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Peter Gaiss, leader of the Poor Conrad peasant rebellion in Germany, 1514
Like any good movement, the Occupy movement has to conduct a serious self-criticism and look at what it did right and what it did wrong. At this point it’s pretty much disappeared. And that’s just a fact. I pass Union Square nearly every day and it’s a very sad sight now. When I go to Union Square the main occupants of the square now are the Hare Krishnas again. Well with all due respect to Hare Krishnas it was much more inspiring when the center stage was occupied by the Occupy movement. — Norman Finkelstein
Norman Finkelstein, interviewed at Counterpunch on his new book on Gandhi, relates it to the Occupy Movement with the following two comparisons/criticisms:
1. With the people. “… Gandhi … dug very deep roots in the Indian masses. He was not speaking from the outside. He was among them. He lived like them. He dug deep roots and he was careful, methodical, to the point of tedium, organizer of every detail of his movement. … And he’s watching where every nickel and dime goes. This is the people’s money. Nothing is going to be wasted. Nothing is going to be squandered, let alone no one is going to be cheated. No one is going to get away with thievery. So the first rule is you have to dig very deep roots in your constituency. I’m not sure how successful the Occupy movement even initially was at that. I got the impression – it’s a superficial impression but nonetheless even surfaces tell something about reality – let’s say when you were in the Boston Occupy. There seemed to be a sense of “We the encampment.” Us versus them. Namely the world outside. We were the enlightened ones and surrounded by the corrupt society. That’s not how you build a movement. It has to be among the people. The moment it becomes us versus them you then become an easy target for the bulldozers because nobody cares.”
Finkelstein later in the interview expands on and re-emphasizes the point: “When you are a people’s movement you have one thing. Your only asset is people. And you have to deal with real people. Not the people of your imagination. Not the people you wish people would be. But people as they exist actually out there in the real world. So you have to be among the people. Hear what they’re saying, know what they’re thinking, and then you’ll be able to figure out what is a realistic demand and what is not.”
2. From slogan to demands. “… the Occupy movement never got beyond the speechifying to ‘Where’s the Beef?’ The ability to not just synthesize a slogan, which was brilliantly done, but then we have to move … to synthesizing a demand or a series of demands with the same criteria. Where is the consciousness of people? What’s the furthest you can reach them with, or their incipient consciousness? What are their demands. Obviously a demand like, nationalize the banks, no – people were nowhere near there. But demands like, if you had four demands. One, a moratorium on student loans. Two, a public works program. Three, a major increase in taxes for the rich. And four, something on the mortgage crisis which is hitting so many people badly.”
I would add a third criticism, which Finkelstein does _not_ state, and it comes from my sense early on that Occupy was anti-intellectual or at least afraid of being accused of eggheaded intellectualism.
3. Empower expertise. Finkelstein touches on this issue at various points in his interview, particularly in the following:
“Number one, to the extent that politics is an intellectual debate, a debate over real ideas and the so called market place of free ideas, you have to be able to defend your position against other people out there. Otherwise in a course of public debate, public so called discourse, you are going to be trounced. You’re going to look the fool. That’s why we like a person like Ralph Nader out there who can tell you everything about regulation, everything about the tricks and the thievery and so forth, the cheating of the banks and the corporations, because we recognize that politics is in part about that public debate – discourse and being able to make rational arguments that carry the day. So in that respect, no we do need to know the facts. We have to have a full and complete control over the facts. Otherwise we’re simply going to be easily dismissed in the course of a public debate.
Secondly, you have to put forth demands which can work. And it’s not enough to say I don’t like banks. Therefore “B.” Well you have to explain “B.” Does it work. Does it have a real possibility of working. Because you don’t want to mobilize people around a demand which then just blows up in their face. Then you lose all credibility. So A, you have to make a convincing case. And B, the case you make has to be rooted in reality. Otherwise a very short way down the road you are going to be made to look very foolish. As in we told you that wouldn’t work.
So no, I don’t think there’s a shortcut. We need people who are competent, who understand these things. And also we have to make ourselves reasonably competent.”
Of course, see 2, defending your position with Occupy-empowered expertise requires first having such positions to defend. Which Occupy never got to. And then, also, how, with such an absence of organizational structure, would Occupy have recognized and empowered individuals to be “its” experts?
4. We are the 90%. Reluctantly and with all respect to ’99%’ as a galvanizing slogan, and this is entirely my own criticism not Finkelstein’s, but somehow sloganizing the conflict as between the 1% and the rest of us too conveniently avoids most of the real class conflict that controls U.S. politics. Doctors mostly aren’t part of the 1% but they’re sure part of the 10%, for instance, and they’re part of a healthcare system that costs double what it should. And most doctors (through the AMA) will fight like hell to keep things that way. Frankly, if you aren’t going to confront most of your enemies (which is what “We are the 99%” definitely indicates), but instead are even going to welcome them onto your side, that’s a prescription for aimlessness, confusion and finally cooptation/death.
Peasant revolts are a dime a dozen. If the successor to Occupy wants to be more than that, 1, 2, and 3 will be present early on. (I’ll leave 4 aside.) Still doesn’t mean such a popular revolution would be successful. That will depend on how bad things get. But, well, “pretty damn hellaciously bad” would about do it, and I see that coming fairly soon.
65 Comments
No. 4 especially. I have been saying it’s the 10% for years.
Everyone in the middle feels this viscerally, that the upper middle class, the families making $150-300K, are on the ‘other side’, the class enemy, ‘the Republicans’ to put it in common language.
