Occupy Wall Street 3: Now What?

yeah I'm really never gonna side with anyone that argues that we should actively and expressly work to make the general public's lives WORSE

which is what Morbz consistently advocates afaict

http://www.mp3crank.com/cover-album/Eagles-The-Long-Run-300x300.jpg

lol

also equating my Don't Vote for Obamdum = Vote for Romnee is exceptional toolism

in swing states that is what yr position amounts to

"Al Gore is ENTITLED to your vote" flashbacks

I voted for Nader in that election (not that it mattered, Gore took CA).

how did you like the Dubya administration. at least it was less fascist than Obama amirite

this is probably not the thread to rehash Voting Theory in the American System 101 for the nine billionth time

agreed. sorry.

what do people make of this purported 'split'

most interesting thing in that article to me is the insinuation that there's something different about the Bay Area that makes this problem/split more pronounced than it has been in other cities, and I wonder why that is

Just more hardcore anarchist/glassbreaker tradition in Bay Area?

I was gonna say that responding to Shakey solely via album covers would be fun, but who are we kidding.

(also Gore actually won in 2000, but Dems characteristically rolled over for the coup d'etat)

After the SCOTUS ruling, I'm not sure what the Dems could have done differently. Impeaching the justices involved would not change the ruling.

this is an ok quote from the Chronicle article:

"We had 50 people in front of banks in San Ramon two weeks ago, and we have been telling people for months about $156 billion bonuses Wall Street executives got last year on the backs of the rest of us, but do we get press?" Goldberg said. "No. Instead, we turn on our TV and there are pictures of people breaking into City Hall.

"What we are protesting about has been totally obliterated by what is coming out of the television set," he said. "It's not just burning the American flag that is terrible - it's terrible that it's all getting totally off message. Trashing buildings and fighting with police is not what 99 percent of what the 99 percenters are about."

but also worth reading / not posted to this thread yet: Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz' speech from Saturday's rally. Very radical, very polarizing, very Oakland.

http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2012/do310112.html

I don't mean shame the rich in order to get money out of their guilt, as has been a long practice on the left and among non-profits. I mean NOT taking money from the rich, isolate the rich, don't allow them to soothe their consciences by giving money and getting huge tax breaks in the process. Force them to build tall walls around their estates and corporate headquarters as the people force the rich to do in Latin America. Imprison them. How dare they be allowed to have plate glass windows on their corporate headquarters and mansions!

Force them to build tall walls around their estates and corporate headquarters as the people force the rich to do in Latin America. Imprison them.

favelas for all!

http://www.tear.org.au/images/gallery/reviews/planetoftheslums.jpg

Santa Rita Jail = 90-120 minute drive south of Oakland. I'd never heard of Santa Rita and I've driven the 101 countless times the last 20 years; it's just south of Prunesdale & the 156 crossover to Monterey.

http://zunguzungu.wordpress.com/2012/01/31/from-the-outside-trying-to-look-in-occupy-oaklands-j28/

this whole thing kinda seems like a huge police victory, in that they came down hard enough on an already angry protest to get elements in it angry enough to do stuff that looks bad on tv, then retroactively used that stuff to justify their coming down hard. which i'm sure they did very consciously, knowing that some shock and awe could provoke kids into breaking shit. maybe what we need is serious training -- training not just in how to resist force effectively but in how to keep looking righteous and noble and collected even when people are beating and shooting you. obv there are elements in america that think it's just and entertaining when cops beat up protesters but i think the majority -- the normals who were horrified by uc davis just like they were by selma -- lean orwell on this point, provided no one's burning flags. and i think the cops know that.

http://i8.photobucket.com/albums/a6/Sprad/SBOT.jpg

so true

that 'polarization' and split that is spoken of is very real, and that article actually painted it rather nicely. what the "99 percenters" don't realize is that the 'hooligans, thugs, anarchists' don't give a fuck about the 99%. This article puts it rather nicely:

‎"The 99% can’t make war on capital’s form of life because they are part of the numerical regulation of life indissociable from democratic capitalism. They forget that they have been counted from the time of their birth and have occupied a territory since the genocide that took place in the Americas. No co-optation necessary: the 99% can’t prevent themselves from becoming a voting bloq. Starting with its name, the 99% assumes that something different will come from within the 100% and the economic relations that determine it."

Here's the rest: http://occupyeverything.org/2012/zero-percent/

admittedly, that's some porphyric academic wrangling (lol), but parts of it are right on, imho.

