Author: Jacob Surpin
Two weeks ago, to mark the six-month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, roughly 300 protesters gathered at Zuccotti Park in New York City, the original Occupy encampment. Perhaps they were nostalgic for better days. Last November, they were swept from the park by police under the orders of Mayor Bloomberg, who cited zoning regulations and public health concerns. In the following weeks, the multitude of Occupy encampments that sprang up all over the country – including in Los Angeles – soon went the way of Zuccotti Park, and by December the movement’s public presence all but faded away.
The New York Police Department reported arresting seventy-three protesters over the anniversary weekend. While not a small number, it pales in comparison to the thousands of arrests made both in New York and around the country this past fall, when the movement was new and still growing rapidly.
For the movement’s leaders, the decline in momentum was not completely unforeseen. Occupy organizer Yotam Marom wrote in a December blog entry for the movement, “Winter brings the sober understanding that we won’t be in the headlines every day, that we need to be more than a string of events or actions or press releases, more than an endless meeting.” Within the same month, even The Nation’s executive editor Richard Kim admitted that “to casual observers, it would appear as if the Occupy movement faded this winter.”
The Occupy six-month anniversary protest offered a provoking contrast between the high-profile days of the movement’s past and the current evolutionary phase that will come to define the movement’s future. Built out of prolonged civil disobedience and enormous amounts of momentum-driven organizing, the movement accrued no shortages of protests, rallies or people willing to be arrested. Now, however, the situation has changed, and it remains to be seen just how well the movement will adapt.
Despite the overlooked anniversary protests and many continued proclamations of the movement’s death, student activists and the Youth Coalition for Community Action (YCCA), an Occidental club founded last year by student activists returning from a Disaster Politics trip to New Orleans, have been quietly developing a grand strategy for the movement’s next push.
Over the weekend of March 3-4, YCCA hosted a training for a core of movement organizers on Occidental’s campus. Organizers from the Center for the Working Poor, including the executive director, Paul Engler, led the event. Organizers were required to attend a total of seventeen-and-a-half hours of training, and engage in teachings on mass civil disobedience, grand strategy, public narrative and relational organizing.
For Guido Girgenti (sophomore), the training sessions helped fill a void left by the failure of Occupy Wall Street organizers to successfully translate the momentum of last fall into a long-term movement. “The most insightful part of the mass training was the presentation of a clear strategic framework,” he said. “Occupy Wall Street . . . failed to ever weave together the essential strategic components of our movement-a narrative that explains the injustices around us, a demand that encompasses our vision for a more democratic society and an analysis of tactics based around how to generate public support for our vision that can be translated into institutional change.”
After going through Occupy Wall Street last semester and working with the Center for the Working Poor this semester, Girgenti feels that YCCA has both the momentum and the structure to be a progressive force both on campus and on the national scene for the foreseeable future. “Now we see the power of mass nonviolent action combined with an ambitious vision for change, and we’re not going back,” he said. “Many of our goals are still the same-building a community for student organizers and activists who are interested in building strong movements for social justice-but we have a much clearer idea of what trainings we can do to truly make that community thrive.”
Other student organizers recognized the need for an increase in structure within the movement. “The momentum that helped us to successfully mobilize students around Occupy first semester is not a sustainable foundation to build a long-term movement,” Maddie Resch (first-year) said.
In the beginning, the momentum built up slowly. On Sept. 17, 2011, a group of young organizers in New York City declared the occupation of Wall Street by calling for people to bring tents and stay indefinitely as a protest. At first, the idea seemed ludicrous (who would want to go live on Wall Street?), but people came. Major news outlets summarily dismissed the infant movement. Five days after the occupation began, Ginia Bellafante of The New York Times wrote, “The fractured and airy movement . . . was clamoring for nothing in particular to happen right away.”
But the occupiers did not go away. Two months later the tents still stood, and on the “Day of Action,” Nov. 17, tens of thousands of protesters mobilized and committed 240 acts of civil disobedience. That day of action became the New York Times’ most commented story of the year. Spurred by repeated acts of police violence against peaceful protesters – pepper-spraying peaceful and non-threatening UC-Davis students, beating New York City journalists, knocking an Iraq War veteran unconscious with a tear gas canister in Oakland and mass arresting upwards of 700 citizens on the Brooklyn Bridge after first ushering them onto it – the American Left began to unite around Occupy.
