“Objective journalism, this is not.”—The New York Observer

“The balanced book on Occupy I’ve been waiting for: sharp journalistic observation and insider knowledge, big picture knowledge of movement dynamics and attention to the telling details, writing that’s witty and poignant. Schneider models for engaged intellectuals and thoughtful activists how to reflect on breakthrough events.”—George Lakey, Swarthmore College, activist and author of Toward a Living Revolution

“This book is a gift and a tool. Full of thick descriptions and the voices of the protagonists themselves, you feel as if you are there, participating in the assemblies and occupations, feeling the joys and frustrations of the movement. A must-read.”—Marina Sitrin, author of Everyday Revolutions: Horizontalism and Autonomy in Argentina

“It wasn’t the revolution, but for a while, Occupy sure damn felt like it could be. Notes from the Occupy Apocalypse takes us back to those first few days of Occupy Wall Street, with all its beauty, its chaos, and its ridiculously long general assemblies. With a strong, often hilarious voice and the critical compassion that can only come from someone who camped out in Zuccotti Park himself, Nathan Schneider goes beyond the simplistic divides (violence or nonviolence? a movement or a moment?) to offer a true sense of what Occupy was. It was a diverse, complicated people, struggling to live up to its own revolutionary ideals. In short, Occupy was America, in all of our tragic glory.” —Josh Healey, winner of Mario Savio Award, activist and author of Hammertime

Nathan Schneider is the author of God in Proof: The Story of a Search, from the Ancients to the Internet (UC Press). He wrote about Occupy Wall Street for Harper’s, The Nation, The New York Times, and Boston Review, among other publications. He is an editor of the websites Waging Nonviolence and Killing the Buddha.

THANK YOU, ANARCHY

NOTES FROM THE OCCUPY APOCALYPSE

By NATHAN SCHNEIDER

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2013 Nathan Schneider
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-27679-6

Contents

Map on pageForeword: Miracles and ObstaclesRebecca SolnitPART ONE: SUMMER TO FALL1 • Some Great Cause2 • New MessiahPART TWO: FALL TO WINTER3 • Planet Occupy4 • No Borders, No Bosses5 • SanctuaryPART THREE: WINTER TO SPRING6 • Diversity of Tactics7 • Crazy EyesPART FOUR: SUMMER TO FALL8 • Eternal ReturnAcknowledgmentsWorks Not Cited

CHAPTER 1

SOME GREAT CAUSE

#A99 #Bloombergville #Jan25 #SolidarityWI #NYCGA #OCCUPYWALLSTREET #October2011#OpESR #OpWallStreet #S17 #SeizeDC #StopTheMach #USDOR

Under the tree where the International Society for Krishna Consciousness wasfounded in 1966, on the south side of Tompkins Square Park in the East Village,sixty or so people are gathered in a circle around a yellow banner that reads,in blue spray paint, “general assembly of nyc.” It is Saturday, August 13, 2011,the third of the General Assembly’s evening meetings.

“No cops or reporters,” someone decrees at the start of the meeting. Othersdemand a ban on photographs.

From where I’m sitting in the back, my hand inches up, and I stand and explainthat I am a writer who covers resistance movements. I promise not to takepictures.

Just then, a heavyset man in a tight T-shirt, with patchy dark hair and a beard,starts snapping photos. He is Bob Arihood, a fixture of the neighborhood knownfor documenting it with his camera and his blog. People shout at him to stop; heshouts back something about the nature of public space. Soon, a few from thegroup break off to talk things through with him, and the discussion turns backto me.

The interrogation and harrowing debate that follow are less about me, really,than about them. Are they holding a public meeting or a private one? Is ajournalist to be regarded as an agent of the state or a potential ally? Can theyexpect to maintain their anonymity?

After half an hour, at last, I witness an act of consensus: hands rise aboveheads, fingers wiggle. I can stay. A little later, I see that Arihood and thepeople who’d gone to confront him are laughing together.

