What Really
Caused the Implosion of the Occupy Movement—An Insider's View
December 23, 2015
I’m in a warmly lit apartment on the Lower East Side. It’s a cool
night in early October of 2011, the height of Occupy Wall Street.
What a
****ing whirlwind it’s been. Two months ago I had just moved into my parents’
basement, feeling deflated after the end of Bloombergville [3] (a
two-week street occupation outside city hall to try to stop the massive budget
cuts of that same year), convinced this country wasn’t ready for movement. Now
I’m in this living room with some of the most impressive people I’ve ever met,
at the shaky helm of a movement that has become part of the mainstream’s daily
consciousness. It’s my first time feeling like the Left is more than a scrawny
sideshow, and it’s surreal. Truth is, I wasn’t much of a believer until I was
caught up in the mass arrests on September 24th, until Troy Davis was murdered
by the State of Georgia and I felt the connection in my body, until more people
came down and gave it legs. But now it’s real. The rush of rapidly growing
numbers, recognition from other political actors, and increasing popular
support and media acclaim is electric and overwhelming. It feels a bit like
walking a tightrope.
I’m a
leader, and people know it, but no one says it. It’s a strange feeling. I’m not
the only leader, of course — there are many. In this room, we’re a wide range
of people. Some of the folks go back to the Global Justice Movement, but most
of us have met in the middle of the whirlwind, building the kinds of
relationships you can only build in crisis or struggle. Some of the room is
seasoned and experienced, some very new to this type of thing, but all of us
have demonstrated leadership early on (some before the thing even really
started) and come in with lots of relationships. Between us we lead a number of
working groups, drive some of the major mass actions, play formative roles in
much of the media being pumped out, and more.
The
meetings are closed, and we all feel kind of bad about it, although this is
another thing we don’t talk about often. There isn’t much coherence to how we
ended up here in the first place — one person invited a few over and the next
invited a couple and so on, until the room was full. It was as arbitrary a time
to stop inviting people as any, but this is how things often happen in movement
moments. We justify the boundary by reminding ourselves that we are certainly
not the only collection of people meeting like this — there are many affinity
groups and other kinds of formations — and that we are here to plan and
strategize, not to make decisions.
But we also
know that there are a lot of movers and shakers in the room, and that this
affords us a disproportionate ability to move things through the rest of
Occupy. We know the age-old pitfalls of people making plans in closed off
rooms, and it’s not lost on us that — while this space is also led by some of
the most powerful women and folks of color in the movement — most of us are
white, middle class, and male. If someone had asked any one of us directly,
we’d likely have agreed that, collectively, we have quite a bit of power and aren’t
being held accountable to it.
But for the
most part, we keep that nagging feeling under wraps, so we can continue the
work. There is a confidence we seem to share that we are filling a void,
meeting a real need, putting everything we have on the line to keep momentum
going. We seem to agree, even if quietly, that movements don’t exist without
leadership, that the general assembly has been more performance art than
decision-making forum since the first couple of weeks, that leaderlessness is a
myth, that we need a place to have sensitive discussions hopefully out of reach
of the surveillance state. And in truth we know our jobs aren’t glamorous by
any stretch of the imagination; after all, a good deal of the efforts of the
folks in the room are aimed at getting occupiers port-o-potties and stopping
the incessant drumming.
We know
we’re breaking the rules, but for the most part we conclude that it must be
done. And besides, we’ve broken the rules our whole lives — it’s how we ended
up here.
Torn at the Seams
It wasn’t
too long before it came crashing down. It got cold, the cops came, the
encampments were evicted, and momentum died down, as is to be expected. This is
the story we tell, and it has some truth in it, but those of us who were on the
inside know there was more to it than that.
Truth is,
we hadn’t planned that far ahead. Probably because not many of us thought it
was going to work. As the folks at Ayni’s
Momentum trainings [4] will tell you, all
movements have a DNA, whether it’s intentional or not. When movements take off
and decentralize, they spread whatever their original DNA is, and while it’s
possible to adjust it as it goes, it’s sort of like swimming against a tide. Our
DNA was a mixed bag. The title had the tactic (Occupy) and the target (Wall
Street) baked into it, the 99% frame demonstrated some level of shared radical
politics, and the assemblies represented a commitment (an obsession, perhaps)
to direct democracy. But we didn’t have too much more than that. As Occupy grew
and spread, its DNA evolved to its natural conclusions: On one hand, a real
critique of capitalism, powerful mass-based direct action, a public display of
democracy. On the other hand, an infatuation with public space, a confusion of
tactic for strategy, a palpable disdain for people who weren’t radical, and
fantasies about leaderlessness. And then there were the questions we had never
answered at all, which were begging to be explained now that we were growing:
How would this transform into something long-term? Who were we trying to move?
