Why do the occupy protesters repeat

In fact, there were around 1, who actually made their way, after a couple of false starts, to Zuccotti Park, between Broadway and Church Street. Yet he sees it as a failure both in achieving what it set out to do at the time and in its long-term impact. But owing to its private status, it afforded a certain protection from immediate eviction. Among that first group who did go there were Marisa Holmes, then a year-old anarchist film-maker who had already visited Tahir Square, and Graeber, who would go on to write the influential Bullshit Jobs , which contended that most jobs were needless and meaningless, before his premature death last year.

That first night Holmes organised a general assembly. At the time I was not prepared. But even though the gathering was nowhere near that size, it was still bigger than any earlier efforts at protest in the area. General assemblies, food committees: this is the language of organised protest. But OWS prided itself on its leaderless principle — a stance that would bring much criticism — and on reaching decisions by public debate and group consent.

A speaker would shout out a few words, which would then be chanted by those close by, and then rechanted by everyone else. Almost immediately a strategic schism emerged. White drafted a resolution outlining the demand, which he emailed to Holmes, but it was gently rejected. The failure to create the demand was a strategic error that was unavoidable based on the prevailing prefigurative anarchism in New York City at that time.

In that idealised society, debate would replace demands. White wanted to gain momentum by organising around a single overwhelming demand that would engage universal popular support. Holmes wanted to set up a makeshift society that would be a model for the future. It was Holmes who slept out in the square. It was an approach that called for an awful lot of meetings. Many activists love meetings.

White is not one of them. Holmes, however, is a meetings person. And she was not alone. In a film she made about OWS called All Day All Week , we see a number of mostly young people excited by outreach meetings, actions groups, legal groups, communications groups, town planning, treasury and comfort groups, food committees and student assemblies.

There was even a demands group, that duly failed to come up with any demands. In the film you can see a performative aspect to the occupation, and not just in the drummers and buskers who seem to provide an endless noisy soundtrack to the proceedings.

Although the autumnal weather soon turned cold, people kept coming in the early days, and the crowds kept swelling. The police made continual attempts to stem the flow by insisting that all tents and permanent structures be removed, but Liberty Plaza, as it was renamed by the protesters, held firm. Some said they would stay there as long as possible.

Police said they would see how the protest developed and declined to comment on whether any action would be taken to remove the camp.

Across the Atlantic, following protests in Chicago, police arrested early on Sunday about people who were part of a growing anti-Wall Street movement when they refused to take down their tents and leave a city park when it closed, police said. About people set up camp at the entrance to Grant Park on Saturday evening after a protest earlier in the day involving about 2,, the Chicago Tribune newspaper reported.

Police said they gave protesters repeated warnings after the park closed at 11pm and began making arrests when they refused to leave. Protesters who were arrested would be released after background checks were done to make sure they did not have any outstanding arrest warrants, police said. Police packed 71 protesters in vans after demonstrators mixed with tourists converged on the major commercial intersection, divided by police barriers.

Tens of thousands of peaceful protesters marched in the city when violence, some of the worst seen in the city for years, erupted. The mood varied from playful to confrontational throughout the afternoon. A handful of occupiers had fashioned their bicycles to look like police scooters, wore mock police uniforms and barked familiar orders at protesters as they passed.

Throughout the march protesters repeated anti-police chants. A chant of "hey-hey, ho-ho, Ray Kelly has got to go," steadily morphed into "Hey-hey, ho-ho, every cop has got to go". Early on, at least two young women and a man were arrested after the women laid on their backs in a busy intersection.

Tensions escalated as the march moved into the SoHo and Chinatown districts, where streets are narrow and ill-equipped to accommodate scores of energetic protesters. Approximately a half dozen more people were arrested or detained in a brief period of intense confrontations in the area. Participants in the march had made repeated attempts to move into roadways and the police responded by sending in helmeted officers carrying batons and bundles of zip-tie handcuffs. One protester appeared to suffer an injured ankle and a plainclothes officer was seen blocking the camera of a New York Times photographer as he attempted to document an arrest.