Organizing Occupy Wall Street: This Is Just Practice book launch

Marisa Holmes

Please join us as we welcome Marisa Holmes to celebrate the launch of Organizing Occupy Wall Street.

This book is the first study of the processes and structures of the Occupy Wall Street movement, written from the perspective of a core organizer who was involved from the inception to the end. While much has been written on OWS, few books have focused on how the movement was organized. Marisa Holmes, an organizer of OWS in New York City, aims to fill this gap by deriving the theory from the practice and analyzing a broad range of original primary sources, from collective statements, structure documents, meeting minutes, and live tweets, to hundreds of hours of footage from the OWS Media Working Group archive. In doing so, she reveals how the movement was organized in practice, which experiments were most successful, and what future generations can learn.

Marisa Holmes is an organizer, filmmaker, writer, and educator based in Brooklyn, NY. She is the director of two non-fiction feature films, All Day All Week: An Occupy Wall Street Story, which captures the occupation at Zuccotti Park, and After the Revolution, a non-linear narrative of the post-2011 context in North Africa. In addition, she has authored numerous short films and articles. Her work has appeared in Truthout, Paris-Luttes, Nawaat, PBS, and Al Jazeera, and We Are Many: Reflections on Movement Strategy from Occupation to Liberation. Currently, she teaches courses on social movements and media at Rutgers University and Fordham University.

Praise for Organizing Occupy Wall Street

“What shines through this fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the Occupy Wall Street Movement by one of its key strategists is the sheer joy that people experienced in forging new kinds of cooperative relationships. Without discounting the movement’s internal battles and tactical challenges, Holmes makes a powerful case for Occupiers’ success in learning, teaching, and honing the practice of radical democracy.” (Francesca Polletta, Chancellor's Professor of Sociology, UC Irvine)

“As an author, filmmaker, and organizer, no one is better positioned to unravel the inner workings and historical significance of the Occupy Movement than the indefatigable Marisa Holmes. She brings her firsthand experience traversing the pathways of recent global movements–from Egypt to New York to Spain to Charlottesville–to bear on her razor sharp analysis of struggle in this definitive study.” (Mark Bray, Assistant Professor of History, Rutgers University)

“'This is Just Practice' is movement history at its best: meticulous, direct, and expansive in revolutionary scope. Providing a crucial corrective to all too many reductive Occupy narratives, Holmes emphasizes the movement's context in international struggles and centers it's all-too-overlooked form as a horizontalist, richly lived radical experiment. This is the Occupy we need to remember; these are the practices we must carry forward.” (Natasha Lennard, Author of Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life)

“More than a decade later, what happened at Occupy Wall Street still matters, and Marisa Holmes explains why. Democracy was not in retreat in 2011 like it so often is today, but advancing though courageous experiments in the streets. That moment and its meaning have never been so vividly described as here.” (Nathan Schneider, Assistant Professor of Media Studies, University of Colorado Boulder)