further back, the same techniques and rhetoric canbe traced to the squatters campaigns that took off in New York City inthe late ’70s (indeed, some of the squatting pioneers are now mentoring a new generation of activists) and the largely forgotten poor people’s
movements of the late eighties and nineties. On May 1st, 1990, in aneffort remarkably similar to Occupy Our Homes, homeless activists ineight cities reclaimed dozens of government owned properties, many ofwhich they wrested control of for good. Occupy, in other words, is notbreaking new ground, but bringing public attention to the kind of civil
disobedience that typically goes under the radar.
But what’s clear—and terrifying—looking back on the occupation
efforts of decades past, is that the potential base of support today is far
broader than previous generations of activists could have ever dreamed.
With one in five homes facing foreclosure and filings showing no sign ofslowing down in the next few years, the number of people touched by the
mortgage crisis—whether because they have lost their homes or because
their homes are now underwater—truly boggles the mind.
+++
Occupy Wall Street’s battle is nothing compared to what early civil rights
advocates faced. Our predecessors had to convince their opponents toradically shift their worldview and abandon deeply held prejudices.
Today, in contrast, public sentiment on economic issues broadly aligns
with Occupy Wall Street. Americans are angry at the banks; they are
angry about inequality; they are angry at politicians’ servility to corporate interests. The challenge, then, is convincing people that their anger
is worth acting on, that something can be done. The path forward isn’t
obvious. It’s difficult to organize against something as abstract as financecapital. How do you occupy something that is everywhere and nowhere?
Organizing around the mortgage crisis is a good step, for not only does
it link seemingly arcane issues, like deregulation, to daily life and connect grassroots direct action to the action of the legislative variety (likethe state attorney generals who are stepping up their inquiries into illegal home seizures and other mortgage misdeeds), it also promises small
successes along the way, like offering shelter to a family that would otherwise be on the street. But not everyone is a struggling homeowner oralready homeless; not everyone will identify with this particular struggle
enough to join it.
Indeed, one problem facing many of Occupy’s early adopters is that,given high rates of student debt and unemployment, they may never havea chance to achieve that version of the American dream. As one of the
big yellow signs at Duarte Square put it the morning after the evictionof Liberty Plaza: “I will never own a home in my life.” For these people
questions of space and where and how to occupy take a different shape.
For individuals who are not part of a student body, or rooted in neighborhood, or part of a union, the need, first of all, is to make a communityfrom scratch, to cohere with a group under a common identity and findcommon cause. A community in formation was part of what the experiment at Liberty Plaza promised. Liberty Plaza was a space to be together,a space to struggle in and over—a space that grounded and oriented the
movement, however imperfectly at times.

Space matters for Occupy. But when we seize it—whether it’s the sidewalk, the street, a park, a plaza, a port, a house, or a workplace—wemust also claim the moral high ground so that others can be enticed tocome and join us there. Occupy Our Homes made clear the connections
between the domestic sphere and the financial sector: The occupationof abandoned bank-owned properties is actually a reclamation, a taking back of that which has been taken away, a recouping of somethingalready paid for through other means (by unfairly ballooning monthly
payments and the still-indeterminate government bail out, for example).
The focus on Duarte Square, I fear, fails to draw the same kind of obvious
unswerving link to the urgent issues that Occupy Wall Street emerged toaddress. At a direct action meeting a few weeks ago a young man spoke
up. “We just need to occupy something,” he said impatiently. “Anything!”
But if Occupy Wall Street takes the wrong space—or fails to clearly articulate the reasons why it is taking the right one—it may end up as lost as
if it had none at all.

contents
After the Eviction Astra Taylor 2
Last Night at Zuccotti Park Mark Greif 2
Mayor Bloomberg’s Language Marco Roth 2
Arrested Kathleen Ross 3
This is What Nonviolence Looks Like Jeremy Kessler 4
The New School in Exile, Revisited Rachel Signer 4
The Legal Issues of Zuccotti Park Karen Smith 6
November 15 Courtroom Sarah Resnick 7
Student Power Rebecca Nathanson 8
Neighbors Erin Sheehy 9
Occupying a Foreclosed Home Meaghan Linick 10
Bulldozers of the Mind Kathryn Crim 11
Occupy Minnesota Randall Cohn 11Campaign versus Encampment Gwen Snyder 13
Occupy Cincy Brandon Harris 14
Occupy UC Davis Geoffrey Wildanger 14
Re-Articulating The Struggle for Education		Christopher Herring and Zoltan Gluck 16
Dispatch from the Audre Lorde—Howard Zinn Library
Kristin Parker 16
Best Years of Our Lives Eli Schmitt 18
December 12 Port Shutdown Lili Loofbourow 18
Greenham Common Ann Snitow 20
After The Action L.A. Kauffman 24
Neo Autonomia Stephen Squibb 25
Act Up Sarah Schulman 26
A Road Trip from the East Coast to the West Coast		
Cinzia Arruzza 28
From Occupation to Communization Daniel Marcus 30
Some Issues with Horizontalism Marina Sitrin 30
Women, Austerity, & the Unfinished Feminist Revolution
Silvia Federici 32
Occupy Climate Change Nicholas Mirzoeff 32
Thoreau at Zuccotti Park Damion Searles 30
OWS Meets Winter: A To-Do List Yotam Moram 35
Occupy & Space Astra Taylor 37

about usthis gazette went to print on december 14th 2011
and is the third in a series
editors astra taylor, eli schmitt, nikil saval,sarah resnick, sarah leonard, mark greif, keith
gessen, carla blumenkranz
design dan o. williams
layout eli schmitt
write to us at gazette@nplusonemag.com

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