Pirates of the Caribbean: Axis of Hope by Tariq Ali
We’d just like to highlight how absolutely adorable this cover is. Look at those beautiful Latin American smiles. Those palm trees. Those piles of burning money.
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Our Occupy Wall Street display. Any donations to the People’s Library are 30% off—we’ll hand deliver them wherever they need to go.
Featuring:
Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class, by Owen Jones
The “S” Word: A Short History of an American Tradition… Socialism, by John Nichols
The Verso Book of Dissent: From Spartacus to the Shoe-Thrower of Baghdad, edited by Andrew Hsiao and Audrea Lim
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Occupy!: Scenes from Occupied America will be published by Verso Books on December 17th, the three-month anniversary of the beginning of the occupation movement.
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Biblioclasm: or, You Can’t Evict an Idea
By Jacob Stevens
Verso NY found itself in a strange situation last night: we were putting the finishing touches to our new book on the Occupy movement, written and edited by our comrades at n+1, at the very moment that NYPD were evicting Liberty Park. While doing so, the city authorities threw the 5,000-book People’s Library into a sanitation truck—joining, in their own sordid way, a tradition that stretches from the the sacking of the libraries of Alexandria and Baghdad, through the Nazis burning Jewish books, to the destruction of libraries in Sarajevo and Baghdad in 1992 and 2003.
The Occupy movement has now spread its roots across the globe, with over 100 occupations in the US alone—and brutal evictions in other cities have tended to lead to new, stronger encampments, often within twenty-four hours. As I write this post, lawyers are fighting the city and NYPD in court, to allow protesters back in, with their belongings. The OWS general assembly met in Foley Square last night—and a new poll shows that a clear majority of New York voters support the 24-hour occupation. The Writers and Artists Affinity Group is planning to help restock the People’s Library, and Verso will of course be contributing (once again) a lot of books. As the protesters chanted last night: “You can’t evict an idea.”
Occupy! will be published on December 17th, the three-month anniversary of OWS. Free, as far as possible, at your local occupation; on sale, for $14.95 or £9.99, everywhere else. You choose!
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Savage Messiah
The following is an excerpt of Laura Oldfield Ford’s Savage Messiah, her long-running fanzine now available in book-form from Verso.
(Source: thenewinquiry)
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Verso Authors on Occupy Wall Street
With the upsurge of support and participation in the occupation movement, radical and progressive literary writers and journalists are doing their part by providing coverage, analysis, and report-backs, as well as by organizing initiatives like Occupy Writers. Among those who have signed on to Occupy Writers are Tariq Ali, Wu Ming, Ahdaf Soueif, Rebecca Solnit, Mahmood Mamdani, and others.
We’ve collected a few of the pieces on the occupation by Verso authors in our #Occupy Archive:
Occupy Wall Street is the most important political happening in America since 1968, by Immanuel Wallerstein
The Occupy Wall Street movement—for now it is a movement—is the most important political happening in the United States since the uprisings in 1968, whose direct descendant or continuation it is.
Why it started in the United States when it did—and not three days, three months, three years earlier or later—we’ll never know for sure… It doesn’t really matter what the spark was that ignited the fire. It started.
Listening to Zuccotti Park, by Richard Dienst
Perhaps the tactic of issuing official texts to the outside world has become obsolete, and the internal need to bind the group through a political testament for external audiences has dissipated. As the occupiers in Manhattan dig in and the network of resistance expands and strengthens, the movement reinvents itself daily by adding ideas, images, and addresses to the mix. Even if the cops don’t move in and the weather doesn’t turn bad, nobody can really say where it will go tomorrow. That is already a great accomplishment.
Zuccotti Park, a psychogeography, by McKenzie Wark
The confrontations with the police usually get the most attention, but they’re not the only thing going on at Occupy Wall Street. I went down to Zuccotti Park at about 9PM on Wednesday, 5th October after putting the kids to bed. I was alarmed by stuff on the twitter feed that detailed incidents of contact with the police but which were not clear about the location. I wanted to make sure our Park was still there.
Read these and other pieces in their entirety, and keep up to date with the bookish sides of the occupation, on the Verso website.
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We’re celebrating the launch of Juan González and Joe Torres’s new book, News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race in the American Media this Thursday, October 20, at the Great Hall at Cooper Union.
