There’s been a common theme lately of calling for a new OWS. I would be overjoyed if all of these calls were in fact calls for a new OWS. But they aren’t. I want to make clear that this isn’t necessarily an attack on people making these calls. They make them for different reasons, and those reasons are often reasons I agree with. But, they are in fact calls for a completely different movement, one that bears little if any resemblance to OWS. I’m going to go through the common refrains of what “the movement” needs and my responses to them.
Let me say first that I think that people really mean that they want another successful and visible social movement when they say they want another OWS they really . I’m completely on board with that, I want another movement with the energy of Occupy. The problem is that the things that made OWS successful are exactly the things people are calling to change.
There have been a spate of articles in places as varied as the WaPo, Huffington Post, and the usual places where leftists publish articles (CounterPunch, TruthDig, here, and so on) about what is at stake in this election. Most of these articles do not tell us to vote for Obama but rather to seek some kind of alternative at best and something close to despair at worst. One of the best of these articles by Henry Giroux (Authoritarian Politics in the Age of Casino Capitalism) has just been posted on CounterPunch. This article should be read by all here and offers about as exhausting an analysis as you could want on where we are at politically at this point in time.
Here Giroux provides a clear statement:
A catalogue of indicting evidence reveals the depth and breadth of the war being waged against the social state, and particularly against young people. Beyond exposing the moral depravity of a nation that fails to protect its young, such a war speaks to nothing less than a perverse death-wish, a barely masked desire for self-annihilation-as the wilful destruction of an entire generation not only transforms U.S. politics into pathology, but is sure to signal the death-knell for America’s future. How much longer will the American public have to wait before the nightmare comes to an end?
None of these articles provide us with a viable course of action (Giroux may be an exception), not because there isn’t one as I’ve often pointed out, but that, from a cultural perspective it is out of the question. For example, I have, for years, made the point that power comes from organized, committed and focused communities who are willing to go to the barricades if necessary to assert themselves. I’ve suggested communities, communes, cooperatives, and even creating leftist-oriented corporations either for-profit or non-profit. From that base power can evolve and be used to influence public policy. At this point in history the cultural reality is that people who profess leftist views can’t or won’t cooperate with each other but prefer to live, in large part, fairly atomized lives with occasional bursts of spontaneous chaotic action (Wisconsin and Occupy) during which they fill themselves with fantasies and illusions about their own sense of righteousness. Much of the fantasy around Occupy went like this: “isn’t it obvious that we represent the 99% and once we get out in the streets most people will join us.” Well that didn’t happen, in fact, most people, on balance, opposed these efforts in part because they were chaotic and disorganized and thus inspired little respect or trust with people who know, as a pragmatic reality, that that is not how the world works.
I write today to, hopefully, start a dialogue and ongoing series about the concept of decolonization. I’m fairly new to the term. Some of the concepts have been in me for a while, but I did not have connection to a philosophy or political movement, much less a name. So, I’ll share my entry point and early thoughts about decolonization. I invite you to share yours.
When I left my house in Boston and headed to New York City to be present in Liberty Square last September, I was going as an “Occupier”, I suppose, since the action was called “Occupy Wall Street”. So many of us felt so strongly that the message about the deep layers of corruption in our economic and political systems resonated, that we didn’t even think about the word defining this burgeoning movement.
For me, the Occupy movement was connected to Arab Spring and the Encampanadas of Spain and even the Green movement in Iran. And Palestine.
Palestine. How could I even think for one moment that “occupying” was a good thing? Well, clearly, I didn’t think.
We are told we need the law. We need a million rules to ensure everyone has a fair shake, a level playing field we rely on as we move through life. But if you are lesbian or gay, the majority have recently passed laws giving people who prefer heterosexual coupling an advantage. The federal government has done nothing to come to this minorityâs assistance. These laws are just the latest in a long litany of discriminatory laws.
We are told we need the law to define culture, to give the boundaries of permissible behavior. Yet, do you think you are aware of every law you live under? In every jurisdiction, outdated laws remain on the books. You are likely to have broken some of them without even knowing. In fact, most new endeavors begin with consultation of a lawyer. Legal professionals research for hours to ensure their clients wonât inadvertently break some little known law. Many of these laws unduly invade our private lives to restrict trivial actions, like putting a window in a wall of your home, so the state or some industry can make money.
We are told without the law, our society would crumble into brutish chaos. To me, the image of John Pike, dressed like an SS officer, strutting around a circle of passive students shaking a can of pepper spray, meant to be used at distance on an advancing crowd, is the image of brutish chaos.
Or perhaps those words conjure up the image of an octogenarian pepper sprayed in the eyes for speaking out against a government that coddles the rich and abuses the poor.
