Luca Taddio - GLOBAL REVOLUTION DA OCCUPY WALL STREET A UNA NUOVA DEMOCRAZIA - Mimesis, Ita, 2012

Una febbre di rivolta sta percorrendo il nostro mondo in preda alla crisi economica. Movimenti di protesta assolutamente nuovi, dai giovani egiziani di piazza Tahrir agli Indignados spagnoli fino a Occupy Wall Street sfuggono a tutte le analisi politiche tradizionali, e si presentano, pur nelle loro differenze, come il fenomeno socialmente più interessante degli ultimi anni. Si affaccia sulla scena della storia un aspetto inedito della globalizzazione: reti autonome di cittadini che sfidano, in modo apparentemente spontaneo, gli attuali assetti del potere. E che ci pongono così una richiesta che non si accontenterà di risposte riciclate. 


 Luca Taddio è dottore di ricerca in filosofia, insegna Estetica all’Università di Udine. Il suo interesse di ricerca prevalente è la filosofia della percezione e la teoria dell’immagine. È autore di numerosi racconti filosofici, per lo più raccolti nel volume Spazi immaginali (2004). Ha recentemente pubblicato Fenomenologia eretica (2011) e ha curato l’edizione di Quale filosofia per il partito democratico e la sinistra (2012). 


 Damiano Cantone insegna Estetica presso l’Università degli studi di Trieste. Si occupa dei rapporti fra cinema e filosofia, con particolare attenzione al lavoro di Gilles Deleuze, cui ha dedicato numerosi saggi e articoli. Ha pubblicato una monografia dal titolo Cinema, tempo e soggetto (2009). È redattore della rivista “aut aut”.

Brandon Jourdan - The Battle of Oakland (January 28th, 2012)

The Battle of Oakland from brandon jourdan on Vimeo.

Eugene W. Holland: The Occupy Movement and the General Strike on #MayDay (30 April 2012)

The Occupy Movement and the General Strike on #MayDay 

BY EUGENE W. HOLLAND
Professor and chair of comparative studies at Ohio State University

The Occupy movement has already spawned one general strike—a spontaneous mass reaction to police brutality in Oakland last November that ended up shutting down the fifth-largest port in the country overnight. The movement is now calling for a General Strike on May Day (May 1st), and so far, well over one hundred U.S. cities, along with groups around the world (in Germany, Greece, Hungary, and elsewhere), are planning actions. Occupy Los Angeles might have the most intricate strike plan: groups from the four points of the compass will march through their parts of the city, engaging in various interventions along the way, and end up together in downtown L.A. for a "convergence celebration."

A one-day mass strike represents a significant development of Occupy strategy. As everyone (including the initial organizers) knew, the occupation of public sites in North America was not destined to last through the winter, even if it did last far longer than expected. Rather than an indeterminate occupation of space, next week's general strike involves a determinate action in a strictly delimited time frame: its aim is to strike a single blow against a broad range of inequities in an equally broad range of places, all at once. The prioritization of time over space could have unexpected benefits for participants: using hand-held social media, marchers could alternate between concentrating in compact groups and dispersing as ordinary pedestrians (something like a flash mob, or a flock of birds), thereby becoming a more difficult target for police action.

Very much like the original Occupy strategy, however, general strikes are not about making specific demands. They are therefore very unlike your run-of-the-mill union strike, which revolves around specific demands at a specific workplace. Instead, the general strike involves anybody and everybody, and it is directed against an entire social order, economic and political. As the original name and location suggests, Wall Street serves as a convenient focal point for all kinds of discontent. So even if the general strike targets an entire system, that system is now obviously dominated by finance capital—by Wall Street and the "too-big-to-fail" banks.

And so the issue underlying the strike is no longer just the exploitation of workers at the workplace, but the indebtedness of everybody, everywhere: from students leaving college saddled with student load debts in the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, to credit-card holders, to the countless homeowners facing balloon payments or foreclosure, to supposedly sovereign nations all across the globe forced to cut back on social services in order to repay bond-holders. (Just recently, student debt surpassed credit-card debt as the second-highest kind of personal debt, after home mortgages; U.S. student debt now exceeds 1 trillion dollars.) At this stage of the game (often referred to as "real subsumption"), the new rallying-cry is not so much "workers of the world, unite!" as "debtors of the world, unite!"—and rough estimates of the proportion of people sharing an "objective interest" in cancelling the debt run as high as ... 99%.

