Those of us 99%: Thinking about new political identities on the tenth anniversary of Occupy Wall Street

It was September 21, 2011, the fourth day of Occupy Wall Street, before the movement was really called Occupy Wall Street, just Occupy. The bad news came that Troy Anthony Davis, an American citizen, was murdered by Georgia State Police Officer Mark McPhee. An organizer told thousands of protesters at the rally, which was filled with anger and sadness, with people shouting, crying and swearing.

From there, people marched to Zuccotti Park, probably the first time the Occupy movement took to the streets, with people tearing down barricades and openly disobeying police orders.

The moment you step out of the roadside is a flash of lightning. It's a complete shift, more important to all involved than years of textual research. It enabled a whole new set of tactics to be allowed and embraced by the hundreds — even the obvious — to a team that was adding new players every day who had never even been involved in the sport before that .

Since then, people have taken to the streets. Days later, mass arrests on Fifth Avenue and the famous pepper spray incident made the protesters news. A few days later, 700 people were arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge. From this moment on, "Occupy" really became the Occupy movement.

It's almost all too obvious, but one of the things that drives "occupation" is a simple fact: it's action-based. Not only that - it's a powerful critique of capitalism, a practice of democracy, and more, but it's impossible to relate these things to the raw, unfiltered expanse that comes from the rules scorn, and using your body to do things that are urgent, purposeful, and real.

Once Occupy collapsed, many left heartbroken, well aware that there would be moments like this. According to the analysis of the actors, the past four decades have been marked by the war of the right against the infrastructure of the left, and even the basic structure of the social connection of ordinary people in this country, which left people weak and unprepared until that year. Sparks fly on September 17.

After the occupation, many people started to build institutions—community organizations, electoral tools, publications, training institutes, cooperative networks, etc.— because these were what revolutionaries did in every movement moment, and because people felt There will be more movement moments in the future . It is believed that if the left has sufficient infrastructure ready to act when the time comes, it can further push the movement moment.

In the process, an entire field of thought about strategy has flourished. There have been many interventions by organizers, thinkers, writers and trainers, partly based on the failure of the Occupy. Many insist that strategy requires a grounded diagnosis , clear and achievable goals, and a coherent plan of action from here to there — a random call to action without goals or a plan to draw in people who are attracted to it is a dead end . Some argue that what we need is an organization, or even a movement, with a clear purpose, with a clear path forward, a way of accepting people and growing. While others believe that people need to organize - need to be part of thriving groups - in order to sustain long-lasting victories in struggles, groups are how we act, where we transform, where we hold each other accountable Way, is where we find where we belong. Support social movement groups in their efforts to be healthy and strategic groups, and support the work of organization building, which should be a daily…

But maybe there is something missing, out of balance, lost in the land of good strategy in this age of institution building.

Organizers mobilize people for direct action training , develop emergency contact sheets , action coordination meetings , develop long strategic plans … these are the labelling processes. There are certainly good reasons for training, of course, and important reasons for planning and coordination; however, people often find themselves craving something more violent and angrier, something real, less orchestrated, and perhaps less so Thoughtful stuff.

People long for those rare, fleeting moments that make planning irrelevant, that require you to let go of everything and take risks you never dreamed of, moments that can hurt you but can also make you better Stronger, bolder, thirsty for more—these are moments when too many people sign up for direct action, and commanders are no longer needed, because the people are directly forming the tide in the streets, and you are safe in them. Perhaps these are some of the things that traditional organizers often forget when developing structures and routines, some moments that are missed when planning.

Of course, one of the downsides of Occupy is the lack of strategy. While there is a ton of planning (yes, nothing really spontaneous), it has no requirements, no goals, and no structure that can go on in the long term. In many ways, Occupy is blind and can be silly, but it brings something important to the world, something that draws on people's anger, captures their imagination, unleashes their creativity, and provides The voices provided by their deepest dreams. Who knows, maybe, if the Occupy movement was "smarter", it might have failed.

