Occupy! A Global Movement 9781138822252, 9781317586319, 9781317586302

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Occupy! A Global Movement

This book is an urgent and compelling account of the Occupy movements: from the M15 movement in Spain, to the wave of occupations flooding across cities in America, Europe and Australia, to the harsh reality of evictions as corporations and governments attempted to reassert exclusive control over public space. Across a vast range of international examples, over twenty authors analyse, explain and help us understand the movements. These movements were a novel and noisy intervention into the recent capitalist crisis in developed economies, developing an exceptionally broad identity through a call to arms addressed to ‘the 99%’, and emphasizing the importance of public space in the creation and maintenance of opposition. The novelties of these movements, along with their radical positioning and the urgency of their claims all demand analysis. This book investigates the crucial questions of how and why this form of action spread so rapidly and so widely, how the inclusive discourse of ‘the 99%’ matched up to the reality of the practice. It is vital to understand not just the choice of tactics and the vitality of protest camps in public spaces, but also how the myriad of challenges and problems were negotiated. This book was originally published as a special issue of Social Movement Studies. Jenny Pickerill, John Krinsky, Graeme Hayes, Kevin Gillan and Brian Doherty were the editors of the journal Social Movement Studies during the height of the Occupy! protests. An international and cross-disciplinary collective, they were uniquely placed to collate and edit this volume.

Occupy! A Global Movement

Edited by The Social Movement Studies Editorial Collective: Jenny Pickerill, John Krinsky, Graeme Hayes, Kevin Gillan and Brian Doherty

First published 2015 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN, UK and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2015 Taylor & Francis All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 13: 978–1–138–82225–2 ePub eISBN 13: 978–1–317–58631–9 Mobipocket/Kindle eISBN 13: 978–1–317–58630–2 Typeset in Times New Roman by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk Publisher’s Note The publisher accepts responsibility for any inconsistencies that may have arisen during the conversion of this book from journal articles to book chapters, namely the possible inclusion of journal terminology. Disclaimer Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders for their permission to reprint material in this book. The publishers would be grateful to hear from any copyright holder who is not here acknowledged and will undertake to rectify any errors or omissions in future editions of this book.

Contents

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1. Why Does Occupy Matter? Jenny Pickerill & John Krinsky 2. Occupy Pittsburgh and the Challenges of Participatory Democracy Jackie Smith & Bob Glidden 3. How Local Networks Shape a Global Movement: Comparing Occupy in Amsterdam and Los Angeles Justus Uitermark & Walter Nicholls 4. Tahrir, Here? The Influence of the Arab Uprisings on the Emergence of Occupy

Sarah Kerton 5. The Indignados of Spain: A Precedent to Occupy Wall Street Ernesto Castañeda 6. Occupying the #Hotelmadrid: A Laboratory for Urban Resistance Jacobo Abellán, Jorge Sequera & Michael Janoschka 7. Already Occupied: Indigenous Peoples, Settler Colonialism and the Occupy Movements in North America Adam J. Barker 8. Whose Occupation? Homelessness and the Politics of Park Encampments Rebecca Schein 9. Collecting Occupy London: Public Collecting Institutions and Social Protest Movements in the

21st Century Jim Gledhill 10. Israel’s ‘Tent Protests’: The Chilling Effect of Nationalism Uri Gordon 11. The Homeless and Occupy El Paso: Creating Community among the 99% Curtis Smith, Ernesto Castañeda & Josiah Heyman 12. Occupy Online: How Cute Old Men and Malcolm X Recruited 400,000 US Users to OWS on Facebook Sarah Gaby & Neal Caren 13. Mic Check! Media Cultures and the Occupy Movement Sasha Costanza-Chock 14. The Free Culture and 15M Movements in Spain: Composition,

Social Networks and Synergies Mayo Fuster Morell 15. Tactics of Waste, Dirt and Discard in the Occupy Movement Max Liboiron 16. ‘Occupy Israel’: A Tale of Startling Success and Hopeful Failure Eitan Y. Alimi 17. The Students’ Rebellion in Chile: Occupy Protest or Classic Social Movement? Cesar Guzman-Concha 18. ‘Why don’t Italians Occupy?’ Hypotheses on a Failed Mobilisation Lorenzo Zamponi 19. Beyond the Network?

Occupy London and the Global Movement Sam Halvorsen 20. Negotiating Power and Difference within the 99% Jeffrey S. Juris, Michelle Ronayne, Firuzeh Shokooh-Valle & Robert Wengronowitz Activist Interventions 21. Occupy—The End of the Affair Anonymous 22. Walking in the City of London Isabelle Köksal

Index

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The chapters in this book were originally published in Social Movement Studies, volume 11, nos. 3–4 (August–November 2012). When citing this material, please use the original page numbering for each article, as follows: Chapter 1 Why Does Occupy Matter? Jenny Pickerill & John Krinsky Social Movement Studies, volume 11, nos. 3–4 (August–November 2012) pp. 279–287 Chapter 2 Occupy Pittsburgh and the Challenges of Participatory Democracy Jackie Smith & Bob Glidden Social Movement Studies, volume 11, nos. 3–4 (August–November 2012) pp. 288–294 Chapter 3 How Local Networks Shape a Global Movement: Comparing Occupy in Amsterdam and Los Angeles Justus Uitermark & Walter Nicholls Social Movement Studies, volume 11, nos. 3–4 (August–November 2012) pp. 295–301 Chapter 4 Tahrir, Here? The Influence of the Arab Uprisings on the Emergence of Occupy Sarah Kerton Social Movement Studies, volume 11, nos. 3–4 (August–November 2012) pp. 302–308

Chapter 5 The Indignados of Spain: A Precedent to Occupy Wall Street Ernesto Castañeda Social Movement Studies, volume 11, nos. 3–4 (August–November 2012) pp. 309–319 Chapter 6 Occupying the #Hotelmadrid: A Laboratory for Urban Resistance Jacobo Abellán, Jorge Sequera & Michael Janoschka Social Movement Studies, volume 11, nos. 3–4 (August–November 2012) pp. 320–326 Chapter 7 Already Occupied: Indigenous Peoples, Settler Colonialism and the Occupy Movements in North America Adam J. Barker Social Movement Studies, volume 11, nos. 3–4 (August–November 2012) pp. 327–334 Chapter 8 Whose Occupation? Homelessness and the Politics of Park Encampments Rebecca Schein Social Movement Studies, volume 11, nos. 3–4 (August–November 2012) pp. 335–341 Chapter 9 Collecting Occupy London: Public Collecting Institutions and Social Protest Movements in the 21st Century Jim Gledhill Social Movement Studies, volume 11, nos. 3–4 (August–November 2012) pp. 342–348 Chapter 10 Israel’s ‘Tent Protests’: The Chilling Effect of Nationalism Uri Gordon

Social Movement Studies, volume 11, nos. 3–4 (August–November 2012) pp. 349–355 Chapter 11 The Homeless and Occupy El Paso: Creating Community among the 99% Curtis Smith, Ernesto Castañeda & Josiah Heyman Social Movement Studies, volume 11, nos. 3–4 (August–November 2012) pp. 356–366 Chapter 12 Occupy Online: How Cute Old Men and Malcolm X Recruited 400,000 US Users to OWS on Facebook Sarah Gaby & Neal Caren Social Movement Studies, volume 11, nos. 3–4 (August–November 2012) pp. 367–374 Chapter 13 Mic Check! Media Cultures and the Occupy Movement Sasha Costanza-Chock Social Movement Studies, volume 11, nos. 3–4 (August–November 2012) pp. 375–385 Chapter 14 The Free Culture and 15M Movements in Spain: Composition, Social Networks and Synergies Mayo Fuster Morell Social Movement Studies, volume 11, nos. 3–4 (August–November 2012) pp. 386–392 Chapter 15 Tactics of Waste, Dirt and Discard in the Occupy Movement Max Liboiron Social Movement Studies, volume 11, nos. 3–4 (August–November 2012) pp. 393–401 Chapter 16 ‘Occupy Israel’: A Tale of Startling Success and Hopeful Failure Eitan Y. Alimi

Social Movement Studies, volume 11, nos. 3–4 (August–November 2012) pp. 402–407 Chapter 17 The Students’ Rebellion in Chile: Occupy Protest or Classic Social Movement? Cesar Guzman-Concha Social Movement Studies, volume 11, nos. 3–4 (August–November 2012) pp. 408–415 Chapter 18 ‘Why don’t Italians Occupy?’ Hypotheses on a Failed Mobilisation Lorenzo Zamponi Social Movement Studies, volume 11, nos. 3–4 (August–November 2012) pp. 416–426 Chapter 19 Beyond the Network? Occupy London and the Global Movement Sam Halvorsen Social Movement Studies, volume 11, nos. 3–4 (August–November 2012) pp. 427–433 Chapter 20 Negotiating Power and Difference within the 99% Jeffrey S. Juris, Michelle Ronayne, Firuzeh Shokooh-Valle & Robert Wengronowitz Social Movement Studies, volume 11, nos. 3–4 (August–November 2012) pp. 434–440 Activist Interventions Chapter 21 Occupy—The End of the Affair Anonymous Social Movement Studies, volume 11, nos. 3–4 (August–November 2012) pp. 441–445 Chapter 22

Walking in the City of London Isabelle Köksal Social Movement Studies, volume 11, nos. 3–4 (August–November 2012) pp. 446–453 Please direct any queries you may have about the citations to [email protected]

Why Does Occupy Matter? JENNY PICKERILL* & JOHN KRINSKY** Department of Geography, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK, Department of Political Science, The City College of New York, New York, NY, USA *

**

ABSTRACT Analysing the Occupy movement is important for understanding the political importance of social movements and the theoretical limits of social movement approaches. Occupy enables us to critically re-examine and question what we think we know about the processes of collective action. We identify eight contentions which illustrate why Occupy matters to scholars and which challenge us to re-examine existing assumptions: (1) the core claim to space that Occupy asserts; (2) the power of the language of occupation; (3) the need to pay more attention to the importance of crafting and repeating slogans; (4) the politics of prefiguring a new society (and its contradictions); (5) the implications of not making demands on the state; (6) the importance of ritualising and institutionalising protest; (7) the messy diffusion and mediation of a potentially global movement and finally (8) why confrontation with the police is understood as important as a movement tactic. Whatever the outcome, Occupy has enthused and mobilised activists in new ways and has articulated that inequality is something we all can, and should, seek to remedy.

Introduction As Occupy activists are once more arrested trying to start another camp outside the London Stock Exchange and others concede to eviction notices (May 2012), it is timely to reflect on why the actions of Occupy activists across the world matter. This is especially so, given their comparatively

short existence (since September 2011). There are obvious precursors and parallels to the Occupy movement (if it can even be conceived as such a connected entity), but it is not a clear progression from the anti-capitalist actions of the 1990s nor necessarily the spirit of the Arab Spring spreading west. There are disjunctures and fissures between these other movements and moments and the ways in which Occupy was conceived and practised. To many it was the moment when resistance to the inequalities of capitalism finally emerged: a tipping point in which the unfairness of bank bailouts juxtaposed against rising personal poverty triggered a moment of clarity of the absurdity of the current economic and political system. Yet we have had these moments of clarity before. Indeed, there are those who claim Occupy to be a manifestation of a particular ideology (and therefore its historical tenet) and there is evidence of certain tints of socialism, Marxism and anarchism at different Occupy protests (Graeber, 2011) and indeed similarity with the 17th century Diggers (Lewycka, 2012). Others rightly have despaired at the ignorance of lessons already learnt about the tyranny of structurelessness or the exclusionary potential of consensus decisionmaking practices (such as hand gestures). Yet it would be a shame if academic contributions were confined to a superficial critique of how things could have been done better. Knowing a lot of social movement theory does not make a good activist. Instead we want to reflect on why Occupy matters for those of us interested in social movements, and in doing so identify the common threads of the papers in this special issue. Analysing Occupy is important for understanding both the political importance of social movements and the theoretical limits of social movement approaches. Thus, Occupy enables us to critically reexamine and question what we think we know about the processes of collective action. The papers in this issue variously draw upon specific actions, places or tactics to explore why Occupy matters, and here we identify eight overarching themes which interweave and tie together these different narratives.

Eight Reasons Why Occupy Matters So why does Occupy matter? It was a convergence of interesting tactics and ideas, few of which were novel on their own, but which when combined ignited a passion and energised activism unlike we have seen for several

years. It has also enthused academics worldwide who have in turn been advocates of, and participants in, numerous Occupy protests. It is not surprising that the mainstream media, hungry for stories of conflict and struggle, amplified the protests, but what is of real interest in the story of Occupy, and thus why it matters, are some of the tactical and strategic approaches taken.

Making Space Occupy puts the issue of space at the core of its agenda: by using spatial strategies of disruption (marching and camping in unpermitted places); by articulating the symbolic significance of particular spaces and by challenging the privatisation of our cities, and thus its reinvigoration of the ‘right to the city’ debates. In London, for example, the failed attempt to occupy space within the square mile of the City facilitated a public realisation that the financial corporate world was not only off-limits to most, economically and socially, but also quite literally. Physical encampments have long been a protest tactic (at military bases, to prevent road construction, etc.) and actions such as Reclaim the Streets in the 1990s sought to reclaim roads (and motorways) for pedestrian use. The act of extended encampments in assertively public spaces (such as city squares or parks) also draws upon the Latin American tradition of public assembly and collective action far more than evidenced in recent years in London or New York. Factory occupations are also a key historical precedent. As in Occupy, the occupations were similarly strategic and symbolic; occupations of factories disrupt production (as some contemporary occupations have sought to disrupt commerce and the ‘normal’ flow of urban accumulation) and they showed that workers want to work, but under different conditions. Thus, Occupy camps reasserted the spatial dimensions of exclusion and inequality by forcing society to recognise that capitalist accumulation happens in certain places, and that these places can be named, located and objected to. These encampments have thus reasserted the power of the tactic to camp, and the power of such encampments to identify the geography of capitalism. Moreover, this focus on space challenges social movement studies to move beyond merely conceptualising the extent of space or the compression of space by time (as with discussions of

globalisation and ‘scaling up’ protest), and instead to more thoroughly explore the strategic use and occupation of space as symbolic.

The Language of Occupation The use of the terms ‘occupy’ and ‘occupation’ by activists turned politics on its head. Occupation used to refer to a state’s forced occupation of another country (such as the USA of Iraq), an act which campaigners sought to overturn and resist. Activists called their acts ‘sit-ins’ (if temporary) or ‘protest camps’ (if long term). Occupy is an altogether more powerful word because it forces the acknowledgement of two things. First, in order to occupy a space it must already be owned. As the British argued in Australia in 1788, if the land has no people (and thus no owners) then it is not an occupation but the claiming of available space and resources. This was, in part, the point of Occupy—to identify the need to reclaim space from corporate greed—but activists also quickly discovered that even a park or square is rarely ‘public’ but is governed by many laws and exclusions. Second, it (perhaps inadvertently) reminded those indigenous people already dispossessed from that land (especially in the USA and Canada) that they were still dispossessed, and gave the impression to some that they were being reoccupied by yet more unwanted intruders (Yee, 2011). As such, ‘to occupy’ had a stronger and more controversial implication than simply to set up a camp or hold a sit-in. This use of powerful language was a tactical choice which framed the movement in a certain way, both positively and negatively, and as such reasserts the debate about ways in which collective action is framed.

Crafting and Repeating Slogans The slogan ‘we are the 99 per cent’ (whether accurate or not) was incredibly powerful. Unlike ‘this is what democracy looks like’ (from the anti-capitalist protests of the 1990s) or ‘Bring our troops home’ (anti-war protests in the mid-2000s), it immediately created a sense of inclusion and majority. The power of a good campaign slogan is well known but hard to get right, and tends to be underrated in social movement studies. In the last century, only a few have stood the test of time. The early slogan of the

suffragettes of ‘Deeds not words’, the Situationists’ ‘All power to the imagination!’ from 1968, ‘Make love not war’ against the war in Vietnam, or, finally, ‘Think global, act local’ by environmentalists, all bear repeating. The Occupy slogan is likely to resonate as much as these and was key to the success of the movement. It is exactly through this repetition that slogans come to populate the discourse and establish their own truths. We need to examine slogans more carefully. Slogans differ from other concepts in studies of social movement claim-making: they are not frames (though they partly serve this function, they are also usually a lot more ambiguous); and they are not narratives. Rather they raise questions about the uses of ambiguity in political claim-making, and the way in which, as Stone (2003) writes, ‘ambiguity is the glue of politics. It allows people to agree on laws and policies because they can read different meanings into the words’. However, this ambiguity also creates space for contestation. While focusing on wealth as a defining difference has its drawbacks (in that there are wealthy Occupy supporters and not all bankers earn enough to qualify as part of the 1 per cent), the notion of a majority ‘us’ and minority ‘them’ was a very powerful emotional motivator, but equally enabled opponents to contest the way in which the movement works based on this common super-majoritarian slogan.

Prefiguring a New Society (and Its Contradictions) Occupy throws the work of prefigurative politics into stark relief, and challenges us to evaluate critically the balance of effort between living and acting a prefigurative, autonomous politics of mutual aid in ‘camps’, and working within, even on the edge of, ‘normal’ movement politics to win tangible reforms and alterations of behaviour in various parts of the state. It raises questions about the actual exclusions from the prefigured community and why they occur. Finally, it raises the political question of whether it is possible or even desirable to align the contemporary anarchist politics that are centrally identified with Occupy with existing labour and community organising and campaigning. As in many other forms of activism, inclusion of diversity in Occupy actions became a point of contention. By focusing on difference according to wealth, it was perhaps assumed that other differences such as race, gender, class and colonial (and other) could be subsumed and to some

extent ignored, or because such exclusions are still not uniformly seen as automatically problematic by some contemporary activists. Moreover, it might have been assumed that the multicultural nature of many of the cities in which Occupy emerged would in turn generate multicultural participation. Unfortunately, this was not to be. Despite often being physically close to different ethnic communities (such as Chinatown in New York), or being in cities where the majority of residents were non-white (such as Oakland, California) there have been accusations of racism and exclusion within Occupy. All exclusion is problematic, but Occupy actions encountered three particular issues with regard to unions, gender and homelessness. Collaboration with labour unions and thus working people was often sought by Occupy. It was recognised that unions could be key allies and that they shared similar grievances to Occupy activists. However, forging such collaborations was difficult and only a few places succeeded. Most notably Occupy Oakland built successful ties with one of the strongest trade unions (the International Longshoreman and Warehouse Union) and together they organised a large general strike and an action which closed several west coast ports (Healey, 2012). As successful as this was, however, the alliance eventually broke down through disagreements around tactics, the need for leadership and which campaign issues should take priority. Moreover, such collaborations raise the quandary of how some prefigurative autonomism actually depended on outside labour support even if this was not always formally acknowledged (such as the financial support of organised labour in the USA for Occupy, or even the assignment of labour and community organisers to Occupy Wall Street by existing community organisations and labour unions). While it is difficult to generalise across all the different Occupy camps which took place, it appears that feminism and its assertion of respect for different genders have yet to be taken seriously. Women’s visible presence is not the same as functioning equality and there were worrying reports of sexual harassment and intimidation making females feel unsafe and unwelcome in camps. Many places established ‘safe spaces’ in which to protect women, but in a movement focused on tackling economic equality it would seem reasonable that social and gender equality should be at the forefront of debates.

Finally, the fact that in many instances homeless people were already present in the spaces where Occupy set up camps has triggered extensive debates as to how inclusive the movement has been to those already living in the streets. Many camps welcomed all participants but others, like in El Paso, Texas, developed rigorous codes of conduct which homeless people had to abide by in order to be allowed to stay with the occupiers or share the donated provisions. This has raised obvious questions about elitism and assumptions being made about homelessness. The political and theoretical outcomes of these exclusions have yet to be fully understood, but are likely to have further implications. For example, the refusal of union support by the indignados in Spain and the rejection of such labour politics ultimately led to a contradictory political outcome in the national election of the conservatives in Spain.

Making Demands on the State The complexity of practising a prefigurative politics is further complicated by the official, but variable, refusal to make ‘demands’ that could be coopted by existing political parties or that recognise the legitimacy of the state as an agent capable of or willing to implement policy. Instead many camps explicitly sought to circumvent traditional providers of services and rather than make demands simply create the alternative. By establishing temporary tent communities with kitchens, bathrooms, libraries, first-aid posts, information centres, sleeping areas and educational space, they recreated new spaces of provision: prefigurative alternative communities with very few resources. These encampments began with a distinct focus on outreach work. In particular, there was significant emphasis on alternative education. In London, the ‘Tent City University’ and ‘The Bank of Ideas’ were quickly established and teach-ins occurred in many camps. At the same time, it quickly became clear that Occupy camps were developing what Laurie Penny called an ‘economy of care, a network of mutual aid’ (2012, p. 27) for their residents. The camps began to take on elements of service provision for all involved which extended beyond mere food provision to dealing with mental health issues, temporary housing and in some cases alternative employment in return for a share of the food. While such organisation is a credit to the importance of voluntarism and the possibility of alternative ways of living, it created further dilemmas for

participants. There was concern by some that they were in effect replacing (or creating anew) resources that the state should be providing, especially for the homeless or those with mental health or drug use issues. Dealing with such issues, and the personal tensions of living in protest conditions together, eventually led to many camps focusing more on the politics of camp life rather than the politics of the action itself. This refusal of public policy and engagement with the state raises two important issues for social movement studies: it suggests that we have to do more in theorising the role of the state vis-a-vis movements; and that we need to develop better distinctions among types of movements based on their (often-fluid) interaction with the state and involvements with it. Thus, this rejection of making demands on the state raises theoretical questions such as: is the state reducible to its core coercive functions? does it make sense to institutionally disaggregate the state into agencies with which movements are likely to make headway (at least at times) and ones they are not? what is the role of political parties in state organisations and in movements, and how does variation of this role contribute to very different political choices facing Occupy (and other) activists? and what explains the current tendency of state actors to throw popular legitimacy to the winds as an important element of wielding power in favour of coercion and repression? Ultimately, can we really speak about movements as fully autonomous from the state, and under what conditions does this make sense?

Ritualising and Institutionalising Protest All of these earlier issues also raise another important question about the role of ritual in social movements, as well as the institutionalisation of movements. Typically, movement rituals are credited with the ability to raise the energy level of activists and their commitments. But while that may be, and slogans play a real role in this as ritual depends on repetition, there is also a sense in which ritual can be exclusive and define a subset of a movement against others or become ‘mere’ ritual that may be devoid of effective political content beyond its performance. Thus, the question of police–protester interaction may be critically scrutinised. Does the repetition of almost ritualised interactions help or harm the growth, reach, or effectiveness of the movement, and how?

Similarly, one can think about the institutionalisation of Occupy in spite of itself as these interactions both repeat themselves and take up increasing amounts of the movement’s energy. In social movement studies, we need to develop our understanding of ritual, acknowledging that it can be demobilising as well as mobilising, especially as the movement now confronts how it will ‘come back’ into popular consciousness and discourse.

Diffusion and Mediation Depending on one’s starting point Occupy can be conceived as a global movement (inspired by the Arab Spring) or as a North American concept which was copied across Europe (particularly in Britain) and onto South Africa, Argentina, Australia and Japan (to name just a few). Other occupations took place prior to Occupy Wall Street (the Indignados and 15M in Spain) or simultaneously (Tent protests in Israel). In Britain, there were student occupations of University buildings against student fee rises from 2010 onwards. These actions variously had similar tactics, goals or language to the Occupy movement, but were also rooted in their local circumstance and politics. The point at which a movement becomes truly global is of course hard to discern. Occupy can be celebrated for its international reach, but that does not mean it was a global movement per se. Certain choices in tactics and strategy are deeply rooted in the Anglo activist approach and some of this did not easily translate to other countries, such as Italy. The relationship and necessity for such movements to become global need further investigation and academics are beginning to analyse the links and disconnects between the movements in different countries. However, questions remain as to how international solidarity can be usefully practised across such vast distances (Kennedy, 2011). Crucial to Occupy’s globality was its Internet-based diffusion. Like most collective action in recent years, Occupy was highly mediated through a range of online forums, social networks and open-source software and practices. Facebook, Blogs and Twitter were extensively used and many Occupy camps were extremely media savvy. Such use of online media has become integral to contemporary protest. It is an easy way to connect hundreds of thousands of supporters and share millions of posts. In many

ways, this open source or ‘free culture, free commons’ networking approach mirrors the non-hierarchical organisational structure of the Occupy movement. It has, of course, enabled a large audience to register support without physically joining a camp, and for ideas and strategies to be shared more easily. However, Occupy was mediated through a mix of ‘old’ and ‘new’ methods of diffusion. It worked with electronic media, and also through interpersonal ties and existing alliances. This mix both helped Occupy grow and garner attention, but also set certain limits around the movement—both in terms of the translatability of tactics from one setting to another, and in the continued salience of more proximate, local problems as the focus of movement grievances. Occupy will doubtless be celebrated as a product of an online age of 24/7 interaction and rampant social networks, but there remains an interesting tension between the utility of online social networks for protest and the place-based utility of personal ties. For social movement studies, there is still a need to move beyond the superficial celebration of digital mediation and unpack the (particularly scalar) implications of this use of mixed media.

The Politics of Policing Finally, the law enforcement response to many of the Occupy actions has been harsh and accusations of unnecessary repression abound (Calhoun, 2011). In Oakland, police were involved in a near fatal assault on activist Scott Olsen (October 2011). Most camps were cleared on the pretext of health and safety or the need to maintain ‘public order’. However, there has been an increasing securitisation of society in the last decade and an ongoing erosion of the right to dissent for much longer. This politics of policing, especially in the collusion between financial interests and the repression of dissent, was made evident by the response to Occupy. Although there is a growing literature in social movement studies on protest policing (e.g. della Porta & Reiter, 1998; Earl & Soule, 2006), there are three elements about Occupy which are still pertinent. Occupy has illustrated the extent to which protest policing has evolved, the ways in which policing tactics have diffused across countries and the very act of confronting the police has a central place in what could be called the ‘Occupy’ repertoire. This, in turn, raises theoretical and political questions about why confrontation with the police is understood as important as a

movement tactic (and for what), and its overall effects on movement recruitment, retention and political vision.

Where Next? While Occupy is beginning to morph in new and interesting directions (such as Occupy Congress and Occupy Our Homes in the USA), there remain challenges to its approach. Feminism needs to be taken seriously and not confined to ‘women’s issues’ or perceived to be solved by creating ‘safe spaces’. Homelessness has also been recognised as a complex situation, and for all concerned structural dispossession still requires more creative solutions. Others have argued that the aims of Occupy can be extended further, in particular to environmental debates. Athanasiou (2011) argues that the inequality that Occupy identifies does not just result in economic poverty but also environmental crisis. Inequality leads to insecurity which leads to an inability to deal with climate change. Thus, the Occupy movement carries on in new forms and new directions. This continuous reinvention and diversity of approaches and tactics is why Occupy matters. It is not a simple movement, not a single issue, but instead embodies the frustration and energy that many of us have with the way society is organised. Whatever its final outcome Occupy will have seeped into the consciousness of many and assertively articulated that inequality is something we can all seek to remedy.

Concluding Remarks This special edition is an attempt to map the diversity of both the location of actions across the world and the issues which they have faced and raised. We are not alone in recognising the need to reflect from both within and without the movement. In addition to the already extensive discussion by participants (such as in the Occupied Times), there is growing academic analysis of events. Notable others include books (Gessen et al., 2011; Byrne, 2012; Gitlin, 2012; Van Gelder, 2012; Writers for the 99 per cent, 2012; Chomsky, 2012), journal interventions (Society & Space, 2012; American Ethnologist, 2012, vol. 39, issue 2) and the excellent forum collated by the Berkeley Journal of Sociology (2012). We hope that this

collection adds to these debates and we provide them free here in the spirit of the movement itself.

References American Ethnologist (2012) Occupy Movements: AE Forum American Ethnologist, vol. 39, issue 2, http://www.americanethnologist.org/ (accessed 02 May 2012) Athanasiou, T. (2011) “Occupy” and the climate negotiations, EcoEquity, Available at http://www.ecoequity.org/2011/11/high-speed-history/ Berkeley Journal of Sociology (2012) Understanding the Occupy Movement, Berkeley Journal of Sociology, Available at http://www.bjsonline.org/category/occupy/ (accessed 02 May 2012). Byrne, J. (Ed.) (2012) The Occupy Handbook (London: Back Bay). Calhoun, C. (2011) Evicting the public: Why has occupying public spaces brought such heavyhanded repression? Possible Futures. Available at http://www.ssrc.org/calhoun/2011/11/18/evicting-the-public-why-has-occupying-public-spacesbrought-such-heavy-handed-repression/ Chomsky, N. (2012) Occupy (London: Penguin). della Porta, D. & Reiter, H. (1998) The policing of protest in western democracies, in: D. della Porta (Ed.) Policing Protest (Minnesota: University of Minnesota). Earl, J. & Soule, S. A. (2006) Seeing blue: A police-centered explanation of protest policing, Mobilization: An International Quarterly, 11(2), pp. 145–164. Gessen, K., Taylor, A., Schmitt, E., Saval, N., Resnick, S., Leonard, S., Greif, M. & Blumenkranz, C. (Eds) (2011) Occupy!: Scenes from Occupied America (London: Verso). Gitlin, T. (2012) Occupy Nation: The Roots, the Spirit, and the Promise of Occupy Wall Street (London: HarperCollins Publishers). Graeber, D. (2011) Occupy Wall Street’s anarchist roots, Al Jazeera, 30th November. Available at http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/11/2011112872835904508.html. Healey, J. (2012) Whose streets? Our streets! Red Pepper, 183, pp. 41–43. Kennedy, M. (2011) Global solidarity and the occupy movement, Possible Futures, Available at http://www.possible-futures.org/2011/12/05/global-solidarity-occupy-movement/ Lewycka, M. (2012) What Occupy can learn from the 17th century, New Statesman, 27th February, pp. 11–12. Penny, L. (2012) The last days of Occupy, New Statesman, 30 January, pp. 26–27. Society and Space (2012) Forum on the ‘Occupy’ movement, Society and Space--Environment and Planning D, Available at http://www.societyandspace.com/2011/11/18/forum-on-the-occupymovement/ (accessed 02 May 2012). Stone, D. (2003) Policy Paradox (New York: Norton). Van Gelder, S. (2012) Staff Of Yes! Magazine This Changes Everything: Occupy Wall Street and the 99 per cent Movement (San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler). Writers for the 99 per cent (2012) Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action That Changed America (New York: OR Books). Yee, J. (2011) Occupy Wall Street: The Game of Colonialism and Further Nationalism to be Decolonized From the “Left” Available at http://www.racialicious.com/2011/09/30/occupy-wallstreet-the-game-ofcolonialism-and-further-nationalism-to-be-decolonized-from-the-left/

Jenny Pickerill is a Reader in Environmental Geography at Leicester University and author of Cyberprotest: Environmental Activism Online, and

Anti-War Activism: New Media and Protest in the Information Age (with Kevin Gillan and Frank Webster). She has published on autonomous, anarchist and indigenous activism, the emotional spaces of collective action and online tactics. She has a particular interest in environmental protest camps and occupations: having worked with anti-roads camps in Britain, forest blockades in Australia and various squats and self-built ecocommunities. She is a co-editor of Social Movement Studies. John Krinsky is an Associate Professor of Political Science at The City College of New York (CUNY) and author of Free Labor: Workfare and the Contested Language of Neoliberalism and is a co-editor of, and contributor to, a forthcoming collection Marxism and Social Movements. He has published on welfare rights and labour organising in New York City, and on a number of aspects of social movement strategy, learning and culture, and on public sector labour activism in the USA. He is currently working on a book on the transformation of public sector work, and on a new project on the articulation of Occupy and existing labour and community organising in New York City. He is a co-editor of Social Movement Studies.

Occupy Pittsburgh and the Challenges of Participatory Democracy JACKIE SMITH* & BOB GLIDDEN** Department of Sociology,University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA, Occupy Pittsburgh Outreach Working Group, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

*

**

ABSTRACT Local manifestations of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) have emerged around the world with enthusiasm for the participatory style used in Zuccotti Park (New York). However, less attention has been paid to earlier lessons about the limits of these techniques for building diverse and sustainable movements. Much of the discussion in the USA ignores how OWS is connected to the long-term and global struggle against corporateled globalization. Also, models of consensus practiced in many OWS sites have become reified to the verge of fetishization. Activists in the USA have yet to effectively incorporate many lessons from global justice activism including the need for a global analysis and strategy as well as greater sensitivity to how consensus practices can exclude people most harmed by the structures the movement opposes. This study draws from our involvement in Occupy Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania) and in the US Social Forum and World Social Forum (WSF) to compare the participatory democratic practices in each setting and identify lessons about organizing broad coalitions against capitalist globalization.

Much of the discussion of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) suffers from historical amnesia. Mainstream media reports and even internal OWS accounts have failed to identify connections to previous movements in the USA and worldwide. But as we shivered our way through several of Occupy Pittsburgh’s long and often unproductive outdoor general assemblies (GAs) last fall, we were reminded of Francesca Polletta’s 2002

book, Freedom is an Endless Meeting. In this book, Polletta traces the ongoing development of participatory democracy through 20th century labor, civil rights, student, feminist and economic justice movements. She analyzes how consensus techniques were developed and adapted through earlier struggles. Her account reveals that the consensus models used by OWS activists were adopted nearly verbatim from the Direct Action Network (DAN), which drew from the Greens and other movements’ techniques to mobilize opposition to the World Trade Organization (WTO) and corporate globalization in the late 1990s. Today, consensus techniques have captured the political imaginations of many who have lacked opportunities to engage in meaningful political deliberation. But many of the younger activists attracted to OWS would have been unlikely to seek out traditional movement organizations, which they have portrayed as stale, unsuccessful and undemocratic in comparison to what was seen in Zuccotti Park. Proponents of this ‘new movement’ often claim that—having been raised on the Internet—they want to model the non-hierarchical, peer-to-peer structures of cyberspace where everybody appears to be equal. These democratic ambitions and generational dynamics mirror those of earlier movements, and we hope that more attention to history can help us avoid mistakes of the past.

Tyranny of Structurelessness Many OWS activists have been swayed by anarchist arguments which stress the tension between spontaneity and the formation of organizations. Consequently, there is resistance to having structure, in favor of fluid and supposedly open processes that are seen as more responsive to the democratic impulses of the group. But Polletta found that whether activists recognize it or not, particular relational structures inevitably shape group practices and affect activists’ ability to realize participatory democracy. She shows that these often invisible structures were most damaging when movements sought to integrate new activists into their work. For instance, feminists developed tight-knit communities based on friendship and trust which fostered unity and commitment, but hindered the integration of new members and thwarted leadership initiatives. The US New Left network called Students for a Democratic Society also found that the friendships that helped build local chapters often prevented newcomers from feeling

welcome. More recently, the experiences of the DAN during the ‘Battle in Seattle’ against the WTO revealed the limits of their particular consensus practices for creating spaces that were open and inclusive of people most harmed by the effects of the capitalist system DAN opposed. While consensus techniques helped build solidarity in small and relatively homogeneous groups, they were not effective in larger and more diverse organizations, especially without highly skilled facilitators. American feminist Jo Freeman spoke in 1970 of the ‘tyranny of structurelessness’ in which the absence of formal structures of accountability allows individuals or cliques to dominate. This has been evident since the early months of encampments at Occupy Pittsburgh and elsewhere, as those who maintained a continuous presence in camps claimed a higher status in group decision-making. Activists who were not able to stay on site often revered those who did or at least were reluctant to challenge their preferences. Thus, decisions about the timing and location of GAs reflected the preferences of a minority of the participants who were able to spend large amounts of time in the camp. Over time, fewer activists from outside the camp attended these meetings despite remaining very active in other aspects of the movement. GAs were the only formal mechanism for collective decision-making, but they failed to reflect the views and interests of many active participants. As a result, the GAs in Pittsburgh repeatedly tabled or rejected proposals that would have increased movement building work. The relational dynamics that emerged in Occupy Pittsburgh and elsewhere are based in the movement’s origins as a physical occupation of public spaces. The backgrounds and experiences of activists involved onsite in the camp differed from those doing outreach and other movement work, and the camp consumed energy and focus that might have gone into expanding the movement. For some, preserving the experience of community and living out an alternative vision became an end in itself, generating an exclusionary group dynamic that made it difficult to build the movement. Although many recognized this, it became impossible to challenge it openly, particularly as we were fighting a court battle against the camp’s eviction. Had the movement been able to develop better methods for democratic deliberation and decision-making, these tensions could have been avoided.

Fetishization of Consensus Models Some Occupy activists in Pittsburgh have celebrated the duration of our GA as a paragon of participatory democracy. But Polletta’s book argues that freedom is decidedly not an endless meeting. For activists staying at Occupy Pittsburgh’s camp, endless GAs were a diversion from the doldrums of the camp and, since held near camp, did not require a long, late-night return commute. But participation by other activists who had to travel to GAs after work or who had family and other obligations required more structure to the meetings—including a pre-announced agenda and a specific end time. Ironically, the least privileged of ‘the 99%’ were most likely to be excluded from participating. Another challenge was that OWS held frequent GAs—initially every day —and other ‘Occupies’ adopted a similar structure. We learned that it was impossible to attend the GAs and still have time to do other activist work. This made learning about other working groups difficult, and we found ourselves scheduling additional coordination meetings for tasks that should have been accomplished in GAs. Those who frequented the GAs tended to be less involved in working groups, and therefore much of the work of Occupy Pittsburgh was left out of GA deliberations. In addition, the GAs often attracted new participants who occasionally created long debates about matters that had already been discussed. As the length of the meetings increased, many either capitulated or left, allowing decisions to be made by the hold-outs left standing at the end. Often, there was an imbalance which favored those speaking against proposals, and belligerent, stubborn and militant individuals tended to control conversation and decision-making. Noticeably, few women participated in Pittsburgh’s GAs after first few weeks. Polletta’s study found additional limitations to consensus practices that we saw in our work with Occupy Pittsburgh. In particular, past experience shows that the attention and energy that is focused on consensus process can detract from the work of movement building. One way it does so is by complicating or slowing decision-making in ways that make it difficult to respond to requests for support from potential allies or to plan actions with sufficient advance time. Another limitation is that a focus on group processes can reflect the avoidance of a larger discussion of goals and strategies. Our group spent a great deal of time attempting to build

consensus among activists who did not share the same strategic orientations or goals, only to see decisions blocked in the end. Decisions that were made could not be enforced, and group statements became too generic and washed out. Persons in the majority ended up being excluded when they became tired of the intransigence of a minority. Another key point is that consensus practices must also be seen as cultural artifacts. Like any cultural element, they can either attract or alienate people of diverse experiences and backgrounds. In Polletta’s account, for instance, detractors of the ‘twinkling’ and other consensus practices used by DAN (and now by OWS) activists to signal support or agreement derided it as ‘Californian,’ or ‘more concerned with selfliberation than with political change and more interested in how things “feel” than in what they can accomplish’ (Polletta, 2002, p. 198). In her widely circulated essay on the 1999 WTO protests, ‘Where was the Color in Seattle,’ Benita Martinez reported: protesters of color […] talked about the ‘culture shock’ they experienced when they first visited the […] protest center set up by the Direct Action Network […]. ‘When we walked in, the room was filled with young whites calling themselves anarchists. There was a pungent smell, many had not showered. We just couldn’t relate to the scene so our whole group left right away.’ Another told me, ‘They sounded dogmatic and paranoid.’ ‘I just freaked and left,’ said another. ‘It wasn’t just race, it was also culture, although race was key.’

Cultural, educational and social disparities also mean that persons less familiar with the dominant practices or less confident or articulate are discouraged from participating in this type of large and open meeting. Participatory democracy does not require consensus-based models, and indeed can incorporate various formulas for decisions by vote. Moreover, there are different forms that consensus processes can take, and activists need to be mindful of whom they seek to engage in the movement as well as whom they might be excluding when they adopt particular forms. The process of deliberation should help participants better understand the diversity of others’ experiences and positions, and generate at least recognition of the legitimacy of others’ arguments, if not agreement.

‘Leaderlessness’ Another feature of the OWS movement that is often celebrated but not always understood is the absence of identified leaders. This is often

mistaken as ‘leaderlessness,’ but we remind those using this term that we are a ‘leader-full’ movement. Again, this feature of the movement is not unique to Occupiers, nor is it new. Feminist groups, among others, have long been conscious of the need to develop what they have referred to as decentralized leadership, both to nurture individual activists’ skills in democratic participation and also to prevent the derailing of the movement through the repression or silencing of one or two key leaders. What is important to participatory democratic forms of decision-making then is that they help groups and their participants understand how power and authority work and enable them to recognize legitimate and illegitimate sources of authority. They can also help groups identify and recognize new forms and sources of leadership that respond to group needs while socializing and empowering new leaders (Polletta, 2002, p. 209). Often the effort to celebrate equality and resist hierarchies ends up undercutting those with particular skills from contributing their leadership to the struggle. Acknowledging people’s diverse abilities and recognizing their contributions are essential for sustaining individual participation, building movement power and cultivating broader leadership skills. It is also important for more privileged activists especially to recognize that groups long marginalized by the larger society may support strong and visible leaders from among their ranks. We saw this in our work, and it appeared in Polletta’s analysis of a low-income church-based organization. By identifying and acknowledging leadership while also constantly scrutinizing the operation of power within the movement, activists can help socialize other participants to learn from and support each other and to develop movement-relevant skills. George Friday, an organizer in the US Social Forum, has referred to this as the ‘strategic use of privilege’ (US Social Forum, 2012).

Lessons from the World Social Forums OWS helped mobilize many new activists resisting inequality and corporate power. To sustain and expand the movement, however, OWS activists will need to build upon the lessons learned over many decades of struggle by earlier movements, most recently in the World Social Forum (WSF) process. The WSF began in 2001 as response to what activists saw as the limitation of the strategy of disrupting meetings of the global economic and

political elites. It has been a laboratory for activists to develop techniques of maximizing participation and inclusion across the huge diversity of a global movement. As an iterative gathering that generates extensive self-reflection, analysis and dialogue, the WSF contributes new understandings and values that can support participatory democracy and inform OWS activism. Like the WSFs, the OWS movement has emerged as a space to envision alternatives to our corporate-dominated economies. It is deliberate in its efforts to build collective power by nurturing broad and diverse coalitions. Organizers in the WSFs have stressed the global dimension of the problems we all face and the need to look for leadership from those most harmed by global capitalism in order to develop an analysis of this global economic system that can inform strategy. Globalized capitalism affects people differently depending on their nationality as well as class and social positions. The movement cannot assess what it is up against until it has a better understanding of how the global system operates. In many places around the USA, for instance, the least advantaged of ‘the 99%’—African Americans, immigrants and other minority groups—were prevented from joining the Occupy struggle by, among other disadvantages, a long tradition of repression by what is known as the ‘prison industrial complex’ (e.g. Martinez, 2000). Thus, enhancing racial diversity in the movement requires attention beyond the financial sector to address the systemic use of violence that excludes particular communities from full participation in political and economic life. In the global context, the WSF’s privileging of leadership from the global South helps activists better understand how the North’s advantages are linked to systemic deprivations and violence elsewhere. As people in the USA work to defend public services we have come to expect, it is essential that we also resist the further exploitation of people in the global South. Experience in the WSF has shown that activists must work consciously to improve movement practices in order to reverse the effects of inequality in our world. This has led to the principle of intentionality, which grew from US Social Forum organizing and contributing to the wider WSF process. Intentionality means the deliberate emphasis on leadership from the most marginalized groups. It has meant that actions and events are cancelled, restructured or postponed until such leadership can be developed. It has also led to the provision of solidarity funds and the development of practices that help overcome the poverty and other obstacles that systematically

exclude particular groups such as people of color, low-income, disabled, Indigenous and lesbian, gay, queer and other gender non-conforming people (see Juris, 2008; Karides et al., 2010). To create more equitable spaces for sharing experiences across national and other differences, the WSF has avoided becoming a political platform and instead stressed relationships and active listening, which tend to be neglected in conventional political campaigns that focus on external targets and time frames. This same recognition, we believe, can be helpful to OWS activists. Many of the tensions we have seen in the OWS movement arise from differences in participants’ experiences and understandings. More conscious attention to the importance of building long-term relationships and mutual understanding will sustain and advance our collective struggle. And the WSF has shown that creating spaces for relationships does not prevent—and can even enhance—possibilities for collective action. A focus on relationships reveals how identities such as those based in class, race, gender and nationality are produced by globalized capitalism. Thus, for WSF activists, any effort to transform this system must develop new kinds of identities and social relations. Spaces such as those created by the WSF and newer movements can allow this to happen by bringing diverse groups together to challenge and transform dominant institutions and cultural practices. One final observation is the ways the intentionality of the WSF has led to concrete ideas and models for advancing large-scale social transformation. Intentionality has helped Indigenous people share their perspectives and shape thinking about paths forward. In 2009, for instance, the WSF in Belém highlighted the ‘Crisis of Civilization’ exemplified by the 2008 financial crisis. Discussions were informed by ideas drawn from Indigenous cultures like the ‘rights of Mother Earth’ and buen vivir—living well— which provide alternatives to Western culture’s anthropocentrism and prioritization of economic growth. Also important for OWS activists is Indigenous traditions’ understanding of autonomy, for which they have struggled for over 500 years. Unlike many Western activists, and perhaps most notably many so-called anarchists, Indigenous cultures stress collective autonomy rather than the individualized autonomy demanded by many OWS activists. This emphasis on collective autonomy stresses individuals’ responsibilities and relationships to the larger group, whereas

the ideas of autonomy held up by many of the most vocal OWS activists reflect the competitive individualism of the capitalist system we oppose. In conclusion, we hope that the coming months bring discussion and reflection about the ways earlier struggles can inform the work of today’s struggles for global economic justice. In particular, there is a need to create more effective structures for collective decision-making and accountability. Occupy activists in the USA especially must consider the global dimensions of this struggle and strengthen transnational communication and solidarity. The movement can be strengthened by conscious attention to the cultural work of transforming identities, institutions and practices to advance struggles against patriarchy and all other hierarchies and exclusions. In the near term, however, we need to stress what Polletta calls the ‘ethic of care’ to nurture the unity in diversity; the relationships we need to carry on what will be a long and hard struggle for a better world.

References Juris, J. (2008) Spaces of Intentionality: Race, Class and Horizontality at the United States Social Forum, Mobilization, 13, pp. 353–372. Karides, M., Katz-Fishman, W., Brewer, R. M., Scott, J. & Lovelace, A. (Eds) (2010) The United States Social Forum: Perspectives of a Movement (Chicago, IL: Changemaker Publications). Martinez, E. (2000) Where was the Color in Seattle? Looking for Reasons why the Great Battle was so White, Color Lines, Spring. Available at http://www.colorlines.com/archives/2000/03/where_was_the_color_in_seattlelooking_for_reason s_why_the_great_battle_was_so_white.html Polletta, F. (2002) Freedom is an Endless Meeting (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press). US Social Forum (2012) Occupy Wall Street and the US Social Forum Movement: Local and National Perspectives, USSF Updates, February. Available at http://www.ussf2010.org/node/372 (accessed 20 April 2012).

Jackie Smith is Professor of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh and a representative to the National Planning Committee of the US Social Forum. She serves as a co-facilitator of Occupy Pittsburgh’s outreach working group. She is the author of Social Movements for Global Democracy and co-author of Social Movements in the World-System and Global Democracy and the World Social Forums. Bob Glidden lives in Pittsburgh and serves as a co-facilitator of Occupy Pittsburgh’s outreach working group. He participated in both US Social

Forums and in the Greens movement in the USA prior to his work in Occupy Pittsburgh.

How Local Networks Shape a Global Movement: Comparing Occupy in Amsterdam and Los Angeles JUSTUS UITERMARK* & WALTER NICHOLLS** Department of Sociology, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, **Department of Sociology, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands *

ABSTRACT The Occupy encampments erupting around the world in Fall and Winter of 2011 developed into local platforms where activists from different milieus came together and forged relations and shared understandings. While Occupy protests broke out around the world in a synchronized fashion and used similar symbols and narratives, the protests were sustained by quite different local networks in different cities. We argue that the abilities of local Occupy movements to cope with challenges and magnify their resonance in the public sphere largely depended on how they were connected to local activist networks. We provide a political geography of Occupy and show how local networks in Amsterdam and Los Angeles shaped the global movement. Occupy activists were able to connect to some of the more prominent elements of Los Angeles’ local activist networks and effectively formulated claims, but Occupy activists in Amsterdam were isolated and lost public support. The aims of the essay are twofold: first, to explain these divergent outcomes and second, to assess the effects of these outcomes in shaping the sustainability of Occupy struggles in these cities over the medium term.

Introduction

Occupy protests erupted around the world in a synchronized fashion and used similar symbols and narratives, but the actual protests were sustained by quite different local networks in different cities. We argue that differences between these local networks account for important variations in the evolution of Occupy in Amsterdam and Los Angeles (LA), respectively. Occupy Amsterdam became increasingly insulated and inward-looking as it became fixated on the encampment and was cut off from their environment. Occupy LA became part of a local movement milieu and its encampment and strategic brokers functioned to connect the occupiers to other activist clusters in the city. Differences in how the Occupy movement integrated into local activist networks shaped whether these movements could sustain their message. Drawing from various sources—informal conversations with key figures in the occupations and the cities’ movement milieus; observations of occupation sites; observations of social media and Internet materials and the minutes of the General Assemblies—this essay examines the processes of relation formation through the cases of LA and Amsterdam. We first present our theoretical angle, then discuss Amsterdam, move on to LA and finally provide some conclusions on how local networks affect the uneven development of the global Occupy movement.

Representation and Connections Any social movement faces two major challenges. First, movements express criticisms of the existing order of things and project alternative futures but, exactly because they hold others publicly accountable, movements themselves become subject to moral scrutiny. Movements thus have to work hard to make sure that their expressions—their symbols, their icons and their texts—are ‘civil’. If they fail to do so, they become regarded as outcasts rather than legitimate challengers, as noises rather than voices. The challenge of achieving legitimacy applies to all movements but in the case of Occupy it takes on a special significance as the movement is defined by its presence in public space. The occupied spaces become the concrete manifestations of the movement but they also attract intense moral scrutiny from their opponents, the media and the public at large. Second, every movement has its own distinctive modes of communication and signifiers but for its message to resonate, it has to be

part of networks that connect it to other activists as well as the general public. Movements need to patrol their own boundaries in order to harness their identity and hone their message but they also need to connect to diverse supporters who will carry their message beyond a core group of militants. Movements thus face a dilemma. If they open up too much, they lose their abilities to patrol boundaries and keep out people who will embarrass, divide or co-opt the movement. Yet if they close off entirely, they cannot reach out to prospective supporters or the general public. Movements thus need to negotiate a balance between closure and connections. We argue that the abilities of Occupy movements to negotiate this balance largely depended on the ‘associational soil’ in which they were planted (cf. Nicholls & Uitermark, 2011). In Amsterdam, social movements have declined and fragmented over the last two to three decades (Uitermark, 2004, 2012). The squatting movement and the movement for immigrant rights had contracted to small groups, while movements with a considerable member base, such as the environmental movement and the labor movement, had become strongly embedded within national consultative bodies and funding structures. Building bridges and networks across activist clusters had ceased being a relevant strategy to achieve political goals. In LA, in contrast, a rich social movement milieu with a sophisticated and developed infrastructure emerged in the 1990s and 2000s (Nicholls, 2003; Soja, 2010). The city had not only become a hub of immigrant, labor and urban justice movements, but activists within different activist clusters achieved their goals by connecting across clusters and maintaining solidarity for one another’s campaigns (Montgomery, 2011). Although the loss of a bridge-building tradition in Amsterdam made it difficult for locals to overcome differences with occupiers, the welldeveloped habit of cross-cluster networking allowed activists in LA to overcome early antipathy toward occupiers and integrate them into the local movement milieu. It could be argued that it is not local networks but contingencies and national circumstances that determine the divergent fates of Occupy in LA in Amsterdam. National circumstances and contingencies are certainly important but we argue they are mediated by local networks (cf. Nicholls, 2009). In fact, it is striking that, in spite of contingencies and different national circumstances, the mobilizations were quite similar at the outset—

both attracted a relatively high share of inexperienced and middle-class activists, both had strong resonance in the media up until the establishment of the encampment, both developed a discourse centered on the exploitation of the 99% by the 1% and both adopted non-hierarchical modes of decision making—and only diverged after they were fully implanted in these different urban spaces. The seeds were quite similar, but the ways the budding relations were nurtured were very different because of the differences in the social movement milieu and the ways the people within this milieu brokered the relations among the occupiers and between the occupiers and others within the political field.

