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Ted Rall was here for and FDL Book Salon a while back. I try to visit his site at least ones a week. He has a guest post there this week which goes along with that was covered in the Salon and to me some of the best advice for OWS I have heard so far. Then ending summary pretty much says it all.
The OWS mentality reminds me of a particular piece of advice that I’ve been told phone company linemen used to get as part of their training back in the 1970s. When you’re up on a wooden phone pole, if you slip, your instinctive reaction is to try to grab hold of the pole. By the time you realize you’re falling though, you’ve already achieved too much speed to be able to stop yourself that way. Grabbing the pole in that situation would be identical to pressing your chest and arms against the world’s largest cheese grater. The splintery wood on the outside of the phone poll would simply rip through your shirt and skin, and you’d arrive at the bottom of the poll as a bloody mess with a big smear of blood and tissue marking the trail you took down. When you start to slip, so went the advice, you have to accept that you are already committed and hope that the two broken legs you’ll be getting when you hit the sidewalk will teach you to be more careful next time.
That’s the lesson the OWSers still haven’t grasped. They think there’s a painless, bloodless way out of this for them. Sure, for a very small number of the 99% there is. But for many of the 99%, they’re already in freefall but still think that, somehow, their legs aren’t going to shatter when they hit the concrete.
You can’t try to change the system while you continue to empower it by using the smart phones, the credit cards, the Facebook accounts, the Twitter posts, and all the rest. You don’t get to have so many amusements and distractions and an “oh, we’re serious, but, golly, we don’t want to give up our shiny little toys and we don’t want to suffer” mentality AND get to win.
Look at the Montgomery Bus Boycott. It took over a year. And why did the bus company cave in? Because the 1% only took 1% of the seats and only paid 1% of the fares. The blacks were the essential lifeblood of the bus line economy. If OWS wants to win, they need to start organizing and start applying economic pressure, just like was done back in the 1950s. Enough with the theatrics. Yes, a flair for the dramatic helps, but it’s window dressing. Enough with trying to shame the bankers. Either figure out what you’re doing or quit your bitching. Enough with these pointless, idiotic, quixotic tantrums.
This has been my main complaint with the OWS movement all along. And my biggest complaint with the left in general. This insistence on protesting in a nice, agreeable, consenting manner. Doing that is not a protest !
Look at the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement and the union strikes. They were NOT NICE or agreeable. The whole point is to be a major but major thorn in the side of the system. Which carries the risk of “getting your legs broken”.
That’s what makes it a protest.
21 Comments
They needed real boycott or violent confrontaion to get lasting effect. Bankers have no shame. The cry of the people is proclomation of success for the bankers. When the bankers feel that their money or their flesh is vulnerable, that is when you start to get results. Oakland had the best results. We do not want peaceful protest. The police and power structor needs to be constantly provoked. The more violent the response of authority, the greater the results of the protest. The last thing you really want is a peaceful protest, but what you really need is to provoke as much violence as you can, in a peaceful manner.
I can’t quite figure out the lesson of what has happened in Oakland so far. The police brutality of late October (raiding the camp, teargassing women and children, nearly killing Scott Olsen) brought thousands to the GAs and tens of thousands to the port shutdown. And immediately thereafter, ostensibly because a handful of people decided to vandalize some buildings at the very end of that day, numbers started to dwindle. The vast majority went back to protesting politely – or getting out the vote for Obama. The conditions we’ve been protesting have only gotten worse, but hey, there’s a new iPhone so whatever. I’m sure Kit’s diary about the abusive relationship between police and protesters accounts for many of those missing in action. But the thing is, when we have larger numbers, there is little the pigs can do.
I am swinging wildly between hope and depression these past couple of days. Something’s gotta give.
Oh, and rec’d. Thank you.
Thanks cmaukonen. Recommended.
While I feel you on the whole electronic gadgets piece, the real problem with the left is, as you also suggest, its loss of righteous indignation, its unwillingness to get its hands dirty, to mix things up, to kick to the curb the poseurs and sellouts (i.e., Van Jones) it vaunts as “leaders.”
The right has NO problem telling anyone – ANYONE – who supports, for example, abortion (oh, sorry, “a woman’s right to choose” in the sanitized parlance of today’s left) to pack up and take their “murderous” beliefs with them.
Not the left. The left sings kumbaya and reaches out and swallows shit, believing time and tolerance – even of practices like torture, provided a “Democrat” is in the White House, of course – will eventually change things.
Yeah. Sure.
Yes, very good diary and rec’d.
I became discouraged and quit (after I was asked to leave) my local group when I suggested more directly confrontational methods of protest.
