David Shankbone (CC BY 3.0)
Day fourteen of Occupy Wall Street in New York City, September 2011.
Yotam Marom remembers how it felt in late 2011 to see the Occupy Wall Street movement, in which he played a leadership role, just sort of fizzle out without much in the way of tangible gains. It was, he writes, “just another crushing example of our lack of power, of our place on the margins of history, of our inability to intervene on the brutality of the system, and it was heartbreaking. I was twenty-five years old and already cynical, already accepting my powerlessness.”
In For Louder Days: Reaching Beyond a Politics of Powerlessness, the Brooklyn, New York-based activist argues that such outcomes, though recurring, are not inevitable. He believes progressives have ceded opportunities for power, in part because of their ingrained fear of leadership. Marom argues that having leaders is actually quite useful if you want to get things done. Those who accept this role, he notes, “take on serious responsibility and often profound risk, offer movements essential guidance, give the public something to identify with, and more.”
The New Press
The New Press, 336 pages. Publication date: June 2, 2026.
Marom, who went on from Occupy Wall Street fame to co-found The Wildfire Project, a national activist training operation, also puts in a good word for conflict within an organizing group. Yes, it can be difficult and even painful, but it can also bring to light problems that can be solved before things get worse.
“We avoid conflict for a million good reasons,” he writes. “But groups that learn to face it with dignity and confidence and care come out with better strategies and are also more capable of carrying them out.” Part of this involves being willing to have difficult conversations, which in his book are often transformative.
For Louder Days is a remarkably personal and deeply heartfelt look at the challenges of movement politics. Marom, who is Jewish, grapples with being “a straight, white male with class privilege in a movement bent on destroying the very systems that gave me those privileges in the first place,” obliging him to “unlearn, betray, and loathe the systems of white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy that invested in me.”
In discussing the building of movements, Marom repeatedly returns to two core concepts. One is honesty: “If we want to build powerful groups, powerful organizations, powerful movements, we will have to cultivate truth-telling as a skill, a reflex, a superpower.” The other core concept is love. Marom, aware of how corny this sounds, borrows from a famous Che Guevara quote to name his chapter on this subject “About Love (At the Risk of Seeming Ridiculous).” But it is love that enables movements to welcome people in and transform their feelings of powerlessness and despair.
In one striking chapter, “To Belong,” Marom recounts how he happened to hook up with a group of guys who get together each week in his Brooklyn neighborhood for a pickup softball game. There he found acceptance that had nothing to do with his politics or even how well he played. It’s a model he finds inspiring: “How rare it is in our world, and even our movements, to feel and be told that we are welcome to join just because we are people, that we have promise and potential, that we are worthy.”
For Louder Days is a wise book, and, ultimately, an uplifting one. Its title, importantly, refers to days to come, when the progressive left will grasp “the immense potential at our fingertips to become what we must become in order to win the world we all deserve.” Yotam Marom has provided a good deal of useful advice on how to make that happen.