Reading all the accounts of Occupy Wall Street’s theorising in Zuccotti Park can send you to sleep: all academic prose and no real world action or demands. They also make explicit Occupy’s resemblance to its enemy, the Tea Party.

There is a scene I always recall when I try to remember the exhilarating effect that Occupy Wall Street (OWS) had on me when it was first getting going. I was on a subway train in Washington, DC, reading an article about the protests in Zuccotti Park in Manhattan. It was three years after the Wall Street bailouts. It was two years after everyone I knew had given up hope in the creativity of Barack Obama. It was two months after the bankers’ friends in the Republican Party had pushed the country right to the brink of default in order to underscore their hallucinatory economic theories. Like everyone else, I had had enough.

Anyhow, the subway car was boarded by some perfectly dressed, perfectly polished corporate executive, clearly on the way back from some trade show, carrying a tote bag that bore some jaunty slogan about maximising shareholder value or what a fine thing luxury is or how glorious it is to be a winner — the kind of sentiment that had been commonplace a short while before but that the American public had now turned bitterly against. The man was clearly uncomfortable with it on his person. And I considered the situation: once upon a time I would have been embarrassed to hold a copy of this magazine on a crowded subway, but now it was people like him who would have to conceal what they did.

A while later I happened to watch an online video of an Occupy panel discussion held at a bookstore in New York; at some point in the recording, a panellist objected to the way protesters had of saying they were “speaking for themselves” rather than acknowledging that they were part of a group. Another one of the panellists was moved to utter this riposte: “People can only speak for themselves, that the self would be under erasure there, in that the self is then held into question, as any poststructuralist thought leading through anarchism would push you towards... ‘I can only speak for myself’, the ‘only’ is operative there, and of course these spaces are being (...)