Theory & Event 14(4): Occupy Wall Street Movement (2011)

“As we go to press, the Occupy Wall Street movement is in its third month. Inspired in part by the Arab Spring and the acampadas in Madrid and Barcelona, the occupation movement has reinvigorated left politics in the US and spread to more than a thousand cities worldwide. In the place of hopelessness and stagnation, there is an open sense of possibility. Now, as a vivid and undeniable feature of our political setting, outrage over inequality, unemployment, debt, and the political power of money and corporations has a form for its expression. Occupation is that form.

Several weeks ago, we invited political and media theorists to reflect on the event of Occupy Wall Street. Given our intermediated setting as well as the open, horizontal, and practically viral nature of the movement, these reflections aren’t outside the event. Rather, they are part of it, pushing its momentum and understanding in some directions rather than others. Some of the contributions began their lives as blog posts. Some are interventions aiming to influence and advise. Some draw out the global dimensions of the movement. Some attend to the affective and sensory modes of being occupation enables. One was initially delivered as a speech in Zuccotti Park. Together the pieces collected for this supplement to 14.4 produce a theorization of a movement that is just beginning and that in this movement of beginning insists on, claims, and asserts, perhaps more than anything else, the freedom to configure its own space of action.” (from Introduction)

With contributions by Franco Berardi, Wendy Brown, John Buell, William E. Connolly, Jodi Dean, Richard Grusin, John Protevi, McKenzie Wark, Slavoj Zizek

Edited by Jodi Dean
Published in November 2011
E-ISSN: 1092-311X

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Sarah van Gelder (ed.): This Changes Everything: Occupy Wall Street and the 99% Movement (2011)

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.

YES! Magazine is donating royalties from this book to support the Occupy Wall Street/99% movement.

Publisher Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2011
ISBN 1609945875, 9781609945879
84 pages

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Self-Organisation: Counter-Economic Strategies (2006)

The book Self-organisation / counter-economic strategies was initiated by the artists’ group Superflex, but it is not about them. It is about the many approaches to the creation, dissemination and maintenance of alternative models for social and economic organisation, and the practical and theoretical implications, consequences and possibilities of these self-organised structures. The counter-economic strategies presented here are alternatives to classical capitalist economic organisation that exploit, or have been produced by, the existing global economic system.

Essays by ten writers cover a wide cross-section of activity, from new approaches to intellectual property and the implications of the free/open source software movement to political activism and the de facto self-organisation embodied in informal architecture and the so-called black economy.

Self-organisation/ counter-economic strategies is not a comprehensive overview or an attempt to unify these diverse interpretations. It is intended as a toolbox of ideas, situations and approaches, and includes many practical examples.

Commissioned texts include Will Bradley on GuaranaPower, Anupam Chander & Madhavi Sunder on fan fiction and intellectual property, Bruno Comparato on the Landless Workers’ Movement in Brazil, Mika Hannula on self-organisation and civil society, Alfonso Hernández on the barrio of Tepito in Mexico City, Susan Kelly on “What is to be done?”, Lawrence Lessig on problems with copyright law, Marjetica Potrč on parallelism and fragmentation in the Western Balkans and the EU, and Tere Vadén on the future of information societies, plus interviews with Craig Baldwin (A.T.A. Gallery, Other Cinema), Brett Bloom (Temporary Services, Mess Hall), Sasha Costanza-Chock (Indymedia), Adrienne Lauby (Free Speech Radio News), and Nigel Parry (Electronic Intifada).

Editors Will Bradley, Mika Hannula, Cristina Ricupero, Superflex
Publisher Sternberg Press, 2006
Producer NIFCA, Nordic Institute of Contemporary Arts; with The Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki; The Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Montana, Denmark
NIFCA publication # 28
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Licence 2.5
ISBN 1933128135
336 pages

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