Generation Occupy

May 31, 2021
Journalist and novelist Levitin (Disposable Man) examines in this abundant yet inconclusive study the influence of the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests on subsequent social uprisings and progressive causes. A cofounding editor of the Occupied Wall Street Journal, Levitin contends that the movement galvanized a generation of activists and upended top-down models of civil disobedience. He situates the occupation of Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park within the context of the contemporaneous Arab Spring uprisings, documents Occupiers’ harnessing of social media to spread their message through “meme-ready slogans and sound bites,” and talks with participants about their reasons for joining the protests. Some of the activists and journalists Levitin interviews suggest that Occupy’s “polarizing tone” and leaderless structure contributed to its collapse, while others see the movement as a successful precursor to Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and the rise of Bernie Sanders. Levitin includes colorful vignettes of his time at the protests, and offers fresh insights on union workers’ participation and the Rolling Jubilee campaign to abolish student debt. But many of Occupy’s biggest contradictions, including the question of whether its lack of organization was an essential ingredient or a handicap, are left unresolved. Still, this is a noteworthy contribution to the discussion over why Occupy Wall Street happened, and what it meant.

July 15, 2021
A vigorous history of the Occupy Movement by a journalist and activist. "Collapsed both from its own lack of structure and from the state violence that suppressed it, Occupy vanished almost as quickly as it had arrived," writes Levitin. It did not die, however. Occupy has spun off into numerous social justice enterprises, one of the most vocal being the movement to resist and forgive student debt, another being the battle against economic inequality (Occupy "introduced the vocabulary of the 99 percent and the 1 percent, putting the crisis of inequality on the map"). Though it seems to have been born overnight and to have centered on Wall Street, Occupy, by Levitin's account, really emerged slowly from the ashes of the Supreme Court's 2000 decision to award the presidency to George W. Bush, who, activists held, was firmly in the thrall of big business interests. That seems to have been confirmed when the court followed up with Citizens United, which gave corporations the same civil rights as individuals, and especially the right to provide endless streams of money to like-minded political candidates. Occupy, essentially, was an anti-corporate movement that "seized its strength from the epicenter of financial greed." Like many autochthonous political movements, it seemed to lack an epicenter itself, and as the author notes, it quickly spread in somewhat diluted form to more than 600 U.S. cities and communities. What its adherents agreed on was that government had a duty to reduce inequality. Given the government's failure to do so meaningfully, by, say, imposing an inheritance tax and otherwise redistributing the $84 trillion in the bands of the baby boomer generation, those adherents have moved on to different battles, including agitation to do something about climate change and to promote immigrant rights, among other matters. An evenhanded account of a political strain that remains influential, if now relatively subdued.

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July 30, 2021

Journalist Levitin (co-founding editor of the Occupied Wall Street Journal) uses the two months of Occupy Wall Street demonstrations in fall 2011 as a lens to examine what he sees as resurgent popular protests during the past decade. Writing from his particular point of view as a leftist with personal experience in the Occupy movement, he attempts to provide prospective that contemporary observers were unable to when they chronicled those events soon after they occurred. Levitin contends that the supposedly "unsuccessful" Occupy Wall Street movement in fact unleashed an energy that was seen in subsequent protests. Chapters on the economy, politics, climate, labor, technology, and other diverse topics are intended to reveal the breadth of the Occupy movement that extended beyond confronting the wealthy "one percent" on Wall Street. Levitin offers brief profiles of people who inspired, led, or participated in these protests; he also occasionally criticizes wealthy targets of this dissent. However, his collection of topical vignettes creates a scattershot effect that fails to explore the protests' complex origins and interconnections. Above all, the book disappoints in failing to clearly examine how successive events reflected Occupy Wall Street's efforts. VERDICT Levitin's use of "occupy" as the first word of each chapter implies a stronger relationship than he demonstrates. The result is primarily a celebration of protests instead of a useful discussion of their origins and effects.--Charles K. Piehl, Minnesota State Univ., Mankato

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