Figure 9.1 Occupy offshoots: organizing groups. Credit: Aaron Carretti.
“THIS IS HISTORY.” Of all the hand-painted signs I spotted on the Brooklyn Bridge on October 1, 2011, this one stood out above the fray. There was a time, during those heady days of the American autumn, when such sentiments were a matter of consensus in the occupied squares. Many among the occupiers were convinced theirs was a movement of world-historical significance. Some even imagined that they were on the cusp of a second American Revolution.
Two months later, with the occupiers in exile, and all but a few of their encampments in ruins, a different consensus had emerged among the nation’s political class: the movement was, in fact, history, but in a more cynical sense. Beginning with Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly—who, on November 16, declared the movement “dead,” “finished as a legitimate political force”—a parade of pundits, political analysts, and social scientists proceeded to write its obituary.1
By 2012, to be sure, Occupy Wall Street was on its way off the national stage. In the end, its collectives and counterinstitutions would prove unable to recover from the combined effects of police raids, political ruptures, and dwindling bases of popular support. Confronted with these new realities, the vast majority of the sometime occupiers would channel their energies in other directions (see Figure 9.1). From occupying privatized urban spaces, they turned to organizing in other places, where the other 99 percent of the “99 Percent” lived, worked, learned, and struggled to make ends meet.2
Figure 9.1 Occupy offshoots: organizing groups. Credit: Aaron Carretti.
One year after Mr. O’Reilly had delivered its death certificate, many of Occupy’s offshoots had outlived the occupied squares. By the end of 2012, Occupy Our Homes activists had successfully fought off bank foreclosures in at least seven states. Onetime occupiers had teamed up with Walmart workers to launch over 200 “Black Friday” protests against poverty wages at the nation’s largest private employer.3 In the wake of Superstorm Sandy, Occupy Sandy had mounted a massive relief operation, with some 50,000 volunteers registered, 300,000 meals served, 1,000 homes remediated, and more than $1 million of supplies distributed to communities along the ravaged coastline.4
By 2013–2014, the 99 Percent movement had outgrown the traditional bastions of Occupy activism, branching out into states and sectors where its presence was least expected. In Raleigh, North Carolina, over 900 would be arrested for occupying the Legislative Building, answering the NAACP’s appeal to protest new restrictions on voting and social rights. In Detroit, Michigan, where residents had been deprived of running water, occupiers would join forces with local organizers to shut down the water shutoffs. In these and other “right to work” states like Alabama and Texas, low-wage workers would launch an unprecedented strike wave for “$15 and a union” (see below).5
Meanwhile, the call to occupy would continue to resonate around the world, to be taken up anew by movements in diverse contexts with distinct goals and grievances. Turkey’s Occupy Gezi, for instance, evolved from an occupation to save a public park into a broad-based revolt against the repressive regime of Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan. Brazil’s Movimento Passe Livre began in São Paulo with a demand for free public transit, but quickly escalated into a wider mobilization against the maldistribution of wealth and the misallocation of resources. Such movements would model themselves, in part, on OWS and the movements of the squares, at once adopting and adapting their nonviolent tactics, their direct action strategies, and their participatory processes.6
Though their issues and interests were distinct, and their outcomes a study in contrasts, this international constellation of Occupy offshoots would remain loosely linked by a common language, with which they could communicate; a shared lineage, which they could commemorate; a common enemy, against which they could agitate; and a web of weak ties, through which information could circulate. As one occupier would put it, “People all over the country and all over the world came together through physical space. And they met each other and they built connections. . . . [Afterwards,] they went back to doing what they were doing before, but with new connections. So this network is there, and it’s still very much alive, and it’s waiting for the next spark to shake it back into being.”7
Having traced the arc of the 99 Percent movement, we can now revisit the four sets of questions that began this work: First, what were the social origins of Occupy Wall Street? What were the dynamics of its political development? Why and how did it take off as it did, when it did?
The Great Recession of 2007–2009 had brought the dark side of capitalism into stark relief. In a few short years, millions had watched their American dreams disintegrate—their jobs disappear, their incomes decline, their homes go underwater, their debts skyrocket into the stratosphere. Although these experiences were widely shared, they were not widely articulated. Their stories were seldom spoken aloud, their grievances rarely aired in public. In the summer of 2011, the 99 Percent Project opened up the political space for the crisis’s victims to give voice to those grievances, to break out of their solitude, and to see that their struggles were shared by others.
