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Innovation for Everyone

Nathan — Fri, 10 Feb 2017 20:35:35 +0000

Catch it while we still have public radio: This weekend I’ll be on WBGH-Boston’s show Innovation Hub. Listen online or over the air with your local NPR affiliate. I’m talking about Ours to Hack and to Own, the new collective manifesto for a cooperative internet that I co-edited with Trebor Scholz.

The book is available now from OR Books, a fine publisher whose model bypasses Amazon’s monopolistic stranglehold on the industry. If you buy books, buy it direct. If you review books—for your blog, Goodreads, The New York Times, whatever—please consider reviewing it (email me for a review copy). If you tweet, retweet my pinned tweet about it. The success of the book and the movement it represents depend on your support.

More radio to come! The Colorado Co-ops Study Circle that I co-founded will begin our monthly radio show, The Co-op Power Hour on KGNU, a Denver-Boulder community radio station.

Anarchy Under Trump

We all have thoughts and feelings about things these days. I made a suggestion in YES! Magazine for how Trump’s infrastructure plan might benefit someone other than the rich. But then I tanked my chances for a place in the new administration by defending the anarchists who protested his inauguration in America. Besides, I’m not enough of an elite-insider for his taste.

Anyway, as the Financial Times reports, we’re one step closer to buying and cooperativizing Twitter out from under him.

Want more anarchy? I once wrote a book on it, plus the intro to Noam Chomsky’s collection on the subject.

Roadshow

2017.02.23: Denver, CO – “Social Worship,” Regis University
2017.03.09: Online – Transform Finance webinar on platform cooperativism
2017.03.15: Madison, WI – “An Internet of Ownership” lecture
2017.04.06: Santa Barbara, CA – UCSB Community Matters lecture

From Occupation to Reconstruction

Nathan — Mon, 30 Jun 2014 18:58:59 +0000

Ever since I wrote a book about Occupy Wall Street, I’ve often found myself being asked, “What happened to Occupy, anyway?” Now, more than two years since the movement faded from the headlines and in the wake of French economist?Thomas Piketty’s best-selling diagnosis of economic inequality, the urgency of the question is mounting, not diminishing. The answer is also becoming clearer: The networks of activists that formed in the midst of 2011’s worldwide wave of protest are developing into efforts to create durable economic and political experiments. Rather than focusing on opposing an unjust system, they’re testing ways to replace it with something new.

More at Al Jazeera America.

The Official Guide to Thank You, Anarchy

Nathan — Mon, 09 Sep 2013 16:15:38 +0000

Maybe you saw a scene from it on HBO’s The Newsroom. Or perhaps you annotated part of it on RapGenius. Some of you may have even glimpsed the foreword by Rebecca Solnit, in which she wrote:

Thanks to this meticulous and elegant book, we know what one witness-participant was thinking all through the first year of Occupy, and what many of the sparks and some of the tinder were thinking, and what it was like to be warmed by that beautiful conflagration that spread across the world.

One way or another, the news about Thank You, Anarchy: Notes from the Occupy Apocalypse is getting out!

Get your copy

Thank You, Anarchy is available as an affordable paperback, extravagant hardcover, or ephemeral ebook. To support fine non-profit publishing, you can buy it directly from University of California Press using the discount code 13W4710. That should bring the price to just about where Amazon has it (and I guess you also can get it there if you have to).

Also, between now and Occupy’s second anniversary on September 17, you can get a signed copy of the book by becoming a member (at $5/month or more) of Waging Nonviolence, the publication where the Thank You, Anarchy got its start.

Once you’ve read the book, I hope you’ll consider writing a review at Goodreads or Amazon, or anywhere really, to tell the world what you think.

Attend an event

There are lots of opportunities coming up:

9/15, New York, NY: OWS Participatory Walking Tour and Cartography Party
9/22, Brooklyn, NY: Panel with David Graeber, Astra Taylor, and Moustafa Bayoumi at the Brooklyn Book Festival
9/24, Arlington, VA: Reading at Busboys & Poets
10/2, New York, NY: “The Occupy Apocalypse” at the Catholic Worker
10/9, Hempstead, NY: Lecture on proofs at Hofstra University
10/24, Brooklyn, NY: “An Evening of Song and Abstraction” at the Oratory Church of St.?Boniface
10/26, New London, CT: Discussion with Frida Berrigan at Monte Cristo Bookshop
10/30, Brooklyn, NY: “Was Jesus a Zealot?” at St.?Joseph’s College
11/8, Providence, RI: Beckett Lecture for the Brown-RISD Catholic Community
11/18, Cambridge, MA: Celebrating On Anarchism with Noam Chomsky and the Boston Review
11/23, Baltimore, MD: Panel at the American Academy of Religion
3/9, Washington, DC: Center for Inquiry lecture

Keep up with more events to come on my speaking page. If you’re interested in helping organize an event in your hometown, don’t hesitate to contact me.

