Cartoons of the day

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Cartoon of the day

Special mention

Cartoon of the day

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Protest of the day

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For more than a week, vast nocturnal protest gatherings that are rising in number—from parents with babies to students, workers, artists, and pensioners—have spread across France [ht: jf] in a citizen-led movement that has rattled the government.

Called Nuit debout, which loosely means “rise up at night”, the protest movement is increasingly being likened to the Occupy initiative that mobilised hundreds of thousands of people in 2011 or Spain’s Indignados.

Despite France’s long history of youth protest movements – from May 1968 to vast rallies against pension changes – Nuit debout, which has spread to cities such as Toulouse, Lyon and Nantes and even over the border to Brussels, is seen as a new phenomenon.

It began on 31 March with a night-time sit-in in Paris after the latest street demonstrations by students and unions critical of President François Hollande’s proposed changes to labour laws. But the movement and its radical nocturnal action had been dreamed up months earlier at a Paris meeting of leftwing activists. . .

The idea emerged among activists linked to a leftwing revue and the team behind the hit documentary film Merci Patron!, which depicts a couple taking on France’s richest man, billionaire Bernard Arnault. But the movement gained its own momentum – not just because of the labour protests or in solidarity with theFrench Goodyear tyre plant workers who kidnapped their bosses in 2014. It has expanded to address a host of different grievances, including the state of emergency and security crackdown in response to last year’s terrorist attacks.

Public art of the day

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New York’s Museum of Modern Art has acquired the Occuprint Portfolio, a collection of 31 screenprints (including the 28 prints featured above) curated by the Booklyn Artists Alliance and published in 2012.

Cartoon of the day

Special mention

Occupy money

In the midst of their own Second Great Depression, Spaniards—like hundreds of local communities around the world—are inventing and using their own local currencies.

In the city of Malaga, on the country’s southern Mediterranean coast just 80 miles from Africa, residents have set up an online site that allows them to earn money and buy products using a virtual currency. The Catalonian fishing town of Vilanova i la Geltru has launched a similar experiment but with a paper credit card of sorts. It implements a new currency worth slightly more than the euro when it is used at local stores.In Barcelona, the country’s second-largest city after Madrid, the preferred model is time banks, which allow people to trade their services in hours without the involvement of money. . .

There are now more than 325 time banks and alternative currency systems in Spain involving tens of thousands of citizens. Collectively, these projects represent one of the largest experiments in social money in modern times.

It will be interesting to see if these local currency experiments—involving different ways and logics of exchanging goods and services—survive the current crises and point in the direction of occupying other areas of the economy.