Category: Occupy Wall Street

Ten years ago, on November 15, Occupy Wall Street was pepper-sprayed into the night by a squadron of police officers who helped shovel the tents, books, and placards left by activists into a fleet of sanitation trucks. A messy, motley, and spirited demonstration, Occupy started as a march of some 2,000 people in lower Manhattan that mushroomed to approximately 1,000 similar protests across the country. It seized enough media coverage to appear like a moment in the making, as it amplified outrage over America’s skewed distribution of wealth and opportunity.

In the decade since its demise, scores of observers—and even participants—have said Occupy Wall Street fell short. Pundits including New York Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin have written that it will amount to nothing more than an asterisk in the history books. Then, there’s Micah White, editor at the activist magazine Adbusters. White’s email blast before the protest began is credited with sparking the idea behind Occupy. But in the 10 years since the protest ended, White has deemed Occupy a disappointment since it never achieved what it set out to do.

In his 2016 book, The End of Protest. A New Playbook for Revolution, White wrote, “an honest assessment reveals that Occupy Wall Street failed to live up to its revolutionary potential: We did not bring an end to the influence of money on democracy, overthrow the corporatocracy of the 1 percent or solve income inequality.” He concluded by calling Occupy “a constructive failure because the movement revealed underlying flaws in dominant and still prevalent theories of how to achieve social change through collective action.”

At first glance, it might seem as if Occupy came and went without leaving much of a legacy. It never solidified around a specific set of demands, nor did it generate a concrete platform. There’s no significant flesh-and-bones organization to point to as its heir. And it never anointed a leadership team.

There’s a big problem with that conclusion, however: Occupy’s messaging just won’t go away. It permeates political discourse about the global economy. It has cemented notions of economic inequality squarely in D.C. policy debates. Ideas that were thought to be too socialist since the demise of the Eastern Bloc—class struggle, wealth distribution across social strata, or even flaws in the capitalist system—were suddenly aired loudly and frequently for the first time since the Great Depression.

Occupy, Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz told TIME, “is part of a series of events that precipitate an understanding of the limitations of corporate America, something that today has morphed into a sense of the misdeeds not only by the financial sector, the fossil fuel sector, and now by big tech. It was the first critique that crystallized it in a very powerful way. Subsequent movements built on growing understanding, a sense that the corporate sector is not really serving American interests.”

Occupy also seized the imagination of two key demographics on the rise. The first of these: Millennials, many of whom participated in the movement’s Manhattan launch or any of the similar protests around the country. The sustained protest also left a lasting impression on Generation Z, a cohort that was just becoming aware of a turbulent world around it.

Powered by youthful exuberance, Occupy not only roused a spirit of protest, but also helped create a template for peaceful resistance that could include equal measures of social media and old-fashioned physical presence. Not bad for two weeks of work—or as Vladimir Lenin wrote, “In some decades nothing happens—in some weeks decades happen.”

Millennials were pivotal in getting Occupy’s message out to participants and the media alike. A majority of participants were young students and college graduates who were steeped in student loan debt, according to CUNY sociologist Ruth Milkman’s studies of New York City’s Occupy enclave. As the first American generation to embrace social media, they used Twitter and Facebook to issue a call to action and later coordinate activities. Electrical outlets at Zuccotti Park made it possible to set up a makeshift communications post, one protesters used to contact media and document daily activities.

Occupy was not created by any one centralized group, nor did it give birth to an organization of formal movement. It embraced an open-source, horizontal structure, more in line with a software developer’s organizational hierarchy. Key figures in the movement including late-professor and long-time activist David Graeber said the structure was deliberate, the goal being a new democratic model which would follow the will of the people. The result, however, was a standstill mired in glacial debates that failed to produce a platform or leadership.

And yet, Occupy seem to pull in support from disparate groups. The attraction lay in the fact that Occupy membership was never limited by narrow goals or messaging, says American University marketing professor Sonya Grier. “It was broad enough to capture all the associations the American public could generate at the time,” she says. “Even absent a unifying strategic action plan, Occupy Wall Street had the legs to spread to different societal groups in a way that continues to the present.”

A long line of protests followed in Occupy’s wake and owe it a debt of gratitude. With the help of Occupy veterans, the Fight for $15 fair wage movement started less than a year after the Zuccotti Park encampment was shut down. Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, the anti-Trump women’s marches, and the March for Our Lives certainly drew inspiration from Occupy. The movement helped propel Bernie Sanders’ Democratic-Socialist presidential campaign. There is a direct link between Occupy’s focus on economic disparity and the ascendancy of the Democratic party’s Progressive caucus.

