Why Occupy Has Faded

[Hexen]

Why Occupy Has Faded


It's impossible to satisfy all rights, every time, everywhere.
July 5, 2012 |

http://images.alternet.org/images/managed/storyimages_1317050787_picture5.png_640x480_310x22 0 Protesters at "Occupy Wall Street" camp, Liberty Square
Photo Credit: Sarah Jaffe




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This article first appeared in The Guardian. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/uk-edition)
Judging by the Occupy national gathering in Philadelphia this week, the Middle Ages is making a comeback. In the shadow of Independence Hall, America's secular Bethlehem, hundreds of pilgrims gathered here for a five-day festival of democracy culminating in night-time procession around the manors of power on the nation's high holy day, 4 July.
By day, in downtown's Franklin Square, an Occupy burgh popped up, complete with jugglers, acrobats, dancers and poets. Minstrels from the "guitarmy" belted out Occupy ballads. Itinerant preachers of socialist, liberal, conservative and anarchist faith spread the Occupy gospel. The "mic check" acted as the town crier. Colored banners signaled to the commoners where to join their humble village of origin – the Southwest, New England, Mid-Atlantic and so on. Activist nobles such as Medea Benjamin and Lisa Fithian circulated among the unwashed. Artisans crafted signs and peddled T-shirts, buttons and stickers.


The colorful semi-mystical gathering – among the faithful, Occupy has near-magical powers – recalled why it captured the imagination. There is no public space in which Americans of all types, income and opinions can talk, play and live together. The carnival spirit of Occupy flourished and the night-time curfew kept the decay and drugs at bay that burdened so many other occupations. The "king's men" kept a low profile in Franklin Square, but police materialized the instant a procession exited the park.


Months earlier, word of the gathering spread throughout the land, but barely 500 people made the journey from distant realms. Some confided they were disappointed by the turnout, but the true believers still see Occupy as their and the country's last, best hope. Alexis Terry, a homeless and unemployed transgendered African-American woman from New Haven, home to Yale University, says Occupy "has given me tangible hope for the first time in my life".



Billy Lolos from Tucson, whose stage-three emphysema didn't deter him from puffing on cigarettes, says he was "unemployed, living in his sister's house" before the movement appeared. Jeanine Molloff, a speech pathologist from St Louis, passionately called on Occupiers to work for universal healthcare and education, explaining that her 49-year-old brother "died a hideous death last year, and I think the system murdered him."


Nonetheless, the hundreds of thousands who participated in Occupy protests last fall did not trek to Philadelphia. There is no one reason why it has submerged back into the middle-class discontent from which it sprang, but this Philadelphia scene does reveal why the movement has faded.


On Monday afternoon, I entered the park with two friends and we were greeted by Sage. Bare-chested, sitting on the grass, he yelled out to us, "I don't like you." His object of anger was Gregg, one of the nicest people fromOccupy Wall Street. Sage continued, "Actually, I like you just fine. You taste sweet. It's the effects of what you do that I don't like." Mild words were exchanged and we quickened our pace.



But Sage was not to be denied. Flying in from our left flank, he planted himself in front of us, babbling about "double sarcasm". Gregg asked to be left alone, but Sage deftly claimed he was being denied his right to speak.


It's unfair to blame Sage, who claims he was "born in a mental hospital". Virtually every occupation was beset by the same types, though New York seemed to have a surplus. Nonetheless, one seasoned Occupy organizer, by way of the Middle East, does blame the wayward behavior of a minority for "destroying Occupy as a functioning entity". He claims after the eviction of the Zuccotti Park occupation last November, there would be meetings of up to 300 people groping for a path going forward, but constant disruptions would "suck the energy out of the room".


The Middle East organizer mentioned that in Tahrir Square, Egyptians would surround provocateurs and disrupters (both of the voluntary and involuntary kind) chase them out of the square. If they came back, then a beating was in order. He said, "While it's a different political culture, the Egyptians and Syrians have had to deal with people shooting them from windows. Occupy Wall Street couldn't even deal with a few crazies."


That moment in Franklin Square encapsulated why Occupy Wall Street crumbled. It was not – and still is not – able to negotiate between conflicting rights. Occupy's child-like view of politics – how consensus and participatory democracy will free the angels within every one of us – was a big reason for its success because it offered a palpable alternative to our cynical, acquisitive society. Yet it apparently hasn't dawned on the hive mind that it is impossible to satisfy all rights, every time, everywhere.


It follows that democracy is not just about compromise; it's also about conflict. Politics is about picking winners and losers according to higher principles like justice and equality. Occupy is still present in campaigns, from labor and immigrant solidarity to home foreclosure defense, student debt and the environment. But, for the idealistic core of Occupy, its original flowering was like a Fourth of July firework display: something dramatic and beautiful, but ultimately ephemeral.


Source: http://www.alternet.org/activism/156182/why_occupy_has_faded/?page=1

[Blanquist]

because protest politics is a dead-end

[Comrade Samuel]

Because there is a limited amount of socialists and an unlimited amount of tear gas in the world.

From what I hear it was really just a few hundered hippies and recently unemployed with blind anger toward any and all kinds of authority who just happend to get media attention rather than an army of educated working class revolutionaries who were determined to create a major change in society like we where all hopeing they were.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Ha, a crazy guy is the reason that Occupy didn't work? Man, sometimes the Guardian has some insightful pieces for a liberal newspaper, but most of the time... :rolleyes:

I think the sub-headline to the story is a little more interesting: "It's impossible to satisfy all rights, every time, everywhere."

Occupy emerged out of a world of very low class politics and dis-satisfaction with mainstream politics. This is very good in many ways because it kept people relying on themselves and avoided being taken over by NGOs. But it's also problematic because of the low political consciousness among most people in the US after 30+ years of a ruling class attack both materially and ideologically. So people could get together and say, "Fuck the rich, fuck this situation that we've been put in" and everyone from radical to reformist to liberal to even libertarian could agree basically on that. But then what? The radicals wanted to reignite some class fight-back, the reformists either wanted to live in a utopian life-stylist commune, the liberals wanted to repeal pro-corporate laws and help "good politicians" like a left-wing tea-party, and the Ron Paul people wanted whatever crazy thing they had heard about on Alex Jones that week.

To solve this there was IMO a fetishization of things like "no demands" and "consensus" and "diversity of tactics". While there is nothing wrong with these ideas and there are times when they are the most appropriate thing to do, I think the problem was in making principles out of them. While I think radicals supported these ideas in order to prevent liberal-takeover where radicals are a minority (which is practically every Occupy) I think this resulted in a maintaining of a low political level and basically just hid disagreements and prevented productive debates. In working groups that didn't have consensus, we were able to achieve a lot more action and have a much higher political discussion of goals and tactics because we all had to commit, we couldn't just say, well they can do this while I'll go plant some flowers or hold up a sign or paint a slogan on a wall.

So in Occupy Oakland, when real political disagreements came up, because they couldn't be resolved in the GAs due to a overburdened process and lack of any meaningful teeth (i.e. things have to pass with either a huge majority or be so low-level and useless that they could be supported in a vote but the voters didn't then have to actively support the action or decision) - sections of Occupy Oakland just split off and began organizing separately.

Future Occupy protests or other movements will need to activly have the debates about strategy and tactics and politics in order to be really effective. Occupy was a start of something that could have done that - and I think that radicals would have actually won many of the debates in the beginning because they were more organized and have sharper politics and the general atmosphere of Occupy in the beginning was one of a hunger for radical ideas and many people moving to the left - but unfortunately it didn't continue developing and in Oakland basically it became the same people doing the same actions over and over and the movement wasn't able to continue bringing people in and developing politically.

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

I thought it "faded" because the mainstream media basically got bored of covering it? There's only so much "look at these crazy hippies" stuff you can run without having to address the underlying reasons why people are protesting.

[Jimmie Higgins]

I thought it "faded" because the mainstream media basically got bored of covering it? There's only so much "look at these crazy hippies" stuff you can run without having to address the underlying reasons why people are protesting.Well they went out of their way to ignore it at first too, so it can't just be that the media decided to stop. Although the media did definitely play a role as the movement developed. The city and state governments were able to use the media as part of their propaganda effort. After initially being caught sort of off guard and (for liberal politicians) not knowing how to address this anger the cities tried various methods from ignoring the movement to humoring it to demonizing it. Right before all the raids happened, the cities organized together and came up with common strategies... they learned from their set-backs while Occupy then didn't know how to respond in an equally organized and adaptive way when our camps all got evicted basically within a couple of weeks of each-other. I got the sense from a lot of people that strategy and tactics were based on the idea that everything is just going to continue to escalate, rather than seeing it as a movement that needs to learn how to forge it's own path based out of the larger political terrain.

[Rafiq]

Class collaboration, Non violence, and Liberalism.

Sent from my SPH-D710 using Tapatalk 2

[Terminator X]

Occupy started off OK, but devolved into a bunch of liberals holding clipboards asking passersby to sign petitions without even "occupying" anything. The Occupy movement in my city right now consists of a tent in front of the Statehouse with a long-haired dude inside sitting on a chair with his dog while handing out bumper stickers and Obama merch.

There was no "next step" for Occupy. With "no demands" and a concerted effort to ban direct action and keep out agitators like the Black Bloc, it became a rudderless ship that really didn't know which way to turn. Shouting "fuck the police!" on a bullhorn and banging pots and pans in the streets gets old really quickly, even for well-meaning hippies.

[MEGAMANTROTSKY]

@Jimmie Higgins: I think I am in basic agreement with what you have said regarding the flaws of the Occupy movement. But I think it could be expanded on somewhat. My thoughts are based on the events surrounding the New York City movement:

1.) Refusal to (physically) strike back against the police. Endlessly I had read news reports of the NYPD pepper-spraying protestors and finding numerous ways to break up the marches themselves, for example their trap on the Brooklyn Bridge (if that's the wrong bridge, please correct me). And you could certainly tie this back into their politics of peaceful protest. But given that the police methods regarded naked brutality for the most part, the website did little more than denounce the violence as opposed to seeking a solution. With Occupy's impotence in the face of the police, the morale of the protestors dwindled and weakened the movement. In my opinion the routing of police by the movement would have helped them greatly in spite of their contradictions. Unfortunately their conflation of the police with the working class did them no good at all, as we have seen. Any action against the police could have attracted a greater number of workers, especially those who are specifically targeted on a daily basis. i.e. blacks and other ethnic minorities, LBGT community.

2.) Their insistence on keeping the movement "non-political". This one probably speaks for itself, for the divorcement of social and economic demands from the political generated no small amount of confusion in the ranks. That being the case I'll say no more about it for now.

I guess that's it for now. If you have any disagreements or suggestions, I'd be happy to hear them.

[Book O'Dead]

Occupy has faded because it has failed to occupy the one place where all the difference is made: The workplace.

