Thank You, Anarchy. Nathan Schneider
so far from what they longed for. They shared their goals and their strategies, as well as their sacrifices—for many of them, imprisonment and torture. They had arguments and epiphanies. They learned from what one another was doing and thinking, and grew stronger as a result.
During a break in the discussion, I noticed a photocopied essay by one of those at the seminar, a memoir of her time in the civil rights movement. The essay opened with a passage from a nineteenth-century poem born of the struggle over slavery. It described a moment arising, or a movement, in which a whole society is forced to choose where it stands: “Some great cause, God’s new Messiah.” When might such a moment, or a movement, come to us in the United States again? Those words became my mission.
I left that meeting with something lit up inside me. I now knew the kinds of stories I needed to learn how to tell—the stories of how people go from wanting to resist to actually doing so, of how by reasoning and creativity they learn to build power. I wasn’t interested so much in reporting on more protests, coming and going with the spectacle; I wanted to experience the planning and organizing by which the spectacle, and whatever comes of it, came about. So when I returned home to New York, I started looking for the planning process of some great cause to follow and to learn from. It turned out that this would be easier than I expected—and that the spectacle would be the process itself.
Revolution didn’t seem like such a crazy idea in 2011. Just a few weeks into the year, two dictators had already bowed to the power of the people. By late February, the victorious Egyptians were phoning in pizza-delivery orders to the occupied Wisconsin state capitol, in Madison. Unrest followed the summer’s heat to Greece, Spain, and England. Europe’s summer was Chile’s winter, but students and unions rose up there too. Tel Aviv grew a tent city.
While Tahrir Square in Cairo was still full, the boutique-y activist art magazine Adbusters published a blog post imagining “A Million Man March on Wall Street.” But the United States appeared to go quiet after Madison, its politics again domesticated by talk of the “debt ceiling” and the Iowa straw poll; when tens of thousands actually did march on Wall Street on May 12, few noticed and fewer remembered.
While following the march that day on Twitter from Florida, however, a thirty-two-year-old drifter using the pseudonym Gary Roland read about another action planned near Wall Street for the next month: Operation Empire State Rebellion, or OpESR. That tweet led him to a dot-commer-turned-activist-journalist named David DeGraw. DeGraw was working through the Internet entity known as Anonymous, which over the past year or two had been emerging from various cesspools online into a swarm of vigilantes for justice. With Anonymous, DeGraw had helped build safe networks for the dissidents of the Arab Spring. Since early 2010 he had also been writing about his vision of a movement closer to home, a movement in which the lower 99 percent of the United States would rebel against the rapacity and corruption of the top 1 percent. An Anonymous unit formed to organize OpESR, calling itself A99.
Through DeGraw’s website, Roland helped make plans. Having recently lost his job as a construction manager for a New York real estate firm, he was familiar with the city’s public spaces and the laws applying to them. He proposed that OpESR try to occupy Zuccotti Park, a publicly accessible place privately owned by Brookfield Office Properties. On June 14—Flag Day—Zuccotti Park would be its target.
Anonymous-branded videos announcing the action had begun to appear in March and got hundreds of thousands of views. Momentum seemed to be building. When the day came, though, only sixteen people arrived at Chase Manhattan Plaza, where the march to Zuccotti was to commence, and of the sixteen only four intended to occupy.
Undeterred, Roland decided to join another occupation that was beginning the same day near City Hall, a few blocks north. Organized by a coalition called New Yorkers against Budget Cuts, the so-called Bloombergville occupation would turn into a three-week stand against the city’s austerity budget. It didn’t seem to amount to much on its own, but it eventually proved to be another step building toward something that would.
“The attention we were able to get online,” David DeGraw wrote after the flop on June 14, “obviously doesn’t translate into action.” Consoling himself with the thought that the attempt was at least spreading awareness, he started talking about trying again on September 10, a date chosen in deference to the Anonymous convention of operating in three-month cycles.
More simultaneity, more synchronicity: September 10 was also the day on which a completely separate mass action was slated to happen in Washington. Seize DC, as it was called, came from a small organization called Citizens for Legitimate Government (CLG), which had experienced a period of some prominence during the Bush years.
“We’re thinking of this as a guerrilla protest,” CLG’s Michael Rectenwald told me on a bench in Washington Square Park. (In addition to being the group’s founder, chair, and “chief editorialist,” he is a professor at New York University who writes about nineteenth-century working-class intellectuals.) The goal was to mount a protest against wars abroad and corporate control at home, beginning on the eve of the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks but possibly continuing much longer. “We’re trying to get the maximum impact for the numbers we have,” Rectenwald said. The details would be worked out more or less on the fly.
Numbers, however, were again the problem. CLG had called for Seize DC on its seventy-five-thousand-member e-mail list, but by late August it was clear that a turnout of even a thousand wasn’t likely. This, too, had to be put on hold.
The call that came on July 13 from Adbusters was just one more among the others. Like OpESR and Seize DC, its prospects were entrusted to the Internet. The name was in the idiom of a Twitter hashtag: #OCCUPYWALLSTREET. Accompanying that was an image of a ballerina posed atop the Financial District’s Charging Bull statue, with police in riot gear partly obscured by tear gas in the background. Red letters at the top asked, “WHAT IS OUR ONE DEMAND?” At the bottom, in white, it said “SEPTEMBER 17TH”—the birthday of Adbusters founder Kalle Lasn’s mother—and “BRING TENT.” The image appeared as a centerfold in an issue titled “Post Anarchism,” which also included an article by David Graeber. With that, more or less, the magazine’s logistical guidance ended.
“What we want to play is a more philosophical role,” Adbusters’ twenty-nine-year-old senior editor, Micah White, told me in August. Not dirtying its hands with organizing became just part of the aesthetic, part of the mystique.
Almost at once, Twitter accounts, Facebook pages, and Internet Relay Chat channels started appearing and connecting. “#OCCUPYWALLSTREET goes viral,” Adbusters announced in a “Tactical Briefing” e-mail on July 26. The following day, Alexa O’Brien’s US Day of Rage declared its support for the occupation. O’Brien and the colleagues she’d found online were organizing actions on September 17 in Los Angeles, Portland, Austin, Seattle, and San Francisco, in addition to Wall Street. Her press releases and tweets became so ubiquitous that people started referring to #OCCUPYWALLSTREET and US Day of Rage interchangeably.
I first heard about the idea of occupying Wall Street while attending the planning meetings of yet another group that, since April, had been planning another indefinitely long occupation of a symbolic public space. In late July I attended one of its meetings, around a conference table in an office above Broadway shared by a handful of New York activist organizations. Those present, both in person and over video-chat, included some of the hardiest survivors of Bush-era dissent. They were mostly middle-aged, frustrated, and ready for a breakthrough. This October 2011 Coalition intended to set up camp at Freedom Plaza in Washington DC starting on October 6, in time for the tenth anniversary of the war in Afghanistan. “Stop the machine!” went their slogan, “Create a new world!”
In early August, Al Gore told TV commentator Keith Olbermann, “We need to have an American Spring.” But people all over the country were already fumbling toward an American Autumn.
What, if anything, the hubbub online actually amounted to remained opaque. “We are not a political party,” Alexa O’Brien told me when I asked her about the nature of US Day of Rage in mid-August. “We are an idea.” Here’s how she described its genesis, out of the inspiration of the Arab Spring:
I