# Occupy Movement > [!info] Designed split — this page is the *movement*, [[Occupy Wall Street]] is the *occupation* > This page covers the wave and its politics. The founding September 2011 Zuccotti Park occupation has its own page at [[Occupy Wall Street]]. Neither page claims the other's title as an alias. The **Occupy Movement** was a decentralized, deliberately leaderless protest wave. It began with Occupy Wall Street in New York in September 2011 and spread within weeks to hundreds of cities in the United States and abroad. Its slogan, "We are the 99%," was an argument about inequality: that concentrated wealth had captured politics and that no one had been held accountable for the [[2008 Financial Crisis]]. ## The arc | Date | Event | |---|---| | July 2011 | The Canadian magazine *Adbusters* calls for an occupation of Wall Street on September 17 | | Sept 17, 2011 | Protesters settle in Zuccotti Park, a privately owned plaza in lower Manhattan | | Oct 1, 2011 | About 700 arrests on the Brooklyn Bridge; the movement becomes national news | | Oct–Nov 2011 | Encampments in hundreds of cities; general strike called in Oakland on November 2 | | Nov 15, 2011 | The NYPD clears Zuccotti in an overnight raid; other cities clear their camps within weeks | ## How it organized Occupy ran on **general assemblies**: open meetings deciding by consensus, with hand signals and the "people's mic." It refused on principle to issue demands or name leaders. That refusal was both its identity and its main criticism. For [[Heather Marsh]], who worked on The Global Square, an effort to build decentralized infrastructure for the movement, and for the [[Stigmergy]] model of coordination, Occupy is the major real-world test. It showed that a leaderless network can mobilize at scale and set the terms of debate. It also showed the failure modes: decision paralysis, no durable structure, and nothing left to negotiate with once the camps were cleared. Anthropologist [[David Graeber]], one of its early organizers, is often credited with the 99% framing. ## How the state watched it Documents later obtained under FOIA showed that the FBI and DHS-linked [[Fusion Centers]] tracked Occupy as a potential threat and coordinated with local police and the banks that were the movement's targets. The treatment is one of the vault's standard comparisons with the [[Bundy Ranch Standoff]] (2014), where armed militia members aimed rifles at federal agents and faced no immediate consequences. ## What it left - **The vocabulary.** "The 1%" entered ordinary political speech and reframed inequality as a question of class power. - **The left that followed.** [[Bernie Sanders]]'s 2016 campaign, the growth of the [[Democratic Socialists of America]] and a generation of organizers came out of the same energy. - **The comparison with the right.** The [[Tea Party Movement]] of 2009 faced the same post-crash anger and chose the opposite organizing model: candidates, primaries, caucuses. It captured a party. Occupy refused institutions and left a vocabulary. The populist energy both tapped reappeared in the [[GameStop Short Squeeze]] of 2021, when Occupy's heirs and MAGA populists found themselves angry at the same hedge funds. ## See also - [[Occupy Wall Street]] · [[David Graeber]] · [[Heather Marsh]] · [[Stigmergy]] - [[2008 Financial Crisis]] · [[Fusion Centers]] · [[Bundy Ranch Standoff]] · [[Tea Party Movement]] - [[Bernie Sanders]] · [[Democratic Socialists of America]] · [[GameStop Short Squeeze]] · [[Resistance Hub]]