November 9, 2011

Supporting students in London and more reading for the revolution

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A message of MobyLives support for students taking to the streets in London today. We can only hope that there won’t be recurrences of the kettling we’ve seen at recent protests, where police have rounded up groups of protestors (and passersby) and penned them in, allowing nobody to leave or enter, some would say provoking them until they react enough to be arrested. With permission to use rubber bullets already having been granted, though, and warning letters having been sent to people arrested during the last demonstrations — even those against whom the charges were subsequently dropped — it looks as though the government and Met Police are determined to cement their abysmal record on legitimate public protest.

With the two-month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street approaching and the movement now extending to cities across the globe, we’ve posted several times recently about reading for revolutions, and no Moby reader can have missed our excitement that Melville House author David Graeber is fast becoming the star of the Occupy movement, and his anarchist history Debt: The First 5,000 Years required reading for current times. People interested in today’s protests in London would also do well to read Dan Hancox‘s Kettled Youth, published earlier this year as part of Vintage‘s ‘Brain Shots: Summer of Unrest‘ series. This series presented outstanding long-form journalism with a British focus on austerity, the Arab spring, riots and protest in 2011. Well worth a look as we enter the final months of this historic year.

Ellie Robins is an editor at Melville House. Previously, she was managing editor of Hesperus Press.

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