[Workers-Control-Over-Prod]

Occupy has done all it could, it has made people aware that millions of people around the world hate inequality and are willing to get beaten, sprayed in the face and tear gassed to make the world aware of their concern. The Occupy movement has been a catalyst for gaining a lot of people for various workers struggles, has in Germany also tied the radical parts of the Occupy movement to workers unions. Occupy is "fading" because it is normalising its existence, has changed the left's public perception quite a bit where we can openly talk about alternatives to capitalism.

[cynicles]

Because it was dominated by a bunch of "let's all come together" types who were politically degenerate and life-stylistic, the fruits of the past several decades of post-modernist labour.

[Jimmie Higgins]

@Jimmie Higgins: I think I am in basic agreement with what you have said regarding the flaws of the Occupy movement. But I think it could be expanded on somewhat. My thoughts are based on the events surrounding the New York City movement.Well where I disagree with what you wrote, I think, probably is based in different subjective occupy situations.


1.) Refusal to (physically) strike back against the police. Endlessly I had read news reports of the NYPD pepper-spraying protestors and finding numerous ways to break up the marches themselves, for example their trap on the Brooklyn Bridge (if that's the wrong bridge, please correct me). And you could certainly tie this back into their politics of peaceful protest. But given that the police methods regarded naked brutality for the most part, the website did little more than denounce the violence as opposed to seeking a solution.Well this was a problem, but I don't think it's rooted in the violence/non-violence question. I think the issue here can be chalked up to two things: liberal illusions about how cops and society work, which is forgivable since this movement is coming out of a society with low class consciousness as a starting point; and second, lack of an organized strategy people could get behind.

Before the first raid in Oakland, I kept asking other organizers what the plan for a raid was. There was a working group around this, but they seemed to concentrate on letting people know what their legal rights were. In B.A.s when people said they were worried about a raid, the answer from one person in the working group was, "we can't decide on a plan for you, we will have a diversity of tactics". The people with more liberal ideas, on the other hand, didn't even think a raid was going to happen, "Mayor Quan's on our side" they'd say.

So that's fine, if the majority of the people in the movement at that time believed this and wern't swayed by other arguments. But then after the raid and re-encampment when there should have been NO illusions on either count, while less people were talking favorably about the cops, people still didn't think that some kind of plan for defending the camp or plan for civil disobedience or massive barricades or whatnot. So small groups of people responded with a diversity of tactics the next time and what did we get: 14 police departments coming down on the camp as some people sat in a circle waiting to be arrested in some kind of moral statement, some people making a tiny barricade, some people running around trying to confront the cops and most people looking around asking eachother what's going on and what they should do. We had a text-alert system, but no plan for massive turnout or whatnot or what kinds of defenses we could do or what forces we could call to come to our aid! It was like "Facebook" and "Twitter" will magically mass people and a plan will just spontaneously arise.

So not only did this make our side scattered and ineffective, but the lack of democratic planning alienated people from the process and so even the campers didn't trust that Occupy would be able to do anything and so all the cops had to do was say they might raid and tons of people would clear out.


With Occupy's impotence in the face of the police, the morale of the protestors dwindled and weakened the movement. In my opinion the routing of police by the movement would have helped them greatly in spite of their contradictions. Unfortunately their conflation of the police with the working class did them no good at all, as we have seen. Any action against the police could have attracted a greater number of workers, especially those who are specifically targeted on a daily basis. i.e. blacks and other ethnic minorities, LBGT community.Well there was actually a section of the movement here who saw any march that didn't end with a showdown with the police (more like they blocked us and then people just ran around downtown like chickens with their heads cut-off) as a failure. Yet the political side of the movement here remained largely white in a city with a long traddition of black activism and militancy (and a large black population) mearly two years after a multi-racial anti-police brutality movement that mostly met in the same place that occupy later happened.


2.) Their insistence on keeping the movement "non-political". This one probably speaks for itself, for the divorcement of social and economic demands from the political generated no small amount of confusion in the ranks. That being the case I'll say no more about it for now.Yeah I totally agree. Just hanging out in Occupy Oakland's encampment, there were tons of political discussions and everyone wanted to talk about these things - even the sort of passive gawkers who would come by we sympathetic and really interested in radical ideas. There was a point at the begining of Occupy Oakland and lasting until a little after the first port shut-down/General strike where the whole town was talking about it, talking about the 1% and talking about racism and the police heavy-handedness. The media chipped away at this constantly and I think if we had been able to better connect Occupy to existing struggles in an organic way, then the media hype would have had less-effect just as their hype didn't stop massive sympathy and support after Scott Olsen was shot. The conversation in communities wouldn't have become an echo of the nightly news mantra: "They're outside agitators who don't really want anything but to 'play around' in the streets and tag things" but would have been: "well, the city says that they are just vandals out for kicks, but look, they're occupying a school that the city wants to shut down and organizing free classes for people while demanding that the city shouldn't shut down the schools while giving developers tax-breaks".

All of my criticisms of the movement are sympathetic criticisms and most of the things that I think were incorrect in retrospect I either understood where people were coming from or sometimes fully supported myself at the time. I think for radicals in the movement, we're so used to having our efforts co-opted that some wanted to keep diversity of tactics and a sort of general political level to be able to preserve radical politics within the larger movement. I think this was an underestimation of the general support and general anger out there. Now is a time where I think radical ideas can directly compete with common liberal ones when it comes to movements - I think the "cops are the 99%" argument or "we can trust the liberal mayor to defend us" show how if we make these debates inside a movement, we can actually pull people towards our viewpoint and legitimize the value of our politics in the eyes of many people who normally would think we're "unrealistic". After the raid on the camp, there were still a few people with illusions, but they were now the minority. But these arguments have to be connected to the general goals of the movement and so the second big hurdle and liberal argument in the movement after the raid was about "non-violence". I think "diversity of tactics" meant that militants couldn't actually win this argument because many didn't even want to have it our or figure out a way to win people to some kind of united militant action (like the port-shut down or a massive sit-in or something). So the adventurists did random ineffective things, some militants tried more interesting actions like building-takeovers but didn't have the full weight of the movement to support something of that kind yet, pacifists did non-violent things and then blamed the adventurists for putting them in danger etc.

We were strongest when we had both the mass support and ability to draw-in progressives and other random workers, and had a focused militant plan and target like with the port-shut-down. With 10,000 people taking the port after intense organizing with and outreach to workers there, the cops had no choice but to let us do what we wanted. If we could have used such militant tactics and connected them with some popular working class demands that could be won, then it would have been harder for the city to put a wedge between the movement and the general population of the town.

[Rocky Rococo]

Insufficient numbers of participants had read the XVIII Brumaire. Well, at least in the sense that there was little to no understanding of the character of political conflict and how it manifests in periods of social revolt.

[Le Socialiste]

1.) Refusal to (physically) strike back against the police. Endlessly I had read news reports of the NYPD pepper-spraying protestors and finding numerous ways to break up the marches themselves, for example their trap on the Brooklyn Bridge (if that's the wrong bridge, please correct me). And you could certainly tie this back into their politics of peaceful protest. But given that the police methods regarded naked brutality for the most part, the website did little more than denounce the violence as opposed to seeking a solution. With Occupy's impotence in the face of the police, the morale of the protestors dwindled and weakened the movement. In my opinion the routing of police by the movement would have helped them greatly in spite of their contradictions. Unfortunately their conflation of the police with the working class did them no good at all, as we have seen. Any action against the police could have attracted a greater number of workers, especially those who are specifically targeted on a daily basis. i.e. blacks and other ethnic minorities, LBGT community.

If I may:

I'm not entirely convinced Occupy's abandonment of nonviolent tactics would have aided it in the beginning. Its development was greatly reliant on its popularity and the support of a dedicated base. The initial reaction from the police boosted Occupy's standing in the eyes of many, allowing it to reach those who might not have considered participating. The movement's ascendance attracted a wide variety of political viewpoints and attitudes, emboldening others to join and take part in its development. A majority of the American population appeared to view Occupy favorably, even if many didn't/couldn't participate. For a lot of people the events in Oakland, Berkeley, and New York proved decisive; fence-straddlers suddenly found themselves on the side of the Occupiers. A lull in the movement (due partly to cold weather, students going home for the winter, etc.) permitted local and state governments enough breathing room to regain lost ground: by the time January 28th rolled around (OO's move-in day) politicians and their allies in the police force were able to simultaneously win the propaganda war and take back the streets.

While Occupy struggled to catch its balance, it had to contend with a drop in 'membership' and an assertive state apparatus with little to no patience for occupations and street battles, leaving small concentrations of assorted activists in its wake. The result was a thoroughly discredited Occupy movement, aided little by the antics of a small but dedicated group of people more interested in fighting the police than setting out a clear political platform to organize around. People were gradually turned off by the images in Oakland and other Occupies (however unjustified), and the movement suffered as a result. I was a part of UC Berkeley's Occupy 'branch,' which by the time April came around had only 5-10 regular 'members' dropping by for GAs. Liberals, idealists, hippies, and moralists dominated the discussions, and any events planned typically attracted people with similar mindsets. What began in November as a bold new movement capable of fresh ideas and organization quickly degenerated into a couple of hippies blowing into an alphorn and shouting "drop out of school" over a megaphone. The actions of a minority (while understandable) were allowed to dominate the course of the movement, and we suffered for it.

There's a point to all this: while I'm a proponent of violence as a tactic, its use should be measured against the mindset and consciousness of the population. America's activist culture is still dragging a lot of baggage from the pacifist movement, from identity politics to liberal idealism. It will take more than a couple hundred activists occupying a park to unload years of liberal co-option, but it's a start. Occupy wouldn't have gotten as far as it did, wouldn't have achieved as much as it had, if it had engaged the forces of the state at the outset. Things have to develop to a certain point before people are willing to physically resist state violence en masse. Americans remain convinced that the cops are on their side, that resistance is wrong and nonviolence necessary. Right now, despite everything that's happened, people are still turned off at the sight of their friends, loved ones, and colleagues defiantly fighting the cops. I look forward to the day when that's no longer the case, but that day won't come unless we begin laying the groundwork, taking the time to organize, in order to build off the successes of Occupy.

That said, it wasn't the violence/nonviolence question that hurt Occupy at the end of the day. There are plenty of reasons for its decline, including but not limited to the fierce reaction of local and state officials, the predominance of liberal conceptions surrounding the police, the Democratic Party, and other institutions, and an emphasis on "no politics" (which you touched on) that ultimately did it in.

[MEGAMANTROTSKY]

Thank you for your responses, Le Socialiste, Jimmie, for they have helped me get a better picture of the Occupy movement than I previously had. I do have reservations and at times outright disagreements with aspects of your stances, but unfortunately I won't have time to give a full and elaborate reply for a while. I apologize for this, because I believe the issues raised are very important and deserve perhaps their own thread. So, as Uma Thurman once said in some Batman film, "Curses!"

