Our new issue was posted online this week. In the essays section, you will find “We Were the 99 Percent,” by Jeffrey Lawrence, a look back on Occupy Wall Street, fifteen years on, and its legacy on the American left. We’re publishing an excerpt here on Substack for you to read. Check out the rest of the new issue here.
Roughly once a week, in August and early September of 2011, I sat in a semicircle in Manhattan’s Tompkins Square Park with eighty to a hundred others to debate how, when and why to “occupy” the financial capital of the world. As a relative newcomer to political activism, I barely said a word in those assemblies. I wish I could say I participated in the New York City General Assembly (NYCGA) because of my convictions, but the truth was I had been dragged to the first meeting by two of my closest friends, the Spanish organizers Begonia Santa-Cecilia and Luis Moreno-Caballud. For most of the summer, they had been telling me about a massive popular mobilization that had erupted in Spain on May 15th of that same year, the 15-M or indignados movement, during which an estimated six to eight million people passed through encampments (acampadas) across their home country calling for an end to the domination of the political system by financial elites. As I sat mostly on the sidelines, viewing the discussions with interest but also with doubt about the prospects for successfully setting up camp anywhere in the Financial District, Begonia and Luis helped form the NYCGA Outreach Working Group, tasked with getting out word of the group’s plan to the public, and in early August, in an email chain involving the anthropologist David Graeber and other assembly participants, they played a decisive role in creating the “We are the 99 percent” slogan that came to define Occupy Wall Street (OWS) in the popular imagination. On September 17th, the date that the culture-jamming magazine Adbusters had somewhat whimsically proposed for OWS, I met up with Begonia and Luis in southern Manhattan, still not entirely convinced that they—that we—could pull off anything other than a publicity stunt. I was wrong. A sizeable group of Occupiers spent that night in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park, and then the next. Occupy encampments began to mushroom around the United States, and then around the world.
Like many of my millennial peers, I date my political formation to the heady months surrounding the 2011 Occupy encampments. Occupy initiated a historical cycle on the left that spanned over a decade, despite the fact that its major phase lasted for just over two months from September to November of 2011. To this day, I believe that Occupy not only catalyzed the revitalization of a new “New Left” but also set the paradigm for a series of social movements that, from Black Lives Matter to the Gaza campus occupations, have remade American political culture. My position is hardly unusual among writers on the left. In the 2021 book Generation Occupy, the journalist Michael Levitin took aim at the still-prominent view that the Occupy movement “made no real impact on American political life,” insisting that OWS “revived the labor movement, remade the Democratic Party and reinvented activism” for the 21st century. In a similar vein, labor historian and popular left commentator Gabriel Winant asserted on the tenth anniversary of the 2011 Zuccotti encampment that “Occupy was the critical event in the formation of a new anticapitalist intellectual milieu,” out of whose “ferment” new left media outlets such as Jacobin and the New Inquiry gained visibility and older venues such as n+1 and Dissent “underwent much-heralded generational transformations.”
Arriving as they did in the middle of the Biden presidency, however, evaluations such as these couldn’t help but take on an elegiac quality. Even by then, the “ferment” of the 2010s seemed to have died out. On the international front, the anti-austerity parties that had emerged in the mid-2010s as serious contenders in Europe (Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain) had faded from the scene, while the so-called “pink tide” of progressive governments that dominated the Latin American landscape for most of the 2000s and 2010s had already suffered a series of stinging electoral defeats. Over the next few years, hard-right leaders surged into power in the region, in some instances (as with Javier Milei in Argentina, or José Antonio Kast in Chile) replacing administrations that embodied the resurgence of the 21st-century left. Domestically, the 2024 reelection of Donald Trump, this time with a majority of the popular vote, merely seemed to confirm the final ebb of the social-movement cycle initiated by Occupy, notwithstanding the Gaza campus protests that emerged in the months preceding his presidency. Already in a 2023 episode of the Jacobin-sponsored podcast The Dig, host Daniel Denvir observed, “It feels like we’re at the end of a notable moment in U.S. history that began with Occupy, Ferguson, Standing Rock, and … that reached its peak with the Bernie 2020 campaign and, amid the height of the pandemic, the summer 2020 George Floyd uprising.” In the wake of what journalist Vincent Bevins has dubbed the “mass protest decade” of the 2010s, during which economic and social justice were placed at the center of a civilizational debate, many have joined Bevins in asking whether our belief in a more equal future was a realistic expectation or mere “teleological self-deception”—an unearned conviction, that is, that “our” cause would eventually prevail because it was the correct one.
As the global tides have continued to shift rightward, I’ve found myself going back to those initial days of Occupy, looking for clues. What was it about the movement that captured the imagination of an entire generation? Where did it come from? How did it lay the foundations for the contemporary American left? And, equally important, what can we learn, fifteen years on, from a movement that promised so much and yet ultimately failed to deliver a political project strong enough to counteract the ensuing surge of right populism?
And subscribe to read issue 37 in full.
Image credit: Christopher Smith (CC BY / Flickr).
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.