“The success of Occupy opened the eyes of a lot of participants to what protest was and how it could make a difference,” says CUNY’s Milkman. “In a way, it made protest cool for a new generation of young people for the first time since the late 1960’s.”

Millennials are often maligned as a changeable and disconnected generation glued to their smartphone screens. That’s off the mark, says CUNY’s Milkman whose studies have tracked a group of several hundred Occupiers over time. She says a substantial majority have continued a commitment to change, some as activists, some as participants in other social movements, and some as labor organizers.

In many ways, Occupy’s function as a loudspeaker marked a tipping point for other groups as well. In 2011, labor unions saw an opening, and several declared support for Occupy or marched including New York City transit workers, a Teamsters local, and later longshoremen at an Oakland, California offshoot. In 2016, a wave of teachers strikes in red states such as Oklahoma and Kentucky were organized by Millennials via social media. And the labor movement’s Striketober muscle flexing this year likely drew some inspiration from Occupy.

Location played a big part, too. Occupy’s headquarters was, of course, in America’s news media capital. Base camp for the movement was Zuccotti Park, a compact 33,000 square-foot public space small enough to be a guilt slice in the glutton’s banquet that is lower Manhattan real estate. The irony: Zuccotti was privately owned. Its owners had won a zoning concession that prevented Mayor Michael Bloomberg from outright evicting Occupy’s protesters and helped its longevity.

From the start, Occupy delivered drama. Early on, New York Police pepper-sprayed several female Occupiers. Later, police clashed with march participants and arrested 700 protesters.

The result was a groundswell of publicity. Occupy started slowly, drawing in 2% of total news coverage by the end of its second week, as measured by the Pew Research Center. By mid-November, that number had grown steadily to 13% while driving economic issues to absorb almost a quarter of newscasts. For perspective, consider two numbers. The first is 20+ million, the combined audience that sat down for evening newscasts of the big three broadcasters ABC, CBS, and NBC, according to Nielsen. At an average cost of $55,000 for a 30-second commercial slot, Occupy at its peak was generating a level of media attention roughly equivalent of nearly $1 million in free advertising nightly.

By the beginning of its second month, the exposure was helping Occupy make inroads. A survey conducted in late October found a slim majority of participants (39% to 35%) supported rather than opposed the movement. Contrast those numbers with a 32%-44% support/oppose ratio generated by the Tea Party movement at the time and Occupy’s pull becomes clear. “When mainstream media, politicians and people milling at the water cooler are talking about political and economic inequality, the Occupiers are winning,” wrote University of California Irvine political science professor David S. Meyer at the time.

Any retrospective of Occupy must include serious consideration of its rallying cry: “We are the 99%.” Economists such as Stiglitz and Thomas Piketty may have already been studying the way inequality had wedged a shockingly wide gap between haves-in-excess and have-nots, but in just 14 characters, Occupy organizers created a message that framed the outrage millions and put “the 1%” on notice. They were armed with a deft turn of phrase made for daily distribution on a crescendo of news coverage. In this way, Occupy echoed the Tea Party and millions of others on the political left, right and center who were suffering during the height of the Great Recession and concurrently expressing outrage at bank bailouts that left them stranded.

Occupy’s message continues to resonate. Exhibit A: President Joe Biden, who has targeted the 1% repeatedly while pushing to overhaul U.S. tax policy to help fund infrastructure improvements and an aggressive social agenda. His administration is also reportedly seeking to make good on yet another of Occupy’s ideas: debt cancellation. The 2020 Democratic Party platform pointed out that incomes for the top 1% in the country were growing five times faster than those of the bottom 90 percent. And let’s not forget Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose “Tax the Rich” dress at this year’s Met Gala event seems to leap straight out of an Occupy pret-a-porter evening collection.

“Occupy’s legacy is the commonsense attention to inequality,” says author Astra Taylor who participated in the protest and later co-authored a book chronicling its day-to-day progression. “Structural issues such as poverty were examined before Occupy, but were subterranean in American discourse,” she says. “Occupy brought them to the surface and in that way made the everyday experience of real people news.”

Occupy’s unprecedented media success helped make the 99% and 1% labels commonplace. The nine months preceding Occupy were marked by global upheaval, so much so that TIME named “The Protester” the person of the year in 2011. The Arab Spring of 2011 had toppled despotic governments in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya. In Europe, the Indignados protests against the Spanish government’s austerity measures followed soon after. By the time of its launch on September 17, Occupy had emerged as the latest in a global wave of mass discontent.

