Matthew Noah Smith and Todd Gitlin have written terrific reflections on Occupy—so good that, when I was first asked toMore…
All posts tagged Occupy
American Ethnologist on Occupy
The May 2012 issue of American Ethnologist has three open-access articles focused on the Occupy movement. In “The Occupy MovementMore…
Occupy Ethnography: Reflections on Studying the Movement
Winter has seen Occupy Wall Street shift gears. Meetings have moved indoors, and the movement is now more a networkMore…
Were March 1st Demonstrators Occupy’s Comeback Kids?
It’s been a long, cold winter and people are wondering, “Is Occupy still going?” It is. But how and whereMore…
Conference-calling across the Occupy Rhizome
As Occupy camps spread around Southern California in early October, a small group of occupiers located at City Hall inMore…
Occupy Philosophy!
Smack in the middle of the holidays, on a Wednesday night in very late December, about 150 people—philosophy professors andMore…
Living Politically
Less than ten years ago, a day of international protests swept across the globe, involving millions of human beings for nearly a full 24 hours. It was a global protest against the United States starting a war against Iraq, and was, as far as we know, the first coordinated global protest against state-sponsored violence. A few years before that, at a World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle in 1999, a series of intense, angry protests against global economic injustice began. These actions occurred repeatedly over several years, and across several continents. As recently as the winter of 2011, there were enormous protests in Madison, Wisconsin against anti-union legislation. The protests were explicitly focused on class and inequalities, not just on wealth, but also on the discrepancy of power between the very rich and the rest.
Horizontalism and Territory
Horizontal social relationships and the creation of new territory, through the use of geographic space, are the most generalized and innovative of the experiences of the Occupy movement. What we have been witnessing across the United States since September 17th is new in a myriad of ways, yet also, as everything, has local and global antecedents. In this essay I will describe these two innovations, and ground them in the more recent past, specifically in the global south in Argentina. I do this so as to examine commonalities and differences, but also to remind us that these ways of organizing have multiple and diverse precedents, and ones from which we can hopefully learn.
A Movement Without Demands?
In this essay, we claim that far from being a strength, the lack of demands reflects the weak ideological core of the movement. We also claim that demands should not be approached tactically but strategically, that is, they should be grounded in a long-term view of the political goals of the movement, a view that is currently lacking. Accordingly, in the second part of this text, we argue that this strategic view should be grounded in a politics of the commons. Before addressing the politics of the commons, however, we dispel three common objections that are raised against demands during general assemblies, meetings, and conversations people have about the Occupy movement.
