#occupy movement

[firstoccupier]

The Ballad of Washington vs. Chicago

🎺 “Hail the Chief,” they holler loud,POTUS points at Chi-town’s crowd.“March the tanks by Wrigley Field,The pizza’s ours, the city yields!” 🥁 VPOTUS bangs a rebel drum,Declares the Confederates have come.But instead of Dixie’s dusty roads,It’s Lake Shore Drive with traffic cones. 🚁 “Deploy the jets!” the orders fly,Over Navy Pier, hot dogs sigh.The skyline ducks, the seagulls squawk,But…

The Ballad of Washington vs. Chicago

[bluepecanpie]

as a retrospective, occupy wall street was the endpoint of the kind of ‘horizontalist’ politics that was popularized with the anti-globalization movement. the involvement of adbusters in establishing the initial ows is more than enough to show us how direct this influence is. underpinning the anti-globalization movement in the global north was a reliance on the framework consecrated by liberalism, and idealist notions that democracy had been distorted from its optimal function by the presence of trans-national corporations bypassing the power of the state. the idea that in the first instance, the state is an instrument of class power - specifically the power of the bourgeoisie, in the capitalist epoch.

occupy’s failure, is the shared failure of that anti-globalization movement, and in between - that of the arab spring, which had seemingly exhausted imagination for another kind of social modality other than one informed by neoliberalism - islamist or not. even the anti-globalization movement came to fore as a sort of post-cold war rebuke of state socialism and the vanguardist politics used to set it up, only to fumble once confronted with the hard power of the state and especially great power conflicts - in a way that ‘actual existing socialist’ states could not do. the occupy movement also forgoed the kind of deep organising that could actually build class consciousness and galvanise the working class into making demands.

i’m not saying that the occupy movement was bad, or counterproductive: it politicized a generation of people, and broke out of this anhedonic, apathetic morose typical of atomised subjects under neoliberalism. I’m just saying that it was no threat to the ruling class, to any corporations, to anyone wearing the robes of institutional power. pro-ows assessment would rather we think how well ows spread and that was the real victory, like there wasn’t a demand for the neoliberal epoch - whether it was explicity stated or otherwise.

[partisan-by-default]

Occupy Wall Street swept the world and achieved a lot, even if it may not feel like it | Akin Olla

A decade ago Occupy reframed US political debate, trained a generation of activists, and served as a dress rehearsal for movements that followed

Occupy was dismissed for years as ineffective, but time has disproven the cynics. If anything, the Occupy movement showed what is possible when a ragtag group of organizers turn private suffering into public action. Occupy not only helped redefine the political conversation in the United States, it served as a dress rehearsal for many organizations and movements that followed. Through policies proposed and passed in its wake, to the individuals it set up to lead a new generation of social movements and political institutions, Occupy Wall Street has left a powerful legacy.

Political uprisings are usually categorized as successful or not based on what policies they achieve at their peak. But this is not the only means of measuring a movement, as noted by theorists Paul and Mark Engler. The Englers, authors of the 2016 book This Is an Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt is Shaping the Twenty-First Century, argued that movements can also be measured by their ability to shape public opinion and articulate new solutions, many of which need more longstanding organizations to carry them through.

[worklabournewsresearch]

David Graeber, 1961–2020

“David Graeber, the anthropologist and activist, died aged fifty-nine on September 2, 2020. The New York Review, to which he began contributing last year, is collecting tributes from his friends and colleagues”

Thomas Gokey

“I first encountered David through his 2008 book Direct Action: An Ethnography and some shorter essays, but it was Debt that really blew the lid off my head. I was in debt myself, I knew the vampiric power of debt, but I didn’t understand what debt really was. David’s book was like finding a secret decoder ring, or the blueprints to the bear trap that was cutting off your leg. Later, during Occupy, I ended up on a listserv for people scheming about debt resistance. David sent a message about how debts were bought for pennies on the dollar, and said we could just buy some debt and burn it. This couldn’t be, could it? It seemed too good to be true. How could such a thing work? The next thing I knew I was down the rabbit hole. It took nine months of research, but eventually I was able to tell him I had figured it out.”

“I bought a small amount of debt as a test. The timing was perfect, as a new debt resistance group was just forming that would take this idea and run with it. We ended up surprising ourselves. It was thrilling, at first, just to purchase and abolish millions of dollars of debt. But the scope expanded quickly, and as soon as we started organizing debt strikes we were able to force the government to discharge over a billion dollars of debt. Now it seems realistic to dream about getting rid of all $1.7 trillion of student debt. I fully expect we will keep surprising ourselves.”

