Naomi, We Were Doing It Wrong

By Cliff Potts, CSO, and Editor-in-Chief of WPS News

Baybay City, Leyte, Philippines — September 27, 2026

Naomi Klein was not the enemy of Occupy.

She was one of the people trying to help.

That matters, and it needs to be said up front, because too much of what followed Occupy turned into people picking sides instead of trying to understand what actually happened. Naomi was not attacking the movement. She was trying to make sense of it, to guide it, to help it become something more durable and effective.

And she was not wrong about everything.

Occupy did a lot of things wrong.

We struggled with structure. We struggled with decision-making. We struggled with scale. Consensus processes could drag on, be manipulated, or simply exhaust the people trying to participate in them. Informal leadership emerged anyway, often without accountability. Personal conflicts became political conflicts. Ego showed up. Confusion showed up. Fatigue showed up.

I saw all of that.

I lived inside all of that.

And at the end of it, I was on the receiving end of some of it too. I was labeled, dismissed, and pushed aside in ways that had less to do with reality and more to do with how unstable the environment had become. That is part of the record as well.

So yes, Naomi, we were doing it wrong.

But that is only half the story.

The other half is that the “right way” was not available to us.

By 2011, the established systems had already failed. The political system was not representing people. The economic system was extracting from them. The so-called established left, at least in places like Chicago, was largely absent from what we were building on the ground. There were exceptions. Some lawyers showed up. Jerry Boyle, whatever his limits, was there with us on the street. That counts. Being present counts.

But the broader structure that was supposed to guide movements like this had already lost credibility.

We were not rejecting structure because we were naive. We were rejecting it because the structures we had inherited were part of the problem.

That does not mean what we built in its place worked.

It means we were trying to build something new in real time, under pressure, without a blueprint.

And that is the part that outside observers, even sympathetic ones, did not fully grasp.

Naomi Klein saw the movement. She understood its importance. She recognized the shift in language, the emergence of the 99 percent, the breaking open of a conversation that had been buried for years. But she was still observing it from outside the day-to-day reality of what it meant to keep that space alive.

Occupy was not a theory.

It was a situation.

It was cold nights and long days. It was police lines and shifting rules. It was people trying to feed each other, organize each other, argue with each other, and figure out what came next without any guarantee that there would be a next. It was documentation. It was conversation. It was conflict. It was presence.

I was there in Chicago collecting as much of that as I could. Recording it. Trying to understand what people actually wanted, not what anyone said they were supposed to want. That material still exists. It is primary-source material. It is the voice from the ground that too many people ignored then and continue to ignore now.

And that voice does not fit neatly into theory.

It tells you that yes, the process was flawed.

It also tells you why.

When you build something horizontally, without formal leadership, power does not disappear. It shifts. It becomes informal, sometimes invisible, sometimes unaccountable. That is a real problem. I saw that firsthand. I experienced it firsthand. Anyone who was there long enough saw it.

But the alternative was to fall back into structures that had already proven themselves untrustworthy.

That was the dilemma.

Not theory versus chaos.

Failure versus failure.

And we chose the version that at least felt honest at the time.

So when Naomi Klein and others pointed out what Occupy was not doing, they were not entirely wrong. But they were only seeing one side of the equation. They were measuring a movement against standards that came from a system the movement itself was rejecting.

That is a mismatch.

Occupy was not a finished model. It was an attempt. It was discovery. It was people trying to find each other and build something under conditions that were not designed to allow that to happen.

It did not hold together.

But it was not meaningless.

Occupy was the first big jolt in the American unraveling since the 1960s. It was messy, unstable, contradictory, and often unfair to its own people. But it was the real response to being sold out by our own government. And real things are rarely tidy.