“El templo de la perspectiva” de Tom Greenall y Jordan Hodgson. Es una representación artística de la historia de nuestro planeta y nuestro lugar en ello (en un pilar de capas) construido como monumento visual. Una exploración secular del significado, contexto y reverencia.
“La audiencia que necesitamos es descubierta a través de medios sociales y culturales, no simplemente atraída con palabras.”
“Como señalara Lenin: el oprimido que se levanta demanda saber cómo vivir, y cómo morir (no sólo qué creer).”
“La gente necesita expresiones ínter-humanas vivas; expresiones sobre la concepción del mundo y la moralidad que sean más que simples catálogos sobre visión del mundo y moralidad.”
Siempre me he sentido frustrado con el presupuesto que podemos atraer gentes hacia la política revolucionaria principalmente “explicándolo” todo —como si, de repente, las personas adquirieran consciencia, militancia, y determinación en la lucha por una nueva sociedad, en gran parte porque se les diga una serie de explicaciones respaldadas por elaboradas estructuras de análisis. Yo he llamado este problema “el fetiche de la palabra”. Un nombre más formal (si necesitáramos otra etiqueta) pudiera ser racionalismo.
Entretanto vemos, tanto en la sociedad como en política a nuestro alrededor, sugerencias de que las “explicaciones,” incluso detalladas y correctas, no son suficientes —y vemos con frecuencia gentes quienes son atraídas a políticas bastante irracionales a través de poderosos medios simbólicos.
Podemos trazar el surgimiento y caída de la fantástica, extravagante, política de Louis Farrakhan —la cual combina el completamente engañoso misticismo con visceral llamado al auto respeto, superación personal, orgullo y mordaz enajenación política.
O podemos ver a grandes secciones del pueblo emergiendo a la vida política durante esta Primavera Árabe, liberándose de décadas de represión y, en su mayor parte, atraídos en primera instancia por la profunda resonancia de “¡Allahu Akbar!” y la ingenua esperanza en la justicia de la ley Shariah.
From their self-description: FIRE NEXT TIME is a revolutionary network on the East Coast of the United States. We believe our central task is to seek out the revolutionary elements of people’s everyday experiences, to support and push this self-activity in ever more radical directions. At the same time, we must ruthlessly critique everything that holds it back: both the racist, sexist, reactionary elements within it, and the liberals and self-appointed leaders who co-opt it, such as politicians, nonprofit staff, and union bureaucrats.
Kasama is posting this in the hopes of sparking off a discussion on the points below.
TEN THESES ON THE U.S. RACIAL ORDER
The following theses are an attempt to understand how the U.S. racial order has changed in recent decades, how it is working at the moment, and what forces may exist in U.S. society today that could destroy capitalism and white supremacy.
1.
The impact of the civil rights and Black Power movements domestically, and the defeat of traditional European colonialism internationally, have shaken the national racial order more profoundly than any event since the Civil War, and the global racial order more profoundly than any event since the Haitian Revolution.
2.
The dismantling of legal segregation after 1954 allowed a small but ideologically significant layer of blacks to enter the non-segregated bourgeoisie and upper middle class, to live, work and learn in the same places as so-called whites. Shortly thereafter, the rise of neoliberalism and deindustrialization destroyed the livelihoods of many working class blacks, and doomed millions to impoverishment and prison. The recent economic crisis has cemented this trend by decimating the black housing base, and cutting the public sector jobs on which many black households rely. Thus the “black community” today is more profoundly split by class differentiation than at any time in its history. Some blacks have “made it” into bourgeois and upper middle class institutions, where they encounter the prejudices of individual whites, but the majority remain structurally barred from even entering these arenas by the police, prison, housing, education and welfare systems.
How will we find and connect with those looking for revolutionary politics? Who are they? And what draws them toward communism? (photo: JB Connors)
By Mike Ely
Intro (October 2012)
We need a communist beginning — including both new regroupment among communists and a process of fusion with a potentially partisan section of the people.
And for that, we need the kinds of discussions that have been going on: of where to begin and what to do when we get there.
