Kate Khatib, Margaret Killjoy, Mike McGuire (eds.): We Are Many: Reflections on Movement Strategy From Occupation to Liberation (2012)

We have all been swept up by the momentum of the Occupy movement. We have seen the results of years of organizing in different communities come together in ways that few could have imagined, bolstered by the scores of people who have left the comfort of their daily routine behind and taken to the streets. Yet as a movement so overflowing with new social and political actors, we lack the framework we need to help us all to understand what a social movement is, to understand how change has happened in the past, to understand what this moment means and what this movement makes possible.

We Are Many is a reflection on Occupy from within the heart of the movement itself. Examining key questions—what worked? what didn’t? why? how? is it reproducible?—the authors and activists in this collection point toward a movement-based framework for future organizing. Heavily illustrated and annotated, We Are Many is a celebration of what worked, and a thoughtful analysis of what didn’t.

With contributions by Michael Andrews, Michael Belt, Nadine Bloch, Rose Bookbinder, Mark Bray, Emily Brissette, George Caffentzis, George Ciccariello-Maher, Annie Cockrell, Joshua Clover, Andy Cornell, Molly Crabapple, CrimethInc., Croatoan, Paul Dalton, Chris Dixon, John Duda, Brendan M. Dunn, Lisa Fithian, Gabriella, David Graeber, Ryan Harvey, Gabriel Hetland, Marisa Holmes, Mike King, Koala Largess, Yvonne Yen Liu, Josh MacPhee, Manissa M. Maharawal, Yotam Marom, Cindy Milstein, Occupy Research, Joel Olson, Isaac Ontiveros, Morrigan Phillips, Frances Fox Piven, Vijay Prashad, Michael Premo, Max Rameau, RANT, Research & Destroy, Nathan Schneider, Jonathan Matthew Smucker, Some Oakland Antagonists, Lester Spence, Janaina Stronzake, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Team Colors Collective, Janelle Treibitz, Unwoman, Immanuel Wallerstein, Sophie Whittemore, Kristian Williams, and Jaime Omar Yassin.

Afterword by David Graeber
Publisher AK Press, 2012
ISBN 1849351163, 9781849351164
355 pages

publisher
google books

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Andrew Hsiao, Audrea Lim (eds.): The Verso Book of Dissent: From Spartacus to the Shoe-Thrower of Baghdad (2010)

A sparkling anthology of revolt and resistance to orthodoxy and repression.

Throughout the ages and across every continent, people have struggled against those in power and raised their voices in protest—rallying others around them and inspiring uprisings in eras yet to come. Their echoes reverberate from Ancient Greece, China and Egypt, via the dissident poets and philosophers of Islam and Judaism, through to the Arab slave revolts and anti-Ottoman rebellions of the Middle Ages. These sources were tapped during the Dutch and English revolutions at the outset of the Modern world, and in turn flowed into the French, Haitian, American, Russian and Chinese revolutions. More recently, resistance to war and economic oppression has flared up on battlefields and in public spaces from Beijing and Baghdad to Caracas and Los Angeles.

This anthology, global in scope, presents voices of dissent from every era of human history: speeches and pamphlets, poems and songs, plays and manifestos. Every age has its iconoclasts, and yet the greatest among them build on the words and actions of their forerunners. The Verso Book of Dissent will become an invaluable resource, reminding today’s citizens that these traditions will never die.

Preface by Tariq Ali
Publisher Verso Books, 2010
ISBN 1844674487, 9781844674480
366 pages

publisher
google books

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Stéphane Hessel: Time for Outrage! (2010-) [FR, EN, DE, IT, PT, GA]

This controversial, impassioned call-to-arms for a return to the ideals that fueled the French Resistance has sold millions of copies worldwide since its publication in France in October 2010. Rejecting the dictatorship of world financial markets and defending the social values of modern democracy, 93-old Stéphane Hessel — Resistance leader, concentration camp survivor, and former UN speechwriter — reminds us that life and liberty must still be fought for, and urges us to reclaim those essential rights we have permitted our governments to erode since the end of World War II.

French edition
Publisher Indigène éditions, Montpellier, October 2010
ISBN 9782911939767
32 pages

English edition
Translated by Damion Searls
Publisher Published by Charles Glass Books, an imprint of Quartet Books
ISBN 0704372223, 9780704372221
40 pages
via Cari

commentary (Charles Glass, The Nation)

wikipedia (FR)
wikipedia (EN)
publisher (FR)
publisher (EN)

Indignez-vous! (French, 6th edition, December 2010, PDF)
Time for Outrage! (English, 2011, EPUB)
Time for Outrage! (English, published in The Nation, March 2011, PDF)
Empört Euch! (German, trans. Michael Kogon, 2011, PDF)
Empört Euch! (German, trans. Michael Kogon, 2011, EPUB)
Indignatevi! (Italian, Scribd.com, February 2011)
Indignai-vos! (Portuguese, trans. Marly Peres, 2011, PDF)
Indignádevos (Galician, trans. Henrique Harguindey, 2011, Scribd.com)

Možnosti studentského života (2010) [Czech]

Možnosti studentského života je průběžně rozvíjený projekt skupiny P. O. L. E. (aktuálně působící ve složení Vasil Artamonov, Alexey Klyuykov, Václav Magid, Tereza Stejskalová, Pavel Sterec, Tomáš Uhnák), který formou výstavy seznamuje s různými pojetími společenské role studujících.

