Bluesky

The date is October 15th, 2011, and it’s the height of Occupy Wall Street. The movement had launched barely a month earlier, when hundreds of activists with sleeping bags descended on Zuccotti Park, a small public space blocks away from Wall Street, to protest growing income inequality, brutal government austerity measures, and other signs of a seriously unjust economy. Around midday thousands of us stream out of our home base and hit the streets, heading uptown. As the cops stretch their line to block us, people pour through the gaps like streams of water, forcing them to race us and try to regroup at the next intersection. There are just too many of us, and we’re too fast, too relentless, so they give us the streets, deciding to simply follow us as we snake our way between cars like waves around boulders. 

Soon, the march breaks up into different groups, each going to a branch of a different bank, and blocking their entrances. We shut the banks down for hours, until dozens are arrested. We continue from there to a rally in Washington Square Park, which fills and fills and fills until its entire ten acres are completely covered with protesters. Moments after walking off the makeshift stage, I can’t remember a word I said, only the sea of people, the shining faces, the sun glaring down on us, the extraordinary feeling of momentum.

After the rally concludes, we march again, beginning our journey of the thirty-five blocks to Midtown. Now there must be over ten thousand of us, so it’s impossible to go all together. We clog the major arteries of the city to a chorus of cars honking—some in frustration, some in solidarity. 

It’s evening by the time we make it to Times Square—80,000 of us by our count. We sing and chant and light sparklers, feeling big and powerful in a way that to this point I have only read about in books. I stand on a trash can on the corner of 42nd St and Broadway, and can see across the street the ABC building, which has a rolling ticker on its facade, where breaking news scrolls across a massive screen. And then suddenly, as if the world is responding to all these people here together, to our chants, to this dream, the ticker pumps out, in big, red, block letters: OCCUPY WALL STREET GOES WORLDWIDE. 

It feels like time has stopped. Where the days have felt like weeks, these few seconds of watching the red letters tick across the black screen feel not long, exactly, but rather like they’re on a different plane of existence. In this time that has stopped, with this sense that we are part of something world-historic and wondrous and dangerous all at once, I can feel the despair that has for years shaped my sense of powerlessness loosening its hold on me. And I know that years from now I will remember this exact moment as the first time I really considered that this movement—or movements like it, movements of the multiracial working class, movements for the world we all deserve—might win.

Fifteen years ago, Occupy Wall Street shook the world. Sparked by people’s anger at the banks that caused the Great Recession and their disappointment with President Obama’s response, and inspired by a wave of pro-democracy movements from Greece to Spain to Tahrir Square in Cairo, the occupation soon became a whole little world of its own, with hundreds of people camping out and many more spending their days there. At any moment, one might find a half-dozen planning meetings in progress, fresh meals being distributed, an impromptu concert by an actual rock star, an infamously loud and relentless drum circle, or a march to disrupt Wall Street. OWS became the launching pad for a dizzying amount of nonviolent disruption all over the city, leading to thousands of arrests. And the movement spread to hundreds of sites across the country, not just in big cities like Los Angeles and Philadelphia but also in Charlottesville, Virginia; the lawn of the Nebraska State Capitol; and a parking lot in Yellow Springs, Ohio. The demonstrations that emerged included hundreds of thousands of people across the country.

The movement reintroduced class struggle into the mainstream narrative as the “99 percent versus the 1 percent,” politicized and trained an entire generation of activists, and led to dozens of new organizations and campaigns, ultimately ushering in a new era of social movements that drew unprecedented numbers of people into the streets to fight for racial justice, climate action, a free Palestine, and more. Looking back at it now, it’s clear that it also laid the groundwork for the surge in organizing for democratic socialism that has taken place over the past decade, from the presidential campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders and the rise of AOC to the recent victory of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the exciting candidacies of left populists across the country.

But Occupy itself was short-lived. Two months after it began, police in cities all over the country raided the occupations and arrested their inhabitants. This was, perhaps, the way it was always going to end: The power of the militarized state far outweighed the power of a burgeoning social movement. But those of us who were there know that Occupy’s collapse was also the product of avoidable mistakes, internal weaknesses, and unhealthy tendencies in the movement. Those stemmed in large part from what I have called the “politics of powerlessness,” a set of ideas and behaviors that fetishize being the righteous underdog, turning movements away from their public and the broader task and inward toward each other. When our movements get used to being on the margins, they begin to accept their powerlessness, and they think and act in ways that perpetuate it. Though the political climate has changed significantly since then, underlying similarities remain, and there is plenty we can still learn from OWS:

Movements must actually want power. At Occupy, the politics of powerlessness took the form of tearing down leaders, refusing to articulate real-world demands or craft a strategy, and engaging in paranoia about being co-opted by liberals and unions. Many other movements and organizations suffer from similar dysfunctions: an insistence on being right over being effective; an obsession with maintaining the boundaries of the movement as though it were a club rather than a vehicle for mass change; an unwillingness to make hard choices that lead to good strategy. Movements must be willing to make sacrifices to get power and build the kinds of structures and processes needed to seize it and wield it.

Movements must combat despair. It is understandable to feel that the world we deserve is out of reach. But despair keeps us home, closes doors, kills movements—and what’s more, it doesn’t reflect the truth: We actually don’t know what’s possible. Occupy itself is proof of this. Mere moments before Occupy began, many of us didn’t really expect it to work. And then it did, at least in some ways, and here we are, 15 years later, tracing the impacts that are still unfolding around us.

Movements must create a sense of belonging that appeals to huge numbers of people. The best antidotes to despair are meaningful action and victories that open up our sense of possibility. Winning movements welcome people in all their beauty and brokenness and trust that those people will develop into agents of change through the movement’s vision, structure, and smart strategy. At its best, Occupy was the epitome of this: so expansive and easy to participate in that people who’d been ignored by the political system for decades could see themselves and their dreams in it, and they began to take action.

The world is, in many ways, even more frightening now than it was 15 years ago. But we are lucky that there are movements around us today that are breaking through, from the resistance to ICE’s Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota, to the rise of democratic-socialist electoral power, to local struggles against data centers and housing insecurity and more. They are teaching us a path out of the politics of powerlessness, out of despair, into mass movements. They are showing us that we can have the world we all deserve if we fight for it.