And, of course, the OWS mentality is also very similar to the white third party progressive electoral approach, except as the 99% falls to earth at warp speed they are not even grasping onto a telephone pole, they are grasping at….straws.
Recc’d
Although I would add that we should be aware of who exactly we’re not being nice to. It’s important to comfort the afflicted as we seek to afflict the comfortable.
The other thing I would say is that there is another kind of “poser” to be wary of. That’s the person who shoots down every idea because it “doesn’t go far enough” as a way of not having to actually do anything themselves. Organizing can take a long time, and it’s work.
Nice one cmaukonen, makes sense to me. Rec’d
Are you suggesting that these poseurs comprise a substantial fraction of “protesters”?
I’d bet that if there were a new “new world” it would be deluged with emigrants. I don’t think the poseurs would be staying home with the compradors either.
Nope, only saying that they are troublesome – beyond their numbers in fact
Also thanks. I realized I spelled poseur wrong.
Wow, I completely disagree.
Smartphones and Twitter aren’t the problem. Using technology isn’t the problem. Just going back to 18th century farming life isn’t the solution.
Telling the OWS protesters how they’re Doin’ It Rong isn’t helpful.
There’s also a strange irony in someone using the internet to tell other people not to use the internet.
Maybe in order to affect Real Change, Ted Rall should start sending his advice to activists via carrier pigeons.
We need to recognize that OWS was a ploy by the 1% and we need to move beyond it, way beyond it.
Well said, Athena. We should worship OWS.
Yeah, and did folks here read the Rall stuff Cmaukonen *didn’t* include? Some kinda lame ‘write letters to Corporations’ stuff.
He’s pretty outta touch, as my diaires of yesterday and a week or two ago could show him (sorry; I ain’t gonna hassle myself to dig out the links).. Plenty goin’ on that’s working to throw wrenches into the Machine, and much of it geared toward economics and profits.
Note that he mentions some undefined ‘suffering’, not willing to die for’, but…profit-busting. His crap about the tech devices as Athena mentions is a bit of a red herring, imo. Do you know how many virtual correspondents out in the revolutionary world are using cell phones? Is Rall aware of it? Apparently not.
And I’d meant ‘Global Revolutionary World’.
Like Frances Fox Piven: people who don’t know much about what’s goin’ on might refrain from ‘damn (‘damned’ is actually the thing) good advice’, imo.
Being how he did a quite a bit of time reporting from Afghanistan I think he might have a clue. And not embedded either.
You are a troll.
Hey there! I see you!
Did he communicate his reporting using smoke signals?
Or does he think HE gets to use technology, but other people using technology are losers, or what?
Don’t know what Ted used and this snippet is not his, it’s guest post.
This is a bunch of nonsense. This week 180 people got arrested in NYC during a march that mostly stayed on the sidewalks. Among the prominent actions were high-profile people marching into bank lobbies and protesting.
There are people from the Occupy movement in multiple locations occupying houses to prevent evictions. They frequently get arrested.
There are still going Occupy movements in places where that is the only opposition to mainstream thinking at all.
Before criticizing, a lot of these critics would do well to actually go out and occupy. And find out what is going on instead of getting their information second hand.
The use of iPhones, Facebook, Twitter and those other frills you point out has: allowed on-the-march changes in destinations and tactics that allow unpermitted marches to stay in the street longer before the police shut it down, captured pictures of police malfeasance to the point that most police departments are now abusing freedom of the press of mainstream journalists, allowed thousand of people to read about, hear, and see what has been going on. In addition, livestreaming provides a continuous provably unedited record of events seen by the camera stored in a location that authorities cannot (for now) censor or fabricate evidence.
It’s time, well past time, for a lot of the folks nostalgic for the protests of the 1960s to wake up to how the social environment and the political oppression are different now, and how that is requiring the adoption of different strategies and tactics.
In 1960, the civil rights movement did indeed have the possibility of overwhelming the jais in Alabama and Mississippi. Today with the intentionally large and growing prison population and a burgeoning prison industrial complex, the authorities don’t have those space constraints. What gets clogged is the courts, delaying speedy trials–which works against protest and dissent.
An disconnecting oneself from the 1% is not that easy once you get beyond moving your money to a credit union and shopping at farmers markets. Just try to disentangle yourself from Koch Industries products. Just try to find out how much private label products they manufacturer for labeling by retailers. Consider how much of their production is feedstocks for other corporations. It is very difficult to shut the system down at the point of consumption.
In my brief experience, the poseurs often turn out to be undercover cops. When they can’t sow conflict, often the can stampede a few folks into entrapment.