In this context, the "Occupy Student Debt" movement has faced a telling alternative: try to work within the system, or directly challenge it. One in-system alternative might involve something like a counter-Norquist "Jubilee petition." ("Jubilee" was a term for the regular and routine cancellation of outstanding debts, which occurred in all pre-capitalist societies.) Candidates would be asked to sign a petition pledging to side with the people against the banks (or even to cancel the debt). The other, direct-challenge alternative was for students themselves to pledge to go on a "debt strike"—to refuse to pay their students loans—once a specified threshold number of students signed the pledge. Unfortunately, the recent tightening of U.S. bankruptcy law made student loans one of the few debts that cannot be discharged through bankruptcy proceedings, so the threshold number is probably higher than initially proposed. But what if a student loan strike prompted a homeowners mortgage strike, which in turn prompted a credit-card strike? For one of the important effects of a general strike, rather than issuing specific demands, is to express solidarity, and to reveal the extent to which we, the 99%, are all in this together. If the breadth and depth of shared discontent can be demonstrated and widely recognized, there may be enough momentum to advocate for significant social change, working within the system as well as against it. (The possible relation between Occupy and the November elections is already a pressing issue.) 

One distinctive feature of the Occupy movement that risks getting all but lost in the call for a punctual, one-day general strike—as important and exciting as it may be—is Occupy's instantiation of the Gandhian principle to "be the change you want to see in the world." With its lending libraries, collective kitchens, people's mics, general assemblies and so forth, Occupy struggled to model a more participatory democratic social order in defiance of the oligarchy our so-called "representative democracy" and the global social order have so obviously become. Along these lines, it is possible to reconceive of the general strike not as a punctual event but as a gradual process—as a slow-motion general strike that might start with the transfer of money from banks to credit unions, say (already taking place in the wake of the crash of 2008), and then combine with the growth of community-supported agriculture, fair trade, open-source software, and so forth and so on.

The point of such a slow-motion general strike would be not just to "be the change you want to see," but to slowly but surely free everyone from dependence on capital for their means of life (and thereby reverse the process of "so-called primitive accumulation" lying at the heart of capitalism). Pervasive indebtedness is only the most blatant form of that dependence, and it may turn out to be one of the unexpected (call it dialectical if you wish) ironies of neoliberalism that in drowning nearly everyone in debt, it ends up turning nearly everyone against itself.

Eugene W. Holland is professor and chair of comparative studies at Ohio State University and author of Nomad Citizenship: Free-Market Communism and the Slow-Motion General Strike.

"This is a brilliant and important book which provides both vital insight into our contemporary political situation and, through a novel synthesis of nomad Marxism and complexity theory, ways for thinking the future differently. Eugene W. Holland’s conceptions of an affirmative nomadology and free market communism make a fresh and invigorating contribution to the contemporary critique of capital and attempts to produce small and large-scale, long-lasting alternatives to its dominion. A superb achievement and essential reading."
—Keith Ansell-Pearson, University of Warwick


Read more on LA's general strike

DEBT THE FIRST 5,000 YEARS - DAVID GRAEBER - MELVILLE HOUSE, USA, 2011

DEBT

THE FIRST 5,000 YEARS

DAVID GRAEBER

Before there was money, there was debt

“Graeber’s most important contribution to the movement may owe less to his activism as an anarchist than to his background as an anthropologist. His recent book DEBT: The First 5,000 Years (Melville House, $32) reads like a lengthy field report on the state of our economic and moral disrepair. In the best tradition of anthropology, Graeber treats debt ceilings, subprime mortgages and credit default swaps as if they were the exotic practices of some self-destructive tribe. Written in a brash, engaging style, the book is also a philosophical inquiry into the nature of debt — where it came from and how it evolved. Graeber’s claim is that the past 400 years of Western history represent a grievous departure from how human societies have traditionally thought about our obligations to one another. What makes the work more than a screed is its intricate examination of societies from ancient Mesopotamia to 1990s Madagascar, and thinkers ranging from Rabelais to Nietzsche — and to George W. Bush’s brother Neil.”
—Thomas Meaney, New York Times Book Review(Read the whole article)

Every economics textbook says the same thing: Money was invented to replace onerous and complicated barter systems—to relieve ancient people from having to haul their goods to market. The problem with this version of history? There’s not a shred of evidence to support it.

Here anthropologist David Graeber presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom. He shows that 5,000 years ago, during the beginning of the agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems. It is in this era, Graeber shows, that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors.

With the passage of time, however, virtual credit money was replaced by gold and silver coins—and the system as a whole began to decline. Interest rates spiked and the indebted became slaves. And the system perpetuated itself with tremendously violent consequences, with only the rare intervention of kings and churches keeping the system from spiraling out of control. Debt: The First 5,000 Years is a fascinating chronicle of this little known history—as well as how it has defined human history, and what it means for the credit crisis of the present day and the future of our economy.

