The Occupy Movement in California
Occupy Los Angeles
Michaela Curran*, Elizabeth A. G. Schwarz* and Christopher
Chase-Dunn
Institute for Research on World-Systems
University of
California-Riverside
Draft v. June 4,
5692 words
IROWS
Working Paper # 74
https://irows.ucr.edu/papers/irows74/irows74.htm
An
earlier version of this article is available at https://irows.ucr.edu/papers/irows74/irows74a.htm
Direct
correspondences to: Michaela Curran, mcurr003@ucr.edu,
University of California Riverside, Sociology Department, 1206 Watkins Hall,
Riverside, CA 92521.
* M.
Curran and E. Schwarz contributed equally to this work. The authors are
sociologists who both participated in, and formally studied, the Occupy
Movement in
collaboration with the University of
California-Riverside Transnational Social Movement Research Working Group (www.irows.ucr.edu/research/tsmstudy.htm)
Abstract
We use data from local Facebook pages to study the
diffusion of the Occupy Movement across cities in California during the first
two months of the movement in 2011. We
present the results of our research and discuss the meaning of the movement for
political developments in California and the United States. We find that about
a third of all of the incorporated towns and cities in California had active
local Occupy groups. Larger cities were more likely to have an Occupy Facebook
page, to have more subscribers to their Facebook pages and to have started
their Occupy pages earlier than smaller cities. Our findings, based on the
comparisons of differences across the cities of California, are similar to
those of studies that looked at differences among individuals. We found that
cities and towns that voted Democratic in the 2008 Presidential election and
with more young people were more likely to have Occupy activities. Those cities
with Occupy activities were more likely to have a higher proportion of the population
who were white. But we also found that cities with lower average incomes were
more likely to have Occupy activities. The rate of foreclosures is surprisingly
unrelated to Occupy activity, and the unemployment
rate is negatively associated with Occupy activities. We also found that towns
and cities with military bases were less likely to have Occupy activities while
towns and cities with four-year colleges and universities were more likely to
have Occupy activities. We conclude with
a consideration of the implications of the Occupy Movement in California for
political developments in California and in the United States.
The Occupy Movement spread rapidly across the United States
and to cities all around the world during the last months of 2011[i].
This rapid diffusion was interesting because participants were activated by
both exposure to mass media reports about the events in Zuccoti
Park in New York City and by their connections to social media that carried
information not available through the mass media.[ii]
Participants in New York were able to use social media to provide first-hand
accounts about events and debates regarding the procedures of carrying on group
decision-making that became a central component of the movement[iii][iv]. Thus, both the ideas and the processes of
direct democracy spread quickly and were replicated in local contexts in which
millions of people learned how to participate in face-to-face public
decision-making. Excellent studies have been published that report and evaluate
the social movement that emerged and evolved in New York City. Perhaps the best
of these were written by participant observers and social scientists Todd Gitlin[v] and
David Graeber[vi].
In late 2011, California, like the
rest of the United States, was still reeling from the financial crisis of 2008
and the home mortgage meltdown. The
construction and real estate industries had collapsed. Unemployment and
mortgage foreclosures were very high, especially in some counties. Students
were unhappy about the increasing costs of higher education and their growing
levels of indebtedness and were demonstrating about these issues on many
campuses. The state government was
experiencing a large budget deficit and so programs were being cut and shifted
onto county and municipal jurisdictions. Public universities and colleges were
being pushed to reorganize as more substantially self-funding enterprises. It
was in this context that the Occupy Movement was taken up across the cities and
towns of California.
The Occupy Movement in New York City
was inspired by the 2011 Arab Spring and anti-austerity movements in Greece and
Spain. Veterans of the Global Justice Movement such as David Graeber were key players. The use of the internet, texting
and social networking was an important tactic, and the notions of leaderlessness and horizontal organization that have been
central tendencies in Leftist movements since the Zapatista rebellion in
Southern Mexico in 1994 were core methods of the Occupy movement. Studies of
the waves of transnational social movements, the Social Forum process and the
emergence of a “New Global Left” have contended that internet usage has allowed
a loose coalition of the “precariate” – marginalized
and casualized workers and underemployed educated
young people who have been sidelined by the neoliberal corporate capitalist
globalization project – to mobilize a global revolution. The Occupy Movement is
understood as one act in this on-going and still spreading precariate
revolt[vii].
