Don’t laugh, GameStop really is Occupy Wall Street 2.0

The Left ignores it at its own peril.

Politics didn’t have anything to do with Paula’s initial decision to buy a few shares of GameStop stock.

Early last week, she heard the buzz about the Wall Street Bets subreddit and decided to join the stock-buying frenzy because she’s a gamer with a soft spot for the struggling video game retailer. As a first-generation Polish immigrant who manages a coffee chain store in Chicago, she couldn’t afford much—just a few shares. 

But after the Empire struck back last week, she’s on the verge of calling an elected official for the first time despite having never voted in an election before. And instead of dumping stock to save cash, she plans to hold on to a portion of them until the bitter end. In WallStreetBets lingo, it’s called having “diamond hands.”

“I feel like I’ve been fighting with the people for the people. It’s just been stocks, yet seeing everyone come together like this has just been so beautiful.”

For all of its meme-fueled absurdity, there’s been surprising beauty in the Reddit revolt. Not only did it bloody the nose of the capitalist class, but the swift blowback from the establishment has also inspired a wide swath of ordinary people to band together to continue the rebellion.

“I graduated high school in 2008 right when the economy tanked. My mom and stepdad immigrated here from Poland for a better life and we were so damn happy to finally own a house and it got foreclosed on,” says Paula. “Now it’s personal.”

If this kind of story sounds familiar, it’s because this unruly flash mob of finance has morphed into something resembling Occupy Wall Street 2.0. For many, trading meme stocks has taken on an ideological element.

“I bought some $GME out of solidarity. Not to earn money. I feel this is Occupy Wall Street 2.0. The injustice of the system is so blatant and painful,” one GameStonker tweeted on Wednesday.

The left has an opportunity to show GameStonkers what collective action could mean if applied in arenas beyond the market. Instead, the movement’s most vocal supporters have been Silicon Valley libertarians and right-wing populists. 

Yikes.

The Radicalization of GameStonk

The original Occupy Wall Street was a defining moment for me. I grew up a dyed-in-the-wool conservative who *gulp* voted for George W. Bush both times.  My slow drift to the left was accelerated by Occupy’s crash course on America’s growing income inequality problem and the myriad ways the political and economic system was rigged on behalf of the one percent. 

The two sets of rules—one for the rich, one for the rest of us—are often obfuscated and can be hard to grasp. I’ve read The Big Short and watched Margot Robbie explain credit default swaps in a bathtub in Adam McKay’s film adaptation but I’d still struggle to articulate what exactly brought down the economy in 2008.

What makes the GameStonk moment so singular is that America is watching closely as a coalition of big finance, tech, and media companies openly circled the wagons to directly defend establishment hedge funders from the barbarians at the gate. The rules got changed in plain sight and in real-time. 

During the Trump years, Wall Street’s machinations hummed quietly in the background. 

Consider that at the beginning of 2021, Tesla’s stock traded above $800 a share—up from $400 in November. The electric car company is currently worth more than the annual economic output of Sweden and shot Elon Musk past Jeff Bezos as the world’s richest man. This for a barely profitable company whose vehicles didn’t make the list of the nation’s 50 best selling.

But few blinked an eye at Tesla’s growing price bubble. It was business as usual. Yet, when an online forum filled with anonymous normies with names like ShadowWolf1212 bought meme stocks and drove GameStop to unprecedented heights last week, Wall Street immediately hit the panic button and the SEC and politicians started paying attention.

Suddenly, retail traders were locked out of stock purchasing software and Reddit and Discord got delete-happy with forums and posts. The fact that an app called Robinhood froze Paula—like all other amateur traders—from buying last Wednesday felt like a cosmic joke: Here was Robin Hood robbing everyday people on behalf of the Sheriff Nottinghams of Wall Street.

Institutional investors and journalists then took to Twitter and CNBC to demonize GameStonkers as greedy pirates or insurrectionists. The right-wing of capital tried to equate them with radical leftist movements (“We are witnessing the French Revolution of Finance,” declared Anthony Scaramucci, a financier who served as Trump’s official shill for 11 days).

Many leftists and liberals went the other direction and tried to paint them as the alt-right’s finance team or the cyber equivalent of those who rioted in the U.S. Capitol. “I don’t get why they’re trying to tie us to Trump, what the hell?” asked a GameStop and AMC stock-owning friend of mine who had just voted for Joe Biden two months ago. 

New York Mets owner and billionaire Steven Cohen—one of the big losers of the GameStop saga—then took to Twitter to taunt them, saying “Hey stock jockeys, keep bringing it.”

