Occupy Nation

The Roots, the Spirit, and the Promise of Occupy Wall Street

Todd Gitlin

• Publisher: It Books
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9780062200921
• eBook ISBN:
  9780062200938
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Advocacy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

"[A] much needed book…a compelling portrait of the Occupy movement…that capture[s] the spirit of the people involved, the crisis that gave Occupy birth, and the possibility of genuine change it represents."
—Eric Foner, author of The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

The Occupy Wall Street movement arose out of a widespread desire of ordinary Americans to change a political system in which the moneyed "1%" of the nation controls the workings of the government. In Occupy Nation, social historian Todd Gitlin—a former leader of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) who stood at the forefront of the birth of the New Left and the student protests of the 1960s and '70s—offers a unique overview of one of the most rapidly growing yet misunderstood social revolutions in modern history. Occupy Nation is a concise and incisive look at the Occupy movement at its pivotal moment, as it weighs its unexpected power and grapples with its future mission.

PART ONE

TWO ENERGY CENTERS

1. Pioneers

Few if any of the few dozen pioneers who unrolled their sleeping bags on the stony rectangle of Zuccotti Park on September 17, 2011, expected their insurgency to bloom so quickly into a movement so vast. They didn’t dare. Daring had a way of turning treacherous. Not three years earlier, many of them dared think, or at least hope, that the election of Barack Obama was going to change the course of the nation. They had surged into his 2008 campaign feeling “the audacity of hope” but one cabinet appointment and policy shortfall after another left them disappointed, then demoralized. Others in Zuccotti Park, far fewer, handfuls of self-guided revolutionaries, dared believe in direct democracy as a guiding principle for a fundamentally revamped society, though they knew in their bones that such a society was not going to spring up in a month or a season. They might have adopted as camp epigram these words from science-fiction writer Robert Anton Wilson, picked up as an e-mail salutation by forty-seven-year-old filmmaker Michael Fix, who threw himself into Occupy Wall Street virtually full-time (and, after the eviction managed their office nearby): “You should view the world as a conspiracy run by a very closely knit group of nearly omnipotent people, and you should think of those people as yourself and your friends.”

“Something has been opened up, a kind of space nobody knew existed,” said Yotam Marom of Occupy, less than four months later. “Something just got kind of unclogged.” What took root in Zuccotti Park and then sent out lateral shoots from there was, as Anthony Barnett would write, “the combination of hi-tech networking and no-tech gathering.” The intricate human experience of face-to-face meeting—with responsibility shared and authority challenged—was galvanizing. There was a public place to go to, where attention could readily be paid, and individuals had faces and stories; there were electronic communiqués in real time and electronic summons for emergencies. These people were not demonstrating—that is, showing authorities that they wanted something in common—but creating a space where leaders and ideas could emerge. As days went by and they became used to inhabiting this space, they became a sort of new tribe.

As the weeks and months went by, the movement’s movers and shakers were astounded and overjoyed at what they had wrought. They had, first of all, endured. They had withstood scorn, busts, billy clubs, pepper spray, and evictions—and grown. They set up functional working groups and decision-making structures that, however outlandish in the eyes of traditionalist outsiders, kept their spaces running decently, for the most part. They set up live stream channels for 24/7 video images, along with Facebook pages, Tumblrs, Twitter feeds, all manner of social linkages.The movement’s live streaming was like “reality TV on steroids,” somebody said. People in and around the movement (and who was exactly in the movement anyway?) started newspapers and theoretical journals. They lived pell-mell in the grip of what sociologist Barrie Thorne, writing about the sixties, once called event time, hurtling from action to action with high fervor and much jubilation. Some burned out, others flocked in, and still others, in widening circles, took off, felt inspired. Talk about audacity, talk about hope. Something was happening, never mind that quizzical and sardonic journalists were stumbling around like Mr. and Ms. Jones not knowing what it was. In the words of a hand-painted sign held aloft in an Occupy support crowd by an intensely serious middle-aged woman in lower Manhattan on October 5, 2011: THIS IS THE 1ST TIME I’VE FELT HOPEFUL IN A VERY LONG TIME.

The sort of sea changes in public conversation that took three years to develop during the long-gone sixties—about brutal war, unsatisfying affluence, debased politics, and the suppressed democratic promise—took three weeks in 2011. At warp speed, all kinds of people felt that they needed to have opinions about the movement, what it was doing and saying, and what it ought to do and say. This was especially true in Manhattan, where not only Occupy’s own electronic but local news amplified the word, and people throughout the outer boroughs heard that something interesting was going on near Wall Street, though just what it was wasn’t exactly clear. Widening circles of people showed up at Zuccotti Park, volunteering, debating, seeing for themselves. Hundreds across the country—and in other countries—planted encampments of their own. (In this book, I’ll focus on New York’s Occupy Wall Street, though with forays to other places.) On designated, coordinated days, much larger numbers marched, tens of thousands at a time. Unknown numbers of others were taking the movement to heart, taking it as a moral challenge and a personal problem. Should they apply for jobs in finance? What, if anything, should they do about the 2012 elections? This was the intense magic of a social movement: not that people talked only about the movement as something outside themselves, something that should think X or do Y or stop doing Z, but that they took to heart the moral challenge, What will you do?

