Thirteen years ago, a thousand demonstrators descended on Wall Street, occupying Zuccotti Park and kicking off what came to be known as the Occupy movement. Revisiting that moment today, we can see how dramatically the terrain of social movements has changed as our society has polarized. The organizers of Occupy Wall Street proposed to create a movement that could bring all society together against the ruling order and the few who profit from it, mobilizing under the slogan “We are the 99%.” Today, the divisions that cut through our society have only deepened, rendering it more difficult to imagine social change. Yet this only renders the legacy of the Occupy movement more important.

At the invitation of Marisa Holmes, one of the original organizers of Occupy Wall Street, we present here the conclusion to her book, Organizing Occupy Wall Street: This is Just Practice. Holmes sets the Occupy movement in the context of the movement against capitalist globalization that preceded it and the wave of similar movements from Egypt and Tunisia to Spain and Greece.

At its peak—arguably, the general strike in Oakland on November 2—the movement that spread around the country from Zuccotti Park was, in the words of one participant, “a collective force with the ambition and capacity to transform the whole city.” In reinventing the general strike, the participants opened a new horizon for 21st-century movements that has yet to be properly explored.

Although anarchists like Marisa Holmes were central to the origins of the Occupy movement, there was considerable debate among anarchists regarding how best to engage within the context that it created. Participants in our collective were critical of what we regarded as a tendency to conceal real conflicts and differences within society as a whole. Reflecting on the Occupy movement from the vantage point of 2014, we argued that the Occupy movement was limited by structural factors:

What limits did the Occupy movement reach? Why did it subside without achieving its object of transforming society? First, it offered almost no analysis of racialized power, despite the central role of race in dividing labor struggles and poor people’s resistance in the US. Second, perhaps not coincidentally, its discourse was largely legalistic and reformist—it was premised on the assumption that the laws and institutions of the state are fundamentally beneficial, or at least legitimate. Finally, it began as a political rather than social movement—hence the decision to occupy Wall Street instead of acting on a terrain closer to most people’s everyday lives, as if capitalism were not a ubiquitous relation but something emanating from the stock market. As a result of these three factors, the majority of the participants in Occupy were activists, newly precarious exiles from the middle class, and members of the underclass, in roughly that order; the working poor were notably absent. The simplistic sloganeering of Occupy obscured the lines of conflict that run through our society from top to bottom: “police are part of the 99%” is technically true, economically speaking, but so are most rapists and white supremacists. All of this meant that when the police came to evict the encampments and kill the movement, Occupy had neither the numbers, nor the fierceness, nor the analysis it would have needed to defend itself.

When a movement reaches its limits and subsides, it illustrates the obstacles future movements will have to surpass—and indeed, from the Ferguson uprising to the Standing Rock occupation to the George Floyd rebellion, the movements that followed Occupy all served to illuminate the fault lines within the social body to which the Occupy movement had addressed itself.

From the vantage point of 2024, however, the idea of a movement that aspired to encompass 99% of society seems not only naïvely utopian but arguably preferable to the intractable situation we face. Today, everyone in all walks of life is all too aware of the lines of conflict that run through our society, and various political factions from the center to the extreme right have positioned themselves to benefit from those conflicts, capturing energy from them as if from a dynamo. Now, the capitalist order is not stabilized by the illusion of general consent, but rather by the looming threat of violent conflict. If we could somehow initiate a movement that could draw people together from all walks of life to take on the ruling class and capitalism, that would enable us to transcend the deeply engrained antagonism that has trapped the social movements of the past decade at an impasse.

To accomplish that, we will need to find ways to enable those who benefit from a modicum of privilege in this society to see what they stand to gain from acting in solidarity with those worse off than them. This is one of the most important challenges before us today.

Although most participants in the Occupy movement used the language of democracy to describe the aspiration to establish solidarity on the basis of participatory decision-making, real existing democracy has always been characterized by pitched conflicts between rival power blocs. As we suggested ahead of the 2020 election,

Democracy is often framed as the alternative to civil war. The idea is that we have democratic institutions so everyone won’t just kill each other in direct pursuit of power. This is the social contract that liberals accuse Trump of violating.

But if, as Carl von Clausewitz said, war is simply politics by other means, we should consider what representative democracy and civil war have in common. Both are essentially winner-takes-all struggles in which adversaries compete to control the state.

