The New Republic Online has just published an informative dispatch on the institutional evolution of the original Occupy Wall Street encampment by freelance journalist Alex Klein:

The decision-making structures have evolved as well, creating hierarchies and chains of command that have persisted beyond the crackdown on Zuccotti Park. The General Assembly, though still an important rallying tool, has ceded influence to a newly streamlined “spokescouncil” model. It is held indoors, with microphones. Factional interests are represented by single individuals, who sit and debate around a central dais. This Hamiltonian-representative model now serves as the governing apparatus of the protest—not the anarchic, painfully-slow finger-waggling of the General Assembly, at which any aging flower child can stand up and soapbox. As one organizer, codename “Zonkers” told me, the horizontal assembly had grown “unwieldy, cumbersome, and redundant.”
Then there’s the cash, half a million dollars of it, each cent meticulously recorded, deposited, and redistributed by the occupation’s powerful financial group. The eight bankers who manage the money have imposed checks and balances on the occupation’s nascent democracy. Their committee vets proposal budget before they reach the spokescouncil, vetoing wasteful ideas. And the group’s members face their own vetting: They undergo comprehensive background checks before being permitted to finger the bills. They navigate tax law, hire accountants, meet with bank boards, and make strategic investments. The drum circles and tobacco sellers accused finance of acting like the government and banks they’re trying to protest, but in reality the committee was setting rigorous rules to protect the occupation’s pocketbook.

As organizations emerge and grow in complexity, hierarchies are established that at first command a fair amount of legitimacy, as people remember the chaos that preceded the establishment of formal decision procedures. Over time, however, this legitimacy is undermined as democratic surveillance of the rulers grows more difficult, and as entrenched incumbents seek to protect their interests.

Perhaps the Republic of Zuccotti Park would have broken with this powerful historical dynamic and preserved its legitimacy for a long period of time. Or perhaps Mayor Bloomberg saved the Republic of Zuccotti Park by allowing it to be shrouded in nostalgia soon after it generated hierarchies and formal decision procedures that, over time, may well have aroused discontent among the governed.