[Ingraham Effingham]

Insufficient numbers of participants

This. Situation's not immediately, acutely, dire enough to get a majority off the couch.

[MuscularTophFan]

Occupy isn't going to change anything. Cooperate control is stronger than ever in America with Citizens United. American politics is gonna push further and further to the right.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Thank you for your responses, Le Socialiste, Jimmie, for they have helped me get a better picture of the Occupy movement than I previously had. I do have reservations and at times outright disagreements with aspects of your stances, but unfortunately I won't have time to give a full and elaborate reply for a while. I apologize for this, because I believe the issues raised are very important and deserve perhaps their own thread. So, as Uma Thurman once said in some Batman film, "Curses!"Nothing wrong with disagreements - and, like I said, I think there were differences among various occupies and from what I've heard from comrades in my group and comrades in Occupy Oakland who went to NYC, is that liberalism was much more the dominant trend in OWS compared to Oakland or maybe Portland and some other places. In Oakland in my experience the non-leaders leadership had always been anti-capitalist even when the majority of people involved were still generally liberal/progressive-oriented. In Oakland, my group, the IWW, and various anarchists all put on teach-ins and things at the camp about the role of the police in capitalism (as well as other things like meetings about Greece and the Indignat movement and Egypt) before the first raid in order to try and make a counter-argument against some of the common liberal ideas and so when the raid did come, these radical arguments carried more weight because radicals had been involved from the beginning and had tried to make a case for anticapitalist radical poltics.

My comrades in the ISO basically said that NYC OWS's leaders were more liberal in orientation; some anarchists in Occupy Oakland were involved in OWS and their perspective was that in NYC, the original organizers had also been anti-capitalists but more like lifestyle anarchists and so they never really put their politics up-front and kind of went for a sort of "prefigurative" society kind of thing. So when the movement got bigger, the anti-capitalists didn't have the sort of organic authority to counter against some of the liberal arguments, because they had initially downplayed their politics.

Anyway, a lot of this is just my impressions and I never went to any other Occupy camps, so I can speak from my own experience about Oakland, but everything else is 2nd hand. Still trying to process the whole thing so I appreciate hearing other views on it - especially from other locations.

[agnixie]

The reasons are many, and a lot of what has been said in this thread is right. I'll still throw in my two bucks (inflation will do the job sooner or later :p ) since I was an organizer early on and working with the ows.org people. I wrote a few pieces for it including the "Modest call for action" (I used to be more modest about it but since I spent the whole damn thing shutting up because I felt as an outsider to NYC it was not my place to speak, I've gotten over it and I'm tired of the nonsense; I make no apologies for writing it, except maybe for the disillusion it caused).

I'll do a mea culpa and admit that our group, with its early publication of press releases mostly written to make the liberals shut up, probably contributed to fostering this "cops are workers too" shit in NYC (truth be told, when I pushed for a "cops are workers too, which makes them traitors" line, it was seen as going too far :/ ). I'll be honest, it's a naivete I've seen even from a handful of the more lifestylist anarchists involved. Sadly, few people saw fighting liberalism's "solutions" as a possibility, and a lot of liberals and liberal-influenced lifestyle soft leftists had decided that hardline left positions were possibly suspicious and sign of infiltration. This led to paranoia, liberal propaganda about hardliners being infiltrators (most of the infiltrators stayed put really, which is probably better for them as they were usually pretty obvious anyway) and so on.

Among the many failings, the obsession with empty identity politics over class politics is one of the many many symptoms of the terrible class politics of the "99%" bullshit. Class collaboration all over.

Then there was the media obsession, the tendency of some of the organizers to be more into navel gazing than actually being there, leading to some of the anarchists to continuously insist the movement was still anarchist while it was obvious to all, even most of the organizers, that it was not true anymore. We were now faced with a useless pseudo-democracy built on the fragile and absurd basis that megapolis could be run through single popular assemblies, with no thought or so little to actually organizing the work place, and a bureaucracy that had successfully put itself in a position of near immunity. My nightmare.

The crowd in NYC also had a slavish dependency on public relations; I don't mean the committee, I mean the media machines. I mean the simple fact that out internal media politics were ridiculously cutthroat for a group of at best 50,000 people in a city of 8 millions, and that we essentially depended on a good word from the New Yorker or Gay City News or whatever other NYC newspaper would deign to mention us. The camps became part of that stupid media apparatus, Spectacle for spectacle without substance. Parks should not have been made into camps, they should have been public places, town halls, meeting places for the soviets of the american working class. Yeah I'm a stupid idealist.

I'm probably rambling at this point, I'm not sober right now (I could get worse though). But yeah, there's many reasons things were fucked. The methods were sort of anarchist-ish for a certain subset of anarchism (not exactly my subset by the end, too much lifestyle politics, too much nonsense, too many cliques masquerading as security culture, too little real organization). The methods were sort of anarchist but too few people actually went forward with the proper class politics involved. The fact that ISO were more forward about it than a large amount, probably most, of the organizers, is kind of a glaring failure right there.


Occupy has faded because it has failed to occupy the one place where all the difference is made: The workplace.


I can't quote this enough, I can't also thank this enough.

There is a certain delusion among some of the organizers that we ever threatened the state. To this I say: Hubris. It's just how the state acts when people don't buy into totalitarian capitalist.

[Book O'Dead]

[...]
There is a certain delusion among some of the organizers that we ever threatened the state. To this I say: Hubris. It's just how the state acts when people don't buy into totalitarian capitalist.

Our basic problem, I think, is that we still view capitalist property as inviolable; sacrosanct. The moment large-scale challenges emerge to capitalist property rights you'll know you're seeing the beginning of the revolution.

[A Marxist Historian]

@Jimmie Higgins: I think I am in basic agreement with what you have said regarding the flaws of the Occupy movement. But I think it could be expanded on somewhat. My thoughts are based on the events surrounding the New York City movement:

1.) Refusal to (physically) strike back against the police. Endlessly I had read news reports of the NYPD pepper-spraying protestors and finding numerous ways to break up the marches themselves, for example their trap on the Brooklyn Bridge (if that's the wrong bridge, please correct me). And you could certainly tie this back into their politics of peaceful protest. But given that the police methods regarded naked brutality for the most part, the website did little more than denounce the violence as opposed to seeking a solution. With Occupy's impotence in the face of the police, the morale of the protestors dwindled and weakened the movement. In my opinion the routing of police by the movement would have helped them greatly in spite of their contradictions. Unfortunately their conflation of the police with the working class did them no good at all, as we have seen. Any action against the police could have attracted a greater number of workers, especially those who are specifically targeted on a daily basis. i.e. blacks and other ethnic minorities, LBGT community.
...

An adventurist notion. The police are well armed and extremely dangerous. To physically strike back at them you *first* need to have mass support, which Occupy only had in a passive way.

And the basis of physical resistance to the police would have had to be organized defense guards, something in practice only the unions could have provided, and the union leaderships were obviously not up for that, and there is not currently enough organized rank and file opposition within the unions to organize things like that over their heads.

In fact, since you reject unions altogether, this is total hot air on your part.

"Physically striking back" would probably just have gotten people killed. I mean, what did you have in mind concretely, Black Bloc anarchists throwing rocks? Well, that was done in Oakland, and sure enough the cops responded brutally, almost killing one protester. And managed to win the propaganda war over that with the populace of Oakland, due to anarchist ineptitude.

Anything more serious than a little rock throwing would have been met with large scale lethal and murderous force.

-M.H.-

[Ele'ill]

And managed to win the propaganda war over that with the populace of Oakland, due to anarchist ineptitude.

What do you mean by 'populace'?

[A Marxist Historian]

What do you mean by 'populace'?

The people who live there in Oakland. Like me, though that's not of course how I feel.

In the fall, 50,000 people marched to the docks to close the port in defense of Occupy vs. Jean Quan and her cops brutality. And the great majority of people in Oakland supported Occupy vs. the cops.

By the spring, as polls have clearly indicated, most people in Oakland supported the cops closing down Occupy, though still not necessarily happy with the most brutal police tactics.

-M.H.-

[Ocean Seal]

Because its been a long time, and I'm impressed that it lasted for so long in the first place. Occupy wasn't defeated, the tip of the iceberg my friends, and a very impressive tip.

[cynicles]

Because its been a long time, and I'm impressed that it lasted for so long in the first place. Occupy wasn't defeated, the tip of the iceberg my friends, and a very impressive tip.

Pft no offense but American social movements don't exactly have a long lifetime, occupy might have another few years but it'll fail like the rest.

[Ele'ill]

The people who live there in Oakland. Like me, though that's not of course how I feel.

In the fall, 50,000 people marched to the docks to close the port in defense of Occupy vs. Jean Quan and her cops brutality. And the great majority of people in Oakland supported Occupy vs. the cops.

By the spring, as polls have clearly indicated, most people in Oakland supported the cops closing down Occupy, though still not necessarily happy with the most brutal police tactics.

-M.H.-

Do you have before and after sources for these polls?

[A Marxist Historian]

Do you have before and after sources for these polls?

Not off the top of my head, but I read the papers and watch the news every day and I live here.

Talk to some Occupy Oakland people if you want a source you'd feel is more reliable, they are all well aware of this, it's not exactly a deep dark secret. Surely you're in contact with some, and I'm sure anybody in Occupy Oakland would confirm these basic facts, howeve they evaluate them.

-M.H.-

[Ele'ill]

Not off the top of my head, but I read the papers and watch the news every day and I live here.

I'm not gonna do the auto-discredit thing here but I watched the news and read the paper frequently where I'm at and of course those sources were pretty much coming from career distorters if not liars.

[A Marxist Historian]

I'm not gonna do the auto-discredit thing here but I watched the news and read the paper frequently where I'm at and of course those sources were pretty much coming from career distorters if not liars.

You really think public opinion in Oakland is still with Occupy? Talk to people in Occupy Oakland, they will set you straight on that.

-M.H.-

[tbasherizer]

"Shame! Shame! Shame!"- the slogan of liberal defeatists in the face of police attacks. That pretty well sums it up. Instead of taking substantive action against police violence, the liberal types just stand back and shout about how their slacktivist friends are all going to watch this in disgust later that evening.

[Jimmie Higgins]

I'm not gonna do the auto-discredit thing here but I watched the news and read the paper frequently where I'm at and of course those sources were pretty much coming from career distorters if not liars.
I agree the polls have to be taken with a grain of salt and many were informal ones done by local news stations. But anecdotaly, as well as from the turn-out to events, I think this trajectory M.H. describes is more or less accurate.

The media coverage was never supportive although initially and after the first crack-down by police, they had some confusion over how to report (which is probably a reflection of the paralysis of the city government after their repression backfired on them... the Mayor and the Police Chief were basically blaming each-other and city council couldn't form a united response). The media coverage always only ranged from dismissive, to confused, to hostile -- generally hostile. So it's not really a media/city plot to "turn on occupy" as much as their propaganda became more effective and Occupy's response less effective over the course of the local movement IMO.

