To the Plaza! To the Park!
How spectacular forms of taking up space can spark social movement growth
Ooh, it’s been a fun couple of weeks as I’ve been down any number of various rabbit holes of research since our last post, revisiting what I know about various movement moments, questioning some of that, and learning lots of new info. If you want to geek out on social movement history, I can suggest the Global Nonviolent Action Database as a one place to visit. As it’s structured around the action categories devised by Gene Sharp, who attempted to systematize the knowledge of nonviolent movement interventions, it doesn’t include armed revolts.1 So you won’t find the work of the Zapatistas or AIM on there, though both have had their successes. But you can find hundreds of examples of various forms of “taking-up space” as a form of rebellion. Sharp groups these as “physical interventions,” breaking them down into a number of different forms, though in reality they tend to bleed into one another: a sit-in or momentary interjection becomes a long-term occupation; an occupation that immediately gains concessions and disbands looks a lot more like a sit-in.
I ran across the database as part of a side quest (still unresolved) to understand why people haven’t typically heard of the successful work in Seattle which I mentioned last time, in which activists in the ‘70s won space for what is now the Daybreak Cultural Center and El Centro de la Raza through occupation. But alas, a search in this database didn’t turn them up either. The first hit when I searched “Seattle” was, instead—it made me laugh when I saw it—a series of actions in which I had been personally involved. I hadn’t even really been thinking about them as applicable in this context, but it’s true: the successful attempt to have the City of Seattle divest from Wells Fargo over its involvement in the Dakota Access Pipeline often involved occupying bank lobbies.2
A little bit of spectacle in solidarity with Standing Rock
I was not one of the folks ever arrested for sitting down inside Wells Fargo in Seattle; when involved in these bank actions (which continued well beyond this one particular event), I was more often in a support role. But perhaps my fondest personal memory from those varied actions is a bit of street theater in which I impersonated a bank teller for an afternoon at an oversized bank window we set up in the plaza across from the Wells Fargo Center. I wore a blue pin-stripe blazer with a name badge I had devised that read “Lize N. Robbins” (a pun there for those who sought it), and blithely let passersby know that I had opened up an account for them whether they wanted it or not, and that our investment products offered the distinct advantage of supporting for-profit prisons and oil-leaking pipelines. (A faithful representation of the company, all of it!) I steadfastly remained in character for hours, even with people I knew, until the moment a local reporter failed to get the joke and began to write down an official quote from “Lize Robbins.” A sense of responsibility overtook me and I corrected her, at which point, she covered her face with her hands, hiding her red cheeks before fleeing in embarrassment.
The plaza event turned into a march in the streets around the bank’s offices. It was, in some regards, just your everyday rally and march, with none of the risk involved in a more genuine long-term occupation or more riotous street takeovers. But the bit of theater in the plaza, and the length of time we were there, help demonstrate the possibilities that begin when we take our desire for change out into public, and let that desire take up space. Not only did the city vote to divest, but we saw another influx (there’d been a major one after Trump’s election) of new volunteers, folks who’d come by the action and hadn’t until then quite known how to direct their concern about climate, or their desire to be in solidarity with Standing Rock. In my bank teller persona, I met a young twentysomething not yet directly involved in either the climate movement or in support of Indigenous solidarity efforts, who after this event would go on to volunteer with our group and then join the organization’s staff and become a stalwart campaigner for Green New Deal policies.
This type of story is sometimes trotted out to placate or soothe in the face of a loss, to help organizers and activists remember they might have accomplished something anyhow and feel a little less dejected. I think we do a disservice to ourselves in talking about such effects in this way; those of us engaged in organizing or movement-building should instead be designing our actions with such outcomes in mind, and increasing their potential. They’re a big part of the point, and why I find sustained occupations and moments of rebellion more useful and provocative than the overused march-and-rally combo.
So what’s wrong with just “taking to the streets”?
Honestly, most rallies and marches usually aren’t particularly good tools for achieving their demands, or at building broader movements that can win those demands later down the line. They’re better instead at communicating numbers of supporters to established decision-makers—if, that is, they’re run in a way that said decision-makers see or hear about them. This usually means generating press that they’re paying attention to, which one may or may not get unless you’ve got some really meaningful hooks to catch the attention of overly busy reporters. Yes, you can always march around city hall to try and catch attention. But let me tell you, I was once inside Seattle’s city council chambers while thousands upon thousands were outside, and it was not all that noticeable. That was on a weekday; your weekend march past empty corporate buildings and minimally staffed public offices is, truth be told, a show mostly for janitors and those already in the streets themselves. (Though as part of the coordinated global climate strikes held that week, one could say this was effective in doing what marches do best, and demonstrating the widespread support for effective climate policy.)
