Liberty Plaza Occupiers Stand Strong

Emerging from New York City’s Chambers Street subway station, you come across the vacant plot where the twin towers used to stand. It sends a shiver down your spine. The Occupy Wall Street movement has been camped out just a block away for the past two months. After a dozen calls to action in Adbusters magazine, one day, people actually showed up to restore the public nature of a park that had been privatized after 9/11 by a bank that purchased it, cleaned up the debris and named it after one of its shareholders, Zuccotti. Every evening at 6 p.m., the New York City General Assembly held meetings there, informally renamed it Liberty Park and began a sustained and creative peaceful protest right in the symbolic heart of capitalism. It is a world in which, as Dave Zirin has pointed out in The Nation, even NFL players have come to unite with the 99 percent of the population adversely affected by the gamblers in the financial casino that is Wall Street.

The movement has transformed the U.S. political landscape. The protest is part of a worldwide expression of discontent, the depth of which is difficult to gauge. Could this be the start of a new era, similar to what happened in 1968? Is it the awakening of American society similar to the one that led to the struggle against the Vietnam War? Or is it simply a response to economic circumstances, given undue credence due to the prominence of students from the best U.S. universities who are able to influence the media more than immigrants? Whatever it is, the occupation has put social issues on the political agenda, and could go on to place them on the economic agenda.

Immigrants, particularly Hispanics, joined the Liberty Plaza protest early on and enriched the movement. They diversified its composition, bringing to it the organizational experience of major mobilizations of recent years, widening the scope of its demands and creating links with many parts of the continent and with sectors of the populace with which the university students and the middle class had not been connecting.

In the popular imagination, the demonstrators revived the principle of hope and opened up the possibility of redirecting a world made up of class distinctions and racial tensions toward a world of social ties between groups. The encampment transformed a scene from Tom Wolfe’s “The Bonfire of the Vanities” – incentivizing financial ambition, cynicism and greed, detached from production – into a kind of post-decadent internationalism. Innovative strategies are being implemented to resolve genuine tensions within the movement. In the corner of the park where the General Assembly used to meet, a sign announces: “If you have problems with your tent neighbors, contact the mediation council.” Mexican geographer Rodolfo Hernández, who studies the peculiar industrialization process responsible for the migration of 500,000 Mixtecs to New York, explains that racial and class tensions in the U.S. run so high that they even manifest themselves within social movements. Initially, there was a great deal of tension between the young middle-class moderates and the more experienced, radical immigrants. Someone once even said that anti-capitalist slogans would affect the movement´s ideologically plural image, but after some thorny discussions, the immigrants’ presence was established, enriching the cultural diversity of the encampment and widening its audience.

The police have been pushing the movement since the beginning. One night, while I was conducting an interview, an Officer Matute of the NYPD approached us waving his nightstick. My companion wasn´t intimidated, saying, “They support us, too. A number of police officers went on strike for a day, some of them even came in civilian clothes to support us while their colleagues made sure they fulfilled their arrest quotas for that day.” One night, rumors of eviction circulated, and the next day 6,000 people arrived at the plaza at 6 a.m.to prevent it from happening. Subsequently, just days before the encampment´s two month anniversary, New York Mayor and financial news and information services magnate Michael Bloomberg – orchestrator of vertiginous electronic movements of capital – suppressed the dissent of those petitioning for a remedy to the suffering caused by ambition and greed. A day later, the movement was still there, ready to reinvent itself.