Occupy Amsterdam: Strong Initial Support, Precipitous Decline The Netherlands experienced a right-wing drift after the ascendency and killing of the populist politician Pim Fortuyn. As the political debate centered on the financial and social costs of immigration and the threat posed by radical Islam, the financial crises aroused indignation but did not become subject of political controversy. Within this political constellation, Occupy was received among many as a revelation—finally, the anxiety about the crisis had a label. While before small-scale and unsuccessful attempts had been made to occupy Beursplein—a square named after and directly in front of the stock market—the movement only gathered steam as the media identified Occupy as a major and significant force. Survey results showed that more than half of the population supported the movement: 62 per cent were positive, 21 per cent were neutral and 11 per cent were negative (6 per cent: no opinion). The intense and positive media coverage directed people to the movement’s Facebook page and websites1. The people supporting the movement in its earliest, pre-occupation stage included a range of activists from various milieus. Some of them had earlier been part of Anonymous, the Spanish indignado movement, the Socialist Party, the squatting movement, the Zeitgeist movement or the 9/11 Truth movement, but it was striking that many had little or no prior experience with activism and saw Occupy as the vehicle to express their previously unarticulated grievances. The networks to arrange basic infrastructure provide media spokespersons and communicate with the municipality shaped largely online—in Internet Relay Chat-channels, on Facebook and

on the Occupy Amsterdam website—in just a few days before the occupation. On 15 October 2011, thousands of people showed up on Beursplein, carrying an amazing variety of self-made signs and developing a range of different activities ranging from public meditations to speeches and chanting. The network of activists that had formed before the occupation set up a basic infrastructure of computers, tents, a stage and a sound system while individuals and groups offered workshops, food, information, music and company. The authorities cooperated from the start, providing chemical toilets as well as electricity and policing with caution and care. An encampment emerged as a couple of people set up tents. In the weeks after, public attention decreased while the camp grew. The general assemblies were initially well attended and managed but it quickly became apparent that the dynamics of and within the camp absorbed almost all energy. While two demonstrations were planned in the first week, it is no exaggeration to say that the camp itself rather than the financial or political system became the main source of contention. The camp, located close to Central Station and right next to the red light district, attracted homeless people and back packers looking for shelter as well as a number of people who had, for various reasons, not been welcomed by other movements and collectives. There were a number of activists who created strong ties among one another and were deeply committed to Occupy but the solidifying of these internal relations could not prevent internal disputes over the management of the encampment. While many friendships (and even a marriage) originated on Beursplein, the fights and fissures between the occupiers aggravated as time passed. As the number of free riders and problem cases increased, it became increasingly challenging for the devoted and committed activists and specifically the ‘peace keepers’ to manage the camp and to deal with drunken tourists or other disturbances. Dramas large and small unfolded, with the widely covered disappearance of a 15-year-old girl as a low point. A segment of Occupy Amsterdam occupied a former Shell building and alienated some segments of the squatting movement by claiming that they had not ‘squatted’ the building but ‘occupied’ it, with the difference supposedly being that the occupiers acted out of ideology whereas squatters only wanted housing. The action itself was fairly disastrous since the loose-knit organizers appeared to be in disagreement about the purpose of the occupation (was it to house the homeless people

who had ended up on Beursplein, to organize an exhibition center or to turn it into a living space?) and were incapable or unwilling to take responsibility. When the initial occupiers had left the building, homeless and other marginalized groups took over. After a person had died from a drug overdose and another had been stabbed in the face, the mayor ordered the eviction of the building that had been heavily polluted by graffiti, excrements and trash. All this was covered in detail in local media and on national television, with occupiers often appearing in dubious roles (as when two occupiers—one donning an Indian wig and another looking like a clochard—slurred insults at one another while they were being recorded). The local authorities had allowed the expansion of the Occupy encampment to become one of the largest in the world. The mayor even visited the encampment to explain how it should be managed and offered an alternative location elsewhere in the city. But as the encampment came to be increasingly seen and indeed functioned as a gathering of outcasts and misfits rather than a hub of civil and committed activists, the authorities increased pressure to exercise and maintain order. Activists argued among themselves whether to accept the offer for an alternative location, to accept the regulations or to find different modalities of protest altogether. After prolonged discussions, the core group of activists who managed the encampment agreed that many of the tents had to go, but their efforts at policing the space could not stop the mayor from imposing his own rules and order. On 8 December 2011, the police removed a number of tents and arrested a dozen activists who disagreed with the mayor’s stipulations. By now, the occupiers had formed their relations and articulated their discourses fully around the encampment, closing themselves both discursively and relationally from the city’s movement milieu and the general public.

Occupy LA: Strong Initial Support, Planned Decline As in Amsterdam, the initial Occupy LA (1 October 2011) demonstration was not spearheaded by activists associated with the local social movement milieu. The leading actors of Occupy LA were linked to a new generation of activists connected to anarchist and new age networks. In many ways, the social and political dispositions of these activists were more comparable to Amsterdam occupiers than the more traditional activist culture of LA.

Moreover, the peculiar mix of new activists, their lack of experience in actual social movements and the location of the encampment adjacent to the city’s most concentrated homeless district resulted in similar challenges of producing a ‘positive’ public image and message. Lastly, Occupy LA drew upon the methods fashioned by Occupy Wall Street to develop internal discipline, manage boundaries and make collective decisions. The initial reception of these newcomers in LA was uneven. Local youth activists linked to the immigrant rights movement expressed strong ambivalence concerning the occupiers. They were considered middle-class ‘hipsters’ who failed to understand the nature of working class and minority struggles. Many immigrant youth activists rejected the term ‘occupy’ because of its close association with imperialist ‘occupations’ in the Americas. Moreover, many local activists found problems with their strategies. For example, early occupiers maintained that the city police were a part of the 99% and should join forces with the movement. For immigrant youth activists, the LA Police Department was the repressive apparatus of a capitalist and racist state. This became an open point of dispute when a long-time youth activist argued at an Occupy general assembly meeting that, ‘Although cops might make the money of the 99%, they represent and defend the 1%’. Occupiers met this argument with jeers. For immigrant youth activists in attendance, this response revealed the gulf that separated white, middle class and suburban activists from the everyday forms of repression and exploitation faced by inner city residents. Like Amsterdam (when occupiers stressed the difference between an occupation and a squat), occupiers in LA failed to understand local activist issues and cultures which resulted in sharp clashes with important activists in this milieu. While these critiques of Occupy LA went viral through social media, locally based labor unions came out in strong support of their actions. The LA County Federation of Labor, the region’s most powerful labor council, declared strong and immediate support. The national and local labor movement had long tried to inject a class-based discourse on inequalities into the public arena. The powerful message of the Occupy movement provided the labor movement with an opportunity to get its own message out to the broader public and change the national debate from controlling deficits to social inequalities. The support provided by the local labor movement was crucial for sustaining the Occupy movement. First, local labor leaders were able to use

their influence to gain the support of the city’s most influential political Figures (the mayor and the City Council President). This very public support made protesters into a ‘voice’ of legitimate grievances. Second, labor organizers took an active role in fostering connections to the local social movement milieu, thereby helping to overcome the initial rejection by immigrant youth activists. Labor leaders used the youthful and dynamic organizers of Good Jobs LA (a labor-sponsored community-based organization) to mediate relations with occupiers. In addition to taking an active role at the City Hall encampment and general assembly meetings, Good Jobs LA organizers also worked with occupiers to coordinate actions directed at banks. Increased coordination enhanced trust and allowed labor to influence how occupiers managed their message, encampments and public demonstrations (media outreach, negotiating with police, etc.). Local labor activists with Good Jobs LA also served as important brokers to connect occupiers with immigrant rights activists, helping to overcome early reluctance among youths. At a personal level, many of the frontline organizers of Good Jobs LA had been youth activists in the immigrant rights movement and retained their affiliations to the city’s prominent rights organizations. Constant circulation between these various worlds helped soften critiques among other youth activists while sensitizing occupiers to the particular issues facing undocumented immigrants. At an organizational level, Good Jobs LA was able to recruit Occupy LA activists to participate in an immigrant rights action directed at the local office of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency. The event, ‘Occupy ICE’, aimed to create resonance for the immigrant cause by framing undocumented immigrant workers as the most exploited members of the 99%. On 30 November 2011, the encampment at City Hall was evacuated following the evacuation of other encampments across the country. The disappearance of the encampment has been a blow to Occupy LA, but activists continue to meet for weekly general assembly meetings and to organize demonstrations. Perhaps more importantly, the message developed by the occupiers has been integrated in the discourse of the local social movement milieu, with immigrant rights, labor and homeless activists employing this language to frame their own claims. In addition to the ‘Occupy ICE’ action described above, there have been ‘Occupy Skid Row’ and ‘Occupy Rampart’ actions to protest police brutality in gentrifying areas of the city. In short, while some activists were initially skeptical,

Occupy LA did evolve into a platform for organizing against (neoliberal) capitalism.

Conclusion We argued that all social movements face two challenges; to find concrete manifestations reflecting abstract ideals and to negotiate closure and connections. The Occupy movement experienced just how difficult it can be to live up to these challenges in both LA and Amsterdam, but the occupiers in the former city were generally more successful. After the initial outburst of enthusiasm and support, Occupy Amsterdam crumbled. When we look closely at the relational mechanisms involved, it becomes apparent that the loose collection of diverse activists was not molded into a well-organized movement network. First, the occupiers lacked the experience and capacity to attract skilled and committed activists and keep out free riders and intruders. Second, the occupiers had few connections to other activist clusters. Labor unions expressed their support but never developed a strong presence on the ground while immigrant groups were almost entirely absent. Third, the activists did have good relations with the authorities for some time but these paradoxically reinforced the tensions among the activists, who were divided about the ways in which they should respond. The Amsterdam case contrasts sharply with the case of LA, where the loose collection of diverse activists was molded into an activist hub through its relations with the city’s associational milieu. First, seasoned activists and especially labor organizers assisted in the management of the encampment and the organizing of protests. Second, these seasoned activists brokered ties to other groups, including immigrant youth activists who were initially skeptical—in contrast to Amsterdam, skeptical or ambivalent outsiders were pulled in rather than pushed out. Third, instead of simply being tolerated for some time (as in the case of Amsterdam), the activists created the conditions for a seemingly radical yet also civil occupation at city hall. In short, the major reason for the divergent trajectories of Occupy in the two cities is that, in LA, Occupy became embedded in a local activist milieu whereas in Amsterdam it did not. The LA occupiers could build on and connect to activist clusters that had already developed the dispositions and networks needed to sustain collective action and articulate a powerful critique. The activists in Amsterdam, in contrast, consisted in large part of

people without such networks and dispositions. The share of misfits, troublemakers and outcasts increased as the camp expanded, while the connections to activist milieus were severed, creating a situation in which the encampment became a sorrowful expression of widely cherished ideals. While the occupy message and messengers continue to circulate in LA, both largely disappeared in Amsterdam.

Notes 1. The survey was done by peil.nl on 14 October 2011, a day before the occupation of Beursplein. Results can be found at http://www.georganiseerde-weldaad.nl/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/1410-11-Peiling-de-Hond.pdf (accessed 25 April 2012).

References Montgomery, S. (2011) Organizing for regime change: An analysis of community unionism in Los Angeles, 2000-2010, PhD Dissertation, Rutgers University. Nicholls, W. J. (2003) Forging a ‘new’ organizational infrastructure for Los Angeles’ progressive community, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 27(4), pp. 881–896. Nicholls, W. (2009) Place, networks, space: Theorising the geographies of social movements, Transactions of the British Institute of Geographers, 34(1), pp. 78–93. Nicholls, W. & Uitermark, J. (2011) Post-multicultural polities: A comparison of minority politics in Amsterdam and Los Angeles, 1970-2010. Paper presented at the RC21 Conference, The struggle to belong. Dealing with diversity in 21st century urban settings. Amsterdam, July 7-9. Soja, E. (2010) Seeking Spatial Justice (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press). Uitermark, J. (2004) Framing urban injustices. The case of the Amsterdam squatter movement, Space and Polity, 8(2), pp. 227–244. Uitermark, J. (2012) The Dynamics of Power in Dutch Integration Politics. From Accommodation to Confrontation (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press).

Dr Justus Uitermark is an assistant professor of sociology at the Erasmus University Rotterdam and the Gradus Hendriks professor of community development at the same university. His research interests are located at the intersection of political sociology and urban studies. He has researched minority politics, drug policy, gentrification and social movements. Dr Walter Nicholls is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Amsterdam and completed his PhD in Urban Planning from UCLA. His main area of research has been the role of cities in social movements. More recently, he has been studying how undocumented immigrants forge a voice in hostile political environments.

Tahrir, Here? The Influence of the Arab Uprisings on the Emergence of Occupy SARAH KERTON Department of English and American Studies, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK ABSTRACT The Egyptian uprising played a key role in initiating and shaping the Occupy movement. By applying Benjamin’s concept of aura to evidence how Tahrir Square is imagined as an auratic and magical experience, I argue that the tactical and political decisions of Occupy were originally negotiated through the emancipatory possibilities of a new political subjectivity in Egypt. I further examine who is empowered to speak of and for ‘the 99%’ by exploring the role Adbusters, a Canadian anticonsumerism group, played in branding the initial aesthetic and ideological direction of Occupy Wall Street (OWS). By positioning itself as instrumental to OWS’s emergence, I posit that Adbusters attempts to police and thus reduce Occupy’s realm of the possible, conditioning Rancière’s ‘distribution of the sensible’.

While the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi in December 2010 and subsequent overthrow of president Ben Ali in Tunisia are widely recognised as the catalyst for the series of protests and demonstrations across the Middle East and North Africa that have come to be known as the Arab Spring, it is Egypt’s revolution, and particularly the occupation of Tahrir Square, which is seen as the focal point of Arab uprisings in the Western world. Within weeks, Western protesters, inspired by the events of Tahrir Square, began conceptualising the possibilities for similar mass uprisings in the West, culminating in the birth of the Occupy movement: a global protest form that borrows heavily from the strategic and tactical methodologies of

the Egyptian revolution and gained widespread media coverage with the emergence of Occupy Wall Street (OWS). I propose that, through a reading of Tahrir Square as embodying Benjamin’s (1936) concept of aura, we can come to understand the role that the Egyptian uprising has played in both initiating and shaping Occupy. By reconceptualising Benjamin’s theoretical framework through the changing technologies of reproduction, I demonstrate how aura functions in proliferating Tahrir Square’s modes of political subjectivity. Further, I examine how the tactical decisions of the Occupy movement are justified through the lens of the success of the Egyptian revolution by applying Fernandez and Lastovicka’s (2011) theory of ‘imitative magic’. This article takes as its starting point the ideological discussions that took place prior to the establishment of any Occupy camps, in particular those found on the website of Adbusters, a Canadian anticonsumerism group, whose initial call to action and subsequent blogposts are frequently credited with initiating OWS. Finally, applying Rancière’s (2004) theories of aesthetics and politics, I illustrate how Adbusters seeks to brand the ideological direction of OWS, policing and thus attempting to reduce Occupy’s realm of the possible.

The Aura of Tahrir Square On 2 February 2011, Adbusters published a blog authored by Konos Matsu entitled ‘A million man march on Wall Street: how to spark a people’s revolt in the West’, the first of a series of posts inspired by the spectacle of Tahrir Square (Matsu, 2011). This incitement to action is directly connected to the successes of Egypt and can be read in Benjaminian terms as the positioning of Tahrir Square as an auratic happening, an aesthetic object against which to model Western resistance practice. For Benjamin (1936), an aura is the authenticity and reverence of the object, borne from the recognition of its ‘unique existence at the place where it happens to be’ (p. II). At the core of this concept is the experience of distance between the object and the observer, and an understanding of that distance as the observer comes to comprehend the object’s uniqueness. Benjamin measures the reception value of the object on two planes, cult value and exhibition value; it is cult value which constitutes aura. The cult value of the object requires that it remain’s hidden and only be visible, thus accessible, to few. He gives the example of religious symbols: ‘certain Madonnas remain

covered nearly all year round; certain sculptures on medieval cathedrals are invisible to the spectator on ground level’ (p. V). As art practice is emancipated from ritual, he states, the opportunity for exhibition increases and thus the aura of the object is diminished. In considering the relationship between Tahrir Square and Western audience, we must consider the importance of its digital mediation. Here, the exhibition value serves not to destroy the uniqueness of the object, as Benjamin might suggest, but rather reminds us of it, and therefore proves crucial to establishing aura. In Benjamin’s considerations, the breaking down of the aura presents a positive space for the political deliberation of aesthetics. As the aesthetic object proliferates, so the object itself becomes democratised. It is clear that, for Benjamin, the experience of presence is what matters primarily; ‘It is easier to exhibit a portrait bust that can be sent here and there than to exhibit the statue of a divinity that has its fixed place in the interior of a temple’ (p. V), he states, and situated historically, at the rise of the moving image and privileging of the physical, this would be true. However, in a time of mass digital reproduction, I would posit that the increased democratisation of modes of looking, and the proliferation of visual representations, leads to a construction of the image as standing in for and ultimately becoming conflated with the object. The live video feeds shown on rolling news channels internationally, images of violent clashes between protesters, the Police and pro-Mubarak Egyptians and the replication of social media content from Egyptian protesters all serve to remind us of the uniqueness of the original to establish its auratic presence. ‘Circulation creates a dialogue which makes [the object] desired, studied’, states Berger (1972, p. 21), in a consideration of da Vinci’s Virgin on the Rocks in the National Gallery. ‘This attention is crucial to the value that we place on it; because when we appreciate and honour the work, we elevate it to another realm and allow aura to be part of our experience’. Effectively, the construction of aura shifts from the object towards the other ‘realm’, the subject. While the object is present everywhere, its symbolic meaning—its conceptual comprehensions and understandings—is presented as ‘hidden’ within the work to be excavated and discovered by those with the relevant understanding to connote meaning. But who establishes the symbolic meanings within Tahrir Square and their relevance to the emergence of Occupy, and by what criteria? The work of Jacques Rancière is useful to examine who has the power of political speech, highlighting who is

privileged with the right to unearth these meanings and ultimately imbibe the auratic object with its necessary cult value.

Policing the Politics of Occupy In ‘A million man march’, Matsu conceptualises an uprising in the form of a march, a choice of form bound to the historical specificity of ‘protest memory’, developed through an understanding of what signifies a successful protest. This signification, indeed the very basis of the understanding of the resources and opportunities available to protesters, is not just structural but ideological, bound up in Rancière’s distribution of the sensible, the practices by which we make sense of our communities, through ‘a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise’ (2004, p. 12). In the case of the Egyptian revolution, through the act of gathering in a public square and making collective demands for societal change, Egyptian protesters demanded their place within a reconfigured public sphere and (re)distributed the sensible. Rancière sees this interruption as the very basis of politics. When the order of things is disrupted, the fiction of the situation is emphasised. Accordingly, he draws an opposition between two key concepts—‘politics’ (la politique) and ‘police’ (la police). Police order is the operation of institutions and the managing of populations. There is rule and ruling requires limits, the resetting of boundaries and borders. Accordingly, ‘politics’ is when these practices come into opposition with another set of practices that calls into question the equality of the situation. The possibilities for resistance and protest presented by Matsu are matters of sense perception, organised into discourse along lines of what is sayable and what is considered doable. The impact and perceived success of Tahrir Square ‘transform[s] the forms of what is thinkable and possible in the present’ (ibid.). But what is theoretically considered thinkable is bound up with who is also empowered to do this thinking, and how it is able to become voiced within current discourse. We must look critically not just at what is said, but who does the speaking and how that empowers them to communicate as and for the unvoiced masses. For Rancière, the importance of who is voiced, and who is empowered to speak of and for the people, is as crucial as deciding who has the right to politics at all.

Rancière’s consideration of ‘la police’ encompasses a sophisticated understanding of governance beyond state institutions and major media powers. As Tahrir Square demonstrates a Rancièrian politics, so those with an interest in framing what is possible and visible within the political sphere express their interest in distributing this experience, expressing what we can or cannot do. By positioning themselves as instrumental in the emergence of OWS, I posit that Adbusters attempts to police the emerging Occupy movement. In the first ‘tactical briefing’ for Occupy on its website, Adbusters illustrates both of its political subjectification, ‘the constitution of a collective capable of speaking in the first person and of identifying its affirmation with a reconfiguration of the universe of possibilities’ (ibid., p. 249), and the methods by which it lays claim to the ability to decide the tactical direction of Occupy itself. ‘The exercise of power is the exercise of an already active superiority that precedes it, and which in return it confirms’, claims Rancière. ‘This is what happens when the exercise of power is identified with the power of science, of birth, of wealth or any other entitlement to govern founded upon an unequal distribution of positions’ (ibid., p. 242). It is clear that Adbusters speaks in one voice, disrupting and reconfiguring the possibilities of the sensible through an appeal towards replicating the successes of Tahrir Square by the use of the same tactical form. The briefing states, ‘Tahrir succeeded in large part because the people of Egypt made a straightforward ultimatum—that Mubarak must go—over and over again until they won. Following this model, what is our equally uncomplicated one demand?’ (Adbusters, 2011). A cursory glance at the English translation of the ‘How to rise up’ pamphlet, the supposed blueprint for the Tahrir Square uprising, evidences 10 demands and 9 goals, yet for Adbusters, the success of Tahrir Square is constructed around a singular one —the deposition of Hosni Mubarak—in order to convince the ‘our’ of the emerging Occupy movement to concede to Adbusters’ call for negotiations that revolve around the policy change. Adbusters’ one demand is thus, ‘We demand that Barack Obama ordain a Presidential Commission tasked with ending the influence money has over our representatives in Washington’ (ibid.), a reformist proposition that shares little relation to the overturning of an entire political regime, as suggested by the Egyptian revolution. Here, Adbusters makes use of magical thinking and ‘imitative magic’ (Fernandez & Lastovicka, 2011) in order to define what exactly makes up the

successful form of Tahrir Square, in order to privilege the use of its favoured organising tactics and solutions. In Fernandez and Lastovicka’s research, ‘consumers’ of the original auratic object—in their research, replica guitars—use ‘magical thinking’ to instil reproductions with auratic power, causing them to ‘radiate aura and thus transforming them into fetishes’ (p. 279). They define magical thinking as ‘the attribution of meaningful connections to correlated actions/events and/or objects’ (p. 280). Unlike a guitar, whose wood, paint and scratches can be physically emulated, replicas of protest sites rely on contested comprehensions of the practices, tactics and strategies of the moment of ‘success’. Adbusters clearly exercises an active superiority, the use of the term ‘tactical briefing’ making explicit its intent to govern the direction of the movement. Its entitlement to govern—to police, and thus distribute and make sense of what is made available to make sense of—gains traction due to its existing location as ‘professional activists’, and its access to a network of activists through their online blog and print magazine, which boasts circulation figures of 80,000. It further governs through its engagement with the mainstream press, appealing to be recognised as ‘the voiced’ of Occupy. In an interview with the Seattle Times, Adbusters’ founder Kalle Lasn clearly takes credit for, as he terms it, the ‘branding’ of the Occupy movement. ‘There are a number of ways to wage a meme war’, states Lasn. ‘I believe that one of the most powerful things of all is aesthetics’ (Yardley, 2011). Lasn sees these gestures as tools to begin remodelling the ‘mental environment’ of the American political left. Alongside its tactical briefing, Adbusters published the first poster for OWS—a photograph of a ballet dancer balanced in arabesque upon the Charging Bull, an iconic public art piece on display in Wall Street, whilst an anonymous crowd in black bloc and gas masks gathers, partially obscured by tear gas behind her. The juxtaposition of the calm serenity of the ballet dancer in marked contrast to the anarchic crowd behind makes clear the aesthetic gestures of Lasn. ‘What is our one demand?’ the poster states, ‘#occupywallstreet. September 17th Bring tent’ The image makes explicit Rancière’s distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate speech (1998). The composure of the ballet dancer, riding atop the corporate strength of Wall Street, conceived of through the bull, is voiced—while the homogeneous mass is denied speech through Adbusters’ policing. Obscured and unidentifiable, the rabble behind is situated on the

level of the bull, struggling through a cloud of gas for some form of recognition, whilst the dancer—with her one demand—is not only clear and forefronted but also in command of Wall Street itself, risen above both the mass and the ‘enemy’. The poster, blogs and the language of ‘tactical briefings’, ‘instigators’ and ‘originators’ positions Adbusters as understanding the political situation of both Tahrir Square and the emerging Occupy movement better than anyone else. Adbusters positions itself as the future, to be followed by those who wish to see change, lest they become subsumed under the mass swarm of the obscured black bloc. Through its aesthetic practice, Adbusters evidences Rancière’s concept of policing in opposition to politics, as it attempt to condition the distribution of the sensible for its own ends.

Conclusion The emancipatory possibilities of the Egyptian revolution may well not be realised with the establishment of a utopian democratic framework for the people of the Arab world, but it has already been seen in the making possible of a new, or certainly modified, form of dissent within the Western world. If aura is established through the comprehension of the object by the subject, then as technologies of reproduction change, so must the audience’s relationship to aura. With mechanical reproduction, Benjamin argues, the original’s aura is diminished, through a reduction of its uniqueness and exclusivity. Yet, by positioning Tahrir Square as the original site of struggle within the Western emulations, OWS and other emulations become imbibed with authenticity through the reproductive process, simultaneously extending the aura of Tahrir Square in a symbiotic exchange between the two sites of resistance. These mediations, across a broad range of channels, establish the importance of Tahrir Square itself as the authentic aesthetic representation of the struggles for Arabic democracy and permeate the replica occupations with correlated significance. Occupy is constructed as a collective 99% and yet some are empowered to speak for it, and others not. Whilst the Occupy movement presents itself as non-hierarchical, the actions and role of Adbusters demonstrate the realities of small self-nominated groups deciding on the goals and ambitions of a nascent movement, through the creation of frameworks which exclude minority voices. We can see that this is not confined solely

to the ‘call to action’, or organisational structures outside of Occupy, as the emergence of caucuses for women, people of colour and other minority groups has developed within the Occupy framework as a way to integrate marginalised perspectives within mainstream discourse. Further, there have been some interesting investigative articles on ‘the 1% of the 99%’, looking at the role of union leaders and other representative organisations in attempting to police the autonomous political organising underway within the Occupy movement. Again, more work needs to be undertaken to investigate the interrelations between forms of nascent protest and the policing of its boundaries. In light of this, whilst this paper constructs a case study around Adbusters’ activities prior to the establishment of the OWS camp, the illustrative work of its actions, post 17 September, is too pertinent to ignore. For Rancière too, language does not just function as criticism, explanation or guidance. The words used by Adbusters and the growing Occupy movement function as an aesthetic practice in their own right, through conditioning the ‘distribution of the sensible’. Language, by ‘reconfiguring the visibility of what [protest] does’ (2007, p. 87), conditions the very possibilities of dissent itself.

References Adbusters (2011) #OCCUPYWALLSTREET, Adbusters. Weblog [Online]. Available at http://www.adbusters.org/blogs/adbusters-blog/occupywallstreet.html/ Benjamin, W. (1936) The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. Translated from German by H. Zohn, in: H. Arendt (Ed.) Illuminations, pp. 217–251 (New York: Schocken Books). Berger, J. (1972) Ways of Seeing (London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books). Fernandez, K. V. & Lastovicka, J. L. (2011) Making magic: fetishes in contemporary consumption, Journal of Consumer Research, 38(2), pp. 278–299. Matsu, K. (2011) A million man march on Wall Street: how to spark a people’s revolt in the West, Adbusters. Weblog [Online]. Available at http://www.adbusters.org/blogs/adbusters-blog/millionman-march-wall-street.html Rancière, J. (1998) Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (Chicago, IL: University of Minnesota Press). Rancière, J. (2004) The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, Translated from French by G. Rockhill (London and New York: Continuum). Rancière, J. (2007) The Future of the Image, Translated from French by G. Elliot (London: Verso). Yardley, W. (2011) The branding of the Occupy movement, Seattle Times, 4 December.

Sarah Kerton is currently undertaking an MA in Gender, Sexuality and Culture at the University of Manchester and is due to begin her Ph.D. studies in September 2012. She is also an active anti-cuts and liberation

campaigner. Her research interests include queer theory, popular musicology, LGBTQ activism, intersectional feminisms and the relationships between social movements and liberation activism. Her latest research explores the re-emergence of women’s activism within the public sphere and its containment by governmental feminism.

The Indignados of Spain: A Precedent to Occupy Wall Street ERNESTO CASTAÑEDA Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Texas at El Paso, El Paso, TX, USA ABSTRACT Faced with an economic crisis, people took to the streets and camped in urban plazas throughout Spain in May 2011. Many people were successfully mobilized by a generalized sense of frustration, indignation and impotency in the face of coming elections where many citizens felt there were no real alternative economic and social policies offered, nor the possibility to vote for government programmes that would deal with the crisis in a way that prioritized the concerns of the population. In online discussions, concerned proactive participants called for ‘A Real Democracy Now’ that represented the concerns and priorities of regular Spanish citizens. In order to make their discontent visible, they called for people to camp and ‘occupy’ public spaces together in order to force politicians and elites to face the generalized discontent with the dire economic prospects. This paper builds on non-participant observation of the Indignados movement in Barcelona, Spain, conducted in the summer of 2011. It looks at the consolidation of the ‘occupy’ contentious performance to protest income inequality and economic policy. It argues that this movement is a direct precedent to the Occupy Wall Street movement in the USA. The 15 May movement showed that not only people in North Africa had reasons to take the streets and engage in collective action, but many citizens in the developed world also had reasons to take public squares and show their dissatisfaction with the economic and political status quo.

This profile argues that the Indignados movement in Spain is a direct precedent and inspiration for the Occupy movement in the USA, even when

such a link is rarely spelled out. The term Indignados could be loosely translated into English as ‘The Outraged’. They are outraged, indignant at the cuts to education, welfare and social programmes put in place first by the government of Socialist Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and later by that of the right-wing Popular Party under Mariano Rajoy. The Indignados is a social movement response to the global economic crisis and the approaches taken by the European Union and the Spanish government to handle it in general. In particular, it is a venue for the discontented collegeeducated youth who cannot find jobs that pay enough to cover rent and basic expenses. Spain has a high national unemployment rate of 21 per cent overall, 32 per cent for the foreign born, 43.6 per cent for those younger than 24 years (INE, 2011). In Cataluña, unemployment rates for those with a college degree increased from 3 per cent to 8 per cent in 2008 (Blanchar, 2011). Not surprisingly, the educated youth forming the core of the movement often talk about their dire economic prospects. Rather than simply asking for jobs, they demand changing the built-in injustices and inequalities of the global economic system.

Sources of Inspiration The Indignados movement started on 15 May 2011, just a week before the national elections of 22 May, where people saw no viable alternative between a neoliberalized left and a neoliberal and conservative right; thus in Spain, it is commonly referred to as movimiento 15M. In the media and in movement discussions and communiqués, many use the word ‘indignados’ to describe the participants (Taibo et al., 2011). Both activists and media often use this word in reference to the influential 32-page activist manifesto by French diplomat, and former resistant, Stéphane Hessel titled Indignezvous!, which calls on contemporary youth to search for injustices around them, get outraged and move into action. The text was translated in Spanish as ‘Indignáos’ and in English as ‘Time for outrage!’ (Hessel & Duvert, 2011). Some complain though that the term Indignado/a does not capture the proactive nature of the movement and prefer other names. Many people in Spain became outraged at the high unemployment and massive cuts to educational, social and cultural programmes as part of the structural adjustment measures promised by the government to international financial organizations, at the same time that Spanish banks were being

bailed out with public funds, and the foreign debt increased. The largest worker unions organized a general strike on 29 September 2010 in opposition to changes to labour laws. Despite having a relatively low popular participation, the strike channelled some of the general discontent and helped create connections among non-union activists. Organizations, largely formed online, such as Democracia Real Ya!, Juventud sin Futuro and No les Votes joined together and called ‘all types of people’ to take to the streets on 15 May. Organizers called for a #SpanishRevolution in the spirit of Tunisia and Egypt.

The Movement of 15 May 2011 The movement of 15 May took place in some form in most Spanish cities yet the largest camps were in Madrid and Barcelona. La Puerta del Sol Plaza in Madrid became one of its symbols with impressive photos showing the plaza completely full, some estimate that over 15,000 people attended (Figure 1). The large number of participants nationwide astonished both the organizers themselves and lifelong activists who were sidestepped by this movement. The date chosen was key, as the national demonstrations were called exactly a week before national elections. People took to the streets due to their disenchantment with, even repudiation of, the existing political parties. Many framed the movement as anti-political since it did not have any affiliation with a given political party and included many young individuals who were inexperienced in public affairs, party politics, labour and social movements. The 15M movement showed its discontent with mainstream politicians. Congruently, many of the indignados did not vote. Discontent with the leftist incumbents, and a certain counter-movement reaction by many middle-aged, middle-class, employed citizens resulted in the electoral victory of the conservative Popular Party. Instead of listening to the movement’s claims, the new government has taken a harder stance on the protestors and has promised to cut the government budgets in line with demands from the European Central Bank and international investors. Some old-leftist conspiracy theorists criticize the 15M movement as insincere, a Trojan horse, or even dangerous, since it helped displace the social democrats bringing the conservatives into power.

Figure 1. People using hand gestures to participate in general assemblies. Camp in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol Plaza. Saturday, 23 July 2011. Photo by Gilberto Cardenas © 2011, used with permission.

The Indignados of Barcelona and the Contentious Performance of Occupying Public Places While the 15M movement is also strong in Madrid, Valencia and other European cities, this article delves more deeply into the Barcelona movement because that is the camp that I observed first-hand (Figure 2). The following is based on non-participant observation, conversations, interviews, videos and photographs taken during different protest events, marches, general assemblies and a protest outside of the city congress in Barcelona during June 2011.

Figure 2. General assembly at Plaza Catalunya, Barcelona, 1 June 2011. © Ernesto Castañeda. Just like in Madrid, over 15,000 people participated in the demonstration on 15 May in Barcelona. Initially the main tactic of the movement in Barcelona was to march to the Parliament of Catalonia and then to occupy the main public square in the city: Plaza Cataluña or Catalunya as the Catalans spell it. During the speeches on 15 May, the organizers called protesters to take the square, ‘Toma la Plaza’, and called for an acampada; tents were set in the plaza and many people ‘occupied and liberated the square’ (Cabal, 2011, p. 15). Plaza Catalunya is located at the beginning of the popular touristic La Rambla street and is surrounded by the Spanish department store El Corte Ingles, the French electronics and media store FNAC, the posh and historic Cafe Zurich and Hard Rock Cafe Barcelona, among many other upscale shopping buildings. Thus the activists opposed to neoliberal policies in Spain planted themselves in the heart of Barcelona, in

an area that portrays the city as an opulent global city. The Indignados reminded Catalans, Spanish, Europeans and the world about unemployment, underemployment, poverty, homelessness and exploitation of migrant labour in beautiful sunny Barcelona. Once the Plaza Cataluña was ‘occupied’, a small semi-autonomous town was born within it. People that camped in the Plaza spent the night there. During the day, different committees met and discussed specific topics regarding education, health, migration, national finances, proposals for alternative national budgets, movement fundraising and accounting, internal security and so on. Different proposals were written carefully and formally, uploaded to the Internet, printed and distributed among the occupiers, who would later be asked to debate and vote them. Walking through the camp, one would see single and collective tents as well as booths hosting commissions, libraries and book sales (Figures 3–6). Assemblies were held at advertised times and days; in them people voted on proposals elaborated by the different commissions and on whether to continue living in the plaza or not. Important decisions were taken by consensus in General Assemblies. Members were vocal about their rejection of parliamentary indirect democracy and asked for the concerns of average citizens to be heard and taken into account as much as those of large financial interests.

Figure 3. Communications Commission’s booth in the centre with commercial corporate advertisements. © Ernesto Castañeda. Participants often say that the goal of the movement was not just to ask for economic and political justice and accountability but also to create horizontal links between individuals in similar conditions and thus strengthen Spanish civil society. This is not a long tradition in Spain which is still recovering from General Franco’s dictatorship and its corporatist state– society relations. New generations inspired by movements abroad have organized in Barcelona since the 1990s in support of the Zapatistas, against neoliberal globalization, in favour of immigrant rights and against xenophobic and neofascist groups. Activists in Barcelona have successful experiences occupying vacant buildings and using them to house students, artists and people of low socio-economic status converting the occupied buildings into housing, art galleries, community centres and movement headquarters (for a related event in Paris, see Castañeda, 2009). What is new

about the Indignados is that they occupied public places as a way to protest simultaneously local and global issues that go beyond housing. Clearly, other reasons to occupy public spaces, such as Plaza Catalunya, were their visibility to the media as well as to other citizens. The mainstream Spanish media often complained that the camps were dangerous, unclean and intrusive to neighbours and commuters, that the protestors’ claims and demands were not clear and they were not proposing viable solutions or alternatives, and that therefore there was no legitimate reason to occupy public squares. In contrast, international news reports on the 15M clearly outlined reasons such as high unemployment rates, bank bailouts with public funds, collusion of business interests and politicians, and lopsided fiscal and budgetary priorities. Looking at the Indignados movement sheds light into the later global Occupy movement, and vice versa. In answering what the occupiers want Matthew Stoler writes,

Figure 4. Blackboard at Plaza Catalunya with announcements, daily schedule and warnings (see zoom in below). © Ernesto Castañeda. What they want […] is to do exactly what they are doing. They want to occupy Wall Street. They have built a campsite full of life, where power is exercised according to their voices. It’s a small space, it’s a relatively modest group of people at any one time, and the resources they command are few. But they are practicing the politics of place, the politics of building a truly public space. They are explicitly rejecting the politics of narrow media, the politics of the shopping mall. To understand #OccupyWallStreet, you have to get that it is not a media object or a march. It is first and foremost, a church of dissent, a space made sacred by a community. But like Medieval churches, it is also now the physical center of that community. It has become many things. Public square. Carnival. Place to get news. Daycare center. Health care center. Concert venue. Library. Performance space. School. (Stoller, 2011)

This is exactly what I observed in Barcelona. The police have attempted many violent evictions to ‘clean’ the plaza. The first attempt occurred on 27 May 2011. The excuse was the participation of the Barcelona soccer team in the final game of the Champions League. The local government said that they did not want the camps to interfere with the public reaction to the team’s victory or defeat. Barcelona won and as is tradition the many fans celebrated in the fountain of Canaletes, at the beginning of the Rambla, across the street from Plaza Catalunya. Human chains of Indignados’ organizers and volunteers separated the plaza from drunks and rabble-rousers looking for a fight. There were no incidents. But in the police’s failed attempt to remove people in the middle of the previous night, many people were injured. As a response to police brutality, the support amongst different social groups in Barcelona increased. People who had not taken the time to stop by the Plaza and inform themselves, who were opposed or ambivalent about the Indignados, felt themselves some indignation after seeing the videos of police aggression to unarmed peaceful city dwellers.

Figure 5. Print out showcasing the violentos pasted in the community billboard at Plaza Catalunya. They were to be kept at bay so that the media could not portray the Indignados movement as violent or anti-systemic. The page below documents police infiltrations to gather information and delegitimize the movement by committing violent acts in civilian clothes.

Others thought they were radical anarchists ready to use violence to shock the system. © Ernesto Castañeda.

Figure 6. Immigration Committee © Ernesto Castañeda.

Transnational Links During my visits to the occupied plaza, national and transnational links were evident. There were important transnational connections in terms of agendas, tactics, contentious performances and activists themselves (Tilly, 2008). Interestingly, many of the participants came from workers movements in Argentina, Chile, Italy and Greece, as well as some pro-immigrant groups. The South American contingent, for example, brought to the movement the practice of the cacerolazos, creating loud sounds by having many people hit pots and pans with utensils at the same time. This contentious performance was employed in Chile against Pinochet and in Argentina following the

economic crisis of 2001, as well as in Iceland in 2008. At certain times of day, one could suddenly hear pots being struck in the dense residential neighbourhoods throughout Barcelona. This way people who were not occupying the plaza were still demonstrating their support and solidarity from their own kitchen windows.

Figure 7. Young women in key leadership roles. Sandra Ezquerra at the microphone directing a general assembly on 5 June 2011. © Ernesto Castañeda. It is important to explore the social positions of activists, organizers, speakers and their outside supporters. Many graduate students not only of sociology and political science but also of chemistry and biology played key roles in the first weeks of the acampada in Barcelona (Pauné, 2011). Manuel Castells and other Professors in Spanish universities gave lectures to the occupiers. I would argue that sociologists played an important role in the

Indignados movement, not only because they know the importance, legitimacy and potential that social movements have to produce social change in a way that would be impossible for any one individual to accomplish but also because of the clear predictions, prognosis and alternatives that sociologists have presented regarding the bubbles and unavoidable crises intrinsic to the current neoliberal global economic system. Young women played key leadership roles: giving speeches, moderating assemblies and committee meetings, talking to the media, writing proposals and updates and mediating different opinions and positions within the group. During the general assemblies, one could sense a tension in the plaza between meeting organizers and a relatively small but visible and loud minority that blocked any compromise and was particularly opposed to proposals to continue working in commissions and start smaller camps throughout the city but to leave Plaza Catalunya, as was eventually done (Figure 7). Furthermore, as Amalia Cardenas, Spanish sociologist studying the movement says, ‘The Occupy Wall Street is the same movement as the Indignados’ (personal communication). The Occupy Wall Street was already being discussed in Europe over the summer in meetings and online (Carolina of Take the Square, 2011). While I was observing people in the Plaza, American tourists would pass by. Some would mention how ‘this would never happen in the USA’ while others said it should. Many activists in the encampments and in online forums agreed on the importance of camping in Wall Street. For practical reasons, activists already living around New York took the lead in this effort. As the social movements literature would predict, activists’ own transnational networks allowed for a diffusion of goals, tactics, contentious performances and repertoires across Occupy sites throughout the world (Tilly, 2008). Some Spanish with experience in social movements elsewhere helped ignite the 15M. The Indignados in turn inspired and influenced Occupy Wall Street; and once Wall Street was ‘occupied’, other American cities followed suit. Analysing the Indignados movement carefully shows how the Occupy movement is global in its causes, implementation and planning (Figure 8).

Figure 8. No more cuts to public programmes and services posters put in front of buildings throughout Barcelona © Ernesto Castañeda.

Where Are We Now? On 27 March 2012, the Central Bank declared Spain back in recession. Thus protests continue, most visible in the international news media was a large demonstration and general strike on 29 March, organized by labour unions but this time backed up by the Indignados, where a few participants set trash bins and even a Starbucks on fire. The media has been quick to spread these messages and assign blame to the unions and the Indignados for these acts. Ninety-nine per cent of the participants in this movement are against any type of violence or property destruction. These acts were done by the socalled violentos and anti-sistema. As the image above and different videos show (Anonymous, 2011; Octarina8, 2012), the Indignados have tried hard to keep these elements at bay, but they are hard to exclude when a general

march through the streets occurs. Due to the negative media framing, many onlookers are quick to delegitimize the movement and its demands. Yet this movement is a peaceful one and the causes for indignation were all still as valid in 2012 as on 15 May 2011.

References Anonymous (2011) Quiénes eran estos ‘indignados’? Available at http://www.firstpost.com/topic/place/barcelona-quienes-eran-estos-indignados-video-yyakl60jiqI1142-2.html (retrieved 30 March 2012). Blanchar, C. (2011, 11 de julio) Cataluña ha perdido 270.000 empleos de jóvenes en cuatro años, El País. Available at http://www.elpais.com/diario/2011/07/11/catalunya/1310346438_850215.html Cabal, F. (2011) Indignados: Toma la Calle 15.05.11 (Madrid, España: Mandala Ediciones). Carolina of Take the Square (2011) Minutes of the 24/07/2011 Meeting in Madrid--‘Indignados’ Protest Marches. Available at http://www.takethesquare.net/2011/08/18/minutes-of-the-24072011meeting-in-madrid-%E2%80%93-%E2%80%9Cindignados%E2%80%9D-protest-marches/ (retrieved 30 March 2012). Castañeda, E. (2009) The great sleep-in: Demonstrating for public housing in Paris, Progressive Planning, 178(Winter), pp. 31–33. Hessel, S. & Duvert, M. (2011) Time for Outrage, 1st North American ed. (New York: Twelve). INE (2011) Encuesta de Población Activa Primer Trimestre de 2011 (Madrid, España: Instituto Nacional de Estadística Español). Octarina8 (2012) Manifestantes apartan contenedores para que no se quemen en el 29M de Barcelona. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuRbvQWaIPY (retrieved 30 March 2012). Pauné, M. M. (2011) Sandra Ezquerra: ‘El 15M ha logrado sacar a la calle miles de personas que no se levantaban del sofá’, La Vanguardia, 10 June 2011. Available at http://www.lavanguardia.com/politica/20110610/54167886053/sandra-ezquerra-el-15m-halogrado-sacar-a-la-calle-miles-de-personas-que-no-se-levantaban-del.html Stoller, M. (2011) The Anti-Politics of #OccupyWallStreet. Available at http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/10/matt-stoller-the-anti-politics-of-occupywallstreet.html (retrieved 30 March 2012). Taibo, C., Antentas, J. M., Vivas, E., Mateo, J. P., Domènech, A., Chueca, I. G. & Monedero, J. C. (2011) La Rebelión de los Indignados (Madrid, España: Editorial Popular). Tilly, C. (2008) Contentious Performances (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Ernesto Castañeda is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Texas at El Paso. He has a Ph.D. from Columbia University. His doctoral work compares immigrant social movements in New York, Paris and Barcerlona. It takes a transnational perspective and compares Latino and Muslim immigrants in the USA and Europe. It analyses the relationship between the contexts of immigrant reception, including the avenues available for political voice, and the political inclusion of immigrants and minorities. Castañeda is editing the Charles Tilly Reader. He is currently

researching migration, homelessness and health disparities along the USA– Mexico border.

Occupying the #Hotelmadrid: A Laboratory for Urban Resistance JACOBO ABELLÁN*, JORGE SEQUERA** & MICHAEL JANOSCHKA* Department of Political Science and International Relations, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Madrid, Spain, **Department of Theoretical Sociology, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain *

ABSTRACT Occupied the night after the worldwide mobilisation of 15 October 2011, the #hotelmadrid was an intensive, 50-day-long political experiment that turned an abandoned hotel in the heart of the Spanish capital into a radical political space and the perceived node of the indignados movement. The squatting of the hotel accomplishes key demands related to ‘real democracy’ and the re-appropriation of public space as a political space with claims for the right to housing, providing an excellent example for the discussion of the shifting dimensions of emancipatory struggles that emerged in the course of the Spanish 15-M Movement. In this regard, squatters engage actively against neoliberalism, promote the right to housing and convert such mobilisation into a forward-looking project that not only reclaims but also takes, socialising private properties through common repossession. Referring to strategic disobedience we discuss how protest camps, public political assemblies and squatting create spaces of citizenship and intend to crack naturalised facets of capitalism such as the powerful discourse about property rights.

Introduction Following the global action day of 15 October 2011 that united more than half a million protesters in an innovative and inspiring demonstration in

Madrid, several thousand activists of the Spanish 15-M Movement debated future actions to spread and intensify protest in a huge assembly. At that moment, many participants had already heard about the occupation of a vacant building in Barcelona that occurred the same day—a squat that aimed at helping evicted families to find a new temporary place to live.1 After intensive and polemical discussions, a group composed of indignados and ‘traditional’ squatters decided to take the opportunity to occupy a building in Madrid and to introduce new claims into the movement. The selected property was the ‘Hotel Madrid’, an abandoned hotel with more than 100 rooms on five floors, located only 200m away from the emblematic Puerta del Sol, the seat of the Presidency of the regional government, epicentre of the extended protest camp and birthplace of the #Spanishrevolution earlier that year. Within the 15-M Movement, the occupation of the #hotelmadrid provided a significant shift in many respects. It created a series of new organisational challenges such as the management of a huge building in an exposed location in the city or structuring the common use of open spaces in the hotel. At the same time, a visible ‘home base’ was established. This occurred in a season when public assemblies and other activities, which had typically been conducted in public spaces since May 2011, became increasingly unpleasant because of the weather conditions. The occupation of the hotel empowered the indignados to broaden their repertoire of civil disobedience towards questions of urban politics and property rights, a core institutional framework of contemporary capitalist societies. However, we argue here that the occupation of the hotel, similar to many earlier incidences such as the establishment of protest camps and the reconversion of neoliberalised ‘public’ space into political space, can be considered a success story on a number of levels. For instance, the activists were able to advance new coalitions and defend a common use of the hotel by accommodating evicted families and other highly vulnerable groups, publicly claiming the right to housing and related aspects of the contradictions of the Spanish model of urban capital accumulation. These questions provided a symbolic and discursive resource for the legitimisation of the occupation of the #hotelmadrid even in the mainstream media, at once shifting and re-articulating the discursive meaning of squatting throughout the country.

Although the squatters were evicted by the police on 5 December 2011, the hotel still remains as a powerful symbol in the movements’ collective memory, as a laboratory for urban resistance and node of counterhegemonic struggles as it was during its 50 days of occupation. But its principal achievement was the politicisation of non-activists such as evicted families, serving literally as a ‘school’ for subsequent squats that spread throughout the city, the city region, the country and even the world. Activists set up working groups, for example the ‘offices’ for housing and squatting, that have subsequently served to help people to get into political action—a practical solution for some of the economic problems a growing number of middle class households are suffering both in the city and statewide. In this regard, the #hotelmadrid stands for the establishment of new forms of collective action during the course of an economic crisis that intensifies and reinforces itself through reciprocal austerity measures, as applied by both the former socialist and current conservative state administration. Here, we aim to embed the occupation of the hotel within broader struggles that have emerged out of the 15-M Movement. Our analysis will focus exclusively on the relationships between squatting and the demands for the right to housing as expressed by the #hotelmadrid. Generally speaking, these claims became increasingly popular during the consolidation of the movement, i.e. after the end of the protest camps and the transfer of activities into the neighbourhoods.

The 15-M Movement: Characterising the Claims of a NonConventional Political ‘Actor’ Far from representing homogeneous claims, the discursive and practical logics of the Spanish indignados movement are composed of a variety of interrelated but divergent collective subjects, necessities, structures, strategies and conducts. In many respects, the external appearance of the 15-M mobilisation as a single movement depends precisely on the inherent power of its nodes, the networks of contestation that commonly share not only space but also communication, knowledge and ways of collective action. We can identify two distinct discursive strands during this cycle of mobilisation: an engagement against the superstructure and the attempt to

break some of the naturalised everyday experiences in capitalist societies. In the first strand lie demands for a fair electoral system, campaigns against de-regulated financial markets and speculation, against political corruption and disinformation and against the institutionalised and corruption-inducing interdependence of political and financial elites. In the second lie the struggle against the hegemonic discourses that (re)produce structural inequalities, and the question of how to develop incipient social change through collective action. This second strand was made visible by the collective appropriation of the Hotel Madrid and the different uses developed inside and outside the building: it was simultaneously a place for the 15-M assemblies and for the relocation of evicted families, as well as for developing different civil disobedience practices in and through the appropriation of space and place. Such constitutive processes can be considered ‘ruptures of quotidianity’ (Holloway, 2010), a mobilisation laboratory for reclaiming the commons. By conceiving prefiguration as a practice that assumes the ends and means to be intimately linked, protest acts which seek to reconfigure urban space may challenge even deeply entrenched rights such as those safeguarding private property. In other words, the 15-M Movement embodies a new mobilisation cycle and recognises that demonstrations alone cannot be the pivotal acts in bringing about collective social change. Together with the quest for specific places, it is rather space itself that is at stake and must be obtained, because claiming consists of ‘taking’.

