Lifehouse by Adam Greenfield;

Author:Adam Greenfield;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 1)
Published: 2024-06-20T00:00:00+00:00

These elements of horizontal practice constituted a lightweight, portable kit of parts that was broadly available at moments of social or economic rupture, and such moments came thick and fast as the second decade of the new century dawned.

Across the Arab world, from Tunisia to Bahrain, conspicuously young populations finally lost patience with the absolutist oppression of elderly despots and the foreclosure of their life chances that went along with it. The indignados of Spain, like the Aganaktisménoi, were responding to a different set of pressures: their aspirations for a better life had been sanded away to nothing by the years-long recession gripping Europe’s southern tier, often brutally exacerbated by austerity programs of the sort imposed upon Greece by the Troika. And in the United States, millions could no longer quite escape the sense that somewhere along the way, the American dream had become the sole prerogative of an absurdly wealthy few; this tiny sliver of the population, having reaped stratospheric profits from the financialization of just about everything, now left everyone else to a grim destiny of casualized employment, equally precarious housing and debt service drawn out unto the grave.

What united significant numbers of people in all these places was the common sense that their future was being stolen away from them in real time, without their having had the slightest say in the matter. And they responded in much the same way: with a demand for ¡Democracia real ya! (“Real democracy now!”). This demand was most visibly expressed in a wave of occupations that broke out spontaneously at Tahrir Square in Cairo in January 2011, at Puerta del Sol in Madrid and Syntagma Square in Athens in May, at Zuccotti Park in the financial district of downtown Manhattan in September and, somewhat later, at Gezi Park in Istanbul. This was the global coming-out party for horizontal praxis known as the “movement of the squares.”44

For many participants, myself included, this tide of protest constituted the first time in our lives that our subjective experiences of the world were reflected in mass political action of any sort. We had grown tired of being told that politics would only ever amount to the choice of the least-worst option and that the best we could ever expect to achieve was the most tepid and incremental sort of reform. On some level that was deeper but harder to articulate, we’d wearied of never seeing our dissent from the bland late-capitalist consensus depicted, or even acknowledged, anywhere in public life. So for us, the wave of occupations felt like a sudden irruption of jubilee time. From Zuccotti Park itself to Dame Street in Dublin, the predominant mood in every protest camp I was able to visit in the fall of 2011 was a kind of infectious glee or delight that this should be coming to pass at all.

It’s highly tempting to understand the “new municipalist” wave that broke out during 2014–15, then, as in part an attempt to bottle the euphoria of occupation and extend the logic that had guided the occupation of the squares to a pursuit of lasting local power.

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