Yotam Marom knows why the Occupy Wall Street movement fell apart 15 years ago. The New York-based organizer and author was a key participant in the nationwide constellation of encampments and rolling protests that brought tens of thousands of people into its fold. But the movement could not withstand police raids, evictions, a bitter winter and, as Marom sees it, an internal “politics of powerlessness”, which mistook a healthy distrust of institutional power for a failure to build a strong, coherent strategy for political change. Occupy splintered within a few short months and never seriously revived.
As he recounts in his new book, For Louder Days: Reaching Beyond a Politics of Powerlessness, Marom has again and again seen similar dynamics weigh down social movements in his work as an organizer and facilitator. He founded the Wildfire Project, a training organization for grassroots groups, and has worked with organizations including the Sunrise Movement agitating against climate decimation, the abolitionist Dream Defenders fighting for racial justice, the Uncommitted movement to end Democratic party support for Israel’s war crimes, tenants unions battling landlords, and more.
A lot has also shifted for the broader left and its relationship to power since 2011: a Democratic socialist is mayor of New York City and a slate of serious leftwing candidates are challenging establishment Democrats for congressional seats.
I first met Marom back in the heady days of Occupy. When we spoke recently, we discussed what movements have learned, what they must continue to learn, and why power must be built through movements, not simply through elected officials.
We first met at Occupy Wall Street. That was a hugely politicizing and lesson-filled time for both of us, and many others. Beyond your personal experience, why do you think it might be important to look back on Occupy now?
We’re in this moment in which we’re seeing some winning for the left, including winning actual governing power. I think there is a pretty direct through line from Occupy Wall Street to here. There are a bunch of ways in which we fell short, obviously. But Occupy brought thousands of people into the movement, trained hundreds of leaders, and led to the foundation of a bunch of different organizations. And it changed the public’s common sense around class in this country; it introduced the narrative of the 99% versus the 1%. It’s pretty hard to see how you get something like Bernie [Sanders]’s run in 2016 without that, and now this opening of mass socialist politics, with the elections of the Squad and Zohran [Mamdani] and a slate of DSA [Democratic Socialists of America] candidates in New York.
Your key takeaway from Occupy, and from a lot of the organizing work you’ve done since, is the notion of the “politics of powerlessness” and how it harms movements. What is the politics of powerlessness, why is it a problem, and with that in mind, what do you mean by power?
So, first of all, when I talk about power, I mean power to bring about a society whose institutions are geared toward people getting their material needs met and thriving. We want a powerful multiracial working-class movement that can bring about the world we all deserve.
The politics of powerlessness is a set of ideas and behaviors that turn us inward, away from our opponent (the forces of capitalism and state violence) and the public, toward – and often against – one another. It often looks like a fear of leaders within the movement, a narrow and individualistic way of understanding identity like race and gender rather than a systemic one, and a kind of belonging that’s meant to protect our spaces and feel good to the people already in them rather than one that’s meant to welcome in the many millions of people our movements need if we hope to win.
I think a lot of that stems from fear of our much more powerful opponent (billionaires, the far-right government, the police), and despair at the state of the world. I came up in a political generation that didn’t really believe leftwing political movements could win, and the natural thing to do, if you don’t believe you can win, is to abandon the risky and difficult work of building power and focus instead on being right, being surrounded by people who are like us, using our differences as weapons against each other. And then that creates unhealthy movements that people mostly don’t want to be a part of, and we lose.
I do think we’re in a special moment of seeing in real-time some organizations intervening in that dynamic – most notably this electoral insurgency around the country and especially in New York with Zohran and this DSA slate – where they’re essentially saying, “No, we want power. We want to govern. We know it’s risky and complicated, but it’s the only way.”
Organizations who take winning seriously do the hard work of crafting good strategy. They get over their ambivalence about leadership. They create structures and processes that let huge numbers of people feel that they belong and are part of the project.
