Adopted by the New York City General Assembly on 29 September 2011, in Zuccotti Park (Liberty Square), Lower Manhattan. The Declaration was drafted collectively through the General Assembly’s consensus process and read aloud using the “human microphone” — a technique in which the speaker’s words are repeated in waves by the assembled crowd, necessitated by the NYPD’s prohibition of electronic amplification in the park.
Occupy Wall Street began on 17 September 2011, when several hundred people marched into Lower Manhattan and established an encampment in Zuccotti Park, a privately owned public space two blocks from the New York Stock Exchange. The occupation — which would last until a police raid on 15 November — became the catalyst for a global wave of occupations, assemblies, and protests under the slogan “We are the 99%.” The movement was catalyzed by a call from the Canadian magazine Adbusters, organized through networks of anarchist and horizontalist activists, and amplified by social media to a degree unprecedented in the history of American protest.
The Declaration reproduced below was the movement’s first and most authoritative collective statement. Its form is significant: modeled on the structure of the United States Declaration of Independence, it transforms Thomas Jefferson’s grievances against the British Crown into a litany of grievances against corporate power. The text’s deliberately open-ended quality — its refusal to make specific policy demands — was both its greatest strength (enabling a broad coalition) and the source of its most persistent criticism. As a political-art document, the Declaration represents a rare instance of a text that was simultaneously a founding document, a performance script (designed to be read through the human microphone), and a work of collective authorship in which no individual voice predominates.
Declaration of the Occupation of New York City
As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies.
As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known.
They have taken our houses through an illegal foreclosure process, despite not having the original mortgage.
They have taken bailouts from taxpayers with impunity, and continue to give executives exorbitant bonuses.
They have perpetuated inequality and discrimination in the workplace based on age, the color of one’s skin, sex, gender identity, and sexual orientation.
They have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization.
They have profited off of the torture, confinement, and cruel treatment of countless animals, and actively combated combated the ability of their employees to organize.
They have continuously sought to strip employees of the right to negotiate for better pay and safer working conditions.
They have held students hostage with tens of thousands of dollars of debt on education, which is itself a human right.
They have consistently outsourced labor and used that outsourcing as leverage to cut workers’ healthcare and pay.
They have influenced the courts to achieve the same rights as people, with none of the culpability or responsibility.
They have spent millions of dollars on legal teams that look for ways to get them out of contracts in regards to health insurance.
They have sold our privacy as a commodity.
They have used the military and police force to prevent freedom of the press.
They have deliberately declined to recall faulty products endangering lives in pursuit of profit.
They determine economic policy, despite the catastrophic failures their policies have produced and exposed.
They have donated large sums of money to politicians, who are responsible for regulating them.
They continue to block alternate forms of energy to keep us dependent on oil.
They continue to block generic forms of medicine that could save people’s lives or provide relief in order to protect investments that have already turned a substantial profit.
They have purposely covered up oil spills, accidents, faulty bookkeeping, and inactive ingredients in pursuit of profit.
They purposefully keep people misinformed and fearful through their control of the media.
They have accepted private contracts to murder combatants abroad.
They have perpetuated colonialism at home and abroad.
They have participated in the torture and murder of innocent civilians overseas.
They continue to create weapons of mass destruction in order to receive government contracts.
To the people of the world,
We, the New York City General Assembly occupying Wall Street in Liberty Square, urge you to assert your power.
Exercise your right to peaceably assemble; occupy public space; create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone.
To all communities that take action and form groups in the spirit of direct democracy, we offer support, documentation, and all of the resources at our disposal.
Join us.
Editorial Note on Significance
The Declaration of the Occupation is remarkable as both political document and performance text. Its anaphoric structure — the repeated “They have” — was designed not only for rhetorical effect but for practical necessity: the human microphone required short, repeatable phrases that could be amplified through collective vocalization. Form and content were inseparable. The text was literally shaped by the conditions of its performance — by the prohibition of amplified sound in Zuccotti Park, by the consensus process through which every sentence was debated and approved, by the physical exhaustion of a crowd repeating each phrase in the September heat.
The Declaration’s refusal to make specific demands — its substitution of a list of grievances for a list of proposals — has been both celebrated and criticized. Supporters argue that the open-ended form was itself the message: that the existing political system was so thoroughly captured by corporate interests that reform proposals would only legitimize a structure that required replacement. Critics counter that the absence of demands enabled the movement’s eventual dissipation. Both readings acknowledge the Declaration’s power as a text that, for a brief period in the autumn of 2011, articulated a grievance shared by millions with a clarity that conventional political discourse had failed to achieve.