What is communist political work? What does it look like? How is it different from other familiar forms of trade unionist or left activism?
Whenever such moments have arisen, in the history of modern politics, there has been a view that we go to the workers, and assist them in the struggles they are already waging, and that out of that we would help sum up the lessons of that struggle (which, presumably, will lead to revolutionary conclusions). The arguments for this are often unarticulated and assumed. But when they come out there are often common themes:
That struggle at the point of production inherently and naturally raises questions about exploitation and surplus value,
That communist ideas are inherently present (in embryo) whenever people rise in struggle,
That people themselves can spontaneously develop the ideas they need for self-liberation, or that they will relatively easily recognize those ideas when offered them in an accessible popular format.
And in contrast to this, is a set of contrary ideas:
That political struggle (over social power, racism, equality, war, macro-policy in society) is a better arena for the development of revolutionary consciousness than the economic struggle of workers in the workplace.
That there are a significant body of ideas that must be made available to oppressed people “from without” — i.e. from outside their own experiences and struggles, meaning: from the study of history, politics, military affairs, economics, and from the world experience of communist movements.
That economic struggle is often an important and necessary arena of working class class struggle. And that upsurges (like the 1960s farmworkers, or the 1970s coalminers, or the more recent breakouts of immigrant meatpackers) are an important site for communist work and solidarity. But that economic struggle is not automatically the arena best suited for developing class consciousness (i.e. the consciousness of the need for a new society and the potential working class role in that). In great upsurges of the past (say 1905 in Russia), the political struggle (over power) has often given rise to political consciousness, while mass economic struggle around collective self-interest has often been a way of drawing in the unawakened and intermediate sections of the workers.
That there needs to be all-round communist work, which is not limited to organizing existing struggles or making such struggles larger and more militant. That all-round work includes participating in key struggles of the people, but also leading — by putting forward specific programmatic (and tactical) approaches based on a revolutionary perspective. And it involves the work of developing historical summations, lively media projects, news analysis from revolutionary point of view, art, theoretical explorations, schools of cadre, durable structures of revolutionary organization, cores of trained accountable leaders and much more.
This was posted on the LA Review of Books website. H/T to J. Ramsey for the reference.
Unlike most of his contemporaries, Badiou has the virtue at least of examining riots from a strategic rather than a moral perspective, and spying something within them other than a maddened reenactment of capitalist consumption. …[H]e takes the riot as something more than a manifestation of “culture,” more than an expression of an underlying social truth which it cannot help but affirm, for all its burned cars and looted shops. The questions which Badiou hears uttered by the Sphinx of riot are the correct ones: How do we generalize and extend the offensive capacity of the riot? How and why do riots spread and become open insurrection?
History and the Sphinx: Of Riots and Uprisings
by Jasper Bernes and Joshua Clover
1.
Riots are the Sphinx of the left. Every soi disant radical intellectual feels compelled, it seems, to answer the riddle they hear posed by the riots of the present, in Bahrain or Asturias, Chile or Britain: Why now? Why here? Why riot? These answers generally come in a few simple varieties. First, if the riot seems to lack focus or present clears demands – that is, if it is illegible as “protest,” as in the case of the London riots of summer 2011 – the intellectual will paint them as a “meaningless outburst” (Slavoj Žižek), undertaken by “mindless rioters” (David Harvey). Invariably, attributions of unmeaning must find support in patronizing sociology, rendering the rioters mere side-effects of an unequal society, symptoms of neoliberalism, capitalist crisis and the ensuing austerity. Frequently, such commentary adheres to the flinching rhetorical structure of “yes, but…” In the words of Tariq Ali from the London Review of Books:Yes, we know violence on the streets in London is bad. Yes, we know that looting shops is wrong.
How Occupy Wall Street is re-centering the economy is an open, fluid, changing, and intensely debated question. It’s not a traditional movement of the working class organized in trade unions or targeting work places, although it is a movement of class struggle (especially when we recognize with Marx and Engels that the working class is not a fixed, empirical class but a fluid, changing class of those who have to sell their labor power in order to survive). Occupy’s use of strikes and occupations targets the capitalist system more broadly, from interrupting moves to privatize public schools to shutting down ports and stock exchanges (I think of the initial shut downs in Oakland and on Wall Street as proof of concepts, proof that it can be done). People aren’t being mobilized as workers; they are being mobilized as people, as everybody else, as the rest of us, as the majority—99%–who are being thoroughly screwed by the top one percent in education, health, food, the environment, housing, and work.
