On February 1st we had the second meeting of our Hegemony How-To reading group and talked about the second chapter of the book. Comparisons with our experiences @DiEM25 came up in the discussion inevitably, as at least five participants were formerly (or still are) aligned with DiEM25. We decided to embrace this tendency as it fleshed-out the debate with some RL experience. (Note to myself: We have to be careful to not alienated future newcomers, tho.)
+++ Chapter 2 Summary +++
In the beginning I did my best to give a brief overview about the contents of the short but insightful 2nd chapter „The 99%: The symbol and the agent“.
In this chapter Jonathan Matthew Smucker (JMS) elaborates on his affiliations with the Occupy Wall Street Movement (OWS) that he decided to use as a key study to guide his readers through this book. In his own words:
„Occupy succeeded in introducing a popularly resonant populist narrative about economic inequality and a rigged political system. How it did so is instructive and foreshadows key concepts that I will keep building upon in later chapters.“
When he first heard about the movement in September 2011 he couldn’t help to be a bit sceptical about the similarities of the OWS tactics (occupying a public space) with the events that took place during Arab Spring and Tahrir in the preceding years. It stroke him as a „lack of appreciation for context“. Soon enough JMS was proven wrong by the success of the events in New York and joined the movement.
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