A few hours after midnight on Tuesday, November 15, Andrew Huckins woke to a text message alerting him that hundreds of police in riot gear had descended on the Occupy Wall Street protesters sleeping in Zucotti Park in downtown Manhattan. As a member of the occupiers’ direct action group responsible for the defense of the park, he left his friend’s apartment where he’d been crashing, jumped on his bicycle and raced to the park. When he got there, he was too late to get in.
“The cops were pushing us as far away as possible,” he said. “The violence got really bad.”
Huckins saw one woman dragged from the park by two officers and thrown to the ground outside. Another friend was beaten with a stick while filming the unfolding events. All around him, Huckins saw members of the media getting arrested, even when they presented their press credentials.
Later, Huckins said, police apparently got “frustrated” while talking with another friend of his: “They threw him down and started punching him and beating him with sticks. He wasn’t in good shape. They arrested him, so we don’t know where he is.”
Despite the mayhem, Huckins spent the rest of that night and all the next day working with other occupiers on implementing contingency plans and developing new ones.
For a few hours “we played cat and mouse with the NYPD,” he said. “Dividing people is their bread and butter—they’re really good at it.” Next he helped unload trucks of functional art—signs and banners—coming from Brooklyn for the protests. Afterward, he and others met with an inter-faith group that had been discussing opening their churches across the city to the Occupy Wall Street movement.
It was only when he returned to his friend’s apartment later that night and started taking in the mainstream media reports of what had happened that the notion of defeat occurred to him.
“It was interesting to hear,” he said, referring to the spin pundits put on the police action. “There’s never been any question among the occupiers that this movement will continue. The overwhelming consensus is that we win these conflicts, no matter how they go.” (For more on his perspective of the significance of last week’s events, see “OWS: Life After Zucotti?“)
Huckins lives and works in the Northampton area, but since the occupation began in September, he has been spending much of his time in Manhattan.
Though he’s only in his mid-twenties, Occupy Wall Street is not the first time Andrew Huckins has shown so much initiative. Three years ago, he organized and launched a performance of The Superman Orchestra to a packed house at the Academy of Music.
The next year, he started the Northampton farmers’ market, and the year after that he got the city’s winter market up and running. This year, he managed the Williamsburg farmers’ market—all of this while he was building a cabin, apprenticing as a luthier and studying jazz and composition at Hampshire College on a full scholarship.
In late September of this year, a few days after protesters had taken over Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan, Huckins was in the city to attend a summit on ways to integrate art and protest. He headed down to Wall Street to see what was happening and quickly became committed.
One evening in late October, weeks before Mayor Bloomberg’s forceful removal of the protesters, the Advocate met with Huckins and asked him to explain Occupy Wall Street [OWS] from his entrenched perspective.
What did you find when you first got to OWS?
It was hard to figure out what was going on at first. At the time—and it’s sort of a hyper version of that now—it was a lot of sleep mats set up around this half-acre park. Very noisy. Hard to tell what people were working on. There was a media group that was clearly doing something. There were also a couple of other groups and a General Assembly meeting every night, but it was a frustrating process the first few days trying to figure out what really was going on.
There was something about it that was incredibly magnetic, though. After a few days, I started to figure out where all the working groups met. I started to realize that there was this intense, although not always efficient, but brilliant structure to everything. That there was a high level of coordination between dedicated, brilliant people who were working on all the kinds of things I care about in the world.
How did you make contact? Was it just a question of hanging out at meetings and talking to folks?
I went on this march on a Saturday [September 24]—it’s the one that really broke the media blackout—and I met some people on that march. I started to help run and lead marches. I started meeting with the direct action group and continue to do so. When I attended the General Assembly meetings at night, there’d be reports from the various working groups, so you’d sort of start to get to know people and faces and what was going on.
During the day—we don’t have amplification there, so we’d do this thing called the People’s Mic. …It’s where I repeat something and the crowd shouts it back. You speak in these very short sentences, and it amplifies things for everyone else.
Sometimes, like when we marched to One Police Plaza in New York City [September 30] to protest against the police brutality, I think we had four generations of People’s Mics. So, I would say, “Thank you for coming!” [And then I’d hear] “Thank you for coming!” “Thank you for coming!” “Thank you for coming!” echoing down a host of thousands of different people.