There’s more

Can’t get enough anarchy? Here’s what else to look out for this fall:

“Where are they now”-style features on Occupy Wall Street in The Nation and the website of the new Al Jazeera America network.
A new collection of Noam Chomsky’s writings published by the New Press, On Anarchism, includes an introduction of mine: “Anarcho-Curious or, Anarchist Amnesia.”
Don’t miss a pair of fantastic new Occu-books by friends hot off the presses, including my Waging Nonviolence co-editor Laura Gottesdiener’s acclaimed A Dream Foreclosed: Black America and the Fight for a Place to Call Home and Mark Bray’s Translating Anarchy: The Anarchism of Occupy Wall Street.

Thank you, as always, for reading.

The Scandal of White Complicity

Nathan — Fri, 03 May 2013 18:48:12 +0000

In the national Catholic magazine America I’ve just published a short review of an important new book with a long title: The Scandal of White Complicity in U.S. Hyper-Incarceration: A White Spirituality of Resistance. It’s an effort by three Catholic thinkers to articulate the depth of white complicity in this country’s massive, highly racialized prison system and to outline an approach to resistance grounded in Catholic social thought.

What would a movement against mass incarceration be able to accomplish with the support of the country’s largest religious denomination?

Upon recognizing the depth of the problem that mass incarceration poses, it may be tempting for many whites, especially those used to positions of influence and authority, to leap into devising solutions. Reading Michelle Alexander’s book certainly brings to mind a litany of anathemas—for instance, discriminatory policing, the senseless drug war, wildly excessive sentencing laws, the broad discretion afforded to prosecutors, the perverse incentives of the private prison industry and chronic underinvestment in communities of color. But the authors of The Scandal of White Complicity do not venture far into policy proposals or political strategizing. Nor do they allude to the many biblical passages about freeing captives that might tempt one to play the liberator.

What they offer instead is a call to humility, to accountability to people of color, to solidarity. The task they set for white Americans is to organize themselves and each other as allies, and to follow the lead of their neighbors of color who are already fighting the battle against the new Jim Crow every day.

Read the rest at America.

What the _ Did Occupy Do? Where the _ Is Occupy?

Nathan — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 18:03:20 +0000

For my report that appears in this week’s issue of?The Nation, I had the chance to call Occupy movement organizers around the country and check in. The thing I heard, more than anything, was something like this: “I now know who I’m going to organize with for the rest of my life.” But this organizing is taking a lot of different forms—ones that I think may be even more important than the occupations themselves.

Distance and time—as well as involvement in ongoing local struggles—have lessened many people’s attachment to the Occupy label. “I’ve been working with all the same people I worked with in Occupy,” said Kate Savage, who specialized in facilitating assemblies at Occupy Nashville, “only it’s not called ‘Occupy’ for a variety of reasons.” For many issues and on many fronts, onetime Occupiers are finding that the Occupy brand—and all the associations that come with it—can sometimes hurt more than it helps.

Thus, the internally splintering movement shows signs of morphing into a productively subdivided movement of movements. One example of this has been this summer’s escalating wave of direct actions against the worst culprits of the environmental crisis. For the first time, a fracking well was blockaded and shut down in Pennsylvania, and a mountaintop-removal coal mine in West Virginia, at the request of local residents, received similar treatment. The Keystone XL oil pipeline, which inspired protests at the White House last year, now has locals and out-of-towners putting their bodies in the way of construction in Texas. In New York State, the fight is against the Spectra pipeline, which would funnel explosive fracked natural gas into parts of Manhattan.

At each of these protests, Occupy veterans have brought their bravado, their experience and their networks with them. “Lots of folks are going from eco-action to eco-action,” said Longenecker. “They’re building their skill sets.”

