Upstream - Documentary #12: Occupy Wall Street – A Decade Later (Documentary)

Starting point is 00:00:00 This episode of Upstream was produced as part of a collective of podcasts brought together to explore the legacy of Occupy Wall Street in light of the 10-year anniversary. Through this project, you can also hear an analysis of the impact of Occupy from shows like the Dig, Economic Update, and Be Labored, all podcasts we would highly recommend checking out. The producing partners for this project are the Rosa Luxembourg Foundation's New York Office and the new schools Milano Program. You can learn more and listen to some of the other episodes by visiting Rosa Lux, that's

Starting point is 00:00:37 R-O-S-A-L-U-X-DOT NYC, forward slash Occupy. Before we get started on this episode, please, if you can, go to Apple Podcasts and rate, subscribe, and leave us a review there. It really helps get upstream in front of more eyes and into more ears. We don't have a marketing budget or anything like that for upstream, so we really do rely on listeners like you to help grow our audience and spread the word. And as always, please visit upstreampodcast.org forward slash support to support us with a reoccurring monthly or one-time donation. It helps keep this podcast free and sustainable. So please do that if you can. Thank you.

Starting point is 00:01:20 And now on with the show. You're listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A podcast of documentaries and conversations that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics. I'm Dela Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond.

Starting point is 00:02:00 Join us as we journey Upstream. To the heart about economic system and discover a cardiac-naked stories of game-changing solutions based on connection resilience and prosperity for all On Saturday, thousands of protesters took to the streets of downtown Manhattan for what was described as an action to occupy Wall Street. Since Saturday, September 17, thousands inspired by popular uprisings from Spain to the Arab Spring, gathered near Wall Street to decry corporate lines of the Arab Spring. Hearing New York protesters are continuing to camp out in the park in the financial district, as part of an action called Occupy Wall Street.

Starting point is 00:02:59 A bunch of us showed up, you know, relatively unprepared for what to expect on August 2nd when they called the General Meeting. And after a little bit of uncertainty we sort of started putting together a process we decided to model in the idea of this sort of horizontal direct democracy they had in Europe. And in a way, the Wall Street action was one focus, but the very idea of building that kind of general assembly movement was a lot of what we really saw. It's day 10 of the Occupy Wall Street campaign on Saturday more than 80 protesters were arrested as hundreds, according yet another march to Wall Street. There is not what it probably gets to the interest of Goldman Sachs and so when you shut that safety valve off you create movements that seek to tear down a monolithic and tone death and

Starting point is 00:03:48 a callous power structure and that's precisely what's happening. We are 99% taking real lives in the world. Hearing me rock the city's powerful unions are set to join the Occupywalls' Free Demonstration now entering its 20th day. Their march to city hall will be bolstered by the walkout of hundreds, potentially thousands of students at major public universities in New York City, where tuition rates are on the rise. for U.S. autumn responding to the aircraft spring. And growing and growing, I hope it spills over to San Francisco and Chicago and Miami and Phoenix, Arizona with our brown brothers and sisters. It's our poor white brothers and sisters in Appalachia, so it begins to coalesce. The Occupy Wall Street protest entered its third week today.

Starting point is 00:04:45 What started as less than a dozen college students camping out in the park near the New York Stock Exchange is now hundreds of protesters and it's spread to other cities. This is literally an uprising of people who have it. And it has already started to spread across the country and other cities. It will continue to spread. It has to spread across the country and other cities. It will continue to spread. It has to start somewhere. It started here with a few hundred. It will grow and really already has grown here to a few thousand.

Starting point is 00:05:12 And will be tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of people. We got sold! We got sold! Nearly two months in to occupy Wall Street, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New

Starting point is 00:05:31 York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New, New York have evicted protesters with the Occupy Wall Street movement from Park in the city's financial district, whether it be camps since September.

Starting point is 00:05:55 So you know the occupations themselves went away, the spirit of Occupy lives on to this day. It's pretty crazy to think that it's been a decade since September 2011, but at the same time, it also feels like forever ago. So much has changed since Occupy, but sadly, a lot remains the same. And actually, if you're looking at wealth inequality and the power of the financial sector, things might even be worse. But no matter what your thoughts are on the Occupy movement, it's impossible to deny its sweeping impact, not just

Starting point is 00:06:45 on the left, but much more broadly, too. You may have heard folks say that Occupy Wall Street was a failure. And if you're talking about how the movement failed to say overthrow capitalism and usher in a new era of eco-socialism, devoid of subprime loans and hedge fund managers, then yeah, sure, Occupy definitely didn't accomplish that. But to save the movement was a failure, is to overlook so, so much. And that's what we want to talk about in this episode. The things that Occupy gave us.

Starting point is 00:07:18 The networks that were built, the ideas that were shaped around democracy, not just the electoral format democracy that's confined to the ballot box, but real direct democracy. The space that was created to exercise the muscles of solidarity and cooperativeism, mutual aid and political organizing, as well as the shifts in public discourse. In the next hour, we'll look at how the chaotic, fervent explosion that was Occupy Wall Street manifested from the moments after the encampments were cleared to today. 10 years later. Look at Occupy is a tactic, not an end in itself.

