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Ernesto Laclau An interview with Ernesto Laclau READ LATER Ernesto Laclau talks to the Greek journal Intellectum about the uses of populism, why radical democracy has nothing to do with liberalism, and how lack of political competition benefits the far-Right. Intellectum: In probably your most famous book, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, co-authored with Chantal Mouffe, you attempted to deconstruct both Marxist theory and liberal democratic thought in order to reinterpret them in such a way that they could contribute to a more sufficient understanding of contemporary politics. What is the significance of the concept of identity for the comprehension of modern reality? Ernesto Laclau: Well I think that the concept of identity can be analysed from different sides. One side would be to identify identity with particularity. There are some difficulties obviously in this type of identification of the two categories. But there are also advantages, because obviously the political problem that presents itself is a problem of general articulation, and general articulation has to rely on some kind of category of identity. So this is the way in which the question of identity emerges today. It can be related to a variety of intellectual contexts, but I think that the essential point is that there are no obvious forms of universality that can replace the notion of identity. Intellectum: In your first book Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (1977), you discussed the phenomenon of populism. In 2005 you published On Populist Reason. It seems that populism has remained at the centre of your interest. In a country that is governed by a populist party, what can we assume about the political identity of that people? How is popular subjectivity constructed? EL: I think we have to introduce a classical distinction: the distinction between populus and plebs. Populus is the totality of the community; plebs are those at the bottom of the social pyramid. A characteristic of plebeian

Occupy Wall Street: Beyond the Rhetoric Matthew Flisfeder One of the distinguishing features of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement is its apparent lack of central leadership. Not only does the movement seem leaderless; it does not appear to be organized around any clearly defined 'demands.' This has been perceived as something quite positive for participants and supporters of the movement, while being the primary point of criticism from opponents, particularly the mainstream media. Clearly, OWS stands against the unfair balance of wealth distribution in the United States (and around the world, for that matter), the unfair neoliberal politics that have swept the globe over the last four decades, corporate greed (especially in the financial sector), and various forms of systemic violence resulting from structural inequalities built into the capitalist system of exploitation. But what media pundits are looking for is something that they can represent: something, that is, with a timeline, that defines when the protestors will be 'satisfied.' This makes OWS qualitatively different from the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings that took the world stage last winter, popularly touted as the 'Arab Spring.' These groups had clearly defined 'demands': first and foremost was the overthrow of their political leaders. OWS is distinguished from the Arab Spring to the extent that its definitive aims and goals have yet to be defined. Activists meet October 7th in Toronto, in a pre-October 15 General Assembly. The movement has gone beyond the various '-isms,' labels that media pundits and the corporate elite find easy to dismiss: 'communism,' 'socialism,' 'anarchism,' 'Leftism,' etc. Commentators outside the United States have started to take notice. CBC business personality, Kevin O'Leary made a mockery of himself last week during a live interview with the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, Chris Hedges, by referring to him as a "Left-wi

Transcript: Slavoj Zizek at St. Mark's Bookshop BY SARAHANA » Fake leftist melancholia; obscene Zionist pact. Slavoj Zizek at St. Mark's Bookshop First part of the talk is a theoritical discussion on melancholy, mourning and prohibition, addressing Judith Butler and Freud. It's followed by a discussion on Wall Streets protests, including (1) a dissection of Anne Applebaum's recent column in the Washington Post that claims democracy is incompatible with globalization, but also that the Occupy protests (which react to the consequences of globalized economy) are incompatible with democracy (2) the idea of a fake leftist melancholia as it applies to these protests (3) the need to preserve the vacuum the protests create, by refusing to engage in a dialogue with those in power, just yet. Later parts of the unscripted talk discuss the obscene pact of Zionism that allows pro-Zionism and anti-Semitism to co-exist in the same group (like American Christian fundamentalists). Towards the very end, there's a brief mention of the anticipated pact between the Egyptian army and the Muslim Brotherhood. October 26, 2011 at St. Mark's Bookshop. -- TRANSCRIPT -- I will simply begin by certain historical observations. You probably notice how some people, and I think precisely the wrong people, started to celebrate the Wall Street events as a new form of social carnival: so nice, we have there this horizontal organization, no terror, we are free, egalitarian, everybody can say whatever he or she wants, and so on, all that stuff. It is as if some kind of a carnivalesque collective experience is returning. And this tendency, much more than here, is alive, as you can expect, on the West Coast. A couple of days ago at Stanford they told me that - the other Sunday, about 9 days ago - that in the center of San Francisco, a guy speaking on behalf of those who occupy, said something like, "They are asking you what's your program. They don't get it. We don't have a program. W

