Periods of revolutionary insurrection prompt periods of reflection on the nature of politics. What may only be tentative signs of the abilities of subaltern groups to reshape social relations provoke treatises on the successes and the frustrations of such interventions, treatises which often turn on a reconceptualisation of the political. In the wake of Occupy's dramatic emergence and equally sudden disappearance, the attempt to delineate the bounds of the truly political event has yet again acquired a new urgency. In this chapter, I argue that how we engage with actually existing movements such as Occupy – and how we understand ‘politics’ in relation to them – matters enormously. It matters not only for the nature of our work as scholars but also for the power relations shaping knowledge production. The form of our engagement with social movements, moreover, will be shaped by where we see the conditions of possibility for future change. My focus in this chapter is largely confined to the political conceptions of Antonio Gramsci – which were developed in the wake of the Factory Councils and the reversal of a revolutionary moment as Italy descended into fascism – and their posthumous reception in post-Althusserian scholarship, which has influenced more recent readings of the political and post-political (Laclau and Mouffe 1985; Butler, Laclau and Žižek 2000). Moving between post-Althusserian Marxist scholarship and Gramscian readings of the political, I argue for a conception of the political based on a philosophy of praxis, and criticise the privileging of conceptual abstraction over contextualised readings of historically and geographically specific practices.