The lesson here is not to say that direct action is the only way to spark a movement, that we should abandon good strategy, or that we should remove coordination, much less stop creating structures that support movement building and take risks differently; here The lesson is that we need both organization and movement, good strategy and instinct, planning and disrespect for planning.

You should be hopeful and at the same time aware that the movement you are fighting for sometimes loses; however, groups that don't themselves believe it is possible to win will always lose - they put style over strategy and will protect the group The culture of the inner city is placed above the tolerance of ordinary people, and the tastes and desires of the small group are placed above the needs and dreams of the masses. They are accustomed to being on the fringes and adopt behaviors that reinforce that fringeness, which makes them less likely to leave the fringes (after all, fringes, while cruel, are at least somewhat "safe"). The so-called fringe is formed by the fear of the power that oppresses you, where people learn to fear the power they may have, and that is precisely the power you should ultimately seek.

There are two kinds of moments in the Occupy movement: there are huge, expansive, inclusive moments in which people see themselves as legitimate, and in which the circle of belonging continues to expand to include those who would otherwise not be. Knowing people, people who would never have been friends, these are the moments when the goal is to truly lead an entire nation out of its own destruction; and there are also dark, hopeless, self-righteous moments in which you Feeling small, beaten, misunderstood, contempt for the public that should be organized, and even attacking each other.

There are many lessons here. Lessons about no leadership, lessons about power, lessons about fear. But most importantly, and perhaps the easiest - revolutions are made by those who intend to be strong; revolutions are made by those who are willing to take risks, lead, and be responsible for something greater than themselves ; Revolutions are created by those who are willing to lose their marginal comfort and security to expand their circle of belonging, those who are willing to lose control. This may be a bit counter-intuitive, but it must be said that this willingness to lead actually goes hand in hand with the willingness to follow - the subversive twists and strategic adjustments required by following social movements, the breaking of boundaries, the shattering of social norms, and the breaking of rules.

Perhaps, fear is one of the main obstacles in this regard . Fear of the enemy, fear of leaving our own comfort zone, fear of failure in the face of historical responsibility, and even fear of each other ( fear of being infiltrated ). This fear is justified. But we have a responsibility to face it, to be our strongest selves, and to build a movement of resistance that can win. This is the only way that will give us a chance.

It is fair to question the achievement of the Occupy. It certainly failed in spectacular fashion, and many left hurt, nervous and anxious wishing they could have done things differently. But for many, the "occupation" really broke something - changed the climate of the country, opened the door for social movements that followed, politicized an entire generation, brought class discourse into the mainstream narrative, A new crop of activist leaders has been developed, a whole new field of movement institutions has begun, a strong electoral left has been bred, and an eventual scramble for power...etc.

But the problem is, the Occupy movement was never supposed to succeed. It's a terrible idea, bred by a misfit magazine editor in Canada, driven mostly by a group of inexperienced young people with no long-term plans, no demands, no political vision, and no clear assessment of the terrain people are struggling with , and, moreover, there are sharp inconsistencies between people in terms of politics and ideology, as well as strategy and tactics. But, that's how it works.

The lesson is simple. We just don't know much. We don't know what's going to work, what's going to resonate, what people are ready for. Even now, there is much to be said, as many observers are actively making. However, no one can explain luck, what magic fairy dust makes such a thing happen or destroy.

There's something absolutely terrifying in this, but there's also something liberating. Not knowing means we're wrong a lot of the time, but sometimes we're right; maybe it also means that sometimes our mistakes are actually the best outcomes.

Everyone knows that empires are strong, weapons of resistance are insufficient, this planet is a ticking time bomb, and many things must be right for us to survive, let alone prosper, here. Moreover, such cases are rare and difficult to achieve. But, in this case, it's important to remember something that you can see on countless resistance sites, namely: that sometimes things happen that you can't imagine, and that people do have the ability to do really transcendent things , there are plenty of opportunities around us waiting to be seized, or, perhaps, stumbled upon.

In any case, may we seize or fall into these opportunities with as much grace, courage, wisdom and humility as possible.