Occupy
Facebook Pages: A Snapshot
We used Facebook searches to study
the Occupy Movement in California. Nearly all the local manifestations of the
movement created their own Facebook pages. We also noted from our participation
in the Occupy Riverside encampment that computer-savvy participants played an
important role among the core activists. Many of these were graduate students
from the University of California-Riverside. They gave the local movement a web
presence and used live streaming technologies to communicate information about
events and proposed actions.
Occupy
Riverside Logo
In order to study the diffusion of
the Occupy Movement in California, we assembled a data set containing
information on the demographic, economic and political characteristics of 481
incorporated towns and cities in California[viii].
We used Facebook searches to determine whether or not each of these 481
settlements had a local Facebook page.
We employed the search command on Facebook to look for, e.g., “Occupy
Riverside.” Once we had located pages
for California towns and cities, we recorded when each page had been created
and how many “likes” each page had received. These indicators were used as
proxies for the existence of a local Occupy Movement, and to indicate the size
of that movement[ix].
In the discussion below, the number of likes is referred to as the number of
“subscriptions.”
In
California, early Occupy sites were established in Los Angeles, San Francisco,
Oakland, and several other large cities. But the movement also spread to
143 smaller cities and towns in California. The Occupy Barstow Facebook page
proclaimed that Barstow is “about as far from Wall Street as you can get.” But
the Barstow occupiers probably did not know that there were also Occupy actions
in other small and isolated California communities such as Weaverville,
Idyllwild, Calistoga and El Centro.[x]
Our survey of 481 incorporated towns and cities in California found that nearly
30% (143) of them had Occupy pages on Facebook between December 1st
and December 8th of 2011.
This snapshot of the web presence of the Occupy Movement shows where and to
what extent this movement diffused from its early presence in the largest
cities to the smaller cities and towns of California[xi].
Multivariate
Analysis of City Characteristics
Overall,
we found that certain city-level characteristics are strongly associated with
Occupy activity in our comparison of 481 California cities and towns. The variable characteristics of cities and
towns we studied were:
·
the
population size of the city or town
·
the
percentage of the population who were white,
·
the
percentage of the population who were Latino,
·
the
median household income,
·
the
party that won the 2008 Presidential election (Democrat vs. Republican),
·
the
number of 4-year colleges and universities,
·
the
number of military bases,
·
the
percentage of the population between 18 and 24 years of age,
·
the
region of California (North vs. South[xii];
East vs. West)[xiii],
·
the
unemployment rate and
·
the foreclosure rate.
City
Size and Protests
Larger
cities were more likely to have Occupy Movements as indicated by the existence
of an Occupy Facebook page. Larger cities also had more subscribers to their
Facebook pages and started their Occupy Facebook pages earlier than smaller
cities[xiv].
It is not surprising that the Occupy Movement was more likely to be located in
large cities and that these established their local presences earlier and had
more participants. The establishment of a local presence requires a critical
mass of activists and such a critical mass is more likely to exist in large
cities than in small towns. But, given this, what is striking about the
California findings is how far the movement did penetrate into medium-sized and
small towns.
Figure
1: Scattergram of Facebook Likes (logged)
and Populations of Cities (logged) of those towns and cities that had Occupy
Facebook pages.
Figure 1
displays the logged number of likes and the logged population sizes of the 143
California towns and cities that had Occupy Facebook pages. We divided up the
cities into small, medium, and large using 2010 U.S. Census population data.
Large is defined as having more than 100,000 residents, medium is defined as
having 25,000-99,999 residents, and small is defined as having 0-24,999
residents. By using this method, we have 66 large cities, 197 medium cities,
and 218 small cities. Forty-nine (74%) of the large cities in California had
Occupy Facebook pages, 68 (35%) of the medium cities had Occupy Facebook pages,
and 26 (12%) of the small cities had Occupy Facebook pages[xv]. Despite the strong effect of community size,
some rather small settlements did have Occupy Facebook pages. These small towns
include Mount Shasta, Sonora, Sebastopol, Ojai, and Half-Moon Bay. These towns
were not geographically close to other larger Occupy groups, so they created
their own pages and occupation camps. According to the Mount Shasta Herald,
over 150 protestors marched through the streets of this small Northern
California town of 3,400 on October 17th, 2011.
