[A decade ago, a grassroots anticapitalist movement burst on the
scene, galvanizing people with its slogan “We are the 99 percent.”
It changed me, and many others, but how much did it change the world?]
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OCCUPY WALL STREET, 10 YEARS LATER  
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Molly Crabapple
September 18, 2021
New York Review of Books
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_ A decade ago, a grassroots anticapitalist movement burst on the
scene, galvanizing people with its slogan “We are the 99 percent.”
It changed me, and many others, but how much did it change the world?
_

, Molly Crabapple

 

On September 16, we published Molly Crabapple’s essay “Occupy
Memory [[link removed]],” a
personal reminiscence about the movement that began—exactly ten
years ago—with a protest gathering in Lower Manhattan that led to
the occupation of Zuccotti Park. As she relates, Crabapple was drawn
in by the unique character of its radicalism, and contributed in a
host of ways—not least, by supplying artwork for posters and
placards, a selection of which accompanies her article. This week, she
also reflected on how we might understand Occupy Wall Street in
historical perspective, and what it achieved; this was the starting
point for the conversation that follows.

MOLLY CRABAPPLE: Absolutely. I didn’t mention the WTO protests only
for reasons of space (and because I was a bit too young to have been
involved), but more than a few very active Occupiers had experiences
in the Battle of Seattle. Another, much more proximate though less
credited influence was the tragically unsuccessful movement to save an
innocent Black man, Troy Davis, from being executed by the state of
Georgia [in September 2011]. In New York, protests for Occupy and
protests in defense of Davis often merged, and Davis’s defenders
gave Occupy a better understanding of police and racism.

_These earlier or allied movements often seemed to catch fire, flame
briefly, then fizzle. People say the same about Occupy. What’s your
underlying theory of political change, how you understand the effect
of such movements?_

If one views success as the existence of Occupy-branded protest camps
across the world ten years later, Occupy certainly failed. But issues
that Occupy championed, such as student debt forgiveness, bans on
evictions, single payer healthcare, an end to the murderous war on
terror, are no longer fringe. They are mainstream. This is Occupy’s
success.

_I’m also conscious, though, that the political left has a pathology
of celebrating failure—from Spartacus to the Spartacists, and
beyond—of turning heroes into martyrs and ennobling historic
defeats. Is there a risk of this in memorializing Occupy? How do we
avoid that?_

It’s not just the left. All movements love their martyrs, who are
useful by virtue of being silent. The important part is to look
clearly at one’s own, and one’s own movement’s past, and to
speak about them honestly.

Molly Crabapple
_On the other side of the ledger, perhaps, after 2011 “inequality”
became a buzzword, Thomas Piketty went on the bestseller list, AOC got
elected, Bernie Sanders ran two historic presidential campaigns, the
pandemic bailout was very different from the 2009 one, and so on. How
do you fit Occupy into all that?_

Occupy broke the American taboo on talking about class. Even better,
it named a clear enemy: a corrupt, rapacious, and frankly
none-too-bright financial elite that they called the 1 percent, which
had bought off the politicians and was sucking all the life and money
out of everyone else. This was bracing stuff and, I’d argue, did
much to make everything you mention possible.

_I really identified with what you wrote about your queasy feeling of
demonstrations’ feeling pointless and a bit embarrassing. Did Occupy
change that for you permanently?_

Yes. Because, for the first time since the huge anti-war
demonstrations that I took part in, I saw protests
that _everyone _was participating in. It did not feel like the hobby
of a tiny, powerless subculture (however correct that subculture
was). Since then, taking part in protests has felt like the rent I
pay for living in this world.

_As you touch on in your piece, there was a lot of grayhead
eye-rolling about Occupy’s leaderless, communalist ethic, its
laundry list of demands, its lack of traditional party-political
structure, etc.—and this was very much part of the critique of its
ultimate loss of momentum and “failure.” But it sounds as though
you don’t accept this, and want to recuperate something about what
was “disorganized” about Occupy as being of lasting value. Can you
define that more?_

I don’t know what these grayheads wanted. Did they expect Elizabeth
Warren to ride in on a white horse, call a mass gathering of
square-jawed truck drivers and photogenic grandmothers who would all
spout perfect economic statistics and identical, incisive policy
proposals, and thus, by sheer force of their rightness, end
foreclosures and ruinous medical debt forever (in an incrementalistic,
reformist way, of course)? I think many of the critics who dismissed
Occupy were very comfortable: they had neither understanding of nor
sympathy for the suffering that 2008 wrought on millions of people. So
they went down to the park, found a dude in a silly hat, and used
whatever he said to distract from the imperative to address that
suffering.

_In __a recent piece in _The New Yorker
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Marantz took a deep dive into the world of organizers behind a
purported “left turn”—a reversal of the neoliberal
counterrevolution against New Deal America that we’ve been living
through since at least the Reagan era. Yet here we are with a
president in post only after the failure of a far-right insurrection
to prevent his inauguration and a Congress so finely poised on
knife-edge majorities that arguably a single senator has more control
over his party’s agenda than Biden does. Is this really the
inflection point of that left turn or the last best hope for the
republic’s democracy?_

The left turn _is_ the last, best hope for the republic’s
democracy.

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