By 2011, the change so many had hoped for, worked for, and voted for in 2008 was nowhere in sight. After the midterm elections of 2010, the center of gravity in U.S. politics had swung dramatically to the right, with the rise of the Tea Party portending a turn from stimulus to austerity, from job creation to deficit reduction, and from economic recovery to the eradication of organized labor. In the summer of 2011, however, the forces aligned with the Tea Party overreached, nearly sending the U.S. government into default. Between the halting economic recovery and the deepening opposition to the austerity agenda, many on the Left sensed a political opening.
At the same time, the “Arab Spring” and the “movement of the squares”—which had seen hundreds of thousands occupy urban centers around the Mediterranean, demanding “real democracy now”—had had a palpable demonstration effect on those who were to occupy Wall Street. Another model was the battle of Madison, in which public-sector workers, students, and concerned citizens took over the state capitol for seventeen days to protest a raft of anti-labor legislation. All of these events helped turn a critical mass toward the strategy of civil disobedience and the tactic of occupation.
Thus, Occupy Wall Street was a creature of a specific historical moment and a global evolution in tactics. “I saw movements inspire other movements,” recalled one of the indignadas I interviewed, who was active in 15-M and OWS. “I think that this positive domino effect is very important. Something that cannot be successful in one place can mean something very big for someone else [in another place], and can inspire them to do different things. . . . People start to think they can organize themselves.”8
Occupy provided a platform within which many other platforms could fit, one that would make space for a multiplicity of often contradictory messages, identities, and ideologies. This platform contained the rules for its own reproduction: take this square, share this meme; use this hashtag, use this graphic. Because the call to action began with an online meme, it found its earliest constituency in loose networks of virtual activists, clicktivists, and hacktivists. Yet it was not Twitter or Facebook that organized people. It was people who organized one another, using every tool at their disposal, from the low-tech (the People’s Microphone) to the high-tech (the InterOccupy network). The occupation had to be assembled in person, and in public. The meme had to be made real through face-to-face interaction within the contexts of actually existing social movements.
In the U.S., as in Europe, the occupations of 2011 tended to follow a more or less predictable sequence of stages: The initial “take” was planned by a hard core of seasoned activists and organizers. From the first, the occupiers organized their efforts around a strategy of nonviolent direct action, aimed at peaceably but forcefully confronting, disrupting, and delegitimizing the workings of “business as usual”—and seizing the media spotlight in the process. With the urban squares as their base camps, the occupiers moved to extend the scope of the occupations to the institutions they held responsible for the economic crisis, thereby turning it into a political crisis for the “1 Percent.”
When their actions incited overreaction from local law enforcement, the events would be broadcast by citizen journalists, then seen and heard by diffuse networks of sympathizers. The participation of the many, although it had its basis in prior grievances, was invariably catalyzed by the imagery of police violence. “That moment really hit me hard,” recounted one occupier who witnessed the arrests on the Brooklyn Bridge. “For the first time, I saw what seemed like regular, everyday folk from different backgrounds . . . who were just being really resilient in the face of repression.”9 Once the occupations became mass phenomena, however, they unfolded in more unpredictable ways, spiraling out of the control of state managers, law enforcers, and even the organizers themselves.
How did the occupiers conceive of the “99 Percent” and the “1 Percent”? How did they deal with the many differences among them? What did they make of capitalism, democracy, and the prospects for social change?
In the beginning, the makers of the 99 Percent movement shared little in the way of collective identity or political ideology. The original general assemblies, after all, had been born of a split between Far Left factions, with anarchists and horizontalists pitted against socialists and populists. All summer long, the rival camps remained entrenched in their positions. The would-be occupiers could not agree on how to agree, leading facilitators to unilaterally impose a form of “modified consensus.” Even then, the warring parties could not come to a consensus on just what demands to make, leading to the de facto decision to not make any demands at all.
By September 17, 2011, however, they had finally found common ground in a singular point of unity: namely, the irreconcilable opposition between the wealthiest 1 percent—the monied minority represented by Wall Street and Washington, D.C.—and the other 99 percent—the silent supermajority represented, at least in principle, by the would-be occupiers of Lower Manhattan. The invention of the “99 Percent”—and the sense of solidarity it lent an otherwise divided Left—would turn out to be the movement’s most enduring contribution to the political culture.
