Club Jacobin

Ho ho ho. Ok. Anyway, I was asked to round up some of the best links about the Occupy Wall Street movement. Now you, my beloved dozen readers on tumblr, get to enjoy the fruits of my labor! (Also please send me any good stuff I missed! This is a work in progress.)

• Theory, tactics and practice: In So Real It Hurts: Notes on Occupy Wall Street, Manissa Maharawal writes about her experiences at the Occupy Wall Street general assembly. McKenzie Wark writes about challenges and opportunities for OWS in How To Occupy An Abstraction and Earl McCabe writes about tactics and goals at the blog Permanent Crisis. A piece by “SKS” discusses the politico-military dimension of Occupy Wall Street’s “leaderless resistance”.
• Occupy/unoccupy: Many people have written about the contradictions of a movement calling for “occupations” on land which was stolen from its inhabitants — and is still being occupied by the descendants and beneficiaries of that theft. Michelle Merrill writes about it in Occupied Lands, and “Tequila Sovereign” writes more about the history of Manhattan and the Lenape who were its original inhabitants in her post Manna-hatta. Another challenge to the perceived whiteness of Occupy Wall Street comes from Occupy The Hood, as Julianne Escobedo Shepherd writes at AlterNet.
• International solidarity: As Occupy Wall Street was inspired by the wave of revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa and movements against austerity in Europe, so in turn it has inspired solidarity actions across the globe. The Maoist website Utopia reports on a gathering in Zhengzhou, China, where protestors called for “Determined Support for the American People’s Great ‘Wall Street Revolution!’” (Summary in English here, original full report in Chinese here.) Participants in the movement of the indignados in Spain have linked their struggle to that in the US and called for a global day of action on October 15.
• Politics and prospects: Many arguments about this movement center on the “demandlessness” of the occupiers. Should they have a list of specific demands? What should they be? This leads to even bigger questions: where is the movement going? What should it strive for and what can it achieve? Vijay Prashad offers some analysis of the movement and its place in the politics and society of the US in Zombie Capitalism and the Post-Obama Left. Matt Sledge writes about occupiers resisting co-optation in a piece for the Huffington Post. At Fire on the Mountain, Jimmy Higgins admits he was wrong about Occupy Wall Street and looks to the bigger picture.
• Stray thoughts: Sarah Jaffe discusses the class implications of the call for protestors to ‘know your history.’ Time collects 50 of the best photos from Occupy Wall Street. At The Nation, Richard Kim says We Are All Human Microphones Now.