More background on one of the puppet masters behind the Occupy Wall Street movement

Here's a long Bloomberg Businessweek article on former Yale Professor David Graeber, one of the chief puppet masters behind the whole Occupy Wall Street movement, entitled "David Graeber, the Anti-Leader of Occupy Wall Street - Meet the anthropologist, activist, and anarchist who helped transform a hapless rally into a global protest movement."

 

To summarize the birthing of the Occupy Wall Street movement:

Graeber began the summer on sabbatical, moving back to New York from London and frequenting an artists' space called 16Beaver. It was an intellectual activist salon, located near Wall Street, the sort of place where people would discuss topics like semiotics and hacking and the struggles of indigenous peoples. Like many other American activists, Graeber had been deeply moved by the occupation of Cairo's Tahrir Square and by the "Indignados" who had taken over central Madrid; in mid-July, he published a short piece in Adbusters asking what it would take to trigger a similar uprising in the West. For much of the summer, the discussions at 16Beaver revolved around exactly that question. When a local group called Operation Empire State Rebellion called for a June 14 occupation of Zuccotti Park, four people showed up.

 

On July 13, Adbusters put out its own call for a Wall Street occupation, to take place two months later, on Sept. 17. Setting the date and publicizing it was the extent of the magazine's involvement. A group called New Yorkers Against Budget Cuts—student activists and community leaders from some of the city's poorer neighborhoods—stepped in to execute the rest. For three weeks in June and July, to protest city budget cuts and layoffs, the group had camped out across the street from City Hall in a tent city they called Bloombergville. They liked the idea of trying a similar approach on Wall Street. After talking to Adbusters, the group began advertising a "People's General Assembly" to "Oppose Cutbacks And Austerity Of Any Kind" and plan the Sept. 17 occupation.

 

The assembly was to be held in Bowling Green, the downtown Manhattan park with its famous statue of a charging bull pawing the cobblestones. Graeber had heard about the meeting at 16Beaver, and the afternoon of Aug. 2 he went to Bowling Green with two friends, a Greek artist and anarchist named Georgia Sagri and a Japanese activist named Sabu Kohso (who is also the Japanese translator of Graeber's books).

 

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When Graeber and his friends showed up on Aug. 2, however, they found out that the event wasn't, in fact, a general assembly, but a traditional rally, to be followed by a short meeting and a march to Wall Street to deliver a set of predetermined demands ("A massive public-private jobs program" was one, "An end to oppression and war!" was another). In anarchist argot, the event was being run by "verticals"—top-down organizations—rather than "horizontals" such as Graeber and his friends. Sagri and Graeber felt they'd been had, and they were angry.

 

What happened next sounds like an anarchist parable. Along with Kohso, the two recruited several other people disgruntled with the proceedings, then walked to the south end of the park and began to hold their own GA, getting down to the business of planning the Sept. 17 occupation. The original dozen or so people gradually swelled, despite the efforts of the event's planners to bring them back to the rally. The tug of war lasted until late in the evening, but eventually all of the 50 or so people remaining at Bowling Green had joined the insurgent general assembly.

 

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For Graeber the next month and a half was a carousel of meetings. There were the weekly GAs, the first held near the Irish Hunger Memorial in Battery Park City, the rest in Tompkins Square Park in the East Village. He facilitated some of them and spent much of the rest of his time in working group meetings in people's apartments. (On Aug. 14 he tweeted, "I am so exhausted. My first driving lesson … then had to facilitate an assembly in Tompkins Square Park for like three hours.") He organized legal and medical training and classes on nonviolent resistance. The group endlessly discussed what demands to make, or whether to have demands at all—a question that months later remains unresolved.

-- Jack Krupansky