Where is occupy

But owing to its private status, it afforded a certain protection from immediate eviction. Among that first group who did go there were Marisa Holmes, then a year-old anarchist film-maker who had already visited Tahir Square, and Graeber, who would go on to write the influential Bullshit Jobs , which contended that most jobs were needless and meaningless, before his premature death last year. That first night Holmes organised a general assembly.

At the time I was not prepared. But even though the gathering was nowhere near that size, it was still bigger than any earlier efforts at protest in the area. General assemblies, food committees: this is the language of organised protest. But OWS prided itself on its leaderless principle — a stance that would bring much criticism — and on reaching decisions by public debate and group consent.

A speaker would shout out a few words, which would then be chanted by those close by, and then rechanted by everyone else. Almost immediately a strategic schism emerged.

White drafted a resolution outlining the demand, which he emailed to Holmes, but it was gently rejected. The failure to create the demand was a strategic error that was unavoidable based on the prevailing prefigurative anarchism in New York City at that time. In that idealised society, debate would replace demands. White wanted to gain momentum by organising around a single overwhelming demand that would engage universal popular support.

Holmes wanted to set up a makeshift society that would be a model for the future. It was Holmes who slept out in the square. It was an approach that called for an awful lot of meetings. Many activists love meetings. White is not one of them. Holmes, however, is a meetings person. And she was not alone. In a film she made about OWS called All Day All Week , we see a number of mostly young people excited by outreach meetings, actions groups, legal groups, communications groups, town planning, treasury and comfort groups, food committees and student assemblies.

There was even a demands group, that duly failed to come up with any demands. In the film you can see a performative aspect to the occupation, and not just in the drummers and buskers who seem to provide an endless noisy soundtrack to the proceedings. Although the autumnal weather soon turned cold, people kept coming in the early days, and the crowds kept swelling.

The police made continual attempts to stem the flow by insisting that all tents and permanent structures be removed, but Liberty Plaza, as it was renamed by the protesters, held firm.

On 25 September, protesters marched from the plaza to Union Square, where the police pepper-sprayed screaming demonstrators and arrested dozens of activists. The scenes were captured on smartphones and quickly went viral, turning up on the evening news, which served to bring more people to the protest. Ryssdal: All right. This is a weird question: Do you think the memory of Occupy can help carry the day for them? What Occupy did is it gave them a sense that other people cared about the same thing.

It reinforced their passion. And it gave them a strong Progressive Caucus within the House of Representatives. Occupy affected the people who were involved in it and the people who were watching it. Is it enough? Ryssdal: I was gonna let you go. It makes for a great story when we talk about social movements of the past. When we say Martin Luther King [Jr.

But in real life, these struggles take a very, very, very long time. It takes a long time to change the world. Our mission at Marketplace is to raise the economic intelligence of the country. Marketplace helps you understand it all, will fact-based, approachable, and unbiased reporting.

Generous support from listeners and readers is what powers our nonprofit news—and your donation today will help provide this essential service. Skip to content. In Europe, protesters did what many U. Protest-aligned parties took national power in Greece and Spain. But the central European banks clung harder to austerity policies that put housing and decent work out of reach for a generation of young people.

When the politics of providing for people who had been deprived became untenable, right-wing movements arose to blame the symptoms of austerity policies on refugees arriving from the Syrian crackdown. In the United States, well, we eventually got President Trump, the inconvenienced owner of the building at 40 Wall Street.

I recall the drugstore on its bottom floor being a popular escape route from police. Protesters everywhere tried out radical forms of self-governance in their camps, inspired by the texture of online networks.

Rather than making demands of politicians, they debated how to make politicians obsolete. Whatever ideology any individual held, together they were anarchists, in the sense of trying to root out hierarchy wherever it appeared.

When celebrities visited Occupy Wall Street to offer support, debates broke out about whether they should be allowed to speak or have any special treatment. There was a time when the open-source website for the Occupy Wall Street assembly was a beautiful machine, publishing up-to-the-minute news and discussion and proposals — a glimpse of politics moving with the speed and interactivity of the internet.

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.