Peanut butter feeds Occupy protestors on the first day (2011) | David Shankbone / CC BY 3.0
On September 17, 2011, a few hundred people spent the night at Lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park and launched the movement known as Occupy Wall Street. Claiming to embody the “99%,” the movement showcased the idea of a great majority pitted against a tiny, immensely powerful minority. While ceaseless debates about Occupy’s composition and nature ensued, the movement can be interpreted as a diverse coalition of political and movement traditions—liberals, social democrats, progressive populists, unions, community organizations, autonomous collectives, and affinity groups, among others—brought together by a common critique of financial power. Occupy was made possible through the adoption of certain principles of organization—horizontality, direct democracy, direct action, and autonomy—that allowed individuals and groups with different approaches and perspectives to coexist, cooperate, and act together, even without agreement on a common program or clearly outlined goals. Nonetheless, Occupy was short-lived; the movement’s encampments lasted only a few months, and related activities under the “Occupy” banner continued not much longer. 15 years later, though, many on the left continue to cite Occupy as a transformative moment—so how to make sense of the movement today? And what use can we make of its memory in our current conjuncture?
With Occupy, the fact that the “success” of a social movement cannot be easily measured was all too evident. How to characterize a “win” when a movement does not list formal demands? And why should we take the latter as benchmarks of evaluation, after all? Indeed, an informal sample of analyses at the movement’s tenth anniversary—such as here, here, and here—reveals a widespread perception that Occupy “changed the conversation” and reshaped activist networks and the Left more broadly. Not only did Occupy produce a new crop of organizers and sharpen participants’ organizing skills, it also strengthened ties across groups and prompted new coalitions and initiatives. This assessment remains true, but Occupy’s fifteenth anniversary also offers us an opportunity to refine our comprehension of the movement’s legacy and identify what we might recuperate for our present moment of rapid change on the American Left.
Occupy must be seen through the lens of a crisis of neoliberal hegemony brought about by the 2008 financial crisis, itself triggered by the collapse of the US housing market and erosion of risky mortgage-backed investments. The movement stood as a response to the failing legitimacy of the socioeconomic order and its representatives, as an outcome and factor of the crisis of hegemony, expanding political horizons and challenging “solutions” that promised more of the same.
Unsurprisingly, its opposition drew from the ranks of the conservative and liberal establishment, who were especially adept at seizing on Occupy’s lack of specific, tangible goals. Occupy embodied wholesale contestation, but counteracting forces worked to contain the energy the movement released. Liberals defanged the movement’s systemic critique and sought to channel frustration with Wall Street into calls for institutional financial regulation that would nonetheless preserve the existing socioeconomic order. Conservatives, meanwhile, leveraged the discontent Occupy represented by converting anti-establishment appeals into right-wing populism. This pattern has persisted for the last 15 years. The challenge left by Occupy is to figure out what a fight for “real democracy” means now that the authoritarian project shaped in the same conjuncture has been consolidated. 15 years in, the crisis of hegemony made clear by Occupy has unmistakenly shifted toward its “morbid symptoms”: staggering wealth inequality, a militarized police and surveillance state, aggressive foreign policies and new wars, censorship of the media and learning institutions, crackdowns on immigration and explicit white supremacy, alongside naked attacks on democracy.
At this point, it’s paramount to remember that Occupy sparked intense debates about tactics that persisted well into its aftermath. By sustaining an ongoing occupation of a (privately owned) public space and refusing a set of demands, the movement effectively engaged in the making of counter-institutions: Zuccotti Park, Occupy’s New York base, was turned into an ambitious experiment to provide for the basic needs of participants, such as food and shelter, as well as build infrastructures of communication via its media center and forms of collective care, such as a sizable library and a first-aid station. Like other protest movements in the 2010s, Occupy grew rapidly and exponentially but could not withstand a series of internal and external challenges, including informal hierarchies and state repression. The movement revealed an inability to scale and articulate a shared long-term horizon, prompting critics to suggest that this approach just doesn’t work. The movement, the argument goes, needs more “organization,” conveying not simply a reaction against a loose movement structure but also a growing sentiment toward institutional engagement and the pursuit of formal political agendas. Throughout the 2010s, as a post-Occupy ecosystem took shape, a shift in political consciousness came about—from a political imagination centered on prefiguration and direct action toward one increasingly concerned with electoral politics and reforming the state.
However, such a shift should not be taken as a mere sign of maturity. The persistent arguments contrasting street-based action and seeking office, or horizontal and vertical organizing structures, reveal more than a dispute over methods of struggle or values. Though electoral politics have become a focus for the Left, horizontal, decentralized networks have not disappeared—as the responses to ICE raids over the past months show. The growing engagement with the institutional level is thus not a displacement of other approaches but an expanded recognition of the landscape of struggle. 15 years ago, Occupy prompted a reflection on movement capacity; today, the institutional turn signals a growing acknowledgment that outcomes are not solely determined by the choice of the correct tactic or organizational form, but by coordination over time to alter the balance of forces.
Indeed, questions of long-term strategy have pushed movements and organizers to think beyond their repertoire or methods and (re)consider more closely the leverage of their adversaries, what institutions matter and the constraints they impose, as well as the distribution of power. Therefore, the Left—or the generation forged in the 2010s—did learn from Occupy. Still, are the lessons it drew sufficient? Where does the vision for a “real democracy” stand amid the brutal antidemocratic attacks? While “strategy” has reentered movement vocabulary, has it become sufficiently ingrained and developed as a practice—or have we cultivated a partial or even defensive understanding of it?
Strategy must involve more than paying attention to adversaries, fending off attacks, or drawing a blueprint for upcoming action—recognizing the ground beneath is key, but understanding our terrain of struggle does not tell us automatically how to cross or transform it. Strategy asks how movements and various forms of political action alter the balance of forces over time. As much as tactical plans are important, these are only pieces in a larger set of puzzles, as are assessments of who holds power and of existing leverage points. Indeed, strategy is not reducible to a sequence of actions oriented toward immediate or even medium-term victories but rather must be conceived as a long-term process of political formation and coordination, through which movements and individuals learn, orient, and reorient themselves amidst changing historical conditions.
15 years ago, Occupy cracked open the hegemonic order and expanded political possibility. But creating an opening and determining its resolution are radically different things. What the present moment demands is reclaiming strategy in its deeper and expansive senses. This entails critical reflection about our shared horizon of liberation, how discrete struggles relate and might reinforce one another, and the specific roles each movement plays in the longer run—while maintaining cognizance that reflection and intervention inevitably must be rearticulated in constantly changing conditions. The US and the world have been upended—economically, politically, militarily, ecologically. Speaking of Occupy today should encourage us to confront the task it left to us, made clearer over the past years: shaping the possibilities the movement brought to the surface and realizing an ambitious vision for a new world.
