Angela Davis: The 99%: a community of resistance

[marmar]

The 99%: a community of resistance
The Occupy movement's exhilarating potential lies in forging a unity that can make a new majority of the old minorities

Angela Davis
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 15 November 2011




When the Occupy Wall Street movement erupted on 17 September 2011, I happened to be reflecting on my remarks for the upcoming International Herbert Marcuse Society conference. By the time the conference convened on 27 October at the University of Pennsylvania, the encampment in Zuccotti Park was well-established and similar encampments had emerged in hundreds of communities around the country. On the opening day of the Marcuse conference, there were over 300 tents in the plaza outside Philadelphia city hall.

The organising theme of the conference – "Critical Refusals" – was originally designed to encourage us to reflect on the various ways Marcuse's philosophical theories push us in the direction of a critical political practice located outside the proper realm of philosophy, but nevertheless as anchored in philosophy as it is in a will to transform society.

So, while we were certainly prepared to ponder the connection between Marcuse's philosophical ideas and his association with the movements of the sixties, we were struck by the serendipitous affinity of the theme with the emergent Occupy movement. As presenters arrived in Philadelphia, we repeatedly expressed our enthusiasm about the confluence of the Wall Street and Philadelphia occupations and the conference theme, which seemed to us to emphatically enact the 21st-century relevance of Herbert Marcuse's work.

I don't know whether any of us could not have predicted that on the second day of the conference, the plenary audience of more than 1,000 would be so riveted by this historical conjuncture that almost all of us spontaneously joined a night march, which wended its way through the streets of Philadelphia toward the tents outside city hall. At the site, I reflected aloud – with the assistance of the human microphone – on the differences between the social movements with which we have become familiar over the last decades and this newly-grown community of resistance. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/nov/15/99-percent-community-resistance

[xchrom]

1. Love, love, love that woman. Nt

[Laughing Mirror]

2. That makes two of us

Always have, always will.

[Starry Messenger]

3. k&r

[Gregorian]

4. The simple beauty of her concepts is 100 years ahead of America.

"Decarceration and the eventual abolition of imprisonment"

That kind of concept gives me such a bright hope. It's just like I was saying about Carlin's comments. They both saw the 1% very clearly, and how they pushed America around for their own gain.