Just weeks earlier, my kids had also joined me as we tailed a few winding marches through these same downtown streets, marches that opposed ongoing budget cuts to social services in the city of Oakland. The one that sparked the most outrage in our small, familial affinity group was the closing of several Oakland public schools and libraries.1 On this wet day, my kids, aged six and four, tired of listening to grown-ups talk, just wanted to know if we were going to march already (and if we could get pizza). While we ate pizza across the street I told them we’d be marching soon enough. Like anything truly beautiful and exciting, it was hard to conceptualize exactly what this new thing was, or to rationally explain the specific reasons I had for feeling the way that I did. We left the park that day and descended to the BART platform. I couldn’t shake that anxious-in-a-good-way feeling and a shared sense of connection with those who waited on that platform with us, their cardboard signs soggy now, but still legible. Nominally waiting for a train, really waiting for a “what next?” that we couldn’t define, but we knew we were a part of.

The encampments were not without their problems and they proved to be less than immune to various forms of repression, but within a few weeks Occupy was everywhere. It was a living, breathing political force with a visible day-to-day existence. As a movement, while ultimately failing to meet its objectives (which are part of a longer and deeper process), Occupy was both disruptive and popular. Its demobilization would require innovation on the part of city administrators and local and federal police. In no city was this struggle to repress the Occupy movement more pronounced or protracted than in Oakland.

The politics of the movement (like any movement) were somewhat varied, but the unifying concerns stemmed most immediately from the most recent economic crisis and the social crises that it furthered—including deeper cuts to education and social services, the 2008–09 bank bailout and its cost, the foreclosure crisis, and the years of recession that followed the financial crisis of 2008. A common chant—“Banks got bailed out, we got sold out”—encompassed a general sentiment of frustration and anger with the neoliberal governance of the past decades (led by both major political parties). These neoliberal policies (also known as free market or trickle-down economics) and their associated political logic had expanded the gap between the rich and poor, fueled an enormous expansion of prisons, shrunk the middle class, facilitated the loss of manufacturing jobs through free trade agreements, shifted the tax burden from the rich onto workers, privatized essential social services from telecommunications to education, and deregulated industries like banking and healthcare (Harvey 2005; McNally 2011; Parenti 1999). The results were persistent economic crisis, the inflation and bursting of a series of speculative investment bubbles, and the steady expansion of social inequality to degrees not seen in this country since the Great Depression. While it did not have a shared, detailed platform (most mass movements do not), the movement was intent on turning these economic and social crises into a political crisis—to disturb the neoliberal politics as usual that fostered these crises and then respond to them by rewarding the corporate criminals responsible for the crisis with taxpayer money, as average Americans lost their homes and jobs.

The conceptualization of “the people” in Occupy Wall Street was “We are the 99%”—a referent to the bottom 99 percent of the income bracket. This populist framing, despite glossing over significant inequalities and tensions that existed within that 99 percent, was effective at both projecting a broad movement base and identifying an enemy—the 1 percent. While starting in New York City, after a call by the magazine Adbusters, the movement in the United States, as elsewhere, was largely decentralized and not led by any organization or coalition. Decisions were made by direct democracy and consensus, in face-to-face meetings called General Assemblies that were transparent and accountable if not always terribly efficient. These populist politics of opposition to a rich elite appealed to a broad base—students who were taking on enormous debt for futures that were increasingly uncertain, homeowners who owed more on their houses than they were worth due to the housing crisis, those who had lost their homes when the housing bubble burst or to predatory lenders, those who had lost their job in the recession, those who had less secure and lower paying jobs than they once had, those getting displaced out of cities by gentrification, those who were opposed to recent environmental disasters aided by government deregulation, and those who saw a lack of social justice (however they happened to define it) and wanted to do something about it.

The act of occupying parks was publicly visible and disruptive without being overly risky. The encampment tactic was also easily transferable to any location—the necessities being a few people with tents and signs. The localization and decentralization of the movement was a clear advancement in relation to other movements. People didn’t need to wait for a march, and the protest wasn’t over a few hours after it started. The camps built and fostered community, discussion, and debate that was more open than traditional forms of mobilization.

The movement, centered around this tactic of park encampments, took off after the initial camp in New York City was erected on September 17, 2011 (Gould-Wartofsky 2015). Dozens of camps were erected in the first two months of the movement, with hundreds of rallies and protests taking place throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe.2 The decentralized, self-led nature of the movement, combined with the visibility of the camp/tent tactic and the broad appeal of the populist frame with which the movement promoted itself, helped to produce camps, rallies, and bank protests in places where mass movements rarely reach. In small towns from Alaska to Mississippi the movement was both something people wanted to be involved in and something they could easily be an active part of.

