How do the different factions of leftypol (individualist anarchists, ancoms, tankies, socdems, leninists, leftcoms, etc.) view Occupy Wall Street? Did it teach us some lessons, and if so what? Have you participated? Did it prove something against the mainstream view of politics, or was it already incorporated into it? What organizational lessons did it provide?
Yeah, we all know. I'd like us to concentrate on the other aspects if possible.
I lived at the Occupy camp in my city for around a month. It was an enlightening moment to see the city, law enforcement, and media colluding to quell the protests. As a communalist, my opinion is that the protests were a nascent polis in the Arendtian conception of the term. A great opportunity was lost by Occupy having no vision of the future they wanted outside of an eclectic bag of demands.
Had the Occupy camps had one demand: to establish the GM as a municipal body for citizens to have actual power over the passing of legislation in their city government, and to give an avenue for civic participation, then the GM could have been the start of a larger project of dual-power. Unfortunately, that opportunity is gone, and all we can do is learn from the past now.
someone post those cointelpro infographs
seconded.
btw Putin talked about cointelpro during his last interview
it's implied when he talks about how the US state dissolved OWS
In OWS the state found itself facing something that could not and did not want to be represented, but that presented itself nonetheless as a community and as a common life (and this regardless of whether those who were in that square were actually aware of it). The threat the state is not willing to come to terms with is precisely the fact that the unrepresentable should exist and form a community without either presuppositions or conditions of belonging.
I see it as a taste of things to come.
There's a huge crisis looming in no time, we'll have to learn again how to organize, how to fight.
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DUDE PROGRESSIVE STACK LMAO
The one with the rape and stuff? But seriously talking to the campers they were straight up retarded slow as balls. Didn't know the first thing about communism or theory or anything whatsoever beyond GIMME MONEY RICH PEOPLE or some idpol shit. Fuck them.
I participated in OWS from start to finish.
I can on the first day the only people who were truly serious about the whole thing were anarchists, who made up about 2/3rds of the people there. The rest were either ML groups (like people from the PSL) or Ron Paultards who thought they could weasel their way in (granted, we gave them no attention). We faced *a lot* of criticism from other leftists right off the bat, with Chomskyites telling us we weren't getting the unions involved enough (some union workers did join us eventually though) and others scolding us for not having clear motivations. The MLs meanwhile kept trying to recruit people into their organizations without giving much thought to the fact that this entire thing was organized by ANARCHISTS who wanted nothing to do with their vanguardism.
It wasn't until a bit later when all the idpol stuff began flooding in. Academic leftists butted in and started taking over the movement, as did Democratic Party members who wanted to use the entire wave of activism as a ploy to get Obomber re-elected. The academic leftists were constantly going on about the "white supremacy" at Occupy, how OWS wasn't using the "decolonize" rhetoric enough, how no one was talking about or relating the movement to Palestine, etc. Occasionally you'd see a Maoist-Turd Worldist on the internet claim OWS was giving a proverbial middle finger to all the poor starving kids in the Third World. I'm not kidding.
I wish OWS had taken some pointers from comrades in Greece or France and willingly engaged in more militant direct action. Even the decentralized model which we used wasn't applied elsewhere. It was a good experience but I much prefer the praxis of European comrades to those of Americans.
So OWS was an anarchist failure, then?
Haven't heard this one before, pretty funny.
You're a liar. The proof of that is the person who started OWS to begin with. What was his ideology?
OWS was just like the Tea Party. It started out simply because people were angry about the bailouts for porky while they got nothing except being stuck with the bill. There was no ideology about it, just angry people against the bailouts. Later it transformed into what it really wasn't originally just like the tea party. The tea party started by Ron Paul fell to the neocon hijacking and OWS fell due to idpol. It was a failure because we were all fools with no direction and the loudest idiots won.
It was a failure of the entire US left in not shitting their pants and eating each other the moment something cool happened
If by "anarchist failure" you mean "failure to create anarchy" then yes. It was much more the fault of OWS being a big tent movement than anything though. I will say, comrades did dig their own graves by refusing to be more militant. I toted around a red and black on a metal pole; I was approached once by a small group of comrades who wanted to use my flag to smash a bank window (just imagine the resulting image) but they quickly left me and I never saw them again.
The camps were basically pointless, outside of a reclamation of public space, mostly symbolic. The camps, in fact, became an end in and of themselves, and Occupy became a game of endurance between the campers and municipal authorities (to what end?). The value of Occupy wasn't in the camps, but in the GM. And it was only a nascent value, abstract rather than concrete. Had the GMs abandoned consensus and embraced majoritarian decision making, and demanded from their cities popular participation in municipal governance, then Occupy could have gone in a municipal populist—potentially revolutionary, if informed by social ecology—direction.
But it didn't.
I'm not sure what you mean. Are you talking about Graeber or Adbusters?
You claimed OWS previously for anarchism portraying other factions (ML, academics) as uninvited outsiders, yet you fail to own up to OWS' failure. It's almost as if anything "good" comes around it's yours, if anything goes bad with that "good" it's not yours anymore.
