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In prioritising the site of production and the industrial proletariat as the revolutionary class, traditional Marxism created a number of problems. To begin with, it excluded all those who did not, or could not work from possessing any kind of agency - with the result that the struggles of domestic labourers (women), the unemployed, the disabled were largely ignored.

This is the tragedy of the urban commons – those who “create an interesting and stimulating everyday neighbourhood life lose it to the predatory practices of real estate entrepreneurs, the financiers and upper class consumers bereft of any social imagination.”

In South Baltimore, “regeneration” meant the displacement of a lively street life where people “sat on their stoops on warm summer nights and conversed with neighbours” in exchange for “burglar-proofed houses with a BMW parked out front and a rooftop deck, but with no one to be seen on the street.” Unable to reproduce itself, the social life vanished and the communities became inchoate and disparate.

Just a few weeks before our meeting, a nation-wide social movement demanded that Bolivia’s natural gas reserves be put under state control. How the wealth underground could benefit the poor majority above ground was on everybody’s mind.

I was meeting with Mama Nilda Rojas, a leader of the dissident indigenous group CONAMAQ, a confederation of Aymara and Quechua communities in the country. Rojas, along with her colleagues and family, had been persecuted by the Morales government in part for their activism against extractive industries. “The indigenous territories are in resistance,” she explained, “because the open veins of Latin America are still bleeding, still covering the earth with blood. This blood is being taken away by all the extractive industries.”

Part of the answer lies in the wider conflicts between the politics of extractivism among countries led by leftist governments in Latin America, and the politics of Pachamama (Mother Earth), and how indigenous movements have resisted extractivism in defense of their rights, land and the environment.

A weird law in New York forbids the use of electric microphones in public space so the only way for the speaker's voices to get through was for the front rows of the crowd to loudly repeat each of their sentences. The resulting litany resembled a kind of postmodern ritual. These speeches were then rapidly posted on YouTube.This of course is not the first time committed intellectuals have spoken in support of a movement of occupation. The Zucotti Park scene recalls a famous speech given by French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre at the Renault automobile plant, at Boulogne-Billancourt near Paris, in 1970. Perched on a cask, Sartre addresses the workers on strike, and tells them that the alliance between intellectuals and the working class that once existed should be rebuilt. These were times of revolutionary upheaval, in France and elsewhere, and intellectuals were urged to take sides.

Žižek, Butler and West, moreover, spoke not in front of an occupied factory, as Sartre did, but in a public place. The occupation of public places is a trademark of these new movements, and the difference is crucial. If occupying public spaces is a matter of "reclaiming the street", or of demanding a "right to the city", then it is simultaneously a symptom of their not knowing what else to occupy.

A final difference between these two scenes is that Sartre was not an academic. He was so distrustful of bourgeois institutions that he refused the Nobel prize for literature in 1964 (as Guy Debord said at the time, refusing the Nobel prize is nothing, the problem is having deserved it).

And so I think at some point the worm will turn.  People will say 'we can't continue like this', and a group of countries which have sufficient democratic traditions and capacity for collective mobilisation are liable to produce politicians who say 'we must act together or alone, and we'll pay whatever price we have to pay, we must recover some control of investment and how we use our collective resources.  We can't allow this to be purely in the control of private owners of capital'.

 From wage and benefit concessions to reductions in social services, in an openly anti-union political climate, it is now being demanded that the working class pay for a crisis which it did not create.  

A June 2010 article by Robert McChesney and John Bellamy Foster discusses the weak state of progressive forces in the United States and their inability to translate significant support for their political positions into commensurate political influence.

Our approach was motivated by the inability of the labour and social justice movements, as well as opposition political parties, to develop an effective response to ongoing attacks against working-class living standards.  It was evident that a fresh organizational approach based on new strategies, new alignments, and new objectives was needed -- an approach that came to be dubbed Workers Assemblies.

The internalisation of whiteness by the Irish workers broke the solidarity in the ranks of the working people. Consequently, sections of the Irish workers became part of the most rabid racists in some parts of the USA. But the realities of the moment have shown that capitalists’ oppression against the working class people knows no borders. There are already projections that the financial crisis will induce a new mass emigration from Ireland. Progressives in Ireland must intensify the ideological and political work inside Ireland to educate these potential émigrés against joining the wave of counter-revolution and racism that is now sweeping North America. It is in this context that we call for an international resistance that transcends national borders and racial categorisation. It is such resistance that is needed to save our common humanity from dehumanisation and plunder by the capitalist class, whose drive for exponential profits is pathological.

These austerity measures and the consequent resistance bring home to the Western workers what the African peoples have been enduring for more than 30 years of neoliberal plunder. It was the African workers that have been at the forefront of the delegitimisation of the IMF structural adjustment programmes. In Africa, the intellectuals have exposed the capitalist interests that dismantle popular social programmes of access to health and education and strip wealth from workers, placing profits before and above human beings.

