Ten years later, the significance of Occupy Wall Street is undeniable, write astradisastra and jonathansmucker. Photographs by transientphotog
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An estimated 900 sister occupations sprang up across the United States and around the globe, some of which would outlast the original encampment by weeks or even months. Millions of people immediately recognized themselves as part of Occupy’s “99 percent,” the supermajority of working and indebted people exploited by the wealthy and powerful “one percent” — rhetoric so intuitively powerful that it has since become embedded in the popular imagination.
The encampment’s wide-open ethos — “We are the 99 percent!” — invited an eclectic array of viewpoints.Here, protesters meet on the eve of eviction, some two months after Occupy began. Occupy was ever contradictory, and in hindsight, it’s clear the movement’s greatest strengths were also its weaknesses. Its ideological openness attracted a diverse array of people and viewpoints, but also led to incoherence and conflict. The lack of centralization fostered autonomy and creativity, but also engendered tactical confusion.
At the end of the first day, the decision was made to demand nothing — on the grounds that demands of the state only legitimized a corrupt system, one in which our ostensible representatives do the bidding of deep-pocketed donors and call it “democracy.” The movement’s adoption of open assemblies was a reaction against the existing order and an homage to dissenters in other countries who had created similar forums.
Zuccotti Park quickly became a veritable tent city, with a food station, a sanitation crew, a well-stocked library, multiple newspapers, upward of 100 working groups, and an incessant drum circle that quickly grew notorious. Young people, old people, crusty punks, college students, and tourists mingled, ringed by a perimeter of cops.
Actually, the encampment’s eccentric aspects were part of its appeal — and its power. “It looks like a pirate ship wrecked in the Financial District and set up a civilization,” a friend who lived a few blocks away said at the time. Befuddled pundits criticized the movement for its lack of clearly enumerated demands.
Crentsil noted the disjunction between Occupy’s stated ideals and the reality. “There were leaders: they’re standing up in the middle of the park and telling us what we’re going to do next,” she said. “I think it’s better to be explicit about it, because then you can hold people accountable.” In this sense, the People of Color working group foreshadowed the common refrain within the Black Lives Matter movement that it was not leaderless but leaderful.
The writer Adriana Camarena described Occupy San Francisco as “a teeter-tottering training ground for the uninitiated activist.” The same was true across the country. When the tents were gone, people tried to apply what they had learned to a variety of new efforts — and they were determined not to repeat Occupy’s mistakes.
The Sunrise Movement, which helped transform climate politics by mobilizing around the demand for a Green New Deal, was profoundly influenced by Occupy. “After Occupy I became obsessed with the idea and power of social movements, and with figuring out how we could do a similar thing — spark a similar sort of moral crisis on the issue of climate change, which we thought, similar to the financial crisis, was a sleeping giant,” Weber told us.
This July, Sandy Nurse, a prominent member of Zuccotti Park’s Direct Action working group, won her primary campaign to represent Brooklyn’s 37th District in City Hall . She knows that just having good elected officials in office is not enough. Social movements create the “wind that pushes us forward,” she told us, meaning the inside and outside have to work in tandem.
While Democrats worked to stymie and denigrate the populist politics of the left, a right-wing insurgency exploded on the scene, backed by deep-pocketed donors and cable-news promoters. Launched in 2009, the Tea Party merged populist rage with racist resentment, blaming the economic meltdown on “Big Government” and Black mortgage holders, the latter being the very people who had been most harmed by the recession.
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