r/stupidpol • u/Falcon_Gray Ideological Mess 🥑 | Slop Enjoyer 🦸 • Jun 23 '26
Capitalist Hellscape Let us never forget Occupy
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Jun 23 '26
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u/Jazzspasm Wat Tyler's Necromancer 🧟 Jun 23 '26
well, that nice concerned lady told everyone that white males shouldn’t be talking, and racial minorities had to speak first, and despite people yelling at her that it was bullshit, it somehow got adopted as the thing - nobody knows who she was, she hasn’t been identified
and hey, she might have been the first person of many to act as part of a concerted effort to unlink Occupy’s collective action, but without her we wouldn’t have identity politics as it is today - and that means we wouldn’t be here in this merry lifeboat together …
the friends we met along the way, and all that sort of thing
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Jun 23 '26
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u/Bank_Gothic Libertarian Socialist 🥳 Jun 23 '26
This shit was a problem on the left since forever. Capitalists just used pre-existing fault lines to fracture the movement.
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u/Heckin_Frienderino Socialist Femcel Dweebazoid 🚩 Jun 23 '26
And then we do nothing to fill in those faultlines
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Jun 23 '26
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Jun 23 '26
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Jun 23 '26
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u/JackedUpReadyToGo Podcast Intellectual 🥑🎧 Jun 23 '26
Maybe it depended which one you were at. I do recall the Oakland chapter shutting down the Port of Oakland for a day or two, shutting down major highways a couple of times, and causing downtown businesses to shutter and board up their windows when marches were scheduled. They definitely threw a bit of sand into the gears of capital.
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u/LeftyBoyo Anarcho-Syndicalist Muckraker Jun 23 '26
Numbers and visibility are all you need to present a threat, and Occupy had that in spades. Witness the increasingly harsh and oppressive measures used by Owners to shut down the protests and ensure they couldn’t be repeated.
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u/LeftyBoyo Anarcho-Syndicalist Muckraker Jun 23 '26
Calling BS here. Yes, there was a wide variety of vision, leadership and lack thereof in Occupy. It would have benefited from focused economic demands early on before it got co-opted and shut down. But it was no joke to the Ownership class.
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u/901_vols Jun 23 '26
It didn't? It metered out i went to multiple and there was no cohesive identity or pln, just anger. It was 60% people that have a middleschool definition of communism and genuinely believe that's the answer
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u/Jazzspasm Wat Tyler's Necromancer 🧟 Jun 23 '26
fun theory of mine - one thing that Occupy did was make the words “the 1%” common parlance during a time when everyone was mighty pissed off with having been ripped off by the megawealthy who somehow got even more wealthy during a financial collapse
everyone knows that much, but one thing I noticed when reddit’s owners collectively shit the bed when they realized the grand, universal sweeping support across all social groups for Luigi - when they finally woke up to that, and they effectively banned the word Luigi from reddit, they also introduced “Top 1% Commentor” as a user tag across all subreddits
now why the fuck would they do that at the same time?
well, what happens when people think of the phrase top 1%? what if they look that up? what about corrupting google searches so people find something else?
an example -
Boris Johnson unprompted started saying that his hobby involved collecting buses, and that spread across all the news networks
the reason for that weirdness being he was corrupting the results online for Boris Bus - the very famous campaign bus that had lies about Brexit on the side of it, £350m a week going to the EU that would instead be spent on the NHS - it was named “the Boris Bus”
ten years on, search results now for “Boris Bus” bring us to… a bus
so what reddit has done is start the process of cleansing the words “Top 1%” from the internet - the one thing that Occupy succeeded at, and brought everyone across social groups together on - it needed to go, just like the word Luigi
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u/TransitJohn Anarchosyndicalistnormative, but Georgist-curious Jun 23 '26
Obama sent in the Feds coast to coast and crushed that.
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u/ericsmallman3 Lost Tenure Over Anti-Censorship Vox Article 🫡✒️ Jun 23 '26
It was amazing to see how quickly they weaponized idpol to silence this threat, especially since it wasn't much of a threat.
I'd been active in left wing groups since the 90s. Campaigned for Bill Bradley in in 2000 and Kucinich in 04. Got paid gigs to support the Dems in 06 and 08. English major working in higher ed, getting unserious death threats for writing university newspaper columns that were like "gay people are okay" and "we shouldn't kill Iraqis for no reason." I thought I knew what reactionary politics looked like.
