Latest / OCCUPY!: An Unfinished Uprising / Episode 3: A Fork in the Road
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- Occupy: An Unfinished Uprising Episode 3: A Fork in the Road Previously on Occupy! An Unfinished Uprising: Chelsea Elliott: It was the Great Recession. And it's literally, like, our first moment in the workforce. And it felt like the sky was falling. Brooke Lehman: The form of direct democracy that was chosen for Occupy Wall Street was a general assembly where literally anyone could walk in off the street, and speak to thousands of people. Facilitator: Mic check! Crowd: Mic check! Kate: The outside critique is two things: Who is your leader and what are your demands? Sandy Nurse: I think I've always had like a fire turning in my chest since I was a kid and so being a part of movements that took action felt really good. I introduced you to Sandy Nurse in the first episode. She grew up as a military brat traveling around the world. In 2011, she’d left a job at the U.N. Food Programme feeling pretty disillusioned. But then – her first day at Occupy washed away much of her cynicism. Sandy Nurse: I was completely inspired by a lot of people who just seemed like everyday folks, you know, like me. She became a fixture at the park in those first couple of weeks. Sandy Nurse: I usually stay, like, two days at a time at the park, then take a break for like half a day, come back out. I did go home to shower and take a nap cuz I didn't really sleep much when I was down there because we were just running around, putting out fires or planning something or scheming on this. Sandy had thrown herself into the direct action working group, which was all about disrupting, calling attention, and attracting people to their cause. They had developed a process for how all of this would get done. Sandy Nurse: We'd meet twice a day and come up with a plan and then spend our days mobilizing people like go into the park meeting, like, okay, we're doing this. Do we got medic? Do we got some food? Do we have enough banners? Do we have art supplies? Do we have the comms group? Are they writing the press release and they're getting the information out or they're tweeting about it or whatever's happening? During the workweek, they’d been marching to the stock exchange to coincide with the opening and closing bell. Saturdays were reserved for bigger actions, like the march to Union Square, which had resulted in the pepper spray video going viral. Sandy and the direct action working group were getting ready to lead another Saturday march – this time over the iconic Brooklyn Bridge. But things would take a dramatic turn when a handful of Antifa types hijacked the direct action working group’s carefully laid plans. Sandy Nurse: I was really upset that folks felt they could suddenly just come up and make decisions for a thousand people. Occupy had been built on the principle of radical inclusivity. Although it was mostly anarchists who had organized Occupy early on, you didn’t have to adhere to a certain politics or philosophy to join in. The only commonality that was assumed was that you, too, were angry at the 1%. But is a common enemy enough to sustain a whole movement? What was about to happen on the bridge that Saturday was emblematic of some real divisions within Occupy and on the Left in general. There were people who wanted to work within the system and those who wanted to dismantle the system. So what happens when the people fueling a movement can’t agree on strategy or tactics or even how they govern themselves? From Future Hindsight, I’m Mila Atmos and this is OCCUPY! AN UNFINISHED UPRISING. Episode 3: A Fork in the Road Chants: Whose bridge? Our bridge! Whose bridge? Our bridge! Sandy Nurse: Going to Brooklyn was about expressing solidarity, and trying to show that the outer boroughs, this is something we are all experiencing. It was an invitation to draw more working class people and people of color into Occupy. At first, it was a joyful walk on a sunny day. A marching band was in the crowd and people were dancing their way to the bridge. Sandy Nurse: So when you're coming up to the bridge on the Manhattan side, if you're gonna go into Brooklyn, there is a point in which you can go onto the walkway, which is a famous tourist walkway and there's vendors. And everyone goes over it. And then there's a space where the cars go, which is the traffic part that people drive over the bridge. If you follow the bridge’s pedestrian path, you go up an inclined sidewalk and end up walking high above the cars that are crossing into Brooklyn. Sandy Nurse: The plan was not to take the roadway. And as we were marching and coming upon the bridge, some folks in the crowd who wanted more aggressive action. A group of individuals I guess what we would say now is like black block, antifa, kind of came to the front and just said, “we're taking over the, the roadway.” If they took the roadway, they would almost certainly be arrested. And that was not the plan. Sandy Nurse: I was like, that's not what the fuck we're doing. There’s a lot of people with us – children. We're not putting kids on a fucking roadway. Like I was hot. This was a kind of a screaming match. But during that screaming match, we managed to arrive at an agreement to offer options. I was like, ‘Cool. Here's what's about to happen. You can tell people there's two options, cuz we're literally at a fork. So I'm gonna tell people if they don't wanna risk arrest, they come this way. And if folks who are open to risking arrest go that way, is that something we can agree on?’ So Sandy climbed onto an elevated footing at the base of the bridge and started screaming: “This way is non arrestable!” as she pointed to the walkway. And “This way is risking arrest!” pointing to the road. She repeated this, over and over, as hundreds of people streamed past her. Not everyone heard Sandy’s warning, or the warnings of one police officer on a loudspeaker. NYPD Officer: I order you to leave this, this roadway now. If you do so voluntarily, no charges will be placed against you. If you refuse to leave, you'll be placed under arrest and charged with disorderly And then A group of police officers, themselves, walked onto the empty roadway, seemingly leading the crowd into the street. Hundreds of people followed the cops and filled the road. Most seemed unaware that any warnings had been issued at all Including Nelini Stamp – she’s the native New Yorker who couldn’t afford college and had been evicted with her mom during the 2008 crash. Nelini Stamp: I don't remember seeing anything. I was on the walkway and the march split off and went on the bridge. I just was like, whoop, I'm jumping down. Nelini literally jumped from the elevated pedestrian walkway onto the road below, excited to take the street. Marisa, our anarchist organizer slash grad student, was already on the roadway, filming the crowd. Marisa Holmes: There were thousands of people who had joined. A lot of young people, also like rank and file union folks. It was really a broad spectrum of people who came out. I joined them and, uh, ended up in the middle filming and then people started screaming, like ‘It's a kettle!’ Someone in the crowd: They’re arresting people? Marisa Holmes: And to escape being arrested some people started climbing the sides of the bridge and hanging on to the pedestrian walkway. In Marisa’s footage, dozens of people are scaling the metal grid that separates the roadway and the pedestrian path, maybe 20 feet above. Things started to get a little wild. Nelini Stamp: They did try to pepper spray, but there were kids in that crowd. There were 12 year olds. There was like, I remember a little kid with a little bunny rabbit hat. Cops go off on white babies. Like, what? I was so, like, flabbergasted! After the Antifa folks — and then the police – basically led people onto the roadway, the police unrolled orange netting and trapped hundreds of people in the middle of the bridge. It was a classic move called kettling. No one was allowed to leave. Eventually, buses began to show up. Nelini Stamp: We were just all sitting like standing there and they started to push back on the crowd. And then when the damn buses rolled up, I was like, are they gonna kill us? One by one, police started zip tying people’s wrists together and putting them on the buses. Protestors said they were held in the buses for four hours before being taken to jail. Nelini Stamp: That was the middle of the day. I didn't get into a cell until nighttime. They did gimme McDonald's though. I'll tell you that. They gave me a cheeseburger that was nice. Sandy Nurse: At the end of the day, they arrested, what, like 700, 800 people on these buses , and people who didn't know they were gonna get arrested. It was a moment where a lot of conflict happened. A lot of media attention happened. It brought greater numbers of people to the encampment, you know, conflict generates interest. And that's what happened. But I also was very disappointed because I felt like people were robbed of their ability to make a decision. And that to me was where I had some, you know, just real splits about what we were doing. It was a concrete example of how consequential a movement’s tactical decisions can be – and how fraught. Sandy had wanted to follow a plan and follow the law. Keep people on the pedestrian walkway, no arrests, just a peaceful march over the bridge. But others wanted to loudly flaunt the rules and make a scene. The whole thing illustrated a truism of any social movement: When there’s not unity within, it's easier for the enemies of the movement to break it apart. In this case, the lack of unity made the protestors vulnerable to manipulation by the police which occupiers say tricked them into getting kettled. But if the police thought that arresting 700 people would weaken the Occupy movement, they were wrong. The mass arrests made global news and raised Occupy’s profile even more. Like the pepper spray video, it sparked another wave of newcomers. And in a big tent movement without leaders, well, there’s bound to be infighting. Lisa Fithian: An exercise I do in my training, sometimes I'll put a up on the wall electoral, policy, legislative, regulatory, community organizing, media, protests, direct action, uh, riots. And I'll ask people, what's the most effective strategy for change? And people line up in different places, of course. That’s Lisa Fithian, a protest consultant, who was dubbed Professor Occupy in the media. Lisa Fithian: And then I often ask people, what's the most rapid strategy for change? They almost all move towards uprising. And in the talk about this, those two polar ends, electoral