Those present were mainly, but not exclusively, young, and when they spoke, theyintroduced themselves as students, artists, organizers, teachers. There were alot of beards and hand-rolled cigarettes, though neither seemed obligatory. Onthe side of the circle nearest the tree were the facilitators—DavidGraeber, a noted anthropologist, and Marisa Holmes, a brown-haired, brown-eyedfilmmaker in her midtwenties who had spent the summer interviewingrevolutionaries in Egypt. Elders, such as a Vietnam vet from Staten Island, werelistened to with particular care. It was a common rhetorical tic to address thegroup as “You beautiful people,” which happened to be not just encouraging butalso empirically true.

Several had accents from revolutionary places—Spain, Greece, LatinAmerica—or had been working to create ties among pro-democracy movementsin other countries. Vlad Teichberg, leaning against the Hare Krishna Tree andpecking at the keys of a pink laptop, was one of the architects of the Internetvideo channel Global Revolution. With his Spanish wife, Nikky Schiller, he hadbeen in Madrid during the May 15 movement’s occupation at Puerta del Sol. AlexaO’Brien, a slender woman with blond hair and black-rimmed glasses, covered theArab Spring for the website WikiLeaks Central and had been collaborating withorganizers of the subsequent uprisings in Europe; now she was trying to foment amovement called US Day of Rage, named after the big days of protest in theMiddle East.

That meeting would last five hours, followed by working groups convening inhuddles and in nearby bars. I’d never heard young people talking politics quitelike this, with so much seriousness and revelry and determination. But theirunease was also visible when a police car passed and conversation slowed; amember of the Tactics Committee had pointed out that, since any group of twentyor more in a New York City park needs a permit, we were already breaking thelaw.

Fault lines were forming, too. Some liked the idea of coming up with one demand,and others didn’t. Some wanted regulation, others revolution. I heard the slogan”We are the 99 percent” for the first time when Chris, a member of the FoodCommittee, proposed it as a tagline. There were murmurs of approval but alsocalls for something more militant: “We are your crisis.” When the idea came upof having a meeting on the picket line with striking Verizon workers, O’Brienblocked consensus. She didn’t want the assembly to lose its independence bysiding with a union.

“We need to appeal to the right as well as the left,” she said.

“To the right?” a graduate student behind me muttered. “Wow.”

Just about the only thing everyone could agree on was the fantasy of crowdsfilling the area around Wall Street and staying until they overthrew thecorporate oligarchy, or until they were driven out. As the evening grew darker,a pack of intern-aged boys walked by, looking as if they had just left a bar,and noticed the meeting’s slow progress. One of them, wearing a polo shirt, heldup a broken beer mug and shouted, at an inebriated pace, “If you always actlater, you might forget the now!”

Bob Arihood died of a heart attack at the end of September, after he exhaustedhimself photographing a march from the Financial District to Union Square. Bythen, the idea that the General Assembly had been planning for was a reality,spreading fast. One of his photos of the meeting survives on his blog, the onlypicture of its kind I’ve found. In that cluster of people around the banner,almost everyone is looking toward the camera; a guy I now know as Richie,dressed in white, is pointing right into the lens. Some look curious, somesuspicious, some scared, some indifferent. I’m barely visible in a far corner ofthe group.

I recognize most of the others now in a way I couldn’t then. Some have had theirnames and faces broadcast on the news all over the world. There’s the woman fromLaRouchePAC with such a good singing voice, and the group who went to highschool together in North Dakota. When I showed Arihood’s picture to a friend, herecognized his former roommate from art school. I try to guess what the ones Iknow best were thinking, what it was exactly that they imagined they were doingthere—so expectant, so at odds with one another, so anxious about beingwatched.

The saying “You had to be there” typically comes at the end of a joke thatdidn’t get the right reaction, that set up high hopes but by the time of thepunch line fell flat. If you were there, after all, you’d know that somethinghappened that really was significant or funny or worth repeating. I keep wantingto say those words again and again about Occupy Wall Street—”you had to bethere,” “you had to be there!”—but I stop myself, because doing so wouldalso be an admission of defeat. Those words are a conversation stopper. If I saythem I’m giving up on even trying to convey why Occupy Wall Street was such amomentous thing and such a rare moment of political hope for us who were bornduring the past thirty years in the United States of America.

