The Prefigurative Prince: An Anarcho-Gramscian Ethnography of the Occupy Vancouver General Assembly

In my Master's thesis, I have reconstructed the dialectical theory of Antonio Gramsci, a twentieth century Marxist scholar and Italian Communist Party activist. In particular, I have aimed to render Gramsci’s concepts more relevant to the obstacles faced by contemporary social movement activists. My reconstructive efforts are grounded in an ethnography that I performed while serving as an activist and facilitator for Occupy Vancouver, a social movement and prefigurative political community most active between October and November, 2011. As an Occupy Vancouver participant, I was privy to some of the systematic ways in which macro-scale institutions – such as patriarchy, white supremacy, and the nation-state - can create institutional contexts that are frequently internalized by social movement participants, finding expression through activists’ exclusionary or marginalizing practices. By employing Gramscian concepts, I have sought to clarify these oppressive institutional tendencies, with the goal of enabling more equitable and inclusive social movement structures.