Radicals don't have much roots in the US and so the most effective thing the US can do is isolate us. Occupy had some points where the potential to break that down a bit were possible and those moments were some of the high-points IMO.

[The Douche]

You really think public opinion in Oakland is still with Occupy? Talk to people in Occupy Oakland, they will set you straight on that.

-M.H.-

I can tell you, anecdotally, the following story:

I was in Oakland for may day. On the morning of the first me and my friends were following the marches from a distance, just trying to get a feel for how the day was gonna go. At one point the march stopped at a bank and things got a little tense with the police. We were on the other side of the street on the sidewalk, watching. When things seemed like they might jump off we put our masks on and continued to stand around on the periphery.

A middle aged white man in nice clothes, carrying a laptop bag stopped and looked at us, he turned to me and said he wanted to ask me a question. I nodded at him and he said "can you guys do me a favor and tone the violence down?". Meanwhile, right behind him stand dozens of police officers fully tooled up in riot gear, with lethal and non-lethal weapons, undercover officers and federal agents milled around taking pictures of people, and police helicopters lingered overhead. Yet, we were the violent ones. I promptly told him to fuck off before he found out about violence first hand.

Later that night, after having gone home and resting we were walking back out to OG plaza for the night marches and what not, a middle aged black lady walked out of the corner store in the neighborhood my friends live in (west oakland) and she looked at us, a group of people in their 20s in all black, and she knew what was up and who we were. Did she stop us to voice her concerns of our "violence"? Nope. Her eyes lit up, and a smile stretched across her face from ear to ear and she started shouting for us to "have a good time out there tonight" and for us to "fuck them pigs up" and "give them hell".



It is of little concern to me what people may or may not think about my actions. What I'm doing is right, and is necessary, and even if nobody agrees, I'm not going to be governed by them, its called fucking anarchy, bro.

Here is a quote which I find relevant in situations like this where people speak about broad support from the "masses" or whatever:


It is no use distinguishing between cops and citizens. Under Empire, the difference between the police and the population is abolished. At any moment each citizen of Empire can, through a characteristically Bloomesque reversal, reveal himself a cop.

[Book O'Dead]

[...]
It is of little concern to me what people may or may not think about my actions. What I'm doing is right, and is necessary, and even if nobody agrees, I'm not going to be governed by them, its called fucking anarchy, bro.
[...]

Is this the sort of individualistic attitude that characterizes "anarchy"?

By your concluding statement can we surmise that you believe that any sort of class solidarity and discipline is pointless?

[The Douche]

Is this the sort of individualistic attitude that characterizes "anarchy"?

By your concluding statement can we surmise that you believe that any sort of class solidarity and discipline is pointless?

Yeah guy, I don't tolerate cops (with or without badges) that means I don't believe in solidarity. As for "discipline" I suggest you figure out another word to make your point, cause otherwise you're just making this shit to easy.

[Book O'Dead]

Yeah guy, I don't tolerate cops (with or without badges) that means I don't believe in solidarity. As for "discipline" I suggest you figure out another word to make your point, cause otherwise you're just making this shit to easy.

I was referring to solidarity of the proletarian kind., and discipline of the proletarian kind.

Are you suggesting that the 'anarchists' you have in mind are unable to distinguish between the cop and the demonstrator and so are against any form of discipline?

[The Douche]

I was referring to solidarity of the proletarian kind., and discipline of the proletarian kind.

Are you suggesting that the 'anarchists' you have in mind are unable to distinguish between the cop and the demonstrator and so are against any form of discipline?

If you act like a cop, I'm gonna treat you like a cop, that meets my definition of both solidarity and discipline.

[Book O'Dead]

If you act like a cop, I'm gonna treat you like a cop, that meets my definition of both solidarity and discipline.

Very subjective, I think.

By that logic we should treat the mods in Revleft like cops whenever they exert any moderating authority over trolls, flamers and the like. No?

Are you trying to tell us that Revleft is full of cops?

[The Douche]

Very subjective, I think.

By that logic we should treat the mods in Revleft like cops whenever they exert any moderating authority over trolls, flamers and the like. No?

Are you trying to tell us that Revleft is full of cops?

When a mod on revleft cooperates with the state or attempts to impede attacks on capital, I will be the first to denounce them.

I can tell you right now though, that I do not consider most of revleft's membership to be genuine communists.

[Book O'Dead]

When a mod on revleft cooperates with the state or attempts to impede attacks on capital, I will be the first to denounce them.

I can tell you right now though, that I do not consider most of revleft's membership to be genuine communists.

Nor do I. But that's another kettle of fish.

I see that there are exceptions to your previously stated dislike of disicpline and solidarity. The encouraging.

But to say that anyone counseling workers against violence and vandalism is doing the work of the police is wrong. I disagree with that.

[Lynx]

People wearing masks can be cops, anarchists, or RevLeft admins :rolleyes:

[The Douche]

Nor do I. But that's another kettle of fish.

I see that there are exceptions to your previously stated dislike of disicpline and solidarity. The encouraging.

But to say that anyone counseling workers against violence and vandalism is doing the work of the police is wrong. I disagree with that.

You're reading so much into my statements. But there is a fine line between those who would offer advice and those who seek to manage struggle/cooperate with the state.

[Ele'ill]

You really think public opinion in Oakland is still with Occupy? Talk to people in Occupy Oakland, they will set you straight on that.

-M.H.-

This is pretty much what I was questioning


And managed to win the propaganda war over that with the populace of Oakland, due to anarchist ineptitude.
-M.H.-

[Ele'ill]

I can tell you, anecdotally, the following story:

This has been my experience too. All the while the news is saying how 'the populace' stands against disruption from 'trouble makers' while showing polls instead of the people throughout various neighborhoods joining marches, clapping, smiling, yelling at the cops and important brief interactions like in The Douche's situation. etc..

So is 'the populace' still caring about Occupy? Is anyone? What actually is Occupy at this point? I think much of the populace stands solidly behind action/change.

[Book O'Dead]

What actually is Occupy at this point?

For me it's an excellent slogan, pregnant with significance.

[The Douche]

Why are people even talking about occupy in the present tense? It's definitely dead.

[Book O'Dead]

Why are people even talking about occupy in the present tense? It's definitely dead.

To paraphrase Fidel Castro, if Jesus Christ died and resurrected after three days, why not Occupy?

[The Douche]

To paraphrase Fidel Castro, if Jesus Christ died and resurrected after three days, why not Occupy?

Cause occupy can't end state and capital?

[Manic Impressive]

I spoke to an occupy person for the first time a few weeks ago. I asked him what the goals were and what they had achieved. He said the point of occupy was to get people to talk about society and to share ideas about how to improve it. Well if that's the case then they succeeded and were actually very successful. It was never going to achieve anything other than that.

[Book O'Dead]

Cause occupy can't end state and capital?

You're right, but I still hold that the "Occupy" slogan can be useful toward those ends.

The concept is good if we can move it beyond its weak beginnings and misdirected application.

[The Jay]

I spoke to an occupy person for the first time a few weeks ago. I asked him what the goals were and what they had achieved. He said the point of occupy was to get people to talk about society and to share ideas about how to improve it. Well if that's the case then they succeeded and were actually very successful. It was never going to achieve anything other than that.


While that may have been true for some of the occupy camps and participants, that was not the case for all. I would even go so far as to say that the reason that it was only successful in "changing the conversation" is precisely because of those who were content to merely gather and talk. Talk is important, as is shifting the rhetoric in mainstream discourse; however, if it were not for such short-sighted goals and quitting while they were ahead the movement may have caused greater changes. I'm not saying that I'm Super-Activist or in charge of anyone, but that's my two cents. What do you think?

[Nox]

This is what happens with peaceful protests... They achieve nothing and eventually people get bored and give up.

[Rottenfruit]

Violence is the only way, pacfisim destroys social movements

The rerason occupy wall street failed is because the protesters held a pacfisit non violent coward stance and hence chaning nothing (what you think the ruling elite are goona change just because you are shouting in the street and camping in a tent)

[Book O'Dead]

While that may have been true for some of the occupy camps and participants, that was not the case for all. I would even go so far as to say that the reason that it was only successful in "changing the conversation" is precisely because of those who were content to merely gather and talk. Talk is important, as is shifting the rhetoric in mainstream discourse; however, if it were not for such short-sighted goals and quitting while they were ahead the movement may have caused greater changes. I'm not saying that I'm Super-Activist or in charge of anyone, but that's my two cents. What do you think?

In my locality the Occupy phenomenon was very visible and managed to gather many, many people (maybe I'll post some pics of the opening demonstration and march).

Subsequently, a well-organized group of socialists attempted to help out by offering onsite forums and discussions about the state of capitalism and the possibilities that Occupy represented.

I don't know to what extent they succeeded but i won't begrudge them their sincere effort and imagine that any any number of seeds planted will sprout the tree of liberty.

I'll concede that the Occupy movement--such as it was--has pretty much dissolved but I do insist that it was an interesting and worthwhile phenomenon, an experiment worth repeating.

[The Douche]

Worth repeating? Do you understand what you said? We need to move beyond occupy, not continue it...

[Book O'Dead]

Worth repeating? Do you understand what you said? We need to move beyond occupy, not continue it...

I agree but, like I said before, just the name alone implies so much that is positive for our side of the class struggle that to dismiss it as just another failed experiment is a mistake.

[The Douche]

I agree but, like I said before, just the name alone implies so much that is positive for our side of the class struggle that to dismiss it as just another failed experiment is a mistake.

I think you should take off those rose colored glasses man, you seem to be giving occupy more credit than it deserves.

[Ele'ill]

This is what happens with peaceful protests... They achieve nothing and eventually people get bored and give up.

It's not even about it staying 'peaceful' it's about nobody doing anything with a sense of urgency or whatever. There was never any escalation in peaceful tactics even while the state continued to up it's urgency/militancy/raids/attacks/smear campaigns as it will. It's safe to say that in most of the cities where occupy was present there wasn't actually any occupations in any meaningful sense of the word 'occupy'. Nothing ventured, like no attempts to try anything.

[Book O'Dead]

I think you should take off those rose colored glasses man, you seem to be giving occupy more credit than it deserves.

You just don't know how much you flatter me with the rose-colored remark.

In my private life I am so negative about everything that when someone tells me, as in this case, that I'm looking at things through too rosy a lens I get to thinking that there's still hope for me somewhere in this wild world.

[blake 3:17]

Re: Oakland - It's its own thing. Not representative of the whole.

As for the whole thing, it has had some amazing impact in a whole lot of different directions. It named the system and tens or hundreds of thousands of people participated in radical action. There's no reason that it needs to keep happening the way it was. The important thing was challenging class rule and trying to establish something better, mostly on a very local level.

