“…No permit, no
plan, no steel fences!”: The Troy Davis March and The Future of Occupy Wall
Street
“After a few minutes we
changed direction again, and finally got onto
Broadway. I'm sure many of
us have been on numerous marches down Broadway
before. But this was
different. There was no permit, no plan, no steel
fences. We had the
street.” - Hena Ashraf on the Troy Davis March
Part I. Cops, Cops, and
more Cops: Race, Radicalism, and the Problem of the Ultra-left
Ok, I admit it. I didn’t
camp out in Liberty Plaza. I didn’t even stay long enough for the first general
assembly the night of the 17th. I was eating Pakistani food with
some friends a few blocks away listening to a comrade talk about his experience
with “Bloombergville”- a protest encampment just outside of City Hall occupied
by students, union members, and social service workers in June of this year.
Later we bought tall boys of cheap beer and went to see “The Black Power
Mixtape” at the IFC. We left Liberty Plaza out of boredom and hunger (this was
day one and the pizza had not arrived yet) in search of beer, food, and fun. We
were tired of waiting and I, for one, was hoping that cops would actually try
to kick us out to see how we would react. It was a beautiful night in the City
and we wanted to party. At Liberty Plaza there wasn’t even a boom box, let
alone booze or dancing (unless you count the brief and intermittent hippie jam
sessions). In fact there was no entertainment at all, no movie screenings or
street theater and at times the silence was deafening. For the most part folks
were sitting and smoking, probably wondering if or when the media would show
up.
I arrived in NYC early on Friday afternoon with a Timbuktu bag containing a heavy-duty painter’s mask, a pair of cheap blue swimmer’s goggles, a black turtle neck and a pair of black cut-off shorts, looking for a something to do. A comrade who volunteered as a medic during the Pittsburgh G20 recommended the mask and goggles. He said that when cops attacked a park where demonstrators were sleeping he wore a mask and goggles to protect him while he treated folks who had been gassed and pepper-sprayed. I even brought running shoes, and I can assure you that the last thing I enjoy is sprinting, unless it’s wildly through the streets with friends. At this point, you can see how naive and optimistic I was. I was hoping for enough of a ruckus that teargas would be deployed. Instead, the NYPD deployed scooters and surveillance teams.
Marching on the sidewalk around Wall Street, I felt more like a child than an anti-capitalist, especially with the cops quietly blocking the street. I remarked to a friend, “I’m twenty- two years old and I can cross the street without looking both ways first, if I want to.” Unfortunately, no one seemed to share that desire and we continued to parade around Wall Street with our police escorts, like school children on a field trip at the Bronx Zoo. The tone was somber, even respectful. I was almost expecting to see folks in black hoods carrying some symbolic coffin with the words “Wall Street” or “Our Future” scrawled across it in white paint. In reality, things were not that theatrical. Pedestrians and tourists alike looked at us with expressions of disgust and humor, knowing full well how impotent we were flanked by cops and barricades on both sides. It was only when a group of anarchists started chanting, “Feed the Poor. Eat the Rich!” that I started to have a little fun. But that was day one of Occupy Wall Street. Since then we have witnessed the emergence of spontaneous solidarity marches between anti-capitalist youth, anti- PIC activists, grassroots organizations, and rank and file workers, as well as mass arrests and police brutality against demonstrators.
So where can Occupy Wall Street go from
here? In the last week, a dizzying number of public intellectuals, official "anarcho-liberal" pundits, bloggers, and celebrities have
weighed in on the present possibilities and future potentialities of Occupy
Wall Street. For a representative sample see here, here, and here. For the purposes of this
post, my focus is on Malcolm Harris’s provocative piece published on the
Jacobin Magazine blog, entitled, “Occupied Wall Street: Some Tactical Thoughts”. Harris's piece has received a flurry of attention from a variety of folks on the Left including the good folks
over at Reclaim UC. Of
Harris’s piece, Lindsay Beyerstein of In These Times observes, “…He (Harris) argues that the protest is
failing to accomplish the two main goals one might have for occupying a plaza
in the first place: disrupting your enemy's operations, or making a big show of
commandeering his space for your own enjoyment” . While, Beyerstein
does mention Harris’s critique of the police presence at Liberty Square, I want
to draw more attention to it here.
Not
long after Harris’s piece started circulating through the usual channels,
conversations about cop presence in Liberty Plaza surfaced on twitter. Sadly,
in many of these conversations the very folks blogging and theorizing about
Occupy Wall Street, declared their unwillingness to participate in the event
itself, dismissing it as both a dissident dragnet and a excuse for the City to
dole out time and a half pay to cops. In the interest of solidarity and out
respect for those comrades, I don’t want to harp on such overblown
dismissals, but I do want to identify their misguided logic.