Successful mass movements come out of and resonate with the majority’s gut feelings. But that goes back to “1″, which I think was at the heart of Occupy’s problems.
Great post.
I’m not sure occupy needs a successor more than an evolution.
Part of the “99%” problem is that the partisan divide in this country is so entrenched and easily manipulated by the 1% or the 10% or whatever kind of ratio you want to have, that they are almost incapable of coming together into a cohesive action. And you can’t get there with 35%.
To Occupy’s credit, they did try to bridge that divide in many instances. But it was so easily penetrated by party operatives who kept steering it toward an alliance with the Democratic party that it became incapable of ever getting to even 80%.
From a mathematical perspective, there comes a time where things are so bad that the partisan divide gets bridged and everyone comes together in a “throw the bastards out” moment that is usually accompanied by extreme violence. I’d like to believe that we don’t have to go there. But it’s going to take real skill, vision and imagination to come up with unifying arguments and demands.
As long as the “some allies aren’t worth having” crowd is alive and well, however, good luck getting to even 50%.
Oh, recommended.
Thanks!
I think ’3′, which is in a sense a call for most of us to be more humble about how much we know (and therefore indicates the limits of consensus decision-making and participatory democracy), clashes with both our ‘distrust intellectuals’ culture and our youth culture. So the anarchic and consensual organizational form Occupy took probably felt very right to many, but for cultural reasons that actually debilitate a serious and potentially winning rebellion against ‘the 10%’.
These ‘next’ movement(s) should be participatory and representative democracies, imho, not one or the other, and if everyone can’t be a leader and many are consigned just to be informed and watchful participants, well the latter is something to be proud of. The organizational forms, generally, should have a ‘normalcy’ and clarity to them if leaders want to reach out to the people and maximize their participation.
I’m not optimistic about the foreseeable future (either?), but articulating what went wrong with Occupy is a step in the right direction. Occupy was important and revealing, and it’s worthwhile doing what Finkelstein recommends.
I’ve been thinking about this situation a lot, and have trouble understanding why the 90-99% are following the lead of the 1% because most of the 10% are being severely impacted by the impoverishment of the 90%.
For instance, say you are a millionaire auto dealer whose sales are going to be badly impacted because your customers are so poor?
I just do not get how the 1% can hang onto the allegiance of the rest of the 10%?
Do you see any push-back coming?
Recommended of course!
Back in 2006 I came across this Modest Proposal to Save the Democratic Party. I went looking just now, and it’s still up, at the Dem Party website.
So, it isn’t as if nobody ever told them. Well, if they won’t take the advice, perhaps Occupy could fill that very conspicuous void.
One of the things that Occupy provided is a meeting place. Not a meeting, with a set time that you first had to find out about, then arrange to get to, sit through on someone else’s agenda and then take your notes home to do — what? The Occupy encampments were places for people to meet face-to-face with people perhaps not like themselves, to get to know them a bit, to explore, talk and think about how we would like to have better lives and to be better people, and how we might work together to do this.
The PTB were very right in understanding that it was the assembling that was dangerous, and nipped it in the bud. Occupy Toronto, for one, seems pretty well nipped — see their moribund website here. Oops, even that is gone. Maybe they are twittering, which I never got into.
I visited the Occupy encampment here in Minneapolis, and was reminded of the sort of struggles encountered by organizers in the 1960s; the participants/organizers were earnest and hard-working, but up against an extremely broad range of awareness and communication skills possessed by their fellow occupiers.
I noticed a fairly constant pressure, especially from young males who seemed to fancy themselves ‘informed’, and who thought it was time to ‘do something’.
I thought it obvious that I was witnessing the early stages of the consciousness-raising phase, and felt that that process would have to run its course.
There’s no way around it.
I also felt it was probably necessary to let these people find their own way forward because of the difficulty of bridging the generational issues that separate us, i.e. I would quickly lose patience dealing with young guys who fancy themselves the next Che, but in reality will end up in jail because they are easy ‘marks’ for agent provocateurs.
I do not intend that my comments be taken as criticism, purely observations of a process that I hope will lead somewhere eventually.
Thank you for this.
Great link, a proudly Chicago-style and prescient proposal:
Yes exactly, 10% vs 90% not 1% vs 99%
Besides, when we finally eat the rich, 1% really isn’t enough to go around and fill up all our stomachs. ;-)
Many of the FDL readers viscerally hate Repubs, so now we’re down to forty percent or so.
really love the sculpture
speaking only for myself, and as an ex-Democrat, it is the Democrats I viscerally hate.
Good post, fairleft. I’d like to offer a few opinions on where the nature of OWS differs from Mr. Finkelstein’s, though, and perhaps yours as well.
His critique was based on the democracy movement as *political*, not a revolution of social consciousness and fairness. OWS very pointedly wanted to do an end around electoral politics, demands, endorsements, etc. since those would necessarily limit participation, and along the way, finding the ‘sense of the meeting’ at GAs, as the Quakers might say. Limiting to a Lefty movement is also counterproductive, imo, as many on the putative right are in solidarity with many of the prime resets to the system most of us here believe are necessary.
Finkelstein seemed to not touch on the Global nature of the Occupy movement, unless I read too quickly and poorly. Given what’s occurring in many, many other nations as citizens are reaping the results of neoliberalism run amok, and the punitive austerity conditions imposed by the World Bank, IMF, (on past and future ‘loans’), central banks galore…more and more of them are striking, marching, protesting, given the sense that ‘there’s nothing left to lose’.
