Michelle Fawcett’s new documentary, “Occupy Wall Street: An American Dream,” examines how a populist upsurge swept the nation, put oligarchs on their back foot, and revived working-class politics.
ARUN GUPTA; @arunindy, [email protected]
Gupta is a journalist who has written for the Washington Post, The Nation, Raw Story, The Guardian, and Jacobin.
MICHELLE FAWCETT; [email protected]
Fawcett is a writer and community organizer whose scholarly work focuses on culture and neoliberalism.
Gupta told the Institute for Public Accuracy: “In 2011, I decided to go down to Occupy from Day 1. I had been covering protest movements for almost 20 years at that point. But at Zuccotti Park, it felt like something special was going on. After a few days watching it grow, I felt like it needed a newspaper––so we created a kickstarter campaign and started the Occupied Wall Street Journal.”
Gupta and his partner, Fawcett, decided to go on a nearly two-year cross-country road trip to cover the Occupy movement. “We interviewed a couple thousand people around the country. But Michelle [Fawcett] wanted to tell this story for her 18-year-old nephew, so the film includes her family’s personal narrative and the way that Occupy marks an end to the American dream. The film really captures that moment’s hope and optimism, which are in remarkably short supply now…
“In 2024, I covered the campus movement for Gaza in New York City. The kids [at those five campus occupations] would all talk about how much they admired Occupy Wall Street. When I saw those encampments, I saw Occupy. It has become part of the vernacular language of protest and it has reshaped protest culture: how to set up tents, medical tents, general assemblies. But we have shifted from grassroots social movements to viral social media sparking movements, and that can be very problematic.
“We want people to see the movie and discuss what it actually takes to build real, meaningful power. Occupy showed the limits and inherent failures of horizontalism and showed the utter necessity of organization and institutional building. We need powerful networks of institutions to fight the most powerful entity in human history: the U.S. government.”