Thank You, Anarchy. Nathan Schneider
the like, none wanted to touch the idea of an occupation with a ten-foot pole. But Klein thought he saw exactly the kind of vast left-wing conspiracy he had been outlining in his book, Red Army: The Radical Network That Must Be Defeated to Save America, which was scheduled for release in October. Before most Americans had heard of #OCCUPYWALLSTREET, Klein’s gumshoeing inspired a new fund-raising and lobbying campaign from the conservative AmeriPAC: “On September 17th,” the title of one solicitation warned, “Socialists Will Riot Like Egyptians in All Fifty States.”
My next chance to go to an NYC General Assembly meeting was on September 10, a week before the date Adbusters had named. The facilitators this time were especially expert—impatient with off-topic speeches and creative with synthesizing what was said into passable proposals. Things got done. But really, most of the work was already being handled by the various formal and informal committees that had grown out of the General Assembly. I was learning that the point of a consensus process like this is often less to make decisions than to hear one another out; individuals and subgroups can then act autonomously, respecting the assembly while sparing it the burden of micromanagement.
On September 1, nine people had been arrested while attempting to sleep legally on the sidewalk of Wall Street as a “test run,” and a video of it was getting traction online. A student group was rehearsing a flash mob to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” The Food Committee had raised eight hundred dollars—the only funding that I heard mentioned—which was about a quarter of the goal for supplying water and peanut butter sandwiches. The National Lawyers Guild would be sending observers in green caps. More than any one plan, there were plans.
I didn’t see Georgia Sagri there on September 10. Gary Roland showed up with an actress he’d met at Bloombergville; they had gone on a bike trip around the country but then decided to come back to see what would happen on the 17th. There was enough of a crowd that the facilitators had to demonstrate the “people’s microphone,” which would become a hallmark of the movement: the speaker addresses the audience in short phrases, and those who can hear repeat them in turn for the benefit of those who can’t. Less can be said that way, and less quickly, but more actually tends to be heard.
In the three weeks since the previous GA meeting I had attended, the mess had congealed into common wisdom. Frustrations were past, folded into the present, and turned into lessons. Some of these planners would later be accused of belonging to a secret leadership cabal behind the leaderless movement; if they were, it was the result of nothing more mysterious than having come to know and trust one another after a month and a half of arguing, digressing, and, occasionally, achieving consensus.
The Tactics Committee gave its report. An occupation right in front of the Stock Exchange seemed unfeasible and overly vulnerable. The previous week, the GA had decided to convene an assembly on September 17 at Chase Manhattan Plaza. The committee was coming up with contingencies, and contingencies for contingencies, in case that plan didn’t work. In all likelihood there would be a legal encampment along sidewalks, which many had done during Bloombergville. Despite Adbusters’s initial suggestion to “bring tent” and the rapper Lupe Fiasco’s promise to donate fifty of them, tents would probably be too risky—though it all depended on how many people would be there and what those people would be willing to do. As in Cairo and Madrid, the encampment would have to form itself.
Keeping tactics loose might also be safer. Everyone assumed there were cops in the group—I, for one, had my short list of suspects—and the less you plan ahead, the less they can plan for you.
By this point, the idea of making a single demand had completely fallen out of fashion. After a month and a half of meetings, those in the General Assembly were getting addicted to listening to one another and being heard. Rather than discussing the Glass-Steagall Act or campaign-finance reform, they were talking about making assemblies like this one spread, around the city and around the country. The process of bottom-up direct democracy would be the occupation’s chief message at first, not some call for legislation to be passed from on high. They’d figure out the rest from there.
I was still wrapping my head around this. Everyone was. This was a kind of politics most had never quite experienced, a kind apparently necessary even if its consequences seemed eternally obscure.
Drew Hornbein, who’d almost left the movement after how he’d been treated at the meeting three weeks earlier, was back. “What’s really keeping me in this is the idea of a general assembly, of the horizontal power structure and decision making,” he said. Mike Andrews—a tall, well-muscled book editor who usually spoke for the Tactics Committee—told me about how he felt after being at a GA meeting:
It pushes you toward being more respectful of the people there. Even after General Assembly ends I find myself being very attentive in situations where I’m not normally so attentive. So if I go get some food after General Assembly, I find myself being very polite to the person I’m ordering from, and listening if they talk back to me.
Maybe assemblies like this could even become a new basis for organizing political power on a larger scale. Of course, in the months to come this would be exactly what happened; as the call to occupy spread, assemblies followed. From Boston to Oakland to Missoula, Montana, activists wiggled fingers in horizontally structured meetings, using a common language to discuss problems both local and global—just as was hoped for, just as was planned. But the fact that there was a plan doesn’t mean that the plan was complete, or reassuring, or guaranteed to have the intended effect.
A spree of decisions passed by consensus the night of September 10. There would be no appointed marshals or police negotiators; if the police wanted to negotiate, it would have to be with the whole assembly. The General Assembly would start on the 17th at three o’clock—“and if we’re in jail we start it there.” A few rebellious minutes after ten, when the park was supposed to be closed, the meeting ended, and we huddled around tables at Odessa, a nearby diner, for drinks.
Throughout the week before September 17, there were committee meetings, civil-disobedience training sessions, and warm-ups. People from all over started sending pictures of themselves holding signs with their grievances against Wall Street, which were posted at wearethe99percent.tumblr.com. When the Arts & Culture Committee put on midday yoga classes and speak-outs in front of the Stock Exchange, onlookers were baffled, but that didn’t matter. “I’ve never felt so liberated, so free!” one of the planners told me, a Brazilian doctor studying for a master’s in public health. He was carrying around with him a hefty copy of Peter Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid.
Also in front of the Stock Exchange one of those days was a man in a giant white no. 4 lottery ball suit with an Uncle Sam hat on top that said “justice.” The suit, he told me, had been created for a business of his then in litigation. Next to him his colleague held a sign that said “Please Re-Elect PRESIDENT OBAMA Or The little guy Has No Chance.” I asked if they were involved in occupying Wall Street, and they informed me they weren’t. For them, the choice of location was a practical matter.
“We were at Times Square once,” the man with the sign said. “It was just too crowded.”
That week, too, Anonymous threatened a fearsome attack on bank websites. And more. No one could know everything that was happening, much less whether it would work.
“Maybe the General Assembly has been the really big central planner, but I don’t know,” Drew Hornbein told me that week over lunch. “There might be a lot of other stuff going on.” I mentioned the group organizing for October 6, and he asked me to send him some links. If Wall Street didn’t work out he could help with that.
There was a small meeting a few days before the 17th in the back of a bar in the Bed-Stuy section of Brooklyn—for outreach, to talk about #OCCUPYWALLSTREET with some locals. It’s a mostly black neighborhood, yet all but one of us—hip-hop elder Radio Rahim—were white. Still, “What a propitious moment this is!” predicted a retired schoolteacher. “This is the moment.”
“This is fucking really new, this is the definition of a truly radical movement,” said one of the graduate students from the General Assembly. “So, yeah, we’re gonna win.”
Occupation was on my mind constantly