I can sincerely imagine that we’ll be inheriting their strength of purpose not far into the future as things get grisly for more in this country.
I also need to take strong exception to his understanding that smart people aren’t involved. He must be totally unaware of the many, many folks who’re busy creating new business models and corporate charters, employee-owned factories, true fin-regs, public banks, many end runs around the machine. The movement has also spawned many parallel organizations for black empowerment, spin-off labor unions, debt jubilee movements (globally), and so on. They may not all be authored by the ‘smartest people’ Finkelstein advises, but there are times that passion and need added to experiencing the System as it fucks people over…trumps the need to explain everything in detail so the brilliant among us don’t mock us.
Two places I agree with both Finkelstein and you, is that OWS needs to look at itself and learn what worked, what didn’t, but those calculations will be in the eye of the beholder, and even within certain ongoing GAs, no?
The other is rethinking capitalism, and especially that the old verbiage is very limiting at this point (and that may change significant;y in the future). I liked this piece published in July at anticapitaist.com, which laid out some of the need for new imaginings in the discussion of collectivism.
There’s likely more, but that’s all I have time for. Except to say that I periodically do update posts so folks here can know that OWS is indeed not dead, just less noticeable to those who aren’t looking.
Didn’t mean to get on a soapbox, but…I guess I couldn’t help myself; hope you don’t mind. ;o)
Good post generating thoughtful comments. Sometimes the comments on FDL become are becoming characterized by excessive me-too-ism.
finkelstein hates evoryone, but self hating jews.
A revolution does not happen until the worker bees who man the security structures of the state experience the loss of legitimacy of the regime. When they have been messed over so much themselves or have been ordered to do violence to their own friends and families. That is the result of historical conditions, not strategy or tactics. In the US, we do not have those historical conditions.
Where the Occupy movement seems to be at the moment is having people settle in for the long haul, building practical coalitions, and expanding the movement in the local geography. Not flashy, not large, a lot of hard work. That might or might not bear fruit later.
Occupy has contributed several things in the past year: a method for raising consciousness and bringing forth participation–the facilitated general assembly; a loose organization that is resilient; a framing of the issues so that all of the issues come from a central reality–the control that the vampire-squid 1% have over almost all the decisions that fundamentally affect peoples’ lives; a participation ethic that self-consciously recognizes that folks “vote with their feet” and that planning finally does not produce action; a visible model of civil disobedience that has penetrated the Wall Street Media; geographic reach deep into “conservative” America even in small numbers; a non-divisive, non-ideological approach to action on dealing with the central reality.
That last item is likely not to compute with folks who take a revolutionary left slant on politics. But it is a key to being with the people. And occurred most frequently in practice outside of traditional left political areas. Pensacola more than Portland. Oklahoma City more than Oakland. Nashville more than New York City. It occurred where there were not folks trying to co-opt Occupy into a premature left revolution.
It will be a peasant revolt until the workers of the security state recognize that they are being treated as peasants too. That is not the key criteria of success; the criteria of success is persistence and presence. Encampments sought to accomplish both those immediately; that is why they were treated as a threat.
Occupy today is knitting together diverse movements under the banner of opposing 1% political control–adding numbers to pickets at Walmart in Elwood IL, providing folks willing to chain themselves to heavy machinery building the Keyston XL pipeline in East Texas, showing up as street medics for shutting new drilling sites for fracking in a Pennsylvania state park….protesting at the DNC and the RNC. Every one of those actions has the primary purpose of breaking the stranglehold of the 1% on US politics.
…yes…10% / 90% is a good split point
Finkelstein is always great .I agree with Jane insofar as OWS needs to evolve , not be replaced .It institutionalized that ”it’s class stupid ” .and hence transcended ,not replaced ,the class-averse dominance of identity politics and its bougy dismissive of trickle-down justice .
There must be demands ,and they can’t be the wimpy pre-negotiated type that seeks to appease the power-elite problem No death penalty ,single-payer ,absolute food security ,decriminalize all petty drug offenses ,save our commons ,have a mixed economy that serves us instead of this globalized paradigm that we are supposed to serve until it yields indentured servitude
There are not only many great ideas being advanced ,there are new cosmologies in problem solving waiting for a conference to put forward a new polity .Check out Jonathan Nitzan whose new economic vision was actually dedicated to OWS .My expertise is in the area of new applications for legalizing drugs while actually reducing availability .Systems thinkers are creating a social physics counterpart .
Can we organize ? Time is not on our side .
It’s rather amusing when an intrepid fellow Occupier was asked recently to remove her ubiquitous ‘We are The 99%’ sticker from her laptop as she was livestreaming the County’s Energy Advisory Commission’s hearing, by the Chairman, who just so happens to be a senior executive of HEI…! Needless to say Occupy is very much alive and active in our communities…! We’re about to celebrate our First Anniversary on Nov.7th…! ;-)
Btw, She most certainly did not remove it…! ;-)
“From a mathematical perspective, there comes a time where things are so bad that the partisan divide gets bridged and everyone comes together in a “throw the bastards out” moment that is usually accompanied by extreme violence.”
Occupy does seem to be evolving by getting closer to unions. Most movements like the Occupiers will tend to be drowned out by the sound and fury of a presidential campaign, when the .01% invests hundreds of millions trying to convince people that we live in a democracy and that elections, as opposed to mass action, change things.
Violence, extreme or otherwise, always originates with the right, who represent the looter class. Preparations for violence include FISA, NDAA, the Paytriot act and a host of local and state laws aimed at criminalizing protest.