The following text will consist of 4 parts, reflecting on the movement from various authors, all of which will have important implications for future resistance. In particular, I hope to be helpful to Chinese activists and activism researchers.

Part I

The first is from Rebecca Panovka , writer and co-editor of The Drift. Her stance as a "young man of the year" reviews the movement critically and offers ideas for the future.

Human Microphone

Ben Lerner's 2019 novel The Topeka School ends with a description of a protest tactic: "Human microphones, where people gathered around the speaker repeat what the speaker says in order to amplify the voice". Lerner's alter ego was with his family during an early anti-ICE demonstration in the Trump administration, and he joined the group's megaphone. "It was embarrassing to me, it always has been," he wrote, "but I forced myself to be part of a tiny public speech, a public that was slowly learning how to speak in the midst of communication ."

That's the last sentence of that book, a proposition attached to hundreds of pages of moral code surrounding a long-simmering crisis in American political language -- Lerner named it "communication," a debate tactic , inundate your opponents with more facts and arguments that they cannot refute within the allotted time. Here, the human mic is credited as Lerner's solution to diagnosing the problem with the book.

Even outside the context of literature and art, this approach can border on cliché. "Mic check?" someone said; "Mic check," the crowd repeated. The speech then begins, in a call-and-response fashion, where the speaker pauses every few words to allow the crowd to speak back. Each speech ("EACH ADDRESS") proceeds slowly ("PROCEEDS SLOWLY"), and the audience repeats an argument ("With LISTENERS REPEATING AN ARGUMENT") before they know ("BEFORE THEY KNOW") whether they agree or not.

Human microphones were first used in the anti-nuclear movement , adopted during protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 1999 , before becoming a staple of Occupy Wall Street, where they gained real status .

The Occupy movement - its working groups, conventions, gestures - embodies a sincere belief in participatory democracy. The structure of this movement (complete horizontalism) is in a sense its message, and the message embodied by the human microphone, through which anyone can speak and be heard. The microphone is more symbolic than practical, and it constitutes a protest against money in politics, a protest against the disproportionate importance of the voices of the rich and powerful, a protest against individualism and, perhaps, a protest against the overcomplication and degradation of political discourse .

While many see Occupy as a disorderly movement, for others it was a formative experience and inspired a decade of organizing. In a certain generation of left-wing groups, the words "Occupy Wall Street" have taken on an almost totem status. Bathed in nostalgic light, Zuccotti Park (or "Liberty Square") appears to be a haven for democratic processes, while the human microphone, initially a way to circumvent the limitations of the PA system, later represented a Aesthetic ideal.

I was asked to provide some sort of objection to an article on this subject because I was too young to have any illusions about Occupy Wall Street. If I were a little older (or a little more politically precocious), I might have formed fond memories of Zuccotti Park, but I don't. I've only been there once, in the fall of 2011, and felt dizzy and uncomfortable with all the activities at the time. Instead of getting involved, I took some pictures and evaluated the scene: there was a free library with colorful homemade signage (not bad), a big beard was too close to my face to talk revolution to me (not so good), there are some descendants of Krishna (why not), and a bunch of V-masked people (disturbing). When the human mic came on, it didn't say anything I could decipher.

I'm not sure how this unleaded and ultimately unstructured crowd can foment a revolution, especially without specific demands - but I'm also not sure to what extent my impressions are being read in the newspapers and what you see on the news. Until then, my only exposure to the left was through the skeptical lens of the so-called mainstream media. I've never witnessed a protest movement before, and a protest movement -- like most things humans are drawn into -- looks quite different from the outside. My question at the time was: Are the protesters too naive, or am I too naive? In Lerner's paradigm, is "occupation" an embarrassment, or a solution?

A decade on, the talking points of the Occupy movement have shed their eerie aura. Full debt forgiveness, basic income, single-payer health care, free college, and other niche ideas of the time were serious agenda items discussed within the Democratic Party. Undoubtedly, thanks in part to the influence of the Occupy movement, the largest protest in American history over the past decade, a serious presidential candidate could even stand on the debate stage and talk about "millions of dollars." millionaires and billionaires".

