Book Review: Occupy! Scenes from an Occupied America

Occupy Wall Street was a movement of many faces. Its impact on the public debate was significant, sparking support and criticism from a variety of sources. The occupation of the park, a ‘privately owned public space’, awoke the interest of the media, triggering nationwide media coverage and generating significant online activity. Behind an almost two-month occupation of a 3,100 m2 park in downtown Manhattan, an element crucial to Occupy Wall Street gaining scale and achieving significant media coverage emerges: Its discourse. Acknowledging that a discourse encompasses a set of ideas, values, identities and activities signified by the use of certain semiotic choices, this paper explores how the different bits and pieces of the Occupy Wall Street discourse play out in the social, political and communication arenas. The methodology is based on empirical and exploratory research. Interviews are conducted with professors, activists, protesters, journalists and editors, most of them based in New York City. Meanwhile a media analysis is performed based on online activity, mainstream media coverage and tag clouds generated out of hundreds of articles from three leading newspapers of various types and political inclinations. Results reveal a social movement represented by protesters whose one common aspect was their frustration with the economic, social and political systems in the United States. This responds to an ideology named “the critique of capitalism.” Despite lacking a single, unified message, Occupy Wall Street managed to deliver strong semiotic choices behind the narrative of “We are the 99 percent,” ultimately producing a compelling, media savvy discourse. OWS also accomplished influencing the public conversation by relying on social media networks. This was reinforced by the very occupation of Zuccotti Park, which would symbolically reenact the movement’s narrative and serve as a storefront for journalists to gather constantly changing stories. In contrast, OWS’ depiction in the news varied considerably, showing a constantly shifting and volatile narrative particularly subject to events of a violent or unsettling nature. This generated increased media coverage, but ultimately affected both public support and the movement’s morale. Still, if there is one thing that Occupy Wall Street indisputably achieved, it is bringing back the public debate on the aggravating issue of economic inequality and its repercussions on the American people.

Social Movement Studies, 2016

Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, 2011

The Journal is interested in how the dynamics of #Occupy and the broader movement manifest a self-learning process of a movement. Like many others, we see the strength of this movement not in its rhetoric but in its ability to bring many into coordinated action. We see #Occupy as a juncture of protest and aesthetic- our research here aims to capture the ways in which people get swept up into a movements and what and how they confront each other's ideas in action. The forms in which the movement communicates to itself are its medias, its aesthetics. We are interested in how individuals respond to the occupation's contexts in order to create a political. We understand that self-knowledge is generative of more real solidarity. This project proposes the act of movement research to reveal the conflicts and tendencies within movements. The researchers have been conducting interviews to better understand the challenges, contradictions and knowledges learned from within this growing movement. We present it here as a snapshot in order for others to dwell in the specifics of this movement so that we as activists, artists and thinkers may better prepared ourselves for the coming years. http://joaap.org/webspecials/dispatches.html http://www.ecoledumagasin.com/session21/

Class Race Corporate Power, 2013

The op-ed evaluates the successes and limitations of the Occupy Movement in the United States. Ronald W. Cox argues that the Movement was inspirational in directing media focus to the trends of growing inequality and the privileges and power of the one percent. The critique of establishment parties and progressive organizations was a key part of the Occupiers efforts to rethink the meaning of social change. The limitations of the Movement became evident, however, in its extremely decentralized structures that emphasized consensus over majoritarian decision-making, and in its refusal to acknowledge and hold accountable its own leaders.

International Sociology, 2015

The Occupy Wall Street movement caught many analysts of social protest by surprise. Although there were isolated social protests against social inequality and disenfranchisement in many parts of the world, the Occupy movement as a global phenomenon was unprecedented. In this review essay, three recent books that focus on the social context that contributed to the Occupy Wall Street movement are discussed. The role of anarchism in imparting the distinctive characteristics of the movement is emphasized.