The way to minimize violence is to build the left and particularly unions, the heavy infantry of social change.
…The way to minimize violence is to build the left and particularly unions, the heavy infantry of social change…
Focused solely on nonviolent, Civil Disobedience tactics…!
I have lost a good deal of faith in the ability of Occupy to bring forth much of anything, at least not in the next three to five years. I agree this movement has to evolve. But the moment the issue is raised there is a plethora of suggestions. And they may all be good ones. But too many cooks spoil the broth.
At some point the goals have to be spelled out. Like the twenty odd million not working full time jobs, the crushing poverty and low pay in so many parts of our country and the lack of affordable health care and let’s not forget the rober barons who stole our savings with liar mortgages. These are social issues, to me social justice.
I think there will be little chance to affect real change until we can come up with a viable list of demands the general public can buy into.
I don’t know about other cities, but our occupation in Pittsburgh got tremendous support from a lot of long-time activist sources – unions, environmental groups, racial activist groups, gender activist groups, etc, etc.
A lot of those people are wrapped up in doing work related to the elections right now. How much continuing interest Occupy really has in my town will only become apparent after the beginning of November.
bluedot, have you participated in any Occupy action, much less, attend a single General Assembly…?
That’s not the process. The process is to involve more and more of the public in participating in the devoloping of those demands. That’s what the general assemblies were about. That’s what the Occupy National Gathering was about (at least doing an experiment in how to do this will larger numbers of people).
The reversal is that it is not marketing, it is politics. It’s not a buy-sell transaction. It’s a long discussion that brings focus to issues and involves people in creating alternatives as well as placing expectations on the institutions (and not just government) that parade themselves as serving the people or representing the people.
Coalition-building, visibility, protest, persistent presence…all those seek to bring more and more people to be involved in the general assembly.
…Coalition-building, visibility, protest, persistent presence…all those seek to bring more and more people to be involved in the general assembly…
Exactly, Tarheel…! Two hot button issues here, locally, has been addressed by our County Council, much to our satisfaction, a Unanimous condemnation against a massive attempt to seize our Public Lands, and, then delivered a significant blow against the highly toxic/abnoxious Geothermal industry here…! ;-)
It was all our networking across the Isle chain, and, active participation in all the hearings/meetings that is getting sh*t done for ‘We the People’ here in the Isles…!
Isn’t that whitewashing history a bit? If all violence comes from the “right” … how do you explain the “Weathermen” or the many other such violent proponents of the left that were active during the Civil Rights era? It seems pretty difficult to characterize Malcom X as “right wing” … and he absolutely preached the idea of engaging in violence under some circumstances.
Likewise, there are any number of stories of violent conflict from the history of unions as they built to the position of power that began to recede in the 70′s. This ranges from the old-school Molly Maguires back East to conflicts in the Coeur d’Alenes and Colorado out West … to name just a couple notorious ones.
The history of the left-wing in America reveals a very violent struggle from time to time. In fact, it appears that any stage in history where the left has asserted a measurable degree of political power, the wider movements which did so certainly included violent elements. It feels like wishful thinking to imagine there has been an exclusively non-violent movement which achieved impact to a degree that can be said to have significantly changed much … at least in the history of America.
Hey bluedot@26 .I think you are confused ,OWS is you .There seems to be some dissonance in your thinking that creates a false duality .You can share your ideas at OWS meetings all over America ,or via Jane and her tireless work .First and foremost ,it is a state of mind .There is no one to serve you ,no outreach ,no entertainment or conflict media . Just gobs of good people who are too evolved to believe in a system run by gangsters who dwarf Lucky Luciano an d Meyer Lansky in all areas of blood-thirsty psychopathy .If you think that is hyperbolic ,then your thinking is your enemy.
On a different note ,where else than an OWS headquarters would one find Sheila Bair and Michael Hudson shooting the breeze ?
Wrong. Focused solely on the defense of working people.
I agree with you, and you state very clearly what the basic issues are that are hitting 70-80% of the people really hard. It’s not that hard to get a sense of what the concrete demands — the super-slogan — might’ve been … ‘Jobs, housing and health care’.
Yes, Occupy was _something_ targeted at the economic crisis that began in 2007, and that’s good and a lot of people learned a lot. My guess/hope is that it could’ve accomplished _something_ on the concrete side.
But let’s face it, the right-wing/corporate media and political superstructure here in the U.S. makes a movement in the tradition of Gandhi or King extremely difficult. Even if Occupy had advanced onto demands that resonated with 80% of the public, even if it watchfully empowered leaders who were ‘normal people friendly’, knowledgeable, honest and articulate, even if yada yada … the media and political system likely would’ve pulled out stuff from its dirty tricks bag, tarred, dismissed and more or less effectively disappeared the movement.
But they didn’t need to. Occupy’s organizational structure just can’t and couldn’t handle moving forward and taking risks in the way that mass movements have always needed to.
All political violence originates, as I said, with the right, the looter class and the governments they own.
SDS’s Weathermen and their Maoist allies operated in the context of opposition to a genocidal war by the US against the peoples of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Why did you ignore that context in your comment? The US murdered over over a million while invading and attempting to occupy Vietnam.
The Weathermen, as far as I remember, might have killed one grad student when they, or someone like them bombed a campus building in, I think, Madison, They suffered from what Lenin described as “Left-Wing Communism: an Infantile Disorder” and should be condemned as stupid enablers of police violence.
Why did you ignore the murder of students at Jackson State and Kent State in your comment? It originated with the right.