The Occupy movement sought to challenge representative democracy via grassroots direct democracy, attempting to remove the state from the equation. We might argue that the best elements of the Occupy experiment were not the ways that it sought to move democratic decision-making processes from congresses and parliament buildings to parks and squares, but rather the ways that it decentralized agency, establishing new relations on a more or less horizontal and voluntary basis. Calling this “democratic” created an ambiguity that enabled politicians from Syriza to Bernie Sanders to draw participants in the movements of 2011 back into state politics. This is why we use the word “anarchist” to describe what we are trying to do—and why it matters that anarchists were some of the most influential participants in getting the Occupy movement off the ground in the first place.

Those who became politically conscious after the Occupy movement, who never experienced the moment of hope and possibility that it represented, stand to benefit from learning about it and drawing on its example in contemporary political experimentation. Without further ado, here are Marisa Holmes’s conclusions on the basis of her experience in and research into the movement.

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Building the New Society

An excerpt of a book by Marisa Holmes.

The square both physically embodies and symbolizes the society as a whole. Occupying the square calls into question how the existing society functions and opens the possibility for a new one to take its place. Whoever controls the square controls the future. The question is: What kind of society do we, the 99%, want to live in?

At the moment, the status quo of neoliberalism is holding on by a very thin thread. It nearly escaped a fascist coup on January 6, 2021 in the US. Elsewhere, there are also increasingly violent counterrevolutionary and fascist movements. The radical left finds itself in a three-way fight with the state on one side and fascists on the other. The two often collaborate against us. As history has shown, reform will not get us out of this situation. We cannot continue as if these are normal times, with politics as usual. There must be a true revolutionary path forward against and beyond the state and capitalism, as well as all forms of domination. Reflecting on Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and the 2011 movements can inform the direction of this path: as a common chant in OWS went, “This—is—just—practice.”

In different contexts, the 2011 movements used the terms autonomous, horizontal, and democratic to describe both their practices and ultimate goals. The revolutionary youth of Egypt and Tunisia were independent, decentralized, and horizontal, and had the goal of creating regional democratic councils. Common chants across The Arab Spring were about bread, freedom, and, above all, dignity. In Spain, at Puerta del Sol, and in 15M after, they were against all forms of representation and practiced what they called “real democracy.” They engaged in an intentional constituent process against and beyond the state and made the strategic decision to go into the neighborhoods where they squatted new social centers and defended people from evictions. At Syntagma in Greece, they insisted on “direct democracy,” created mutual aid projects, and defended the semi-autonomous neighborhood of Exarchia.

The New York City General Assembly (NYCGA), which organized OWS, defined itself as a “an open, participatory, and horizontally organized process.” During the occupation, The Declaration of the Occupation called for direct democracy, and the Statement of Autonomy asserted our autonomy from existing political structures. In one meeting of the 2011 movements in Tunis in 2013, we occupied the World Social Forum, and established an autonomous, horizontal, and democratic space. What were shared most across the new movements of 2011 were our practices of organization.

From The Global Justice Movement to Occupy Wall Street

One important precursor to OWS and other 2011 movements was the Global Justice Movement (GJM), sometimes called the alter-globalization movement. There were many direct connections and intergenerational conversations between the two. Action frameworks, agreements, and tactical plans were informed directly from the GJM. Even the people’s mic was adapted from the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle. A genealogy can be traced from the GJM to OWS.

The Global Justice Movement was primarily organized around summits of major financial organizations like the WTO. There were many months in between summits, and time for trainings and organizational development. Then, those who could afford to go, or were in some way subsidized to go, would descend on the summits to engage in a variety of creative and direct-action antics. When a summit was over, the attendees would return home. The squares were convergences around physical spaces, in opposition to a shared corporate target, where alternatives were created. However, they were not counter summits. First, they were not intended to be temporary, but permanent. Even if they were all eventually cleared, there was an initial intention to stay and hold space indefinitely.

Second, during the GJM summits, there would be convergence spaces for collectives and working groups to coordinate. Food, legal support, medical care, shelter, art making, and action-planning happened in these convergences. However, they were not very open. During OWS and other squares, those who participated generated organization in the course of the occupation. The practice of engaging in direct democracy was extended to the society as a whole. There was an invitation to participate on social media, and in person, in the co-creation of another world. This world was possible, because it was unfolding in real time before our eyes.