and riots or sometimes direct action, see each other as the enemies. But part of the conversation you can go to is like, if we can become allies and work strategically by having a level of respect, respect is the important thing, we can become so much more powerful. Respect other people’s preferred strategies for change. It sounds easy, but it’s not. Because in this world of progressive politics, people’s entire identities are often defined by their political strategies: black bloc antifa, policy wonks, social anarchists, Anonymous hacktivists, career advocates, union bosses, elected officials, celebrity activists. Occupy was made up of all those kinds of people. And some drew more attention than others like the celebrities who had been increasingly popping in as Occupy got more popular. News clip: The protestors have gained thousands of supporters, including some A-list celebrities. News clip: Kanye West and Russell Simmons pulled up in a Maybach, a car that costs over $300,000 and stayed for about 30 minutes. News clip: Yoko Ono, Russell Simmons, Kanye West, Susan Sarandon, the obvious Michael Moore. Uh, and, and even, uh, somebody like Tom Morello from, uh, Rage Against the Machine. It's artists, television stars, and movie stars as well. Many Occupiers didn’t want anything to do with celebrities. Nelini Stamp: Miley Cyrus reached out to us and I was like, we need to work with her. And it was blocked because people were like, no, not pop culture. When celebrities did visit, they didn’t always get a warm welcome. Chris G. who helped run the kitchen, particularly hated those visits. Chris G.: Celebrities would, like, try to serve. They would just like come in with their frigging posses, you know, and like, oh, I'm gonna serve. And they just wanna have a picture taken, you know, of them doing it. And meanwhile, like, whoa, whoa, we got like a system here. We have a procedure. And then they're like, whoa, I'm a celebrity! I should be able to do this! Ba ba ba! There was, in some corners, similar vitriol for elected officials who showed up to support the movement or, depending on your perspective, co-opt it. Capitalize on it. Marisa Holmes: Occupy Wall Street was very clearly against all forms of representation. It was not interested in forming a political party or running candidates, even in, like, making demands or claims of the existing political system or economic system. It was really about the day to day self-organization and building of autonomy, through assemblies, through direct democracy. We even wrote this statement, the statement of autonomy, which clearly said that we were not a political party. We were not a brand. We were not for sale. Inevitably, factions formed. Even though everyone agreed that the problem was a capitalist system rigged by the 1%, they didn’t agree on how to approach the problem. Sandy Nurse: Oh, you're with this group and you're a little more fringe or you all are anarchist, you just don't, you just don't wanna work with anything. You just wanna burn everything down. And other people, you know, would be like, oh, you're real liberal. You just wanna be safe. You don't actually challenge anything you think like the way we're gonna achieve change is this, like, long slow process of dying slowly, you know, all of this tension between theories of change, worldviews, approaches to these immensely challenging and overwhelming structural injustices. The general assembly meetings, where everyone got a chance to speak, were supposed to help sort out all these different opinions. They were supposed to result in consensus. But– Brooke Lehman: There was a lot of fighting. That’s Brooke Lehman, who you heard in episode 2. She’s a longtime anarchist activist and a member of one of the most famous banking families in America. She’d been leading workshops on direct democracy in Zuccotti Park. She thought that the general assemblies needed to have more structure. Brooke Lehman: I also looked at this form of direct democracy where literally anyone could come off the street and share as not a particularly effective structure for what was then becoming clear that we were about to, we were running an occupation where thousands of people were getting fed and housed and streets were needing to be cleaned. Porta-potties were needed to be acquired. All these things that were really mechanical needs, needed some form of coordination. And I brought up the idea of having a spokes council in addition to the general assembly, which will go down in my own personal history as my worst idea ever. The idea was to have regular spokes council meetings, where logistical and budgetary decisions would be made. These meetings would be separate from the giant general assemblies. The structure would be like a wagon wheel – each working group would select a spoke to sit in the middle of the circle with the other spokes; all the other working group members would sit behind their spoke. The spokes would act as delegates for their group – not to make decisions on their behalf – just to be the voice explaining what their group’s needs were. It was a structure that had been successful in several other movements Brooke had participated in over the years. But it didn’t work so well at Occupy. Brooke Lehman: Because it was, uh, not only, like, just an unbelievable amount of labor to get