There’s not much doubt that for the foreseeable future 2011 will be remembered as the ‘Year of Protest’. When a mainstream magazine like Time selects ‘The Protester’ as their cover-story 2011 Person of the Year then something of significance is clearly happening. Though whether the last twelve months will in the long-term come to represent anything as significant as 1989’s fall of the Berlin Wall or 1968’s extraordinary mix of Paris, Prague and Vietnam is probably too early to judge.

However what can be claimed already with a degree of confidence is that the organisational forms of protest in 2011 changed decisively. Certainly if we are making any kind of comparison with those led by a traditional ‘Bolshevikised Left’ these were protests that looked very different in the manner they were organised.

The aspirations of those that had always preferred to organise horizontally and cut out the middle man vanguard party have been realised via a mix of the internet, smartphones, twitter, facebook, flickr and more. This is a culture of dissent that is deeply distrustful of leaders and takes producing a movement that has the evolution of forms that are participative and pre-figurative as one of its founding principles.

This is an approach epitomised in the West by the Occupy Movement, chronicled in the instant journalism of Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action that Changed America written by the Writers for the 99%. This is activist authorship at its best. Messy, from the frontline, loyal to the ethics of the movement in its form, written up by those who took part almost as soon as the action comes to some sort of an end. The detail is impressive, the basis of the various affinity groups, the spreading of the message across New York, the courage in the face of brutal policing. There is a real sense of a making of community, but also the divisions that would on occasion erupt.

Read the full review in Philosphy Football

Other TV types have been disappointingly slow to respond to the gauntlet thrown down by Kay Burley’s raunchy novel First Ladies last year, but at last a challenger has emerged in the unlikely form of Newsnight economics editor Paul Mason. Mason’s just-published debut novel Rare Earth (“a washed-up TV reporter stumbles on a corruption scandal in China”) has moments that leave the Sky News anchor looking prim, including a standout scene distinctively fusing economics and erotica. In it a character called Khunbish explains a business deal while he and his lover Chun-li try out “tantric position 103″ – she mounts a stuffed horse while he clings head-down to its side. “He began thrusting wildly in the general direction of her chrysanthemum but missing, his paunchy frame shuddering with the effort of remaining rigid and upside down. ‘The cartel, sells, to the global market,’ he panted. ‘The price is inflated because production has been capped!’ She began to pant in unison with him … ‘Cartel evades export controls. Market capitalisation of western miners stays low. Massive, one-way, bet’… He switched to some ancient steppe language as he ejaculated, blubbering and incoherent. Chun-li faked an orgasm, keeping her mind focused on an eighth-century lyric of sadness.” Let’s hope Jeremy Paxman is in too good a mood to tease him.

Read the full article on The Guardian’s Media Monkey

On the last day of 2011, I went for a stroll towards Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan. As late as mid-November this clump of off-Broadway public space, usually the preserve of Financial District workers, was a congested tent city teeming with thousands of men and women protesting against an economic system stacked in favour of a plutocratic and often tax-evading minority.

Now, barely six weeks later, it was empty: police had placed barricades all around to make entry difficult; flustered out-of-town shoppers milled about in search of discount department stores, enterprising vendors hawked tatty Occupy Wall Street badges, the smell of cheap muffins wafted from a food truck.

A few defiant protesters remained. One wore a V for Vendetta mask and held up a piece of cardboard with the slogan “Capitalism Has Failed” for tourists to photograph. A woman of pensionable age recited from memory Adrian Mitchell’s “To Whom It May Concern (Tell Me Lies About Vietnam)”. But the passion and rebellion that had been staged here and broadcast all across the world appeared to have been extinguished. By the time I returned home and switched on the television, the evening news was taken up by politicians chundering forth an idiot argot of fudge, cliché and parochial mendacity. Had Occupy Wall Street been just a dream?

A slew of new books offer convincing and often thrilling evidence to the contrary. They include Occupying Wall Street: the Inside Story of an Action That Changed America (OR Books) assembled by a collective made up of dozens of freelance journalists, students and activists, that goes under the name of Writers for the 99 per cent; Occupy! Scenes From Occupied America (Verso, £9.99) edited by Astra Taylor and Keith Gessen and featuring many contributors drawn from savvy New York-based journals such as n+1, Triple Canopy, Dissent and The New Inquiry; This Changes Everything by the staff of YES! magazine that collects speeches and essays by the likes of Naomi Klein, Rebecca Solnit and Ralph Nader.

Read the full article in The Daily Telegraph

IN COMPELLING DETAIL, two leading civil rights attorneys — both leaders of the Center for Constitutional Rights (New York) — recount the extraordinary life and deliberate killing of the world’s most popular revolutionary, Ernesto Che Guevara. Using internal U.S. governmental documentation, only recently released, the authors use their forensic skills to analyze the evidence of the CIA’s involvement in the execution of a war prisoner captured alive.

After a brief summary of Guevara’s life and struggles, they examine the U.S. documents that bear witness to CIA involvement in the tracking down of the Cuban/Argentinian fighter.

