This summer, Nurse won the Democratic primary for city council in her Brooklyn district. Local government has access to resources, she realized: there are only so many times you can take out the bolt cutters to access a space and then get booted out before you wonder what needs to happen to keep it open.
When she put out a call on Facebook for a masseuse to aid her campaign staff, their bodies wrecked from long hours knocking on doors, it was Shapiro who answered, saying that her partner was a masseuse.
Nurse hired him. It was a concentrated amount of people in a space that allowed for ideas and co-creation … [it gave me confidence] that where I was going, there were many, many, many people pulling in that direction. O ne morning this past summer, I rode my bike to Zuccotti park.
NYPD barricades were grouped together on the east side. On the south side, street vendors sold falafel and smoothies. Construction workers gathered on the west side. I searched for a trace of Occupy, but found only well-maintained stone slabs and floor lights, perfectly spaced trees and flower beds.
Today, OWS is the networks and campaigns and political shifts it generated. It is the people and work and experiences to which it led thousands, catching so many of us in the right time and place to have our lives upended, altering trajectories or cementing those already in progress. You probably felt it in your own life, but for the actual participants, it was participation in a community for the first time in their lives. People are separated from one another. They can work in a participatory community.
They can set up their own food supplies. They can have meetings where things can be discussed. Life can be different. There are different forms of existence than just individual subordination to a master in a gig economy.
But for two months in , this tiny park modeled the beauty and the mess of trying to reorganize society on different terms, and that, in turn, pushed many to continue searching for new possibilities in the ways we live, work, eat and engage in the world. Nicole Collazo-Santiago leads a chant outside the Goldman Sachs building.
The movement launched a generation of leftist activists —and gave them a vision of real change. That was 10 years ago. Topics Activism features. Reuse this content. President Obama has responded to the growing pressure by mandating new carbon cuts for power plants, signing a first-ever emissions-slashing deal with China, and vetoing a Republican measure to push through Keystone although his decision in May granting permission for Shell to drill in the Arctic struck many as a disturbing reversal of his climate promises.
When it comes to money in politics, Occupy also drew mainstream attention to the corrosive influence of wealth on the political process. That helped spur a nationwide movement as 16 state legislatures and more than U. The message has resonated on both sides of the aisle, as presidential candidates from Clinton to Republican Senator Lindsey Graham call for a new era of campaign-finance reform to remove big money from electoral politics.
The student-debt crisis is another magnified arena where the Occupy protests shouted first and loudest—and in which serious policy shifts are now afoot. Those movements also spurred a rebellion by student debtors, known as the Corinthian 15, who in April celebrated the closure of the for-profit Corinthian College chain, which they had accused of deceptive marketing and deliberately steering students into high-cost loans. And in late April, nine Democratic Senators joined a list of 60 Congress members supporting a resolution to institute four-year, debt-free college nationwide—a dramatic departure from piecemeal proposals of the past.
Most significant, perhaps, is how the debate over inequality sparked by Occupy has radically remade the Democratic Party. The plan behind the Rolling Jubilee was simple — and smart: Organizers raised money to buy delinquent debt that financial institutions often sell for pennies on the dollar. Instead of trying to collect that debt, they forgave it.
Alumni from that went to the Debt Collective , a union for debtors that has helped students launch debt strikes, such as former students of the now-defunct for-profit institution Corinthian Colleges.
The attention the Debt Collective drew to the issue of student debt, including for those who took out loans to attend institutions that were fraudulent or broke the law, resulted in millions of dollars of loan forgiveness. It propelled regulations to protect student borrowers against misleading and predatory practices. Gazette, said of the movement. The conversation around debt right now — and specifically student debt — is front and center.
Sanders in campaigned on a message of free college, and the majority of the Democrats running in the presidential primary back the idea or something similar. Calls to break up the big banks and bring back Glass-Steagall, a Depression-era law that separated commercial and investment banking but was repealed in , have roots in Occupy as well. She started holding teach-ins about the law and eventually became part of a group called Occupy the SEC.
That group sent a more than page comment letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission on the Volcker rule , a regulation included in the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill that bars banks from conducting certain investment activities.
Some of the movements that grew out of Occupy Wall Street were more directly similar, like Occupy Homes, an effort to try to help Americans hit by foreclosures and evictions during and after the crisis, and Occupy Sandy, which helped communities affected by Hurricane Sandy after it hit the East Coast in the fall of Occupy was also a launching pad for several people who would go on to become influential figures on the left.
Berger is one of the founders of Momentum, a group that trains organizers of social movements. Berger is also one of the founders of If Not Now. Much of his work is focused on the importance of social movements speaking to broader audiences and avoiding just talking to themselves. Smucker, who told me that he was initially skeptical, went to New York after he saw Occupy take off. He wound up staying for a year to try to help build movements and train people. He acknowledged that work might not have always been so visible.
For many former Occupiers, life has been more complicated. Cecily McMillan, for instance, was arrested at an Occupy protest months after the original encampment and was subsequently charged with and convicted of assaulting a police officer as he tried to lead her out of the park.
She was convicted of a felony and jailed at Rikers Island for 58 days. She wrote a book about the experience and now lives in Atlanta. Those more immersed in Occupy tended to see it as a major force, while others on the periphery or whose involvement in the left is more rooted in current events downplayed it.
A number of people pointed out that multiple other social movements, especially the Movement for Black Lives, have been essential. Charles Lenchner, who was on the Occupy tech committee and helped create an email list for it, and Winnie Wong, who helped start the sustainability working group at Occupy, created Ready for Warren to push Sen.
Elizabeth Warren D-MA to run for president in , and that eventually turned into People for Bernie in support of the Vermont senator. He is still one of the administrators of the Occupy Wall Street Facebook page. We talked about the kind of movement we wanted to build together. Most of the people in the circle were in their earlys, but there were older people too. None of us felt represented by the people holding public office.
We all agreed that massive, systemic change was required. Occupy was never my ideal protest. It could be messy and frustrating at times, but I also knew my perfect social movement would never appear. The conversations I had that first afternoon, sitting in a circle with random strangers, convinced me to stick it out. I quickly became so invested in the occupation that I asked my partner, the musician Jeff Mangum, to come sing for our fellow protesters in hopes it might raise their spirits.
Today we take for granted that social movements exist, but Occupy emerged at a moment when public demonstrations were practically nonexistent. Just seeing people out in the streets was exciting. If nothing else, Occupy forced a conversation about class and capitalism in America. We talk about the fact that our economy is broken, and name socialism as a possible and increasingly popular alternative among younger people , at least.
A decade ago, such ideas were basically taboo. Former occupiers are working to transform the system from inside and out. I never would have guessed that Occupy Wall Street, given its staunchly outsider stance, would help breathe new life into electoral politics.
Beyond the Sanders campaign, lots of Zuccotti Park regulars are currently engaged in electoral work in various capacities, including Nelini Stamp, now the director of strategy at the Working Families Party, and Leah Hunt-Hendrix of Way to Win, a women-founded progressive donor and political strategy hub.
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