Occupy Wall Street didn’t begin for me on September 17, 2011. I was there when Zuccotti Park was first claimed by activists and the encampment began, but I didn’t see much potential that first day on a drab stretch of lower Manhattan concrete. For me, Occupy began later, on October 1, when 700 people were arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge, myself included. A timeless protest recipe (mix collective direct action and police stupidity) blocked a major New York City artery for hours; then around the country, the heartbeat of something happening grew louder. I can calendar mark an anniversary, but I can’t date Occupy’s end for me — it was a fizzling, a burnout, a failure to re-emerge after hiatus. But it did end. The more radical, on-the-ground actions emanating from Occupy camps were shut down by police, while the messaging lived on, funneled into political campaigns. On September 17, 2016, a handful of onetime Occupy participants returned to Zuccotti Park to mark five years since the camp’s inception. They paid homage with cardboard signs carrying anti-capitalist slogans and spoke to the few journalists who were present, answering questions about the presidential election. Caleb Maupin, 28, told The Guardian that he thought the Sanders campaign was like “a giant Occupy Wall Street rally.” “Every candidate wants you to think they are the Occupy candidate,” he said. There was a time, five years ago, when for many of the protest participants, the term “Occupy candidate” was an oxymoron. It “changed the conversation.” That much has been said, again and again, of Occupy Wall Street in the years since the brief but intense flourish of encampments, marches, and political direct action that began in New York in September 2011. What this tends to mean is that issues of income inequality, banking regulation, and raising the minimum wage — and phrases like “the 99 percent” and “the 1 percent” — have been picked up by politicians and recognized by major media institutions. And there’s truth to it. One need look no further than the popularity (especially among the young) of the self-described democratic socialist who wanted to be president. The problem with Occupy’s legacy as primarily a “conversation changer” is that the protest moment gets framed as a set of talking points — a corrective to mainstream political discourse alone. “Occupy” has been historicized as a slogan and forgotten as a tactic and a verb. This is understandable: Historians bestow the title “success” on that which continues — after all, “to succeed” doesn’t just mean to win, but also to follow and replace. But we miss a useful lesson in radical political history if we confine Occupy’s memory to the thing that laid the ground for Sanders’s campaign and “changed the conversation.”

Photo:Mario Tama/Getty Images

I had reported on the protests from their earliest planning stages while stringing for the New York Times, before (with some controversy) aligning myself with the activists, particularly those invested in an anarchist politics of opposition to representative democracy. Occupy, for me, was an experiment in burdensome consensus-based decision-making and a commitment to creating new, untested political spaces. Former occupiers who turned their energies to the so-called Sanders revolution stress that more than just talking points have carried through. Modes of horizontal, rhizomatic organizing, and the deployment of a network of over 50 Twitter and Facebook accounts by the People for Bernie activist coalition, all began in the context of Occupy. The @OccupyWallStNYC Twitter account (with its 205K followers) was taken over by former occupiers using the platform to support Sanders. Recalling the fierce disagreements that characterized the internal politics of Occupy, this recuperation of the handle even led to a lawsuit. For some, the coalescence of Occupy ideas and networks into a coherent political campaign had been a goal since the early days of the Zuccotti Park camp. For just as many others, Occupy’s raison d’être was a fierce autonomy and a refusal to be co-opted into political parties, however sympathetic their leader and platform might be. “As time goes on, Occupy is remembered as a movement for the 99 percent, against Wall Street, dealing with income inequality. Most people talk about the legacy on this discursive level,” Marisa Holmes, an activist, filmmaker, and former New York occupier, told The Intercept. “This misses so much of the day-to-day action, and the more radical anarchistic politics we engaged in.” The suggestion is not that discourse doesn’t matter — discourse shapes policies and delineates the political imaginary. To focus on this alone, however, does historical discredit to the importance of Occupy’s form — a banner under which to create public spaces and forums and to intervene in the assumption that politics is just about voting or supporting candidates or joining campaigns. Consider the several hundred protesters camping with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline construction. The question of occupation is complicated here by the fact that it is Sioux land under threat by the pipeline. But the strength of the protest tactic reminds us of the history of contesting colonized space by physically taking it (back) — this is the political history in which Occupy belongs. Sen. Sanders has stood with the protestors at Standing Rock, and elsewhere, which recalls a different Occupy legacy worth preserving: If elected officials turned up, they stood with the group, in the group, not for the group.

Protesters demonstrate at Zuccotti Park near the New York Stock Exchange on the second anniversary of Occupy Wall Street on Sept. 17, 2013, in New York City. Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images