What were we trying to win?
But there’s
more to it than that too. There was, alongside the external pressures of growth
and definition, an internal power struggle, as there so often is in moments
like this.
It happened
in many circles of Occupy, and it happened to the group I was a part of, too,
in that Lower East Side apartment. Some of the folks in the group got
frustrated, and pulled away. They accused the rest of us of being liberals
(this was a curse-word), said we were co-opting the movement for the unions,
claimed that even meeting like this was a violation of the principles of the
movement. Those claims were false, but they were hard to argue with, because most
of us were already feeling guilty for being in closed off rooms. So we shrunk.
Sort of like when an over-zealous white “ally” trips over other white folks to
call out an example of racism; the first to call it out sits back smugly,
having taken the moral high ground and pointed a finger at the others, and then
the rest clench their jaws and stare at the floor guiltily, hoping the storm
passes over them.
We tried to
stop the split. We slowed down. We spent time trying to figure out what the
right thing to do was. We tried to be honest about how much of this had to do
with differences in politics and how much of it was really just ego on all
sides. Some of us tried to reach across the aisle, to mend broken
relationships. But in the meantime, the folks who had taken the moral high
ground had begun building a separate group. That split happened in
October in that living room on the Lower East Side, perhaps in other circles in
the movement around the same time; by November it was playing out in the movement
more broadly, until in December there were distinctly different tendencies
offering different directions to the movement as a whole. It would be overly
simplistic to trace the overall conflict inside the belly of Occupy Wall Street
to the dissolution of this one group or even to in-fighting more broadly, but
at the same time, it was a significant factor. All movements develop mechanisms
for leadership and coordination, whether formal or informal, and they suffer
real setbacks when those systems collapse.
Of course,
in the midst of the squabbling and the confusion about our direction, the state
came crashing down on us. We became a real threat and the men in suits and
uniforms who make decisions about these sorts of things realized that that the
benefit of being rid of us outweighed the negative press they would get for the
state violence necessary to do it. They were right. The mayors got on
conference calls to coordinate. The newspapers turned on us. They dragged us
out of parks and squares all over the country, arrested thousands of people. We
did our best, but we weren’t organized, disciplined, or grounded in communities
enough to stop it in the end. Ultimately, we weren’t powerful enough.
Without the park, we were rootless. It got cold. We had no way to huddle together,
to learn from what had happened, to support one another through what had become
an existential crisis. We met in union offices instead of public squares, and
the organizing core shrunk. We went from actions in which the whole base
participated to projects different collectives tried to drive on their own, and
ultimately, that dwindled too. By the following summer, the true believers who
insisted that Occupy was still going strong had become an endangered species.
But the
truth is, it wasn’t the state, or the cold, or the media. The real problem
underneath it all was a deep ambivalence about power. In fact, all of
the things that made Occupy Wall Street brilliant had this paradox built into
them, this politic of powerlessness woven deep inside, like a bad
gene or a self-destruct mechanism.
For
example, the mantra of leaderlessness came from a genuine desire to avoid
classic pitfalls into hierarchy, but it was, at the same time, a farce, and
divorced from any sense of collective structure or care for group culture. It
foreclosed on the possibility of holding emerging leaders accountable, created
a situation in which real leaders (whether worthy or not) went to the shadows
instead of the square, and made it impossible to really develop one another (how,
really, could we train new leaders if there weren’t supposed to be any in the
first place?). Similarly, the refusal to articulate demands was brilliant in
opening radical possibilities and sparking the popular imagination, but it also
meant we didn’t have a shared goal, meant the word winning wasn’t
even part of the movement’s lexicon. In many ways, it was an expression of a
fear of actually saying something and taking responsibility for it,
and it encouraged the often-repeated delusion that we didn’t even want anything
our enemy had to give, that Wall Street and the State didn’t have any power
over us. The vigilance against co-option came from honest history of movements
falling prey to powerful forces hoping to dull or divert their aims; but it
ultimately became a paranoia more than anything else, a tragic misunderstanding
of the playing field and what it was going to take to build popular power.