The environmental campaigns are only one such beneficiary of the movement. Some Occupiers are serving as hired guns for big unions, helping to agitate in unusually militant campaigns against corporations and austerity budgets. Others are working to draw attention to the massive influx of corporate cash into the electoral system post–Citizens United, while still more are fighting the National Defense Authorization Act and have successfully challenged its most troubling provisions in federal court. Home liberation efforts are taking place around the country—from Occupiers’ support of a high-profile rent strike led by Latino women in Brooklyn to under-the-radar house reclamations in the poorest neighborhoods of Chicago’s South Side. Partly thanks to the light that Occupy Wall Street has shined on it, the NYPD’s use of a discriminatory stop-and-frisk policy has declined dramatically. Meanwhile, the Strike Debt campaign being mounted by Occupiers in New York is developing online memes and public assemblies meant to mobilize those suffering from predatory lending into a mass movement.

Read the rest at?The Nation.

Paint the Other Cheek

Nathan — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 16:16:08 +0000

When?The Nation?assigned me to do a story about questions of violence and nonviolence at Occupy Wall Street early last month, I had no idea how much the subject would explode. Occupy Oakland’s “Move-In Day” on January 28 and a subsequent article by Chris Hedges (as well as some heated discussions on my articles at Waging Nonviolence in between) triggered a national identity crisis in the movement. I followed the controversy as it played out in the OWS Direct Action Working Group, one of the movement’s most active and radical corners during the relatively quiet winter. Over the course of the month, I found yet another example of what “diversity of tactics” really means for Occupy Wall Street — the overcoming of challenges through raw creativity. In particular, I wrote about the birth of a new undertaking called the + Brigades:

The urge for this first came from a frustration with the same old tactics that Natasha Singh had been feeling for a while. “The marches were pointless,” she says. Then, just after the incident in Oakland, her friend and artistic collaborator Amin Husain returned from a World Social Forum meeting in Brazil, where he learned about the Chilean student movement’s creative tactics. He wanted to bring some of that home. The two of them recruited others and settled on a name: “+ Brigades.” They scoured photographs of movements through history at the New York Public Library. The goal, says Husain, is “addition and supplement rather than negation, opposition and subtraction.” Thus their answer to all the worry about black blocs: create blocs of your own.

Husain, who with Singh was one of the earliest OWS organizers, took part in the first intifada as a teenager in the West Bank. But he identifies neither with principled nonviolence nor, for instance, anarchism. The movement’s problem, he and Singh thought, wasn’t a matter of violence or not; it was a lack of imagination. There was too small a repertoire.

“Don’t negate the things you don’t like,” said Austin Guest at that inaugural + Brigades meeting in the church basement. “Add the things you do, so we can get a real diversity of tactics.”

Read the rest of the article at The Nation.

This Is Not Online

Nathan — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 19:59:11 +0000

Well, it sort of is now. Read a (slightly edited) portion of what’s below the fold at Occupy Writers, or a blown-up pdf here. I’ll also be giving a talk—which was gracefully entitled for me “The Ballerina and the Charging Bull”—at Maryhouse (55 East 3rd St., New York) on January 13 at 7:45 p.m.

Occupying Memory

Nathan — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 17:37:58 +0000

My coverage of Occupy Wall Street continues, and evolves. The movement that started at Liberty Plaza is growing all the time, and as it does, I’ve been spending less and less time at the occupations themselves and more and more time writing about them, trying to take account of what has so far been the most tremendous, instructive, and hopeful political experience of my life, and perhaps of my whole generation. I’ve noticed many of the early organizers now stepping back some—resting, letting others take leadership roles, trying to dodge the temptations of ego that come with a movement that has hit the big time, a movement that is not to be confused with particular individuals, even while being made up of nothing else.

As a journalist, I’ve been doing the same. Everyone with a notebook or a camera seems to be covering the movement now, so I’m letting them do the work I was doing early on, when few others were there. I’m going through my notes and through my pictures and through my memories, trying to sort out where this came from and how. In the meantime, some more publications and appearances:

My article “From Occupy Wall Street to Occupy Everywhere” was the lead story of the October 31 issue of The Nation.?I subsequently discussed it on The John Batchelor Show.
A bit of an essay of mine forthcoming in The Catholic Worker?newspaper is now up at OccupyWriters.com, a petition that I helped start with Jeff Sharlet and Kiera Feldman.
An essay?on the meaning of “diversity of tactics” for Occupy Wall Street at Waging Nonviolence has been pretty widely circulated—and I hope its call for nonviolence will be heard. I’m told an edited version will appear in a new book being put out by YES! magazine next week.
In an essay in?The New York Review of Books, Michael Greenberg mentioned the article of mine in the first issue of The Occupied Wall Street Journal, adapted from my Nation?FAQ.

