The reason? Occupy Wall Street. Hundreds of protesters had been camping out in the park for two weeks, and a rumor flew around the encampment that the British band was going to do a pop-up set to rally the crowd.
Occupiers were angry at the state of the world in the wake of the financial crisis. They rejected the deep inequalities that capitalism had fostered. Governments around the world were shoring up financial institutions while leaving their citizens behind. And now, Occupy Wall Street was even angrier: The weekend before, the New York City police had arrested some 80 protesters — and hit some of them with pepper spray.
Radiohead was the biggest sign of the support for the movement yet. Hundreds of fans descended on Lower Manhattan expecting to catch the show, swelling the already sizable crowd at Zuccotti. Except Radiohead never appeared. The concert was a hoax. The episode seemed to show that Occupy was a disorganized, anarchic mess. No one can even agree, nearly a decade later, who started the rumor. Just seven weeks later, police cleared the park and the protest ended.
In the short term, the movement appeared to have failed. But today, Occupy Wall Street no longer looks like such a failure. It animated the rise of Sen. It was also a training ground for some of the most effective organizers on the left today. I spoke with more than three dozen people — former members of the Occupy Wall Street movement, journalists who covered it, and people who are currently active in socialism and on the left — about how Occupy Wall Street shaped the world we live in.
The tents in the park are gone, but many elements of Occupy have proven to be an enduring success. More anarchist than socialist, Occupy Wall Street was a nominally leaderless movement that refused to lay out specific demands. The hacker group Anonymous helped spread the message via blogs, Twitter, and YouTube. Organizers held general assemblies in the weeks leading up to the occupation itself.
The concept of the 99 percent vs. Columbia University economist Joseph Stiglitz, for example, had explored it in a piece for Vanity Fair earlier that year. Ultimately, it distilled a precise way of talking about the message of Occupy and spoke to the effects of inequality so many people were feeling. The image it provoked was an evocative one: It pitted the very upper echelons and wealth and power against the masses, and it set up a framework for thinking about how the political economy works.
The rallying cry allowed Occupy to be much bigger than the protests themselves. If nothing else, we understand how to organize logistics to feed and care for large numbers of people in an urgent situation. The work we did on worker co-ops is perhaps the best example of this. The nonprofit The Working World was just getting started in New York City at the time, and their first loan was to a worker co-op we started, OccuCopy. Now The Working World is the fiscal sponsor and founder of the Seed Commons , which is a national loan fund for worker co-ops.
OccuCopy eventually merged with another business to become Radix Media , which thrives today as the only union worker co-op print shop in New York City. The other co-ops we started fizzled, although many of the participants are still active in collectives and passed along assets like screen printing supplies to other activists, keeping these resources in the movement. Cities around the country have copied this effort.
Bank Transfer Days , which encouraged individuals to move their money from big banks into credit unions, also gained popularity during the height of the Occupy movement. This tactic of moving money continues to be popular as activists call for accountability from big banks for everything from foreclosures to pipelines.
During Occupy, there was also an Alternative Banking Working Group, and efforts to start an alternative bank, which echo campaigns in a growing number of municipalities across the US calling for public banks. Millennials are moving into middle age. In the solidarity economy world, former Occupiers often serve as staff and lead national and local US organizations.
Such relationships have been a source of power, and shared ethos and history. For many alums of OWS, part of that legacy has been a renewed internationalism.
This helped spark relationships and analysis at a truly global level. These days, more and more people have continued to break away from the idea that the status quo is working. The pandemic made that clear for even the most comfortable among us. It is grandiose to say that OWS was the beginning, but it certainly was not the end! Direct action, disrupting business as usual, has been a crucial component of all these fights.
Before long in Egypt — and perhaps now Tunisia — the democratic revolution turned into a new dictatorship. Authoritarians have taken power from Brazil to Belarus, while deepening their hold in China and Russia. On January 6th, the United States saw an attempted coup on behalf of a billionaire, the landlord of a Wall Street office tower who represents capitalist decadence like no other.
Wealth inequality, it goes without saying, has only grown worse. Now a decade older, many of those same activists are on the defensive, trying to protect what remnants of 18th century democracy we have left.
Veterans of Occupy are campaigning for candidates and making policy demands, attempting to secure a more humane republicanism. They have helped organize a surge of economic populism, as well as calls for climate justice, defunding police, and canceling student debt. Onetime protesters have helped lead a revival of the solidarity economy , trying to inscribe democracy into daily economic life.
Some hold positions of relative power; others are still living on the street. Some have developed software, like Pol. Perhaps the protests were too utopian, not pragmatic enough, and had some things backward.
But I am not interested in fixating on what the young and impatient Occupiers should have done instead. There is no simple formula for what makes social movements effective, for how to back up their numbers and networks with the power to make lasting change. Too rarely do we mourn all the hopeful visions forgotten when a phalanx of police comes to restore order. The fact is that when a global, unarmed movement called for a democracy worthy of the 21st century, the response from those in power was no , with all the cruelty they thought they could afford.
Wars that began in are still raging in Syria and Yemen, and elected authoritarians are still consolidating power. They are not done. Most protesters do not want to be associated with Anonymous, for a myriad of reasons. Including the Fight Club -y credo that once you identify yourself as Anonymous, you are no longer Anonymous. So their presence is often referenced at the protests by people wearing masks, but those people may or may not really be Anonymous.
Get it? What they are protesting: What have you got? They, at least, have a mission statement and a list of demands : We demand that Citizens United versus FEC which deems corporations to be people when it come to political contributions be overturned. We demand that corporate personhood be abolished.
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