It is undeniable that "occupation" changes the dialogue, but changing the dialogue is not the same as changing the physical environment. While the Occupy movement forced the phrase "income inequality" to the front and center, Google's Ngram, which recorded its popularity between 2011 and 2019, looks a lot like a graph of wealth acquired by the richest 1% over the same period. Over the past year and a half, the 15 richest Americans have added $400 billion to their wealth, with the 1% adding $10 trillion. At the same time, the COVID-19 death rate in the poorest 20% of U.S. counties was 67% higher than in the richest 20%.

"At its core, Occupy has made protests cool again," Michael Levitin, author of "Occupy Generation: Reawakening American Democracy," wrote in The Atlantic. He attributes the success of the Bernie Sanders campaign and the election of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as well as the BLM, the #MeToo movement, and the Sunrise movement, to the momentum of Occupy. If protests are cool again, it's that one particular type of protest is superstitious over all others: highly photogenic street protests, often in big cities for days or weeks, then abandoned. The phrase "Protest is the new brunch" became an early slogan for the resistance after it was popularized by the Obama alumni's podcast Pod Save America. As a radical movement against police violence flooded the streets last summer, countless people posted black squares, selfies with cardboard signs and infographics featuring multiracial pink people holding hands. Ocasio-Cortez attended the Met Gala this week with the words "Tax the Rich" written in red on her dress and didn't seem to spark any resentment among her peers. Next month, CBS was supposed to air a show called "Activists," where participants will have the opportunity to influence world leaders at the G20 meeting. (In response to the reaction on Twitter, the network decided to cancel the edited series and convert the footage into a documentary)

I have no intention of dousing a worthy protest movement with cold water, nor blaming this state of symbolic supremacy entirely on Occupy. But when Twitter posts are used as a substitute for political action, when the wealthy can enjoy near-fashionable class politics without paying a dime (except for Met Gala ticket prices), when corporate media like CBS try to When turning activism into a rodeo without using its corporate power to bring about the changes advocated by protesters, it's worth considering whether the appearance of protest has gotten too cool -- whether unconscious repetition has accumulated a lot of aesthetic value.

We sometimes forget that the Occupy movement was inspired in part by another protest movement: the Arab Spring , during which American commentators once lauded the Internet as a democratizing force. Occupy was dreamed up at a time of optimism about the potential of a world where all people can have a voice through social media. Right now, there is very little hope across the political spectrum about the utopian possibility of getting everyone talking at the same time, or the wisdom of having a message repeated uncritically by a group of strangers. Whether 99% of people have a desire for unity, let alone be able to express it in a single voice, remains an open question. Perhaps the left is indeed learning how the challenge before us goes beyond talking to ourselves—how to get out of an infinite, sometimes external, cycle of incomprehension.

Part II

The second is from Gabriel Winant , a direct participant in the Occupy movement, assistant professor of history at the University of Chicago, and editor of Dissent magazine. His new book, The Next Shift, published in 2021, you can download here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/yi-ge-xin-de-56854072

a new political identity

When I look for the historical significance of Occupy Wall Street, the first thing that comes to mind is not rallies, marches, or even mass arrests. Instead, the first memory that comes to mind is a meeting of the Marxist Reading Group in 2011, which I attended from 2010 to 2018, my years in graduate school. In October of that year, we held a meeting specifically for Occupy, and the group swelled from the usual five or ten to a room full of dozens of people still trying to understand what was going on. (This also happened during the occupation of the Wisconsin State Capitol and the Arab uprising in February of the previous year)

What we discussed that night is still vague to me now — whether "99%" is a useful class language or a populist obfuscation, we don't know — except for cultural historian Michael Denning's beyond a word. Denning predicted that the most important consequence of the Occupy movement was not the immediate political victory, but the experience itself, the personal lessons it taught, and the way it embedded itself in the life histories of those who lived through it. As with all intense social movement cycles, participants can find themselves doing things they didn't expect, with people they didn't know otherwise. They change not the country, but themselves, and then bring that change to other places. At that moment, I felt that I was in a unique political group that was forming, and that feeling became the common thread of the Occupy movement.