Occupation as Political Form
by Jodi Dean
Editor’s Note: Jodi Dean presented the following text as a keynote lecture for the 2012 iteration of Transmediale, an annual new media festival in Berlin. The theme of the 2012 festival was “In/compatibility…the condition that arises when things do not work together.” The section of the festival at which the author presented was titled “Incompatible Publics.” 1 The discussion that followed Dean’s lecture was moderated by Krystian Woznicki2 —the text of the discussion is included below. –MW
I’m going to talk today about Occupy Wall Street in light of our theme of incompatible publics. I claim that the occupation is best understood as a political form of the incompatibility between capitalism and the people. To call it a political form is to say that it is configured within a particular social-historical setting. To call it a political form of the incompatibility between capitalism and the people is to say that it has a fundamental content and that this content consists in the failure of capitalism to provide an economic system adequate to the capacities, needs, demands, and general will of the people. More bluntly put, to think about the Occupy movement in light of the idea of incompatible publics is to locate the truth of the movement in class struggle (and thus reject interpretations of the movement that highlight multiplicity, democracy, and anarchism—autonomism). So that’s what I hope to convince you of today.
The problem that cuts through all the objections to demands is the movement’s inability to deal with antagonism. So the very question of demands brings to the fore the fact of division within the movement, a division that many—but not all—have wanted to deny.
Fortunately, the truths animating each of the objections suggest a way forward. In order to metamorphose from a protest movement into a revolutionary movement, Occupy will have to acknowledge division, build alternative practices and organizations, and assert a commonality.
A Movement Without Demands?
by Marco Deseriis and Jodi Dean
The question of demands infused the initial weeks and months of Occupy Wall Street with the endless opening of desire. Nearly unbearable, the absence of demands concentrated interest, fear, expectation, and hope in the movement. What did they want? What could they want? Commentators have been nearly hysterical in their demand for demands: somebody has got to say what Occupy Wall Street wants! In part because of the excitement accumulating around the gap the movement opened up in the deadlocked US political scene—having done the impossible in creating a new political force it seemed as if the movement might even demand the impossible—many of those in and around Occupy Wall Street have also treated the absence of demands as a benefit, a strength. Commentators and protesters alike thus give the impression that the movement’s inability to agree upon demands and a shared political line is a conscious choice.
Anyone who is familiar with the internal dynamics of the movement knows that this is not the case. Even if some occupations have released lists of demands, the entire question is bitterly contested in New York, where only independent organizations such as labor unions have released their own demands. In this essay, we claim that far from being a strength, the lack of demands reflects the weak ideological core of the movement. We also claim that demands should not be approached tactically but strategically, that is, they should be grounded in a long-term view of the political goals of the movement, a view that is currently lacking. Accordingly, in the second part of this text, we argue that this strategic view should be grounded in a politics of the commons. Before addressing the politics of the commons, however, we dispel three common objections that are raised against demands during general assemblies, meetings, and conversations people have about the Occupy movement.
These changes have been driven by two chief things: capitalist accumulation and the desire to expand into the public education sector, but also white supremacy and the restructuring of state power to manage poor Black and Brown people in the city in a manner that most benefits the political and economic power structure of “global Chicago.” This is a fundamental dimension of the larger structural crisis of capitalism: how do you deal with a kind of surplus humanity? It’s not just keeping wages down anymore but it is actually something that is a real political problem for the ruling class. So I think the destruction of public housing, and public schools even more so, has been key to that.
What’s behind the attack on teachers and public education?
by Peter Brogan
Editor’s Introduction: On September 9, 2012, a day before the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) went on strike, Peter Brogan gave a talk in Chicago on the political and economic reasons underlying the attacks on public education and teachers in the United States. The following is an edited transcription of his talk.
