Faced with increasing pressure from authorities, Olga Bloemen investigates Occupy's plans for the coming year.

In the midst of Burns Night festivities, Occupy Edinburgh packed up their tents at St. Andrews square after more than 3 months of occupation. Despite Edinburgh City Council being the first governmental body in the world to grant the movement official recognition, businesses in the area nonetheless took them to court. As the proceedings went on, a decision was made by the Occupiers to leave voluntarily to avoid forced eviction.

However, a pair of shoes and some other various camper necessities accidentally left behind meant that the court issued an official eviction notice after all. The day after their departure, a cleaner team armed with high pressure sprayers could be observed hastily removing some remaining chalk slogans from the walls. From a distance, on the trampled grass, a crew of unrecognisable Occupiers observed the operation, dressed smartly as the 1% rich and powerful for the occasion. They, in turn, were watched suspiciously by a police team.

There were mixed feelings all around, as the square had housed a temporary but close-knit community. But, as the Occupy Edinburgh blog states, “you can’t evict an idea". Public brainstorming meetings are already underway, planning and preparing to roll out ‘Phase Two’.

But how did the sight of tent camps in the middle of the city stop surprising us? First there was the Arab Spring, followed swiftly by the ‘Spanish Spring’ of the Indignados (the outraged) who took their tents to the squares in the midst of pending local and regional elections in May.

Then came the online call-out from Adbusters, an international anti-consumerist magazine and network, to occupy Wall Street on the 17th of September, 2011. The ‘Global Day of Action’ occurred on the 15th of October; protests were staged and occupations began in almost 1000 cities in 82 countries. As the weeks unfolded many of these camps became places of dialogue between people from many different (albeit unfortunately not all) social backgrounds.

But Occupy movement became more than just a camp. Occupy Wall Street set up a People’s Kitchen feeding thousands of the homeless and its own campers, opened a People’s Library, provided free bedding, shelter and medical care to anyone who needed it, organised public talks, workshops and cultural events, inspiring Occupy groupings globally.

The global reach of the movement, its buzzing and connecting virtual extension on Facebook, Tumblr, Flickr, blogs and forums, is perhaps the most fascinating aspect of it. But equally interesting is the consensus decision-making process the movement practices, striving to include everyone’s voice in daily General Assemblies. Usually, smaller working groups bring proposals to these assemblies and take action when everyone approves.

Characterised as a “democratic awakening”, the movement has challenged the narrative spun by the financial sector and governments that presented the economic crisis as the result of some mysterious mathematical failure in the financial market, a couple of greedy individuals and/or some irresponsible governments. Occupy, in turn, recast the crisis as the result of a system that persistently allows a few to accumulate wealth on the back of many. Rather than asking “how can we manage this system better in order to continue Business As Usual?”, they ask “how can we change social relations and tackle existing inequalities?’”

Finding answers to this question is at the core of the movement and its priorities for 2012. But of course there are as many answers as people involved: engaging a bigger percentage of ‘the 99%’; scrutinising current social problems and possible alternatives through educational activities; articulating demands against the powerful few in politics and business; creating autonomous institutions, like social centres, activist collectives, alternative media, credit unions and co-operatives in which different values and lifestyles can take shape. As the movement seeks to represent the diversity of 99%, it tries to accommodate all these views.

At Occupy meetings in Toronto, New York and Edinburgh, it became clear that Occupy is a ‘movement’ in the very sense of the word: a reflexive experiment in communication, decision-making and collaboration in which new ideas, plans and solutions are continuously generated. This process is not a means to an end but an end in itself. With this, Occupy aims to prefigure the world they would like to see.

Many separate groups and struggles have gathered in this buzz of possibility. Their mission statement is a simple one: you don’t have to read the newspaper, frown, sigh and go to work. You can occupy Wall Street. In fact, you can occupy everything. I was surprised by how many times I heard people expressing the word ‘hope’ when I celebrated New Year’s Eve with OWS. That night, people tore down the police fences put up around Zucotti Park after the eviction on the 14th of November. As people danced on the fences piled up in centre of the square, the night felt epic and revolutionary. At 2am this came to a sudden end when the police decided to assert their authority and evacuate the square with a force of hundreds.

It is partly under pressure of authorities, that OWS, Occupy Edinburgh and others are currently reinventing themselves. Within Occupy Edinburgh, ideas are floating around for flashmobs and ‘roaming occupations’ around the city focused on public engagement and education. OWS is taking a similar path by occupying Zucotti Park every day with ‘Culture and Ideas’.

Eric Light, involved with organising these events told me on New Year’s Eve: “It is with food, music, humor, games, political theatre, creative activities, think tanks and so on that we can continue to inspire and involve others”. OWS is simultaneously working on ‘pop-up’ occupations on squares all over New York. Occupy Glasgow, as well, decided to disband their camps in December and focus on outreach and direct action. The same course has been chosen by many Occupy’s globally.

But in London, Occupy LSX is still camping at St. Paul’s cathedral while fighting eviction before court. Their ‘Tent City University’ outside of St. Pauls is a hub of activity, as is the ‘Bank of Ideas’, an abandoned office block in Hackney opened to the public “for the non-monetary trade of ideas to help solve the pressing economic, social and environmental problems of our time”.

But the movement is running the risk of fragmentation, so global action is in the pipeline too. On the 25th of January, Adbusters called out for a ‘showdown’ this May in Chicago where the G8 and the NATO are holding a simultaneous summit. “With a bit of luck”, they wish to pull together the “biggest multinational occupation of a summit meeting the world has ever seen”. Here, the movement is set to depart from its current course and make more explicit political demands: a ‘Robin Hood Tax’ (on the financial sector), a binding climate change accord and a three-strikes-and-you’re-out-law for ‘corporate criminals’ are suggested in the Adbusters’ call-out.

Other demands will be proposed through General Assemblies and a “global internet brainstorm’. If these demands are not met, Adbusters writes that together they “...will shut down stock exchanges, campuses, corporate headquarters and cities across the globe.’”

This implies that Occupy is planning to resort to more drastic tactics in 2012 so that they can no longer be ignored by ‘the 1%’. American Politics professor Jason Adams has argued that occupying time would indeed be a better strategy than occupying space, since our economic system is foremost a matter of time, of delivering goods and services ‘in time’ and of ever-increasing production speed for lower labour costs and higher profits. Instead of a “disruption of space”, as the occupations were, a general strike is a “barricade in time”, Adams writes. On an individual level, another proposed strategy is moving accounts from commercial banks to credit unions or co-operative banks.

On the 1st of February, Adbusters is organising a ‘Move Your Money’ day in Canada and global actions might follow. Through these kinds of (preemptive) strikes, Occupy seeks to lift the economic crisis from an issue dealt with only in closed-off international summits to a street-level emergency. An emergency demanding responses far more democratic than the current wave of austerity measures put into place in Europe, the US and other countries.

Wikipedia still lists 2818 Occupy groupings on all multiple continents, while some wither away and others spring up as you’re reading. Whether Occupy will indeed occupy 2012, we’ll have to wait and see. Or, perhaps, we could join the dialogue, the decision-making and the action and take part in moving this movement towards its open ends through our shared status as the 99%.