Rikers Island is a bleak atoll in New York City’s East River, festooned with razor wire, home to some 13,000 prisoners, and run by correctional officers (“New York’s boldest,” as they call themselves) with serious attitude issues. It was not …
Community organizers and those who write about them have a bad habit of exaggerating the divide between “organizations” and “movements.” Building the kind of people power we need to slow, halt, and reverse present trends requires of various organizing camps …
Bernie Sanders may actually run for president. The feisty Senator from Vermont is giving dinner speeches in Iowa, telling journalists he’s “prepared” to campaign, and is deciding whether he wants to compete for the Democratic nomination or take the “radical” …
In the latest escalation of the low-wage workers’ movement, fast food workers went out on strike this week in hundreds of cities around the globe. Sarah and Michelle speak with Tsedeye Gebreselassie of the National Employment Law Project about the importance of local victories in this global struggle, and why workers must lead the way. Plus: miners’ deaths abroad and at home, teachers’ ongoing resistance to high-stakes testing, Thomas Piketty, and more.
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 …
