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.
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