CONNECT
Waging Nonviolence / Op-Ed
Published: Saturday 24 September 2011
There’s a lot of misinformation about the occupation of Wall Street. What’s it really about?
“This is Just Practice” The Story of The Wall Street Occupation
A lot of what you’ve probably seen or read about the #occupywallstreet action is wrong, especially if you’re getting it on the Internet. The action started as an idea posted online and word about it then spread and is still spreading, online. But what makes it really matter now is precisely that it is happening offline, in a physical, public space, live and in person. That’s where the occupiers are assembling the rudiments of a movement.
At the center of occupied Liberty Plaza, a dozen or so huddle around computers in the media area, managing a makeshift Internet hotspot, a humming generator and the (theoretically) 24-hour livestream. They can edit and post videos of arrests in no time flat, then bombard Twitter until they’re viral. But for those looking to understand even the basic facts about what is actually going on—before September 17 and since—the Internet has been as much a source of confusion as it is anything else.
For someone who has been following this movement in gestation as well as implementation, it’s painfully easy to see which news articles take their bearing entirely from a few Google searches. Some reporters come to Liberty Plaza looking for Adbusters staff, or US Day of Rage members, or conspiratorial Obama supporters, or hackers from Anonymous. They’re briefly disappointed to find none of the above. Instead, it’s a bunch of people—from round-the-clock revolutionaries, to curious tourists, to retirees, to zealous students—spending most of their time in long meetings about supplying food, conducting marches, dividing up the plaza’s limited space and what exactly they’re there to do and why. And that’s the point. More than demanding any particular policy proposal, the occupation is reminding Wall Street what real democracy looks like: a discussion among people, not a contest of money.
As is now well known, the anti-consumerist group Adbusters made a call on July 13 for an occupation of Wall Street. That and a bit of poster art were the extent of its involvement. Adbusters floated the meme and left the rest to others. The trouble was, though, that most of the others were meme floaters, too.
The occupywallst.org web domain was registered anonymously on July 14, and it soon became the main clearinghouse for information about the movement’s progress. It remains so now and is getting, on average, about 50,000 unique visitors per day. It’s maintained mainly by a man and woman who met through the Anarchism section on the web site Reddit.
Soon came US Day of Rage, the project of Alexa O’Brien, an IT content management strategist. Since March, she has been trying to build a nationwide movement for radical campaign-finance reform—”One citizen. One dollar. One vote.”—and decided to peg her efforts to the September 17 action. While she has around 20 organizers working with her in cities around the country, as far as one leading #occupywallstreet organizer in New York could tell, it seems like her only colleagues might be coffee and cigarettes.
Then, of course, there’s Anonymous. The most-wanted hacker-activist collective indicated that it would join #occupywallstreet in late August. Within days, the Anons’ presence in the movement was being felt through Anonymous-branded viral videos, the bombardment of the movement’s Twitter hashtags (of which there is an ever-growing number) and rumors of scrutiny from Homeland Security.
Meanwhile, quietly, a group of several hundred mainly young activists, artists and students started gathering as a “General Assembly” (GA)—a leaderless, consensus-based decision-making process. They met weekly in public parks, starting on August 2 and continuing until the occupation began, with the intention of building an organizational and tactical framework for the action. It grew out of New Yorkers Against Budget Cuts, which had recently held a three-week occupation near City Hall called “Bloombergville” to protest against austerity measures. They had learned a lot from that and were ready to try something bigger.
The GA formed an Internet Committee, which quickly became fraught with infighting about process, security concerns and editorial control. These problems consumed hours and hours of the whole Assembly’s time. Their site went up, then down and then finally up again just days before the occupation began. It is now online at nycga.cc, but it receives only a small fraction of the traffic of occupywallst.org. Only on Thursday afternoon did the two sites figure out how to formally coordinate their activities.
As a result of these hiccups, in the lead-up and early days of the occupation, media coverage almost always associated it with meme floaters like Adbusters, US Day of Rage and Anonymous. But none of them were especially responsible for what would be happening on the ground starting on September 17. That was the GA’s doing.
