Occupy Archives - Public Seminar

Activism

Ten Years After Occupy Wall Street

A moment of madness that began on September 17, 2011, illuminated the world where the “99 percent” lived

September 17, 2021 • by Nara Roberta Silva

Ten years ago, on September 17, 2011, a few hundred people spent the night at Lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park and formally initiated the movement known as Occupy Wall Street. Occupiers had no immediate goals and the occupation lasted two months. But it wasn’t insignificant, and its importance as an inflection ...

Feature

Review of Jodi Dean’s Crowds and Party

On Collectives, Communicative Capitalism, and Suspension of the Individual Ego

March 23, 2017 • by Luke Mergner

Nowhere was this sense more palatable than in Zucotti Park, where the #OccupyWallStreet protesters set up camp. It was a moment when, especially for the Left, the world paused as if the railroad switch of history might suddenly direct the country on a new, more equitable track. Six years later, even ...

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Minding the Gap of “The Great Divide”

A review of the book by Joseph Stiglitz

August 4, 2015 • by Vince Carducci

In the wake of Occupy Wall Street and the anti-austerity protests in Spain, Greece, and elsewhere around the world, economic inequality has emerged as one of the more hotly debated issues in the public sphere. One of the more prominent voices in the discussion is economist <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stiglitz" target="_blank" ...

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What’s Left?

A response to Jeremy Varon

April 7, 2014 • by Eli Zaretsky

Jeremy Varon’s interesting and important response raises three questions: 1) What do we mean by a “Left”? 2) How are we to understand the New Left’s break-up and, specifically the relation of the women’s movement to that break-up and 3) How are we to evaluate the Left today? Let me ...

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Jonathan Schell Remembered

Letters from The New School for Social Research

March 31, 2014 • by James Miller and Elzbieta Matynia

Here are two remembrances of a distinguished colleague, Jonathan Schell, who died last Tuesday. Miller wrote his as a letter to the members of the Committee on Liberal Studies, where Schell once taught. Matynia’s is a remembrance of Schell’s public engagements as a writer and public actor, ...

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Solidarity with Ukraine against Putin’s Reality

March 7, 2014 • by Michael D. Kennedy

We should not be surprised by differences about how to respond to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Understanding reasons for those differences is one critical step toward formulating an effective response. Recognizing both real policy options and the equal importance of political signals is the second. Moving too fast is ...
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Look Out Kids: On the New and Next Left

A reply to Eli Zaretsky

February 26, 2014 • by Jeremy Varon

Bundled into Eli Zaretsky’s unmistakable claim that second wave feminism was substantially to blame for the undoing of the 60s-era Left is another curious charge: that no American Left exists today, or has for a long time [“Rethinking the Split Between Feminists and the Left”]. In their response, Ann ...
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Further Reflections on Feminists and the Left

A response to Ann Snitow and Victoria Hattam

February 17, 2014 • by Eli Zaretsky

“The Women Did It?” by Ann Snitow and Victoria Hattam correctly argues that we need to understand the conflicts and splits of the late nineteen sixties if we are to build a New Left today. Today’s Left is rooted in the decisions and turning points of that time, and ...
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A Working Class Hero(ine) is Something to Be.

November 27, 2013 • by McKenzie Wark

Its been a bizarre kind of self fulfilling prophecy. Mark Fisher called out the leftish commentariat for their barely restrained petit bourgeois moralism, and for his troubles has been hit by a wave of – petit bourgeois moralism. What set this off was the spectacle – there’s no other word – ...
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On New Political Identities

October 21, 2013 • by Simon Critchley

Below is an interview of Simon Critchley by founder and editor of the UK-based quarterly print magazine STIR, Jonny Gordon-Farleigh. It appears in the Autumn issue of STIR under the title "An Interview with Philosopher Simon Critchley."

The most challenging task of recent times has been to find a common ...
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Multi Media

Gezi, Occupy Solidarity, and Beyond

October 13, 2013 • by Hakan Topal

Global social movements lit up like constellations all around the world beginning in 2011. Protests in Egypt, Tunisia, the United States, Spain, Israel, then Turkey, Brazil, Bulgaria and Greece brought to the fore urgent socio-political issues including neoliberal economic transformation, the privatization of commons, the widening income gap, repressive regimes ...
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Multi Media

Michael Hardt on Continuity and Leadership: An Interview After the Talk Turkey Conference

October 13, 2013 • by Hakan Topal

Michael Hardt at the Occupy Solidarity and Global Consequences panel and here in an interview after the conference, argues that since 2011 -- different from previous "nomadic" global movements -- these new protests have been rooted in territory, demand a new definition of publicity and commons beyond the false “public/private” ...
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