Malcolm X, the SNCC organized Lowndes County Freedom Organization, or Black Panther Party, advocated self defense from the virulent and violent racists who fought any advance for black people. Why are you opposed to self defense, defaming it as violence. Do you think that people should have enabled the KKK by refusing to defend themselves.
Unions also engaged in self defense against the violence of the looter classes and the government they own. Do you object to self defense? Should workers just stand there and get shot or should they defend themselves from management goons, scabs and strikebreakers, including those in police and military uniforms?
Leftists, including myself are not advocates of non-violence. That’s for losers. Nor do we advocate military campaigns to defeat the right and the looter class. We advocate self defense utilizing the strategy of building strong unions and other groups to protect communities of workers and of people of color. That strength is what prevents violence.
Wendy, I disagree with some of your comment but what a thoughtful one it was!
A point Finkelstein seemed to be making (I’m not actually sure) but one I make definitely, is that smart, knowledgeable people need to be empowered. Many many smart people did great analytical work and published great stuff as part of OWS teams. But none of that stuff has any status, it is not the foundation of any demands. It has the same status as a great Michael Hudson or Ralph Nader book.
You’re right that Finkelstein didn’t touch on the global nature of Occupy. But I’m not sure Occupy would want to take discredit for how ineffective popular reaction has been to austerity on a scale mind-boggling to any American. For example, what exactly is happening in a country like Spain, where the unemployment is now nearly 25% (see paragraph 8 (8!) of this WSJ article on Spain’s unemployment) and still climbing? Austerity full steam ahead is what is happening, even with 25% unemployment. And it’s essentially the same story all across the EU.
Finally, that’s an excellent piece you link to in anticapitalist.org. I really don’t think a strong, ideological movement needs to resurrect the old ‘capitalism or socialism’ issue that motivates a lot of obscure leftist organizations but has long been dismissed by ‘the people’. People see good things about capitalism and good things about democratic ways of organizing our lives (notice I ditched ‘socialism’ for ‘democracy’, because ‘socialism’ has too many bad connotations for most Americans). I think one of the great weaknesses of the left is that we haven’t really articulated what is good about democracy versus privatization. (I see this all the time in the education debate, where there’s this inarticulateness about why public (controlled by we the people thru our democratic institutions) education is normally preferable to private and inevitably profit-driven education.)
Of course, one of Occupy’s weaknesses is its ambiguous relationship with democratic ways of doing things. Consensus is not really democracy imho.
Tarheel, also a great comment though I disagree with some of it.
I think my key disagreement is over ideology. The resistance to worldwide austerity (for us and prosperity for the rich) has to have a structured and persuasive understanding of how the world works, and then it needs to state clearly what changes it wants to make and how those changes improve on the way the socio-economic world currently works. That’s ideology.
The labeling is the problem. I agree at least for strategic reasons that Occupy should not label itself as ‘leftist’ right out of the box, but in fact its ideology likely will be leftist. I mean, we want to redistribute wealth from the top 1 and 10% to the rest of us. What’s more leftist than that? Nonetheless we probably must rigorously avoid self-labeling, but we sure need to state that, yeah, whatever label you wanna put on it that redistribution’s what we wanna do. And we want to make it permanent. Whatever got the distribution of power/income/wealth so out of line with what’s right, we the people want to fix that on a permanent basis. Again, sounds lefty to me but we can call it ‘economic democracy’ or ‘popular economics’ or something else …
Anyway, imho it will be a peasants rebellion until the lead banner is a plan for how we’ll transform financier-and-their-rich-friends-ruled America into an authentic democracy that forcefully and permanently distributes wealth, income and power much much more evenly. The angry peasants need a plan, something more than “I’m f#@ckin’ hungry and you got my grain!!”
Have you guys read this:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/10/03/voting-for-death/
Wow, Dinh says what we all are thinking.
Eye on the ball: those people are not all republicans. Working in a corporate law office in NYC with a bunch of democrat tribalists, I’m reminded of the importance of this fact every day.
Stepping outside the largely meaningless major party identification game, now basically just an identity/cultural game, I think the vast majority of the top 10% would oppose the policies that would generate massive redistribution of wealth and income from the top 10-20% down to the rest of us. But there are many exceptions, of course, at all economic levels.
I have a lot of issues with what Finklestein said; fortunately, many of the commenters above have already articulated most of them.
Here’s what I know: Occupy’s the most hopeful thing that has happened to me in the last 30 years or so – basically since Reagan, when a lot of us lefties gave up all hope. For whatever reason, a whole bunch of us have continued to cultivate complex relationships with occupiers we didn’t know and would never have met or sought out, were it not for Occupy. Many of these are people who exasperate us, piss us off, make us want to walk away. But there is something so compelling about what we all went through and discovered together – that little window into that “better world we hold in our hearts” – that we keep trying. It’s worth it. As I read this, it almost sounds like a cult experience. But I think it was just a little taste of actual freedom that made us realize that our lives don’t have to be so pointless and so utterly dependent upon fixing a system that we can’t really fix.
Finkelstein takes Occupy as something intended to be in the tradition of Gandhi or King Jr. That was and is only one way of looking at the movement, and others took it and take it as something entirely different, as for example a shelter from the storm of out of control capitalism. Nothing at all wrong with that, but I agree with Finkelstein and hope that the meeting of minds/souls and bonding in common perspective and pain are sidelines from the main focus and intention of Occupy.
Compradors produce misery.
Wow, there you have it. You and Finkelstein
To me, that is exactly the main focus and intention of Occupy and everything else is a sideline. So either the version of the world that my comrades and I hold in our hearts will win out or we are well and truly fucked. I guess we shall see.
