Thank You, Anarchy. Nathan Schneider
and Tarak Kauff, who were just arriving from another gathering in Harlem. They had met each other at protests over the past few years, in jail after an action at the Supreme Court in DC, and in Cairo during a mobilization against Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip. I updated Tarak—who had served in the army in the early 1960s and could still do a hundred push-ups—on what had been going on. None of it appeared to surprise or trouble him.
“It’s really, really hard,” he said in his Queens accent, as the Internet Committee proposals ground through consensus a few steps away. “They’re doing fine.”
Micah White of Adbusters said, when I called him on August 12:
The worst outcome would be to get there and they just fumble it by doing this whole lefty game we always play, which is self-defeatist. We go there, make some unreasonable demand, like, we want to abolish capitalism and we won’t leave until we do. And well, that’s like the war on terrorism; that’s an impossible dream. Or they just squander it by being some hipster, anarchist insurrection like, we’re gonna smash some stores and make a spectacle. And everyone’s like, “Why?”
Because we have something beautiful going here. So we’re trying to rise above the sectarian clashings of whether or not US Day of Rage is tweeting too much or whether or not the libertarians are—you know? And reach out to the Tea Party too. This is a moment for all of America.
I don’t see why this has to be a lefty moment or a righty moment, because this is a moment for us to reinvent democracy in America, because it’s getting to be too late. If we don’t do it now, we are reaching the end.
In the NYC General Assembly, as well as on the Internet, the idea of “one demand” that Adbusters had promulgated was a topic of perpetual discussion. Some of the proposals that were being suggested:
Impose a Tobin tax (or a “Robin Hood tax”) on financial transactions, a popular proposition among some economists for simultaneously bringing the most speculative markets a bit more under control while generating revenue for social programs. This idea was described in one of the planning GAs on a photocopied sheet of paper signed under the activist pen name “Luther Blissett.”
Restore the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which was repealed by Bill Clinton in 1999. It prevented investment banks from gambling with money deposited in their commercial affiliates, putting a further brake on speculation and lessening the public’s exposure to the banks’ risk.
Overturn the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which massively deregulated the campaign finance system.
Demand universal employment in New York, with the accompanying socialist mantra “A job is a right!”
“End the Fed.” The various libertarian contingents (and fans of the online documentary sensation Zeitgeist) were especially insistent on this proposal for the abolition of the Federal Reserve.
“End the wars, tax the rich.” This slogan of the antiwar movement tended to come from older voices, and it figured prominently in the October 2011 Coalition.
None of these was to win out. “One demand is dangerous,” I remember someone saying in Tompkins Square Park. “This is for the long haul.” Another added, “Personally, I’m not asking anything of Wall Street.” And another: “Once you get pigeonholed into one demand, it becomes easy to be just about winning or losing.”
At first the “one demand” was simply hard to agree on. But gradually its absence seemed to make more and more sense.
The August 27 GA meeting didn’t happen because there was a hurricane that weekend—weird for New York City, just like the earthquake a few days earlier. I missed the following weekend’s meeting because I went to the October 2011 Coalition’s retreat at Ellen and Tarak’s house up in Woodstock, where a dozen organizers holed up for two nights and a long day of planning the DC occupation. They were eating well, singing protest songs, and debating the theories of Gene Sharp, the scholar who from his home office in Boston helped inspire revolutions as far away as Serbia and Egypt. Everyone in the group came with some deep well of experience—a Ralph Nader presidential campaign manager, leaders of major antiwar groups, and the gruff Veterans for Peace, whose youthfulness returned to them with any talk of tactics. After decades of trying leaderless activism, they affirmed to one another that identifying leaders is really okay. It was conspicuous that only the very youngest—a sober-minded, thirty-eight-year-old Israeli who managed their website—had any real Internet expertise.
The goal of the occupation was to create a space for people to come into their own, explained Margaret Flowers, a pediatrician and a mother of three teenagers, who became radicalized while fighting for single-payer health care. She was among those who first conceived of the plan for October 6, but Margaret and the other organizers realized that the moment they succeeded—if they did, by some definition of the word—would be the moment they’d have to let go and let this take a life of its own.
“I just think of how I raised my children,” she said.
The organizers gathered in the living room the first night, after dinner on the screened-in porch out back, for a meeting over Skype with a guru-type old man in Santa Cruz. His expertise was in a technique for “grounding” oneself with chi—or energy, or qigong, or the earth, or plain love—pointing one’s attention to the ground underneath and feeling oneself as connected to it. For too long, they put up with him explaining all this—as strange women strolled by in the background, occasionally pausing to look at the camera or to stand in as demonstration subjects when he attempted to explain just what he was talking about and what it had to do with revolution. Tarak fell asleep in his chair as it became clear that the guy was quite pathetically just in search of a market, a spot on the website, and access to a huge crowd so he could jizz his metaphysics on them and make a buck in the process. For the rest of the retreat they’d joke about this—“Are you grounded?” But a few weeks later, standing again and again before columns of angry cops, I’ve got to say that I fell back on what little I’d gleaned of his technique.
The rest of the retreat was far more reasonable. Sketching notes on giant sheets of paper on an easel, the organizers set out to assess what their protomovement was up against and what its strengths and weaknesses were. While debate about the “one demand” had come to an impasse in Tompkins Square Park, this group decided much more methodically not to state demands at the outset. For months already, they had been developing a fifteen-point set of proscriptions on issues ranging from military spending to public transportation, but now they started thinking that the group wasn’t strong enough—not yet—to make such demands heard. They concluded from their discussion of Gene Sharp that there was no point in making a demand until they were in a position to force the system to accept it. Instead, their goal would be to host an open conversation at their occupation in the capital, to spread a culture of resistance to the illegitimate politics of Washington. Given where they were at the time, the first priority was to claim that space, cause a disruption, and grow.
The concluding topic of the retreat, after Goals and Strategy and Tactics were settled, was Message. Over wine that Saturday night, the group tripped and turned over words until finally landing on something that would let them go to bed satisfied: “It Starts Here.” The slogan, however, was destined for obsolescence; by the time they pitched their tents in October, they would seem like latecomers.
Reports about the planned occupation of Wall Street trickled out slowly online, and consequently they betrayed the biases of the Internet: much discussion of Adbusters, US Day of Rage, and Anonymous, but hardly anything about the General Assembly—which, despite not having an active website, still constituted the closest thing to a guaranteed turnout on September 17.
Among the most prolific early chroniclers was Aaron Klein of the right-wing news website WorldNetDaily. His articles claimed that September 17 could bring “Britain-style riots,” that “Day of Rage” was a reference to the terrorism of the Weather Underground, and that the billionaire George Soros—who else?—was behind it all. Because Stephen Lerner of the Service Employees International Union had been murmuring about wanting to see an uprising against banks, Klein concluded