Others, it seems, have taken it upon themselves to fill the GA’s media vacuum of their own accord. One document being circulated and discussed online is “Occupy Wall Street—Official Demands,” dated September 20 of 2013, which includes detailed proposals for reforming the financial system, none of which has been approved by the GA.
“This is definitely not ours,” says Marisa Holmes, a facilitator of the GA since the first planning meetings. “All decisions made by the GA are made in this space.”
Worse, thanks to some imaginative theorizing by Aaron Kein of the right-wing online publication WorldNetDaily, the idea began circulating that the movement was “closely tied” with ACORN, SEIU and that it took its inspiration from the Weather Underground; George Soros; and, ultimately, President Obama himself. Five minutes at a GA meeting would easily disabuse one of such associations. The GA had no official organizational ties and, besides a food fund that has been stuck in an inaccessible WePay account, almost no money. Many wish that they had the support of unions, but so far they still don’t.
What’s actually underway at Liberty Plaza is both simpler and more complicated: music making, sign drawing, talking, organizing, eating, marching, standoffs with police and (not enough) sleeping. It’s a movement in formation. As protesters sometimes like to chant, “This Is Just Practice.” There are a handful of guys with Anonymous Guy Fawkes masks backward on their heads, but they’re just one affinity group among many. O’Brien didn’t appear on the plaza for a couple of days—she was “running the back-end,” she says—and there has been almost no talk of “One citizen. One dollar. One vote.” Adbusters sends the occasional package of posters in the mail and offers confusing advice to organizers on the ground. Nobody’s exactly sure yet who is doing what, but they’re learning.
For the most part, the occupation is riding the momentum started in the GA meetings that were going on for a month and a half beforehand. They built a community of people who trust each other, who have a sense for each other’s skills and who are in some basic agreement about ends and means.
In the revolutions and uprisings and occupations that have been taking place around the world since the beginning of this year, there has been a lot of talk about the mobilizing power of social media—of the Twitters and Facebooks and cell phones. But when the Egyptian government shut down the Internet and the cellular signals in January, the movement there carried on. One of the deciding factors that brought down Mubarak, in the end, was not some Twitter hashtag, but a general strike organized by traditional labor unions. The Internet can help (as well as hurt) a movement, but it’s no replacement for actual relationships among actual people, building actual trust through actually working together over a period of time.
“I could have a political discussion just on the Internet,” says web developer Drew Hornbein, who is on the GA’s Internet Committee, “but it’s nice to get out like this.” When he started attending GA meetings in August, he got excited, thinking, “This is something really real. This could really be something.”
So it has become. But everyone at Liberty Plaza knows the movement has to be bigger for it to have the effect they want to see. Whole swaths of Americans—from racial minorities to disgruntled Wall Streeters—are underrepresented among the occupiers. Not everyone, it seems, is quite so glued to Twitter as the young radical set. They’ve had to start scrambling to relearn how to make fliers, reach out to membership organizations and find people where they are to make the movement’s numbers grow.
On Thursday evening, a surprise march of hundreds mourning the execution of Troy Davis in Georgia set out for Liberty Plaza from Union Square, led by occupiers. Police made attempts to stop it with barricades and clubs and arrests, but they couldn’t; and when the marchers arrived, the numbers in the plaza swelled. There were a lot of new faces and new kinds of faces. It paid off to quit the Internet, go to where people actually are and bring them back.
In the GA that night, Ted Actie, who lives in Brooklyn and works for On the Spot, a minority-owned talk-show production company, called on the protesters to speak more directly to the communities around them. “You do so much social networking,” he said, “you forget how to socialize.”
FEATURE A
Connect with your friends
Find new content you might like and see what your friends are sharing!
18 comments on "“This is Just Practice” The Story of The Wall Street Occupation "
Erik,you can do both, but I renmomecd copying from/mnt/HD_a2/newsbin/conf/php.ini cause I made some adjustments that you can upload nzb's also through the webinterface and some other small things for support with newzbinbut my php.ini is 98% the same as the php.ini-renmomecd
igrnfgks
This is EXACTLY how the antiVietnam war movement got started and grew exponentially. While many 'organizers' such as Weather Underground, Abby Hoffman, SDS, etc. Were either blamed or took credit-it was always bigger than any of them-and just as disorganized. The lesson is clear-while participants disagree on tactics, message and all the other moving parts are not agreed on- one thing is: Americans are pissed-and we arent going to take it anymore. So while the cogniscienty try to cind someone to blame-and stop, it has it's own momentum, built of frustration and clueless leadership. THESE are the American who are NOT being represented by our Congess or our president. Time for those assholes to pay the piper. Go protestors! Let's show them how this country was created - protest against oppression. Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, Hamilton and all the other "traitors" would be proud!
