Who says we can’t do both? Can’t fart and chew gum at the same time? Stop chewing gum for a few seconds, let 'er rip, and then resume chewing gum. ACORN tried it your way, the Alinsky way, and they were very good at it. Or maybe it just isn’t all that difficult. At any rate, they scared the people who snuffed them. So, yeah, we can do that.
We can also gather together in inchoate bunches and bask in each other presence. We don’t have to fuck everything up by forming committees to explore the question of blah blah blah. At least not all the time. But nobody is going to stop them, its valuable work, that some of us are gifted for. Some can easily handle hours of haggling over the correct wording of a position paper, others of us can only stand about thirty minutes before our vision gets all red and swirly and we want to stab! stab! stab!. Some of us are like that.
Its not necessarily an either/or situation. This approach may not command your respect, but we don’t have that now and are not going to get it tomorrow. Keep in mind, there is more than one way to skin a cat, but some are more entertaining than others.
I know I’m showing my age but I have to agree. The Civil Rights movement is a model, perhaps the only real model of our times. At least mine, since I lived through it.
The difference - and it’s a major one - is that there isn’t a real and identifiable villain for OWS to oppose. The Southern bigots committed such outsized, almost cartoonish, villainy that even the majority of Northern whites - not exactly on the side of blacks - were appalled and outraged. The conditions replicated those that led to the Civil War, where a population that was perfectly content to discriminate against blacks themselves were pushed to defend them by such blatant unAmericanism.
Slavery was a completely unnecessary system. Jim Crow was a completely unnecessary system. Capitalism is not. Wealth is not. Finance is not. Banking is not. You can seek to refine or regulate them, but not to eliminate them.
The Civil Rights movement won victories because it could define what it was against and what it was for. The Gay Rights movement of today is winning support because it also can do that - along with the cartoonish opposition. Being able to define exactly what you’re against gets you to a movement. Most of the 60s’ movements achieved that. Being able to define exactly what you are for gets you victories.
There is the white overclass. It not be destroyed or dispossesed – it is enough to put an end to its weilding political power out of proportion to its numbers.
The Man is not an identifiable villain. (Yes, I’m equating the white overclass with the 60s label of the Establishment, i.e. The Man. The two overlap so much that it’s ludicrous not to.)
Look, the youth movement tried that once before. And couldn’t get people to identify Richard Nixon as a villain. How do you think that’s going to work with Barack Obama as President? Or even Mitt Romney?
Neither you Simon, nor the fifty thousand
Nor the Romans, nor the Jews
Nor Judas, nor the twelve
Nor the priests, nor the scribes
Nor doomed Jerusalem itself
Understand what power is
Understand what glory is
Understand at all*–Jesus to Simon, Jesus Christ Superstar
There is that contingent. I’ve declined joining groups that even mention Paul favourably on facebook (eagerly awaiting the Occupy social network site, should it ever happen). There was no such anarcho-capitalist movement in OLSX though. I quoted Milton Friedman to a guy that described himself as a “capitalist” (he was in a suit and had a briefcase, he could actually have owned capital) and he was pretty shocked. He said he believed in a safety net and other institutions that arose through Socialist thought. I guess that’s the difference between Europe and the US.
Actually, they’d be more likely to sing about working conditions in Coke factories and suppressions of unions by Coke, wouldn’t they?
I don’t really follow this movement at all, so question:
Are there any plans for the OWS people to actually organize and start voting? It seems that, in the wake of the USSC health care decision, that there really ought to be at least SOME kind of left-leaning answer to the Tea Partiers, who were galvanized even more after last week’s decision.
From what I know of the movement, it seems that all the OWS folks do is stand around and bitch about the wealthy. Unless they get out and fucking VOTE, well, then it’s a pretty damn pointless thing that they’ve got going on.
There’s a long history of various anarchist and Marxist groups not engaging in elections. Not that the Occupiers could be classified as such, explicitly.
I went to OWS at Zuccotti Park in October 2011 and noticed that many of the protesters were communists. Some were antisemites and others were 9/11 truthers.
There was even a guy dressed in an East German Grenztruppen (border guard) Hauptmann (capitan) uniform.
Reading through this thread has been immensely entertaining. Too bad OWS never did anything worthwhile or got big enough so that my kids might one day ask me about it and I could chucke to myself and say, “Yeah, that OWS movement never really did amount to much of anything.”
