Occupy, Education, and Me
In May 2010, I was sitting in my apartment in the Floresta neighborhood of Quito, Ecuador and I was angry. I'd just seen James Cameron's Avatar in a theater downtown. A friend of mine had reported on indigenous groups leaving the Amazon for the first time to see this film, which was an allegory for colonial resource extraction in the rain forest. Something about the film and her article pushed me over an edge. I couldn't stand it anymore. After two years of being a high school teacher in Quito, getting to know Ecuador's history of exploitation and resistance, and reading Marx for the first time, I wanted to do something about the problems at the heart of society. I'd attended some actions in Ecuador and followed movements there. I wrote about one novel environmental policy that had caught my attention. I'd started reading about organizing, but had very little clue about what it meant.
I was meditating regularly at the time and, after watching the movie, I had a fantasy of going to New York City and walking to Wall Street and meditating in the middle of the street to protest capitalism. I was moving there for graduate school in a year and I thought, I have to do something!
Little did I know that I'd actually get to meditate in the middle of Wall Street as part of a global movement a year later. It's the tenth anniversary of that movement, Occupy Wall Street, which was my first movement and introduction to organizing. I spent two years working with amazing people on education issues in OWS and I also learned a lot from the experience. Here's a few scenes and confessions.
Hell Yeah
After a year of grad school my girlfriend and I were thinking of moving in together. While waiting to see an apartment in Brooklyn I picked up a copy of an independent weekly. I can't remember which one. I frequently looked for offbeat stuff happening in the city like concerts, art shows, or book talks. Flipping through the announcements in the back of the magazine I saw a call: "On September 17th, Let's Occupy Wall Street!" Hell yeah, I said to myself.
I wasn't there the day Zuccotti was first set up. I didn't know about the planning meetings that were happening throughout the city before the 17th. A few days after organizers were chased around the financial district until they settled in the triangular public-private park, I went down to see what was happening. I'd been reading about it and decided it was time to go.
It was amazing. Hundreds of people listening to a General Assembly, with notes projected onto a sheet flying in the wind. Police everywhere. Onlookers, cameras from news media, and a carnival feeling (some people were literally dancing and singing). There were floodlights from nearby construction and it was like a stage, except it was reality.
When the meeting proposed an Empowerment and Education Working Group I looked around me and saw people wiggling their fingers in the air to agree. I did too. Facilitators announced the location of the first meeting and I wrote it down: 60 Wall, in an indoor public pavilion.
Nomadic University
The first meeting of Empowerment and Education (E&E) had about twenty people sitting in a circle at the pavilion. There was an organizer from the Spanish Indignados movement there. When discussing what the group should do, he made a proposal: there must be an educational institution that carries the flame of this movement after the occupation ends. There needs to be spaces where people can think, learn, talk, study together even if Zuccotti breaks up (which he said it inevitably would within a month or two, he was right about that). He said he'd worked on such a "nomadic university" in Spain. The group wiggled its fingers and so it was: the Nomadic University subcommittee of the Education and Empowerment Working Group would have its first meeting in a week at the New School.
Those meetings were great. Sometimes more than thirty people around a big table, talking issues out for hours. We wanted to make a university in line with the movement: horizontal, participatory, free, against the one percent. A lot of the discussion was around curriculum and administration: what classes would we offer, how would we teach them, where would they be located? But sometimes we didn't know what we meant by basic terms like nomadic, university, pedagogy. I was studying philosophy and education at the time and signed up for a task force to come up with working concepts of these terms. That small group started meeting in Trump Tower on 57th street and 7th avenue, in a public-private atrium there. We thought Trump embodied everything we were fighting against and we should use the OWS strategy of taking space against Trump. We couldn't have imagined he'd be president five years later.
After a few meetings we decided conceptual work should be practical, so the task force got interested in pedagogy. How would teaching and learning look at a university for the Occupy movement? We started running little workshops and came up with a protocol where facilitation got passed around, where we asked questions collectively, and had discussion about some text or issue. We turned the group into a kind of teaching laboratory for the university. Organizers would come through and participate once or twice or sometimes stayed for weeks at a time. We met like this for almost a year. We called it horizontal pedagogy. I based my dissertation on it and continue to use it in my teaching now.
Occupy University
Meanwhile, our university classes were up and running. Some of us in the workshop helped put these classes together: Poetry and Political Feeling, History of May Day, and a bunch of others. One of my personal favorites was Occupy Algebra. A Polish mathematician and professor at a city community college wanted to make math education more liberatory. He came to a few of our pedagogy meetings and proposed the class to the larger group. I volunteered to help him out.