These small town protests demonstrate the great spatial depth of the movement
in California.
Our
survey of Facebook pages found that local Occupy Movements emerged in seemingly
unlikely places, demonstrating the depth of frustration that people felt about
the recession and the austerity measures that were taken by authorities.
Discussions on local movement Facebook pages illustrated the variety of issues
that were important to local participants. In the small town of Yreka in
Northern California, a man who had recently lost his home to foreclosure was
trying to start an Occupy site in early November. Participants on the Occupy
Riverside page discussed the high unemployment rate in Riverside County and the
high rate of housing foreclosures. They also helped an ex-Marine reoccupy the
home from which he and his family had been evicted as a result of foreclosure.
On December 6, 2012, there was a national call to Occupy Our Homes. According
to one protestor in Petaluma, over 1,000 homes were facing foreclosures in the
town of 56,000. Occupy protestors in Petaluma successfully petitioned Fannie
Mae and Freddie Mac to suspend evictions during the coming holiday season.
The Occupy Ojai movement organized its participants to move
their savings from accounts in large banks such as Wells Fargo and the Bank of
America to local banks and credit unions. The Occupy Oakland encampment was
subjected to repeated attacks by police and organized a successful one-day
shutdown of the Port of Oakland in protest. Occupy Davis protested police tactics
in wake of the events at UC-Davis in which students who were sitting down in a
public place to support the Occupy Movement were pepper-sprayed by a policeman.
Occupy Redding supported postal workers who were protesting job cuts. Other
issues that were discussed on the community Facebook pages included student
loan debt, rising tuition costs, raising taxes on the rich, corporate crime and
moving toward a more democratic and sustainable economy.
The Relative Importance of City
Characteristics Regarding Their Influence on the Occupy Movement
Our
comparative analysis of cities and towns pits characteristics of towns against
one another to determine whether or not the associations of particular town
characteristics are statistically significant controlling for all other
characteristics. Therefore, the results we found hold true despite that we were
already taking account of the effects of city size discussed above.
We
found that the percentage of the population that is white in a city or town is
significantly associated with the presence/absence of an Occupy Facebook page
(Table 2 in the Appendix) and also with the number of subscribers (Table 4) and
with the earliness of the date of the creation of the Facebook page (Table 6).
Thus, all our indicators of the local presence and size of an Occupy Movement
are statistically associated with the degree of whiteness of a town or city.
This tendency of towns and cities with a greater proportion of white residents
to have greater likelihood of participation in the Occupy Movement is
interesting because it corresponds with the findings of studies of individual
participants in the Occupy Movement and with a topic that was frequently
discussed within the movement itself. The survey of actively involved Occupiers
in New York City by Ruth Milkman, Stephanie Luce and Penny Lewis showed that,
though only 33% of the residents of New Yorker City are white, and non-hispanic, 67% of the actively involved Occupy respondents
were white[xvi].
This is interesting because variation across individual survey respondents may
not be related to similar variation in average characteristics across
communities. Assuming that an association between group-level characteristics
necessarily implies the same relationship among individual characteristics is
called the ecological fallacy. But the
similarity of the survey results with our cross-community comparisons suggests
in this case that the same relationships hold at the individual and at the
community level.
While many of the local encampments
discussed how inequalities in American society were being recreated within the
movement and made efforts to improve this situation by reaching out to ethnic
minorities and the poor, the race issue was most visible and contentious in
Oakland. The Oakland Occupy Movement was large (see Figure 1 above) and
radical. Oakland has long suffered from conflict between poor African-Americans
and the Oakland Police Department. This conflict had become more salient in
recent years because of highly publicized instances of the abuse of police
powers. And the Mayor of Oakland, a long-time community activist and supporter
of Leftist causes, was having a feud with the Oakland Police Department before
the eruption of the Occupy Oakland movement.
