Horizontal social relationships and the creation of new territory through the use of geographic space are the most generalized and innovative of the experiences of the Occupy movements. What we have been witnessing across the United States since September 2011 is new in a myriad of ways, yet also, as everything, has local and global antecedents. In this article I will describe these two innovations and ground them in the more recent past, looking back to Argentina’s popular rebellion of eleven years ago and its conception of horizontalidad. I do this so as to examine commonalities and differences, but also to remind us that these ways of organizing have multiple and diverse precedents from which we may learn.
Horizontalidad, horizontality, and horizontalism are words that encapsulate the ideas upon which many of the social relationships and political interactions in the new global movements are grounded—movements from Spain to...