Photo: Stacy Lanyon
I’m a neighbor of Zuccotti Park. I live in downtown Manhattan.
I’ve lived there for a long time. I live in what used to be known as the frozen
zone after 9/11. I mention that because it has some relationship to the NYPD’s
actions and their general approach to Occupy, I think in retrospect. What
happened during the frozen zone was of course that the NYPD established
complete sovereignty over that whole part of Manhattan. It was for a limited
period of time, but they never really abandoned that sense of sovereignty.
That’s where Police Plaza is. That’s where the most important precincts are,
where they used to keep the horses, and it’s also a neck of the woods that NYPD
feels it has a kind of national obligation to protect. Every time there is an
anniversary of 9/11, the security in what used to be the frozen zone really
steps up, and it really does feel like an occupied zone, occupied by the
police.
This was particularly the case in 2011, which was the 10th anniversary. We were told that there
was a missile launcher stationed on Canal Street as part of the NYPD arsenal.
The degree to which they have become heavily militarized in the course of the
last fifteen years or so, who could doubt that that would be the case. I don’t
know if it’s verifiable, but they were apparently prepared to take down any
plane. I think that part of the mentality is that they are protecting what has
become sacred space, which is ground zero, where American blood was spilled in
such large quantities. The fact that Occupy sprang up just a week and a half
after the 10th anniversary
of 9/11, I think is forgotten and has been glossed over, for the most part, so
a lot of the friction that resulted between occupiers and the NYPD probably was
generated out of the sense that this was a particular affront to the NYPD’s
role in protecting that space.
Most people focus on protecting Wall Street, protecting Goldman
Sachs from the occupiers, and that’s certainly the case, but the proximity of
ground zero is very important for anyone that was part of the Zuccotti Park
occupation. They were aware of this all the time. It was more of a presence in
some ways than Wall Street. What followed of course was a fairly brutal record
of police suppression and is an extraordinary case study in the violation of
basic civil liberties, not just in this city but elsewhere, and the fact that
the liberals were mostly missing in action over this, that they were not more
outspoken about this suppression of civil liberties, I think again is a part of
the case study that was neglected, in retrospect. It was a very low moment for
liberals because they are supposed to care about civil liberties above all
other things, and they were not outspoken, least of all those in positions of
high office on Capitol Hill and even in state government. City officials, some
of them were pretty good.
To get back to the initial questions, my first relationship was
partly as a neighbor. My neighborhood has been one that has been steadily more
and more occupied by the 1%. When I moved down there twenty years ago, it was
not. In the course of the last two decades, it’s become one of the favorite domiciles
for the 1%. That’s an aspect that is probably worth commenting on also. This
encampment was in the middle of a neighborhood that had become increasingly
residential and increasingly lived in by members of Wall Street finance sector,
especially the higher salaried members who could afford to live down there
because it’s a very expensive zip code now to buy anything in. So the presence
of the encampment was an affront to many of the newer arrivals. The folks who
had been there a long time were more welcoming as neighbors.
I also fairly early on established ties of my own to the
occupation, mostly through the formation of the Occupy Student Debt Campaign. In
early October, I was invited to come and give a talk as part of the open forum
series that the Empowerment and Education working group ran, and I chose to
talk about the student debt crisis. There were a lot of people who showed up
who expressed an interest in working on this issue. So we created our own sub
group within Empowerment and Education, which was the Occupy Student Debt
Campaign, and it was an effort to formalize and channel, capture a lot of the
energies that were fairly apparent at the time, that were openly expressed
around student indebtedness, not just in Zuccotti Park, but it seemed at every
occupation across the country.
People spoke of how they were burdened with student debt, and they
included a large number of people who had recently graduated and found
themselves in a wretched employment environment. They were standing up and speaking
openly about their debt, a ritual which in retrospect has been normalized, but
at the time was very unusual. It was very uncommon for people to publicly speak
about their debt because there is so much shame and guilt that is attached to
debt in our society. It’s usually borne very privately. It generates a lot of
personal anguish, and the inability to pay debt can lead to all sorts of
catastrophic consequences in people’s private lives – depression, divorce,
suicide. People standing up in the public agora and talking about their debt,
we perceived at the time to be a very important kind of political moment, that
it might even be the coming out ritual of a new kind of political movement.
It’s one of the reasons that we started the Occupy Student Debt Campaign.