The group I'm affiliated with participated in Occupy, provided material support for Occupy, and in terms of "intervention" (a term I like less and less) brought striking workers to Occupy and brought Occupy-ers to workers struggles.

[The Douche]

It named the system and tens or hundreds of thousands of people participated in radical action.

I've gotta disagree here. I did not see occupy, as a phenomenon (the most accurate way to describe it, since it was not really a coherent movement), clearly and without qualification name any of the systems which exploit and oppress us. Even now, with only the most dedicated of hangers-on still trying to breathe life back into it, I see no real clear declarations against capital, the bourgeois state, or its agents.

I also don't know what meets your criteria for "radical action" but permitted marches and chants of "whose streets/our streets" do not meet mine.


Occupy was a protest movement (which, right there, means its not going to overturn state and capital), it was the second major protest movement I got to participate in, and the third major one I was witness to. They will always come and go, the real task, moving forward, is to synthesize the lessons and bring them into future movements, including the one(s) which will eventually destroy the current social order.

[Workers-Control-Over-Prod]

I never had any kind of illusions that the Occupy movement was going to change anything. It has been the most important social movement in the last twenty years (at least) as it named the problem quite precisely: 99% versus 1%, and it has done this globally. There are protests now in Europe every single day, and i can attest that the Occupy movement which started in New York City and came to my hometown of Munich, has moved a lot. It was a catalyst for normal people to know that they are not alone in their opinion on the negativity of inequality. In Germany we have now weekly demonstrations of unions, and in southern Europe weekly strikes. Occupy has not only been the catalyst for global protest, but was a "sensation" in the media, pushed the left more towards the center of attention, where it needs to move towards. Only with more protests of the masses against inequality, against social cuts, against bank bailouts over the next months, can leftist organisations begin to see an opening for mass organisation.

[Ele'ill]

I've gotta disagree here. I did not see occupy, as a phenomenon (the most accurate way to describe it, since it was not really a coherent movement), clearly and without qualification name any of the systems which exploit and oppress us. Even now, with only the most dedicated of hangers-on still trying to breathe life back into it, I see no real clear declarations against capital, the bourgeois state, or its agents.

I also don't know what meets your criteria for "radical action" but permitted marches and chants of "whose streets/our streets" do not meet mine.


Occupy was a protest movement (which, right there, means its not going to overturn state and capital), it was the second major protest movement I got to participate in, and the third major one I was witness to. They will always come and go, the real task, moving forward, is to synthesize the lessons and bring them into future movements, including the one(s) which will eventually destroy the current social order.

I think Occupy on the West was different than on the East. There were plenty of radical actions carried out by radicals that left positive impressions among a lot of people who were not familiar with such actions. I'm not sure I follow you regarding what your vision is from a realistic goal kind of perspective.

[agnixie]

99% versus 1%

The problem is that it's not precise, it led to exactly the problems I was expecting when the person who thought of the slogan had the idea; i.e. it's almost as much of an arbitrary thing as income-level/home-ownership based class distinctions to make it look like everyone is part of that nebulous chimera that is the middle class. The only problem is that it's also an uphill battle if we were going to use any sort of vaguely communistic terminology.

[Workers-Control-Over-Prod]

The problem is that it's not precise, it led to exactly the problems I was expecting when the person who thought of the slogan had the idea; i.e. it's almost as much of an arbitrary thing as income-level/home-ownership based class distinctions to make it look like everyone is part of that nebulous chimera that is the middle class. The only problem is that it's also an uphill battle if we were going to use any sort of vaguely communistic terminology.

I disagree, what you are expecting can only come from already educated socialists explaining the root of inequality: autocratic relations of production. This needs to be educated, because capitalism is not such a transparent class system as others in history, the idea of surplus labor and surplus value needs to be educated.

[Os Cangaceiros]

I live somewhere small and isolated, so what I know of OWS can only be interpreted through what I saw in the media, both the large, corporate media, and the small, independent media. I remember my morale as a left-winger being reinvigorated at that time (by "that time", I mean from around October-December 2011). For once I could turn on the news and actually see the wealthy & powerful whining about how vilified they were! And how they actually needed to defend their obscene levels of wealth! Amazingly enough this was the first time I'd ever seen this.

That, along with the fact that 1) I had completely written off OWS the moment I'd heard of it on this site as being a short-lived liberal wankfest that would be immediately co-opted by MoveOn.org and the Democratic Party (and possibly some far-left activist groups) before going extinct, and 2) there were some inspiring actions at some OWS sites and OWS proved that it could spread internationally, made me have one of those rarest of moments, one of those moments when I actually felt good about being a leftist!

Now my inner leftist is back to the usual state: frusteration, depression, impotence and confusion. :cool:

[Le Socialiste]

Occupy was, for all intents and purposes, an uneven patchwork drawn largely from a profound feeling of loss and disenfranchisement; the immediacy (or lack thereof) of genuine means of organization could only, at the most basic level in which said activities occurred, achieve rudimentary forms of consciousness. To expect an immediate, conscious disruption of the interrelations inherent in capital after a period of liberal co-option and active defeatism is, put bluntly, borderline defeatist in and of itself. What Occupy did was highlight the difficulties in sustaining and developing any given movement without the proper organizational tools, including the necessity of those aware of the fundamentals to be on hand and present should situations arise. In the meantime our role isn't to sit idly on the sidelines, but to continue building off each successive rise as it peaks and passes. Movements come and go, each wave leaving more and more radicalized in its wake. Our immediate goal, then, isn't to lecture the people that they've yet to consciously dictate their opposition to private capital and its relations, nor is to divorce ourselves from any movement that doesn't immediately register the nature of its struggle. Prioritization lies in the building of organizations of and by those who are willing and capable of working through and alongside the common struggles of the proletariat, in high times and low. The latter is where our efforts are most applicable (and necessary!), bearing fruit in those times when the struggle is at its most militant.

[The Douche]

I think Occupy on the West was different than on the East. There were plenty of radical actions carried out by radicals that left positive impressions among a lot of people who were not familiar with such actions. I'm not sure I follow you regarding what your vision is from a realistic goal kind of perspective.

I didn't participate in occupy out here. I never disputed that radicals made some headway through occupy.

I'm opposed to protest movements in general, its not my bag. In a way they're positive, and in a way they're really negative.

I think occupy learned a thing or two from the anti-war movement (most of the large camps adopted diversity of tactics agreements, many of them made clear attempts to reject the democrats, quite a few had rules against police entering the space), but I think they also left glaring examples of things that still need to be learned.

[A Marxist Historian]

I can tell you, anecdotally, the following story:

I was in Oakland for may day. On the morning of the first me and my friends were following the marches from a distance, just trying to get a feel for how the day was gonna go. At one point the march stopped at a bank and things got a little tense with the police. We were on the other side of the street on the sidewalk, watching. When things seemed like they might jump off we put our masks on and continued to stand around on the periphery.

A middle aged white man in nice clothes, carrying a laptop bag stopped and looked at us, he turned to me and said he wanted to ask me a question. I nodded at him and he said "can you guys do me a favor and tone the violence down?". Meanwhile, right behind him stand dozens of police officers fully tooled up in riot gear, with lethal and non-lethal weapons, undercover officers and federal agents milled around taking pictures of people, and police helicopters lingered overhead. Yet, we were the violent ones. I promptly told him to fuck off before he found out about violence first hand.

Later that night, after having gone home and resting we were walking back out to OG plaza for the night marches and what not, a middle aged black lady walked out of the corner store in the neighborhood my friends live in (west oakland) and she looked at us, a group of people in their 20s in all black, and she knew what was up and who we were. Did she stop us to voice her concerns of our "violence"? Nope. Her eyes lit up, and a smile stretched across her face from ear to ear and she started shouting for us to "have a good time out there tonight" and for us to "fuck them pigs up" and "give them hell".



It is of little concern to me what people may or may not think about my actions. What I'm doing is right, and is necessary, and even if nobody agrees, I'm not going to be governed by them, its called fucking anarchy, bro.

Here is a quote which I find relevant in situations like this where people speak about broad support from the "masses" or whatever:

Sure. There are definitely people in Oakland who support Occupy 100% vs. the authorities, and I am one of them. In general, there are a lot of black people angry enough at the Oakland police to automatically support anyone who stands up to them.

But we were the majority at one point, and now we are not. Unfortunately.

-M.H.-

[The Douche]

Sure. There are definitely people in Oakland who support Occupy 100% vs. the authorities, and I am one of them. In general, there are a lot of black people angry enough at the Oakland police to automatically support anyone who stands up to them.

But we were the majority at one point, and now we are not. Unfortunately.

-M.H.-

I mean, protest movements have a shelf life. Where is the anti-war movement or the anti-globalization movement now?

Thats the problem with a politics of protest as opposed to a politics of insurgency or civil war or whatever.

[Ele'ill]

I mean, protest movements have a shelf life. Where is the anti-war movement or the anti-globalization movement now?

Thats the problem with a politics of protest as opposed to a politics of insurgency or civil war or whatever.

How do you see those other politics becoming relevant?

[Book O'Dead]

How do you see those other politics becoming relevant?

Good question.

[The Douche]

How do you see those other politics becoming relevant?

I think relevant is the wrong term to use. In one way, insurgent politics (or the politics of communism) are perpetually relevant, in that we (all animals and the planet on which we live) need communism in order to survive, and this makes protest politics relevant as well.

Its not about relevancy necessarily. I think what we're really getting at here is "how do we get more people to agree", and its this constant numbers game that we all play, the leninists chase numbers in party building and paper selling, and the anarchists chase numbers in how many people they can get to turn out to demos, events, and assemblies. Everybody is always after numbers.

Personally, I think thats a mistake. Of course we should make our ideas available and accessible, and we should make it easy for people to engage with them, and we should be quick to seize on opportunities to practice these ideas with any and all people. But that shouldn't necessarily be our main concern in my opinion.

Communism is not a project for mass society, communism rejects mass society.

I think I don't really have the answer you're looking for because I'm not thinking about the question you're posing, yet. I don't think we need to think about the mobilization of tens of thousands. I think we need to figure out how to organize our own communities, and organize them in a way that they are resilient to the attacks of the police, that they communicate effectively, that they can support each other, that they can attack and withdraw in unison etc.

[blake 3:17]

I think I don't really have the answer you're looking for because I'm not thinking about the question you're posing, yet. I don't think we need to think about the mobilization of tens of thousands. I think we need to figure out how to organize our own communities, and organize them in a way that they are resilient to the attacks of the police, that they communicate effectively, that they can support each other, that they can attack and withdraw in unison etc.

Wasn't that what Occupy was doing? I was super impressed with Occupy Toronto in that protest movement against social injustice and inequality also made camp for months, kept it clean and safe, negotiated with local residents, found political allies, fed itself, and broke the law without inviting a pounding from the cops?

Occupy had a positive presence in the last few mass demonstrations here. The left wing of the labour movement got a boost from it, and it helped spur the mass student strike in Quebec.