The Øther 2009-2010 READ LATER By Daniel Tutt, American University Comments and or questions are welcome. Please direct them to danielp.tutt@gmail.com Proximity towards the jouissance of the Other, or the neighbor, in Lacan's seminar The Ethics of Psychoanalysis becomes a matter of ethical concern because the Other as das Ding (the thing) poses problems outside of the moral relationship. In this paper I will examine the ethical positions of two psychoanalytic theorists, Eric Santner and Slavoj Žižek. The proximity towards the excessive jouissance of the neighbor as das Ding presents a number of interesting ethical problems. Žižek's confrontation with das Ding is a complex procedure that remains ambiguous, particularly in light of his sympathies towards the Christian Pauline agape version of radical love. Žižek's treatment of proximity towards the Other seeks a total escape from the fantasmatic symbolic coordinates of the oppressive symbolic order, whereas with Santner, in his text The Psychotheology of Everyday Life, the "mental excess" of jouissance caused by confrontation with the Other as das Ding is sought to be converted into an owning of the excessive proximity into a "blessings of more life." This paper first identifies and describes the Lacanian subject - a subject rooted in lack and the crisis of symbolic investiture and argues that Lacanian subjectivity is capable of radical freedom from the fantasmatic symbolic coordinates that sustain its relationship to its own freedom. There are several meta-ethical questions that arise in light of Lacan's notion of ethics for subjectivity inhabited by fantasmatic symptoms and a symbolic order structured by oppressive fantasy relations. These problems will be explored in this paper as they guide both Žižek's and Santner's work, particularly the superego demand to "love thy neighbor as thyself." The question of politics in relation to the Other for Santner is centered on how to convert

The Crisis and The Way Out Of It: What We Can Learn From Occupy Wall Street Posted on October 8, 2011 The Occupy Wall Street movement more effectively addresses the cause of the financial crisis than economists and discussions in the mainstream press. Further, this movement embodies democratic solutions for a way beyond the crisis. This essay focuses on Occupy Wall Street's facilitating of political action from disparate, heterogeneous partisans; increasing of transparency and participation in decision-making; and relying upon both human-scaled and participatory technologies. Through these processes, the Occupy Wall Street micro-community embodies a vision for a pluralistic, direct democratic society and demonstrates it through practice. Three years into an economic recession that rivals the Great Depression, economists are scrambling for explanations of its origins and the steps to take. Congressperson Darrel Issa (R-CA), Ranking Member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, blames unaffordable housing and political kickbacks from the banking industry. He stresses the need to "return to fiscal discipline and prudent, responsible   housing policies"(Issa, 2011, p. 419). Gary B. Gorton of the Yale School of Management traces an added cause to the "parallel" banking system and a banking panic that began in August 2007 (2010, p. 2). Former economist at Freddie Mac and the Federal Reserve and current Cato Institute adjunct, Arnold Kling, blames capital regulations and "cognitive failures" of executives in financial institutions. It may not be surprising to the reader that this employee of a libertarian think-tank advocates for deregulation and expects the public to "not be deceived into believing that regulatory foresight can be as keen as regulatory hindsight" (Kling, 2011, p. 517). Ten-year veteran CEO and President of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and current Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute blames "a failu