There were other student debt reform initiatives around at that
time, and they were reform initiatives, because they were all aimed at
lobbying, elected law makers. There was Student Loan Justice. There was Student
Loan Forgiveness to Stimulate the Economy, which was another big one that was
trying to collect a million signatures to try and lobby officials. In common with the Occupy ethos, we felt that
elected officials were not in any position to do anything about this, that they
were too beholden to creditors, too beholden to their financial backers or the
financial sector in general, to produce anything significant in the way of
reform, so we didn’t want to invest a lot of energy on petitioning Capital
Hill. We were much more interested in self-empowerment through collective
action.
We formed a campaign, with action plans and campaign principles.
The plan was to attract signatories who would pledge to refuse their debt
repayments once a million others had signed on. Then there were four other principles
that were designed to transform higher education away from a debt financing
model. We launched the campaign and the pledge in an effort to ride the wave of
the Occupy energy, and hoped to go viral with it. Occupy was a media darling in
those days, and anything that came out of Occupy had the chance of being
amplified and distributed in a much greater and more effective way than a
regular public interest campaign, so we gambled on that, even though we had a
very small number of people and very limited resources. We thought, “You know,
if we just push this thing out into the middle of the river, it might get taken
up by the main currents of public opinion and public interest." It
certainly did cause a bit of a stir for a while and it generated a good deal of
public debate, and of course we got attacked viciously by the lending industry.
We didn’t achieve anything like the number of signatures over time
that we had hoped for, and there were all sorts of reasons for that. There were
efforts to sabotage the campaign on the part of the reform initiatives. There
was also the fact that we had very limited resources, and to run a national
campaign like that, you really do need a full-time office with staff working
24/7 to make sure that the campaign is carried into every corner. The other
reason that we decided was that the public was not ready at that moment to
embark on an active campaign of debt refusal. Ironically enough, over the
course of the next year, one million student debtors would default, privately,
almost exactly the number we had aimed for. If they had all signed our pledge
and thought of themselves as a million strong potential refusers, then that
portion of the history of the movement would have been different, but the
conditions and the circumstances were not ripe. People were not ready to do it.
That’s not to say that they might not be at some point in the
future, which is why we decided that this campaign was really just the first
step in trying to build a political movement that would take many years to come
to fruition. We were active on this campaign for the best part of several
months, really until the late spring of 2012. We did a lot of public education.
We did a lot of forums. We did a lot of dialogue and media, and I think we did
have some real impact in raising the issue to the level of public prominence
and public scrutiny, to the degree to which I think it’s fair to say around
about the spring or the winter of 2012, student debt was perceived to be a top
level national challenge, if not crisis, that was discussed everywhere, from
family dinner tables to the halls of Congress. It really got established on the
public landscape as a major issue, and I think we played some role in doing
that.
There were many things we discovered in the course of the
campaign. One of them had to do with the structural inability-- and this has to
do with consciousness as much as anything-- of actually enrolled students to
address their indebtedness. We discovered that they don’t actually, for the
most part, think of themselves as indebted, although they are accumulating
debt. It’s not until they start paying it off that they consider themselves to
be debtors. In fact, most debtors who make regular monthly payments don’t think
of themselves as debtors either. It’s only when they fail to make payments that
they perceive themselves to be in debt, only when they are struggling to pay
their debts. When we’re making routine monthly payments, especially when our
banks do it as part of a direct service, automatically, that takes away that
element of self-reflection upon your identity as a debtor, and when people
don’t dwell on the fact that they are repaying debts at all, then they don’t
think of themselves as debtors, and least of all, as I have said, currently
enrolled students not making payments. There are other reasons. One of them has
to do with the stigma of debt. If they’re in a school like NYU, an elite
private school, they are often surrounded by students from well-heeled families
that don’t have to go into debt, so there’s a stigma attached to carrying debt.
That’s something I’ve discovered in my classes and conversations with students
here and elsewhere.
We operated in a way that was more single minded than many groups
within Occupy. There were certainly some members of our group who circulated
among other Occupy working groups. Those who had the time to do so spent a lot
of time in Occupy, but there were others who were single issue, and they were
really focused on student debt. Then, there were people like myself who were
full-time professionals and parents. I have young children, who became Occupy
children in one fashion or another, but I had limited time to get more fully
involved in the whole culture of Occupy, but I spent a lot of time in the park and even more in
meetings, and participated in all the big actions. The first meeting I attended
was really the first artists meeting, and I think that was the beginning of the
Arts and Labor working group.