This is EXACTLY how the antiVietnam war movement got started and grew exponentially. While many 'organizers' such as Weather Underground, Abby Hoffman, SDS, etc. Were either blamed or took credit-it was always bigger than any of them-and just as disorganized. The lesson is clear-while participants disagree on tactics, message and all the other moving parts are not agreed on- one thing is: Americans are pissed-and we arent going to take it anymore. So while the cogniscienty try to cind someone to blame-and stop, it has it's own momentum, built of frustration and clueless leadership. THESE are the American who are NOT being represented by our Congess or our president. Time for those assholes to pay the piper. Go protestors! Let's show them how this country was created - protest against oppression. Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, Hamilton and all the other "traitors" would be proud!
September 27, 2011 12:30am
It appears this author has never organized, much less participated in a grass roots movement designed to wake up sleeping giants. The work is tedious, exhilarating, frustrating, redundant, fragmented, and just plan MESSY. (reread The Founding Fathers) Better yet, go try and organize anything involving even five people, where more than just your ideas matter. Would love to read your blog on that little experiment. It is time to end 'government to the highest bidder'. My respect, admiration and support goes to the organizers and the protesters, not to this critic on the sidelines. Mary D Daoui
September 26, 2011 10:39am
What's the point. I don't see a coherent message in any of this at this time.
September 27, 2011 1:02pm
What the people at Occupy Wall Street are protesting is the endemic corruption in all levels and branches of government, and the subversion of that government by the firms which run Wall Street. This corruption is expressed in numerous ways:
1. the prosecution of wars which are not supported by a majority of the American people, and the pandering to the greed of the military industrial complex by our supposed "representatives in Congress;
2. the bailouts of the "too big to fail" companies on Wall Street with the money of the current and future generations of middle and working class taxpayers, to the tune of trillions of dollars, massive amounts of which go to benefit the most wealthy people in the US;
3. the corruption of the electoral process by ballot access laws and the disdainful treatment of candidates who do not support corporate interests, leading to elections in which the policies of the Democratic and Republican candidates do not differ to any significant extent;
4. the corruption of the legal process by courts which act in blatantly partisan opinions giving little if any regard to the rights of non-corporate persons;
5. the corruption of the educational process by profit-driven schools which con students into getting worthless degrees and selling themselves into virtual slavery to pay off student loans which are not dischargeable in bankruptcy due to laws written and paid for by the financial industry;
6. the fact that the government subsidizes loss of jobs formerly benefitting the American middle and working classes, by encouraging companies through the tax code to use foreign labor, including slave labor, to make consumer goods, and to engage in legal tax avoidance schemes;
7. the increasing militarization of police and expansion of the national security state and government secrecy, and violent suppression of non-violent dissent ....
and I could go on. This is why their demands are so numerous and apparently disconnected. They're addressing the symptoms, the endemic corruption of the American republic, and not the problem itself. The answer may very well be "regime change", and in the past, this has been accomplished in a peaceful manner, through real elections in which the parties represented the real interests of their supporters, instead of the sham which the electoral process has become. In 1864 there were four major political parties which had very different stands on policy; now we have two parties which act as one, and the Congress is unrepresentative of American people. Perhaps the best answer is to go back to the system outlined in the Articles of Confederation, and decentralize government even farther, so that most of the power is held and exercised at the local level, and maybe this is what the protestors will eventually get to. Remember that the Continental Congress went thorough years and years of endless debate before 1776, this current effort has only been in existence for two months.