Strengthening Occupy for the Future 6 ways to stop the movement from becoming institutional BY HARRIET BARLOWSHARE      Print Harriet Barlow, co-founder and Senior Fellow of the On the Commons, sends a warning that the creeping institutionalization of the Occupy movement- suggested by many well-meaning supporters as a way to strengthen its impact- will undermine what has made these protests so powerful and effective. Photo by Tom Giebel under a Creative Commons license. If we institutionalize Occupy, so that its spirit will succumb to the politics of the possible rather than continuing to create new possibilities, we will have missed an opportunity that history seldom offers. It's worth a long night's conversation over your beverage of choice to explore the history of how becoming institutionalized affected the course of the civil rights and women's movements, among others. Was the radical spirit of each distracted or stifled? Each of those movements came out of the gate with a powerful set of demands. Yet, once organizational dynamics took hold and divisions were confirmed by structure (think SCLC vis-à-vis SNCC, or NOW vis-à-vis NARAL) the chance of maintaining one strong voice committed to radical change diminished. Radicals became captive to a mindset dominated by the imperatives of competitive fundraising and institutions, rather than movement building. There were payrolls to be met, auditors to be satisfied, board members and donors to be placated. To be clear, there is a stage when that evolution is inevitable in order to make the shift from fostering outrage to changing policy. At their best, strong, transparent and accountable formal organizations are essential building blocks for social change. But is this the appropriate role for Occupy? My eloquent colleague, On the Commons Program Director, Alexa Bradley wrote: "The beauty of Occupy is that it is popular, wild, free. I don't mean that in a romantic sense, although

Charting Hybridised Realities:  Tactical Cartographies for a densified present In the midst of an enquiry into the legacies of Tactical Media - the fusion of art, politics, and media which had been recognised in the middle 1990s as a particularly productive mix for cultural, social and political activism [1], the year 2011 unfolded. The enquiry had started as an extension of the work on the Tactical Media Files, an on-line documentation resource for tactical media practices worldwide [2], which grew out of the physical archives of the infamous Next 5 Minutes festival series on tactical media (1993 - 2003) housed at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. After making much of tactical media's history accessible again on-line, our question, as editors of the resource, had been what the current significance of the term and the thinking and practices around it might be? Prior to 2011 this was something emphatically under question. The Next 5 Minutes festival series had been ended with the 2003 edition, following a year that had started on September 11, 2002, convening local activists gatherings named as Tactical Media Labs across six continents. [3] Two questions were at the heart of the fourth and last edition of the Next 5 Minutes: How has the field of media activism diversified since it was first named 'tactical media' in the middle 1990s? And what could be significance and efficacy of tactical media's symbolic interventions in the midst of the semiotic corruption of the media landscape after the 9/11 terrorist attacks? This 'crash of symbols' for obvious reasons took centre stage during this fourth and last edition of the festival. Naomi Klein had famously claimed in her speedy response to the horrific events of 9/11 that the activist lever of symbolic intervention had been contaminated and rendered useless in the face of the overpowering symbolic power of the terrorist attacks and their real-time mediation on a global scale. [4] The

How Oversocialization and Feelings of Inferiority Cripple Bay Area Occupations Occupy Reality by MARC SALOMON The Bay Area has always been the outlier in American politics, often for the better and occasionally for the worse.  In the case of Occupy, the Bay Area's unique situation highlights the challenges facing the movement from both its relative "left" and "right" flanks.  The downside of this Bay Area specialness has been exposed like our earthquake fault lines after two actions, one in San Francisco on January 20th (J20) and another in Oakland on January 28 (J28). San Andreas fault on the right are the institutional actors, nonprofit corporation centered advocacy groups and organized labor with varying degrees of connection to the state, the Democrat Party and its corporate sponsors.   The Hayward fault on the left includes the dwindling ranks of sectarian leftists and the more predominant militant blacque bloque anarchoids, which exist outside of the constellation of power affiliated with the Democrat Party.  The attributes of labor and the nonprofit corporations are clear, but this anarchist would hesitate to ascribe the term 'anarchists' to the militants in Oakland. Despite of decades of activism and nominal public support for goals, professional activists have failed connect with and mobilize sufficient numbers of people to create critical mass and raise political power, although those years were not entirely fruitless in building some base capacity from which Occupy benefits now.   Power, for its part, succeeded in coopting activists into the nonprofit corporate sector beginning in earnest during the early years of Clintonia. Organized labor, long an ugly stepchild of the Democrat coalition, has been in slow free fall for the past three decades but less so in the Bay Area public sector.  Since labor abandoned unorganized workers, it has forfeited its relevance to most of the 99% and is paying the political price now.  The

