Occupy Movement Archives - Public Seminar

Activism

Occupy, Fifteen Years Later

What does today’s Left owe to those nights at Zuccotti Park?

September 17, 2026 • by Nara Roberta Silva

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 ...

Activism

Children of 2008

A guide to the changing landscape of the labor movement

March 12, 2026 • by Dave Kamper

Solidarity, we’ve always thought, is more difficult at a distance. The great, mythic union victories of the 1930s, like the Flint Sit-Down Strike of 1936–37, when the United Auto Workers beat General Motors and opened the door to organizing the auto industry, were won by workers who lived and worked ...

Activism

Ten Years After Occupy Wall Street

A moment of madness that began on September 17, 2011, illuminated the world where the “99 percent” lived

September 17, 2021 • by Nara Roberta Silva

Ten years ago, on September 17, 2011, a few hundred people spent the night at Lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park and formally initiated the movement known as Occupy Wall Street. Occupiers had no immediate goals and the occupation lasted two months. But it wasn’t insignificant, and its importance as an inflection ...

Activism

Americans Have Been in the Streets for Almost Ten Years

The legacies and lessons of Occupy Wall Street, the Women’s Resistance, and Black Lives Matter

June 11, 2020 • by Peter Dreier

In his call with governors on June 1, President Donald Trump said the current protests are “like a movement, and it’s a movement that if you don’t put it down, it’ll get worse and worse. This is like Occupy Wall Street.” Astonishingly, like that broken clock that is correct twice a ...

Americans Have Been in the Streets for Almost Ten Years

Feature

Artist-as-debtor, Debt-as-Creator

The unseen debt sustaining the art market

April 15, 2019 • by Noah Fischer

This article is part of a series of texts published on Public Seminar in the lead-up to the Digital/Debt/Empire symposium in Vancouver in late April 2019, convened by Benjamin Anderson, Enda Brophy and Max Haiven. Is there a better place to glimpse the logic of capitalism than at art fairs, those ultra luxury trade shows ...