Few scholars have done as much as Frances Fox Piven to describe how widespread disruptive action can change history, and few have offered more provocative suggestions about the times when movements—instead of crawling forward with incremental demands—can break into full sprint.
On Monday, May 5, Occupy Wall Street activist and friend of Dissent Cecily McMillan was unjustly convicted of assaulting a police officer at an Occupy protest. In response to this egregious verdict, members of the Justice for Cecily team have collaborated with fellow activists, writers, and editors to produce the Free Cecily! gazette.
Over the past few weeks, the essays in the Our Inequality series have developed a historical explanation for our growing divide. The introduction discounted the importance of the “usual suspects” in this story: globalization, technology, and demography. (Because these trends …
On Saturday, May 3, my son and I took Cecily McMillan to lunch. Cecily, as is now widely known, is an Occupy Wall Street activist and the defendant for the past month in a criminal trial for allegedly assaulting a …
When government officials exert their most coercive powers, the logic behind their actions should be obvious. Only autocratic states deprive people of their liberty without an explicit rationale, and this country’s political forebears took pains to circumscribe the government’s legal …
Ellen Bravo sits down with Belabored to discuss new challenges and milestones in the movement for gender justice and why the basic, structural struggles for women’s economic empowerment are still far from over. Plus: the port truck drivers’ latest labor action; struggles led by sherpas, cabbies, and banking sector workers; divisions in NYC charter schools; and Donald Sterling.
Nothing, it seems, says anti-establishment these days like the demand for a cheap place to park your car. New York’s last bohemian, the Times tells us, flees a city ruined by gentrification. High on “outlaw artist” Clayton Patterson’s list of complaints, right …
Last Saturday, April 26, marked the official opening of Hong Kong’s June 4th Museum, the world’s first permanent exhibition on the 1989 Tiananmen student movement. On the eve of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the pro-democracy protests and Beijing’s brutal crackdown, …
Dissent would like to inform our beloved podcast listeners that from now on, in order to ensure the best quality production and richer coverage, Belabored will air biweekly rather than weekly. The next episode will air on Friday, May 2, followed …
Shaped by Latin America’s uneven and wildly unequal incorporation into the global market, Gabriel García Márquez’s literary project retains an eerie sense of foreboding today.
“The best way to improve economic prospects for women is to improve job prospects for the men in their lives, even if that means increasing the so-called pay gap.” The above quote is from a recent column by Phyllis Schlafly, arguably the …
New digital technologies, particularly social media, make money by offering “free” services to users that encourage us to spend our lives on their platforms, while other tech companies try to turn work that was previously paid into play for unpaid …
For Belabored’s one-year anniversary, Michelle and Sarah talk to Saket Soni of the National Guestworker Alliance about how the conditions faced by guestworkers are spreading to more and more of the workforce. Plus: a victory for UPS workers in Queens and a labor uprising in China; the drug-testing of public employees; the fight for $15 in Seattle; and more.
Those in the West who were paying attention reacted with shock and indignation when, last month, the newly formed Ukrainian provisional government welcomed a tranche of neo-fascists into its fold. The Svoboda party’s Oleksandr Sych is now Deputy Prime Minister, …
Cecily McMillan has had trouble concentrating on the master’s thesis she is supposed to be writing this spring under my direction at the New School in New York City, a study of the political beliefs and career of the late, …
