Occupy Wall Street - 2013 - The Democracy Project: A History, A Crisis, A Movement

The Democracy Project: A History, A Crisis, A Movement
David Graeber
Spiegel & Grau
2013
326 pages

David Graeber is the former Yale assistant professor of anthropology who was let go from that institution, possibly for his anarchist political views. He currently teaches anthropology at the London School of Economics. His anthropological work has been highly praised by others in the field, and as a far-left spokesman, he appears congenial and nonthreatening while expressing his thoughts in accessible language. He probably best known as an author for his excellent book Debt: The First 5000 Years, which investigates the history of debt across time and cultures and provided part of the intellectual grounding for Occupy Wall Street.

In addition to Graeber's career as educator and author, he is also an activist and was a principle organizer for the Occupy Wall Street movement. This book, The Democracy Project, is Graeber's report on the initial stages of Occupy's formation, his own role in the movement, and his perspective on what occured in Liberty park during the fall of 2011. Much like he had in his earlier work, Direct Action: An Ethnography, Graeber combines his two roles in in this book, scholar and activist, to describe what worked about Occupy.

The purpose of Graeber's book is to report on Occupy at a time when everyone believes the movement to have died out. He repeats through his book that social movements take years, decades even, to achieve the changes they seek, leaving the reader with the thought that perhaps the Occupy movement that appears moribund at the time of reading was a dramatic phase of a longer-lasting movement. Besides describing the Occupy movement, Graeber also describes in this book a set of institutions: media, police, financial organizations, government, and outlines how they constitute power in American society and how Occupy constituted a response to that power. At a deeper level of analysis, Graeber discusses how these institutions prevent the practice of real democracy in American society and how the Occupy movement pointed towards such a practice. One chapter, How Change happens, is almost entirely dedicated to a description of how the kind of real democracy envisioned by the Occupy movement was practiced in real life when all of the institutions that make up the existing power structure were doing whatever they could to destroy it.

occupy wall street - 2012 - We Are Many: Reflections on Movement Strategy from Occupation to Liberation

We Are Many: Reflections on Movement Strategy from Occupation to Liberation
Kate Khatib, Margaret Killjoy, Mike McGuire (eds)
AK Press
2012

The Occupy Wall Street Movement was, to an outsider, at some times exhilarating to watch, and at other times, very strange and occasionally disappointing. The police are part of the 99%? An anti-capitalist moment of silence for Steve Jobs? Why? Because he was a vegetarian in addition to being a brutal industrialist? Still it was a real uprising in America, in lower Manhattan, that largely adhered to anarcho-socialist ideals of building a new world in the shell of the old.

Occupy Wall Street generated a lot of literature within twelve months of the movement's start date of September 17, 2011. There were many books about Occupy published even before January 2012, when the movement still seemed like it may continue in its original form. We Are Many, from the venerable AK Press, is a collection of reflective pieces on the movement that came later in 2012, with a number of its authors referring to writing their entries during the summer of that year. Almost all of the authors are almost politically radical and while there is a great deal of variety to the entries, many of the pieces are critical of the more liberal side of the movement. This was the side of the movement who suggested that police were part of their class and, presumably, felt that Steve Jobs was an honorable exception to the plutocratic class the movement claimed to opposed.

The book includes dozens of short entries, including pieces on the handmade signs, spirituality, race and gender issues, connections to other uprisings, movement strategies and constitutive documents, and many personal reflections. The entry that struck me more than any other when I was reading the book was titled, The Tourist Brochures in People's Hearts: A Snapshot from Occupy Santa Fe. This was a piece in which the author, artist and writer Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore paints a picture of a local occupy movement directed by people who may be members of the %99 but they wouldn't be members of the %95, if that was the term adopted by the movement.  Bernstein Sycamore's piece expresses a passionate love for the ideals of the movement to be realized, and a bitter critique of a local encampment which was turned into a public relations forum for a thriving local arts market by wealthy art dealers, gallery owners, and artists. The piece reads like an address to a general assembly, and perhaps that's what it was written as, but more importantly it sketches out a situation where all of the radical energy of the movement was siphoned away by liberals and their wish-washy views on society. The idea that the arts community just plain belongs to Occupy is a liberal one. Bernstein Sycamore laments the tears of someone crying in anguish over the closing of twenty galleries, which, sure, sounds bad, until our author goes on to note how many many  galleries there actually are in Santa Fe and how much money and competition there is in their market. You might cry for the art galleries and you probably wouldn't shed a tear for luxury car dealerships but both types of commercial institutions cater to upper-middle class consumers and play a role in economic disparities.

The book covered many aspects of the Occupy Wall Street Movement, but not all of them. The role of social media was actually downplayed in this book. I don't remember reading a mention of the 'We are the 99%' tumblr page that featured those iconic and mimetic images of individuals holding up their handwritten stories of woe in selfie shots and affirming their support for the movement. I don't think Anonymous' role in the movement was given much attention here, and I would have loved to have read something about the library at Liberty Plaza. Oh well... it's still probably the best book I've seen on the movement to date.

occupy movement - periodical - 2011- - Occupy! Gazette

Occupy! Gazette
n+1 
2011-


From the Occupy! Gazette page: "Occupy! is a semi-regular, forty-page broadsheet newspaper inspired by the Occupy movement.  Edited by n+1 with Sarah Leonard, Sarah Resnick, and Astra Taylor."

Occupy! Gazette is a dense, sporadically issued, newspaper (in pdf format) devoted to the Occupy Movement put out by n+1 magazine.  To date there have been four issues released, and the most recent was published on May 1st, May Day.  

The fourth issue includes a variety of contents, including a lengthy transcript of a panel discussion about debt featuring anarcho-anthropologist David Graeber (a frequent presence in Occupy content), discussions of recent Occupy activities, including the Occupy Homes movement that puts people into foreclosed homes, as well as criticism of the Movement Resource Group, a funding project started by left-leaning millionaires such as Ben and Jerry to direct money into the Occupy movement.  Numerous other aspects of the Occupy Movement are addressed in this text-heavy 32 page gazette, which also features poems, photos, and illustrations.

occupy movement - television - 2012 - The Julian Assange Show: Occupy Movement

Occupy Movement
The Julian Assange Show
RT
May 29, 2012
27 minutes


Julian Assange hosts a half-hour discussion with organizers from Occupy New York (Wall Street) and Occupy London, including anthropologist and anarchist, David Graeber.  They discuss some of the tactics and strategies deployed by Occupy groups, the development of some of their symbols, the preconditions for their movement, and they contest the commonly held notion that Occupy and other recent uprisings thrive on social media.