Inside Occupy Wall Street's 'People's Library': Chomsky, Zinn, Klein

A demonstrator browses books at the library of the Occupy Wall Street protesters' camp at Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan in New York.

Mike Segar / Reuters

Another blue-skied weekend at Occupy Wall Street saw the usual congeries of activists, drummers, pontificators and sympathizers converge on Lower Manhattan's Zuccotti Park.

Folk musicians strummed guitars next to environmental campaigners agitating against the practice of fracking. By the northern face of the park, a man visiting from Florida angrily denounced the bailout of banks before a broadcast streamed across the Internet. Viewers watching online texted back their support in an open chat window.

Not far from this real-time vox pop, three volunteers sat sorting a pile of books. One raised a copy of an Estonian dictionary. “Is this for reference or foreign languages?” she asked. “Foreign, I think,” came the considered answer.

Occupy Wall Street's “People's Library” is, like much else at the movement's adopted home, somewhat surprising. Taking up a good chunk of the northeastern corner of the park, it consists of a maze of tables and hard plastic boxes marked by genre — fiction, classics, sci-fi, children's, and so on. The movement's designated librarians say there's somewhere between 2,500 to 4,000 volumes in the park, with more in storage and dozens of new books donated by visitors and supporters every day. “As the occupation and movement has grown,” says Zachary Loeb, an actual librarian in the New York City area who volunteers at the site, “so too has its library.”

(MORE: Occupy Wall Street's Own Mini-Government, Complete With Library)

The ten or so volunteers who man the library at any given moment record the ISBN number of each book and tag the books' bindings with pink stickers marked “OWSL” — making the collection, despite its unorthodox home, look like something not out of place in any public library. But there is no formal method for borrowing from the People's Library. It exists on an unwritten honor code among denizens of Occupy Wall Street.

While I was speaking with Loeb, a visitor asked him whether there was any system to returning books. “None,” Loeb replies. “You'll just have my eternal gratitude.” Hristo Voynov, a student at Hunter College and another volunteer at the library, claims that simple trust works at Occupy Wall Street. “Every night, the library ends up with more books than it started with.”

One may wonder why Occupy Wall Street needs to invest time and energy into maintaining a library, not least as New York's bitter, oft-snowy winter approaches. Loeb turns the question around: “Why is it important to have a kitchen, a [tents and blanket] station, a press table and not a library? Information matters. We are feeding people's minds.”

The most popular books on offer do seem to be what one would expect: leftist tracts on history and politics by authors like Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, or Naomi Klein. These populate a set of shelves in the People's Library of books that cannot be borrowed because they're so popular and in demand. Yet also in the most popular mix are satirical commentaries from The Onion, a binder of ponderous articles explaining the financial crisis and myriad anthologies of poetry, including one of poetry written explicitly by participants of Occupy Wall Street or in honor of the protesters. That collection even boasts works submitted by famous American poets such as Adrienne Rich and Anne Walmdan.

(PHOTOS: Occupy Wall Street Protests Go Global)

In the Sunday afternoon sunshine, one adolescent boy sits amid the crowd in yellow socks and soccer cleats, reading a comic book entitled “Addicted to War,” about the militarization of American society. Myriad New Yorkers and protesters file through the library's aisles, perusing and sitting down on nearby park benches with copies. Amanda Hartkey, another library volunteer, says that the library is emblematic of the wider spirit in the park. “I'm inspired by how so many different people come here and treat each other with respect. No one interrupts the other and now they read together.” Through wireless headphones passed around to those in the park, the library has recently started its own public readings series. It's Zuccotti Park's local radio station.

But, away from the almost quaint pleasantness of the library, all's not rosy for Occupy Wall Street. Winter is coming and the scramble is on to amass enough warm sleeping bags and clothing so that the occupiers could withstand below freezing temperatures. Organizers claim they'll be prepared, but also acknowledge that the park's overnight numbers may slip dramatically as activists opt for warmer, indoor spaces. Meanwhile, some among the group are pushing for the movement to consider Occupying Central Park, a move that could more easily incite police intervention and which is opposed by a good number of the organizers at Zuccotti Park.

Moreover, concerns are growing about local community complaints over the disturbances caused by protesters — including incidents of public urination and the incessant noise of the park's drum circle. Organizers claim to have reined in the hours during which the drummers bang away and some grumble about wanting to sabotage the musicians' equipment. Occupy Wall Street has the money to rent Port-a-Potties, but protesters say New York City authorities have so far denied them the right to set those up. “We are doing everything in our power to abide by the laws and respect our neighbors,” says Sherman Jackson, an Occupy Wall Street media representative, who adds that many on the neighborhood community board support their presence. Still, the threat of eviction is a perennial, invisible presence in the park.