September 27, 2011 1:01pm
What the people at Occupy Wall Street are protesting is the endemic corruption in all levels and branches of government, and the subversion of that government by the firms which run Wall Street. This corruption is expressed in numerous ways:
1. the prosecution of wars which are not supported by a majority of the American people, and the pandering to the greed of the military industrial complex by our supposed "representatives in Congress;
2. the bailouts of the "too big to fail" companies on Wall Street with the money of the current and future generations of middle and working class taxpayers, to the tune of trillions of dollars, massive amounts of which go to benefit the most wealthy people in the US;
3. the corruption of the electoral process by ballot access laws and the disdainful treatment of candidates who do not support corporate interests, leading to elections in which the policies of the Democratic and Republican candidates do not differ to any significant extent;
4. the corruption of the legal process by courts which act in blatantly partisan opinions giving little if any regard to the rights of non-corporate persons;
5. the corruption of the educational process by profit-driven schools which con students into getting worthless degrees and selling themselves into virtual slavery to pay off student loans which are not dischargeable in bankruptcy due to laws written and paid for by the financial industry;
6. the fact that the government subsidizes loss of jobs formerly benefitting the American middle and working classes, by encouraging companies through the tax code to use foreign labor, including slave labor, to make consumer goods, and to engage in legal tax avoidance schemes;
7. the increasing militarization of police and expansion of the national security state and government secrecy, and violent suppression of non-violent dissent ....
and I could go on. This is why their demands are so numerous and apparently disconnected. They're addressing the symptoms, the endemic corruption of the American republic, and not the problem itself. The answer may very well be "regime change", and in the past, this has been accomplished in a peaceful manner, through real elections in which the parties represented the real interests of their supporters, instead of the sham which the electoral process has become. In 1864 there were four major political parties which had very different stands on policy; now we have two parties which act as one, and the Congress is unrepresentative of American people. Perhaps the best answer is to go back to the system outlined in the Articles of Confederation, and decentralize government even farther, so that most of the power is held and exercised at the local level, and maybe this is what the protestors will eventually get to. Remember that the Continental Congress went thorough years and years of endless debate before 1776, this current effort has only been in existence for two months.
September 25, 2011 12:17pm
I dont know much about the internecine struggles of the many activists and groups involved in organizing this, but I think that ALL involved should heed what I consider the most important disclosure of Schneider's article: "Whole swaths of Americans—from racial minorities to disgruntled Wall Streeters—are underrepresented among the occupiers. Not everyone, it seems, is quite so glued to Twitter as the young radical set." Yes, people are free to express their protest how they see fit, but don't think you will gain a mass following, especially of those most oppressed in our society, with a protest conducted in this manner. The most exciting day so far has been when the protesters in Union Square standing up for Troy Davis came and met you guys downtown--that should be a truly resonant lesson for everyone down there. I believe in what yall are doing, and my greatest hope is that you will find a way to make your protest more relevant and accessible to marginalized groups.
September 24, 2011 7:14pm
"The Internet can help (as well as hurt) a movement, but it’s no replacement for actual relationships among actual people, building actual trust through actually working together over a period of time."
Amen and right on.
Is anyone fanning out through the city streets, subways and colleges to pick up new support and recruits? Affinity groups and work teams should be trained to do it.
Recruiting people in person, and helping them find a comfortable sub-group, is the way to build up a movement. The internet is not enough.
In Solidarity,
Laurence of Berkeley
November 13, 2011 12:28pm
GREAT comment, Laurence! My husband has been saying this from the beginning, and I now think that you're both right... fanning out to recruit where the people "actually" congregate will no doubt greatly enrich this movement.
September 24, 2011 2:59pm
Dear Alexa O'Brien, Thank you for proving that the left's tendency to drown itself in a welter of internal self-criticism remains alive and well.
Best regards, John Seal
PS. I don't know Nathan Schneider, but I found his article eye-opening, positive, and uplifting. I read your comment and immediately fell back into the well of despair.
September 24, 2011 1:45pm
Schneider's inclusion of 'coffee and cigarettes' as Ms. O'Brien's only colleagues seems itself either slightly venomous or designed to provoke an off-the-point controversy. Also it is unattributed? I also suggest that Mr. Schneider contact Ms. O'Brien directly. Otherwise kudos to those who are both 'on the ground' , networking, and reporting to give this issue 'legs'.