In Ireland itself, international capitalists such as Peter Sutherland established intellectual institutes within Trinity College Dublin to divert attention from the kind of research that could expose the speculative bubbles that were being heralded as the success story of Ireland. Mainstream economists accepted the propaganda about unbridled capitalist globalisation while proclaiming Ireland as the ‘Celtic Tiger’. Ireland was presented in textbooks all over the world as the example of the benefits of foreign direct investments and capitalist globalisation.

unless there is an understanding of capital’s role in this situation, and unless precisely this fact is determined, broken down and fought against, that the very protests themselves are an additional new frontier for capitalist appropriation.

The only way to truly accomplish radical change is to link different social struggles, which are all implicated in capital’s appropriation of every sphere of life”

In the 1980s and 1990s African institutions of higher education came under Western influence to the extent that universities, like African economies, have had to prostitute themselves for research funding from foreign donors as kleptocratic African governments failed to fund universities whilst they prioritized military expenditure instead.

While both campaigns have clear symbolic meaning, they include larger issues like an infusion of Black theorists in the curriculum, hiring more Black professors, on-campus workers rights and more.

Culture is a product of history. Historically, under capitalism, white workers were exploited to produce commodities, but Black workers WERE commodities. So, although the oppression of Blacks is primarily economic, slavery and colonialism produced an ideological superstructure to legitimate and reinforce white supremacy in general and anti-Black racism in particular. Since all human beings have a history and culture, one of the primary means used to exclude Blacks from the Human family is to write Black people out of history.

While the colonizer uses history to deny our humanity, for us, Our Art and History is a weapon we use to cut the throat of our oppressor. The learning of history helps us to de-colonize our minds but to be clear, there is no pre-existing ‘African nation’ prior to slavery that we are attempting to reclaim. Our intent is to supplant white imposed definitions of reality with Black definitions of the world; therefore, we assert that Black or Pan African identity is principally a product of the Black Liberation Movement. Our common oppression is not what makes us African; it is our movement for freedom that give us consciousness of our identity. Therefore, we are not just acted upon but are agents of history.

Kabat-Zinn’s work appears to vindicate Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek’s critique of Western Buddhism as a supplement to neoliberal capitalism: “It enables you to fully participate in the frantic pace of the capitalist game while sustaining the perception that you are not really in it.”

But Davis has seen the benefits of mind/body practices and is not so swift to dismiss them. How can mindfulness genuinely support social justice? This was the basic question she kept returning to in Oakland.“In a racially unjust world,” Davis earnestly asked Kabat-Zinn, “what good is mindfulness?”

While the brief discussion between Davis and Kabat-Zinn remained abstract, actually existing experiments at the intersection of mindfulness and social change are blossoming. Several organizations are now focusing their efforts on the fold between subjective and social change: the Center for Transformative Change, Generative Somatics and the Movement Strategy Center are three leaders.

Some universities present themselves as caring, as providing mental health services and a personalized environment that will help students meet their individual needs and goals. For the most part, this is advertising -- as everybody knows. The reality is  stress, debt, the reproduction of privilege, and, for some, a few years of extreme partying.

What's innovative in the last round of protests is the weaponization of safety and vulnerability. Think cultural revolution rather than therapy, hundreds and thousands of students on campus after campus rejecting the status quo and demanding change. The attack on privilege is an attack on hierarchies of race and class, waged in the language available to those told they live in a post-racial society offering no alternative to capitalism.

The risk of invoking vulnerability and appealing to safety comes in the reinforcing of an authority who would promise security, who would recognize the vulnerable as vulnerable and guarantee that he would protect them from harm.

Without the tide of European revolution to buoy it, the new socialist government in Russia was attacked from all sides by the great capitalist powers. The liberatory promise of the Russian Revolution was not destroyed by a lack of democracy, an attempt to turn the world upside down, or even by Stalin. It was destroyed by the guns, bayonets and pogroms of the “White Army” funded and supported by every major capitalist power in the world. While the Bolshevik government survived, the revolution was smashed to bits, replaced by an empty bureaucracy ruling over the ruins of a working class.

The lesson of the failure of the Russian Revolution is not that it placed insufficient emphasis on democracy. It was doomed by the fear of social democratic parties to challenge capital and their abandonment of internationalism.

Like Sunkara, I am a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and (possibly unlike Sunkara) I believe there is a dialectical relationship between building working class power within the current system and building the potential for socialist revolution. The lesson of the defeat of the Russian Revolution is that the cost of our timidity is far worse than the cost of our boldness. To pretend otherwise is to doom the prospects of liberation and invite the terror and death of the 20th century once more.