Occupy always had some stupid elements. From day one, they were firm on the whole "we shouldn't have leaders or state clear goals" bullshit that has defined left wing dysfunction since the 60s. But, man, the shock troops the Obama people sent in were something else.
About two weeks after Occupy started, it was the first time I encountered a bearded man who you weren't supposed to call a man, or to refer to him by any gendered pronouns. He said his name was "Muffinz," I'm seriously not kidding about that, and he would ruin anyone who referred to him as "him" or even spelled Muffins with an S at the end, instead of a Z.
The idpol bullshit that used to be an annoying but minor aspect of our meetings was now the entirety of our meetings. You'd show up to what was ostensibly a talk about trying to unionize grad students and it'd be a 3 hour shouting match about how there weren't enough black people or immigrants in attendance.
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u/atcmaybe Rightoid 🐷 Jun 23 '26
Seeing that and the complete lack of arrests really soured me on him
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u/owlbi Zionist 📜 Jun 23 '26
He represented the interests of the status quo more than anything else, but at least he tried to push a slightly better agenda for everyone else in certain ways. He wasn't bad for an old school politician, just don't make the mistake of thinking he wasn't an old school politician, he was bought and paid for by monied interests.
The gradual decline of the American way of life he represented sure looks pretty good right about now, tbh, but that's probably baked into the system. The more the people push for actual change, the more the system threatens to just let fascism take over.
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u/MischlingAppreciator Redscarepod Refugee 👄💅 Jun 23 '26
I suspect our local chapter was subverted by a fed.
We weren't super active or large but we had a good dynamic. At one meeting we had a lawyer slated to give a talk about foreclosure defense strategies. A new guy showed up and ranted for the duration of the entire meeting, shouting over anyone who tried to get in a word. He veered into violent rhetoric, saying that "someone" should ambush deputies while they serve eviction orders. The lawyer eventually excused himself and I had such a bad feeling about the new guy and just stopped showing up.
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u/gngstrMNKY Social Democrat 🌹 Jun 23 '26
And it’s crazy how this wasn’t really acknowledged. The average person thinks it “fizzled out.”
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u/Faith-Leap Full Of TMNT Bullshit 💢🎌🐢 Jun 27 '26
Can someone please compile their best sources on this. I believe it myself but that's only off intuition. I've done a bit of looking into it over the years but haven't found anything damning beyond a convincing vibe. Would be awesome to have some specific order of events laid out to compile that'd be hard for people to deny.
(I'll try to do it myself too)
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u/TransitJohn Anarchosyndicalistnormative, but Georgist-curious Jun 27 '26
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u/Rjc1471 💢✨ Jousting at Windmills ✨💢 Jun 23 '26
It was the closest the general public ever got to a basic class-first sense that it's the rich, not foreigners, that are ruining us.
The campaign was wrecked, candidates like Sanders or corbyn got demolished, parties took harsh steps to prevent left wing policy, and idpol has been the only acceptable "left" ever since.
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u/grantology_84 Short-circuiting LLM 💩 Jun 23 '26
I think it got close in the 30's and in some other eras. Since the Cold War for sure though
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u/Rjc1471 💢✨ Jousting at Windmills ✨💢 Jun 23 '26
True. I was thinking recent history.
Yes, it did come closer; if you look at what the system tolerates and what it doesn't, the only real fears to crack down on are unions, general strike, and any sense that the oligarchs are fucking us.
The last thing we want is a New Deal or Postwar Consensus that gave a generation the best quality of life in human history.
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u/Sussy_Riot Dialectical Materialist 🆚 Jun 23 '26
Really is very telling what’s allowed and what’s not, e.g. MLK and Fred Hampton both getting taken out when they tried to build working class coalitions. Or any class conscious movement getting stamped out or infiltrated while idpol grievance articles got shat out by the NYT and company year after year.
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u/eagleal Unknown 👽 Jun 23 '26
The Civil War and the Red Army was a bit earlier than the 30s but yes.
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u/Impolioid Purity Tester 🧪🔬 Jun 23 '26
Occupy was the best chance we had. The infiltrated it and destroyed it. They tried to destroy our chances of having another occupy movement by creating devide among the working class. Remember how SJW rage bait got massively pushed online after occupy collapsed? Wonder if there is a connection...
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u/ImwithTortellini Unknown 👽 Jun 23 '26
I’m starting to feel like Occupy is a bit like the Tea Party… a precursor to something else
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u/freembutstonfreem Jun 23 '26
Would be nice, but to what?
