This Year's Occupy Wall Street Protest Anniversary

I remember the beginning of Occupy Wall Street (OWS). My own activist grapevine sources told me that a more significant event by a different name was going to occur in D.C. and was being organized by well known American activists. So initially OWS was merely a curiosity. If memory serves, they were planning to occupy space around the Wall Street trading center overnight. I was thinking about staying to see what would happen but had to rule that out because I was invited to a wedding for two former students on the next day. The day was September 17, 2011.

OWS started very inauspiciously. A road to the Wall Street trading center was barricaded by the police. There were a few protesters  who decided that they would sit in front of the barricade in defiance of police orders. Alas, OWS appeared to be just another disappointing, poorly attended protest in NYC. Here my memory gets a little foggy in terms of the order of events. I stayed for a  little while and decided to get something to eat. I was thinking about going home but decided to see what else was going on. 

I ended up at Battery Park which is a little south of where we were. And that is when things got interesting. Activists were broken up into groups with the people in each group using hand signals to communicate their feelings about what was being said by whoever was speaking in the group. For each group, after everyone who wanted to speak did so, the groups would sometimes vote on whether they could agree with a given proposal. But instead of using the majority rules option one disagreement, called a block, could table a whole proposal and it was back to the drawing board to see if proposal could be reworked so that everyone was on board. This was a new concept for me but was apparently not new for some there. 

Photo from Artnet News was one of the sites where OWS protesters gathered.

We later marched around the famous Wall Street Bull (pictured above) where there was a significant police presence many of whom had multiple zipties indicating that they were going to arrest the protesters. But they didn't. After that, we went up to Zuccotti park and that began the encampment of Occupy Wall Street.

There were other OWS encampments around the nation. I also participated in the local one where I live and in the adopted one in D.C.--that was the one previously mentioned which was planned by seasoned activists. Oddly enough, though most of my OWS participation was in lower Manhattan, I stayed overnight only at the one in D.C.

Within OWS, there were different groups that were designed to address certain sets of issues being addressed by or needs of the Occupation. In one of my subsequent trips to OWS, I found myself volunteered to join the Global Justice Work Group. We would research different problems or issues, discuss them, make proposals in terms of what we would support or oppose, and then we would vote on those proposals in the same way that the small groups were voting on the first day of OWS in Battery Park. What we agreed on was then passed along to the General Assembly, all of the protesters at a given time, who were staying in Zuccotti Park. The only proposal that I have any  memory of was one that opposed the sanctions against Iran because of the effects those sanctions had on many of its people. We wanted to carefully craft that position  so that it did not lend any support for the then Ahmadinejad regime. 

Again, the decision making process used in OWS was one of the significant contributions that could come out of it. Not that we could depend on finding a unanimous agreement in very diverse settings. But it is the spirit of that decision making process that is important. Instead of battling it out in a competition to see who could get one's point of view to win a simple majority of votes, we were looking to create proposals and positions that would be inclusive of everyone participating--there was no tyranny of the majority. And there is a world of difference between that kind of consensus building than the political tribalism that has so divided our nation today. Then again, what does our current form of Capitalism teach about competition and conquest?

Another contribution that OWS produced was the document entitled The Declaration Of The Occupation Of New York City first passed on September 29, 2011 by the NYC General Assembly (click here for the document). If you read through the document, you'll find that many of the issues brought up then are still unresolved and relevant today. Those issues were describing how the 1% was exploiting the rest of us. 

Why we can consider this document a contribution despite the demise of OWS and the document's unresolved issues that remain  is because what movements like OWS and the documents they produce can, at best, do is to give people opportunities to change, to see the world they live in a different light. In that way, OWS and the positions it took was like the Old Testament prophets. Both gave people a chance to see things differently and change accordingly. Not all of the Old Testament prophets were successful if success was measured in getting people to change enough. In fact, some of the prophets were martyred-- martyr the speaker is not a sign of a successful altar call.

OWS had faults as well. The most prominent faults were our use of the police reaction to peaceful civil disobedience to gain publicity. It wasn't that many of the police were fans of ours or would have liked our Facebook page had we had one. But to get publicity, we practiced unnecessary civil disobedience so that any police overreaction could be used to draw more attention to our cause.

The second fault was worse, and more counterproductive than the first. Though the complaints listed in The Declaration Of The Occupation Of New York City were spot on even for today, we used those facts to try to motivate society to turn against and punish the 1%. Besides the ethical problem with doing that, it was very counterproductive to our cause. For in attempting to try and convict the 1% in the eyes of the public, many of whom were dependent on the 1% for their success if not their survival, we put the burden of proof for our charges on ourselves. And we did not invest much into proving our charges against the 1%. We more less treated them as assumptions.

What we could have done instead was to ask the 1% to leave their political and economic gated communities and end their apartheid practices against the rest of us. Let's face it, the 1% very often gets to sponsor legislation that benefits them first putting the welfare of some of the 99% in some kind of jeopardy. By asking the 1% to join the rest of us, the burden of proof would switch to the 1% and could easily be seen in their reaction to our demands. 

Would we have had a different result without making either one or both of those errors? Possibly. I think we would have had a better chance to have the encampments last longer and be more successful without them. But there is no way of knowing.