Some of the question I want to address today include: Why is Rahm Emanuel attacking the Chicago Teachers Union? Why is it so important for Emanuel and his supporters to break the CTU at this moment? Why are attacks on teachers and their unions at the center of both the Democratic and Republican Party’s political agenda? Why are both parties in such staunch agreement on the “education reform” agenda, which is fundamentally about dismantling the institution of public education, replacing it with a hybrid, largely privatized and corporate form? Why is the attack on public education so fundamental, not just for the right wing, but actually for the broader ruling class, in this country and globally?Hence the fieldwork that I’ve been doing in Chicago is part of a comparative study of Chicago and New York that looks at transformations in urban space and capitalism, and is really trying to understand the problem of why the dismantling of public education and the creation of a privatized, corporatized education is really central to the larger transformations in the global political economy.
Rita Stephanie — an inspiring teacher, and a dedicated revolutionary organizer– has been giving Kasama day by day reports — on the actions and mood among the teachers. Now the authorities are trying to press through a compromise agreement, and have manufactured outrage that the teachers chose not to immediately grab the deal and rush back to work. Instead they want to study it, consult with each others, think it over, and weigh their options — all while the Democratic City Hall of Rahm Emmanual threatens to criminalize their strike itself.
by Rita Stephanie
Here we go: Week two.
I was anxious to get to the picket at 7:30 this morning. I know that many of my fellow teachers will be disappointed that we are not back in school today. Many of us are both teachers and parents.
Last night when the news became clear that we were going to be out on strike until at least Wednesday I witnessed first-hand the disappointment and frustration of my own child—a CPS student.
“I support the strike, but why can’t you go back while they finish the contract so that we can get back to school.”
This is a mass, class conscious movement, not merely for wages, benefits, and working conditions, but against the combined powers of a united ruling class (the rich, their political poodles from both parties and all their weapons–courts, cops, deceit, hunger and more). This ruling class finalized the emergence of a corporate state, fascism, with the bank and auto bailouts, setting in motion new circumstances which must set up interrogation of strike tactics and strategies–but also grand strategy. In the long run, for what?
Chicago: the Strike is On
By Rich Gibson
The Chicago school workers’ strike is on. It is a real class war that must be won.
Enrolling about 400,000 students, with about 22,000 school workers, Chicago is the third largest district in the country, segregated as it may be. Chicago schools are the centripetal organizing point of city life–as is true now of most of de-industrialized North American life.
The Chicago Teachers Union is Local One, the first, of the American Federation of Teachers, the smaller and more urban of U.S. teacher unions.
On August 31 six Occupy activists were convicted of criminal trespass after a four-day jury trial Seattle Municipal Court. They were accused of participating in an act of civil disobedience demanding the resignation of Seattle police chief John Diaz – a man notorious for ordering violent attack on Occupy Seattle and for the daily police brutality against the people.
One person was sentenced after the trial — to 2 years probation and community service.
A sentencing hearing for the other five people will be held on September 20 in Seattle.
One of the accused was convicted on an additional charge of “obstruction of a public official.”
The five people now facing sentencing are Liam Wright, Blake, Danielle, Bryce Phillips, and Miles Partman. Two are supporters of Seattle’s Red Spark collective and the national Kasama network. Two were part of the Chase 5.
A seventh defendant received a mistrial – but may now face a new prosecution on this charge.
Opposing police brutality and repression
What were these seven people being criminalized for?
For being active participants in the Occupy Seattle campaign to force the resignation of John Diaz, Chief of the Seattle Police Department, as well as the prosecution of all officers found to be repeatedly engaged in misconduct.
After years in which people on the streets of Seattle had been brutalized in racist and well-documented ways, Occupy Seattle was then targeted with outrageous police violence.