Instead of welcoming other progressive forces and actually co-opting them,
purists shamed “liberals,” cultivated a radical macho culture more focused on
big speeches at assemblies and arrests in the streets than the hard organizing
behind the scenes, and turned Occupy into a fringe identity that only a few
people could really claim to the exclusion of the hundreds of thousands who
actually made it real.
Occupy Wall
Street created a new discourse, brought thousands of people into the movement,
shifted the landscape of the left, and even facilitated concrete victories for
working people. But at the same time, a substantial chunk of its
leadership was allergic to power. And we made a politic of that. We
fetishized it, wrote articles and books about it, scorned the public with it.
Worst of all, we used it as a cudgel with which to bludgeon each other.
Sure, the
cops came for us — we invited them, after all. But we were the
problem: When the state tugged hard enough, we tore at the seams.
The People Went Home
I spent
years being angry about it. I was angry at the people who had attacked the
group I was part of from the inside, the people who bullied me into giving up
every piece of leverage I had by making me feel like I didn’t have the right to
organize the folks I had access to, who punished me every time I was quoted or
interviewed, who came to the meetings I facilitated and intentionally disrupted
them. The stories are too long and too many to recount here, and anyone who was
in the middle of it has their own share of war stories too.
But more
than anyone else, I was angry at myself for letting it happen. I spent months waking
up in the middle of the night, replaying the different moments I had
capitulated to cool kids and given up real opportunities to grow the movement
out of fear that I’d be iced out if I didn’t. And the truth is, I had no
excuse. I had already learned this important lesson at the New School in 2008
when a couple hundred of us occupied a building to get a war criminal thrown
off the board, win back student space, and push forward student self-governance
and responsible investment: Bad politics don’t go away on their own, you
actually have to fight them.
Maybe it’s
counter-intuitive, and it’s certainly unpleasant, but it’s true. In those
moments, when we refuse to engage in these fights because they feel childish
and below the belt, we forget that the majority of people are standing in the
middle, wondering what the hell is going on and looking for people they can
trust. When those of us who are thinking about power and trying to
grow the base don’t step up to that challenge, the folks in the middle assume
that the people bringing in toxicity are the leadership, and they
don’t want to have anything to do with it. They find no other voices providing
leadership they can feel a part of. So they go home.
And that’s
kind of what happened. The state upped the ante, raised the heat on us. **** got ugly, and directionless, and toxic. The self-destruct mechanisms went off,
the politics of powerlessness played out to their logical conclusions. The
folks best equipped to offer leadership in that moment didn’t step up. So
everyone went home.
And as I
think back on the mistakes I made — among them, this grand mistake of shrinking
from the responsibilities of leadership, however personally costly — I can’t
help but feel a little bit ashamed. We did a tremendous amount. But we
could have done more. We could have lasted longer, brought more people into the
movement, established more powerful institutions, won more material gains. If
we understand the prison industrial complex and climate change and wealth
inequality and the foreclosure crisis as hard and tangible threats to people’s
literal survival, then we have to see, with equal clarity, that our
movements are nothing short of an attempt to save lives. And we could have
saved more lives.
The Politics of Powerlessness
Many of us
left that moment bitter, depressed, heart-broken. Some of that is predictable,
maybe, on the downward spiral from such a high. Some of it was the product of a
lot of young folks experiencing their first tastes of movement and thinking the
result was going to be a revolution. But some of it was specific to this
toxicity, the sudden snapping of this unbelievable tight rope we had been
racing across.
From there,
I went wandering. I bumped straight into the movement’s social media call-out
culture, where people demonstrate how radical they are by destroying one
another. It felt like walking into a high school locker room. In this universe,
we insist on perfect politics and perfect language, to the exclusion of
experimentation, learning, or constructive critique. We wear our outsiderness
as a badge of pride, knowing that saying the right thing trumps doing anything
at all. No one is ever good enough for us — not progressive celebrities who
don’t get the whole picture, not your Facebook friend who doesn’t quite get why
we say Black Lives Matter instead of All Lives Matter, not your cousin who
mourned the deaths in Paris without saying an equal number of words about those
in Beirut. Instead of organizing these people, we attack them. We tear down
rather than teach each other, and pick apart instead of building on top of what
we have.