A real-world effort/movement for a better world was at least one of the main purposes of Occupy, right? That’s what Gandhi and King were experts at, and that’s the perspective I think Finkelstein brings to Occupy.
I think you missed my point entirely, by the way: the vast majority of the people who were my friends before Occupy are still hanging in there with Obama and system. I previously had very little in common with most of the occupiers I now consider to be, if not friends, then certainly people who are at least on the right side of the barricades. Our pain is really the only thing we have in common; isn’t that what movements are made of?
Are you suggesting that bypassing the system that is currently failing us is not a “real world effort”? Because I think that pretending we are likely to get even incremental change from the oligarchy is as unreal as it gets. Many other countries seem to have that figured out and are back out in the streets. We sit and discuss the debates.
The first suggestion by Finkelstein is that Occupy needed to be, in sum, more ‘attuned to and with the people’. Not the best people or the most enlightened, but mostly the unfortunately less enlightened: the real, average, TV-watching, most of them white, crappy expensive health care, sales job, stuck in the mainstream media’s propaganda stew, struggling to pay off the mortgage Americans.
Occupy was mostly a collection of some of the most enlightened people about our current catastrophically screwed-up economy, media, and politics. Occupiers could choose to prioritize looking inward and strengthening bonds with each other, or choose to mix it up with, and enlighten, and bring into the movement’s circle the irritating, less-enlightened rest of America. I think doing the former is the right thing to do, but the latter has to be the main thing, the priority.
Anyway, you can see the latter was heavily emphasized by Gandhi, and he gradually built up a campaign that brought down the British Empire in India. Again, maybe the whole ‘build a movement and bring the system down’ wasn’t, at bottom, ever the ‘real’ intent of Occupy for many or most of its most dedicated.
I guess I am still not being clear. My experience with Occupy is that, while many of the most visible and outspoken “representatives” might have been people you would refer to as the “most enlightened,” a lot of them actually were the people you just described. Not nearly enough, by any stretch. But because it was never predicated on party politics or even a left/right axis, average people from all walks of life showed up – especially those who were struggling. That’s what brought them to the town square; they weren’t getting any help from the TV or their elected representatives. I certainly don’t have all or even some of the answers as to how to get more people involved and I think there are many, many valid criticisms of Occupy. I just get really tired of people who set up an expectation and then complain that Occupy failed to meet it. That’s the old paradigm.
MLK had the *actual pulpit*, remember, and helped give birth to the Social Gospel movement of that time. It was based on moral convictions, and a call to higher ethics and consciousness, much as OWS has articulated. Justice for all, not the two-tiered one we now experience, or that some say the Constitution actually provided for (I’m not willing to argue that, pro or con). That we all have the right to The Commons in all its meanings, as well as healthy food, clean water, freedom from political or profitable incarceration, either very affordable of free education, universal health care, and above all, the admonition to build community and new models free of the machine from the ground up.
*And* often unpopular here, joining forces with those of other political persuasions who can agree on the big ticket items we share.
Oh, and remember, King also benefited from the cautionary tale of the Black Panthers….
A bit incoherent here, I just woke up with a big headache…
But I do see OWS as embodying more traditionally feminine principles, including measuring worthy endeavors by what they might look like seven generations out.
Please remember just one thing: in NYC breakaway unions joined those pesky kids at Zucotti Park, as did veterans, and even some hedge funders who looked down on it all, walked off the job…joined, and stayed involved and committed.
That said, I’ve long advocated for actions like Uncut Flashmobs that could gain folks’ attention, then listen to questions, answer them, and perhaps hand out small brochures that could enunciate some of the history of how we got where we are. It could start with Clinton/NAFTA/repealing Glass-Steagall, the fraudulent housing bubble, the meltdown, the bailouts, the increase in Big Bank profits since, all that.
Precisely. These issues do not skew right or left and they don’t require an intellectual or activist bent. They’re universal and they are being universally fracked up by the oligarchy. The average, “less informed” person knows that now, perhaps in some small measure due to Occupy.
Wendy, it’s very interesting that you say that OWS embodies feminine principles, given all the (at least in Oakland) uproar about patriarchy. But I think you’re right – at least that’s the aspiration.
I love the flashmob actions; I think those are great examples of the sort of thing that Occupy has encouraged people to do. And that’s another point – people are out there doing shit they never did before. They may not call it occupying, but I believe that people have suddenly realized they do not need permission or leadership to do something helpful and hopeful.
And…as far as I remember it, we imported UK Uncut, so…again, it’s a global movement. And yes: so many groups with certain defining interests have sprung up since being arguably emboldened by the democracy movement. If I could remember the title, I’d go fetch a recent post I did about so many groups and GA projects in so many of the areas of need, and of Right.
Yes, I can’t get the informed/uniformed calculations mentioned here; yes, in front of a video camera, someone ranting without direction is not good, but where are the cameras? ;o)
On comparing MLK and Gandhi to Occupy, to me the crowning achievement of all three is that the PTB had to come out of the woodwork and oppose them, or in the case of the early Civil Rights movement join them – so that each succeeded enormously in energizing the public, and that is still going on, for each of them. I include Occupy in this ongoing outreach.
Had they not done what they did, who knows how many ‘lesser evil’ arguments we would still be getting? How much did public perception change when those dramatic confrontations with authority were going on? And they are a gamechanger still. I never went out and Occupied, but I was so proud of them. I don’t mind how they present now or in future; they are a presence ongoing and I believe they have changed public perception. Even though they were driven away (and MLK and Gandhi were assassinated) they hurt the PTB, they took them down! Any future progress is because they did this, and they did what they could do with the resources they had.