Back at the library, there are more immediate problems. Voynov, one of the volunteers, struggles to preserve the integrity of the sci-fi/fantasy shelf. “People just put back books anywhere,” he says. But he admits it's impressive that books once borrowed come back at all. Of course, not all are returned. The People's Library had on reserve two copies of Steal This Book, by 1960s activist rabble-rouser Abbie Hoffman. Both volumes have been stolen.

LIST: Occupy Wall Street Protester in 2011's Topical Halloween Costumes

Ishaan Tharoor is a writer for TIME and editor of Global Spin. You can find him on Twitter at @ishaantharoor. You can also continue the discussion on TIME's Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIMEWorld.

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Greeks Take to the Streets Against More Cuts

Demonstrating high school students march towards the Greek Parliament on October 3, 2011 . High school students staged a protest march against the austerity measures, loss of jobs by their parents and the lack of books and teachers due to the crisis.

Louisa Gouliamaki / AFP / Getty Images

The Greek government is facing powerful public resistance to new austerity measures that foreign lenders are demanding in return for bailout loans. The country's main labor unions, ADEDY and GSEE, which represent 2.5 million workers, say they expect thousands to march to parliament on Wednesday to protest cuts in the public sector and a new property tax which will be collected through electricity bills.

The first general strike since June has grounded most international flights, halted trains and closed tax offices and some state schools. Hospitals are running on emergency staff. At the same time, inspectors from the European Union and International Monetary Fund continue their evaluation of Greece's finances to determine whether the country should receive $11 billion, the latest installment of a $150 billion bailout loan package, by next month. The Greek government said Tuesday it has enough cash to pay its bills only through November. (See photos of the protests in Greece.)

Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos said Tuesday that Greeks must back the new measures if the country has any hope of meeting its deficit target for 2011, which was revised to 8.5% of gross domestic product from 7.6%. Along with tax hikes, budget cuts and the long-overdue reforming of the country's bloated public sector, the Greek government must also privatize some state assets and crack down on longtime tax evasion.

But winning public support for more austerity seems virtually impossible right now. Polls show that nearly all Greeks oppose more cuts and most believe the measures have done little to get Greece out of debt. More than a year of tax hikes and wage and pension cuts have decimated the middle class. Unemployment is at more than 16%. Personal bankruptcies, homelessness, suicides and crime are all on the rise. And yet the Greek government missed its deficit targets this year. Euro-zone finance ministers have decided to delay the latest loan payment, which Greece needs to stay solvent, because they don't think the country is trying hard enough to reform itself. More austerity, they say. (See photos of the global financial crisis.)

Yanis Varoufakis, a professor of economic theory at the University of Athens, is one of many economists who say austerity is actually killing an already weak Greek economy. "Anyone with any logic can see that this is not the way to jump-start the economy of a country that's in recession," Varoufakis says. Instead, austerity has put the economy in "a permafrost from which the Greek society has lost its capacity to react creatively to the crisis and to work itself out of the hole in which it has found itself."

Greeks have also lost faith in nearly all of their politicians. As the government party, center-left PASOK has suffered the most. "Right now, considering how big and unprecedented this financial crisis is, it's understood that the government committed the equivalent of political suicide a long time ago with the austerity drive," says Takis Pappas, a political science professor.

PASOK, which stands for the Panhellenic Socialist Movement, is led by George Papandreou, a quiet but stubborn sociologist and the American-born scion of Greece's most prominent political family. His grandfather and father were both premiers. His father, Andreas, who founded the party, was a Harvard-educated economist who built up the public sector to offer "jobs for life" to an emerging middle class in Greece. The civil service never became a bastion of Greece's best minds. Instead, it grew into an unwieldy monster overstuffed with party loyalists, many of whom were unqualified for their jobs.

Yet many Greeks, even well-educated ones, long desired a position in the civil service "because it was easy," Pappas says. "Now that option is gone. So for the government to restructure the civil service and make it truly productive, it has to make sure that it lays off not the bright, efficient workers but the ones who are not doing their jobs. It has to give people incentives to strive instead of rely on cronyism. The state needs to show that it has changed."

Anita Papachristopoulou, a 44-year-old environmental scientist who works for the Athens Water Supply and Sewer Company, says there's a grain of truth to the caricature of the lazy Greek civil servant worker. But she says there are thousands of Greek public-sector employees, like herself, who got their jobs through perseverance, not connections. "No one introduced me to anyone," says Papachristopoulou. "I just sent in my application cold, and I was lucky to get the job." (See why it's make up or break up time for the euro zone.)

Papachristopoulou says she was torn on going to Wednesday's demonstration, even though many of her colleagues will be there. She's worried about the usual street fights between anarcho-leftist activists and riot police outside parliament. Police always respond by firing tear gas at everyone, and the stinging clouds make her cough for days. "People are very angry," she says. "Even if we're not out on the streets chanting and marching, we're still angry."

See why the euro isn't fixed yet.

See if it's time to admit the euro has failed.