Jodi Dean - Crowds and Party

On October 15, 2011, a massive crowd filled New Yorks Times Square. Most were Occupiers, demonstrating in concert with anti-capitalist protests in nine hundred cities around the world. October 15 was also the five-month anniversary of Spains movement to occupy the squares. Half a million people came out in Madrid. Riots broke out in Rome. In Times Square, nearly thirty thousand people blocked traffic as mounted police pushed them up against quickly set-up barricades. Tourists caught in the crush joined the Occupiers in chanting We are the 99 percent.

I had been separated from my group at Sixth Avenue when police started blocking streets to prevent more people from joining up with the protest. I made my way through to a small traffic island at Broadway and Forty-Third. A couple of shoppers, crammed up against those of us with signs, excitedly asked whether we were going to occupy Times Square. They added that they supported Occupy Wall Street and were glad that someone was finally doing something. Together we booed the police when they dragged off protesters who ventured beyond the barricades.

That fall Occupy Wall Street was the most important thing in On the New York City subways, passengers read the Occupy Gazette and the Occupied Wall Street Journal. People praised the Occupiers and condemned the police. We all wondered how far we could go. Would it be, as Adbusters had urged in an initial call for the occupation of Wall Street, our Tahrir moment?

After the Times Square demonstration, many of us proceeded down to Washington Square Park for a general assembly (GA). The general assembly was a primary organizational form during the Occupy movement. Prominent in the Spanish demonstrations and indebted to the horizontalism and autonomy of movement practices in Argentina and Mexico, the GA structures discussion according to democratic egalitarian principles aiming toward consensus. By the time I arrived in Washington Square Park, what looked like a thousand people were sitting in a circle near the parks center. Multiple police vans lined the curb just outside the parks fence on lower Fifth Avenue. A few barricades were scattered near the Washington Square Arch. Twenty or thirty police stood around faux-casually. Over the next few hours, they would close in to form a line.

At the GA, people were debating whether we would take the park. Some had brought tents and sleeping bags with an eye to spreading the occupation from Zuccotti to Washington Square. Zuccotti Park, renamed Liberty Square during the occupation, had rapidly become overcrowded. Although its proximity to Wall Street gave it enormous symbolic value, its location on the edge of New Yorks financial district was inconvenient. The local fast food restaurants had been accommodating, even welcoming, but the paucity of nearby toilet and shower facilities was taking its toll on the hundreds of Occupiers sleeping in the park. In contrast, Washington Square Park is next to New York University, close to the New School and Cooper Union, easily reachable by subway, and, all in all, in a popular, visible, heavily trafficked part of the city.

We knew that Washington Square Park was closing at midnight. We felt the police tightening their line, starting to deny newcomers entry to the park. After the fifteen-minute or so breakout session where we talked with those around us about taking the park, we pulled back together as one assembly. Speaker after speaker, amplified by the Peoples Mic (where the crowd repeats the words of a speaker so that those who are farther away know what is being said), urged us to take the park. We are many. We outnumber them. We can do it. We must do it. Upraised hands twinkled approval in waves of support round and round the circle. Then, a tall, thin, young man with curly dark hair and a revolutionary look began to speak.