That article is A+ trolling.

http://www.finearts.ohio.edu/film/pages/fac-staff/louis_schwartz.htm

http://www.finearts.ohio.edu/film/pages/fac-staff/Louie.jpg

gah, sorry. didn't realize it would be so big.

Could not take his prose. I stopped after about 1000 words. It was painfully condescending and the author took pains to keep you aware of how superior his understanding of the entire situation was compared to your understanding of it, sentence by painful sentence.

that article is satire right

he would tell you he's serious, and he probably is to some degree. but his entire academic career constitutes a form of trolling IMO. i'll leave it at that.

he has a lot of sycophants too.

If the set included all of the people on earth, the 99% would become part of something close to 1% of the wealthiest individuals globally. In order to survive, they must pretend their poorly drawn Venn diagram refers to an actual state of affairs. The 99%’s new spirit of solidarity is, in fact, an old and vindictive one. It arises from the fact that their wealth comes from the exploitation of others. They conceal this from themselves by abstracting, homogenizing, and objectifying the concept of exploitation, as if it were milk in a supermarket. The 99%’s citizenship-drug produces the delirium of rights, among them the right to representation, while paralyzing the movements of 99% so severely that they can’t act in any way proscribed by the rules set up for them by capital. Incapable of seriously considering armed struggle or the seizure of indoor, unambiguously private property, they want to rebuild the Amerikan dream and voice their belief that it will “live again” and that “the Ameri[k]an way is to help one another succeed.” Sadly, Mayor Bloomberg was correct to assert that both the 99% and the 1% dream of a return to boom times — boom times based on the extraction of surplus value from someone, somewhere.

thing is, this is basically otm and rendered in the the most clownishly academic (and oh-my-god ELITIST) prose that i actually want to punch this person directly in the face.

'let's take our country back' is pretty distasteful whether its from a tea partier or an occupier

yes you have to include _something_ that's self-evidently true to begin building your persona as someone who sees through all the bullshit, including yours, dear reader.

i love how the word "reform" in this piece is worth the unending scorn of scare italics. i'm gonna stop reading this; i know where this dude is coming and it's an ugly combination of intellectual one-upmanship and utter despair.

xxpost

under what law(s) do police arrest people marching on city streets?

― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Tuesday, January 31, 2012 8:02 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

in DC it tends to be "failure to obey a lawful order" (like, "you are being ordered to get on the sidewalk")

ok well

Unfortunately, mass movements function as apparatuses of capture. Despite the many entries on the blog, few, if any, posts articulated a systemic critique of capitalism.

you've just given the game away. no mass movements b/c mass movements are incapable of articulating a "systemic critique."

oy.

xpost

damn that is so disturbingly circular. what is a "lawful order"? an order you have to obey.

"capture" = having to actually deal with other real-life people and their concerns (cf. writing bullshit from your privileged position as a tenured academic)

sure except that when most people who are actually just people you know livin say "let's take our country back from corporate america/special interests/whatever" (or maybe something racist) they don't mean it as a rejection of the rest of the world, that they hate. they say it because it's sort of how you say stuff you really mean. it really isn't a fuck-you to starving babies in africa, it's a clumsy reach for stock phrasing. which, if you're in the mood for some self-congratulatory masturbating, could mean that they're brain-dead idiots that watch too much tv and lack the cultivation needed for real-shit revolutionary poetics. or it could be that they were trying to come up with a poster idea, or something to shout, and got stumped

xp to hoos

btw it's nice to read people here calling LGS's bullshit, b/c lord knows it's impossible to argue w/ him or one of his academic sycophants without being condescended to as a running dog of the existing order. (in that sense he's like morbious with much heavier intellectual weaponry.)

"capture" = having to actually deal with other real-life people and their concerns

^^^this.

there is an undercurrent of disdain in pieces like this that is p abhorrent. like even if the dude is right, conceptually, about the fact that mass movements are predatory and simplistic, his whole attitude is wholly lacking in compassion

yeah, that's why i noted that he's coming from a place of despair and intellectual one-upmanship. he's a sad case. i'd feel bad for him if he wasn't such an insistent shit.