Third, in the GJM, there were more formal coalitions among institutional partners such as non-profits, community-based organizations, and unions. In contrast, the squares were organized largely around individual participation rather than group affiliation. Jeffery Juris calls this “a logic of aggregation” (2012). This allowed for people who were not already organized to plug in, as well as individuals to challenge the more hierarchical organizations they may have been part of. For example, there were rank-and-file workers, who were organized, but stifled by the bureaucracy and hypocrisy of their labor unions. There were organizers who had day jobs in non-profits, who held more radical politics. They could find an outlet for their real interests and talents at OWS. Organizing people as individuals into a collective created a dynamic space, where participation in our own structures grew, while the more institutional left was pressured to respond.

Fourth, during the GJM, people used participatory and democratic structures with consensus decision-making processes. This primarily took the form of councils, working groups, and affinity groups. Consensus was built in smaller groups, and then confederated to accommodate for scale. During the squares, consensus was also used, but started in assemblies and then later moved into councils. Members often rotated between groups, and the boundaries were fluid. This allowed for more flexible organization and guarded against too much specialization or bureaucracy.

Overall, OWS and the squares could be read as a next step after the GJM. Much of what was developed in the GJM was adapted and expanded upon. The biggest shift was operating in the open, in public. This generated a movement that was not only internally participatory or democratic, but outward facing and inviting for anyone who wanted to join. The 2011 movements were what I call participatory movements.

Internal Challenges

Walking down Wall Street in the financial district, one will notice a series of wooden squares in the ground. They mark the original wall constructed by Dutch colonial settlers in the seventeenth century to keep out potential invaders whether pirates, natives, or the English. It was along this wall that slaves were bought and sold. It was here that women were subjugated and trafficked. Here, JP Morgan Chase privatized the New York water system, and built his first headquarters. Here the US customs house was established, and the Bill of Rights was signed into law.

During Occupy Wall Street, we practiced a coalitional politics that wove together individual identities into a collective one—the 99%. We, the 99%, were those who had lost homes to foreclosures, those who faced long-term unemployment, or were buried under student debt. We, the 99%, were day laborers, prison workers, domestic workers, and sex workers. We, the 99% were brutalized and killed by police and stopped at borders. We, the 99% were disciplined along gender binaries and roles. We, the 99% were denied healthcare. We, the 99% were all of those long oppressed and exploited, who had simply had enough. There was a common enemy, and it was right there in front of us—Wall Street. It was the solidarity between us that was powerful. It was multi-racial, multi-national, and multi-gender. It had a lot of potential, but it fell apart.

The GJM and OWS faced many of the same internal challenges around race and gender. Elizabeth Betita Martinez reflected on the racial composition of the convergence against the World Trade Organization in Seattle, 1999. In her widely cited article, “Where was the color in Seattle? Looking for reasons the Great Battle was so white” (2000) she argued there were multiple factors that led to a lack of people of color participating in the event. The solution Betita Martinez proposed for addressing the demographic problem of Seattle, and the GJM more broadly, was for POC to get more organized themselves. She wrote, “There must be effective follow-up and increased communication between people of color across the nation: grassroots organizers, activists, cultural workers, and educators. We need to build on the contacts made (or that need to be made) from Seattle.” Manissa McCleave Maharawal reached a similar conclusion.

After the GJM there was more of a commitment on the radical left to address oppression more seriously. Some of this work was specifically centered around accountability.

Much of the work done in OWS around community accountability by the Safer Spaces Committee (SSC) was inspired by INCITE! (2006) and driven by members of Support New York (2016). The SSC consistently took a survivor-centered and intersectional approach that acknowledged the many ways power operates. It’s not as if this work wasn’t happening. It was. It just wasn’t priori- tized or valued by everyone in OWS. If more people had listened to the Safer Spaces Committee, and they had been more influential, then our spaces would have been better equipped to deal with harm and conflict.

