2011, 1999, 1968 -- and 2012? The history of the Left and #Occupy

 March 18, 2012  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

Video Recording Panelists Brooke Lehman is a faculty member at the Institute for Social Ecology and a longtime activist. She is on the Board of Smartmeme, the Brecht Forum, and Yansa, and spends most of her time organizing with Occupy Wall Street. Dave Haack is an organizer of Occupy Your Workplace. Description The two historical precedents for #Occupy are Seattle in 1999 and Paris in May 1968. The 1960s and 1990s saw the rise of anarchism against otherwise predominant liberal, social-democratic and Marxist tendencies. [Read More]
Occupy  Left Forum  Left Forum 2012  1968  1999  Occupy wall street  OWS  Seattle 

The Significance of Art in the Occupy Movement

 March 17, 2012  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

Video Recording Panelists Noah Fischer is a Brooklyn-based artist originally from north of San Francisco. He has exhibited kinetic art installations, photographs, and sculpture in New York, Europe, and India. He has also worked collaboratively with the Berlin-based performance group andcompany&Co. Noah initiated Occupy Subways and Occupy Museums in the first weeks of OWS. Noah is the curator of the No-Eyes Viewing Wall at Brooklyn Zen Center. [Read More]
Occupy  Left Forum  Left Forum 2012  Aesthetics  Art  Occupy  Occupy museums  Occupy subways  Occupy wall street 

What is the #Occupy Movement? London I

 March 16, 2012  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

Held on March 16, 2012, at Housmans in London. Audio Recording Your browser does not support the audio element Panelists Barbara Dorn (IBT) Tammy Samede, Occupier Ed Nagle, Activist Steve Maclean, and Michael Richardson, editors of The Occupied Times Description A roundtable discussion with students and activists either directly involved with Occupy Wall St. or who are closely following the #Occupy movement. The recent #Occupy protests are driven by discontent with the present state of affairs: glaring economic inequality, dead-end Democratic Party politics, and, for some, the suspicion that capitalism could never produce an equitable society. [Read More]
Occupy  IBT  International Bolshevik Tendency  Michael Richardson  Occupy  Occupy London  Occupy wall street  OWS  Steve Maclean  Tammy Samede  The Occupied Times 

The movement as an end-in-itself?

The movement as an end-in-itself?

 January 31, 2012  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society  • Other languages: Ελληνικά

ON DECEMBER 16, 2011, Ross Wolfe interviewed David Graeber, Reader at Goldsmiths College in London, author of Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (2004), and central figure in the early stages of the #Occupy Wall Street Movement. What follows is an edited transcript of the interview. Folk singer Tea Leigh at the #Occupy site Ross Wolfe: There are striking similarities between the #Occupy movement and the 1999 anti-WTO protests in Seattle. [Read More]
Anarchism  David Graeber  Occupy  Occupy Wall Street  Protest  neoliberalism 

What is the #Occupy Movement? NYC II

 December 9, 2011  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

A series of roundtable discussions hosted by The Platypus Affiliated Society. This is the second part of the discussion series held in New York City, on December 9, 2011 at New York University. Video Recording Audio Recording Your browser does not support the audio element Transcript in Platypus Review #44 Panelists Hannah Appel (OWS Think Tank Working Group) Erik Van Deventer (NYU) Nathan Schneider (Waging Nonviolence) [Read More]
Occupy  Occupy wall street  OWS Think Tank Working Group  Waging Nonviolence  Z Media Institute  Zuccotti park 

The Occupy movement, a renascent Left, and Marxism today

The Occupy movement, a renascent Left, and Marxism today

 December 1, 2011  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

ON NOVEMBER 5, 2011, using questions formulated together with Chris Cutrone, Haseeb Ahmed interviewed Slavoj Žižek at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, the Netherlands. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation. Haseeb Ahmed: Are we currently – after Tahrir Square and the eruption of the Occupy movement – living through a renaissance of the Left? If so, what is the historical legacy that stands in need of reconsideration? [Read More]
Egypt  Vladimir Lenin  Maoism  Max Horkheimer  Moishe Postone  RCP (USA)  Slavoj Žižek  Theodor W. Adorno  Occupy  Occupy Wall Street 

What is the #Occupy Movement?

Halifax

 November 9, 2011  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

A roundtable discussions hosted by The Platypus Affiliated Society at Dalhousie University on November 16, 2011. Audio Recording Your browser does not support the audio element Panelists Anna Bishop (King’s University) Miles Howe (Halifax Media Co-op) Jd Hutton (Dalhousie) Asaf Rashid (From the Margins host, CKDU) Hamish Russell (Dalhousie) Description The recent #Occupy protests are driven by discontent with the present state of affairs: glaring economic inequality, dead-end Democratic Party politics, and, for some, the suspicion that capitalism could never produce an equitable society. [Read More]
Occupy  Occupy nova scotia  Occupy wall street 

Whither Marxism?

Why the occupation movement recalls Seattle 1999

 November 1, 2011  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

THE PRESENT OCCUPATION MOVEMENT expresses a return to the Left of the late 1990s, specifically the 1999 anti-World Trade Organization protests in Seattle. They both have taken place in the last year of a Democratic U.S. Presidential administration, been spearheaded by anarchism, had discontents with neoliberalism as their motivation, and been supported by the labor movement. This configuration of politics on the Left is the “leaderless” and “horizontal” movement celebrated by such writers as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (Empire, Multitude, Commonwealth), John Holloway (Change the World without Taking Power), and others. [Read More]
Anarchism  Marxism  Occupy  Occupy Wall Street  Seattle  Globalisation 

What is the #Occupy Movement? NYC I

 October 28, 2011  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

A roundtable discussion with students and activists either directly involved with Occupy Wall St. or who are closely following the #Occupy movement. Video Recording Roundtable Participants Phil Arnone is a grad student in NYU’s Draper Interdisciplinary Program. He has been active in the anti-war and alter-globalization movements since high school; was an organizer with Students for a Democratic Society and a member of United Students Against Sweatshops while completing his undergraduate studies at the University of Mary Washington, where he was a student organizer for the campus living wage campaign which successfully won a living wage for all University workers in 2006. [Read More]
Occupy  Occupy wall street  OWS  Working groups  Zuccotti park