September 24, 2011 1:11pm
Alexa needs to learn to write short. Take the time, Alexa. Nobody would wade through so much.... knashing, to coin a word.
September 24, 2011 12:33pm
You know, you're right about one thing in your article. There is a LOT of misinformation about the movement. It's a shame that you chose to ADD to that misinformation. I have been watching the live stream, and have had the honor of being a part of the online community at www.livestream.com/globalrevolution where people can actually watch history in the making. In fact, I help moderate the chat there in an effort to help build a community that can work together to help this grow nation wide, as it NEEDS to be done. Corporate corruption both on Wall Street and in our political system needs to be dealt with.
I am proud of these people, and consider them MY family!
Remember folks, there are 3 P's in Protest: Patience, Persistence & Peacefulness! And these fine people are showing all 3 in abundance.
September 24, 2011 12:30pm
Kudos to everybody, but let's not make this into a pissing contest, either.
Alexa, that's some mighty angry rhetoric there. That intense energy is better directed to the cause, not against people trying to explain what's going on. If this article is inaccurate, offer corrections. But I'd skip the venom.
As for the article itself, maybe these sorts of pieces could be labeled 'subject to revision as our understanding improves,' for example. We have got to keep the personality conflicts in the background.
Wikileaks suffered when Julian Assange soaked up most of the group's attention; it suffered greatly when his personal life became the Wikileaks story.
The consumer media will latch on to division in the ranks and similar human stories rather than cover the purpose of these actions, if they can. Don't feed them anything but what you want them to report.
That said, and most of all, thanks for all you're doing.
September 25, 2011 11:03am
Well, there's making and implimenting plans, and, then there is how it all turns out in real life. Everyone needs to realise that there is no such thing as perfection. However, if we all do our best then we will all move forward one way or another...smile.
September 24, 2011 11:07am
Dear Mr. Schneider,
Please correct the downright falsehood and inaccuracies in your article.
http://www.truthout.com/occupywallstreet-more-hashtag-its-revolution-for...
US Day of Rage 'endorsed' the call to action to #occupywallstreet in
early July. I don't remember seeing you at those early GA meetings Mr.
Schneider. Probably because you weren't there.
We even live tweeted GA meetings and wrote about them on our web site
early on explaining who was who. Ask the Internet.
Secondly, we physically organized all the the non violent civil
disobedience trainings in REALITY that occurred in the run up to Sept
17. Every single one.
We even recorded CD digital non violent training talks early on
(http://www.usdayofrage.org/resources.html) because we knew outreach
was hitting critical mass on the Internet with the game generation.
Those videos were with Jason and Sam. Ask them. Or just watch the
videos that have been since the beginning of August.
Here is one:
http://www.youtube.com/embed/ft3mXm76jEA
A quick visit to the Internet would corroborate all of those facts.
Were you aware that many so called core GA organizers and other
"group" supporters feel alienated by the NYC GA process? Where were
you or your unnamed mysterious "main" organizer to ask those people
for their perspective for this article?
All our Non Violent CD trainings were open to the public, despite the
fact that some GA facilitators tried to copt them for their own group
purposes.
US Day of Rage also established contact with the National Lawyers
Guild and organized legal observers for Sept 17. In fact, Susan Howard
of the NYC NLG urged me to contact the GA and implore them to contact
her in my conversations with her, which I did.
I also gave her the email and name of the one GA member who called the
NLG and introduced himself as "not the GA but an independent artist"
who was curious about the legality of Sept 17.
One week prior the GA barely had consensus or a legal working group.
We supported Sept 17 and mitigated potential risks that those
realities presented by designing tactics and a crowd source map as a
back up contingency for the lack of organization on the GA's part.
We did this because we knew that many people were coming because they
learned about the action on the Internet. If people are looking for US
Day of Rage, its only proof that we actually performed outreach -
because we were actually organizing the effort for Sept 17 and we did
it in a manner that created solidarity for the action and all the
groups involved - whereas the NYC GA could even get a website up until
3 days before Sept17 and infighting.
We considered the welfare of ppl's coming our moral responsibility. In
fact, the GA couldn't even reach consensus on the action's "non
violence" in the run up to Sept 17 (something I would think you cared
about considering your blog title, "Waging Non Violence".)
