This book is an urgent and compelling account of the Occupy movements: from the M15 movement in Spain, to the wave of Occupations flooding across cities in American, Europe and Australia, to the harsh reality of evictions as corporations and governments attempted to reassert exclusive control over public space. Across a vast range of international examples over twenty authors analyse, explain and helps us understand the movement. These movements were a novel and noisy intervention into the recent capitalist crisis in developed economies, developing an exceptionally broad identity through a call to arms addressed to ‘the 99%’, and emphasizing the importance of public space in the creation and maintenance of opposition. The novelties of these movements, along with their radical positioning and the urgency of their claims all demand analysis. This book investigates the crucial questions of how and why this form of action spread so rapidly and so widely, how the inclusive discourse of ‘the 99%’ matched up to the reality of the practice. It is vital to understand not just the choice of tactics and the vitality of protest camps in public spaces, but also how the myriad of challenges and problems were negotiated. This book was published as a special issue of Social Movement Studies.

BE THE REVOLUTION: HOW OCCUPY WALL STREET AND THE BERNIE SANDERS MOVEMENT RESHAPED AMERICAN POLITICS Most people think that Occupy Wall Street failed, and Bernie Sanders's meteoric rise to the national stage was simply a 'viral' phenomenon that captured the hearts of unrealistic Millenials. Be The Revolution reveals how Occupy organizers strategically activated their national network of activists to fuel the grassroots movement that propelled the Senator’s campaign to change the course of American history. This is an inside journey through the key events of the 2016 and 2020 primary races. It follows a secret group of Sanders influencers called Bernie’s Avengers as they challenge the Democratic establishment and then join the historic pipeline fight at Standing Rock. This book also offers important insights into the rise of QAnon and neofascism. Be The Revolution is a gonzo adventure into the heart of the grassroots movements that defined a decade, a memoir that also contains a theory of change to guide the development of the movements urgently needed to take on national and global crises. PRAISE FOR BE THE REVOLUTION: Be The Revolution offers Important insights into some of the most significant developments in modern America, based on intimate knowledge and direct participation. -Noam Chomsky “We should thank Jay for his life’s work. As an organizer, he is a wonder to watch in action. This accounting of events of the last ten years is a profound and seismic piece of American political, and cultural history that has gone all but unnoticed in the mainstream. Be The Revolution is not about a battle of right or left, but the battle for humanity and the natural world. The timing of this book couldn’t be more right, nor the message more on point.” Ken Burns should do a doc on this!” -Mark Ruffalo “Jay Ponti is a legendary long distance revolutionary thinker and activist whose vision, analysis and courage is a beacon of hope in our bleak times! Don’t miss this jewel of a book!” -Dr Cornel West “This book is a great history of progressive action from the Occupy moment to the present—clear, invigorating, and encouraging of future efforts. We owe Jay Ponti a big thank you for his tireless efforts to change the American political landscape, and thus to help save Earth’s biosphere from a catastrophic mass extinction event. It’s crucial work he describes here, and joining the effort can give anyone a project that includes meaning and hope.” -Kim Stanley Robinson Be The Revolution is an important first-hand account of the efforts led by Occupy Wall Street and Bernie Sanders’ inspired activists to resist the forces of neoliberalism and mobilize for an equitable future. This history is crucial to understand if the human race is going to save itself from the climate emergency and rise of neofascism. -Thom Hartmann “Be The Revolution is a love letter to our movements, an honest and searching testimonial from the heart of the grassroots. Jay Ponti is a ride or die revolutionary who has given us a glimpse into some of the most important moments of political struggle in the last decade. This is the book the establishment doesn't want you to read.” -Nina Turner “The prevailing narrative of American politics is not the real story. It obliterates the deeper reality of who we are as people and the overarching meaning of struggles for justice. Beneath the corporate-created hype and the games of our political establishment lie the activism and sacrifices of real people doing the gut-wrenching work of trying to further and save our democracy. Be The Revolution tells the story of those people.” -Marianne Williamson Wopila (Thank you) for writing the blow by blow actions of the War we faced at the Oceti Sakowin Camp (Standing Rock). Jay Ponti had great influence on the two Declarations written at Oceti Sakowin , particularly the Divestment Treaty among Nations. The First Declaration defies the Doctrine of Discovery and illegal actions used by it. The second called for Divestment by countries from fossil fuels, especially by DAPL, and all other oil corporations.. Thank you for your written words. -Phyllis Young American Indian Rights Activist “Stories are vitally important when it comes to the thing called politics. Jay Ponti has done everyone on the left a remarkable service by telling stories that could so easily be lost.” -Tim Morton

Mic check! Mic check! Lacking amplification in Zuccotti Park, Occupy Wall Street protestors addressed one another by repeating and echoing speeches throughout the crowd. In Occupy, W. J. T. Mitchell, Bernard E. Harcourt, and Michael Taussig take the protestors’ lead and perform their own resonant call-and-response, playing off of each other in three essays that engage the extraordinary Occupy movement that has swept across the world, examining everything from self-immolations in the Middle East to the G8 crackdown in Chicago to the many protest signs still visible worldwide. “You break through the screen like Alice in Wonderland,” Taussig writes in the opening essay, “and now you can’t leave or do without it.” Following Taussig’s artful blend of participatory ethnography and poetic meditation on Zuccotti Park, political and legal scholar Harcourt examines the crucial difference between civil and political disobedience. He shows how by effecting the latter—by rejecting the very discourse and strategy of politics—Occupy Wall Street protestors enacted a radical new form of protest. Finally, media critic and theorist Mitchell surveys the global circulation of Occupy images across mass and social media and looks at contemporary works by artists such as Antony Gormley and how they engage the body politic, ultimately examining the use of empty space itself as a revolutionary monument. Occupy stands not as a primer on or an authoritative account of 2011’s revolutions, but as a snapshot, a second draft of history, beyond journalism and the polemics of the moment—an occupation itself.