Just what did that identity mean to the occupiers themselves? For my respondents, it was no ready-made category of the real, but a collectivity they sought to make real, forging a single community of interest out of a heterogeneous many. This they set out to do by way of a shared story about who we are (defined by what they are), why we are in the position we are in (and what they do to keep us there), and what we might do together to win back what is ours. The 99 Percent and the “1 Percent” were, in essence, two sides of a single narrative strategy, which enabled the occupiers to bring class back into U.S. politics without alienating U.S. publics.10
What started as a statistical artifact soon became a powerful political tool. The language of the “1 Percent” served to “call out Wall Street,” to “take it to the root of the problem,” and to “put economic inequality on the map.”11 The language of the 99 Percent worked to “attract a broad tent,” to “promote solidarity among everyday people,” and to raise up a “giant umbrella banner that everyone and their mother could identify with.” In so doing, it worked to convince “everyday people,” labor unionists, and community organizers that their issues were interlinked—that, in the words of one OWS strategist, “all our various struggles are the same struggle, and [that] we can and must build a movement of movements. . . if we’re ever going to be able to present possibilities for building a free society that is participatory and responsible, equitable and just.”12
Over time, the politics of the 99 Percent would become progressively more fraught, “problematic,” and “complicated.” “Great slogan,” noted a founder of the People of Color Working Group. “Not sure if it’s a great analysis. Someone making half a million dollars a year versus someone making $20,000 a year? Very different folks.”13 The 99 Percent strategy papered over a world of difference among the 99 Percenters themselves. Again and again, some will say, the aspiration to universality came up against the disparities of lived experience: between white and nonwhite Americans, waged workers and student debtors, homeowners and homeless itinerants, citizens and undocumented immigrants. In the long run, the heterogeneity of the crowd, and of the interests and aspirations it embodied, made consensus difficult, if not impossible, to achieve.
“I think that was the most potent thing about Occupy,” argued one organizer with Occupy Philly. “Tearing down this invisible fence that kept people from working together. . . . Nothing in this country will work until people can take up [each other’s] struggles. . . . That was the potential beauty of Occupy. And that was the failure of it.”14
There were valiant efforts to “take on the differences among the 99 Percent,” rather than to “pretend they don’t exist.” In some of my interviews, respondents underlined the anti-racist and feminist work that went on in the squares and beyond, often below the radar of other occupiers. They asserted the priority of “empowering one another against all forms of oppression,” including everyday iterations of racism, sexism, homophobia, and religious bigotry. Above all, they argued for an engagement by the broader movement with ongoing organizing in marginalized communities—which would require “tearing down these fences,” “putting stuff on the ground,” and “putting ourselves at the disposal of the most oppressed.”
Overall, the political positions that came up most frequently in my conversations with the occupiers were the critique of capitalism, on the one hand, and of representative democracy, on the other. For many, the very act of occupation entailed an outright rejection of the reigning economic system, and a wholesale withdrawal of the consent of the governed. If they were not working, they insisted, it was not because they had failed, but rather because capitalism had failed them. If they were not voting, it was because they were living, not in a democracy, but in a “plutocracy” or “corporatocracy,” in which “money controls politics” and “corporations buy elections.”
For a plurality of my respondents, Wall Street was a kind of cypher for capitalism itself, which they conceived as “the enemy,” “the monster,” and “the reason for our troubles.” For many OWS supporters, of course, the goal was not to overthrow the system, but rather to reform it to be more “equitable,” “responsible,” and “just.” “Capitalism isn’t going to end right now,” notes one such reformer. “But it can be made less damaging.” Still, for many within Occupy’s core, the ultimate goal was to dismantle the profit system and to rebuild society on a radically different basis, variously conceived in terms of anarchism, socialism, or simply, “economic democracy.” Meanwhile, their work centered on “opening up the space to talk about the question,” “creating common resources that you share,” and “projecting the idea that another world is possible.”
At the same time, the occupiers I interviewed were nearly unanimous in their embrace of one or another form of radical democracy, which they often spoke of with passionate dedication and a quasi-religious devotion. Democracy, to be sure, meant many things to many people within the Occupy orbit: “consensus process” and “autonomous action” to the horizontalists, “freedom of discussion” and “unity of action” to the socialists. Yet most all of them agreed that representative democracy was hardly representative at all. As opposed to “periodic voting” in elections “rigged in favor of the 1 Percent,” they sought to enact a direct democracy, in which “everybody enjoys the right to participate and the conditions that are required to participate.”
