Messages from the Occupy Wall Street Protest
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Author Archives: Public Intellectuals Project
Anger and Angry People
Thomas Harrington suggests that maybe it’s time for liberals and progressives to unlearn what they have been teaching about expressing anger against social injustice: “If you poke around a bit in the emerging body of literature on the Occupy Wall Street movement, you will find that one of the more oft-repeated elements of advice from well-wishers concerns the need to avoid being, or even appearing, overtly angry. Continue reading
Posted in Public Intellectuals
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Con-Dem-Nation and the Attack on Academic Cultures
Liz Morrish offers critical insights into the language of the neoliberal academy—audit culture, enterprising academics, and student consumers—and considers the implications of such language for undercutting the traditional autonomy of academics within the university. “Anyone who has worked in UK universities since 1981 will recognize that their careers have unfolded in an era of constant crisis, accompanied by urgent calls for ‘change’, ‘efficiency’ and ‘modernisation’ to forestall further crisis.” Defending academic culture and humanistic values at the institutional level in response to “managerial behests” must involve engaging in explicit and sustained critique, demanding democratic governance, using resistant humour, and embracing division and conflict as the way forward. Read the article…
Is Occupy Oakland Undermining Its Own Message with Violence?
The voices of 10,000 non-violent protesters in Oakland, California, were heard across the city on November 2, despite vandalism committed by a small group of people later that night. Occupy Oakland has called for a coordinated general strike across the United States. Such a mass mobilization in the past relied on “class identification,” according to Ben Agger, who suggests that what may be emerging in the Internet age is rather “a sort of perpetual revolution,” as more Occupy actions spring up around the globe. Read the article…
End America, Inc.: Support Occupy Wall Street and the 99% Movement
by Beverly Bandler
Something fundamental, something of vital importance has been going on in the United States—we’ve all been aware of it, confused as well as overwhelmed and frustrated by it. The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests are calling us “99 percent” to wake up, face it and act. Continue reading
Posted in Social Justice
Tagged inequality, Occupy Wall Street, social justice, social movements
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Spurning the “Disembedded Market”: Occupy Movement Rejects Commodification of Everything
Janice Harvey, drawing on Karl Polanyi’s 1944 classic The Great Transformation, suggests that the Occupy Wall Street/Occupy Everywhere movement is a predictable reaction to a destructive market logic that seeks to commodify everything, even the “experience of being human within a larger community of life.” The intensifying global struggle is for “an ecologically sustainable economy in the control and service of a just society, and a politics that empowers people to redesign the economy to these ends.” This is not simply about making “demands” on those in power—it is about wholesale transformation. Read the article…
A Master Class in Occupation
Chris Hedges discusses a conversation he has with an Occupy Wall Street activist about the evolving movement and its inclusiveness. Hedges describes the middle-class youth as an “interlocutor,” one among several of the Occupying “revolutionists [who] bridge the world of the streets with the world of the middle class” and “haul theory out of books and shove it into the face of reality.” The article takes a turn through the philosophy of Bakunin and Marx in order to conclude that revolution is best served through an alliance of “discarded” intellectuals—“sons and daughters of the middle class…unemployed journalists, social workers, teachers, artists, lawyers and students”—and the disenfranchised poor and working class. Read the article…
Published by Truthout, 31 October 2011
Rebuilding the University: From the Innovation Economy to Craft Society
Christopher Newfield, author of Unmaking the University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class, poses the question: Why is the university system in crisis? A central reason is the financial pressure put on colleges and universities by the “innovation economy,” pressure which has led to rising student debt, less personalized instruction, and growing research funding deficits. Continue reading
Posted in Education
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Occupy Wall Street Marks the Latest Street Action against Capitalism
Ben Agger illuminates connections between the OWS movement and “historical models of ground-up social change and civic activism,” from the civil rights movement to the women’s movement to anarcho-syndicalism. Understanding OWS means being informed about a “long tradition of left/anti-authoritarian opposition and organizing,” which can be traced back even to Karl Marx’s early writings and their “philosophical humanism [that] prizes protean, free-form, anti-authoritarian institutional forms.” Read the article…
Youth Movement in a Culture of Hopelessness
Henry Giroux in an interview with Al Jazeera English discusses the Wall Street protests in terms of why young people around the world, “a whole generation that now is being pushed into the waste barrel of history,” are speaking out against political and economic oppression. The Occupy movement is nothing less than a“fight for radical democracy.” Read the article…
Published by Al Jazeera English, 8 October 2011
October 8, 2011
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Posted in Social Justice Tagged austerity, democracy, Giroux, media, neoliberalism, social movements, youth
Posted in Social Justice Tagged austerity, democracy, Giroux, media, neoliberalism, social movements, youth