David Graeber: anthropologist, anarchist, financial analyst* By gregdowney Posted: October 15, 2011 Wall Street is in the grips of an 'occupation,' and activist and anthropologist, David Graeber, now at Goldsmiths, University of London, is in the centre of the action.  Graeber has been doing a few television and radio interviews of late (check here for his interview on ABC Radio National, Australia), talking about the organization of the Wall Street occupation as well as his new book, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Melville House). The juxtaposition of Florida Governor Rick Scott's recent comments about anthropology and the fact that Graeber is offering what may be among the most penetrating and accessible analyses of an important dimension of the current global debt crisis is striking. Of course, maybe clear-eyed analysis of our current economic situation, and the ability to point out that other societies do perfectly well with other sorts of economic and political systems, is precisely the sort of academic work that Gov. Rick Scott thinks universities should give up.  After all, no one needs to understand why US firms are shedding jobs, or take a sober look at the current financial regime in the light of the 5,000-year history of debt.  Students should just put their heads down and do the sorts of degrees that will give them technical jobs.  Pay no attention to The Man behind the curtain! Graeber is doing exactly what many of us want university-based social and cultural anthropologists to do more of: not just doing outstanding, useful applied work (which is bloody brilliant, of course), but also showing how our distinctive intellectual perspectives - comparative, evolutionary, cross-cultural, critical, even deconstructive (and 'post-modern') - provide academic analyses with important, 'real world' implications. After all, part of the current problem in the global economy is not just that we have bad applications of economic theory-we have b

The Situationists and the Occupation Movements (1968/2011)   One of the most notable characteristics of the "Occupy" movement is that it is just what it claims to be: leaderless and antihierarchical. Certain people have of course played significant roles in laying the groundwork for Occupy Wall Street and the other occupations, and others may have ended up playing significant roles in dealing with various tasks in committees or in coming up with ideas that are good enough to be adopted by the assemblies. But as far as I can tell, none of these people have claimed that such slightly disproportionate contributions mean that they should have any greater say than anyone else. Certain famous people have rallied to the movement and some of them have been invited to speak to the assemblies, but they have generally been quite aware that the participants are in charge and that nobody is telling them what to do. This puts the media in an awkward and unaccustomed position. They are used to relating with leaders. Since they have not been able to find any, they are forced to look a little deeper, to investigate for themselves and see if they can discover who or what may be behind all this. Since the initial concept and publicity for Occupy Wall Street came from the Canadian group and magazine Adbusters, the following passage from an interview with Adbusters editor and co-founder Kalle Lasn (Salon.com, October 4) has been widely noticed: We are not just inspired by what happened in the Arab Spring recently, we are students of the Situationist movement. Those are the people who gave birth to what many people think was the first global revolution back in 1968 when some uprisings in Paris suddenly inspired uprisings all over the world. All of a sudden universities and cities were exploding. This was done by a small group of people, the Situationists, who were like the philosophical backbone of the movement. One of the key guys was Guy Debord, who wrote The Society of the Sp

May 1, 2012 Pt.1 A Call To Strike To friends who don't live in the US, or others who have not yet been touched by the call for a General Strike on this day, we write this short note, as a kind of update. Some of our earliest discussions in the space began with considerations of what could or could not be considered work; who is included and who is excluded when we talk about labor. And what constitutes labor today in this everywhere and nowhere paradigm of production. Moreover, we have reflected together on what could potentially constitute a political activity today? It is no surprise then that the most intensive global attempts at responses in recent memory come precisely when the living labor of humans is in its most deformed and devalued form, and political space everywhere appears the most foreclosed, by a logic that would prefer to reduce politics to a managerial task of order and administration. A call for a national general strike in the United States has happened perhaps only once, for May 1st, 1886 [to be expanded by historians?]. In our January retreat/seminar, The Crisis of Everything Everywhere, we had a session, "On the General Strike". We asked: How it could be deployed? What are our historical and political conceptions of the strike, how do they relate to our present contexts, and what forms of communication and solidarity are necessary to see the strike we want to see? Who calls for the strike, who strikes, what do we do during the strike, and is there an AFTER the strike? What activities do we expect to precede this call, and what do we expect to follow? Can we have a general strike which is not instrumentalized, but is a political act, a step towards definitive refusal or revolt? The efficacy of this meeting was to be found neither in its valor for organizing, nor the theories we developed together. Its efficacy came in its indiscernibility between intellectual work, cultural work, and political work. To