From this perspective, the legacy of the movement is best understood as an episode in the history of ideology. It is at the ideological level that it has the greatest impact — which is why it is often mistaken for having no impact.

Most immediately, the Occupy movement was a key event in the formation of a new anti-capitalist intellectual environment . You can go to Zuccotti Park and you'll find people arguing about policing, finance, feminism, the climate crisis - in this fermentation, new institutions are formed, and old institutions are changed. Both The New Inquiry and The Jacobin predate the Occupation (perhaps as expected), but both gain a great deal of solidity from the resulting small group involvement. In 2012, the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research emerged, founded by left-wing graduate students at Columbia University looking for a meaningful alternative to dead-end academic careers. As it turns out, all of this has consequences.

This is not to say that everyone in this intellectual group was important to the development of the Occupy movement (notable exceptions were writers Vicky Osterweil and Malcolm Harris, who helped bring in a group in the early days with false promises of Radiohead); Instead, the Occupy movement was important to most of them in some way, and the wider world of activists, writers, and thinkers around them. Or, to be precise, it's important to all of us. For example, the day I spent in prison after the Occupy protests meant more than the fact that I was first arrested; instead, I can recall well the countless people I met in the holding cell, and trace their trajectories over the past decade: papers they are publishing, histories written, leading labor and tenant organizations, work in electoral politics, documentaries produced: an environment like this makes it possible for us to construct a new Political identities, and it seems arguably thousands of people have done so.

[Note: We covered the details of prison unity when we talked about the protests in Belarus, and in the future we will also talk about resistance in prisons and the meaning of prisons, which is an important topic . See How to Be a Revolutionary here]

From here it is easy to draw a line from the workplace activism of the past decade among academics, journalists, museum staff and other similar professionals. Organizational activity by part-timers took off in 2012, and for private-sector researchers, the key breakthrough came in 2013 at New York University — the closest research facility to Zuccotti Park in New York, no coincidence. Graduate students there have organized extensively for and around Occupy, including follow-ups such as Occupy Sandy and the Debt Boycott. Subsequently, campus movements across the country emerged like an avalanche. In many places, local occupations are interspersed with workplace organizing: activists gather for meals outside, then meet again inside around a table to make plans.

In the public sector, particularly at the University of California — where the 2009 campus Occupy campaign foreshadowed the 2011 campaign — there was an explosive student movement around tuition and debt. When UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi sent police to clear its campus of occupation, they pepper-sprayed students sitting there, creating a lasting image of the movement: the resulting outrage now appears to be A clear precursor to the development of abolitionist thought outside the black radical left. The UC system, particularly Berkeley and Santa Cruz, also saw a rolling wave of graduate student activism in subsequent years, especially in 2014—with campus police again at the center of the dispute.

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Concepts need to have a material basis if they are to gain and stay alive—the job of a group of people is to make them, perfect them, apply them, spread them. Cultural institutions generate and disseminate ideologies, and the "Occupy" movement has had an outsized impact on thousands of young people that is too large to grasp. It condenses into one event the structural power of a unique intergenerational experience of deprivation and anger that arises, while creating an environment in which individuals can see themselves in relation to this experience, and relationships with others. Over the next decade, thousands of people began working on some kind of ideology, finding a way to represent what "occupation" meant, or more broadly, who they became in 2011.

Earlier this year, a student asked me during my office hours if I knew of some radical writers. I laughed and said, "Oh, sure, I saw that guy once at a Verso party seven or eight years ago". The student winked at me — "Verso Loft? Did you really go there?" While we'd love to roll our eyes at the totem status of a left-wing gathering place centered on New York's media, and easily derided as A circle, but we should take its meaning seriously.

Of course, "occupation" cannot be reduced to some occupation in the cultural superstructure. Like any scene, this scene has its narcissism, its social hierarchy, its blind spots, and its abuse. But it must be acknowledged that the 2011 movement created what cultural theorist Raymond Williams called "the fabric of feeling": a loose institutional system of producing and receiving ideologies in which shared experiences and emotions Can be solidified to a certain extent into a common language, even among rivals within the left.