But play with the standard format of either a rally or march just a bit and you can begin to get some of the movement-building effects of more interesting occupations, which includes creating spaces that take people out of their everyday routines, involves them in new experiences, and then gives them clearer pathways and relationships for future participation to help make sense of and build upon what they just did.
The participatory spectacle of Occupy Wall Street
So what’s that look like? Since this particular post has already become a bit more about my personal experience with such actions, let me talk a little about my take-aways from Occupy, in which I was also involved (predominately in Los Angeles, but also briefly at OWS). It’s a movement whose core achievements at times felt almost unintentional, results of the (yes, at times misguided) dedication to occupation as a tactic, and occasionally as byproducts of some of its most-hated features.
Take the General Assemblies, which many would eventually come to admit weren’t the enlivening democratic spaces people had envisioned. Nonetheless, the assemblies took the kinds of meetings and talk normally done behind closed doors and put it out in front for all to see. In Zuccotti, though not everywhere, they had both the drawback and benefit of being done via the People’s Mic. (Remember the People’s Mic? Where the audience repeats line by line what was said by the speaker, replacing the megaphones that weren’t allowed?) The drawback: things worked slowly. The benefit: those who thought they had come as merely observers found themselves quickly drawn into active participation in the basic communication infrastructure of the encampment, lifting up the voices of a movement and physically practicing taking action with others, if only in a small way. Unintentional, borne out of necessity in the face of restrictions on amplification, but in its own way rather genius as a transformative tool for experiential learning and building up the commitment of newcomers.
Here’s a short list of other ways that occupations—particularly those that are porous, and open to the broader public3—can be effective in increasing momentum for a social movement, with some notes on how each worked for Occupy:
Drawing people in by a display of something so clearly out of the ordinary it captures their curiosity: Before the current housing crises, the site of tents in downtown spaces felt decidedly not normal for many, and definitely raised more questions than, say, just a bunch of people holding signs and watching someone give a talk in a park. As not just tents but all other sorts of infrastructure were built (kitchens, meeting spaces) and the spectacle grew larger, there was more to incite people’s curiosity and bring them in.
Making visible the action’s infrastructure, allowing people to see and imagine themselves as part of the team at work: Occupations are quite good at this because there is typically logistical infrastructure that is physically obvious, from kitchens to libraries to bathrooms. Requests for help with daily tasks are made repetitively. But so are the kinds of organizing spaces that people don’t see; at Zuccotti, one could check a daily board to see where the press team was meeting and other various groupings helping take care of many aspects of the social infrastructure and needs of the occupation.
Providing space for people to take action aligning themselves immediately:
Building on the above: the sheer multiplicity of avenues for participation at Occupy could almost be paralyzing, but typically there was something simple one could easily do right away: help serve food or head out on that day’s march, for instance. Or, of course, stay and camp. And since all were welcome and seen to be part of the collective, it was possible to very quickly take on a more formal role in a committee, without the longer processes sometimes present in more traditional organizations. Why does this matter? Taking action builds an individual’s sense of identity and commitment with a group. The majority of meetings and gatherings people attend keep them on the sidelines, as spectators, a low-commitment role. Immediate physical action builds something like muscle and emotional memory, and strengthening these opens up new possibilities for future action-taking.
Creating space for people to have experiences that break their sense of normalcy: From those who found themselves camping among banks to those who had never stepped foot into a protest before, there’s no doubt that Occupy pulled people out of their routine. This is in part a result of that shift from spectator-to-actor. This is critical in building hope that the world can actually be different, and, like the ability to act right away, can help transform someone’s identity from “dejected but accepting of the status quo” to “someone working to change the status quo.”
Providing space for relationship building outside people’s usual affinities or the bubble of pre-existing groups: In cities with little movement infrastructure or less of a history of community organizing, this was tremendously important and was a clear benefit of Occupy. Small localized groups suddenly had citywide and cross-sector reach, and were talking with folks they otherwise would never have met. People who never believed others could share their concerns suddenly knew the names of many just as overwhelmed and outraged as they.
Revealing the level of support or discontent to the broader public: Occupy didn’t take elected officials as their primary target, a point that confused most commentators at the outset. The call for systemic change, instead, highlighted the complicity of nearly every major social institution. In doing so it daylighted numerous social issues that had yet to be clearly vocalized, among them the student debt crisis and the role of money in elections. That so many were struggling, and that so many cared, and that there was a place you could go and meet them: this was huge. For those without prior connection to social movement spaces, without any sense of where to start to get involved, there was suddenly a very clear, very obvious place to go. Many people learned, for the first time, that they weren’t alone and that collective action was possible. Occupy worked on changing the public’s perception of itself and the world we all inhabit and that’s no small feat.