This orientation of rejecting communication, cooperation, and collaboration with the police or mayor’s office would come to play a significant role in the nature of the Occupy Oakland encampment. The encampment conceived of itself as a commune, with hundreds of residents and hundreds more as active participants in planning protests, creating committees, resolving conflicts, making posters, cooking food, providing basic healthcare, and helping to care for children on a daily basis. The camp and the broader community that was Occupy Oakland was a prefigurative movement—a collectivity premised on self-sufficient mutual aid that attempted to model a different and egalitarian set of social relations. It was also very much a militant movement that was far more hostile to existing political structures than disillusioned by them. From the very first day, the stage was set for an inevitable conflict between the movement and the administration of the city. The unfolding of that conflict, the creativity of various forces of repression, and the resilience of the movement form a story no one could have foretold.

The fall of 2011 presented a political opportunity initially seized by Occupy Oakland and then lost. The course of events illustrates how that opportunity was an effect and not a cause, as a reality forged by the movement itself. On October 25, hundreds of people withstood ongoing barrages of less-lethal weapons for several hours. It was the critical wounding of marine veteran Scott Olsen that put a face on the police violence of that night.6 That violence opened up a significant political opportunity that simultaneously mobilized and expanded the movement while demobilizing aggressive street policing in the coming weeks. That chain of events would not have taken place if people had simply dispersed or been deterred by the waves of less-lethal weapons. As in any society, stability and social control are the norm; therefore, studying how the social control of movements works illuminates not just the repression of social movements, but the terrain upon which they operate and the most immediate struggles they must transform in order to succeed. The term “social control” is used in relation to social movements throughout the book to refer to the symbiotic relationship between both “hard” and “soft” techniques of repression. Hard repression refers to the range of mostly police techniques of preemptive arrests, restriction of free assembly, surveillance, riot police, less-lethal weapons, arrests, prosecution, and incarceration (Noakes and Gillham 2006). Soft repression refers to efforts by various state and nonstate actors that have the intent or effect of politically delegitimating, dividing, coopting, or intimidating movement actors or movements.

For various reasons all of these contexts that shape the viability and efficacy of social control—whether negotiated management or police repression—were unfavorable to the police and city officials in Oakland in October 2011. Negotiation proved impossible in an encampment that fashioned itself as an autonomous commune, self-styled after the Paris Commune, where anticapitalist and antipolice sentiment were not only present, but widespread. Not only could police find no one to negotiate with, they were physically confronted and verbally abused when they would attempt to even go near the perimeter of the camp.7 Letters from City Hall were burned at General Assemblies.8 In terms of public opinion, the police themselves had been the target of many recent major protest movements. Tactics used against anti–Iraq War protesters as well as general police abuse and misconduct, including the Oakland Riders scandal,9 had further tarnished a police department already well known for political repression and abuse of subaltern communities (Bloom and Martin 2013; Murch 2010). Physical repression of a progressive/radical populist movement, which was riding the momentum of democratization movements in the Arab world earlier that year, in what is arguably the most Left-leaning urban area in the United States, held with it the serious risk of blowback for the city. When police in Oakland were incapable of getting the movement to abide by its wishes through persuasion, force was the only option left. The fears expressed by Mayor Quan and others, that repression would create a martyr of the camp and the movement, engendering public support and ultimately proving counterproductive, turned out to be particularly astute.10

Later that day a few thousand came out to protest and march in opposition to the eviction, finding the park where the camp had stood cordoned off by several hundred riot police. Hundreds of mutual aid police from seventeen other surrounding cities pursued a coordinated strategy of controlling urban space in downtown Oakland.13 That night they successfully prevented Occupy Oakland from retaking the plaza in front of City Hall where their encampment had stood until being evicted early that morning.14 As night fell and the number of demonstrators dwindled to about a thousand, the police attacked the demonstrators with less-lethal weapons for several hours. As Occupiers would approach Fourteenth and Broadway (at the perimeter of Oscar Grant Plaza where the camp had stood) to meet the rows of riot police assembled from more than a dozen Bay Area police forces, volleys of concussion grenades, tear gas, CS gas, rubber bullets, and bean-bag munitions were fired at the retreating crowd.15 The police held their line, but demonstrators kept coming back, and were met with more aggression in the form of wave after wave of police projectiles and chemical weapons. This process went on for several hours. During this series of police attacks, marine veteran Scott Olsen was hit with a tear gas canister from very close range, critically wounding him and putting a bloodied human face on the now martyred movement.16 The police violence was immediate global news. Other centers of the movement in Cairo, New York City, and elsewhere were quick to express solidarity.17

The following evening, October 26, more than three thousand people descended upon downtown Oakland and reclaimed Osca...