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Abstract
The occupation of public urban space is a prominent feature in most descriptions of the global wave of protests after 2011. This paper examines the occupation of one significant space, New York’s Zuccotti Park, to investigate how first, ‘occupying’ became the central form of practice of what later was called Occupy Wall Street. By reconstructing the habitus of the movement’s core constituency and its resonance with the practice of the occupation, this investigation also explains why it was so difficult for the movement to evolve into other forms. It sketches out how the practice of occupying influenced the cooperation between members of different social classes participating in the protest and compares the development of this occupation to the very different trajectory of the Occupy movement in Germany. It is argued that the US occupation only temporarily overcame obstacles to mobilizing the discontent of those young adults that found themselves biographically blocked from joining the new petty bourgeoisie and to building alliances with other social groups in the USA of the post-recession era. Since the eviction from the park reinforced these obstacles, it triggered a de-mobilizing dynamic.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 These routinized protest practices are at the heart of the interest of many Bourdieu-inspired models of social movements, such as the one by Crossley, who criticizes Bourdieu's (Citation1988) own writings on protests for neglecting the specificity of social movements as a semi-autonomous realm of practices, which are, in Crossley's (Citation2003, Citation2002) conceptual framework, shaped both by a distinct ‘field of contention’ and a ‘radical habitus’. While Crossley's contention might be legitimate with regards to established social movements and their protest practices, I think the autonomy of a given protest practice as a distinct realm of practice should be treated as a question rather than as a starting point for analysis, and that in the case of OWS, Bourdieu's ‘crisis model’ of protests is de facto better equipped to grasp the peculiarities of its protest practice.
2 All interviewees' names were replaced by pseudonyms.
3 It is probably no coincidence that this is also the day the first article in the New York Times referring to the group in Zuccotti Park as ‘Occupy Wall Street’ was published (Bellafante Citation2011).
4 It would be an interesting task beyond the scope of this paper, to try to reconnect the political fault lines between the anarchist radicals and the social-reform populists, which Gould-Wartofsky describes, to the different socio-demographic groups in the park—an endeavor which would maybe also allow the understanding why the anarchist radicals, even though a relatively small group with less economic resources than the latter, were able to establish a de facto hegemony over how the occupation was run.
5 Cordero-Guzman's survey was based on a non-representative survey of visitors of an important web page of OWS, occupywallst.org. While his own presentation of the results concentrates on the ‘supporters’ of OWS, he was kind enough to leave me the data for secondary analysis, so that I was able to identify the subset of those that actively participated in the early occupation. Milkman, Luce, and Lewis's study is based on a representative survey of the participants in the May Day demonstration in 2012, the vast majority of participants in this demonstration declared to be supporters of OWS.
6 The term ‘core constituency’ is used here to designate the leading ‘class-generational unit’ (Mannheim Citation1964; cf. Rosenhek and Shalev Citation2014) of the movement. By ‘leading group’ I neither refer to the group necessarily encompassing the numerically largest number of participants nor to the group from which the institutional leadership is recruited (cf. Poulantzas Citation1973, esp. 34ff.), even though both can be, and in OWS in large parts also was, the case. It is rather the socio-demographic group who's ‘style’ and interests are dominant in shaping the praxis of the movement. Even if its identification is grounded in empirical observations, it is ultimately a speculative construction that has to prove its analytic value through the explanatory power of the models developed with its help.
7 The new petty bourgeoisie is different from the classical or ‘old’ petty bourgeoisie in that its members are salaried employees that do not legally own means of production, but are, due to their specialized knowledge (cultural capital), able to find relatively high-prestigious work in non-productive (in a Marxian sense) sectors of the economy or are as engineers and technicians de facto controlling means of production so that their wage is paid out of the surplus fund.
8 For example, Milkman, Luce, and Lewis (Citation2013, 9) notice the unusually high percentage of students of ‘top ranked colleges and universities’ participating in the protests, Cordero-Guzman (Citation2011) also notes that the majority of protesters answering his survey were ‘highly educated’ but income poor and that over 50% of the participants were less than 35 years old.
9 The analysis is based on research conducted as part of my dissertation project comparing OWS, the Tea Party and Occupy in Germany. In fall 2012 and in spring 2013 and 2014, I conducted 27 in-depth interviews and 4 open group discussions with a total of 45 participants in OWS. About 30 of those interviewed belonged to the core constituency. The open group discussions were recorded discussions of 3–7 participants discussing OWS, which were intentionally non-directive and designed to allow the participants to ‘home in’ on ‘shared centers of experience’ (for the method of the open group discussion, see Bohnsack Citation2004). The interviews were about 45–90 minutes long, and focused on generating narratives on how the interviewees got involved in OWS (for the method of the narrative interview, see Schütze Citation1976, Citation1981).
10 The patterns were reconstructed using the so-called ‘documentary method’ as it was developed by Ralf Bohnsack (Citation2003) and which is especially suited for the analysis of habitus (Meuser Citation2007). The reconstruction itself, which was done in the framework of my PhD project, uses extensive fine-sequential analysis (for the epistemological and methodological implications of reconstructive fine-sequential analysis, see Oevermann Citation1996, Citation2005) and comparisons across different cases (also from other social movements), cannot be replicated here for limitations of space. The passages and their discussion in the following are therefore to be understood as mere illustration of the results.