In regard to the political system as a whole, these movements are exercising – and that is perhaps all they can do at present – what Colectivo Situaciones have called poder destituyente, de-instituent power. They undoubtedly also possess a constituent power whose future and direction is as yet impossible to predict. It may result in new political forms, new mechanisms of representation, new institutions or, at the very least, new organisations. It may result in all of those at once, as was the case in Bolivia in the aftermath of neoliberal crisis. But right now, their main achievable goal is probably that of flushing the system; and not only can this not be done overnight, the sharpening of contradictions in the short term – Spain now has a right wing government elected by 30 percent of the population, while polls indicate that around 70 percent agree with the indignados, who the new government are on a declared collision course with – may lead to just that in the longer run.
The Lessons of 2011: Three Theses on Organisation
By Rodrigo Nunes
Moving beyond the conceptual polarisation of tight-knit vanguardist parties and loose-tie virtual networks, Rodrigo Nunes sifts the residue of last year’s wave of revolts to produce a more nuanced picture of organisational dynamics in the age of Web 2.0
2011 was an exceptional year, one which could – hopefully – come to be remembered in the same breath as 1968 and 1848. That being so will depend on whether the coming years will fulfil its promise, making it appear retrospectively as the start of something. Understanding the nature of that promise, and the means by which it can be fulfilled, therefore, are part and parcel of making that happen. A key challenge in this regard is to strip what happened in 2011, as much as possible, from false representations, both negative and positive, created by media coverage and the sometimes misleading reflections of protesters. To try, in other words, to stay as close as possible to what people were and are doing, rather than what they say or are said to be doing.
What it might be for an unemployed person or precarious worker to strike on May 1 is up for grabs. Plans for the marches, rallies, disruption and general insubordination are still in their early stages. Arguments about march routes, permits, interaction with police, tactics and aims promise to push occupiers to their wits’ end. There is, however, a shared desire underpinning this ambitious call to action – even among those who resist the language of general strike – to disrupt business as usual and for May Day 2012 to escalate a fiercer wave of dissent against our current socio-politico-economic context.
Can Occupy pull off a general strike?
By Natasha Lennard
For some months now, the allure of the general strike has quietly persisted in the Occupy movement. In recent weeks, calls for a nationwide general strike on May 1 have grown louder; more than two months in advance of the date, a deluge of propaganda – posters, banner drops and short online videos – portends a May Day that promises to up the Occupy ante.
The Arab Spring was galvanized by general strikes in Tunisia and Egypt, while in Greece general strikes regularly rupture business-as-usual and bring thousands onto the streets. In headier conceptions, the general strike – a withdrawal from and an attack on capitalism – is the most radical act of defiance available. Little wonder, then, that a general strike was attempted in Oakland, Calif., on Nov. 2. The call for a nationwide general strike, originated in Occupy Los Angeles, has gleaned support from Occupy groups around the United States, with the help of a Twitter hashtag (#M1GS) and a Facebook event that has more than 12,000 promised attendees.
For a movement seeking new directions and escalations, the general strike is historically resonant and attractively bold. But can it work in the United States? And, if so, how?
“Instead of enhancing an existing movement with experienced activists who very badly want to be involved, 99%Spring is attempting, very badly, to replace that niche and attempting to formalize something that is organic.
There is none of the excitement and the engagement that exists in the Occupy Movement. There is nothing but a lame attempt to steal it. It’s like choosing stale bread over bread that’s fresh out of the oven.”
99%Spring is a bust at co-opting Occupy Wall Street
Everyone knows that I’m a big fan of Van Jones, and it’s not just because he’s hot. That’s not why I chose to participate in 99% Spring, however.
I’m not one of those people who goes around worrying allot about co-option. I assume that if we all have the same goals, it doesn’t matter much. I didn’t think that 99%Spring was out to co-opt Occupy Wall Street.
Kasama received the following essay from Nat W. a regular contributor to this discussion.
The rulers and enforcers don’t give a fuck about a Black life….
….But the people are showing that Trayvon’s life was cherished
by Nat Winn
So much for a post-racial United States.
The murder of Trayvon Martin has put front and center the fact that a young Black man is risking his life simply by walking out of his front door. It has also demonstrated in front of a national audience that the authorities in this society don’t give a fuck about the life of a Black person.
