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Hi Everyone,
The following is a report from the Wall Street Occupation protest march
which I am now on the train returning home from.
When I arrived at Zuccotti Park at approximately 12:15, the march which
was just getting under way initially appeared to be small, marginal and
unimportant. By describing it in this way, I do not mean to denigrate
it. After all, I have spent a good part of my life attending small,
marginal, and almost certainly unimportant events-namely concerts by
obscure ensembles performing obscure "new" music, whatever that means
these days. Of course, in these days of internet connectedness, events
which attract only a few local participants can attract a national, or
even world-wide audience of thousands. A concert in New York of the
music of Lamonte Young or Milton Babbitt will almost certainly seem, and
almost certainly is marginal, by any reasonable definition of the term.
But invariably, scattered around the world there are a few pockets of
admirers who will amplify the event into something which is, at least,
in their minds of great importance. The same goes with
#occupywallstreet. Numerous "tweets", blog postings, comments to blogs,
reports of solidarity marches, busses arriving from Madison, St. Louis,
etc. gave the impression that this event had the potential to attract
large or at least respectable numbers.
The fact is that it did not. The original group, and I made several
efforts to check this, was almost certainly less than 1000, which is to
say that it filled about a half the length of a New York city block.
Those who were at the Feb 15, 2003 demonstration will remember that the
throng extended the entire length of 5th Avenue from 42 St. to 96th,
across to and back down again on Second across to the United Nations and
then back up again to 96th. That makes for something like 120 blocks or
more crammed full with people-a crowd estimated at a million. This was
almost certainly a factor of 500 smaller-an indication of where this
movement needs to go to get the attention of Lloyd Blankfein, Jamie
Dimon, and the other felons who are now our de facto rulers. More on
that later.
When I describe the march as marginal, those familiar with protests of
this general sort will know what I mean. Doug Henwood's report
(http://lbo-news.com/2011/09/23/visiting-the-occupiers-of-wall-street/)
of his visit to Zuccatti Park (a.k.a. Liberty Plaza) nicely captured a
static version of the basic outlines of the scene pretty well: a throng
of college or post college radicals, whatever that means these days (not
much, in my experience), with a few moth eaten contingents from the
various Marxist sects still carrying the flag based on some more or less
idiosyncratic passage in the Grundrisse, a few obvious psychotics best
avoided, a few artsy lower east side types, though by now surely
displaced to the outer boroughs. Of course, there were lots more: a few
vaguely neurotic looking, aging academics like myself, a disarmingly
pretty Asian girl with purple hair and her boyfriend, a few hip-hop
enthuiasts, likely attracted by rapper Lupe Fiasco who had endorsed the
march. In any case, this is what we had to work with. And as Donald
Rumsfeld famously remarked, you protest with the marchers you have, not
those you wish you had. And so I joined in somewhat skeptically though
I was to become less so for several reasons which I'll describe in the
following, along with some interspersed commentary and reflections.
First, as the march got close to its ultimate destination of Union
Square, it seemed to pick up steam, its numbers increasing, the chants,
while still mostly pedestrian, becoming more coherent and less obvious
recyclings of decades old slogans which have become by now almost
irrelevant. Most significantly, as the march progressed it would be
infused with a lot more passion and legitimate anger. On this latter
point, it needs to be observed that a double digit unemployment rate
means that being college student or a recent grad is likely to be
suffused with something in between misery, dread and stark terror of the
future which likely awaits. And while this has becoming increasingly
apparent to me among the students I teach, it was still more visible in
the faces of more than a few of the protestors. This is not just the
long term future of carbon induced planetary apocalypse which they will
live to see-and which I, thankfully, will not. It is the immediate and
midterm future of un- or at best underemployment at wages and working
conditions reflecting the tight, employer-centric labor market. That
means eking out an living through dead end internships, temporary office
work will become the norm for all but a few of the chosen (read Ivy
League) grads in the appropriate majors having the right connections.
