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In the Streets

October 29, 2011 - 10:10am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
In the Streets

The Man Behind Occupy Wall Street
Seth Fiegerman

Forget the labor unions. A University of London anarchist and anthropologist is a major force behind the protest movement.

When he's not busy brainstorming how to tear apart and rebuild America's democratic system, David Graeber prefers to think about simpler things, like why we still don't have flying cars.

Graeber, a professor at the University of London and a widely respected anthropologist, has achieved a new level of fame in recent weeks for his early influence on the Occupy Wall Street protests that began in New York City and have since spread around the world.

The Wall Street Journal declared Graeber to be "the single academic who has done the most to shape the nascent movement," while Bloomberg Businessweek declared him to be the "anti-leader" of Occupy Wall Street who generally abstains from the limelight even as his writings,
including a new book on the history of debt and the influence of money, serve as an "intellectual frame" for the protesters.

October 29, 2011 - 9:57am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
In the Streets

Anthropologist Graeber Turns Radical Side Loose in Zuccotti Park Protest
Drake Bennett

David Graeber likes to say that he had three goals for the year: promote his book, learn to drive, and launch a worldwide revolution. The first is going well, the second has proven challenging, and the third is looking up.

Graeber is a 50-year-old anthropologist -- among the brightest, some argue, of his generation -- who made his name with innovative theories on exchange and value, exploring phenomena such as Iroquois wampum and the Kwakiutl potlatch. An American, he teaches at Goldsmiths, University of London.

He’s also an anarchist and radical organizer, a veteran of many of the major left-wing demonstrations of the past decade: Quebec City and Genoa, the Republican National Convention protests in Philadelphia and New York, the World Economic Forum in New York in 2002, the London tuition protests this year.

October 27, 2011 - 5:07am -- stevphen
Analysis & Polemic
In the Streets

Occupy to Self Manage
By Michael Albert

I have yet to see my nearest large occupation, Boston, or the precursor of all U.S. occupations, Wall Street. Instead, I have been on the road for the past six weeks in Thesselonika and Athens Greece; Istanbul and Diyarbikar Turkey; Lexington, Kentucky; London, England; Dublin, Ireland; and in Barcelona, Madrid, and Valencia Spain.

In all these places, I talked with diverse individuals at many meetings and popular assemblies. I met people involved in occupations, as well as audiences assembled by my hosts to hear about participatory economics. Beyond addressing assigned topics, my own priority was to learn about local movements. I repeatedly asked what folks struggling for many months wished to say to other folks first embarking on similar paths.

October 25, 2011 - 6:47am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
In the Streets

No More Bubble-Gum
Mike Davis

Who could have envisioned Occupy Wall Street and its sudden
wildflower-like profusion in cities large and small?

John Carpenter could have, and did. Almost a quarter of a century ago
(1988), the master of date-night terror (Halloween, The Thing), wrote
and directed They Live, depicting the Age of Reagan as a catastrophic
alien invasion. In one of the film’s brilliant early scenes, a huge
third-world shantytown is reflected across the Hollywood Freeway in
the sinister mirror-glass of Bunker Hill’s corporate skyscrapers.

They Live remains Carpenter’s subversive tour de force. Few who’ve
seen it could forget his portrayal of billionaire bankers and evil
mediacrats and their zombie-distant rule over a pulverized American
working class living in tents on a rubble-strewn hillside and begging
for jobs. From this negative equality of homelessness and despair, and
thanks to the magic dark glasses found by the enigmatic Nada (played
by “Rowdy” Roddy Piper), the proletariat finally achieves interracial
unity, sees through the subliminal deceptions of capitalism, and gets
angry.

Very angry.

October 21, 2011 - 8:50am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
In the Streets

Occupy The World! To the Barricades Comrades?
William Bowles

Four years ago in a Ministry of Defence Review, the Whitehall Mandarins,
more astutely than any so-called Lefty, determined the following:

“The Middle Class Proletariat — The middle classes could become a
revolutionary class, taking the role envisaged for the proletariat by
Marx. The globalization of labour markets and reducing levels of
national welfare provision and employment could reduce peoples’
attachment to particular states. The growing gap between themselves and
a small number of highly visible super-rich individuals might fuel
disillusion with meritocracy, while the growing urban under-classes are
likely to pose an increasing threat to social order and stability, as
the burden of acquired debt and the failure of pension provision begins
to bite. Faced by these twin challenges, the world’s middle-classes
might unite, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape
transnational processes in their own class interest.” — ‘UK Ministry of Defence report, The DCDC Global Strategic Trends Programme 2007-2036’ (Third Edition) p.96, March 2007

Yeah, I know, I'm always using this quote (I first used it four years
ago) but it illustrates the great intellectual divide between the
political class and the citizens they rule, including our Left, now made
so apparent by what the pundits are now calling the 'Occupy The World'
(OTW) movement. It seems that only our very own ruling class foresaw
OTW.

