Occupy Strategic Planning Reading Resources

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This is a page with suggested reading.

GOAL OF THE READINGS

The goal of this reading is to have a "solid basis" for the group's understanding of existing theory.

SUGGESTED LEARNING METHOD

You can start out by reading the first couple of paragraphs and the last couple of paragraphs in each of the recommended articles in Monthly Review. These essentially summarize the ideas and concepts professed in the articles.

THE READINGS

1. Monthly Review magazine

www.monthlyreview.org. Search bar on upper right hand side of MR home page.

[Monthly Review]

Samir Amin, "The Trajectory of Historical Capitalism and Marxism's Tricontinental Vocation," Monthly Review, February 2011. This is a seminal historical analysis of capitalism which is a key to grasping the comptemporary global anti imperialist struggle that has emerged since the late 1990s in Latin America and in recent years in the Arab Spring.

Istvan Meszaros, "Structural Crisis Needs Structural Change," March 2012. Istvan Meszaros is the leading contemporary Marxian theoretician, according to John Bellamy Foster, Editor, Monthly Review. This is a definitive analysis of the structural crisis of the capital system.

John Bellamy Foster & Robert W. McChesney, "Endless Crisis," May 2012. Foster, as indicated above, is the Editor of Monthly Review and McChesney is its former co-editor. Foster and McChesney analyze the Great Financial Crisis and the Great Recession with great accumen based on the economic stagnation theory pioneered by Paul Baran and Paul Sweezey, a founding editor of Monthly Review. Baran and Sweezy are the authors of the seminal essay, Monopoly Capital (NY: Monthly Review Press, 1966).

2. Noam Chomsky Lecture

Noam Chomsky's 1970 Lecture entitled, "Governments in the Future" Full Audio (56 minutes) http://archive.org/details/NoamChomskyOnGovernmentsInTheFuture. Chomsky the leading US dissident and most prominent scholar in this role since the 1960s is always worth reading/listening to for fundamental analysis.

World Forum for Alternatives "The Economic and Social Crisis: Contemporary Capitalism & Class Struggle," Weekly Bulletin for May 7, 2013. Search: World Forum for Alternatives. According to Karl Marx class struggle is "the motor force of history." This is an overview of the levels of class struggle the world around in the present historical era. Raising our collective level of class consciousness is essential to being able to fight as effectively as possible against the corporatocracy or global corporate capitalist ruling class.

3. Legal History of "Corporate Rights"

Text form: [Legal Defense Fund] Since the early 1800s, corporations have gained "rights" and protections under the United States Constitution. While we never find the word “corporation” in the Constitution, corporations are able to invoke constitutional “rights” and protections under the Commerce Clause and Contracts Clause, as well as under the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Fourteenth Amendments. These pages/videos share the history, as well as what people are doing to challenge these court-bestowed "rights".

[Short Form Video] (10 minutes)

[Full One Session Lecture] (45 minutes)

[Series of Four Hour Democracy School Lectures]