From Nation of Change: Occupy Wall Street's Coordinated Chaos at the Stock Exchange

A lit­tle after 7 last Thurs­day morn­ing, hun­dreds of pro­test­ers marched from Zuc­cotti Park, the scene of a mas­sive po­lice evic­tion two days ear­lier, into the war­ren of streets that sur­round the New York Stock Ex­change.  It was the two month an­niver­sary of Oc­cupy Wall Street, which has in­tro­duced a new lan­guage of po­lit­i­cal con­fronta­tion—the 99 per­cent ver­sus the 1 per­cent, Oc­cupy!, “Whose Streets? Our Streets!”—to the na­tional con­ver­sa­tion. An en­tire “Day of Ac­tion” was in the works. For the early morn­ing event, marchers hoped to reach Wall Street it­self, or as near to Wall Street as they could get given the metal bar­ri­cades, po­lice vans, mo­tor­cy­cles, and riot po­lice that have ef­fec­tively pri­va­tized that nar­row strip of once-pub­lic land. It was per­haps the move­ment’s most care­fully-or­ches­trated ac­tion—though you might not have known it by watch­ing the news that day.

Oc­cupy Wall Street’s un­ortho­dox ap­proach to di­rect ac­tion was on full dis­play Thurs­day morn­ing as mul­ti­ple columns of marchers en­cir­cled Wall Street. The flood of pro­test­ers stopped to chant or quickly moved on, de­pend­ing on the den­sity of po­lice per­son­nel ar­rayed to cor­ral and dis­perse the crowd. Oth­ers sat down in front of bar­ri­cades when the po­lice re­fused fur­ther ac­cess to the pub­lic. This seem­ingly chaotic rhythm of the protest was, in fact, in­ten­tional.

For many days prior to the No­vem­ber 17 day of ac­tion, Oc­cu­piers met to map out the mul­ti­ple stages of the ac­tion, not­ing the var­i­ous in­ter­sec­tions where po­lice would try to bot­tle­neck marchers, and de­vis­ing routes of re­treat that would allow them to re-group when faced with over­whelm­ing po­lice force.  In order to spread out the po­lice pres­ence, the march was stag­gered; dif­fer­ent strands would leave min­utes apart and aim for dif­fer­ent ac­cess points to Wall Street. Al­though these gen­eral con­tours of the ac­tion were planned en masse, over a dozen affin­ity groups—self-or­ga­niz­ing sets of vol­un­teers—met on their own to plan ac­tions-within-the ac­tion: some would break off from the main march to pro­ceed di­rectly to Wall Street through a Duane Reade on Pine; oth­ers planned acts of civil dis­obe­di­ence at strate­gic lo­ca­tions.

This or­ga­nized ran­dom­ness frus­trated po­lice tac­tics, which are best suited to cor­ralling a sin­gle-minded mass. As a re­sult, the po­lice did as much as the marchers to block ac­cess to Wall Street, man­han­dling pedes­tri­ans and “freez­ing” in­ter­sec­tions in order to stanch the un­pre­dictable flow of protest. Per­haps the chief break­down of po­lice con­trol oc­curred at the in­ter­sec­tion of Broad and Beaver at around 10 a.m., where sev­eral strands of the march met after ear­lier sit-ins on Pine Street. Un­pre­pared for this sec­ondary flow, the po­lice ini­tially al­lowed the marchers to take to the street, danc­ing and singing—free from po­lice vi­o­lence, if only for a few min­utes.

Click Here to continue reading this interesting article, particularly if you read Naomi Wolf’s just-posted article.

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• Don’t Let Them Confuse You about Violence – Op-Ed by Nathan Schneider (Waging Non-violence) (jhaines6.wordpress.com)
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