Aaron White

Hours before the City Council Budget Vote

On June 30th, 2020, after a month of Black Lives Matter protests across the city and a week-long Occupation outside City Hall, the City Council was preparing to vote on the annual budget due at midnight. It remained to be seen whether the council would vote down the proposed budget by Mayor Bill de Blasio […]

by Aaron White

Signs of the Occupation

On Tuesday night, Black Lives Matter activists occupied City Hall in lower Manhattan to demand that Mayor Bill de Blasio cut the NYPD budget by $1 billion. The activists plan to stay until at least June 30th, when the Mayor and City Council announce the new budget. I went down to the occupation on Friday […]

by Aaron White

Naomi Klein: “The moral crisis is inextricable from the ecological crisis”

This piece was originally published by openDemocracy. For the past two decades, Naomi Klein has been a leading voice exposing the social and environmental injustices of neoliberal capitalism. From revealing the appalling conditions experienced by those working at the bottom of the global supply chain, to documenting the ‘shock doctrine’ agenda imposed by disaster capitalists […]

by Aaron White

Why we need to build an alternative online infrastructure

We are living in an age with unprecedented asymmetries of knowledge and power. From the prevalence of drone warfare, the corporate coup d’état of our executive, or the incredible aggregation of personal data held by the wealthiest companies in the world – one of the fundamental struggles of our time will consider what role the superintendents […]

by Aaron White

Private jet saviors: why billionaires are not the answer to the climate crisis, we are

The Overton window is shifting. The Green New Deal (GND) championed by Justice Democrats and the Sunrise Movement demonstrates the formation of a comprehensive agenda in line with the recent UN assessment that necessitates a 45% reduction of carbon emissions in the next 12 years in order to prevent apocalyptic climate ramifications. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and […]

by Aaron White

A User’s Guide to ‘Discussing Gilets Jaunes’

To help visualize our recent podcast on the Gilets Jaunes – here are some photos and videos that I took from the experience: pic.twitter.com/MbNNF3o6tk — Aaron White (@aaronwolfwhite) January 11, 2019 ‘2008: We Don’t Forget. Give us our money back’#GiletJaunes #ActeIX #YellowVest #Paris pic.twitter.com/tu6P5wpxBp — The Junction (@tweetthejunc) January 12, 2019 Tax Evasion + Financing […]

by Aaron White

Subversive Space: The Effectivity of Occupy Wall Street

To help contextualize the Gilets Jaunes protests in France, it is useful to return to an analysis of the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011 and the theories of Guy Debord and Henri Lefebvre to understand the effectivity of urban mobilizations that simplify the political space and creatively critique the dominant ideology. The Occupy Wall […]

by Aaron White

A Visual Alternative: The Aesthetics of TWT 2018

How do aesthetics reflect ideology? What does the formation of an alternative narrative look like? The recent The World Transformed (TWT) festival in Liverpool visually revealed the establishment of a new hegemony on the left. The Black-E TWT was primarily split between two main locations – The Black-E space and the Hinterlands venue. The Black-E […]

by Aaron White

Was the Bernie Sanders campaign populist?

The term populism colloquially evokes a negative connotation. Yet as Ernesto Laclau argues in On Populist Reason (OPR), populism refers to a social logic and not a predetermined ideology. Through utilizing Laclau’s text and theoretical approach, one can gain a greater understanding into the mechanisms behind the formation of a populist movement. In a brief […]

by Aaron White

The Jolly Roger

Marcus Rediker, in conversation with Fiona Jeffries in Nothing To Lose But Our Fear, deconstructs the symbolism behind the Jolly Roger pirate flag. The conventional narrative concerning the flag maintains that it was used to send: “a clear message: surrender or die. The symbolism worked. When the Jolly Roger went up, the men on the […]