This politics of hyper-democracy did not lend itself to traditional policy prescriptions, party platforms, or petitions for redress of grievances. According to one early occupier, “Nothing was going to budge the 1 Percent with online petitions, registering people to vote, sending e-mails, having polite town meetings. Occupy upped the ante. . . . Loud, boisterous, creative actions and street protests were the key.”15 At the same time, more than a few of my respondents acknowledged the uses of a “diversity of tactics”—that is, “for people who want to work on an election next to people who want to work on a direct action.” In the words of one of the original facilitators of the NYCGA, “The same people who do direct actions don’t have to be the same people who lobby Congress. But sometimes they work hand in hand. You need a more militant wing in order to make reforms possible . . . to make policy changes a real possibility.”16
These findings, however, are by no means representative of Occupy as a whole. For any claims to be confirmed, further empirical evidence is required. In the case of OWS, the only representative study to date—a survey of 729 occupiers and supporters taken on May 1, 2012—contains some intriguing insights, broadly consistent with my own findings.17 Among those respondents who reported active involvement in the movement, the most commonly cited concerns were “inequality/the 1 Percent”; “money in politics/frustration with D.C.”; “student debt/access to education”; “corporate greed”; “antiwar, environment, women’s rights issues”; and “capitalism as a system.”
Online surveys offer a broader perspective on the movement beyond New York (though the problem of self-selection renders their findings less than representative). The most extensive such study, undertaken by Occupy Research from December 2011–January 2012, found a similar set of motivations among the 5,074 occupiers surveyed.18 “Inequality” and “income inequality” topped their list of concerns, followed by “economic conditions”; “corruption”; “justice”; “corporations” and their “influence in politics”; “anti-capitalism”; and “unemployment.” Taken together with my interviews, such findings, inconclusive though they are, point to the common denominators of 99 Percent politics: above all, the hostility to economic inequality, the rejection of corporate rule, the call for a more just economy, and the plea for a more democratic politics.
A third question concerns the paradoxes of occupation in practice. Were power and resources equitably distributed among the citizens of the squares? How did their everyday practices measure up to their democratic principles?
In theory, what the occupiers sought to enact was a horizontal mode of decision-making, in which anyone could participate and no one would dominate. The occupied square was supposed to be self-governed by nightly general assemblies, tasked with taking up any and all decisions bearing on the occupation as a whole. The agenda was up for discussion. The “stack” was open to all. The consensus process was followed to the letter, with ample time allocated to every proposal, concern, and amendment.
Yet even these hyper-democratic procedures could not guarantee democratic outcomes. In practice, from the first, the process of “modified consensus” was fraught with contradictions. First, participation in three-hour meetings, twice or thrice a day, required a surplus of time and a measure of personal autonomy. Full participation therefore tended to be reserved for full-time activists, part-time students, and freelance professionals—plus a scattering of the underserved poor who had taken up residence in the squares. For the vast majority of 99 Percenters, their jobs, job searches, and/or family obligations tended to preclude them from full participation.
Second, there were clear disparities of experience, know-how, and political capital among those who did participate. The better educated an occupier was, the more experience s/he tended to have with the intricacies of consensus and its techniques of communication. The more activist know-how s/he had, the better positioned s/he was to participate meaningfully in the process. And with a certain level of higher education and prior experience, too, came a wealth of political capital and social ties. These ties connected the most privileged participants to one another, and also to other networks of influence, which only served to empower certain actors over others.
The unequal distribution of time and autonomy, capabilities and political capital, lent this “leaderless” movement an informal leadership despite itself.19 And despite the elaborate mechanisms put in place to ensure everyone’s participation in the process, it tended to be the college-educated, the best networked, and the better off among the occupiers who assumed (or were ceded) positions of power and influence. It was they who formed the inner circles of “coordinators” and “facilitators,” “point people” and “bottom liners,” by way of an unspoken division of labor.
Meanwhile, assemblies everywhere were beset by a host of practical troubles and power struggles. Given the mechanics of the assembly process, a single individual could move to “block” a hundred from coming to a consensus. A group of ten could stand in the way of the will of ninety. The constant turnover was a constant challenge, as attendance fluctuated wildly from one night to the next. So, too, was the presence of disrupters, who had little respect for the rules of the process. Finally, fault lines began to show between those generally assembled in the square and those otherwise occupied with “getting shit done,” as they put it, day in and day out, beyond the bounds of the square.