However, before there was Occupy Wall Street, there was Wall Street, that vortex of human calculation and passion, portal to a vast network of connected minds and impulses, where vast fortunes are made by insiders who master the game of heads-we-win-tails-we-win-too.

Wall Street is symbolic, a whorl of opportunity-making and opportunity-breaking where anything that can be marketed is marketed. Through Wall Street and its opposite numbers in London, Hong Kong, and elsewhere, capital—that potent and mysterious intangible—circulates and cascades, ever in pursuit of the highest returns. Capital has no fixed address. High-flying traders can conduct their high-speed buying and selling and bundling from almost any node in a virtually seamless planetary web. Hunches, calculations, loans, debts, and accounting, creative and otherwise, are as borderless as financial crises, and for the same reasons. Yet still, humanity being a species that craves face-to-face company, at lunch and in bars and via water-cooler chat, a lion’s share of the core decisions that entail the fates of nations are launched from a compact terrestrial neighborhood. The human passions of greed and fear cluster in lower Manhattan’s ornamented stone high-rises and boxy glass-and-steel edifices, jammed up against one another, where the prowess of hotshots is tested and good fortune rewarded with the proceeds from other people’s money. Here, in the great investment banks, the graduates of Ivy League colleges (among others) underwrite securities, arrange mergers and acquisitions, devise extraordinary varieties of tradable paper, and invest in every quantifiable phenomenon under the sun, all the better to finance the chiefs’ Porsches and Picassos and the hulking beach houses in the Hamptons and the private jets to overfly ground traffic on the way there and the paneled, extravagant yachts in which they float free of national boundaries. The proprietors make extravagant use of the ever-replenished ingenuity of thousands of Ph.D.’s in mathematics and physics, who work for them designing financial products (as if they were tangible things), securitizing (rendering marketable), and managing (a word designed to soothe nerves if ever there were one) risk (a word connoting the sort of danger that can be managed). But, however rectilinear the high-rise incarnations of calculation, however ornate the physical facades, however nicely carpeted the suites and well-appointed the conference rooms, Wall Street has always been a feral place: a scramble of fortune-hunters sometimes partnering to help each other forward and sometimes betraying each other as they scramble toward pinnacles of wealth, pinnacles that recede, somehow, the higher they climb. For there is always somebody on the wrong end of a winning deal, and there is always someone who possesses more than you do.

For the movers of money and the makers of megadeals who channel their animal spirits into elaborate games that they play with other people’s money, shunting it around the world at lightning speed in pursuit of the main chance, collecting huge sums in packages of compensation and fees and options and parachutes by merging, shuffling, enlarging, and breaking up companies the way some people merge lanes, shuffle cards, and break promises, and also packaging combinations of risky securities, sharing the risk by opening up lines of contagion, hooking banks in Reykjavik to bad loans in Rapid City, the value of these securities being predicated on the value of other risky securities whose risks were unknown to, or misunderstood by, their buyers if not their sellers. For these financial corporations, known collectively in the vernacular as Wall Street, the three decades since 1980 were high-octane, high-testosterone, go-go years of fortune-making and out-contracting, megamansion-erecting and name-engraving, attention-getting philanthropy, meteoric rises and high flights, succeeded by home and business bankruptcies in the millions and rescues and bailouts in the billions, punctuated by occasional crashes and burns. All the gaudy fortune hunting took place under the half-horrified, half-envious gaze of the rest of America—the supermajorities who call themselves middle class—while most young people looked forward to lives spent stringing together part-time jobs when they couldn’t get full-time jobs, and living in much more cramped style than they grew up in, and returning to nest with their parents, and scrambling to pay back their college loans, and, if they came from poverty in the first place, looking forward to the likelihood of more of the same.

Here, in lower Manhattan, beats the heart of America’s business civilization. Through a circulatory system known as investment, wealth never rests, and as it moves it makes things happen in the material world, distributing enchantments and losses, performing over and over again capitalism’s historically unprecedented ceremonies of magic. Wealth and its promises flow into Wall Street in order to course again outward, then inward again, endlessly flowing, and along the way, building houses, heating them, furnishing them, wiring them, equipping them, sending in cement mixers and moving trucks, opening factories on distant continents, closing them, chopping down forests, drilling oil, mining coal, building wind turbines and solar panels, offering myriad opportunities to generate yet more capital to make more things happen.