For one,
cop-hating for cop-hating’s sake reeks of privilege and reveals a general
isolation from and lack of connection with Occupy Wall Street itself. In this
case, cops aren't a problem simply because they are cops (and thus agents of the
State and Capital), they are a problem because they are brutalizing Occupy Wall
Street protesters in the streets and low income communities of color (as well as
queer, homeless, and trans youth) throughout NYC and beyond. A recent call for an anti-cop march on friday makes this very
clear.
Therefore, cops should be banned from Liberty Plaza in order to build a
permanent space where those folks brutalized by Quality of Life ordinances,
gentrification, and austerity can come to receive free medical attention and
food, as well as organize and plan actions, and not because they (the cops that
is) make a handful of ultra-leftists jittery. Second, if we are to accomplish
the eventual goal of liberating the Park by keeping the cops out, organizing
among affinity groups won’t help much. Only a diverse, spontaneous, and mass militant assemblage of actors can achieve that.
Part II. “We are all
Sean Bell! NYPD go to hell!”: Militant Troy Davis Protesters Occupy Wall Street
"At 5th avenue just a
few blocks north of Washington Square Park, the
police had gathered
themselves and blocked the street. But we kept going, and there was a very
tense moment where we shouted 'We are all Sean Bell! NYPD go to hell!' – Hena
Ashraf
Interestingly,
one of the most militant, spontaneous, and confrontational moments to occur in
NYC since Occupy Wall Street, was not formally affiliated with Occupy Wall
Street: the Troy Davis snake march from Union Square to Liberty Plaza on the
evening of September 23rd. This march witnessed the possibility of
that assemblage yet received little attention from both corporate media and the ultra-left. Since this march wasn’t immediately about capital or
property relations, or couched in the language of Italian Autonomism and
insurrection many bright ultra-left commentators simply ignored the march altogether,
failing to understand its radical potential and its truly militant,
confrontational character. As Hena
Ashraf, a contributor to Left Turn magazine,
recalled, “I had never seen a march like this or anything with direct
confrontation or resistance to the police.” While I encourage everyone to read
Hena Ashraf’s detailed, stirring account of the rally and subsequent snake
march, there are a few highlights from Ashraf’s account worth mentioning for the
purposes of this piece. First, while the rally at Union Square was planned the
march was not. The decision to march, unlike the decision-making apparatus of the general assembly, truly came from both no one
and everyone; a synthesis of direct action and direct democracy forged in a
moment of excitement and uncertainty. Unlike Liberty Plaza and previous mass
marches, there were no facilitators or marshals, no police liaisons and spokespeople.
As Ashraf observed, “It was clear there was no one in charge, and I think
that made it better, and more spontaneous, and thus harder for the police to
contain us.”
In this sense, the snake
march actually accomplished some of Harris’s goals, including both a
celebration of collective resistance and a disruption of business as usual; albeit a temporary one. Additionally, as I previously mentioned, the snake
march to Liberty Plaza from Union Square was unique in its diversity. Reporting
on the march for New America Media, Ryan Devereaux wrote,
“Parents
marched with children on their shoulders. Crust-punk activists joined
demonstrators in pressed shirts, repeating the refrain, “The system is racist,
they killed Troy Davis!” Wide-eyed Manhattanites poured out of restaurants and
businesses, camera phones in hand, to capture what was unfolding. As the number of marchers swelled it became evident
that some of the spectators had transformed themselves into participants.
This “crowd of love” as
Ashraf described them demonstrates the potential for further disruption and
sustained confrontation with the police as Occupy Wall Street advances. As I
noted earlier, a group of activists calling themselves the “Bail Out the People
Movement”, have called for a demonstration and march against “police brutality,
harassment, and attacks” on Friday. Without knowing any details, I can only assume
that this planned march does not have a permit or a planned route. If this
march gathers the same sense of collective rage, spontaneity, militancy, and
numbers as the Troy Davis march (and there is a good chance that it will
considering the levels of police brutality in recent days) it has the potential
to be a major moment of resistance. Yet, in order for that to work,
two things need to happen first. One, organizers need to work harder to recruit the participation of labor unions and two, folks at Liberty Plaza need step up and
confront the police, starting with the barricades surrounding Wall Street.
Those barricades stand as gleaming testaments to our own passivity. We need to show the cops that we are not fucking around, that this
is not another stupid symbolic march called for by the A.N.S.W.E.R. coalition.