Early
on, the relations between more radical and confrontational elements among the
occupiers and the faction dedicated to non-violent protest tactics became
heated. This was reflected in the discourse about the “diversity of tactics” in
which the radical elements contended that the destruction of property by those
who thought it to be appropriate to the situation should be condoned by the
movement as a whole. Some of those who were committed to non-violent forms of
protest were pacifists as a matter of principle while many others considered
that violent protest was tactically unwise and likely to bring on police
violence and to be condemned by the larger public. This division tended to
separate educated whites from less educated and angrier minorities and the
result was contentious. This disagreement
over tactics was exacerbated by a series of forceful actions by the Oakland
Police Department intended to suppress the Occupy Oakland movement.
We
also found a statistically significant relationship between the percentage of
the local population between the ages of 18 and 24 with the number of likes to
Occupy Facebook pages (Table 4). This could have been due to differences in the
age distributions across communities in which those with larger numbers of
young people were more likely to organize Occupy encampments, or it could have
been due to the more frequent use of Facebook among this segment of the
population, which led to the greater Facebook participation. Interestingly this
finding regarding differences in the age distribution among communities also
corresponds with the finding of a large number of young people among the
actively involved participants in the Occupy Movement in New York City. The Milkman et al study shows that
though only 28% of the residents of New York City are under 30 years of age,
40% of the actively involved Occupy survey respondents were under
30[xvii].
But
some of our other findings imply that the relationship between inequality and
the Occupy Movement in California was more complicated. We also measured the
percentage of the population of cities who identified themselves at Latino but
found no relationship between that and the presence/absence of local Occupy
movements or their size. This finding is interesting because the growing Latino
vote is one of the most important trends in California (and national) politics.
We did, however, find a statistically significant relationship between the
average household income of cities and the number of subscribers to Facebook
pages (Table 3), but the relationship is negative.
This means that towns and cities with less average household income were more
likely to have larger Occupy presences on Facebook when other characteristics
of cities are statistically controlled.
The negative relationship with income is still present in Tables 2
(existence of an Occupy Facebook page) and Table 5 (earliness of Facebook page
creation, but these are small associations and are not
statistically significant). The income
finding would seem to contradict the race finding because income and whiteness are
obviously positively correlated. Our findings imply that cities with higher
proportions of the population that is white and with relatively poorer
residents were more likely to participate in the Occupy Movement.
We
also investigated the foreclosure rates and the unemployment rates of cities
and towns.
We found no
statistically significant relationships between the foreclosure rate and Occupy
activity after the other variables were controlled. This non-finding is interesting
because the housing crisis was an important part of the discourse of the Occupy
Movement both in California and across the nation. We did find two significant
associations of the unemployment rate with the Occupy Movement, however.
Curiously, the rate of unemployment was negatively
associated with the number of Facebook Occupy subscribers (Table 4) and
with the earliness of the creation of the local Facebook page (Table 6)[xviii].
This result implies that cities with lower rates of unemployment were more
likely to participate in Occupy Movement. An examination of the data on the
unemployment rates shows that the highest rates are found in small agricultural
towns in the Central Valley of California (e.g. Mendota at 42%). Most of these did not have Occupy sites and
they are and these are so high on unemployment that the skewed distribution may
be producing this negative association. Towns and cities without Facebook pages
were coded as zero for the purposes of these models (See Figures 1 and 3 in the
Appendix). When the statistical models are limited to just cities with Occupy
Facebook pages, the unemployment variable fails to be significant.
Political
Geography in California
California
has the most politically polarized legislature in the United States. The
democrats are very liberal and the conservatives are very conservative, so much
that the United States Congress looks bipartisan by comparison[xix].
This extreme political polarization makes the study of the Occupy Movement in
California of particular interest. We found a significant association between
the presence (Table 2), the size (Table 4), and the earliness of Facebook page
creation (Table 6) with the percentage of the population towns and cities that
voted for Barack Obama (versus John McCain) in the 2008 presidential election.
This association holds even after the size of cities and the other
characteristics we are studying were statistically held constant in the
comparison of California cities. It is not surprising that the Occupy Movement
was more likely to emerge and be large in cities with more Democratic voters.