I for one will be happy with whatever we can do peacefully to build upon that awakened perception.
There is no need to say it should be the 10% vs the 90. That just enlarges the enemy group – what is good about that when you are working to be inclusive? Of course there are many in the well-off regions of the 99% who’d like the 1% to win out – there are plenty in the lower regions as well who still vote against their best interests having been hoodwinked into it. The point is that the 1% and the 1% of 1% are the powerbrokers! We should not forget that.
Hey wendydavis @50 ,do you ever wonder if the republic can only be saved if it devolves into autonomous county government .I’m psychologically geared to think of reforms from a statist view ,but I love Berkeley ,and previously Ann Arbor ,while feeling no ambition to impose their values on retrograde areas based upon traditional this ,original that ,or old fashioned the other .
The big-picture stuff for me is eliminating the empire adventurism to which the pernicious neoliberal economic model is enmeshed ,public banking from the bottom up and public campaign financing .
I think millions ,maybe tens of millions ,who realize big government has merged with international corporatism to betray the citizenry ,would work for this vision .
Your thoughts ?
In my opinion, I think the occupy movement has been tremendously successful. Did it break up the ‘too big to fail’ banks, get us single payer, end the 2-party duopoly, help to ensure much needede relief for those decimated in the recession?
No.
But what it did do is give an entire generation the blueprints for organizing, peaceful protesting, advocating for issues, dealing w/ law enforcement/ACLU, etc — all far removed from the two establishment party model.
Considering where everyone was in 2008 (largely committed entirely to the hope and reform ‘bait & switch’ promises of the Democratic Party and Barack Obama) occupy was a much-needed step towards real change.
Where it goes now, who can say, but as the ones most committed to the movement learn more and recognize some of the shortcomings in the current model, and make changes, I suspect it will evolve and remain significant.
The only thing that could stop it is more job opportunities, relief from student loans, mortgage relief, and a better economy. Until that happens people are going to continue to be angry and frustrated and motivated to make some noise.
I appreciate your point about the inadvisability of the 10/90% meme, juliania. ‘More enemies’; hmmm. For myself, I think the Culture Jammers got it right, and that OWS is a revolution of spiritual consciousness and insurrection.
Can’t find the link, but the message was:
“We awoke one morning to the dark realization that humanity is being dragged into a black hole of ecological, financial and spiritual catastrophe that our democracy has been seized by a corporatocracy that every day two hundred species of plant, insect, bird and mammal become forever extinct that a deluge of advertising is sleepwalking our civilization to the brink of insanity and that unless we fight back in the most visceral and creative way possible all will be lost.
And yet, what sets our struggle apart in 2012 is that we are not fighting to save a distant future. We are not trying to prevent some terrible event that is still to come. This is not about our unborn grandchildren. Instead, many of us sense that the threshold has already been crossed; the tipping point has already happened and what we are fighting for is our present. We are living in that tragic moment of eerie stillness where the fatal damage has been done, widening cracks can be seen, yet the edifice still stands and business as usual continues but for how much longer?
Our days may be shadowed by this dark realization, but there is reason to be deeply optimistic for “where danger is, grows the saving power also.” Never before has the tantalizing possibility of a Global Spring, a worldwide people’s insurgency for democracy, seemed as close. For perhaps the first time in human history, we just might be on the edge of an everywhere-at-once revolution against the financial fraudsters, corporate lackeys and the ideology of consumerism that has brought the Earth to the precipice of collapse.
In this, the era of the total and transcendent indignato swarm, we look to each other, not to the masters above, to find out what it will take to pull off the ultimate culture jam: spiritual insurrection.
for the wild,
Culture Jammers HQ”
Sublime times ten, imo.
It’s ideology because of the framing of 1%-99% will at least be populist. But that ideology is not set in advance; it emerges out of the process of actually doing the politics that one advocates. The lack of ideology right now is and should not be a strategic ruse as a movement. It is a movement of autonomous individuals who each bring their own ideologies and political principles. It can accommodate liberatarians who currently support Ron Paul or who self-identify with a Tea Party organization as well as Greens, disillusioned Democrats, disillusioned Republicans, anarchists, socialists, communists, and folks who are sympathetic to the European Pirate Party.
A plan of the sort that you say is required is not something that gets put together in a year for a movement that potentially represents 7 billion people. (It is all too easy for USians to not see the Puerto del Sol indignato movement in Spain, the various Arab Spring movements, the Greek opposition to austerity, the student revolt in Chile, the labor movement in China, and the anti-corruption movement in Mexico as a part of the Occupy movment, but it is the same movement.) Just working out the mechanics of how you build such a plan is going to take several years. And that is occurring in the midst of movement-building coalitions and protests and encampments and rallies and many other things that bring people into the conversation.
And that conversation has been about the details of the current situation, details that are crucial to any practical plan of action. And a lot of that is gathering the research about the manifold ways that the 1% PtB, the vampire squid, has its tentacles into all of the areas that are major issues. For example, Occupy Columbia SC had a teach-in session when they were encamped that presented the ins and outs of the nuclear energy industry in SC and how the people of SC were being sold out to the idea of nuclear reprocessing in the old Savannah River bomb plant and the lax enforcement of safety regulations in one of the nuclear generating plants of an investor-owned utility. There has been work in educating folks about the cui bono aspects of the TransCanada Keystone XL pipeline project. All of those require separate local action.