So throughout the day, anybody can stand up and make any announcement, and it’s kind of a barometer of how important people think the announcement is, depending on who shouts back. There’s a lot of people who just want to sound off.
At this point, though, there’s just this never-ending flow of teach-ins, famous speakers, workshops, working groups, and small mobilizations to get certain small things done that need doing.
Some have suggested young people are joining OWS because it’s exciting and fun. Is this why you’ve stayed?
The reason that I’ve stayed there and stayed active is because—and I think a lot of people share this experience—is that we’ve been waiting for a while now, looking at each other, wondering where [the urge to take action] is going to come from and who’s going to do it. And how far we’re going to let [the situation] get before we act.
It’s a bit of a fluke that this [OWS] gained so much momentum in a certain sense. Because the first night, it was a call from AdBusters with support from the hacker group Anonymous to occupy Wall Street. They called for 20,000 people. Two thousand came. A hundred and fifty spent the night in the park.
Officials blocked Chase Park. They blocked Wall Street. So [the protesters] ended up in this concrete, gross little park a few blocks away from Wall Street and spent a whole week of nights expecting to be evicted. And then we went on this march the following Saturday which those pepper spray videos came out of, and the march was a huge success.
After that weekend, the media descended on it, and people got curious enough to… actually come down and check it out. When they got there, they realized it was a forum for them, too. There’s something about it that seems very accessible to a wide range of people. I mean: yeah, we’re reclaiming space, and yeah, we’re doing these different things, but the most important thing is we’ve created an open, politicized space for people to do whatever they want with.
For some people, that looks like coming after work with a sign and holding it. For other people, it looks like engaging in intense political debate all day long. For other people, it means organizing, and to me, this is the most powerful element of it. There are people organizing alternative currencies; there are people organizing every kind of caucus for every type of marginalized person you can possibly imagine.
Is there any structure?
General Assemblies (GA) have been the structure. It was a GA—which is basically a gigantic group consensus-making process—that decided on occupying that first night, and that’s been a central decisionmaking body ever since. But what immediately sprang up were working groups that started to deal with all the practical things that needed to happen. There’s dozens of these working groups. They’re all autonomous. They don’t answer to anybody. They all communicate with each another through all these coordinating meetings. They make big decisions through the GA, and smaller decisions usually through consensus in their own groups. Those groups include food, sanitation, kitchen, shipping and receiving, storage, direct action, tactical, media, design, PR, Occupy Wall Street journal, and literally dozens of other groups. They’re incredible.
In a sort of true, autonomous, direct democratic form, there’s a lot of inefficiency.
It’s messy?
Yeah… However, at Occupy Wall Street I have these criticisms that are pretty complex, thought-out things. I’m walking around the park, trying to figure out what I’m going to do with this thought, and the guy who’s been smoking cigarettes and playing guitar at the corner of the park for the past two weeks is having a conversation with somebody about what I’m trying to articulate. And then I’m sitting at the GA that night and there’s a working group report back—that’s a working group formed around this issue that’s been meeting for a week—and the report’s brilliant, as you’d expect the work of caring people to be.
A major issue is that the General Assembly is not set up to make the kinds of decisions that it’s making. It’s supposed to be a community forum, in which occasionally large, community-related decisions will be made. However, there’s issues—like how to get laundry done, or how to coordinate between sanitation and finance to get the money needed to sanitation—it doesn’t work very well to make these community-based decisions.
Now, depending on the night, we have between 500 and 1,500 people attending a General Assembly, and we’re deciding first on consensus—or modified consensus if that doesn’t work (we need nine-tenths approval, basically)—and it just doesn’t function to make certain important decisions. It’s a criticism that I had made weeks ago.
But there’s a working group called “Structure” that I have been working with, and there’s a proposal that we’ve been workshopping for weeks.
In addition to the GA spokes-council model, [this work we’ve done] will move us towards a [decisionmaking] model that’s historically been used by affinity groups to plan specific actions. Like environmental and anarchist affinity groups coming together to figure out how to all coordinate to shut down some global meeting. This is going to be a sustained version of that, which will be amended for the needs of our community, and it will deal with the decisionmaking of, say, getting a generator so they can keep food warm. That doesn’t need to be a community decision, necessarily.