Against and Beyond Urban Neoliberalism in Madrid: Claiming the Right for Housing The 15-M Movement is far from homogeneous, and the decentralisation of neighbourhood activities from June 2011 implies the increasing prominence of local demands, as well as the existence of different coalitions between movements active in similar fields and whose existence precedes the appearance of the indignados. One important debate concerns the urban impacts of neoliberalism, especially housing and the rapidly rising number of evictions. Movement claims disrupt the hegemonic discourses, practices and policies which have manipulated housing into a speculative and increasingly overpriced good (the so-called ‘Spanish Model’; López & Rodríguez, 2011); empty housing stock now accounts for between 4 and 5

million units. The 45 state-owned savings banks were central to this model, providing finance to both the real estate companies and those in need of housing. However, one of the many dark sides of the current economic crisis in Spain is the increasing problem that individuals face in paying back their loans. Backed by legislation, banks can easily begin legal proceedings against defaulting debtors, expropriate properties and evict former owners. The number of evictions has been rising by ~50% annually since the beginning of the crisis, peaking at 58,250 in 2011 (CGPJ, 2012)—in other words, 160 expropriations and evictions every day. In addition, in many cases the current legislation locks people into debt with the banks even after they have lost their property, pushing them into further economic and social exclusion. Given this structural mismatch, between untamed and state-assisted neoliberal market forces in the real estate sector, on the one hand, and the constitutionally anchored ‘right to use of decent and adequate housing’ (Art. 47 of the Spanish Constitution) on the other, the current crisis exacerbates all previous crises of accessibility to the basic commodity of ‘housing’. Broader parts of the population, whether young people, economic migrants, blue-collar workers, single women households or the unemployed, are experiencing exclusion from housing, suffering structural eviction from the market mechanisms of residential supply. Since 2006, this situation has led to significant mobilisations against abusive housing and rental prices. These mobilisations have mainly been organised by the ‘platform for dignified housing’ and V de vivienda (vivienda means housing), who have invaded the political sphere beyond the influence of political parties and trade unions (Sequera, 2011). The systematic violation of the constitutional right to housing thus became politically visible and received increasing attention. For example, the Zapatero administration granted public rental subsidies to younger generations from the mid-2008. Although the movements discussed above suffered significant demobilisation at that time, they had already prepared the ground in organisational and discursive terms for claims that became key structural issues and the main political battleground for the 15-M Movement. For this purpose, a second actor, the Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH, translation: Loan affected platform), established in Barcelona in February 2009, is a further important movement node. The platform had already been developing a coherent discourse about the right

to housing and had been focusing on the fight against evictions for more than 2 years when the 15-M mobilisations occurred. However, it was not until the 15-M Movement exploded that this struggle gained major visibility.

The #Hotelmadrid: An Analysis The occupation of the Hotel Madrid took place after the massive demonstration of 15 October 2011, raising extraordinary public interest. On the one hand, it provided the first occupation of a building since the 15-M Movement erupted onto the political scene. Hence, the interest among activists in discussing and deciding the future uses of the building was huge, and over the subsequent days, several hundred people participated in public assemblies. The assemblies rapidly highlighted that the #hotelmadrid should be imagined and perceived as different from any other existing ‘traditional’ squat in Madrid, most of which consist of alternative social centres bringing together left-wing activists around a shared political project. Such squatted social centres are widely marginalised, disregarded and discursively criminalised2 by broader parts of mainstream society, conservative media and public administration—partially because of active manipulation strategies but also because of the failures of the movement to communicate with broader parts of society. The occupation of the hotel was thus imagined as a response to this political context, and to build bridges to broader sectors of society, creating solidarity and sympathy with the activists involved. This is why the hotel was rapidly denominated as liberated and recovered space, rejecting references to terms such as squatting.3 As part of this communication strategy, the building was considered not only an autonomous and selforganised space, but also a meeting place for everyone, including neighbours and visitors. This conceptualisation stimulated interest in knowing the hotel, and for several days, crowds walked in to gather around and see the interior of a building that had been closed to the public for many years. One side effect of the liberation of the hotel was the unexpected media interest in the participatory processes, as well as in the prospective use of the rooms. Through a series of statements released by different 15-M neighbourhood assemblies, the PAH and other social movement actors effectively

converted the decision about the use of the hotel into a matter of public interest. Media coverage was unexpectedly extensive and increasingly positive, a phenomenon directly derived from the presence of activists unrelated to the traditional squatters’ movement. In the socio-economic context of increasing evictions, the debate over whether the occupation of an abandoned but fully functional building could provide housing was especially influential in persuading sceptics. A key factor here was the unconditional backing of the PAH, an association considered to be moderate and which played a key role in this shift in public opinion. The assembly of the hotel decided on two main uses: two floors were given over to temporary residences for evicted families, and two floors were appropriated as space for the different working groups and assemblies, most of them constituted in the aftermath of the protest camps. In addition, the hotel administration and several newly created working groups were also given space for their activities. On 31 October 2011, the hotel opened its doors for the first resident, a 75-year-old woman who had been evicted the week before. Again, media coverage was significant and very positive, creating sympathy with and compassion for those relocated to the hotel. The following day, 16 new residents arrived, and in little more than a week, the hotel was fully occupied with more than 100 inhabitants, although in fact only some of them had previously been evicted. In addition, the hotel emerged as a neuralgic and visible centre of the 15-M Movement, in a way similar to the protest camp in May and June. Beyond bringing together working groups of the movement to a common and increasingly symbolically important place, the specific dynamics of the hotel also created a new series of groups and projects. Amongst these were working groups concentrating on empowering the residents themselves, based on the idea that the hotel should only serve as a temporary residence. Activists also created a housing office and an office for occupation, in line with the aim of establishing a laboratory for urban resistance and for the politicisation of the population more broadly. Both offices were designed to establish deeper contact with people suffering negative impacts of the crisis, and they aimed at empowering residents and anyone else interested to occupy other vacant properties owned by banks and public institutions. Although the realisation of such an idea was not as easy as imagined and posed a variety of problems, it took only 3 weeks for the first of these planned occupations to take place in Madrid, on 19 November 2011. And within the following days

and weeks, five different squats were established—by those involved in the #hotelmadrid and by other groups. In Barcelona, where a building had been occupied during the 15 October 2011 mobilisation, five residential buildings were squatted in November. In addition, different groups of activists on the outskirts of Madrid and a dozen other cities across Spain occupied vacant buildings following aims similar to those developed in the #hotelmadrid in November and December 2011 (6 were located in the Madrid metropolitan area, and another 15 in other Spanish cities). In line with the innovation initiated by the #hotelmadrid, all these new spaces were imagined in the name of the new terms of recovery and liberation. Such a discursive transformation makes it clear that a recovered space rescues the city from the negative impacts of the real estate market, filling abandoned places with life, contrary to the notion of ‘attacking’ and ‘stealing’ a property which was associated with traditional squats. This strategy was key to changing the meaning of the occupation of buildings among broader parts of the population. Although the hotel was vacated early in December, demands regarding the right to housing still remain central to the movement, and squatting is now established as a tool for raising questions about the development of another urban model. In the late March 2012, during the ‘week to fight for the right to housing’, another building in the centre of Madrid was squatted, again stimulating public debate.

Concluding Remarks Before the eruption of the 15-M Movement into the public consciousness, activism in Spain had been structured around three key phenomena. The first is a substantial increase in ‘participatory’ attitudes within the framework of existing democratic rights, usually organised and supervised by state actors. The second is the rise of non-institutional forms of political participation centring on moral or economic questions that are not strictly political. Such demands search for new ways of constituting politics outside the state and beyond any state-led alternative, as a structuring process that has to destroy structures to re-structure society. The third is the fragmentation of demands in minority groups lacking the discursive power to influence the political agenda. This latter aspect reduced the impact of many social movements before the emergence of the 15-M mobilisation.

However, since 15 May, counter-hegemonic struggles have been widely reconfigured by the emergence of new networks with horizontal aspirations as facilitators and democratic spaces of association. Activists related to the 15-M Movement reject pre-configured debates and executive committees, and they create working groups and a reduced, rotating coordination structure that does not pretend to represent the movement as a whole. These basic assumptions are not negotiable, as they are the keys to the development of an inclusive movement capable of bringing together multiple demands and integrating different, and sometimes mutually antagonistic, ideas. In addition, the indignados aim to articulate the apparent manipulation of public discourses, offering different interpretations of social realities to prepare the ground for, and advance towards, social transformation. In this regard, the #hotelmadrid symbolises the re-signification of the occupation in terms of legitimation for and with the citizenry. The affinity with the broader demands of the indignados has enabled the development of a wider consensus that squatting, initially a marginalised underground activity, is now a publicly celebrated practice constituting one potential response to exclusion and eviction in the contemporary socio-economic context. In addition, squatting presents ad hoc solutions for the right to housing. Such a new solidarity is embodied by the tool of occupying buildings for social use, literally reintroducing the question of housing into broader public debates. In conclusion, therefore, the mobilising cycle of the 15-M Movement has enabled a qualitative change with regard to the social meaning of occupations. Within a couple of weeks, squatting went from being a ‘taboo’ in Spanish society to part of the commonly accepted repertoire of collective action. The example shows how this kind of rupture of consensus can result in qualitative stimuli for the appropriation of the city and the rights integrated into it. Before the crisis, the right to housing was mainly supplied by banks, individualising a central problem of ‘risk society’ (Beck, 1992). However, following the outbreak of an economic crisis which has emerged precisely from the economic policies of risk, both the problem and the possible solutions for the right to housing are now beginning to be collectivised, and occupation is one of the possible tools for this collectivisation.

Notes 1.

In this article, we have adopted a pragmatic and neutral use of the terms ‘occupation’ and ‘squatting’, though are conscious of the variegated notions both terms may have in different debates. 2. A legislative reform in Spain has formally criminalised squatting since 1996, punishable by a maximum of 2 years in prison. However, this punishment has never so far been applied, and activists have developed a series of strategies to avoid punishment. 3. Spanish activists use the term ‘okupación’ for the politically motivated squatting of buildings, while aspects related to the ‘occupation’ of space are usually addressed as ‘taking’ (i.e. take the square). During the occupation of the Hotel Madrid the term ‘okupación’ was avoided.

References Beck, Ulrich (1992) Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (New Delhi: Sage). CGPJ (Consejo General del Poder Judicial) (2012) Informe de actividades (Madrid: Ministerio de Justicia). Holloway, J. (2010) Crack Capitalism (London: Pluto Press). López, I. & Rodríguez, E. (2011) The Spanish Model, New Left Review, 69(3), pp. 5–29. Sequera, J. (2011) Del movimiento vecinal a las movilizaciones por una vivienda digna en Madrid. De la necesidad hecha derecho al derecho hecho necesidad, Nómadas: Revista Crítica de Ciencias Sociales y Jurídicas, 29, pp. 489–504.

Jacobo Abellán is research fellow of the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and Research Assistant of the EU-financed research project ‘NEOLIBERAL_CITI: Re-framing urban neoliberalism and neo-liberal citizenship’. His research focuses on new expressions of counter-hegemonic social movements as exemplified by squatting and the 15-M Movement. Jorge Sequera is research fellow of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and PhD candidate at the Department of Theoretical Sociology of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. His PhD thesis focuses on spatial reconfiguration processes, gentrification and contestation in the city centre of Madrid. Michael Janoschka is Ramón y Cajal Research Professor at the Department of Political Science and International Relations of the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, leader of the EU-financed research project ‘NEOLIBERAL_CITI: Re-framing urban neoliberalism and neoliberal citizenship’ (PERG-08-GA-2010-277115: Marie Curie European Reintegration Grant, 7th European Community Framework Programme).

His research focuses on the political restructuring of space and the consequences of neoliberal policy implementation in cities.

Already Occupied: Indigenous Peoples, Settler Colonialism and the Occupy Movements in North America ADAM J. BARKER Department of Geography, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK ABSTRACT Indigenous struggles in Canada and the USA—the northern bloc of settler colonialism—have long been characterized by tactical occupations. It is often assumed that Indigenous peoples’ concerns are congruent with those of ‘the 99%’: broad-based opposition to economic and political marginalization, strong sub-currents of environmentalism and direct democracy, and antipathy towards state violence. Indigenous people and groups have engaged with Occupy, but have also raised powerful critiques of the goals, philosophies and tactics of various Occupy movements. As a result, there have been changes within the praxes of Occupy, but also conflict and disintegration. Many concerns of Indigenous peoples remain unaddressed; legacies of historical colonization and the dynamics of contemporary settler colonialism are powerfully entrenched. The Occupy movements seek to claim the spaces created by state power and corporate wealth—specific sites such as Zuccotti Park or Wall Street, and general spaces of urban poverty and suburban collapse. Indigenous occupations, by contrast, seek to reclaim and reassert relationships to land and place submerged beneath the settler colonial world. These occupations question the validity of settler colonial nation states. Simultaneously, the nationalistic, racialized content of Occupy movements in North America does not just leave Indigenous peoples out; it situates Occupy within a settler colonial dynamic, participating in the transfer of land and power to the hands of the settler colonial majority. Settler colonialism provides a powerful lens through which to examine Settler—Indigenous dynamics around Occupy.

Introduction The Occupy movements have staked their claim to large areas of political terrain in Canada and the USA, drawing in anti-poverty and proimmigration activists, non-governmental organisations of all stripes and various other social movements. Because of the history of colonial dispossession, it is often assumed that Indigenous peoples’ concerns are congruent with those of ‘the 99%’: broad-based opposition to economic and political marginalization, strong sub-currents of environmentalism and direct democracy and antipathy towards state violence. Indigenous people and groups have engaged with Occupy, and have also raised powerful critiques of the goals, philosophies and tactics of various Occupy movements. As a result, there have been changes within the praxes of Occupy, but also conflict and disintegration. Many concerns of Indigenous peoples remain unaddressed; legacies of historical colonization and the dynamics of contemporary settler colonialism are powerfully entrenched.

Figure 1. This graphic was widely distributed by Occupy groups online. The original creator is unknown, and they may well be Indigenous.

However, its popularity within Occupy, as blogger Adrienne (2011) points out, is highly problematic. The Occupy movement first began to grow and spread online, an environment conducive to graphic design, with electronic posters and artwork being used to spread a variety of messages. Some of the first notable clashes between Indigenous peoples and Occupy were sparked by the images and wording being used on posters, pamphlets and online graphics. Intended to publicize the movement and also draw explicit links with Indigenous struggles, some messages badly missed their mark. Particularly notable is a poster intended to draw attention to persistent colonial dynamics in Occupy Wall Street (Figure 1). This poster, proclaiming the need to ‘DECOLONIZE WALLSTREET’, was heavily critiqued. It is not difficult to see why: the message of the poster is confused. Despite the location of Wall Street, the aesthetic is ‘plains’: images of Sitting Bull, buffalo and arrowheads; a combination of colours often associated with the medicine wheel. This aesthetic is commonly appropriated by Settler people in constructing myths of pure, noble savages, implying an exile outside of contemporary events and into circumscribed narratives (Adrienne, 2011). The text is also problematic. Wall Street is declared to be on ‘Algonquin land’, but Algonquin is a language group, not a people; the land properly belongs to the Lenape (Delaware). Supporters are exhorted to ‘defend mother earth’ (another overplayed trope), as if Indigenous concerns are strictly environmental, leaving economic and political critiques to others. This poster and the language of ‘occupation’ more generally have cascaded into direct, contentious discourses. A popular online article by Jessica Yee (Kanienkehaka/Mohawk) encapsulates many of the concerns Indigenous communities have with Occupy (2011). For settler states such as Canada and the USA, the reality of capitalist oppression is inseparable from the history of colonization; the concerns of Indigenous communities are not necessarily those of the 99% and ‘occupation’ as term and tactic needs to be fundamentally reconsidered. This last point is the most important: Canada and the USA collectively form the northern bloc of settler colonialism. This space was created and has been perpetuated through the production of a ‘structure’ of invasion (Veracini, 2010). That invasion has never ended; this space is already occupied (Yee, 2011).

In this context, it is important to remember that occupying particular sites has a long history in Indigenous peoples’ resistance against colonial aggression (Kilibarda, 2012, p. 36). Fundamentally, though, these occupations are different. The Occupy movements seek to claim the spaces created by state power and corporate wealth—specific sites such as Zuccotti Park or Wall Street, and more general spaces of urban poverty and suburban collapse. Indigenous occupations, by contrast, have sought to reclaim and reassert relationships to land and place submerged beneath the settler colonial world. Their occupations do not question simply the divisions of wealth and power in the northern bloc; they question the very existence of settler colonial nation states.

Pervasive Settler Colonialism The relationships within and between the various communities converging around Occupy are complicated and shifting. Settler colonialism does not explain the friction between Occupy and Indigenous peoples in totality; however, it does provide a powerful lens through which to examine Settler– Indigenous dynamics around Occupy. Settler colonialism is persistent and pervasive, and is one of the most powerful forces to shape the North American social, political and economic landscapes. It cannot be ignored if for no other reason than that it implicates almost every Settler person in its functioning. The settler colonization of the Americas created a vast amount of wealth for colonizers, while forcing Indigenous peoples to the extreme margins. It is impossible not to feel for the American homeowners whose lives have been devastated by predatory banks and lax regulations, or the increasing mass of the poor caught on one side of the widening wealth gap. But at the same time, it cannot be ignored that American wealth (especially that of the esteemed home-owning middle class) was and is generated from the exploitation of stolen land. The dispossession of Indigenous peoples through a vast array of ‘transfers’ (Veracini, 2010, pp. 35–50) enables invasive settler collectives to co-opt the power of place: physical resources of minerals, timber, fertile land and conceptual power relationships with the land enacted through private property and the nation state. The diffuse nature of settler colonialism enables the perception that, while everyone may be somehow connected to colonization, no one is

responsible for it. Veracini explains: …a recurrent need to disavow produces a circumstance where the actual operation of settler colonial practices is concealed behind other occurrences…. The settler hides… behind the activity of settlers elsewhere, behind the persecuted, the migrant, even the refugee…. The settler hides behind his labour and hardship…. Most importantly, the peaceful settler hides behind the ethnic cleanser…. Settler colonialism obscures the conditions of its own production. (Veracini, 2010, p. 14)

This denial—not of the existence of colonization, but of personal complicity (Regan, 2010, p. 45)—makes settler colonialism very difficult to confront effectively. That these elements manifest inside the Occupy movements is not surprising, but rather inevitable. However, it is not only the persistence of settler colonialism within Occupy that is at issue; it is also what settler colonialism reveals about the direction and intent of the Settler majority that makes up Occupy. Beyond the colonial accumulation of wealth and power, Settler people remain preoccupied with naturalization. Veracini argues that all settler colonial societies desire to supersede themselves, that is, to create a ‘post settler’ polity. He describes settler colonial societies as ‘palindromes’ (Veracini, 2010, pp. 100–101) that must come full circle to naturalize themselves in place, or be forever reminded of their status as foreigners and, more accurately, invaders and exploiters. This necessitates the erasure of indigeneity from place (Alfred & Corntassel, 2005, p. 598). Not just the physical erasure of indigenous populations, either; the very memory of Indigenous ways of knowing and being must be erased or subsumed into a multicultural Settler polity. In this way, the Indigenous–Settler divide disappears, and Settler people become naturalized as simply ‘American’, ‘Canadian’ or whichever other identity labels apply. Kilibarda (2012) points out that themes of nationalism persist in the Occupy movements. The narrative of reclaiming ones country from a corrupt few is a powerful story. Selbin’s (2010) analysis of social movements reminds us that people respond to ‘stories that they know’ and build the narratives of social change as ‘bricoleurs’, using the pieces of social memory and history that are available to them. In many ways, the Occupy movements return to powerful settler colonial stories: the exceptional nation, individual equality, a market that generates fundamental freedoms if only properly tended and regulated. Despite the roots of capital accumulation in Indigenous dispossession, Occupy has largely chosen to

focus on the abuse of power and position by individuals and corporations. This problem is to be addressed by mass collections of individuals: ‘the 99%’. Rather than addressing the roots of inequality in settler colonialism, the 99% seeks to level the playing field within the imposed system of state and capital, completing the settler colonial palindrome: Settler and Indigenous disappear, along with the history of colonization, leaving only homogenized (liberal and progressive) rights-bearing individuals. Settler colonial theory reveals this overlap between stories of national liberation and histories of colonial dispossession in settler states. This overlap is evident to some extent in the way that Occupy movements conceptualize themselves. The ‘99%’ moniker is both a powerful rallying cry and also a homogenizing declaration (Kilibarda, 2012, pp. 30–32). In fact, Indigenous peoples are not part of ‘the 99%’ in the way that most Settler people are (Yee, 2011). In order to enter the social space of the 99%, Indigenous peoples must ignore generations of difference making and marginalization by governments and Settler communities, and assume the role of a politicized ‘minority’ in solidarity with other minority groups making equivalent claims. Participation is contingent on abandoning fundamental aspects of indigeneity.

Indigenous Struggles and Occupation Perhaps it was inevitable that a movement for economic justice—even framed in social terms—would not resonate with Indigenous activists. Indigenous peoples have contended with colonial power since before the creation of the northern bloc settler states. The severe deprivation and economic marginalization that is a feature of much of Indian Country inspired similar Indigenous-led protests decades ago. In 1972, before anyone thought to Occupy Wall Street, Indigenous activists were already occupying the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) offices. It is important to remember that despite ‘centuries of genocidal policies targeting indigenous lands, belief systems and bodies, indigenous communities have nevertheless repeatedly managed to check the same capitalist system that #occupy is now confronting’ (Kilibarda, 2012, p. 27). I would argue here that Indigenous communities have more properly been checking the growth of settler colonial power, manifested as capitalist exploitation and state oppression. These power dynamics have been identified and engaged by

Occupy movements as well; yet, there seems to be little understanding of how Indigenous peoples’ experiences in resistance have informed evolving goals, strategies and tactics, including that of occupation. There is a certain frustration that undoubtedly arises for Indigenous peoples observing Occupy movements trying to define themselves. In the early days of Occupy Wall Street, discussions about economics and policy were quickly subsumed into discourses about the practice of experimental and direct democracy. For Indigenous peoples, these discourses must seem at turns ironic and absurd: privileged Settler people play-acting at freedom while Indigenous peoples’ own fully functioning, traditional and tested forms of governance have been derided and attacked for centuries. And while the protesters would likely suggest that they are not the problem— instead citing government, military or corporate structures—in the context of settler colonialism, this position is untenable. It is too easy to point fingers at these large institutions of power and privilege. Indigenous activists are aware of this. There are many signs of shifts in Indigenous praxis away from contending with governments and institutions of power, and towards asserting differential relationships to place in spite of (rather than against) colonial power structures (Alfred, 2005; Alfred & Corntassel, 2005). Although, as noted, Indigenous struggles in the northern bloc have long been characterized by tactical occupations, the motivations, goals and methods of occupying have changed over time. Occupations of Alcatraz and the BIA Office in the 1960s and 1970s were intended to defy government dictates—asserting autonomy—and to raise public awareness. Later occupations, such as those in Tla-o-qui-aht (Clayoquot Sound) or Burnt Church, brought more specific demands to bear, asserting control of particular resources desirable to Settler society. However, these occupations have also been based on a subtext that is slowly, powerfully moving into the foreground: land is not so much occupied as reclaimed. At issue is not just ownership or control, but rather ways of being on and with the land. The goal is not to reform imposed systems such that Indigenous peoples can equally benefit from them, but rather to fundamentally decolonize power and place through a transformation of how people relate to and in place. Indigenous scholars are articulating effective Indigenous activism as the act of reconnecting with land, and through this, to identity, social cohesion and self-sufficiency (Alfred, 2005). Increasingly, Indigenous activism is

practised through the direct, collective assertion of place-based relationships that inform a worldview encompassing individual and group identities, resource acquisition and use, and governance structures and social institutions. This can include non-indigenous participation, such as the cooperation between Indigenous Hawaiians, anarchists and other activists in Hawaii (Goodyear-Ka’õpua, 2011). Indigenous peoples are willing to share the struggle, but only to the point that the ultimate goal of liberation from colonial power, expressed through state and capital, is achieved. Long before the goal of settler colonialism was clearly articulated —the transfer of all land from Indigenous to Settler control; the erasure and replacement of Indigenous space with settler colonial spaces; the naturalization of Settler people on the land—Indigenous activists understood this inevitable trajectory and began moving to check it. Either the goals of Indigenous liberation and the decolonization of the northern bloc have been lost on many in Occupy, or they have been rejected. As noted, Occupy movements have only partially engaged with Indigenous concerns. Despite a huge effort in both the online and physical communities of Occupy Toronto, resistance to Indigenous leadership persisted. Indigenous participants chose different forms of engagement, avoiding the GAs that have come to characterize Occupy encampments and gatherings. Instead, Indigenous activists tended a sacred fire at the Occupy Toronto site, asserting an Indigenous space within the wider protest area. Furthermore, in January, Indigenous academics and activists spoke at a public forum, ‘Occupy Talks: Indigenous Perspectives on the Occupy Movement’. This forum, while reaching out to the Settler community, was not reconciliation or reintegration, but an explanation of differences that Occupy Toronto had obfuscated. Similar patterns occurred in Montreal, with Indigenous concerns portrayed as an ‘add on’. In Vancouver, despite an initial acknowledgement of Indigenous territory and a strong analysis of colonization throughout, ‘many at the camp still had problems taking leadership from indigenous peoples’ (Kilibarda, 2012, pp. 28–30). During the discussions on the name change during Occupy Oakland, many of the Settler members of Occupy clung to the name and moniker despite Indigenous protests. After voting down the Indigenous activists proposed name change, the general assembly devolved into a mass of shouting, arguments, confusion, protest and

counter-protest (Ruiz-Lichter, 2011). It remains to be seen if solidarity can be established under these circumstances. Some Occupy activists have asserted that the occupations that they pursue are on par with Indigenous occupations, as well as those in places such as Tahrir Square. These are positioned as fundamentally different from colonial occupations. The assumption, articulated by one blogger, is that there is a basic difference between oppressive occupation by ‘the 1 percent or the military machine’, and liberatory occupations by protestors (D’amato, 2011). Meanings are ascribed to the term ‘ occupy’ that is assumed to have universal resonance. Understanding of Indigenous difference and the differential relationship that a history of settler colonialism has forged with the concept of occupation is limited. In 2005, Alfred wrote that anti-globalization protestors appeared, to Indigenous eyes, as ‘nothing but staunch defenders of the first wave of globalization against the second’ (Alfred, 2005, p. 235). The Occupy protestors may be more than this, but thus far their unwillingness to engage with Indigenous concerns and settler colonial privilege in the main seems to reinforce the point. The nationalistic, racialized nature of Occupy movements in North America does not just leave Indigenous peoples out; it situates Occupy as another settler colonial dynamic participating in the transfer of land and space to the hands of the settler colonial majority. If that is the case, then Occupy activists should not be surprised when Indigenous peoples confront them directly; Indigenous peoples have far too much experience fighting for their survival and right to be on the land to be drawn into another homogenizing rights and reformation discourse. After all of this, though, there remains hope that Occupy and Indigenous peoples’ movements can find common ground; though slight, changes have been made and Indigenous activists, bloggers and scholars continue to engage with various Occupy movements, and vice versa. Furthermore, there are non-indigenous activists involved in Occupy and other movements that are aware of settler colonialism and move to challenge it. One of those activists, Harsha Walia, sums up the dual need for engagement and decolonization, asserting non-natives must recognize our own role in perpetuating colonialism within our solidarity efforts. We can actively counter this by… discussing the nuanced issues of solidarity, leadership, strategy and analysis—not in abstraction, but within our real and informed and sustained relationships with Indigenous peoples. (Walia, 2011).

In order for Occupy and Indigenous movements to truly support each other, decolonization must be central to their future relationships.

References Adrienne, K. (2011) Representing the native presence in the “Occupy Wall Street” narrative. Available at http://www.nativeappropriations.blogspot.com/2011/10/representing-native-resencein-occupy.html (accessed 4 April 2012). Alfred, T. (2005) Wasase: Indigenous Pathways of Action and Freedom (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press). Alfred, T. & Corntassel, J. (2005) Being Indigenous: Resurgences against contemporary colonialism, Government and Opposition, 40(4), pp. 597–614. D’amato, P. (2011) To occupy or (un)occupy? Available at http://www.socialistworker.org/2011/11/07/occupy-or-unoccupy (accessed 4 April 2012). Goodyear-Ka’őpua, N. (2011) Kuleana Lahui: Collective responsibility for Hawaiian nationhood in activists’ Praxis, Affinities, 5(1), pp. 130–163. Kilibarda, K. (2012) Lessons from #Occupy in Canada: Contesting space, settler consciousness and erasures within the 99%, Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies, 5, pp. 24–41. Regan, P. (2010) Unsettling the Settler Within: Indian Residential Schools, Truth Telling, and Reconciliation in Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press). Ruiz-Lichter, R. (2011) Open letter to the ‘Occupy’ movement: The decolonization proposal, on-line (video). Available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_s3X0uW9Ec (accessed 6 April 2012). Selbin, E. (2010) Revolution, Rebellion, Resistance: The Power of Story (London: Zed Books). Veracini, L. (2010) Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (Eastbourne: Palgrave Macmillan). Walia, H. (2011) Decolonizing together: Moving beyond a politics of solidarity toward a practice of decolonization, Briarpatch Magazine. Available at http://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/decolonizing-together (accessed 6 April 2012). Yee, J. (2011) OCCUPY WALL STREET: The game of colonialism and further nationalism to be decolonized from the ‘Left’, Racialicious. Available at http://www.racialicious.com/2011/09/30/occupy-wall-street-the-game-of-colonialism-and-furthernationalism-to-be-decolonized-from-the-left/ (accessed 6 April 2012).

Adam J. Barker is a postgraduate researcher focusing on settler colonialism and social change, Department of Geography, University of Leicester. Originally from Haudenosaunee territory near Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, he identifies as a Settler Canadian committed to decolonization.

Whose Occupation? Homelessness and the Politics of Park Encampments REBECCA SCHEIN Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies (Human Rights Program), Carleton University, Ottawa, Ont.Canada ABSTRACT As a progressive policy platform and radical political programme, the right to the city suggests that the formulation of specific policy demands for affordable housing, free transit or municipal services can advance in tandem with a shared political understanding of the underlying roots of inequality and exclusion. The right to the city offers a useful, twofold challenge to the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement: to more clearly motivate its tactics in the reclamation of city space; and to cultivate openness to collective political transformation in the midst of struggle. This paper argues that the practical questions associated with OWS encampments—and particularly, the relationship between public space occupations and homelessness—are an opportunity to advance a shared political analysis across an ideologically and tactically fragmented left.

The last decade has witnessed a revival of scholarly and activist interest in Lefebvre’s 1968 formulation of a ‘right to the city’, which called for the inclusion of city dwellers in the collective project of creating and transforming the material spaces of public and social life (Lefebvre, 1996; Mitchell, 2003). As Wigle and Zárate have observed, ‘the right to the city’ has emerged simultaneously as a research agenda, a political project and a policy platform (Wigle & Zarate, 2010). Since Lefebvre’s original formulation, when he described the right to the city as ‘a cry and a demand’, the concept has straddled the divide between political slogan and

conceptual framework, implicitly promising to organize the disparate grievances of city dwellers into a coherent analysis of urban injustice and a coordinated strategy for its redress. The right to the city has increasingly come to represent in shorthand a cogent analysis of the democratic costs of neoliberal globalization at the city level, linking multiple dimensions of urban policy—whether development priorities, policing, transit funding, tenant protections or homelessness—to a broader analysis of cities’ capitulation to the demands of mobile capital (Smith, 1996; Mitchell, 2003; Harvey, 2008). Its insistence on the rights of ‘inhabitants’ in city life is the lynchpin in a radical critique of the primacy of property rights, the commodification of public goods and the limits of formal political citizenship (organized around the nation-state) as the basis of meaningful participation in public life. Whether the right to the city can in fact help to reorganize our fragmented and episodic responses to neoliberalism into a more powerful and coherent social movement remains an open question, however. Indeed, its utility as either a conceptual framework or a political project has not been fully established, particularly with respect to its rather ambivalent (or at least ambiguous) resort to the moral language of rights. The promise of the right to the city is essentially a Marxist formulation of praxis, a promise that the process of contestation over urban space will at once transform the terrain of struggle and the consciousness of the participants. As a progressive policy platform and radical political programme, the right to the city suggests that the formulation of specific policy demands for affordable housing, free transit or municipal services can advance in tandem with a shared political understanding of the underlying roots of inequality and exclusion. This short paper examines that promise through an investigation of the tactical dilemmas and political tensions that have been foregrounded by the practices of public space occupation in the ‘Occupy Wall Street (OWS)’ movement. The daily practices of occupation associated with OWS reveal a remarkable congruence with the central features of Lefebvre’s formulation: participatory decision making over the use of space; re-appropriation of common space for collective use; and the recognition of ‘use’ and ‘inhabitance’, rather than private ownership, as the basis of legitimate claims to urban space (Lefebvre, 1996; Mitchell, 2003). Although these practices suggest that the insights of Lefebvre’s formulation have already

been deeply internalized by contemporary urban activists, the nature of the relationship between the physical occupation of public space, the political aims of the movement and the advancement of a coherent political analysis underlying the movement’s goals and objectives remains to be fully articulated. I argue that the practical questions associated with OWS encampments—and particularly, the relationship between public space occupations and homelessness—are an opportunity to advance a shared political analysis across an ideologically and tactically fragmented left. The right to the city offers a useful, twofold challenge to OWS: to more clearly motivate its tactics in the reclamation of city space and to cultivate openness to collective political transformation in the midst of struggle.

The Political Logic of the Park Occupations Within a few short weeks of the first call to ‘Occupy Wall Street’, the establishment of 24-hour park encampments had become the most visible feature of OWS-inspired organizing in cities across North America. The encampments emerged not only as a practical resource for politics—a space to meet, deliberate and make decisions—but as a stage for ‘pre-figurative’ politics. In the parks, occupiers visibly and publicly enacted an alternative present and future, ‘attempting to build, in miniature, the kind of society they wanted to live in’ (Writers for the 99%, 2011, p. 8). In conjunction with the consensus process and the general assembly, the decision to share food, books and blankets in the park became a prominent public expression of the movement’s understanding of inclusivity and equality and its critique of the status quo. Parks as such were not the declared target of OWS, but parks as public space became a symbolic and practical resource for the movement and an opportunity to advance a shared political vision. Social movement historian Frances Fox Piven has been a prominent defender of the political utility of the park occupations, arguing that the decision ‘to live out of doors, to link arms with the poor and to share food with the poor is a major advance’ for movement building, both enacting a meaningful solidarity with society’s most vulnerable individuals and locating income inequality as the central grievance of OWS (Piven, quoted in Gupta 2011). The implicit logic of the park occupations was the seizure of public space for the purpose of meeting specific unmet social and political needs. Holding political meetings in the park dramatized the public’s effective

exclusion from the places and processes that are formally dedicated to political deliberation. At the same time, the parks fulfilled a practical need for free meeting space once readily provided by our increasingly impoverished public institutions, whether universities, libraries or community centres. Here, the symbolic and material dimensions of the occupations converged, as the re-appropriation of public space simultaneously highlighted the effects of public divestment and reclaimed the terrain from which to counter its effects. This convergence represents one of the most hopeful and innovative dimensions of OWS: a recognition that the success of our political organizing depends not only on whether it is symbolically coherent, but also on whether it identifies and addresses the material conditions that have contributed to our demobilization. Public space occupations express a tactical instinct that I suspect was critical to its success in galvanizing fresh energy and attention across North America last fall. OWS-inspired activists refused the geographical rootlessness that came to characterize summitfocused activism of the last decade, instead laying claim to local public space as a base of operations for political organizing. Last fall, activists opted not to flock to New York, where the action was, but rather to stay where they were—indeed, to set up tents and declare their intention not to leave. The OWS encampments were unique in their indefinite temporality: the absence of formal demands and timelines made clear the movement’s open–ended and unscripted character, setting it apart from the many wellattended but temporally delimited marches, rallies and labour actions of recent years. In their visible commitment to permanent, local opposition to the status quo, the occupations seemed to build on the motives that had driven the creation of the World Social Forum in 2001, which Klein has described as ‘the most ambitious attempt’ to move beyond ‘summithopping’ and begin a proactive, deliberate process of sustained debate and strategizing for an alternative present and future (Klein, 2002, p. 10). Where the World Social Forum promises to foster collaboration and coordination among social movement actors spread across the world, local political capacity building seemed to be the priority of OWS, with public space functioning as a staging ground for specifically targeted organizing, a theatre for political demonstration and a strategic battleground in the defence of the commons against enclosures of all kinds.

Social movements need spaces for people to meet, build trust and develop shared goals and strategies, and parks can meet those needs reasonably well (at least while the weather cooperates), while also maintaining a visible movement presence in the public eye. The ambitions of the park occupations went beyond simple meeting space, however, implicitly linking the political vision of OWS with the communal provision of basic human necessities in the park—food, shelter and washrooms, as well as books, music and space for recreation.

Voluntary and Involuntary Occupiers In practice, the logistical demands of maintaining the encampments and the micro-politics that have emerged among diverse ‘occupiers’ have raised a number of thorny questions about the relationship between this form of occupation and the political analysis informing the movement’s goals and priorities. This is nowhere more visible than in the relationship between voluntary occupiers of public space—people who have homes elsewhere, but have chosen to tent in the park for political reasons—and those involuntary park occupants who have no choice but to live their lives entirely in public: ‘the homeless’. Homeless people quickly became a significant presence in OWS-inspired park encampments in major cities across North America. Perhaps inadvertently, the voluntary inhabitants of the ‘Occupy’ encampments have brought into the foreground a largely unacknowledged social function of cities’ remaining public space: for people without homes, public space represents the most important bulwark against the spatial obliteration of their ‘right to have rights’, a shrinking venue for the enjoyment of an individual’s most basic right ‘to be’ without molestation by property owners or the state (Waldron, 1991, p. 315). Homelessness emblemizes starkly the annihilation of human rights by property that is one of the key insights advanced by the right to the city. If, as Waldron wisely observes, ‘no one is free to perform an action unless there is somewhere he is free to perform it’, the encroachment of public space, by both legal and de facto market logic,1 represents a human rights catastrophe for individuals who must live their lives entirely in public (Waldron, 1991; Mitchell, 2003). The realities of homelessness weave together many of the political and economic grievances that have converged around OWS and which underpin

the right to the city: the primacy of property rights over human needs; the increasing privatization of public goods and services and the bankruptcy of democratic political citizenship in the absence of basic material security. But while the appropriation of the parks as a political meeting space articulates quite neatly the simultaneous function of public space as means and end in a struggle against the encroachments of neoliberalism, the political vision underlying the provision of food and shelter in the park is rather less clear. Communal provision of food, shelter and basic bodily security in the park no doubt helped to foster relationships of trust and care among the occupiers, building movement capacity by cultivating an effective camaraderie and solidarity among strangers. As an expression of prefigurative politics, the communal provision of goods and services in the park is more than a means to movement building, however, but an enactment of the movement’s end. For some participants and observers, the communal, ad hoc fulfilment of basic bodily and social needs in the park demonstrates only the movement’s commitment to inclusivity, equality and material security. To others, the communal provision of goods and services is not only the enactment of a core value, but also a programmatic intervention, a kind of peaceful ‘propaganda of the deed’. The capacity of park occupants to engage in consensus-based decision making, share food, stay warm, resolve conflicts and to have a good time represents powerful evidence of the illegitimate and unnecessary character of both capitalism and the state. But what happens when your attempts to fulfil diverse material and social needs are not entirely successful? When diverse needs are not adequately met? Declaring the park an expression of the society you want to build makes a certain sense up until the moment when the encampment is manifestly unable to meet the needs of all of its inhabitants. The presence of homeless people within the encampments illustrated this limit dramatically, although other use conflicts and dilemmas over policing, racism and sexual violence among occupiers have also deflated the triumphant self-confidence contained in the slogan, ‘This is what democracy looks like!’ Soon after they were established, participants and onlookers in OWS encampments in many cities began to express concerns that they were getting bogged down in the logistics of occupation, whether preparing and distributing food or negotiating and mediating disputes within the park. As Ehrenreich (2011) observes of the logistics of

occupation, ‘Trash has to be removed; medical care and rudimentary security provided—to which ends a dozen or more committees may toil day and night.’ The relationship between social service provision, political strategizing and pre-figurative community building became increasingly murky, as occupiers variously resisted and succumbed to a language dividing the ‘real’ political occupiers from those drawn to the park by the promise of a meal or a safe place to sleep. Indeed, from the perspective of people chronically under-housed and homeless, the Occupy encampments are yet another ad hoc tent city, in which people’s attempts to provide for themselves the rudimentary necessities of life are met with police violence and forcible eviction (Ehrenreich, 2011). In the Occupy encampments, as substantial energies of the occupation were consumed by the demands of food, shelter and protection from the police, some began to wonder whether the encampments were successfully supporting or fulfilling any clear political objectives, whether direct provision of social services or capacity building for an emergent social movement.

From Tactics to Political Analysis: Where does the Occupation Lead us? In the aftermath of the park evictions last fall, conversations among activists have turned to the question of re-occupation come spring. Should OWS return to the parks? Identify other strategic sites? Target privatized, semi-privatized, pseudo-public or fully state-owned and state-managed public space? Six months on, what can we say about the relationship between the practice of occupation and the tactical or strategic objectives of OWS? Where are the points of intersection and divergence between symbolic politics, practical capacity building and prefigurative community? Are the practical demands and micro-politics of occupation a distraction from the arduous work of crafting a shared political analysis and vision, or can engagement with the micro-politics of occupation push us to develop the skills, relationships and analysis we might need to advance such a politics? Although it may be necessary to use a park as a space for political discussion, or to provide people with a meal or a place to sleep, surely we are not intending to argue that parks are best used to host tent cities, or that people are best housed in park encampments. Likewise, few would

recognize a vision of social and economic justice that begins and ends with the right not to be harassed or evicted by police when sleeping in the park, whether you are there to express your politics or because you have nowhere else to go. The reason for occupying the park is to bring into public view the reality that these critical social needs are going unmet, and that OWS is committed to meeting them. These are the implicit ‘demands’ of the Occupy Movement. How those needs will be met is an open and urgent question, and one that the OWS movement must not walk away from. Some OWS participants have rightly acknowledged their limited capacity to provide services adequate to the needs of the homeless people who have become part of OWS encampments—including food, clothing, mental health services and treatment for addictions and other chronic illnesses, not to mention safe, stable, long-term housing. A critical assessment of the capacity of OWS to provide ad hoc for such needs in the park should not lead us to conclude either that occupations are a dead end for politics, or that practical engagement with the needs of homeless people will distract or divert energy from more politically productive aspects of occupation. Rather, the practical dilemmas and limitations of the encampments have usefully foregrounded many of the questions that are in fact central to the advancement of a coherent movement politics. If we can agree that OWS expresses at its core an objection to the collusion of capital and the state at the expense of meaningful democracy, what role do movement participants imagine for the state in the provision of public goods, if any? If the reclamation of public space is both a symbolic strike and a practical strike against the intensifying enclosure and privatization of public goods of all kinds, how might we make tactical use of diverse kinds of public space in order to defend and preserve their public character and function? What would truly democratic provision and management of such public goods look like? Does a commitment to prefiguration necessarily preclude an engagement with existing, stateprovided public goods and services—whether libraries, recreational facilities or universities—or with the kinds of professional expertise embodied in our librarians, city planners, teachers and social workers? Might not a simultaneous critique and defence of our impoverished and imperfect public institutions be part of the process of articulating our vision of the world we want to live in?

Unless we engage seriously with these questions, OWS runs the risk of splintering into predictable political factions and/or imploding into a miniaturist subculture; unable to scale up to a level where the real challenges and dilemmas of democracy assert themselves. Tactically, public space occupations represent a real opportunity—not only to engage in a highly visible symbolic politics, but also to advance our political analysis in a practical terrain, where we are less likely to run aground on familiar ideological fault lines. Park occupations are an opportunity to bring our valued public services into the public eye, to visibly assert our objection to the erosion and privatization of public goods that should be preserved and held in common for everyone. Rather than ad hoc book collections in our public parks, then, why not work with public librarians to maintain a mobile state-funded public library in the park? If OWS sees the public provision of books as an essential feature of its politics, perhaps we can find ways to visibly, publicly demonstrate the irreplaceability of both the common stock of books themselves and the public librarians who enable their collective use. For most occupations, it has been substantially easier to establish and maintain an ad hoc library—often complete with wireless Internet access— than to assemble the kinds of complex skills and resources that would enable effective, compassionate, dignified provision of social services to people who are homeless or under-housed. Such resources, to the extent that they have ever existed at all at the state level in North America, have already been substantially degraded and eroded by neoliberalism, and there is no obvious equivalent to the ‘bookmobile’ when it comes to redressing the multiple exclusions that converge to make homelessness possible. Nonetheless, if OWS is to take seriously the idea that ‘occupation’ both expresses and enables opposition to the injustice of enclosures of all kinds, it must be willing to grapple seriously with the demands of complex social life—whether meeting people’s need for books, food, anti-racism training or a place to sleep.

Notes 1. Thede facto supremacy of market logic can be read, for example, in arguments that the removal of homeless people from public space is justified on the grounds that their presence deters shoppers and tourists (Harvey; Mitchell; Smith).

References Ehrenreich, B. (2011 October 24) Why homelessness is becoming an issue for Occupy Wall Street, Mother Jones. Gupta, A., Occupational hazard: Living with the homeless, Salon. November 4 2011. Available at: http://www.salon.com/2011/11/04/occupational_hazard_living_with_the_homeless/ Harvey, D. (2008) The right to the city, New Left Review, 53(Sept/Oct), pp. 23–40. Klein, N. (2002) Farewell to ‘the end of history’: Organization and vision in anti-corporate movements, in: L. Panitch & C. Leys (Eds) Socialist Register, pp. 1–14 (London: Merlin Press). Lefebvre, H. (1996) The right to the city, in: Writing on Cities, eds and trans. Kofman, E. and E. Lebas (Oxford: Blackwell), Originally published as Le Droit à la Ville. Paris: Anthropos 1968. Mitchell, D. (2003) The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space (New York: The Guilford Press). Smith, N. (1996) The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City (New York: Routledge). Waldron, J. (1991) Homelessness and the issue of freedom, UCLA Law Review, 39, pp. 295–324. Wigle, J. & Zarate, L. (2010) Mexico city creates charter for the right to the city, Progressive Planning, Planners Network 184(summer), pp. 13–16. Writers for the 99 Percent (2011) Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of the Action that Changed America (New York: OR Books).

Rebecca Schein completed her Ph.D in the History of Consciousness program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and is now an Assistant Professor in the Human Rights stream of Carleton University's Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies in Ottawa, Canada. Her research and activism focus on social movement strategy, public space, the right to the city, and the political cultures of liberalism and neo-liberalism in the U.S. and Canada.

Collecting Occupy London: Public Collecting Institutions and Social Protest Movements in the 21st Century JIM GLEDHILL Museum of London, History Collections, London, UK ABSTRACT The attempt to occupy the London Stock Exchange and the subsequent camps established at St Paul’s Cathedral and other locations bordering the City of London have created new dynamics in social protest. Museums and other public collecting institutions face major challenges in preserving both the material culture and the social experience of this movement, which are often ephemeral in form or difficult to record in a rapidly changing environment. The danger of oversimplifying or misrepresenting meanings within this protest culture is ever-present. Yet, this danger has been mitigated by the self-chronicling and archiving tendencies of the Occupy movement itself, particularly its extensive use of social media and web-based resources.

This is not a protest. This is a process. Slogan from Occupy Finsbury Square

Introduction The Occupy London Stock Exchange (LSX) camp established at St Paul’s Cathedral on 15 October 2011 made the City of London not only the focus of national media attention, but also positioned the capital’s financial district as a locus within a transnational narrative of social protest. The global Occupy phenomenon began with the occupation of New York’s Wall

Street on 17 September 2011 and the establishment of a camp at Zuccotti Park. Inspired by the ‘Arab Spring’ uprisings, particularly the occupation of Cairo’s Tahrir Square, and the Spanish Indignados movement, Occupy Wall Street (OWS) attained global significance. The Occupy LSX camp at St Paul’s imported many aspects of its American counterpart to London. Having begun as an accidental response to the failure to occupy the LSX, Occupy LSX quickly established a satellite camp at Finsbury Square. This was followed by the creation of the ‘Bank of Ideas’ in a disused building owned by the United Bank of Switzerland on nearby Sun Street. After this occupation was evicted on 30 January 2012, a ‘School of Ideas’ was opened in a disused school building on Featherstone Street. This was evicted at the same time as the main camp at St Paul’s on 28 February 2012. As a public institution dedicated to telling the story of London from its prehistory to the present day, the Museum of London responded immediately to the events on its doorstep. The speed of the response was matched by an imperative to consider the methodological, ethical and cultural issues around collecting within the occupied environment. The museum has a long history of collecting protest movements, including the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the 1980s and the anti-road protests of the 1990s but it had not hitherto found itself engaging directly with a movement opposing the Corporation of London, one of its two core funders. Both state and financial institutions, and the power relationships they embody, were being questioned by the Occupy movement, within the City of London and nationally, as new camps sprang up elsewhere in the country. For a public institution funded by the state via local government, this represented a challenge to acquire representative material culture which would require active engagement with the movement, while maintaining proper boundaries as a public body. This paper will consider how and why public collecting institutions must engage with social movements like Occupy; it will also examine the attendant methodological and ethical considerations. The discussion will be framed within the ongoing debate around ‘public history’ and the institutional limitations museums and other publicly funded cultural organisations face when engaging with political activism. As prior discourse around ‘public history’ has tended to focus on museums and their relationship with the past, this study will offer a fresh perspective by considering their role in preserving the historical memory of the active

present. Approaches to collecting the Occupy movement in the USA will also be examined for comparison.

Developing an Institutional Relationship With the Occupy Movement Any collecting relationship between a museum and a donor requires trust between the parties. This traditional relationship was difficult for the Museum of London to establish with a non-hierarchical organisation based on consensual decision making. Consent to remove objects associated with people and place is usually an ethical requirement when collecting. Typically, when collecting on demonstrations the use of ephemeral material, such as placards, is time specific and it is, therefore, legitimate to remove material left behind as disowned. The static and prolonged nature of Occupy presented an obstacle to this mode of collecting. Suspicion and hostility towards institutions in the City of London, including the Corporation, were also prevalent within Occupy LSX. Early approaches to protestors, for example to obtain one of the ‘Guy Fawkes’ masks inspired by Alan Moore’s graphic novel V for Vendetta, were met with bemusement and suspicion. This was unsurprising, given the logic of anonymity embodied in wearing these masks. However, a formal approach, made through one of the newly established walk-in tents, prompted the offer of the first printed copy of the movement’s newspaper The Occupied Times of London. This was symbolically presented to the curator on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral. In the event, the presentation of the newspaper signalled a perception on the part of Occupy activists of a potentially legitimising relationship between Occupy LSX and the Museum of London as a public institution in the City. The museum was, therefore, factored temporarily into the movement’s strategic considerations which posed further ethical questions. The curator’s a priori decision to collect material from Occupy imbued it with important social historical status that could be interpreted by both participants and critics alike as a source of political legitimacy. From an ethical standpoint, however, the risks inherent in the curatorial decision to engage with the Occupy movement for collecting purposes were offset by the overriding legitimacy of the museum’s publicly enshrined mission of preserving London’s history.

Following the first approach, a more consistent process of observation and interaction was adopted by museum staff. This was based on the realisation that the museum, as both a cultural institution and a public service, had to position itself as a third pole between the authorities (St Paul’s; the Corporation of London; the City of London and Metropolitan Police forces and the High Court) and Occupy LSX in order to maintain impartiality appropriate to its mission. This was done by articulating the social value of the museum’s core aim of historical preservation. Contact was established between Occupy activists and the museum via email and phone, resulting in further collecting opportunities. This was fostered by visits to St Paul’s, Finsbury Square and the Bank of Ideas for both dialogue and visual documentation by the museum’s photographer. Given the ephemeral nature of much protest culture, the photographic record of graffiti and other visual messages in situ was essential. The presence of museum staff in the Bank of Ideas was typically received positively and they were given access to areas not designated ‘public’ by the occupiers. The curator was also invited into a non-public area in the St Paul’s camp: its communications hub known as the ‘Tech Tent’. The curator and photographer were allowed to record the Earl Street Community Centre, part of the building complex housing the Bank of Ideas. This space had been occupied by Climate Camp activists during the 2009 G20 summit and had then been the subject of an eviction by police. Museum staff were shown evidence of these events and allowed to document an important historical continuity between the evolving Occupy London movement and the earlier protests. Visiting the Bank of Ideas resulted in the donation of significant artefacts to the museum. These included a large banner which had been suspended over the façade of the building, featuring the slogan ‘UBS YOU OWE US’ and a subverted version of the United Bank of Switzerland’s logo. However, the relations that facilitated these donations were not unproblematic. Negotiations around the donation of artefacts sometimes involved reciprocal requests for museum resources, such as materials for producing new banners. Given the museum’s status as a public body, it was impossible to provide logistical support to a political movement. Collecting in this environment also required cultural sensitivity towards the act of protest itself. The preservation of what is ephemeral or intended to be auto-destructive, for example certain forms of visual art, presents an

ethical dilemma for collecting institutions. This was exemplified by the installation created by the artist, Banksy, for the Occupy LSX camp. This work consisted of a satirical take on the Monopoly game as a metaphor for contemporary capitalism. The condition of the installation quickly deteriorated and most of the tokens disappeared. On one visit, the curator observed the last remaining token on the board, the silver boot. Although the installation had been documented photographically and on Youtube, the opportunity to preserve a complete piece called to the museum’s mission. Faced with the dilemma of whether to take the boot for preservation in the museum or treat it as an active part of the protest, the decision was taken to leave it in situ. A formal appeal was subsequently made to the Occupy LSX General Assembly, the movement’s primary decision-making body, for the boot to be donated but the matter was not discussed. In retrospect, taking the preservation course may have provoked conflict between the museum and Occupy. This dilemma is emblematic of the broader relationship, and potential dissonance, between a public institution’s mission—in this context, historical preservation—and its own agency in evolving a realistic ethical and methodological framework within which to fulfil that mission.