Starting point is 00:08:15 As a tactic, it was extremely successful. It raised national consciousness. It gave us a new vocabulary by which to speak about the largest transference of wealth upwards in American history. It focused the attention on the real centers of power, which is Wall Street, the big banks and corporations. So if you look at Occupy as a tactic rather than an end in itself than it's not a failure. Chris Hedges is a journalist and author. He was very active in Occupy, taking part in the Enchantments Direct Action Committee,

Starting point is 00:08:54 planning and participating in the People's Hearing, which was a mock trial for Goldman Sachs and even getting arrested. It did create this network, this solidarity, these friendships, these connections that then played out in a variety of protest movements since Occupy, Black Lives Matter, the anti-fracking movement, boycott, divestment, and sanctioned movement against Israel. It splintered out in many directions, though, effort to unionize and raise the wages of fast food workers. Many of those organizers came out of Occupy. So it provided a kind of experience, a kind of community, and I think that without seeing the name of Occupy, you can see the

Starting point is 00:09:38 effects of Occupy in numerous resistance movements throughout the country. And then the structures of Occupy, I'm not an organizer, so watching how they created non-hierarchical structures, how they created the people's assembly, how they prioritized voices that traditionally are shunted aside or marginalized. But this was all amazing to me. And just the organizational skill, people don't often understand the high level of organization it took to maintain.

Starting point is 00:10:09 Zucati, because remember they were feeding people, they had a medical tent at the same time they were trying to do activism on the streets. I mean, it was very inspiring on all of those levels. all of those levels. Occupy Wall Street emerged during an incredibly dark period in US history. The hope and change that was promised during Obama's presidential campaign turned out to be a false promise. Wall Street was held largely unaccountable after the financial collapse of 2008. And in fact, the banks whose greed and recklessness led to the collapse were actually bailed out. The bubble had burst, and everyday people were left to clean up the mess on their own. Of course, this is an old story at this point, and when you really think back to how messed

Starting point is 00:11:00 up things were back then, it's really not surprising to think about how quickly Occupy grew and how much it resonated. I think that Occupy Wall Street was part of a wave of protests that mark broadly speaking a certain moment in human history and in the history of capitalism. Ethan Earl is a Paris-based political consultant who has written extensively about Occupy Wall Street. At the time of Occupy, he was the US director of the working world, a nonprofit that provides investment, capital, and technical support for worker cooperatives. Graham, she has written very eloquently about the Interregnum. When the old has died and the new is still struggling to be born. And I think that it's clear that the 2010s, and I would say up to the present, constituted a form of interregnum and that the neoliberal order had become increasingly a zombie ideology

Starting point is 00:12:16 that nobody even really believed, but it just kept walking on. When you think back to the beginning of the millennium, and even the decade before it, it was a pretty subdued time. Things were dormant and of course it's not that things were going great. It's just that for whatever reason there weren't many popular movements, nothing to plug into. There was a brief period of protest around the time of the war in Iraq, but that didn't really last. It wasn't until Occupy during the 2010s or teens or whatever we want to call them that things really began to get stirred up. It was a sudden explosion of all sorts of different things at once. The vast majority of which

Starting point is 00:12:59 could be described as sitting somewhere on the progressive left side of the spectrum, but which encompassed all sorts of more horizontal, vertical, traditional, innovative approaches ways of doing left politics, ways of existing in this world, and this phase of whatever phase of late capitalism we might be in, there's occasionally what I would characterize as a misreading, oftentimes in good faith and sometimes in bad faith, that Occupy Wall Street was some sort of failed with social movement because it did not achieve tangible reforms. But there's a fundamental mischaracterization there, which is that Occupy Wall Street was not a reform based social movement with a specific constituency and a specific sort of defined set of reform

Starting point is 00:13:52 oriented goals. And these are incredibly important in history, these sorts of social movements, right? And I think that Occupy Wall Street was a much more of a revolutionary moment in the way that it changed people's ways of thinking, ways of relating, ways of understanding their own agency, their own ability to occupy a space in downtown Manhattan and get radical left ideas onto the front page of the New York Times or New York Post, even if it was to disparage them and then to integrate them. And this sit-in, this encampment of people who are really protesting against a wide array of the, what we're sort of viewed as the excesses and perversions of contemporary

Starting point is 00:14:50 and perversions of contemporary manoeuvrial capitalism somehow sort of sparked a fire, let a match that caught on very, very quickly across the country and across the world. We are the night out! We are the night out! We are the night out! My name is Stephanie Luce. I'm a professor of labor studies at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies and also a professor of sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center. My own personal connection to Occupy Wall Street was that I would say in the summer leading up to it, we had a number of our students

Starting point is 00:15:29 had been involved in some of the precursor activities, such as Bloomberg Bill, that took place that spring. And we were hearing a lot of talk about this proposal for Occupy Wall Street. I've been involved in a number of things in New York, but I didn't really pay it a lot of attention. I didn't have a lot of optimism about it really having any success.

Starting point is 00:15:51 But within the first week, I went down to Occupy and kind of got sucked in. It seemed clearly that it was something very different and important. So I got involved just on a personal level. I was finding myself there almost every day and engaging in some of the work particularly through the labor working group.

Starting point is 00:16:12 And then later on, I got involved with my colleagues with doing a study of Occupy and interviewing some of the key activists. The labor working group that's key activists. The labor working group that Stephanie participated in was just one of over 70 different working groups and affinity groups that were open to the public as part of the Occupied decision-making body. The meetings used a horizontal governance model that allowed for participants to comment on committee proposal using a process called a stack, which is a queue of speakers that anyone could join.

