The American state cannot tolerate any political alternative even if it emerges on the symbolic field. However, street events were retaliated almost similarly what we had seen concerning the Arab Spring. The hysteria against rising alternatives and the brutal state repression probably have shaken the image of "the freest country" thus Occupy maybe started something. It is hard to tell what might develop from it but something has actually changed.
Category Archives: Former issues
Occupy Wall Street, Composers and the Plutocracy: Some Variations on an Ancient Theme
Composers and musicians – who are also hierarchical leaders on their own way, since the concert hall follows the model of Darwinian competition – are at the mercy of the political and business elite. Bankers, politicians and businessman finance culture not exactly benevolent and free from their own interests. So, although composers did appear in the Occupy movement and their anti-capitalistic commitment cannot be questioned but their performance and role still contradictory.
Original article is at Occupying New Music: Guest Blog Occupy Wall Street, Composers and the Plutocracy: Some Variations on an Ancient Theme By John Halle.
Why Ideology?
On the book of Viktor Kiss: Marx & Ideológia [Marx & Ideology] Budapest L'Harmattan, 2011
The Wold Class Struggle: The Geography of Protest
We are living in a chaotic situation. Due to the structural crisis of the capitalist world economy, standard solutions for managing a shrinking economy do not work anymore, despite that politicians and experts keep assuring that the recovery is just around the corner. Fluctuations in everything are large and rapid and this applies as well to social protest. This is what we are seeing as the geography of protest constantly shifts.
A Post-Socialist Capitalism
A special and unique form of capitalism has evolved in Eastern Europe after the post-socialist transformation. This form is characterised by the unusual weak SMEs sector, an agricultural sector with few efficient capitalist large farms and many weak small farms often producing for self-subsistence and very weak labour in general. In these new systems, in addition to multinational companies, technocrats have a large weight in the evolving domestic capitalist elite, coming from the second rank of the former nomenclature and often with inherited bourgeois cultural capital.
Original article Nigel Swain: A Post-Socialist Capitalism in Europe-Asia Studies Vol 63, Issue 9 2011