By John Gapper and Shannon Bond Nascent campaign forced on to the back foot
Another world is possible, read the message projected in giant white letters on to the side of a tower near City Hall in Manhattan on Thursday night, as thousands of Occupy Wall Street demonstrators massed by Brooklyn Bridge. It was the biggest turnout of a week marking a turning point in the two-month-old protest.Many protesters against inequality and the dominance of the financial industry called for the lines of police to let them through so they could repeat a sit-in on the bridge six weeks ago. Instead, they were channelled peacefully along the pedestrian path, and streamed over the long span to Brooklyn holding placards. A couple tried to persuade cars mired in a traffic jam to hoot in support. Few responded.
This week, city authorities in New York, London and Oakland in California took decisive action to clear the Occupy camps that sprung up around the world after the occupation of Zuccotti Park near Wall Street two months ago. Demonstrators responded by taking to the streets and 240 people were arrested in New York as they attempted to disrupt the opening of the New York Stock Exchange.
The New York protesters failed to do that, but they succeeded in making life hard for people trying to get to work in downtown Manhattan. Pedestrians were barred from crossing roads including Nassau Street and Broadway for much of the morning as police cleared protesters from intersections. Later in the day, campaigners tried to “occupy the subway”, handing out leaflets to commuters.
A police officer shook his head as a woman who said that she lived on Nassau Street pleaded to cross the barricade. “ID, no ID, you’re not getting in,” he said.
As protesters around the world contend with the clampdown by authorities, growing criticism from other city dwellers and the onset of winter, the question is whether the movement can keep up its momentum. Having shifted the rhetoric of politicians from President Barack Obama to the Republican right, the Occupy campaign faces profound challenges.
Michael Bloomberg, New York’s mayor, followed Jean Quan, mayor of Oakland, in clearing his city’s camp. “The park was becoming a place where people came not to protest, but rather to break laws, and in some cases, to harm others,” he said. “The first amendment [to the US constitution] gives every New Yorker the right to speak out – but it does not give anyone the right to sleep in a park.”
The Zuccotti Park raid, carried out at 1am on Tuesday without warning, drew protests that the mayor was being heavy-handed and ignoring civil liberties. In tactical terms, however, it was a success. Protesters were taken by surprise, and many gathered up their belongings in a dazed fashion, watched over by riot police and bathed in electric lights. They were allowed back in, without their tents, later in the day.
John McCarthy, a transport worker who came to the park on Tuesday after the eviction, said: “I thought Bloomberg and the police worshipped private property. Those tents they ripped up are private property.”
On the other side of the Atlantic, the City of London Corporation promptly started legal action against protesters who have occupied land in front of St Paul’s Cathedral. Boris Johnson, London’s mayor, scornfully described the young protesters, some with dirty faces and dreadlocks, as “crusties bivouacking in the precincts of St Paul’s”.
In the first few weeks the campaigns won public support, and even praise, from figures such as Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who said the UK should “take seriously the moral agenda of the protesters at St Paul’s”. Their clear message that “the 99 per cent” of people in society were losing out unfairly to the “1 per cent” elite of bankers and the wealthy resonated in economies with high unemployment.
The protests’ utopian nature – with participants gathering to discuss social reform in “general assemblies” at which everyone could speak and decisions were reached by consensus – also won admiration. The phenomenon, originally sparked by the Canadian quasi-anarchist group Adbusters, was not allied to political parties and seemed unlike what had come before.
But as weeks passed, they wore out their welcome with neighbouring residents and small businesses. When Ms Quan ordered Oakland police to try to clear the camp for the first time on October 25, thousands of demonstrators showed up and the police responded by releasing teargas and firing rubber bullets into the crowd, leaving a war veteran with a fractured skull. The mayor backed down.
Things changed with a day-long strike on November 2, when about 5,000 demonstrators shut down the Port of Oakland, the fifth busiest in the country. As business owners began to feel the effect of the protests on their revenues, or had to pay to repair broken windows, resentment at the protests grew.
While many continued to direct their anger at the police, blaming them for provoking protest or using excessive force, others were disenchanted with the camp itself, which had become populated by the homeless. Pressure grew until Ms Quan ordered the camp to be cleared on Monday, this time defending the eviction in terms of health and safety – as cited by Mr Bloomberg.
Civil liberties lawyers say these are pretexts and protesters have a right to camp. Their arguments were rejected by a judge in New York, however, and US law appears to be on the side of the mayors. In a 1984 case involving a campaign group that wanted to camp in Lafayette Park near the White House in a protest at conditions, the Supreme Court sided with the park authorities. The justices ruled that camping did not count as “expressive conduct” – making a point symbolically – which is covered by the first amendment right to free speech and assembly. An “attempt at camping in the park is a form of picketing; it is conduct, not speech”, said Chief Justice Warren Burger.
The law is less clear in London. The Occupy London protesters this week rejected a proposal to stay until the new year and then leave voluntarily. It will take at least three months for the case to get through the courts, allowing them to stay longer even if they lose. “To be honest, as it comes into the winter months, we think the cold is going to be more of an issue than our legal problems,” said Spyro Van Leemnen, an activist at the camp.
The protesters are also camping on land owned by multiple parties, only one of which is pursuing an eviction. If they lose, they could simply shift their tents further on to land owned by St Paul’s, which withdrew its threats of legal action more than a fortnight ago after weeks of bad press and high-profile resignations in the clergy. Protesters could also move to another smaller site in Finsbury Square, which is facing no legal action. They might also win in court.
The camp was ordered to clear out by 6pm on Thursday to avoid legal action, but as the deadline came, protesters held a party to mark the decision to stay. The camp is looking defiant and solid, with 200 tents including a university tent, a technology tent, an information tent for tourists, a meditation tent and a kitchen tent – as well as five portable toilets.
The ultimate challenge for the protesters is less legality than legitimacy. As the US protests have been driven on to the streets, they have clashed both with police and local residents. There are widespread accusations of police brutality and the New York police issued a statement defending how they had arrested a protester photographed with blood streaming down his forehead.
The New York police did not help their cause by arresting several journalists and photographers who were covering the events, and barricading reporters away from the raid. They also arrested highly articulate protesters, including Keith Gessen, the editor of N+1, a literary magazine based in Brooklyn.
But as attention turns to police tactics and demonstrations, the danger is that the protesters will alienate a far larger swath of the population than “the 1 per cent” and that their original aims and methods will be forgotten. The peaceful debates and policy forums are already becoming overshadowed by street clashes that resemble the anti-globalisation protests of the 1990s.
Some of the leaders of Occupy Wall Street were involved in those protests, which focused on free trade income disparities between developed and developing nations. They faded after a violent confrontation in Genoa in 2001, in which one protester died, and one of Occupy’s tasks will be to maintain its generally peaceful tone.
The original activities are still under way. The New York protests have spawned several policy forums, including one on alternative banking in which a number of Wall Street bankers are taking part. The London camp led to the setting up of a group called Reclaim the City, which is campaigning for democratic reform of the City of London Corporation.
Much of the physical energy in New York, however, is now being poured into outwitting the police and staging disruptive events. Another world may be possible – even desirable – but this is a familiar one.
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