The New York Civil Liberties Union announced on their website January 10 that the city of New York has relented on measures to limit Zuccatti Park’s function as a center for political activism.
"Metal barricades had encircled the park since the NYPD cleared the Occupy Wall Street encampment there on Nov. 16. Until tonight, the public could only enter the park through two gaps where security personnel selectively subjected people to searches." The NYCLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the New York City chapter of the National Lawyers Guild put New York City collaborated on a letter condemning the arbitrary uses of power that limited civilian activity in the park, which they sent to the city on Monday. The city responded the day after.
"'The groups said that these security measures and the constantly changing, selectively enforced and unwritten park rules violated zoning laws, longstanding city policies, and park-owner Brookfield Properties’ legal obligations under a 1968 special zoning permit that established the park as a 'permanently open park' for 'the public benefit.'" So reports the NYCLU in their announcement, quoting the letter sent by the three legal organizations.
On January 9th the NYCLU posted their contentions with the city's regulations. The unique legal existence of the park protects protesters' use of the park as a center for activism. The three groups stated that Mayor Bloomberg’s insistence on protecting city laws was the same grounds on which they were asking him to scale back restrictions.
NYCLU Executive Director Donna Lieberman is quoted on their site as saying, “The metal barricades, security checkpoints and selectively enforced rules not only raise serious constitutional concerns, they violate city zoning laws. We expect the city to ensure that the park is managed in a manner consistent with its own laws.”
This does of course raise questions concerning the notion of an "OCCUPATION" and what that meant in the first place. Much of the media's fascination with OWS obfuscated it's rather radical and disobedient nature.
Occupations have a long tradition, most notably as a labor strategy designed to do everything from pressuring management to taking control of the factories to be run them democratically. Much of this began in Europe but there is a much more radical Latin tradition from central and southern American countries. However, the most direct roots of the OWS movement extend from student movements which, until 2009, had been declared legally dead for extended absence since the 70's.
Starting in the summer of 2009, the University of California regents decided to hike tuitions fees un unprecedented 30%+ and also cutting funding to staff and more, making it disputable whether state education was comparably cheaper than out-of-state or private institutions and thus shaking the reputation of the UC system as a world class and affordable education.
This of course pissed students off. September 29, 2009, students at UC Santa Cruz occupied the Graduate Student Commons. No demands, but a statement is read.
"We are occupying this building at the University of California, Santa Cruz, because the current situation has become untenable. Across the state, people are losing their jobs and getting evicted, while social services are slashed. California’s leaders from state officials to university presidents have demonstrated how they will deal with this crisis: everything and everyone is subordinated to the budget. They insulate themselves from the consequences of their own fiscal mismanagement, while those who cannot afford it are left shouldering the burden. Every solution on offer only accelerates the decay of the State of California. It remains for the people to seize what is theirs."
They attribute the strategy: "Occupation is a tactic for escalating struggles, a tactic recently used at the Chicago Windows and Doors factory and at the New School in New York City. It can happen throughout California too. As undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, and staff, we call on everyone at the UC to support this occupation by continuing the walkouts and strikes into tomorrow, the next day, and for the indefinite future. We call on the people of California to occupy and escalate."
The prefix "occupy" began here. This blog, Occupy California, was not only the only reliable reporting source on the riots that spanned the next year at, most notably, UC Berkley, UC Irvine, and UCLA, today it spearheads efforts to organize some of the most radical and daring outgrowths of the OWS movement and draw media attention to police violence, including the Port Shut Down movement and the police brutality in Oakland.
On my visits to Berkley around this time I would listen as best as I could to hear rumors from the number of intellectual cadres that published in-depth political theory concerning the UC situation in the context of a growing economic crisis. Never have I read such clear and brave analysis. These groups, such as http://theimaginarycommittee.wordpress.com/ and http://anticapitalprojects.wordpress.com/ and most importantly http://afterthefallcommuniques.info/were instrumental in laying the theoretical ground work by reviving student organizing, and even possibly the physical foundations, of all the student movements to come. Their faith in their peers culminates in the abandonment of the spectacle of electoral politics and the embracing of a new politcal imagination and creativity. This is where OWS was born.
Students at UC were being pepper sprayed and beaten years before OWS. They fought for more than just tocken issues from the 60's or Democratic Party issue tickets, but for the people around them, like Oscar Grant, executed by BART police, and those suffering in Oakland's crushing poverty.
The slogan "occupy everything. demand nothing." orginated in the halls of UC's, expressing the sentiment that "the univeristy belongs to those who use it." The whispers of autonoumous self-managment of schools and resources built into the media tornado that is OWS. Perhaps some of the orginal occupiers were verterans of the UC movement? What drove them to Wall Street, what informed their first move? Where were they from, what did they say, how did they say it? A project of catalouguing the orgins of this movement must be under taken to understand the process that lead to the rebirth of a pupulist potential to answer the collape(ing) of liberal-democratic capitalism. Only by embracing the roots of this movement can we imagine an effective future strategy, or discover whether we need one at all. Revolution is not a game but a war, not a hobby but a project. Do not pretend the other side sees it as anything else; they at least KNOW HOW POWERFULL WE ARE. They have been writing histories since they first started winning wars. We need to write one from below. Only by archiving and studying what we have each learned can we innovate effectively and understand the commons on which we all act.
Movements do not immaculately conceive. Through detailed and passionate praxis, involving the intellectual and philosophical in purposeful action, a process of experimental resistance begins. This grows in a network of rebels and revolutionaries who discuss in dorms, co-op housing, and outside union halls, patronized and ignored by day, manifesting as the human spirit by night. There is something very sinful to all this. In today's society, the country pulsates in Eros, sexual and violent love of wild transcendental experiences; a long drive through Las Vegas intermittently disturbed by a call to save something: the environment, AIDS victims, the homeless, or alcoholics. We save them all by buying Starbuck coffee, moaning lefty agit-prop through milk froth and spittle, our eyes rolling back in our heads at the smell of [coffee drink]. This is our religion. So of course when, on wet, neon-light smeared pavement, the human spirit calls to us as we stumble home in the rain to our TVs and we are enchanted by the clear ring of its clarion call to have faith in a larger dream. It takes us home and cares for us, wiping glitter from around our eyes. This is the transgression of our epoch. Not sex, but agape, divine, unconditional, self-sacrificing, active, volitional, and thoughtful love; camaraderie. Not a religion of transcendental experience, holy in its politically-correct transgressive enjoyment of sensation that produces inexplicable rebellious phenomena. Revolution, today, is the sinful embrace of a different and dangerously possible future. The dirty work is done by deciding that we will go all the way with these movements…not just back to the hotel. That means meeting the parents.
What will we do with the newly (re)opened opportunity?