Radical Thinking To Recreate And Reimagine Our Cities By Anthony Cuthbertson on Sep 4, 2011 Does this look like your average mayor? It is estimated that by the year 2050, eighty percent of the world's population will be living in cities. Unfortunately, modern-day cities are often crime-ridden, chaotic, and in some form of decay. The Torre de David, the world's tallest squat, which has emerged in Caracas, could be a precursor of things to come if something isn't done about expanding urban populations. One answer is to build brand new cities, such as Iskandar in Malaysia, soon to be home to 3 million people. However, if governments don't have a few trillion dollars to spare, there is a slightly cheaper solution. Follow in the footsteps of others. A series of films commissioned by the Danish Film Institute and national broadcaster DR, focusing on four mega-cities that faced extreme problems, sought out and gave recognition to inspired visions for an urban future. Of the four cities dealt with in Cities on Speed, the most incredible story of transformation comes from Colombia. Bogotà Change tells the tale of two unorthodox politicians, Antanas Mockus and Enrique Peñalosa, whose successive mayoralties transformed the Colombian capital from a city plagued by crime, poverty and corruption to one of social equality and relative harmony. The political metamorphosis in the place once dubbed 'the worst city on the planet' was, bizarrely enough, when Mockus pulled down his trousers and mooned 2000 students who were booing and insulting him. He was chancellor of the university at the time and was soon forced to resign-though remarkably this action became a symbol of his candor, which was seen as part and parcel of a larger integrity. Within a few months he was running to become the first independent mayor in Bogotà's history. Campaigning in spandex 'super-citizen' suits, he won. Immediately, he put into action a behavioral philosophy that turned Bogot

In this Oct. 18, 2011 photo, an Occupy Wall Street protestor speaks into microphone for a live-streaming online interview at the media area in Zuccotti Park in New York. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)   From its inception, the Occupy movement has had a contentious relationship with the mainstream media. On September 17, a few hours into the first day of the occupation, as a couple of hundred people assembled in Zuccotti Park, some demonstrators were already complaining of a "media blackout." I was there, as an enthusiastic participant, yet even I wasn't convinced the event was particularly newsworthy: in May more than 10,000 people had marched through nearby streets airing similar grievances; a month later protesters camped for two weeks outside City Hall as part of a protest called Bloombergville. Yet accusations flew through the Twittersphere. The traditional media are ignoring us! Why aren't we big news? About the Author Astra Taylor Astra Taylor is the director of the documentary films Zizek! and Examined Life. She has written for Monthly Review,... Also by the Author Occupy Wall Street on Your Street (Occupy Wall Street) Banks trying to foreclose on homes are surprisingly vulnerable to direct action-a fact that Occupy Our Homes intends to exploit. Astra Taylor 7 comments The Other Prison Population (Movements, Disability Rights Movement) Disabled people march on Washington to protest policies that keep them out of sight, out of mind. Astra Taylor Related Topics Entertainment Religion Social Issues Technology War Before long, Occupy Wall Street would be. When protesters managed to hold their ground through the weekend, sleeping on hard concrete and eating pizza donated by well-wishers from around the world, reporters began dutifully to file stories. But the charge of a media "blackout" persisted until September 24, when shaky video of several young women being cordoned off and pepper-sprayed point-blank by a white-shirted police officer was up

Constructing a radical politics in an age of crisis Clark University, Worcester, MA, November 4-6, 2011 Co-sponsored by the Graduate School of Geography at Clark University and the journal Human Geography, the 18th Annual Conference on Critical Geography seeks to bring critical geographers together to engage with a world in crisis. Historically, crises have been viewed as moments of political opportunity; as points in time where hegemonic contradictions are revealed and contested. This conference views crisis as an entry point into questions of how critical geographers can construct a responsive, radical politics. If the aim of critical social theory is not only to understand but to change, we seek to question what notions of change, politics, and action underlie contemporary critical and radical geographies. The conference will begin on Friday, November 4th, 2011. The opening evening will feature a keynote address by Neil Smith, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Geography and Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the CUNY Graduate Center. The program on Saturday, November 5th will consist of paper sessions, panels, and round table discussions. Saturday evening will feature a keynote panel addressing the theme of the conference. Sunday, November 6th will include additional sessions. We invite you to submit abstracts or proposals for paper sessions, panels, roundtable discussions, or sessions with alternative formats by the extended deadline of September 15, 2011. Abstracts or proposals should be 250 words in length, and we ask that you include contact information and any titles or affiliations you would like placed in the program. We are especially interested in participants organizing their own sessions. If you are interested in organizing a session, please let us know in advance and you can then issue your own CFP through the appropriate mailing lists. Papers submitted individually will be reviewed by the program committee afte

