for them to move on.’ The mayor’s most vocal critic, city councilman Ignacio de la Fuente, also supported the encampment’s removal by appealing to the rights of all citizens: ‘I believe we have the duty and responsibility to protect not only their [the protesters’] rights, but other people’s rights – businesses and people that work downtown in the City of Oakland. So at some point you have to take action because you are responsible for that.’ In the arguments against both Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Oakland, critics always affirmed the protesters’ rights to freedom of speech and assembly. But they contested the particular practice of those rights, in the form of occupation. The courts agreed, showing
goal – instead, this mindset leads to suppressing differences and marginalising voices that obstruct consensus. A better-functioning democracy takes precedence over a truer democracy, in which every individual or public has a voice. It is the singular notion of community or public, and privileging the rights of the many over the rights of the few, which troubles me about Occupy’s critics. While they affirmed ideals of speech and assembly, the evictions helped silence debate and stop coordinated action. In fact, the evictions did little good for either the idealised public or any other publics. First, many spaces chosen by the protesters were little used before their occupation. Zuccotti Park and Frank Ogawa Plaza were not household names and like many Occupy sites, were chosen because they were central, not because they were popular. Jon Stewart described Zuccotti Park as ‘the park
Portrait of a Occupy Wall Street protester on November 2, 2011
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the strict limits to this type of expression. When ideals ran up against annoyance, the latter usually won. The disjuncture between ideal rights and practiced rights puzzles, particularly because they are so esteemed, almost revered, in democracies. So too are the public spaces in which they most often occur, whether the agora of the Greeks, the forum of the Roman Republic, or the streets and squares of modern cities. In their ideal, these are places where all citizens can gather to discuss, debate and protest. But this ideal of the public space, much like the ideal of freedom of speech and assembly, is often compromised. To theorists such as Nancy Fraser and Iris Marion Young, this comes as no surprise. It is a by-product of striving for an unachievable social harmony, or assuming all social concerns can be decided by the public, together. But it is not just an impractical
no one, even those of us who live across the street from it, had heard of until the Occupy Wall Street movement’. Certainly there were many more publics using these spaces during the movement than before or after. Second, the Occupy encampments were largely inclusive, in both the ideas debated and how space was used. Far from excluding the public, Occupy accepted and reached out to many publics, from libertarians to union members, students to retirees, and lower to upper-middle class. The behaviours at Occupy sites varied greatly as well — from drumming to teaching to praying. As before, publics ate lunch there. Third, the squares that were to be immediately returned to the public were not fully open to anyone in the aftermath of the evictions. Zuccotti Park was cleared on the morning of November 15 with promises from Mayor Bloomberg that the park would re-open later in the day.
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