For nearly two months in the fall of 2011, a square block of granite and honeylocust trees in New York’s Financial District, right between Wall Street and theWorld Trade Center, became a canvas for the image of another world. In occupiedZuccotti Park, thousands of people ate, slept, met, talked, argued, read,planned, and were dragged away to jail. Many came to protest the most abstractof wrongs—the deregulation of high finance, the funding of electoralcampaigns, the erosion of the social safety net, the logic of massincarceration, the failure to address climate change—but what they foundwas something more tangible. There was a community in formation, which theywould have a hand in forming; there was work to be done, which they would dowith people and ideas that the world outside had insulated them from everconsidering.

Before the occupation itself, there was a process by which a few hundred people,inspired by what they saw happening overseas, found the wherewithal to imagine,plan, and resist. After the encampment ended, the many thousands who hadexperienced it faced a crisis of what to do next.

Over the course of a year of being immersed in Occupy Wall Street, I saw a veilbeing lifted. Etymologically, the lifting of a veil is what the word apocalypserefers to; after that, one can’t go back unchanged. The preceding world haspassed, and a new revelation is at hand. Nobody who worked to make Occupy WallStreet happen imagined anything much like what actually did: it altered them andtransformed them and messed with them. The movement’s most unsettling featureswere often the same ones that made it work—in addition to being at faultfor the extent to which the Occupy joke ended up falling flat.

But disappointment is part of any apocalypse. The fact that the most radicalaspirations of Occupy Wall Street remain unrealized is also a symptom ofsuccess; images that it promulgated of shutting down Wall Street and mounting ageneral strike became implanted in people’s minds, if even just to provide ameasure of how those images failed to become manifest.

This was movement time, the nonlinear and momentous kind of temporality that theGreeks called kairos. The dumb piece of red sculpture that towers over ZuccottiPark—the “Big Red Thing”—now has in my nervous system the chill-inducingand undeserved status of Beacon of the Real, as the first thing I’d seewhen approaching the occupation from the subway. Under that distracting piece ofcorporate abstraction, a living work of art brought every aspect of life into asharper kind of focus. It was a utopian act, but in the form of realism. Withartists mainly in charge, Occupy Wall Street was art before it was anythingproperly organized, before it was even politics. It was there to change us firstand make demands later.

And so it did. Like probably thousands of other underemployed Brooklynites whootherwise had no business being in the Financial District, I came to know thatarea’s twisty streets like the neighborhood I grew up in. And, now, fearing thatmy generation might slip back into irony and apathy and unreality, I feel anurgent, evangelistic duty to record as best I can the sliver of this realitythat I experienced.

What first brought me to Occupy Wall Street, in some respects, dates back to2001. I was in high school and had an internship at Pacifica Radio in WashingtonDC. My first and only reporting job there was to cover a protest against theinvasion of Afghanistan, just a few days before the invasion began. I followedthe course of the march, and interviewed people, and wasn’t sure whether Ishould be marching too or standing at a professional distance. It was amoderately impressive display, and yet of course the war went on.

Then, in early 2003, the same thing happened, only more so. The worldwideprotests against the invasion of Iraq were the largest mobilization in history,and the war happened anyway. The newspapers hardly even noticed the opposition.A lot of us who were young enough to believe that we could turn back the bombersif our slogans were loud enough retreated into disappointment and the complacentcynicism of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. But those protests lodged aquestion in my head: What would it have taken to make a difference? What wouldit have taken to capture people’s imaginations and keep them from letting thepoliticians lead us into disaster again?

For the most part, though, I turned my attention to other things. I converted toCatholicism and studied religion. I went to graduate school and started writingfor magazines. By the time the middle of 2011 came around, I was putting offfinishing a quixotic book I’d been writing for years about how and why peopleconcoct proofs about the existence of God. This put me in a fidgety mood, primedfor apocalyptic distractions.

I had been watching revolutions from a distance since the beginning of the year,when people rose up and expelled dictators in Tunisia and Egypt, stirring upLibya, Bahrain, Syria, Jordan, and more. Continually refreshing my social mediafeeds, with Al Jazeera on in the background, I tried my best to blog each dayabout whatever was happening in the Middle East. I wanted to understand wherethese movements came from, who organized them, and how. Experts in the UnitedStates were satisfied with attributing the uprisings to global food prices andTwitter, but the revolutionaries themselves didn’t use the language of economicor technological determinism. In interviews, they seemed instead to talk abouthaving rediscovered their agency, their collective power, their ability to act.