Interpreting the Culture of Protest For the curator, one of the challenges presented by the Occupy movement was identifying the historically significant material within the panoply of visual culture. Conventional ephemera, such as traditional left-wing posters, competed with more imaginative and esoteric material from groups and individuals operating outside the standard forms of labour movement or anti-capitalist protest. Collecting in other areas, such as the 2011 ‘March for the Alternative’ organised by the Trade Union Congress, curators have seen the recent prevalence of highly personalised political messages encoded in self-produced placards and signs. These stand out from the mass-produced printed material of traditional campaign groups, parties and trade unions. The articulation of more complex economic and political ideas derived from published sources has also been documented. A banner collected from the Occupy LSX camp and bearing the slogan ‘Grow the Real Economy’ incorporated ideas from the New Economic Foundation’s The Great Transition. Documenting banners and other material culture also provided a greater depth of field when examining the evolution of the Occupy

movement. At the start of the St Paul’s camp, the most prominent banner proclaimed ‘Capitalism is Crisis’; near the end of the camp’s existence, this had been replaced by the slogan ‘Democratise Capitalism’. In tandem with the acquisition of objects and ephemera, the museum has collected oral history recordings made with Occupy participants involved in producing it. In addition to recording the social experience of taking part in Occupy, these interviews also provide important information about the experiential and ideological context of its material culture. Another feature of contemporary protest culture has been the elevation of sophisticated design ethics in its publicity and imagery. The museum’s collecting around Occupy has stimulated offers of self-archived material from other social movements, such as Climate Camp, which reflects an analogous visual culture. The prominent role played by ‘design activism’ relates to another problem museums face in collecting protest culture. As with other forms of social and political activism, material produced by groups to publicise or record their activities is increasingly ‘born digital’ on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Youtube and Livestream for download or streaming and has no physical form. Building both the infrastructural capacity and methodological criteria for preserving this material represents a colossal paradigm shift for collecting institutions, whose identity has hitherto been constructed around materiality. Documenting and interpreting social media usage by protest movements must not diminish the importance of material culture. Aitchison has noted the ‘tendency of more assertive middle-class male activists to dominate discussion at meetings’ during student occupations at University College London in 2010–2011 (Aitchison, 2011, 437). Given the prominence of the assertive, middle-class (although not exclusively male) constituency observed in the Occupy London movement, and the likely dominance of its social media channels by this group through greater access and familiarity, the need to document the experiences of the socially marginal and excluded comes to the fore. The absence of physical forms of domination in the virtual environment may also empower some social groups, including women, with greater freedom of expression. The modern interrelationship between digital and material cultures, such as the banners which are the traditional media for the politics of the disenfranchised, is therefore crucial to our understanding of social movements.

Occupy and Public History Both the rationale and process of documenting Occupy reactivate the debate around public history and how museums represent the past. Jordanova (2006) has argued that museums frame the past within an elitist idiom of ‘heroes and villains’. The formulation of historical narratives by cultural institutions like museums is itself a contested process and the nature of heroes and villains mutable. The Museum of London’s Galleries of Modern London represent a broad range of social movements for equality, including previously marginalised groups: women, gays and lesbians and ethnic minorities. The presence of these perspectives in the galleries results from resource mobilisation by these groups over time, but what of contemporary protest and its representation? Tarrow has commented that social movements ‘rest on a razor’s edge between institutionalization and isolation’ (Tarrow, 1998, 138). The donation of the Occupied Times of London newspaper shows that Occupy London was aware of the value of engaging with the mainstream in the form of a public institution. Jordanova has also criticised museums for shaping public perceptions through artefact selection (and therefore omission) and sanitisation for display (Jordanova, 2006, 129). Museum of London curators adopted a selective approach when collecting from Occupy, opting for a balance between material representing individual experience and agency (handmade banners, clothing and oral history recordings with participants) and generic protest accessories (the ‘Guy Fawkes’ mask, the rainbow PEACE flag). The scope of collecting was informed by the constraints of limited museum space, the physical condition of objects and individual curatorial choice. The rationale for what museums collect and subsequently display to represent social movements could be better informed by greater interdisciplinary collaboration between curators, academic historians and social scientists. Such collaboration would also enhance the potential for engagement with social movement participants to interpret their culture and its meanings. Ownership of the past and the decoding of its meanings are political acts, however, that can generate tension between social movements and cultural institutions. OWS set up its own ‘working group’ to archive the movement and rented its own storage space for the purpose. This was a conscious move by OWS to assert its independence and ownership of its material

culture, in response to the collecting activities of institutions like the Museum of the City of New York and the New York Historical Society. Taking this logic a stage further, in January 2012 the Occupy Museums (OM) group occupied the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York on its free-entry day to demand ‘culture for the 99%’. This brought the group into contact with art handlers from the Teamsters union, who had been locked out by auctioneers Sotheby’s. OM protested at the treatment of the workers and highlighted the complicity of MoMA, through its corporate relationship with Sotheby’s. The group undertook a similar protest at the American Museum of Natural History to critique the role of Republican and Tea Party supporter, David Hamilton Koch, whose private philanthropy had funded the museum’s dinosaur wing (http://occupymuseums.org/index.php/actions). Occupy London has not at the time of writing engendered similar phenomena, although it has generated offshoots like Occupy Research and Occupy Design. The movement has also been archiving its social media and other digital culture and has discussed donating a centralised digital archive to the Museum of London (http://occupylsx.org/?cat=22). This archive may record events too brief for the museum to document, such as the short-lived occupation of the Roman House building near the Barbican on 21 January 2012. The self-archiving tendencies of the Occupy movement in the USA have encouraged public institutions to explore new vistas in digital culture. The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University in Virginia has created a digital repository occupyarchive.org to collect audio-visual material in the form of artwork, stories, photographs, video and sound recordings. Employing a Creative Commons licence, the site allows Occupy participants to upload their own files within a regulatory framework. This interactive medium is directly influenced by the movement’s own methodology. The Museum of London is exploring the use of Creative Commons licensing when making its oral history recordings with Occupy participants available online. The museum has maintained an active engagement with the Occupy movement and plugged this into a wider debate about documenting contemporary social protest. On 26 March, Occupy activists, including journalists and designers involved in the production of the Occupied Times of London, were invited to join a discussion at the museum around

collecting from social protests. Media coverage of this event generated criticism from some Occupy activists who argued that the material has no place in a museum because the movement is not ‘dead’. The conspicuous preservation and public display of signs, banners and placards at the Finsbury Square camp could be interpreted as a reassertion of independent ownership of this visual culture by the movement. The dynamic between institutions and social movements has changed since the debate over public history began, owing to the communications revolution of the last two decades. Increasingly, museums and other public collecting institutions are opening new channels of dialogue and engagement with a populace able to access and share unprecedented levels of information. Museums and other collecting institutions are now inviting far greater interactivity with their users, including web-based mechanisms for interpreting their collections and narratives.

Conclusion The liminal nature of Occupy LSX, which gave rise to other spatial forms of protest in and around the City of London, has proved a significant institutional challenge and has played a part in accelerating processes of modernisation in the museum’s collecting infrastructure and methodology. Direct engagement with activists has forced museum staff to consider the institutional boundaries that should operate within this process and the extent to which public bodies can interact with social movements. As statefunded organisations, museums are politicised and their narratives are contested and reconfigured by wider economic and political vectors. As state institutions, public museums cannot challenge governments or offer political alternatives, but they can represent the material culture of those who have and they should continue to do so actively in the present. In an era of increasingly accessible information and new forms of digital culture, museums must engage more actively with social movements as expressions of important strands of public opinion on contentious issues. On a deeper level, this process requires a reconsideration of how public collecting institutions regulate culture in terms of representation and access. Eric Wolf has argued that ‘we must make culture more flexible and open-ended and connect it with power’ (Wolf, 1999, 289). The cultural institution is itself after all a process shaped by protest.

References Aitchison, G. (2011) Reform, rupture or re-imagination: Understanding the purpose of an occupation, Social Movement Studies, 10(4), pp. 431–439. Jordanova, L. (2006) History in Practice, 2nd ed., (London: Hodder Arnold). Tarrow, S. (1998) Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics, 2nd ed., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Wolf, E. R. (1999) Envisioning Power: Ideologies of Dominance and Crisis (London: University of California Press).

Jim Gledhill was educated at the University of Oxford and University College London. He previously worked at the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester and the Foundling Museum in London. He was the principal curator on the museum’s Occupy London collecting project. Presently, he is the Curator of Social and Working History at the Museum of London.

Israel’s ‘Tent Protests’: The Chilling Effect of Nationalism URI GORDON Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, Ketura, Israel ABSTRACT The Israeli ‘Tent Protest’ movement enjoyed wide popular support, but displayed a distinct lack of political radicalism. Not only did calls for discrete welfare policies replace explicit anti-capitalism, but there was a widespread insistence on the movement’s ‘apolitical’ nature and an avoidance of any direct confrontation with the neoliberal Netanyahu government or calls for new elections. The article argues that these anomalies can be explained by the chilling effect of the patriotic, stateloyalist discourses which reached unprecedented prominence in Israeli society in the past year. This led movement participants to avoid at all costs being perceived as left-wing and disloyal, and created an atmosphere of deliberate self-censorship which silenced any engagement with the Israeli– Palestinian conflict during the mobilization. The movement is understood here as an all-too-brief interlude in Israel’s ongoing move away from democracy.

The Israeli ‘Tent Protest’ movement came and went over the space of 6 weeks in the summer of 2011. The movement started on 14 July when Daphni Leef, a freelance video editor from Tel-Aviv, pitched a tent on Rothschild boulevard in the city center, after having to vacate her rented apartment for renovations and discovering that a new flat would be beyond her means. Leef created a Facebook event for her protest and was joined by several friends. Within 24h, dozens of tents were standing on the grassy sidelines of the promenade, and over the coming fortnight more than 60 encampments appeared in almost every Israeli town and city. The protests’

agenda rapidly widened from housing prices to the high cost of living, and from there to the government’s social and economic policies and the high concentration of wealth in Israeli society (OECD, 2011). Calls for a return to the old welfare state were widely heard. It was doubtlessly the largest protest movement in Israel’s history. Weekly Saturday night demonstrations drew increasing numbers of people, with over 400,000 participating in the last major demonstration, on 3 September. Though the participants largely represented the faltering middle classes, polls indicated up to 90% support for the movement amongst the general public. On the streets, a sense of empowerment and community was palpable. The tent cities became sites of direct democratic selfmanagement, practical cooperation and public discussion of social affairs. It was a breath of fresh air in a society that had become increasingly atomized and consumerist. For many people, it was the first experience of collective mobilization, and the first opportunity to educate themselves on social and economic issues. Although the Israeli protests preceded the American Occupy movement, they followed close on the heels of the Arab Spring and the Spanish Indignados mobilization—precedents which were not lost on the tent-city dwellers. Some activists situated their mobilization within the Middle Eastern context, with a placard on one street corner even renaming it ‘Rothschild–Tahrir’, yet direct connections with protesters in Egypt, Tunisia and Bahrain were nonexistent. The Indignados movement, on the other hand, had a much more direct influence in seeding the Israeli movement’s practices of popular assembly. Aya Shoshan, an early activist at the Rothschild camp, had just returned from Spain and was quick to teach the protest instigators about hand signals, stack-taking and facilitation. Though never adopting a formal consensus process (decisions were usually adopted by what protesters came to call a ‘clear visual majority’), its more deeply significant elements—active listening, compassion and a sense of common purpose—were widely on display. These practices were so different from the usual Israeli mode of impatient and conflictual argument that for many protesters they were nothing short of a revelation. Within two weeks, assisted by media attention to ‘twinkling’ and other curiosities, they spread throughout the country. Yet compared to similar events around the world, one is tempted to designate the Israeli tent protests as the tamest specimen in the current

global wave. Not only did calls for discrete welfare policies replace any explicit anti-capitalism, but there was a widespread insistence on the movement’s ‘apolitical’ nature and an avoidance of any direct confrontation with the Netanyahu government or calls for new elections. Instead, protest leaders repeatedly expressed a desire that the current government itself would solve the country’s social problems, somehow abandoning its own explicit neoliberal ideology. One explanation for this is that Israel has been largely isolated from the world financial crisis, and has experienced relatively low unemployment, steady growth and no special austerity measures. But a more substantive explanation follows from noticing the elephant in the room (or the boulevard): the fact that a movement mobilizing around social justice effectively ignored the social conditions of millions of Palestinians living under their own government’s military occupation, with an often minimal standard of living and few if any political rights. This was an Occupy movement that ignored the other, real occupation taking place in its own backyard. Some obvious factors in the lack of spending on education, welfare and social services—namely a bloated security budget and the heavy subsidizing of settlements in the West Bank—remained largely unmentioned. Instead, the Palestinians continued to be viewed as extrinsic to Israeli society, rendering the occupation irrelevant to questions of social justice ‘inside’ Israel. This lack of discussion discloses the central factor impeding the Israeli movement: the chilling effect of the patriotic, state-loyalist discourses which have reached unprecedented prominence in Israeli society in the past years. Indeed, the movement is best understood as an all-too-brief interlude in Israel’s ongoing move away from democracy, evident in the recent wave of legislation against minorities, refugees and human rights organizations and in the McCarthyist campaigns against opponents of the occupation in academia and civil society.

Left-Wing Protest in the Israeli Context What is important to understand is that in Israel today, any association with the term ‘left’ is by itself enough to brand one as disloyal and outside the mainstream consensus. Israeli society is becoming increasingly entrenched in its siege mentality, viewing international censure of the occupation as a

threat to the very existence of the Jewish people. In such a context of collective hysteria, aligning oneself explicitly with the ‘left’ is tantamount, in the eyes of many Israelis, to consorting with the enemy. Such a public atmosphere does not arise on its own. On the contrary, it is inflamed both by the discourse of existential threat that is repeatedly used by governing politicians (most prominently by Prime Minister Netanyahu in reference to Iran’s nuclear program) and by a wide array of institutional policies. The present Knesset has approved, or is debating, a slew of antidemocratic bills directed primarily against the country’s Arab minority and human rights organizations. Laws already approved include a law allowing to imprison, without trial, asylum seekers and refugees, as well as their children, who enter Israel through the border with Egypt; a law enabling civil lawsuits against individuals who call for boycott of settlement products; a law authorizing to revoke the citizenship of persons convicted of terrorism, espionage or disloyalty; a law authorizing to relinquish state monetary support from any body or institution that marks the date of Israel’s establishment as a day of mourning for the displacement of Palestinians in 1948 and a law permitting acceptance committees to villages and communities to turn down a candidate that does not fit their ‘social fabric’, effectively barring Arabs’ access to Jewish communities (ACRI, 2011). This legislation evinces a power trip on part of an utterly stable rightwing coalition which enjoys an unprecedented parliamentary majority. Add the fact that many of these bills have been supported or even initiated by members of the major opposition party Kadima, which has recently joined the coalition, and the picture becomes one of a group-minded right-wing parliament that is attempting to revise the ground rules of Israeli politics by exorcising elements which it considers disloyal to the Jewish national collectivity. Alongside these parliamentary efforts, a number of extra-parliamentary organizations including NGO Monitor, Israel Academia Monitor, Yisrael Sheli and Im Tirzu have for the past several years been conducting a McCarthyist campaign against critics of the occupation in universities and civil society. This has included the conspicuous filming and recording of left-wing academics’ lectures, ‘blacklist’ websites stalking their publications and public utterances and right-wing counter demonstrations at gatherings of the small remains of Israel’s peace movement.

Accusations that the protests were left-wing surfaced early on. Settler leaders were first, with Ariel mayor Ron Nachman stating that ‘all kinds of left-wing organizations have taken over the protests and are keeping us away’, and Efrat mayor Oded Revivi stating that the only apparent goal of the protests was to topple the government (Breiner, 2011). More insidiously, the Prime Minister’s office used its battery of paid comment writers to bombard news websites and Facebook pages with comments—apparently from unaligned readers—to the effect that the protesters were at best ‘spoiled shirkers’ who ‘expect the government to fund their housing’, and at worst ‘antisemitic’, ‘communists’ and ‘traitors’ (Avrahami, 2011; Genosar, 2011). Senior politicians from the governing Likud party soon joined in. Two weeks into the protests, the Israeli parliament (Knesset) convened to debate motions of non-confidence tabled by opposition on the back of the protests. Replying on behalf of the government, minister Benny Begin accused the protesters of hiding their political agenda, and ‘pretending as if it is all spontaneous and that there is no assistance, no speech writers, no advisers, among them surely also people with a distinct political agenda, which first of all targets the personality and status of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’ (The Knesset, 2011a, p. 85). In the same session, Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin went as far as to say that he identified ‘buds of anarchy’ in the protests (p. 94), echoing culture minister Limor Livnat’s statement earlier that day that the protests were instigated by ‘particular anarchist groups’ (Wolff, 2011). The tiny Israeli anarchist movement, it should be clarified, hardly participated in the protests and was certainly far from being their instigator. When activists from Anarchists Against the Wall tried to set up their own group of tents on Rothschild Boulevard a few days into the protests, they were vocally denounced by other protesters for bringing in an explicit antioccupation agenda, and soon decamped to the ‘Lewinsky’ tent city opposite Tel Aviv’s central station, which had a large presence of actual homeless people and African refugees—constituencies with which they had been in active solidarity for several years. For the most part, however, Israeli anarchists ignored the protests and remained focused on joining nonviolent Palestinian demonstrations in the West Bank. A further assault came a month later, on the eve of the 3 September demonstrations, when right-wing Ma’ariv journalist Kalman Liebskind published an ‘expose’ according to which in the previous March, leaders of

the National Left (a shelf-party that mixes nostalgia for the Rabin administration with Zionist patriotism) had met with American Democratic Party strategist Stanley Greenberg, in order to discuss how a political upheaval could be initiated (Liebskind, 2011). The initiative was allegedly an effort to spawn a large protest, based on a multitude of groups and organizations, then to use the mass of individuals who would rise to decide future elections. The fact that the National Left had later donated several tents to the Rothschild protesters was considered enough to establish a causal link with the March meeting.

Avoiding ‘Leftism’, Endorsing Nationalism Against this background, it is not surprising that protesters did everything to remain in the mainstream. Although Leef and her friends were indeed aligned with the left, the public atmosphere led them and the vast majority of movement participants to avoid at all costs being perceived as ‘leftists’— a term which these days in Israel is all but synonymous with ‘traitors’—and created deliberate self-censorship which not only silenced any engagement with the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, but also defused confrontation on socio-economic grounds. Efforts to recreate a welfare state were not presented as a matter of social conflict along class lines, but instead through appeals to social unity as an expression of ‘true Zionism’—rhetoric that panders to Israelis’ nostalgia for the collectivism and republicanism of the early state. At the same time, the protests functioned as a kind of safety valve for social dissent, allowing it to vent itself over issues which had never been strongly associated with questions of national security or demographics, and thus still part of the legitimate public discourse. In this context, it is worth noting that several Arab communities also established protest sites—in Umm el Fahem, Tira and Jaffa among others. Though this was never said explicitly, it seems fair to interpret their mobilization as having been enabled precisely by the protests’ lack of radicalism. The widespread declaration of an a-political stance created a safe space for Palestinian citizens of Israel to express their discontent with decades of discrimination and underdevelopment, without it being seen as a sign of disloyalty. Perhaps the most striking example of the unholy matrimony between social justice and nationalism in the language of the Israeli protests came

after the military escalation that took place a week into the mobilization. On Thursday 18 August, a group of Palestinian militants crossed the Egyptian border near Eilat in southern Israel, and attacked a public bus, an Israeli army patrol and a private vehicle, killing 8 and injuring 40. The Israeli air force retaliated with attacks on multiple targets in the Gaza strip, killing 15 and injuring dozens, including unarmed civilians. Palestinians in turn fired rockets into Israel, killing a civilian and injuring close to a dozen. Exchanges of fire would continue for another week. The military escalation did not take the protest movement by surprise. Indeed, one or another version of such a turn of events had been widely anticipated among tent activists. One leading Israeli security commentator even raised the possibility that the prime minister would initiate a military adventure to distract people from the social protests—though concluding that chances were slim (Melman, 2011). In any event, protest organizers decided that the demonstrations planned for that Saturday would still go ahead, but as silent candle-lit marches without speeches or music. From this point on, movement spokespeople’s statements began to pander directly to sentiments of vulnerability and patriotism. In her call for the silent march, protest leader Stav Shaffir explicitly sought to assimilate the movement’s goals into the hegemonic discourse of security: full of sorrow for the loss and anxious about our country’s fate, we bear the responsibility of continuing to act […] without societal security, there is no security at all. Without social justice, there is no security at all. Our security is our home, and our health, and our welfare, and our education. The unity of our society—is our security (Shaffir, 2011)

The call-out for the silent march from a representative of the Jerusalem tent city went even further (Anon., 2011): Quietly, but resolutely. Because the nation demonstrating is the same nation absorbing the blows of fire from our enemies, and its staunch demand for a deep change in economic priorities and for overall social justice does not come at the expense of the struggle against terror—on the contrary. A nation whose sons are bound by mutual guarantee, and fight together for the future and the fortitude of the State of Israel, is a strong nation who can face all its enemies.

Such wording would probably shock any movement participant in New York, Barcelona or London. But in Israel it came quite naturally and remained unchallenged.

Prospects Six months after the last large demonstration, it seems that Israel has returned to business as usual. A state-appointed committee made a set of recommendations on education, taxation and welfare, which the government endorsed but is unlikely to implement in practice (70% of government decisions in Israel are never implemented—The Knesset, 2011b, p. 19). While sporadic protest events continue to take place, and while a second wave of mobilization may yet materialize this coming summer, society seems to have sunk comfortably back into its proverbial couch, consuming its usual cocktail of fear, consumerism and reality TV. Daphni Leef was last seen in the UK, where she accepted an invitation from the Israel Ministry of Public Diplomacy (Hasbara) to speak at campus counter events during Israel Apartheid Week. ‘I am not here to say what a wonderful place Israel is’, she told a London paper for Israeli ex-pats, ‘I am here to explain that there are wonderful things happening within Israeli society and there is a very complex socio-economic reality in Israel’ (Glasser, 2011). Even more disappointing is the fact that the protests have had no effect on projected voting patterns. All recent polls show the governing Likud party increasing its share of parliamentary seats, and retaining a secure coalition with the right-wing and religious parties (Verter, 2011; Ynet, 2011). This, if anything, indicates that Israeli voters continue to desire a strong right-wing government that will resist international pressure to end the occupation, even if this same government continues on its path of neoliberal impoverishment of the 99%.

References ACRI--The Association for Civil Rights in Israel, Update: Anti-democratic Legislation Initiatives (5 February); Available at http://www.acri.org.il/en/2012/02/05/update-anti-democratic-legislationinitiatives/ Anon. (2011) Dialogue circles: Between social justice and national fortitude, (Hebrew) Facebook event; Available at http://www.facebook.com/events/221411751239242/ Avrahami, M. (2011) Tent Protests aren’t breaking through in social networks: 48% of comments are negative (Hebrew), ICE (21 July); Available at http://www.ice.co.il/article/view/278925 Breiner, Y. (2011) Settlers: ‘We also suffer from a housing shortage, but the protests are leftist’ (Hebrew), Walla News (27 July); Available at http://news.walla.co.il/?w=/22/1844729 Genosar, S. (2011) Talk Show (Hebrew), Yediot Aharonot (9 September); Available at http://www.scribd.com/doc/64478542/ . Glasser, U. (2011) Face of a Nation, Alondon (5 March); Available at http://www.alondon.net/index.php?action=art&id=5677

Liebskind, K. (2011) This is the best planned spontaneous protest you’ve ever seen (Hebrew), NRG Maariv (2 September); Available at http://www.nrg.co.il/app/index.php? do=blog&encr_id=79974780b5e0d394fddbd1a00f4f21d3&id=2804 Melman, Y. (2011) Methods of Diversion, Ha’aretz (5 August); Available at http://www.haaretz.com/weekend/week-s-end/methods-of-diversion-1.377120 OECD--Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (2011) Divided We Stand: Why Inequality Keeps Rising, Country note: Israel. OECD website; Available at http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/3/42/49559314.pdf Shaffir, S. (2011) The Silent March--A letter to the tent cities, (Hebrew) Facebook note; Available at https://www.facebook.com/notes/stav-shaffir/10150759856510296/ . The Knesset (2011a) Session 268 of the 18th Knesset, Knesset Annals, 39 (Hebrew); www.knesset.gov.il/plenum/data/03529811.doc The Knesset (2011b) Protocol 152 of the Committee on State Comptroller Affairs (18 January) (Hebrew); Available at http://www.knesset.gov.il/protocols/data/rtf/bikoret/2011-01-18.rtf Verter, Y. (2011) Haaretz poll: Most of the public opposes an Israeli strike on Iran, Haaretz (8 March); Available at http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/haaretz-poll-most-of-thepublic-opposes-an-israeli-strike-on-iran-1.417282 Wolff, P. (2011) Knesset speaker on the protests: I identify buds of anarchy (Hebrew), Walla News (1 August); Available at http://news.walla.co.il/?w=/1/1846374 Ynet (2011) ‘Yediot Aharonot’ Poll: Mofaz victory aids Yachimovich (Hebrew), Ynet (29 March); Available at http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/07340,L-420957500.html

Uri Gordon is an Israeli activist and academic. He is the author of ‘Anarchy Alive: Anti-authoritarian politics from practice to theory’ (Pluto Press, 2008) and a co-founder of the Anarchist Studies Network. He teaches politics and ethics at the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies and is active with the Negev Coexistence Forum and Anarchists Against the Wall.

The Homeless and Occupy El Paso: Creating Community among the 99% CURTIS SMITH, ERNESTO CASTAÑEDA & JOSIAH HEYMA Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Texas at El Paso, El Paso, TX, USA ABSTRACT Tensions between activists and the homeless were common across different Occupy locations. This article focuses on the Occupy movement in downtown El Paso, Texas. It discusses the interactions between activists and homeless people. Initially, as the Occupiers camped in the square they excluded the homeless. A pivotal point was when some Occupiers spoke out against the mistreatment of the homeless arguing that these prejudiced actions were examples of classism. Furthermore, they argued that the homeless exemplified an important segment of the 99%. The contradictions that the homeless population brought to the movement allowed for the movement to grow. The tensions disappeared once the homeless took particular roles in the maintenance of the camp and the logistics needed to keep it running. This justified the presence of these individuals in the eyes of others. This also gave the homeless people a different identity, and normalized their sleeping arrangements since everyone in the camp was sleeping in urban public areas. By becoming Occupiers, homeless individuals gained a new political role that was different from that of being a recipient of charity and services. Some homeless people even credit the activities they carried with the Occupy El Paso movement for helping them recover from addiction and their eventual attainment of housing. The acceptance of homeless people as Occupiers gave coherence and strengthened the movement, while simultaneously providing dignity and solidarity for homeless people.

Do homeless people and Occupiers sleeping outside have something in common? Can the 99% become a group acting together on common interests? As Ehrenreichs writes, The Occupation encampments that enlivened approximately 1400 cities this fall [2011] provided a vivid template for the 99%’s growing sense of unity. Here were thousands of people from all walks of life, living outdoors in the streets and parks, very much as the poorest of the poor have always lived: without electricity, heat, water, or toilets. In the process, they managed to create self-governing communities. General assembly meetings brought together an unprecedented mix of recent college graduates, young professionals, elderly people, laid-off blue-collar workers, and plenty of the chronically homeless for what were, for the most part, constructive and civil exchanges. What started as a diffuse protest against economic injustice became a vast experiment in class building. The 99%, which might have seemed to be a purely aspirational category just a few months ago, began to will itself into existence. (Ehrenreich & Ehrenreich, 2011)

This paper looks closely at the interactions between Occupiers and homeless people in El Paso. Inspired by Occupy Wall Street and its diffusion, Occupy El Paso camped in San Jacinto Plaza on October 17, 2011. They chose the plaza because it is the main public square downtown and because of its location in the center of El Paso’s business district next to the local headquarters of Chase Bank, Bank of America and Wells Fargo among others (Figure 1). The Occupiers primary means of communication was the Occupy El Paso Facebook page. On October 11, 2011, a post announced that negotiations with city officials were a success including An indefinite permit to occupy San Jacinto Plaza …Our movement is on the verge of creating a stronghold in the heart of El Paso’s financial district …Having the city behind our movement can only prolong our occupation and allow us to be heard. (Facebook’s Occupy El Paso page, October 11, 2011)

The Occupiers saw an opportunity to portray their message in a positive light. Due to the government’s official recognition, Occupy El Paso began to enforce the government’s conditions, such as not allowing money to be collected or alcohol to be consumed. Large signs were posted with all the official conditions of the permit, in English and Spanish. The organizers of Occupy El Paso consciously discussed opportunities for mobilization, message congruence and the tensions brought by the need of organizers to communicate their message while not violating the terms of the camping permit. As the encampment commenced, the Occupiers delineated boundaries between those who could stay in the plaza and those who could not. This

was done in order to provide some order and control the image projected by the camp. The decision to self-police was particularly strong since the organizers had obtained a permit from City Council to sleep in the square at night, even while this was in general prohibited in the local legislation. In the past, police had asked homeless people sleeping there to abandon the plaza (Figure 2). San Jacinto Plaza was proposed by Occupy El Paso for the permitted encampment and accepted initially by a mostly supportive City Council with no discussion of the existence of the homeless people by either side. This certainly demonstrates the marginality of the homeless. It is rumored that, ultimately, the City Council turned against Occupy, not because of any behavioral problem by Occupiers or the homeless, but possibly because powerful downtown landlords found the encampment unsightly. Thus the permit was rescinded and the encampment was dissolved by police on the night of November 12, 2011.

Homeless of the Plaza In a typical expression of Occupy El Paso’s explicit values, an Occupier posted on Facebook, The goal is to let the 1% that control the vast majority of the wealth know that we are aware of what is going on and to wake up those who are asleep and oblivious to the condition our country is and why.

Figure 1. Demonstration in San Jacinto ‘los lagartos’ Plaza, October 7, 2011, leading up to the camping in the square. Photo by Daniel Silvadoray © 2011.

However, including the homeless proved difficult in practice. Rick, an Occupier who was not homeless, explained that there was a perceived difference between those who deserved to live with the Occupiers and those who should be kicked out. He elaborated on a situation where a homeless person seemed irrational by calling the police on the Occupiers. The homeless man felt that his rights were violated. Rick said that ‘He felt that he had the right to stay there…Police, of course, removed him instead.’ This shows how Occupy protestors were perceived to have more rights than the homeless. As Rick said, ‘A lot of them are willing to follow all the rules we’ve put up for the community, so they stay—and they’ve been welcome to stay.’

Figure 2. Occupy El Paso tents. Photo by Curtis Smith © 2011. Rules, such as not drinking publicly, became an important source of inside/outside distinction within this ostensibly egalitarian movement. Other issues had to do with sharing resources such as food and water, which were donated, yet limited. The Occupiers did not want the homeless to become freeloaders on their movement. This implied that homeless people were not welcome in the plaza once the occupation commenced. Many homeless were permitted to stay within the community as long as they followed the rules the Occupiers had established and the acquisition of worth in terms of chores

that needed to be done. Some Occupiers seemed to be questioning whether the homeless people deserved access to food donations, and justified feeding them only in relation to the work they provided. This was related to a persistent internal tension among Occupiers themselves, between active participants and others who did less for the collective good. However, the Occupiers tended to know each other at the start of the occupation, or quickly identified as a group, which helped to limit some of these internal tensions, whereas the homeless initially were strangers to the group. Since the Occupiers started their demonstrations in the plaza, a few of the homeless people were asked to leave due to their conduct. Those homeless either relocated or were arrested. The exclusion of the homeless was openly criticized by some Occupiers because (1) although the homeless have stayed in the plaza for years, by occupying the plaza the activists forced the homeless to move from the plaza, (2) the Occupiers proclaimed food donations to be limited to the Occupiers, and later to specific homeless who were living in the plaza— effectively banning food distribution to the homeless (3) the Occupiers were trying to control the homeless by attempting to remove them from the demonstrations and the plaza. This situation gets more complex when considering why the Occupiers might take these positions. They might do so because of (1) their own social prejudices, (2) desires to hold on to donations and (3) their internalization of the rules set by the city. For example, they internalized the constraints of the city permit to camp in the plaza by becoming enforcers of rules to prevent drawing negative attention and (4) lack of clear behavior control mechanisms in this new community meant that the Occupiers had a hard time dealing with violent or intoxicated persons of any background, so Occupiers had to fall back on the help of the police.

The Call for Reform Early on, there was a debate among Occupiers about the actions of the Occupy movement in the plaza in relation to the homeless. One of the Occupiers, called it a form of ‘colonization’ and said, ‘We must understand the streets and the plaza are [the homeless people’s] home, not ours. These people were occupying the plaza decades before we were’ (Frank Perez). The homeless inhabitants of the plaza were at odds with the occupying

newcomers. Thus, we saw an unintended colonial situation where two groups struggled for exclusive use of a particular space, and also in discursive terms by the way that some progressive activists sometimes took a patronizing attitude toward homeless people as an obstacle to the movements’ aims. These critics particularly focused on the issue of excluding people from the Occupy movement. For example, FP posted on the Occupy El Paso Facebook wall: Our interactions with these [homeless] people must show a level of compassion that we must possess as ‘human rights advocates’…If we insist on controlling the homeless people’s actions and impose our rules on them we become colonizers, we become Cortez, we become Columbus, and we become a greedy corporation…These ‘authoritative’ figures in Occupy El Paso fail to recognize how quickly anyone anywhere can become homeless…it is our duty as people with integrity and conviction. We cannot claim to be fighting greed and class structures when we are creating a hierarchal structure within the camp. Each time you speak badly or do something against the homeless community you are BETRAYING OUR CAUSE…This stigmatizes an already dehumanized group in society…There are separate coolers with food and supplies for certain [homeless] people only. We were giving out drinks and one of the very active members of the group came up to me and told me to not allow people to take all the drinks. My answer was ‘that’s what they are for’. Let me clarify that nobody at the Occupy El Paso camp is risking starvation in middle of downtown. The public has been generous enough to donate food, water, among other supplies. Do not use the homeless peoples (sic) hunger as an excuse to police the food others have given us to share. Another occupy member demanded that this guy stop panhandling as if he was a cop. I think the guy was asking for a cigarette not money. (Posted on October 23, 2001, emphasis in the original)

Here Perez is immediately aware of the problematic treatment of the homeless by some of the Occupiers and spoke against it publicly. While there were some tensions between temporal campers and the homeless, a sense of community started developing in the plaza once the homeless were allowed to participate as equals, and like others, were given certain tasks within the camp (Ehrenreich, 2011). They were called upon to help serve food, clean and work security positions.

The Process of Resolution and the Creation of New Identities As Rick said, Honestly [the homeless] are trying to get a job, and that situation [referring to the man who had to be thrown out by the police as discussed above] makes it difficult for the rest [of the occupiers]. One of [the homeless individuals] is addicted to heroin. What he’ll do is he’ll

panhandle and get his fix. He’ll stay away from the camp…He’s trying to cut himself off [from drugs], slowly…If he uses, he just doesn’t come back [out of respect for the movement].

Rick suggested that the man does this because he cares about how the rest of the community perceives him (Figure 3). Bill said, ‘My life fell apart in Salt Lake City. I’ve been homeless all over this country.’ He explained that he was passing through El Paso when he saw the gathering of people in the plaza. He explained that he knew he would have to get food by panhandling, stating matter-of-factly that the job market was too bad to get a job, ‘even in the day-labor halls.’ He said, That’s no big deal, because I’ll get food, you know what I’m saying? …[for the Occupy community] I’m on the Food Group, Security Group, and telling people what’s going on, you know stuff like that. That’s the only reason I stopped, because it’s a good cause…I absolutely feel like I’m part of a community.

Bill felt that there was a mutual benefit from his newfound Occupy El Paso community. He seemed to really value the notion that he was helping the movement and that people were treating him with respect for it. ‘I’m helping them as much as they’re helping me. They’re being real people’ (Figure 4). The homeless Occupiers felt valued by the community. The phrase, ‘they treat me like a real person’ seemed to be a phrase widely used by many of the homeless people among the crowd of Occupiers. Sarah, another homeless person living in the plaza, felt very accepted by the community. She said,

Figure 3. Bill staying with Occupy El Paso. Photo taken by Curtis Smith with Bill’s permission. We are from Massachusetts and we are stuck here. We spread the word about the movement… These are some good people, I mean, they took us in. I help out with the kitchen. I serve meals

and stuff. We are the definition of this. We are that definition—the 99%…They should do one of these for the homeless…Obama is giving money to the car factories but what about money to the homeless, money for shelters, money for agencies, money for bus tickets? …it’s like a little family over there [speaking of the Occupy El Paso community]. There are some homeless that are ridiculously drunk and just don’t care. I have no parents, no family, no life. This is the first time I’ve ever done something like this. When we got here we had nothing but a blanket. These people gave me a tent, and that guy right there [pointing] gave me a jacket. They are helping the homeless if you think about it. They’re saying—hey! Stop helping the rich and help the poor! You got to have the initiative to help yourself you can’t just depend on others. That’s why I’m helping around here. We made a little family here. My mom won’t have nothing to do with me— left me at 22 years old.

Thus, Sarah was extremely thankful for the movement and the camp. Yet she was realistic and she added, ‘Once these people leave, the people who are homeless have to leave.’ This begs the question, what happens next with the homeless people? The homeless seem to feel valued by the Occupy community if they can gain acceptance into it. This is interesting because, although the homeless were getting food and water from the Occupiers, they seemed to value this community over seeking available services from formal service providers.

Figure 4. Bill moved into his own apartment and stopped using drugs. He credits the Occupy El Paso for this. Photo by Curtis Smith. Ed, another homeless person staying in the plaza, maintains a job even though he is homeless. He had been only homeless for a few months. He talked about the homeless in the third plural person, It gives them a sense of still belonging—still being a part of the world. The sense that they are contributing to their own life is a big deal. That they are not completely at the mercy of the

world.

He added that those on the streets that cause the most problems tend to be the people that are not a regular part of the local homeless community. Ed said, Sometimes they have places to go and they are just on the streets to party and then return to their bed in their own place. It’s like they are just thrill seeking… I find myself asking if the occupiers are thrill seeking, themselves.

There was indeed a difference between people who were camping voluntarily and those that were chronic homeless Occupiers.

Contradictions The initial conflict between the homeless and the Occupiers is ironic because the homeless are at the bottom, but part of the 99%. If the homeless were not allowed to coexist with the Occupiers, then many Occupiers expressed the movement was being like the 1% by imposing their priorities over a less powerful group. The contradiction seemed to be that the Occupiers were standing against social inequalities, but among their earliest acts was to push the poorest of the poor out. As Gouldner (1980) points, contradictions are a part of any social movement. Contradictions within a movement often reflect the contradictions of the larger social system in which they are embedded. As Giddens (1979) writes, ‘in redeeming itself, the proletariat redeems the whole of society from the contradictory nature of a class society’ (p. 135). So why would the Occupiers initially treat the homeless this way? The homeless are a heavily stigmatized group. Phelan et al. (1997) found that the homeless face multiple stigmatizations, though they are perceived to have no more control over the situation than a poor housed person. In fact, many of the beliefs associated with homelessness are questioned in contemporary homeless research, making it very hard to generalize distinct patterns among homeless people (Barrett et al., 2010). We argue that the Occupy movement eventually provided a means to clearly express the homeless people’s identity as Occupiers over society’s role, and stigmatization, as homeless (Snow & Anderson, 2006).

Final Thoughts The dichotomy of homeless and Occupiers hides many nuances and commonalities. For example, how many of the homeless are marginally housed, spending only part of their time outside? While the Occupiers are living outside, are they living as homeless people or are they just camping? Yet there seemed to be an overlap among the social groups involved in Occupy El Paso which created a positive example of solidarity across classes. After the contradictions became evident, those still occupying the plaza were posed with the very real issue of exclusion versus solidarity. In the long run, the Occupiers were able to establish a sense of community among its members. As the Occupy movement developed an identity, the homeless did so as well by willingly following the rules the movement established for them. This process proved to evolve into a significant community for those homeless who were allowed to participate, even when they knew that once the occupation ended the community would dissipate. Many homeless reported that when interacting with conventional service providers, they put effort into distancing themselves from or fighting the stigma rather than conforming to imposed ideals. All of the homeless interviewed reported that they prefer to stay in a community they felt valued in, such as the occupied plaza, over staying at a shelter. The homeless appreciated available food at encampment, although food was also widely accessible at local food kitchens and shelters. Both the Occupiers and the homeless went through a process to establish a clear identity that they felt truly represented them. First, the Occupiers condemned the homeless by viewing them in a traditional homeless role. Many Occupiers expressed this to be similar to colonialism by condemning the have-nots to an inferior role. By showing a willingness to work in a manner that they felt gave them a true identity, the homeless seemed to temporarily move beyond some of the stigma attached to homelessness within the Occupied Plaza. The Occupiers chose to accept the homeless into the movement, which also seemed to give the movement a clear identity while providing the homeless something that went beyond basic needs. As the Occupy movement developed an identity, the homeless actively became members as they willingly followed the rules the movement established. Despite the initial contradiction, the movement was able to create an identity by transcending stereotypes through dialogue and social

interaction. For example, Occupiers and homeless spent several long general assemblies, working out the details of how to organize the food tent. Substance use was a more difficult issue for dialogue. Divisions on this topic cut across both Occupiers and homeless given the looming presence of the police and the park permit. All traveling homeless people reported that they planned to stay in the plaza until the city kicked them out. Even though the people in the plaza were from different social groups, they all valued each other. This is important because the community’s identity helped some homeless individuals identify themselves in ways that seemed to positively change their life situation by simply being a part of the movement. The homeless and Occupiers, alike, found value in the overlapping social groups.

References Barrett, L., Tyler, K. & Write, J. (2010) The new homelessness revisited, The Annual Review of Sociology, 36, pp. 501–521. Ehrenreich, B. (2011) Throw them out with the trash: why homelessness is becoming an Occupy Wall Street issue, TomDispatch.com. Available at http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175457/barbara_ehrenreich_homeless_in_america (accessed 2 May 2012). Ehrenreich, B. & Ehrenreich, J. (2011) The making of the American 99% and the collapse of the middle class, TomDispatch.com. Available at http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175480/ (accessed 2 May 2012). Giddens, A. (1979) Central Problems in Social Theory; Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social Analysis (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press). Gouldner, A. (1980) The Two Marxisms: Contradictions and Anomalies in the Development of Theory (New York, NY: The Seabury Press). Phelan, J., Link, B. G., Moore, E. R. & Stueve, A. (1997) The stigma of homelessness: the impact of the label ‘homeless’ on attitudes toward poor persons, Social Psychology Quarterly, 60(4), pp. 323–337. Snow, D. & Anderson, L. (2006) Identity work among the homeless: the verbal construction and avowal of personal identities, The American Journal of Sociology, 92(6), pp. 1336–1371.

Curtis Smith is a masters student of Sociology at the University of Texas at El Paso. He worked for six years as a homeless street outreach worker in Cincinnati, OH, USA; Covington, KY, USA and Phoenix, AZ, USA. Ernesto Castañeda (Ph.D., Columbia University) is an assistant professor of Sociology at the University of Texas at El Paso. His work compares immigrant social movements in New York, Paris and Barcelona. It analyzes the relation between the contexts of immigrant reception, including the

avenues available for political voice, and the political inclusion of immigrants and minorities. Castañeda is editing the Charles Tilly Reader. He is currently researching migration, homelessness and health disparities along the US–Mexico border. Josiah Heyman (Ph.D., City University of New York) is professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Sociology and Anthropology Department at the University of Texas at El Paso. As an active participant in Occupy El Paso, he witnessed many events described herein, though he did not camp at the Plaza. Across his three decades of researching the US–Mexico border, he has written on many topics including production and consumption, local working classes, migration, police bureaucracies and state power, human rights, immigrant community activism, unequal mobility and alternative border policies. He is also interested in the concepts and practice of engaged social science.

Occupy Online: How Cute Old Men and Malcolm X Recruited 400,000 US Users to OWS on Facebook SARAH GABY & NEAL CAREN Department of Sociology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA ABSTRACT What attracted so many supporters of the Occupy Wall Street movement to the movement’s Facebook pages? Using a database of 1500 Facebook Occupy group pages, we analyze the types of posts that recruit new users. In the case of the Occupy movement, the success of recruiting over 400,000 users to Facebook was driven by user-created content produced in a medium that encourages contributions and sharing to an existing set of dense networks of potential movement sympathizers. We find that the posts that are most successful at recruiting active Facebook engagement utilize existing forms of communication, such as sharing pictures and status updates. We also find that posts that use confrontational messages and messages about solidarity appear most often in the top posts. Our findings suggest that online social networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter provide a powerful tool for movements to rapidly spread information and reach broad audiences. In addition, we offer some analysis of the impact of these findings for social movements that hope to utilize Facebook.

Since Occupy Wall Street (OWS) began in New York City on 17 September 2011, the movement has spread offline to thousands of locations around the globe. Social networking sites have been critical for linking potential supporters in order to share information and stories. More than 1500 unique

Facebook pages were established to spread the movement including pages focused on the Wall Street Occupation, local occupations across the globe, occupying specific institutions and networking occupiers. Through common Facebook activities such as sharing pictures, videos and status updates (Pempek et al., 2008), Facebook pages provide a familiar medium for engaging in the movement. The movement’s Facebook presence therefore consists of Occupy’s political message filtered through the social network’s style of interacting. While corporate control of the communication network is not without drawbacks, this relatively seamless extension of a primarily non-political communication platform allows the movement to engage with an incredibly large audience without the filter of the mass media and without having to develop a new media infrastructure. In order to explore how activists, sympathizers and others interact on Occupy-related Facebook pages, we examine the top 100 posts in terms of drawing in new users. We find that the most popular posts utilize familiar Facebook activities. Major uses for Facebook within the movement include the recruitment of people and resources to local occupations; information sharing and storytelling and across-group exchanges. Among the top pages are quotes from elites interpreted as support for the Occupy movement and narratives by unlikely adherents, indicating the capacity for storytelling to convey messages of surprising alliances (Polletta, 2006). Our research demonstrates how activists and their sympathizers adapt existing technologies and ways of using those technologies for political purposes.

Social Movements Online Prior research on social movements online has focused on cyberactivism in the form of electronic campaigns, e-movements and the distribution of brochureware (Daniels, 2009; Earl et al., 2010). Generally, online activities are broadening the repertoires of social movements (Karpf, 2010). A number of scholars have been attentive to the capacity for online activism to generate offline activism (Raynes-Goldie & Walker, 2008; Earl et al., 2010), but in few cases do the online tools studied directly relate to an offline social movement. Instead, these studies look at the general influence of online participation in influencing offline collective action (RaynesGoldie & Walker, 2008). Still, other past research has focused on alternative frames for online activism that extend beyond the dissemination of

information, and instead address the establishment of collective identity through online interaction (Flanagin et al., 2006) or the formation of social movement online communities (Caren et al., 2012). Past research indicated that online social movement websites generally have low levels of interaction and very little dialog (Stein, 2009).

Occupy Offline and Online The Occupy movement was inspired by Arab Spring and the Spanish Indignados movement, which involved tens of thousands of individuals camped out in cities like Madrid, calling for increased democracy and employment through assemblies organized around consensus principles. The Occupy movement formally began on 13 July 2011 when Adbusters, a Canadian not-for-profit magazine, asked, ‘Are you ready for a Tahrir moment? On 17 September, flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street’.1 This call was echoed by a diverse group of pre-existing entities, ranging from the hacktivist collective Anonymous to the community labor coalition New Yorkers Against Budget Cuts, who organized a meeting on 2 August at which the general assembly (GA) format was established (Chafkin, 2012). On 8 August, more than a month before the planned Occupation, the first Facebook page for OWS was established. The initial posts on the Facebook page called supporters to a GA, a tactical form of participatory democracy that would become one of the signature elements of local Occupations. On 17 September, hundreds gathered in lower Manhattan, initiating a movement that would grow and spread, leading to the establishment of many local Occupy groups and encampments with a number of strategies that drew national attention. OWS thus far has primarily been an off-line activity involving activists gathering in central city locations for hours, days or even months on end. Notwithstanding, OWS has been an active presence on major social media platforms using sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Meetup, Livestream and individual websites. Our analysis suggests that Facebook is among the most prominent social networking sites associated with the movement. For instance, during the rise in movement membership in October, http://occupytogether.org had 13,868 ‘occupiers’, while the Facebook page for Occupy Boston had 28,020 likes alone. The number of

followers on Facebook also far outnumber that on Twitter and Meetup, with only 17,760 Twitter followers subscribed to the Occupy Boston Twitter feed, and five Meetup members. Many movement groups also have websites such as http://occupyboston.com.

Facebook Activism Past research on the utilization of Facebook as a social networking tool shows that people use Facebook first and foremost for communicating with friends, and then for sharing pictures, often doing so in Facebook’s public space as opposed to through private messaging (Pempek et al., 2008). In addition, while students in Pempek et al.’s study on average joined about 25 groups, the majority reported never using groups to discuss serious topics or to express opinions or connect with other group members. The Facebook infrastructure is geared toward this sort of apolitical behavior: sharing news about your life and pictures of cute cats (Zuckerman, 2008). Yet, as first noted by Zuckerman (2008), this dense network for information sharing provides ‘a wealth of tech that’s extremely helpful to activists’. While the Occupy movement developed its own movement infrastructure centered on local GAs, communication between activists, supporters, sympathizers and the curious could take place on a medium on which many already spent hours a day—Facebook. With the ease of showing support for Rihanna or the Hunger Games that regularly takes place online, individuals could express support in the same medium for the Occupy movement by clicking ‘Like’. Occupy and other activist and movement groups that have utilized similar approaches to organizing through Facebook have been able to expand rapidly, due to the reduced cost of participation. Since the activity takes place on Facebook, we would expect that the form it takes would mimic the form of nonpolitical Facebook activities, such as sharing pictures or status updates, despite the change in topic. Whether this limited form of online participation turns into offline activism remains an open question (e.g. Gladwell, 2010; Shirkey, 2011) and is beyond the scope of this Profile, but given the magnitude of online participation—with over four hundred thousand individuals active on Occupy pages—Facebook activism constitutes an important component of the Occupy movement.

Occupying Facebook Media accounts have emphasized the role of Facebook in the Occupy movement,2 and a survey of visitors to http://occupywallstreet.org found that Facebook was the social networking site most used by protesters.3 In order to explore the extent and type of Occupy group usage on Facebook, we created a list of all Facebook pages related to the movement. Using published lists4 and Facebook searches for key terms, we identified 398 pages on US Occupations. There are likely to be smaller pages that we did not account for.5 We found that the density of Facebook activism was highest in college towns and in state capitals. Only data from public Occupy pages were used in this study. The majority of Facebook activity happens on personal pages, and we were not able to observe this information because of privacy restrictions. For example, if an individual posted a status update that he/she was attending an Occupy Durham event, we would not be able to capture that activity. If he/she posted this on the Occupy Durham page, however, we would have collected the information. Thus, the estimates that we provide here underestimate the extent to which Facebook users have been engaged with OWS. For each page, we used Facebook’s developer application programming interface (API) to download all posts and comments on the page between the day the page was created and 17 October 2011, covering the first month of the Occupation. From this we are able to identify the number of likes for each post along with text, content and author of each post and post comment as well as the date of a user’s first and subsequent posts. Through this means, we were able to identify the posts that drew in the most new users (for a fuller discussion of the data and methods, see Caren & Gaby, 2011). In order to better understand the types of posts that recruited members, we analyzed the top 100 posts on Facebook that drew in new users, the majority of which were posted by the OWS Facebook group. We found that we could categorize 93 of these 100 posts in six general categories: confrontational posts (35 occurrences), posts representing elite support for the movement (9), informal polling of movement members (3), personal narratives (7), media inaccuracies (3) and solidarity (43). Personal narratives that engaged new users were often expressed by individuals who

were unlikely movement adherents such as children and the elderly. The remaining uncategorized posts were focused on popular culture, specific movement incidences such as the search for a missing occupier and the sale of a movement photograph. We also overwhelmingly found that pictures were the type of post that drew the most new user hits (47 occurrences), followed by announcements in the form of status updates (30), videos (16), informal polls (5) and news stories (2).

