Occupy in theory and practice

Dr David Bates (reporting on research produced in collaboration with Dr Matthew Ogilvie and Emma Pole, from the Social Movements Research Group, Canterbury Christ Church University)
The Occupy Movement emerged in late 2011, and appeared to assume the status of a global phenomenon. Though there has been an extensive commentary in the popular media who have deemed Occupy to be the latest wave of anti-capitalist mobilisation, there has yet to be a comprehensive in-depth theoretically informed comparative analysis of this movement.
Our paper is based on a theoretically informed empirical analysis of the ‘official’ publications of the Occupy Movement, in Wall Street and London. Operationalising core concepts from the framing perspective within social movement theory (Snow and Benford, 1987), we analyse the strategic frames of these movements. We then situate these frames within a broader macro-theoretical context of radical social movement traditions – from classical Marxism to post-Marxism and post-Anarchism.