Occupy and the constitution of anarchy
Ruth Kinna
Alex Prichard
Thomas Swann
2134/36891
https://repository.lboro.ac.uk/articles/journal_contribution/Occupy_and_the_constitution_of_anarchy/9469151
This paper provides the first comparative reading of the minutes of the General Assemblies of
three iconic Occupy camps: Wall Street, Oakland and London. It challenges detractors who
have labelled the Occupy Wall Street movement a flash-in-the-pan protest, and participantadvocates who characterised the movement anti-constitutional. Developing new research into
anarchist constitutional theory, we construct a typology of anarchist constitutionalising to
argue that the camps prefigured a constitutional order for a post-sovereign anarchist politics.
We show that the constitutional politics of three key Occupy Wall Street camps had four
main aspects: (i) declarative principles, preambles and documents; (ii) complex
institutionalisation; (iii) varied democratic decision-making procedures; and (iv) explicit and
implicit rule making processes, premised on unique foundational norms. Each of these four
was designed primarily to challenge and constrain different forms of global and local power,
but they also provide a template for anarchistic constitutional forms that can be mimicked and
linked up, as opposed to scaled up.
2019-02-15 11:25:24
untagged
Political Science not elsewhere classified