Building a Following The post that drew in the most new users was a picture with two versions of a New York Times story posted 20min apart.6 On one side the caption below a photograph of police arresting demonstrators reads: ‘After allowing them onto the bridge, the police cut off and arrested dozens of Occupy Wall Street demonstrators’. The same picture on the revised version reads, ‘In a tense showdown over the East River, police arrested hundreds of Occupy Wall Street demonstrators after they marched onto the bridge’s Brooklynbound roadway’. Across the two articles written in bright pink letters reads ‘it only takes 20 minutes to shift the blame’.7 We found that this picture appeared three times in the top 100 posts, posted by two individual users to Occupy pages and by a third Occupy group. In total, the post drew in 1125 new users. The reoccurrence of a post in the top 100 indicates the importance of the particular post in recruitment. Additional posts that occurred more than once include two appearances of a video depicting individuals being arrested inside a Citi bank allegedly attempting to close their accounts, and drew in 242 new users. This was a confrontational post as the video shows police dealing aggressively with protesters who are chanting and shouting at them. There were also two appearances of a video showing an Occupy march in Madrid, which combined drew 205 new users, and two occurrences of a picture with a Malcolm X quote about oppression which drew 554 users combined. An additional double occurrence was of a video in which a Marine takes on 30 cops in a ‘Wallstreet Faceoff’.8 The post drew 265 total new users. The majority of the posts that drew in new movement participants occurred early on in the timeline, as expected. There were nine posts that occurred prior to 1 October 2011, the 15th formal day of the movement. Three of these posts were references to elites (Malcolm X twice and

Thomas Jefferson), three were calls to solidarity (e.g. ‘Over 5000 people are here now! We are overflowing into the streets. How many tomorrow?’),9 and four were confrontational (e.g. a photo of a police officer pointing a gun at a photographer that reads, ‘Photography, it’s not a crime’).10 The majority of posts that occurred as the movement grew throughout October were less focused on elite support and shifted to posts about solidarity, personal narratives and confrontational posts. Posts that were categorized as announcements also increased as the movement progressed, although posts of pictures remained the most prominent throughout the data-set. Personal narratives were incorporated into the language of the movement, often ending in the line ‘I am the 99 percent’. These narratives of involvement or the retelling of movement-related experiences were found often in the top 100 posts. Stories were generally targeted to the local group but may have a more general reach. Personal narratives were complemented by the retelling of experiences of other Occupy groups, sometimes through digital outlets such as YouTube videos. Commonly posted content dealt with cases of violence at Occupy sites, such as the 5 October 2011 OWS violence. Other reactions focused on combating misconceptions about the group. For instance, the most liked post on any Occupy Facebook page, with 22,132 likes (the third most popular post for drawing in new users at 746), was a photo of an elderly man holding a typed piece of paper that reads: As a young man I served honorably in the Navy. […] Now I am retired. […] I live in an apartment with my working daughter and grandson. My retirement doesn’t always cover all of my share of the monthly bills. […] And I am sick of providing welfare to multinationals and being forced to pay for insurance that doesn’t insure, food that doesn’t nourish and taxes that support arms, oil and drug cartels. I am sick of politians [sic] loyal to Wall Street. I am part of the 99%.11

The picture, originally posted to the http://wearethe99percent.tumblr.com/ page on 6 October, was shared by 10,114 people and commented on by 2223 people after it was posted to the Occupy New Brunswick wall on 8 October.

Discussion In this profile, we focus on the way that activists co-opt existing social media tools intended for sharing pictures of cute cats (Zuckerman, 2008) for political purposes. We find that the majority of posts that draw in new users fit into six content categories: confrontational posts, posts representing elite support for the movement, informal polling of movement members, personal narratives, media inaccuracies and solidarity, in five styles of posting: pictures, announcements in the form of status updates, videos, informal polls and news stories. Our findings support the theory that activists and supporters utilize tools they know in collective action. Like other social networking sites, such as Twitter, Facebook allows movement sympathizers to be involved in new political networks without requiring movements to develop a separate communication infrastructure. Additionally, these findings point to the power of images in gaining movement support. In roughly 60% of the top 100 posts that drew in new users, pictures and video were the medium for these messages. Although social movement scholars have offered some interpretations of the use of images for shock value (Jasper, 1997) or to carry political messages (Szasz, 1999) or by media and other countermovement groups to portray a movement (Laraña et al., 1994; McAdam et al., 1996), far less attention has been paid to the role of images in the recruitment of movement adherents (Halfmann & Young, 2010). While some of these photos, such as a graphic photo of a female protestor who was shot with a rubber bullet,12 have the appeal of the grotesque employed by movements such as the antislavery and antiabortion movements (Halfmann and Young), we observed a variety of emotional, logical and moral appeals associated with various images. With sites like Facebook that readily allow researchers to see the tools of movements, future studies should continue to address the power of images in movement recruitment. Despite the success of certain types of images and posts, there is no simple recipe for movements that hope to exploit the power of Facebook to reach those not already deeply embedded in political networks. Few of the top posts relied entirely on centrally produced content. We found no evidence that the top images were produced by OWS or local Occupations for the purpose of going viral. Instead, the list of top posts is dominated by user-created content. Those posts that resonated with different audiences

became popular through online sharing, while thousands of posts with little appeal were simply passed over. While movement framing processes are often contested, this process may further reduce the power of movements to shape their own frames. However, the combination of a large, dense network of potential sympathizers and a medium that encourages contributions and sharing makes dominant social networking sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, unique and powerful resources for movements.

Notes 1. Adbusters. 2011. ‘#OCCUPYWALLSTREET A shift in revolutionary tactics’. http://www.adbusters.org/blogs/adbusters-blog/occupywallstreet.html. 2. http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/10/egypt-occupy-wall-street/. 3. http://www.fastcompany.com/1789018/occupy-wall-street-demographics-statistics. 4. http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/10/04/1022722/-Occupy-Wall-Street:-List-and-map-ofover-200-US-solidarity-events-and-Facebook%C2%A0pages; http://www.collectivedisorder.com/occupytogether/latest. 5. Please contact the first author if you know of any pages that we overlooked 6. Top images available at http://imgur.com/a/CrwmA#0. 7. https://www.facebook.com/184749301592842/posts/286107748083800. 8. http://www.facebook.com/153774071379194/posts/295464300464118. 9. http://www.facebook.com/184749301592842/posts/209094492491656. 10. http://www.facebook.com/153774071379194/posts/10150307153440248. 11. https://www.facebook.com/129365397165056/posts/133249930109936. 12. http://www.facebook.com/138981536200235/posts/151473594951029.

References Caren, N. & Gaby, S. (2011) Occupy Online: Facebook and the Spread of Occupy Wall Street. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1943168 Caren, N., Jowers, K. & Gaby, S. (2012) A social movement online community: Stormfront and the white nationalist movement, Research in Social Movements, Conflict, and Change, 33, pp. 163– 193. Chafkin, M. (2012) Revolution number 99, Vanity Fair. Available at http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/2012/02/occupy-wall-street-201202 Daniels, J. (2009) Cyber Racism: White Supremacy Online and the New Attack on Civil Rights (New York: Rowman & Littlefield). Earl, J., Kimport, K., Prieto, G., Rush, C. & Reynoso, K. (2010) Changing the world one webpage at a time: Conceptualizing and explaining Internet activism, Mobilization: An International Journal, 15(4), pp. 425–446. Flanagin, A., Stohl, C. & Bimber, B. (2006) Modeling the structure of collective action, Communication Monographs, 73(1), pp. 29–54. Gladwell, M. (2010) Small change: Why the revolution will not be tweeted, The New Yorker. Available at http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_gladwell

Halfmann, D. & Young, M. (2010) War pictures: The grotesque as a mobilizing tactic, Mobilizations, 15(1), pp. 1–24. Jasper, J. (1997) The Art of Moral Protest: Culture, Biography, and Creativity in Social Movements (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press). Karpf, D. (2010) Macaca moments reconsidered: Electoral panopticon or netroots mobilization? Journal of Information Technology Politics, 7(2), pp. 143–162. Laraña, E., Johnston, H. & Gusfield, J. R. (1994) New Social Movements: From Ideology to Identity (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press). McAdam, D., McCarthy, J. & Zald, M. (1996) Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: Political Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and Cultural Framings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Pempek, T., Yevdokiya, A., Yermolayeva, A. & Calvert, S. L. (2008) College students’ social networking experiences on Facebook, Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 30, pp. 227–238. Polletta, F. (2006) It Was Like a Fever: Storytelling in Protest and Politics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press). Raynes-Goldie, K. & Walker, L. (2008) Our space: Online civic engagement tools for youth, in: W. L. Bennett (Ed.) Civic Life Online: Learning How Digital Media Can Engage Youth, pp. 161–188 (Cambridge: MIT Press). Shirkey, C. (2011) The political power of social media, Foreign Affairs. Available at http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/67038/clay-shirky/the-political-power-of-social-media Stein, L. (2009) Social movement web use in theory and practice: A content analysis of US movement websites, New Media Society, 11(5), pp. 749–771. Szasz, A. (1999) Ecopopulism: Toxic Waste and the Movement for Environmental Justice (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press). Zuckerman, E. (2008) The Cute Cat Theory Talk at ETech. Available at http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2008/03/08/the-cute-cat-theory-talk-at-etech/

Sarah Gaby is a graduate student in the Department of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is interested in social movements, political sociology and organizations, particularly as they relate to youth civic engagement. Neal Caren is an assistant professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research interests center on the quantitative and qualitative comparative analysis of protest and social movements.

Mic Check! Media Cultures and the Occupy Movement SASHA COSTANZA-CHOCK Comparative Media Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA, USA ABSTRACT Scholars and activists have hotly debated the relationship between social media and social movement activity during the current global cycle of protest. This article investigates media practices in the Occupy movement and develops the concept of social movement media cultures: the set of tools, skills, social practices and norms that movement participants deploy to create, circulate, curate and amplify movement media across all available platforms. The article posits three key areas of inquiry into social movement media cultures, and explores them through the lens of the Occupy movement: (1) What media platforms, tools and skills are used most widely by movement participants? (Practices); (2) What role do experienced practitioners play in movement media practices? (Expertise); and (3) In what ways does the movement media culture lean toward open or participatory, and in what ways toward closed or top–down? (Open/Closed). Insight into the media culture of the Occupy movement is based on mixed qualitative and quantitative methods, including semi-structured interviews, participant observation, visual research and participation in Occupy Hackathons, as well as the Occupy Research General Demographic and Political Participation Survey, a database of approximately 1200 local Occupy sites, and a dataset of more than 13 million Occupy-related tweets. The findings will be of interest to both scholars and movement participants.

On the basis of research into media practices in the Occupy movement, this article proposes a shift away from platform-centric analysis of the relationship between social movements and the media toward the concept of

social movement media cultures: the set of tools, skills, social practices and norms that movement participants deploy to create, circulate, curate and amplify movement media across all available platforms. I suggest three initial areas of inquiry about social movement media cultures: (1)

Practices: What media platforms, tools and skills do movement participants use most widely? (2) Experts: What role do experienced practitioners play in movement media practices? (3) Openness: In what ways do movement media cultures lean toward open (participatory), and in what ways toward closed (top-down)? Insights into media culture in the Occupy movement are based on mixed qualitative and quantitative methods, including semi-structured interviews, participant observation, visual research in multiple Occupy sites and participation in Occupy Hackathons, as well as the Occupy Research General Demographic and Political Participation Survey (ORGS) and a dataset of more than 13 million tweets with Occupy-related hashtags (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Occupy Media icon. Source: Occupy Design.

Background On 17 September 2011, a small group of activists took New York City’s (NYC) Zuccotti Park and sparked a movement that, in three short months, would spread across the country and around the world. Occupy Wall Street (OWS) was inspired by the global protest wave that began in Tunisia with the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, spread across the Middle East and North Africa in what is now broadly referred to as the Arab Spring, and continued through the Israeli ‘Social Justice Summer’, Spanish ‘Indignados’ mobilizations and Greek anti-austerity uprisings. The initial call to OWS was circulated by Adbusters magazine, a publication that gained visibility during the height of the Global Justice Movement as an important home for high production value ad-hacking, brand contamination and détournement.

The call to action gained momentum when it was endorsed by the loose global network of hacktivists known as Anonymous, in a widely circulated web video (http://youtu.be/2svRa-VsaOU; Schultz, 2008; Coleman, 2010). OWS began to receive significant mass media coverage only after police brutality against protest participants. Video clips of NYC Police Department (NYPD) Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna pepper-spraying a kettled group of unarmed young women during a march on 24 September, circulated first via social media and later broadcast on multiple TV networks, brought an initial wave of mass media attention to the movement (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZ05rWx1pig). Shortly afterward, social, print and broadcast media attention all spiked as NYPD corralled and arrested hundreds of people participating in the 1 October march across the Brooklyn Bridge. Sophisticated new data-gathering and visualization approaches, such as work by Pablo Rey Mazón (2011) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Civic Media, allow us to observe the development of newspaper coverage about the movement in comparison to its presence on social media sites such as Twitter (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. Percentage of newspaper front pages and number of Occupy tweets per day. Source: Pablo Rey Mazón (2011).

For the next three months, OWS maintained an ongoing presence in Zuccotti Park, organized regular protest marches and actions throughout lower Manhattan and generated huge amounts of media attention across social network sites (SNS), print and broadcast platforms. The movement spread widely, with camps and ongoing mobilizations in nearly every major US city including Oakland, Los Angeles, Boston, Seattle, Chicago and many more (both in the USA and internationally). Within six months, over 6500 Occupiers had been arrested while protesting (see @occupyarrests at https://twitter.com/occupyarrests). In over 1000 cities and towns, Occupy groups sprang up and conducted General Assemblies (GAs), formed Working Groups (WGs), initiated marches and engaged in a wide range of protest activities and prefigurative politics. Throughout the spread of the Occupy movement, Occupiers produced and circulated media texts and self-documentation across every platform they had access to (see Figure 1). SNS were crucial for the spread of media created by everyday Occupiers, while media, press and tech WGs worked to build SNS presence (especially on Twitter and Facebook), create more highly produced narratives, edit videos, operate 24-hour livestreams such as http://www.Globalrevolution.tv, organize print publications such as the Occupied Wall Street Journal, design and code websites such as http://www.OccupyTogether.org and wikis such as http://www.NYCGA.cc, and build autonomous movement media platforms and technology infrastructure (see http://www.Occupy.net). Members of these WGs also worked with members of the press, from independent reporters and local media outlets to journalists from national and transnational print, television and radio networks. What can we understand about social movement media cultures by looking more closely at these and other aspects of the media culture of the Occupy movement? As an exploratory move let us turn to movement media practices, expertise and openness.

Practices Mass media accounts of Occupy often emphasize the digitally connected nature of the protesters. Indeed, supposedly high levels of digital access (‘they all have Apple computers and iPhones’) are invoked to dismiss the movement on thinly coded class grounds. In fact, all Occupations face

significant digital inequality, which itself both shapes and is shaped by existing structural inequalities of class, race and gender (Hargittai, 2008). These divides are, unsurprisingly, replicated within the media practices of the Occupy movement. Many Occupiers are both highly conscious of this fact and take active steps to attempt to mitigate it: For a long time, we were saying that there weren’t enough people of color, or enough LGBTQ people,’ says Mazen. ‘But overall we’re also working with people who barely text, let alone vote on a Wiki. If we really want to represent the 99 percent, we have to think about how we can disseminate through low-tech means. (Faraone, 2011)

Media practices within Occupy are marked by extensive offline, analog, poster and print-based, and ‘low-tech’ forms of media production, in parallel with cutting-edge technology development and use (autonomous wireless networks, hackathons, creation of new tools and platforms). In many cases, Occupy activists make and circulate media elements across platforms (including analog media forms and channels) in processes elsewhere described as transmedia mobilization (Costanza-Chock, 2011). In this context, what media platforms are most widely used by the Occupy movement? Participant observation, interviews and survey data all reveal a complex picture on the ground. The ORGS, an online survey with about 5000 respondents, organized by the Occupy Research Network (which I cofounded) along with Oakland-based http://www.DataCenter.org, provides one data point (see Figure 3; for more details about the ORGS methodology, please see Occupy Research & Data Center, 2012). Among those who answered questions about how they used different types of media to gather news and information about the Occupy movement, respondents were heavy users of some digital media platforms but not others. The majority (64%) reported using Facebook for Occupy-related information within the 24h before taking the survey, while just a quarter said that they used Twitter (23%) or blogs (24%) for the same purpose. Face-toface communication played a key role for many: nearly half (43%) reported discussing Occupy within the previous 24h, about the same as those who said they used Occupy movement websites (44%) or email (42%). A third (29%) used YouTube, a quarter (24%) used newspapers and a fifth used a livestreaming video site (19%), TV (17%) or radio (17%) for Occupy information during the past day.

Figure 3. Occupy activity participation. Source: ORGS (2012). As for media making, the most common activities reported by respondents were posting on Facebook (74%) and participating in face-to-face conversations about the movement (73%). A smaller group of Occupiers were involved in more intensive forms of media making: about a fifth of survey respondents (18%) said that they wrote blog posts, while less than one in 10 (8%) made a video about Occupy. These low proportions for highengagement media production practices should not be a surprise; they mirror similar percentages across the general US population (for example, see recent reports at http://www.pewinternet.org). If we compare media-making

activities with other forms of participation, most respondents of ORGS reported attending GAs (69%) and participating in protests organized at camps (69%), while more than a third volunteered to provide food or services (41%), took part in workshops or events (40%) or participated in working groups (38%); 17% lived or slept in camps and about 4% got arrested. Overall, while smaller numbers of Occupiers perform higher-engagement media practices, the majority take part in face-to-face movement activities while appropriating social media sites to circulate movement-related media (mostly in the form of short posts and status updates, FB likes and shares).

Expertise Social movement scholars have long noted that movement actors often travel from one social movement organization to another, and from one movement to another, over the course of their lives (Roth, 2000). This is certainly true for the Occupy movement as a whole, with more than half of the respondents of the ORGS survey reporting that Occupy is not their first social movement (Occupy Research & Data Center, 2012). It is also true within specific WGs. Many WGs were formed by people with previous experience in horizontalist movement spaces. For example, many of the food tents and WGs were set up by participants in local chapters of Food Not Bombs, libraries were often initiated by librarians from the Radical Reference network, medical teams often included Street Medics who gained experience in mass mobilizations against global financial institutions or the Iraq war (Pelly, 2012). Many of those who initially facilitated GAs had previous experience with direct democracy and consensus processes in the context of the Global Justice Movement (Juris, 2012). In this context, it is no surprise that networks of experienced media activists also play key roles in all major Occupations, usually through participation in media and tech tents and WGs (see Figure 4). Occupations often also have press WGs, while a few have public relations WGs or InterOccupation communication groups. Media teams almost always include experienced media activists, and individual media activists who move between movement networks bring specific practices with them. Many, if not most, of the practices seen as innovations of the Occupy movement (not only by both outside observers and mass media journalists, but also by many

Occupiers) actually have much longer histories. Specific examples of communication practices popularized by the Occupy movement, but developed earlier, include formal consensus process as used in GAs (with a long history traced back by some to Quakers and by others to the anarchist movement); the set of hand signals used during consensus process (developed by the Disability Justice movement) and the technique known as the People’s Mic, as well as practices more commonly thought of as ‘media’, for example livestreaming and the Occupied Wall Street Journal.

Figure 4. Media tents at Occupy Boston, Detroit and London. Source: http://www.Indymedia.org.

The People’s Mic In large crowds with no amplification, the People’s Mic consists of one individual speaking in single sentences or sentence fragments, their words repeated after each pause by all those assembled (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Bu9K26Qt1I). This technique was adopted widely within the Occupy movement, in some locations initially due to bans on sound amplification, but soon as a general part of the movement culture and a signifier of the participatory nature of the Assemblies. The Occupy movement popularized the technique and made it a part of broader consciousness, both through the direct experience of thousands at GAs and through widespread circulation of recordings of the People’s Mic in practice. Video and audio of the People’s Mic spread via broadcast television and commercial radio newscasts, on YouTube, across social media platforms and in real-time live streams from mobile phones and laptops. However, the technique itself was not an invention of the Occupy movement. The exact origin is not clear, but the People’s Mic was used during anti-nuclear rallies in the 1980s (Kahn, 2011), as well as in the Global Justice Movement during

the 1990s. For example, the technique appears in This Is What Democracy Looks Like (1999), a feature-length documentary about the protests that shut down the WTO Ministerial in Seattle in 1999, produced by Big Noise Films in collaboration with dozens of Indymedia video activists (this film also provided a template for the failed Hollywood dramatization Battle in Seattle, with Woody Harrelson). In the film’s dramatic closing scene, several hundred people are assembled in solidarity with arrestees inside the King County jail. The People’s Mic is used to announce that the protests have played a key role in ending the trade negotiations; veteran Chicago Seven activist Tom Hayden then uses the technique to share a prefigurative prose poem (see minute 55, at http://archive.org/details/ThisIsWhatDemocracyLooksLike): (Crowd repeats each line) I never thought the time would come that a new generation of activists would part the waters. The waters in which your idealism is supposed to be drowned and come to the surface smiling, fighting, laughing, dancing, marching, committing civil disobedience renewing American democracy concretely expressing solidarity Not only here in the United States but in the far corners of the earth beyond the eye of the media. Tom Hayden, This Is What Democracy Looks Like (Big Noise Films, 2000)

The Global Revolution Livestream Live video streaming in general, and the Global Revolution livestream in particular (http://globalrevolution.tv), became a key symbol of the sophistication of media practices in the Occupy movement. At the peak of the mobilizations, up to 80,000 unique viewers per day tuned in to watch DIY real-time streams from Occupations around the country and around the world. http://www.GlobalRevolution.tv was initiated by experienced video activists who worked with the Glassbead Collective (http://glassbeadcollective.org) and Twin Cities Indymedia to cover the Republican National Convention (RNC) in 2008, and subsequently to cover radical culture and social movement activity in NYC. At the RNC 2008,

citizen media organization The Uptake (http://theuptake.org) gained some notoriety for live streaming the protests using smartphones; in this context, activists who later founded GlobalRevolution learned about the viability of this tactic. Other recent notable social movement live streams include those from the Wisconsin State Capitol during the 2011 protest wave against Governor Scott Walker’s anti-union measures, as well as during the DREAM activist takeover of Senator McCain’s office in 2010. Indeed, the practice of live video coverage of movement activity in the US dates back at least to the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Deep Dish TV organized satellite uplinks for live feeds from anti-nuclear and anti-war demonstrations. The broader availability of smartphones with the ability to stream live via the net thus vastly expands, although does not provide the first instance of, the capacity of movement media makers to produce live video coverage of mobilizations. These stories could be repeated many times over, with rich specificity and local context for a general shared story: in many cases, though not all, media and tech WGs were organized by activists with previous social movement experience (more often than not, in the Indymedia network). In other words, innovative media practices, for the most part, did not spring fully formed from the fertile minds of massed ‘digital youth’. Rather, without downplaying the innovations of Occupiers, or the energy and creativity of dedicated activists engaging in the process of media teams and WGs, we can also recognize the importance of a biographical or life-course approach to understanding social movement media cultures.

Open/Closed Social movement media cultures might be characterized along an axis with top-down (vertical) message control on one end, and participatory (horizontal) media making on the other. A movement’s location along the axis may be shaped, but is not determined, by factors including the technical affordances of the dominant media platforms, levels of information and communications technology (ICT) access and media literacies in the general population and the population of movement participants, legal and normative constraints on speech and so on. Occupy, as a movement, is characterized by extreme openness. Practices that promote open and transparent communication include public live notes during GAs, live streaming of GAs and the practice of printing out GA and WG notes to make them physically

accessible in libraries. In keeping with the slogan that Occupy was not a leaderless, but instead a ‘leaderful’ movement, many Occupations organized open media trainings in which any movement participant could learn how to speak to the press. The most important force pushing Occupy toward openness is the participatory nature of the GAs (see Figure 5) and of nearly all WGs, including media and press WGs. Overall, Occupy media teams do operate in ways that are participatory and open. At the same time, within Occupy there are strong forces ‘leaning toward closed’: security culture, the clash between ‘hard core’ and less frequent participants, and the very real tensions between openness and respect for hardwork and dedication. Ultimately, perhaps the strongest forces militating against true openness are those identified by feminist scholar Freeman as the tyranny of structurelessness (1972): truly equitable participation in formally open processes is still always structured by race, class and gender inequality. Processes that are ‘open’ are thus typically dominated by white straight males, by those with class, race and gender privilege, including access to free time, feeling empowered to speak in public and today, by increased access to digital literacies and ICTs. As the Occupy movement unfolded and critiques of its racial composition (mostly white) began to surface, many local Occupations attempted to address their lack of diversity and to develop stronger analyses of structural racism. In NYC, a small group of Women of Color successfully blocked consensus on the Declaration of the Occupation of New York to rewrite language around race and gender. They formed the core of the People of Color (POC) WG, which grew rapidly to meetings of over 200 POC, inspired POC WG formation in many other Occupy locations and brought the analysis of race and gender forward inside the Occupy movement as a whole (see more on race and Occupy by Colorlines at http://colorlines.com/tag/Occupy%20Wall%20Street). Occupy the Hood was also formed by seasoned activists (such as Malik Rahsaan) during the early stages of movement growth, to connect Occupy to communities of color, deepen connections to existing organizations and movement networks in those communities, and advance a more inclusive, just and equitable vision of the movement’s possibilities (see Figure 6).

Figure 5. General Assembly, Liberty Square, October 2011. Source: Occupied Wall Street Journal.

Figure 6. page.

Occupy the Hood logo. Source: Occupy the Hood Facebook

At the micro-procedural level, many GAs adopted a modified version of consensus process that included progressive stack, wherein women, POC and LGBTQ folks are able to move more quickly to the front of ‘stack’ (the list of people waiting to speak during GAs or WG meetings). However, at the time of writing, Occupy continues to be dominated by Anglo faces and voices in both face-to-face practice and mass media representation—and more importantly, to subsume intersectional analysis of racial and gendered inequality within a relatively simplistic articulation of class inequality.

Conclusions This article began with a short overview of the Occupy movement, then turned to a discussion of key areas of inquiry into social movement media cultures. In terms of media tools, skills, practices and norms, Occupy turns out to be complex and internally differentiated, rather than a mass of digitally savvy youth with laptops and smartphones. Surveys, participant observation and interview data indicate that most Occupiers use face-to-face

communication and engage in Facebook activity, and much smaller subgroups engage in media practices such as blogging, video production, livestreaming and print media. Media, tech and press WGs composed of small numbers of relatively highly skilled, more experienced movement actors play key roles in creating, curating and circulating media texts, as well as in shaping the media culture of the movement. Previous histories of movement media practice, as well as key individuals with past experience as movement communicators, also influence social movement media cultures and bring tactics, techniques, skills, knowledge and social networks with them across their life course. At the same time, as a ‘leaderful’ movement, Occupy has resisted designation of particular individuals as spokespeople, even as internal and external pressures militate toward closure around access to standing in print and broadcast media. In a context of structural inequality that shapes participation along intersecting lines of race, class and gender, Occupy has made some attempts to more systematically include the voices of women, people of color and LGBTQ folks in both internal and external communication processes. However, there is much more to be done in this direction. Overall, the media culture of the Occupy movement leans strongly toward open, distributed and participatory processes. Hopefully the concept of social movement media cultures, as well as the areas of inquiry explored here, can be used by movement actors and scholars to better understand the relationship between social movements and the rapidly changing media ecology.

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Sasha Costanza-Chock is an assistant professor of Civic Media in the Comparative Media Studies program at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology. He is a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, co-principal investigator at the Center for Civic Media, and co-founder of the Occupy Research Network. More information about his work can be found on his website (http://schock.cc).

The Free Culture and 15M Movements in Spain: Composition, Social Networks and Synergies MAYO FUSTER MORELL Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA ABSTRACT This profile discusses the organization, goals and practices of the Spanish 15M movement. I argue that it developed as a complex, multilayered ecosystem, mobilizing a new generation of citizens through the convergence of struggles over housing and the Free Culture and Digital Commons Movement (FCM), creating a common framework for action through social networks. Primarily in and through the actions in public squares, the 15M movement also constructed further layers of mobilization, incorporating the networks and skills of previous social movements (such as those mobilizing over inter alia education, health, alternative consumption) and connecting with previous generations who had mobilized over civil liberties in transition to democracy. Furthermore, I argue that links with the Free Culture Movement had a profound effect on the genealogy of 15M—in terms of its composition, agenda, framing and organizational logic. The methodology is based on case studies of both the FCM and 15M between December 2010 and December 2011 in Spain.

Spain has recently witnessed the emergence of a wave of social mobilization, starting on 15M (15 May 2011), featuring some of the largest occupations of public squares since the country transitioned to democracy in the 1970s. The 15M—alternatively known as indignados mobilization— caused surprise not only because of the size of the protest but also by its

character. With new technologies in information and communication (ICTs) playing an important role in the mobilization process, the 15M movement has become the latest and greatest exponent of a self-mobilization or social network format organized through the Internet. It is also characterized, in the current context of multi-crisis, by the contention surrounding information, culture and knowledge regulation (Lessig, 2004). The emergence of the Free Culture and Digital Commons Movement (FCM) is a sign of this conflict (Fuster Morell, 2010) as it supports a vision of accessibility and flow of information and knowledge, and open and collaborative formats of knowledge creation (such as software or other types of immaterial content), instead of proprietary and restrictive visions. The FCM not only places the regulation of the Internet and ICTs at the heart of its political agenda but also makes extensive use of ICTs in achieving its goals of mobilization and organization (Fuster Morell & Subirats, 2012). This profile first presents the components of the 15M wave of mobilization, then presents an analysis of the ways that the FCM might have interacted with the 15M and ultimately influenced the growth of the 15M. The methodology is based on case studies of both movements in Spain between December 2010 and December 2011. Several qualitative methods were employed. Virtual ethnography of websites and participative observation of events were conducted to become familiar with the actors, the organizational logic, and to obtain an overall view. A detailed analysis of 25 interviews, and audiovisual materials and documents, was used to identify actors, organizational forms, and to interpret the links between the FCM and the 15M.

The Wave of Mobilization Through Social Networks Arrives in Spain: A Surprising Start In a context of social discontent, and of growing mobilization in other countries, Anonymous and individual citizens started to mobilize themselves through social networks to conceive and prepare a general call to citizens for mobilization. In March 2011, a group of collectives decided to create a common platform, Real Democracy Now (RDN). Since 15 May 2011, this initial call has generated an unexpected and spectacular wave of mobilizations in Spain. In the words of the organizers:

Call […] to organize a large protest throughout Spain before the coming municipal elections […] to denounce the deplorable situation in which citizens suffer from severe abuse caused by political and economic powers. (Call Mobilization Demonstration, 15 May).

Common to all the collectives involved were factors such as new initiatives (created in the previous months and without strong ties to previous social movements) and, more importantly, the sharing of common views and principles on an organizational model based on the reliability of ICTs in general and of social networks more specifically, being used both as a tool and simultaneously as an inspiring organizational format (Interview, member RDN, 17 September 2011). The organizational and communicative model of a social network was primarily inspired by Internet use in Arab countries, with a few precedents in Spain itself. Important among those precedents were the revolt of 14 March 2003 to protest the Government reaction to the Madrid train attacks, the housing movement of 2006, and various campaigns of the FCM. The mobilization achieved in the 15M demonstration exceeded all expectations. On the night of 15M, a group of Madrid residents (with a significant presence of hackers) decided spontaneously to encamp at ‘Plaza del Sol’ (Intervention, member RDN, 3 June 2011). Similar encampments subsequently proliferated in the main squares of several Spanish cities and later extended, in acts of solidarity, worldwide.

Composition of the 15M: Precedents and Synergies Around the 15M Mobilization It is not easy to describe the overall composition of the 15M. The Global Justice Movement (GJM) of the early 2000s has been described as a ‘movement of movements’ (della Porta & Mosca, 2005). However, this characterization does not suit the 15M, as it has many more interactions and synergies of a plurality of components which together create a complex system composed of interacting or interdependent components or layers that form an integrated whole. The configuration of a new generation of mobilized citizens who had not previously mobilized, or at least not in the last cycle of the GJM, is particularly relevant in the Spanish case. For many participants, the organization of the 15M demonstration was their first political experience (Intervention, member RDN, 18 June 2011). These new participants were

mobilized and organized through social networks and by starting new collectives. Even so, the early 15M composition went beyond these new participants, evolving further with the confluence of previous mobilization trajectories and the accumulation of knowledge that had an affinity with the organizational spirit of the 15M. In this regard, the 15M was also formed by the confluence of previous movements. The most important of these are the housing movement, the opposition to and denunciation of the banking system, and the FCM (Intervention, member RDN, 22 May 2011). In 2006 and 2007, mass mobilizations occurred demanding the right to respectable (fair, decent) housing in Spain. Some parts of this movement have remained active since then, becoming more forceful with the bursting of the real-estate bubble to form the platform of those affected by mortgages (PAH), which had a notable presence before 15M, and helped to increase the numbers for that mobilization. The housing movement’s demands became more visible alongside the demands of the 15M movement, with the development of direct solidarity actions among neighbors to stop housing evictions resulting from mortgage non-payment (Intervention, member PAH, 27 October 2011). The housing movement also influenced the 15M in adopting a speech and an esthetic that broke with the correctness of previous political languages, to connect with the emerging youth cultures (Haro, 2010). Another movement that contributed to the early 15M was the opposition to the banking system. In 2008, activist Enric Duran (given the name Robin Bank by the press) hacked more than 30 banks and extracted almost half a million Euros in credits that he later used to finance newspapers that explained his actions and provide information on functioning projects outside the capitalist economy (Interview, Enric Duran, 15 May 2011). The anti-austerity mobilizations against cuts in public services such as healthcare and education were already highly mobilized before 15M; however, they converged after the 15M mobilization within the 15M system in the public squares. The same applied to the occupied social centers and other subsets from the previous wave of the GJM, which played a key role in the growth of the public squares movement, and the later migration to the neighborhoods (Interview, member of occupied social center, 23 May 2011). The squares also attracted a plurality of alternative visions of society, from diverse traditional political orthodoxies through to mystical groups, and regular occupants of public spaces, such as the homeless.

In this sense, the alternatives resulting from the waves of the GJM also joined the occupation of the squares. After the major demonstrations against the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and the European Union before 2004, the GJM in Spain transformed its energy into putting alternatives into action, which by 2011 had reached maturity. This was the case with the networks of solidarity interchange, such as the time bank, the networks of interchange of knowledge, the networks of interchange of goods (trueque) and the cooperatives of agro-ecological consumption (Ubasart et al., 2009). The squares were like living cities, and managing the squares involved many skills. Differences in technological practice might explain why the start of the 15M was not significantly connected to previous social movements, but they subsequently converged. The GJM was also innovative in using ICTs for social mobilization, using websites, Short Message Service (SMS) messaging, email distribution lists and Indymedia. Even so, the groups and activists that came from a GJM background were of the technological generation of the early 2000s and were unfamiliar with social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, which became popular in Spain only much later and were opposed by many activists because of their corporate character (Interview, Enric Duran, 15 May 2011). A further important synergy lies in the diffusion of the movement message online (info-actions) from home. The ‘info-action’ was particularly important for feeding the informational ecosystem of the 15M and maintaining connections with a network of solidarity locations in other countries to amplify and internationalize the protest (Interview, member of occupied social center, 23 May 2011; Interview, member RDN, 17 September 2011). This informational ecosystem of conversational flows was created by the connection of mutually interacting applications and spaces. As the mobilization processes converged within the 15M, the movement also activated previous generations who had struggled for political and social freedoms, such as grandparents who had fought during the dictatorship and who felt sympathy for the spirit of the squares, and showed solidarity with their oppression. Indeed, the 15M movement enjoyed wide support among the citizenry; according to a Metroscopia survey of June 2011, the majority of Spanish people (84%) believed that the movement tackled problems that directly affected the citizens and had good reasons to

mobilize. Spain has a youth unemployment rate of approximately 45% and problematic access to housing. Those precarious living conditions could help explain the understanding and level of support the protest received. In short, the 15M engaged a multi-dimensional synergy: a new generation of citizens converged with the housing movement and the FCM to create a common framework for articulating actions through social networks and changed the scene by generating the fire to demonstrate. However, to this first composition was added, primarily in the squares, the networks and skills from previous social movements (such as education, health and alternative consumption, among others) as well as a connection to previous generations—together generating a virtuous cycle that obtained large social support and engagement (online and off-line) for the mobilizations.

The FCM in the Genealogy of the 15M The FCM interacted and contributed to the genealogy of the 15M in various ways—with composition, agenda, frame and organizational logic the most significant.

Composition The FCM was one of the movements that mobilized for the 15M demonstration. Individuals and two of the initial groups (Anonymous and Do Not Vote for Them) that formed the platform to organize the initial demonstration were directly connected to free culture struggles. The FCM also contributed in providing the main physical spaces—in centers connected to free culture practices before the occupation of the squares—to celebrate the organizational meetings.

Agenda The FCM contributed to the agenda of the 15M through developing an information and knowledge policy that favors public domain and access. Even so, the documentation on the 15M shows a reduced presence of subjects tied to new technologies and intellectual property. The FCM also contributed to the 15M agenda through the development of the concept of

the digital commons (Fuster Morell & Subirats, 2012), and thus the wider connection with the commons as political tradition, strategy and organizational format.

Frame Creation The 15M changed the terms of opposition to the political and economic system, moving from contemporary thematic movements (such as ecological or feminist) to a more general, meta-political frame confrontation. The creation of a general ‘meta-politics’ frame dates from 2007. Law professor Lawrence Lessig, a key advocate of Creative Commons licenses (an alternative to Copyright that favors use and accessibility), announced that he would stop working on free culture and cyberlaw. The reason that he gave up was that he had reached the conclusion that promoting free culture and its democratic values through promoting free culture practices as such had arrived at a specific endpoint. In his view, therefore, to advance it, it was necessary to face institutional corruption and to directly engage in political system reform; the political system, according to Lessig, is structurally corrupt, and therefore prevents any possibility of change in the institutional and administrative framework (Lessig, personal blog, June 2007). In the Spanish case, we can also trace a mutation in the FCM actors already mobilized by the free culture agenda, but who jump in at a specific point, aiming to change the political system. One of these mutations could be seen in the mobilizations against the Sinde Law of December 2010 on Internet regulation. A strong movement of opposition was generated, and actions against the law were developed over the Internet. The publication on Facebook of the ‘Manifesto of defense of fundamental rights’ against the Sinde Law generated more than 240,000 responses in under 24h. Expressions of rejection achieved a large presence on Twitter, too. The hashtags (keywords to identify conversations in Twitter) #leysinde or #sindegate became a trending topic. Distributed Denial of Service attacks (or cyberattacks), generated large information flows from multiple connection points to block the webpages of the conservative Popular Party (PP), the Socialist Party (PSOE), the Catalan Nationalist Party (CIU) and of the lower house of Parliament (Congress of Deputies), who had voted for

the Sinde Law, which was finally approved in mid-February 2011. FCM activists countered with the Do Not Vote for Them campaign (in Spanish, ‘Nolesvotes’), denouncing the corruption of the political system, and targeted to influence the municipal elections of 22 May 2011. The campaign consisted of a shared manifesto that asked electors not to vote for political parties that had approved the Sinde Law. In sum, the approval of the Sinde Law prompted part of the FCM to reconsider their campaign focus and to redirect their activities (previously centered on free culture issues) to address the political system as a whole for RDN (Interviews with FCM members, 10 June and 13 July 2011). After 15M, other concerned networks also converged with this meta-politics frame.

Organizational Logic Last but not least, another source of FCM influence on the 15M is the modality of its extensive use of ICTs and its organizational logic in general. The formats of the Sinde Law campaign and the Nolesvotes campaign were a reference point for designing the 15M as a campaign with a swarming modality (Interviews, member FCM, 10 August 2011, and member RDN, 17 September 2011). These campaigns were not based on creating a platform of representative organizations but on creating a common pool, which any person or organization who felt attached to the campaign could easily join. Similarly to Wikipedia, which prohibits group participation, individual participation is also the characteristic of FCM campaigns. Furthermore, participation is organized so that it accommodates the various types and degrees of resource availability and interest in contributing (Fuster Morell, 2010). It is also highly dependent on the digital arena. Here, the informational ecosystem is central to the movement’s communicative strategy for occupying the public space, not only through the mass media but also by attempting to become a trending topic on Twitter, reducing dependence on intermediaries or traditional media actors. Although the 15M has significantly more face-to-face activity than typically occurs in the FCM, the decentralized meta-coordination of the mobilization through the Internet informational ecosystem plays a key role in both movements.

Conclusions In some respects, the FCM is a predecessor of the 15M mobilization; our analysis reveals a series of channels by which the FCM contributed to the genealogy of 15M. These contributions include composition (providing a mobilization trajectory and resources that fed the 15M), agenda (incorporating questions in the 15M agenda relating to an information and knowledge policy favoring public domain and access, and, more importantly, the commons political tradition and strategy), frame (reinforcing the necessity of framing the passage from thematic-specific to meta-politics) and organizational logic. In this last respect, as with its predecessor the FCM, the 15M generated an online informational ecosystem, which played an important role in meta-coordinating the mobilization, and in communicating and intervening in the public debate. In this regard, the 15M movement has not only become the latest exponent of a mobilization format arranged principally through the Internet but also managed to overcome the FCM’s limitations to online settings, and generated large face-to-face mobilizations. Our analysis of the 15M composition further reveals that its ecosystem character is not limited to meta-coordination and communication of information in online settings only, as it mirrors an informational ecosystem characterized by a complex system of diverse components, interactions and synergies. The 15M system of layers includes a new generation of mobilized citizens, who, with the juxtaposition of the housing movement and FCM, created the first surprising start. Following the occupation of public squares, the movement negotiated a convergence of anti-austerity mobilizations, the student movement, the occupation of social centers and alternative practices resulting from the previous wave of the GJM. Finally, info-actions by networked individuals from home helped sustain an international solidarity network, and secure the support and solidarity of previous generations who had fought for political freedom in the transition to democracy, as well as the strong support of much of the population over precarious living conditions. The set of interactions and synergies of these components combined to generate a virtuous cycle that obtained large social support and engagement (online and off-line) for the mobilizations.

References

della Porta, D. & Mosca, L. (2005) Global-net for global movements?, Journal of Public Policy, 25, pp. 165–190. Fuster Morell, M. (2010) The governance of online creation communities, Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, European University Institute, Florence. Fuster Morell, M. & Subirats, J. (2012) Towards a New Policy Making? Cases the Free Culture Movement and the Digital Commons and 15M in Catalonia. Research Report. IGOP-UAB for EAPC. Haro, C. (2010) Political Activism in the Network Society: The Case of Housing Movement (Murcia: Congreso AECPA). Lessig, L. (2004) Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity (New York: Penguin Press). Ubasart, G., Ràfols, R. & Vivas, E. (2009) Barcelona for the Community Action: Networks of Solidarity Exchange in Barcelona City (Barcelona: Ajustament de Barcelona).

Mayo Fuster Morell is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, and member of the Institute of Government and Public Policy at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. She recently concluded her Ph.D. dissertation (Governance of online creation communities. Provision of infrastructure for the building of digital commons) at the European University Institute, Florence.

Tactics of Waste, Dirt and Discard in the Occupy Movement MAX LIBOIRON New York University, New York, NY, USA, Occupy Museums & OWS, New York, NY, USA ABSTRACT Both Occupiers and our opponents have used waste and discards—figuratively and literally—in strategies to create and cultivate a new social movement on one hand, and to maintain power and control over protesters on the other. This study will look at the roles trash, waste, filth and discards have played in tactical decisions by both sides of the movement from the point of view of a New York City Occupier. Overall, the examples examined of trash, filth, discards and their attendant transgressions make up an ongoing political debate about the ideal society by both Occupiers and its opposition. These are the terms over which contests about what counts as tolerable and intolerable conditions, right and wrong, citizenship and the Other, acceptable and unacceptable behavior and what constitutes ‘out of placeness’ have been waged.

Both Occupiers and our opponents have used waste and discards— figuratively and literally—as strategies to create and cultivate a new social movement and ideals on one hand, and to maintain power and control over protesters on the other. I will look at some specific roles trash, waste, filth and discards have played in tactical decisions by both sides of the movement from the point of view of a New York City Occupier. The first section outlines how the New York City municipal government and its police have used their power to designate what is trash and what is not. The second section considers several ways Occupiers have used waste to both protest an economic and political system that disenfranchises the public and use trash as a platform to enact just citizenship and imagine a better future. In all

cases, waste and trash are the materials through which larger contests of belonging and values are played out (Figure 1).

Anti-Occupy Tactics At around 1 am on 15 November 2011, police came into a tented Liberty Plaza and began handing out fliers. The fliers said Occupiers had to leave the park or face arrest. Shortly after Occupiers ran from tent to tent to spread the news of pending eviction and arrest, police began tearing down tents and putting them in dumpsters. Many Occupiers grabbed what they could carry and left, others stayed as long as they could. No one could return to the park to gather their belongings. In the end, everything in the park—clothes, books, tents, medications, backpacks, laptops, kitchen supplies and food— was put into a garbage truck and transported to a city sanitation transfer station. There were mixed reports of whether Occupiers would get their belongings back.

Figure 1. Occupy trash diagram, ink on paper, by Rachel Schragis in collaboration with the author. The next morning, Occupiers gathered in a stripped and scrubbed Liberty Plaza for an early General Assembly. Any time a backpack or a bag was put on the ground, it was scooped up by police and put in a dumpster. Effectively, this meant that people carrying things salvaged from the previous night’s eviction could not enter the park. People were eating breakfast standing up. One woman joked that she was afraid to put down her two-year old, who might be whisked into a trash bin by mistake. One security officer explained it to a friend: ‘Anything that touches the ground is garbage’. He looked at her feet suggestively.

Later that day and the next, some Occupiers went to retrieve their belongings from the Sanitation station where police said they were ‘storing’ them. The hundreds of books from the People’s Library were of particular concern. The books and other belongings had been compacted in the truck and dumped to the concrete floor, effectively destroying them. They had clearly been subject to identical treatment as regular trash. While there were many shows of power by police and New York City Mayor Bloomberg during the eviction, including censoring the press, violating city laws and effectively privatizing public and semi-public spaces, I want to focus on the actions whereby taxonomies of trash were used as a conscious effort to restrict access to space and to define and discipline protesters. The police’s trashing actions ordered by Bloomberg on 15 November, as well as before and since that date, are a logical extension of the heavy rhetorical work coming from the Mayor’s office and anti-occupy mainstream media claiming that Occupiers, Occupy camps and Occupy politics are dirty, filthy and unsanitary. This slippage between (imagined or real) unsanitary physical conditions and unsanitary politics and conduct is blatant in the evictions of Occupy camps around the world. In Philadelphia, giant frontend loaders plowed through tiny collapsible tents. In Paris, police in riot gear attacked tents and then rigorously guarded the piles of trash they made. In Los Angeles, crews dressed in full hazmat suits picked through park materials. In each case, the state is performing power, but they are also performing political repulsion. They are demonstrating their belief that such political gatherings are dangerous in their filth, regardless of material sanitary conditions. As Douglas so eloquently puts it, ‘As we know it, dirt is essentially disorder’ (1984, p. 2). And in the eyes of those in power, the essential nature of Occupy is disorder. It is dirt. These symbolic rhetorics and actions are the mediums through which group subordination is generated and operationalized by those in power. Not only do the Mayor’s office, police and dominant media control the terms of public conversations about Occupy in terms of sanitation so Occupiers have to constantly demonstrate their cleanliness in public, but more importantly, such derogatory symbolism rests on a binary: clean and dirty, safe and dangerous, us and them. This is the contest between Bloomberg and his police, and New York City Occupiers. The Mayor and police work to make the Occupiers Other, and Occupiers strive to exercise their rights as citizens

to assemble and protest. This contest is often fought in terms of filth and waste. For example, before the eviction of Liberty Plaza, Mayor Bloomberg told Occupiers that they would have to leave the park for cleaning. In response, the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) Sanitation Working Group called for a parkwide, OWS-initiated clean up. Bloomberg had ruled that the Occupation was unsanitary and so the city would have to clean up after them, while OWS maintained that they were good citizens and took care of their space. Hundreds of protesters scrubbed Liberty Plaza until it sparkled and there was no possible material evidence of unsanitary conditions. The ‘cleaning eviction’ was cancelled. When Liberty was raided one month later, Bloomberg claimed it was due to his mounting concern that ‘the occupation was coming to pose a health and fire safety hazard to the protestors and to the surrounding community’. The contest of filth and belonging is not new. The recorded history of those in power seeing threats to their social order as ‘filth’ stretches as far back as medieval times. More recently, Ezra Pound’s Cantos regarded ‘the multitudes in the ooze’, citizens and their political leaders, as a flood of excreta, with democracy as a sea of swampy sewage. In contrast, Pound’s description of his desired enlightened dictator was neat and tidy, even shining. In the last three centuries, the rhetoric of waste has usually been class-based, where the bourgeois ‘[condemns] the excremental working classes’, a pattern suited to a movement protesting the yawning gap between the rich and poor (Inglis, 2011, p. 216). In every recorded case described by Inglis, filth and waste are used to describe the inferior, unregulated, disorderly and dangerous Other that pose some threat to the system of rule. Within this understanding of the role of waste in protest, the seemingly contradictory acts of Bloomberg, the police and other opponents to Occupy whereby they decry waste even as they create waste by turning entire encampments into trash make sense. They are methods to define and control what they see as dangerous disorder, specifically a danger to dominant social order. These are exercises in classing protesters as non-citizens. As Them. As Other. As Trash and Dirt.

Occupy Tactics

From cardboard esthetics to calling out ‘dirty’ money, OWS also uses waste strategically. I will focus on two related tactics of trash, dirt and discard as they relate to ideals within the movement. First, I will look at how waste functioned in the encampment and beyond, and secondly how waste has been used as a rhetoric for just citizenship when calling out unjust corporations, banks and governments. One of the unique aspects of the Occupy movement compared to similar movements is the encampments. In these densely populated impromptu urban settlements, perfect strangers have to live together. In this context, ideals for how the world should work must be put into practice on the ground. First and foremost, there must be toilets. There were hundreds, even thousands of people at Liberty Plaza on any given day before and after the eviction, and few accessible toilets in nearby businesses. Protesters had to figure out a way to rent, pay for and site sani-potties. In New York, this meant an alliance with the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) to place the sani-potties in the union’s loading dock. The UFT’s president said, ‘we are happy to help Occupy Wall Street to continue to be a good neighbor’. This language is telling, as we will see in a moment. There was also a laundry service at Liberty, recycling stations and, of course, the Sanitation Working Group, a facet of every Occupy encampment around the world (Figure 2). These infrastructures for sanitation are part of a system of citizenship within the Occupy movement. Signs announced: ‘We are all part of the sanitation effort’, ‘We at Sanitation uphold the Good Neighbor Policy, which is a great guideline of our values and respect for each other in this community’ and ‘Thank your sanitation workers! It starts from the ground floor’. These services and signs were part of the rules and values of citizenship in the Zuccotti encampment, all of which mirrored what Occupiers expect and demand from the 1%. According to anthropologist Mary Douglas, ‘dirt’ is all about maintaining good citizenship, where beliefs and practices about filth and contagion uphold social values and what counts as acceptable and unacceptable behavior. The way Occupiers treat dirt and trash is symbolically similar to the City’s efforts to alienate them: in both situations, dirt is about maintaining a set of ordered relation, and rejecting inappropriate elements. For Occupiers, these ordered relations involved respect, sobriety and cooperation. One of the three community rules at Liberty Plaza, drafted through a consensus process, was ‘Keep it clean. This

plaza and these flowers are important to the community. Our ability to uphold the beauty of this park well represents our commitment to a better world’. Very often, the cleanliness of the park was articulated as a direct testament to protester’s desires for just, ‘clean’ politics. Signs declared, ‘Today we clean up our community, tomorrow we clean up Wall Street’ and admonished, ‘If you can’t clean up after yourself, you can’t clean up this corrupt world’. This sentiment is so strong that one protester self-identified as a cleaner: ‘We [Occupiers] clean. It’s what we do. It’s who we are’.