And of
course, the politic of powerlessness doesn’t only live on social media, but in
our organizing spaces as well — and it’s in the realm of identity that so much
of the battle takes place. We confuse systems like white supremacy, patriarchy,
and capitalism with individuals we can use as stand-ins for them. We use the
inevitable fuck-ups of our potential partners as validation that we should stay
in our bunkers with the handful of people who make us feel safe instead of
getting dirty in the trenches. We imagine identity as static and permanent,
instead of remembering that all of us — to borrow terminology from
organizations like Training for Change [5] — have
experiences of marginalization that can help us support one another, and experiences
of being in the mainstream that can help us understand the people we want to
shift. We forget that, while identity gives us clues and reveals patterns,
itdoesn’t fully explain our behavior, and
it certainly doesn’t determine it. We abandon the truth
that people can transform, that ultimately we all — oppressed and
potential oppressors alike (if such simplistic frames should even be
entertained) — can and must choose sides. So we shirk this ultimate
responsibility we have as organizers: To support people in making the hard and
scary choices to be on the side of freedom. In all of this commotion, we turn
inward. We forget the enemy outside, and find enemies in the room instead, make
enemies of one another.
And here,
just as from Occupy Wall Street, the vast majority of people — those great many
on whom this system relies and the very same ones we will need to organize to
make it come to a screeching halt — grow tired. So they go home. And we lose.
Compassion and Curiosity on the way to Power
It’s
October of 2013, brisk and breezy, with the leaves changing in dramatic colors.
I’m in a Mexican restaurant in Minneapolis with organizers from Occupy
Homes — the same folks now part of the leadership of Black Lives Matter MN [6]. We’re
debriefing the retreat a couple of us just held for them as part of the Wildfire
Project [7]. Wildfire supports new, radical groups emerging from movement
moments with long-term training and support, and connects them to one another
to help them become greater than the sum of their parts. We’re tired from a big
weekend, and I’m getting feedback on my facilitation.
The
organizers tell me to step up. They notice that in the training, I didn’t tell
my story, shared very little of my experience at Occupy or elsewhere even when
directly relevant, evaded every opportunity to offer opinions on their
strategic plan even when asked, deferred to the group on everything. They say
they know I have more to offer, that they asked me to come here because they
trusted me, that they demand that I bring more of myself next month. They want
to invest in me, they explain, because they need me to be my most powerful self
so I can support their members in that same transformation, and so I can go out
and help build a powerful network for them to be a part of.
The
feedback makes me a bit blurry. I can’t remember the last time anyone told me
they wanted me to be powerful. I’m a straight, white,
class-comfortable male in the North Eastern United States, certainly not part
of the groups most impacted by the systems we are fighting. I’ve spent the past
few years duking it out with the voices in my head — on one hand knowing I have
something to offer in this important moment, and on the other hand
internalizing deep shame about where I come from and guilt over the mistakes
I’ve made along the way as a result. In the midst of those mistakes and in the
face of a movement culture that seemed to see me as a threat, I internalized
the message that the best thing I could do for the movement was to mitigate the
damage I’ve done by existing — that my job, really, was to disappear. There are
historical reasons for this dilemma, and current reasons that our movements
have adopted these knee-jerk responses to what it perceives as power or
privilege. But in the end, the impact was that it made me less effective,
whether as an ally to other oppressed people, a leader in Occupy, or a
facilitator with Wildfire. This is part of the politics of
powerlessness, I think to myself as I sit in this restaurant booth in
Minneapolis, and it has found its way into my bones.
But the
demand to become powerful comes from the folks to whom I am most
accountable — heroes who are defending themselves from foreclosure, occupying
already-foreclosed houses to keep people off the street, taking over local
political offices to try to use eminent domain to take back people’s homes, and
asking Wildfire for support — so it feels different this time. I go home to New
York and I do the work. I go through all sorts of transformative processes to
remember where I come from, to try to understand the conditions that made me
internalize those self-sabotaging politics. I find partners who want to win
more than they want to be right, who forgive me and help me forgive myself, who
invest their time and love and energy in me while holding me accountable and
demanding I do the same for them. I re-commit to using everything I’ve been
given in the service of the movement.
