Introduction to Street Protest, Blockupy Workshop in preparation for Frankfurt ECB 2015
1. Why Street Protest
• a fundamental right and contribution to democracy is to express our dissent
• collective manifestation of dissent creates news, encourages others, threatens elites
• the way to win (reforms) is to raise the costs of the current way of doing things until it becomes in the interests of the elites to do it our way
• threat/promise to take over
Protest Institute: From ideology to ideas, from social movement to social change: a biography, a case study, a dinner party
“You have presented things I have never seen in the same chain of meanings.”
The mechanics of the struggle for hegemony: a case study of Local Food (at RLS)
Lecture to the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, 5 February 2015.
Protected: Practices: Purity versus politics
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
Why are the San Francisco street protests so robust? Interview with San Francisco Magazine
Historical evidence insists that oppression on its own does not produce social movement reaction. In places with little culture of resistance, there will be little social movement reaction to social problems, or occasional outbursts may not be sustained. San Francisco has had, regularly and recently over the last decades, a series of effective and sustained street manifestations, so there are people, organizations, networks, systems, etc. to make the next ones bigger and more robust.
The Grounds (groundless) Sydney, review
If Disneyland had a farm (and they probably do} it would be The Grounds. It’s farm aesthetic as money machine. And swarming with spenders sucked
Food Sovereignty as a Social Movement (at Sydney Environment Institute)
So what is the cosmology of food sovereignty? Food is a community, not a commodity… But how do we turn this idea into culture? Alberto Melucci explains how it is that we create culture… through creating new spaces, identities, meanings, identities, commitments….
Alternatives to the Global Food System
Lecture to “Plants and the Environment” course, University of Sydney, 7 October 2014.
Lech Wałȩsa and craft labor
His explanation of his strategic capacities is “I am an electrician.” This reminds me of Matthew Crawford’s painstaking work on the “cognitive riches” of trade labour. (Summary here.) Crawford’s point is that trade work is satisfying. Wałȩsa’s point is that it is also a form of analytic training.
I am an economist who knows that popular understanding of and political power over the economy is crucial to freedom and self-determination of communities. We are engaged in social movements to establish authority over the conditions which affect our lives, the power to protect our ecosystems and cultures, the control to create meaningful work, the right to eat delicious and healthy food, the information to be our own doctors, and the physical and psychological time and space to be creative.
I do not believe we need multinational corporations, supermarkets, genetically modified organisms, or for-profit healthcare organizations to achieve these things.
I am interested in indigenous cosmologies and visions of development, sustainability and permaculture, alterglobalization, participatory democracy, good work, great food, and creativity.
Love & Rage,
Amory