The park became a place that I regularly took my children, and I
tended to see it through their eyes. It was a carnivalesque experience for
them. It was very easy to get them to go, especially when there was free food
available. We would go down after school, and they would draw and make art,
sing, and dance, and they would learn chants and so on and so forth. In their
eyes it was very much like a fairy tale. There was an evil king in a castle--
Wall Street-- and the people were rising up to overthrow the evil king. There
was a very cartoonish aspect to it from their perspective that was very easily
graspable. A lot of visual stimuli too, so it was not boring for them, as a
more conventional political event might be for them. They went on a number of
marches, a lot of the earlier marches, and increasingly the debt-related
marches. Most recently, my kids have been the backbone of The Little Red
Squares, which is the childrens’ theatre group that performs with Strike Debt.
For myself, I’ve lived in New York quite a long time now and
really did feel that Occupy was one of the most significant political things
that had happened in the city. We’d been waiting for this for a very long time.
It was belated and overdue. Finally, it was happening in New York and not somewhere
else. That was immensely satisfying and gratifying. I’m not someone who indulges
in New York triumphalism, but for once I was very proud that this was happening
in New York and that this was the center of it. I thought that that was very
important. All of the radical energies in the city were being mobilized, and
even many of the not so radical energies and impulses of our fellow citizens
were being mobilized. The spectacle of the GA in its heyday was particularly
galvanizing-- palpable reminder of what direct democracy could or should look
like. The spectacle was one thing. The actual practice of horizontal decision
making was another. I think people learned a lot of lessons of how that could
or should be done in the course of the next several months.
It was fairly clear from an early point, to me at least, that
there were people for whom the creation and the maintenance of a micro
community in the park was a primary, anarchist goal. This I understood from the
history of prefigurative communities, and of course there were many people at
the core of Occupy who were steeped in that theory and practice of anarchism.
In addition, I would say that anarchist customs and practices have become
really the default mentality for politically active youth in the last twenty
years or so, especially in the Global Justice Movement where a lot of customs
and networks were established that Occupy drew directly upon. These anarchist
precepts were very much on display and embodied in the sociological structure
of the park community.
Of course, there were other political perspectives represented
because it was an ecumenical space, but the core was pretty anarchist, and to
some large degree remains so. For those
who really did see the creation of the micro community as the main goal, this
was an alternative society in the making. This is how you build an alternative
society, not by waiting, but by creating a micro community now that prefigures
the future you want. While that idea of a beloved community was an important
motivating factor, it also became a problem when the park was taken away. It
was kept alive in various ways by people who wanted to retake space, as we know
over the course of the next year, but that wasn’t practical, because of police
policy.
Not everyone in Occupy perceived anti-debt to be the underlying
principle, even of the targeting of Wall Street, but over time, there was more
and more of a focus on debt as a unifying principle. That’s where the work that
we were doing on the student debt campaign became more central. We came to
realize that many kinds of household debts are interconnected. If you focus only
on student debt, then you often fall into the trap of seeing the student debtor
as this isolated individual without necessarily any other economic ties. We
realized that it’s more productive to look at a household and at all the different
kinds of debts that flow through the households and how the ability to make
payments on one depends on the sources of income from here, there and
everywhere, and also how one kind of debt, if it goes into default, affects all
the others.
We were looking to form a coalition with other Occupy groups that
might want to work on other kinds of debt – housing and healthcare, for
example. It just so happened that the other working groups on housing and
health care weren’t necessarily focused on debt. In the early summer of 2012 when Occupy
Theory started doing assemblies in Washington Square Park, we decided that we
would join with them and do an education debt assembly. While it was focused on
education debt, what we were hearing from people who stood up and testified
about their debt was really how interconnected the other debts were, and so we realized
that we really needed to take this on for ourselves. The coalition that we
formed with the folks from Occupy Theory (who put out the Tidal magazine) was
the beginning of Strike Debt—focused on four different kinds of debt – medical,
housing, education and credit card debt--because debt is the thread that
connects so many of the economic, social, and cultural burdens that neo-liberal
policymaking had imposed on the general population.
