Jason DeCrow/AP Photo
Occupy Wall Street protesters join a labor union rally in Foley Square before marching on Zuccotti Park in New York’s Financial District, October 5, 2011.
Friday is the tenth anniversary of the beginning of Occupy Wall Street, a monthslong activist annexation of public space around the world. Almost to this day, the media depicts Occupy as an inchoate mass of discontented young people with no real ideas or specifics or strategy to bend politics to their liking. And yet in 2011, when it began, the Democratic Party’s standard-bearer was trying to figure out how to cut Social Security and raise the Medicare eligibility age in a grand bargain with Republicans over the deficit. Today, the Democratic Party’s standard-bearer, the previous standard-bearer’s vice president, is trying to spend trillions of dollars to give people universal pre-kindergarten; free community college; expanded health care, child care, and elder care benefits; and a Child Tax Credit that amounts to a universal basic income for children.
This shift within Democratic politics would not have been possible without a progressive movement that sprang in large part from Occupy, both in its willingness for confrontation and in its analysis of how the economy was not working for most people. Occupy has direct linkages to the movement to fight inequality, the movement to cancel student debt, and both of Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns, which were staffed by a number of Occupy veterans. Occupy also demonstrated how the state can crush dissenters of all kinds, giving rise to further scrutiny of police brutality.
One of the first people in Zuccotti Park in New York City, the original Occupy encampment, was Winnie Wong, a founding organizer who went on to work on both Sanders campaigns, and now continues as a media maker and online activist. She reflected on ten years since Occupy and how it precipitated social and political change.
An edited transcript follows.
David Dayen: I get a little frustrated by this commemoration, and its focus on whether Occupy succeeded or not. Do you think the framing of the question “Did Occupy change politics?” puts a ridiculous burden on people who were just expressing discontent with the system?
Winnie Wong: I think Occupy Wall Street was the beginning of a social movement that I think we’re now in the thick of, which is good. I don’t think there’s going to be an end to the struggle, because it’s very difficult to fight the ruling class. They’re very well resourced and equipped to do battle. But I think we’re doing a very good job.
It’s hard to even explain what I feel about Occupy Wall Street. I have no desire to go to the park on the 17th. I’m not a nostalgic person, I don’t look back on the things I do with any sentimentality. I’m an organizer, every conversation I have is an organizing conversation. And a lot of organizing came out of Occupy. There’s People for Bernie, Strike Debt, and half a dozen more organizations continuing this work. Some are stronger than others.
Prior to Occupy Wall Street, activism was for the most part single-issue. Occupy, specifically at Zuccotti, was a space for activists advocating for their issues. And it suddenly became intersectional activism. The ruling class had been able to keep nuclear activists in their lane, away from the anti-war activists, away from the Black Panthers. They were able to keep people separated. You couldn’t do that when we were holding physical space.
Courtesy of Winnie Wong
Winnie Wong, right, in Zuccotti Park
I know you’re not given to looking back, but what do you think drew people to Occupy in the beginning? Why was it able to take off?
There’s a straightforward answer to that: It happened at the right time. It happened at a time when social media platforms were becoming more widely used by the public. A lot of tech-savvy Occupiers understood that we could use social media to broadcast our discontent, and broadcast images of how the state criminalizes dissent. And it caught fire. You are not supposed to be able to broadcast dissent, the ruling class didn’t know how to deal with that. So they dealt with it through force, through crushing it.
My way in had nothing to do with electoral politics. I was fresh out of a program in urban planning. I was thinking about Buckminster Fuller, vertical gardening, thinking anything is possible. In Zuccotti Park, they had a compost bin that I set up myself. I brought in power chargers, weird things that have nothing to do with my life now.
Many possibilities were happening in the park at once. It was like an incubator. There was a lot of talking and discussing and mic-checking. Out of that, we got this picture that it was us against them. That is powerful because it’s actually true. We are the many and they are the few.
That’s interesting that you highlight the criminalization of dissent. In addition to broadening the understanding of inequality, do you think Occupy also broadened the understanding of police use of force beyond just the Black and Latino populations? Like white people were being hit with tear gas now.
Yes. It definitely was the imagery of young white women getting their hands cuffed and thrown to the ground that shocked liberals. Liberals were sympathetic to us for a good couple of months, until the media said, “What are their demands?” Because the state had to come up with something quickly to dismiss us. The truth is there were a set of demands, they were ridiculous at the time. But these ideas are things that are more likely to happen in our political system today.
