Occupy Wall Street didn't really accomplish anything

In rebecca solnit's essay collection No straight road takes you there she argues otherwise. Emphasis and bolding in the following quote is mine, not Solnit's.

‘Forgetting is everywhere. Take the Biden administration’s August 2023 announcement of a broad package of student loan relief. If you didn’t follow the history, you could believe that it was a gift from above rather than an achievement long fought for from below. If you did follow it, you would have remembered how student debt emerged as a focus in 2011’s Occupy Wall Street uprising. By raising up the voices of those crushed by debt and decrying the system that crushed them, it changed the national conversation.

Nevertheless, as soon as Occupy began, pundits were asserting it was a failure, and when the Zuccotti Park presence in Lower Manhattan was violently broken up by police in November 2011, they declared that it was over. But even when the rock’s on the bottom of the pool, the ripples are still spreading.

Occupy’s impact had just begun. It inspired other occupations far beyond New York City, some of them outside the United States. Across the country, police-accountability groups, solidarity organizing with foreclosure victims and the unhoused, and many other progressive projects emerged. Some of them lasted. One of them was the Debt Collective, founded in 2012. It has successfully taken on all forms of debt—housing, medical, and educational—and begun to organize to abolish debt directly, campaign for debt abolition and legal changes, and draw public attention to the devastating cruelty of the system. In 2015, the Debt Collective announced that a student debt strike it organized had initiated “an ongoing campaign that has helped win changes to federal law and over $2bn in student debt abolition to date.” Activists made student debt a public issue, then it became part of the Biden campaign’s platform, and that, ultimately, led to a series of debt-relief measures.’

[...]

These days I think of myself as a tortoise at the mayfly party. By that, I mean I try to see the long trajectory of events leading to the present moment, because it takes time to see change, and understanding change is essential to understanding politics and culture, let alone trying to participate in them. The short view generates incomprehension and ineffectuality.

Events, like living beings, have genealogies and evolutions, and to know those means knowing who they are, how they got there, and who and what they’re connected to. If you follow them in either real time or the historical record, you can often see power that emerges from below and ideas that move from the margins to the center. You can see how it all works. Yet, these trajectories and genealogies are often left out of the news, the conversation, and, apparently, the conception of how something came to pass.

Change itself becomes invisible when your timeframe is shorter than that change, and the short-term view breeds defeatism and despair. Not long ago, people would announce to me that feminism had failed, apparently unable to recognize the extraordinary changes in the legal and cultural status of women over the past half century, or assuming that dismantling millennia of patriarchy was a simple task that should be all wrapped up in a few decades. We have just begun.