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Title: From Occupy to Ferguson Author: CrimethInc. Date: November 20, 2014 Language: en Topics: Occupy, Ferguson, Read All About It Source: Retrieved on 2nd December 2020 from https://crimethinc.com/2014/11/20/from-occupy-to-ferguson
In early 2011, in response to austerity measures, protesters occupied
the capitol building in Madison, Wisconsin. It was a localized struggle,
but it gained traction on the popular imagination out of all proportion
to its size. This clearly indicated that something big was coming, and
some of us even brainstormed about how to prepare for it—but all the
same, the nationwide wave of Occupy a few months later caught us
flat-footed.
In August 2014, after white police officer Darren Wilson killed unarmed
black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, a week and a half of
pitched protests shook the town. Once again, these were localized, but
they loomed big in the popular imagination. Police kill something like
three people a day in the United States; over the past few years, we’ve
seen a pattern of increasing outrage against these murders, but until
that August it hadn’t gained much leverage on the public consciousness.
What was new about the Ferguson protests was not just that people
refused to cede the streets to the police for days on end, nor that they
openly defied the “community leadership” that usually pacifies such
revolts. It was also that all around the country, people were finally
paying attention and expressing approval.
Like the occupation of the capitol building in Madison, this may portend
things to come. Ferguson is a microcosm of the United States. Could we
see an uprising like this spread nationwide? It seems almost possible,
right now, as the governor of Missouri has declared a preemptive state
of emergency and people all over the US are preparing demonstrations for
the day that the grand jury refuses to indict Darren Wilson.
What limits did the Occupy movement reach? Why did it subside without
achieving its object of transforming society? First, it offered almost
no analysis of racialized power, despite the central role of race in
dividing labor struggles and poor people’s resistance in the US. Second,
perhaps not coincidentally, its discourse was largely legalistic and
reformist—it was premised on the assumption that the laws and
institutions of the state are fundamentally beneficial, or at least
legitimate. Finally, it began as a political rather than social
movement—hence the decision to occupy Wall Street instead of acting on a
terrain closer to most people’s everyday lives, as if capitalism were
not a ubiquitous relation but something emanating from the stock market.
As a result of these three factors, the majority of the participants in
Occupy were activists, newly precarious exiles from the middle class,
and members of the underclass, in roughly that order; the working poor
were notably absent. The simplistic sloganeering of Occupy obscured the
lines of conflict that run through our society from top to bottom:
“police are part of the 99%” is technically true, economically speaking,
but so are most rapists and white supremacists. All of this meant that
when the police came to evict the encampments and kill the movement,
Occupy had neither the numbers, nor the fierceness, nor the analysis it
would have needed to defend itself.
When a movement reaches its limits and subsides, it illustrates the
obstacles future movements will have to surpass. It’s possible to
understand the social momentum originating in Ferguson as an answer to
the failures of Occupy. Where Occupy whitewashed the issue of race, the
protests in Ferguson placed it front and center. Where Occupy confined
itself to the unfavorable terrain of “political” physical sites and
reformist demands, the people who rose up in Ferguson were fighting on
their own streets for their own very lives. Whereas, with the temporary
exception of Occupy Oakland, Occupy lacked the will to stand down the
police, people in Ferguson braved tear gas and even bullets to do just
that. Where Occupy sought to conceal all the different forms of
hierarchy and strife that cut through this society beneath the unifying
banner of “the 99%,” the conflicts in Ferguson compelled everyone to
confront them. Even if it doesn’t arise in response to the grand jury
verdict on Darren Wilson, the next powerful social movement in the US
will likely have more in common with what we’ve seen in Ferguson than
with Occupy (or its ersatz sequels, like the self-policing, pre-pacified
People’s Climate March).
The momentum proceeding from the demonstrations in Ferguson has its own
internal tensions, which will become more apparent the further it goes.
Is the problem police brutality, or policing itself? Is the rightful
protagonist of this struggle the local poor person of color, the
respectable leader of color, the white ally, or everyone who opposes
police killings? If it is the latter, how should we deal with the power
imbalances within this “everyone”? How should demonstrators from outside
the most targeted communities relate to conflicts playing out within
them, such as disputes over tactics or risk? And do we really have to
repeat the debate about violence and nonviolence yet again?
Right now, authorities of all stripes around the US are scrambling to
capitalize on those fault lines to neutralize a potential second wave of
unrest in response to the murder of Michael Brown. They intend to manage
our rage and heartbreak, to channel it into contained protests that will
function as a mere pressure valve—like the people who held signs at
Occupy for a few months before returning to their lives as atomized
individuals. If they succeed, it will embolden police departments
nationwide to go on killing people, especially young black men, and it
will take the question of transforming society off the table once more.
The stakes are high.