We decided on Strike Debt as a name because anything that we did
or were going to do would be a strike-like action. We were not focused on any
particular kind of strike, or even a general strike taking the form of debt
refusal. Every piece of direct action and every piece of public education we
did would be a strike against the debt system. The name itself was supposed to be
very active rather than goal-oriented, which the Occupy Student Debt Campaign
had been. At that time, Occupy was really reduced to its core remnants, and
more and more of them started coming to the assemblies, and getting involved in
Strike Debt. Over the course of the summer, it became one of the few
initiatives within Occupy that was actually growing and that seemed to be
gathering momentum. By that same token, we, from the very beginning, saw
ourselves as an offshoot of Occupy, and not necessarily as an Occupy group. Some
of the core Occupy people who came on board may have been more interested in
trying to keep alive some of these horizontal principles, and they saw Strike
Debt as a way of doing that. But for those of us who founded the coalition, we
really wanted to move beyond “process” and more into the realm of “delivery,”
which is why we focus on products and services. I use these business terms
ironically, of course.
The Debt Resistors Operations Manual, for example, which we worked
on over the course of the summer, was driven by the desire to put something
into people’s hands, which was seldom the case with Occupy. People took away
something that was really concrete and could be put to use for transformative
purposes, as opposed to just taking away campaign literature or propaganda. We
wanted to make something that would be an instrument of mutual aid but that would
also perform a service. The whole idea behind the manual was to suggest how
people could not only escape from their debts but also evict the power of
creditors from their lives. While there is a lot of practical advice in the
manual, some of it culled from insiders from the lending industry, we tried to
steer readers into the realm of collective action, because the only way to
transform the debt system is through collective action. You find that’s a
thread that runs throughout. S17, the first anniversary of Occupy, was a launch
date for the manual, and the launch was a big event of the weekend. Everyone
who came to New York went away with a copy and felt that this is something that
was moving forward and that we could use and build on.
We had another project that was germinating at the time, which was
the Rolling Jubilee. It was actually an idea that had come in to the Occupy
Student Debt Campaign several months earlier from Thomas Gokey, who was not in
New York. Over the course of the summer of last year, we decided, “Oh, we’ll
give this one a go. Maybe it’s worth trying out.” That’s when we decided to
push ahead with the Rolling Jubilee, which is basically a project that raises
money to purchase distressed debt, and instead of collecting on the debt, which
collection agencies do, we abolish the debt. It involves finding a debt buyer
who will buy the debt for us in that shadowy secondary marketplace and then eliminating
it. We decided to launch this in November of last year, and we had the
expectation that we might raise 50,000, which would allow us to buy twenty
times that amount of debt, but the thing went viral, and it seemed to really
resonate with people, and so we raised about half a million dollars in a few
weeks, which allows us to abolish 10 million dollars worth of debt.
It was a big event because it came along around the same time as
Occupy Sandy, and a lot of Strike Debt people were also involved in Occupy
Sandy. Both of these, the Rolling Jubilee and Occupy Sandy, were perceived as
Occupy 2.0, the next phase of Occupy that would reach communities that were far
beyond the orbit of the original Zuccotti Park community, and that would also
generate a lot of public and political good will. Both Rolling Jubilee and
Occupy Sandy really appealed all across the political spectrum. A lot of people hoped that projects like these
were somehow bringing to fruition principles and impulses that were latent in
the first wave of Occupy, the Zuccotti Park phase, and that looked forward to
something even more constructive and co-extensive in the next 3.0 wave. I think that’s where
we’re at right now, contemplating what that might be.
Our views of the future devolve around our own political views
because each political standpoint has its own version of a just society. Like
many folks of my generation, I’ve always been comfortable drawing from multiple
political traditions rather than subscribing to a single ideological
standpoint. By birthright, I was a democratic socialist because of where I grew
up in working-class Scotland in a very particular point in history. By analytic
training, I became a Marxist, feminist, pro-queer, anti-racist. My thinking
also drew on homegrown American traditions of radical republicanism and radical
democracy, and I’ve always been a bit of an anarchist by inclination, so those
are some of the multiple political standpoints. They don’t necessarily add up
to any unified vision of the future, which is one reason why people affiliate
to a particular political standpoint--because it gives them some certainty
about the future they might like to see. My vision of the future is one without
ideological guarantees.
Though Occupy was ecumenical in its embrace of people with
different political positions, there was a kind of tacit agreement to play by
the rules of anarchist conduct, and that certainly had an impact on a lot of
people’s political thinking. I mentioned earlier that anarchist customs and
anarchist views have become part of the political lifeblood of the younger
generation of activists. That kind of anti-authoritarian perspective is quite
different from the counter cultural perspective that I was weaned on in the
1960s and 1970s. That was a libertarian culture, and it was anti-authoritarian,
but it wasn’t driven by anarchist principles. The anarchist principles more
visible in Occupy present a view of the future that is based on mutual aid,
cooperative endeavor, and commoning, rather than on petitioning for a more
equitable redistribution of wealth by the state.