Is there a risk of overstating this moment of winning? We are still in the context of power concentrated with billionaires, a burning planet, authoritarian rule, our inability to stop Israel’s ongoing genocide, brutal border regimes; I could go on.
For sure. In New York, where I live, we might be feeling on top of the world – Knicks in five! Zohran and the recent DSA sweep! And our movements are more mature than they were 15 years ago at Occupy. We have a lot more assets at our disposal now, and we’re a little more practiced at winning and building organizations that want to win, and that’s a huge deal.
But, of course, we’re only at the beginning of this trajectory. And around the country, a lot of people don’t feel this way at all. The far right controls the federal government; they’re gutting the institutions that would make it possible to replace them. We’re facing the ticking timebomb of climate change. We’re up against some of the most powerful people who have ever walked the planet, who run some of the most violent institutions that humans have ever designed. We have a very long road ahead of us.
When movements face serious barriers and real loss, we often feel the temptation to shrink – to narrow the playing field so that we can feel powerful in our tiny corner rather than powerless in the big wide world. I think that can happen here in New York, too.
In your book you describe a particular moment on an organizing retreat with the organization CAAAV (Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence), and how the group shifted towards building a strong strategy, and the difficulty that can entail.
The book is really full of stories, and one of my favorites is about CAAAV, a New York City community organization that organizes Chinese and Bengali tenants in Manhattan’s Chinatown and in Queens.
In a strategy retreat years ago, they faced this hard moment of having to decide whether to continue doing what they’re doing, which is comfortable and known and righteous, or to choose to prioritize some things over others even though it was painful. They decided – against this enormous pressure that most groups have to maintain the status quo – to shut down a chunk of their organizing in Queens and reprioritize the people, time and money they had spent on a particular campaign in Chinatown, which they would probably have lost if they didn’t. But it was heartbreaking. It meant having to go back to the projects in Queens and say, “We’re going to close this campaign down. This isn’t a winnable campaign, and we’re not going to organize this building anymore.” It meant that some of the people on staff who were hired for that work could lose their jobs. But there was this very powerful moment where they came to grips with this. In fact, a young woman at risk of losing her job said very bravely, “No, we have to do this. We have to make this choice.”
Years later we can see that the choices they made there led to their sister organization, CAAAV Voice, being one of the early endorsers of Mamdani, and then playing a significant role in organizing a Chinese and Bengali base for his victory. But none of them knew at the time that that’s what it was going to be. The important thing then was telling the truth, being willing to be in conflict with each other and lose some things. That’s what leads to good strategy. It’s what leads to organizations healthy enough to carry it out. It’s also what leads to real transformation.
Theorists like Anton Jäger have criticized the last 15 years of leftist movements and uprisings for failing to translate this work into mass politics and strong leftwing parties. What sort of structures – institutions, infrastructures – does the left need for power, in your view?
In the same way as we’re not going to have real meaningful social transformation by hopping from one big movement moment to the next, we’re also not going to get it by hopping from one election to the next. That’s not going to happen.
I also have fantasies of “the big party”, but I don’t feel qualified to say what exactly the form is. What would be wise for us to do is ask, “What would the big party be made up of?” We should build up those institutions and capacities with or without the umbrella.
It’s made up of the capacity to mount an electoral challenge and govern. It’s the capacity to wage campaigns against a boss or a landlord and win concessions. The space to welcome people in and become politically educated and meet each other and have social relationships that are good and healthy. A compelling vision for this society. And a relationship between these different things, especially the non-electoral power-building slice of the movement and the electoral one, so that they really mutually support each other.
-
Yotam Marom is an organizer, facilitator and writer based in Brooklyn, New York, with over 20 years of participation in movements and experience in facilitation, strategic planning, group dynamics and conflict work
-
Natasha Lennard is a columnist for the Intercept and a professor of critical journalism at The New School in New York City. Her work has appeared in the Nation, Bookforum, Dissent and the New York Times, among others. She is the author of Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life and the forthcoming On Un/Certainty
