Goals without Demands: The New Movements for Real Democracy

Since the end of 2010, millions of people around the globe have been taking to the streets in cities, towns, and villages—assembling in plazas and occupying parks, buildings, homes, and schools. This new wave of movement is both revolutionary in the day-to-day sense of the word and without precedent with regard to consistency of form, politics, scope, and scale. It is a growing global movement of refusal—and simultaneously, in that refusal, it is a movement of creation. The current frameworks provided by the social sciences and traditional left intellectuals to understand these movements generally have yet to catch up with what is new and different about them. This article suggests new ways of interpretation.