Moving moments

Moments of Excess: Movements, Protest and Everyday Life is the combined work of a number of anti-capitalist organizers from the United Kingdom called The Free Association (two members, David Harvie and Keir Milburn, recently visited Sacramento). They’ve assembled an anthology that covers contemporary anti-globalist work like the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle, the G8/20 summits, and the 2009 climate-change conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. Their accounts of people protesting power and wealth during this decade of capital-labor conflict inform and link this era to the past, like the anti-nuclear struggles of the 1970s (looming large, as Japan’s radiation crisis illustrates). The essays spur our grasp of what these anti-capitalist movements were and were not; the main point is that a movement is not a thing but a process. It has no end, thus the 2007-08 economic crisis creates new chances for us to build a better world in 2011.