During the park, the Safer Spaces Committee, the People of Color Caucus, Women Occupying Wall Street, the OWS Queer Caucus, and OWS Disability Caucus insisted on an intersectional framework for our work and pushed us all to do better. They called on OWS to be inclusive rather than open, and to engage more seriously with power. While we did not solve all problems, and were not perfect, there were lessons learned from the caucuses in real time, which shaped how OWS continued. During the May Day planning process, there was an intersectional analysis and a coalitional approach that were made explicit with the phrase, “All Our Grievances Are Connected.” The definition of work was broadened to include domestic work, reproductive work, sex work, prison labor, and unskilled labor—forms of labor generally excluded from the mainstream labor movement that have more oppressed people doing them. During the one-year anniversary, we used the phrase “All Roads Lead to Wall Street” and built an action framework to accommodate multiple areas of organizing and tactics. This was just not enough.

External Challenges

Occupy Wall Street and the other 2011 movements were hit on all sides by those who wanted to tear us down. This cannot be overstated. Institutionalization, cooptation, repression, and counter-revolution were strong forces working to prevent a true social revolution from taking place. Part of the current struggle against these forces involves the writing of analytical work from within our movements. If this work is not done, then our enemies will drive the narratives that current and future generations take for granted.

In OWS, there were attempts at particular forms of institutionalization. Some early examples were the Occupy Office and the Movement Resource Group. These projects consolidated access to physical and financial resources without any accountability, transparency, or oversight, and attempted to steer OWS and the broader movement toward more acceptable, “reasonable” forms of political engagement. Those involved utilized the language of affinity to justify themselves, distorting it beyond recognition.

There were informal elites throughout OWS, but they became most prominent in the later stages of offshoots. Strike Debt faced multiple power plays by political blocs who, again used the language of horizontal, autonomous, or democratic politics, but prevented these ideas from being put into practice. Instead, they worked to create formalized hierarchies with themselves at the top. Those in Occupy Sandy talked about mutual aid, not charity, but coordinators were in fact doing charity. Hierarchies were again created around resources. Similar processes played out in other squares. Given the centrality of social media, there were brutal battles for control over accounts by informal elites.

In parallel to institutionalization, there was a more overt process of cooption from political parties. The Working Families Party (WFP), a “progressive” wing of the Democratic Party, infiltrated OWS, and sought to redirect some of its energy into an electoral process. Bill de Blasio, for instance, visited the park, as NYC Public Advocate, and later ran for office using the rhetoric of the 99% and the “tale of two cities.” The Bernie Sanders campaign was even more explicit about its strategy and made constant conflations of the movement and the campaign. This happened in parallel to SYRIZA and Podemos, which considered itself a “party-movement.”

The repression was shaped by the context of the War [on] Terror. The Global Justice Movement (GJM) had reached its peak before 9/11, before the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. The GJM, was, in part, disbanded, due to escalating repression and creation of counter- terrorism campaigns. OWS came along at a time when the War on Terror was much more entrenched with drone campaigns striking the very countries in North Africa and the Middle East that were rising up in 2011. The Department of Homeland Security had developed much more widespread and integrated methods of surveillance and data collection, alongside old-fashioned in-person infiltration. The GJM could not withstand the repression, and neither could OWS.

The counterrevolution that took hold after OWS and Black Lives Matter was much more intense than anything experienced during the GJM. Actual white supremacists and neo-Nazis emerged, using many of the same digital and social media tools, to integrate and broaden their reach. They also sought to control in person public spaces. Charlottesville is one key example. Neo-fascism developed as an international movement in reaction to the potential for a real revolution to break out. It was already underway before Donald Trump ever considered running for office, although his campaign and victory definitely added fuel to the fascist fire.

Lessons Learned

Horizontal, autonomous, and directly democratic practices were shared across contexts; they made the 2011 movements happen. People had a voice, many for the first time in their lives. The energy and excitement of this was palpable and made new worlds possible. Unfortunately, the squares and OWS were met with many internal and external challenges and they could not address them all effectively. This brings us to a contemporary aim—building more intentional, intersectional, accountable, equitable, and resilient movements.

Setting Intentions

There was not strong enough organization in OWS or the squares over the long run. Being in public and open to new people meant exposing ourselves to many different experiences and understandings of the world. At the beginning, this was essential and helped fuel our growth. However, not everyone who came through the squares or other organizing spaces understood why these practices were important. They were gaining some hands-on experiences and were becoming highly skilled, but lacked a sense of movement history or ideological cohesion. Without a consistent commitment to political education and collective defense of principles, it was much easier for other political tendencies, with hierarchical practices, to swoop in and take control. Future movements must be prepared to move from the initial moment of growth into a more sustained horizontal, autonomous, and democratic organization.