And so they did. And for increasingly political reasons.

“Fuck the SEC. Where does the manipulation stop? We have to fight back. We have to bring this to the forefront of the world. Look what they are doing to us! We won’t stand for it,” wrote one R/WallStreetBets user. 

What the GameStonkers looks like now—at least in part—is a decentralized movement that acts in solidarity, largely because many of those involved have skin in the game: their own money. The short squeeze they’re trying to pull off takes coordination and discipline. Sell now and you profit or make some of your money back but then you’re no longer part of the movement. Many are choosing the latter.

Paula could personally lose upwards of $3,000, but she’s on a mission to make hedge funds bleed green. 

“I'd rather lose it all than sell right now with my current profit if it means I'm helping make history,” she says.

They’ve even appropriated GameStop's corporate tagline as a kind of populist anti-Wall Street slogan: Power to the Players.

Where the hell is the Left?

If there’s a political realignment happening, the first real evidence is the bizarro world Occupy of Zuccotti Park last week. Fifty protesters attended a “Re-Occupy Wall Street” rally in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park, the symbolic birthplace of the 2011 movement. 

“We need to take a stand today, tomorrow, and every day that comes forward. [Wall Street is] corporatizing the American dream and making a mockery of American freedom,” said one speaker.

That quote didn’t come from anyone in The Squad, but the lips of the vice president of a New York Young Republicans Club. The irony is tragic.

Lefty critics are right that this is not exactly a vanguard of an anti-capitalist revolution. It’s a leaderless mass of amateur investors that spawned from a fringe subreddit that—until a week ago—operated as an online water cooler for the Wild West of trading advice. Many of those who stalked R/WallStreetBets were like California panhandlers sifting for the next nugget of stock market gold to line their own pockets.

Even now, many GameStonkers say they just want an honest and uncorrupt version of market capitalism—not socialism. But the left should patiently explain how capitalism’s very nature makes that a losing proposition. 

Instead, much of the professional left seems content sitting on the sidelines and laughing at what they portray as a surrealist Internet prank played on Wall Street by its bratty kid brother. They’ve swallowed the liberal media’s worst stereotypes of them: they’re greedy and profane white dudes playing a losing game by trying to beat a broken system using its own levers. 

That second part is largely true. Elizabeth Warren criticized the stock market as functioning as a giant casino for billionaires but it’s actually worse than that. In America, the house doesn’t just always win, it changes the rules in the middle of a game. The chips will fall the way of the establishment one way or another. 

This particular moment of yo-yoing GameStop stock will end, and there’s evidence that it will be quashed this week as prices continue to plummet. 

Yet, even if it implodes tomorrow, this surreal Occupy sequel has already been more effective at being an adversarial force against Wall Street—even if largely by accident—than the original ten years ago. 

In practice, 2011’s Occupy functioned as an elaborate PSA, not a political project. It had no coherent goals or policy recommendations and didn’t actually present an imminent threat to capitalists. That’s why one of the enduring images from that era is Wall Street types laughing at Zuccotti Park denizens from upon a literal perch. 

Contrast that with the fact that GameStonkers have already made hedge funders cry on television, probably because they’ve cost them real money to the tune of $5 billion. Citron Research, which got caught up in the GameStop squeeze said it would no longer pursue the practice of short selling.

“Where we started Citron was supposed to be against the establishment, we’ve actually become the establishment,” said Andrew Left, Citron’s founder. 

It’s possible that GameStonk’s most lasting legacy will be a financial transactions tax. Ilhan Omar proposed one last week, estimating that it could generate $1 trillion a year revenue—money that could fund progressive policies such as canceling student loan debt and providing free college. 

Ideally, there’d be organized leftists on the streets demanding such a tax, or sweeping Wall Street reform, or the $2,000 checks that Joe Biden promised. That hasn’t been the case. Many are content making Bernie mitten memes rather than using this meme stock chaos as a teachable moment. 

Organizing workers and building a working-class movement through unions to build political power is still paramount. But we also have to adapt to the times in which we live and realize that the fight against capitalism is also asymmetrical, decentralized, and digital—especially in the time of COVID. We can’t wait for principled Marxists to emerge fully formed from the womb. We have to meet people where they’re at—even if it's from the seedier side of Reddit.

Ceding an anti-Wall Street narrative to Ted Cruz and Barstool Sports’ Dave Portnoy isn’t just short-sighted, it’s malpractice.