It's not just organizers, writers, editors or podcasters that make this kind of thing possible. It is also the active participation of audiences formed through the same experiences as the cultural producers, by participating in and making sense of a historical moment together: tens of thousands, then millions , they find themselves disturbed by unpromising jobs , mounting debts , egregious police brutality . In this sense, the world of small magazines and radical publishers, podcasters and progressive activists is not only inward-facing. Otherwise we wouldn't be living in a revival of left-wing politics. For ideology to take off, it needs a historical environment in which cultural producers and audiences can recognize each other based on their shared experiences. Otherwise, where does this recognition come from?

Part III

The third is from Wen Zhuang, a writer and member of the Debt Collective; a coalition of debtors working to cancel debt and protect millions of families. Here he explains the traction of the Occupy movement on the resistance movement since then to the present day. For the debt movement, see Debt Rebel Movement: Traditional Class Struggle May No Longer Apply .

debt kidnapping

The late anthropologist David Graeber often likened indebtedness to a web of promises — "a series of IOUs we have between each other". If you loan your neighbor $50 for groceries, promising to return it in a week, and your neighbor is sick, the terms of the agreement may be renegotiated. But in contemporary conditions, all the details of the deal - what promises were negotiated, who made promises to whom, and what promises were kept - are in the hands of the ruling class. When rooted in mutual trust and commitment, debt is an important tool for building networks of collective power. But under what Wall Street occupiers call "mafia capitalism," debt is a medium of violence.

Strike Debt was an early attempt to create a debt resistance movement that grew out of the Occupy movement to build the former and fight the latter. A decade later, as total U.S. household debt hits a record $15 trillion, Strike Debt insists that debtors "owe everything to each other and nothing to Wall Street," still a reliance on personal responsibility and personal fault A powerful rebuke of the financial system . In this financial system debtors are told they can only blame themselves. What once seemed shameful and disgraceful to some, many debtors today see the potential for solidarity and collective action.

Emerging from the ashes of the Occupy movement, Strike Debt's actions produced important material results. Its Rolling Jubilee project uses crowdfunding to buy delinquent medical and tuition debt for pennies a dollar, making more than $30 million in debt disappear. After Strike Debt disbanded, some of its members formed the Debt Collective, a union of debtors that has secured debt relief for tens of thousands of people. The Debt Collective sees its organizing work as connected and complementary to other movements; debt is a lens for income inequality, racial injustice, the privatization of education, the housing crisis, and more. Its work is led by debtors who believe the only way to achieve real change is to provide the necessary resources and space to empower others in similar situations.

In 2015, The Debt Collective sought out students who had attended the now-defunct for-profit Collins College. After legal seminars, leadership development, political education, story sharing and media training, the "Collins 15" staged the nation's first debt strike, demanding that the Obama Department of Education cancel their fraudulent student loans. The campaign included the creation of an online tool that used a little-known legal term, the Borrower Repayment Defense (DTR). The tool allows borrowers who have been deceived by the school to submit appeals challenging their student loans. Much like a union, it brings debtors to the negotiating table . The DTR tool is now a permanent fixture on the Department of Education website, which in July announced it would comply with a federal court order effectively clearing the debt of 7,200 former Collins students. With the help of the "debt collective" and legal mechanisms discovered by Collins' protesters, the Biden administration has eliminated nearly $10 billion in student debt for those attending for-profit colleges and those with disabilities.

