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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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 was honored to be invited to speak at Occupy Wall Street on Thursday night. Since amplification is (disgracefully) banned, and everything I say will have to be repeated by hundreds of people so others can hear (a.k.a. "the human microphone"), what I actually say at Liberty Plaza will have to be very short. With that in mind, here is the longer, uncut version of the speech. I love you. And I didn't just say that so that hundreds of you would shout "I love you" back, though that is obviously a bonus feature of the human microphone. Say unto others what you would have them say unto you, only way louder. Yesterday, one of the speakers at the labor rally said: "We found each other." That sentiment captures the beauty of what is being created here. A wide-open space (as well as an idea so big it can't be contained by any space) for all the people who want a better world to find each other. We are so grateful. If there is one thing I know, it is that the 1 percent loves a crisis. When people are panicked and desperate and no one seems to know what to do, that is the ideal time to push through their wish list of pro-corporate policies: privatizing education and social security, slashing public services, getting rid of the last constraints on corporate power. Amidst the economic crisis, this is happening the world over. And there is only one thing that can block this tactic, and fortunately, it's a very big thing: the 99 percent. And that 99 percent is taking to the streets from Madison to Madrid to say "No. We will not pay for your crisis." That slogan began in Italy in 2008. It ricocheted to Greece and France and Ireland and finally it has made its way to the square mile where the crisis began. "Why are they protesting?" ask the baffled pundits on TV. Meanwhile, the rest of the world asks: "What took you so long?" "We've been wondering when you were going to show up." And most of all: "Welcome." Many people have drawn parallels bet

Of Corporations, Law, and Democracy: Claiming the Rights of Communities and Nature by Thomas Linzey Twenty Fifth Annual E. F. Schumacher Lectures October 2005, Stockbridge, Massachusetts Edited by Hildegarde Hannum ©Copyright 1999 by the E. F. Schumacher Society and Thomas Linzey May be purchased in pamphlet form from the E. F. Schumacher Society, 140 Jug End Road, Great Barrington, MA 01230, (413) 528-1737, www.smallisbeautiful.org/publications.html. Introduction by Christopher Lindstrom, Staff, E. F. Schumacher Society It was above all the concept of decentralism that brought me to the Schumacher Society, the idea of citizens coming together in their communities to find ways of creating a sustainable life on the local level rather than thinking our needs can be met by large and cold corporations and governments. Decentralism involves searching for solutions on an individual and family and community level. In this regard it is my privilege to be introducing Tom Linzey, co-founder of and staff attorney for the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, which provides free legal services to grassroots, community-based environmental groups and rural municipal governments. Tom provides the tools for communities to organize and take a stand against corporate power. He has awe-inspiring stories to tell, archetypal David and Goliath tales. His bold charisma and his relentless commitment to defending the rights of community and the environment have provided inspiration and hope to people throughout this nation. Last year I heard Tom speak at the Bioneers Conference in California. There was a cast of truly extraordinary speakers, and they were all given a standing ovation at this conference. When Tom finished speaking, not only did the audience of two thousand people roar their approval but people could not settle for just standing up; the majority stood on their seats and started jumping up and down and whistling. It was really remarkable. That gives you a s