David Graeber, in his work on both anthropology and anarchism, has offered a very interesting critique of the idea of Western civilization as the birthplace of democracy. He has demonstrated that the West has been more of a collecting and integration of various ideas from other cultures, and in turn has changed those ideas like that of democracy. In non-Western and premodern cultures there has been numerous cases of direct democracy and using consensus in collective action, but the West has transformed that process into representative democracy that allows the formation of hierarchy. The final result has been that an idea of Western civilization has been used to pacify the truly revolutionary potential of democracy for the sake of a preexisting power structure.

 
The significant characteristic of the Occupy movement is that it is both a resistance of the status quo and a creation of a new politics and economics in one process. The occupations disrupt the accepted narrative that there is no alternative to the plight we find ourselves in by introducing new voices, and through the General Assemblies there is the formation of new collective action that practices direct democracy as a new model. This is in line with the process described by Gilles Deleuze as deterritorialization and reterritorialization. The direct democracy of the General Assemblies insures that this new disruption is not coopted into the old narrative and made harmless to those in power. The result, the new political and economic models, is immanent to the people who first began their resistance by occupying public spaces.