 Alpa Shah

“After the publication of Debt, David became a global figure, earned recognition within and beyond the academy. If David revolutionized the idea of pirates as rebels and abducted folk who had mutinied against their captains to create truly democratic communities onboard their ships, declaring a war on all of the world, then his own pirate fleet was growing. He was loved far and wide.”

NYRDaily, September 5, 2020: “David Graeber,1961–2020,” by Astra Taylor, Molly Crabapple, Marshall Sahlins, Beka Economopoulos, and Melissa Flashman, et al.

Against Economics

“Breaking through neoclassical economics’ lock on major institutions, and its near-theological hold over the media—not to mention all the subtle ways it has come to define our conceptions of human motivations and the horizons of human possibility—is a daunting prospect. Presumably, some kind of shock would be required. What might it take? Another 2008-style collapse? Some radical political shift in a major world government? A global youth rebellion? However it will come about, books like this—and quite possibly this book—will play a crucial part.” [ Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics by Robert Skidelsky, Yale University Press]

The New York Review of Books, December 5, 2019: “Against Economics," by David Graeber

Youtube, The Guardian, October 28, 2015: David Graeber: debt and what the government doesn't want you to know (3:26 min)

[thoughtportal]

‘People are finally talking about class’: Astra Taylor on US democracy, socialism and revolution

The writer and film-maker explores the meaning of democracy in a new documentary and book, and discusses the current state of politics, from Donald Trump to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

For her, democracy was a word imperial America used to sell free markets and push its agenda. For all the cynicism the word attracted, she could see there was power in an idea meant to strengthen the people, a power that she explores in her new documentary, What Is Democracy?, and her upcoming book, Democracy May Not Exist, But We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone.

In her new film and book, Taylor traces democracy back to its origins in Athens (a patriarchal slave state – we should have seen trouble coming) and then quizzes a diverse group of people, from the academic Cornel West to Syrian refugees and Trump-supporting Florida teens, asking what they now think of the word. The result? It’s not clear what any of us think democracy is or should be, or even if true democracy has ever existed (Taylor thinks not, although she thinks of democracy as a dynamic evolving concept that has yet to be achieved, and is more interested in exploring what the idea means to others than giving her own tight definition). That is Taylor’s aim: to make us think, to ask new questions and hopefully come up with new answers.

While there has been plenty of bad news for democracy in recent years, there is no doubt that politics is changing. More women, more people of colour, teachers, LGBTQ candidates and people from low-income backgrounds are running for office, and winning. A new generation of activists are interested in union organising and strikes.

“We don’t live in an infinite world,” she says. Even a more equitable system would have to deal with inequality, not least in a world facing apocalyptic climate change. “To me, democratic socialism would just mean more interesting democratic dilemmas. We would no longer be arguing over whether billionaires should exist or be abolished – they should be abolished – but there are still so many questions,” she says.

The decline in liberal arts and the rise of “practical” degrees in subjects such as pharmacology, nursing and construction management, she says, suggest a society that is tailoring people to the workplace rather than encouraging them to think about the big issues, while saddling them with major debts.

Her book and film are an argument for the case that “of all academic disciplines, the one that demands to be democratised is political philosophy, which is basically the asking of the questions: how do we want to live? How should we live? What kind of people should we be? How should we govern ourselves? This is something that increasingly only the elites get to carve out time to think about. That is really a tragedy.”

[memoryfortomorrow]

2014 Hong Kong protests

[bigdreamstonsofweirdness]

Why a forgotten 1930s critique of capitalism is back in fashion

Seventy years ago the thinkers and writers of the Frankfurt School warned of capitalism’s drift towards a cultural apocalypse. Has it already happened, but we’ve been too uncritical to notice?

“...Humans had been transformed into desirable, readily exchangeable commodities, and all that was left to choose was the option of knowing that one was being manipulated. “The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them.” The Frankfurt School is relevant to us now because such critiques of society are even more true now today than when those words were written.”

[upsettingandunfortunateclasshate]

Ex-diplomat Carne Ross: the case for anarchism

How a high-flying diplomat and Middle East adviser lost his faith in western democracy – but put his trust in people power

I wouldn’t mind watching this. His anarchism is a bit iffy but his insight into how government operates is brilliant, especially the insider info he has on the Iraq invasion.