October 19, 2011 - 10:33am -- jim
News
In the Streets

Russian Pirates Against Poverty Occupy St. Petersburg
Vladislav Litovchenko

ST. PETERBURG – The “Occupy Wall Street” movement of mass rallies that
has spread around the world has mostly missed Russia. Still, a group of
Russian Indignados are finding their own way to protest against
injustice and inequalities.

Unknown perpetrators raised a pirate flag on an administrative building
in St. Petersburg on Tuesday. This followed a similar symbolic assault
on Sunday, when a Jolly Roger was raised on a mast of the Aurora, a
historic cruiser long associated with the Russian Revolution that has
been converted into a museum, and is moored on St. Petersburg’s Neva River.

October 16, 2011 - 4:05pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
In the Streets

Reflections for the US Occupy Movement
Peter Gelderloos

After the courageous revolts of the Arab Spring, the next phenomenon of popular resistance to capture the world media’s attention was the plaza occupation movement that spread across Spain starting on the 15th of May (15M). Subsequently, attention turned back to Greece, and now to the public occupations spreading across the US, inspired by the Wall Street protests.

October 16, 2011 - 3:38pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
In the Streets

The Awakening in America
Ken Knabb

"A radical situation is a collective awakening. . . . In such situations] people become much more open to new perspectives, readier to question previous assumptions, quicker to see through the usual cons. . . . People learn more about society in a week than in years of academic 'social studies' or leftist 'consciousness raising.' . . . Everything seems possible -- and much more IS possible. People can hardly believe what they used to put up with in 'the old days.' . . . Passive consumption is replaced by active communication. Strangers strike up lively discussions on street corners. Debates continue round the clock, new arrivals constantly replacing those who depart for other activities or to try to catch a few hours of sleep, though they are usually too excited to sleep very long. While some people succumb to demagogues, others start making their own proposals and taking their own initiatives. Bystanders get drawn into the vortex, and go through astonishingly rapid changes. . . . Radical situations are the rare moments when qualitative change really becomes possible. Far from being
abnormal, they reveal how abnormally repressed we usually are; they make our 'normal' life seem like sleepwalking." --Ken Knabb, The Joy of Revolution

* * *

The "Occupy" movement that has swept across the country over the last four weeks is already the most significant radical breakthrough in America since the 1960s. And it is just beginning.

October 12, 2011 - 7:29pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
In the Streets

A Call to the Army of Love and to the Army of Software
Franco "Bifo" Berardi and Geert Lovink

October 2011. The fight opposing financial dictatorship is erupting.

The so-called ‘financial markets’ and their cynical services are destroying the very foundations of social civilization. The legacy of the postwar compromise between the working class and progressive bourgeoisie has all but disappeared. Neoliberal policies are cutting back education and the public health system and is cancelling the right to a salary and a pension. The outcome will be impoverishment of large parts the population, a growing precarity of labor conditions (freelance, short-term contracts, periods of unemployment) and daily humiliation of workers. The yet to be seen effect of the financial crisis will be violence, as people conjure up scapegoats in order to vent their rage. Ethnic cleansing, civil war, obliteration of democracy. This is a system we call financial Nazism: FINAZISM.

October 10, 2011 - 11:55am -- jim
News
In the Streets

Chinese Activists and Academics Support Occupy Wall Street
China Study Group

From the middle of September, a great “Wall Street Revolution” has broken out in the United States. This street revolution, going by the name of “Occupy Wall Street,” has already expanded to over 70 cities and countries in North America, Europe, and other areas. In their statement on “The Wall Street Revolution,” the American people have sworn that this demand for “a democratic country, not a corporate kingdom” mass democratic revolution must spread to every part of the world, and they will not rest until this goal is met. From the anti-capitalist demonstrations that began after the 2008 financial crisis, and which this year have spread across Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and South America, this magnificent global mass democratic movement has finally spread to the center of capitalism’s financial empire–Wall Street.

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