"Rights, Solidarity and Justice. Working People Organizing, Past and Present"
LAWCHA (Labor and Working-Class History Association) National Conference, New York City, June 6-8, 2013

Saturday, June 8, 2:15 - 4:00pm

Roundtable: The "New" Movements: "We won't pay for your crisis - we are your crisis"

    Marina Sitrin CUNY Graduate Center
    Dario Azzellini Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria
    Luis Moreno-Caballud University of Pennsylvania

2011 and 2012 have been two years of uprisings, movements and moments (we are not yet able to write a history of 2013) – all against an economic crisis and the politics of representation. Kefya! Ya Basta! and Enough! are shouted by millions against an untenable situation – and simultaneously they are met with Democracia Real Ya! and We are the 99%! - powerful affirmations. There have been numerous historical epochs where something massive and “new” sweeps the globe – moments such as the Revolutions and revolts of the mid 1800s, the massive working class struggles of the early 1900s, and the massive political and cultural shifts and anti-colonial struggles of the 1960s, to name only three. We believe we are in another significant historic epoch. This one is marked by an ever increasing global rejection of representative democracy, and simultaneously a massive coming together of people, not previously organized, using directly democratic forms to begin to reinvent ways of being together.
In this panel we will set a focus on common forms and practices of the “new” movements. In view of the fact that these movements have often diverse social compositions, we want to explore and interrogate whether and how their commons forms and practices are shaping a new collective journey for radical social change beyond capitalism, what processes of radical transformation are envisaged by their practices, what forms of commons they set in place that enable the reproduction of life on new ground, and how these alternative forms of sociability and production can become hegemonic and mainstream.
Dario Azzellini will talk about what the new protest movements in Italy, Spain, Greece and the US have in common, root concepts and practices to movements in Latin America and discuss characteristics of the rupture. Marina Sitrin and Luis Moreno-Caballud will speak about the new forms of social relationships developing in the movements. In particular Luis will discuss forms of collaboration developing within and across movements in Spain and Marina will address new forms of value production in Greece, from the experiences of the newly recuperated workplaces to the producer consumer networks to the expansion of barter.


Marina Sitrin is a sociologist, lawyer and postdoctoral fellow at the CUNY Graduate Center. She has both participated in, as well as has been writing about, the new global movements. She is the author of Everyday Revolutions: Horizontalism and Autonomy in Argentina and the co-author, with Dario Azzellini, of Occupying Language and the forthcoming They Can’t Represent Us! Reinventing Democracy from Greece to Occupy.

Luis Moreno-Caballud researches and teaches Spanish contemporary history and culture at the University of Pennsylvania and participates in 15M and Occupy movements. He is currently working on a book about the emergence of cultural practices of sharing and collaborating that are playing an important role as alternatives to the ethos of individualism and competition responsible for to the current Spanish crisis.

Dario Azzellini is lecturer in Sociology at the Johannes Kepler University Linz (Austria). He is the author of several books and documentaries on movements, participative democracy, workers control, Private Military Contractors and migration. He served as Associate Editor for The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest, he is part of the founders collective of the web site workerscontrol.net.