As time went on and money flowed in, the assemblies finally broke down amid disputes over the distribution of resources: Who controlled the purse strings? Where was the $450,000 that had been donated to the cause? Why was more money spent on communications than on food and medicine combined? As a result of the inefficacy of the process, most decisions came to be taken behind closed doors, in church basements and private apartments, by a handful of ad hoc affinity groups. Here, the resources flowed freely, and the power flowed informally to coordinators and facilitators.
For many citizens and denizens of the square, theirs was supposed to have been a “new world in the shell of the old,” a little concrete utopia in which everybody would have a say and nobody would be excluded from the decisions that affected them. Yet, despite the occupiers’ best efforts, the occupation tended to reinscribe structural inequalities in the space of the square and to reproduce relations of power among the nodes of the network. As a result, occupation in practice often proved less than horizontal, its social relations less than equitable, and its outcomes less than democratic.
There was more to the Occupy phenomenon than the movement in which it had its origins and effects. How did the occupiers interact with the established institutions of social and political life? Why did the alliances that built the 99 Percent movement finally break down? And how did the power players themselves respond to the challenge?
The early success of the occupations was predicated not only on the taking of squares, but also on the building of bridges and the construction of cross-class, multiracial, and intergenerational coalitions. In 2011, the occupiers formed long-missing links with labor unions, community organizations, and religious institutions. For a time, all of these forces aligned against the power players of Wall Street and City Hall behind the universalizing banner of the “99 Percent.” Yet few of these alliances survived the combined force of external repression and internal dissension.
The most powerful of the occupiers’ connections, and also one of the most fraught, was the one they forged with organized labor. At this time, union workers nationwide were facing cutbacks and layoffs, wage freezes and furloughs, while their younger, nonunion counterparts were working for low wages and no benefits—if they were working at all. Though they had very different political ideas and generational identities, the union members and nonunion 99 Percenters expressed a shared sense of injustice. They first came together in the Wisconsin winter, then again in Manhattan in September, when fifteen leading unions endorsed OWS in the course of a single week.
In a few short weeks, the 99 Percenters experienced a kind of quantum leap from the political margins to prime time. Many of their biggest days in the streets were fueled by labor turnout in the tens of thousands. But behind the scenes and away from the cameras, the occupiers, with their “horizontal” politics, clashed with the union leaders, with their “vertical” structures, over everything from police permits to electoral politics. Any attempt to push a legislative agenda was anathema to the horizontalists. The refusal to make demands was the height of folly to the trade unionists.
With the eviction of the encampments and the approach of the elections, the sometime allies increasingly went their separate ways. Despite occasional shows of unity, such as May Day 2012 in New York, they were less and less inclined to give one another the time of day. The “Ninjas” and other horizontalists went back to “autonomous action,” while the trade unionists turned to defeating Mitt Romney. The end result was a split between “Occupy” affiliates, on the one hand, and “99 Percent” coalitions, on the other.
In addition to the unions, the occupiers received the material support and the institutional endorsement of a multitude of nonprofit service providers, advocacy groups, and religious institutions. These organizations had their base among the urban poor, who had been hit hardest by the housing crisis, the unemployment crisis, and the budget cuts that had attended the rise of the pro-austerity coalition. The fall of 2011 was a time when housing and food insecurity had reached historic heights, overwhelming the capacity of state services and nonprofit providers to meet the needs of these constituencies.20
The nonprofits stayed away in the early days of the occupations, focused as they were on fundraising and service provision. Yet as the movement diversified in its demography and geography, the encampments attracted growing numbers of participants, both from the ranks of nonprofit professionals and from the midst of front-line communities: the unsheltered homeless, the long-term unemployed, underserved youth, overlooked seniors. Amid the retrenchment of social services in many cities and states, the occupiers were constructing “people’s kitchens,” “medical tents,” “comfort centers,” and “service tents,” open to all, for free. At the same time, the occupiers were taking on some of the very financial institutions responsible for the subprime mortgages, foreclosures, and repossessions that had left millions of Americans out in the cold.
Traditionally more prone to compete with one another for financial support than to work together toward common ends, many players in the nonprofit industry now saw in the Occupy moment a rare opportunity to work together. While the occupations lasted, the occupiers depended on these providers for donated services, satellite spaces, and operational support. When they were evicted from the squares, the exiles turned to the churches for sanctuary, and to the nonprofits for professional help. But by 2012, these once promising relationships also were beginning to break down under the pressures of competing claims to resources, and of conflict over territory and turf.
