Occupy Wall Street rediscovers the radical imagination

Why are people occupying Wall Street? Why has the occupation – despite the latest police crackdown – sent out sparks across America, within days, inspiring hundreds of people to send pizzas, money, equipment and, now, to start their own movements called OccupyChicago, Occu- pyFlorida, in OccupyDenver or OccupyLA?

Occupy’s anarchist roots.

New York, NY — Almost every time I’m interviewed by a mainstream journalist about Occupy Wall Street I get some variation of the same lecture:

Occupy’s liberation from liberalism: the realmeaning of May Day

The US press seems to have decided that the Occupy movement is no longer a story. Pretty much no matter what we do. In New York, on May Day, something between 50,000 and 100,000 people marched through the streets – we don’t know the exact numbers because most papers didn’t report the event at all, and therefore, didn’t bother to make estimates.

On social currencies and human economies: some notes on the violence of equivalence

In this essay I propose a category of ‘human economies’ to refer to those where the primary focus of economic life is on reconfiguring relations between people, rather than the allocation of commodities. Currencies that used to be labelled ‘primitive money’, but which are primarily used to effect this, would better be called ‘social currencies’.

On the Moral Grounds of Economic Relations

For all the vast literature on “the gift,” the concept is surprisingly under-theorized. This is because everyone assumes that there is something called “the gift”, that all transactions not involving payment or the promise of payment are the same thing.

On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant

In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this.