It also forced sections of the moderate Left into supporting certain types of direct action and civil disobedience which many of us have forgotten about.

[Ele'ill]

I think relevant is the wrong term to use. In one way, insurgent politics (or the politics of communism) are perpetually relevant, in that we (all animals and the planet on which we live) need communism in order to survive, and this makes protest politics relevant as well.

I meant relevant in the eyes of those who haven't yet discovered its utility from a tactical position.


Its not about relevancy necessarily. I think what we're really getting at here is "how do we get more people to agree", and its this constant numbers game that we all play, the leninists chase numbers in party building and paper selling, and the anarchists chase numbers in how many people they can get to turn out to demos, events, and assemblies. Everybody is always after numbers.

Personally, I think thats a mistake. Of course we should make our ideas available and accessible, and we should make it easy for people to engage with them, and we should be quick to seize on opportunities to practice these ideas with any and all people. But that shouldn't necessarily be our main concern in my opinion.

What should be our main concern?



Communism is not a project for mass society, communism rejects mass society.

I think I don't really have the answer you're looking for because I'm not thinking about the question you're posing, yet. I don't think we need to think about the mobilization of tens of thousands. I think we need to figure out how to organize our own communities, and organize them in a way that they are resilient to the attacks of the police, that they communicate effectively, that they can support each other, that they can attack and withdraw in unison etc.

Yup, getting those tens of thousands in twos and tens to start projects and network with others doing the same- after the big events. And that was done a bit here on the West and I think it's what made Occupy West a bit more radical.

[Rottenfruit]

In my locality the Occupy phenomenon was very visible and managed to gather many, many people (maybe I'll post some
I'll concede that the Occupy movement--such as it was--has pretty much dissolved but I do insist that it was an interesting and worthwhile phenomenon, an experiment worth repeating.

Waste of time to repeat the occupy movement, any movement that supports pacifisim is a waste of time to be involed because they will fail

Bombs and Guns work
Signs and flowers dont

[Lucretia]

Waste of time to repeat the occupy movement, any movement that supports pacifisim is a waste of time to be involed because they will fail

Bombs and Guns work
Signs and flowers dont

What a lot of overblown macho posturing. People won't know pacifism's limitations until they put it into practice. If anything, Occupy was productive for that reason alone. For a lot of people with certain naive conceptions about how social/political change works, the experience opened many eyes.

[Book O'Dead]

Waste of time to repeat the occupy movement, any movement that supports pacifisim is a waste of time to be involed because they will fail

Bombs and Guns work
Signs and flowers dont

So you agree with Osama Bin Laden and his ilk?

[RedHammer]

Waste of time to repeat the occupy movement, any movement that supports pacifisim is a waste of time to be involed because they will fail

Bombs and Guns work
Signs and flowers dont

Ideally, I would agree with you. But the United States is not quite yet at that point. Violence on the part of the Occupy movement at this point will only turn away people.

[cyu]

So you agree with Osama Bin Laden and his ilk?


Imagine the things you could do if you carried a gun and used it only to prevent bodily harm to yourself. You would certainly be able to do a lot more things than those without guns... whether it's picking up and eating an apple at a grocery store or wandering past a No Tresspassing sign to pick a flower.

...and the more people on your side that had guns, the less likely you would be overwhelmed.



Ideally, I would agree with you. But the United States is not quite yet at that point. Violence on the part of the Occupy movement at this point will only turn away people.


Is it violence when police officers carry guns? If not, then it is not violence when protestors carry guns. Is it violence when police officers shoot people that attack them? If not, then it is not violence when protestors shoot people that attack them.

If plutocrats send their minions at you with weapons, carrying similar weapons would only be fair.

Note, this is not the discussion to be had between leftists - instead, this is the argument that should be presented to the neutral.

[Book O'Dead]

Imagine the things you could do if you carried a gun and used it only to prevent bodily harm to yourself.

No need to imagine, just ask George Zimmerman.

[RedHammer]

No need to imagine, just ask George Zimmerman.
I'm guessing you're anti-gun, too? So you support Obama and are for gun control...

[Book O'Dead]

I'm guessing you're anti-gun, too? So you support Obama and are for gun control...

Actually, I'm not anti-gun, just pro-pen (as in "the pen is mightier than the sword").

[Ele'ill]

Actually, I'm not anti-gun, just pro-pen (as in "the pen is mightier than the sword").

This means absolutely nothing knock it off.

[A Marxist Historian]

Waste of time to repeat the occupy movement, any movement that supports pacifisim is a waste of time to be involed because they will fail

Bombs and Guns work
Signs and flowers dont

A totally false lesson to read from the disintegration of Occupy. The problem was that, as a movement of "the 99%," a social category that does not exist, which had no program and no base in the real lives of real working people other than spontaneous occupation of meaningless public squares, it could not be effective either with violent or nonviolent tactics.

What we need is a movement of the working class, not the "99%," starting at the point of production where the power of the workers resides, that if it wants to occupy something would occupy where they work, not public parks where they play.

But that requires dealing with the nitty-gritty reality of workers lives and organizations, which in America boils down to their trade unions, rotten as they are. Not leftover New Left fantasies of "horizontal democracy" out of thin air.

-M.H.-

[Book O'Dead]

This means absolutely nothing knock it off.

I guess it means more to you for someone to say that they prefer guns and bombs over "signs and flowers".

Where the fuck is your sense of perspective? And why am being targeted for trying to be rational in the face of dangerous, irrational statements?

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

The Occupy movement petered out because it was amorphous. I can't see that it was a bad thing, but it was terribly limited. The Rhapsodic responses by the reformist left was predictable and moderately nauseating. The revolutionaries that consistently criticized the limitations of the movement and tried to recruit people to a real Marxist program -- perhaps laying the groundwork for better things ahead -- they are on the right track.

[Raúl Duke]

In my local Occupy, there were two dimensions wherein one could find its problem and what lead to its demise.

An ideological one and a logistical one.

The logistical one is more important: Our Occupy had very little to barely any legal support. Thus, whatever one may think about pacifism, they couldn't even practice the most basic form of civil disobedience (as it was done back in the 60s by the Civil Rights movement). When the cops showed up, barely anyone stood their ground. They vacated, just as the cops told them too. Those who did risk arrests/fines were mostly alone due to no real group-level legal support. From what I heard, OWS in NYC doesn't have much of this problem due to having legal support from the NLG. The constant arrival of cops to fine/arrest people, the lack of legal support, etc made morale take a large plunge to the point where the local Occupy is mostly a pathetic shell of itself run by long-time activists types. Also the whole "the cops are our friends rhetoric" played a part of this morale plunge, in the face of negative cop reaction, it made the local chapter seem weak, pathetic, and naive/stupidly liberal.

Ideologically, Occupy became a magnet for all sorts of contradicting/opposing ideologies from liberal activists, progressive activists, Paultards, Venus Project people (who I believe were the ones who started the whole thing, and while they're quite idealist and somewhat liberal they're at least anti-capitalist to a degree), libertarians, etc.
The liberal activists and paultards inundated all the discourse/rhetoric in this local group thus making it hard to put across a radical anti-capitalist viewpoint.

Among my non-political/apolitical friends who participated in Occupy because either they were genuinely sick of the system or are just doing it because it was hip, it was somewhat easy to get a warm reception to anti-capitalist (and a bit anarchist, but I mostly focused on criticisms of the system rather than putting forward anarcho-communism) ideas.

The paultards and liberal activists types were more dogmatic and to discuss politics with since often they don't even want to discuss with you in good faith, all they do is shout or insinuate you're a crazy bomb-thrower who wants to kill cops indescrimately while they sleep and blow up banks when they're open with people in it, and since they dominated the discourse it would be quite hard for a radical anti-capitalist to get the floor in some discussion and put forward anti-capitalist statements, opinions, analysis without ridicule or being shouted down.

I mean, its quite fun and exciting to be politically involved with average and usually apolitical persons, especially my peers, but not so much to associate with Ron Paul libertarians, Alex Jones conspiracy theorists, and MoveOn.org liberal spineless activists. I would have a much easier time working with certain types Leninists than those people.

[Book O'Dead]

In my local Occupy, there were two dimensions wherein one could find its problem and what lead to its demise.

An ideological one and a logistical one.

The logistical one is more important: Our Occupy had very little to barely any legal support. Thus, whatever one may think about pacifism, they couldn't even practice the most basic form of civil disobedience (as it was done back in the 60s by the Civil Rights movement). When the cops showed up, barely anyone stood their ground. They vacated, just as the cops told them too. Those who did risk arrests/fines were mostly alone due to no real group-level legal support. From what I heard, OWS in NYC doesn't have much of this problem due to having legal support from the NLG. The constant arrival of cops to fine/arrest people, the lack of legal support, etc made morale take a large plunge to the point where the local Occupy is mostly a pathetic shell of itself run by long-time activists types. Also the whole "the cops are our friends rhetoric" played a part of this morale plunge, in the face of negative cop reaction, it made the local chapter seem weak, pathetic, and naive/stupidly liberal.

Ideologically, Occupy became a magnet for all sorts of contradicting/opposing ideologies from liberal activists, progressive activists, Paultards, Venus Project people (who I believe were the ones who started the whole thing, and while they're quite idealist and somewhat liberal they're at least anti-capitalist to a degree), libertarians, etc.
The liberal activists and paultards inundated all the discourse/rhetoric in this local group thus making it hard to put across a radical anti-capitalist viewpoint.

Among my non-political/apolitical friends who participated in Occupy because either they were genuinely sick of the system or are just doing it because it was hip, it was somewhat easy to get a warm reception to anti-capitalist (and a bit anarchist, but I mostly focused on criticisms of the system rather than putting forward anarcho-communism) ideas.

The paultards and liberal activists types were more dogmatic and to discuss politics with since often they don't even want to discuss with you in good faith, all they do is shout or insinuate you're a crazy bomb-thrower who wants to kill cops indescrimately while they sleep and blow up banks when they're open with people in it, and since they dominated the discourse it would be quite hard for a radical anti-capitalist to get the floor in some discussion and put forward anti-capitalist statements, opinions, analysis without ridicule or being shouted down.

I mean, its quite fun and exciting to be politically involved with average and usually apolitical persons, especially my peers, but not so much to associate with Ron Paul libertarians, Alex Jones conspiracy theorists, and MoveOn.org liberal spineless activists. I would have a much easier time working with certain types Leninists than those people.

A fair break down of Occupy in general, not just your locality.