Figure 2. Good neighbor policy sign greeting anyone who enters Zucotti Park. 8 November 2011. Photo by the author. Not only was basic maintenance part of the citizenship-building process of the Zucotti encampment, dirt, trash and discards were also used as the raw material to imagine a better world. At the height of the encampment, Zucotti boasted a greywater system as part of the People’s Kitchen, a bike-powered

composter whose compost was cycled to several nearby community gardens, a recycling depot and a reuse station to fuel the movement’s cardboard esthetic. These environmental amenities, constructed from scratch for public use, were a concrete manifestation of the better world Occupiers seek. In this better world, waste and trash were a thing of the past, as citizens’ duties included using resources as fully as possible. In many conversations, prolific waste was seen as a necessary product of exploitative capitalist production (Figure 3). Together, the rhetorics and actions of cleaning up and building a wasteless future come to bear directly on Occupy’s message for just citizenship from 100% of society. Not only is littering and leaving messes for others to clean a breach of citizenship in the park, but it is also an ethical breach in politics and finance. Not only is wasting, trashing and discarding an undesirable act in the park, but it is also undesirable and intolerable from institutions outside of the park. Wall Street is a notoriously bad housekeeper. It is worth noting that after the eviction of Zucotti, the ‘ethics of doing your chores’ continued as the Sanitation Working Group cleaned foreclosed houses for reoccupation, and cleanliness continues to be a goal in meetings and other shared spaces within Occupy, though in different forms.

Figure 3. Occupier powering batteries at Zucotti Park. The greywater system and compost area is to the right. Photograph by the author.

Figure 4. Members of Occupy Student Debt put on their trash bag cap and gowns during the launch of the campaign. 21 November 2011. Photograph by the author.

A second way that trash, dirt and waste play into the tactics of Occupy is the argument that things that ought not be discarded have been wasted and trashed by the wealthiest 1% of society, banks, governments and corporations. Many Occupiers involved in the eviction of Zucotti whose belongings were ‘stored’ in dump trucks carry their crushed laptops to public gatherings as artifacts of injustice. The People’s Library called a press conference after the eviction and piled hundreds of trashed books in front of reporters to demonstrate the intolerable politics of trash practiced by Bloomberg and the police. The same tactics are also used in a more symbolic sense. Members of Occupy Student Debt donned graduation caps and gowns made of garbage bags to symbolize how their degrees and earning power after graduation were worthless under the weight of their debt. Occupy Museums built a miniature model of a house in Harlem threatened with foreclosure out of discards and presented it to the Museum of American Finance, asking that the depreciated status of the property be ensconced in an elite cultural institution as part of the master narrative of how American Finance affects everyday people. Various testimonials on the ‘I am the 99%’ tumblr site make reference to how their lives, futures or degrees are ‘going to waste’ or ‘being wasted’ because of the corruption and inadequacies of institutions meant to support them. In each case, the rhetoric of waste, trash, filth and discards are used to critique the disproportionate power of a minority to discard the rights and livelihoods of the 99%. There is an implicit argument here that a citizen or resident of the USA should not be treated like trash by definition of what it means to be an enfranchised person (Figure 4). In conclusion, to focus on the physical and material aspects of dirt and trash within Occupy or to keep a tally chart of when and where trash appears and whether or not it actually carried dangers of tuberculosis as some media claimed is to miss the point of the roles of waste, discard, dirt and filth within the movement. Instead, we must focus on the different logics of transgression attendant to waste and dirt. We can see that ideas about filth, waste and transgressions make up an ongoing political debate about the ideal society by both Occupiers and its opposition. While many new tactics that use trash and filth to argue for or against certain types of order have been innovated on both sides of the Occupy movement, these are the terms over which contests about what counts as tolerable and intolerable conditions, right and wrong, citizenship and the Other, acceptable and unacceptable

behavior and what constitutes ‘out of placeness’ have been waged for centuries, and will continue to be waged.

Acknowledgements Special thanks to the three New York City Occupiers who reviewed this article but wish to remain anonymous.

References Douglas, M. (1984) Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Ark Paperbacks). Inglis, D. (2011) Dirt and denigration: The faecal imagery and rhetrocs of abuse, Postcolonial Studies, 16(39), pp. 207–221.

Max Liboiron is a postdoctoral fellow in Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, where she works on theories of scale for advocacy and activism engaged in environmental change. Her dissertation, Defining Pollution: Plastics in the Wild, investigates the struggle to define plastic pollution, and how plastics are challenging norms of pollution control, environmental advocacy, and theories of pollution. Her work has been published in eTOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies and in the Encyclopedia of Consumption and Waste: The Social Science of Garbage. She writes for the Discard Studies Blog and is a trash artist and activist.

‘Occupy Israel’: A Tale of Startling Success and Hopeful Failure EITAN Y. ALIMI Department of Political Science, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel ABSTRACT In between the Arab Spring and the US Occupy movement, Israel has had its share in demonstrating the people’s power against unjust authority in general and socioeconomic wrongs in particular. This paper analyzes the context, rapid growth and yet swift abatement of the Israeli protest-tent summer of 2011. I argue that the reasons for the shortly lived Israeli protest summer related more to difficulties in coping with intramovement challenges, framing alignment and a relatively ‘closed’ political environment, and less to the omnipresent security complex and militarized political culture, which has repeatedly been suppressing other episodes in Israel’s history.

As we again witness sporadic attempts to mobilize Israelis to retake the streets and to pressure the government to adopt a more humane economic policy, we are reminded of the unprecedented wave of protest that swept Israel last summer, called the ‘protest-tent’. Beginning on 14 July 2011, thousands of Israelis occupied public places in community-like encampments throughout the country, mounting mass rallies and demonstrations attended by hundreds of thousands of people almost on a weekly basis. The main reason that brought so many people to identify with and join the relatively small group of youngsters who shortly before had moved to live in Rothschild boulevard, at the heart of Tel Aviv, resonated with similar protest activity taking place in other parts of the world: the neoliberal economy and its unbearable social repercussions.

As elsewhere across the world (e.g. Spain and the USA), the Israeli ‘occupiers’ expressed their anger and frustration over issues such as high cost of daily necessities (e.g. food and gasoline), housing prices (both for purchase and rent) and low salaries. What amplified the rage of the Israeli ‘occupiers’ in particular was related to the gradual yet consistent retreat of the State from its traditional welfare ideology and practices in favor of massive neoliberal privatization. In a country fraught with wars and existential threats, where a deeply infused security culture and wellestablished military complex suppress all other issue domains, and army generals often shape state policy; in such a country, the sheer fact that such a wide-reaching and intensive opposition was mounted should not be thought of lightly. In fact, given the negative association of the term ‘occupy’ in Israel, the tent protesters would have never named their collective claims-making that way. For a moment, the Israeli protest summer, as Gamson (2011) has recently called it, brought with it some rays of hope, pointing to a meaningful reshuffling of Israel’s political culture from a one-dimensional security issue to a multidimensional one. In what follows, I analyze the context, rise, rapid growth and yet swift abatement of the Israeli ‘Occupy’ protest campaign. I argue that the reasons for the short-lived Israeli protest summer related more to difficulties in coping with intra-movement challenges, framing alignment and a relatively ‘closed’ political environment, and less with the omnipresent security issue—a fact that leaves me somewhat optimistic and hopeful of the Israeli experience.

Where From? Compared to other issues (foreign, security, ethnicity, religion, etc.), socioeconomic protest in Israel has always had the lower-hand in setting the agenda of Israel’s politics. Perhaps the main reason for this is the omnipresent ‘security situation’, which has been key in shaping public discourse since the pre-statehood era. This is not to say that public unrest over socioeconomic issues has not led to protesting and rioting; nor has it been a non-issue among political parties and candidates. The point is that as pressing and demanding a given socioeconomic concern might be, it will always be moved aside and silenced when ‘cannons roar’. Backtracking into the history of Israeli society and politics it seems that the frequency and

duration of socioeconomic protest tend to be inversely related to the severity, whether real or perceived, of the security situation. In spring 1971, for example, a time of relative calmness in terms of security threat, Israel was shaken by a small group from a Jerusalemite slum, of Sephardic origin, who protested against what they perceived as unjust government socioeconomic policy that systematically discriminated against ‘oriental’ Jews. This group of youngsters, naming themselves the Black Panthers after the US Black Panther Party that inspired them, managed to broaden their protest and to sustain it for more than 2 years with some significant signs of success, yet only to lose momentum in the buildup to the Yom Kippur War. They simply did not have a chance! To give a sense of how deeply ingrained the ‘security situation’ is in people’s cognition and thinking, consider the following: in early 2003, during the national election campaign and while the second Intifada was still raging, a lower-class woman described her unbearable economic situation as a result of Netanyahu’s (then minister of finance) neoliberal economic policy, on national TV. When asked whether she would favor the Labor party candidate, Amram Mitzna, given his social welfare agenda, over Prime Minister Sharon, she replied ‘no way—Mitzna loves Arabs’.

Protest by Whom and for What? Having to cope with the same age-old security obstacle as had others before them (again the Palestinians, the Iranian ‘nuclear specter’, as well as heightening tension vis-à-vis Syria with President Assad’s attempts to ignite Israel’s northern border in order to deflect international attention from his brutal repression of his people), the Israeli ‘occupiers’ nonetheless differed from previous movements in two meaningful ways. First, and unlike in the past, Israeli ‘occupiers’ were mostly middle-class, ranging from youngsters and students, through workers in high- and low-tech, service workers in both private and public sectors, to freelancers—the Israeli summer protest movement was far from a ‘poor people’s movement’, to use Piven and Cloward’s (1979) term. What brought these people to take to the streets was the deepening and worrisome gap between their high future expectations and their constantly weakening financial situations. Put simply, we are dealing with people who could no longer make it through the month, so to speak, based on their income.

There were (and still are) good reasons for the ‘occupiers’ discontent, which leads me to the second point of difference. The move away from a welfare state to neoliberal global capitalism, accelerated by Netanyahu as minister of finance during Sharon’s first term as Prime Minister between 2003 and 2005, has reached full speed under Netanyahu’s own administration. Not surprisingly, the initial demands centered on affordable housing (rent or purchase), tax reform, reducing the concentration of the Israeli economy, regulation over prices of food and other daily necessities (e.g. gas) and fair salaries. Quickly enough, however, demands began to re-shift to what the protesters saw as yet another source of their predicament, one that is rooted in unjust social inequalities and wrongful national priorities. If, as the minister of finance and his proxies took pride in arguing daily that Israel is not experiencing the unfortunate fate of Greece, Portugal, Ireland or Spain as a result of a responsible financial system and policy, and therefore the national budget framework must be strictly adhered to, then a solution can (in fact should) be found in changing national priorities. Thus, instead of offering band-aid gestures and insinuating that most protesters were in fact spoiled, reckless bohemians, what the government should do is to relocate funds and to equalize the share of the burden. By chanting ‘the People wants social justice’, Israeli ‘occupiers’ were not only calling for a more humane economic policy but, closely related, accused the government of favorably discriminating toward and applying important welfare policy measures to benefit specific populations (e.g. ultra-orthodox) and specific places (e.g. settlements). No wonder then that alongside demands for greater allocation of funds to education and daycare centers, there were additional demands (although made less explicitly as a way to attract ultra-orthodox Jews and Arab supporters) for greater investment in public housing in pre-1967 Israel, and applying compulsory military service to all, or benefiting those who do military service.

How Protest? Precipitating the Israeli occupy experience was a successful e-mobilization campaign, to use Earl and Kimport’s (2011) conceptualization, launched on Facebook in June 2011 and which focused on boycotting cottage cheese. The campaign, which rapidly attracted over 100,000 ‘like’ followers, forced

dairy companies in Israel to significantly lower the price of cheese (along with other foodstuffs), which skyrocketed after the government decided to stop regulating it in 2008. Encouraged by these signs of success, the Israeli occupy campaign took off with the first protest-tent encampment put up in Tel Aviv, following a Facebook ‘event’ by Daphni Leef, a former student and video-editor by profession who, like many others, realized she could no longer afford accommodation rental prices in the city. This first encampment was soon emulated elsewhere in Tel Aviv and in other cities by participants who responded to the Facebook calls. Whether or not the initiators of the occupy campaign were consciously inspired by similar past episodes of encampment in public places that took shape during the 1980s and early 1990s is unclear. What is certain, however, is that the Israeli ‘occupiers’ were encouraged by the power of the masses they witnessed in nearby Arab countries, and emulated the successful indignados protest-tent campaign in Madrid, which began in mid-May 2011. Accordingly, in addition to what Tilly (2004) called the public representation of unity and commitment by occupying public places and turning them into community-like housing, the main action tactic devised to voice the ‘occupiers’ demands and to demonstrate their rapidly growing number was mass rallies. Almost every week, usually on Saturday evening, mass rallies were organized in city squares or other open spaces in Tel Aviv, Haifa, Jerusalem, Beer Sheva and additional cities across the country, with ever-broadening participation. The biggest orchestrated rallies took place on 3 September 2011, attracting some 500,000 participants in total. The message that was voiced in all the mass rallies was simple, authentic and, as such, powerful; by chanting ‘the People wants social justice’, the Israeli ‘occupiers’ called for the need to place ‘society before economy’, to be ‘a-political’, to be ‘broad based, diffused, with no form of hierarchy and partisan organizing’ (rarely were politicians allowed to participate, and at times the terms chaos and anarchy were also voiced) and ‘to have the government come up with concrete solutions’. Yet the potential of this spontaneous act of defiance to attract supporters and goal promotion has its downsides. In the short-term, an all-inclusive message may be good for action mobilization, resonating with as many people and groups as possible (Snow et al., 1986; Klandermans, 1997). Indeed, the diversity of groups who quickly joined the ‘occupiers’ was

unprecedented, including the student national association (led by its chair Itzik Shmuli who soon became one of the central leading figures alongside Leef), social workers, medical interns, youth movements from both the leftwing and right-wing ends of the political spectrum, parents of disabled children, animal rights organizations, left-wing groups and Israeli-Arab activists, the Reformist movement, settler groups and many others. For a moment, it looked as if the prospects for a true social revolution were there. In the long term, however, such a ‘catch all’ framing may not only be too abstract for participants to sustain their commitment, but also detrimental for forming and managing consensus over means and goals. Collective forums for deliberating strategy and how to frame demands and goals, as well as coordinating activities, whether among the various leadership cores or between them and other occupy protest activities initiated by lower-class people, were scarce, leading periodically to intense disagreements and rifts. A telling example took place in late August during a press conference held in Tel Aviv. While several key leadership figures refused to participate, others accused those who did of acting on their own, and that their rejection of the government-appointed commission to look into the situation and offer solutions was unrepresentative. As it turned out, the Israeli ‘occupy’ summer resembled more a coalition-like protest activity than a movement whose participants felt linked by ties of solidarity and identity (Diani et al., 2010). Ironically, the lack of greater specification of claims and a proactive stance regarding solutions (i.e. we are not the ones to come up with solutions), certainly a major cause of alarm and embarrassment for the Netanyahu coalition, nonetheless gave the government the wiggle room and way out it needed. To be sure, Netanyahu had little reason to be concerned. Not only did his broad coalition have a clear and stable majority in the Knesset, rendering any no-confidence motion insignificant, but there also was little if any opposition to be concerned about. Kadima, which gained the majority last of the vote in the national election, could have provided the political opening and ally, yet was too deeply fragmented and divided to have a clear voice or even to embrace some kind of social stance. Facing no meaningful threat to its political positioning, coupled with a lack of concrete demands on the part of the ‘occupiers’, Netanyahu seized the moment, and in early August declared the appointment of a special commission of economic experts—the Trajtenberg commission—to offer

solutions. Realizing that the government was effectively kicking their struggle into the long grass and that they were losing the initiative, and facing mounting public criticism over their lack of a constructive agenda, occupy leaders convened in order to come up with specific demands. This, however, was a case of too late and too little. By the time they tried to come up with a list of demands, leading to intense disagreements and rifts, they had already lost the momentum and been portrayed as complete amateurs, which only reinforced those early calls that presented them as unworthy coffee-shop revolutionaries. On 4 September, the day after the largest public rally of all, with some 500,000 protesters spread throughout the country despite a horrendous terrorist attack that threatened to conjure up the omnipresent ‘security situation’ all over again, leaders of the student groups declared it was time to disassemble the encampments and start negotiating with the government.

The Israeli ‘Occupy’ Case in Perspective It was not surprising that the decision to disassemble the encampments was met with strong objection and resentment from many leading figures and groups. Despite opposition which, in some instances, resulted in violent encounters with police forces evicting protesters, it took several days for the Israeli occupy campaign to dissipate. One is tempted to be skeptical about the Israeli case, especially those of us who have been living the Israeli experience, given the gloomy experience of popular contention over socioeconomic issues in Israel. Nevertheless, attempting to look at the glass as if it is one-third full leaves one somewhat hopeful. Admittedly, measured by the ultimate test of success—policy change—the Israeli protest-tent summer would be considered a failure. Yet, it is also true that the Israeli summer has propelled an important shift in public and media discourse, showing the way to future initiatives and forcing the government to take the public voice into consideration more seriously than before. Of even greater importance is the fact that the decision to disassemble the encampments reflected a failure to adequately address a variety of challenges that social movements in other places have been facing, and not the age-old incapacitating security situation. The fact that under such an omnipresent security mentality (which on so many instances has proved to be a self-

fulfilling prophecy), we have witnessed that such a powerful public voice is certainly a source of sober optimism.

Acknowledgements Special thanks go to Nachman Ben-Yehuda, Sidney Tarrow, Naama Tridel, and Michael Ziv-Kenet for their helpful comments on earlier version.

References Diani, M., Lindsay, I. & Purdue, D. (2010) Sustained interactions? Social movements and coalitions in local settings, in: N. Van Dyke & H. J. McCammon (Eds) Strategic Alliances--Coalition Building and Social Movements, pp. 219–238 (Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press). Earl, J. & Kimport, K. (2011) Digitally Enabled Social Change: Activism in the Internet Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Gamson, W. A. (2011) Arab Spring, Israeli summer, and the process of cognitive liberation, Swiss Political Science Review, 17, pp. 463–468. Klandermans, B. (1997) The Psychology of Social Protest (Oxford: Blackwell). Piven, F. F. & Cloward, R. A. (1979) Poor People’s Movement: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (New York: Vintage). Snow, D. A., Rochford, E. B., Worden, S. K. & Benford, R. (1986) Frame alignment processes, micromobilization, and movement participation, American Sociological Review, 51, pp. 464–481. Tilly, C. (2004) Social Movements, 1768-2004 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers).

Eitan Y. Alimi is an assistant professor of Political Sociology in the Department of Political Science, the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from Boston College, USA. His research interests include social movements and contentious politics, conflict dynamics and processes, and political violence and terrorism. His recent publications include articles in British Journal of Political Science, Sociological Forum, Political Studies, Mobilization, Theory and Society, Comparative Politics, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism and International Political Science Review. He is the author of Israeli Politics and the First Palestinian Intifada—Political Opportunities, Framing Processes and Contentious Politics, published by Routledge in 2007.

The Students’ Rebellion in Chile: Occupy Protest or Classic Social Movement? CESAR GUZMAN-CONCHA Department of Political Science, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands and Center for Area Studies, Freie Universität, Berlin Germany ABSTRACT This article gives an overview of the trajectory, components and repertory of the Chilean students’ movement, which staged a series of protests during 2011. Although it started by contesting inequalities in the education system, the movement soon evolved into a challenge to the authoritarian character of political institutions, sharing similar goals with protests elsewhere around the world—including radical economical and political democratization. Should we therefore see the Chile students’ protests as an Occupy-type protest? By analyzing the main interpretations over the movement, this article argues that the Occupy label is insufficient to understand the specificity of the conflict. In Chile, protests did not occur through small groups coordinated by loose networks; instead, they were spurred by traditional student organizations. This created a scenario of social unrest that resembles classical forms of contention, and in that respect differs from Occupy Wall Street, the indignados or the Arab Spring. This case shows that despite the crisis of neoliberal governance forming a common historical backdrop, the modularity (how?) and the composition (who?) of the movement are better explained by the historical configuration of national political systems.

Is the Chile students’ rebellion an Occupy-type protest? In 2011, when thousands of protestors occupied public squares in New York, Madrid, London and other cities worldwide, Chilean students were also on the

streets. While the former demonstrated on behalf of the ‘99%’ affected by the economic crisis that followed the financial collapse in the developed world, the latter struggled for free education, more state involvement in the education system and political reforms. Is the Chilean case an example of the same movement that took place in advanced countries? Were these disparate protests movements connected, and if so, in what ways? This article analyzes the students’ uprising in Chile. It describes the main characteristics of the movement, and assesses some of the interpretations of the movement that have been influential in the national public debate. These accounts have paid attention to one of the following aspects: a rebellion of the indebted middle classes; a mobilization against the rightward shift in government; the higher cost of repression; the importance of information and communications technologies for catalyzing collective action on an extraordinary scale. Comparison with the worldwide wave of Occupy protests highlights important differences between Chilean protesters and other exemplary cases of popular dissent that have occurred more or less simultaneously. However, for Chilean activists, protest movements in other countries represented a source of inspiration and reinforced their morale. The great attention that these protests enjoyed in mainstream media enhanced the resonance of the motives and claims of Chilean students. Collective action arises in presence of grievances, opportunities, identity, emotions and embeddedness (Klandermans et al. 2008). I argue here that the combined effect of these factors explains the emergence and magnitude of the students’ movement in Chile. Therefore, no single variable can account for this large protest movement. The movement is the result of the combination of long-term historical factors with causes that relate to the political process, and the presence of triggers. Thus, the local context explains crucial characteristics (e.g. modularity, composition) of this episode of civil unrest. These factors can be summarized as follows: (1) a long-standing failing education system at all three levels. The lack of regulation of the private sector, combined with the extension of a statesponsored private market of college loans, has only improved access at the expense of quality and has furthermore increased the indebtedness of families. This has fed the streets with disgruntled students; (2) the turn in government that allowed a right-wing coalition to take office 20 years after the end of Pinochet’s dictatorship in 1990, which reinforced the perception

that the political regime was unresponsive; (3) for decades the identity of the students’ movement has been oppositional, clearly left-leaning and rooted in the tradition of the historic students’ movements of the 1920s, the 1960s and the 1980s. Such an identity has been a major source of collective action; (4) strong feelings of injustice and indignation arose among the young as their grievances were not properly addressed by successive governments. The perceived futility of any attempt to negotiate has spread feelings of disillusion; (5) The students’ unions are historically rooted and legitimized by their own constituency and the wider public. They have been a key resource for socializing ideas and claims, organizing and leading the protest, effectively communicating their demands and persuading public opinion. These organizations are the reservoir of the movement’s memories, which facilitate its reproduction over time. Examining these five factors together enables us to go beyond local accounts of the movement, which tend to be unidimensional, insofar as they put the weight of the explanation on single factors; and/or manifest a structuralist bias, insofar as they often dismiss the relevance of factors other than indebtedness and the historic deterioration of the education system. However, although it is argued here that the Chilean protest movement is rooted in the national context, this does not imply that it was indifferent to similar events in other countries. In fact, students benefited from the international wave of protest, in particular the demonstrations in Western countries. In a similar vein, the events in Chile enhanced the geographical range of the wave of protest, giving both activists and observers grounds to speak of a far-reaching movement.

The Conflict In the last days of April 2011, the Confederation of Chilean Students (CONFECH) announced a national day of protest to be held on 12 May. With the support of other civil society organizations, 15,000 marched in Santiago under the slogan ‘there is no future without quality public education’. The main demands concerned an increase of funding for the university system, a comprehensive reform of access mechanisms and the democratization of university governance. This and subsequent demonstrations were intended to influence the public agenda on the eve of the annual presidential address to parliament, which takes place every year

on 21 May, detailing the contents of the government’s legislative initiatives for the coming year. On 21 May, over 20,000 gathered outside parliament, calling on the government to address the problems of the education system. As the president’s speech ignored their demands, the students declared their intention to intensify their campaign of protest. In a press conference, Camila Vallejo, CONFECH’s spokesperson and the head of the students’ union at the Universidad de Chile, announced new rallies and the threat of indefinite strike if the government did not meet their demands. While the education secretary declared that those mobilized were an ‘ideologized minority’ and that students ‘have gone too far’, secondary students joined in the movement. The demands of the secondary students corresponded with those of their fellows in college: free education, the proscription of for-profit schools and greater public investments to improve Chile’s disastrous public school system. On 9 June, 26 schools were taken over by students and most of the public universities went on strike or had their buildings occupied. By the end of July, nearly 140 schools were occupied in Santiago alone. Marches on 16 and 30 June refuted the government’s expectation that after a few demonstrations the movement would fade away: over 100,000 people demonstrated in Santiago and there were massive rallies in all the major cities. The students were joined in these rallies by the main national labor union (CUT) and public-sector workers, MPs from opposition parties, chancellors and faculty members of the main public universities and even well-known television personalities. These events became Chile’s largest demonstrations since 1990. The impressive support for the movement and its own collapse in popularity led the government to believe that, not having anything to gain from the conflict, repression combined with the radicalization of some fringes of the movement would lead to its exhaustion. Yet increased government repression provoked widespread public indignation, strengthening the movement. The national day of protest on 5 August resulted in the arrests of over 900 demonstrators nationwide, 14 wounded (two of whom were police officers) and the transformation of downtown Santiago into a site of clashes between students and police. The disproportion of the police reaction produced a revival of an old piece from the Chilean repertory of protest: cacelorazo, banging cooking pans, frequently used during the struggles against Pinochet’s dictatorship. This

time, cacelorazo denounced President Piñera’s handling of the education problem. ‘Cacelorazo’ was the world’s trending topic on Twitter that night. Between its first announcement in June and the last round of negotiations in September, the government offered slight increases in the education budget and a further expansion of vouchers and subsidies aimed at lowering the interest rate on student loans. These proposals eased the worst effects of the prevailing model, but were not aimed at changing the underlying principles that have shaped the system over the past three decades, namely: subsidizing demand, the key role of the private sector and free competition (between schools and colleges) as the mechanism of regulation and quality achievement. The unwavering position of the government combined with the persistency of the protesters led to the realization that there were no available mechanisms to resolve these sorts of disputes. The movement countered by proposing a referendum. But with the exception of very specific circumstances, the Constitution does not provide for direct democracy procedures (though municipalities are able to hold referendums). What started out as a conflict over education policies thus became a major political problem. The students’ movement asked why certain matters could not be deliberated and decided beyond the boundaries of those groups with access to political institutions. In effect, by questioning the consensus of the elite that has governed the country for 20 years—that same consensus that enabled the transition to democracy in 1988–1989— students called for new institutional arrangements to improve the democratic system.

The Same Wave of Protest? Some analysts argue that protests in the Arab region and several advanced economies are expressions of a global phenomenon. This is not only because of their simultaneity, but also because they share modes (massive demonstrations in central public spaces), goals (democratization, egalitarianism) and actors (young, unaffiliated to traditional organizations). However, a closer look shows that in many countries popular discontent with the economic crisis started earlier (e.g. Greece, Iceland) and involved traditional actors such as labor unions and Left parties (e.g. Spain, Greece, France). Moreover, it should be noted that despite shared aspirations, those

mobilized in the streets of Arab cities protest against political oppression derived from (post)colonial cleavages, while demonstrators in advanced economies conveyed their anger against austerity measures and inequality. Chilean protesters claim to have affinity with the crowds that filled the streets voicing their discontent in many countries during the last year. However, these cases differ in crucial aspects: (1)

Context: Occupy and the indignados emerge from a prolonged economic crisis, while the Chilean movement is not the response to such a collapse; (2) Composition: in Chile the leading actors are traditional student organizations, while in advanced countries it is a heterogeneous mix of small and rather new groups of young, white, middle-class background coordinated by loose networks; (3) Repertory: while Occupy and the indignados adopted the forms seen in the Arab Spring (prolonged occupation of central squares), Chilean students relied very much on rallies and demonstrations. To be sure, a widespread climate of social unrest benefits any individual movement. Chilean students took advantage of indignados and Occupy in that these movements reinforced their position within public opinion, legitimizing the justness of their demands and boosting their morale. As these protests took place simultaneously and enjoyed major media coverage, the students’ movement could present itself as the local branch of a general claim against inequality and the lack of democratic accountability of elites. This effect was possible as the students’ movement framed its objectives in terms of a moral economy that was alike—though not identical—to the one put forward by protest movements in advanced countries. In this respect, it is important to note that the wave of movements of 2011 differs from the New Social Movements-type in that these are distributional: they want to democratize access to wealth and resources. Therefore, this would indicate a mutation of the underlying cleavage that was at the basis of the wave of protest of the 1970s and 1980s. While new social movements struggled against the threats posed by increasing bureaucratization (that’s why they sought autonomy, recognition and participation), the current protest wave origins from the rapid deterioration

of socioeconomic conditions for large sectors previously protected by Keynesian welfare arrangements.

Grievances The Chilean education system is the outcome of the reforms carried out during Pinochet’s rule (1973–1990). These reforms created a market of education at all levels (primary, secondary and higher education), with family spending becoming a major source of funding for the system. At preprimary level, Chile’s share of private funding is 31% (above the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) average of 20%), while in higher education private sources account for 84% of the funding (well above the OECD average of 27%; OECD, 2008). Private universities have proliferated over the past two decades, accounting for an impressive broadening of access to higher education. But since regulation is weak, there is a huge disparity in terms of quality. The labor market has reacted accordingly by devaluing some diplomas and/or by lowering salaries in oversupplied professions. As three-quarters of the universities are private, they have absorbed a large part of the increasing demand. Though nominally forbidden, many are profit-seeking businesses. Both private and public universities collect most of their income from tuition fees, which have increased by more than 60% (in current dollars) over the past decade. Higher education in Chile is one of the most expensive worldwide in proportion to GDP per capita. The rising costs combined with high interest rates have led a great proportion of students to default on their loans. The length of academic programs, 5 years in many careers or 7 years in medicine, aggravates the debt-burden. It also contributes to the fact that a significant share of students leave college with no degree but considerable debt. As for the school system, while rich families educate their children in high-quality private schools, poor families send their children to badly run public schools. This has been described as a ‘system of class segregation’ (OECD, 2004) and ‘educational apartheid’ (Waissbluth, 2011). Is hardship in the education system deeper and more grievous than in other domains? Why did this major outburst not come from the labor movement? Some have suggested that the quality of education system grievances explain why Chilean democracy was not contested by the usual

suspects. Yet it has also been well documented that unregulated labor markets are a major cause of Chile’s stark inequalities. Nonetheless, research in contentious politics has shown that grievances in themselves do not explain protest. To account for the differences of mobilization capacity between these two movements, we should look at the organizational strength and leadership legitimacy of each. Unions are weak (unionization is at a record low of around 10%), divided (two national labor unions have emerged in recent years, debilitating the historic CUT), fragmented (forced to negotiate labor contracts only at the firm level) and delegitimized among their constituency (their leaders have been accused of mismanagement, petty corruption and inefficacy). When students organizations are observed a different picture emerges.

Opportunities Since the democratic re-establishment in 1990, the teachers’ union (Colegio de Profesores) and students’ unions from traditional, public universities have been very active in calling for reforms to the education system. Student organizations have usually staged protest campaigns at the start of the academic year (March). The intensity and duration of these protests vary, yet they reach momentum in May–June. In 2006, an unexpected actor entered the scene: secondary students. In the so-called ‘Penguins’ Revolution’ (because of pupil uniforms), thousands of schoolchildren mobilized around a comprehensive list of demands that ranged from free bus travel passes to the re-nationalization of public schools (which were under municipal management due to reforms implemented during Pinochet’s regime), creating a political crisis in Michelle Bachelet’s centerleft administration. The May 2011 protests successfully revitalized the historic demands made by secondary students. Piñera’s right-wing administration looked at the movement contemptuously. The government believed that it would exhaust itself after a few weeks. This erroneous assessment would prove costly. Its response was defensive, based on a mix of scorn and repression. More generally, some observers have stated that the rise to power of the right-wing coalition freed constituents that had been loyal to the center-left administrations. The ranks of the students’ movement would have been fueled by this formerly disciplined crowd. Others have suggested that the collapse of the legitimacy

of the whole political elite would have encouraged the search for new channels of political participation. Although further research is required to test these hypotheses, it seems problematic to suggest that the young protestors (aged 15–25) were in some way affiliated with the established political parties of the center-left (via the political culture of their parents?). Furthermore, surveys have confirmed that disengagement from party politics has steadily grown since the 1990s. As for unconventional forms of political participation, data confirm that they have prospered since the arrival of Piñera’s administration. In 2010, according to the Chilean police, there was a 50% increase in events of public order and a 130% increase in the number participating in those events (with respect to the previous year). This contradicts a widespread belief that popular protest would have receded due to a change of expectations in the wake of the enormous earthquake and tsunami that hit the country just days before Piñera took office. In 2011 the increase in the number of events and in the number of participants was extraordinary, 188 per cent and 292 per cent, respectively (Carabineros de Chile, 2011). This confirms the historical significance of the students’ movement and corroborates the idea that the change in government contributed to the rise of unconventional political participation.

Political Culture: Identity, Resources, Embeddedness History explains the presence of strong oppositional identities in the students’ movement. In the 1960s, left-wing parties recruited new members from the student population. Their organizations in both secondary and higher education were truly leaders’ factories. This tradition survived the brutal repression of the dictatorship. University students were at the forefront of the opposition to Pinochet’s regime. Schoolchildren were also very active, especially in a group of institutions of secondary education known as ‘liceos emblemáticos’, emblematic schools. These were highquality state-run schools founded in the beginning of the twentieth century to educate the growing middle classes. In the 1980s, secondary students contributed to the popular struggle against Pinochet by engaging in memorable schools occupations. Although after 1990 several civil society organizations underwent crises, the main student organizations managed to maintain their role and became a

front in which the opposition to neoliberal policies was expressed. Most of the left parties (from the Communists to the radical left) have stakes in the movement. The fact that most of their leaders have come from these organizations illustrates the argument. These groups learn from the movement just as much as they aim to guide it. Therefore, the 2011 students’ movement did not appear from nowhere. It benefited from former experiences and the organizational network students created for many years. History provided identity and demands, but it also framed the struggle within the boundaries of a well-known repertoire of conflict.

Conclusions Compared to the struggles staged in the USA and Europe during 2011, Chilean social unrest resembles classic forms of contention and in that respect it differs from those cases. It has been argued that the timing, modularity, composition and political program of the Chilean students’ movement can be explained by looking at the national context. However, from a longue durée approach we have learned that the same worldprocesses are behind different national outcomes (e.g. Silver, 2003). For instance, the diffusion of neoliberal ideas among political elites in Western European countries and the substantial cuts to social-economic rights might also contribute to explain this phenomenon. Indeed, in the Latin American context, only Chile was the stage of large demonstrations during the last year. In this region, those countries that departed from neoliberalism (most notably -but not only- Brazil and Argentina) did not experience such large wave of protest. Further comparative research would be necessary to corroborate whether the crisis of the neoliberal policies explains the differences in protest behavior in Latin American countries. The students’ movement has been historically a powerful political force in several countries. Students are numerous and not difficult to organize, especially when strong and legitimized organizations are headed by charismatic and well-prepared leaders. Internet and social networking tools have facilitated their quick coordination, as evidenced in some demonstrations during the year. But since these tools have been available for some years, their role is not sufficient to explain the magnitude/timing of civil unrest. I have argued here that to understand this phenomenon in Chile we should consider the combined effect of long-standing grievances,

unresponsive and closed political institutions, historically rooted and wellequipped organizations, whose members share strong feelings of injustice and disillusion. These characteristics have brought about a large movement whose particularities are nevertheless entrenched in global processes. Although simultaneity of protest is to a large extent an unexpected outcome that is beyond the command of protestors, once it has occurred it benefits single movements only if they are able to frame their struggles in common ideas. However, as other experiences have proved, these efforts do not guarantee more resonance and legitimacy. For instance, it has been argued that the frames of the alter-globalization movement did not resonate well in working-class contexts, or in peripheral countries such as those of Eastern Europe and Latin America (Gagyi, 2012). From the perspective of social movement theory, this suggests that a transnational wave of protest is not necessarily a resource for domestic movements. Instead, it could turn into a limitation impeding local mobilizations from gaining prominence. In particular, this article has shown that the Chilean students’ movement has a specific context, composition and repertoire. But the fact that grievances come from different generative processes and that the political systems in which these protests took place are diverse, do not impede activists from seeking connections, learning from each other and reinforcing their own position within national settings. Whether these linkages would be fruitful for the fortunes of these movements in the future remains to be seen.

References Carabineros de Chile (2011) Control del Orden Público 2011, Presentación ante Comisión de Derechos Humanos Cámara de Diputados. Unpublished report, (Santiago, Chile). Gagyi, A. (2012) Occupy Wall Street? Position-blindness in the New Leftist Revolution, Journal of Critical Globalization Studies, 5, pp. 143–148. Klandermans, B., van der Toorn, J. & van Stekelenburg, J. (2008) Embeddedness and identity: How immigrants turn grievances into action, American Sociological Review, 73(6), pp. 992–1012. OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) (2004) Chile: Reviews of National Education Policies (Paris: OECD). OECD (2008) Chile: Education at a Glance (Paris: OECD). Silver, B. (2003) Forces of Labor. Workers’ Movements and Globalization Since 1870 (New York: Cambridge). Waissbluth, M. (2011) Las “Mejores” escuelas de Chile, Available at http://blog.latercera.com/blog/mwaissbluth/entry/las_mejores_escuelas_de_chile (accessed 29 March 2012).

Cesar Guzman-Concha is postdoctoral researcher in the Center for Area Studies, in Freie Universität Berlin (Germany), and is also affiliated to the Department of Political Science of Radboud University Nijmegen (The Netherlands). He studied sociology and history in the University of Chile (Santiago), and earned a PhD in Sociology from the University of Barcelona. His main research interests are contentious politics and protest, social movements, and political parties.

‘Why don’t Italians Occupy?’ Hypotheses on a Failed Mobilisation LORENZO ZAMPONI European University Institute, Florence, Italy ABSTRACT Italy was the birthplace of the first mobilisation targeting the crisis-related austerity measures: in 2008, students protesting against the governmental cuts chanted ‘We won’t pay for the crisis’. After that, Italy appeared unable to play a significant role in European anti-austerity mobilisation. The waves of protest of the last three years seem much less influential, in the global context, than the British, Spanish, Greek or Chilean events, let alone the Arab Spring. Furthermore, all the attempts to start some occupy-style mobilisation, during the Fall of 2011, failed. Having participated as an activist/researcher in hundreds of demonstrations, assemblies and meeting, in this paper I propose some hypotheses for future research aimed at understanding and explaining this failure: the political context, with the peculiar role of Berlusconi in attracting on himself all the criticism regarding the crisis, saving from the popular blame the EU and the 1% and paving the way for Mario Monti’s quasi-unanimous approval; 15 October, with the loss of credibility for the movement after the riots and the internal breaks, with consequences on any other attempt of mobilisation; the complex interaction between political groups and general movement, once a resource for mobilisation, and now a potential obstacle, given the difficulty of fitting the sophisticated ‘Italian theory’ in the post-political and down-to-earth frame of crisis-related indignation. This exploratory paper aims to take part in the reflexive elaboration of the Italian movements and to break the academic habit of studying only successful protests.

Whenever we go abroad, unfailingly, someone asks us why, while Greece is burning, Spain is in ferment and in North Africa and Middle East (including Israel!) it is happening what we know, it looks like in Italy nothing is happening. ‘In Italy you produce so much theory that you export it’, they say referring to Italian Theory, to post-post-workerism etc. ‘but, talk aside, where are the struggles?’ (Wu Ming, 2011)

This quote, from an article published on their blog in September 2011 by the collective of militant Italian writers Wu Ming, explains the feeling that many Italian activists had at the beginning of last Fall. At that time, the Wu Ming collective answered that ‘the absence of contention is an optical distortion’, blaming the tendency of Italian movements not to bother telling their stories in foreign languages. In fact, in the last few months of 2011, Italy experienced relatively high levels of contention: the largest and most violent 15 October demonstration in the world, student mobilisations, a national demonstration for public water and two general strikes. How, therefore, can we explain the failure of Occupy in Italy? The ongoing academic debate over the outcomes of social movements (Bosi & Uba, 2009) shows how complex it is to define success and failure, given the wide spectrum of intended or unintended outcomes that collective action can achieve. Therefore, it remains possible that the Italian anti-austerity mobilisations of the Fall of 2011 will prove relevant to some future political and social development. By ‘failure’ in this particular context I, therefore, mean something very narrow and precise, that is, the failure of Italian anti-austerity activists in respect of the two main goals that they shared in September. These goals, as I heard in dozens of assemblies, were to give a political connotation to the expected fall of Berlusconi, paving the way for real progressive change after his era, and to integrate the existing Italian anti-austerity mobilisation within the global indignados/occupy framework, in order to gain media coverage, mass participation and international recognition. These two goals were evidently not achieved: Berlusconi was replaced by a technocratic administration led by former European Commissioner and Goldman Sachs advisor Mario Monti, and the austerity measures implemented in the following months were not opposed by an Italian version of Occupy or of the Spanish 15M movement. How did this (not) happen? I will try and address this failure through some of the conceptual lenses of social movement studies: political context (Kriesi, 2004), identity (Polletta & Jasper, 2001), diffusion (McAdam & Rucht, 1993), protest events (della Porta, 2008) and organisational and

coalitional dilemmas (Jasper, 2004; Meyer & Corrigall-Brown, 2005). My discussion is based on a peculiar kind of participant observation: I participated in these mobilisations as an activist, witnessed their failure and now seek to identify, using the tools of social science, the mistakes and problems of the movement; more widely, I seek to raise theoretical puzzles from the point of view of this particular empirical case, and contribute both to the reflexivity of the movement and to the academic debate.

Antecedents: The Anti-Austerity Mobilisations in Italy, 2008– 2010 The student mobilisation of 2008, the so-called Onda Anomala (‘Anomalous Wave’), is usually considered the starting point of an antiausterity discourse in Italy (Caruso et al., 2010). The slogan ‘Noi la crisi non la paghiamo’ (‘We won’t pay for your crisis’), in fact, explicitly linked a very precise and material struggle (the mobilisation against Law 133/2008 which made huge cuts to the educational budget) with the master frame dominating public discourse in 2008 that of the financial crisis. Even those scholars who place the recent wave of student mobilisations within a long cycle of reaction to the corporatisation of the university since the 1990s (and I am one of them) admit that in the most recent years, ‘the appeal to the condition of youth has been instrumental in articulating broad movements that undermine the dominant discourse on the economical crisis and the austerity measures’ (Fernández, 2012, p. 175). The Italian student movement, in 2008, thus anticipated some of the characteristics of the Spanish experience, building a shared anti-austerity mobilisation that cut across political identities and was recognised by a wide spectrum of social and political actors, even if did not share either its ability to involve different parts of society or its huge symbolic impact. The mobilisations of Fall 2010 were the context in which this double role achieved its apex: the students mobilised against university reform (the socalled ‘Gelmini law’, proposing the introduction of external members onto university boards, the replacement of student grants with loans, and the abolition of tenure for researchers), and developed an anti-austerity discourse aimed at involving larger parts of Italian society. Through participation in major protest events—like the steelworkers’ demonstration of 16 October 2010, or the demonstration during the vote of confidence to

then Premier Berlusconi, on 14 December 2010—the student movement became increasingly politicised, building a message that, starting from a critique of university reform, became a denunciation of the social condition of the Italian youth as a ‘precarious generation’ hit by crisis and austerity, and, therefore, developing a strong demand for radical, social and political change. This process of politicisation and radicalisation changed the collective identity of the movement, in a fashion that is familiar to cycles of protest (Tarrow, 1989): the broad, inclusive and a-political identity of the Onda became increasingly defined while the target of the mobilisation shifted from the defence of the public university to opposition to austerity and neoliberal globalisation. This process of radicalisation—which obviously affected protesters with different levels of intensity, depending on the level of engagement in the mobilisation—also affected the repertoire of contention: starting from the occupation of universities and squares in 2008, the students arrived at the occupation of the most important Italian monuments (25 November 2010), blockades of railways and highways (30 November 2010) and even violent clashes with the police (14 December 2010). The parliamentary approval of the Gelmini law on 23 December 2010 ended de facto the wave of mobilisation in universities. Despite the policy defeat, the discursive outcomes of the student mobilisations (in terms of public support for an anti-austerity and anticorporate discourse) found an echo in various political events during spring 2011 (Maida, 2011), including the national demonstration of women (13 February), the day of action of precarious workers (9 April), the general strike (6 May), the election in Milan and Naples of radical mayors (29 May) and the unexpected victory of the referendums for the re-publicisation of water and against the nuclear energy programme (13 June 2011). Nevertheless, in the season of the Arab Spring and of the Spanish indignados, no movement in Italy managed to achieve the level of mass participation, symbolical strength and transversal recognition necessary to develop a general anti-austerity movement. In Italy, the anti-austerity mobilisations were strong but segmented in different fields of action. There was no unifying moment comparable to the 15 May demonstration in Spain (Errejón, 2011).

The Italian Diffusion of the Indignados Identity The labels indignados, or the Italian translation indignati, were initially only used in the media (here I focus on articles in La Repubblica, the largest circulation newspaper in Italy) to refer to Spain (Ciai, 2011a, 2011b; Gotor, 2011; Lazar, 2011) or Greece (Livini, 2011a, 2011b). The media subsequently started to use these terms to identify not only the small and isolated group camped in Piazza San Giovanni in Rome which explicitly appropriated the label (G., 2011), but also the activists belonging to the student movement, the unions and others (Capelli, 2011). The media stretched the indignados identity, turning it into a passepartout that could define any protester. Journalists desperately searched the web for some Italian indignado (Saviano, 2011), while individual activists (e.g. precarious public workers mobilising against the government) started to use the term in their public discourse (Mania, 2011), especially as movement definitions referring to previous waves of mobilisation, like the no global label, were ridiculed by the media (Calandri, 2011). Between July and August, the media saliency of the indignados label activated a circuit, involving both journalists and activists, in which the word indignados identified almost every kind of protester: citizens mobilising against a corrupt mayor (Marozzi, 2011), young writers (De Santis, 2011) and precarious teachers (Intravaia, 2011). In September, this representation was so powerful in the public sphere that social movement organisations started to use deliberately not only the word indignati but also the tent as a symbol commonly associated with indignados identity. On 4 September, the steelworkers’ union FIOM camped in Turin (Parola, 2011); the following day, the autonomous social centre Cantiere camped in front of the Milan Stock Exchange (Pisa, 2011); on 6 September, the grass roots trade union Usb camped near to the Senate in Rome (Serloni, 2011). All these acampadas involved only a few activists from specific organised groups, and lasted only a few hours. Activists seemed more interested in the symbolic aspects of the Spanish movement, which granted the media saliency connected with the fashionable indignados identity, than in following the example of the 15M in its actual characteristics (Huges, 2011). From 17 September, the indignados label also absorbed Occupy Wall Street: demonstrators in New York were defined as indignados (Aquaro, 2011; Rampini, 2011a, 2011b) and the symbolic representation of the

Spanish and American mobilisations became so entrenched that, in the 92 articles in La Repubblica containing the word ‘occupy’ in October and November, 86 contained also indignados or indignati. These articles reported news from the USA, but also and mainly from Italy, given that in these two months, all the different protest events organised by different groups of activists were framed, both by the media and by the activists themselves, within the indignados/occupy identity. The first event, on 7 October, was the national student strike called by the school students’ union Unione degli Studenti. The articles reported that tents were pitched in a square in Bologna (Venturi, 2011) and the protest was generally defined ‘indignados style’ (Lerner, 2011; Zunino, 2011a). Three different phenomena seem to have interacted in this particular kind of diffusion: the instrumental choice of organised groups, which tried to allude to the indignados symbolic repertoire in order to look new and international and to gain popular participation and media attention; the symbolic resonance of the Spanish and American mobilisations, which encouraged individuals to mobilise in the same way, to call themselves indignados and to bring a tent to the demonstration; the established tendency of the media to interpret any collective action through the lens of another familiar or fashionable example (Bird & Dardenne, 1988). These three factors interacted in different ways on different occasions; on 12 October, Draghi Ribelli (‘rebel dragons’), a group of activists from Roman social centres and student groups, started #occupiamobankitalia, protesting in front of the national bank in Rome, whose then chairman, Mario Draghi, was to become the chairman of the ECB (Angeli & Vitale, 2011). In this case, the prevailing factor was the action repertoire instrumentally adopted by activists, who tried to look as much like indignados as possible in order to activate a symbolic resonance in public opinion and trigger mass mobilisation. Very few people camped, and in a similar initiative in Bologna, activists tried to enter the local offices of the national bank, clashing with the police (Cori, 2011), showing that in the Italian political context ‘occupy’ has a different meaning than in the American political context. The public recognition of an indignados identity for the Italian mobilisation was further challenged on 15 October, the global day of action called by the 15M.

The indignados identity and the big event: 15 October

The role of events is recognised as fundamental in building and shaping collective identity (della Porta, 2008, p. 49). As far as the indignados/occupy identity is concerned, this is particularly accurate: the Spanish 15M movement took its name from the day of the first large demonstration, while the American name derives from its specific choice of occupation of symbolically powerful spaces. But this can be both a resource and a constraint: if the actual experience of an event and its representation in the media do not meet the expectations connected with a particular collective identity, the process of identification by protesters and bystanders is at risk. This is what happened in Italy on 15 October. Both the organisation of the demonstration (called by a platform of national social and political groups, involving unions and parties, and organised as a traditional national march in the centre of Rome) and what happened in the streets (several hundred activists dressed in black set off a violent riot, occupying for hours the square in which the demonstration was due to end and people were supposed to camp; Zunino, 2011b) were in open contradiction with the expectations of the previous days (Bonini, 2011; De Luca, 2011) and with some of the main features of the indignados identity as it had been represented in the media in the previous months: unity, the invisibility of organised groups, the organisation of local events, innovation in protest repertoires, the absence of violence. After 15 October, it became difficult to use the indignados label to identify the movement. This was not the only negative outcome of 15 October. What happened in the demonstration also damaged the mobilisation in two other ways: on the one hand, the different interpretations of the riots by different political groups active in the mobilisation (some praised them, while most condemned them) made it more difficult for them to work together in the following months; on the other hand, the riots in Piazza San Giovanni made it impossible for people to camp there, starting what was supposed to be the first Italian acampada. For the purposes of this paper, the contradiction between what happened in the streets and the indignados identity is the most relevant factor: the pictures in the Italian newspapers, on the day after the demonstration, were different from those in any other country. Therefore, the use of the indignados identity by activists to recruit people and to gain media coverage, after 15 October, became much more difficult, because neither media nor potential activists knew which image was to associate with the

indignados label: the acampada in Plaza del Sol in Madrid or the riots in Piazza San Giovanni in Roma? In fact, the media sources that contributed to the diffusion of an indignados identity (one that is quite different from what emerges from the pictures of 15 October) immediately created a distinction that defined as ‘indignados’ only the peaceful demonstrators and resurrected the old global justice movement label ‘black bloc’ for violent demonstrators (Zunino, 2011b). In the second half of October, 119 articles in La Repubblica contained the term ‘black bloc’. The violence in Piazza San Giovanni thus contradicted expectations connected with the indignados identity, destroying the symbolic construction that activists and media had been building for months, and furthermore brought back old debates (violence/nonviolence) and old definitions (‘black bloc’), symbolically connected with old movements and old defeats (the 1970s, the global justice movement, etc.). The events thereby contradicted the narrative of the ‘new’ indignados movement able to overcome ideological distinctions and errors of the past.

The decline of the indignados identity in the Italian mobilisation After 15 October, divisions among the activists and political groups that participated in the anti-austerity mobilisations grew: on the following global day of action, 11 November, in some Italian cities, such as Rome (Favale & Giannoli, 2011) and Naples (Di Costanzo, 2011), the public debate was still based on the supposed risk of violence, while in Bologna two different autonomous social centres started two different acampadas in competition with each other (Stinco, 2011). The use of the indignados label in the media rapidly decreased, and on 17 November, most articles covering the national student strike, contra events of 7 October, did not use the word indignados to identify the protesters. In the following days, the word indignados was used only to report the end of some short-lived acampada (Vanni, 2011), and in December went back to where it had started, in the international section of newspapers (Ciai, 2011c; Stiglitz, 2011).