The grassroots movement that started Sept. 17, 2011, with a protest in a park near Wall Street has mushroomed into a series of demonstrations in hundreds of cities around the world. In a year of protests from the Middle East to Madison, Wis., the Occupy uprising, a passionate outcry for economic justice, has been defined by its lack of definition. Now from TIME comes an illuminating collection of stories that answers many of the key questions about Occupy: How did it get started? What's behind the anger of the so-called 99% this group claims to represent? Who leads this leaderless movement? What should its agenda be? How can it transcend the occupation of tiny Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan? What Is Occupy? includes chapters from the pages of TIME by columnists Joe Klein and Rana Foroohar, as well as new chapters original to the book, plus the results of exclusive TIME polls.

This unique volume is about how ordinary people construct political meanings, form political emotions and identities, and become involved in or disengaged from political contests. Drawing on psychological anthropology, it illustrates the complexities of political subjectivities through engaging personal stories that complicate our understanding of the relationship between culture and politics. Chapters examine the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street in the United States, third gender activism in India, Rastafari in Jamaica, Courage to Refuse in Israel, the environmental movement in the U.S., Salafi movements in northern Nigeria, post-socialist labor politics in Romania, and anti-immigrant activism in Denmark.

Analyzing the movement's deep-seated origins in questions that the country has sought too long to ignore, some of the greatest economic minds and most incisive cultural commentators - from Paul Krugman, Robin Wells, Michael Lewis, Robert Reich, Amy Goodman, Barbara Ehrenreich, Gillian Tett, Scott Turow, Bethany McLean, Brandon Adams, and Tyler Cowen to prominent labor leaders and young, cutting-edge economists and financial writers whose work is not yet widely known - capture the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon in all its ragged glory, giving readers an on-the-scene feel for the movement as it unfolds while exploring the heady growth of the protests, considering the lasting changes wrought, and recommending reform. A guide to the occupation, The Occupy Handbook is a talked-about source for understanding why 1% of the people in America take almost a quarter of the nation's income and the long-term effects of a protest movement that even the objects of its attack can find little fault with.

In the fall of 2011, a small protest camp in downtown Manhattan exploded into a global uprising, sparked in part by the violent overreactions of the police. An unofficial record of this movement, Occupy! combines adrenalin-fueled first-hand accounts of the early days and weeks of Occupy Wall Street with contentious debates and thoughtful reflections, featuring the editors and writers of the celebrated n+1, as well as some of the world’s leading radical thinkers, such as Slavoj Žižek, Angela Davis, and Rebecca Solnit. The book conveys the intense excitement of those present at the birth of a counterculture, while providing the movement with a serious platform for debating goals, demands, and tactics. Articles address the history of the “horizontalist” structure at OWS; how to keep a live-in going when there is a giant mountain of laundry building up; how very rich the very rich have become; the messages and meaning of the “We are the 99%” tumblr website; occupations in Oakland, Boston, Atlanta, and elsewhere; what happens next; and much more.

This volume offers scholarly perspectives on the creative and humorous nature of the protests at Gezi Park in Turkey, 2013. The contributors argue that these protests inspired musicians, film-makers, social scientists and other creative individuals, out of a concern for the aesthetics of the protests, rather than seizure of political power.

Large-scale protest movements have recently transformed urban common spaces into sites of resistance. The Arab Spring, the European Summer, the American Fall in 2011, the revolts in India and South Africa and, more recently, in Istanbul, in several cities in Brazil, and in Hong Kong, are part of a common wave of protests which reclaims squares and urban places, monumentally designed as political and economic centres, as places for discussion and decision-making, for increasing participation and intervention in the governance of the community. Through banners and signs, open assemblies, and other communicative practices in the encampments and interconnecting physical and virtual spaces, participants permanently reconfigure their lived spaces discursively. The attempt to account for on-going social phenomena from the moment they first happen, and with an international perspective, undoubtedly represents a theoretical and methodological challenge. This book is a successful and innovative attempt to address this challenge, capturing the complex interplay between social, spatial, and communicative practices, drawing on complementary and alternative methods. Originally published in Journal of Language and Politics issue 13:4 (2014).

Given the centrality of economics and communication in the Occupy movement, Understanding Occupy from Wall Street to Portland uses economic insights and contemporary theories of communication to better understand the movement at this current juncture in history. This collection is organized by complementary theoretical and methodological perspectives: the global—critical cultural and economic understandings of Occupy; the local—interpretive ethnographic examinations of a local site—Occupy Portland, Oregon; and mediated perspectives—analyses of the words of officials and media. The contributors also examine social movement phenomena by stepping outside of social movement theory to analyze the macro- and microprocesses of the Occupy movement, demonstrating the saliency of communication theory. Throughout the volume are in-depth case studies that examine universal narratives about Occupy. One of the challenges of studying Occupy is that members of this movement are committed to not allowing any one person (or entity) to define it. One way the editors acknowledge this and attempt to honor the individualism and postmodern fragmentation of this movement is to consider their findings in light of the three interpretive lenses of the romantic, functional, and critical. This informative and comprehensive text provides a critical lens on the constantly evolving Occupy movement.