The lasting effects of Occupy are not isolated to the Left. A surge in populism is visible across the American political spectrum and much of the Right’s messaging can be traced back to the discontent Occupy crystallized. Donald Trump was able to leapfrog a crowd of Republican contenders in 2016 in part by hinting early on about raising taxation rates for the rich—only to U-turn later. His close adviser, Steve Bannon has identified a growing distrust of elites by a predominately white working class as key to Trump’s popularity.

“The notion of money corrupting politics, of corporate welfare, and of crony capitalism—this is the stuff that left- and right-wing populism are made of,” says Robert Reich, formerly an economic adviser to the Clinton administration. Indeed, Bannon, whose film Occupy Unmasked claimed to expose an orgy of criminality at the heart of the protest, nevertheless took up positions about the abandonment of the working class that mirrored the movement’s tone. Bannon frequently pointed to his father’s loss of life savings when AT&T stock tanked in the 2008 market drop as prime motivation. Occupy’s wide appeal was fueled by shared frustration, more specifically a sense of disconnect between commonfolk and the government. “The idea is essentially that the system is not going to save us, we’re going to have to save ourselves,” said activist Graeber two days after Occupy launched.

The 1%, meanwhile, has all but written Occupy off. The movement had no discernible impact on banking. No corporate regulation is directly linked to it. Ten years later, Wall Street and corporate America are bursting at the seams. Since 2011, the S&P 500 has climbed over 325% and now has a combined market capitalization of $39 trillion. Over the last 10 years, the wealthiest have gotten robust tax breaks thanks to a sizable windfall in the Trump tax cuts of 2017. And some measures find that members of the 1% grabbed hold an additional $7 trillion in wealth during the pandemic alone.

Economist Thomas Piketty, who authored two seminal books on inequality in the last decade— Capital in the 21st Century (2013) and Capital and Ideology (2019)—says, “Inequality has been moving to the center stage since Occupy and Capital, but it is not enough. The process will continue and will probably be accelerated by COVID and global warming, but the forces of resistance are still very strong.” He adds, “What makes me optimistic is that it’s always been like this: elites fight to maintain extreme inequality, but in the end there is a long-run movement toward more equality, at least since the end of the 18th century, and it will continue.”

As children we tend to see our elders and guardians as leaders, showing us right from wrong and teaching us how to fend for ourselves in this harsh world. In our teen years, we often rebel against parental guidance, as we are prone to see parents more as autocrats at this time and no longer as leaders. Once we reach early adulthood, we will have acquired enough knowledge to keep ourselves alive and stay healthy on our own. From here, we can fully assimilate into society; however, this is not without the help of many other leaders and institutions. We have relied upon leaders for the entire duration of our species existence, in present day, we seek Government services when we are in need of financial aid or medical attention, we search the web when we want to learn something, we contact the authorities when we are in need of legal assistance. Leadership is not something that is imposed on people by any one group of individuals, it is a quality in which humans are born with. The leader guides others, so too the leader is human and must seek out leadership, direction, and enlightenment, in order for them to follow the right path for their themselves and their followers. Every social organization demands some sort of leadership, even within “leaderless” events, a figure of authority is usually organically selected – in an almost primal manner. With Tufekci’s writing in mind, the following essay will dissect the topics of protest, society and their connection to social media and the necessity of leadership roles.

Tufekci has a broad background. Specializing as a ethnographer, sociologist, and programmer, she studies how technology shapes society and encourages social development. Present internet-derived protest movements, are the primary topics found in Twitter and Tear Gas. As an onlooker, author, and volunteer, Tufekci delves deep into how modern social movements have been affected by the rise of the internet and what that means for future protests and social developments. Tufekci’s novel is a combination of her own data-analysis and anthropological investigation, with the research of others and data collected from social media platforms. ‘The internet similarly allows networked movements to grow dramatically and rapidly, but without prior building of formal or informal organizational and other collective capacities that could prepare them for the inevitable challenges they will face and give them the ability to respond to what comes next.’ Tufekci refers to this phenomenon as, “tactical freeze”. This makes movement-groups less able to adapt and improvise their tactics. Tufekci isn’t necessarily arguing that contemporary protests are less effective, but more so that they are different. Successful movements must learn to understand these newfound differences and utilize the advancements they have been given, while minimizing the present disadvantages. Protests are an excellent example of a response that corresponds to one of several underlying motives shared by individuals of a group. In her book, Tufekci develops a series of classifications for talking about social movements. The three categories she discusses include: narrative capacity, disruptive capacity and electoral and/or institutional capacity. Narrative capacity, is the ability to alter the shape of the conversation, just as Black Lives Matter did in regards to police violence and Occupy Wall Street attempted to do for wealth inequality. Disruptive capacity, is the ability to halt usual business. Lastly, there is the electoral or institutional capacity, which incorporates the ability to vote, fundraise, lobby, and so on. This classification of protests helps to assist the government in improving it’s reaction to protest events. For example, in 2015, the Chinese government responded to protesters in Hong Kong by not engaging with them at all, this completely avoided and disregarded videos and photographs that would later become viral and attract the world’s attention. Instead, they instructed their police to hold back and waited for the excitement to de-escalate, from lack of attention.

