a guest post by Zach Schwartz-Weinstein
My last guest post on the Wall Street occupation came way back on day three. In the intervening three weeks, occupations and/or general assemblies have sprung up all over the U.S., from Maine to San Diego, Portland to Buffalo, Oakland to Charlottesville, Va. I’ve spent a lot of time in the week and a half at occupied Dewey Square, across from Boston’s South Station, and one of the first occupations to spring up beyond Wall Street.
Like the Wall Street occupation, protesters in Boston are a diverse group of anarchists and libertarians, socialists and liberals, college students and laid-off construction workers, homeless veterans and anarchosyndicalist grad students who’ve found each other in massive general assemblies, Yom Kippur services, musical performances, and “Free School University” seminars—on such matters as the surveillance state and the financial crisis—held on a grassy slope behind a department of transportation building north of the encampment.
Unlike the Wall Street occupiers, the Boston group has had access to tents and a public-address system, and intermittent access to electricity to power a media tent. Dewey Square has become a thriving tent city, an experiment in direct democracy and a staging ground for a militant movement to transform the U.S.’s economy and class structure.
General assemblies have openly grappled (not always successfully) with the racial geography of the city, the multiple logics of difference operating within the “99 percent,” the hegemonic way in which members of this movement have identified themselves as a collectivity defined by its opposition to Wall Street plutocrats, and with the colonial optics of a movement of occupations which is taking place on land that has never been “unoccupied.”
Daily marches from Dewey Square have been steadily increasing in size, and unpermitted demonstrations have routinely taken major thoroughfares and shut down traffic for blocks. Monday’s march, a gesture of solidarity by a large student contingent and local labor and community organizations like MassUniting, numbered in the thousands.
As the march surged up Tremont Street, marchers chanted “Wall Street: Demolish It, Student Debt, Abolish It!” and periodically sat down in intersections to rest, rehydrate, and to reclaim this financialized, neoliberal, CVS-dominated landscape for the emancipatory social movement many of the occupiers I’ve talked with imagine themselves to be building together.
After repeating this pattern again in Government Center, the march turned to the Charlestown bridge, where one person was arrested for allegedly attempting to storm the bridge, and an impromptu general assembly took place to determine how to proceed in solidarity with the arrested while also ensuring that the Dewey occupation remained protected.
When the final group from the bridge standoff returned, singing “Solidarity Forever” down the Rose Kennedy Greenway, we learned that the Dewey occupiers had expanded the camp to the next block, moving about a dozen tents across Congress Street into a second square.
Last night, police ordered occupiers to remove the tents and retreat back to Dewey Square, despite the protesters’ cooperation with the authority that administers the Rose Kennedy Greenway itself. As their ranks swelled with new arrivals, the protesters vowed to hold both areas and defend the expansion of the occupation. Hundreds of protesters mobilized to defend both blocks. At around 1:45 a.m., police marched in in riot gear, arrested and beat protesters (including the members of Veterans for peace who placed their bodies between the police and the protesters), tore down all of the north camp tents, and threw away medical supplies, donations, and protester’s possessions.
Police officials have sought to explain their crackdown through the shibboleth of an “anarchist takeover”, but the protesters were united in their belief in the need for the occupation to grow, and while anarchists have been a part of the protests from the beginning, leadership remains decentralized and democratic, and anarchist involvement has been open and transparent throughout what had been for the most part a surprisingly cordial relationship with police. It’s not clear why the presence of people who identify as anarchists alone would justify what many protesters are now calling a police riot aimed at halting the growth of the occupation in Boston.
Instead of dealing the movement a setback, tonight’s clampdown may well encourage greater support for the protesters. Certainly it has not damaged the internal solidarity of the group.
From their cells, arrested occupiers loudly sang Ralph Chaplin’s 1915 syndicalist labor anthem “Solidarity Forever.” The remaining protesters moved to bail out arrestees, conducted a large impromptu march in the wee hours of the morning, and began to discuss next steps.
Rather than containing or dampening the militancy of the occupation in Boston, both last night’s bust and yesterday’s march may mark the latest step in an increasingly assertive tactical militancy among the occupation movements which have mostly shied away from confrontation with the police, have largely confined their direct action tactics to marches and rallies, and which have been at times accused by critics on the left of conflating nonviolence with legality.
Thus far, police action to remove occupiers in other cities has largely failed to stem the movement’s momentum. Boston’s occupiers vow that they will continue to build their struggle and refuse to be cowed by such displays of force. “We will occupy,” they insist.
Those who wish to donate to the legal aid fund for those arrested may do so here. City and state officials and authorities may be contacted at these numbers. Boston Mayor (24 hrs) 617-635-4500; Non-Emergency Number for Boston PD - 617-343-4200; Governor’s Number 617-625-4005; Boston PD Media Relations 617-343-4520
Updates: occupyboston.com
More: occupyca djripley
Previous coverage:
Why I Occupy
All the News Fit For Bankers
Bankers Chuckle (Must-See Footage of the Week)
Occupiers Issue First Statement (And it’s Bigger News than Radiohead Rumor)
Mass Arrests on Wall Street
Protests Spread to Both Coasts
Police Violence Escalates: Day 5
Wall Street Occupation, Day 3
What Are You Doing for the Next 2 Months?
Occupy and Escalate
Big Brother on Campus
California Is Burning
Will Occupation Become a Movement?
Grad Students Spearhead Wisconsin Capitol Occupation
The Occupation Will Be Televised
The Occupation Cookbook
related:
More Drivel from the NYT
Citizens Smarter than NYT and Washington Post, Again
Education Policy Summit or Puppet Show?
Parents and Teachers, the Alienated Democratic Base
Dianetics For Higher Ed?
Zach Schwartz-Weinstein’s dissertation looks at service work and service workers at U.S. universities from the mid-20th century to the present. His broader interests include affective, immaterial, service, and emotional labor, cognitive capitalism, flexible accumulation and neoliberalism, knowledge production, migration, labor and working class history, and 20th-century U.S. cultural history. He organizes with GSOC-UAW, the union for graduate teaching and research assistants at NYU.