Until that conversation globally is pretty much complete, we are going to see what you call a peasant revolt.
Gandhi had a simpler go of things at this point in the Independence movement. It was clear what had to happen and where. Britain had to leave India to self-government. After 65 years, the revolution part of that movement is a work in progress that is experiencing its own Occupy movement.
The civil rights movement had an easier conceptual job. De jure segregation in the South had to be ended. Racial discrimination in voting, housing, employment, and education had to be ended. That revolution is still a work in progress, and a lot of folks who were in that movement have participated in and support Occupy over against others in that movement who became part of the establishment and now are some of the mayors who send police to evict Occupy encampments.
There nothing wrong with keeping the peasant rebellion going, or more accurately supporting and interlinking various spontaneous peasant rebellions that are the result of issues arising from the 1% control of governments. And the internal practices in the workplaces controlled by the 1%.
Would that I had some thoughts, defogger. What you’re asking is beyond the scope of my knowledge. I will say that on a recent post of mine, I’d misconstrued a friend/denizen’s comment in thinking he may have been speaking of Home Rule Charters, which I’d vaguely remembered as available to counties. Past that: I really don’t know much.
I have read here the opinion that *regional* states, aggregates, etc. may be the eventual solution; I resist the idea because there are many Southerners, for instance, who are emphatically not racist, so leaving the impression that the South, or the Republican Party as a whole, is full of White Supremacists, is foul to me on its face, but then…that is my nature, I suppose. Plus I know so many great and wonderful Southerners, even here and at other sites I’ve posted over the years.
That said, I’ve been really encouraged that so many local groups, enlivened by OWS, are experimenting with a host of programs and models to work around The Machine, and holding discussions about how well the models, when successful, might ‘scale up’, which was a new concept to me not too long ago.
Ah, bugger, defogger (pure accidental poetry, that, lol), I’m feelin’ rode hard n’ put up wet, as they say around here. I did due diligence (finally) and found at least this post that you may or may not care for.
To me OWS offers the main hope. Including my interpretation of one of our/their core messages: love all those you can, and create community with a purpose. (Planning on a post echoing that soon, if my plans don’t get derailed as they most often do.)
Damn straight.
For the record, Randall Kohn, that sort of characterization is not only reflexively antagonistic, but has nothing to do with the merits of his criticism of the movement.
Hey wendydavis ,thank you for your response .I did a poor job of conveying my proposal largely because I was leapfrogging from three places in my mind .First ,I was thinking of OWS and Spain’s autonomous regions in some anarchist context .Then ,I was thinking of your comment about good people with different belief systems can unify in mass resistance to a government over which we have lost control.Finally .I reflected on my anti -bankster sites where good pubs such as Sheila Bair ,Paul Craig Roberts and Catherine Austin-Fitts sing from the same hymnal as Michael Hudson ,Chris Hedges ,
They are all highly-principled ,courageous ,smart ,and want to save our country .
Look forward to your post .Have a nice evening .
Occupy needs leadership and a program. Neither are emerging from the ostensibly ongoing process, because you’ll never achieve a consensus on either, or even a consensus on the process by which members of Occupy vote for a leadership or a program. So, I don’t see a formation process taking place over the last year.
Also, I don’t see the basic parameters of an ideological viewpoint, with specific demands, being complicated. What might be challenging is generating an in-fact-leftist set of demands that doesn’t turn off all the people who are hurting and angry who have been part of Occupy: this includes libertarians, tea party members, and lots of conventional thinking people. For example, getting money out of politics is likely one of the two or three most basic demands shared by almost all Occupiers. But when you get to specifics (after empowering expertise), you get to public funding of the electoral process and candidates and the FCC telling private companies to give free advertising to candidates, and so on. Libertarians would oppose all of those specifics, and conventional-thinking people would reflexively oppose ‘giving money to politicians’.
But Gandhi and his leadership team succeeded in having a plan and forming specific can’t-be-ignored demands that pushed the confrontation with British power forward. Constructing a punchy list of specific demands is extremely difficult on a political level — compromises and throwing lots of good demands out that don’t resonate well with the people likely would be necessary. Wise, elected, closely monitored leadership could make those tough decisions. There’s no other way other than being the coordinated folks who shout the loudest and are the biggest bullies simultaneously at all the consensual Occupy gatherings.
Anyway, it will be interesting but likely depressing to see how the Occupy decision-making structure reacts to the tsunami of class war coming down over the next 4 months and four years. I just don’t see that structure being helpful at all, in a time of desperate need for leadership and clear, galvanizing class-based vision. The PTB knows there’s a class war (not an identity politics war) going on, and enlightened leadership needs to guide the 90% toward that truth and to smart action. Time is of the essence.
Mornin’, defogger. You may be speaking of areas like the Basque region and the Mondragon Collectives? It would be interesting to learn how independent they are. (Sure are boatloads of things to learn, aren’t there?)
Yes, it gets tiresome to have to defend a Paul Craig Roberts or Sheila Bair from criticism of their pasts. We should be cautious about it, but on the whole I really like it when Foxes turn Gamekeepers. ;o) They usually come with a wealth of insider experience, and know how easily the system can be played for profit. Some revert, or disappoint us (Wendell Potter comes to mind, I guess). Shoot, Neil Barofsky: talk about an insider going public!
Hedges…I have reservations about, and almost wish he and OWS hadn’t formed such a tight relationship, but that’s just me.
Stay strong, glad you’re here.
I’m one of those real people Finkelstein mentioned, and I say the hell with him.