What remained of these alliances would form the infrastructure of Occupy offshoots like Occupy Our Homes and Occupy Sandy. The first would fight to keep families in their homes, to win protections against eviction, and to elevate housing to the status of a human right. The second would mobilize tens of thousands to meet the unmet needs of those stricken by Superstorm Sandy. The transition from OWS to Occupy Sandy marked the completion of the turn from the financial centers to communities on the front lines of economic and ecological crises. But this transition also led many to question whether the call of social service should take priority over the work of a social movement.
How did the power players respond to the challenge that the occupiers posed? We do not know what went on behind the closed doors of corporate boardrooms or City Hall conference rooms. We do know that the aftermath of the Great Recession was a time of uncertainty for corporate actors and state managers, some of whom publicly worried that they were in danger of losing their legitimacy—or even of facing an anti-corporate insurgency from a significant portion of the U.S. population. We also know that state agencies, financial firms, real estate corporations, and others worked in close partnership throughout this period. When threatened, they tended to fall back on the use of force, reasserting their sovereignty and tightening their grip on public and private property.
We can assess their response with reference to the urban security forces tasked with their protection. The crackdown on Occupy was but the most public manifestation of a long-running trend in law enforcement and in urban security strategy. The wave of repression required no vast government conspiracy—only the normal operation of militarized police forces, federal intelligence agencies, and their network of corporate partners. Still, during the American autumn and its immediate aftermath, the occupiers’ actions did pose a real threat of disruption to certain financial services, commercial facilities, and transportation hubs. In light of this fact, public servants of all descriptions worked diligently to deter the threat and protect this “critical infrastructure.”21
From day 1, the occupiers were met with an aggressive and increasingly sophisticated response from law enforcement, including individual assaults, mass arrests, and spectacular shows of force. At the same time, it may be argued that the police were doing “exactly what they were supposed to do,” as Mayor Bloomberg put it the day after the Brooklyn Bridge arrests.22 In New York City, at least, they were following the protocols of public order policing—micromanagement and containment, command and control—first introduced amid the urban unrest of the 1990s, and already familiar to a generation of young African Americans and Latinos.23 Such tactics had escalated in the decade since 9/11, as police units from Manhattan to Ferguson, Missouri had been given free rein and generous funding in the name of homeland security and business continuity.24
Throughout the fall of 2011, such agencies mobilized their resources, first to manage the occupations, then to disband them. The first move was to contain the encampments within certain parameters set by police command officers and municipal state managers. In Lower Manhattan, this meant keeping OWS at a safe distance from Wall Street itself. The second move was to keep an eye on Occupy with a regime of surveillance and “situational awareness”—often with ample “mutual aid” from state, county, federal, and private-sector personnel. The third move was to restrict the occupiers’ freedom of movement and to minimize their capacity for disruption. To this end, officers resorted to “cattle pens,” cordons, kettles, and “frozen zones.” In New York, Oakland, and elsewhere, tactical units also turned to “less-lethal” munitions to dramatic effect.
The next step was to escalate to eviction. The pretext was almost always some variation on the theme of public safety, in the context of deteriorating conditions within the encampments. Yet the decision to evict tended to be made under intense pressure from without—typically from private-sector stakeholders, such as Brookfield Properties or the local Chamber of Commerce. In city after city, riot police moved in under the cover of darkness, using overwhelming force to disrupt and disperse. The quasi-military character of these actions sparked widespread public outrage, political backlash, and legal action. Still, none of it prevented municipal managers from continuing the crackdown in the months that followed. Public servants and private contractors collaborated closely throughout, preempting each and every attempt to reoccupy urban space.
Occupy did not simply fade away. The occupiers, as we have seen, were forcibly and forcefully dispersed, with over 7,000 arrests in some 122 cities.25 The crackdown was highly effective, depriving the movement of a physical space within which to assemble, a public stage from which to speak, and above all, a popular base on which to call. The repression appeared to work its effects, not only on those at the receiving end of police batons, but also on those on the other side of the barricades. To these prospective participants, repression sent an unequivocal signal: the act of occupying had become an arrestable offense. The political and psychological costs were incalculable. The movement, thus criminalized, was reduced to the province of a militant few.