this, this idea passed, but it was seen as such an affront to folks that were very attached to the general assembly. It was as though we were bringing in like a, foreign army to take over Occupy Wall Street, bringing in this second layer of organizational structure. And then both the spokes council and the general assembly became what I can only refer to as a Jerry Springer show where people literally used to show up just to watch the fights happen. And it was traumatic. Like, I consider myself a pretty seasoned facilitator and I could not facilitate the spokes council after a while. I would literally shake, like my hands would be shaking. [laughs] And I laugh because Occupy Wall Street was a bit of a train wreck it was, was a really exciting and enlivening and, and beautiful train wreck, but it was a train wreck. Brooke says there was one thing that caused more arguments than anything else. Brooke Lehman: So we were a movement for economic justice that spent most of our nights fighting over money, which is just absurd on so many different levels. And I mean, some of the decisions were wise and some of them were to give, you know, I, I don't know how much money Occupy Wall Street spent on cigarettes over the course of that occupation. But, um, it was messy. Yep – money. It was an accidental problem of abundance. And it started, oddly enough, with pizza. The Occupy kitchen had been accepting food donations from day one. People would show up with pizza, bagels, boxes of produce, and supporters across the country paid for local restaurants to deliver food to the encampment. There was actually a wave of media stories about how well the occupiers were eating, including a New York Post article that mocked a chef who brought salmon cakes and quinoa salad to the park. So, yes, the Occupiers were eating well because so many people wanted to feed them. But the kitchen also accepted money for food. Pretty quickly, they had waaay more money than they knew what to do with. Here’s Chris G. from the Kitchen Working Group: Chris G: Kitchen, at the beginning, it was the only place people could go to donate. And so, I was watching that thing just go from like $1,200, $5,000, $10,000, $15,000, $20,000. I’m watchin’ it happen before my eyes. And because we were the only ones that had that money, a lot of people began coming up to me. This is early on in the occupation and just said like, look we need money for these sleeping bags. We need money for underwear for these socks or these tents, stuff like that. You know? It started with sleeping bags, but they needed all kinds of stuff. Brooms and laundry money to keep things clean. Money to print the Occupied Wall Street newspaper that had sprung up. Money to buy or replace tech equipment for the livestream working group. Bandages, gloves, and blood pressure pumps for the medic tent. A finance working group was formed to figure out how to manage the money. And there was a lot of it to manage. Pretty quickly, Occupy had almost half a million dollars in the bank. People all over the nation were giving small donations at breakneck speed. It was an incredible show of support. But it was also kind of a curse. Once the money was being handled separately from the kitchen, a shift happened. Chris G.: I began noticing a difference between what might colloquially be called the front of the house staff and the back of the house staff. There were the people who generally had been more upper middle class, generally whiter, generally more educated, and they were the ones who were talking to suppliers and vendors. They were the ones, you know, doing communications and outreach. You know, they were the ones meeting with potential donors and, and things like that. He wasn’t the only one who noticed it. The Daily Show senior correspondent Samantha Bee did a segment about divisions within Zuccotti Park. In 2011, Samantha Bee was probably the most prominent woman in the world of political satire. Samantha Bee: Occupy Wall Street. It was born out of the loftiest of ambitions. Occupier 1: We're trying to build a new society Samantha Bee: As it dragged on, the movement had been in danger of becoming the very thing it was fighting against. Occupier 2: The more people that came, the more people kind of like segregated into like their own little groups. The park kind of just split in half. Samantha Bee interviewed several men that she was clearly amused by – one with a faux hawk and green Che Guevara style shirt, another with a hipster scarf who said he didn’t keep track of time anymore, and a guy who said everyone should have access to technology, but wouldn’t share his iPad. They described how the park was divided into an “uptown area” and a “ghetto.” Occupier 3: Up there is like, um, where the college hipsters that live in Brooklyn, uh, go and, uh, try to rule the park from, you know, and down here it's more of the poor people's encampment and, uh. That it's kind of contentious. Samantha Bee: Occupy Wall Street was divided by class. On the one side, the elites with their library, Apple pop-up store, and bike-powered espresso machines on the other, the downwardly mobile with their drum circles. It wasn’t just a critique from outsiders. A lot of die hard Occupiers were both thrilled to be part of the movement, and uncomfortable with the power dynamics within it. Occupy’s