Occupy movement

Initiated primarily by anarchists in the fall of 2011, the US Occupy movement brought ideas of class struggle and direct democracy to the forefront of the national consciousness. People occupied hundreds of parks and plazas around the country, practicing horizontal self-governance, training a new generation of activists, and organizing countless direct actions against the disproportionate power of the richest 1%. "Inequality is back in the news, largely thanks to Occupy Wall Street," wrote Paul Krugman of the New York Times.

By early 2012, the parks had been cleared and the movement had mostly disappeared, aside from some national "days of action" and a few lasting working groups such as Occupy Sandy and Strike Debt. Some have claimed Occupy was mostly ineffectual and a missed opportunity, while others claim the long-term impacts will be quite significant.

Origins in New York

On 2 August 2011, anarchists in New York attended a Workers' World Party (WWP) rally that had been falsely advertised as a general assembly to a put into action the "Occupy Wall Street" proposal pitched by the Canadian magazine Adbusters. Frustrated by the authoritarian WWP, the anarchist-leaning majority of the crowd broke away and formed a real general assembly, establishing working groups that began planning the 17 September occupation of Zuccotti Park. They developed the slogan "We are the 99%" to draw attention to the extreme inequality between the richest 1% and everyone else.

The camp held daily general assemblies that strove for full consensus but could make decisions with 90% agreement. 32 working groups formed to run a kitchen, a library, a health clinic, sanitation, livestreaming, and many other projects.

The camp kept a strong commitment to horizontality. Using a simple technique called the "human microphone," crowds repeated speakers' remarks so that everyone in the park could hear. As Sarah Resnick recalls, people would refuse to amplify oppressive and hierarchical messages:

During announcements, a man who claimed to carry a message from the Egyptian revolution spoke to the GA: 'Choose your leaders now!' he cried. 'Choose one demand now or your movement is lost!' The human mic ceased amplification, drowned by audible disapproval. This 'leaderless resistance movement with people of many political persuasions,' as it calls itself, was not about to concede autonomy or participatory democracy or any of its founding tenets-not yet at least."

Mark Bray interviewed 192 leading Occupy Wall organizers and found that 39% self-identified as anarchist and another 33% "had 'anarchistic' politics (anticapitalist, antihierarchical, direct action-oriented) that were largely indistinguishable from anarchism."

Occupy Oakland

Occupy encampments sprang up around the country, but none were as militant as Occupy Oakland, established in early October. The day after a brutal police raid on the camp, a general assembly called for a general strike on 2 November. When 2 November came, masses gathered downtown under a "Death to Capitalism" banner, and tens of thousands shut down the Oakland port. A black bloc-led march smashed corporate windows, and a nighttime riot, according to a first-hand account, smashed "most of the businesses and city offices around the plaza, including a police substation."

Peter Gelderloos reflects, "Occupy Oakland, which was far from nonviolent, triggered a general strike, spread critiques of capitalism that surpassed OWS's populist rhetoric, and disrupted the functioning of the government and economy far more than any other Occupy." The "violence" reported by Gelderloos only referred to vandalism and graffiti, and perhaps some unarmed self-defensive tactics during such actions.

Crime went down by 19% in Oakland during the encampment. Rebecca Solnit reports, "Occupy was so powerful a force for nonviolence that it was already solving Oakland's chronic crime and violence problems just y giving people hope and meals and solidarity and conversation."

Evictions

Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Oakland were cleared in November. Writing in Harpers, Jeff Madrick argued that government repression was "the real cause of Occupy's decline." He elaborated, "Taken together, the coordinated and disproportionate actions of the NYPD, the FBI, and Homeland Security represent a campaign of suppression without which Occupy might well have evolved into something more formidable."

According to David Graeber, when authorities cleared the camps, "the liberal establishment more generally, made a strategic decision to look the other way."