A decade after the Occupy movement, despite the anti-election stance taken by many of Strike Debt's founders , the "debt collective"'s influence in Washington is undeniable . The once-marginalized vision of student debt and free public education has grown in popularity and moved to the brink of possibility. "I'm funding a broken system that has been aggressively punishing people like me. So, I refuse to pay". The group's director, Umme Hoque, announced in January that she and 99 other members had staged the second mass organized debt rebellion since Collins, pushing Biden to use the executive powers delegated to him in his first in office. Eliminate all student debt within 100 days. During the week of coordinated action, the branches held rallies across the country. In New York, passersby were encouraged to set ablaze scraps of paper on the doorstep of Senator Chuck Schumer's home as a metaphor for burning debt; in Philadelphia, an oversized inflatable ball and chain were erected in front of the center plaza. In reality, debt revolt happens every day: One in ten Americans default on their student loans. But when inability to pay is organized into collective action, when those who must default recognize their inability to pay as a shared oppressed reality, inability to pay becomes refusal to pay.

Despite his campaign promise to cancel student loans to some extent, Biden remains adamantly against blanket relief. The defiance, however, has achieved real victories: the elimination of billions of dollars in fraudulent debt through DTR, a four-month debt moratorium, and a viable update to Bernie Sanders' College for All Act, which includes cancelling All $1.6 trillion in student debt and tuition-free for public two- and four-year colleges, paid for by Wall Street taxes. The Debt Collective is also growing its movement, forming coalitions with graduate unions to discuss other aspects of the crisis in higher education and forming committees to focus on all the ways financial instruments like debt and bonds have turned learning spaces into Wall Street profit centers.

I joined the Debt Collective in 2019, but I've lived in debt almost my entire life. As a first-generation college student from an immigrant, single-income family, I was exposed to class politics and economic inequality early on. But at one point my parents and I believed that if I worked hard and stepped into the gates of the elite—going to their college and imitating their way of life—class lines would blur. It soon became clear to me, however, that my ticket out of the working class was out of the question when the economic system was set to trap people like me. I experience class as the limiting factor in my freedom of choice: my time is inextricably linked to and in service of my debt.

At the Debt Collective's new member presentation, I entered a breakout room and all the attendees' cameras were off. Debt is a shameful thing. It forms the context of your life and your commitments. To understand and talk about it with others is to acknowledge its pathetic nature, not your own. Those of us in the "debt collective" are not only bound by debt, but by our commitment to each other and to building a better world - where we turn the source of exploitation into power and oppression ties become ties of solidarity.

Part IV

The fourth is from Zachariah Mamplily , co-founder of the African Social Studies Project. From another perspective, he criticized the lack of enthusiasm of the Western left for broader transnational alliances in the Occupy movement.

Why does the Western Left ignore "Occupy Nigeria"?

On New Year's Day 2012, the Nigerian government announced the end of fuel subsidies that have artificially lowered the cost of oil in Africa's largest country. The government's action is to take advantage of the fact that many Nigerians have returned to their villages to celebrate the festival. But the government's efforts to thwart popular anger have failed. Trapped far from their workplaces, angry Nigerians have taken to the streets as fuel prices more than doubled. In just a few days, the protests have become the largest in Nigeria's history, reaching almost every corner of the country.

This is not just an African uprising story. The two-week movement that has angered the Nigerian government, dubbed Occupy Nigeria, is part of a global wave of Occupy protests inspired by the 2011 occupation of Zuccotti Park in Manhattan. Millions of participants poured into the streets of Lagos, Abuja, Kano and other major Nigerian towns in the world's largest occupation movement . Ten years later, however, very little has been written about "Occupy Nigeria" — or the many other African uprisings that have taken place over the past decade. Instead, Westerners typically see these protests as "part of the general unrest plaguing African countries" and deemed unworthy of global attention or respect. Even on the left, progressive African movements are ignored or treated as curiosity rather than meaningful political action.

Consider Y'en a Marre, a Senegalese collective that led mass protests against President Abdoulaye Wade's attempts to rewrite the constitution in the fall of 2011, which led him to abandon his 2012 search third term effort. Y'en a Marre has built an extensive network in Senegal and the region, which remains strong and well-organized nearly a decade after its first appearance. But some major left-wing publications in the US, including Dissent and Monthly Review, have made no mention of the movement. Alternet and New Left Review each provided an article mentioning the movement, as did Jacobin.

