Capitalism On Edge by Albena Azmanova
I’m very honored to be included in Albena Azmanova's new book Capitalism On Edge: How fighting precarity can achieve radical change without crisis or utopia. The book features my CAPITALISM IS OVER If You Want It mural and my TAX THE RICH mural. From the book:
It might be true that the networked protests in our digital age lack the organizational rigor of the postwar civil rights movement, whose leadership and strategy had enabled them to affect the policy process directly. However, even when incapable of transforming policy, social protest is still fulfilling its core function: to frame the agenda of political debate by making grievances of suffered injustice relevant to politics. Prominent mobilizations such as the Occupy movements of 2011-2012, the Black Lives Matter demonstrations in 2014, the 2003 protests by millions of people in more than sixty countries against the prospect of war in Iraq, and the Women's March in January 2017 may not have affected the course of politics, but they did change the public narrative: that is, they altered the framework of political reference. Before Occupy propelled inequality to the very center of discussions of justice in the uNited States, the notion had been at the margins of the political agenda. It would be indeed a sign of the poor health of liberal democracy if we are to expect civil society to rival political society and do its work. It is the division of labor between civil and political society, between street protest and party politics, that fuels the vitality of modern democracy.