💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › malcolm-harris-occupied-wall-street.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 12:43:08. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
➡️ Next capture (2024-07-09)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: Occupied Wall Street Author: Malcolm Harris Date: September 27, 2011 Language: en Topics: Occupy Wall Street, tactics Source: Retrieved on 8th December 2021 from https://www.jacobinmag.com/2011/09/occupied-wall-street-some-tactical-thoughts/
I’ve been to the encampment at Zuccotti Park a few times since the
17^(th), but I have never stayed that long. It’s not just cause I’d
rather sleep in my room in Brooklyn on which I spend the vast majority
of my income, but because I’m just not that into it. Yet I’ve met some
great folks and I really do believe in the intentions of the vast
majority of non-undercover non-Party attendees, so these notes are to
them in hopes that we might advance the struggle together. When I was
leaving the Park a few days ago, I heard someone in an assembly tell the
audience: “We’ve won just by being here!” and she was met with
uncontested applause. Sleeping on the sidewalk is not a victory unless
you’re first in line for concert tickets. Sleeping on the ground of a
small decorative park owned by a commercial real estate firm is not a
victory unless you are attempting to protect an endangered squirrel or a
really old tree, and probably not even then.
Meanwhile, the ring of police officers surrounding the park earn
time-and-a-half, stroking their batons, waiting. I’ve seen far fewer
cops disperse much larger groups of better trained and prepared
demonstrators in a matter of minutes, as has almost anyone who protested
against the Iraq War; the notion that we have won control of the park
through the strength numbers is absurd. Meanwhile the police go on with
the farce of instructions from “the space’s owner” as if there were a
guy standing in an officer tower watching the park and changing his mind
back and forth. It’s a tactic, and one we ought generally ignore. Look
around. See the group with guns and sticks? They’re calling the shots. A
friend remarked that if aliens showed up on the scene, they would think
they had stumbled onto a police holding pen.
It seems to me that the tactic of an occupation has two main goals,
neither of which the Zuccotti Park encampment is achieving. The first
would be some sort of sabotage or interference that halts business as
usual. When you hear “occupy Wall Street,” you don’t think Soviet tanks
rolling into Prague, but there’s a suggestion of interruption. We want
to occupy Wall Street because we want to make them stop what they’re
doing. Camping in a park outside their office isn’t how you make them
stop, it’s how you ask them to prom if you’re creepy about it.[1] It’s
not like we’re even costing any CEO his beauty sleep “HeyHeyLBJ”-style.
They all go home at night. When you walk to the encampment, it’s hard to
realize anything’s happening until you get up and inside. It is
painfully clear that the people who work there could not give a fuck.
Wall Street’s crisis-business goes on as usual, under “occupation” or
not.
The second function of an occupation would be a kind of collective
enjoyment or gain at your enemy’s expense. His stuff becomes your stuff,
which you get to play with and put to use. A park could be useful in
this way as a staging ground for other actions and a liberated space
participants can enjoy. As the snake-march to Union Square (with an
arrest rate between 10 and 30 percent) demonstrated, a spot that’s
surrounded by cops is probably not the best place to plan the specifics
of your next action. I’m not being paranoid or even controversial in
pointing out that police officers are working inside and outside the
bounds of the occupation. Sorry, but that buff 30-something guy with
sunglasses, three Blackberries, and no friends isn’t there because he
saw the Olbermann feature on Current. There’s no security and no attempt
to keep anyone out of the park, which I understand, but people should be
aware that plans made in this supposedly occupied place go straight to
the police, if they weren’t suggested in general assemblies by cops in
the first place. So it’s not a very good staging ground for a next wave
of actions, it does not perform that function as a strategic resource.
As for the enjoyment, I guess that’s a subjective question, but it was
hardly a raucous party. Mostly people didn’t want to “give the cops a
reason” by enjoying themselves too publicly. If you thought passing
around a bottle of whiskey was tough in your parents’ basement in high
school, try doing it under the watchful eye of dozens of New York’s
finest. I mean, we did, and it was kind of fun, but not like temporary
autonomous zone fun. As I’m writing this, I’m seeing reports on Twitter
of a cop-enforced quiet time after 10. It makes me wonder if they
haven’t let the whole thing go on this long as a way to get some
austerity-hit officers overtime pay.