The whole “what are their demands” thing was always off to me. The initial call in Adbusters was to find one idea, and I feel like Occupy did. It was systemic inequality and an economy that doesn’t work for most people. Why is that seen as a failing of the movement?
Up until that moment, there hadn’t been a successful mobilization of people critiquing capital and capitalism. For the capitalist class, that was terrifying. We had people at Davos shaking in their boots. This was an inflection point and they didn’t know how to stop this. They had no way to criticize mostly middle-class white kids and an invisible Asian woman going against the state. We had 1,500 encampments around the world, the network effects were in our favor. So they stamped it out violently.
Two years later, we started Occupy Sandy [a crowdsourced mutual aid effort to assist victims of Superstorm Sandy in the New York City area]. I was there.
My history started on September 17 at 9:00 am ten years ago and never ended. Now the Green New Deal is Occupy, the fight for health care is Occupy. And we have allies inside Congress. We don’t have enough allies. We had a chance with Bernie and couldn’t get him across the finish line. But I’m not sad about the $3.5 trillion infrastructure bill that could see daylight. I never thought this was possible six months ago. I was very much a naysayer. I thought it would be cut down. Now I’m like, OK, maybe.
I don’t think any of this would have been possible if that movement had not started. [Democrats] would have been passive. Occupy greatly expanded the parameters of political participation. And by political participation I mean protest. Because protest is explicitly political.
I think people don’t recognize how the Sanders campaign and Occupy had all these linkages that go back to the 2016 “Draft Warren” movement and even before that. Could you explain that history?
In 2014, it became apparent to me that Occupy Sandy would not become a long-term organizing project, with infighting in the group and municipal government not being conciliatory for long-term community work. I became demobilized quickly. We did everything right, we raised money to give out 700,000 meals. I was very demoralized.
I didn’t want to participate in organizing and activism. I thought, I’ll be a permaculture designer. I was getting insane offers from architecture firms. Like, there’s a billionaire who wants indoor vines. I’m thinking I’m going to kill myself now. I was pretty depressed.
And Charles Lenchner [a fellow Occupier] trolled me into starting Ready for Warren. He said, “I know you hate electoral politics, you’re a ‘small-a’ anarchist, but we can’t stop now.” I said, “What do you mean? Look what they did to us. They’re turning the Rockaways into a mini-mall.” He said, “Elizabeth Warren, what do you think about her?” I didn’t know much, just that she’s a senator. What I found out was compelling to me. Here’s a woman who understands what happens inside financial institutions.
After a couple meetings, we came up with this idea to start a PAC to encourage her to run against Hillary, because we knew another coronation for a Clinton would be a disaster for the world. I view Occupy as very much an anti-war movement, like all movements should be. And I was very concerned about Hillary starting more wars.
I said, “OK, let’s encourage [Warren] to run. If she does, great, if not, maybe it’ll light a fire.” We were also looking at Keith Ellison. He and Barbara Lee were the only leftists in Congress. So maybe he will run. And Warren initially disavowed us—I don’t want anything to do with these people, I don’t want to run for president, you’re crazy. After a couple months, when MoveOn co-opted our work, she realized this group of liberal activists put her on the map and she became a household name. She began to not disavow us, but was still emphatic that she wasn’t going to run.
Then we heard Bernie was thinking of running. His goal initially was maybe to raise $5 million, and get the conversation going around social democracy and democratic socialism. So we said let’s do it, let’s support this guy, and let him know that we were Occupy Wall Street founders, because it’s four years later and we’re on the map. Let’s release a letter and get comrades to sign off and support his run. That’s how People for Bernie was born. #FeeltheBern was definitely invented by our group. We decentralized it by giving the [People for Bernie Twitter] password away to 50 other Twitter feeds and 100 Facebook groups.
Bernie wanted to meet with us in 2015; I didn’t want to because I thought we would be stymied. I then met my mentor, RoseAnn DeMoro with National Nurses United (NNU), who said we will spend as much as we need to get it done. People for Bernie got on the map because of our relationship with NNU. A true grassroots group would normally never be taken seriously. We needed an ally like NNU to stand behind it and resource us. That helped the inside campaign put together by the great organizer Claire Sandberg, who I work with closely now. She created a really sophisticated organizing program, which was about getting people to really do something. We wanted to ask people to redirect their energy from this movement to phone-banking and door-knocking.
And that was the real lesson of Occupy, right? That a mass of people coming together can channel their passion and build something greater than the sum of its parts, and that this can actually make a difference?
It’s the only way. And it’s something they can never take from us. If each person understands what they are able to do, then we have a revolution. That’s a lesson a lot of us have learned over the last decade.