official structure was horizontalism which meant it was supposed to be leaderless, without a hierarchy. Nicole Carty: It wasn't horizontal. This is Nicole Carty. She grew up in Atlanta, very aware of the structural inequalities around her. Nicole Carty: My family has a history of social activism, social justice. My dad grew up during Jim Crow. Um, you can't, at least I couldn't really grow up in Atlanta without being aware of inequality and differences. And I was a very, like, justice oriented weirdly political kid. And I went to a really progressive school, but even amongst that population, activism was pretty unheard of. I think you have to understand that, like in 2010, 2011, there weren't social movements. There weren't young people out being active, caring, loudly about issues. I tried to do student organizing and campus organizing and I noticed how unpopular it was. Nobody cared. She graduated college in 2010 and moved to New York, ready to hang up her college activist hat and “find a real job.” But then she heard about the young women who were pepper sprayed, and she started following Occupy on Twitter and watching the Occupy livestream. Nicole Carty: I remember those first live streams were – I feel like they had a really intentional effort to just put the most charismatic young people on screen to, like, walk you through the occupation, to go past the kitchen and talk about how the park was organized. And I'd never seen young people my age care about inequality publicly. She showed up with some friends on the day of the Brooklyn Bridge march to join in. Nicole Carty: We had just kind of perched up on the pedestrian side and looked over and watched them close down and, like, trap 700 people on the bridge. Later, she met Nelini and a bunch of others at one of the Irish pubs that dot the financial district and joined the facilitation working group. Nicole returned, day after day, totally inspired. Nicole Carty: It felt like we were going to dismantle capitalism in, like, the next week and it felt amazing to be at the park. It was like everybody who you didn't know existed, but who felt the same way was finding each other. You were meeting new young people who cared about what you cared about. I'd never been part of such a, like, transformative, special utopian space in my life. And so I was pretty hooked. But she also started noticing the power dynamics at play in this growing little society of Occupy. Nicole Carty: There's the formal infrastructure and then there's the informal infrastructure. She saw that some working groups seemed to have more power than others. Nicole Carty: The finance working group, for example. Nicole also felt like some decisions weren’t being made by consensus in the general assembly. Nicole Carty: The direct action working group, like all the, like, sexy young anarchists. I don't know, they were all sleeping with each other. And they would kind of make decisions around what actions were gonna happen and not consult other people. And then there were some actual indoor meeting spaces just off Zuccotti Park including a public atrium in the Deutsche Bank building. Not everyone knew about these indoor meeting spaces, which seemed to be the real centers of power. Nicole Carty: And I, like, walk into this meeting room and there's, like, three people at the front of the room. And I'm like, oh, this is where the decisions are getting made. Obviously, this is where the, like, the real power hub of the occupation is. It was all of, like, the big players from across the facilitation working group, but lots of people who weren't in working groups who were just shaping the sort of political message of the occupation. This was not a general assembly. This was like a need to know only meeting, but they were probably like 50 people in the bigger, broader room. And these folks were in the center of it. Nicole noted all of this not exactly to call people out for doing anything wrong, but to critique the structure a bit, in a way that, I think, can be beneficial to anyone who is trying to create a non-hierarchical movement now. Nicole Carty: It wasn't horizontal. It wasn’t horizontal! I mean, there's a really good short essay called “The Tyranny of Structurelessness” that I became acquainted with at the time of this occupation. And what it essentially says is that if you don't have structures – like no structure and, you know, Occupy had like fake structures – but if you don't have structures, you're gonna actually reproduce the same inequalities that exist in the world. And so, because we're all horizontal, it's flat, there's just this one broad structure. We're making decisions together, allegedly – It was structurelessness and what that meant was that, like, it was people who were, politically connected, charismatic, had outside connections to like other political players in New York or nationally that were really making the decisions. The essay Nicole mentions, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness,” was written by American feminist Jo Freeman in 1970. It was a critique of the women’s liberation movement, which had tried – like Occupy – to get rid of hierarchies. Freeman argued that when a group attempts to be structureless and leaderless, it doesn’t necessarily make it more democratic. It just conceals the power dynamics. Influence can still