Along the
way, I start to internalize wisdom taught me by a mentor and coach from Generative
Somatics [8], an organization that fuses emotional healing, physical practice,
and radical politics: People do what they must to survive. Our behaviors — even
the self-sabotaging ones — are our bodies’ responses to threat. Our instincts
are clumsy at times, and they often cut us off from our better options, but
credit where credit is due: these instincts, at some points, probably saved our
lives. Instead of hating those traits so much, we might be better off tipping
our hat to them, thanking them for the safety they have provided us, and
letting them know that we don’t need them anymore — that we want to practice
something new instead. It doesn’t mean excusing bad behavior in ourselves or
the movement; it means understanding where it comes from for the sake of
changing it.
This is our
task as organizers and revolutionaries: to become our most powerful selves and
supporting the whole movement in that same transformation. In the service of
that goal, my anger thaws into compassion and my self-righteousness becomes
curiosity, and it’s with this lens that I start to look at the movement with
fresh eyes. I wonder what really caused the implosions at Occupy in
the first place, and why those behaviors persist across the Left. I start to
try to figure out where the politics of powerlessness come from, what needs
they meet for us. And as I dig below the surface, I can’t help but notice the
shifts that the Black folks rising up across this country have already offered
the movement; so many enormous contributions in the struggle for freedom, but
even something as small as hats that say power on them are a
challenge to the politics of powerlessness, a reflection of our ability to make
and practice new rules for ourselves as we transform.
Undoing the Politics of Powerlessness
Today, when
I think about the politics of powerlessness, it feels clear as day to me that
the source of all of it is fear. Fear of leaders, of the enemy, of the
possibility of having to govern, of the stakes of winning and losing, of each
other, of ourselves. And it’s all pretty understandable.
We call
each other out and push one another out of the movement, because we are
desperate to cling to the little slivers of belonging we’ve found in the
movement, and are full of scarcity — convinced that there isn’t enough of
anything to go around (money, people, power, even love). We eat ourselves alive
and attack our own leaders because we’ve been hurt and misled all our lives and
can’t bear for it to happen again on our watch. We race to prove we are the
least privileged, because this is the only way we can imagine being powerful.
We turn our backs on people who don’t get it, because organizing them will not
only be hard but also painful, because we will have to give up some of our
victimhood to do it, because it will mean being vulnerable to the world we came
to the movement to escape. Our ego battles are a natural product of a movement
that doesn’t have a clear answer for how leadership is to be appreciated and
held accountable at the same time. Our inability to celebrate small victories
is a defense from having to believe that winning is even possible — a way to
avoid the heartbreak of loss when it comes.
And perhaps
most importantly: Our tendency to make enemies of each other is driven by
a deep fear of the real enemy, a paralyzing hopelessness about our
possibilities of winning. After all, whether we admit it or not, we spend
quite a lot of our time not believing we can really win. And if we’re not
going to win, we might as well just be awesome instead. If we’re not going
to win, we’re better off creating spaces that suit our cultural and political
tastes, building relationships that validate our non-conformist aesthetic,
surrendering the struggle over the future in exchange for a small island over
which we can reign.
The
politics of powerlessness is a defense mechanism, meant to protect us from our
worst fears. And as I’ve been learning, it never works to hate one’s defenses,
to bang our heads against them, to bend them into submission. No, the way we
change is by really getting curious about their source, and trying to address
their root causes. Of course we’re afraid. Fear is a totally grounded
response to what is happening around us. We need to sit with that. And we need
to find new practices for dealing with our fears, because in the end, those
hard truths are precisely the reason we need to do away with the politic
of powerlessness.
This
defense mechanism, which may have saved our collective lives somewhere along
the way, has outlived its usefulness. It has become a barrier to the
success of the movements being born around us, the flourishing of our people,
the world we want to win. We are standing against a series of crises one more
terrifying than the next, stemming from systems more towering than ever before,
guided by people who are happy to kill many of us to preserve their wealth. If
we don’t get powerful soon, we’re going to lose. And in this case, losing means
not only the immense oppression, exploitation, and repression this system
guarantees; it also means the extinction of our species. Challenging the
politics of powerlessness and replacing it with something that can win is not
an academic question; it is truly a matter of life or death. We had better get
our shit together, and quick.