Providing space for non-didactic and self-guided learning:
There were workshops anywhere one looked in the larger encampments. There were libraries. People sharing zines and other self-made lit. Speaker after speaker coming by to talk and share. Occupy is the quintessential example of how occupations more generally can provide an encounter with a density of information and stories that isn’t easy to access elsewhere, accelerating the learning of an entire community.
The grainy photo below is one example of this, and captures a bit the potential for drawing people into conversation and connection they might not otherwise have had. The paper on the ground is a timeline of civil rights in the United States, one that I’ve used in various contexts to talk about the relationship between direct action and legal and legislative change. I took it down to the OccupyLA encampment the weekend that CicLAvia—an event in which blocks of city streets are closed down for people to walk and ride bikes without cars—was scheduled to go right by City Hall, which brought an incredible amount of foot traffic to the new encampment. I unrolled the timeline and faced it toward the street, and my then-partner and I began to have conversations with all sorts of strangers about the story we saw the timeline telling.
A key takeaway from the timeline, which is full of summaries of court cases and legislation, is that the Supreme Court has more often than not been a wellspring for increasing corporate dominance in our political and economic systems. They entrenched the notion of “corporate personhood” into law and continue to use it to grant copious rights to corporations, including the right to political participation via campaign donations, now legally protected as “free speech.” A second key takeaway is that greater human rights for actual people have tended to come after sustained periods of direct action and work by social movements, and not from the courts. (If you’re interested in a copy of this timeline, there is now a digital version available.)
To me, it was an obvious tool to use to clarify some of the motivation and logic behind an action that seemed inscrutable to many. (Why don’t these people just vote? Why do they need to get attention in this way?) And it built support for a variety of the core issues people were there to talk about, which included concentration of wealth and corporate domination of elections. These are not the kinds of conversations I can have easily at a march. They require time, and space—both more easily afforded by an occupation, whose basic presence says “we’re going to be here awhile.” But beautifully, no one had asked me to show up and have those conversations. I just did, because the container was there, ready to be made use of. When I packed up and went home, others took my place to talk and learn together in whatever creative ways they felt called.
Those who thought of Occupy as just a bunch of tents and people holding protest signs tended to miss just how much was going on, and how a container for the creative energy for thousands had been built.
I sometimes use the phrase “prefigurative commons” to describe this container that Occupy made. The point wasn’t simply to fight against what we didn’t want, but to create a space where the possibilities of democratic or collaborative society could be lived out, actively experimented with, and put on display, even while knowing that whatever was built wouldn’t be permanent. Such experiments are transformative for the individuals who experience them, and they also create the potential for future collective action.
Indeed, many, many collective projects have continued since then, built on the relationships started or strengthened at the time and the sense of empowerment and possibility of that moment, from Occupy Sandy bottom-lining much of the hurricane disaster relief in New York only a couple years later, to Occupy Homes boosting the anti-eviction movement, to the Debt Collective beginning to tackle the long-term work on student (and other) debt which we’re now seeing have effect at the national policy level.
In our last post, we asked if the ruptures created by moments of rebellion can open up space for repair that previously did not exist, and we followed it up with a whole other slew of questions about the effectiveness of occupations:
Why is occupation so often the tactic of rebellion these days? What is gained by it? And when is it likely to be actually effective, and when is it more likely to fail? Do occupations—which are inherently place-based, necessitating the physical maintenance of a specific location—offer us any better opportunity for place-based healing? Do they increase or lessen the possibility for rebellion to turn to repair?
We’ve maybe answered a few questions about what can be gained through one kind of occupation, but this is really just our first dip into the conversation here. I hope we’ve set some groundwork for thinking more strategically about what it is that space-taking actions can achieve, even aside from issue-specific goals. We’ll also need, in this conversation, to discuss what we mean by repair. I think if we dig into some models used by different groups in the reparations movement, we’ll gain some language by which we can make such assessments as we learn more about other moments of occupation and rebellion. So keep your eyes open for that coming your way soon.
Thanks for reading. Until next time,
Meg
People sometimes like to refer to Sharp as ‘the Machiavelli of nonviolence.’ I’m not sure that’s quite accurate—I’d maybe argue he should be more so than he really is—but his work is worth exploring for its methodical description of tactics.
Let me mention that the description of events on this page of the database is incomplete; it does not mention a number of rallies, marches or sit-ins that took place as part of 350 Seattle’s Solidarity with Standing Rock efforts.
Incredibly important to note that not all occupations have this characteristic. Closed, higher-stakes occupations are in many ways a different kind of tool, which we’ll be writing about in upcoming posts.