David Graeber teaches anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is the author of Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value, Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire, and Direct Action: An Ethnography. He has written for Harper’s, The Nation, Mute, and The New Left Review. In 2006, he delivered the Malinowski Memorial Lecture at the London School of Economics, an annual talk that honors “outstanding anthropologists who have fundamentally shaped the study of culture.” 

Read the Debt first 23 pages on ISSU

Vote for David Graeber as one of Time’s 2012 most influential people

Vote for David Graeber as one of Time’s 2012 most influential people

David Graeber, author of Debt, the First 5,000 Years, has been nominated by Time magazine as one of 2012′s most influential people. Graeber, a former Yaleprofessor and social-justice advocate, is widely recognized for his efforts influencing and leading the Occupy Wall Street Movement.

Last year’s most influential list included such luminaries as tech giant Larry Page, Prime Minister David Cameron, musician Bruno Mars, and author George R.R. Martin, among others.

According to Wikipedia:

The list was started with a debate at a symposium in Washington, D.C., on February 1, 1998, with panel participants CBS news anchor Dan Rather, historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, former New York governorMario Cuomo, then-political science professor Condoleezza Rice, neoconservative publisher Irving Kristol and Time managing editorWalter Isaacson.

The list was first published in 1999, when Time magazine named the 100 most influential people of the 20th century. Based on the popularity of the installment, in 2004 Time magazine decided to make it an annual issue, listing the 100 people most influencing the world. Making the list is frequently mistaken as an honor; however, Time makes it very clear that people are recognized for changing the world, for better or for worse. Those recognized fall in one of five categories: Leaders & Revolutionaries, Builders & Titans, Artists & Entertainers, Scientists & Thinkers, and Heroes & Icons. Within each category, the 20 most influential people (sometimes pairs or small groups) are selected, for a grand total of 100 each year.

Of Graeber’s book, the Financial Times said, “If you want to get a fresh perspective on the issue, take a look at a fascinating new book called Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber … not just thought-provoking, but also exceedingly timely.”

And in the New York Times Book Review, Thomas Heaney predicts: ”Graeber’s most important contribution to the movement may owe less to his activism as an anarchist than to his background as an anthropologist. His recent book DEBT: The First 5,000 Years (Melville House, $32) reads like a lengthy field report on the state of our economic and moral disrepair.”

So join the growing revolution of people who understand and admire the work of David Graeber. Vote for him today as one of Time Magazine’s Most Influential People of 2012.

Read more on Melville House website

Occupy! I movimenti nella crisi globale - a cura di ANNA CURCIO e GIGI ROGGERO - Ombre corte, It, 2012

Gli anni Novanta del secolo scorso si aprivano con la retorica della fine della storia, per nutrire l’apologia dell’unico mondo possibile. Il primo decennio del nuovo millennio si chiude con la crisi, ormai permanente, di quello stesso mondo. È in questo quadro che possiamo cogliere la straordinaria importanza di un movimento emerso nel cuore del capitalismo finanziario: Occupy Wall Street, il cui esempio sarebbe immediatamente stato seguito da molte città negli Stati Uniti, a cominciare da Oakland. Dalla composizione sociale alle nuove forme di organizzazione, dalle pratiche di lotta all’uso dei nuovi media, dalla crisi della rappresentanza all’occupazione degli spazi metropolitani, Occupy ha dei tratti fortemente comuni con gli altri movimenti nella crisi, dalle insorgenze del Nord Africa alle acampadas spagnole. È un movimento che non pone domande, ma che agisce su un piano immediatamente costituente: proprio per questo motivo la sua comprensione sfugge a media e istituzioni della rappresentanza politica. I testi raccolti nel presente volume – documenti prodotti dalle occupazioni e materiali di inchiesta, interventi nelle piazze occupate e narrazioni, articoli di analisi e interviste – costituiscono allora contributi unici e indispensabili per comprendere dall’interno il movimento Occupy, le possibili prospettive, i nodi irrisolti. Ci aiutano quindi a interrogare gli elementi comuni e le differenze con le lotte in Italia degli ultimi anni, nel profilarsi di un movimento globale dentro la crisi strutturale del capitalismo.

gli autori
F. Barchiesi, B. Buczynski. J. Butler, G. Caffentzis, P. Carpigano, N. Chomsky, A. Davis, M. Davis, Z. Eisenstein, S. Federici, H. Gautney, M. Haiven, M. Hardt, D. Harvey, N. Klein, G. Lasagni, L. Loofbourow, C.T. Mohanty, A. Negri, Occupy Student Debt, F. Fox Piven, M. Premo, J. Read, A. Ross, N. Saval, G. Ch. Spivak, S. Zizek

Anna Curcio (1971) fa parte dell'esperienza di UniNomade e del collettivo transnazionale edu-factory, collabora con "il manifesto" ed è ricercatrice precaria. È autrice di La paura dei movimenti (Rubbettino, 2006) e co-autrice di Precariopoli (Manifestolibri, 2005). Di recente ha curato The Common and the Forms of the Commune ("Rethinking Marxism", 2010) e Comune, comunità, comunismo (ombre corte, 2011).

