I believe Occupy Wall St, despite all its failings...

Their rhetoric is a little fucked up. They can't decide whether Soros is King Porky or if he's a Marxist-Leninst saboteur

Suppose you have a rule that anything your group does needs 100 % perfect consensus. This can work in a very small group (like six people), it can also work in a slightly larger group (ten to twenty) if people know each other well. If your rule is pure consensus, then one single saboteur can block anything. If you want to make it easy to join, how is that supposed to work out? The downfall doesn't require infiltration, it can be just an attention-seeker. And if you want to use pure consensus in a group of a thousand people, failure doesn't need any bad person, it simply doesn't work at that scale.

Consensus decision-making is a very late development in lefty/anarchist movements, it comes from the US peace movement and they had received that from the practice of some Quakers (religious people living together with all sorts of rituals how they talk with each other). Now, some folks come up with ideas how to patch things, like consensus minus one or consensus minus two. Suppose a group with such a rule set grows. What then happens is that it gets harder and harder to reach the threshold for making any decision. If you want bigger agreement than simple majorities, it makes more sense to fix a percentage like 70 %. But why would you want something more than the normal majority threshold to begin with? If the default is doing nothing, super majorities just make it more likely that you don't decide to do anything. If you believe the current state of affairs is awesome, then it makes sense to have super majorities for everything.

The real issue is the gap between wishing for something and actually making it a reality. There is no point in having 90 % or even a 100 % voting that they want X to happen if they are all together to weak to make it happen. And if 51 % want something to happen, and they are enough to make it happen without help form the other 49 %, that's good enough. The decision rule should be majoritarian in that a minority is not allowed to actively undermine a majority (calling a decision stupid after it is made doesn't count as undermining though), and consensus-oriented in that a person who voted against doing X is not ordered to do anything for it.

If your group meets in person and you have enough space, and you aren't all super-introverted, you can decide by wish/do compass: The moderator asks people to position themselves on a line based on how much they want X to happen, and ask them then to also position themselves on another axis based on how much they want to do for that thing. The moderator then walks to people and asks them about why they chose their position (not everybody needs to be asked for every question, the extreme positions are more important and the moderator should also keep track of people who haven't said much yet).

For issuing statements bearing the group's name, super majorities can make sense. The question here is do you even want to come across as a monolithic entity? If you are okay with having ongoing discussion published, with different opinion pieces marked as such, why should these need majority approval? So, for issuing statements, there can be two tiers: 1. official position of the group (requiring something like 80 % approval threshold), 2. opinion piece (like 20 % to prevent trolls). People can vote publish, publish with opinion disclaimer, not publish. If the threshold for the first option isn't reached, these votes automatically count towards the second threshold.

Intuitively I agree with this but more than hierarchy I'm afraid of procedure and parliamentaryism- I think to the extent possible that should be worked out online first and keep the physical world about implementation- I think voting IRL should be more along the lines of short and sweet jury trials about the unforseen emergent questions on the ground- maybe randomly select ~1/4 of the movement as jurists right before voting to keep vote-wrangling and coalitions to a minimum.

Sounds like consensus is oppressive. Better to model around a union of egoists.

Pure drivel.

If you're organizing another occupy you need to make sure you have some major orgs like DSA, IWW, and others involved. Will gain the most support when people are particularly pissed about something.

How radical are DSA and IWW nowadays?

The IWW helped organize a massive prison strike last year. I'd say that's pretty radical.

dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3411683/Occupy-Wall-Street-protesters-arrested-giving-middle-finger-cops-52-000-payout-cops-infringed-Amendment-rights.html

Channing Creager is a personal friend of Sam Hyde and posts antisemitic remarks on reddit

This is why you start with a hardened cadre and then recruit people rather than letting liberals wander in off the street on their coffee break.

We would need a uniform that wasn't easy to spoof, tyvek suits with a custom patch or something.

But are they… expropriation radical?

lads what i we expropriate a building

In before >ancoms.jpg though, I mean it. Take and hold a fucking office building with pikes and riot shields it could really be done.

I honestly don't think you can do that without removing Occupy from your vocabulary completely. Horizontalist, structureless, open movements will always have this shortcoming.

I agree, but I don't know how we SHOULD organize to make this effective.

I think the left has an image problem, we have very few uniformed service dudes on the left these days and it shows.

