Some people like it and some people don’t, but the catchiest thing to come out of the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon is the “We Are The 99%” meme. If politics is ultimately about the distinction between friend and enemy, this is the slogan that made OWS truly political.

One of the most reactionary aspects of post-sixties American political culture has been the imagined division of society into a (racialized) “poor” and a fictional “everyone else.” The 99% reverses that polarity: the poor, the working class, and the broad middle (“we”) are all, in this formulation, united against a tiny rich elite. It’s simple, but it’s catchy.

Slogans aren’t theoretical tracts. They only work when the words and images they appropriate are ones we already know by heart. So how is it that the very first time we saw the phrase “We are the 99%,” we all knew exactly which 99% it was talking about?