Yotam Marom was inside Occupy Wall Street when it collapsed. The nationwide movement that once filled city streets with tens of thousands crumbled within months, undone by police sweeps, winter weather, and what Marom now identifies as a fatal trap: a "politics of powerlessness" that confused skepticism of institutions with the inability to build real strategy.
Fifteen years later, Marom has watched the left stumble through the same mistake repeatedly. As an organizer and founder of the Wildfire Project, a training hub for grassroots groups, he has worked alongside climate activists, racial justice fighters, tenant organizers, and abolitionists. Each time, he saw movements sabotage themselves from within.
But something shifted. A self-described democratic socialist now leads New York City. Leftist insurgents are mounting serious primary challenges against establishment Democrats. The Squad holds House seats. What once seemed impossible arrived quietly in electoral victories and governing power.
Marom traces a direct line from Occupy's energies to this moment. "Occupy brought thousands of people into the movement, trained hundreds of leaders, and changed the public's common sense around class," he said. The "99 percent versus 1 percent" framework introduced then made figures like Bernie Sanders conceivable in 2016. Without that movement, the Democratic Socialists of America slate that swept New York City races might never have assembled.
Yet Marom's new book, "For Louder Days: Reaching Beyond a Politics of Powerlessness," suggests the left's greatest vulnerability remains unchanged. The politics of powerlessness, as he defines it, turns movements inward. Leaders become objects of suspicion. Identity gets narrowed to personal identity rather than seen as systemic. Belonging means protecting spaces for those already inside, not welcoming the millions needed to actually win.
"It often looks like a fear of leaders within the movement, a narrow and individualistic way of understanding identity like race and gender rather than a systemic one," Marom explained. This mindset flourishes when movements despair of winning. His generation came of age believing leftwing movements could not succeed. The response was predictable: abandon the difficult work of building power and settle instead for being right, surrounded by the like-minded, weaponizing differences against each other.
The organizations breaking this cycle do something harder. They treat winning as non-negotiable. They craft strategy ruthlessly. They move past ambivalence about leadership. They build structures where thousands of people feel they truly belong to the project.
A story from CAAAV, a Chinatown and Queens tenant organization, crystallizes the cost of this approach. Years ago, the group faced a brutal choice at a strategy retreat. They could continue their comfortable work, or they could consolidate resources on a winnable campaign in Chinatown, abandoning an unwinnable Queens effort. Staff jobs would be lost. People they had organized would be left behind. A young organizer facing job loss spoke up: they had to make the hard choice. "That's what leads to good strategy," Marom said. "It's what leads to organizations healthy enough to carry it out."
Those difficult decisions bore fruit years later when CAAAV's partner organization helped organize the Chinese and Bengali base that propelled Zohran Mamdani to victory in a legislative race. But nobody knew that would happen when they made the call.
The moment New York now finds itself in is real, Marom acknowledged. Movements are more mature. They have more resources and institutional knowledge. They have tasted winning. Yet he offered a sober caveat: the far right controls the federal government, the climate crisis tightens, and the most powerful interests on earth are actively gutting the institutions that could replace them. New York's victories do not reflect conditions across the country.
The greater danger is that success in one city tempts movements to shrink their ambitions. To feel powerful in a tiny corner rather than face powerlessness in the larger world. To slip back into the very patterns that paralyzed Occupy.
Building durable power, Marom suggested, requires institutions and infrastructure that most of the left has not yet constructed. Not just electoral capacity, though that matters. Not just the ability to wage campaigns against landlords or employers, though that matters too. But spaces where people become politically educated, build relationships, develop a shared vision for society, and integrate electoral and non-electoral power-building so they reinforce each other rather than compete.
"We're not going to get real transformation by hopping from one election to the next," Marom said. The party the left needs to build, in other words, may not arrive as a single banner organization. It arrives as a network of capacities, all feeding each other, all oriented toward winning.
Author James Rodriguez: "Marom's diagnosis cuts to the bone: the left spends more energy protecting its purity than expanding its power, and that's a recipe for permanent minority status."
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