Or the Berkley students night-sticked in the bread basket to discourage peaceful assembly:
Yet, surely our teachers and parents are right. Surely we need the rule of law to guide society. We need some rules.
Or not.
Today we crawl outside one of our deepest and oldest mental boxes to consider the unthinkableâthat changes in the law cannot cure societyâs ills, because the law, itself, is part of the problem. Today we take a walk on the wild side in a lawless society.
We are told we need the law. We need a million rules to ensure everyone has a fair shake, a level playing field we rely on as we move through life. But if you are lesbian or gay, the majority have recently passed laws giving people who prefer heterosexual coupling an advantage. The federal government has done nothing to come to this minorityâs assistance. These laws are just the latest in a long litany of discriminatory laws.
We are told we need the law to define culture, to give the boundaries of permissible behavior. Yet, do you think you are aware of every law you live under? In every jurisdiction, outdated laws remain on the books. You are likely to have broken some of them without even knowing. In fact, most new endeavors begin with consultation of a lawyer. Legal professionals research for hours to ensure their clients wonât inadvertently break some little known law. Many of these laws unduly invade our private lives to restrict trivial actions, like putting a window in a wall of your home, so the state or some industry can make money.
We are told without the law, our society would crumble into brutish chaos. To me, the image of John Pike, dressed like an SS officer, strutting around a circle of passive students shaking a can of pepper spray, meant to be used at distance on an advancing crowd, is the image of brutish chaos.
Or perhaps those words conjure up the image of an octogenarian pepper sprayed in the eyes for speaking out against a government that coddles the rich and abuses the poor.
Or the Berkley students night-sticked in the bread basket to discourage peaceful assembly:
Yet, surely our teachers and parents are right. Surely we need the rule of law to guide society. We need some rules.
Or not.
Today we crawl outside one of our deepest and oldest mental boxes to consider the unthinkableâthat changes in the law cannot cure societyâs ills, because the law, itself, is part of the problem. Today we take a walk on the wild side in a lawless society.
DHS documents were released to Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) that despite extensive redactions reveal a greater administration role than previously known in the crackdown on the Occupy movement.
Homeland Security Documents Show Massive Nationwide Monitoring of Occupy Movement
Documents just obtained by the PCJF from its FOIA request show massive nationwide monitoring, surveillance and information sharing between the Department of Homeland Security and local authorities in response to Occupy. The PCJF, also on behalf of author/filmmaker Michael Moore and the National Lawyers Guild Mass Defense Committee, has made a series of FOIA demands regarding law enforcement involvement in the Occupy Crackdown. …
This set of released materials reveals intense involvement by the DHS’ National Operations Center (NOC) in these activities. The DHS describes the NOC as, “the primary national-level hub for domestic situational awareness, common operational picture, information fusion, information sharing, communications, and coordination pertaining to the prevention of terrorist attacks and domestic incident management. The NOC is the primary conduit for the White House Situation Room and DHS Leadership for domestic situational awareness and facilitates information sharing and operational coordination with other federal, state, local, tribal, non-governmental operation centers and the private sector.”
Documents are available in 3 pdfs here, here and here.
What good a revolution, have you no fixed plan for what comes next?
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Be careful what you wish for….
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Things aren’t that bad. The devil you know may be better than the devil you get…
Things are that bad. Things are unimaginably bad, had people the ability to connect dots so obvious a kindergartener with a crayon could complete the picture and probably sound out “Fascism” before the MSM could possibly do it.
I dreamed, long ago in gentler days of a 100th monkey moment of enlightenment. I prayed that humanity would evolve. I beseech-ed those who would listen that unless we did something then, that things were turning dire. I think even if my moderating forces were still around me? My radicalization is the result of facts on the ground.
Revolution is now coming whether or not you like it, dear readers. Everything is about to change so visibly that like the proverbial frog in the boiling pot, people will wonder why their world is burning around them, and wonder how we let it get so far.
Well I’m finally back here at work after another recent series of personal adventures; in the middle of all the fun I’ve been finding time to get down to my local “Occupy” event, and for those of you who have not been keeping up I thought we’d take a moment today to compare a bit of Fox-driven perception to the reality I’ve been seeing.
What I’ve been told to expect, at least in certain quarters of the public space, are dirty filthy hippies with no jobs or ambitions hoping to destroy America while having deviant public couplings fueled by the free distribution of dangerous psychotropic drugs.
Sadly, I’ve found that there’s not really much truth in that description, even as tiny bits of it do ring true; but with a manifesto in hand and a few conversations under my belt we’ll see what we can do to create a picture that will surprise a lot of the 99% who already support Occupy Wall Street, even if they don’t know it yet.