Human’s naturally thrive off the energy around them and in most cases this energy needs to be tamed by a figure of power. If leaders did not exist in society, no change would occur due to our natural ways of disorderliness. In the end, what these protest-groups want is recognition, as they feel that the subject they are protesting is not being given enough attention. With the rise of the internet, came a new and efficient way to spread information quickly among social groups. Meetings, discussions, etc. can now all take place in a more accessible online-environment. Leaderless online social-movements can be problematic at times, as it is difficult to display direction or a solid-objective when there is no one incharge. Communicating a message via social media, without any sort of leadership, can unfortunately have a broken-telephone effect on the receiving end, thus, leaderless movements are generally less organized or planned. This lack of planning and organization can lead to confusion and disorder among protesters. Leaving everyone in charge, unfortunately leaves no single person in charge, thus, these movements are more likely to fuel violent intentions among members of the protest. Members of a leaderless movement group may also experience frustration and angst, when unable to seek help or assistance, due to a lack of HR protocol. Leaderless movement groups can also unfortunately resort to using methods of overpowering, after attempts to attract more members fails due to a lack of hierarchical structure. It is crucial for movements to identify the institutions that have the appropriate power to help implement the change they seek. This hierarchy of leadership roles, may include the media, police, government resources, educational system, or any other organizations that may benefit the cause. As important as group-support is to a movement, without leadership and help from institutions, drastic changes in society are unlikely to occur. For instance, In Serbia, from 1998 to 2004, the revolutionary group known as, “Otpor”, was the target of police brutality and many arrests; however, the group saw these arrests not merely as acts of violence or aggression, but as an opportunity to form positive relations with the police. Eventually, when the police had to make a decision whether they were to join the movement or continue with arresting/resisting, they chose to join the ranks of leadership within the social movement. The protesters were even later trained by the police to defend themselves and the officers, if any provocation was to arise. This is why pillars of authority are a necessity when attempting to create a successful and efficient movement within the constructs of society. Leadership helps design a movement that does not consist of overpowering or overruling but rather, one that is centered around inclusivity and teamwork.

As many people are aware, the ‘Occupy’ movement was started by a group of younger activists who took hold of Zuccotti Park, located in Manhattan. They protested against economic and social inequality. Similarly, Otpor was a group in Serbia that sought to overthrow the Milošević government, run by the much disliked, Slobodan Milošević. However, despite their similarities, the results the two groups achieved, could not have been more different. In the case of Occupy movement, the protesters involved gave up in a few short months and accomplished very little. Otpor, on the other hand, not only successfully overthrew the Milošević regime, but went on to enlist activists in the ‘Georgian Rose Revolution’, the ‘Ukrainian Orange Revolution’ and the ‘April 6 Youth Movement’, and these are just a few of the many movements Otpor went on to assist in. The main reasons for the differences in outcome, was the absence of leaders and the confused motives in the Occupy movement. While Otpor had one clear goal, to depose Milošević, it was difficult to understand what Occupy was looking to accomplish. Clarity of purpose and achievability among all members of a large group, is necessary in order to create a successful movement.

Exactly ten years ago, the messages of ‘Occupy Wall Street’ and its criticism of the financial system and social inequality went around the world. What has become of it?

People march through the streets with backpacks, US flags and placards. ‘People Power,’ they shout, and ‘Occupy Wall Street.’ They stop in front of the bronze bull, which is behind a barrier and is already being guarded by police officers. For the protesters, it is the symbol of capitalism, of the power of banks and money over people, of the inequality between the one percent of the wealthy and the rest of the population. ‘We are the 99 percent,’ some have written on their posters. ‘We need an economy for the people and by the people,’ says another.

What began on that day in September exactly ten years ago as a protest by almost a thousand people in New York developed over the next few months into one of the largest protest movements in the USA, which made it to London, Paris, Berlin and Vienna and in Total fueled over 700 demonstrations. ‘Occupy Wall Street’ was a critique of the financial system and social inequality, the messages of which quickly spread across the world with the help of social media. But as quickly as the movement arose, it seemed to disappear again. Two months after they began, the police broke up the gatherings. While Occupy soon became a nostalgic memory for many participants, for some it lives on to this day.