These are the same towns and cities in which organized labor is strong. Many unions expressed sympathy for the Occupy
Movement as it blossomed across the United States. In Riverside, the Service Employees
International Union (SEIU) offered early logistical support to the Occupy
Riverside. The International Longshore
and Warehouse Union (ILWU) supported the effort by Occupy Oakland to shut down
the Port of Oakland for a day on November 2, 2012.[xx]
Occupy Oakland
at the Port
California was long known to have an
important political difference between the Democratic and liberal San Francisco
Bay Area and the more conservative and Republican cities of Los Angeles and San
Diego. Political scientists have noted
that this North/South difference has declined since the 1980s and they argue
that there is now an East/West political divide between the more liberal
coastal cities in the West and the more conservative rural regions in the East[xxi].
We coded our towns and cities into both north/south and east/west groups for
our analysis but did not find any differences. This result supports the
observation that the north/south difference has declined but does not support
the notion of an east/west difference.
Our analysis shows that 70 cities
in Northern California (defined as being north of Bakersfield) and 73 cities in
Southern California (defined as Bakersfield and south of it) have Facebook
pages. By using this method to divide incorporated California cities, we have
255 northern cities and 227 southern cities. About 27% of the northern cities
had Facebook Occupy pages, while 31% of the southern cities had Occupy pages.
When we look at the early adopters (cities that established Facebook pages in
September), we find 13 cities. Seven of them were Northern California. In
October, 97 Occupy Facebook pages were started. Forty-seven of these pages were
in Northern California, while 50 were in Southern California cities.
We also examined the Los Angeles area (Los Angeles, Kern, Orange, San
Bernardino, and Ventura Counties) and the Bay Area (San Francisco, Alameda,
Contra Costa, Marin, Napa San Mateo, Santa Clara, and Solano Counties). We
found that of the 143 Occupy Facebook pages, 78 (54.55%) of them were located
in cities in either the Los Angeles or the Bay area. The Los Angeles area
comprises 14,663,765 (47.58%) of the total population of California, while the
Bay Area comprises 6,102,154 (19.80%) of the total population of California.
Greater Los Angeles area had 50 or 34.96% of the total Occupy Facebook pages,
and the Bay Area had 28 or 19.58% of the total Occupy Facebook pages. This
supports the idea that Northern California is no longer a bastion of Leftist
progressives compared with Southern California, at least as this is indicated
by the Occupy movement. Our findings suggest that the north/south difference,
at least as indicated by the propensity to establish Occupy sites, is no longer
a factor in California politics.
Military
Towns and College Towns
We also
examined variation in the number of local military bases and the number of
local four-year colleges and universities with the expectation that these might
be related to differences across cities that would enhance or undermine the
likelihood of an active Occupy group. After observing that graduate students
from the University of California-Riverside had been important early organizers
of the Occupy Riverside movement, we hypothesized that proximity to higher
education communities might have an effect on whether or not cities would
establish an Occupy Facebook page. We found that 170 cities or 35.27% of the
California cities have at least one higher education institution. Most cities
(312 or 64.73%) do not have at least one university or college. We found that
83 of the 170 cities with at least one university or college had Occupy
Facebook pages (49%). This compares with 60 cities with Occupy Facebook pages
of the 312 that do not have at least one university or college (`19%). The
eight cities with the most number of universities or colleges all have Occupy
Facebook pages. Our multivariate analysis also supported the hypothesis that a
concentration of colleges and universities was positively associated with
Occupy activity. Table 4 in the appendix
reveals a statistically significant positive association between the number of
colleges and universities and the number of Occupy Facebook subscribers when
other city characteristics are held constant.
And Table 5 displays a statistically significant negative association
between the number of local military bases and the earliness of the creation of
an Occupy Facebook page.
Implications
of the Occupy Movement in California
It
has been frequently noted that the Occupy movement had an important impact in terms
of putting the issue of growing inequality in the U.S. on the front burner of
political discourse. The popularity of Thomas Picketty’s
analysis of long-term trends in inequality[xxii]
and the growing prominence of this issue in electoral politics demonstrate that
the Occupy discourse about the 1% has spread and evolved. In California recent
protests in San Francisco surrounding the use of public bus stops by luxury
private buses owned by the Google Corporation to transport workers from San
Francisco to the Google headquarters in Cupertino reflects the growth of this
discourse. Gentrification of residential neighbourhoods in San Francisco in
which poorer local residents have been driven out by rising prices has long
been a sore point and community activists have used the new sensitivity
regarding growing inequality to press their point about this and to dispute the
apparent favouritism by the municipal government.
