Abstract
Abstract:This article 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 participant-advocates 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.
Highlights
Anarchism is rarely if ever discussed in the context of constitutional politics
In this article we show that anarchist political thought and practice is at its heart a post- or anti-statist and anti-capitalist constitutional politics, and we do so through a contextual analysis of organisational structure and democratic process of three iconic Occupy camps
We argue that the anarchist constitutional politics of Occupy was designed primarily to challenge and constrain different forms of global and local power, while providing a template for anarchistic constitutional forms that can be mimicked and linked up, as opposed to scaled up
Summary
Anarchism is rarely if ever discussed in the context of constitutional politics. anarchist activists rarely understand their activities in these terms. Distracted by the arguments for ‘real’ democracy at the heart of Occupy, Hardt and Negri (2017) understandably lament the absence of an institutional or constitutional politics amongst the ‘leaderless left’ and argue that now is the time for its theorisation given ‘the effectiveness of and existing conditions to support nonsovereign political institutions and democratic organizations’ (Hardt and Negri 2017: 45; cf Waldron 2016). We agree, but this model is hiding in plain sight. The anarchist constitutional politics that emerged sought to challenge and equalise global power imbalances at the point of their everyday intersection, in the camps that were set up to challenge the egregious power imbalances of
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