They came, they occupied. Then what?
“WE ARE THE 99 %.” Ten years ago that unifying slogan travelled around the world. Some attribute its origin to the economist Joseph Stiglitz, who first popularised the distinction between the 1% of people with great wealth and power and the rest of us. Others say that it was the late anthropologist and anarchist David Graeber who coined the phrase. But everyone agrees that it went global when it was voiced by demonstrators who gathered in lower Manhattan’s financial district on 17 September 2011
What took place that day, and in the two months that followed, would become known as Occupy Wall Street, a protest movement against economic inequality and injustice that spread to 28 other US cities, to European capitals and financial centres, including London, Paris and Berlin, as well as parts of South America and Asia. In total it’s said there were more than 750 Occupy events around the world, featuring demonstrators ranging from a few tens in some places to many thousands in others. Inspired by the Arab spring protests that had toppled several dictators in the Middle East, OWS was also a delayed reaction to the global financial crisis of 2008 that had ushered in an era of austerity.
“The one duty we owe to history,” said Oscar Wilde, “is to rewrite it.” In the limitless leisure of retrospect, any particular moment in time and space can become imbued with pivotal significance or be consigned to the dustbin of historical dead ends. A decade on, opinions about OWS remain starkly polarised among both observers and participants.
One school of thought views it as a transformative event in contemporary US history, a popular uprising against the power of corporate America that helped shift the Democratic party leftwards, and