As part of Democracy Now!”s 15th anniversary celebrations, award-winning journalist Amy Goodman will host a conversation with the authors.
After Thursday’s kick-off event, Joe and Juan will be going on their book tour for all the people. For tour dates, locations, and more information on this epic race, you can visit the Verso website.
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Slavoj Žižek visited Liberty Plaza to speak to Occupy Wall Street protesters. Here is the original text of his speech:
Don’t fall in love with yourselves, with the nice time we are having here. Carnivals come cheap—the true test of their worth is what remains the day after, how our normal daily life will be changed. Fall in love with hard and patient work—we are the beginning, not the end. Our basic message is: the taboo is broken, we do not live in the best possible world, we are allowed and obliged even to think about alternatives. There is a long road ahead, and soon we will have to address the truly difficult questions—questions not about what we do not want, but about what we DO want. What social organization can replace the existing capitalism? What type of new leaders we need? The XXth century alternatives obviously did not work.
So do not blame people and their attitudes: the problem is not corruption or greed, the problem is the system that pushes you to be corrupt. The solution is not “Main street, not Wall street,” but to change the system where main street cannot function without Wall street. Beware not only of enemies, but also of false friends who pretend to support us, but are already working hard to dilute our protest. In the same way we get coffee without caffeine, beer without alcohol, ice-cream without fat, they will try to make us into a harmless moral protest. But the reason we are here is that we had enough of the world where to recycle your Coke cans, to give a couple of dollars for charity, or to buy Starbucks cappuccino where 1% goes for the Third World troubles is enough to make us feel good. After outsourcing work and torture, after the marriage agencies started to outsource even our dating, we see that for a long time we were allowing our political engagements also to be outsourced—we want them back.
We were called losers—but are the true losers not there on the Wall Street, and were they not bailed out by hundreds of billions of your money? You are called socialists—but in the US, there already is socialism for the rich. They will tell you that you don’t respect private property—but the Wall Street speculations that led to the crash of 2008 erased more hard-earned private property than if we were to be destroying it here night and day—just think of thousands of homes foreclosed…
We are not Communists, if Communism means the system which deservedly collapsed in 1990—and remember that Communists who are still in power run today the most ruthless capitalism (in China). The success of Chinese Communist-run capitalism is an ominous sign that the marriage between capitalism and democracy is approaching a divorce. The only sense in which we are Communists is that we care for the commons—the commons of nature, of knowledge—which are threatened by the system.
They will tell you that you are dreaming, but the true dreamers are those who think that things can go on indefinitely they way they are, just with some cosmetic changes. We are not dreamers, we are the awakening from a dream which is turning into a nightmare. We are not destroying anything, we are merely witness how the system is gradually destroying itself. We all know the classic scene from cartoons: the cat reaches a precipice, but it goes on walking, ignoring the fact that there is no ground under its feet; it starts to fall only when it looks down and notices the abyss. What we are doing is just reminding those in power to look down…
Read the rest of the speech on the Verso blog.
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Communism, A New Beginning? Livestream
Verso will LIVE STREAM the conference, beginning Friday, Oct 14th at 6pm. You’ll need to log in to access the video page, so please register now if you don’t yet have an account.
The long night of the left is coming to a close,’ wrote Slavoj Žižek and Costas Douzinas in their introduction to The Idea of Communism. The continuing economic crisis, the shift away from a unipolar world defined by American hegemony, and the ecological crisis mean that growing numbers of people are keen to explore an alternative and to rediscover the idea of communism. With the advent of the Arab Awakening, millions have sought new ways to overcome corruption and dictatorship.
Responding to Alain Badiou’s proposition of the ‘communist hypothesis,’ the leading thinkers of the Left convened in London in 2009 to discuss the perpetual, persistent notion that, in a truly emancipated society, all things should be owned in common.
Now Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou are returning to the discussion—this time in New York.
Organised with Verso Books, eight leading thinkers will be discussing Communism, A New Beginning? at Cooper Union on the weekend of October 14–16.
With great regret we have to announce that, due to illness, Alain Badiou will not be able to attend the conference this weekend. We are all extremely disappointed but we hope you’ll join us in wishing Alain a swift recovery. He has prepared a text to be read by Bruno Bosteels—so he will still be able to contribute to the conference, and we still expect the conference to be an extraordinary event.