Foreign Minister Aleksey Kosygin went to Havana at the end of June 1967, and, in his meeting with Castro, complained that the guerrilla in Bolivia was “playing into the hands of imperialism.” In his answer, the Cuban leader “accused the USSR of having turned its back upon its own revolutionary tradition and of having moved to a point where it would refuse to support any revolutionary movement unless the actions of the latter contributed to the achievement of Soviet objectives, as contrasted to international Communist objectives.” It could almost be a Trotskyst critique of Stalinism…

Read the full review in Against the Current

Sometimes the truth is buried in front of us. That is the case with more than 140,000 pages of government documents relating to the abuse of prisoners by U.S. forces during the “war on terror,” brought to light by the ACLU.

Since 2004, the ACLU has requested and received thousands of documents on the Bush administration’s torture program. The task of extracting a narrative from this intimidating pile of documents was left to Larry Siems, Director of Freedom to Write at the PEN American Center.

First started as an ongoing online report (TheTortureReport.org), Siems’ new book — The Torture Report: What the Documents say about America’s Post 9/11 Torture Program — isnow available in print and online. The book presents an array of eyewitness and first-person reports — by victims, perpetrators, dissenters, and investigators — of the CIA’s White House-orchestrated interrogations in illegal, secret prisons around the world, and of the Pentagon’s “special projects” in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to tell the story of the Bush administration’s torture program.

Read more and listen to the podcast on the ACLU blog.

Chase Madar joins Ted, Maegan and Kristen to preview his new book, “The Passion of Bradley Manning.”

Listen to the podcast on “Wilshire & Washington”.

The reader could be forgiven for assuming that Rare Earth, the first foray into fiction by Newsnight’s economics editor Paul Mason, is little more than an extended libel against the Communist Party of China, if not the whole nation.

The cartoonish front cover doesn’t help. Neither does the orientalist mention of feng-shui on the first page.

Yet Mason is too thorough a journalist and too engaging an author to construct anything other than a remarkably multidimensional account of China’s struggles with a social market economy.

He paints the conflicts of greed and principles, freedom and order in outrageously vivid hues, proving that fiction can tell big truths that factual accounts sometimes miss.

Read the full review in Morning Star

Hot on the heels of the aforementioned book come OR Books addition. Titled Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action That Changed America, this work covers similar ground to Occupy! Scenes From Occupied America. What it lacks in graphics, it makes up for in content. Written in a continuous narrative broken into chapters, Occupying Wall Street differs from the collection of vignettes contained in the Verso Books text, while also maintaining a more or less chronological telling of the original Zurcotti Park encampment from its beginning to its eventual destruction by the police on November 15, 2011. In addition, Occupying Wall Street spends more time placing the Occupy movement in the context of the international wave of protest that has swept from Greece to Britain to Tunisia and Egypt to the United States and a multitude of other localities around the globe.

Read the full review in CounterPunch

So, you’ve written a novel [Rare Earth]… presumably because there simply isn’t enough economics news at the moment?

I actually wrote it in 2009 when we were in a bit of a lull. And I was in China and it just hit me that you are never going to tell the story of China factually because so much of it is hidden from you. They’re going to have their Katrina and their riots and you’ll never know about it. The novel starts in the same way as the Newsnight story I did, in pursuit of corruption and a pollution scandal and I just saw where that took me. Although when the ghosts come in is when it slightly diverges from reality. The ghosts and the crazed female biker gang.

Ah yes, the ‘Steel Fuchsias’ girl gang…they seemed like they might be the construct of some sort of middle-aged male fantasy?

Well, they’re not a male fantasy because if you saw the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China you would have seen a bunch of women goose-stepping through Tiananmen Square in pink miniskirts and white leather boots. I was wondering whose male fantasy that was to put them in the Communist party parade.

Read the full interview in The Observer

On October 2nd, a few weeks after Occupy Wall Street began, Colin Robinson, a British man with a head of loose gray curls, fished a Natural Light beer case out of a trash can in Chelsea. He tore off a rectangle of brown cardboard, folded it into the shape of a book’s cover and spine, and wrote, in Sharpie, “Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action That Changed America.” Where the author’s name would normally go, he scribbled, “Writers for the 99%.” He did not yet know who the writers would be, but he set out to find volunteers. Robinson, an erstwhile Trotskyist and a current “unapologetic leftist,” is the co-publisher of a boutique press called OR Books. He has published Christopher Hitchens and Noam Chomsky, but this is his first book by a leaderless movement. “I wanted to audition writers, but it became very clear that would not fly. So I thought, Let’s just try it and see what happens.” Eventually, a group took shape, with a rotating membership of about sixty—“some more involved than others,” Robinson admitted—who interviewed key figures in the movement and wrote collaboratively in Google Docs. In 1948, the editors of the Washington Post promised their readers “a first rough-draft of history.” Now, thanks to digital print-on-demand technology, historians can work like journalists.

Read the full article in The New Yorker