[agnixie]

The logistical one is more important: Our Occupy had very little to barely any legal support. Thus, whatever one may think about pacifism, they couldn't even practice the most basic form of civil disobedience (as it was done back in the 60s by the Civil Rights movement). When the cops showed up, barely anyone stood their ground. They vacated, just as the cops told them too. Those who did risk arrests/fines were mostly alone due to no real group-level legal support. From what I heard, OWS in NYC doesn't have much of this problem due to having legal support from the NLG. The constant arrival of cops to fine/arrest people, the lack of legal support, etc made morale take a large plunge to the point where the local Occupy is mostly a pathetic shell of itself run by long-time activists types. Also the whole "the cops are our friends rhetoric" played a part of this morale plunge, in the face of negative cop reaction, it made the local chapter seem weak, pathetic, and naive/stupidly liberal.

I didn't go in the logistics angle because I felt it would be whining, considering I was in NYC which had the strongest financial support of the lot, but even in NYC, outside of legal support, doing anything was a nightmare. Between three or four organizers, we ended up having to decline various offers that could have seen to keeping tens of thousands fed for quite a while because there was no follow up once it reached the appropriate groups (or lck of facilities, or lack of people to staff the facilities, etc - this despite, as one guy I met in Baltimore said, hundreds of people lounging about all day around the camps). At the same time, finances was pissing cash at complete bullshit, for things I'm only partly aware of (despite rumors, however, we weren't paying rent for the offices, they were on loan from one of the conservative unions that backed us, I think SEIU). The truth is that logistics beyond legal support were an utter nightmare everywhere, and legal support was in most places. Vermont had the poorest (they even went so far as to refuse donations altogether once they had 10 grands in the bank for emergencies, giving people a list of NGOs they felt were more deserving of the effort) yet seemingly one of the best organized systems.



I mean, its quite fun and exciting to be politically involved with average and usually apolitical persons, especially my peers, but not so much to associate with Ron Paul libertarians, Alex Jones conspiracy theorists, and MoveOn.org liberal spineless activists. I would have a much easier time working with certain types Leninists than those people.

I was always saddened when I went to Zuccoti to see that my ban-on-sight policy only ever applied to the website. Yet it was worse in some places, the Norquist types managed to completely take over one of the southern occupations from what I heard, and some of the organizers had to have a few heart to heart conversations with democrat types who were trying to turn some of the southern occupations into bases for Democratic Party "occupy PACs". It just became that overwhelming concerted effort at some point, made worse by the approaching Wisconsin by-election.

[A Marxist Historian]

The Occupy movement petered out because it was amorphous. I can't see that it was a bad thing, but it was terribly limited. The Rhapsodic responses by the reformist left was predictable and moderately nauseating. The revolutionaries that consistently criticized the limitations of the movement and tried to recruit people to a real Marxist program -- perhaps laying the groundwork for better things ahead -- they are on the right track.

Oh, certainly it wasn't a "bad thing," it was a "good thing," for whatever that is worth, which at this point in the decline of society as capitalism decays, doesn't mean much.

I had hopes throughout that a left wing would develop with some clear understanding of the need to get beyond "99%" petty bourgeois populism and move towards Marxism and understanding the centrality of the working class. As far as I can tell, that never happened.

The left wing of Occupy, so strong out here on the West Coast, basically fell into anarchism and ended up in a stupid and unnecessary confrontation with union officialdom, in which the union officials naturally had the loyalty of the rank and file who elected them after all and didn't really know Occupy from a hole in the ground. I think the Seattle confrontation with the ILWU in January is what finally killed Occupy.

And I'm not defending the labor bureaucrats, they acted in a thoroughly predictable fashion. One might have expected better from radical Occupy activists (and from the ILWU activists who tried to use Occupy as an outside power base to give them muscle and rank and file support they didn't have within the ILWU itself.)

-M.H.-

[Ele'ill]

Found this relevant to this discussion

http://blackorchidcollective.wordpress.com/2012/08/02/between-the-leninists-and-the-clowns-avoiding-recklessness-and-professionalism-in-revolutionary-struggle/

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

Oh, certainly it wasn't a "bad thing," it was a "good thing," for whatever that is worth, which at this point in the decline of society as capitalism decays, doesn't mean much.

I had hopes throughout that a left wing would develop with some clear understanding of the need to get beyond "99%" petty bourgeois populism and move towards Marxism and understanding the centrality of the working class. As far as I can tell, that never happened.

The left wing of Occupy, so strong out here on the West Coast, basically fell into anarchism and ended up in a stupid and unnecessary confrontation with union officialdom, in which the union officials naturally had the loyalty of the rank and file who elected them after all and didn't really know Occupy from a hole in the ground. I think the Seattle confrontation with the ILWU in January is what finally killed Occupy.

And I'm not defending the labor bureaucrats, they acted in a thoroughly predictable fashion. One might have expected better from radical Occupy activists (and from the ILWU activists who tried to use Occupy as an outside power base to give them muscle and rank and file support they didn't have within the ILWU itself.)

-M.H.-

In future struggles/protests, what do you think the best strategy would be, to overcome the pro-capitalist union bureaucracy from the left, whilst at the same time not resorting to internal squabble/losing the outward message of the movement?

It seems as though the 'left' has run itself out of proper tactics, and thus once it gets into a decent position a la Occupy, doesn't quite know how to transition from 'protest' to 'struggle'.

[Ele'ill]

No more protests only actions.

[agnixie]

The Occupy movement petered out because it was amorphous. I can't see that it was a bad thing, but it was terribly limited. The Rhapsodic responses by the reformist left was predictable and moderately nauseating. The revolutionaries that consistently criticized the limitations of the movement and tried to recruit people to a real Marxist program -- perhaps laying the groundwork for better things ahead -- they are on the right track.

The only supposedly marxist program I saw offered was as annoyingly reformist as what everyone else proposed. Even the marxists and anarchists acted like liberals.

[A Marxist Historian]

In future struggles/protests, what do you think the best strategy would be, to overcome the pro-capitalist union bureaucracy from the left, whilst at the same time not resorting to internal squabble/losing the outward message of the movement?

It seems as though the 'left' has run itself out of proper tactics, and thus once it gets into a decent position a la Occupy, doesn't quite know how to transition from 'protest' to 'struggle'.

The right strategy is to undertake the hard work of working within the unions to organize a rank and file opposition on a revolutionary socialist program. And of course to participate in the struggles of other oppressed peoples, especially black people, in America, and link the struggles of minority communities against racial oppression in this deeply racist country to labor struggles.

To do all this, of course the first thing you need is a genuine working class revolutionary party, something definitely lacking in America, and in the world too.

And that is why Occupy Oakland went so much further than Occupy anywhere else, and indeed, unlike elsewhere, still exists. Because in Oakland you had the linkup between the radical traditions of the ILWU and the heritage of the Black Panthers, the Oscar Grant rebellion of just a few years ago, and so forth.

So that's what made the Oakland port shutdown, unquestionably the high point of Occupy, possible.

But the fact remains that most Occupy activists had barely heard of unions before Occupy exploded, were mostly from either a petty bourgeois student background (or lumpen, all the homeless who joined Occupy), and basically shared common American anti-union prejudices, expressed in anarchist form by the very most radical Occupy folk, the Black Orchid people up in the Pacific Northwest, who Obama is now going after (and we should all defend them, whatever we think of their ideas).

So even Oakland by and large fizzled.

Anyway, this all could be a great learning experience for all the new people momentarily drawn into the movement. But I'm not sure to what extent it was, as all too many folk have drawn the wrong lessons or just got demoralized.

By the way, there's a very interesting video documentary about Oakland Occupy, "Occupy the Bay," that is having its first showing tomorrow night at 7 at the Berkeley Unitarian Fellowship. Folk in the Bay Area will want to check it out.

http://www.facebook.com/LongMemoryProductions

-M.H.-

[The_Red_Spark]

The biggest mistake was made before any protest even began. That was the decision to begin an attempt to occupy in the early fall leaving only a month or two before the onset of winter. This was a fatal flaw. Had the decision been made to organize a huge push on Mayday, beginning the planning phase in October, it would have had a much different impact. Instead it was rather spontaneous and disorganized. Had the occupy movement began in May they would have gained momentum as students returned home from school. They would have had 5-6 months of good weather to make an impact. Instead it petered out in December.

The more disturbing fact is that the Socialists and others were not prepared to exploit this opportunity. It was an opportunity we were totally unprepared for due to being disorganized and splintered up into a thousand tiny factions. Opportunity is fleeting and we must be ready for sudden spontaneous outbreaks and be ready to capitalize on them. We failed as much as the Occupy movement.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

No more protests only actions.

Protest leads to action, surely? Or rather, action is born out of protest..!

[The_Red_Spark]

Protest leads to action, surely? Or rather, action is born out of protest..!
I think that you are right. I think this is all part of the process that builds and progresses into bigger and more effectual things. Revolutions come about as tensions rise and rise and build until they explode. Failed electoral processes, ineffectual protests, and most importantly governmental crack downs are all necessary steps that lead to taking concrete action.

It is like a pot of boiling water as it goes through its various stages. It has to start with little beads of air around the bottom of the pot and then it begins to simmer, until it finally starts to boil. It eventually boils over but it must go through its process before it can boil over and extinguish the flame that made it boil in the first place. At this moment it is simmering but it could begin to boil at any moment if the right historical conditions are present among society. People feel there is no effective avenue to address their grievances at the moment but this too is a necessary precondition.

I believe the election will bring about the boiling of the water in the pot and that protests will make it boil even more intensely as austerity measures are introduced that devastate the working class. All that it may take from there is a police action that is brutal and galvanizing and it will boil over into the stove. We must be prepared to meet the historical conditions of the times and this requires more sophisticated organization and a planned response so that if protests begin we can take advantage of this rise in class consciousness and shape and direct its growth. Such a scenario would give us a chance to reach out to the proletariat in ways that were previously impossible.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

The protest is the economic struggle, the action the political struggle. I don't think either are mutually exclusive. At least, not a genuinely proletarian political struggle, since surely the only way the working class achieve a revolutionary consciousness is through economic struggle, not mere ideology.

Either way, I don't wanna ramble any more off topic stuff so i'mma leave it at that.

[bcbm]

i think they meant we should stop making demands to those in power and marching around or setting up camp begging them to do stuff they wont/cant and instead start relying on ourselves and just doing what we need to do. dont beg for the right to live take it! or whatever

[Ele'ill]

Protest leads to action, surely? Or rather, action is born out of protest..!

People think protest is action. Protest leads to more protest because let's be totally honest complaining can be really fun. Protesting is walking up to someone who doesn't give a fuck like your boss and saying I need a raise. Steal their car or at least their favorite pen.





I think that you are right. I think this is all part of the process that builds and progresses into bigger and more effectual things. Revolutions come about as tensions rise and rise and build until they explode. Failed electoral processes, ineffectual protests, and most importantly governmental crack downs are all necessary steps that lead to taking concrete action.

Or they rise and rise until people protest.


It is like a pot of boiling water as it goes through its various stages. It has to start with little beads of air around the bottom of the pot and then it begins to simmer, until it finally starts to boil. It eventually boils over but it must go through its process before it can boil over and extinguish the flame that made it boil in the first place. At this moment it is simmering but it could begin to boil at any moment if the right historical conditions are present among society. People feel there is no effective avenue to address their grievances at the moment but this too is a necessary precondition.