At Occidental, the Occupy movement quickly captured the imagination of a handful of students. While many students expressed sympathy for Occupy, the fastest and most effective response came out of YCCA.
“Even before Occupy Wall Street happened, YCCA’s mission statement was always to stand in solidarity with local and national movements for social, economic and racial justice,” Girgenti said.
As the Occupy Wall Street movement began to break out, YCCA found itself in a favorable position to act. “We were living within what could be a once-in-a-decade explosion of progressivism. I remember spending an entire YCCA meeting discussing Naomi Klein’s speech at the New York City encampment entitled ‘The Most Important Thing in the World Right Now’ and finding that a strong core of our leadership truly believed that Occupy Wall Street was indeed the most important thing happening in terms of rescuing our democracy and economy from the r
uin wrought by Wall Street and other corporate allies,” Girgenti said.
Mirja Hitzemann (sophomore) visited New York City over fall break and went to see Zuccotti Park. “I met mostly young people at Zuccotti Park and in Times Square during the march of Oct. 15. “Many had left college and their homes to be part of the movement, which again emphasized the urgency to take control of political decisions away from Wall Street and back to the people,” she said.
While Girgenti admits that it was “daunting to feel like you were suddenly being swept up in the wave of history.” Within weeks of the movement’s outbreak, YCCA formed the Students Occupy L.A. activism group, connected with the national network of Occupy Colleges and organized a widely attended teach-in with Occidental faculty as part of the national teach-in on Nov. 2.
In the very early morning of Nov. 30, police poured out from City Hall in Los Angeles and out into the surrounding Occupy L.A. encampment. They stomped out tents and kicked over trash cans. City Hall was directly in the middle of the encampment, and the sudden appearance of so many policemen startled the resident protesters, many of whom had been camped out for more two months or longer. They had been expecting the raid, but they had not been expecting the police to come from within City Hall. The protesters rushed towards the middle of the encampment to investigate, and the police acted quickly to set up a perimeter and cordon off the different areas of the encampment from each other. The encampment had been declared an unlawful assembly two days before, and the police had orders to clear it. I was there, though not as a journalist. Along with about twenty or thirty other Occidental students, I was working as acting as a peaceful activist, hoping to ensure the protest remained nonviolent.
We were warned. Police officers with loudspeakers made their way through the encampment announcing that we had ten minutes to evacuate the premises before we would be arrested. I had been separated from the main part of the encampment and stood on one of the outer lawns with three other students: Resch, Girgenti and Imran Chandoo. Chandoo was initially unsure. With police lights and barricades all around, he pulled out a coin. He said that if it came up heads he would stay, and if it came up tails he would leave. He flipped it. The coin came up tails, but he decided to stay anyway.
The four of us sat in a circle and linked arms. We were cut off from the main body of the protest and surrounded by police. A news reporter, unable to get further inside the park, came to our circle instead. “Who are you texting?” she asked us. I was telling my mother I would be arrested. “Are you all texting your parents?” she asked. We said yes.
“You know what you are doing,” my mother texted back.
A few minutes later, an officer walked up to us and asked if there was anything he could do to get us to move.
“You can walk away from this,” the officer said.
“We’ll leave if you promise to join the movement,” Girgenti said. The officer smiled underneath his visor.
“I can’t do that,” he said. “You won’t be hurt,” he added and walked away.
Within a minute the officer lifted us off the ground and handcuffed us individually. Officers directed us onto a curb outside of the park to be processed.
“Martin Luther King said that he felt the freest when he was in jail,” one protester sitting with us said. An older protester sitting next to me laughed. “I’ve been in jail plenty of times,” he said. “And I never felt free.”
In total, police arrested approximately 300 protesters at the Occupy L.A. encampment in the very early morning (arrests started at around 12:30 a.m.), including four students (Girgenti, Resch, Chandoo and myself) and one alumnus (Alex Stevens ’11). We were held on five thousand dollar bail and threatened with the charge of “failure to disperse,” a misdemeanor. About a third of the protesters, including all five Occidental students and alumni, were able to post bail and were released at some point on Dec. 1. The five of us were in jail for approximately 40 hours. Those who were unable to post bail were arraigned and released the night of Dec. 2.