#AMERICANAUTUMN What 'diversity of tactics' really means for Occupy Wall Street by Nathan Schneider | October 19, 2011, 12:02 pm Occupy Wall Street marchers watch from the pedestrian walkway as hundreds of their comrades take to the roadway of the Brooklyn Bridge on October 1. Even as Occupy Wall Street shapes the public conversation about high finance, political corruption, and the distribution of wealth, it has also raised anew questions about how resistance movements in general should operate. I want to consider one of the matters that I've thought about a lot over the past month while watching the occupation and its means of making its presence felt on the streets of New York and in the media. "Diversity of tactics," in the context of political protests, is often treated as essentially a byword for condoning acts of violence. The phrase comes by this honestly; it emerged about a decade ago at the height of the global justice movement, especially between the 1999 demonstrations that shut down a WTO meeting in Seattle and those two years later in Quebec. While all nonviolent movements worth their salt will inevitably rely on a variety of tactics-for instance, Gene Sharp's list of 198 of them-using the word "diversity" was a kind of attempted détente between those committed to staying nonviolent and those who weren't. Consider this characterization by George Lakey: "Diversity of tactics" implies that some protesters may choose to do actions that will be interpreted by the majority of people as "violent," like property destruction, attacks on police vehicles, fighting back if provoked by the police, and so on, while other protesters are operating with clear nonviolent guidelines. Those who extoll the importance of total nonviolent discipline-as Lakey eloquently goes on to do-might be disappointed to learn that Occupy Wall Street has made "diversity of tactics" its official modus operandi. However, the way that the occu

Diversity of Tactics and Democracy By George Lakey Clamor magazine March-April02 Last fall while working with activists in Europe I had the chance to hang out more with young people from Otpor, the resistance movement that brought down dictator Slobadan Milosevic in Serbia in October00. These Otpor activists were ages 19-23, typical ages in the movement that catalyzed the downfall of Milosevic (pronounced "Milosevitch"). They taught people twice their age some powerful lessons about how to overthrow a dictatorship, including how to keep going despite years of arrests and beatings. Some of the young people who started Otpor in 1999 had already been doing direct action in 1996 in the student pro-democracy movement. There they learned a hard fact: as the demonstrations grew the government paid infiltrators to pretend to be activists and do property destruction and street fighting. The government's tactic was brilliant because it scared away the potentially hundreds of thousands who were getting ready to join the movement, and gave back to government the moral high ground. Refusing to be discouraged, those who made a fresh start in 1999 made a critical decision: in order to win, Otpor would establish a policy of nonviolence. The stakes were too high, they reasoned, to have the luxury of everyone doing their thing. Milosovic was desperate, and surrounded with thugs who had no scruples. Only a policy of nonviolence could avoid the mistakes of 1996. I was impressed by the fast learning curve. Most movements do have a learning curve that enables them to benefit from their experience, but Otpor confronted a very hard lesson and quickly changed their policy of tolerance for diversity of tactics. Maybe their youth gave them an advantage in flexibility. Was Milosevic's tactic unusual? So many powerholders have used the tactic of what the French call "agents provocateur" that it is virtually predictable. Not only the "bad guy" authoritarians like Milosevic do it; liber

