Substack 4
Laura Wiederspahn
10/28/22
ORST 198M
Substack 4
Occupy Wall Street reinvigorated a new era of protest because of the repeated assemblies occurring for multiple weeks, and how people were free to make decisions in their principles of working. Occupy Wall Street was a unique and trendsetting social movement due to the ongoing gatherings day after day in an open space, and the ability for protestors to declare their needs over time rather than facilitators telling people what to do. Occupy Wall Street was a model to follow for other organizing events across the country due to its obvious effectiveness. One example of the movement’s success was how it allowed for individual organizations like the Debt Collective to gather support. After Occupy Wall Street, the Debt Collection organization won billions of dollars of student loan cancellation for debtors, and that demand originated at Wall Street. Similar to how the Debt Collection gained attention at Occupy, movements recognizing police brutality began within this movement, like the Dream Defenders. Protestors at Occupy Wall Street included working class people of all demographics from New York City, and some experienced their first interactions with police violence. Nelini Stamp describes how within the first two weeks of Occupy Wall Street, there were increasing arrests, shoves, and overall aggression from police officers. Stamp details how one day the police used orange netting to surround a group of protestors and pepper spray was everywhere. She concludes that this event was; “an awakening for a lot of young white folks or more affluent folks who didn’t come from overpoliced communities, actually saying and trying to hold the police accountable”. After this event, Nelini believed that people across the US were more engaged in acknowledging acts of police brutality such as the wrongful killings of Ramarley Graham and Trayvon Martin. Overall, the large-scale organizing at Occupy Wall Street ignited a fluidity of movement building and increased the stamina of those organizing in places all over the country. Facilitators like Nelini Stamp then moved around and shared knowledge and direct action skills to other communities. Occupy Wall Street influenced movement building everywhere, because there was such a pronounced and determined emphasis on the important matters being protested for. Occupy Wall Street addressed issues of class, income, and housing inequalities, and these matters resonated with other communities around the country, making Occupy Wall Street such an influential movement.
It’s possible that Occupy ushered in a new era of protest because of the collective longevity of the movement. Nelini Stamp, highlighted that the main difference in Occupy Wall Street from other movements was how people were saying “we’re going to stay here, and we are going to collectively work together to build another world because we believe another world is possible”. I think that Nelini noticed that this movement differed from others due to the physical, empty space that was occupied on repeat, as well as the networking that came from the organizing. Those who attended Occupy Wall Street had confronted the limitations of electoral processes, and realized that change could come from protesting and filling physical spaces such as Wall Street, where the source of various oppressions were taking place. The efforts from this movement were seen globally, and therefore had a ripple effect for direct action movements across the country. The way that facilitators and organizers took their experiences from Occupy Wall Street and shared this knowledge within other cities in the US demonstrates the horizontality of organizing that has taken place since Occupy Wall Street.
Occupy Wall Street was informed by movements like the Seattle WTO protests most likely because of the scale of the massive street protests. The massive scale of the Seattle demonstrations involved around 40,000 protestors, and dwarfed all previous demonstrations in the US. Furthermore, both the Seattle WTO protest as well as the World Social Forum movement involved planning for action months in advance, and included local, national, and international organizations. These movements could have influenced Occupy Wall Street because of their size, organization and planning, as well as the physical space they consumed.