11 This is not a mere pun, but was a decisive insight for my empirical research. Compared to the very well working group discussions with Tea Party activists, for a long time, I had the impression that it is absolutely impossible to recruit a group of OWS activists that in its discourse documented milieu-specific interpretative patterns—until I realized that the way of negotiation of differences in opinions and ‘orientation-schemes’ was exactly the documented commonality that I had been looking for. For the difference between explicit, communicatively shared ‘orientation-schemes’ and the latent patterns orientating their deployment, see Bohnsack (Citation2012).
12 That the occupation of Zuccotti Park provided such a communicative setting, partially because of its impromptu character which left so many things up for negotiation, can also be understood as one reason why it attracted more dedicated participants than ‘Bloombergville’. This 11-day protest encampment on the sidewalk in front of NY City Hall in July 2011 had been called for by an alliance of leftist organizations which pre-formulated the goals of the encampment. It was registered with and closely regulated by the NYPD, which rendered its practice much less participatory and dialogical for those that came to support it.
13 The reoccurrence of this motive in the accounts of my interviewees could be understood as reflecting a recruitment bias, introduced through my snowballing recruitment, in which those that were isolated at first tended to connect with each other in the protest, and then recommended each other as interviewing partners to me, as one reviewer brought to my attention. However, since I met my first interviewees through participating in different events and meetings, this seems rather unlikely. Furthermore, a participant in OWS who came from Europe also mentioned as ‘odd’ that most participants came to the encampment individually. If Graeber’s (Citation2012) description of the formation of the NYCGA is correct, then even this small circle of activists was formed by people that sensed their mutual affinity at the assembly through clothing and ‘style’ and not by knowing each other beforehand!
14 It is in this light that one should read the recent findings of a poll on members of the ‘Millennial’ generation, according to which they have the lowest levels of social trust of all living US generations (Pew Research Center Citation2014).
15 It occurred to me only after I identified this mechanism as a plausible interpretation of a series of seemingly paradoxical features in the accounts of my interviewees in OWS that this actually has a lot of similarities with what Frankel calls the ‘traumatic basis’ of the support of right-wing politics. Namely, the hesitation to let go of one's embracing of the social authority by which one, at the same time, feels abused, for fear of ‘punishment’ and especially ‘abandonment’ (Frankel Citation2015). And indeed, Tea Party activists I interviewed interpreted the civil disobedience exercised by OWS activists as a sign that they, other than them, had achieved nothing in their life and therefore have nothing to lose!
16 It comes as no surprise that the Tea Party Patriots accused the activists of being ‘freeloaders’, but the New York Times also titled ‘Want to Get Fat on Wall Street? Try Protesting’ (Zernike Citation2011; Gordinier Citation2011).
17 The term ‘precariat’ is used here not in the sense of a unified new, global class recruiting itself from all over the old class structure (Standing Citation2011), or some kind of ‘affective class’ (Berlant Citation2011, 195), but in a much narrower sense as referring to the disintegrating lower ranks of the proletariat youth, the ‘urban outcasts’ as Wacquant (Citation2008) conceptualized them.
18 Again, this discursive strategy was shared from the right to the center-left: the conservative New York Post mocked that the kitchen team was frustrated by ‘freeloaders’ (Algar Citation2011), but the liberal The Daily Show (Citation2011) also ran a clip titled ‘Occupy Wall Street Divided’.
19 The discussion with Group1 was conducted in fall 2012 in Zuccotti Park itself.
20 The beginning of social de-mixing into different groups can, for example, be seen in an internal survey conducted in 2012 (Owen Citation2013). In early 2014, when I participated in two widely announced events of groups that evolved from OWS, the ‘people's gong’ in front of the New York Stock Exchange and the presentation of the ‘Debt Resistors Operations Manual’ by ‘Strike Debt’, only one person other than me went to both events (NY, 4 April 2014).
21 In what remains of the Occupy Archive, the printed posters of the nurses' union stand out amongst the hand-written posters and pizza cartons of OWS itself (NNU Citation2011a). The National Nurses United (NNU) had already endorsed OWS on 30 September (NNU Citation2011b).
22 A document of this was the persistent feature in many interviews that the NYPD brought drug-abusing individuals and people with mental problems into the park to undermine solidarity. Independent of the factual correctness of this claim, its persistence in the narrated accounts points at the centrality of the associated conflicts for the experience of life in the park.
23 This might also be due to the survey being conducted on May Day.
24 One should not overestimate the role of Adbusters in any decision-making processes in and around the park. They are referenced here rather as an indication that the idea of the occupation being a tactic with an expiration date was widespread at that moment.
25 The German camp scene was, also due to the de-centralized urban landscape of Germany, very diverse. The following conclusions are drawn from interviews and participant observations around the camps of Occupy Frankfurt and Occupy Berlin, the two largest ‘Occupies’ in Germany.
26 Original: ‘Wir zahlen nicht für eure Krise!’, translation by the author.
27 The campaign’s name is composed of ‘Occupy’, as the political moment that it wanted to contribute to, and ‘to block’, as a reference of one key tactic of mass civil disobedience that especially the IL had developed after the summit in Heiligendamm. It was initiated by the IL in cooperation with various other NGO's and organizations; UG joined the process in its second year (Blockupy_Group1, Lisa_Blockupy).
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Nils C. Kumkar
Nils C. Kumkar is a PhD candidate in the DFG Research Training Group ‘Critical Junctures of Globalization’ at the Leipzig University Centre for Area Studies.