Such as for Marisa Holmes, who describes herself as an anarchist and anti-capitalist and helped organize the protests at the time. ‘After the financial crisis and the demonstrations in the Middle East, it was clear to me that there had to be protests here, too, to take action against the country’s banks and elites,’ says the 35-year-old, who works as a communication scientist and filmmaker in New York , to DEFAULT. The economic recession that followed the financial crisis had alienated thousands of young people like her at the time.

Like many others, Holmes became aware of the burgeoning movement in July 2011 through an appeal by Adbusters, a Canadian magazine known for its provocative and dissident stance. ‘Are you ready for a Tahrir moment? Flow into lower Manhattan on September 17, build tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street,’ it said, referring to the Arab Spring protests that had taken place a few months earlier.

A little later, the hacker group Anonymous picked up the message and spread it to different groups on the Internet. The movement soon found support from the prominent economist Joseph Stiglitz and the anthropologist and anarchist David Graeber, who had previously helped to define the distinction between the wealthy one percent of the population and the rest.

On September 17, 2011, a thousand people protested for the first time in Zuccotti Park, a small square between Wall Street and ‘Ground Zero’, the site of the former World Trade Center. ‘There were a lot of different people coming from all over the place, not just young, white students, as is often assumed,’ says Holmes. Together with 200 other people, she then camped in the park overnight and turned the protests into a stationary gathering. ‘For me, the movement became my life. I was there day and night, looking out for police checks, organizing discussions and cooking services.’

Decisions should be made through public debate and general consensus among participants. ‘That guaranteed Occupy stayed open and created trust between the protesters,’ says Holmes. Many saw it differently. ‘There was great tension within the movement from the start,’ says sociologist Heather Hurwitz, who researches social movements at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio and was an activist close to Occupy, to STANDARD. Women and people with non-white skin were not really included – ‘a big omission,’ says Hurwitz.

Occupy also found its way into Austria, albeit on a much smaller scale. ‘Back then we organized a rally on Stephansplatz. Not many came,’ says Philipp Janyr, one of the co-organizers at the time, to the STANDARD. The movement was designed to allow all opinions. ‘That also meant that any nonsense could be presented.’ The movement was very quickly infiltrated by conspiracy theorists and neo-Nazis.

In fact, the movement lost credibility and persuasiveness after the WU professor Franz Hörmann was invited, who had come under criticism for ‘dubious statements about the Holocaust,’ as the WU put it soon afterwards, and Hörmann was temporarily suspended from work.

Occupy did not make any concrete demands in the USA either. Instead, a variety of debates arose in which not only the rich one percent, but also the financial industry, the high tuition fees and the tax system were criticized. ‘The movement was above demands. We weren’t a reform movement, we were a revolution,’ says Holmes.

In mid-November 2011, the police managed to break up the gathering in Zuccotti Park after bad weather had increasingly weighed on the activists’ will to protest. Until 2013 there were always individual protests connected with Occupy. Nevertheless, for many it was the premature end of the movement.

According to many observers, Occupy was not able to achieve much in concrete terms. After the movement, the financial industry remained as it had been before, and there was hardly any change in social inequality in the USA. Otherwise, Occupy did not lead to concrete political or economic changes. So what’s left?

‘Occuppy has shown that it is possible for citizens to network in a very unbureaucratic manner,’ says Holmes. The way of communicating and protesting via social media later promoted movements such as Black Lives Matter and MeToo. Hurwitz sees it differently: ‘What we should learn from Occupy is how important it is to have leaders in a movement who also represent the voice of often disadvantaged groups. A leaderless movement like Occupy does not automatically lead to inclusion.’

Hurwitz agrees with Holmes that Occupy helped launch many other forms of activism in the years that followed. Many activists later joined the Black Lives Matter rallies. At the political level, Occupy paved the way for people like Bernie Sanders, and many activists organized an unofficial campaign for Sanders at the time.

The general message of social inequality has also reached the mainstream through Occupy. In addition, a number of smaller offshoot organizations emerged from Occupy, some of which are still committed to lower tuition fees, climate protection or more banking regulation.

‘The fact that there is extreme inequality between the super-rich and the rest of the population has become a general awareness,’ says Janyr. In that regard, Occupy won. ‘Where we lost is that to this day nothing has changed.’

Holmes remains confident that the movement will live on. ‘I know a lot of people who are now dealing with issues that they took with them from Occupy in some way,’ she says. ‘One way or another, we’re still fighting to this day.’