Occupying Wall Street on September 17: Hacktivists, Anarchists, Students--and You?

When the culture-jamming activist group Adbusters put out a call on July 13 for “20,000 people” to “flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months,” it never said who those people would be. Now, the question on the minds of everyone from the Department of Homeland Security to the Lower East Side anarchist set is just who and how many will actually show up.

The simplest cop-out of an answer is to say that nobody exactly knows. To an extent, it’s true. The large, established, membership groups—unions, lobbies, etc.—have kept quiet about it, so their rank-and-file can’t be counted on en masse. There’s no central planning committee, no permit with the city, and not even an official website, so there’s no obvious person to ask for a prediction or a figure. (Adbusters continues to say 20,000, though its role in organizing is, according to Senior Editor Micah White, solely “philosophical.”) Saturday, among other things, will be a test of the scattered American grassroots—their ability to mobilize against the outsized power of corporate elites, and their inclination to do so.

Some on the right-wing’s most lunatic of fringes have taken advantage of the information vacuum with headlines declaring “Wall Street Targeted for Britain-Style Riots” (along with thoroughly fictitious links to ACORN, SEIU, and even President Obama), a claim which has already turned into a fundraising scheme for Republican political candidates. Imaginative, but false.

A better place to look for some sense of what’s in the works would be a visit to the “NYC General Assembly” that has been meeting for the past month or more on Saturday evenings in New York’s Tompkins Square Park. For as long as five hours at a time, a crowd of 100, give or take, discusses matters of process and principles, as well as peanut butter sandwiches, bathrooms, and pepper spray. They can’t pretend to be able to tell all the people who come what they can and can’t do, but they can at least provide a loose framework and some information about what is and isn’t legal—for example, no tents. They’re not bringing any port-a-potties or appointing any marshals or police negotiators. They talk about nonviolence, with various conceptions of it in mind, and hope for the best.

The group is mainly young, with a tendency toward black T-shirts, bicycles, and hand-rolled cigarettes. A few have accents from Spain and Greece, through which they share stories from this year’s uprisings in those countries. They vary in their levels of experience with the modified-consensus process that the Assembly employs—together with its concomitant courtesies, no-nos, and hand signals. There are those who have never done anything like this before, and then those who are coming freshly-inspired and well-rehearsed from taking part in the three-week Bloombergville encampment earlier in the summer. There’s a contingent from the LaRouchePAC, and there’s a big, bearded man in the back who, against the wishes of some, keeps snapping photos. A police car cruises by from time to time, but it doesn’t stop.

Their stories are ordinary, but in a charmed sort of way. One regular at the Assembly moved to New York from North Dakota on a whim, and without a job, a few months ago after finishing a master’s degree and breaking up with his girlfriend; almost immediately he found out about September 17 and has been working on the Arts & Culture Committee full-time. Another is a filmmaker who has just been in Egypt interviewing the leaders of the Tahrir Square protests. Yet another is a Vietnam vet from Staten Island with a sagely smile. Still others drift by through the park, stop to listen, and then keep walking, or stay.