Austerity and the Post-Capitalist Politics of Protest Camps: Experiments in Autonomy at Occupy London

A banner hung across the square outside of St Paul’s Cathedral. In bright pink on blue letters it declared, Capitalism Is Crisis. For the rst few weeks of Occupy London in October 2011, this message was broadcasted all over the country. It stood as both a symbol of the movement and a rallying cry. Spatially, it marked the territory of the Central London Occupy protest camp as a gathering point, a convergence space (Routledge 2003), a site of pre-gurative community where alternatives to capitalism and the austerity agenda of politicians in power could be debated, enacted and imagined (Breines 1989; Epstein 2002).