Occupy Wall Street observes its first anniversary today with the culmination of three days of education, celebration and resistance in NYC (see here and here). To mark the occasion we’ve pulled some great pieces on Occupy from AntipodeFoundation.org’s archive…
Last month we re-blogged an essay by Antipode author Richard White, ‘Towards a post-Occupy world‘, on the pervasive nature of non-commodified spaces in ‘capitalist’ societies and the implications that this has for taking purposeful steps forward toward post-capitalism.
In June Sara Nelson reported how an anti-foreclosure movement in Minneapolis – Occupy Homes MN – was making individual debt an opportunity for collective action (‘a social crisis rather than a personal problem’, as Sara puts it) and in doing so building solidarity among debtors.
‘OWS Screenprinting: Markets, Commons, and Questions, Parts I and II’ by Jesse Goldstein reflected, in March and April, on the story thus far of the OWS Screenprinters Guild and Cooperative and their struggle to build an alternative economy including an working ‘anti-retailing’ business model.
The immediate concern for OWS in January, Jesse reported, was policing and de-/re-occupation of Zuccotti Park by officers serving the state in its capacity as ‘a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie’. ‘Cops and the 99%, Parts I and II’ asks some searching questions – ‘Who do you serve? Who do you protect?‘ and ‘Cops, scabs, and the 99%‘.
Violence and the policing of protest was also high on the agenda on the West coast of the US in January. Rachel Brahinsky reported how protesters at the University of California and elsewhere had been feeling the force of a repressive state apparatus (‘Police, protest, and spaces of power‘).
Finally, earlier this year Kareem Rabie offered a set of four short essays connecting the Occupy movement with other concerns of our time: Palestine; anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, the language of ‘occupation’, and ‘Israelified’ policing.
Check out the video report, ‘Occupy Wall Street: one year later’, in the online magazine Reflections on a Revolution (ROAR) – http://roarmag.org/2012/09/occupy-wall-street-one-year-later-a-video-report/