Sounds interesting, but not unlike local politics&
It’s a very radical movement. Direct democracy is radical when it’s really played out. On the ground at the plaza—despite a lot of shortcomings—there’s an attention to the dismantling of power structures that I’ve only encountered at weekend-long conferences on really intense issues where every body is focused on the issue of racism, privilege, or native peoples, or women’s rights, or a million things. In those spaces, it’s charged. Everybody is aware of the issue being discussed.
In this [Occupy Wall Street] space, it feels that people are aware of all of it, all of the time. And they’re addressing it, and they’re really trying to figure out what an alternative to our current system would look like.
It’s kind of a microcosm at playing this. For instance, we’ve been having issues with drummers. They want to drum all day long. We’ve got a great relationship with the community board, and they’ve asked us to ask the drummers to stop. The drummers haven’t stopped.
How do we enforce that? I mean, most of us have really strong criticisms against law enforcement, or at least the ways it exists in this country. So we have a mediation team. But the drummers still haven’t stopped. How do we make a decision to kick them out of the park, and who is included in that decision? What if people don’t include themselves? We’re not trying to not include them, but what if they don’t want to be part of the decisionmaking process? Is it okay for the people who want to be included to make decisions about the people who don’t want to be included? All of it is really a radical re-questioning of the systems we take for granted.
There’s been a few key criticisms that are like this laundry list that everyone brings up about Occupy Wall Street&
Care to address those?
I’d love to.
The first criticism is that [OWS hasn’t issued] any demands. Most people who haven’t been participating have this criticism. It’s brilliant that we don’t have any demands.
Let’s say we said we wanted to end the Federal Reserve, or we want health care reform, or we want the banks to be held responsible. First, a political process could be embarked upon to answer those concerns. That would end up with some kind of reform a year from now that would likely go through our political system and would mean it would get watered down and bickered about. It also means, if we had one of those demands, then people could start to argue about whether it’s right or wrong, and whether it’s the thing to focus on or not.
What’s brilliant about the openness and space of the movement is that it lets people give voice to their own frustrations. There are people who believe that any one of the things I mention is the thing to do—it has to happen—but there’s just as many people who disagree with any one of those things. [OWS] brings all the people together who see a problem to start talking about how to address those problems.
Another criticism is that we’re just a group of young, white people complaining in a park who don’t have a job or something better to do.
The truth is there are so many people, from so many walks of life and so many ethnicities. It’s so lovely to see a student with $80,000 of student debt and no job prospects having a conversation with a cab driver who lives in a really marginalized neighborhood in New York City next to a mother and father with their son, talking about their home mortgage, and on and on.
The movement’s also been accused of message-drift and general disorganization.
The organization thing is really interesting. We live in a culture where when things look official, they look like business, they look professional. They look like these hierarchical structures and norms that we agree to play within. I function like this, too, and I consider myself an anarchist. It’s taken me, personally, some real work to be okay with what it looks like to have a non-hierarchical, directly democratic group looking to get things done. That means leaderless. I mean, this is so totally different from almost every movement that’s come before.
It’s communist?
Don’t say that word [laughs]! People don’t like that word. It’s actually anarchist. Because it’s this line between socialist and communist&
Because the movement’s not driven exclusively by economics?
Right, and it has a high emphasis on autonomy, and a mixture of responsibilities of the self and the community. People won’t say it’s anarchist, but if you read a book about anarchist philosophy, it would include all these things.
So if it’s leaderless, people have the hardest time figuring it out. News channels come with their crews—we have so many cameras in the plaza at all times, with interviews happening everywhere—and they don’t know who to interview, and it’s brilliant.
[Since] there’s no spokesperson, they can’t figure out who to talk to, and thus they revert to interviewing the kinds of people who get a lot of attention. If there’s a woman without her shirt, or there’s a guy ranting, they interview those people, who are often less involved than other folks. So there’s all these crazy clips of people being interviewed saying all this random shit, but it’s so clearly not a cohesive message that the media is getting that they can’t launch into the defaming process fully. All they can say are things like, “It doesn’t look like people are showering enough, and it looks really disorganized.”
But there’s nothing to grab on to, and there’s no person to co-opt at the top.
I can see why that’s attractive, but how do these two worlds meet? How does what’s happening on Wall Street translate to someplace else, like the Pioneer Valley?