Killing Celebrity Buddhas

Nathan — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 13:34:56 +0000

Occupy Wall Street’s Liberty Plaza has become pretty much?the?place for self-styled progressive celebrities and politicians to appear. On the one hand, these visits are greatly appreciated by the occupiers and have helped strengthen the movement. However, they also raise tricky questions for a movement determined to be non-hierarchical and egalitarian. In?a roundtable on the occupation movement at?Religion Dispatches?today, I try to explain the rationale behind the rather unfortunate recent episode in which Occupy Atlanta opted not to allow civil rights veteran John Lewis to speak to their General Assembly:

Occupy Wall Street has had its share of celebrity visits and they haven’t always gone very well either. The example that comes to mind concerns another prominent black leader, Russell Simmons, who was allowed to speak during a General Assembly meeting. He interrupted the discussion at hand and gave his two cents about what, in general, the movement should do, concerning the by-then-tabled question of “demands.” He received applause and thanks. But a few minutes later, after the scheduled discussion continued about how white, male-bodied people on the plaza needed to “check their privilege,” a white, male-bodied young man got up and said something like, “Perhaps celebrities should check their privilege, too.”?That got applause as well. A lot, as I recall.

It’s really unfortunate that this has become a racial issue, especially when the occupiers have problems with outreach to some racial groups already. As one black left-wing journalist suggested in a conversation I took part in recently, it may be better understood as a problem of communication styles among different communities rather than active, albeit subtle, racism.

But I do think this represents a really interesting effort on the part of occupiers to—so to speak—kill the Buddhas of power and hierarchy in our society. And celebrity really is a huge Buddha.?Even well-earned celebrity. I’ve witnessed other—including white—notable people getting essentially no attention during visits to the plaza. I think it’s really telling that Lewis chose not to hold a grudge. From his remarks, I don’t get the sense that he understands the movement in a deep way, but he does clearly understand—from experience—that creating a new world can get messy sometimes.

The occupiers’ obsession with process—the General Assembly meeting, in this instance—is one really important case of the role of ritual in what they’re doing. The ritual of process comes before all else because it is the vehicle of the future, and the bulwark against compromises with the past.

Read the rest, including Anthea Butler’s discussion of the Lewis incident,?at?Religion Dispatches.

Ten Years of War, Three Weeks of Occupation

Nathan — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 20:45:04 +0000

Today—or yesterday, depending on how you count it—marks a decade since the ongoing war on Afghanistan began. Tomorrow marks the end of the third week since the occupation of Liberty Plaza near Wall Street began. The first might be an utterly solemn occasion were it not for the second. And were it not, also, for the occupation of Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C., which began yesterday and, at nightfall, held a candlelight vigil for 10 years of war.

I wrote about the Freedom Plaza undertaking yesterday in The Nation:

A group of seasoned activists has been planning it for months already, since before the Wall Street occupation was even proposed by?Adbusters. And like those in Liberty Plaza, they are intent on staying as long as it takes to be heard.

Before taking to the streets, the October 6 group gained the support of such familiar mass-mobilizers as the Green Party and Veterans for Peace, as well as newer ones like Peaceful Uprising and US Uncut—though they stress that this is a coalition of individuals above all. As individuals, they’ll be having open discussions on Freedom Plaza about 15 “core issues,” ranging from corporatism and militarism at the top on down to transportation.

The first day succeeded in making Washington pay attention. Some 2,000 people gathered at Freedom Plaza, heard speeches and music, and marched to the Chamber of Commerce and along lobbyist-lined K Street. Hundreds spent the night in sleeping bags on the plaza—illicitly, with light police presence. The organizers hold a permit through the end of the weekend, and what will happen after that remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, I’ve been busy writing about the various occupations for a variety of other publications, as well as giving interviews far and wide for such outlets as Al Jazeera, CBC, Pacifica Radio, New York 1, and WNYC’s Brian Lehrer. Here are some highlights:

A discussion in The New York Times about what Occupy Wall Street is doing right and wrong. I emphasize the power of sustained occupation and the danger of disorganized civil disobedience tactics, though what the editors chose to highlight was my warning at the end about the movement getting co-opted.
On the Harper’s?website, an attempt to figure out where Occupy Wall Street’s General Assembly came from.
Also at The Nation, a widely-read “FAQ” on Occupy Wall Street. This was also reprinted in the Occupy Wall Street Journal, a newspaper produced by the occupation. Ezra Klein of The Washington Post?called it “the single best place to start.” I then spun it into narrative-style for the print issue.
Also in?The New York Times,?a letter to the editor?defending Occupy Wall Street from an early, dismissive article.