Over the summer, I attended a seminar in Boston with civil resisters from aroundthe world. Some were still glowing from recent success, like the Egyptians who’dhelped overthrow Hosni Mubarak, while others, like the Tibetan and the two fromBurma, remained so far from what they longed for. They shared their goals andtheir strategies, as well as their sacrifices—for many of them,imprisonment and torture. They had arguments and epiphanies. They learned fromwhat one another was doing and thinking, and grew stronger as a result.

During a break in the discussion, I noticed a photocopied essay by one of thoseat the seminar, a memoir of her time in the civil rights movement. The essayopened with a passage from a nineteenth-century poem born of the struggle overslavery. It described a moment arising, or a movement, in which a whole societyis forced to choose where it stands: “Some great cause, God’s new Messiah.” Whenmight such a moment, or a movement, come to us in the United States again? Thosewords became my mission.

I left that meeting with something lit up inside me. I now knew the kinds ofstories I needed to learn how to tell—the stories of how people go fromwanting to resist to actually doing so, of how by reasoning and creativity theylearn to build power. I wasn’t interested so much in reporting on more protests,coming and going with the spectacle; I wanted to experience the planning andorganizing by which the spectacle, and whatever comes of it, came about. So whenI returned home to New York, I started looking for the planning process of somegreat cause to follow and to learn from. It turned out that this would be easierthan I expected—and that the spectacle would be the process itself.

Revolution didn’t seem like such a crazy idea in 2011. Just a few weeks into theyear, two dictators had already bowed to the power of the people. By lateFebruary, the victorious Egyptians were phoning in pizza-delivery orders to theoccupied Wisconsin state capitol, in Madison. Unrest followed the summer’s heatto Greece, Spain, and England. Europe’s summer was Chile’s winter, but studentsand unions rose up there too. Tel Aviv grew a tent city.

While Tahrir Square in Cairo was still full, the boutique-y activist artmagazine Adbusters published a blog post imagining “A Million Man March on WallStreet.” But the United States appeared to go quiet after Madison, its politicsagain domesticated by talk of the “debt ceiling” and the Iowa straw poll; whentens of thousands actually did march on Wall Street on May 12, few noticed andfewer remembered.

While following the march that day on Twitter from Florida, however, a thirty-two-year-old drifter using the pseudonym Gary Roland read about another actionplanned near Wall Street for the next month: Operation Empire State Rebellion,or OpESR. That tweet led him to a dot-commer-turned-activist-journalist namedDavid DeGraw. DeGraw was working through the Internet entity known as Anonymous,which over the past year or two had been emerging from various cesspools onlineinto a swarm of vigilantes for justice. With Anonymous, DeGraw had helped buildsafe networks for the dissidents of the Arab Spring. Since early 2010 he hadalso been writing about his vision of a movement closer to home, a movement inwhich the lower 99 percent of the United States would rebel against the rapacityand corruption of the top 1 percent. An Anonymous unit formed to organize OpESR,calling itself A99.

Through DeGraw’s website, Roland helped make plans. Having recently lost his jobas a construction manager for a New York real estate firm, he was familiar withthe city’s public spaces and the laws applying to them. He proposed that OpESRtry to occupy Zuccotti Park, a publicly accessible place privately owned byBrookfield Office Properties. On June 14—Flag Day—Zuccotti Parkwould be its target.

Anonymous-branded videos announcing the action had begun to appear in March andgot hundreds of thousands of views. Momentum seemed to be building. When the daycame, though, only sixteen people arrived at Chase Manhattan Plaza, where themarch to Zuccotti was to commence, and of the sixteen only four intended tooccupy.

Undeterred, Roland decided to join another occupation that was beginning thesame day near City Hall, a few blocks north. Organized by a coalition called NewYorkers against Budget Cuts, the so-called Bloombergville occupation would turninto a three-week stand against the city’s austerity budget. It didn’t seem toamount to much on its own, but it eventually proved to be another step buildingtoward something that would.

“The attention we were able to get online,” David DeGraw wrote after the flop onJune 14, “obviously doesn’t translate into action.” Consoling himself with thethought that the attempt was at least spreading awareness, he started talkingabout trying again on September 10, a date chosen in deference to the Anonymousconvention of operating in three-month cycles.
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