Every single one of us holds the key to power – debt. Just as coal miners in England used their access to coal to flip the balance of power, so debtors can use their access to credit by declaring a ‘debt strike’, to force a revaluation of the bank stranglehold […]
It’s happened before, in 1848 and in 1968. The youth of the world took to the streets to protest the injustices of autocratic political regimes and rapacious business interests, and to demand the basic human right to participate as equal citizens in the affairs of society. On October 15th, millions of […]
In early May, a Global Occupy Manifesto, drafted by an international Occupy assembly, was published in “The Guardian” to correspond with the global May 12 actions. The document’s authors aimed to offer a critique of the in-built injustices within economic and political systems globally. Yet they wrote the document without once […]
On 6 February, Chris Hedges, a journalist, self-described Christian and prominent weathervane of the softer side of American radicalism, opined that Black Bloc anarchists were “the cancer of the Occupy movement” (www.truthdig.com). Hedges had earlier extended Occupy a hearty “welcome to the revolution,” and so his critique sparked considerable discussion. […]
How does one approach the creation of a new world in the face of such confusion, cynicism, ignorance and alienation? The left has failed at offering an effective, unified resistance to rampant neo-liberal capitalism. Weak from the many assaults from the establishment and the constant propaganda of the corporate media, […]
What amounts to being radical in society today? Returning to the library after a lecture by David Harvey on “Rebel Cities”, I do have to ask myself the question – who are we rebelling against, and what for? Harvey makes good points: the proletariat of the Left may not look […]
Background If the World is a book, it is written by power. If the political movements of the poors are so far incoherent, it is because they are responding to an incoherent world. If the world has become incoherent, it is because the kind of power that rules tends to […]
The Occupy movement seemed to spring out of nowhere in the autumn of last year. First we saw the Occupy Wall Street camp in New York’s Zuccotti Park – which was swiftly renamed Liberty Square in homage to Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Here in Britain, we saw a series of Occupy […]
In the early months of 1776 a pamphlet called Common Sense became a sensation in the English-speaking colonies of North America. Its author, Tom Paine, called for the end of British rule, on the grounds that kings were ridiculous and crooked: ‘of more worth is one honest man to society […]
CONNECT <-> Occupy began as an original, direct, popular and spontaneous response to a world crisis that is destroying individual lives and the natural environment. Occupy challenges the inequality and the division by which unfathomable wealth is accumulated by a few and untold miseries are faced by the many. Occupy […]