He and I stood out in Union Square with a whiteboard and a sign that said "free math tutoring." He would work through problems with people in a little cluster. A mother brought her young daughter over to ask a question about an equation. A man who said he'd been out of prison for a few days was studying for GED and asked us some questions. There was also Critical Walking with an architect who came up with walks around the city based on political themes in the architecture.
The name of the Nomadic University changed to Occupy University (OccU). After a handful of classes, we started having series based on certain themes. The series would be a set of discussions on successive days featuring presentations from different speakers and discussion afterwards. The first one was on debt.
The Occupy Student Debt Campaign had made a big splash with their work. They approached people with student debt and asked them to sign a pledge that if a million other people signed, they'd all stop paying in a debt strike. The group changed iterations several times and many of the organizers overlapped with the university project (it eventually became the Debt Collective, which is still going strong). I got involved with the debt work, playing banjo on the subway to advertise the series. I'd put music to a Woody Guthrie song that apparently he'd never written a melody for. I thought singing about debt could help organizing around it. I'm not sure it did but we were trying everything. I got to sing it at the Rolling Jubilee, a telethon that raised enough money to buy and abolish $5 million of debt. I even recorded an album of songs. (The lead singer of TV on the Radio said he liked it!)
The last OccU project that I remember was a series on Hurricane Sandy called the People's Climate Series. It happened at Blue Stockings bookstore. It was pretty successful. But the OccU group ran into issues. I was one of one them. I didn't know anything about working across racial, gendered, aged, and ability differences. Using more contemporary language, I didn't show up well. I took up space. I didn't listen. I thought I knew everything. I thought this would be the movement that would change everything. I thought older people brought old ideas that didn't work before and wouldn't work now. I got defensive. Those kinds of habits and an inability to take criticism led to conflict and bad feeling in the group. I was so wrong! There were other issues too. The movement was splintering and there were so many projects dissolving, reconfiguring, ending. We tried to work it out but the project stopped in 2012.
Luckily there were people running a lot of other educational projects: Think Tank, Open Forum, and the Free University were some of them. The last of these kept running for years.
Occupy Learning
I have a lot of other memories from throughout the movement. There were marches in the streets full of dancing and music. A particularly big one shut down Times Square. I was in a group that was reading David Graeber's Debt along with him in his apartment. I remember being a diner with him, eating fries and talking about freedom (can't believe he's gone!). I remember the meetings. I spent hours riding my bike around the city to go to different meetings: followup meetings, prep meetings, debriefing meetings. Meetings outside, meetings inside, meetings on the subway. I sat on sidewalks, danced and laid down and sang in the middle of shut down streets, threw beach balls at police asking them to join us like we were at a concert together.
I remember when the General Assembly got a huge donation and it split the occupation into two: a Spokes Council to deal with the money, which met at the Brecht Center, and the Assembly that stayed at the park. I remember watching facilitators run those Council meetings like conductors at a symphony, hundreds of people reaching consensus. I remember being at the Spokes Council and watching the debates about funding stop-and-frisk campaign buttons. I remember the disruptors who we found out later were paid by police to throw the meetings into disarray.
I remember the night they raided the park, seeing the pieces of the People's Kitchen and the Library on the ground, and following the crowd as it tried to find a new place. I remember driving out to Staten Island and helping set up a free store with ex-cops after Hurricane Sandy. I remember yelling at a friend of my girlfriend's on the phone, a Bloomberg reporter of some renown, telling him to actually go to a meeting rather than just write about it from afar and repeat the media's gross narrative about Occupy. I was so angry at him. I was changing. I remember fighting with my girlfriend as I got more and more into the movement, spending so many hours at Trump Tower, becoming a different person than the one she met.
I remember going to a meditation workshop on the sidewalk near the Stock Exchange that someone else had organized, fulfilling my weird fantasy from Ecuador of doing protest meditation on Wall Street.
I learned so much. I'm still working through it. Maybe the most important thing I learned was that spark of possibility organizing requires. The sense that things can and should be done and that I'm part of it: to set up the meeting, follow up, take minutes, think about next steps, go to the action, map everything out--not to wait for someone else to do it and sit by and watch events happen. Maybe it's the sense of movement: the fast sense of being on the edge of something historical and how all the little decisions add up. It got me going on a path of left organizing, theory, and activism that I'm still on.