D4net Netwerk voor Dromers, Denkers, Durvers en Doeners

The Occupy Movement, which has already been hugely successful in thrusting issues of inequality and corporate power into the public discourse, faces a critical juncture. As many of the larger encampments in New York, Oakland, Philadelphia and Los Angeles are shut down by the police, activists have been searching for the tactics to move beyond Occupation to Phase 2 of the movement. Some say that the movement now should evolve into the political arena, supporting policy ideas, running candidates for office, and putting pressure on politicians and corporations. Similarly, others argue that the next step is to develop a specific list of demands, which presumably could further policy initiatives and protests.

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The spirit of liberation psychology--a tradition from Latin American protest movements--has been embraced by U.S. Occupy participants.

 While the term liberation psychology is less commonly known in the United States than in Latin America, the spirit of liberation psychology has been embraced by U.S. Occupy participants.

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Silvia Federici discusses the Occupy Movement and the struggles of social reproduction to challenge capital.

Occupations and the Struggle over Reproduction

Silvia Federici is a veteran activist and writer who lives in Brooklyn, NY. Born and raised in Italy, Federici has taught in Italy, Nigeria, and the United States, where she has been involved in many movements, including feminist, education, and anti-death penalty struggles. Her influential 2004 book Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation,built on decades of research and activism, offers an account of the relationship between the European witch trials of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the rise of capitalism. Federici's work is rooted in a feminist and Marxist tradition that stresses the centrality of people's struggle against exploitation as the driving force of historical and global change. With other members of the Wages for Housework campaign, like Selma James and Mariarosa Dalla Costa, and with feminist authors like Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, Federici has been instrumental in developing the idea of “reproduction” as a key way to understand global and local power relations. Reproduction, in this sense, doesn’t only mean how humans reproduce biologically, it is a broad concept that encompasses how we care for one anothe

r, how we reproduce our physical bodies depending on our access to food and shelter, how culture and ideology are reproduced, how communities are built and rebuilt, and how resistance and struggle can be sustained and expanded. In the contest of a capitalist society reproduction also refers to the process by which “labor power” (i.e. our capacity to work, and the labor force in general), is reproduced, both on a day to day basis and inter-generationally. It was one of the main contributions of the theorists of the Wages For Housework Movement to Marxist feminist theory to have redefined reproductive work in this manner. In this interview, an extended version of which will appear in a forthcoming issue of Politics and Culture, Federici reflects on the #Occupy movements, their precedents and their potentials.

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Opinie Indymedia, gepost door: By Bruno Cava; Translated from the original Portuguese by Kevin Lynch op 05/12/2011 12:03:06

“As a social forum, a thousand things happen at the same time and this is how thing flow. The square is beginning to fill up. Having a thousand things and a thousand different ways is a path towards no turning back!” Rodrigo Bertame at Occupy Rio.

The encampment in Rio has now completed its first week. For those who are living in the camp, their days and nights there have been so much more. The occupation has not only radically transformed space, like time, it has become denser and richer, saturated in creative and unexpected moments. If Cinelândia square already had its daily routines chronicles, now they have multiplied a thousand times and more. Everyday is a whole world and a thousand things happen at the same time.

-Collapse and Uprising in Europe: The Right to Insolvency and the Disen
-Occupy Wall Street: Return of a Repressed Res-Publicatanglement of the General Intellect's Potency
-Occupy Wall Str eet's Democratic Challenge
What Is To Be Done?
-Claiming Division, Naming a Wrong
-Premediation and the Virtual Occupation of Wall Street
-Semantic, Pragmatic, and Affective Enactment at OWS
-This Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit
-Actual Politics

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The Movement Action Plan (MAP) was first published as the Fall 1986 edition of the Dandelion. Twelve-thousand copies were published and distributed. This is a revised edition of that article. People are invited to participate in the continuing de

velopment of MAP and help spread it to local groups.

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The drive to stop foreclosures and squat bank property marks a radical shift from the occupation of public space to the public repossession of private property.

The Occupy movement is ratcheting up the resistance. Inspired by the Spanish indignados, this Tuesday activists all over the United States will be taking the struggle indoors: to the homes of poor families who are under threat of being evicted by large and powerful Wall Street banks. The move from occupying public space to reclaiming private property marks a radical escalation of civil disobedience, striking the capitalist system right at its institutional  heart.

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Given the corporate and financial stranglehold on U.S. urban governments, it is hardly surprising that the mostly white (but consistently non- and anti-racist) sleep-and eat-in-the-urban-park Occupy Movement has itself come face-to-face (well face-to-Darth-Vader-visor) with the right and militarized police hand of the repressive state that has been so ubiquitous in the nation’s urban communities of color throughout the long mass-incarceration-ist neoliberal era. Large numbers of young white progressive and radicals have been given an instructive new taste of what many Black and Latino youth have been experiencing for decades in the disingenuous name of “the free market.” Let the lessons be learned as we build toward ever more epic, multiracial and many-sided struggles with the rich and powerful Few who are crucifying, our cities, our civil rights and social justice ideals, and livable ecology[32] on a cross of capitalistic greed.

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By Reid Mukai, CAGJ Co-Chair

The dominance of neoliberal policies has made our world a crony capitalist dystopia. Wall Street connected legislators give multi-trillion dollar bailouts to big banks and corporations (1) as war-profiteers continue to reap benefits of both a “War on Terror” and “War on Drugs” costing trillions more taxpayer dollars (2). Infrastructure of cities and towns decay while police become increasingly militarized and the largest corporations boast record profits. According to a 2010 AFL-CIO analysis of 299 U.S. companies in the S&P 500, average gross CEO pay was about 11.4 million dollars, 343 times the median wage (the widest gap in the world) (3). Banksters, big agribusiness and corrupt lawmakers make healthy food inaccessible for growing numbers of people around the world while basic health care continues to become prohibitively expensive thanks to bloated medical, insurance and pharmaceutical companies. Meanwhile corporate-owned media distracts and disinforms the masses just enough for the top-heavy self-destructively corrupt system to drag on a little longer. So when a group of activists (organized largely through the internet and social media) took a stand to occupy Wall Street, they also occupied the collective imagination. Occupiers’ critiques of corrupt political and economic systems are nothing new but today they’re so transparently and demonstrably true, occupation sites spread like wildfire across the country and world faster than the establishment’s concerted efforts to extinguish it with propaganda and violent coercion.

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