Projekt má několik složek. Faktografická část poskytuje základní vhled do dějin studentstva jako společenského fenoménu. Tvoří ji jednak graf, jenž lokalizuje klíčové události a hnutí na časové a zeměpisné ose, jednak medailonky vybraných osobností studentského aktivismu. Teoretická část přibližuje formou citátů různé koncepce identity studujících. Jako zdroj těchto pojetí posloužily manifesty studentských hnutí a úvahy některých myslitelů. Další složka projektu má podobu multimediální instalace, koláže z plakátů a letáků či sestřihu videí a ukazuje obraz studujících jako specifické skupiny konzumentů, jenž je dnes prosazován reklamou a masmédií. Nedílnou součástí projektu jsou také bannery a další předměty používané při pouličních protestech. Tyto artefakty, ať už převzaté od různých studentských uskupení nebo vyrobené samotnými autory projektu, jsou v závislosti na kontextu prezentace aranžovány do podoby muzeální instalace nebo naopak začleňovány do aktuálně probíhajících protestů.

Původní verze výstavy byla připravena ve spolupráci se Studentskou komorou RVŠ pro galerii TranzitDisplay v roce 2009 u příležitosti sedmdesátého výročí 17. listopadu 1939. Aktualizované reprízy proběhly v roce 2011 v galerii D9 v Českých Budějovicích a v klubu K4 v Praze. Pro prezentaci na Filozofické fakultě UK v rámci Týdne neklidu autoři přepracovali projekt tak, aby se stal nedílnou součástí protestů proti připravované reformě vysokých škol.

Edited by Vasil Artamonov, Patrik Eichler, Miroslav Jašurek, Václav Magid, Tomáš Uhnák
Publisher tranzitdisplay, Prague
80 pages

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Krisis: Journal for Contemporary Philosophy, No. 3: Special Issue on Civil Disobedience (2012)

“Some of the most prominent theories of civil disobedience, e.g. those of Rawls and Habermas, highlight its primarily or even exclusively symbolic character. This, however, seems to reduce civil disobedience to a purely moral appeal. On a theoretical as well as on a practical level we are today faced with the question whether civil disobedience requires a moment of real confrontation for it to be politically effective. It seems that civil disobedience does in fact have an irreducible symbolic dimension, but that it cannot be reduced to this dimension, because without moments of real confrontation it would also lose its symbolic power and turn into a mere appeal to the conscience of the powers that be. The articles in this special section highlight various of the challenges and possibilities the theory and practice of civil disobedience is confronted with today, from the question whether Paraguayan campesinos have a right of necessity also to uncivil actions via the political potential of the apparently criminal behaviour of marginalized migrants and the effects of ‘hermeneutic invisibility’ on the public nature of civil disobedience to the effects rise of ‘art activism’ on the relation between the social and the artistic and the situatedness of the bodies of protesters in relation to changing police tactics.

In ‘The Misadventures of Critical Thinking’ Jacques Rancière explores the anti-emancipatory effect of an artistic and theoretical critique that specializes in unmasking how all attempts at critique are always already anticipated and incorporated by ‘the system’, suggesting that we should instead focus on what he calls ‘scenes of dissensus’. As Joost de Bloois argues in his comment on Rancière’s text, however, this analysis might not only underestimate the complexity of this unmasking critique, it also seems to run into some of the same problems it diagnoses.

In our interview with Wendy Brown we discuss the emancipatory potential as well as the theoretical and political limits of the notions of democracy and communism, the paranoid practice of walling with which states seem to compensate their waning sovereignty, the Occupy movement and the danger of Oedipalization, the varieties of secularism, and the responsibility of teaching.”

Published in Amsterdam, 2012
101 pages
via Jappe Groenendijk

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Alain Badiou: The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings (2011/2012)

Testing the winds of history blowing from the Arab revolts.

In the uprisings of the Arab world, Alain Badiou discerns echoes of the European revolutions of 1848. In both cases, the object was to overthrow despotic regimes maintained by the great powers—regimes designed to impose the will of financial oligarchies. Both events occurred after what was commonly thought to be the end of a revolutionary epoch: in 1815, the final defeat of Napoleon; and in 1989, the fall of the Soviet Union. But the revolutions of 1848 proclaimed for a century and a half the return of revolutionary thought and action. Likewise, the uprisings underway today herald a worldwide resurgence in the liberating force of the masses—despite the attempts of the ‘international community’ to neutralize its power.

Badiou’s book salutes this reawakening of history, weaving examples from the Arab Spring and elsewhere into a global analysis of the return of emancipatory universalism.

Originally published as Le Reveil de l’histoire, Nouvelles Editions Lignes, 2011
Translated by Gregory Elliott
Publisher Verso Books, 2012
ISBN 1844678792, 9781844678792
126 pages

review (Jasper Bernes and Joshua Clover, Los Angeles Review of Books)
review (Daniel Tutt, Platypus)
review (Anindya Bhattacharyya, Socialist Review)

publisher
google books

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Émile Zola: Germinal (1885) [French/English/German]

Germinal is the thirteenth novel in Émile Zola’s twenty-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart. Often considered Zola’s masterpiece and one of the most significant novels in the French tradition, the novel – an uncompromisingly harsh and realistic story of a coalminers’ strike in northern France in the 1860s – has been published and translated in over one hundred countries as well as inspiring five film adaptations and two television productions.

The title refers to the name of a month of the French Republican Calendar, a spring month. Germen is a Latin word which means “seed”; the novel describes the hope for a better future that seeds amongst the miners.

commentary (Ruth Scurr, The Guardian, 2010)

wikipedia

Download (French, published by G. Charpentier, 1885)
Download (French, published by G. Charpentier, 1900, Vol. 1)
Download (French, 1900, Vol. 2)
Download (English, translated by Carlynne, published by Belford, Clarke, Chicago/New York, 1885)
Download (English, translated by Havelock Ellis, 1894)
Download (EPUB, German)