Fingerprinted, photographed and given a number, we were placed in cells and given little to no information on the legal process. I remember the speech made by a young war veteran, in full uniform, to our holding block. “I’ve been doing civil disobedience for years,” he said. “We have never been treated like this. They are trying to intimidate us. We have to stay calm. This is part of the protest.”
The legal process was an arduous one. The city pressed charges against those with a prior record and withheld the right to press charges for up to a year against those without any priors.
The consensus among the protesters was that we had stood up to the raid successfully. Although the police had reclaimed the park, we had exceeded our expectations in number of arrests – it took the city more than eight or nine hours, by some reports, to fully process all of the protesters and get them into jail. Moreover, many protesters around us said they felt that the police acted unjustly by arresting people who had been meaning to leave and by holding us for so long on five thousand dollar bail.
Yet even with those victories, there was a sense of an upcoming shift in the movement. We could no longer protest and risk arrest without fear of being convicted. And although it was still sunny in Los Angeles, we had received emails from Occupy Wall Street asking for donations to buy sleeping bags for the winter.
The symbolic Occupy tent erected on Occidental’s campus last semester no longer stands. Without a noticeable public presence, however, YCCA organizers still have the movement foremost on their minds.
Following the six-month anniversary protests, it has become clear that the movement is, at the moment, rather disjointed. The older, less flattering face of the movement encompasses the sense of post-eviction stagnation and nostalgia for the good old days of large actions and intense media coverage. This attitude leads directly to unproductive bursts of action absent any larger strategic vision, as we witnessed with the recent protests in Zuccotti Park and Union Square.
The other is far more encouraging. Movement organizers across the country, including the organizers of “The 99% Spring” and the YCCA club on campus, are currently engaged in a quiet frenzy of strategizing and training all across the country. As Girgenti said, they are seeking to answer two questions: “What do we
want, and how do we win?”
To that end, Girgenti and Stevens have been working with a coalition of Los Angeles organizers. Nicknamed Starfish, the coalition includes the executive director for the Center for the Working Poor, a high-ranking official of Strategic Actions for a Just Economy (SAJE), a nurse union organizer and one of the leaders of the original Occupy L.A. encampment, Elise Whitaker. Each leader within the coalition represents a essential constituency for the movement: students, workers, faith-based groups, city government and Occupy organizers.
Whitaker, who left college to work at Occupy L.A. and is now taking classes at Occidental, poses a different question for the movement: How to find sustainable momentum? She and other Starfish organizers advocate for a hybridization of momentum and structure based organizing. “What was beautiful about Occupy was that it was so grassroots, but that’s also been something of a weakness. Moving forward we need a more sustainable model and trainings and to have consistent strategic action.”
Neither success nor longevity is assured. Recent progressive campaigns such as Rebuild the Dream and One Nation Working Together failed in rather unspectacular fashion. They attracted the support of major leftist institutions but never captured the imagination of the public. Occupy has the public’s attention now, but it may fade in the absence of an aggressive strategic campaign. Moreover, there is a danger that the Occupy brand may outlive its use.
But spring is here, and organizers both on Occidental’s campus and off are preparing for the future. YCCA plans to be in the thick of things and to be there for a while. “The movement needs a dramatic, high-profile event, probably in the form of a nonviolent action, that re-triggers and re-activates the latent anger at the corporate takeover of our democracy. This action needs to be tied to an organizational structure that can absorb and store the momentum generated by collecting petition signatures, training leaders and getting pledges from upcoming actions. The momentum allows the movement to struggle forward; the structure creates durable resources that allow the movement to sustain itself,” Girgenti said.
Looking ahead, Girgenti said the Occupy movement must wrest power from corporations and restore it to the people before it can begin to change national policy on a large scale. “We will not win any other the issues we want – foreclosure relief, student loan debt reform, reigning in financial self-destruction – while our democracy is literally bought and sold by the banks that wrecked our economy.”
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