Blurb:

This chapter concerns a specific moment of political protest that took place in London in 2014, organised by a group called Occupy Democracy. The protest was marked by the iconoclastic destruction of protest material culture by ‘Heritage Wardens’ and Police. My interest is in the political agency of protest things. In order to understand how these things might – at least at certain sites and on certain occasions – possess political agency, I turn substantially to Emile Durkheim’s theory of totemism and then to Jane Bennett’s vitalist conception of the assemblage.