Subvert City: The Interventions of an Anarchist in Occupy Phoenix, 2011-2012

By way of combining the methodological practices of autoethnography and informal anarchist analysis of social movements, this project establishes anarchist autoethnography as a way of navigating the unavoidable and irreconcilable tensions between academic research and the ethical commitments of anarchists. By way of this method, I explore some of my interventions – as an anarchist – during the Occupy movement in Phoenix, Arizona from October, 2011 through until mid-2012. I explore the internal movement conflicts that arise when certain individuals, factions and political tendencies attempt to homogeneously define the interests of a heterogenous social movement that happens to employ anarchist principles of organization and includes the participation of anarchists. I focus on the conflicts around decision-making processes, the debates about nonviolence, and attitudes towards policing. Beyond analyzing some of my experiences in Occupy Phoenix, and doing so transparently as an anarchist, I additionally explore how the underlying connection between utopianism and the techniques of maintaining urban social orders shape the experience of movements in cities. I find that the moral strategies of left activists very often mirror the dualist ideologies of utopian urban planners, thus reproducing statist ways of seeing. Against the movement managers of the left, who I argue ultimately end up helping to reproduce the social order of cities, I turn at the end towards an exploration of historical Luddism as exemplars of sabotage. In framing anarchism and Luddism as accomplice tendencies that seek to subvert social order so as to preserve autonomy in capitalist states, I carefully distinguish neoluddism as a separate and undesirable approach to questions of technology and techniques of social control.