And while for a long time the Nietzschean devil-take-the-hindmost ethos
of college students was unforgiving, viewing those unable to compete in
the new economy as having only themselves to blame, it is now becoming
apparent that the game is being played with a stacked deck. And so for
the first time in a long time those in their teens and twenties have an
immediate personal stake in that which they are protesting, and while
the still dreadful legacy of sociology departments, "non hierarchical"
discourse, diversity training and "anti-racism" remains evident in the
rhetoric, slowly the smothering layer of academic abstraction and
language games seems to be lifting from protest culture and what is
revealed is a deep, festering and altogether righteous anger-what the
Arabic speakers refer to by the word "hamas."
Secondly, it became increasingly clear that more that a few of the
participants were willing to push the envelope of the protest in the
direction of outright confrontation, and, more importantly, this seemed
both justifiable and appropriate under the circumstances. I use these
words advisedly, doing so based on the recognition that demonstrations
have become choreographed rituals which have long since lost the
capacity to demonstrate anything meaningful. And when I say
choreographed it needs to be understood that those doing the
choreographing are the police, under orders from higher ups who are well
schooled in crowd management techniques designed to marginalize and
blunt the effectiveness of protest.
Under the Giuliani and Bloomberg regimes the cold precision of the
choreography imposed by the NYPD on protests rivals that of the Bolshoi
under Balanchine: since the Feb 15th, 2003 and Republican National
Convention protest, the authorities have made use of a highly effective
combination of carrots and sticks. Quiet and non-violent-by which is
meant non-disruptive protests under the terms set by the authorities are
tolerated. However, those stepping out of line, those who insist that
protests do what they are supposed to do, i.e. disrupt business as usual
and impose a cost on those primarily benefitting from its operation, are
dealt with considerable harshness.
The response of demonstrators over the past few years has been to
capitulate to these imposed conditions and thereby, often under the
rubric of "non-violence", allowing protest to become empty rituals.
What is necessary now is that demonstrations reclaim their roots as a
demonstrations of power, specifically, their ability to disrupt. And
while the disruptions effected today, in the larger scheme of things
were quite minimal, what a critical mass of the participants seem to
implicitly understand is that disruption-the ability to inflict real
costs on entrenched capital through unpredictable and spontaneous (i.e
unchoreographed) direct action is a necessary condition for the success
of any protest. If these protests succeed in growing with this
assumption at their core, they have real potential to become truly
meaningful. It remains to be seen whether they will do so.
A couple of examples will give some idea of the potential I'm referring
to, one of these extraordinary: after the march reached its eventual
destination at Union Square Park, most seemed to expect that we would
return more or less the way we came back to Zuccotti Park. While we
were there, it became clear that the police had received orders to
disperse the group. Their initial attempt to do so was when we were
still in the park, and was effected by vinyl mesh barriers which
prevented the crowd from returning south back to its original
destination in Wall Street. To do this required erecting these barriers
at edge of the group, turning back those who had just started on its way
south. Among these was a man maybe slightly younger than myself-though
not much-who simply demanded to go where he to, and he would be damned
if he would let the cops get in his way. And so he stepped in front of
the cops who were trying to hem us in, inviting a violent confrontation
and likely arrest. But that's not extraordinary, as this was to be
duplicated with greater or lesser degrees of violence at least forty
times over the next hour. What was extraordinary was how the man
impeded the cop: he did so by pushing a stroller which enclosed the
man's three or four year old child in the cops way. The cop pushed the
stroller aside and attacked the man with real viciousness, in full view
of the child. I didn't see what would later materialize-how or whether
the man would be arrested. I did, however, see another small child in
the park who was a spectator to the event breaking down in tears, as his
father, a dreadlocked man tried to console him.
As a parent of a small child who I was considering bringing along to
this, but thankfully did not, I wasn't sure how to respond to what
seemed to be an act of almost insane recklessness. Initially, I was was
appalled, but in retrospect, in revisiting the mental image, I couldn't
help but be moved by the commitment and courage displayed, and by the
recognition that finally the stakes of our confrontation are becoming
clear. As Marx said "we are now required to compelled to face with sober
senses, (our) real conditions of life, and (our) relations with (our)
kind." While few of us will find ourselves capable of this man's
courage, this is the kind of reaction which will be required of us when
we face up to the realities we are encountering with sober senses.