Hypotheses on a Failure: The Political Context It is impossible to deny the fundamental role played, in this process, by the sudden change in the political opportunity structure (POS) caused by the fall of Silvio Berlusconi. In 2010, in fact, the POS was particularly favourable for the movements: the right-wing government was weak, damaged in public opinion by sexual scandals involving the premier, and in parliament by the split of Gianfranco Fini from Berlusconi’s party, and there were great opportunities for the movement to find allies from within the elites (in the media, in parliament and in academia). On 16 November 2011, Berlusconi resigned in the midst of an acute debt crisis and a ‘technical government’ (without politicians in the cabinet) led by economist Mario Monti was appointed. The POS radically changed: the new government was strong, supported in parliament by a grand coalition involving the three major parties, and in public opinion by a feeling of ‘national unity’ spread by the mainstream media. Furthermore, Monti’s strength in the public sphere was enhanced by the use of technicality as an authority principle and as a device of reduction of dissent. Over the previous months, Berlusconi had functioned as a shield for the common targets of the European anti-austerity movements (ECB, IMF, financial system, etc): while he was in power, all the country’s social and economic problems could be attributed to him, while elsewhere the blame went to supranational neoliberal policies. Although activists, throughout the 2008–2011 anti-austerity wave of mobilisation, had tried to frame their protest in a post-political way, building an anti-austerity message able to transcend the struggle with the right-wing government (Caruso et al., 2010), Berlusconi’s shadow was overwhelming in the Italian public sphere, and he and his ministers were often targets over corruption and lack of legitimacy. Under the new government, this line of argument was redundant, with new and more severe austerity measures imposed by qualified, honest and successful professors and businessmen. Furthermore, the financial emergency pushed many social and political actors, like the centre-left Democratic Party, trade unions and the progressive mainstream newspaper La Repubblica from a position of opposition to Berlusconi’s austerity measures to one of support for Monti, leaving the movements without possible allies and without any public

legitimacy for opposition to austerity measures now almost universally considered to be the only way to ‘save Italy’ (Faris, 2011). On 17 November, when the traditional demonstrations for the International Students’ Day coincided with the inauguration speech of premier Monti in the Senate, people were asking of activists: ‘Who are you protesting against?’

Hypotheses on a Failure: Diffusion, Cycles of Protest and Coalition Building Berlusconi’s fall was sudden but not unexpected. In fact, the adoption of an indignados identity, for many Italian activists, was instrumental in influencing the outcome of the long-awaited governmental crisis. The scholarship on social movements has already ‘shown how activists construct, deconstruct, celebrate and enact collective identities as strategies of protest’ (Polletta & Jasper, 2001, p. 294). Nevertheless, this attempt of symbolic appropriation failed. I do not consider the change in the POS to be a sufficient reason to explain the failure of Fall 2011. The 15 October demonstration is the most obvious example of trends that characterised the whole season, and that might be usefully analysed not only in relationship with the political context, but also with the problems of diffusion and coalition building in different stages of a cycle of protest. Scholarship has already shown the role of structural contingencies in diffusion (Bunce & Wolchik, 2006; Beissinger, 2007), and I think that further analysis is needed on this topic. Collective identities, like any other cultural construct can be interpreted and modified, but, as research on collective memory has shown, their malleability is limited (Spillman, 1998); they come with a whole set of references and connotations attached, and some of these might not fit in the actual situation of the movement. This concept might help us to understand the failure of the Italian mobilisations of Fall 2011. In fact, we may be able to explain some of the difficulties experienced by Italian activists in meeting the expectations connected with the indignados identity by the fact that, in 2011, they had already organised three years of anti-austerity mobilisations. And we already know that, in terms of politicisation, repertoires of action and coalition building, time matters.

How does diffusion work between waves of mobilisation at different stages of their development? Broad and inclusive identities and non-violent practices are usually considered typical of the early phase of a mobilisation, while in an advanced phase of a cycle of protest, when activists have elaborated deeper and more precise political thinking and experienced repression, arrests and defeat, politicisation of the movement and radicalisation of the repertoire of action are usually considered more likely (Tarrow, 1989). I do not consider this some kind of iron law of cycles of protest: rather, path-dependency mechanisms may be observed in the development of some waves of mobilisation, and this seems to apply to this case. In fact, some of the most particular elements of the Spanish indignados identity, such as the invisibility of organised groups, a-political identity and the stress on breadth, political transversality and non-violence are quite similar to the main features of the Onda Anomala (Caruso et al., 2010). As I have already explained, from 2008 onwards the Italian movement became increasingly politicised. It was not easy, therefore, for activists to revert to less radical and more down-to-earth contents. Furthermore, the repertoire of action of the indignados/occupy identity was initially based on the peaceful and symbolic occupation of public spaces: something that Italian activists, especially from the student movement, had already experienced in 2008 (occupation of universities and public squares) and overcome, in terms of radicality, in 2010 (occupation of monuments, blockades of streets and railways), and both times mobilisation ended in a defeat at the policy level. Therefore, even if many activists understood the need for a new beginning, involving a larger part of the population, I observed how strange it felt, for them, to give up the different political paths they were following in order to fit into the indignados framework. Another relevant factor is the role of organisational and coalitional dynamics in the building of an indignado movement. Scholarship has already shown how superficial narratives of spontaneity (Polletta, 2006) and myths of immaculate conception (Meyer & Rohlinger, 2012) are in explaining collective action. Planning an ‘unplanned’ protest and hiding pre-existing identities are strategic choices activists can make, in particular in the early stages of mobilisation. Furthermore, often ‘social movements are coalition affairs, featuring sometimes loosely negotiated alliances among groups and individuals with different agendas’ (Meyer & Corrigall-

Brown, 2005, p. 329), especially in very politicised contexts. Coalitions can be invisible and informal, but, most of the time, they exist. Participation carries a price: ‘an organisation may obscure its own identity in service of a larger movement, diminishing its visibility in mass media or its capacity to recruit members. […] During favourable political circumstances, groups are likely to have less interest in cooperating with others’ (ibid., pp. 331–332). For many reasons, in the Fall of 2011, the informal coalition which had supported the anti-austerity mobilisation of the previous years was loose: the increasing politicisation of the movement had deepened the differences among the political groups, all the groups had increased their level of militancy, the excitement around the expected fall of Berlusconi raised expectations of great opportunities to seize in the following months and groups planned to seize them in different ways. On the other hand, the pressure of international examples made the perspective of building a united mobilisation more appealing. I observed in many attempts to start acampadas that the trade-off between the visibility of groups and the unity of the movement stalled mobilisation. Organised groups tended to prefer their own visibility whilst they were not sure that the movement would really develop, and only when they had seen the first big assemblies and demonstrations would they give up their share of sovereignty and recognise the movement as the legitimate common actor; but the initial tendency towards visibility and differentiation made the mobilisation less appealing for bystanders and potential activists, and therefore made its development more difficult. This is not uncommon in the early phases of mobilisation. Sometimes, external factors break the deadlock: the media, a particular social or political context or a nice sunny day bring to the streets a sufficient number of people to overcome resistance. At other times, it is up to activists to take that leap of faith and bet on the opportunities of a movement they have not seen yet. But in this particular case, the usual difficulties of coalition building were increased by the development of the cycle of protest: starting a new wave of mobilisation from the beginning, really embracing the indignados identity with a real process of reflexivity and challenging original identities, would have meant giving away much of what had been built, in terms of anti-austerity politicisation, in the previous years. Paradoxically, the high level of politicisation in a social context—in part rooted in a long history, in part produced by an ongoing cycle of protest—

can be both a resource and a constraint for collective action, because the more populated and articulated a movement environment is, the more difficult it is to squeeze it into a specific framework.

Conclusions It would be unwise to draw conclusions from hypotheses based on personal experiences, even if they are analysed through the lenses of scholarship. Therefore, I will simply point out two possible directions for the development of research built on the foregoing reflections. The first one is a further analysis on the structure and identity of social movements: who is the movement? The individuals, the groups, the coalition? Recent examples hint towards a more process-oriented understanding of collective action, in which boundaries between the movement and external actors are blurry, given the fundamental role that some of them (like the media) have had in its development. The second direction I propose points towards the relationship between cultural constraints (Polletta, 2004), habitus (Jasper, 2012) and creative innovation, especially in processes of transnational diffusion and adaptation. In fact, I have pointed out various obstacles, constraints and path dependencies, and at the same time I have shown how activists, with creative innovations, tried to overcome them. They failed, but it does not necessarily mean that it was impossible. Maybe they were not creative enough.

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Lorenzo Zamponi is a Researcher at the Department of Political and Social Sciences in the European University Institute, in Florence (Italy), working on the relationship between collective memory and social movements. His research interests include public memory, contentious politics, student movements and media. He participated as an activist of the student union Rete della Conoscenza to the mobilisations described in the piece.

Beyond the Network? Occupy London and the Global Movement SAM HALVORSEN Department of Geography, University College London, London, UK ABSTRACT This article argues that paying attention to the spatialities of the Occupy movement, and in particular the role of territory, suggests that the dominant metaphor of the network may be insufficient to understanding the diverse spatial strategies of contemporary social movements. The aim of presenting this argument is both to be provocative and also to take seriously the Occupy movement’s ‘politics of asking’, not shying away from asking challenging questions. It starts by introducing the reader to the Occupy London movement and its autonomous tendencies of non-hierarchical organisation and do it yourself politics. It then places Occupy London within the wider movement and compares it to the alter-globalisation movement, a similar example of a global movement for socio-economic justice. It is argued that understanding the autonomous politics of the alterglobalisation movement through the logic of networking is not only useful but also limiting in its potentials for conceptualising non-hierarchical organising. The remainder of the essay considers how Occupy may be moving beyond the network as a dominant organisational form and political goal. Specifically, it draws on the author’s experiences at international gatherings and in the international commission working group of Occupy London and argues that there has been a renewed attention to territory and territoriality. This does not imply that networked spatialities of activism have become less important but raises questions over the centrality of networked thinking to contemporary understandings of global movements. By way of conclusion, this articles poses questions for activists and academics interested in Occupy.

Following the eviction of its flagship occupation at St Paul’s courtyard on 27 February 2012, Occupy London represents one of the longest lasting examples of Occupy camps in the world. Occupy London has been about much more than a camp outside a Cathedral, however. Since its birth on 15 October 2011, activists occupied a separate camp in a neighbouring borough (which was evicted on 14 June 2012) as well as numerous buildings, including an old UBS bank and disused primary school. Moreover, it has created a diverse array of working groups, focusing on everything from alternative economic models to online ‘livestreaming’. I write this article as both committed activist and academic researcher, involved in Occupy London from the start, but in my own particular ways. I do not seek to fully represent the diverse experiences and perspectives of those who go under the ‘Occupy’ banner. I have two main aims in writing this. Firstly, I introduce the reader to the Occupy London movement. I do so in the following section by outlining what I see as some of its key tendencies. Secondly, I place Occupy London within the global Occupy movement. Specifically, I compare it to the last time a global movement for socio-economic justice was proclaimed, which was largely focused around the logic of the network. The remainder of this essay then interrogates the metaphor of the network and considers how other spatial strategies, in particular relating to territory, are suggesting a politics that moves beyond the network as the dominant spatiality of activism. I end by posing some questions for further thought.

Occupy London: Creating Other Worlds Occupy London did not appear in a vacuum. The recent experiences of the Spanish indignados, the prior Arab Spring and of course the inception of Occupy itself in New York no doubt had important, although different, impacts in London. Moreover, the financial crisis and subsequent austerity measures in the UK were probably significant in mobilising people. Yet the paths that led Occupiers to get involved in London are multiple and diverse, as are their political ideas and opinions. I find it helpful to understand Occupy London as a process of grassroots activism, broadly conceptualised as a form of autonomous politics. In order to elaborate on this, I focus here on two key tendencies of Occupy London: non-hierarchical organising and ‘do it yourself’ (DIY) politics.

Following the call to ‘Occupy the London Stock Exchange’ on 15 October 2011, activists were unable to get near the heavily guarded building, and instead gathered in the neighbouring courtyard of St Paul’s cathedral. After a short period of hesitation and uncertainty, we gathered on the steps of St Paul’s and started our first general assembly (GA). The GA is the backbone of the Occupy movement and is the space through which all collective decisions are made. Based on consensus decision making, which involves numerous hand signals and facilitation techniques, the idea is that a group works together in order to reach outcomes that are acceptable to all. Often, however, the outcome of the GA is less important than the process of making decisions itself. Occupy London has formed dozens of autonomous working groups, focusing on everything from practical issues such as kitchens and first aid to groups discussing alternative economic models and links between the financial crisis and the environment. Some of the latter have produced statements, subsequently approved at a GA, outlining some common thoughts of the collective. For many working groups, Occupy London has been a constant process of experimenting with different ways of doing things, from managing our internal finances to creating alternative models of education. The provisional nature of working groups, constantly shifting their focus and remit (and participants), is reflective of an open politics that recognises it does not have the answers. Rather, it is the process of asking questions that defines how Occupy functions. As the Zapatista rebels say, ‘walking, we ask questions’. As we ask questions, we keep taking action. Central to Occupy London has been a commitment to doing. Rather than resisting the multiple crises of capitalism, we have been concerned with the ways we can create alternatives. This represents a DIY politics that seeks to make the changes we want to see in the here and now. We have set up a Tent City University that has provided a diverse range of seminars and discussions, as well as facilitated ‘teach outs’ in front of banks. We have taken direct action, shutting down the headquarters of FTSE100 companies whilst simultaneously talking about already-existing economic alternatives. We have occupied a disused primary school set for demolition and turned it into a space for community organising and providing local services. This autonomous politics of Occupy London, asking questions and taking direct action, should not be romanticised, however. From the start we have

had numerous internal tensions and problems. This includes the (re)creation of patriarchal relations in our autonomous spaces; numerous hierarchies based on experience, skills and confidence and incidents of violence, abuse and disruption, violating our ‘safer space’ policy. Our autonomous politics must thus be understood as existing in the interstitial spaces both within and beyond the hierarchical spaces of contemporary capitalism (see Pickerell & Chatterton, 2006). These ‘cracks in capitalism’ (Holloway, 2010), in which we experiment with other possible worlds, are not confined to the temporal spatialities of Occupy London, however. In what ways, then, is Occupy London part of a ‘global’ movement? In order to answer this, it is useful to consider the last time a global movement was announced.

Alter-Globalisation Movement Following claims that ‘there-is-no-alternative’ to neoliberal globalisation, and the subsequent ‘end of history’ (Fukuyama, 1992), it became apparent that many had alternative imaginations. After the insurgency of the Zapatista army against ‘free trade’, and the subsequent initiation of the People’s Global Action network, social movements around the world were coming together in a common struggle often labelled the ‘alter-globalisation movement’. Although the media preferred to label it anti-globalisation, it was clear that rather than being against globalisation per se, this movement was specifically rejecting dominant neoliberal forms of globalisation, whilst actively creating a diversity of alternative worlds. For this reason, following several high-profile international mobilisations at the summits of global governance institutions, much of the alterglobalisation movement united around the slogan ‘another world is possible’ in the new World Social Forum (WSF). Meeting annually, the WSF sought to create an open space in which movements celebrate their diversity and thought about how to foster links and support each other. It aimed to be a non-hierarchical and horizontal space that explicitly avoided any formal decision-making structures. Whilst many celebrated this new grassroots form of globalisation (de Sousa Santos, 2006), there were also numerous criticisms (Adamovsky, 2005). This included complaints over lack of transparency in the organising committees, and the prominent role of large hierarchal organisations, in particular the Brazilian Workers Party who played a strong role in its formation.

The Logic of Networking The concerns underlying the WSF process are arguably reflective of broader tensions of the alter-globalisation movement that can be understood through an examination of its dominant metaphor: the network. The work of Manuel Castells is often held as a key descriptor of the contemporary ‘network society’ in which the ‘space of flows’ has come to dominate the ‘space of places’ (Castells, 1996). Similarly, Hardt and Negri (2000, p. 45) claim that any attempt to build alternatives to neoliberal globalisation via place-based politics ‘misidentifies and thus masks the enemy’. Unlike previous experiments to build alternatives through vanguard politics and top-down processes, contemporary alternatives must be found in the flows of the global multitude, made possible by the new forms of social interaction in the network society. Many have attributed the successes of the alter-globalisation movement to its logic of networking. Building on Castells, Juris (2004) claims that the alter-globalisation movement, in particular its autonomous tendencies, was based around the ‘cultural logic of networking’ in which the network was both a mode of organising and a new cultural model to strive for. Juris (2004, p. 347) claims that the network allows local autonomous groups to directly connect and form part of a global justice movement ‘without compromising their autonomy or specificity’. The WSF can be seen as an important node within the network, facilitating this process of connection between diverse groups and helping to strengthen the alter-globalisation movement. A key tension underlying the logic of networking has been the continued prevalence of hierarchical structures. Routledge (2008, p. 212) has traced this problem to central social actors that he terms ‘imagineers’, ‘[who] have far more capacity to direct the course of relations than others’. Whilst these imagineers can act as an important driving force underlying the network, they also reproduce the hierarchy of power relations that exist within capitalist society, utilising their greater access to resources to attend global gatherings such as the WSF. For Escobar (2004), the tensions underlying the WSF were due to the prevalence of imagineers that came from hierarchical organisations (e.g. trade unions or political parties), and subsequently imposed their own agenda on the network. He claimed that

greater attention needs to be given to the ‘rules of interaction’ between the various nodes of the network. According to Escobar (2004), networks can thus be understood through two competing structures: that of hierarchies or the dominant ‘spaces of flows’ in capitalism and that of the ‘meshwork’, based on a self-organised and non-hierarchical politics of emergence. A crucial challenge for the WSF has been to provide an interface for diverse movements to interact whilst simultaneously preventing the (re)creation of hierarchical structures. With the emergence of the Occupy movement, there has been a renewed focus on the rules of interaction in global networks and a noticeable hesitation towards creating interfaces such as the WSF. Moreover, my recent experiences with the Occupy movement suggest that the logic of networking, whilst still important, is no longer being privileged as the dominant spatial strategy and that other spatialities are playing an important role.

Beyond the Network in the Global Occupy Movement Networks of information and exchange are clearly important to the Occupy movement, as seen in the use of online spaces such as the ‘takethesquare.net’ listserv. However, my experiences in the Occupy movement suggest that so far there is little desire, and perhaps even a reluctance, to create the infrastructure for a global networked movement. Firstly, I have attended international gatherings together with other Occupiers from around the world, Spanish indignados and activists from the Arab Spring. This included an anti-G20 summit in Nice and a WSForganised gathering in Porto Alegre. A few years ago, such events would have been held as key nodes within the alter-globalisation movement, providing ‘convergence spaces’ (Routledge, 2003) for diverse movements to interact. Just a handful of years later, global convergence spaces appear very marginal to the Occupy movement. Indeed most Occupiers were unaware that these convergences were happening, and those that were generally paid little attention to them. Even for those participating, I witnessed concerns over the need to respect the diversity of processes that exist between our movements, and strong hesitations towards the creation of any central interfaces such as the WSF (Halvorsen, 2011).

My second experience with the ‘global’ movement has been through Occupy London’s international commission working group. Following several months of discussions, the international commission decided that its main task should be just focused around communication—seeking to filter information from around the world into Occupy London, as well as maintaining dialogue with other Occupy movements. There was no suggestion, however, of creating central processes such as the WSF to help facilitate transnational networking. Moreover, many activists in Occupy London have been unaware of the international commission’s existence and the work they have been doing. Juris’ (2004, p. 357) observations of global movements creating networks as new ‘cultural models for radically reconstituting politics and society’ seem less relevant to Occupy. The reluctance to create global convergence spaces and infrastructures for the network suggests a renewed commitment to non-hierarchy that puts into question both the scale of organising and the function of global networks.

Territories of the Occupy Movement Central to the Occupy movement has been the occupation and subversion of prominent urban public spaces. As well as looking beyond the network as a key model for its politics, Occupy has given renewed attention to territory. This can be seen in three important ways. Firstly, territories have been essential for the practice of Occupy’s autonomous and prefigurative politics. Whilst online technologies have undoubtedly facilitated decentralised communication, Occupy has also highlighted the limits of the ‘facebook revolution’, and shown the need to be grounded in place. The importance of grounding politics and recreating particular territories has been observed for a long time in autonomous politics (Goyens, 2009). Occupy is thus an important reminder that alternative imaginations for other worlds need territories as much as the connections that unite them across space. Secondly, liberating territories for autonomous experiments towards other possible worlds often leads to defensive territorial strategies. As noted above, Occupy London can be seen as existing in interstitial spaces, and these are often highly fragile and sensitive to disruption. Territoriality, defined as ‘the attempt by an individual or group to affect, influence, or control people, phenomena, and relationships, by delimiting and asserting

control over a geographic area’ (Sack, 1986, p. 19), is thus very important to Occupy. Territoriality is not only a defensive strategy but also can be seen as an offensive weapon. Thirdly, then, Occupy London has been ‘taking’ and ‘holding’ spaces such as entrances to train stations or shopping centres in order to excerpt an influence on the flows that pass through. Indeed, by locating themselves in the heart of the City of London, it has provided a ‘counter-temporality’ (Adams, 2011) to the fast-paced rhythms and flows around them, and, in opposition to Hardt and Negri’s ‘multitude’, used fixity and territory as a weapon (see Invisible Committee, 2008). This has reasserted the agency of territorially based social movements, against the trend to always extend outwards and build connections. Recognising the importance of territory to the Occupy movement does not imply that networks are less important. Indeed numerous studies have highlighted the importance of territories in providing resources and support to sustain networked movements (Bosco, 2001; Lacey, 2005). Nor does it suggest that place-based movements should be thought of as closed and against building extra-local relations (Featherstone, 2008). Rather, it allows us to pay closer attention to the spatial strategies being used in the Occupy movement, and reconsider how doing autonomous politics in globalised movements interacts with space whilst creating other possible worlds. The messy reality of activism involves engaging with numerous spatialities (Leitner et al., 2008), and care should be taken not to overly privilege any one by itself.

Conclusion My experiences with Occupy London have highlighted the importance of autonomous politics to the movement. Moreover, my involvement in Occupy as a global movement has suggested that we need to reconsider the dominant spatial metaphors we use to conceptualise contemporary social movements. Specifically, Occupy seems to be moving beyond the logic of networking as an over-arching model of organisation and ‘guiding ideal’ for the movement (Juris, 2004). In order to understand the ways in which Occupy is building its autonomous politics, we thus need to consider not only how it is generating networks but also how it is (re)creating particular territories. Fetishising the network as an all-encompassing spatial logic of social movements ignores the messy and dynamic ways in which activists

engage with space. The critiques of global networks that were highlighted in the alter-globalisation movement should thus be taken forward together with a reconsideration of the multiple spatialities of activism. The argument presented here has hopefully been thought provoking but is clearly incomplete. In conclusion, and in the spirit of Occupy’s ‘politics of asking’, I finish by posing some questions for further thought. Firstly, to what extent is it appropriate or desirable to talk of Occupy London as part of a global movement? This question is of significance to activists as they consider ways forward, and possibilities for future collaborations and international processes. It is important to learn from past experiences and remain open to new ways of conceptualising our politics. Secondly, if Occupy represents a shift away from the dominant metaphor of the network, then the obvious question is what next? Do we need another metaphor to provide the movement with newfound agency and confidence in itself? Or is this an unnecessary intellectual challenge that distracts from the very messy and dynamic politics on the ground? Occupy has re-awoken the radical imaginations of activists and scholars around the world. Let us use this moment to keep walking together and to never stop asking questions.

Acknowledgements The author is grateful to the following people for their feedback on drafts of this paper: Tess Carota, Pooya Ghoddousi, Kevin Gillan and Anna Plyushteva. The author also thanks the Occupy Research Collective for discussions around much of the content of this paper.

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Featherstone, D. (2008) Resistance, Space and Political Identity: The Making of Counter-Global Networks (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell). Fukuyama, F. (1992) The End of History and the Last Man (London: Penguin). Goyens, T. (2009) Social space and the practice of anarchist history, Rethinking History, 13(4), pp. 439–457. Halvorsen, S. (2011) Occupying: The politics of process, Society and Space. Available at http://societyandspace.com/2011/12/12/sam-halvorsen-occupying-the-politics-of-process (accessed 4 March 2012). Hardt, M. & Negri, A. (2000) Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Holloway, J. (2010) Crack Capitalism (London: Pluto Press). Invisible Committee (2008) The Coming Insurrection, Semiotext(e). Available at http://tarnac9.wordpress.com/texts/the-coming-insurrection (accessed 4 March 2012). Juris, J. S. (2004) Networked social movements: Global movements for global justice, in: M. Castells (Ed.) The Network Society: A Cross-Cultural Perspective (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar). Lacey, A. (2005) Networked communities: Social centers and activist spaces in contemporary Britain, Space and Culture, 8(3), pp. 286–301. Leitner, H., Sheppard, E. & Sziarto, M. (2008) The spatialities of contentious politics, Transactions of the Institute for British Geographers, 33, pp. 157–172. Pickerell, J. & Chatterton, P. (2006) Notes towards autonomous geographies: creation, resistance and self-management as survival tactics, Progress in Human Geography, 30(6), pp. 1–7. Routledge, P. (2003) Convergence space: Process geographies of grassroots globalization networks, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 28, pp. 333–349. Routledge, P. (2008) Acting in the network: ANT and the politics of generating associations, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 26, pp. 199–217. Sack, R. (1986) Human Territoriality: Its Theory and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Sam Halvorsen is an M.Phil./Ph.D. candidate at University College London (UCL) in the Department of Geography funded by the ESRC. His research is focused on the spatial strategies of the Occupy Movement, and in particular the role of territory and territoriality. As an active participant of the Occupy London movement, his methodology is based on a (con)fusion of his dual roles as activist and researcher. Previously he completed an M.Sc. in Globalisation at UCL, researching the politics of place in a student occupation. More broadly, he is interested in new ways of conceptualising the geographies of activism and the role of autonomous politics in particular.

Negotiating Power and Difference within the 99% JEFFREY S. JURIS*, MICHELLE RONAYNE**1, FIRUZEH SHOKOOH-VALLE***2 & ROBERT WENGRONOWITZ†3 Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA, **Nova Psychiatric, Quincy, MA, USA, •Department of Sociology, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA, USA *

ABSTRACT The Occupy movements have given voice to the widespread frustration that so few (the 1%) seem to hold all the power. The vast majority (the 99%) lacks an (equal) say in the social, economic, financial, political and ecological processes that affect our lives. Inspired by the 2011 global wave of protests including the Arab Spring, the Greek resistance, the acampadas in Spain, the Wisconsin uprising and the Israeli summer, and starting with the takeover of New York City’s Zuccotti Park on 17 September 2011, the Occupy movements have sought to overturn these power imbalances by using the occupation of public spaces, mass assemblies, tent cities and direct action to shine a light on the effects of growing inequality and the disproportionate influence of corporate power over our politics and economy. However, while the occupations rally against external systems of power, a widespread logic of aggregation and majoritarian populism have complicated efforts to recognize and address internal differences and inequalities. This article examines power and exclusion in the Occupy movements through an analysis of race within Occupy Boston, which began in late September 2011 and has continued in a decentralized fashion since the camp’s mid-December eviction. As scholar activists from diverse backgrounds, we employ observant participation, interviews and activist reflections to explore how occupiers in Boston have represented, negotiated and addressed internal power relations, suggesting that a shift toward networking logics, practices and forms offers a

promising avenue for engaging differences as well as racial, class and other modes of exclusion.

Introduction The facilitator, a white male, began the activity by asking for 20 diverse volunteers to line up side by side at the front of the crowd assembled at the Occupy Boston encampment at Dewey Square. He then issued a series of declarations: ‘If your ancestors lost land by the conquest of the U.S. government, step back; Step forward if your ancestors gained assets through the slave trade; Step back if your ancestors were brought here in chains to be slaves; Step back if you or your ancestors arrived as immigrants from Latin America, Asia, Africa, or the Caribbean’. These and other statements produced a visible line of stratification, with mostly white participants at the front and people of color toward the back. More than 250 occupiers took part in this much anticipated antioppression workshop on 16 October 2011 in response to the widely perceived lack of diversity and experiences of exclusion at Occupy Boston. That the General Assembly had been cancelled for the first time ever to create a space for the workshop underscored the importance of the evening, although as organizers later noted, the attendees included many more women and people of color than usual, suggesting a self-selecting audience. Nonetheless, this was one of the first times Occupy Boston had addressed, in a collective and public way, the significant differences and power relations that despite the populist rhetoric continue to permeate the 99%. This essay reflects on the dynamics of power and exclusion within Occupy Boston and the Occupy movements more generally. We focus on race and class, as did the anti-oppression workshop described above, but it is important to note that gender, sexuality, race and class all intersect to create overlapping systems of oppression. Within Occupy Boston, activists are constantly negotiating and contesting their places, identities, relationships and positions within complex webs of power. Indeed, a clearcut understanding of power fueled the Occupy movements, as the discourse of the 99% versus the 1% united a vast group of people who felt they were being increasingly excluded from the fruits of society. This dualistic framework was a potent way to facilitate collective mobilization and

political action, but the majoritarian populism reflected in the 99% frame, itself shaped by a powerful logic of aggregation in the Occupy movements (see below), has complicated efforts to recognize and address internal differences, inequalities and exclusions. Through our own engaged ‘observant participation’ (Vargas, 2006) and semi-structured interviews with a dozen activists, we explore how occupiers have represented, negotiated and addressed internal power relations within Occupy Boston, suggesting that a shift toward networking logics, practices and forms offers a strategically promising avenue for engaging social differences as well as racial, class and other modes of exclusion. As scholar activists from diverse disciplines and backgrounds—two sociologists, an anthropologist and a psychologist; one of us is a white woman, another a woman from Puerto Rico and two of us are white men (we are all US citizens, identify as heterosexuals and come from middle-class upbringings) —our goal is to contribute to discussions of difference and power in the Occupy movements through a particular focus on the dynamics of race and class, as well as alternative forms of organization within Occupy Boston. Our analysis points to the need for a deeper engagement with internal differences and power relations among occupiers, as well as a self-reflexive, adaptable approach toward negotiating and bridging such differences.4

The Rise of Occupy and the Pitfalls of Majoritarianism The Occupy movements have given voice to the widespread frustration that so few (the 1%) seem to hold all the power. The vast majority (the 99%) lacks an (equal) say in the social, economic, financial, political and ecological processes that affect (and threaten) our lives. Inspired by the 2011 global wave of protests including the Arab Spring, the Greek resistance, the acampadas in Spain, the Wisconsin uprising and the Israeli summer, and starting with the takeover of New York City’s Zuccotti Park on 17 September 2011, the Occupy movements have sought to overturn these power imbalances by using the physical occupation of public spaces, mass assemblies, tent cities and direct action to shine a light on the effects of growing inequality and the disproportionate influence of corporate power over our politics and economy, while simultaneously building a movement of equals where each voice is as important as every other.

Unlike the previous era of global justice activism, however, which involved a ‘movement of movements’ and was characterized by a powerful networking ethic of coordination across diversity and difference (Juris, 2008a), the Occupy movements with their majoritarian populist impulse and organizational logic of massing large numbers of individuals in concrete physical spaces (Juris, 2012) have had difficulty recognizing and addressing internal specificity and difference. The movements for global justice also had to confront a relative lack of racial and class diversity (Starr, 2004; Juris, 2008b), but their networking logic allowed them to grasp internal differentiation. As the occupations expanded beyond Zuccotti Park to cities across the USA, moreover, the use of social media together with extensive mass media coverage, after the first week at least, allowed occupiers to reach far beyond typical activist circles. This greatly expanded their base of organizing but also meant that many occupiers lacked an awareness of internal differences, privilege and intersecting racial, class, gender and other forms of domination typical of the wider society. Occupiers with greater experience, including many activists of color, have struggled to build awareness around these issues and to create structures and processes more conducive to the participation of marginalized groups. The critique of the Occupy movement’s homogenizing discourse and practice expressed, for example, in the successful effort by a group of women of color to remove ‘post-racial’ language from Occupy Wall Street’s Declaration of Occupation,5 also extended to the concept of the 99% itself, which was widely recognized as a powerful semantic coup that frames the Occupy movement as a majoritarian challenge to the disproportionate political and economic influence of an elite few, but which also made internal differentiation more difficult to address. As Becky,6 a white antiracist organizer in Occupy Boston, pointed out, the 99% frame ‘is ingenious and amazing in its simplicity, what I think is a problem is that it was taken on as “we are already the 99%.” For us to win against the 1% we need the 99%, not 23% of the 99%’. Although individuals from marginalized groups did have a presence at Occupy Boston, including activists of color and members of the ‘houseless’ community (this semantic shift was used pervasively at the Dewey Square encampment), people of color and especially those from poor and workingclass communities, were significantly underrepresented, particularly given the demographics of Boston, where non-Hispanic whites comprise a

minority of the population. Beyond the challenge of recognizing internal differences and power relations, powerful structural barriers are also at work. Given the time and resources needed to participate in mass movements, not to mention the access to relevant information, it is no surprise that, with a few exceptions, contemporary movements in the USA —particularly those characterized by more informal, fast paced and individualized modes of participation—tend to be predominantly, if not entirely, composed of privileged actors with the economic, social and cultural capital necessary to effectively operate within them. In this sense, there has been an historical divide between the more ‘personalized’ politics of white and middle-class activists and the ‘communitarian’ politics of people of color communities that have tended to organize within more formalized grassroots organizations (Lichterman, 1996; cf. Juris, 2008b). Recognizing the need to both engage the unequal racial and class dynamics within Occupy Boston and negotiate differing organizational logics and forms, community organizers and occupiers began holding ‘movement-building’ meetings early on to attempt to bridge the divide between grassroots organizations and the comparatively white, middle-class occupiers. Organizers grappled with the challenge of how to work with a movement defined by an individualized mode of participation and voiced the importance of addressing the experiences of their working class, people of color constituencies: ‘the most deeply affected 15%’.7

Racial and Class Tensions within Occupy Boston The movement-building meetings were initiated as a way to address a divide that arose early on between Occupy Boston and a network of community-based organizations. The first night of the occupation, Friday, 30 September 2011, coincided with a mass action against the Bank of America regional headquarters organized by a local anti-foreclosure group —City Life/Vida Urbana—in conjunction with the national Right to the City Network. That protest brought together thousands of mostly lowincome people of color from across the country to engage in the largest anti-foreclosure action of its kind in Boston and perhaps anywhere in the USA. At the first assembly to plan Occupy Boston, which took place on the Boston Common just three days prior, organizers of the Right to the City event spoke out in an attempt to delay the occupation, pointing to the race

and class differences between the two protest groups and the need to support low-income communities of color. However, those early assemblies were chaotic, involving several hundred people, including many first-time activists, coming together in the dark, and most people did not fully grasp the issue, particularly those who missed the first assembly. Moreover, the lack of an agreement upon a set of basic principles, structures and protocols and the highly individualized nature of participation in the assembly made it difficult to recognize the collective needs and interests of the different groups that Occupy Boston might engage, the potential tensions between them and the alternative strategies, tactics and forms of organization through which diverse constituencies mobilize. Another incident of racial and class tension took place during the early days of Occupy Boston when a young white man claimed to have developed a list of common demands, sparking controversy when he failed to recognize that his list reflected his particular social location. As Jennifer, a middle-aged white member of the Occupy Boston facilitation working group, recalled: This is a privileged white male [who] stands up, and I think with the best of intentions, reads what his list of demands are, and he says he thinks he’s come up with a good list because he’s been inclusive and has talked to a lot of people, but nowhere in his list of demands was anything about our criminal justice system… or the fact that our constitution actually has written into it racism and is anti-women, like women don’t get the vote and blacks are 3/5 of a person. When people started questioning what’s in his list he got angry.

The point Jennifer was making was less about the specific content of the man’s list than a critique of his non-self-reflexive, universalizing assumptions and behavior. For Jennifer, it is important to step outside of one’s own privileged perspective, recognize internal differences and make sure that marginalized voices are included. Additional tensions more directly reflected structural contradictions and organizational differences between different communities. For example, Daniela, a Latina activist, explained that many of Occupy Boston’s structures and practices, including the time consuming assembly-based consensus processes, do not easily translate in the context of communities that use different forms of organizing, mobilizing and decision-making: ‘If the point was to involve community members and immigrants, it was an inaccessible language, it wasn’t connecting with the people’. Moreover,

‘consensus is very democratic, but it takes a lot of time, and time is one thing our folks don’t have’. For her part, Deborah, a young African American organizer, explained that the cultural tension between the individualism of mainstream occupiers and the communalism that, in her view, characterizes the grassroots organizations and people of color communities where she lives and works, contributed to her decision to back away from the movement. One way this tension played out was in her frustration with ‘autonomous actions’, which she felt undermined the collective will and put people from marginalized groups at risk. She believes in a diversity of tactics, but ‘there is also an importance to collective agreements, where you put what the community has decided as a whole above your own personal needs and desires’. She went on to implicitly criticize the highly personalized politics and logic of aggregation within Occupy Boston, lamenting that participation and proposal-making within the assemblies were driven by individuals, which discouraged more interactive and collective forms of decision-making where members of marginalized communities might feel more comfortable.

Recognizing Difference and Challenging Exclusion Occupiers have developed multiple strategies for recognizing differences within the 99%, negotiating privilege and challenging unequal relations of power. For example, multi-racial groups of organizers and activists, including many with previous anti-oppression training, have formed working groups and organized trainings and forums to raise awareness about and begin to address privilege and oppression within the movement. At Occupy Boston, the group that held the anti-oppression workshop depicted in ‘Introduction’ section went on to create the anti-oppression working group which has continued to meet regularly since, as has the Decolonize to Liberate group that formed to bring the perspective of indigenous struggles against colonialism to Occupy Boston. Meanwhile, members of traditionally marginalized groups have created their own spaces to discuss the needs and experiences of their members, while challenging exclusions of race, gender, class and sexuality and bringing a greater awareness of privilege and oppression to the struggle. At Occupy Boston, organizers and activists have created the People of Color Caucus, the Women’s Caucus and the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender

and Queer direct action working group. Outside Occupy Boston, organizers inspired by Occupy have started initiatives such as Occupy the Hood and Ocupemos el Barrio to mobilize working-class people of color constituencies using methodologies and engaging issues perceived as more relevant to their communities. Finally, the movement-building meetings that have attempted to bridge the divide between occupiers and communitybased groups have provided another forum for organizers and activists to engage differences and relations of power within Occupy Boston. In this way, experienced organizers and activists of color have created multiple autonomous spaces within and around Occupy Boston that have allowed for diverse constituencies with distinct organizing traditions, practices and forms to coexist and work together within a more or less coordinated movement field. A hybrid model of organization has thus begun to emerge combining a logic of networking with a logic of aggregation. Finally, innovations have also been introduced with respect to the assembly and decision-making processes to make them more accessible for working-class people and communities of color. These include a reduction in the number of General Assemblies per week from seven to four and finally to three, the introduction of a progressive stack where members of marginalized groups and those who have spoken less frequently are given preference on the list of people waiting to speak and the use of small group discussions to make deliberations surrounding proposals more inclusive, interactive and participatory. Nonetheless, critical challenges remain, such as ensuring that power, privilege and oppression are addressed outside particular caucuses and working groups, negotiating differences within marginalized groups and anti-oppression spaces, raising awareness and facilitating discussions without reproducing ideological rigidities and contending with the realities of lingering tensions and structural constraints to building diversity and cross-class, multi-racial alliances. This essay has explored some of the differences and exclusions along axes of race and class that were reproduced within Occupy Boston, as well as various efforts to address them. Not only is it crucial to address power differentials within the 99% but also efforts to engage marginalized groups, including working-class communities and people of color, can be enhanced by further incorporating networking logics, practices and forms that make it possible to recognize internal power relations, facilitate autonomous organization and grassroots participation and promote coordination across

diversity and difference. For example, the rise of ‘spokescouncils’ in many occupations, which provide smaller, more collective and interactive spaces for delegates of various working and affinity groups to communicate and coordinate, represents a promising shift in this direction. Although some occupiers, including participants in Occupy Boston, have viewed spokescouncils as a challenge to the authority of the General Assembly, signaling a tension between a logic of networking and a logic of aggregation, the two can and have effectively worked together: spokescouncils allowing for different groups and constituencies to organize autonomously in more intimate settings and then to coordinate their activities and actions, the General Assembly continuing to provide a mechanism for more individualized expression and decision-making around issues that affect the wider community.

Notes 1. Email: [email protected] 2. Email: [email protected] 3. Email: [email protected] 4. A special note of thanks to Bryan MacCormack, a student occupier, for participating in our research team by conducting an interview and sharing his insights regarding Occupy Boston. 5. The text that was removed included the following: ‘formerly (emphasis ours) divided by the color of our skin, gender, sexual orientation, religion, or lack thereof, political party and cultural background (Ashraf, 2011)’. See also Maharawal (2011). 6. Pseudonyms have been used throughout to protect individual identities. All quotes are from personal interviews unless otherwise indicated. 7. Interview with David, a participant in the movement-building meetings.

References Ashraf, H. (2011) Brown Power at Occupy Wall Street! 9/29/11, Blog post, Available at http://henaashraf.com/2011/09/30/brown-power-at-occupy-wall-street (accessed 8 April 2012). Juris, J. (2008a) Networking Futures: The Movements against Corporate Globalization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press). Juris, J. (2008b) Spaces of intentionality: race, class, and horizontality at the United States social forum, Mobilization, 13(4), pp. 353–372. Juris, J. (2012) Reflections on #occupy everywhere: social media, public space, and emerging logics of aggregation, American Ethnologist, 39(2), pp. 259–279. Lichterman, P. (1996) The Search for Political Community: American Activists Reinventing Commitment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Maharawal, M. M. (2011) So real it hurts: notes on Occupy Wall Street, Post to Facebook page, Available at http://www.racialicious.com/2011/10/03/so-real-it-hurts-notes-on-occupy-wall-street (accessed 8 April 2012).

Starr, A. (2004) How can anti-imperialism not be anti-racist: the North American anti-globalization movement, Journal of World-Systems Research, X(1), pp. 119–151. Vargas, J. H. C. (2006) Catching Hell in the City of Los Angeles (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press).

Jeffrey S. Juris is an associate professor of Anthropology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Northeastern University. He received his PhD in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, and is the author of Networking Futures: The Movements against Corporate Globalization (Duke University Press), Global Democracy and the World Social Forums (co-author, Paradigm Press) and numerous articles on social movements, transnational networks, new media and protest. His co-edited volume, Insurgent Encounters: Transnational Activism, Ethnography, and the Political, is forthcoming with Duke University Press, and he is currently writing a new book about free media and autonomy in Mexico. Michelle Ronayne has a PhD and MA in Clinical Psychology from Suffolk University in Boston, MA. In addition, she received her BA in Psychology from Connecticut College. She is interested in community psychology and group interactions, specifically in the dynamics of power as they are expressed in groups with a particular focus on the role that gender plays. Firuzeh Shokooh-Valle is a journalist and a PhD student in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Northeastern University. She received an MA in Journalism at Northeastern University and a BA in Latin American Studies at the University of Puerto Rico. She is interested in the intersections between the state, society, digital technologies and social movements. Robert Wengronowitz is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Boston College. He received an MA in the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago and a BA in Sociology at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign. He has two main interests that intersect in the notion of transformative praxis. First, he is concerned with social movements proper and the ways we bring about social, political, economic and cultural change. Second, he is interested in alternative agriculture, particularly how cooperative and community-driven enterprises can lead to a more environmentally sustainable, and perhaps more meaningful, way of living.

PROFILE Activist Intervention: Occupy—The End of the Affair ANONYMOUS1 ABSTRACT This is a first person account of my time at one of the Occupy camps that sprung up around the UK in November 2011. It is, of course, only a personal and subjective account. I try to give a feel for what it was like to live through it. I describe the hope and potential which seemed to be there at the start, the difficulty of effective action in that environment, the problems caused by substance abuse, differing views of the movement’s aims, misogyny and a failure to address women’s issues (within a movement that was ostensibly about all of the 99%), and the acrimonious breakdown it ended in.

Introducing Myself I’m a white woman in my 30s, living in the UK, working in the education sector. My politics are lefty, eco, feminist, so of course I have 3 × no sense of humour. I go to demos and benefits, sign petitions, but I’m not a full-time activist type. I shop in charity shops, worry about food miles, smoke rollups, read The Guardian. In my youth I was involved in the free party scene, campaigned against the Criminal Justice Bill, etc., and I have been known to attend the odd squat party. But mostly these days I’m a bit more mainstream. I joined the Occupation in my town at the start, in mid-November. The story below is what happened in the next four months. Things ended very badly, as you’ll see, so I’m writing this anonymously for fear of poking the hornet’s nest.

The Honeymoon Period, in which We are Full of Hope It was like we all fell in love. You know how when you fall in love, it’s usually only a few weeks into a relationship and you don’t REALLY know the other person? You’ve got a rough sketch of their personality, and you fill in all the details in your head to be how you want them to be. A year or so later you’ve worked out what they’re really like, and often, you aren’t in love with them any more. You’re just cross with them for not being the person you thought they were in those early days. It’s like that. We were all in love with Occupy. We were in love with the idea of it. But we all had different ideas. We were all in love with a different movement, in our heads, and I think that’s where the problems came from. The honeymoon period was amazing though. In the first few days on camp, I had more REAL conversations—about the state of the world, about the future we’d like to live in—than I’d had in the previous six months. To sit around a campfire sharing our visions of the future and realising that there are other people in the world who give a shit … That was electrifying. It felt revolutionary. We had police officers stopping by to tell us they thought what we were doing was brilliant, and talk about the cuts. An old guy came up with a bag of tins, ‘I got my pension today, so I brought you these.’ A family walked up to the info stand and their seven-year old handed us a home-made card, ‘Dear protesters, we are very grateful that you are protesting to make things better. Good luk!’. The striking and amazing thing in those first weeks was how much people were actually listening to each other. Many of us came from a fairly radical political background, and had strong opinions, but Occupy seemed to promise a way of getting beyond all sitting in separate corners, shouting, ‘You’re wrong!’ at everyone else. We had arguments and disruption, mess and noise. But at that point we had so much hope, everything seemed possible. We were part of the first ever global protest movement. Brothers and sisters, together we can do anything! We thought that we just needed to sort a few things out and it would all get easier. Realistically, I always thought that this was just Phase 1 of moving to a better world. No matter how much we camped, it wasn’t going to persuade

the government to abandon their cuts, the World Bank to suddenly reverse all their policies, and multi-national corporations to stop behaving like psychopaths. But it was the start of a process. What the Occupy movement COULD do was start conversations. We, the people, could just ignore the 1% for a minute, get together for a chat and say, ‘This isn’t really working out for us, is it? What kind of world do we want to live in? And how do we get there?’ And that’s what seemed to be happening, quite naturally. People wanted to come and tell us their stories, and we listened (some of us). People told us about losing their jobs, the effects of the cuts, their contempt for the banks and a cabinet full of millionaires. They talked about their hopes for the future. We felt the mood was growing, and it was with us.

The Difficulties We Faced Drove Many Away But it was always hard, even then. Being in the centre of town meant a constant stream of drunk revellers on Friday and Saturday night. Some wanted to join the campfire and bitch about the bankers. But some wanted to jump on tents, threaten people, start fights, shout abuse. The whole situation was stressful. It was cold, it rained on everything, water and toilet facilities were a constant problem. It was paranoiainducing. We were (quite realistically, given what we know about police infiltrators like Mark Kennedy) worried about undercover police or agent provocateurs. The far-right English Defence League was making threats on our Facebook page. Add to that the amount of weed smoked on camp, and the disconnect from reality that comes from being in such a strange and intense environment. Rumours flew round the camp, growing in the telling. At the beginning, we had a real social mix. Although there was a preponderance of youngsters and men, there were also families, women in their 50s and 60s, working people from bin-men to general practitioners (GPs). But the camps were always a magnet for people with issues. Maybe that’s why all of us were there. We all wanted to save the world, or be part of something. But there were a lot of people with alcohol issues, and with the complex emotional needs which underlay them. We were one small camp, dealing with the social problems of a whole city. We didn’t want to exclude people, but this did make life difficult. The problem wasn’t with the people,

it was with some of the behaviours. Little old grannies were stopping by to wish us luck and give us blankets and cake, and then getting abused by aggressive drunks clutching cans at 10 am. This wasn’t helpful. How to balance being inclusive to messed-up alcoholics, against being inclusive to grannies? You can’t, in practice, be inclusive to everyone. Local businesses (some very sympathetic in the early days) started getting fed up of shoplifting, drunken shouting and aggressive behaviour, and started complaining more to the police and the council. We were trying to challenge the combined might of the global economic system, with a team of argumentative activists, shouty alcoholics and wellmeaning but unreliable stoners. You couldn’t help feeling it was a bit of a tall order. We tried having a dry site, but it proved unenforceable. The late-night noise and disorder meant that nearly everyone with a full-time job left in the first couple of weeks, because it was impossible to get a night’s sleep. A lot of people couldn’t deal with it. It wasn’t really inclusive at all.

Women’s Issues Get Short Shrift There were always far more men than women in the camp. In the beginning it was maybe 25% women. But a lot of the women would hang out inside a tent, with friends, of an evening, uncomfortable with the edgy atmosphere. It wasn’t rare for the campfire to be surrounded by 20 blokes, mostly drinking alcohol and getting a bit lairy, and no women at all. To a new arrival, who didn’t know anyone, it definitely didn’t feel like a safe space for women, so this was off-putting to new recruits. Not only this, but when a few of us women tried to raise this issue at a general assembly, it was met with, ‘Oh but we’re all sound guys, none of us would hurt a woman.’ There was no understanding that (even if that were true, which it wasn’t) that wasn’t the point. It still felt like a threatening environment. There was no willingness to listen to what the women there were trying to say. When my boyfriend had to go away for a bit, I realised that I didn’t feel safe sleeping in a tent alone on the camp. Never mind stranger-danger and being in an exposed position in the centre of town. The camp was allcomers: there were guys there who frankly gave me the creeps. I stopped

staying the night down there, but I was still spending a lot of time there during the day. A teenage girl was sexually assaulted on the camp, and one man’s response when told about it was a dismissive, ‘Well she does behave in a very sexual way.’ After another incident, a different man told the girl concerned off for speaking to the police. When someone suggested that maybe we should reach out to local feminist groups, to help address the gender balance, two men who fancied themselves key players on camp responded very negatively, saying that feminists were dangerous, and would try to take over. It seemed ‘we’ were the 49%, not the 99% after all.

It Really Starts to go Tits Up The attention of the more together people ended up being turned more and more inwards, just trying to deal with the practicalities of keeping the camp going. We were all totally burnt-out. The camp wasn’t running an info stand any more, direct actions, or talks or events, like we had in the first couple of months. There weren’t even any signs up saying what we were there for. It all got a bit post-apocalyptic. Passers-by could see obvious drinking and disorder at any time of day. There were piles of rubbish sitting around. Police visits and 999 calls were commonplace. We weren’t raising public awareness and building a movement, we were just pissing the public off. It had become completely counterproductive. You started to hear more and more conspiracy-theorist stuff—9/11, Bilderberg Group, ‘the Jews’ (yes really). Global warming is a fiction made up by the New World Order, apparently. Direct democracy is a plot to mind control us. And black, of course, is white. I’d been reading a book about Glenn Beck and recognised a lot of this stuff. How did we get to a position where racist, misogynist, anti-socialist conspiracy theories from the American extreme right were making their home in what was supposed to be a progressive movement? The rhetoric, and many of its targets, so obviously (to me) suits the agenda of the economic elite, I couldn’t understand how the conspiracy theorists couldn’t see they were being used. I was exasperated and stopped having the patience to try to engage constructively with these arguments. Even I, to my shame, stopped listening.