I believe the election will bring about the boiling of the water in the pot and that protests will make it boil even more intensely as austerity measures are introduced that devastate the working class. All that it may take from there is a police action that is brutal and galvanizing and it will boil over into the stove. We must be prepared to meet the historical conditions of the times and this requires more sophisticated organization and a planned response so that if protests begin we can take advantage of this rise in class consciousness and shape and direct its growth. Such a scenario would give us a chance to reach out to the proletariat in ways that were previously impossible.

I talked to someone once about work place organizing, unionizing, and they weren't interested but they then told me about their crazy weekend where they shot a cop car with a firework mortar.

[citizen of industry]

I talked to someone once about work place organizing, unionizing, and they weren't interested but they then told me about their crazy weekend where they shot a cop car with a firework mortar.

Average cost of a cop car: $30,000

Losses incurred by a 24-hour 2012 general strike in Spain: $4,900,000,000
http://t1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQ0BD3gDPT57fFvusUMFYlIuuBjDIbnu MqcLh84kwy3DDbZBWZzTQ
Spain - General Strike

How many cop cars destroyed in Spain? Good question.

Protest actions have little effect on capital, but they are fun and help hold organizations together.

[bcbm]

http://t1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQ0BD3gDPT57fFvusUMFYlIuuBjDIbnu MqcLh84kwy3DDbZBWZzTQ
.

for some of us the small victories still matter

[Ele'ill]

Average cost of a cop car: $30,000

Losses incurred by a 24-hour 2012 general strike in Spain: $4,900,000,000
http://t1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQ0BD3gDPT57fFvusUMFYlIuuBjDIbnu MqcLh84kwy3DDbZBWZzTQ
Spain - General Strike

How many cop cars destroyed in Spain? Good question.

Protest actions have little effect on capital, but they are fun and help hold organizations together.


What is your point?

[Raúl Duke]

I think Siembra Socialismo was agreeing with you, that workplace organizing/actions (like general strikes), are more effective even in the "straining the state's budget and/or fucking shit up" department rather than one-time "light a cop car on fire"-type actions like the firework mortar thing you mention.

[Die Neue Zeit]

It seems as though the 'left' has run itself out of proper tactics, and thus once it gets into a decent position a la Occupy, doesn't quite know how to transition from 'protest' to 'struggle'.

Class struggle and social revolution must be programmed. The bigger picture needs to be discussed, but the underlying components that make the bigger picture must be emphasized, too. Underlying the wealth gaps are subjects like precarity, consumer debts, real wage depression, etc.


The protest is the economic struggle, the action the political struggle. I don't think either are mutually exclusive. At least, not a genuinely proletarian political struggle, since surely the only way the working class achieve a revolutionary consciousness is through economic struggle, not mere ideology.

Either way, I don't wanna ramble any more off topic stuff so i'mma leave it at that.

WTF???

The protest is more political than most strike action could ever be, and you just asserted economism by saying that economic struggle drives consciousness.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

People think protest is action. Protest leads to more protest because let's be totally honest complaining can be really fun. Protesting is walking up to someone who doesn't give a fuck like your boss and saying I need a raise. Steal their car or at least their favorite pen.



I think there are some left groups that like protesting, and doing some more protesting, and some more.

But the un-conscious or newly class conscious elements of the working class, you cannot expect them to go from being subordinated members of the unconscious working class to politically conscious radicals in one step. A lot of people I have spoken to often point to a protest or demo as the point that radicalised them. I think protests are a natural stepping stone to concrete political action - the political struggle is born out of the economic struggle.

[Ele'ill]

I think Siembra Socialismo was agreeing with you, that workplace organizing/actions (like general strikes), are more effective even in the "straining the state's budget and/or fucking shit up" department rather than one-time "light a cop car on fire"-type actions like the firework mortar thing you mention.

I don't think that's really agreeing with me because I was comparing protest culture to action but 3-4 people can't be a general strike although they can carry out other actions as well as participate in a general strike. The firework mortar thing was a conversation I had a long time ago with someone who I wouldn't consider to be a radical.

[cyu]

What we need is a movement of the working class, starting at the point of production where the power of the workers resides, that if it wants to occupy something would occupy where they work, not public parks where they play.


Agreed, but not just that, but local media outlets as well. When the powers-that-be want to squash a movement, they always turn to the media first before turning to the guns. Without their propaganda, they would not be able to rally enough support for when they send in the guns.

We all know there will be sympathizers in the media, but as they are structured, each employee can have his life destroyed by someone higher up in the corporation and a closer sympathizer with the 1%. You never know if they will ever overcome their fear of losing their livelihood, so you have to take control yourselves.

But as the media are occupied, you can bet you'll be in for the fight of your lives. Parks, streets, and squares are nothing - capitalists don't need them to impose control. The mass media is a different story - you can bet their anti-occupy propaganda would ratchet up to near shrill levels as it happens, so you'll need to be prepared.

[Le Socialiste]

It seems as though the 'left' has run itself out of proper tactics, and thus once it gets into a decent position a la Occupy, doesn't quite know how to transition from 'protest' to 'struggle'.

Not necessarily. The problem facing the 'left' has less to do with the amount (or lack of) tactics used, but the sheer level of disorganization plaguing existing organizations for the last 20-30 years as a result of continual onslaughts from the right and a general degeneracy into irrelevance (brought on in part by everything from poor politics to unabashed sectarianism). The left will remain on people's mental wayside so long as it refuses to acknowledge where it is and how it arrived there. Our task involves rebuilding the revolutionary left into a major, influential force in both the "quiet times" and the "loud" ones. Inroads cannot be made unless we undertake the monumental process of building up sound theoretical and organizational bodies capable of putting its ideas into practice, as opposed to mere "talk shops" with little to no ties with the organic movements of the working-class. This involves building up the branch, the study group, and a variety of other key essentials necessary for creating a sustainable and growing presence in one's locality, with the intent of linking up with others to create a vast, interconnected network. It entails putting oneself and one's comrades out there, talking to people, which is and can be a scary thing for some.

Occupy highlighted the core weaknesses of the left in responding to moments of heightened struggle, revealing the extent of its disorganization while showing how necessary it is for the left to tackle this question head on. I'll tack on more when I have time, I have somewhere I need to be right now.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

Class struggle and social revolution must be programmed. The bigger picture needs to be discussed, but the underlying components that make the bigger picture must be emphasized, too. Underlying the wealth gaps are subjects like precarity, consumer debts, real wage depression, etc.

No, precarity, debt and wage depression are effects of class struggle, they don't underly it nor the wealth gap. You can still have a huge wealth gap in a zero debt [saving-fuelled investment], two-class society [no precariat] with high real wages [low inflation]. It's called Keynesianism and it was 'just as Capitalist' as the neo-liberal variant that exists today. The position of class forces hasn't changed.

How can class struggle be programmed? That's bollocks. We don't even know the material conditions in which a possible revolution may occur, nor when it will occur, nor where it will erupt first. How can we programme that? Pure spontaneity is a cop out, but neither can you pre-programme a revolutionary rupture in the systemic social fabric of society.


WTF???

The protest is more political than most strike action could ever be, and you just asserted economism by saying that economic struggle drives consciousness.

Erm. The protest is the economic struggle? The strike is a political action, a political struggle. The former is economistic and defensive, the latter political, conscious, demanding and offensive. The economic struggle drives consciousness insofar as it is necessary - along with political struggle - for a revolutionary situation to occur via the building of class consciousness amongst the proletariat.

[Fourth Internationalist]

Maybe if Occupy looked more organized and sophisticated it would not have failed.

[Igor]

Maybe if Occupy looked more organized and sophisticated it would not have failed.

What exactly do you mean by "sophisticated"?

[Fourth Internationalist]

I'm guessing you're anti-gun, too? So you support Obama and are for gun control...

The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Viloence gave a Obama a failing report card for gun control.

FactCheck says Obama has done little to promote gun control.

"In this country, we have a strong tradition of gun ownership that's handed from generation to generation. Hunting and shooting are part of our national heritage. And, in fact, my administration has not curtailed the rights of gun owners -- it has expanded them, including allowing people to carry their guns in national parks and wildlife refuges." - Obama

[Fourth Internationalist]

What exactly do you mean by "sophisticated"?

so·phis·ti·cat·ed**
/səˈfistiˌkātid/
Adjective
(of a machine, system, or technique) Developed to a high degree of complexity.
(of a person or their thoughts, reactions, and understanding) Aware of and able to interpret complex issues; subtle.
Synonyms
refined

[A Marxist Historian]

so·phis·ti·cat·ed**
/səˈfistiˌkātid/
Adjective
(of a machine, system, or technique) Developed to a high degree of complexity.
(of a person or their thoughts, reactions, and understanding) Aware of and able to interpret complex issues; subtle.
Synonyms
refined

Doesn't answer the question. Would it be better if the Occupy movement had a better ability to interpret complex issues? That depends on whether the interpretation is a good or a bad one. A sophisticated but wrong interpretation is worse than none at all. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

And the number of sophisticated but misleading and false interpretations descending on the Occupy movement has been countless. Indeed, we've seen quite a few here on Revleft.

-M.H.-

[cyu]

Maybe if Occupy looked more organized and sophisticated

"looked" is the key word here. Who in society decides how people look? From what viewpoint do we see things when we're not personally there?

How the same thing "looks" on Fox News can be expected to look quite different from, say, Democracy Now or Hard Knock Radio.

[Ele'ill]

Maybe if Occupy looked more organized and sophisticated it would not have failed.


A reason Occupy failed and most of the reasons it almost failed building up to it's peak was because of attempts by people/groups to make it 'organized and sophisticated' because 'organized and sophisticated' is a very specific thing.

[Aristophenes McTwitch]

I imagine destroying police vehicles doesn't accomplish much, since police are seen as a must by the capitalist power structure, so they'll probably just take it out of an educational budget or something that could've been earmarked for something more important.

You really can't fight the law and win. You can gain against the police, but you can never actually win since they'll find some way to punish society regardless.

[white picket fence]

the "nuts" factor was largely underreported, this over-simplified ridiculous sense of inclusivity, and a lack of self-discipline as a group prevented anyone from dealing from being able to deal with the problem in a productive way.

the chaotic atmosphere of every camp didn't help, with every group proclaiming their inalienable right to protest in their own way, all the drum circles, white rastas, pot activists, various subcultures and a dj perpetually blasting noise into every encampment and you have a carnival and nothing else.

[Paul Cockshott]

you can fight the law and win with enough support.

[cyu]

you can fight the law and win with enough support.


...and plenty of revolutions have proved you right - as they say, revolution is not a crime if the government is overthrown =]

(Never expected to upvote you BTW ;)