Trayvon was visiting his father’s fiance in a gated community. He stepped outside during halftime of a basketball game to buy a snack. He was young. He wore a hoodie. He was Black. These facts were enough to make him “suspicious” to the neighborhood watch vigilante George Zimmerman.
Those things were enough to cost Trayvon his life.
“There is no contradiction between opposing every instance of US meddling in Iran–and every other country–and supporting the popular, democratic struggles of ordinary Iranians against dictatorship. Effective international solidarity requires that the two go hand in hand, for example, by linking the struggles of political prisoners in Iran and with those of political prisoners in the US, not by counterposing them. Iranian dissidents, like dissidents in the US, see their own government as their main enemy. The fact that Iranian activists also have to deal with sanctions and threats of military action from the US only makes their work and their lives more difficult. The US and Iranian governments are, of course, not equal in their global reach, but both stand in the way of popular democracy and human liberation. US-based activists must not undermine the brave and endangered work of Iranian opposition groups by supporting the regime that is ruthlessly trying to crush them.”
Solidarity and Its Discontents
By Raha Iranian Feminist Collective
While building solidarity between activists in the U.S. and Iran can be a powerful way of supporting social justice movements in Iran, progressives and leftists who want to express solidarity with Iranians are challenged by a complicated geopolitical terrain. The U.S. government shrilly decries Iran’s nuclear power program and expands a long-standing sanctions regime on the one hand, and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad makes inflammatory proclamations and harshly suppresses Iranian protesters and dissidents on the other. Solidarity activists are often caught between a rock and a hard place, and many choose what they believe are the “lesser evil” politics. In the case of Iran, this has meant aligning with a repressive state leader under the guise of “anti-imperialism” and “populism,” or supporting “targeted” sanctions.
As members of a feminist collective founded in part to support the massive post-election protests in Iran in 2009, while opposing all forms of US intervention, we take this opportunity to reflect on the meaning and practice of transnational solidarity between US-based activists and sections of Iranian society. In this article, we look at the remarkable situation in which both protests against and expressions of support for Ahmadinejad are articulated under the banner of support for the “Iranian people.” In particular, we examine the claims of critics of the Iranian regime who have advocated the use of “targeted sanctions” against human rights violators in the Iranian government as a method of solidarity. Despite their name, these sanctions trickle down to punish broader sections of the population. They also stand as a stunning example of American power and hypocrisy, since no country dare sanction the US for its illegal wars, torture practices and program of extrajudicial assassinations. We then assess the positions of some “anti-imperialist” activists who not only oppose war and sanctions on Iran but also defend Ahmadinejad as a populist president expressing the will of the majority of the Iranian people. In fact, Ahmadinejad’s aggressive neo-liberal economic policies represent a right-wing attack on living standards and on various social welfare provisions established after the revolution. And finally, we offer an alternative notion of and method for building international solidarity “from below,” one that offers a way out of “lesser evil” politics and turns the focus away from the state and onto those movement activists in the streets.
This comes from Socialist Worker. This piece was written in response to an earlier one on the Bay of Rage website. We are posting this to generate discussion, it should not suggest an endorsement of the views expressed.
“Given the current weakness of the workers’ movement, it’s no surprise that many people would look first to struggles outside the workplace as the hope for building the movement. But that is a limitation, not a strength of our movement. It is a product of past defeats, not a strategy for our future. The perspectives put forward by the Oakland Commune authors elevate our weakness into a point of principle, leaving us at a dead end.”
The rise of the “precariat”?
Geoff Bailey and Kyle Brown take up a debate about Occupy and the working class.
AMID A flurry of debates assessing the fallout from the two Occupy port actions in the Bay Area and the upcoming call for a general strike on May 1, an anonymous article posted by “Oakland Commune” aims to put the tactical debates surrounding the port shutdowns into a theoretical framework.
The author or authors argue that structural changes in the nature of capitalism have created conditions that require us to refashion our tactics around a new, more transient and precarious labor force.
In doing so, they defend an idea that has become almost common sense on the U.S. left: that the working class as it once existed–and was once seen as the central agent of revolutionary change for generations of radicals and revolutionaries–has been so diminished and atomized that new struggles and tactics are necessary.
