Squares in Movement

What has been called the squares movement is characterized by practices of commoning that reinvent public space as commons. People in the recent square occupations were not only demanding justice and direct democracy but were also creating ad hoc new forms of solidarity and egalitarian organization. Focusing especially on the Syntagma Square occupation in Athens, this essay explores the importance of a decentralization–recentralization dialectics both for the construction of a shared feeling of belonging to communities in movement and for the emergence of new forms of political subjectivation. Analysis attempts to compare discourses and manifestos to acts of coordination and mutual support in an effort to show that the “occupy the squares” phenomenon is multifarious and dynamic and that it challenges many of the certainties of oppositional movement (Left or anarchist).