Certain countries on the African continent, for specific historical or political reasons, did receive more attention from the Western Left - most notably North African countries, especially during the so-called Arab Spring. The overwhelming trend is to reinforce the colonial divide between North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa, treating them as separate from each other. The main exception is South Africa, which has drawn attention for its racially divided history (often seen in parallel with America's legacy of apartheid) and its strong tradition of social movements -- including "Rhodes Must Fall" and "Rhodes Must Fall" in 2015 and 2016. #FeesMustFall” movement, in which young people challenge racist totems and economic marginalization in a way that resonates with their American contemporaries. Here, too, the legacy of colonialism and false narratives about South Africa's specificity reinforce the idea that the country is not part of "true" Africa.

The other 50 countries in Africa are full of dynamic and vibrant movements filled with brave young activists: feminism and anti-police violence movements in Nigeria, climate justice activists in northern Uganda, pro-democracy movements in eastern Congo, revolutions in Sudan , and many other ordinary people who struggle with oppressive political and economic systems. Why are they silenced in the global north?

Whether we discuss Africa or not, racism is always an important factor. In left-wing spaces, racism rarely takes the form of explicit prejudice, but its subtler, more subconscious forms play their part in reinforcing the continent's marginalization. In addition to these left-wing biases, I think it is worth proposing two other explanations for why African social movements continue to be excluded from Western left-wing discourse. I offer these two explanations not to make excuses, but to try to move the conversation forward.

First, there is still a huge gap between those who see the state as a potentially liberating force and those who see it as a predatory actor almost all the time. Unsurprisingly, the imagination of the Western left was dominated by African politics in the 1960s and 1970s, a period during which a number of African countries - including Julius Nyerere's Tanzania, Kwame N'A Ghana, led by Krumah, and Algeria, led by Ahmed ben Bella - became the darlings of socialists around the world. With a few exceptions in the 1980s or 1990s, including Thomas Sankara's rule in Burkina Faso and certain members of the apartheid-era African National Congress in South Africa, in recent decades the African left has taken a national level victories are few, especially compared to Asia or Latin America . African leaders today are almost unanimously committed to a neoliberal paradigm that relegates citizens to problems to be solved rather than voters to be served. Given the grievous failure of governments to improve the lives of ordinary people, most African people's movements view the state with suspicion and fear, rather than using it as a tool of liberation. To the Western left in pursuit of state power, the lack of interest in African social movements in seizing state power may seem puzzling.

Second, and related to the above, while most contemporary African social movements are deeply concerned with poverty, they rarely pursue their strategic goals from an anti-capitalist perspective . The sharp escalation and rapid decline of occupation of Nigeria demonstrates the limits of overt class-based appeals. (While organized labor was initially at the forefront of the movement, it struggled to connect with informal workers who made up the bulk of the protesters, and eventually got involved in secret negotiations with the government, which many saw as a betrayal)

This does not mean that Africans reject class analysis. They have been questioning a global economic system that has turned rich and poor countries across the continent into one of the most unequal countries in the world. Yet even the most economically marginalized often demand a more equitable distribution of resources rather than overthrowing capitalism altogether. While the cultural form of Pan-Africanism remains attractive, the decline of revolutionary pan-Africanism in the minds of ordinary Africans shows that, while the soil remains fertile, progressive intellectuals and movements across the continent have not been challenged by the new global freedoms support for the offensive.

This poses a serious question for the international left: where does Africa fit in its imagined post-capitalist future? The fact that China, despite its turn to capitalism, remains the most prominent alternative to neo-colonial relations, treating Africa as nothing more than a place of extraction and consumption , makes it harder to argue that a socialist world order is in fact Can make any meaningful improvement in the lives of ordinary Africans.

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The best traditions of the Western Left have long been rooted in historical real movements. But when it comes to Africa, a continent that will soon be home to a quarter of all humanity, few attempt to deal with the realities of structuring social movements and popular politics. This is a pity. Africa is at the center of the global fight against the climate crisis and inequality, as well as the broader struggle for basic human dignity. An international project without a solid understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of African social movements will inevitably reinforce the logic of apartheid . ⚪️