Thank You, Anarchy: notes from the occupy apocalypse

204 Pages·2013·1.94 MB·English

by  Nathan Schneider

THANK YOU, ANARCHY
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the
generous support of the General Endowment
Fund of the University of California Press
Foundation.
THANK YOU,
ANARCHY
NOTES FROM THE OCCUPY APOCALYPSE
NATHAN SCHNEIDER
Foreword by Rebecca Solnit
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
BERKELEY LOS ANGELES LONDON
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University of California Press
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University of California Press, Ltd.
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© 2013 by Nathan Schneider
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Schneider, Nathan, 1984–.
Thank you, anarchy : notes from the occupy apocalypse / Nathan
Schneider; foreword by Rebecca Solnit.
pages cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
978-0-520-27679-6 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN
978-0-520-27680-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN
9780520957039
eISBN
1. Occupy Wall Street (Movement). 2. Occupy movement—New
York (State)—New York. 3. Occupy movement. 4. Protest
movements—United States—History—21st century. 5. Equality—
United States. 6. Income distribution—United States. I. Title.
HC110.I5S36 2013
339.20973—dc23
20130078
79
Manufactured in the United States of America
22  21  20  19  18  17  16  15  14  13
10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1
In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally
responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed
this book on Rolland Enviro100, a 100% post-consumer fiber paper
that is FSC certified, deinked, processed chlorine-free, and
manufactured with renewable biogas energy. It is acid-free and
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Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side;
Some great cause, God’s new Messiah, offering each the
bloom or blight,
Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the
right,
And the choice goes by forever ‘twixt that darkness and that
light.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, “THE PRESENT CRISIS” (1844)
I think you have to engage in almost revolutionary strategies
to achieve reform.
FRANCES FOX PIVEN, LECTURE AT NEW YORK UNIVERSITY
(FEBRUARY 16, 2012)
CONTENTS
Map on page
Foreword: Miracles and Obstacles
Rebecca Solnit
PART ONE: SUMMER TO FALL
1 • Some Great Cause
2 • New Messiah
PART TWO: FALL TO WINTER
3 • Planet Occupy
4 • No Borders, No Bosses
5 • Sanctuary
PART THREE: WINTER TO SPRING
6 • Diversity of Tactics
7 • Crazy Eyes
PART FOUR: SUMMER TO FALL
8 • Eternal Return
Acknowledgments
Works Not Cited
FOREWORD | MIRACLES AND OBSTACLES
REBECCA SOLNIT
I would have liked to know what the drummer hoped and expected.
We’ll never know why she decided to take a drum to the central
markets of Paris on October 5, 1789, and why that day the tinder
was so ready to catch fire and a drumbeat was one of the sparks. The
working women of the marketplace marched all the way to
Versailles, occupied the seat of royal power, forced the king back to
Paris, and got the French Revolution rolling. It was then the
revolution was really launched, more than the storming of the
Bastille—though both were mysterious moments when citizens felt
impelled to act and acted together, becoming in the process that
mystical body civil society, the colossus who writes history with her
feet and crumples governments with her bare hands.
She strode out of the 1985 earthquake in Mexico City: parts of the
central city collapsed in that disaster, but so did the credibility and
the power of the PRI, the Institutional Revolutionary Party that ruled
Mexico for seventy years. These transformative moments happen in
many times and places, as celebratory revolution, as terrible
calamity, and they are sometimes reenacted as festivals and carnival.
In these moments the old order is shattered, governments and elites
tremble, and in the rupture civil society is reborn. The old rules no
longer apply in that open space of rupture. New rules may be
written, or a counterrevolution may be launched to take back the
city or the society, but the moment that counts is the one in which
civil society is its own rule, taking care of the needy, discussing what
is necessary and desirable, improvising the terms of an ideal society
for a day, a month, a season, the duration of the Paris Commune or
the Oakland Commune (as Occupy Oakland was sometimes called),
or the suspension of everyday life during disaster.
Those who doubt that the significance of these moments matter
should note how terrified the authorities and elites are when such
moments erupt. Those who dismiss them because of their flaws need
to look harder at what joy and what hope shine out of them and ask
not what these moments produce in the long run but what they are
in their heyday (though they often produce profound change in the
long run—and when it comes to long runs, there’s always that official
of the Chinese government who some decades back was asked what
he thought of the French Revolution: “Too soon to tell,” he said).
In these moments of rupture, people find themselves members of
a “we” that did not exist, at least not as an entity with agency and
identity and potency, until that moment; new things seem possible,
or the old dream of a just society reemerges, and for a little while it
shines not just as a possibility but as how people live with one
another. Utopia is sometimes the goal, it’s often the moment, and it’s
a hard moment to explain, since it usually involves hardscrabble
ways of living, squabbles, and eventually disillusion and factionalism
—but also more ethereal things: the discovery of personal and
collective power, the realization of dreams, the birth of bigger
dreams, a sense of connection that is as emotional as it is political,
and lives that change and do not change back to what they were
before, even when the glory subsides.
Sometimes the earth closes over these moments, and they have
no obvious consequences—sometimes they’re the Velvet Revolution
and the fall of the Berlin Wall and all those glorious insurrections in
the East Bloc in 1989, and empires crumble and ideologies fall away
like shackles. Occupy was such a moment, and one so new that it’s
hard to measure its consequences. I have often heard that Freedom
Summer in Mississippi registered some voters and built some
alliances, but more than that, the young participants were
galvanized into a feeling of power, of commitment, of mission,
perhaps, that stayed with them as they went on to do a thousand
different things that mattered and joined or helped build the slow
anti-authoritarian revolution that has been unfolding for the last half
century or so. It’s too soon to tell.
Aftermaths are hard to measure and preludes are often even more
elusive. And one of the great strengths of this book is its recounting
of the many people who laid the fire that burst into flame on
September 17, 2011, giving light and heat to many of us yet. The
drummer girl of that moment in Paris walked into a group where
many people were ready to ignite, to march, to see the world change
—injustice and difficulty as well as hope and devotion make these
conflagrations. We need, with every insurrection, revolution, and
social rupture to remember that we will never know the whole story
of how it happened and that what we can’t measure still matters.