17 September 2026 marks 15 years since Occupy Wall Street began in New York’s financial district. The mobilisation followed a call in the Canadian magazine Adbusters, which proposed a symbolic occupation of Wall Street to protest economic inequality and corporate influence over politics.

Participants could not occupy Wall Street itself and settled in Zuccotti Park, a privately owned public space. The movement had no formal leadership. Decisions were discussed in general assemblies, and messages were repeated through the “people’s microphone” because amplified sound was restricted. The phrase “We are the 99%” concentrated criticism of the distribution of income and wealth after the 2008 crisis.

The protest attracted activists, students, union members and people affected by debt. The absence of a single list of demands was read either as a weakness or as openness. Police cleared the camp in November 2011. The language of the “1%” and “99%” continued to shape debates about wages, debt and economic concentration. The concrete impact remains debated; the clearest influence was a change in public vocabulary.

This episode is not the same as the reopening of US markets after 11 September 2001, another Wall Street landmark, ten years earlier.

Photo: Zuccotti Park, 23 September 2011, the seventh day of the protest. Photograph by David Shankbone, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Source consulted: Encyclopaedia Britannica — Occupy Wall Street.