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This chapter explores recent forms of neoliberal protest that have emerged in response to the economic crisis in the United States and Europe. The chapter focuses on the recent Occupy movement and highlights how their practices perform translations between the abstract logics of capital and political experience, and thus render the economy a site of political struggle in a way that bridges the impasse between economy and politics in contemporary theory.

This chapter explores the possibilities for a financial system revolution that equalizes access and democratizes power, such as through movements like Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street. Examples of steps toward equalizing access and democratizing power include student loan debt protests, municipal identification documents, community benefits agreements, and public banks. These examples demonstrate the importance of uniting incremental change with the power of people. Moreover, any revolution must intentionally challenge the financial system’s calibrations to whiteness. The financial system’s calibrations have been a global, centuries-long exercise in concentrating economic power with whiteness. The type of revolution our financial system needs cannot be achieved through technological advancements.

Occupy Wall Street (OWS) is a massive protest movement calling for radical social change and an end to unbridled corruption. OWS emerged in September 2011 in New York with highly confrontational demonstrations against the Wall Street banks, and a small encampment in the city’s financial district. Within weeks, hundreds of local camps emerged throughout the U.S., along with ongoing series of vehement, decentralized protest actions. Much to the chagrin of the American political establishment, OWS operates as an elusive and flexible, “leaderless” organization, without a centralized authority or party affiliation, and uses occupation as a primary form of protest. This paper looks at the ways in which the movements’ leaderless organization and egalitarian social vision were/are deeply influenced by anarchist principles like anti-authoritarianism (anti-statism), anti-capitalism, direct action, and prefiguration. It then discusses attempts by Occupy camps, such as those in New York, Philadelphia, and Oakland, to repossess spaces, rights, and other forms of social wealth within different urban contexts. It analyzes how the Occupy camps, as well as innovations like the General Assemblies, spokescouncils, and social media formations, are transforming urban landscapes and creating new forms of social and political engagement based on anarchist praxis.

Chapter 6 uses Occupy Wall Street as a window to examine episodes of politically inflected camping, particularly a series of encampments in the nation’s capital since the late 1960s. While for many Occupy seemed unprecedented, earlier protests that used camping to protest poverty, the Vietnam War, and homelessness reveal new perspectives on public nature. Many of them wound through the courts, culminating in a Supreme Court case from 1984 that examined whether the Constitution protected camping and sleeping outside as a First Amendment expression. The rise of the homeless crisis in the 1980s, which this last case concerned, was a significant development. Camping as function of poverty or as a platform for politics remained available as means of last resort—to find shelter or assert voice. Occupy, and protests that preceded it, attempted to use camping to reinvigorate political participation, to reestablish community and connection, and to renew the social contract.

Today the next socialist left is being forged by third-wave feminists, liberationists of color, and opponents of neoliberal inequality, many of whom came of age in the Bernie Sanders Democratic primary campaigns of 2016 and 2020. Sanders renewed American democratic socialism by running the greatest campaign ever waged by an American socialist, in 2016. He is better described as a social democrat than a democratic socialist, yet he dramatically revived the language of the class struggle. Forty years of letting Wall Street and the big corporations do whatever they want have yielded belated protests against flat wages, extreme inequality, and destroying the planet.

This chapter analyzes the significance of gender conflict and feminist mobilization for the emergence and dynamics of the Occupy Wall Street movement that began in 2011. The analysis is based on participant observation, in-depth interviews with seventy-three participants, and movement documents. The chapter shows that gender conflict influenced the Occupy movement’s goals, organization, tactics, and strategies, giving rise to spin-off feminist mobilizations that reinvigorated feminist organizations and networks. The analysis focuses on three processes that were central to feminist mobilization within Occupy: the construction of feminist collective identity, the creation of feminist free spaces, and the use of feminist bridge leaders.

This chapter looks in depth at the political potential reflected in Occupy Wall Street as a protest movement. The chapter examines how Occupy can be seen as successful as a protest movement in reframing public discourse about growing inequality in an age of neoliberalization. The chapter poses questions regarding how the multitude of diverse people can become a concerted political force in an age of neoliberal political as well as economic constraints. The chapter looks at how precarity has usefully served as an actually existing term of politically organizing the multitude, how the politics of representation via spectacle of protest can further mobilize people to act in concert, and how protest politics can help influence elections and public policymaking.

This chapter offers a study of the early Obama years against the backdrop of national optimism and the darkness of the Great Recession. Images capture street protests, good humor, and political division against a backdrop of economic devastation and distress.

This chapter examines the contrasting responses to the recent shift in the political economy by Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party. The chapter makes use of the idea of melancholia (especially as deployed by Sigmund Freud) to suggest the different limitations of each political movement and how they have a shared concern that could conceivably become the basis for a more broadly based mobilization by ordinary Americans in response to ongoing neoliberalization, increasing inequality, and the growing precarity endured by more and more ordinary people in the changing economy.

Despite the broad reach of the American welfare state, Americans continue to have conflicted and contradictory attitudes about the role of the state in mediating economic equality through both taxation and social spending. This chapter identifies several key themes that help explain these contradictions. Specifically, information about taxes and spending is complex and hard to understand, cognitive biases and limitations hamper people’s ability to process information in a way that is always consistent, and affective and symbolic factors influence social attitudes about taxes and government benefits. This chapter explores the implications of these insights for public policy, including the possibility of designing tax and welfare institutions to counteract cognitive bias and raising public awareness by advertising the benefits of popular government programs. It also examines the recurring phenomenon of grassroots mobilization of American voters around issues of taxes and spending, and contrasts the Tea Party movement with Occupy Wall Street.