flow through informal networks, but without recognition or accountability. And if a group continues to insist that there are no leaders, it can be difficult to confront those who are quietly or even accidentally exercising power. Freeman warned that, rather than eliminating inequality, structurelessness can allow existing social and cultural hierarchies – like racism and sexism – to reappear in less visible forms. For example, the general assemblies where everyone was invited to speak? Well, as you might expect, some voices tended to dominate. Nicole Carty: It was a lot of dudes. Like Occupy had a total dude problem. And I say this partly with love because they're friends of mine, these people, right? Like, I like them, but they didn't listen to women really. You know, like, um, they just would talk to themselves. There was an attempt to even the playing field by using something called progressive stack. The person making the list of people who wanted to speak might bump you up to the top of that list if you hadn’t spoken yet, or if you represented a group that wasn’t being heard very much. But even with this adjustment, many occupiers said it was pretty hard to get some of the very opinionated, long-winded men to make room for other voices. So, yes, horizontalism was proving to be difficult. There wasn’t a formal hierarchy, but there were definitely people who had more influence than others. And, despite her critiques, Nicole didn’t think that was necessarily bad for the movement. Nicole Carty: So just like a couple of days after I had joined formally, there was this big March and it was the first time that Nelini had brokered – Nelini and a couple others – had brokered with the unions and they were supporting the occupation for the first time. We were really building momentum and there'd been some politicking to get the unions to, like, buy in and like support us in small small way. And so that was like a victory. It gave the occupation some legitimacy and that political deal was made through relationships, like through Nelini running around and using the relationships she had through the Working Families Party. There would continue to be tensions between the people who wanted to be totally autonomous and those who welcomed help from politicians and celebrities. But unions seemed to be one part of the institutional left that most people were OK working with. It just made sense. After all, unions were regularly trying to wrest power from the top 1 percent. And tons of union members were already part of Occupy. At first, Nelini hid her involvement in Occupy from her boss at the Working Families Party. She’d already heard what her coworkers thought about the occupation of Zuccotti Park. Nelini Stamp: Everybody was like, ‘Who these kids think they are? There's no organization with them. They were like, ppshh, whatever, oh, all these white kids, they're all privileged,’ all this shit. So I was like, ‘I don't know nothing about that.’ All the while, of course, Nelini was at Zuccotti before work and after work, often facilitating general assemblies. She was sleeping there most nights. She would hide her sleeping bag under her desk so no one would discover her secret. And she was definitely, absolutely using the office printer to make Occupy fliers. Nelini Stamp: People were like, ‘What is she printing?’ And I was like, ‘Nothing!’ I was like I’m there every day, y'all are just sitting out here behind your computers. At least I'm trying to figure out what this direct democracy shit is. And then the 24th happened. That was the day Chelsea had been pepper sprayed by police -- the day Occupy went viral. Well, Nelini had gotten caught up in that. She was supposed to be working, but instead she was at Occupy. Nelini Stamp: You know, we march, we take the streets and I just remember seeing people, like, outside their windows being like, “yeah!” And I was like, we are the 99%. Woo. And I was like, this is dope. And then people just start getting arrested and like the nets come out and I was like, what is this shit? I was so confused about what was going on and then saw the pepper spray and was like, oh hell nah. Soon as I get back to the park, somebody's like, ‘Hey, can you lead a press conference?’ And I was like, I'm not supposed to be on TV now. And I think my young not caring about things, I was like, fine. I also was like, I've never led a press conference before. But she led the press conference. There was no way her boss could miss it. Nelini Stamp: It was like the front page of the Daily News and I was just like, oh shit, we are about to blow up. But I also was like, oh shit, am I gonna get fired? The next morning I was at work at my computer, acting like do da do da do like nothing happen. And the deputy director of the Working Families Party of New York goes, ‘Nelini, Jon Kest wants to see you downstairs.’ Jon Kest was one of the founders of the Working Families Party. He was a big deal. Nelini Stamp: I was like, shit. I was like, palms sweaty. I was like, I need a cigarette. I think I was like, I tried to smoke a cigarette before – they were like, ‘Don't smoke a cigarette, go downstairs!’ And I was like, ‘Shit.’ Nelini took a deep breath. The walk down the stairs, over to John Kest’s office felt like an eternity. In his office, she sat down shakily. Nelini Stamp: And Jon Kest was – he looks at me. I'm sitting there like, uh oh, my face is like, you know, like I'm probably the palest I've ever been in my life. And he's like ‘That Occupy Wall Street. Cops fucked with you. I want labor in. I want all the groups to endorse this thing. But you gotta help me.’ And I went, ‘What?’ Oh my God. The Working Families Party was founded as a coalition between labor unions and community organizations. Kest had the ear of unions and now, he wanted to use that leverage to help this chaotic, quickly growing movement of people sleeping in a park. He and Nelini began to plan a march: Labor and Occupy together to stand up against corporate greed. Tons of rank and file union members were already deep into Occupy. In fact, Nelini had been part of a conversation about how to join forces with unions on the very first night at the park. Nelini Stamp: Somebody had this great idea like let's map out every labor struggle in the city. And let's just show up there with our signs. I visualize it as if we had a map and we're putting stuff on, but we had nothing cuz it was the first night of the park. In my head it was like a Game of Thrones map, but no, it was just somebody taking notes in a small ass notebook. Occupiers showed up to support union members who were holding their own demonstrations at the Central Park Boathouse, Sothebys, and Verizon. After occupiers showed up at the Verizon picket line, one of the union leaders told Nelini how grateful he was. Nelini Stamp: He said that his members were picketing in front of Verizon and it was just them and, like, 40 to 50 people, maybe he was exaggerating, came over with our little cardboard signs saying you are the 99%. And we gave some energy and he was like, ‘I cried.’ The amount of, I think, the fueling that we did to a labor movement that was struggling at the time was pretty, pretty incredible. Union membership in the U.S. had been in decline for decades, falling steadily from 33% of workers in 1954 to about 12% by 2011. But then, labor and Occupy started to fuel each other. The unions planned to march with the occupiers on October 5, 2011. For 18 days, people had been sleeping in the park and building their little anarchist village there. They’d been marching daily on Wall Street, and drawing bigger and bigger crowds during their weekend marches. Getting arrested, making the news. And now, their first official march with the unions made it clear that this was a workers movement; that the 99% slogan could be applied to real demands for workers. People began arriving at the park. Then the park filled up, and crowds began to spill into the streets. Nelini got a box to stand on so she could see down Broadway, a wide avenue that runs from the southern tip of Manhattan all the way up to the top of the island, more than 13 miles away. Nelini Stamp: I look up and I kid you not, I was like, I didn't see where the people ended was like, ‘Oh shit, where are all these people gonna go?’ She was shocked and nervous. Nelini got things going and then union leaders took the stage to energize the crowds. Union leader 1: We have two main antagonists, the government and the banks on Wall Street. Union leader 2: The time is now to unite and fight, unite and fight. Union leader 3: So let's march on Wall Street. Show them what democracy looks like and because we're the 99% Chants: We are the 99%, we are the 99%, we are the 99% The crowd cheered and blew on whistles as they marched. Some groups held their official union signs, while others held up handmade ones with messages like “Save our Jobs” and “Hold Banks Accountable.” It was, by all accounts, successful. For years, labor leaders had been trying to change the narrative about capitalism, to shame and push CEOs and government leaders to value the workers who hold the economy up. But, for years, union support had weakened. This felt like a turning point. And, indeed, Occupy would re-energize labor in a big way. The movement would lay the groundwork for increased minimum wage in some states, and open the door to more pro-union politicians like Bernie Sanders. But that comes later. At the moment, Occupy was in a sweet spot. It was flush with money from supporters. The unions were on board. The crowds were growing. Copycat occupations were popping up around the nation. But there were plenty of forces at work trying to squash the movement. Remember how I said that the disagreement between Sandy and the Antifa activists made the whole movement more vulnerable to manipulation by the police? Well, that was just the tip of the iceberg. The NYPD had been hesitant to forcefully evict a bunch of peaceful protestors from a privately owned park. Instead, they were trying to get Occupy to implode. They were secretly working to inflame the tensions that already existed so the movement would collapse on its own. Mara Verheyden Hilliard: Infiltrators, undercover operatives routinely go into movement spaces and did throughout Occupy. Sandy Nurse: We don't know who is a informant and yet we are here talking about planning actions together. Nelini Stamp: Folks who were houseless, that they were trying to get off the street, folks who were dealing with some drug problems that they didn't wanna deal with and they would send them to park and say there’s free food. That’s next time on OCCUPY! AN UNFINISHED UPRISING.