General assembly (Occupy movement)

The larger assemblies often restricted the speakers only to spokespeople who represented smaller working groups, however each individual was still able to provide feedback, if only by means of hand signals.

General assemblies had been used by the Occupy Wall Street movement since its planning stages in August 2011, and were held in Zuccotti Park during the occupation itself.

[6] The use of General assemblies for consensus based decision making can be traced to the Athenian democracy that arose around the sixth century BC in Ancient Greece.

Since then formal decision making assemblies of Common people have occurred only sporadically and have been of little prominence in world affairs, with exceptions occurring as part of the direct democracy taking place in the Swiss Cantons of the late Middle Ages, and the Quaker movement which arose in the mid 17th century.

[5][7] They grew in prevalence at around the turn of the millennium, manifesting as the spokescouncils of the 1999 anti-globalization movement and as the horizontalist assemblies that began to appear in South America as a response to the Argentine economic crisis (1999–2002).

[2] The Marxist activist Larry Holmes said that the Occupy movement needed to have general assemblies so they could create "real democracy", to oppose the existing state sanctioned institutions which he believes are controlled by financial interests.

[11] The author and academic Luke Bretherton has written that general assemblies provide an "experience of a completely different space and time" so people can perceive the oppressive nature of regular reality.

[15] A trend developed in the global movement for some occupiers to take significant actions autonomously without waiting for approval from an assembly.

[2] Professor Grace Davie reports that at an Occupy Wall Street meeting to discuss general assemblies, held in late December 2011, several participants expressed dissatisfaction with them.