This chapter examines the impact of Barack Obama’s reelection in 2012 on American politics. It begins with an overview of America’s political culture, with emphasis on the role of the Democratic Party and Republican Party, and the polarization of American politics. It then considers the hallmarks of the new politics, focusing on advocacy groups, big money, media, the blogosphere, and social networks. It also looks at the role of public opinion polls, pundits, and predictions in American political life; the rise of the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street; and Obama’s relationship with progressives, liberals, and the Left and Right.

Collective identity, or a shared sense of belonging to a group, is the scaffolding of social movements. Integral to collective identity is the creation and articulation of the boundaries of a group. Boundaries promote an awareness of a collective's commonalities and effectively demarcate who is—and who is not—a legitimate member of a group. In short, boundaries communicate the cognitive, moral, and emotional connections among individuals to both group members and external audiences. This chapter examines boundary shifts in the Florida Tea Party movement (TPM). It shows that the collective identity of the local TPM constricted with the cycle of contention. Specifically, it identifies three “episodes of contention” and highlights how electoral success and the emergence of the Occupy Wall Street movement, which made overlapping claims, forced the TPM to renegotiate its collective identity boundaries in ways that limited its political appeal. It concludes with a discussion of the implications for the study of social movement dynamics and collective identity.

This epilogue suggests that the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movements have something fundamental in common. They are both expressions of pain from differing points of view of the same social process—the dismantling of American middle-class life. In effect, the Tea Party movement is reacting to the feeling that prosperity is being taken away from them while the Occupy movement is reacting to the feeling that they will never have it. The great financial meltdown of 2008 brought a shocking and explosive ending to what had been a gradual process of decay. In its final stage before the financial collapse, the erosion of middle-class life was masked by easy credit, in particular, the ability of homeowners to borrow against what seemed like the continuous upward valuations of their property. In September 2008, this all came apart. Millions would find themselves underwater on their homes—owing more than the home's current value; grinding recession and large-scale, long-term unemployment was on the horizon. The financial crisis came toward the end of the working lives of most Tea Party supporters. Everything they had earned, suddenly, was insecure. They would enter into a furious mobilization against those they felt were trying to take it away. Whereas, for many in the OWS movement, the financial crisis came at the beginning of their working lives. Their prospects for housing, for adequate wages, for the mere opportunity to pay off their student loans—all this was bleak, and worse.

This concluding chapter reexamines the Cyber Left against the backdrop of informational capitalism and history. Through this lens, it discusses indymedia as a precursor to Occupy Wall Street and many of the emergent social movements that have developed since the economic crisis of 2008. It also explains how the core logic and strategy of the Cyber Left played a significant role in the inability of the Global Social Justice Movement to build long-term power. It identifies four interrelated, core problems: (1) a retreat from class and capitalism as analytic and political categories; (2) a tendency toward technological determinism; (3) an anti-institutional bias; and (4) no emphasis on political education and leadership development.

The book has argued that political meanings are created, shaped, and changed primarily in public discourse and that the arguments that frame these discourses, as well as the ways that they change over time, can and do alter what people understand public problems and their solutions to be. The interplay between these levels of individual understanding, choice, innovation and public constraint is what politics consists of, providing a field of action that is, at once, practically bounded and potentially infinite. For political challengers, this field of discourse and action is an indispensable site of power. The conclusion explores the implications of the book’s theory of political acceptance for two twenty-first-century social movements: the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street.

The final chapter briefly touches on Richardson’s second divorce but focuses on her difficulties finding and keeping employment. After holding a series of jobs in various corporate and not-for-profit agencies, Richardson eventually earned a permanent civil service position with the City of New York, where she worked until the twenty-first century. In one way or another, all her jobs involved some kind of social justice. Over the last five decades, Richardson has paid close attention to social change movements, including Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter, and this chapter discusses her thoughts about them, particularly her view that young people have the capability and vision to lead the nation to greater freedom, just as young people did in the 1960s. She advises them to replicate the group-centered and member-driven model student activists employed in the early 1960s and to avoid becoming ideological.

Chapter 5 exploresthe idea of political voice. It charts how the shift in journalism’s positions about labor unions and the working class relates to the shift in focus of the Democrat and Republican parties in the late 1960s and early 1970s and the concept of the “Silent Majority” encouraged by the Republican Party. As the media and politicians talked less about class, and the working class lost their voice,they found it again in the nascent Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements, which had similar origins, but wildly divergent solutions. The chapter also looks at the case of Iowa’s shift in political voice in the 2016 presidential election.

Serious debate about the state of capitalism has been undermined in both media and political realms by the technological forces that, ironically, capitalism helped bring to life. The pervasive power of mobile phones has democratized information and ideas, largely through search engines and social media channels, and made political debate more accessible to more humans than ever before. Yet those same forces have fragmented humanity in ways that equally make public dialogue more challenging than ever, as mainstream media and political parties become captive to smaller and more interest-driven groups. The intensification of news and political cycles—and the concurrent shrinking of collective attention spans—further weaken efforts to focus the public on both long-term and structural challenges in the economy.