Square movements attacked elite collusion rather than capital itself, breaking from labor tradition

Evidence

The rhetoric deployed by the squares movements was also strikingly contemporaneous. Their slogans, demands, and chants bore only a faint resemblance to those of the historical labor movement. Instead, they harked back to those of the antiglobalization mobilizations that flourished in the late 1990s and early 2000s. All of these had shared a clear labor component, of course, mainly through the American Federation of Labor’s (AFL-CIO) hostility to international trade deals. Yet the new protesters’ primary backing did not originate within the classical labor movement, either. With no powerful institution like the labor movement to call upon, leftists were forced to take the battle to the electoral arena, thereby launching the true left-populist gamble. Prior to this, many observers had already identified a populist component in the square movements, expressed in mottoes such as “We are the 99 percent,” “They do not represent us,” or “They call it democracy and it is not.” Their main targets were not capitalists and multinational corporations per se. Instead they attacked the unholy alliance between economic and political elites—the “caste.” — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment, 93

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the morality-of-debt/penance framing of austerity and to Laclau’s populist logic of equivalential chains against an elite enemy. — connects to: The industrial working class’s absence crippled the squares movement — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment: The Left After the…, 92; Square movements targeted elite collusion, not capitalism per se. — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment: The Left After the…, 93; Petty-bourgeois factions drove Tea Party and Occupy protests — Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization…, 188 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Square movements targeted elite collusion, not capitalism per se. #corroborates (1.00) — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment, 93
• The 2011 square movements broke from older left protest forms in scale and organization #expands (0.80) — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment, 87
• Petty-bourgeois factions drove Tea Party and Occupy protests #expands (0.75) — Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics, 188