While Friday’s scheduled march against police brutality is a great start, we
need both offensive and defensive tactics in this war. If "Wall Street is
War Street" as the Black Mask collective declared so many years ago, then
we will have to wage our own war (the class war that the GOP is so afraid of)
against its shock troops, the police. The cops need to know that they cannot
drag us through the streets, beat us, kettle us, or pepper-spray us without a
fight. Similiarly, we need to know that we can count on each other to
collectively resist them. More should be done to attempt to block or disrupt
police movements. At the very least, we will have to step up and agree to make
an effort to sabotage the arrest process itself. If that means circling a
police wagon with comrades inside then so be it.
Part III. “No permit,
No Plan, No Steel Fences”: The Future of Occupy Wall Street
“We need more class war in
the streets and less camping in parks next to Wall Street.” Infshop.org
facebook status update 9/28/2011
“ No permit, no plan, no steel fences!” This should be the motto, the
battle cry of Occupy Wall Street in the coming days, weeks, and months ahead.
Occupy Wall Street must be a movement without fences and barricades, police
escorts and permits, formalized plans and voting procedures. Direct democracy,
in the form of the general assembly and the people’s mic, while an amazing and
empowering experience, is not direct action. What Occupy Wall Street needs now
more than ever is extralegal mass action in order to get new folks out of their
offices, classrooms, and homes and into the streets. If Wall Street is truly
“our street” then we must shut it down. If the police continue to brutalize us we must
retaliate. If both the corporate and so-called progressive media continue to
ignore us then we must, to borrow from John Jacobs, “bring the war home”. Wall
Street can become “our street”, but first we need to take to the streets
themselves, like the brave crowd of Troy Davis marchers who battled cops as
they weaved their way to Wall Street. The following are suggestions for how to
shift the focus from maintaining and preserving structures of direct democracy
to mobilizing forms of direct action:
-Disrupt Wall Street:
There is a long and storied history of such actions. According to ACTUP NY
(Aids Coalition to Unleash Power), on “September 14, 1989: ACT UP once again
makes history by stopping trading on the Stock Exchange floor. Seven ACT UP
members infiltrate the New York Stock Exchange and chain themselves to the VIP
balcony. Their miniature foghorns drown out the opening bell, and a banner
unfurls above the trading floor demanding "SELL WELLCOME." Other ACT
UP members snap photos which they then sneak out and send over newswires. Four
days later, Burroughs Wellcome lowers the price of AZT by 20%, to $6,400 per
year.”
-Target corporate media
with disruptions and sabotage. If they are attempting to black us out of news
coverage then we should black them out and prevent them from being able to
cover anything at all.
- Bring back Boombergville or similar encampments against
austerity and police brutality outside of City Hall. Remember, he's the one who
called on his dogs to rough up protestors in the first place. Target City Hall
in general. ACT UP operation “Target City Hall” drew over 3,000 people to City
Hall.
- Banner drops: Blanket
the city with banners. Off of the top of my head, City Hall, the First
Precinct, Buses, Subway entrances, and parks would all be good targets to start
with.
-Take over parks close to
or near police stations where protestors are being held. This establishes a
base to plan, coordinate, and enact different forms of jail solidarity and
support for those arrested. It also lets the cops know that we are not
intimated.
-Occupy major roads,
highways, and bridges
- Occupy/ disrupt banks
- Do more and continue to
do outreach with labor unions and unemployed workers, as well as student, anti-war, and
environmental justice, and anti-eviction movements in the hopes of building for a general Day of
Action against austerity and cuts. The I.WW. General Defense Committee released at statement in support of Occupy Wall Street earlier this afternoon and we should view this as a good sign. Additionally, firedoglake is reporting that other union interest is increasing.
-Direct action training
sessions: everyone has valuable experience to share with each other. People need to share their stories and
tactics with each other if occupy Wall Street is to survive. I was fortunate
enough to attend a direct action training session last fall at Cal hosted by
the amazing folks from Gay Shame (a direct action, anti-capitalist network of
queer and trans folk in the Bay Area) and it was an invaluable experience. We need to know what we are up against and how others have organized in the past
- Move beyond Liberty Plaza,
closer to and beyond Wall Street. Every street is controlled by the logic of
capital and regulated by real or threatened police violence, and thus every
street is a perfect target for disruption. Every street is “our street”.
- Employ a diversity of
tactics including street theater, dance parties, critical mass rides, die-ins,
rallies, permitted marches, snake marches, strikes, walk-outs, four square
games, bike polo etc. We should be able to play together and have fun with each other.
- Boycott or refuse to pay
fare for public transportation. If you have to go to work ride your back and
get there late or leave early. Numerous sudden and sporadic critical mass rides
staggered throughout the work-day and into the night.
Hope to see you at the barricades in the near future.
