NEWS: Occupy
Occupy Oakland
Nathan Brown
We live in a time when tents have become the singular weapon of the people which power cannot tolerate, and against which it does not know how to defend itself. The bureaucrats are in shambles; the ‘city’ and its ‘police’ are at each other’s throats; middling reformists have no idea where to position themselves. Everyone agrees: it’s about to explode.
This is the situation as I write on the night before the morning of what will be the second police raid on the Occupy Oakland encampment, announced in a memo leaked this afternoon. It is a situation that devolves, primarily, from the fallout of the first evictionon 25 October. Like any important historical sequence,the story of what has happened in this city during the past two weeks is harrowing and inspiring, beautiful and unbearable…
Occupy New York
Sabu Kohso
Evaluation of a movement is never an easy task. Emphatically not so, when it is ongoing and moving in confrontation with power, going through ups and downs, gains and losses. Historically there are many examples in which the loss of one achievement or a digression led to a gain or advancement elsewhere. Development is never linear. The same movement may be thought of differently from different perspectives: even when a movement appears hopeful, with full potentiality from a longer and wider perspective, things tend to appear messy in shorter and more detailed views. Occupy Wall Street (OWS) has been the epitome of such a thing.
As of 15 November, OWS lost its physical space for communal living: Zuccotti Park. The initial symbolic achievement is lost. The stable basis is lost. Now the movement is destabilized. This might have damaged the movement, but the impetus has not disappeared. The destabilized impetus is more in flux and flow,released into the entire urban space. Now, its object of occupation is literally everything and every space, inside and outside…