Starting point is 00:17:02 In addition to participating directly in Occupy, Stephanie co-authored a report titled, Changing the Subject, a bottom-up account of Occupy Wall Street in New York City, in which she and her colleagues interviewed 25 core Occupy activists and surveyed 729 people who participated in an Occupy-sponsored rally in March. Some of the questions they asked included, where did Occupy come from? Who were the protesters? What motivated them to join this new movement? And why did the Occupations gain such enormous traction with the media and the wider public?

Starting point is 00:17:42 A decade later, Stephanie and her colleagues are working on a follow-up report and have interviewed almost all of the original 25 activists again. We asked her what her thoughts are on the legacy of Occupy Wall Street 10 years later. I think one is this idea of shifting the discourse because before that time, kind of the right-wing analysis of the global recession was that, you know, oh poor people bought houses that they couldn't afford, or that unionized workers were too greedy and getting pensions from the public dull, for example.

Starting point is 00:18:36 And so I think what Occupy did was to really help change that narrative and to say, hey, look, it was the 1% that was responsible for that crisis. And the 1% that's been responsible for the ongoing crisis before 2008, that's been going on for decades, the 1% has been taking all the riches of our society and blaming the 99%. I think that shift has stuck, like that has fueled a large segment of the population in the US and globally to really highlight this inequality in resources and in power.

Starting point is 00:19:09 The actual occupation of Zucati Park and the other spaces around the United States and the world that people occupied, you know, didn't last very long, that's true. Ruth Milkman is a professor at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. She co-authored the Changing the Subject Report with Stephanie,

Starting point is 00:19:25 along with their colleague, Penelope Lewis. But what did last was the change in the public conversation, and especially around the issue of inequality. People like myself, social scientists, sociologists, historians, and all were very aware that the amount of economic inequality that existed in 2011 still exists, by the way, and the explosive growth of inequality in the previous decades, that was well known to experts on such topics. But it was not well known to the general public. I mean, they might have felt it, experienced it in some way, but the sort of we are, 99% slogan really got traction as people called public attention to the fact that a relatively small group of people were getting most of the benefits of what economic growth had occurred

Starting point is 00:20:13 in recent decades. And we documented this in our report that media mentions of the word inequality went up quite dramatically after 2011, after Occupy, and stayed up, compared to before. So that was one really important thing, that it just completely transformed the public political conversation about economic issues and especially growing inequality. And it also empowered that generation politically, the occupiers that I know of anyway, included

Starting point is 00:20:44 at least two distinct groups. One was a group of long-time activists and organizers who had participated in many other protests over the years and, you know, a various ages and so on. And, you know, they didn't particularly see this one as special and advanced of it. They didn't think that it would last so much longer or get so much more attention than other protests

Starting point is 00:21:03 they had been involved in. But then it did. And that was extremely empowering and made people feel that they really could have an impact on the world. And so many of them would go on to bigger and better things thereafter. So that was another impact. And then the other group were sort of the newbies, young people who were drawn to this protest, especially as it was amplified, its visibility got greater and greater over time,

Starting point is 00:21:27 but hadn't been activists before, and were transformed into activists as a result of their participation, and began to see the possibilities for social change that emerged. So it was the beginning of a whole new wave of social movement activity in this country. So I think it was a watershed moment that kind of opened the floodgates to a new wave of social movement activity in this country. So I think it was a watershed moment that kind of opened the floodgates to a new wave

Starting point is 00:21:48 of social protest led by a new generation that had, you know, most of whose members had not been particularly active politically prior to 2011. So even though the occupations themselves went away, the spirit of Occupy lives on to this day and has manifested itself both in the public conversation and in other movements that have followed. I'm going to do it. We can't understand a lot of what happened over the last decade without recognizing the role that Occupy Wall Street played in it. And I think here of the movement for Black Lives, which gained enormous visibility shortly thereafter, I think of the first Bernie Sanders election

Starting point is 00:23:17 that caught everybody off guard. I think of the subsequent election of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as well as other outspoken socialists to US Congress of the enormous rise of a DSA, the Democratic Socialists of America, which went from having being a small, tired, old Democratic Socialist party of a few thousand members to having nearly 100,000 members

Starting point is 00:23:43 and hundreds of elected officials. I think of the METU movement as well. I think about a partial rebirth of labor activism through which we've seen a real strike wave, for example, in the education sector over the last year, year and a half. I could go on speaking about climate justice and other areas. And I think that we can see direct lineages, first of all, people who were involved in occupying Wall Street, and then who learned and got into left politics there believed that change was possible in a way that they perhaps did not before, and then took that 90 number of different directions, right, into work on racial justice, climate justice,

Starting point is 00:24:26 housing justice, electoral campaigns, a massive growth in worker cooperatives as well over the last decade. So it was a space where you could find yourself and try to understand what you believe to be the way to make change happen and find others who thought like yourself. So I think that it's after a decade and in some ways a generation of a very subaltern left,

Starting point is 00:24:52 which was not able to find its foot and to find an expansive space in the public imaginary, in the public discourse, in the political or policy sphere, occupied wall structures exploded that, and then we saw the shards of it everywhere. I first encountered it in August of 2011 in Tompkins Square Park in New York City under the Harry Christian tree, the tree where the Harry Christian movement was founded. There were maybe about 60 to 100 people gathered around this tree and it was turned out to be maybe the third, depending on how you count official meeting about this idea in New York City. Nathan Schneider is currently a professor of media studies

