Nine years ago today, the #Occupy movement initiated the occupation of Zuccotti Park—an ambitious experiment in self-organization.

This was a crucial breaking point at which a critical mass of people realized that capitalism is never going to benefit most of us.

A short thread.

Capitalism had rendered so many people precarious or redundant that it had become difficult to fight from recognized positions of legitimacy within it as “workers” or “students.”

Emerging from a wave of global unrest ( https://cwc.im/2012/01/01/nightmares), Occupy represented a new strategy.

While politicians around the US coordinated to evict the occupations, the movement was hampered from defending itself by liberal attempts to impose "nonviolence" and by confusion over whether its assemblies should serve to govern the movement or simply help to coordinate it.

Undoubtedly, one of the high points of Occupy was the general strike in Oakland on November 2 ( https://cwc.im/atc2blog ), which still offers a useful precedent for how we can organize a general strike in a post-industrial economy in which many of us are unemployed or inessential.

Occupy was one of many movements in a global wave that included the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, the #15m movement in Spain, and Greece and Bosnia. Afterwards, we chronicled the successes and failures of these in our book From Democracy to Freedom ( http://cwc.im/democracy ).

Today, we can look back and see that the most ambitious and confrontational participants in the #Occupy movement were right about the direction our world is headed.

The most controversial tactics and proposals of that era have become the baseline of today's mass movements.

This video we published after the General Strike in Oakland offers a time capsule of Occupy's headiest days—an important part of our heritage as aspiring revolutionaries and evidence that, as David Graeber said, "we do, in fact, win some."