Dear all,

This long con is finally starting to pay off. Getting attacked by Andrew Breitbart, Rush Limbaugh, and Glenn Beck over the course of 48 hours was nice. Hate mail poured in. Tens of thousands of new people visited our site. All of them, presumably, became radicalized on the spot. We sold [...]

The lesser depression has called forth a profusion of new and old theories about what’s wrong with the American economy, and what can be done to put it right. As you can see in Mike Konczal’s topological maps, these accounts can be broadly separated into “demand” and “supply” side arguments. Within the supply side, [...]

“Real America” is banging at the gates. Over the past 24, Limbaugh, Breitbart, and company have hurled a Fatwa of sorts in our direction. They’ve been denouncing a panel we had at Bluestockings last Friday, especially the participation of Natasha Lennard. Lennard occasionally freelances for The New York Times. Freelanced that is. The Times caved without resistance and dropped her almost immediately.

There’s [...]

In what should be a worthwhile venture, Platypus is hosting the first in a series of roundtables on the Occupy Wall Street movement. I’m not sure if the event’s coordinators want people to show up wearing Halloween costumes, but I personally encourage it.

Friday 7pm | October [...]

Peter Orszag has a column about the diminishing share of labor in national income, relative to capital. Mike Konczal provides some useful additional discussion. Both of them frame the issue as a new empirical mystery, because it contradicts a “stylized fact” that economists have long assumed about capitalist economies: that the relative share [...]

I left the Jacobin panel debate on Occupy Wall Street on October 14 pretty dispirited. In the process of trying to address shared concerns that the protests would dissipate, the participants seemed to be instantiating the dissipation. They talked past one another and at times seemed to want to cast suspicion on the good faith of [...]

Talking Points Memo today linked to a couple demographic surveys of Occupy Wall Street participants. A close reading will have to wait. But here’s something that jives with what Peter Frase argued the other day — there’s a conflation of “partisanship” with “political ideology” among both elites and our fellow protesters.

One survey 

So in the context of OWS, I’ve been doing some reading on anarchism lately, and I thought I’d periodically note down some of my findings here.

One thing that’s struck me so far is that the most acute critiques of anarchism have come from anarchists themselves, of which there is no shortage of thoughtful and [...]

#OWS: a debate on left politics and strategy

Held on Friday Oct. 14, 2011 at Bluestockings bookshop on Allen St. in New York City.

Since the beginning of Occupy Wall Street, voices from across the spectrum, both friendly and otherwise, have accused it of vagueness, incoherence, and demanded it produce some [...]