Isn't the anarchist academics (like Graeber, who was also heavily involved with OWS from the start) a problem in your eyes too, or do you approach them on a selective basis?
Would you blame individualism for that failure to create communal power structures (aligning yourself with Jodie Dean)?
I never said anarchists were blameless, in fact I said the exact opposite, that they wrote their own fate by allowing liberals and other assholes to come in and take over the movement.
Graeber isn't a power-hungry ideologue.
What's GM?
So an ideologue is ok if it's not "power hungry?"
Graeber is not an ideologue, he's an anarchist.
I wouldn't blame individualists. The goal just wasn't there to begin with, with regards to creating a new governance structure. Adam Curtis is correct when they say in Hypernormalization that Occupy was about managing a movement, and didn't have a vision about what a future society would look like.
General meeting.
I love how the disagreement in the second half is between two white dudes. Like the progressive stack OWS guy is all about giving minorities a platform, but he (a white guy) is who they have to argue with the other guy who wants to talk about class. Like, couldn't they at least get someone with dark skin to spit out the standard line? Guess not, because the whole thing is really about people with white guilt patronizing minorities.
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Right, so let's get this straight. If an academic pushes for a certain ideology he's OK if it's anarchist, and problematic if non-anarchist.
Great.
What about the long tradition on the radical left of doing so, beginning with (well, not really, but being central to) Marx?
It's interesting that you put it this way. I asked you about Jodi Dean, and you are (it appears) unfamiliar with her. She wouldn't portray "a lack of vision for a future society" an error, but the very thing that in a sense makes the collective possible and stick together (as a negative force: something that needs to be figured out, something that won't go away until it is addressed again and again).
Occupy was better than nothing, but it was shit. Let's get a real party, not this horizontal weakness.
Wow, she got BTFO
Of course anarchists were the only ones who took a horizontal, disorganized, liberal-infiltrated failure seriously. Any real Marxist would see it largely as a place for recruiting and nothing more (other than opportunists).
I disagree with this characterization: "anarchists are for everything goes; Marxists see it as a ground for recruitment."
OWS, in my opinion, was a possible site of something bigger. Neither anarchists, nor Marxists should approach this sight for "personal" gain only. If pushed, and if optimally organized, OWS could have become much more threatening to the system as a whole. Does it really matter if a liberal individual starts participating in OWS when there's the clear possibility of the collective transforming all of the participants into mass-based thinkers and 'desirers'?
I'm interested in your response.
site
One look at OWS– the individualism, the liberalism, the anarchism, and the libertarianism that ran amok in it –tells you that it had not revolutionary potential. The moment and conditions of the USA at the time had a small amount of potential, but if a genuine party had been able to take advantage of it, it simply wouldn't have been Occupy any more, it would have been something else.
Today, there is no more new energy in the Occupy movement. All of the Occupy organizations, and those that adhere to the same values as Occupy, are being relegated to the dustbin of history. Notice how the growing organizations today are kicking liberalism to the curb: explicitly socialist or anarchist organizations that are either ready for or becoming acquainted with power and authority.
Occupy was Americans waking up. The real movement is just getting started.
Let me make explicit why and how we disagree. It will be a structuralist point, mind you.
Liberalism, individualism, anarchism (etc.) aren't born in a vacuum, like every and all ideologies. These ideological tendencies share a common source: the capitalist environment around us. In my opinion what made OWS a possible evental (ie. revolutionary) site is that it created a new form of collective mold, informing the participants. It gave them a new was of thinking and being with the possibility to transform into a communist collectivity.
I disagree with your assessment of the ontology of revolutions: it is secondary what each and every individual believes, what matters is the form that might possibly give rise to a new "oppositionalism". (I'm an Althusserian anti-humanist, mind you: structures over nodes…)
Sure, but: the prerequisites of a party were "objectively there." What hindered its emergence was the identification with the broader society (vs. the constitutive reason for the collectivity of OWS).
My position is this, to put it very bluntly: take a liberal, a conservative, put them into a collective with preferable mechanisms, and you transform them into proto-communists: people who are able to address collective troubles with collective unity.
Notice how I'm not judging "conservatives, liberals" as individuals; I'm addressing them as ideological end-products of a larger whole – something OWS could have complemented…
OWS could have been the real movement.
new way of thinking*
Kind of off-topic, but what do idpolers even mean when they say this? I've never been able to get a clear definition of what "decolonize" is supposed to mean as an actual concrete political practice, beyond REEEEEing about white people usually by other white people. Go back to Europe and give the US back to the natives?
I thought it was like "decolonize your mind bro…"
meaning stop reading and learning 'old white people shit'
Means: stop being [your skin color] and stop [participating in "stealing our" other skinned-culture]…
Usually it in practice means "This movement needs to focus more on black issues." (it's always the blacks.) Sometimes it even means that the ideology of the movement itself is inherently racist and white supremacist for failure to take into account black/brown issues to a sufficient degree.
e.g.
I don't like that it got declawed so easily.
weak
sad