Starting point is 00:25:53 at the University of Colorado Boulder, but 10 years ago during Occupy, he was a reporter living in New York. This was a response in turn to a call earlier in the summer made in This was a response in turn to a call earlier in the summer made in AdBusters magazine. A centerfold of, I have the physical thing right here. As we were talking over a remote audio and video recording app, Nathan held up the AdBusters centerfold. the Adbuster's centerfold. A moody, black and white image of a ballerina in an attitude arabesque pose. Arms delicately outstretched, one leg up, posing on top of the famous bowl of Wall Street sculpture in Manhattan's financial district. The backdrop of the image is a shroud of what appears to be tear gas through which you

Starting point is 00:26:49 can partially make out figures and gas mass, one appears to be holding a club. At the very top of the centerfold of the question, what is our one demand is written in red font. And at the bottom, it just says, hashtag OccupyWallStreet September 17th, bring 10th. That in turn was an outgrowth of a blog post that at Buster's had done in January or February of that year, noticing what was happening in Tunisia and Egypt and saying, you know, can we bring to rear to the United States? Right? So this was a year of uprisings. Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Jordan, Morocco, Libya,

Starting point is 00:27:54 all over the Middle East, then into Europe, Greece, Spain, France. So they kind of used the adbusters call as a galvanizing point, but it was a convergence of much more that was already underway. And so when this fairly small group of people did in fact go to Wall Street on September 17th, it was about 1,000 people. A few hundred ended up spending the night at a park called Zucati Park nearby, this kind of public private space,

Starting point is 00:28:26 hard stone ground. And it took a few days for this to get any attention at all. In many ways, at first, it felt like a disappointment for a lot of people involved. But then midway through that week, as they stayed, they had more and more encounters with police. And the documentation of that, the videos, the images started to spread. And by the end of the week, there was a protest where there was more intense kind of police attack.

Starting point is 00:28:54 And that really, really spread. Drew Moore people in by October 1st, Occupy Wall Street, was in headlines all over the world. And there were Occupy camps in cities in headlines all over the world, and there were Occupy camps in cities across the United States and around the world. There are way too many to list comprehensively, but every single state in the country had at least one city with an Occupy protest or demonstration. There were 60 cities and towns in California alone, and outside of the United States, at least 951 cities in 82 countries,

Starting point is 00:29:28 stretching from Cairo to Kito, Mexico City to Munich, Sydney to Stockholm. Occupy was of a moment where it felt like this generation was craving democracy. There was this insatiable desire for it. It was this visceral thing. And it was something people were commenting about. It was all over these movements. There was this demand in 2011. We want deeper democracy, richer democracy in our everyday lives. The inability of the systems around us to give an inch, to enter into that dance and that exploration. Okay, let's try something new. Let's explore.

Starting point is 00:30:08 Let's enter into new forms of participation and engagement and decision making. Let's open up the canvas. That didn't happen. And I think a result is that across political spectrums around the world, in all sorts of places from now, Afghanistan to the American Heartland, you see this deep distrust of democratic institutions that claim to be democratic and have really failed to live up to the democratic aspirations that people within them feel.

Starting point is 00:30:42 And so you can look at that on a macro political economic scale, the sense in which people aren't being provided for in these fundamental ways, systems are failing them in very large scales. But there's also this like local sense, that sense of democracy that the populists in the late 19th century really understood, which was that you build a national politics on the basis of everyday experience. And if you want to build a democratic movement, you need to create spaces in which people can be democratic in their daily lives and feel that power and extend that power, knowledge, and practice into ever larger scales. And Occupy still sticks with me, right? As that, that

Starting point is 00:31:27 demand, that beautiful demand, sense of possibility, sense of hope, that actually, you know, we are capable of deeper democracy than we've experienced before, and we want to enter into that. Nathan saw this happening in real time inside of the Occupy encampments. My method as a reporter was to show up early when no one else cared and stay late after everyone else was gone. And one of the things that I saw people doing when I stayed late was starting to turn into a new economy movement. The culture of the occupation was this unquenchable craving for democracy in every part of life. People were always trying to figure out how can we be more radically democratic in every moment

Starting point is 00:32:17 in how we lead our protests and how we make a decision and how we deal with bathrooms and all kinds of basic necessities. And so it was kind of natural that as the protest spaces were lost and people had to figure out their way into the economy again, they started rediscovering the cooperative movement. And I started reporting on that as I was trying to figure out where is all this energy leading. So there were efforts, for instance, to set up worker cooperatives in New York City in the Rockaways, a region that was really hard hit by Hurricane Sandy. Some of those people were involved in really building out the New York City network for worker cooperatives, which is still kind of anchor organization there. And around the country, this kind of question of, can we do economic democracy?

Starting point is 00:33:10 Can we practice the values that we were exploring in the occupation in our economic lives? So for instance, a group set up a worker co-op called AQ Copy to make flyers for the movement, basically a copy shop. It's now called Radix Media. It's a worker cooperative. And that was the natural way to build business in the context of a community trying to be democratic in every possible way.

Starting point is 00:33:35 And I felt victim to that. I combined that impulse with the anxieties about these technologies that this movement had been so much built on, the new social media, corporate driven tools and the emerging gig economy. And so within a few years, I was in a position of helping to build this movement called platform cooperativism. In no way did we claim the mantle of Occupy, but I wouldn't have been there without that Occupy experience. And the people who I was encountering there, and I was in no way alone.

Starting point is 00:34:11 Many of the people who have gotten to know in the kind of new wave of the cooperative movement were kind of formed in decisive ways in the context of Occupy. So really for me as well, it was an enormous opportunity to not just to sharpen my ideas, which Occupy Wall Street was a fantastic place for that with these rich discussions taking place around the role of worker cooperatives and other forms of democratic ownership and large scale economies, right?