Gigi Roggero (1973) fa parte dei collettivi UniNomade ed edu-factory, collabora con "il manifesto" ed è ricercatore precario. Tra i suoi lavori: Intelligenze fuggitive (Manifestolibri, 2005), Introduzione all'archivio postcoloniale (Rubbettino, 2008), La misteriosa curva della retta di Lenin (La casa Usher, 2011). Per i nostri tipi ha pubblicato La produzione del sapere vivo (2009; tradotto negli Stati Uniti nel 2011) e curato La testa del drago (2010).

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Introduzione: Occupare la crisi di Anna Curcio e Gigi Roggero

Il 17 dicembre 2010 Mohamed Bouazizi (ventiseienne, diplomato, costretto a fare il venditore ambulante di frutta e verdura per campare) si immola nella città tunisina di Sidi Bouzid, per protestare contro l’arroganza della polizia e l’insopportabilità delle condizioni di vita. Pochi, allora, potevano pensare quel gesto come l’inizio simbolico di un processo insurrezionale che avrebbe condotto alla caduta del regime di Ben Ali e a quello di Mubarak in Egitto, per poi estendersi ad ampie aree del Nord Africa e del cosiddetto mondo arabo. Ed era ancora meno facile prevedere che ciò sarebbe stato il preludio di una sollevazione globale dentro la crisi economica contemporanea. Non si è trattato, tuttavia, di un evento privo di radici: al contrario, in Tunisia come altrove le genealogie sono profonde e complesse. Da un lato, affondano nei conflitti operai e studenteschi, nelle lotte e nelle dinamiche di sedimentazione politica e organizzativa che hanno attraversato l’ex colonia francese a partire dagli anni Ottanta. Dall’altro, la composizione che ha guidato il processo insurrezionale – giovani, altamente scolarizzati e produttori di saperi, precari e disoccupati, in qualche modo simboleggiati dalla biografia dello stesso Bouazizi, a cui si può aggiungere il grande protagonismo delle donne – ha in tutta evidenza tratti affatto comuni con i movimenti che si sono sviluppati nella crisi sull’altra sponda del Mediterraneo, dall’Inghilterra all’Italia, dall’Au- stria alla Grecia, e poi ancora in Cile e, appunto, negli Stati uniti.

Non è solo, allora, un ponte ideale che collega i movimenti del Nord Africa a quelli del Nord America. Esattamente nove mesi dopo che il fuoco aveva avvolto il corpo di Bouazizi, il 17 settembre 2011 alcune centinaia di altri corpi sfruttati che bruciano di indignazione si sono sollevati raccogliendo l’appello lanciato dalla rivista militante canadese Adbusters il 4 luglio precedente su Twitter (...)

Leggi l'introduzione completa sul sito Uninomade/Read the PDF of the complete introduction

01.12.2011 - The Occupy movement, a renascent Left, and Marxism today - An Interview with Slavoj Žižek by Haseeb Ahmed with Chris Cutrone @ Platypus website

This is a brief extract of Slavoj Žižek's very interesting interview on Platipus website.

Haseeb Ahmed: Are we currently—after Tahrir Square and the eruption of the Occupy movement—living through a renaissance of the Left? If so, what is the historical legacy that stands in need of reconsideration?

Slavoj Žižek: I would say my answer is very cautious. Conditionally: Yes. That is to say, the way I read all these events, totally spontaneous as they are, is that, although people try, for example, to read the Tahrir Square events as the simple demand for democracy, nonetheless there is a deeper systemic dissatisfaction. What I see as a hopeful sign is that these are no longer simple, one-issue protests against this or that. There is some vague awareness that there is another fault in the system as such. By this I mean precisely the capitalist system. And, point two, that the standard representative multi-party political democracy is not a form through which we can deal with the problems. The problem today is that we have a lot of “anti-capitalism,” indeed an overload of anti-capitalism, but it is an ethical anti-capitalism. In the media, everywhere one finds stories about how this company is exploiting people someplace and ruining the environment, or this bank is ruining hardworking people’s funds. All of these are moralistic critiques of distortions. This is not enough. The anti-capitalism of the popular media remains at the level of something to be resolved within the established structure: through investigative journalism, democratic reforms, and the like. But I see in all of this the vague instinct that something more is at stake. The battle now, as for the capitalists themselves, is over who will appropriate it.

