News is by now getting around that today there were mass arrests of Occupy Wall Street protesters—700 or more—on the Brooklyn Bridge. As over a thousand marchers made their way toward the bridge a few minutes after 3 p.m., they split into two groups. Some followed members of the Direct Action Committee who led the way up the elevated pedestrian walkway in the middle of the bridge. Another group, however, broke away and took to the Brooklyn-bound road on the bridge’s south side, eventually filling the whole roadway so that no traffic could get through. The front row of them locked arms and proceeded. At first, police had blocked neither entrance.
“That was not planned at all,” Direct Action Committee member Sandy Nurse told me, looking down from the pedestrian walkway onto those marching on the roadway. “I think there’s a lot of people in that group that don’t realize what they’re getting into.”
Before the marchers on the roadway reached the first stone tower, and having been led by a phalanx of senior police officers, they were intercepted from the other side. (Even The New York Times offers evidence that the police intended to lure marchers into a trap.) Out came dozens of dark-blue shirted officers with plastic cuffs—actually, cardboard boxes full of them. Some officers unrolled the same type of orange nets they had used the previous Saturday to make nearly 100 arrests, while others lined up opposite the protesters, halted them, and began to apprehend and cuff them, one by one.
For a few minutes, the scene was very tense, as could be observed from above on the pedestrian walkway, where hundreds more marchers were passing by. On the roadway, there were scuffles as some force was used against those being apprehended. “This Is a Peaceful Protest!” people chanted. And: “No! Sleep! Till Brooklyn!” But soon the whole process assumed the appearance of routine, and, for those waiting to be taken away, of solemn dignity.
At the front and back, with the crowd of marchers on the roadway surrounded on three sides by nets, police continued cuffing them and leading them away, one at a time. Slowly. Most of the marchers sat down and waited. “If you sit down, there is no fear,” called one marcher, each phrase echoed by the others in the “people’s microphone.” They talked, and smoked cigarettes, sang songs, and chanted. Many smiled as they were led away.
Meanwhile, more police arrived on the pedestrian walkway, and they used more nets to cordon off the area directly in front of where the arrests were happening. And so it went on and on over the course of hours, as police vans and city buses arrived to take away those arrested. It started raining—lightly, at first, and then hard.
The several hundred marchers who had been on the pedestrian walkway and had been turned back down to the Manhattan side rallied at the base of the bridge. They marched around some in the rain, including to 1 Police Plaza to demand the release of their comrades. Then they debated where to go next, and finally agreed to return to Liberty Plaza. On the way, they were joined by several hundred more, who had made it to Brooklyn on the pedestrian walkway and returned on the Manhattan Bridge. As a mass, together, they all returned with a sense of victory to the plaza.
It was dark by then. Dinner was ready, and they celebrated and started planning the next move.
This was the second major Saturday march halted by a mass arrest, largely on account of obstructing traffic. One might wonder, however, whether causing such an obstruction is really the proper mode of civil disobedience given the purposes of the protest. It’s helpful to recall a maxim of Gene Sharp’s: “Either you do something you’re not supposed to do, or you don’t something you are supposed to do.” To put it another way: do something good that’s against the law, or refuse to do something bad that the law demands of you.
Creating such an obstruction certainly does fulfill the purpose of occupation—it is a way of reclaiming public space, of being heard, and of stopping business as usual. But it also obstructs a lot of people who are not the protest’s targets. Therefore, this may not be the most appropriate law to be arrested for breaking—or at least not the one that sends the clearest message.
What might be better? Perhaps something along the lines of Tim DeChristopher’s well-known obstruction of an illegal oil and gas lease auction, for instance. In this and other classic cases of civil disobedience, from Gandhi’s salt march, to the sit-ins at segregated lunch counters, to the Freedom Rides, to Rosa Parks’ choice of seat on a Montgomery bus, resisters took care to break the precise laws or rules or customs that they opposed. Their message, even without having to say anything, was absolutely evident. Especially since many people complain that there isn’t enough clarity of message from Occupy Wall Street, more clarity of action might go a long way to winning even more people to the rapidly-growing cause.
Today, hundreds of people were arrested, many surely for the first time. More seem likely to follow. The world was watching (including tens of thousands on the movement’s livestream TV channel), and what it saw were entirely peaceful protesters, in the streets to oppose an unjust economy and a corrupt political order, being arrested en masse while bringing their messages across one of New York’s greatest landmarks.
How do you break the “precise laws or rules or customs” that you oppose when they’re so numerous and diffuse? How do you break the laws that prop up an unjust economy and a corrupt political order?
Further, how do any of Sharp’s prescriptions apply to liberal capitalist regimes? It’s all well and good for obvious tyrannies and dictatorships concentrated in state power, but how does it work with political-economic systems in which the methods of control and exploitation are more subtle and more concentrated in private power? How do you change not only a political but an economic system with such methods?
It’s a good question, and it’s why the occupation itself might be the most strategic option. Gene Sharp himself has said that nonviolent conflict against corporations is untrodden territory that he leaves to the next generation of scholars and strategists. But I do think one can be more precise in one’s disobedience even against corporate targets. I mentioned Tim DeChristopher—his action very effectively targeted an instance of government-corporate collusion. One could even consider an action conducted by some Wall Street occupiers some days ago: the disruption of a Sotheby’s auction in protest of the company’s poor labor practices.
Please consider a campaign against debit and credit cards. Even a small, symbolic ‘Starve the Banks, Use Cash’ campaign could lead to widespread support. Right now the Banks are imposing fees on debit card use while making credit cards ‘free’ in hopes of reaping the higher swipe fees and inevitable overdrafts and late payment fees associated with such cards. A campaign to pay cash $10 a week, with a website to post $ amount taken out of the bankstream would work.