Things Get Even Darker, and Personal Around Christmas I gave up any hope we could sort this. The people who really cared, could see the big picture, and who were prepared to put effort in, were just too outnumbered. But I still felt a responsibility to the movement—maybe just to my hopeful dreams from the early days, so I was still helping with some of the online stuff. As someone who stood up to aggressive and bullying behaviour, and who’d challenged the conspiracy-theory stuff when it came up, I came in for a lot of very personal abuse from that faction. I wasn’t the first person they picked on—or the last. In retrospect, they picked people off one by one. When I got in their way, I got it in the neck. If the first few weeks were the honeymoon period, this was the bitter end of a relationship going badly wrong, where everything you say or do is twisted into the worst possible interpretation. It was a horrible experience— real hatred was directed against me, from people who barely knew me, for things I hadn’t even done. I remember thinking to myself, ‘This must be what it feels like to be Heather Mills.’ I became afraid for my safety and for a few days wouldn’t walk anywhere on my own—from the distance of a couple of months, that seems like an overreaction, but the paranoid mindset is infectious. And in all rationality, the things they were saying and the aggressive behaviour had become so extreme that I couldn’t tell myself for definite that these people wouldn’t turn to violence. They explicitly said they would try to hurt me, blacken my name, destroy my career. Part of me was thinking, ‘Well they’ll never stop smoking weed and ranting on the Internet long enough to actually do anything.’ But it’s hard to feel sure of that when it’s your actual life this is happening to. That’s why I’m writing this anonymously and have omitted any details that would identify which Occupation I’m talking about. I completely cut off all ties to the movement, only keeping in touch with a few people who’d become close friends. Another friend got targeted after this, and at one point he was physically threatened by a group of young lads, armed with knives and baseball bats. Some of this really hasn’t been fun.

So did We Fall, or were We Pushed?

I’ve discussed it with other people who’d been involved in the camp, and we all feel there was deliberate entryism by Freeman on the Land followers, 9/11 ‘Truthers’ and other conspiracy theorists. Perhaps the vagueness of our aims left the movement vulnerable to this. I’ve heard rumours of similar things at Occupations in other parts of the country too. Several people suspect that this could have been covertly encouraged, to sabotage the movement, by corporations whose interests we threatened. Is that paranoid, or realistic? A left-leaning police officer told us, off the record, that the police wouldn’t have the resources to try to infiltrate us, but if he was us, he’d be worried about corporations doing it. It’s not impossible, given some of the stuff that’s come out in recent years (e.g. about corporate astroturfing, or Dow Chemical’s dirty tricks against Greenpeace), but you end up down such a rabbit-hole once you start thinking like that. Maybe people just often are irrational, easily swayed and prone to scapegoating when things get tough. A woman who’d been at Greenham Common said to me, ‘Movements don’t need infiltrators most of the time. They destroy themselves.’ 1. For the reasons explained in this Profile piece, the author wishes to remain anonymous.

Activist Intervention: Walking in the City of London ISABELLE KÖKSAL Tent City University, St. Paul’s, London, UK ABSTRACT The closure of the ‘public’ Paternoster Square, or more accurately, the fortifying of the space with police, private security and metal barriers, was a moment when the real nature of this ‘public’ space was revealed—only a very specific type of public was welcome, and their activities are restricted to those of work and consumption. The sudden transformation of Paternoster from public to private reflects, in fast-forward mode, the process of the privatization of urban space that is happening in the City of London and beyond. This privatization of vast swathes of the City makes it out of bounds to ordinary people and protest, which greatly undermines the state of our democracy. Armed with picnic baskets, Twister, badminton racquets and our own ‘Street Bingo!’ a group set off to walk and play in the City in order to explore and challenge the increasingly blurred boundaries between public and private space, and with the aims of creating and reclaiming public space. The City of London is predominantly used as a space of financial accumulation for the elite, however, we reckoned, using the City in different ways would displace and disrupt this primary (dys)function. This paper draws from this action-walk around the City of London using it to discuss the changing nature of urban space that has been central to people’s discussions and experiences at Occupy London. The paper also argues that the walk can be a powerful action in which people can begin to re-imagine and re-create urban space.

Introduction

On 15 October 2011 I joined thousands of others outside St Paul’s Cathedral with the intention of occupying the London Stock Exchange and setting up camp there. I had been involved in many previous protests against the government’s cuts but it felt as if these had been easily ignored by the people in power. Having watched videos of Tahrir Square and Occupy Wall Street on the Internet, I was excited about the idea of a protest where we would not go home at the end of the day, but where we would remain for as long as we deemed necessary. Where we would create a space where capitalism could not intrude and real democracy was practiced and where we could plan further actions in an attempt to reclaim our present and the future that we felt were being hijacked. As a lifelong Londoner, I harbour a strong aversion to camping, even urban camping, and so I made regular day visits to the camp. Whilst the camp was the focus, the out of bounds Paternoster Square exerted a strange pull. Perhaps before I had felt a sort of belonging in the city, and now, all of a sudden, steel fences were popping up preventing our access to certain parts. I felt a strong sense of indignation at this. Our location outside of St. Paul’s was also not secure as the Church had not taken a liking to their new neighbours. However, rumours spread around the camp that some of the land on which we were camped was once an old path that sheep were herded through and was common land. As a Human Geographer, and still feeling indignant about our restricted access, I began talking with people about making maps of the City of London—looking at who owned the space, whether it was public/private, people’s lived experiences of places, mapping police tactics—as a useful tool for the movement. I coordinated the Radical Mapping Working Group for several months during which we conducted this walk, set up talks, created maps and held meetings to discuss and interrogate space, democracy and protest.

A Space to Occupy? The closure of the ‘public’ Paternoster Square, or more accurately, the fortifying of the space with police, private security and metal barriers, was a moment when the real nature of this ‘public’ space was revealed—only a very specific type of public is welcome, and their activities are restricted to those of work and consumption. What were previously invisible walls, supported through the use of signs delineating the appropriate behaviour in

this space, closed circuit television (CCTV) and private security guards, became real physical barricades after a call out, inspired by Occupy Wall Street, to occupy the London Stock Exchange which is located in Paternoster Square. The sudden transformation of Paternoster from public to private reflects, in fast-forward mode, the creeping process of the privatization of urban space that is happening in the City of London and beyond. This privatization of vast swathes of the City makes it out of bounds to ordinary people and protest, greatly undermining the state of our democracy—the issue that the Occupy movement worldwide was organizing around. The Occupy camp therefore ended up outside St Paul’s Cathedral which is adjacent to Paternoster Square. Here, what was previously nothing more than a transitory space was transformed into a truly public space as people came together to create the space—setting up a library almost immediately (surely a promising sign, when a library is a movement’s priority)—spend time here, and talk with one another, as well as practice direct democracy. The camp itself then was an intervention, a critique of the undemocratic design and control of the urban space that surrounded it. As Harvey (2011) put it to us, ‘you have created a commons… in the belly of the beast’. Yet, soon after we had set up our tents, the struggle over the space began as the City of London Corporation sought to have us evicted. Meanwhile, injunctions sprang up in Broadgate and Canary Wharf banning protest here, whilst the City of London Corp erected steel fences in front of its headquarters, and around any piece of land they feared might become home to a tent. Any other protests that did occur in the City of London, and elsewhere, were heavily policed, with November 9th student protest feeling more like a walking kettle (a kettle is a police tactic in which they attempt to ‘contain’ protestors by creating a line of police around the protestors and prevent the protestors from leaving. Usually the kettle is in a fixed area; a walking kettle refers to when the police surround a march on all sides in order to prevent the free movement of protestors) than a protest. It was being made very clear that these were not our streets.

Walking and Re-imagining the City of London The emergence and experience of the Occupy St Paul’s camp and the subsequent shutdown of the City of London to protesters raised for many of us the questions about public space and our right to the city. We were curious

to explore further, and make interventions into, the changing nature of urban space that the closure of Paternoster and the subsequent re-fortifying of the City had highlighted to us. Armed with picnic baskets, Twister, badminton racquets and our own ‘Street Bingo!’, a group set off to walk and play in the City in order to explore and challenge the increasingly blurred boundaries between public and private space and with the aims of creating and reclaiming public space. This emphasis on playing in and with the city in order to remake the space as well as our perceptions was inspired by the Situationists. The City of London is predominantly used as a space of financial accumulation for the elite, however, we reckoned, using the City in different ways would displace and disrupt this primary (dys)function. On Thursday 17 November, a group of 30 people met at the St Paul’s camp and headed off down Cheapside, our large group pushing against the sea of pinstripe suits. This collective walking through the streets itself was a wonderful experience as we talked and got to know each other and spotted things that one pair of eyes may overlook. The practices of direct democracy in the camp, of openness and participation were being enacted in the streets as well. As we walked, people shouted out things to fill out their street Bingo which was designed to provoke us to see the City differently—try to spot chickweed (wild food in the City of London), urban wildlife (other life rather than just humans inhabiting the space), signs of poverty/inequality (that the City of London tries its best to hide), CCTV cameras (constant surveillance of our activities) and people using space in an interesting way (usually it is just people walking purposely from one place to another, or shopping). Our first stop was the City of London Corporation headquarters where we intended to picnic in the ‘public’ Guildhall Square (see Figure 1). A couple of days before, Occupy LSX protesters had been kettled in this space for protesting against inequality as the Lord Mayor banqueted with his friends including David Cameron. When we arrived, the City of London Corporation was still fearful of anything resembling public dissent challenging their feudal–neoliberal government and so had erected a steel fence at the entrance of the square. We sat down outside the barrier and shared our food around. We had made cupcakes on which we iced ‘Defend the Right to Protest’—a rather ingenious form of protest which meant that if the police came in to kettle us, the offending protesting cupcakes could be quickly gobbled up—returning the space back to its dissent free sterility (see

Figure 2). However, it was not the cupcakes that we had to worry about. Our presence, through which we challenged the concentrated power, stifling of protest and ostentatious wealth held in this space, was not acceptable to those controlling the space and they tried to move us on, reassuring us that we could enter the square if we took another entrance. When we arrived at this entrance a couple of people were welcomed through, until another security guard took a disliking to our large group:

Figure 1. Picnicking outside Guildhall Square. Photo courtesy of Étienne von Bertrab.

Figure 2. ‘Defend the Right to Protest’ cupcakes. Photo courtesy of Étienne von Bertrab. Security guard: You can’t come through. Us: Why not? Security guard: Because I own it. Us: Do you? Who are you? Security guard: Who are you? Who’s leading this? Us: We’re an autonomous walking group. Security guard: Fuck off…I’m not letting you in because I don’t like you.

Public squares, in most people’s minds are the archetypal ideas of public space, yet the City’s paranoia had closed off this space and our attempts to create our own ephemeral public space on the other side of the barrier had been scuppered. However, we had eaten our fill, revealed the power relations governing the space and were ready to move on. Our next stop was the Lloyd’s insurance building, known as the ‘InsideOut’ building because of its striking, futuristic, postmodern architecture. We gazed at the building with its steel pipes running across it and the glass elevators racing up and down, amazed, someone commenting that it was like

something out of Brave New World. The arrogance of this architecture, which enables the finance workers to literally inhabit another world apart from the rest of society, also acted as a provocation for us. Why stop at turning architecture inside out—let us really turn things inside out. As workers crossed the forgotten space between the Inside-Out building and the Willis building, our group formed a circle ready to learn the ceilidh moves from Vic our ceilidh leader—the only type of leader we want at Occupy LSX. At this point, a young security guard approached us rather sheepishly from Willis. Fortunately it was only to request that Vic step off the bench, and we were allowed to continue our ceilidh between the towers of glass and steel. Workers peered down enviously at us from their windows as we swung our partners wildly about, and so in some way we most definitely disrupted the flow of capital through the City (see Figure 3). The grey paving and the towering glass and steel buildings became much less hostile when you are spinning about uncontrollably. Successfully reclaimed public space I think we can conclude, whereby laughter inhabited a space that had looked so far into the future it had lost any sense of humanity. Despite this space clearly being the private courtyard of the Willis and the Lloyds building, we were able to temporarily appropriate this space, after complying with some rules, such as not standing on the bench. Our presence created a spectacle, and so for the short while that we had the energy to dance, our presence was acceptable, even welcomed. Perhaps it was felt that our dancing was not much of a threat as it was not seen as political, but clearly it is a political act to be using the space in such a way, in which fun and togetherness are the guiding principles. Seemingly private space then should be ventured onto and used in subversive ways; it is space that holds great possibility for all sorts of encounters. In a strange bit of psychogeography and illustrating the walk as an experience of collective learning, a member of the group found a Wikipedia page for nearby St. Andrew Undershaft church which described another dancing event a long time ago and student unrest as well: ‘The church’s curious name derives from the shaft of the maypole that was traditionally set up each year opposite the church. The custom continued each spring until 1517, when student riots put an end to it, but the maypole itself survived until 1547 when a Puritan mob seized it and destroyed it as a “pagan idol”’. We were following in the long tradition of dancing and unrest in the City of London.

Figure 3. A worker in the Willis building waves at us from her office window as we recover from our ceilidh. Photo courtesy of Étienne von Bertrab. Our final stop of the grand tour was the impressive looking Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) building on Bishopsgate, of which the tax payer owns 84 per cent after bailing out the bank, and the adjacent seemingly ‘public’ Bishops Square. Having such a large stake in this bank, we were curious to see whether this ownership translated into access and use of what is publically owned space. We hoped that we could use the modestly sized foyer area to hold a discussion on the nature of public space and ways of reclaiming the city—an activity that is much more productive than investing in the destructive tar sands that RBS are currently engaged in. However, after speaking to one of the three security guards standing outside the building, it was quite clear this was not the public space we hoped it would be. In fact, as we stood outside on the pavement, a large man in plain clothes, some sort of undercover security, was filming us in quite an intimidating way, making it absolutely clear that our presence was not welcome. So we set off to

investigate Bishops Square instead, which does allow entry—only not to protesters. Stuck to the sign reading Bishops Square was a plastic A4 pocket which contained documents from a recent High Court of Justice hearing on November 2nd. The notice banned ‘Persons unknown entering or remaining without the consent of the claimant on the Bishops square estate, London E1 in connection with protest action’—yet another ‘protest-free zone’ in London. Within the document they had included grainy black and white photographs of protests outside RBS—illustrating exactly what it is that is prohibited. Badminton and Twister however are acceptable—and arguably just as political as a protest (or a form of protest in themselves), for we were showing that this square has more uses than a space in which you cross from one shop to another, but can be a place where people gather, play, interact and engage with one another. Exhausted, we then settled down on the picnic rug and talked about our experiences, ideas and thoughts about the city. Another public square that turned out to be not so public after all—and a publicly owned bank in which the space remains out of bounds and their actions, particularly with relation to the tar sands, completely unaccountable. Our bodies were aggressively monitored in the space outside RBS, but further on in Bishops Square, despite the notices to regulate our activity, there is also the ability to circumvent these rules and try to enjoy ourselves in these spaces. Through our walking—and picnicking, dancing and playing—we were able to explore the blurred boundaries between public and private spaces and reveal their true nature through exposing the power relations governing particular spaces in the City of London. We were also able to create ephemeral public spaces and challenge the City of London’s cartography of power, creating our own cartographies of the urban landscape based on horizontal relations; for as Solnit (2001) notes, the act of walking is very much associated with the dispersal of power. Exploring the City in this collective and subversive way was loads of fun —‘the most concentrated amount of fun there has ever been in the City’ as a fellow walker told me. There was a real sense of freedom in what we were doing—walking together, using the City in new and exciting ways, making ourselves at home. The usually oppressive City was transformed by our presence and our actions, and in turn, our perceptions and understandings were changed too. Whilst we certainly covered a lot of ground, there is more of the City of London to be explored and played in, to be reclaimed for

public use and to be re-imagined. After our grand tour, maybe capitalism will chug along for another day, but perhaps at Lloyds insurance tomorrow, there will be an empty desk as a worker finally pursues their dream of being a Scottish dancer.

Walking the Revolution I write this subtitle somewhat tongue in cheek; however, I do want to argue for the radical possibilities of walking. As I described above, there was a great sense of freedom that came from this collective walking and challenging of boundaries—a feeling I have rarely felt in my own city. As we walked together, we shared knowledge about the different spaces we visited and pointed out things that may otherwise have gone unnoticed. Walking and talking together generated ideas about other actions and interventions we could take in urban space in the future. Walking in a large group also creates something of a spectacle, when the intended use of the space is for the lone consumer being funnelled from shop to shop. People look surprised at the act of collective walking and it disrupts people’s ideas of the possibilities of cities. Finally, the walk is an act that is humble and this is precisely why it is so powerful. Walking is accessible and simple— everyone can take part, and yet this seemingly small act can dramatically alter our perceptions and experiences of cities, and in turn radically re-shape cities. The Zapatista saying ‘asking, we walk’ captures both this humbleness and radicalness. As if to support my argument for the walk as a powerful act for social change, numerous other walks cropped up around London in the following months of our action-walk. Some of these, such as the Elephant and Castle anti-gentrification walk, explicitly critiqued the privatization of urban space, as well as highlighting the alternatives, through the act of walking itself of course and by inhabiting the soon to be demolished Heygate estate by cooking soup there on a fire and watching films projected onto the grey concrete. Other walks, such as the Invisible Food walks and the Occupy Tours, do not critique the privatization of space so explicitly; however, they seek to reveal what would otherwise remain hidden in our urban landscape —wild food on our doorstep and the hedge funds of Mayfair and their role in the financial system, respectively. Again, through the act of walking, they

place an emphasis on togetherness and the interrogation of urban space, rather than simply individual consumption of urban space. The privatization of our streets is going largely unnoticed and unchallenged, despite the fact that we have intimate and constant contact with them. It is a strange paradox that this privatization of the very space we inhabit should go so unnoticed. Yet, the Occupy movement, in London and elsewhere, has changed this—highlighting to us how very little public space there is in which we can gather and organize together. The Occupy movement has also enabled us to directly re-shape the urban landscape through our encampments and through other actions such as walking. Thus, the privatization of cities is being revealed, critiqued and reversed by the Occupy movement worldwide. Walking is integral to this process of reshaping and re-imagining our cities. Walking is a powerful act which also allows us to see this process of privatization and challenge it there and then, and go beyond—creating a new urban landscape as we move together through the city. In these ways then, through camping, walking and other interventions in the urban landscape, real democracy is being woven throughout cities all over the world.

References Harvey, D. (2011) David Harvey at Occupy London, Available http://davidharvey.org/2011/11/videodavid-harvey-at-occupy-london-november-12-2011/ (accessed 12 November 2011). Solnit, R. (2001) Wanderlust: A History of Walking (London: Verso). ‘St. Andrew Undershaft’ from Wikipedia, Available http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Andrew_Undershaft

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Isabelle Köksal studied her undergraduate degree in Geography at the University of Oxford. She then studied for her Master’s in Activism and Social Change in the Geography Department of the University of Leeds. Returning to her home city of London, she became involved in Occupy LSX from the first day and coordinated the Radical Mapping working group from which the action-walk emerged. She is currently spending her time organizing with various campaign groups including Lambeth Save Our Services and Boycott Workfare. She spends the rest of her time reading and trying to understand capitalism, its consequences and resistance to it, with a particular focus on the UK.

Index

15M Movement see movimento 15M 9/11 Truth Movement 19 Abellán, J. 41–7 acampadas 140, 142, 144, 155–6 accountability 11, 15, 18, 34, 132 active listening 14, 71 activists 1–7, 10–15, 17–23; beyond networks 148–9, 151–3; failed mobilisations 137–45; free culture 109–10; homelessness 56–8, 60, 77, 80–1; Indigenous peoples 52–4; Indignados 31, 33, 37–9; influences 27; institutions 64–6, 68; interventions 162–74; media cultures 96, 101–3, 105; nationalism 71; online recruitment 89–90, 93; power relations 155–9; resistance labs 42, 44–6; student rebellions 130, 136 Adbusters 24–9, 89, 97 addictions 77, 82 Africa 155 African Americans 14, 159 Africans 73 agency 66–7, 152–3 Aitchison, G. 66 Alcatraz 52 alcohol 78, 164 Alfred, T. 54 Algonquin languages 50 alienation 12, 20 Alimi, E.Y. 123–8 alter-globalisation movement 148, 150–1, 153 American Museum of Natural History 67–8 Amsterdam 17–23 anarchism 1, 4, 11, 13, 15, 20, 27, 73, 102 Anarchists Against the Wall 73 Anonymous 19, 89, 97, 108, 110 anthropologists 156 anti-abortion movement 93 anti-austerity movement 97, 109, 112, 137–9, 142–4 anti-capitalist movement 1, 3, 66, 70–1 anti-consumerist movement 24–5 anti-globalisation movement 54, 150 anti-nuclear movement 102–3 anti-road movement 64 anti-semitism 72

anti-slavery movement 93 anti-war movement 3, 103 apartheid 75, 133 Apple 99 application programming interface (API) 91 appropriation 57–8, 143 Arab Spring 1, 6, 24–9; beyond networks 149, 151; institutions 63; media cultures 97; nationalism 71; online recruitment 89; power relations 155–6; student rebellions 129, 132; successes/failures 123, 137, 139 Arabs 72–3, 108, 124–6, 132 architecture 171 Argentina 6, 37–8, 135 Ariel 72 Asia 155 Assad, B. 124 associational soil 18, 22 astroturfing 166 Athanasiou, T. 7 aura 24–8 Australia 3, 6 autonomy 15, 52, 132 Bachelet, M. 134 Bahrain 71 bailouts 1, 31, 34, 172 Bank of America 78, 158 Bank of Ideas 5, 63, 65 banks 1, 4, 21; activist interventions 163, 172–3; beyond networks 149; failed mobilisations 140, 149; free culture 109; homelessness 78; Indigenous peoples 50; Indignados 31, 34; online recruitment 91; power relations 158; resistance labs 43, 45–6; tactics 121 Banksy 65 Barbican 68 Barcelona 30–5, 37–8, 41, 44–5, 74 Barker, A.J. 48–55 Battle in Seattle 11, 13, 102 Beck, G. 165 Beer Sheva 126 Begin, B. 72 Ben Ali, Z. 24 Benjamin, W. 24–5, 28 Berger, 25 Berlusconi, S. 137–9, 142–4 Beursplein 19–20 beyond networks 148–54 Big Noise Films 102 Bilderberg Group 165 Bishops Square 172–3 Bishopsgate 172 black bloc 28, 141 Black Panthers 124

blacklists 72 blockades 139, 144 blogs 6, 25, 27–8, 53–4, 100–1, 105, 137 Bloomberg, M. 116–17, 121 Bologna 140, 142 Bologna, A. 97 Boston 99, 155–61 Bouazizi, M. 24, 97 bourgeoisie 116 Brazil 135, 150 bricoleurs 51 Britain 6, 137 British 3 Brooklyn 91 Brooklyn Bridge 97 buen vivir 15 Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) 52 Burnt Church 52 cacerolazos 37, 131 Cairo 63 Cameron, D. 169 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) 64 camping permits 78, 80, 86 Canada 3, 24–5, 48, 50, 89 Cantiere 140 Cantos 116 capitalism 1–2, 10–11, 14–15; activist interventions 167, 173; beyond networks 149–51; free culture 109; homelessness 59; Indigenous peoples 50, 52; institutions 65–6; nationalism 70–1; network comparisons 21–2; resistance labs 42–3; successes/failures 125; tactics 118 Cardenas, A. 39 Caren, N. 88–95 Caribbean 155 Castañeda, E. 77–87 Castells, M. 38, 150–1 Casteñada, E. 30–40 Catalan Nationalist Party 111 Cataluña 30, 32 CCTV 168–9 censorship 70, 73, 116 Center for Civic Media 97 Champions League 37 Charging Bull 27–8 Chase Bank 78 Cheapside 169 Chicago 99 Chicago Seven 102 Chile 37–8, 129–37 Church of England 168 Citi Bank 91

citizenship 56, 59, 72, 114, 117–18, 121 City Life 158 City of London 2, 63–9, 152, 167–74 civil disobedience 42–3, 102 civil liberties 107 civil rights 10 civil society 34, 71–2, 130, 134 classism 77, 81, 85, 99, 105, 116–17, 124, 133, 155–60 Climate Camps 65–6 climate change 7 cliques 11 Cloward, R.A. 124 co-option 18 codes of conduct 5 coercion 5–6 Colegio de Profesores 133 collective action 2–3, 6, 11; activist interventions 169, 173; beyond networks 149; challenges 14–15; homelessness 56–7; Indigenous peoples 53; Indignados 30; influences 26, 28; nationalism 71; online recruitment 93; power relations 156; resistance labs 42–3, 46; student rebellions 129–30; successes/failures 126, 138, 140, 144–5 colonialism 4, 48–55, 81, 86, 132 Colorlines 105 Columbus, C. 81 commodification 56 communists 135 community creation 77–87 Confederation of Chilean Students (CONFECH) 130–1 consensus decision-making 2, 10–13, 15; beyond networks 149; homelessness 57, 59; Indignados 33; institutions 64; media cultures 101–2, 104–5; nationalism 71; network comparisons 19, 21; power relations 158–60; successes/failures 126; tactics 117 conspiracy theorists 32, 165–6 convergence spaces 151 copyright 111 Corporation of London 64–5, 168–9 corporatism 2–3, 10, 14; activist interventions 163, 166; failed mobilisations 139; free culture 110; Indigenous peoples 50–2; Indignados 34; institutions 67; online recruitment 88; power relations 155–6; tactics 121 corruption 43, 111, 118, 121, 133, 140, 142 Cortez, H. 81 Costanza-Chock, S. 96–106 Creative Commons 68, 111 Criminal Justice Bill 162 Crisis of Civilisation 15 cross-cluster networks 18 cult value 25 cultural issues 96–113 culture shock 13 cyberactivists 89 cyberattacks 111 cyberlaw 111

cyberspace 11 Da Vinci, L. 25 datacenter.org 100 debt 31, 43, 121, 129–30, 133, 142 decentralised leadership 13 Declaration of the Occupation of New York 104, 157 Decolonize to Liberate 159 Deep Dish TV 103 demands on state 1, 5–6 Democracia Real Ya! 31 democracy 3, 10–16, 25; activist interventions 165, 167–9, 174; free culture 107, 111–12; homelessness 56, 59, 61; Indigenous peoples 48, 52; Indignados 30, 33; influences 28; media cultures 101–2; nationalism 70–2; online recruitment 89; power relations 159; student rebellions 129, 131–3; tactics 116; urban labs 46 Democratic parties 73, 142 Denial of Service attacks 111 design activism 66 Dewey Square 155 difference 155–62 Diggers 2 digital commons 111 Direct Action Network (DAN) 10–13 dirt tactics 114–22 Disability Justice 102 discard tactics 114–22 discourse 21–2, 26, 28; homelessness 81; Indigenous peoples 50, 52, 54; institutions 64; nationalism 70–4; power relations 156–7; resistance labs 43–4, 46; successes/failures 124, 127, 138–9 disenfranchisement 114, 121 diversity 4, 13–15, 18–19, 22, 104, 112, 126, 148–52, 155–62 do it yourself (DIY) politics 149 Do Not Vote for Them 110–11 Douglas, M. 116–17 Dow Chemicals 166 Draghi, M. 140 Draghi Ribelli 140 DREAM 103 Duran, E. 109 Earl, J. 125 Earl Street Community Centre 65 East River 91 economic crisis see financial crisis economy of care 5 education 5, 13, 30–1; activist interventions 162; beyond networks 149; free culture 107, 109–10; Indignados 33; nationalism 71, 74; student rebellions 129–31, 133–4; successes/failures 125, 138 Efrat 72 Egypt 24–8, 31, 71–2, 74 Ehrenreich, B. 60, 77 Eilat 74

El Paso 77–87 El Paso City Council 78 Elephant and Castle 173 elites 5, 14, 30; activist interventions 165, 167, 169; failed mobilisations 142; institutions 67; online recruitment 89, 91–3; power relations 157; resistance labs 43; student rebellions 132, 134–5; tactics 121 embeddedness 134–5 employment 5, 30, 33–4, 44, 71, 110 encampments 2, 5, 11; activist interventions 162–7; beyond networks 148; free culture 108, 117–18; homelessness 56–62, 77–85; Indigenous peoples 53; Indignados 30, 32–5, 38–9; institutions 63–4, 66; media cultures 101; nationalism 70; network comparisons 17, 19–22; online recruitment 90; power relations 155; resistance labs 42; successes/failures 123, 125, 127; tactics 114–18 enclosures 61 English Defence League (EDL) 163 English language 27, 30–1, 78 environment 3, 7, 18, 48, 50, 118 Escobar, A. 151 ethics 15, 64–6, 118–19, 157 ethnic cleansing 51 ethnicity 4, 67 Europe 6, 32–3, 39, 135, 137, 142 European Central Bank (ECB) 32, 40, 140, 142 European Commission 138 European Union (EU) 30, 109 evictions 1, 12, 20; beyond networks 148; free culture 109; homelessness 60; Indignados 35; institutions 64–5; power relations 155; resistance labs 41–6; successes/failures 127; tactics 114–17, 119, 121 exhibition value 25 experts 96, 99, 101, 103 expropriation 43 Facebook 6, 19, 66; activist interventions 163; beyond networks 152; free culture 110–11; homelessness 78, 81; nationalism 70, 72; online recruitment 88–95; successes/failures 125 failed mobilisations 137–47 Fawkes, G. 64, 67 Featherstone Street 64 feminism 4, 7, 10–11, 13, 104, 111, 162, 164 Fernandez, K.V. 24, 27 fetishisation 10, 12–13, 27 financial crisis 15, 19, 30; beyond networks 149; failed mobilisations 137–8; Indignados 38; nationalism 71; resistance labs 42–3, 45–6; student rebellions 129, 132 Fini, G. 142 Finsbury Square 63, 65, 68 Flickr 66 Food Not Bombs 101 Fortuyn, P. 19 France 132 Franco, F. 34 Free Culture and Digital Commons Movement (FCM) 107–13 free riders 20, 22, 80

free software 7, 107 Freedom is an Endless Meeting 10, 12 Freeman, J. 11, 104 Freemen on the Land 166 Friday, G. 14 FTSE 100 companies 150 Fuster Morell, M. 107–13 future research 93, 134–7, 145 G20 summits 65, 151 Gaby, S. 88–95 Galleries of Modern London 67 Gamson, W.A. 124 Gaza 74 Gelmini Law 138–9 gender 4, 15, 99, 104–6, 156–7, 159, 164 general assemblies (GAs) 10–12, 18–19, 21–2; activist interventions 164; beyond networks 149; homelessness 57, 77, 86; Indigenous peoples 53; Indignados 32–3, 38; institutions 66; media cultures 99, 102–3, 105; nationalism 71; online recruitment 89–90; power relations 156, 158, 160; resistance lab 43–5; tactics 115 genocide 52 gentrification 22, 173 George Mason University 68 Giddens, A. 85 Glassbead Collective 103 Gledhill, J. 63–9 Glidden, B. 10–16 Global Justice Movement (GJM) 97, 101–2, 108–10, 112, 141, 148, 157 global movements 1, 17–23, 148–54 global warming 165 globalisation 3, 10, 14–15, 34, 54, 56, 139, 148, 150, 153 globalrevolution.tv 99, 103 Goldman Sachs 138 Good Groups 82 Good Jobs LA 21–2 Good Neighbour Policy 117 Gordon, U. 70–6 Gouldner, A. 85 graffiti 20, 65 Greece 37, 97, 125, 132, 137, 155–6 The Green Transition 66 Greenberg, S. 73 Greenham Common 166 Greenpeace 166 Greens 10 The Guardian 162 Guildhall Square 169 Guzman-Concha, C. 129–36 hackathons 96–7, 99

hacktivists 89, 97, 108 Haifa 126 Halvorsen, S. 148–54 hand signals 102, 149 Hardt, M. 150, 152 Harlem 121 Harrelson, W. 102 Harvey, D. 168 Hasbara 75 hashtags 97, 111 Hawaiians 53 Hayden, T. 102–3 hegemony 42–3, 46, 74 heroin 82 Hessel, S. 31 Heygate 173 Heyman, J. 77–87 High Court 65, 172 hold-outs 12 Hollywood 102 homelessness 4–5, 7, 20–2, 33, 56–62, 73, 77–87, 109, 157 Hotel Madrid 41–7 housing 5, 20, 34; free culture 107–10, 112; homelessness 56–7, 60–1, 77, 85; nationalism 72; resistance labs 42–6; successes/failures 123, 125–6; tactics 121 hubs 18, 22 human rights 59, 71–2, 81 hybrid organisational models 159 Iceland 38, 132 identity 15, 18, 51; homelessness 77, 82, 85–6; Indigenous peoples 53; online recruitment 89; student rebellions 130, 134–5; successes/failures 126, 138–45 ideology 1, 20, 24–6; homelessness 56–7, 61; institutions 66; nationalism 71; power relations 160; student rebellions 131; successes/failures 123, 142 Im Tirzu 72 imitative magic 24, 27 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) 22 imperialism 21 Indigenous traditions 15, 48–55, 159 Indignados 5–6, 19, 30–40; beyond networks 149, 151; free culture 107; institutions 63; media cultures 97; nationalism 71; online recruitment 89; resistance labs 41–3, 46; student rebellions 129, 132; successes/failures 126, 138–44 Indymedia 102–3 inequality 1–2, 4, 7–8; activist interventions 169; challenges 14; homelessness 56–8, 85; Indigenous peoples 51; Indignados 30–1; influences 27; media cultures 99, 104–6; network comparisons 21; power relations 155–6; resistance labs 43; student rebellions 129, 132–3; successes/failures 125 info-actions 110, 112 information and communications technology (ICT) 103–4, 107–8, 110, 112, 129 infrastructure 18–19, 66, 68, 89–90, 99, 117, 151–2 Inglis, D. 117 Inside-Out Building 171

inspiration 31, 130 institutions 1, 6, 15; free culture 111; homelessness 58, 61; influences 26; nationalism 72; public collecting 63–9; resistance labs 43; student rebellions 129, 132; tactics 118, 121 intellectual property 111 intentionality 14–15 interdisciplinarity 67 intergenerational support 110, 112 internalisation 80 International Longshore and Warehouse Union 4 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 109, 142 International Students’ Day 143 Internet 6, 11, 18–19, 33, 61, 107–8, 111–12, 135, 165, 167 Internet Relay Chat-channels 19 InterOccupation 101 intersectionality 156–7 interventions 162–6 Intifadas 124 Invisible Food 174 involuntary occupiers 58–60 iPhone 99 Iran 72, 124 Iraq 3, 101 Ireland 125 Islam 19 Israel 6, 70–6, 97, 123–8, 137, 155–6 Israel Academia Monitor 72 Israel Apartheid Week 75 Israel Ministry of Public Diplomacy 75 Italian language 139 Italian Theory 137 Italy 6, 37, 137–47 Jaffa 73 Janoschka, M. 41–7 Japan 6 Jefferson, T. 92 Jerusalem 74, 124, 126 Jews 72, 124–5, 165 Jordanova, L. 67 Juris, J.S. 151–2, 155–62 Juventud sin Futuro 31 Kadima 72, 126 Kanienkehaka 50 Kennedy, M. 163 Kerton, S. 24–9 kettling 168–9 Keynesian economics 133 Kilibarda, K. 51 Kimport, K. 125

Klein, N. 58 Knesset 72–4, 126 Koch, D.H. 67 Köksal, I. 167–74 Krinsky, J. 1–9 Labor Party 124 laboratories for resistance 41–7 landlords 78 language 1, 3, 6; free culture 109; homelessness 57, 60; Indigenous peoples 50; influences 28–9; media cultures 104; online recruitment 92; power relations 159; tactics 117 Lasn, K. 27 Lastovicka, J.L. 24, 27 Latin America 2, 135, 155 Law 133/2008 138 leadership 4, 11, 13–14; Indigenous peoples 53–4; Indignados 38; influences 28; media cultures 104– 5; nationalism 71, 74; network comparisons 21; student rebellions 130, 132–5; successes/failures 126–7; tactics 116 Leef, D. 70, 73, 75, 125–6 Lefebvre, H. 56–7 leftism 73 legitimacy 18, 28, 34; failed mobilisations 142–4; homelessness 57, 59; Indignados 38, 40; institutions 64–5; resistance labs 42, 46; student rebellion 130, 133–5 Lenape 50 Lessig, L. 111

Lewinsky tent city 73 LGBTQ people 99, 105–6, 159 Liberty Plaza 114–17 Liboiron, M. 114–22 libraries 103, 115, 121, 168 liceos emblemáticos 134 Liebskind, K. 73 Likud 72, 75 Livestream 66, 90, 99–100, 102–3, 105, 148 Livnat, L. 73 Lloyds 171, 173 local networks 17–23 logistics 58, 60, 65, 77 London 2, 5, 63–9, 74–5, 129, 148–54, 167–74 London Stock Exchange (LSX) 1, 63, 149, 167–9, 171 Los Angeles County Federation of Labor 21 Los Angeles (LA) 17–23, 99, 116 Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) 21 Ma’ariv 73 McCain, J. 103 McCarthyism 71–2 Madrid 31–2, 41–7, 89, 92, 108, 126, 129, 142 magical thinking 27 majoritarianism 156–8 Malcolm X 88, 92 Manhattan 89, 99 Manifesto of defence of fundamental rights 111 manifestos 31, 111 map-making 168 March for the Alternative 66 Martinez, B. 13 Marxism 1, 57 masks 64, 67 Massachusetts 82 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) 97 Matsu, K. 25–6 Mayfair 174 media 2, 6–7, 10; beyond networks 150; cultures 96–106; free culture 112; Indignados 31, 34–5, 38, 40; influences 26; institutions 63, 67–8; nationalism 71; network comparisons 18–21; online recruitment 89–91, 93; power relations 157; resistance labs 42, 44–5; student rebellions 130, 132; successes/failures 127, 138–40, 142, 144–5; tactics 116, 121 mediation 1, 6–7, 19, 21, 25, 28, 38 medicine wheel 50 Meetup 90 meme wars 27 mental health 5, 60 meshwork 151 meta-politics 111 Metropolitan Police 65

Metroscopia 110 Middle East 24, 71, 97, 137 Milan 139 Milan Stock Exchange 140 Mills, H. 165 Mitzna, A. 124 mobilisation 1, 6, 10; beyond networks 149–50; free culture 107–13; homelessness 78; Indignados 30; media cultures 97, 99, 101, 103; nationalism 70–1, 73–5; network comparisons 19; resistance labs 42–4, 46; student rebellions 129, 132–5; successes/failures 123, 125–6, 137–47 Mohawk 50 Monti, M. 137–8, 142–3 Montreal 53 Moore, A. 64 mortgages 109 Mother Earth 15, 50 movement-building meetings 157–9 movimento 15M 31–2, 34, 39–46, 107–13, 138–42 Mubarak, H. 25, 27 multiculturalism 4, 51 Museum of American Finance 121 Museum of the City of New York 67 Museum of London 64–8 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) 67 Nachman, R. 72 Naples 139, 142 National Gallery 25 National Left 73 nationalism 48, 51, 54, 70–6 naturalisation 51, 53 negotiation role 155–61 Negri, A. 150, 152 neofascism 34 neoliberalism 22, 31, 33–4; activist interventions 169; beyond networks 150; homelessness 56–7, 59, 61; Indignados 38; nationalism 70–1, 75; resistance labs 42–4; student rebellions 129, 135; successes/failures 123–5, 139, 142 Netanyahu, B. 70–3, 124–7 Netherlands 19 New Economic Foundation 66 New Left 11 new societies 1, 4, 114, 121, 132 New World Order 165 New York 2, 4, 10; beyond networks 149; Historical Society 67; homelessness 58; Indignados 39; institutions 63, 67; media cultures 97, 103–4; nationalism 74; online recruitment 88; power relations 155–6; successes/failures 129, 140; tactics 114, 116–17 New York Police Department (NYPD) 97 New York Times 91 New Yorkers Against Budget Cuts 89 NGO Monitor 72 Nice 151

Nicholls, W. 17–23 noble savage myth 50 nolesvotes 31, 111–12 North 14 North Africa 24, 30, 97, 137 North America 6, 48–55, 57–9, 61 NYCGA 99 Oakland 4, 7, 53, 99–100 Obama, B. 27, 82 occupiamobankitalia 140 Occupied Times 8, 64, 67–8 Occupied Wall Street Journal 99, 102 Occupy 1–9; activist interventions 162–74; Arab Spring 24–9; beyond networks 148–54; comparisons 17–23; difference 155–61; failed mobilisations 137–47; homelessness 56–62; Indigenous traditions 48–55; institutions 63–9; media cultures 96–106; nationalism 71; online role 88–95; power relations 155–61; precedents 30–40, 71; social movements 129–36; tactics 114–22 Occupy Amsterdam 17–23 Occupy Boston 90, 99, 155–61 Occupy Chicago 99 Occupy Congress 7 Occupy Design 68 Occupy Durham 91 Occupy El Paso 77–87 Occupy Finsbury Square 63, 68 Occupy Hackathons 96–7, 99 Occupy the Hood 105, 159 Occupy ICE 22 Occupy Israel 123–8 Occupy LA 17–23, 99 Occupy London 63–9, 148–54, 167–74 Occupy Museums (OM) 67, 121 Occupy New Brunswick 92 Occupy Oakland 4, 7, 53, 99 Occupy Our Homes 7 Occupy Pittsburgh 10–16 Occupy Rampart 22 Occupy Research 68, 96–7, 100 Occupy Research General Demographic and Political Participation Survey (ORGS) 96–7, 100–1 Occupy Seattle 99 Occupy Skid Row 22 Occupy Student Debt 121 Occupy Talks 53 Occupy Toronto 53 Occupy Tours 174 Occupy Wall Street (OWS) 4, 6, 10–15; activist interventions 167–8; failed mobilisations 140; homelessness 56–61, 78; Indigenous peoples 49–50, 52; influences 24–8; media cultures 97, 99; network comparisons 21; online recruitment 88–95; power relations 157; student rebellions 129; tactics 116–17 occupyarchive.org 68

occupy.net 99 occupytogether.org 90, 99 Ocupemos el Barrio 159 Olsen, S. 7 Onda Anomala 138–9, 143 online recruitment 88–95 open-source software 6–7, 107 openness 96, 99, 103–6 oral history 66–8 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 133 Other 114, 116–17, 121 outreach work 5, 11, 21 Palestinians 70–4, 124 palindromes 51 panhandling 81–2 paradigm shifts 66 paranoia 163, 165–6, 171 Paris 34, 116 participatory cultures 10–16, 96, 103–4, 112, 132, 144, 159 Paternoster Square 167–9 patriarchy 15, 150 patriotism 70–1, 73–4 peace-keepers 20 Penguins Revolution 134 Penny, L. 5 People of Colour (POC) 104–6, 155–60 People’s Global Action 150 People’s Kitchen 118, 121 People’s Library 115 People’s Mic 102 Perez, F. 81 Phelan, J. 85 Philadelphia 116 Piazza San Giovanni 139, 142 Pickerill, J. 1–9 Piñera, S. 131, 134 Pinochet, A. 38, 130–1, 133–4 Pittsburgh 10–16 Piven, F.F. 57, 124 Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH) 44–5 Plaza del Sol 108, 142 police 1, 6–7, 19–21; activist interventions 163–9; homelessness 56, 60, 78–9, 81–2, 86, 92; Indignados 35, 37; influences 25–6; institutions 65; media cultures 97; online recruitment 92; resistance labs 42; student rebellions 131, 134; successes/failures 127, 139–40; tactics 114–16, 121 political geography 17 political opportunity structure (POS) 142–3 politics of asking/talking 148–50, 153, 173 politics of walking 167–74 Polletta, F. 10–13, 15

Popular Party 30–1, 111 Porto Alegre 151 Portugal 125 Pound, E. 116 poverty 1, 7, 14, 33, 48, 50, 169 power relations 64, 85, 116, 121, 151, 155–62, 173 practices 96, 99–101 Presidential Commissions 27 prison industrial complex 14 privatisation 2, 59–61, 116, 123, 167–8, 173–4 privilege 13–14, 26–7, 52, 104, 157–60 proletariat 85 property rights 42–3, 56, 59 protest camps 3, 5, 19–20; activist interventions 162–7; beyond networks 148; free culture 108, 117– 18; homelessness 77–85; Indigenous peoples 53; Indignados 32–5, 38; institutions 63–4, 66; media cultures 101; nationalism 73; online recruitment 90; power relations 155; resistance labs 41–2, 45; successes/failures 123, 125, 127; tactics 114–18 protest cycles 143–5 protest memory 26 protest movements 1, 6–7, 17; activist interventions 163; Indignados 40; influences 24–8; institutions 64–6, 68; nationalism 70–6; network comparisons 22; resistance labs 41, 43; student rebellions 130, 132 protest-tent movement see tent protests psychologists 156 public collecting institutions 63–9 public goods 56, 59, 61 public history 64 La Puerta del Sol 31 Puerto Rico 156 Puritans 171 Quakers 102 Rabin, Y. 73 racism 4, 21, 48, 59, 61, 104–5, 155–60, 165 Radical Mapping Working Group 168 Radical Reference 101 Rahasaan, M. 105 Rajoy, M. 30 Rancière, J. 24–8 Real Democracy Now (RDN) 108, 111 recession 40 Reclaim the Streets 2 referendums 131–2 relationships 14–15, 18–20, 22; activist interventions 162, 165; beyond networks 150–1; homelessness 59–60; Indigenous peoples 48, 54; institutions 65 repression 6–7, 13–14, 21, 129, 131, 134, 143 La Repubblica 139–41, 143 Republican National Convention (RNC) 103 Republican Party 67–8

resistance laboratories 41–7 resources 134–5 Revivi, O. 72 Rey Mazón, P. 97 rights to city 56–7, 158 risk society 46 rituals 1, 6, 25 Rivlin, R. 73 Roman House 68 Rome 139–40, 142 Ronayne, M. 155–62 Rothschild Boulevard 70–1, 73 Routledge, P. 151 Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media 68 Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) 172–3 St Andrew Undershaft Church 171 St Paul’s Cathedral 63–6, 148–9, 167–9 Salt Lake City 82 San Jacinto Plaza 78 sanitation stations 115–16 Sanitation Working Group 116–17, 119 Santiago 130–1 satellite uplinks 103 Schein, R. 56–62 School of Ideas 63 Seattle 11, 13, 99, 102 Seattle Times 27 security culture 7, 123–4, 127 Security Groups 82 segregation 133 Selbin, E. 51 self-governing communities 77 Sephardic Jews 124 Sequera, J. 41–7 settler colonialism 48–55 sexual harassment 4 Shaffir, S. 74 Sharon, A. 124–5 Shell 20 Shmuli, I. 126 Shokooh-Valle, F. 155–62 Short Message Service (SMS) 110 Shoshan, A. 71 siege mentality 72 Sinde Law 111–12 sit-ins 3 Sitting Bull 50 Situationists 3, 169 slavery 155

slogans 1, 3–4, 6, 103, 138, 150 smartphones 99, 103, 105 Smith, C. 77–87 Smith, J. 10–16 Social Forum 10, 14 Social Justice Summer 97 social media 18, 21, 25, 63, 66, 68, 88–96, 157 social movement theory 2–3, 5–7, 19; beyond networks 148, 150, 152; contemporary 63–9; free culture 107–8, 110; homelessness 57–9, 85; Indigenous peoples 51; Indignados 30, 38–9; institutions 67–9; media cultures 96, 101, 103, 105–6; network comparisons 22; online recruitment 88–9, 93; student rebellions 129–36; successes/failures 127, 138, 143–5; tactics 114 social networks 6–7, 88–95, 105, 107–13, 135, 148–54 socialisation 13, 130 socialism 1, 19, 30, 42, 111, 165 sociologists 38–9, 156 software 6–7, 107 solidarity 6, 11, 14–15; free culture 108–10, 112; homelessness 58–9, 77, 85; Indigenous peoples 52– 4; Indignados 38; media cultures 102; nationalism 73; network comparisons 18; online recruitment 88–95; resistance labs 44, 46; successes/failures 126 Solnit, R. 173 Sotheby’s 67 South 14 South Africa 6 South America 37 space claims 1–3, 18, 35; activist interventions 167–74; beyond networks 148, 150, 152–3; failed mobilisations 142, 144; homelessness 56–9, 61, 81; Indigenous peoples 48, 50, 53–4; power relations 156–7; resistance labs 42–5; tactics 116 Spain 5–6, 19, 30–46; beyond networks 149, 151; free culture 107–13; institutions 63; media cultures 97; nationalism 71; online recruitment 89; power relations 155–6; student rebellions 132; successes/failures 123, 125, 137–40, 142–3 Spanish language 31, 78, 111 Spanish Model 43 spokescouncils 160 squatting 18–21, 41–2, 44–6, 162 Starbucks 40 stereotypes 86 stigmatisation 85 Stoler, M. 35 Stone, D. 3 Street Medics 101 strikes 4, 31, 40, 131, 138–40, 142 structural adjustment measures 31 structurelessness 11 student rebellions 129–36, 138–9 Students for a Democratic Society 11 students’ unions 130–1, 133, 140 suffragettes 3 summit-hopping 58 Sun Street 63 surveillance 169

swarming modality 112 synergies 107–13 Syria 124 tactics 1–4, 6–8, 26–8; activist interventions 168; homelessness 56–8, 60–1; Indigenous peoples 48, 50, 52; Indignados 32, 37, 39; media cultures 103, 105; online recruitment 89; power relations 158–9; successes/failures 126; types 114–22 Tahrir Square 24–9, 53, 63, 71, 89, 167 takethesquare.net 151 Tarrow, S. 67 Tea Party 67–8 teach-ins 5 teach-outs 149 Teamsters 67 Tech Tent 65 Tel Aviv 70, 73, 123, 125–6 Tent City University 5, 149 tent protests 5, 70–6, 123, 125–7, 140, 156 territoriality 148–9, 152 Texas 77 This is What Democracy Looks Like 102 Tilly, C. 126 Tla-o-qui-aht (Clayoquot Sound) 52 top-down cultures 96 Toronto 53 Trade Union Congress (TUC) 66 Trajtenberg Commission 127 transmedia mobilisation 99 transnational links 37, 152 Truthers 166 tuition fees 133 Tumblr 121 Tunisia 24, 31, 71, 97 Turin 140 tweets see Twitter Twin Cities Indymedia 103 twinkling 12, 71 Twitter 6, 66, 88, 90, 93, 96–7, 99–100, 110–12, 131 tyranny of structurelessness 11 Uitermark, J. 17–23 Umm el Fahem 73 unions 4–5, 21–2, 28; beyond networks 151; failed mobilisations 139–40, 142; Indignados 31, 40; institutions 66–7; media cultures 103; resistance labs 44; student rebellions 130–3; tactics 117 United Bank of Switzerland (UBS) 63, 65, 148 United Federation of Teachers (UFT) 117 United Kingdom (UK) 75, 149, 162 United States (US) 3–4, 7, 10–11; activist interventions 165; challenges 14–15; Indigenous peoples 48, 50; Indignados 30, 39; influences 27; institutions 63–4, 68; media cultures 99, 101–3;

nationalism 71, 73; online recruitment 88–95; power relations 155–7; student rebellions 135; successes/failures 123–4, 140, 142; tactics 121 University College London 66 The Uptake 103 V de vivienda 44 V for Vendetta 64 Valencia 32 Vallejo, C. 131 Vancouver 53 Veracini, L. 51 Vida Urbana 158 Vietnam 3 violence 14, 25, 35; activist interventions 165; beyond networks 150; failed mobilisations 137, 139, 141–2; homelessness 59–60, 81; Indigenous peoples 48; Indignados 40; online recruitment 92 Virginia 68 voluntary occupiers 5, 58–60, 155 Waldron, J. 59 Walia, H. 54 Walker, S. 103 Wall Street 25, 28, 48–50, 63, 88, 92, 118 Washington 27 waste tactics 114–22 websites 19, 26, 89–90, 97, 100, 103, 108 welfare state 70, 73, 123, 125 Wells Fargo 78 Wengronowitz, R. 155–62 West 15, 24–5, 28, 130, 135 West Bank 71, 73 Wigle, J. 56 Wikipedia 112, 171 wikis 99 Willis Building 171 Wisconsin 103, 155–6 Wolf, E. 69 women 4, 7, 10–13; activist interventions 162, 164; failed mobilisations 139; free culture 111; Indignados 38; influences 28; institutions 67; media cultures 97, 104–6; power relations 156, 158– 9; resistance labs 44 Workers Party 150 working groups 12, 42, 45–6; activist interventions 168; beyond networks 148–9, 152; institutions 67; media cultures 99, 101, 103–5; power relations 158–60; tactics 116–17, 119 workshops 19, 101, 156 World Bank 109, 163 World Social Forum (WSF) 10, 14–15, 58, 150–2 World Trade Organisation (WTO) 10–11, 13, 102 Wu Ming 137 xenophobia 34

Yee, J. 50 Yisrael Sheli 72 Yom Kippur War 124 YouTube 65–6, 90, 92, 100, 102 Zamponi, L. 137–47 Zapatero, J.L.R. 30, 44 Zapatistas 34, 149–50, 173 Zárate, L. 56 Zeitgeist movement 19 Zionism 73 Zuccotti Park 10–11, 48, 50, 63, 97, 99, 117–19, 121, 155–7 Zuckerman, E. 90