Here Comes Everybody epub

structures of power, and its subjectivity is couched in its intention to destroy them.

Thus a distinction between populism and radical politic must be created. The former is stuck within the system. While constituting hegemonic agency through a ‘people’ established by their demands on the system and able to affect some change, the ‘people’ are ultimately stuck within the prevailing sociopolitical structure demanding concessions from it instead of effecting systemic change. Revolutionary or radical mass politic on the other hand is led by ideology; its enemy is systemic; and, its goals are nothing less than a new social ordering. From this distinction, it becomes clear that a distinction must be drawn between the Occupy Movement that sprung up (mainly in the West) in late 2011 and the collective events comprising the Arab Spring which started in late 2010.

The intricacies of the Arab Spring are beyond the scope of this article, but the political changes that emerged from the uprisings in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, and Syria stand in evidence of their radical natures. These were not Left-wing uprisings by any stretch of the imagination, but the emergent mass politic challenged the systems of power in place in these countries. The people attacked the structures of political power and the capacity of the system to reproduce this power.

Standing in contrast to these events, the framework of Occupy centered on demands addressed to the extant systems of power: full employment, greater equality in the distribution of wealth, and the establishment of Robin Hood taxes (taxes targeting financial transactions). These demands established a clear, non-radical populism at the foundation of the movement. Occupy’s now famous slogan, “We are the 99%,” sets Occupy up in opposition against an implied, or sometimes explicit, “1%” which controls vastly disproportionate access to capital. Occupy established the “99%” as the defining universal political subject of their movement while establishing the “1%” as interloper corrupting the system. This 41