Working at the Intersections

Race, gender, class, and ability were not central enough to our work. They should have been baked into the work from the very beginning. Learning from this, future movements must start with an intersectional analysis, and practice. This would include centering those who are oppressed in decision-making, action-planning, and more public-facing visible roles. It would mean listening to those who are oppressed and taking their concerns seriously. Most of all, this would mean acknowledging that while the new world is being built, we tend to replicate patterns of the old one. None of us are immune from doing things that are harmful. There is also no immediate answer or way to fix systems and structures that are so ingrained without struggle. Undoing racism, undoing sexism, undoing classism, and undoing ableism will be a constant process of abolishing what is and creating what we want.

Being Accountable

There was not enough emphasis on harm reduction or addressing conflict. We all went in a bit blind to the many possible ways that people could get hurt. There was the naive belief that everyone who participated would be well-intentioned, and there for all the right reasons. Most people were, but it doesn’t take many—only a handful really—to totally derail the work of building relationships. Future movements must have processes of accountability for all instances of harm and conflict. There must be shared expectations of all those involved to be accountable to others, and share in the work of doing accountability. There must be consequences when people refuse to be accountable and perpetuate harmful behavior. Excluding some people so that other people can keep participating must be an option.

Distributing Resources

It is essential to think carefully about who has access to resources, when, where, and why. Much like the current society, resources become sites of informal and formal concentrations of power-over others. These could include financial, cultural, social, or other resources. Given the reliance on social media in the squares and OWS, the accounts were resources. I hope that future movements take the use of social media very seriously, and how it can facilitate both horizontal and hierarchical structures. A movement is not a marketing campaign. It cannot be reduced to brands, memes, and hashtags. It is not about individual celebrities or fundraising. It is about our relationships.

Becoming Resilient

Going about making a social revolution inevitably put us at odds with the forces of institutions, political parties, the state, and counterrevolutionary movements. It is an essential step to come to terms with this fact. If there is no conflict with opposing political forces, then there is no struggle. The question really is when and where to draw a line between one’s friends and enemies. After establishing this, the follow-up question is how to be participatory and open enough to new people while protecting a project against attacks. There is no easy answer here that works in all cases. There may be different strategies and tactics given the context. Overall, though, the goal must be to minimize the influence of those seeking to institutionalize, co-opt, repress, or redirect for the counterrevolution. At the same time, there must be increasing influence of those seeking a horizontal, autonomous, and democratic revolution.

Facing our enemies was physically, emotionally, and mentally exhausting during the squares. To guard against this in the future there is a need for pacing and taking things slow when needed. There must be a conscious effort to build capacity with regular people who are sympathetic, but not professional organizers. There must be a holistic way of approaching the work and integrating healing practices. We must build a culture of care if we are to outlive fascism.

Occupy Everywhere

Wherever there are people who insist on acting as if they’re already free, the spirit of OWS is present. OWS lives in occupations of public space and in squats. It lives in rank and file independent labor actions such as work stoppages, strikes, and sabotage. It lives in direct actions during pipeline campaigns to protect water. It lives in the refusal to pay all unjust debts, whether student, medical, housing, or personal credit debts. It lives in prisoners struggling inside, and supporters outside. It lives in immigrants and refugees breaking down borders. It lives in actions against police murders, abolition, and Black liberation. It lives in Indigenous struggles to defend and reclaim land. It lives in those reclaiming Pride from corporations and police. It lives in LGBTQI+ liberation. It lives in feminists challenging all concentrations of dominating power, like the Supreme Court of the United States. It lives in disabled people asserting autonomy and fighting for healthcare. It lives in neurodivergent folks fighting for mental health support. It lives, perhaps most of all, in the ever-expanding networks of mutual aid providing material assistance and care to one another. OWS lives on, if not always in name, in practice.

The question now is how to weave together all these struggles. How can we emulate what was effective from OWS and the squares? How can we overcome all the challenges we faced? What began in 2011 at OWS is still possible, now, in the present. Let’s stop thinking of the world as it is and imagine what it could be. Then, we can really occupy everywhere.