Our finding that communities with a
higher proportion of young people were more likely to have active Occupy
movements supports characterizations of the contemporary ongoing world
revolution as being driven in part by political protests by young people who
have earned educational degrees, often while incurring large debts, but who
have little hope of finding jobs that will allow them to support a middle-class
lifestyle[xxiii]. This notion is also supported by the Milkman et al survey of Occupy activists in New
York mentioned above.
Social movement sociologists have
long known that movements generate counter-movements and oppression. In
California, as in most other states in the United States, the tolerance of
public officials for having encampments in public spaces came to an end, and
most encampments were forcibly evicted. The events in Oakland also scared the
powers that be in a more fundamental sense.
The militant actions of a subgroup of the Occupy Movement were dramatic,
but probably the scariest moment was when the Longshoremen collaborated with
Occupy Oakland to shut down the port for a day. The prospect of an active
alliance with organized labor was daunting in its implications for business as
usual. This prospect was present in every local instance of the Occupy
Movement. We have already mentioned Occupy Redding’s support for the postal
workers In Riverside, the Occupiers turned down the offer of SEIU to move the
encampment to a piece of property owned by the union. Many of the activists
felt that occupation of public space was an important element of their
movement. Some also felt that the unionists were trying to use the movement for
their own ends. So, while the
relationship between the unionists and the anarchists remained somewhat
amicable, there was not a strong and militant collaboration. In Oakland, the ILWU (Longshoremen’s union)
was divided in its support for the Occupy Movement, but the old communists
within the union were willing to go along with the Port shut down for a day in
order to send a message to the powers that be. That message was received, and a
strong counter-movement at the highest levels of California politics mobilized
to rid the campuses and public spaces of Occupy encampments. [xxiv]
So what are the implications of the
Occupy Movement for future politics in California and the United States? As in earlier
periods of unrest generated by political and economic crises, the key question
remains whether or not middle-class radicals and the urban poor and workers can
come together to push for political change. The narrow electoral defeat of a
popular challenge to the Tea Party politics of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker
in 2012 was a setback for such an alliance. Walker was able to paint the public
sector unions as privileged special interest groups who were living on rents at
the expense of the taxpayers.
The
economic situation following the financial meltdown of 2008 has been bad, but
the U.S. has managed to muddle through, mainly by deficit spending to save the
banks and the continuing viability of “dollar seignorage”
in which the U.S government is able to print world money and to sell government
bonds on the world market. The bubble never completely burst and now it is
being reflated once again. The fiscal
crisis of the state government in California is over, and the real estate
market is coming back. Unemployment is still high, but has been going down.
Students are still unhappy, but most of them are expressing this unhappiness in
private ways or in apolitical Spring Break mob scenes. The labor movement seems
most concerned with turf struggles among different factions (e.g., Change To Win vs. the AFL-CIO). Respect for all kinds of authority
has declined and many people continue to be unhappy with the status quo, but
the social order is substantially stable.
A lot has been learned
by the Occupy activists about both the delights and the pitfalls of “leaderlessness” as a movement strategy. Participatory
democracy is quite vulnerable to disruption by a few individuals or a small and
dedicated group. Lacking designated leaders means that no one can be held accountable
when things go wrong. Social movements suffer from the same distrust of
authority that institutionalized authorities do and this situation is not
likely to dissipate soon. Older models of charismatic leadership have been in
decline since the World Revolution of 1968. So new leaderless
movements are likely to continue to emerge. In this context, how could
social movements of the Left become consequential in the United States? A new synthesis might combine the prefigurative and processual
elements of the Occupy Movement with a strategy for mobilizing larger numbers
of Americans to engage in the electoral process in a way that respects the
notions of delegation that are part of anarchist theory. Anarchists assert that
individuals who represent groups of constituents should be tightly constrained
by constant and direct communication with their constituents and have only
minimal autonomous authority to commit the group to agreements.[xxv]
An electoral political strategy that incorporated this idea of delegation rather
than representation might provide new energy for an electoral process that seems
to many activists to be moribund or to have been captured
by big money. Such a synthetic movement might be able to do more than change
the discourse in the United States.
Endnotes