Occupying Political Science: The Occupy Wall Street Movement from New York to the World PDF
Preview Occupying Political Science: The Occupy Wall Street Movement from New York to the World
Occupying Political Science This page intentionally left blank Occupying Political Science The Occupy Wall Street Movement from New York to the World Edited by Emily Welty, Matthew Bolton, Meghana Nayak, and Christopher Malone OCCUPYINGPOLITICALSCIENCE Copyright © Emily Welty, Matthew Bolton, Meghana Nayak, and Christopher Malone, 2013. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-1-137-27739-8 All rights reserved. First published in 2013 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-44712-1 ISBN 978-1-137-27740-4 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137277404 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: January 2013 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 C O N T E N T S List of Illustrations vii Introduction: We Had a Front Row Seat to a Downtown Revolution 1 Matthew Bolton, Emily Welty, Meghana Nayak, and Christopher Malone One Occupy Wall Street as a Palimpsest: Overview of a Dynamic Movement 25 Emily Welty, Matthew Bolton, and Nick Zukowski Two Demands Belong to the 99%? The Conflict over Demands, Issues, and Goals in OWS 59 Susan Kang Three The Art of Nonviolence: The Adaptations and Improvisations of Occupy Wall Street 89 Emily Welty Four The FLO Consensus 117 Devin Balkind Five T his Space Is Occupied!: The Politics of Occupy Wall Street’s Expeditionary Architecture and De-gentrifying Urbanism 135 Matthew Bolton, Stephen Froese, and Alex Jeffrey Six barricades dot net: Post-Fordist Policing in Occupied New York City 163 Matthew Bolton and Victoria Measles vi Contents Seven OWS and US Electoral Politics: An Early Critical Assessment 191 Christopher Malone and Violet Fredericks Eight The Anti-Globalization Movement and OWS 225 Ron Hayduk Nine The Politics of the “Global” 247 Meghana Nayak Ten A n Occupied Political Science: Concluding Reflections on Downtown Political Thinking 275 Christopher Malone, Matthew Bolton, Meghana Nayak, and Emily Welty Contributors 283 Index 287 I L L U S T R A T I O N S 5.1 An Occupy Wall Street demonstrator participating in the May Day 2012 137 5.2 The 1807 Manhattan Grid 140 5.3 “Festival Map” of Occupied Liberty Square 148 5.4 Technical Survey Map of Occupied Liberty Square 150 5.5 Occupy Wall Street demonstrators in Union Square 153 6.1 Old NYPD sawhorses blocking Murray Street to cars on a Sunday 172 6.2 Examples of the use of FX-7 and other barriers to police OWS access to public spaces in Lower Manhattan 173 6.3 The NYPD SkyWatch surveillance tower at Zuccotti Park 174 6.4 Occupiers retool a traffic cone into a bicycle-borne music system 177 6.5 An OWS graffito “jams” an MTA “See Something, Say Something” public service advertisement in Times Square subway station 178 7.1 News articles on income inequality 201 7.2 “Occupy Wall Street” Google searches 202 7.3 “Income Inequality” Google searches 202 7.4 Newsfeed posts to Occupy Wall Street website (August 1, 2011–May 1, 2012) 203 7.5 MIP index on the economy, January 2001–March 2012 204 7.6 MIP index, September 8, 2011–March 11, 2012 204 7.7 MIP index, March 8–June 10, 2012 205 7.8 Government spending and debt ceiling 206 I N T R O D U C T I O N We Had a Front Row Seat to a Downtown Revolution Matthew Bolton, Emily Welty, Meghana Nayak, and Christopher Malone I have never seen a political or a social movement catch fire this fast . . . I really want to encourage you to not let this moment slip by . . . Let’s not lose the moment! — Michael Moore, at the 2012 Left Forum at Pace University Occupy Wall Street (OWS) was a sudden irruption of otherness into the mundane hustle and bustle of our downtown academic lives. We will use many clashing metaphors in this book as we struggle to understand what happened, but our first is that OWS represented a kind of kairos moment—a quickening, a turning upside down, a heterochronos, a time of difference. A bland, colorless, sparse park, just blocks from our cam- pus, became a festival of vitality, difference, conflict, discourse, fric- tion, art, music, culture. Pace University became part of the landscape of Occupation, part of the terrain of contestation. We marched with our colleagues through the surrounding streets, plazas, and bridges that had long seemed quiet, unremarkable. Police positioned themselves on our steps, looked out from our rooftops, and stationed their horses alongg our street. Students snapped photos of Occupiers marching across the Brooklyn Bridge from high up in their freshman dormitory, Maria’s Tower. They visited Zuccotti Park—now Liberty Square—with 2 Matthew Bolton et al. trepidation, exhilaration, disgust, and excitement. Reporters who had long ignored our research, suddenly wanted to talk to us. Three Pace students ended up on MTV’s Real World Occupy Wall Street. One of our adjuncts recorded a stirring hip-hop anthem of the Movement, “Occupation Freedom”, and ran for Congress on an unofficial OWS platform. Progressive bloggers and social media personalities flocked to our campus for the Netroots conference; the Left Forum, hosted by Pace for the past few years, seemed livelier than usual, crackling with vigorous speeches from Michael Moore, Chris Hedges, Gayatri Spivak, M1, Marina Sitrin, and a new generation of activists, artists, and dissenters. The drama in the streets seeped into our class discus- sions and faculty meetings as our Pace community struggled to make sense of our new context, often in radically divergent ways. We were a university rooted in the Financial District—initially founded as an accounting school—unexpectedly at the nexus of a global movement against economic injustice. Here we were, specialists in a discipline—political science—that pro- fessed to offer insights into power, organization, society, economy, cul- ture. We bore the self-assuredness of cultivated training and classroom authority. But in talking to passionate strangers in the micro-city of Liberty Square, awkwardly navigating the consensus process, trying to “mic-check,” learning from students in Occupy University classes on “horizontal pedagogy,” grieving the surge in police violence, and lis- tening to people from Manhattan’s margins, we found our very sense of professorial self unsettled. We discovered a new identity: We were the 99%. But what did we have to offer to a movement that challenged the very fixations of our discipline—leaders, power, identities, political parties, demands, legitimacy, and accountability? What did it mean to be a teacher, a researcher, a public intellectual in this moment? How should we give ourselves to this ecstatic moment of political change, as Michael Moore urged us to do, while maintaining the critical distance our discipline demands? We occupied but we also became occupied—the Movement occupied us. We became preoccupied. Are we doing enough? How do we balance our responsibilities as academics (our occupation) with what we feel is part of our civic responsibility (the Occupation)? Perhaps predictably, as scholars, we reacted to this dilemma by turn- ing it into a research project: we would write a book about OWS and political science. The tools of our discipline and training would help us understand what was happening and what our response should be. But we soon discovered this would not be so straightforward. Interacting with, describing, and theorizing OWS polarized the differences
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