Ten years after Occupy Wall Street took over a small park in downtown Manhattan, the new left that was birthed there continues to develop and grow. The occupation of Zuccotti Park — and the numerous other occupations that it inspired — was short-lived, but it transformed the political landscape in the United States and beyond. At Zuccotti, a tent city thrived with newspapers, a library, a kitchen, and dozens of working groups, and it buzzed with constant political discussion about a world in which 1 percent of the population enriches itself at the expense of the rest of us, the 99 percent. A decade later, writes Occupy participant, documentary filmmaker, and author Astra Taylor, the US political situation “remains far more promising than it was at the start of the last decade.”

In the years leading up to Occupy, Taylor recently commented, the Left was demoralized and fragmented. But Occupy inaugurated a “social movement renaissance,” and we “have not stopped talking about capitalism, we haven’t stopped talking about class, we haven’t stopped talking about debt” ever since.

In her latest book, Remake the World: Essays, Reflections, Rebellions, Astra Taylor weighs in on the legacy of Occupy, the organizing capacity of debt resistance, and our prospects for achieving something resembling democracy. Taylor’s own path through Occupy Wall Street took her from a supportive observer — returning “day after day, unable to resist the bizarre and growing gathering of the discontented” — to an active organizer via an Occupy offshoot that began organizing around debt.

While it may be true that in the days of Occupy, discussion of debt was often unmoored from the broader political economy of its roots, this was just the beginning. The Occupy working group that Taylor was a part of developed into the Rolling Jubilee campaign and then the Debt Collective. That movement has already won significant debt relief and reflected and clarified a growing awareness that debt is a major nerve center in the anatomy of capitalism.

Bosses and lenders collude to keep us underpaid and financially dependent, while gutted social services have attached colossal price tags to our life necessities — creating a perfect storm of economic domination. As Taylor notes, for instance, “In countries with universal health care, individual medical debt is rare: in the United States, it is a leading cause of poverty and the main catalyst for bankruptcy.”

First, we are exploited at work. Then, our financial vulnerabilities are taken advantage of to further bind us to creditors. Debt therefore acts to entrench economic inequality. Student debt alone totals $1.6 trillion, and more than a million people have defaulted on their loans every year between 2015 and 2019. Total household debt is now nearing $15 trillion.

The economic consequences of mass insolvency, Taylor argues, suppresses demand, impedes homeownership, and stresses body and mind, “a tendency exacerbated by the fact that debtors tend to delay or avoid seeking medical care, fearful of the cost.” Though much has been made of growing household savings that Americans have accumulated throughout the pandemic due to government spending, this, too, has mostly reinforced inequality. The top 20 percent of income earners have accounted for 85 percent of the savings accrued, while the bottom 20 percent accounted for just 0.5 percent.

The racial wealth gap is exacerbated by debt as well. Consider, for instance, student debt. Historic economic inequality, undergirded by segregation, discrimination, and racist lending practices, has made it much more difficult for black families to pass down significant amounts of wealth to the next generation. With skyrocketing tuition rates and little inherited wealth to count on, black families are finding that higher education often crushes rather than advances economic mobility.

The Wall Street Journal reported last month that “more than 84% of college-educated Black households in their 30s have student debt, up from 35% three decades ago . . . the younger generation owes a median of $44,000.” By comparison, 53 percent of their white counterparts have college debt, with a median debt of $35,000. This growing burden of debt contributes to a yawning chasm of racial wealth inequality. The median wealth of black households with a college degree ($8,000) barely inches above that of black households without a degree ($6,000). Significantly, whether black families do or don’t include someone with a college degree, their median household wealth is far below white households with no degree ($45,000), and eons away from white households with a degree ($138,000).

Debt, in other words, is a tool of an exploitative and oppressive system. In Taylor’s words, she came to see debt as “an effective means of social control.” Working people are too busy working to pay off their monthly obligations to have time and energy leftover to protest. The growth of debt as a means of social control developed alongside the neoliberal world order, but “the emergence of Occupy was a welcome sign that the control mechanism was breaking down.”

Significantly, out of her experiences at Occupy, Taylor recognized a possibility to organize people around indebtedness. To do so is an economic necessity, a means to address inequality and social control. But resisting debt also provides an opportunity to “bridge the personal and political.” Debt binds “individuals to a broader set of economic circumstances, and as such presents a powerful opportunity to unite otherwise divided populations.” In one sense, as Taylor argues, organizing people around their indebtedness helps us to update the union model of organizing “for our current conditions of financialization and insecurity,” to build “fresh ties among stranded people who lack stable employment, let alone union membership.”