Starting point is 00:34:41 But it was also a place to find people who were interested in worker cooperatives themselves, who already perhaps were in worker cooperatives, who had been part of the worker cooperative movement. Like with many other movements, it had been named very sort of dormant and subaltern. Again, we'd had this huge gap in the United States, the period where there was no visible left and worker cooperatives and its movement had sort of subsided in the public imaginary and visibility like everything else had during that period. So it was like people coming out from all different places, again with all

Starting point is 00:35:15 sorts of different ideas and interests, but many of those being in worker cooperatives. So it was a place where we were meeting people who wanted to build worker cooperatives and figuring out how we could help them to do that. It was a place where we were supporting worker cooperatives that were supporting Occupy Wall Street itself, such as Occupy. And it was a place where I was learning from people who had decades of experience in some cases. voices. So many people who I work with nowadays reveal to me that they came into awareness of cooperatives and the solidarity economy through Occupy Wall Street or various occupations, places like Boston or wherever, and that it was like completely not on their radar. Hestobon Kelly is the executive director of the U.S. Federation of Worker Co-Ops,

Starting point is 00:36:52 a national grassroots membership organization for cooperatives. For me, I had become aware of that just through a different cultural moment around sort of 90s punk anarchist movements and ways in which that was an echo of political organization in the UK and in response to thaturism and its analog in the US with Reagan and the Neocons here. As a teenager listening to punk music and going through the lyrics of bands and being

Starting point is 00:37:23 an anarchist reading groups and things like that, I was like, well, of course, before I'd ever encountered cooperatives or begun organizing them or affiliated as a member of different kinds of co-ops, I had heard about them through a lot of that literature around what it looks like to have community control, to have agency and direct deliberative

Starting point is 00:37:43 whatever democracy stewardship to have agency and direct, deliberative, whatever, democracy, stewardship over the kinds of, you know, mutualist institutions at the smallest level. But whatever your road is to there, actually arriving at that place and being like, oh, we do have this critique of how our economy is structured, how power flows in that way to reproduce those inequities economically. So I had a sense of cooperatives in the solidarity economy, and then I got plugged into them because it was already I was on the lookout for opportunities to engage in these structures, these mutualist projects.

Starting point is 00:38:19 That's just a very different path than I think what a later generation of cooperative organizers, many of whom are my colleagues nowadays, and our leaders nowadays were, you know, 10 years out from Occupy Wall Street, and these are folks who only first heard about them through encounters in the occupations themselves. So yeah, I do attribute a lot of the audience and interest and supporters that we have now, I do attribute a lot of the audience and interest and supporters that we have now, I think especially around worker cooperatives, to the sort of legacy, the aftermath of what came

Starting point is 00:38:56 when Occupy Wall Street started to ebb a little bit, but the deeper analysis and self-education that people took on, that that continued to shape people who really, I think it started with this sort of rhetorical idea, you know, yeah, another world is possible. We were doing that all the way through the anti-war stuff, but really to say, if that's true, if it's true that another world is possible, then what is it that we can do to help to bring about that world? People went from another world is possible to some education about what that might look like,

Starting point is 00:39:32 learning a little bit about cooperatives, and then immediately they were able to see or google or visit, oh, these are enterprises that exist right now, like in my burrow in New York or in my city, right now, like in my burrow in New York or in my city, whichever occupied chapter or whatever you were participating in, to be able to see an actual project and be like, oh, it's not just that theoretically workers can be the sort of owners of the means of production. Here are 10 businesses in my backyard that exemplify that. Let me find out more about them. Let me talk to those workers themselves. Here with that's like, what was their journey.

Starting point is 00:40:06 And more importantly, let's get busy building some of these cooperative projects and businesses or at least joining the movement and seeing how we can contribute to the work that's already underway. So, yeah, I think the impact, all the way up to people who are currently on my board, people who have founded new organizations that do corporate business development or technical assistance or financing non-extractive loan funds and things like that. So many of them were turned on to that from Occupy. occupied. I knew two people who were involved and I was it. I really didn't know anyone else who

Starting point is 00:40:56 was involved in a deep way. Tammy Shapiro is a New York City activist and facilitator, co-founder of Movement Net Lab, and currently the program director of the NYC Network of Worker Cooperatives. They basically got me involved in two different working groups. One was the Movement Building Working Group, and the other one was planning a big action on October 15th, and that meeting had people across working groups from our state of Wall Street. So basically what that ended up doing was

Starting point is 00:41:25 situating me between a cross-section of folks in New York City and coordinating interoccupy, which was connecting people nationally across the country. And that was the role that I kind of maintained for most of our Iowa street. Tammy had been an organizer for almost a decade before she got involved with Occupy. Experience that put her in an ideal position to help create an online organizing platform and communication channel for Occupy and its many working groups. And so our first call was bringing people together. I mean, basically we were in a office building

Starting point is 00:42:01 in a few blocks from the park and there were a lot of people there actually and there were about a hundred people on the call and we asked did people want to connect nationally and what did they want to connect about and who would want to help make this happen and so we asked who wanted to help coordinate this effort and people raised their hands from Philadelphia from LA from Michigan from Seattle and that first call, those people we met on the first call, we pulled together into a meeting and that became an preoccupy. Interoccupy played a crucial role in connecting the various occupations around the country

Starting point is 00:42:43 during the period of the Occupy encampments and actions, helping the different areas of the country share tactics, strategies, and simply just providing a sense of connection and solidarity. But unlike the encampments themselves, inter-occupy and the networks and connections it fostered, didn't end when Sukade was cleared out by the police. They emerged again a year after the evictions when superstorm Sandy made landfall in New York. Burkain Sandy crashing on shore, winds now at 90 miles per hour. Show the system going right into New York City.

