Occupy Wall Street as Immanent Critique: Why IR Theory Needs a ‘Mic Check!’

The recent movements that have emerged across the world to ‘occupy’ various public spaces present an immanent critique of the contemporary arrangements of global politics – one that theorists of International Relations (IR) and International Political Economy(IPE) should reflect on with some urgency. Emerging from a complex intertext including, but by no means limited to, anarchist and neo-Marxist frameworks, the movement has called for a recognition and appraisal of the ‘communism of everyday life’. Resonating with arguments made in Hardt and Negri’s Commonwealth (2009), as well as David Graeber's Debt: The First 5000 Years (2011), the movements appear to wish to draw attention to a dominant capitalist ontology which denies the highly distributed and social nature of the way in which real value production takes place today. In this context, they argue, the burden of debt that the 99% must endure merely to maintain a dignified standard of living bespeaks the erosion of any semblance of democracy in the allocation of social wealth...