The fuzzy ultra-left ideal about forging new kinds of relationships
through struggle and finding each other and such can’t just be about
meeting in space and time, otherwise we could start a bowling league and
be done with it. If we’re trying to learn how to have each other’s
backs, how to trust and depend on each other moving forward, then we
need to put ourselves in situations that demand that kind of strength
and solidarity.[2] And I don’t mean taking people’s sides in arguments
over assembly process. That shit is dumb.
I don’t want to quibble about whether or not the encampment counts as a
“real occupation” — you can occupy a bathroom, but that doesn’t mean
you’re doing shit. It seems clear to me that the encampment at Zuccotti
Park isn’t providing the benefits a successful tactical occupation could
and should. That said, there are definitely some bright spots. First of
all, the occupation has accumulated (last time I heard) $24,000 in a war
chest, along with literally tons of donated food. It looks like the
national climate is such that an action of this ideological orientation
can attract financial support, which is going to be huge, especially
considering the costs associated with the criminalization of protest.
When a brutal cop maced a couple women just for kicks, some anonymous[3]
internet folks posted a good bit of his personal information online. If
there are direct personal consequences for particular aggressive cops,
that can only be a good thing. For the first time it looks like people
on the interwebs can help protect people on the ground. It seems to me
they could do more. For example: I, for one, if the webs are listening,
am interested in learning more about the owners of Zuccotti Park. These
are elements of an emergent potential, the question remains what we can
do with it.
Here are some ideas:
particularly susceptible to police co-optation. In one of the most
heavily policed places in the world, where the NYPD is bragging about
its ability to shoot down planes, we should assume they have a Che
t-shirt and a Chrome messenger bag in a prop room somewhere. If anyone
can lead the group, that means anyone can lead the group. A switch to a
model based on smaller bands of people (5–10) who know and trust each
other and have found common ground and operate in (naturally)
overlapping ways would have the dual benefits of enabling creative
rather than agreeable actions and reducing the risk of police
infiltration, without forfeiting the benefits of a large group. The
technical term for these crews is “affinity groups,” but I prefer
“friends.”
threatening the normal functioning of Wall Street, then it could open up
space for smaller groups to operate without too much police attention
and change the balance of power in the park. I heard unconfirmed reports
that Radiohead is planning a concert at the occupation this week, which
if true could make it uncontrollable and attract more folks to a
relatively uninhabited part of the city. I’m disinclined to believe the
rumors, but you never know, and it’s not like they can’t afford to bail
themselves out of jail. Maybe they could be cajoled over Twitter to show
up and play a few acoustic songs. Either way, it doesn’t make sense to
me to try and protect the occupation from this kind of influx of people,
even if that would make it untenable in its current form.
going to be explosive: the two Parties will spend a billion each
reminding Americans how terrible everything is, and hoping they can get
away with blaming each other for a permanent unemployment crisis. The
social ills that brought people out aren’t getting better any time soon.
Occupy Wall Street is part of a sequence, not the sequence itself, and
we should be thinking about its role in a revolutionary campaign of a
longer but bound duration.
around one’s neck and choke it to death?
These are admittedly preliminary thoughts, and I want to discuss what to
do with other folks, but I don’t want to address an assembly, and not
just for security reasons. When I’ve found people and groups of people
at the occupation who are ready to move beyond its current bounds, it’s
on the edges of the large circles. Maybe it’s time the whole thing got
edgier. That is, sharper.
See you in the streets.
[1] I swear this is a plot point in a movie or tv show, but I can’t
remember which one. Remind me in comments and get your name here!
[2] This also means doing it the smart way. When I expressed surprise to
a longtime New Yorker that the Union Square march resulted in so many
arrests, he told me everyone knows the NYPD doesn’t play above 14^(th)
Street while the UN is in session. I did not know that, and I would
wager some of those arrested didn’t either.
[3] It’s an adjective, not a Party.