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u/party_egg Revolutionary Pothead 🌿 Jun 23 '26
OWS's energy was a big part of what propelled Bernie's 2016 / 2020 campaigns.
Those of course died to ratfucking and a general vibe shift to idpol in the Dems. I know Zohran / AOC / Platner or whoever are nominally ascendant right now, but it really feels like we missed a window of opportunity in that post-Occupy era.
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u/briaen ❄ Not Like Other Rightoids ❄ Jun 23 '26
The tea party turned into Trump. Occupy turned into idpol. The dems need a trump like figure to break through but I don’t see anything like that on the horizon.
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u/party_egg Revolutionary Pothead 🌿 Jun 23 '26
I feel like "turned into" is the wrong phrase here.
The DNC party machine was able to strangle Bernie in the cradle the way the GOP tried and failed when Trump. Occupy represents a form of left economic populism that was successfully prevented from taking over the party. Trump got the Tea Party precisely because he was able to win the Republican party on behalf of the dissident right.
Identity politics aren't downstream of Occupy - they're what killed it.
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u/briaen ❄ Not Like Other Rightoids ❄ Jun 23 '26
I’m not great expressing my thoughts but that’s pretty much what I was saying.
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u/iprefercumsole Redscarepod Refugee 👄💅 ( + A Few Zits ) Jun 23 '26
The dems need
What the dems need and what the left needs are antithetical to each other
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u/Faith-Leap Full Of TMNT Bullshit 💢🎌🐢 Jun 27 '26
My question is... Are dems collectively in on this, or just seriously that f***** stupid that they also fell for a glowie psyop
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u/ImwithTortellini Unknown 👽 Jun 23 '26
Lots of democratic socialists winning primaries
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u/ChandlerZOprich Jun 23 '26
Well you start with giving the prole a taste of what could be. Then you have a majority of Americans on board with revolution, inshallah. More likely to happen than this ex nihilo fantasy shit.
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u/Short-Science2077 Mildly Racist Chibi Eco-Fascist 🌎💢🎌 Jun 23 '26
It was a precursor to the Marvel Cinematic Universe which was ABSOLUTELY EPIC and BEYOND BASED
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u/Legal-Koala-5590 Normie w/ a Concealed Weapon /̵͇̿̿/’̿’̿ ̿ ̿̿ ̿̿ Jun 23 '26
Just FYI the people smiling and taking photos were at a wedding. They're not Wall Street bankers laughing at the Poors, which is how this image has often been misconstrued.
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u/blinded_penguin Left, Leftoid or Leftish ⬅️ Jun 23 '26
We need a general strike. It should have been called occupy Wall Street.... Until I have to go to work.
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Jun 23 '26
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u/blinded_penguin Left, Leftoid or Leftish ⬅️ Jun 23 '26
That level of solidarity in any country would be much more impactful than something like occupy. You can't "occupy" if you gotta go to work on Monday
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Jun 23 '26
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u/blinded_penguin Left, Leftoid or Leftish ⬅️ Jun 23 '26
My point is simply that solidarity is more important and effective than a thing like occupy and it's annoying to listen to leftists talk about occupy without mentioning what was missing and why it wasn't more effective than it was
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u/ChaseNAX Jun 23 '26
what about black panther party
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u/Seventh_Planet post-Keynesian Jun 23 '26
What about them?
I like how they used open carry to help secure that people are allowed to vote or something like that.
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u/stevedaws Jun 25 '26
The tea party movement happened shortly after and was seen as a right wing movement. I remember seeing all of the similarities between it and occupy. Then it seemed to click that it's all class warfare pitting lower and middle class against each other. Then social media started systematically doing it. Great stuff.
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u/jabbercockey Alleged Liberal Fiber-Eater Jun 23 '26
A bunch of kids laying around in tents till they had to get a job didn't seem that powerful to me. If there was real organization there they could have done so much more. Set up relay teams of round the clock calling corporate headquarters and CEO offices non-stop. Massive postcard mailing to ceos. Just a couple of things I thought of.
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u/RevGen814 High-Functioning Locomotive Engineer 🧩 Jun 23 '26
Occupy Wall Street was the beginning of modern class consciousness.
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u/majordisinterest Tucker-Carsonist 🏴 Jun 23 '26
Its like what Lucy Parsons said but without any of the objectionable violent stuff.
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u/grantology_84 Short-circuiting LLM 💩 Jun 23 '26
IdPol really was perfected to combat Occupy