This whirling center of passions and calculations and deals is not confined to a few hundred acres in lower Manhattan (with neighboring precincts in New Jersey and Connecticut)—or to the webs that tie it to the competing centers in London, Hong Kong, and elsewhere. It is tethered to Washington. For the past three decades, those banks and insurance companies and financial divisions of other corporations were liberated to conduct their business more or less as they pleased because government regulations, put in place during the Great Depression in order to protect the public, were lifted. They were lifted at the behest of financial industry lobbyists and campaign contributors, and their economist collaborators who swept aside decades of obstacles in the belief that financial markets, like others, fundamentally regulated themselves, and that it would be integral to the self-regulatory process if investment banks, commercial banks, brokerages, and insurance companies were permitted to merge, so that savings and investment could be conducted under the same roof, an efficiency for financial capital that had been banned by the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, one of the regulatory pillars of the New Deal. Wall Street has long been crash prone. Watered stock, unregulated investment pools, and easy money in margin loans (the equivalent of subprime mortgages) brought it to its knees in the twenties, then the conglomerate craze in the sixties. During the deregulatory years, which began in the late seventies, when Jimmy Carter was president, but accelerated at turbo speed during Ronald Reagan’s terms, as inventive financiers like Michael Milken and arbitrageurs like Ivan Boesky made fortunes with leveraged buyouts, nifty little “products” nicknamed junk bonds, and trading in inside information, Wall Street and Washington became the systole and diastole of America’s (and therefore much of the world’s) political economy. A system evolved in which the top financiers administered to themselves the rewards of self-dealing, squeezed through revolving doors, practiced deregulation and administrative collusion, organized themselves into combinations in the name of competition, all of this cheered on or at least tolerated by a larger public panicky about falling behind and convinced, more or less, that its own interests would be served too if capital were unleashed. Wall Street became, and, despite the economic crisis that some call the Great Recession, continues to be, the place where the action is: the rush, the buzz, the allure, the electricity. Capital might be an abstraction—no one has ever laid eyes on one fleck of it—but it was a potent one, for on its expectations contracts could be let, debts repaid, risks taken, vast organizations stood up and heaved into motion. For the mass murderers of al-Qaeda, Wall Street’s most conspicuous towers had been prime targets for their cinematic materializations of grandeur. Then, for a decade and counting, the missing World Trade Center, and the construction zones that loomed there, slowly filling up the spaces formed by the world’s tallest absence, would become the area’s chief tourist attractions. Wall Street was the canyon of dreams.

Then, anticipated by no one, and yet with astonishing speed, as if bursting through the crust of a volcano long thought to be extinct, Occupy Wall Street erupted. It turned out there was another dream, this one circulating on Twitter: “Dear Americans, this July 4th, dream of insurrection against corporate rule,” with the hashtag #occupywallstreet.

Within weeks the upsurge took on the feel of a popular movement, with its flare-ups of solidarity and blazes of sudden commitment, its improvisations and personal attachments, its incandescent compound of indignation, joy, outrage, hope, ingenuity, and resolve, its spikes of passion and wild ideas. As a moment in time passed into a movement in history, it astounded everyone, not least its participants, many of whom had long pined for a world-changing social movement in the interest of equity, some of whom had experienced such things themselves, or hoped against hope that they might do so someday, but had not dared think that a major eruption was possible now, never imagined how quickly it might be possible for a movement to take off, turning the homely verb occupy into a rallying cry and making “We are the 99 percent!” a household phrase. They were, as one of them put it, rebooting history.

However, nothing comes out of nowhere. There are a few origin stories that converge, remarkably, in that zeitgeisty way in which people who don’t know one another sometimes get more or less the same idea at the same time. In February 2010, thirty-seven-year-old independent journalist David DeGraw posted on his own website a call for a 99 percent movement. “It blew up virally,” he says, and got picked up by Alternet, a major left-wing alternative news service. In January 2011, his site got knocked offline by hacker attacks—emanating from someplace unknown, he says—and since his service provider along with hundreds of other sites were also incapacitated, the provider declined to host his site any longer unless he graduated to a more expensive arrangement. When DeGraw put out a call for help, the network Anonymous came to his rescue and set up a new site for him. In March 2011, DeGraw and an Anonymous subgroup, operating together under the name A99, brazenly called for an Operation Empire State Rebellion on Flag Day, June 14. They would organize bank protests and close accounts.

Meanwhile, New York City anti-austerity activists had been building up a critical mass since the spring. On May 12, several thousand marched around Wall Street, summoned by an online call from a coalition of small left-wing groups calling itself New Yo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Part One: Two Energy Centers
• 1. Pioneers
• 2. Surprise! Popularity and Polarization
• 3. Energy Is Eternal Delight
• Part Two: The Spirit of Occupy
• 4. Oases and Bases
• 5. Rituals of Participation
• 6. The Evolution of Horizontalism
• 7. Splendors and Miseries of Structurelessness
• 8. And Leaderlessness
• 9. The Movement as Its Own Demand
• 10. Wonders of Nonviolence
• 11. Radicals
• 12. The Co-optation Phobia
• Part Three: The Promise
• 13. Live-in Victories
• 14. Work the System? Change It? Smash It?
• 15. Can the Outer Movement Get Organized?
• 16. Is There a Global Revolution?
• 17. “This Is the Beginning of the Beginning”
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Other Works
• Copyright
• About the Publisher