Occupy’s horizontalist, demandless prefiguration rejected institutions themselves as the problem.

Evidence

“I just showed up,” recalled the anarchist anthropologist David Graeber of those first meetings, and protesters there spontaneously “decided to have a real assembly.” When labor unions and Democratic Party figures such as then–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi expressed solidarity with the encampment, they found themselves brusquely rejected. Beyond the demand for debt relief, the demonstrators did not put forward any concrete agenda, refused any institutional leadership or “vertical interference,” and strictly adhered to horizontalist principles. For Graeber, Occupy was defiantly “prefigurative.” “If you make demands,” he said, “you’re asking the people in power and the existing institutions to do something different. And one reason people have been hesitant to do that is they see these institutions as the problem.” — Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics, 190

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Occupy collapsed because it rejected theory and organization while ignoring its own neoliberal backers — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 904; Occupy failed because it lacked a coherent counter-repertoire to embedded neoliberalism — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 906