Starting point is 00:43:25 The East Coast is being humbled with the power of a record-breaking Superstorm. I will first visit the city. Superstorm Sandy devastated New York City, causing massive flooding and power outages, which in some cases lasted for weeks. The official disaster relief response was woefully inadequate in many ways, especially in hard-hit areas like the Rockaways, a narrow peninsula lying along the coast south of Brooklyn. The glaring gap that was left by official authorities, however, was quickly filled by grassroots network of activists and volunteers. And because this spontaneous community-led relief effort was supported in large part by the

Starting point is 00:44:10 already existing networks formed during Occupy Wall Street a year earlier, it became known as Occupy Sandy. The story of how Agnipeis Andy started I think is actually really fascinating, much like the interoccupy story. It was right after the one year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, and some of us went away on a retreat, and the goal of the retreat was to really debrief the year. You know, what had we done well? What would we do differently? The next time a movement moment happened, whenever that may be. And we spent a weekend upstate. It was beautiful.

Starting point is 00:44:52 It was fun. We had some really, really great discussions. And at the end, we all rushed home because we heard there was a storm coming. We didn't talk about organizing in the storm. We just knew we had to get back. So we all rushed home. because we heard there was a storm coming. We didn't talk about organizing in the storm, we just knew we had to get back. So we all rushed home, and the actual storm happened.

Starting point is 00:45:10 I luckily was not really impacted. You know, some branches fell on my block, but that was it. But the day after the storm, someone I had driven to the retreat, showed up at my house because his jacket was in my car. And so he showed up to get his jacket, and then he convinced me, actually much to my dismay,

Starting point is 00:45:26 to drive him to a place in Red Hook that folks were starting to gather to help support people who'd been impacted. Red Hook is a neighborhood in Northwestern Brooklyn that was hit particularly hard by Sandy. And so I drove him there, and then people were there talking about how we're gonna start organizing. And there was a desire to figure out how do we get the word out about

Starting point is 00:45:47 what we're doing, how do we hold the information and because I was connected to interoccupy and interactive pie had built this whole website basically to do just this I connected what was happening there to interoccupy and that was basically how I got involved and every step of the way from there was what was happening what became Occupy Sandy. There were a lot of efforts happening in different places all at the same time, but most of us were connected because we had been involved in Occupy Wall Street. Everything that happened was built upon infrastructure that was created during Occupy Wall Street.

Starting point is 00:46:17 So the next day, someone contacted me who I knew he was Occupy Kitchen, so he cooked a lot of food for different meetings and events and things like that. And he said, I have some food in the Occupy Kitchen store, Dairy Would That Be Useful. So I went to pick him up, and we were heading towards Red Hook again, and we got word that there were too many people at Red Hook, and we needed to go somewhere else.

Starting point is 00:46:40 So we were in touch with someone from Occupy Faith who was a pastor at a church. And he said, sure, you can come put your stuff down at this church. And so we got there. We started setting up shop and people from Red Hook started sending folks to us. And what ended up, you know, we're just going to leave our stuff for the night. We were there probably for a month or two months as one of the main headquarters in Brooklyn where we were distributing to the different areas that were impacted.

Starting point is 00:47:14 Dozens of different distribution hubs quickly popped up all over the city. People would drop off their supplies at these hubs and then other folks would deliver these supplies to wherever they were needed most at any given time. It was a really sophisticated operation with lots of moving parts, and it was all done in the spirit of Occupy, meaning that it was based on mutual aid as opposed to charity, and it was done horizontally, without any of the hierarchy or cumbersome bureaucracy that often comes with official relief organizations like the Red Cross. And finally, it was done in a way that made sure the communities themselves were put front and center.

Starting point is 00:47:56 There were no savior or victim dynamics. Occupy Sandy volunteers worked with the communities they were helping. And so everything, the foundation of Occupy Sandy was built a family foundation of Occupy Wall Street. We had a database set up. You know, everyone during Occupy Wall Street, we had the moments in the park, but people kept working all year on creating infrastructure, on figuring out how to, you know, it's not like the movement ended when the park was rated. And I think it was precisely when the

Starting point is 00:48:35 park was rated and we were no longer able to stay there, that things like interoccupy became more important because they were the virtual spaces that were holding the movement. And so there were databases that we had been building so that we could do better intake and they were already built. So we were able to use that as we were bringing volunteers in. Occupy Sandy was comprised of nearly 60,000 volunteers and activists at its height and developed its very own relief registry, a legal team, a medical team, a team of translators,

Starting point is 00:49:04 a prescription drug delivery system, and a meal program serving around 20,000 meals a day. It's still considered one of the most effective grassroots relief efforts in U.S. history. They kind of saved the city, which is pretty ironic when you think about how a lot of the folks volunteering had been brutalized and violently evicted from Zucati Park less than a year earlier. You know, when you have a moment like Occupy Wall Street or Occupy Sandy, there's a latent network that gets created and you need the moments to massage the network. The moments that reminds everyone that the network is still there.