Part of the idea is to provide a model and an example for people to organize themselves. These GAs have been sprouting up all over, although, as we’re learning in New York City, it’s not the be-all and end-all of decisionmaking bodies. It is an empowering suggestion, though, for how to start conversations within your own community and figure out what needs to happen.
It’s interesting to watch the hierarchy within the different Occupations develop, because everyone’s looking to New York City, and everything we do is symbolic and really powerful for what’s going on everywhere. But we’re all pushing for that not to be the case. We’re all pushing that New York City deal with the issues of New York City, and that Oakland deal with it’s own issues, et cetera. It’s an example, it’s a suggestion, and a possibility that other people are ready for.
As far as where this movement goes, I think that’s… an appropriately big question mark, and I know it’s something that a lot of us are working very hard on. Here we have this opportunity. We didn’t think we’d have it. We didn’t know when it would come, or what it would look like. It looks like this. It’s messy. It’s different than we might have hoped for, but there’s real potential and opportunity here.
With the winter coming, what happens if we go indoors? Say, legally go indoors. Do we become an organization? What is it about this space that attracts thousands and thousands of people every day and has sparked a national movement? What is it about that space that sets it apart from other organizing that’s happened? How does that evolve? Do we keep on taking over spaces until soon we’re bigger than New York City and sort of subsume the system? Or do we use this to launch more typical organizing efforts?
There’s a lot of thinking on this, and it’s all brilliant.
It often seems these days that we’ve forgotten how to plan for a future. People seem much more interested in worrying about the present and yearning for the past.
Do you know Slavoj Zizek? He’s this wonderful [Croatian] philosopher. He came and talked. He made this point about how China’s government had just banned all alternate-reality, futuristic media of all sorts. He said that was a good sign, because it meant that the people in China are still capable of thinking like that and the government considers that a threat.
Here in the United States, what can we envision? It’s 2011 and all we can think about is the apocalypse. How many post-apocalyptic zombie movies or meteors hitting the Earth kinds of movies do we have? And we’re all worried about the environment and a million other things, but what does it look like for us to continue? Not just to stop all the bad stuff. It’s such an important conversation to have. But for most of us, our muscle that can envision a positive future has totally atrophied.
Are there other people from the Valley down there that you know?
There are some, and I should tell you about one really lovely initiative that’s going on in this area. It’s called Feed the Movement, and it’s organized by my sweetheart, Julia Handschuh, and some other folks. I have a lot of contacts with local farmers and she does, too. So every Friday there’s a truckload of donated veggies that goes from here. … The kitchen [at OWS] has this system where they have all these different kitchens around the area where this food gets disseminated, and work teams go to cook it all up. Then it’s brought to the people who do all the serving onsite. So it’s sort of like this food chain that’s originating here.
I feel passionate about sustainable systems and community building, but I’ve also been waiting for a long time to find other people who are willing to radically question things. Northampton’s a frustrating place for that. And it’s a frustrating place to come back to. That’s one of the reasons I emailed you. Everyone’s got their long list of criticisms that are keeping them really well distanced from anything that might challenge what’s going on in their life and what’s going on in the world. We have our initiatives, but they happen within the bubble of this area for the most part.
We live in a very academic place where people have often studied some element of a lot of different things, and can have very academically informed conversations about them. There’s a huge gap in experience, though. My experience [at OWS] has been that I’ve had my mind blown over and over again. The discussions I have with people, I see myself in them in terms of the criticisms that they’re raising and trying to draw lines between yes and no and this and that. Every working group down there is completely open and everybody on the ground is engaged and is making huge differences. Everything that’s being done down there is empowered by this momentum and social capital. People have started doing things down there that would have taken them years in another context.
There’s a now-or-never feeling. Everyone’s ready to throw down. Make an announcement at the GA, and you’ve got a dozen people. And then a week later, you’ve got a proposal. Anyone who wants to see something happen can come down and make it happen in this fast and empowered and brilliant way.
Now that the Williamsburg market has closed for the year, you’re planning on being down there full-time?
I’ll be down there for the next few weeks. The Northampton winter market starts on November 19th, and it’s the next responsibility up here I can’t duck out of. Paul and Elizabeth’s restaurant will be doing warm food, there will be places to sit, an art gallery, great music every week, and the place totally packed full of vendors. It’s going to be amazing.
