This week we hear three different perspectives on the ongoing Occupy movement. Firstly, an open letter to the police by occupier Reverend Richard Lang. Then Noam Chomsky on how to broaden Occupy and on its relationship to the US Republicrat kabuki. Finally P2P theorist Michel Bauwens sets Occupy in the context of emerging peer production. We conclude with another reading from chapter 7 of David Graeber's Debt, The First 5000 Years.
Thanks to Mike McCormick for the Richard Land interview, and to InterOccupy for the Noam Chomsky interview.
We start the show with some reflections of the various Occupy battles as symptoms of society's auto-immune disease. In this context, we hear a November 2011 open letter from Occupier, Reverend Richard Lang to the Seattle Police Department. Encouraging them to work with, not against the occupiers, he notes their common interest, and that the police who accept their orders to brutalize and provoke protesters are no longer serving humanity or their own interests.
Then we hear an interview of Noam Chomsky about the meaning of the Occupy Movement in the context of US politics. He highlights the need for direct civic engagement by the occupiers to transform their wide mandate of support from a habitually inactive populace into a broad active engagement -- which is the best defense against brutal police. Chomsky notes that the established US political parties will try to coopt Occupy to meet their own ends. He recalls David Hume's observation that "Power is in the hands of the governed" and that the only way that an elite can maintain control is through an enormous and ongoing campaign to shape public opinion. Occupy threatens that control to the extent that it presents a counter narrative independent of commercially controlled media.
Our first hour concludes with a recent interview of Michel Bauwens about the significance of Occupy. He highlights the emerging phenomenon of peer production, which substitutes traditional top down hierarchies such as corporations with a pattern of more amicable and egalitarian interrelationships. Bauwens suggests that Occupy is a manifestation of the same, decentralized spirit in the political arena. This continues into the second hour and we conclude with another half hour of Chapter 7 of David Graeber's Debt, The First 5000 Years.
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