EVENT
Occupy Wall Street
The 2011 protest movement that began in Zuccotti Park and spread to over 1,000 cities globally — Graeber was instrumental in its organization and is widely credited with popularizing its slogan, 'We are the 99 percent.'
Occupy Wall Street began on September 17, 2011, when activists occupied Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan to protest the distribution of wealth and political power in post-2008 America. The movement spread within weeks to occupations in over 1,000 cities worldwide. Graeber was central to its organizational development — bringing his anthropological expertise on consensus-based decision-making and his anarchist commitment to horizontal political structures to the practical work of building a movement. He is widely credited with popularizing the slogan 'We are the 99 percent,' which crystallized the movement's analysis of contemporary inequality. Occupy was eventually evicted from physical spaces but reshaped American political discourse, introducing terms like '99 percent' and '1 percent' into ordinary speech and influencing subsequent movements from Black Lives Matter to climate justice organizing.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Graeber's contribution to Occupy was both intellectual and practical. He brought to the movement his ethnographic experience with the Global Justice Movement of