Where did we come from and what can we learn? An ana­lys­is of Lon­don’s Oc­cu­pyLSX in the con­text of the now-dis­ban­ded UK “Camp for Cli­mate Ac­tion” net­work

"Move­ments al­ways ar­rive un­ex­pec­tedly", ac­cord­ing to philo­soph­er and vet­er­an act­iv­ist Cin­zia Ar­ruzza — but once they ar­rive, what is to be done? Cin­zia re­con­structs the mo­ments of ful­min­a­tion be­hind the high points of Oc­cupy Wall Street, out­lining a cau­tious vis­ion for pro­pelling the move­ment on­ward.

A force­ful out­line of Oc­cupy Wall Street’s her­it­age in the anti-glob­al­iz­a­tion and Za­patista move­ments, 18th-cen­tury aes­thet­ics, and Pla­to’s Re­pub­lic. Draw­ing on the polit­ic­al the­or­ies of Han­nah Aren­dt and Jacques Rancière, Char­en evinces a fun­da­ment­al struggle between the rad­ic­ally egal­it­ari­an core of OWS tac­tics and the stul­ti­fy­ing gaze of pop-polit­ic­al rep­res­ent­a­tion

Pre­dict­ing that People’s Mic will come to be re­garded as paradig­mat­ic of post-lit­er­ate polit­ics, Ruby brings Pla­to to bear on bore­dom, sac­ral­ity, and erot­i­cism in the move­ment, high­light­ing key con­tra­dic­tions of tech­nos­cientif­ic cap­it­al in the so­cial me­dia of the Amer­ic­an Fall and Ar­ab Spring re­spect­ively.

Writ­ing from his ex­per­i­ence as a long-time act­iv­ist hav­ing lately found af­fin­ity with New York’s ‘Oc­cupy’, Varon re­minds us that ‘Oc­cupy’ should not be ap­proved of so much as ap­pre­ci­ated as a trans­gress­ive dis­rup­tion of nor­mal lib­er­al-demo­crat­ic func­tion­ing.

If uni­versity stu­dents are offered the per­ni­cious choice of re­sem­bling either products or con­sumers, what are the fun­da­ment­al choices fa­cing today’s uni­versity pro­fess­ors? Are the prac­tices of our pro­fess­ors in line with their preach­ing? Un­crit­ic­al Fac­ulties ques­tions the apolit­ic­al at­ti­tudes and self-serving poises found among many pro­fes­sion­al aca­dem­ics today.

In this sober yet uto­pi­an ap­prais­al of the present real­ity of cir­cu­lat­ing struggle against the sub­sump­tion of edu­ca­tion by cap­it­al, Thor­burn, the­or­ist of the Ed­u­Fact­ory, de­scribes the rad­ic­al prax­is of ‘mil­it­ant re­search’ and for­mu­lates con­crete pro­pos­als to­wards the autonom­ous uni­versity.

An over­looked his­tory of so­viet polit­ics in China, restor­ing the “Wukan vil­lage in­cid­ent” to its right­ful (but im­per­fect) place in the can­on of rad­ic­al struggle.

Pro­voked by an in­stance of trans­phobic-fem­in­ist lo­gic, Soph­ie Lewis prob­lem­at­izes the middle-class eu­phor­ia over the highly poly­valent concept of ‘oc­cu­pa­tion’, point­ing to gendered and post­co­lo­ni­al ten­sions around its de­ploy­ment by the OWS move­ment.

Journal for Occupied Studies

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