A description of the remainder of the march requires the trite but, in
this context, altogether accurate phrase, "violently dispersed by the
police", though this is, of course, usually applied to various third
world dictatorships. One block south the police began to erect a
second set of barriers with the purpose of dividing the march into
smaller groups, separated by a block or so, arresting those who refused
to get out of the street, and who resisted. The arrests were
undertaken with considerable brutality which I was a direct witness to,
and almost a victim of. The worst which happened to me was to have
receive the full brunt of a body which had been slammed with remarkable
force by a particularly violent and thuggish cop. Another encounter
which I witnessed was worse and somewhat disturbing. A protester who
had, I would imagine, prevented the erection of the crowd control
barrier, was tackled and set upon by at least seven or eight cops
administering a series of blows to all parts of the man's head and
abdomen. I had never seen a display of violence of such intensity and
it was quite unnerving. The fact that the target of this display of
brutality was black will probably not come as a surprise.
These are some of the events which seem worth reporting here. There
were others which a more journalistically inclined (and trained)
observer would no doubt relate. Rather than itemizing these I'll close
by mentioning a third reason for why I am somewhat optimistic. This is
personal and even a bit sentimental so those who don't know me might do
well to skip the remainder of this paragraph. At the intersection of
West 4th my friend Judd Greenstein who I had called earlier darted in
the the crowd next to me. Judd, in addition to being probably the most
gifted, passionate and communicative of the younger composers I know, is
also one of the finest people-in the most simple and meaningful sense of
the term. Pretty much unique in my circle of acquaintances, he is a
reliable presence at these sorts of protests, having met up with me a
year ago or so at a Wall Street protest following the bank bail outs.
More significantly for me, this seemingly random encounter brought back
for me one of my most treasured memories. At the Iraq war protest in
Feb 2003, I was within a sea of bodies walking southward on the corner
of 79th and Amsterdam, when I spotted within the crowd heading west my
father Morris who was then eighty and my mother Rosamond who was now
walking slowly having begun to be affected by the Parkinsons disease
which would take her life this year. I probably shouldn't have been
surprised. While they are not political activists (certainly less so
than my father's long time friend and colleague Chomsky) their
investment in politics is real, though almost exclusively moral-dictated
by a simple code which required them to actively protest when their
government is enacting atrocities in their name, as it did in Vietnam
during my childhood, and as it was about to do in Iraq. Protest is what
every decent person did back then-it was not limited to an activist
clique. There were lots like my parents back then.
Judd attended this demonstration for exactly the same reasons which my
parents did nearly half a century ago, and which were defining events of
my childhood. Protest is what decent people do when they are confronted
with evil. Having both witnessed the thuggish crackdown south of Union
Square, I was grateful to be able to be able take stock of the situation
with him. His presence today was for me a validation of the possibility
that there maybe some ultimate hope to be squeezed out of what now
appears to be a fairly desperate trajectory into something approximating
a police state-at least for those who do what is necessary to make
protest meaningful.
Finally, a post-script: I'm writing this as the police prepare for what
may be a final-and likely, if today's events were any guide, intensely
brutal assault on the encampment in Zuccati Park. As I have been
posting on Facebook, this appears to me to be a Martin Niemoller moment
for us-one where they are coming for a marginal clique, one which is the
butt of jokes (including my own above) and regarded as absurd and
insignificant by all but a few. Today's NYT's coverage of the
protestors, predictably contemptuous and dismissive, sets the stage
perfectly for this crackdown-and provides grounds for all the right
thinking people who are the Times' primary demographic to avert their
eyes. The few decent people who find out about this may get on the
subway and head to Wall Street to bear witness, and maybe even act. But
I can't say I'm in the least optimistic that anything like this is in
the cards-certainly nothing approximating the display of force which we
must martial to make a difference. All this is only further
confirmation of Niemoller's dictum: when they come for us there may very
well be very few left to speak up.
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