“Struggles that emphasize the fact of exploitation – its unfairness, its brutality – and seek to ameliorate the terms and character of labor in capitalism, take the working-class as their subject. On the other hand, struggles that emphasize dispossession and the very fact of class, seeking to abolish the difference between those who are “without reserves” and everyone else, take as their subject the proletariat as such. Because of the restructuring of the economy and weakness of labor, present-day struggles have no choice but to become proletarian struggles, however much they dress themselves up in the language and weaponry of a defeated working class …Worker’s struggles these days tend to have few objects besides the preservation of jobs or the preservation of union contracts. They struggle to preserve the right to be exploited, the right to a wage, rather than for any expansion of pay and benefits. The power of the Occupy movement so far – despite the weakness of its discourse – is that it points in the direction of a proletarian struggle in which, instead of vainly petitioning the assorted rulers of the world, people begin to directly take the things they need to survive. Rather than an attempt to readjust the balance between the 99% and the 1%, such a struggle might be about people directly providing for themselves at a time when capital and the state can no longer provide for them.”
This piece raises the important question of how we think about the revolutionary subject today. Does it still reside in the working class, or at the point of production, as traditionally conceived? How have changes in capitalism transformed class composition? How does this affect revolutionary strategy? We are posting this in order to generate discussion. We will soon post responses from others. Posting should not suggest endorsement.
Blockading the Port Is Only The First of Many Last Resorts
Posted by OaklandCommune • December 7, 2011
By any reasonable measure, the November 2 general strike was a grand success. The day was certainly the most significant moment of the season of Occupy, and signaled the possibility of a new direction for the occupations, away from vague, self-reflexive democratism and toward open confrontation with the state and capital. At a local level, as a response to the first raid on the encampment, the strike showed Occupy Oakland capable of expanding while defending itself, organizing its own maintenance while at the same time directly attacking its enemy. This is what it means to refer to the encampment and its participants as the Oakland Commune, even if a true commune is only possible on the other side of insurrection.
Looking over the day’s events it is clear that without the shutdown of the port this would not have been a general strike at all but rather a particularly powerful day of action. The tens of thousands of people who marched into the port surpassed all estimates. Neighbors, co-workers, relatives – one saw all kinds of people there who had never expressed any interest in such events, whose political activity had been limited to some angry mumbling at the television set and a yearly or biyearly trip to the voting booth. It was as if the entire population of the Bay Area had been transferred to some weird industrial purgatory, there to wander and wonder and encounter itself and its powers.
“…[I]nfiltration is the norm in political movements in the United States. Occupy has many opponents likely to infiltrate to divide and destroy it beyond the usual law enforcement apparatus. Other detractors include the corporations whose rule Occupy seeks to end; conservative right wing groups allied with corporate interests; and members of the power structure including nonprofit organizations linked with corporate-funded political parties, especially the Democratic Party, which would like Occupy to be its tea party rather than an independent movement critical of both parties.
Infiltration to Disrupt, Divide and Misdirect Is Widespread in Occupy
By Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers
This is Part I of a two-part series on infiltration of Occupy and what the movement can do about limiting the damage of those who seek to destroy us from within. This first article describes public reports of infiltration as well as results of a survey and discussions with Occupiers about this important issue. The second article will examine the history of political infiltration and steps we can take to address it.
In the first five months, the Occupy movement has had major victories and has altered the debate about the economy. People in the power structure and who hold different political views are pushing back with a traditional tool—infiltration. Across the country, Occupies are struggling with disruption and division, attacks on key people, escalation of tactics to include property damage and police conflict as well as misuse of websites and social media.
As Part II of this discussion will show, infiltration is the norm in political movements in the United States. Occupy has many opponents likely to infiltrate to divide and destroy it beyond the usual law enforcement apparatus. Other detractors include the corporations whose rule Occupy seeks to end; conservative right wing groups allied with corporate interests; and members of the power structure including nonprofit organizations linked with corporate-funded political parties, especially the Democratic Party, which would like Occupy to be its tea party rather than an independent movement critical of both parties.
Communism and the Problems of a Movement
