Category: Uncategorized
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Radicals and the 99%: Core and Mass Movement
This essay is a chapter in the new book from AK Press We Are Many: Critical Reflections on Movement Strategy from Occupation to Liberation. The book is 450 pages with contributions from 50 authors — most of whom have been active in Occupy Wall Street. Order it here! — Occupy Wall Street audaciously claimed to…
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We Are Many: #OWS Book Launch in NYC this Saturday (Sept.15)
Next week marks the one-year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street — the movement that took New York’s financial district by storm, rapidly swept across the nation, and dramatically shifted the dominant political discourse. AK Press is releasing their new book We Are Many: Reflections on Movement Strategy from Occupation to Liberation just in time for…
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Claiming and Contesting Meanings and Symbols of the Nation
The nation as a constructed concept frames a commonality amongst citizens who live within the borders of a defined land mass. The conceptual common terrain of nation has provided a large part of the ground upon which the idea of a public was built. Though a plausibly common terrain, it is also an arena of…
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Beautiful Trouble!
If you haven’t yet checked out the new book Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution, well, get on it! The book, was assembled by Andrew Boyd, who herded about 70 folks into writing a whole lot of short, outstanding essays about grassroots organizing, creative action, and social change. Beautiful Trouble is “a book & web…
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how language can limit tactical options
We know that movement groups adopt targets, tactics, and strategies not only because they have a good likelihood of being effective and because they are consistent with the group’s express ideological commitments, but also, often, because they are symbolically associated with people or things that are attractive for other reasons, or are symbolically opposed to…
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Activists in Google’s N-gram viewer
I learned about Google’s N-gram viewer from reading Eli Pariser’s book The Filter Bubble. The tool queries a “database spanning the entire contents of over five hundred years’ worth of books — 5.2 million books in total… [Pariser].” So you can see how often different phrases have been used in print, over many years. I…
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Theory of Political Behavior SERIES
In July I wrote a four-part series elucidating parts of a theory of political behavior. This here is a landing page for that series. Here are the parts: A theory of political behavior Evolutionary logic of identity Political dimension of group identity Imagined communities & populist alignment And here are a few “companion” posts that…
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TONIGHT in NYC: “Occupy Their Desire” discussion with Jodi Dean, Not An Alternative, and yours truly
Hey New York City-area friends, tonight I’ll be part of a discussion called Occupy Their Desire at the Austrian Cultural Forum. The panel will include Jodi Dean, the art/activism collective Not An Alternative, and yours truly — followed by a discussion. Here’s the info: Tuesday, August 21 6:30pm – 8:30pm Austrian Cultural Forum 11 East…
Jonathan Matthew Smucker 