US Day of Rage also organized 5 other protests on Sept 17 in
solidarity with #occupywallstreet in Austin, Seattle, San Francisco,
Los Angeles, and Portland...and are currently organizing a Portland
occupation in solidarity with #occupywallstreet and #occupyDC (please
see our Joint Solidarity Statement with the Oct2011 movement from
several months ago) called #occupyPortland to be announced this
weekend.
We performed outreach on major news channels in the run up to Sept 17
ALWAYS mentioning the various groups involved in the action and ALWAYS
stressing the 'supposed' independence of the GA. Check the Internet
and the google group for sept17.
We have great respect for the individuals GA members who actually
worked. We love them. I smile when I see them. But many did so
independent of the process created by the GA. That is not the case
with the Tactics Committee. I won't speak for them. Although I have
heard some of them say as much casually.
In fact, members of the Arts & Culture committee that "independently"
staged a test run of #occupywallstreet. I wasn't at the test run,
because I work a full time job, but I was at the Police Station to
greet the one protester who was kept all night.
This does not mention the organization for online outreach. That is
one that we will let you figure out for yourself.
Articles like yours putting down the hard work of myself others or
presenting yourself or putting forth the NYC GA as the only thing that
is legitimate or actually exists as an organization, organizer, or
body of people around Sept 17 is flat out false and disrespectful.
We don't conduct ourselves in like manner to you because we actually
support the idea of independent bodies of people assembling on Sept 17
and thereafter.
The question remains, if that is actually what the NYC GA was from the
start or is now.
A question we publicly questioned in meetings, on our site and have
tried to protected from the beginning. Just ask ppl about my one
block. Then ask me for a comment on why I block what I blocked.
On Sept 17 US Day of Rage had people on police scanners monitoring
police movements and were on the ground verifying reports and rumors,
including several ridiculous ones from @occupywallstreet saying "Riot
Police were coming" and "Cell Phone Service was being cut at Bowling
Green" or from various GA members who are probably provocateurs saying
things people were being kettled.
Further I have been on or around the plaza almost everyday since the
occupation, except when I crashed with a 101 fever on Wednedsday. See
that visqueen keeping people dry, US Day of Rage donated that. See
those ponchos, we donated those. We have handled out socks, sleeping
bags, and clean socks and T-shirts.
On a personal note. I have given my home, cell phones, and a place to
crash to people here for the action to support US Day of Rage or who
were GA members or just PEOPLE who don't care about the idea, "One
citizen. One dollar. One vote." but who support the First amendment.
I am not sure if you actually research, fact check, or provide context
but US Day of Rage did not endorse the GA's original occupation
tactics on commercial property, because we felt it put people who did
not have affinity groups and who were inspired by digital outreach at
risk and also perverted the idea of independent assemblies of people,
who one would think would vote on their own process.
In fact, you would think that a sign of independence of an assembly is
the group's ability to actually vote on the process they use.
We were nevertheless sympathetic to not disrupting actions in the heat
of a tense situation that day by creating a pissing match in terms of
tactics.
Have you spoken to people not participating in GA meetings but on the
ground at Zuccotti or actually organizing the occupations
sustainability about how they feel about the GA process? Or do you
just slander people and other participating organizations with out
conscience?
I have been using every waking spare moment to make this action happen
since we originally endorsed the call to action. Who cares? I don't.
But I will not allow you to put down my work or the work of others in
such a disrespectful and frankly irresponsible manner.
Some of our supporters brought carpools and showed up on Sept 17, or
are there now.
What were you and your unnamed 'main organizer' doing?
Certainly not smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee, or organizing Sept
17, which is about the extent of every available waking moment of my
life and other US Day of RAge organizers and supporters since early
July.
Please learn to respect your craft and actually research your articles
or seek comments from those for whose work you slander publicly.
Something I failed to mention is the immensity of the role of social
media and tech in spurring and growing the actions of Sept. 17 or that
will help sustain it. That is a discussion you an I could have if you
actually showed the capacity to talk to me face to face and start a
conversation.
Best Regards,
Alexa O'Brien