Many in the media and in academia have rushed to make sweeping causal claims about the impact of Occupy on American politics. I believe it is still too early to tell.
Great social transformations rarely occur on the timetable of twenty-four-hour news cycles, or even three-year retrospectives. It took seventy years for women to win the right to vote in U.S. elections; sixty years for the labor movement to win the most basic collective bargaining rights under federal law; and thirty for the Black Freedom movement to see the beginning of the end of legal segregation in the South.26 In light of the long arc of social change, as well as the demands of social science, any claims we might wish to make will require rigorous testing and vigorous debate. Even then, the impact of OWS may be impossible to isolate from that of the larger movement that gave it birth.
The conventional view holds that the occupiers changed the political equation by “changing the conversation.” There are certainly some telling indicators that the occupiers may have helped to “put economic inequality back on the map”—no small feat at a time when both parties were preoccupied with deficits and budget cuts. Analysis of major media coverage in late 2011 showed exponential increases in mentions of “income inequality” coinciding with the rise of OWS.27 But the news networks quickly lost interest as the encampments were evicted and election season approached, their coverage of the issue declining in proportion with their coverage of Occupy itself.28
Still, amid the aftershocks of the financial crisis, the rise of the 99 Percent coalition may well have played a role in the reemergence of class conflict as a force in U.S. politics. “OWS created a new class vernacular that has gained great resonance,” according to the founder of The Occupied Wall Street Journal. “And [that] is its lasting ideological contribution.”29 A Pew poll taken in December 2011 found a significant uptick in the proportion of respondents who reported perceptions of serious class conflict, with 66 percent claiming “strong” conflict (a figure 40 percent higher than two years earlier) and 30 percent claiming “very strong” conflict (more than double the share reported in 2009).30 For the first time in generations, many Americans were speaking openly and unapologetically about class inequality under contemporary capitalism.
What’s more, the return of open class conflict to the public sphere may have portended the return of labor conflict to the private sector. From 2012–2014, tens of thousands of low-wage workers would organize, strike, and, in a few instances, even occupy their workplaces in a bid to raise the wage floor and shift the balance of power. In December 2011, Occupy Oakland activists had been the first to put forward the idea of a fast food workers’ union. In late 2012, their efforts would be taken up by the Fast Food Forward campaign, which, by May 2014, had set off a wave of strikes and walkouts in more than 150 U.S. cities. Soon, service unions would launch a new offensive, including sit-ins and occupations, aimed at employers who refused to pay a living wage or recognize the right to organize.31
While the occupiers’ own calls for a “general strike” had failed to generalize beyond a militant minority, their visibility may have lent a new legitimacy to the use of the strike as an escalating tactic and an organizing tool. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, strikes involving more than 1,000 employees, after falling to historic lows in 2009–2010, shot up by 90 percent in 2011–2012, reaching restaurants, shopping centers, schools, hospitals, warehouses, airports, and office buildings across the country.32
Elsewhere, in more elite circles, Democratic and Republican Party strategists alike were taking notice of the growing grassroots insurgency. “I’m so scared of this anti–Wall Street effort,” admitted GOP consultant Frank Luntz at a gathering of governors. “They’re having an impact on what the American people think of capitalism.”33 In what may have been a case of unintended consequences, the politics of the 99 Percent also appeared to be having an impact on what Americans thought of their political alignments. While many occupiers hoped the movement would resist the threat of “co-optation” in the electoral arena, it may have been here that it made its most measurable mark in the U.S.