:hugs:

i can give or take intellectual one-upmanship— i actually dislike most of what that man has written, but conceptually, i think he's spot-on. just sayin'.

explain

i mean he's right that OWS isn't the bolshevist revolution and that most of its publicly articulated goals amount to reform of capitalism. but y'know, i could've told you that, and i wouldn't have insulted you in the bargain.

also you know 99% was always kind of an awkward term designed to (a) make noticeable the increase concentration of wealth and power and (b) seem as inclusive as possible in a way that might play well in the media. like i said, it's an awkward term with no poetic grace but he wants to "read" it as if it holds the key to contemporary protest -- chiefly its limitations.

it's sort of like looking at the sanitation workers strike in memphis and critiquing the "i am a man" placards and then dismissing the whole phenomenon with an arrogant hand-wave.

i can see LGS responding to that suchlike: "they want to be men, but what is a man, under our capitalist system? nothing more than a vehicle for instrumental regimentation and exploitation. by signaling their fundamental desire to be 'men' the sanitation workers have revealed the conformism and reformism that dooms their 'movement' to failure."

ok that's unfair insofar as the "99%" tag does have lots of problems and limitations (as we've discussed in many a thread here), but the impulse to rejection and marginalization that his article demonstrates seems like it could be "convincingly" applied to just about any situation. the only 'movement' i recall LGS applauding was the rioting in the parisian suburbs a few years ago. the urge to destruction seems like the only 'pure' revolutionary ambition he can endorse. and as we all know that like nearly all such riot actions resulted in a country that was utterly transformed, with the system of capital upended and the means of production returned to the w--- oh, wait, it didn't?

citizenship-drug

sorry for typos. i'll abandon this thread until more folks are posting, sorry for constant posting.

so here's a long post no one will care about regarding questions raised sunday that i'm not gonna go digging under the cut for--

so we need to have a variety of tactics and locally-focused strategies that help small constituencies manifest their local aims without the efforts of a few necessarily trumping the message of the larger movement. along with the sign holders singing union songs and waving signs in the free speech zones, we need people willing to do creative things that spur the growth of the movement while sometimes militantly pushing and even violating the bounds of the law. crucially, this militant bleeding edge needs to be the front end of a mass behind them--but if the militants become the most visible element of a broad movement, the message can disappear. that's a given, or so you'd think, but of course part of the difficulty on this point is that our media's thirst for dollars and eyeballs leads them to focus on the most confrontational at the expense of the--let's say--peaceably assembled, obviously. for the sake of eyeballs, it becomes about the cloud of gas.

in oakland, where a community center is apparently a notoriously difficult to create but sorely needed resource, people decided to take direct action in violation of private property laws to stake a claim on a community center. then police attacked those people, to defend an empty building & enforce private property laws. that's why direct action gets the goods: the action is the message.

then, of course, the militant edge defended themselves--why did they want in that building again? oh shit, tear gas.

obvious real talk: a contest of escalating violence against police in an industrialized country is a contest activists will always lose. the state has a monopoly on violence, and charging directly into the lions' mouth is not a winning strategy. but does that mean an activist shouldn't throw a tear gas canister back as an act of self defense? should we stop someone from building a barricade in the street to hold the line against kettling riot cops cause it's a bad PR move? (ps: are flaming trash cans to burn off tear gas ~always~ destined to be misinterpreted as a sign that says "wooo let's riot"? pps: are police statements ~always~ destined to be taken as an actual account of the way shit went down by people who never get busted in the head?)

all that said--the activists i know from communities of color (maybe some selection bias here tbf) often make a point of saying in the rote 'nonviolence vs diversity of tactics' discussion: "we get busted in the head by cops all the time--you expect ________ to be impressed by your moral fortitude in taking what we get every day? you want us on your side, you show us you'll fight with us against cop oppression." that's always struck me as an interesting perspective on the question of outreach.

so yeah--you don't build a serious constituency by alienating the people who're among those you're trying to organize, and maybe a barricade in oakland makes the union guy in tallahasee uncomfortable. and a flaming trash can will always make the news over the need for a community center. and one cop with a head wound from a thrown-back tear gas canister will always get more attention than the dozens of manhandled, bruised, and variously violently buttslammed arrestees, cause guess whose world we're living in?

i still respect the people who choose to strategically defend themselves against the police, because we need a militant edge at large, and because i respect that not everyone's experience with the police is quite as pleasant as my racial & class privilege have allowed mine to be--to say nothing of what it's like to live under the boot of the same cops that fought in the war against the panthers.

you don't win by racking up riots, but let's (again) get some fucking perspective here: does a weekend scuffle undo our victories and seal the coffin of the movement? no, it really fucking doesn't.