Republished with permission from metamute / Mute Magazine in London:
Moving beyond the conceptual polarisation of tight-knit vanguardist
parties and loose-tie virtual networks, Rodrigo Nunes sifts the residue
of last year's wave of revolts to produce a more nuanced picture of
organisational dynamics in the age of Web 2.0
We are the outraged, the anonymous, the voiceless. We were there, silent but alert, watching. Not gazing upward at the powers that be, but looking from side to side for the right time to unite with each other.
ReadThe NYC General Assembly is composed of dozens of groups working
together to organize and set the vision for the #occupywallstreet
movement.
Our ability to move into a collectively imagined future has been trapped in an ever-present now, composed of continually transmitted images. The spectacle accompanies us throughout our lives. News, propaganda, advertising, entertainment and social media present a continuous stream of imagery, projecting a constant justification for how our culture is formulated. When Guy Debord first published The Society of the Spectacle in 1967, the digital revolution was still decades away and the technological capacity to project images into every corner of our lives was far less developed than it is today. The spectacle is no longer simply all of the time; it is also everywhere. More than ever before, Debord's words apply: "Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation."
ReadThe occupation of key public spaces by Occupy Wall Street, as a means of
calling attention to more basic problems, raises questions of the role
of public spaces that need to be urgently dealt with. The basic
questions about the organization of society, democracy, inequality,
social justice, public priorities are deep-going and require long-term
answers. They should not be pre-empted by the immediate needs for space,
not should any space be fetishized. But spatial issues need to be dealt
with immediately and urgently.
In this essay, we claim that far from being a strength, the lack of demands reflects the weak ideological core of the movement. We also claim that demands should not be approached tactically but strategically, that is, they should be grounded in a long-term view of the political goals of the movement, a view that is currently lacking. Accordingly, in the second part of this text, we argue that this strategic view should be grounded in a politics of the commons. Before addressing the politics of the commons, however, we dispel three common objections that are raised against demands during general assemblies, meetings, and conversations people have about the Occupy movement.
ReadWe call for a #globaldebout day of action on the 15th of May, 2016.
We call on peoples movements across the world to mobilise for justice and real democracy on the weekend of May 15th, 2016 for a #GLOBALDEBOUT. We invite you to come to Paris for an International Gathering of movements at Place de la Republic on May 7 and 8.
Today #46mars (April 15) is just two weeks after one million people mobilized in Paris and the movement Nuit Debout continues to grow. In numerous French and foreign cities, #Nuitdebout (Night on our Feet) is a light in the dark, it gives testimony to our hopes, dreams and common rebellions. Those who have taken the squares in the past and those who are taking them NOW: we know something is happening.
We, OccupyLA, agree that the legal state of affairs at many occupation
sites is unacceptable. Mass arrests are numbering in the thousands
across NYC, Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, Denver, San Diego, Long
Beach and many more cities.
Unshackle the Human Spirit!
The most precious natural resource is human spirit. A close second is
human imagination. Spirit and imagination will do more than oil, gold
and guns to determine the fate of the human experiment on Earth, an
experiment that has never been as precarious as it is today.
News at 12:30 and 19:30 everyday Istanbul time, in Turkish and English.
ReadMarianne Maeckelbergh is Lecturer in Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University, the Netherlands. She is author of The Will of the Many: How the Alterglobalisation Movement is Changing the Face of Democracy (Pluto Press, 2009) and is a member of the World Financial Crisis Research Group.
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