The point, after all, is to change the world.
Over the past academic year, students, faculty, staff, and communities have organized against efforts by the CUNY administration and the US military to increasingly privatize and militarize the university.
Students from universities across Ukraine played an essential role in generating the critical mass in what became the (Euro)Maidan protests, the most massive mobilization in the history of independent Ukraine.
In 2011, the biggest student mobilization in recent Chilean history began to pick up steam. Camila Vallejo and Noam Titelman were among the movement’s most visible participants. They reflect on strategies, tactics, organizing structures, and lessons learned from years of education activism.
Pickup Artists, Virtual Intimacies, and the Reconstruction of Heterosexual Masculinity
China’s undemocratic elections are usually attributed to a national political culture. But manipulation most often unfolds at the local level: through insidious practices rather than structural constraints.
A simple tax audit leads to a thorny bureaucratic question: What does it mean to be an artist?
The recent global wave of revolt has reinvigorated a crucial (and longstanding) question on the Left: what kind of a politics is to be pursued, here and now, if we are to build a more democratic and egalitarian society?
Occupy Wall Street participant Jonathan Smucker takes a critical look at the movement’s “prefigurative politics” through the theoretical lenses of Gramsci and Habermas.
When revolutionaries do not produce ideology, demands, and leaders, does this mean that the revolt will have no ideology, demands, and leaders? Cihan Tuğal discusses the limits and traps of Egypt’s “leaderless revolution” in light of the nation’s current military rule.
How do relationships between left-leaning political parties and social movements change over time? Rebecca Tarlau looks at the case of the Brazilian Landless Worker’s Movement (MST) and the Workers’ Party (PT), examining the complexity of state-society relations — asking whether social movements can be “prefigurative” while still contesting state power.
Few know more about democracy and governance in Iceland than Jón Ólafsson. Thomas Hintze interviews Ólafsson, asking if it is fair to characterize Iceland’s “cutlery revolution” of 2009 as prefigurative or leaderless.
Hong Kong’s Occupy Central campaign is part of a thirty-year struggle for democracy. As it enters it second week, activists have to confront not only police and violent thugs but internal dissent over the future direction of the protests.