Events happen, and then you have the crucial battle to decide what an event means. I think that precisely these events, like Occupy Wall Street, are crucial because, on the one hand, they demonstrate that the problem is capitalism as such. This was the big issue in the 20^th century, but somehow disappeared in the last decades from the traditional left, where the focus became specific issues such as racism and sexism. But this problem is still here. At the same time, I claim that nonetheless old answers no longer work. This is why, what critics and sympathizers notice, there is a lack of concrete proposals, what to do. Apart from abstract things, like with Spain’s Indignados, against people serving money instead of money serving people. But every fascist would subscribe to this.

What it reminds us is the fact that, as my friend Alain Badiou puts it, the 20^th century is over. Not only state socialism and the social-democratic welfare state, but also, I would add, the deepest hope of the utopian left, “horizontal organization,” local communities, direct democracy, self-organization—all this, I don’t think it works. So, again, it is a big challenge. The old problem is back, but it is clearer than ever that the old answers are not up to the challenge. It is a great challenge. If you look at predominant ways the modest liberal left is conceptualizing problems, for instance, in John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, you can see that all this doesn’t work to recuperate this negative energy.

What surprises me is that there is so much energy. I thought that maybe it would stop. But look at how it is exploding all around the United States. Even Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans join them. This is the big news. There is an incredibly serious, great degree of rage and dissatisfaction that clearly doesn’t fit the established channels to resolve problems within the traditional scope of economic protests. It’s a wonderful, crucial moment. It’s a negative gesture. My slogan is, “No dialogue!” at this point. Let’s not get caught into this dialectic of dialogue with the enemy. No. It is too early. Not in the sense of, “We won’t talk, we’ll just kill you.” But, rather, if we talk now, we have to use some language, but this will be the language of the enemy. We need time to construct our own new language, time to formulate. (...)

Enjoy the complete Zizek interview on Platypus website

November 2011 - Occupy!: Scenes from Occupied America Edited by Keith Gessen, Astra Taylor, Eli Schmitt, Nikil Saval, Sarah Resnick, Sarah Leonard, Mark Greif, and Carla Blumenkranz (Verso books, US)

The first book to explore the Occupy movement in depth, with reportage and analysis.

In the fall of 2011, a small protest camp in downtown Manhattan exploded into a global uprising, sparked in part by the violent overreactions of the police. An unofficial record of this movement, Occupy! combines adrenalin-fueled first-hand accounts of the early days and weeks of Occupy Wall Street with contentious debates and thoughtful reflections, featuring the editors and writers of the celebrated n+1, as well as some of the world’s leading radical thinkers, such as Slavoj Žižek, Angela Davis, and Rebecca Solnit.

The book conveys the intense excitement of those present at the birth of a counterculture, while providing the movement with a serious platform for debating goals, demands, and tactics. Articles address the history of the “horizontalist” structure at OWS; how to keep a live-in going when there is a giant mountain of laundry building up; how very rich the very rich have become; the messages and meaning of the “We are the 99%” tumblr website; occupations in Oakland, Boston, Atlanta, and elsewhere; what happens next; and much more.

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December 16, 2011

Verso Books

OCCUPY! Scenes from Occupied America Launch Party

This Changes Everything: Occupy Wall Street and the 99% Movement [Paperback] Sarah van Gelder (Editor), staff of YES! Magazine (Editor)

We Are the 99%

The Occupy Wall Street movement named the core issue of our time: the overwhelming power of Wall Street and large corporations— something the political establishment and most media have long ignored.

But the movement goes far beyond this critique. This Changes Everything shows how the movement is shifting the way people view themselves and the world, the kind of society they believe is possible, and their own involvement in creating a society that works for the 99% rather than just the 1%.

Attempts to pigeonhole this decentralized, fast-evolving movement have led to confusion and misperception. In this volume, the editors of YES! Magazine bring together voices from inside and outside the protests to convey the issues, possibilities, and personalities associated with the Occupy Wall Street movement.

This book features contributions from Naomi Klein, David Korten, Rebecca Solnit, Ralph Nader, and others, as well as Occupy activists who were there from the beginning, such as David Graeber, Marina Sitrin and Hena Ashraf. It offers insights for those actively protesting or expressing support for the movement—and for the millions more who sympathize with the goal of a more equitable and democratic future.

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