If you're going to wear a uniform it has to be uniform. Every little detail needs to be the same on every person, laces tucked, all zippers done up, every button buttoned etc etc

Moldy hippies don't win public support

Well I can't help you because I'm too paranoid and not experienced enough on the subject, so the only advice I have for you is that whatever your political and philosophical worldview is, you can almost certainly find people online of similar persuasion who have been through what you're going and learn from their experience.

If you're american, for example, there's nothing stopping you from e-mailing people at itsabouttimebpp.com or the IWW and asking for suggestions and a chart or an outline of their organization's structure, or asking individual people who have been through every conceivable 60's and 70's radical group like Maxwell Stanford/Muhammad Ahmad what they'd do today. Unfortunately we don't have proper parties so new generations can organically interact and learn from the older ones, but we can't start from a blank page at every turn so you need to reach out to these people, read their books, study their organizations, etc.

I know you're an ancom and all, but if you're really interested in that kind of organization, there is only one teacher: Lenin. The Bolsheviks were exactly what you describe.

Different circumstances ask for different strategies, Lenin would be the first to acknowledge that.

The pre-war Tsardom had, to the detriment of the Bolsheviks, a strong police state, no public apparatus through which a working class group could maneuver for improvements, and a small uneducated proletariat. But to their benefit, these circumstances lead to the creation of a conspiratorial, underground and tightly knit worker's movement even b efore Lenin, the fact they were often a worker's only source of education meant the study circles of the 80s and 90s created an unifying culture for socialists, and the revolutionaries there were revolutionaries for life, because once you grow up with exile and Siberian jails you don't suddenly "grow up" and accept the system as it is.

The situation in the US and the rest of the developed world is completely different. Instead of one illegal worker's movement, there are several, including a few sponsored by capital and the state. Instead of one culture tied together by decades of clandestine study groups, you have a degree of cultural diversity that is almost impossible to override. And, as Trotsky learned with experience, the revolutionaries of the west are simply not as dedicated and prone to self-sacrifice as those born in the conditions of Tsarist Russia. "Professional revolutionaries" are one of those muh privileges of backwardness, when you have to deal with people who are often too distracted with videogames to read a book, you can't bet on that.

This is why Bolshevik-style parties in the west often fail or degenerate into cults. In this sea of diversity and distraction a party can't ask for too much sacrifice, let alone when you have so much competition. If OP means what he says, he needs a common ground between Mass Party and Bolshevism, something open and connected to the public, affable to its interests and not too demanding, but coordinated by a network of smaller, underground cells of dedicated people (which is rare enough in today's left) tied together by a similar training process, cultural preferences, etc.

I should know already but where did Lenin write about this?

Something like a cell in each ghetto >n residents over a metro area with a goodly number of such- each given a general directive and empowered to deal with their local community orgs.

marx2mao.com/RG.html#O
marx2mao.com/RG.html#ST

Read Tony Cliff's short biography on Lenin, at least the first chapters, so you can understand the cultural background of Russian social-democracy.

marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1975/lenin1/index.htm

What is to be done IIRC. But points out very well what kind of challenges our society places on us in this regard. The kind of organization (not too demanding mass party and small, committed hard cadres) probably do exist today somewhere, but I couldn't tell ya where. I want to say that the Muslim Brotherhood and Hezbollah, but honestly don't know enough about them and their specific context (something to do with setting up their own welfare institutions to create popular support?).

In the US, the closest I can think of is the Nation of Islam. Although it never went national, it's undeniably influential in the communities it's part of, it survived repression while continuously expanding for decades while other black organizations flopped, and managed to do so while having some pretty retarded views and leadership. Obviously I'm not saying to adhere to Yakub race theories, but it might be worth studying their structure and finance.

...

I think the idea was he started flooding OWS with IdPol groups that caused infighting and destroyed cohesion.

This

OP I'm not in New York, but I'm not terribly far from it either. Unfortunately I wouldn't be able to help organizing in NYC IRL but if big events were going down I could make it out there. Not sure if it would be worth me contacting you since there isn't much I can really do.

damn thats a really good idea

I fucking hate liberal "movements" so goddamn much

Especially that Nuit Debout shit

Fucking lifestylist niggers REEEEEEEEEEEEEE

This is turning out to be a really good thread. Survival bump

neither, those are masks soros wears. He's a globalist ;)

why are you so fucking stupid Holla Forums