Beyond the radical fringe
Two months earlier, I was living in Providence, Rhode Island, and I was quite skeptical about Occupy Wall Street. When I first read Adbusters magazine’s call for a Tahrir Square–style uprising in New York City’s financial district, the lack of appreciation for context annoyed me.32 Wall Street is not Tahrir Square. And though I was inspired by the Arab Spring, I didn’t think you could neatly transplant its tactics. Moreover, as Occupy Wall Street kicked off, it looked to me like the brave radicals initiating it were making the classic mistake of putting their counter-cultural foot forward first, thereby dooming the action to be locked onto a predictably lonely path where so many Americans who agreed with their populist sentiments would be inoculated against them as the messengers. It seemed to me to fit a pattern I had long been critical of, where self-selecting “activists” connect with each other at the expense of connecting with the broader society. A week into Occupy Wall Street, I even wrote a post for my blog with this critique titled, Occupy Wall Street: Small Convergence of a Radical Fringe.33
That was the experienced grassroots organizer in me. That’s the thing about experience. When you hear about an idea, you can instantly foresee a million things that could go wrong. And when your concerns repeatedly play out, it is easy to grow a little cynical and even a little bitter. It is easy to forget that revolutionary moments require an ingredient that you may now be running low on: a drive that once consumed you, but now pulses through the veins and brains of people younger than yourself, whom you are tempted to condescendingly dismiss as politically naïve. Can’t they see that to mobilize masses of people, you need more than a militant call to action and a Twitter account? Sure, just about everyone was furious with Wall Street, but turning latent discontent into coordinated collective action requires strategies to organize people and build alliances, and an appreciation for context.
Sometimes what you really want is to be proven wrong. That is how I started to feel when the occupation of Zuccotti Park persisted and the story started to significantly break into the mainstream media cycle; when labor unions and longstanding community organizations started to endorse and to plan actions under the new frameworks of “occupy” and “we are the 99%”; when GOP strategist Frank Luntz said he was “frightened to death”34 of the effort and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor decried the “growing mob”35 of Wall Street protesters, while House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi expressed her support,36 and the New York Times also endorsed the protest.37
Overnight, it seemed, a new political force had emerged; one that had the potential to frame the national debate and finally create popular pressure—a counterforce to the formidable power of capital. Despite my doubts, the thing had started to go big.
Grassroots movements for change are more often than not rife with all kinds of clumsy missteps. Thankfully the concerns that I was stuck on were not enough to stop the rapid growth of this audacious new movement. I realized that I myself had to get unstuck. If I were to wait for the perfect movement—one that I had no critiques of—I would wait forever. History would pass me by.
I heard that my friends Beka Economopoulos, Brooke Lehman, and Han Shan were involved, and I called them up. Then I freed up ten days from my schedule and took the train from Providence to New York City.
Ten days turned into the better part of a year.
Occupation as tactic and as symbol
By the time I arrived, Occupy Wall Street had already broken into the mainstream media and was profoundly changing the national narrative about wealth, power, and democracy in the United States. Occupy’s initial success in recalibrating the mainstream discourse about politics and the economy is remarkable. It was as if a 30-year spell had suddenly been lifted, as a new “common sense” was unveiled about what is at stake and who is to blame. It behooves us to retrospectively examine why this particular tactic of occupation struck such a nerve with so many Americans and became such a powerful catalyzing symbol. To do so, we have to make a distinction between Occupy’s broad audience and its core actors, and between the meanings that resonated popularly and the meanings that the physical occupation held for the dedicated people who were on the ground occupying. Zuccotti Park was home to a thriving civic space, with ongoing dialogues and debates, a public library, a kitchen, live music, General Assemblies, more meetings than you can imagine, and all varieties of high-energy, creative activities. In this sense, occupation was more than just a tactic. Many participants were consciously prefiguring the kind of society they wanted to live in.38
But it was also a tactic. A tactic is basically an action taken with the intention of achieving a particular goal, or at least moving toward it. In a long-term struggle, a tactic is better understood as one move among many in an epic game of chess (with the caveat that the powerful and the challengers are in no sense evenly matched). A successful tactic is one that sets us up to eventually achieve gains that we are not presently positioned to win. As Brazilian educator Paulo Freire asked, “What can we do now in order to be able to do tomorrow what we are unable to do today?”39 Thus, a tactic is a kind of stepping stone.
By this definition, the primary tactic of Occupy Wall Street (physical occupation of public space) could be considered enormously successful. We subverted the decades-old hegemonic conservative narrative about our economy and our democracy with a different moral narrative about social justice and real democratic participation. As a result, we are arguably better positioned than before to make bold demands, as we can now credibly claim that our values are popular—even that they are common sense—and connected to a substantial social base. With a new broadly resonant vocabulary, we are now better positioned to organize popular social bases to take more powerful political action. Such a shift in the constellation of popular meanings is among the central operations required in a long-term hegemonic struggle.
I want to suggest that the primary reason the tactic of occupation resonated so far and wide is because it served as a symbol about standing up to powerful elites on their own doorstep. To most sympathizers, the “occupy” in “Occupy Wall Street” essentially stood in for the F word. Millions of Americans had been waiting for someone or something to stand up to Wall Street, the big banks, the mega-corporations, and the political elite. Then one day, a relatively small crew of audacious and persistent New Yorkers became the catalyzing symbol of defiance we had been waiting for.
Thus, Occupy Wall Street served as something of a floating signifier, amorphous enough for many different kinds of people to connect with and to see their values and hopes within the symbol.40 Such ambiguous symbols are characteristic of popular challenger alignments. Many objects can serve as the catalyzing symbol, including actions (e.g., the occupation of Tahrir Square or of the Wisconsin State Capitol), individual politicians (quintessentially Juan Perón in Argentina), or even constructed brands (e.g., the “Tea Party”). As these examples suggest, this phenomenon can be seen in all kinds of political alignments, across the ideological spectrum. In all cases though, a good degree of ambiguity is necessary if the symbol is to catalyze a broad alignment. If the symbol’s meaning becomes too particular—too associated with any one current or group within the alignment—it risks losing its powerfully broad appeal.
It is important to note that although the signifier is floating (i.e., not peg-able), it is not empty of content. First of all, it has to feel meaningful enough to resonate. Furthermore, different symbols tend to pull in different directions (depending partly on the strength of the organization and “ground game” of those who are pushing or pulling them). Candidate Barack Obama as floating signifier, for example, pulled a lot of grassroots energy into what has in many ways turned out to be an establishment-reinforcing direction. Occupy Wall Street as floating signifier, on the other hand, pulled—at least initially—both popular and some establishment forces