States respond to homeless squatting in empty land by selectively conferring resilience on individuals, groups and/or institutions. In this chapter, we reflect on the role of aggregated or collective claims to state-backed resilience linked to homeless squatting on empty property. Specifically, we consider how interests become aggregated; how aggregation promotes collective consciousness and reaffirms individual claims; and how groups garner state support through the exercise of collective influence or voice. We recognize that the co-option of state actors and agencies to shore up the resilience of the group is not unidirectional but bidirectional. While collective or group interests may seek out state-backed resilience in the form of “other-regarding” state action, states also invoke collective interests to justify or explain their actions, particularly when the state’s own self-interest aligns with the interests or claims of the group. In this chapter we broaden the scope of our “problem topography” by alternately centering a range of networked or aggregated stakeholders: neighbors, market actors, social activists. We explore how collective interests cluster around specific claims; how they exercise influence to secure state action, and also how state actors and institutions justify or explain their responses with reference to the protection of specific group interests. These collective claims are not distinct from, but overlap with the individual claims of owners and squatters, who are themselves simultaneously self-interested individuals and members of networks that share common interests and goals.

This chapter considers the possibility of an anti-marketised global justice, which is conceptualised as ‘occupying’ global justice. After considering the question of ‘reform or revolution?’, the chapter discusses four tactics of anti-marketised global justice: first, unplugged global justice, which concerns the abandonment of marketised visual and linguistic habits; second, despectacularised global justice, which emphasises the slow and quiet, therefore finding the time and means to focus on context; third, unmasked global justice, which reveals stereotypes by means of irony and satire and has a theatrical element to it; and fourth, resistance global justice, which foregrounds agency and insists on an internationalism of solidarity. The tactics can be utilised for different struggles at different times – but they all share the same strategy: anti-imperialism built on internationalism and solidarity.

In “Slow Insurrection” I bring Mark Nowak’s documentary poetics into conversation with relational aesthetics and dissent encampments to explore the emergence of new democratic forms at the interstices of neoliberal capitalism. In Coal Mountain Elementary, Nowak makes coal miners and their labor central as agents in a project of radical history. In the facilitation of workshops in the Worker Writers School, as described in Social Poetics, writing is a site of political theorizing about labor and precarity. Following the discussion of Nowak’s work, I turn to Jacques Rancière’s theorization of aesthetics and politics and Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics to think about dissent encampments. I examine the ways that Occupy made the imagination of more just, caring, and sustainable social institutions part of the practice of inhabitation and central to its challenge to the political and economic institutions of neoliberalism. I argue that these inhabitations offered examples of Bourriaud’s “microutopias”: ephemeral futures in the interstices of global capitalism. Occupy embraced disruption and favored what Rancière calls “dissensus” over consensus. In the last part of the chapter I bring together the social practice of poetry with the encounter of relational aesthetics, illuminating the power of both literary texts and artistic interventions to offer new modes of democratic process.