American Ethnologist on Occupy by Zachary MenchiniTweetFacebookEmail The May 2012 issue of American Ethnologist has three open-access articles focused on the Occupy movement. In "The Occupy Movement in Žižek's hometown: Direct democracy and a politics of becoming," Maple Razsa and Andrej Kurnik write: We trace the development of decidedly minoritarian forms of decision making-the "democracy of direct action," as it is known locally-to activists' experiences of organizing for migrant and minority rights in the face of ethnonationalism. We compare the democracy of direct action to Occupy Wall Street's consensus-based model. In conclusion, we ask how ethnographic attention to the varieties of emergent political forms within the current global cycle of protest might extend recent theorizing of radical politics and contribute to broader efforts to reimagine democracy. Jeffrey S. Juris offers "Reflections on #Occupy Everywhere: Social media, public space, and emerging logics of aggregation": Whereas listservs and websites helped give rise to a widespread logic of networking within the movements for global justice of the 1990s-2000s, I argue that social media have contributed to an emerging logic of aggregation in the more recent #Occupy movements-one that involves the assembling of masses of individuals from diverse backgrounds within physical spaces. However, the recent shift toward more decentralized forms of organizing and networking may help to ensure the sustainability of the #Occupy movements in a posteviction phase. And David Nugent comments on the first two articles and the questions they raise "about the temporalities of capitalism and about the dilemmas of inclusion in the recent Occupy movements." Tags: activism, becoming, capitalism, coauthorship, democracy, direct action, direct democracy, globalization, inclusion, inequality, new technologies, Occupy, political protest, public protest, public space, Slovenia, social media

Which way for the ecology movement? Murray Bookchin 0 Resenhas AK Press, 1994 - 75 páginas In the essays that make up this book, Murray Bookchin calls for a critical social standpoint that transcends both "biocentrism" and "ecocentrism." A call for new politics and ethics of complementarity, in which people, fighting for a free, nonhierarchical, and cooperative society, begin to play a creative role in natural evolution. Bookchin attacks the misanthropic notion that the environmental crisis is caused mainly by overpopulation or humanity's genetic makeup.
He resolutely points to social causes--patriarchy, racism, and a capitalistic "grow or die" economy--as some of the problems the environmental movement must deal with. These ideas have to be confronted by environmentally concerned readers if the ecology movement is not to destroy its own potential as a force for social change and the achievement of a truly ecological society.
Murray Bookchin's writings have profoundly influenced ecological thinking over the last forty years. Now in his 80s, he has been a life-long radical, a trade union activist in the 30s and 40s, an innovative theorist in the 60s, and a leading participant in the anti-nuclear and radical wing of the Greens in the 70s and 80s. His ideas on social ecology have been important contributions to left libertarian thinking.

We Power From Zuccotti Park to Main Street, people's yearnings spark new possibilities for a shift from me to we BY JULIE RISTAU & ALEXA BRADLEYSHARE Print Occupy Wall Street and related actions across the country overturned the conventional wisdom that most Americans passively accept a massive transfer of wealth from the middle class to the wealthy. There's genuine surprise among journalists and other experts that thousands of people from all walks of life are camping out in the autumn chill to protest Wall Street greed. And there's shock that their actions are supported by a majority of Americans. A recent Time magazine poll found that 54 percent view the Occupy Wall Street protests favorably (23 percent do not). Compare that to the 27 percent in the same poll who view the Tea Party favorably. Until now, it's been easy to think that no cares what's happening because there were no protests in the streets. But the dynamics of social change are more complicated that that, as shown in this essay by On the Commons Co-director Julie Ristau and Program Director Alexa Bradley. Although written before the Wall Street occupation, it pinpoints the power of our yearnings to set the stage for future action. We live under the market paradigm today, they write, in which "people's social, political, and even personal consciousness is conditioned by their belief in the market as the only efficient system to organize society." That means it takes time for many people to respond to events like the economic crisis, and that when they do it comes out first as feelings, not as policy proposals. But three years after the crash, there's an upsurge in outrage about the richest one percent high-jacking the U.S. economy-and rising interest in the commons as a way to find our way of this mess. - Jay Walljasper Adapted from the On the Commons book All That We Share: A Field Guide to the Commons. Young and old together, we will not be moved. (Credit: By "David Shan

Commentary on the First Statement of the Occupy Wall Street Movement Wed, 10/05/2011 - 07:40 - lindorff by:  Dave Lindorff   This statement was released after a unanimous vote of Occupy Wall Street's general assembly:   As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies. As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known. Wall Street and the corporatocracy are behind America's rampant militarism They have taken our houses through an illegal foreclosure process, despite not having the original mortgage. They have taken bailouts from taxpayers with impunity, and continue to give Executives exorbitant bonuses. They have perpetuated inequality and discrimination in the workplace based on age, the color of one's skin, sex, gender identity and sexual orientation. They have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization. They have profited off of the torture, confinement, and cruel treatment of countless nonhuman animals, and actively hide these practices. They have continuously sought to strip employees of th