Even in a $6 billion election cycle, corporate ties were increasingly seen as a liability, and not just as an asset.34 November 6, 2012, saw large-scale losses for candidates identified with the “1 Percent,” from the presidential race to congressional contests in Connecticut and Colorado and the gubernatorial race in Illinois.35 Although many of the core occupiers I interviewed openly rejected the two-party system, many of their supporters nonetheless identified as Democrats, according to surveys taken from October 2011 to May 2012.36 These “Occupy Democrats,” as they called themselves, sought a realignment of the party away from the neoliberal “New Democrats,” and its reorientation in a Left-populist direction. In 2012, candidates endorsed by this wing of the party notched congressional victories in Massachusetts, Ohio, and Wisconsin.37
By opening up a Left flank in U.S. politics—one significantly to the left of President Obama and much of his party—the “99-to-1” strategy may have made it possible for players in both major parties to take a position, at least in principle, against unchecked corporate power.38 In 2013, the trend accelerated in a series of landmark local elections. For instance, in the birthplace of OWS, mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio scored an upset win over two candidates closely aligned with Mayor Bloomberg, largely on the strength of his calls to tax the rich and refund public programs. In an interview just before the election, De Blasio would argue that “the [99 Percent] movement . . . was expressing the concern that people felt all over the city and all over the world.”39
This crisis of inequality is likely to remain a core issue in elections to come, and the “99-to-1” strategy likely to remain a winning formula in many contests. Any candidate advocating for a “99 Percent” agenda will inevitably have to contend with the staying power of corporate power, whose influence is built into the very structure of the political system.40 At the same time, both Democrats and Republicans will have to contend in the coming years with an emerging anti-corporate coalition of newly mobilized Millennials, organized labor, and disenfranchised constituencies of color.41 If the major parties fail to take on the crisis of inequality, they may face a proliferation of third-party challenges at the grassroots (as they did in Seattle, Washington, where the occupier Kshama Sawant became the first Socialist in a century to win a City Council seat).42
Less visible in the media, but even more vital in the eyes of many occupiers, have been the outcomes of local ballot initiatives and statewide referenda. Since 2011, voters have leaned to the left on signature 99 Percent issues like taxing the wealthy and raising the wage floor. In November 2011, Ohioans voted in overwhelming numbers against anti-union legislation. One year later, Montanans voted to revoke corporate citizenship, and Californians to raise taxes on “1 Percent” taxpayers to refund the state’s public schools. In 2014, voters in Seattle moved to raise the minimum wage to a historic $15 an hour, setting the stage for similar initiatives in other cities and states. Each of these campaigns resonated with the politics and the rhetoric of the 99 Percent movement.43
At the same time, many occupiers remain reluctant to put much stock in the ballot box. This is a lesson they carry with them from the 2008 and 2012 elections, which saw candidates campaign on promises of sweeping change to the nation’s fiscal and economic policies, only to stay the course of the Wall Street-Washington consensus once in office. The importance of moments like Occupy may well lie less in their diffuse effects on individual preferences, in secret ballots and party-line votes, than in their demonstration effects on the public, in public, of its own inexorable power in numbers (see Figure 9.2).
Figure 9.2 Taking Foley Square, Lower Manhattan, October 5, 2011. Credit: Michael A. Gould-Wartofsky.
Whither the 99 Percent movement in the aftermath of the Occupy moment? Many of my interviewees, reformers and revolutionaries alike, report a creeping realization that the systemic change they seek will take time—longer than, say, the span of an occupation or an election. They continue to believe, as fervently as ever, that another America is possible, but they have learned it will take years of organizing, more than months of occupying; sustainable long-term strategies, more than short-term tactics or one-off street actions. The veterans have emerged from the Occupy moment with a deep and abiding commitment to staying “in it for the long haul,” as many are wont to say.
There is no shortage of possible paths for movements like this one in the 21st century. One such path would be the construction of independent bases of power—from popular assemblies and democratic unions to national formations and international networks—which could generate the collective capacity to advance a concrete political program. Thus organized, the 99 Percenters might demand (yes, demand) winnable reforms that empower them to participate more directly in the decisions that affect them; that decriminalize acts of public assembly; that reinstitute the right to organize; that deprivatize housing, health care, and education; that decarbonize the fossil-fuel economy; and that begin to democratize the places where they work, live, and learn.
To bring about such changes may call for the credible threat of civil resistance, as seen in the Occupy moment and the movement of the squares. However, it will also call for new avenues of action, with multiple levels of engagement, that do not require giving up one’s job or freedom as the price of admission. It will demand a new kind of movement that meets people where they are, that speaks to their interests, that raises their expectations, and that empowers their participation on a more equal basis.
For the time being, the realization of genuine democracy and greater equality remain distant dreams, even in the eyes of the occupiers. Corporations, they note, remain firmly in control of national and international politics. The wealthy continue to accrue the lion’s share of the gains from the economic recovery. Millions remain out of work, while many millions more continue to see their incomes stagnate, their debts accumulate, and their benefits evaporate. By all accounts, the conditions that led a generation to occupy Wall Street are still very much with us. To the extent that the occupiers’ grievances remain unaddressed, while corporate power remains intact and a more democratic society out of reach, the 99 Percent movement is likely to persist, to proliferate, and quite possibly to radicalize in the years and decades to come.