What this movement is about is that even the democratic institutions we do have now have been corrupted by big money, and in the same way our movement would be corrupted if we were subsumed into that same political system. We have to maintain the integrity of this experiment. — David Graeber
"Movements always arrive unexpectedly", according to philosopher and veteran activist Cinzia Arruzza — but once they arrive, what is to be done? Cinzia reconstructs the moments of fulmination behind the high points of Occupy Wall Street, outlining a cautious vision for propelling the movement onward.
Where did we come from and what can we learn? An analysis of London’s OccupyLSX in the context of the now-disbanded UK “Camp for Climate Action” network
Predicting that People’s Mic will come to be regarded as paradigmatic of post-literate politics, Ruby brings Plato to bear on boredom, sacrality, and eroticism in the movement, highlighting key contradictions of technoscientific capital in the social media of the American Fall and Arab Spring respectively.
A forceful outline of Occupy Wall Street’s heritage in the anti-globalization and Zapatista movements, 18th-century aesthetics, and Plato’s Republic. Drawing on the political theories of Hannah Arendt and Jacques Rancière, Charen evinces a fundamental struggle between the radically egalitarian core of OWS tactics and the stultifying gaze of pop-political representation
Writing from his experience as a long-time activist having lately found affinity with New York’s ‘Occupy’, Varon reminds us that ‘Occupy’ should not be approved of so much as appreciated as a transgressive disruption of normal liberal-democratic functioning.
In this sober yet utopian appraisal of the present reality of circulating struggle against the subsumption of education by capital, Thorburn, theorist of the EduFactory, describes the radical praxis of ‘militant research’ and formulates concrete proposals towards the autonomous university.
If university students are offered the pernicious choice of resembling either products or consumers, what are the fundamental choices facing today’s university professors? Are the practices of our professors in line with their preaching? Uncritical Faculties questions the apolitical attitudes and self-serving poises found among many professional academics today.
No chaos resulted from the actions of people without leadership and without previously formulated program…instead of mob rule there appeared immediately the same organization which for more than a hundred years now has emerged whenever the people have been permitted for a few days, or a few weeks or months, to follow their own political devices without a government (or a party program) imposed from above. — Hannah Arendt
Provoked by an instance of transphobic-feminist logic, Sophie Lewis problematizes the middle-class euphoria over the highly polyvalent concept of ‘occupation’, pointing to gendered and postcolonial tensions around its deployment by the OWS movement.
An overlooked history of soviet politics in China, restoring the “Wukan village incident” to its rightful (but imperfect) place in the canon of radical struggle.