In the work we have done with Strike Debt, one common discourse is
about cooperatism and mutual aid and other anarchist touchstones, but there are
also some of us who believe there is a role for the state to play, and I would
be one of those. I believe in common
goods and am an advocate for commons-driven initiatives, but I also think the
state is needed to redistribute wealth and public goods. Public goods have to
be in there along with common goods, and there are also certain rights that the
state can and should be a guarantor of, minority rights uppermost. That’s a
very long winded way of saying that I don’t espouse a hardcore anarchist view.
I don’t really have a conception of a future for my children. My
main hope, really, is that they will have a part in actively making that
future. They’ve learned a little from Occupy, even though they were only ten
and seven when they were involved, and they are clearly quite concerned, as are
many of their peers, about the ecological crisis. The way they’ll be growing
up, in a way, is not so different from the generation that grew up with the
prospect of instant destruction of the world through nuclear war. The bomb
generation grew up with that shadow hanging over them, as part of their
apocalyptic imagination-- the end of the world would come quickly, as an
abolition of consciousness. For youth right now, for whom climate change and
ecological depletion is something that’s part of their horizon, they recognize
that this isn’t something that would happen so abruptly. For that reason, it’s
not so apocalyptic. But it’s a slow apocalypse. It’s not something that can so
easily be imagined Hollywood style, and so it’s not easy to gauge the depletion
and erosion from day to day. Climate change is one of the least visible or palpable
signals because it’s so slow. How they respond to averting that apocalypse I
don’t know but I have every faith they’ll be active in doing it.
It will be probably more of a localized world than a globalized
one because the creation and the survival of just and sustainable societies
will have to be more of a bioregional effort. We’ve been led to believe that we
have to live more globally and that we are more globally connected, but that
has not necessarily been an instrument of sustainability. In the future, people
will be creating more sustainable pockets of living in their own ecosystems,
and that’s already happening in the world of local food provision. That’s not
to say that we won’t be globally connected, but there will be networks of these
pockets around the world, and they will be different from the networks of elite
enclaves that we currently have, where the wealthy have the resources to create
their own heavily fortified eco havens, but only at the expense of impoverishing the rest of us.
Just to add to the public cliché store, I also think the new
American Dream will be to live free of debt—quiet a departure from the
mid-twentieth century version of the American dream, which was to have access
to good debt in order to win yourself a place in the middle class by building a
foundation of home ownership and access to education and material goods that
signified quality of life. That was a picture of the American dream that
depended very heavily on debt and access to credit. That debt-dependent version
ran aground before 2008, but the financial crisis drove a stake through it.
What’s emerging now is almost the exact inverse. There is no “good debt,” and living free of debt will be a fantastic
achievement, and perhaps the only way to retain any kind of middle class in
this country. To do that, you need things like free access to education and
healthcare. If the US doesn’t join that list of countries that affords access
to free higher education or healthcare, then it simply won’t have a middle
class in the 21st century.
Social mobility is dwindling quiet rapidly, and much of that has
to do with the rising cost of education. It’s not the only cause, but part of
it has to do with the debt burden. This is a lesson that was learned in the
global South countries that, for thirty years, have been consigned to a
postcolonial debt trap. Since the financial crash, relatively affluent populations
in the global North found that they were also in a debt trap, rather than
living through versions of the American Dream. Indeed, our national economic
managers are having a very hard time keeping the standard elements of the
American dream template in place because there are so many indebted people we
now see, and many of them are in Occupy, who have given up all hope of home
ownership or having children, and who are thinking about going off the grid in
one fashion or another. I won’t be doing that myself, but I hope I don’t lose
touch with my Occupy comrades who choose to do so.
Interview by Stacy Lanyon
http://buildingcompassionthroughaction.blogspot.com/
https://www.facebook.com/stacylanyon
https://instagram.com/stacylanyon/
https://twitter.com/StacyLanyon
http://stacylanyon.com/
Interview by Stacy Lanyon
http://buildingcompassionthroughaction.blogspot.com/
https://www.facebook.com/stacylanyon
https://instagram.com/stacylanyon/
https://twitter.com/StacyLanyon
http://stacylanyon.com/