Starting point is 00:49:39 And that's exactly what Occupy Sandy was. It was a moment where we had this network it had been created. It wasn't quite late, but it also was kind of fizzling. And then we had a moment that reminded us that that network is there, that it's useful, that we actually have a lot of power. Power that didn't end with the disaster relief work. Efforts during Occupy Sandy, which were informed by Occupy Wall Street itself, in turn inspired an explosion of organizing and economic democracy efforts over the months and years that followed in the

Starting point is 00:50:12 Rockaways and beyond. So, during Occupy Wall Street, interoccupy, was trying to figure out what do we do next. So, we were starting to talk about becoming a co-op, and what would it mean to become a worker co-op? And in that process, we had connected to Brendan Martin from the working world which had recently moved from Argentina to New York City. The working world, if you recall, is the organization that Ethan Earl, who we heard from earlier, was the director of US operations for during the time of Occupy. The working world helps provide investment, capital, and technical support to worker cooperatives in the US. Brendan Martin, who Tammy met during Occupy Wall Street, is the organization's founder and

Starting point is 00:50:56 lead director. You know, a lot of people had lots of jobs and lots of employment and folks were interested in co-ops. So because I knew Brendan from the Occupy Wall Street time, I brought him to a meeting with folks who were interested in co-ops from across the Occupy Sandy landscape. Occupy Sandy was connected to people in Bracelet, Staten Island, Pony Island, New Jersey. So we were connecting a lot of places and all those folks were showed up to this meeting and we had a discussion about what would it look like to support people with co-ops and we brainstormed a bunch of ideas. The one that I worked

Starting point is 00:51:24 on, which is actually the one that ended up happening, was in connection with Br-ops, and we brainstormed a bunch of ideas. The one that I worked on, which is actually the one that ended up happening, was in connection with Rockaway. So we started talking to the pastor of the church where we had a relief site, and we said, are you interested in this work? Because we knew that he was really concerned about employment for his congregation. And we knew that worker co-ops were useful for lots

Starting point is 00:51:41 of different populations, including immigrant populations, which were particularly population that belonged to this trick. And he was. So we started setting up basically worker co-op infosessions that turned into a academy. And it was a partnership between the working world, another individual who was involved in worker co-ops and occupied sandy volunteers. And like by sandy volunteers didn't know anything about worker co-ops and definitely nothing about business, but we were organizers and coordinators. So we were playing that role. And the working role folks were playing the role of, you know,

Starting point is 00:52:12 work-a-co-op training and sort of supporting the occupied Sandy organizers who were supporting the teams that were trying to start worker co-ops. The co-op academy that Tammy helped create was called Worker-owned Rockaway Cooperatives or the Works Program. Through those relationships that we built, doing this mutual aid work right after the storm, we were able to build a lot of trust, because we were there, we showed up, they knew us,

Starting point is 00:52:33 saw our faces, and the Works Program, I could see just how much hope and excitement there was in the room, the spaces were so energetic. I mean, when we first started doing these academies, we had food that was still being cooked by the Occupy Kitchen and delivered. We had volunteers who were doing childcare and we were doing it in English and Spanish,

Starting point is 00:52:53 but without interpretation equipment. So we were doing everything in consecutive interpretation, which meant we were in the small church full of people with kids running around, food, and then the whole evening was in English and then Spanish. And what that meant is that different communities in Rockway who didn't normally actually interact,

Starting point is 00:53:12 were interacting through this work or cloth space. So very vibrant and energetic space. And it was a real honor to support it at the time. There was an element of the functioning of Occupy, like the experience of trying to have what we know I'd say prefigurative politics, just to try and live in that park and function as direct democracy to feed and provide health care and so forth. Here's Stephanie Luce again, and I think there are a lot of lessons that were learned from that experience as well, good and bad, like the limitations of that, as well as the beauty of what is possible. And I think some of those lessons have played out

Starting point is 00:54:09 in subsequent mutual aid efforts, whether it was in Superstorm Sandy, whether it was during COVID in the pandemic, the people who practice mutual aid and rely on some of those strategies, rely still on some of the lessons learned in Occupy. I mean, it had been going on before Occupy 2, but I think Occupy had some an important intervention there. Whether you're talking about climate disaster,

Starting point is 00:54:32 you know, pandemic, police, you know, brutality, like the idea that to be already organized and have those networks in places so crucial, you're not going to respond, you know, that well, if you don't have that in place. And I think Occupy really helped set some of that terrain here in New York City. As we mentioned earlier, Stephanie, along with her colleagues Ruth Milkman and Penelope Lewis, authored a report in which they interviewed 25 core Occupy activists just after Occupy ended. Now, they're currently working on an updated report

Starting point is 00:55:05 in which they have re-interviewed almost every single one of those original 25 individuals. Going back to them 10 years later, it is remarkable how consistently everyone is still deeply politically engaged. Now, that ranges a lot from people who are, for example, Sandy Nurse, who is running for City Council in New York. People who are doing their political work full time as a job, labor organizers and so forth.

