The Counter-hegemonic spectacle of Occupy Wall Street: Integral State and Integral struggle

In this article we explore the US social movement “Occupy Wall Street.” Our objective is to interrogate this form of social mobilization about its capability to contribute to the construction of counter hegemony, as well as to provide a more general argument about the perils and possibilities social mobilization in times of crisis. We interpret OWS as embedded in a framework of multiple tensions that we explain through a Gramscian framework: between identified objectives and adequate means to achieve them, between civil society and state, between the strategies of ‘war of maneuver” and “war of position,” and finally between conventional and unconventional politics.