Contemporary protesters confront a dual-struggle. Most obviously, the struggle of protest is directed at targets in an effort to make social, cultural or political change. Yet, in order to engage the struggle of protest, activists must prevail to some degree in a struggle to protest. The struggle to protest pits citizens against a multidimensional policing strategy designed to incapacitate the protest itself. The research here examines the Occupy Wall Street struggle to protest by identifying and analyzing a dozen “moves of resistance” performed by protesters to counter the New York Police Department’s efforts to incapacitate protest through spatial constraints, surveillance and information control. The analysis here focuses on the first two months of OWS protests in New York City based on data derived from two week-long field observations in New York City during the first and second month anniversaries of the occupy protests as well as interviews with activists, news media and activist accounts, legal reports, and legal observers.

Cultural Studies <=> Critical Methodologies, 2013

Will Occupy Wall Street be our May 1968? I ask the question not because I want to make a comparison between how the events might inspire political reflections. In terms of reflection, much has come from May 1968—directly and indirectly—and perhaps the essays collected here are among the first of what will have been much reflection, too—much reflection, that is, many, many years from now. No, I ask the question in terms of what we’ll have learned from Occupy: Will Occupy teach the same thing that ‘68 should’ve taught us about ourselves as political subjects?

2014

This text analyses the U.S. Occupy movement as a particular societal response to the crisis of neoliberal hegemony, and as the initial stirrings of a counter-hegemonic project. Here, the movement is situated within the context of a blocked transformation, in which the finance-dominated accumulation regime, despite falling into a deep structural crisis, nonetheless remains dominant. Instead of a post-neoliberal transformation, we are experiencing a resurgent neoliberalism. [...] In this text, I focus on four specific interventions of the movement at the front line of the crisis to show how it responded to the eviction from the public squares and regrouped, and how it navigated these tensions. My aim is, on the one hand, to provide a historical picture of the post-eviction state of the movement and, on the other hand, to provide an analysis of the movement’s developments and current blockages. The four examples are as follows: ‘Occupy Our Homes’, a multi-city network opposing home foreclosures and evictions. Using direct action along with affected home-owners, this intervention brings the movement into direct confrontation with the process of accumulation by dispossession (David Harvey). Occupy Labor describes the connections between Occupy and the labour movement. I will try to show how this relationship contributed to the growth of the new movement, on the one side, and to the emergence of a new round of labour struggles against precaritisation, privatisation, and wage dumping, on the other. Here the movement has connected and supported struggles against a ‘recovery’ based on further class polarisation. Mobilisations of the ‘graduates without a future’ in multiple campaigns against student and consumer debt. In these struggles for debt relief, we see state-interventionist strategies, attempts to build an autonomous debtors’ movement, and mutual aid initiatives. Seeking debt relief, these new subjects are attempting to protect themselves from financial ruin and shift the burden of the crisis of over-accumulation onto the ‘1 %’. ‘Occupy Sandy’, a rapid mutual aid network developed to aid victims of Hurricane Sandy, who were left unprotected by the eroded state safety net, and to defend them against debt-based, personal recovery strategies. In this example, we see the attempts to develop an alternative to a ‘disaster capitalism’ based on the dispossession of low-income urban populations and debt-based recovery, through the formulation of a holistic alternative recovery called ‘the people’s recovery’.

Cultural Studies <=> Critical Methodologies, 13(3), 2013

This article investigates the possible geographies generated in Occupy Wall Street's emergence and subsequent evictions from multiple sites of occupation. As Occupy Wall Street (OWS) moves into other spaces, most notably the home, we counter the application of a priori analytics of traditional social movement studies, through which OWS would be seen as unified (with leaders, corresponding constituencies, and clearly crafted demands). Instead, we argue for a relational conception of spaces of politics, and emphasize the indeterminate multiplicity that we believe is crucial for ensuring continued critique and agitation. The argument is advanced, first, by considering the theoretical disjuncture between OWS and social movements, and second, by turning to OWS's geographies of movement and settlement. We conclude by suggesting that, when OWS goes home, it does not retreat from politics. From a relational perspective, the home is itself a space of politics and not a secure, enclosed site to which one returns when the political is left behind.