We need to
replace judgment and self-righteousness with curiosity and compassion. Those
are the tools that will help us support each other in the face of the crises
ahead, and they are the qualities we will need in order to truly understand the
very many people we still need to organize. They will help us become
facilitators instead of polemicists, teach us to build instead of tear apart.
Flexing these new muscles, we must convert a politic that punishes imperfection
into one that uses everything at its fingertips to win — that compels each and
every one of us to turn our gifts into weapons for the sake of freedom. We need
to build groups — collectives, organizations, affinity groups,
whatever — because groups are what keep us in the movement, they’re what keep
movement moments going, where we transform, how we fight, and the best way to
hold each other accountable to the long struggle for liberation. We need to win
small victories that open up space for bigger ones, and we must celebrate them,
because that’s the best inoculation against a politic based in fear that
nothing is winnable. We have to develop powerful visions for the world we want,
so we can put those small victories inside a broader strategy that strikes at
the roots of the systems we face. We must all engage in the hard and
transformational work to become our most powerful selves; after all, it is
truly the only way we even stand a chance.
Honoring Fear
I’m at a
retreat center in Florida, at the first ever Wildfire National Convening, with
80 members of organizations from all over the country: folks from Ohio
Student Association [9], Dream Defenders [10], GetEQUAL [11],Rockaway Wildfire [12], and
the Occupy
Homes[13] groups in Atlanta and Minneapolis. It’s the first night, and
the organizations are performing skits that explain their origin stories. It’s
Rockaway Wildfire’s turn — a group that formed in the wake of Hurricane Sandy,
merging the relief effort with organizing in Far Rockaway, Queens. Out there,
floods fell on top of broken schools, impoverished projects, and a population
that was drastically underemployed and over-policed. The folks in the Rockaways
were losing their homes to foreclosure before the floods wrecked them, losing
their sons to prisons long before the storm came to displace them.
The skit
begins, the lights go down. We hear the pounding of feet against the floor,
which sounds unmistakably like heavy rain. And then a chorus of howling that
sounds like the violent wind that battered the New York area that October in
2012. Then heart-wrenching wailing, like a child crying. Pounding and howling
and wailing that get more and more intense like an orchestra building up to its
crescendo. Suddenly, I’m crying. The sounds catapult me back to the hurricane,
but also to the fear I carry with me of the many more hurricanes surely on the
way, and the children and parents and friends we will have to protect when they
come. Suddenly the sounds come to a crashing halt, the lights go up, dimly, and
I realize most of the other people in the room are weeping too. There is
silence, the kind of hanging stillness you stumble on rarely, when a room full
of people dedicated to the struggle are all quietly reckoning with the fear we
carry in us every day and the doubts we have about whether we can do what must
be done. Then one of the actors breaks the silence with the last line of the
play, delivered soothingly to her child, as if she has read the minds of the 80
fighters gathered here: “Don’t worry, baby, don’t worry. We’ll be alright.
Momma’s gonna start a revolution.”
The fear is
real — palpable and also grounded. In addition to good organizing, it will take
some small miracles to win the world we all deserve. It’s better to acknowledge
that than to try to bury it. At least it’s honest. And who knows, maybe there
is something about fear that — when we turn and face it — can be grounding
instead of handicapping, can help us sit in the stakes rather than live in
denial, can compel us to take the risks we need to take rather than to hide,
can drive us to be the biggest we can be instead of shrinking. Or at least,
that’s my hope.
And when
I’m in doubt, I remember the most important lesson I learned at Occupy Wall
Street: We don’t know shit. The secret truth is that Occupy Wall
Street wasn’t supposed to work. But it did. It created a whole new world
of possibility. That possibility is here — we can feel it in the very heart of
the movements being born around us. And we have been invited; the only
question, now, is whether we will rise to the challenge.
Yotam
Marom is an organizer, facilitator, and the Director of the Wildfire
Project [14]. More of Yotam’s writing can be
found at www.forlouderdays.net [15]. Maybe
someday he’ll learn how to use twitter @yotammarom. We all have dreams, don’t
we?
[17]
Links:
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