That is what MoveYourMoneyProject.org is all about. Take your money out of the big banks and put it into the local banks and credit unions.
Read this on portside-good except for the critique of the target and the inconveniece of people-sure–in a perfect world you have a point—but that is not what we have—
And I think we must give maximum support for ows—
I think the target was a good one—as you even acknowledge –I am also not so concerned by those inconvenienced—i think you give it too much importance especially if we agree it was good target for a lot of reason. Also, there are other bridges and it was the cops who kept that bridge closed for many hours—had the march just gone on — the bridge would have been cleared earlier
Great article, Nathan. I really like the references to DeChristopher, bus boycott, Freedom rides, and salt march in terms of their strategic targeting of practices and institutions that represent a larger injustice.
One thing I can’t help but think, however, with all these occupations is the misplaced connection these campaigns are making with the Arab Spring, most commonly the occupation of Tahrir square. With this action on the bridge, I can’t help but think that there was a desire to create the same kind of photos and images that were created in Egypt and demonstrators battled police with water canons.
The issues Americans face are VERY different than the issues Egyptians continue to face in their struggle. Ergo the demands and visions of tomorrow will be different. Ergo the tactics used and how they are sequenced will and should be different.
As much as those of us who are committed to social justice want to be in solidarity with our brothers and sisters resisting nonviolently throughout the Arab world, we must not assume that that solidarity be expressed through doing what they did. As one of the commenters above said, the move your money campaign may actually apply more pressure on big banks than an occupation. Pushing for and uniting large coalitions around legislative measures like clean election campaign finance reform or supporting independent efforts like Americans Elect, would probably go further in removing the influence of big money in our political system.
There is still political space in this country for people to effect political and social change, A LOT more than what people in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, and Bahrain faced and are facing. Will Occupy Wall Street inform and mobilize enough people (those who are participating and those who are watching) to build enough political force to shape actual legislation? If so, then I think its moving in the direction of success. Will Occupy Wall Street attempt to create an image or manufacture the sense that America is brutal autocracy like those that were toppled in Tunisia and Egypt? If so, I think its moving towards failure.
Daryn, thanks for the comment.
I’m definitely not aware of any attempt to model the bridge incident on Cairo. In fact, I think the comparisons with Egypt are really much less on the minds of the key on-the-ground organizers than the experience of the May 15 movement in Spain—where several Wall Street organizers were actually participants. And that’s a movement that didn’t topple a dictator, but created a powerful political movement with real effects.
It was Adbusters that proposed the model of Tahrir, with the “one demand.” But Adbusters didn’t actually plan the occupation. Even before September 17, the OWS organizers were thinking much less in these terms and much more in terms of realistic goals for movement-building—organizing a broad range of people around a range of interconnected goals. And, to my surprise, actually, that’s exactly what has happened. Occupations have sprung up throughout the country. Large membership organizations like labor unions and MoveOn.org have called on their members to join in. If this continues, a real political force is emerging that could energize considerable sectors of American society to counteract the influence of corporate money in government. What these young people started, in that case, would end up compelling grown-up lawmakers to shift their priorities in a meaningful way.
Some people, it’s true, come to OWS in the hope of some sudden revolution. But almost everyone who sticks around and participates in the assemblies realizes that something much more interesting is actually taking place. Just today I heard three such conversion stories, independently.
Occupying the Brooklyn Bridge is not what effective civil disobedience looks like today.
The comparison to the Salt March, the Freedom Rides, and the sit-ins at segregated restaurants is apt. In each one of those cases, civil disobedience took the form of breaking an unjust law by crossing a clearly defined line. With the Freedom Rides and the segregated restaurants, it was the color line. With the Salt March, it was the line separating the colonized and the colonizers. Today, where is the equivalent line? It has moved inside.
In our day, civil disobedience may come to look something like the savage in Brave New World: living in complete non-cooperation with all the forces of of organized-violence in the world, namely governments and corporations.
P.S. Nathan, I’m surprised to hear that Gene Sharp said that nonviolent conflict with corporations is untrodden territory. What about boycotts? Even the Montgomery Bus Boycott targeted a corporation, the one that held the charter to operate buses in Montgomery.
Pablo, I think the reason for Sharp’s comment is a recognition that corporate power is now far beyond what it was in the civil rights days. Then, corporations worked much more under the oversight of governments, and within certain countries. Now, they are much more multinational, and are much more directly taking a hand in directing government policies. The largest and most powerful ones are conglomerates that are more difficult to harm with boycotts. Most importantly, the target now is not particular corporations but the whole structure of corporate power in general.
People are FINALLY waking up, and seeing the injustice around them. College kids my age (I’m 27) are graduating from college with Masters and Ph.D’s in their hands, they go into the real world, and guess what? They are now hundreds of thousand’s of dollars in debt, and have to work bussing tables making minimum wage, and wondering “I have all of this education, and it’s going to waste. I did everything right; I went to school, and I am ready to work.”
You can only push a person so far before they snap. You take a person’s job, house, and car. What else do they have? Nothing. Their unemployment is gone, they are scraping by just to make end’s meet, and once they are kicked out their house, they have to live on the street. They fall into a deep and dark depression, and where else to they go? They don’t.
People are now waking up and seeing that this country is no longer peaches and cream. People are tired of Wall Street living the high life, paying ZERO taxes, and all we are asking is they pay their fair share. They drove this country into a ditch, and they want to keep it there.