Starting point is 00:55:31 To some who have their political work has done the other methods through their music, through their teaching, through their research and writing, for example. But they all see themselves still pretty deeply engaged in political struggle and political work. What's, yeah, been so interesting to me is just to see that there are different trajectories in terms of the way the activists have gone in terms of their relationship to electoral politics or their relationship to direct action, their relationship to, you know, formal organization, but they all still see themselves as part of this general struggle, which is the struggle

Starting point is 00:56:05 against the 1%. There was a certain basis of protest against wealth and equality, income inequality, economic inequality, but it was very much also about racial justice, about climate justice. It was about anti-militarism. It was about housing justice. It was about anti-militarism. It was about housing justice. It was about labor movements. It was about a mutual aid. It was about worker cooperatives, as I was mentioning before economic democracy. You can go on and on and on. It was a place where people could find themselves, right, and find ways to express themselves and into experiment with ideas that again had previously been very

Starting point is 00:56:47 subaltern in mainstream let's say American society So suddenly kids from Indiana and maybe had never had the opportunity to enter left political meal use to talk about Marks or or whomever else right right, as well, from elect intellectual historical tradition, we're able to find themselves, find others who were like-minded in one way or another, and use these physical spaces really to experiment. So it was a massive surprise explosion of experimentation with all sorts of different left ideas. I think in the moment where Occupy was popping off, because we forget sometimes the narrative was building as the campaign was developing. And it's not like people went in with a framework of wealth inequality, the 99 percent, like

Starting point is 00:57:43 part of the function of the occupations was raising the awareness once people were there, right? So it was sort of like, whoa, there's this, it's almost like a bonfire or something, it's like it attracts the humans who might be alienated for any number of reasons, which was another part of the elegance of Occupy, regardless of your class background, age,

Starting point is 00:58:03 so many people found a reason to be in touch with their alienation and then through that to seek affinity with other people who were alienated and then they sort of connected in these occupations. I still see my you know social networks are totally populated by people from that. I mean one thing that was really striking to me was, when I look at, you know, how Facebook tells you how many friends you have in common with somebody. Normally, I get a friend request or something,

Starting point is 00:58:33 it's like, okay, you have five, 10, 15 friends in common. If it's somebody from Occupy, it's like, you have 400 friends in common, right? The density of the network was just of a different order than ordinary life and that inevitably produces, you know, connections, effects, consequences that as every network is are not linear, are emergent, are their own thing yet it's impossible to say that they weren't in some way connected to the density of that network that arose from packing a bunch of people deeply, deeply committed to doing something about the state of the world in one place or in multiple places around the country

Starting point is 00:59:20 around the world that had this kind of isomorphism about them. Part of the lasting legacy of Occupy Wall Street is it reinserted a class consciousness, even if it wasn't explicitly so, that there's sort of a latent class consciousness that people, there's a new common sense understanding of how our economy is structured, of how it's not serving, almost all of us,

Starting point is 00:59:46 including people who are upper middle class, who are not part of the 1% right, and that curiosity and that orientation, that curiosity of like, well, what's really going on behind the scenes, has everything to do with how people are interpreting and navigating the world we live in now, and how that then has helped to feed, not only to feed into particular movements that bring, for example, a racial analysis around the racial wealth gap and anti-black racism or the legacy of the 2008 financial crisis and how it really wiped out black wealth that has not recuperated at the pace that White wealth has. But I think in a lot of ways that class consciousness was the beginning, it catalyzed an intersectional understanding of how actually all of these movements are, it's one movement.

Starting point is 01:00:40 It is us trying to fight for emancipation, liberation, agency, and power, including the extent to which a lot of our own wealth is being vacuumed, like siphoned off from us. Even things around, like the Me Too movement and other kinds of hashtags, Black Lives Matter, that a lot of those things, I think, tapped into a proliferation, a common understanding of our agency, that I think traces back to Occupy, that idea that we can do something. And I think that there was an early misjudgment or an unfair critique of Occupy that it's like, what even was all of this? You've galvanized and mobilized all these people and you didn't have clear demands about

Starting point is 01:01:24 what needed to happen. And it's like, yeah, but in retrospect, I don't know that that was what the purpose of Occupy was. What it did was it shook people awake from this reverie of, you know, to that point 30, 40 years of neoliberal policies that most folks are pretty ignorant about and got them turned on to what really is going on here?

Starting point is 01:01:48 Why do we feel like we're sort of spinning our wheels? These are the all these different movements and also How does this help us understand our stakes of mutual or mutual stakes of liberation? That we're not going to get free by like just reforming of liberation that we're not going to get free by just reforming bank regulations, consumer protection kind of policies, we're not just going to be free by doing a cap and trade thing around climate. That actually all of these movements really do need to be woven back together, and I think a lot of that does tie back to Occupy. to occupy. Thank you to Do Make Say Think, Will Stratton, Chris

Starting point is 01:02:32 Sibrisky, Taylor Dupree, Carl Blau, and American Football for the music in this episode, and thank you to Beth and Mirror for the cover art. Upstream theme music was composed by Robert. This episode of Upstream was produced as part of a collective of podcasts brought together to explore the legacy of Occupy Wall Street in light of the 10-year anniversary. Through this project, you can also hear an analysis on the impact of Occupy from shows like The Dig, Economic Update, and Be Labored. The producing partners for this project are the Rosa Luxembourg Foundation's New York

Starting point is 01:03:10 Office and the New Schools Milano Program. You can learn more and listen to the other episodes by visiting Rosa Lux, that's R-O-S-A-L-U-X-DOT-NY-C-FORWARD-SLA-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-U-X dot NYC forward slash Occupy. And special thanks to Jenny Stanley for reaching out to us about producing this episode and for all of her support along the way. Upstream is a labor of love. We distribute all of our content for free and we couldn't keep things going without the support of our listeners and fans. Please visit upstreampodcast.org forward slash support to donate. And because we're physically sponsored by the nonprofit

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Upstream - Documentary #12: Occupy Wall Street – A Decade Later (Documentary)

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