Occupy Movement

What became globally known as “Occupy” or “the Occupy Movement,” and more popularly in the United States as “Occupy Wall Street,” emerged as an international social and economic justice movement involving hundreds of thousands, or depending on how counted, several million people. Although Occupiers followed the law in wide measure, they were frequently defined and treated as deviants by the state because of their fundamental opposition to governing political, economic, and social control institutions.

Occupy arose in response to the global economic crisis of 2007–2008, which resulted in large downturns of stock markets and the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Internationally, Occupy is connected to burgeoning democratic movements claiming inspiration from the Arab Spring, and aligning itself with popular European resistance to crippling austerity policies imposed by grossly indebted states, such as Spain and Greece. In the United States, Occupy provided an outlet for outrage at the government's response to the financial crisis. The state chose to bail out large private financial institutions even as these same institutions issued evictions and foreclosures on homes and businesses. The state failed to provide protections to a public unable to bear the costs of devalued houses or to maintain small businesses in the face of growing unemployment and trillions of dollars of lost consumer wealth.

Occupy took hold in the United States with coordinated protests in the financial districts of multiple American cities on October 17, 2011. The protests were prompted by a call to action by Adbusters magazine with media attention focusing on Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan near to Wall Street itself. The movement spread quickly and, with its quintessential slogan of “We are the 99%,” called for a class war against the wealthiest 1% of society. The latter were portrayed as the owners of greedy economic entities responsible not only for the economic collapse but also for the wide national gap in wealth, for the government's failure to protect its citizens from the housing bubble, and for the corporate media who looked to sales and profits instead of warning the public about a deregulated capitalism let loose and a war on Iraq that was misleadingly achieved and extraordinarily costly.

The Occupy movement quickly defined itself by the use of nonviolent resistance and protest; the occupying (encampment) of public spaces (parks, squares, etc.); and the symbols of tents (in encampments), general assemblies (organizational governance by consensus), and the “human mic” (group repetition of a speakers' statements to ensure all can hear). State resistance to Occupy soon filled America's television screens with scenes of riot police inflicting harm on citizens exercising constitutional rights of protest. Two important incidents—virally disseminated on the Internet—included footage of the violent expulsion of the Occupy Oakland encampment, in which an Iraq war veteran protester was critically injured, and footage showing a small group of University of California, Davis Occupy students being heavily pepper sprayed as they sat in quiet resistance to a police demand that they disperse. Such scenes raised public sympathies and evoked memories of Civil Rights and Vietnam-era antiwar protests, which had included both the occupying of buildings and state violence against citizens.

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