Organizing Occupy Wall Street: This is Just Practice

Occupy Wall Street, which began on 17 September 2011 and lasted for 59 days, offers many lessons for present struggles. Read a reflection and lessons learned from Marisa Holme’s 2023 book, Organizing Occupy Wall Street: This is Just Practice.

Introduction

Organizing Occupy Wall Street: This is Just Practice is the first study of the processes and structures of the Occupy Wall Street OWS movement, written from the perspective of a core organizer who was involved from the inception to the end. While much has been written on OWS, few books have focused on how the movement was organized.

Marisa Holmes, an organizer of OWS in New York City, aims to fill this gap by deriving the theory from the practice and analyzing a broad range of original primary sources, from collective statements, structure documents, meeting minutes, and live tweets, to hundreds of hours of footage from the OWS Media Working Group archive. In doing so, she reveals how the movement was organized in practice, which experiments were most successful, and what future generations can learn.

Below is an extract from Chapter 25: Building the New Society, pgs 311 – 321, kindly shared by the author and publisher. The Commons Library has made minor formatting edits to the original text – adding paragraph breaks, sub-headings and quote marks.

Book Excerpt: Building the New Society

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 neo-liberalism is holding on by a very thin thread. It nearly missed a fascist coup on 6 January, 2021 in the U.S. Elsewhere, there are also increasingly violent counter-revolutionary and fascist movements. Thus, 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), that 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. If one reads this book carefully, it becomes apparent that there were many direct connections, and intergenerational conversations. Action frameworks, agreements, and tactical plans were informed directly from the GJM. Even the people’s mic was adapted from the WTO in Seattle. A genealogy can be traced from the GJM to OWS.

The GJM 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 summits, and 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.

1. Not Intended to be Temporary

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.

2. Convergence Spaces

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, organization was generated in the course of occupation, by those who participated.

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.

3. Individual Participation

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.

4. Consensus

Fourth, during the GJM, participatory and democratic structures with consensus decision-making processes were used. 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, J.P. Morgan Chase privatized the New York water system, and built his first headquarters. Here the U.S. customs house was established, and the Bill of Rights was signed into law.

During OWS 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 (WTO) 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.” A similar conclusion was reached by Manissa McCleave Maharawal, who I cite in Chap. 10.

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

As outlined in Chap. 11, 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 prioritized 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. I describe in Chap. 16 how during the May Day planning process, there was an intersectional analysis, and coalitional approach that was made explicit with the phrase, “All Our Grievances Are Connected”. Work definition 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, described in Chap. 17, 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

OWS and the other 2011 movements were hit on all sides by those who wanted to tear us down. This cannot be over-stated. Institutionalization, co-optation, repression, and counter-revolution were strong forces working against 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. As detailed in Chap. 15, 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, and distorted it beyond recognition, in order to justify themselves.

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. These examples are both discussed in Chap. 19. Similar processes played out in other squares. Given the centrality of social media, there were brutal battles for control over accounts by informal elites, which I go over at length in Chap. 20.

In parallel to institutionalization, there was a more overt process of co-option 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 process of co-option is described in Chap. 22.

The repression was shaped by the context of The War Terror, which I explain in Chap. 23. 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 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 counter-revolution 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 under way 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, and 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 counter-revolutionary 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 re-direct for the counter-revolution. At the same time, there must be increasing influence of those seeking a horizontal, autonomous, and democratic revolution.

Facing our enemies was very 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 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 dominate power, like the Supreme Court of the United States. It lives in disabled bodies asserting autonomy and fighting for healthcare. It lives in neuro-divergent 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, and 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.

References

• INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence. (2006). Color of Violence: The INCITE! Anthology. South End Press.
• Juris, J. (2012). Reflections on #Occupy Everywhere: Social Media, Public Space, and Emerging Logics of Aggregation. American Ethnologist, 39(2).
• Martinez, E. B. (2000). Where Was the Color in Seattle? Looking for Reasons the Great Battle Was So White. Colorlines. Retrieved September 15, 2022, from https://www.colorlines.com/articles/where-was- color- seattlelooking- reasons-why- great- battle- was- so- white
• Support NY, Accountability Process Curriculum. (2016). Retrieved September 15, 2022, from https://supportny.org/transformativejustice/curriculum/

Access Chapter & Full Book

• Chapter 25: Building the New Society, pgs 311 – 321
• Organizing Occupy Wall Street: This is Just Practice (Publisher’s website)
• Borrow from a library near you (Wordcat)

Watch Videos

All Day All Week: An Occupy Wall Street Story by Marisa Holmes
The documentary by Marisa Holmes, All Day All Week: An Occupy Wall Street Story, is an inside look at the making of a movement. From the planning stages, throughout the course of the occupation, and beyond, the film tells the story of Occupy Wall Street from the perspective of those who lived it.

Legacies of Organizing at CUNY: The Power of Collection Action – Watch Marisa Holmes from 44:00 – 1:00:00 mins.

Book Reviews and Interviews

• A Human Geography Of The Space Of The Square, review by Anitra Nelson published on Progress in Political Economy, July 25, 2023
• Organizing Occupy Wall Street: Interview with Organizer Marisa Holmes
• Coffee with Comrades: Episode 196: “This is Just Practice” ft. Marisa Holmes (listen below)

About the Author

Marisa Holmes is an organizer, filmmaker, writer, and educator based in Brooklyn, NY. She is the director of two non-fiction feature films, All Day All Week: An Occupy Wall Street Story, which captures the occupation at Zuccotti Park, and After the Revolution, a non-linear narrative of the post-2011 context in North Africa. In addition, she has authored numerous short films and articles. Her work has appeared in Truthout, Paris-Luttes, Nawaat, PBS, and Al Jazeera, and We Are Many: Reflections on Movement Strategy from Occupation to Liberation. Currently, she teaches courses on social movements and media at Rutgers University and Fordham University.

Explore Further

• Lessons from Occupy Wall Street
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