#1
hell's heart
Post rating: +
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/11/28/111128fa_fact_schwartz?currentPage=1

If anyone could claim responsibility for the Zuccotti situation, it was Lasn: Adbusters had come up with the idea of an encampment, the date the initial occupation would start, and the name of the protest—Occupy Wall Street. Now the epicenter of the movement had been raided. Lasn began thinking of reasons that this might be a good thing.
Lasn is sixty-nine years old and lives with his wife on a five-acre farm outside Vancouver. He has thinning white hair and the small eyes of a bulldog. In a lilting voice, he speaks of “a dark age coming for humanity” and of “killing capitalism,” alternating gusts of passion with gentle laughter. He has learned not to let premonitions of apocalypse spoil his good mood.



White, who is twenty-nine years old, was born to a Caucasian mother and an African-American father. “I don’t really fit in with either group,” he told me. He attended suburban public schools, where he began a series of one-man campaigns against authority. In middle school, with his parents’ blessing, he refused to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. In high school, he founded an atheists’ club, over the objections of the principal. This led to an appearance on “Politically Incorrect,” and atheist organizations flew White to their conferences to give talks. “It all went to my head,” he said. “I became a little ego child. Ego destroys. I was too young to understand that.”



White watched as the e-mail’s proposal raced around Twitter and Reddit. “Normal campaigns are lots of drudgery and not much payoff, like rolling a snowball up a hill,” he said. “This was the reverse.” Fifteen minutes after Lasn sent the e-mail, Justine Tunney, a twenty-six-year-old in Philadelphia, read it on her RSS feed. The next day, she registered OccupyWallSt.org, which soon became the movement’s online headquarters. She began operating the site with a small team, most of whose members were, like her, transgender anarchists. (They jokingly call themselves Trans World Order.



P. took the subway to Bowling Green. On his way to the exit, he passed a line of police officers accompanied by bomb-sniffing dogs. Outside, police had surrounded the “Charging Bull” with barricades and, a few blocks north, sealed off a stretch of Wall Street around the Stock Exchange. P. tried to look nonchalant as he carried a black messenger bag that contained a first-aid kit, a bottled solution of liquid antacid and water (to remedy the effects of tear gas and pepper spray), fifteen Clif bars (carrot cake), and several hundred photocopied maps, showing seven possible locations. “We decided that low-tech communication methods would be best,” P. told me. “If we’d used a mass text message, or Twitter, it would have been easy for the police to track down who was doing this.”

P. majored in math at a small liberal-arts college and plays in two bands, “some punk, some noise.” Like most of Occupy Wall Street’s core organizers, P. is an anarchist, meaning that he is “dedicated to the eradication of any unjust or illegitimate system. At the very least, that means the eradication of capitalism and the state.” He does not smash bank windows, though he said that he does not necessarily disapprove of people who do.



This resulted in some confusion on August 2nd, when scores of graduate students and labor activists showed up, expecting a rally for New Yorkers Against Budget Cuts. They erected a small stage and began giving amplified speeches, which alienated the roughly fifty Adbusters supporters, mostly anarchists, who came expecting a planning session. There was some angry shouting before a group of anarchists broke off, sat down in a circle on the cobblestones, and held their own meeting.
The anarchists immediately agreed to use “horizontal” organizing methods, according to which meetings are known as general assemblies and participants make decisions by consensus and give continuous feedback through hand gestures. Moving one’s fingers in an undulating motion, palm out, pointing up, means approval of what’s being said. Palm in, pointing down, means disapproval. Crossed arms signals a “block,” a serious objection that must be heard. Some participants knew this style of meeting from left-wing traditions stretching back to the civil-rights movement and earlier.



As the facilitation meeting was wrapping up, Marisa Holmes, wearing a dark-green trenchcoat, arrived; soon she was conferring with two other organizers over cold noodles about how they would present the proposal for the Spokes Council that evening. She had arrived with the team that was to conduct the general assembly, and the atrium quickly reorganized itself around them. Despite the movement’s taboo on leaders, many in this group had accrued a sort of power. “Marisa is a quiet leader,” Marina Sitrin, an occasional facilitator and the author of a book about horizontalism in Argentina, says. “She’s not a young Tom Hayden, the white-male type who by force of personality and speech wins an argument.”



In mid-October, supporters in Tokyo, Sydney, Madrid, and London held rallies; encampments sprang up in almost every major American city. Nearly all of them modelled themselves on the New York City General Assembly: with no official leaders, rotating facilitators, and no fixed set of demands. Today, endorsements of the Occupy movement can be found everywhere, from anarchist graffiti on bank walls to Al Gore’s Twitter feed. On a rain-smeared cardboard sign near the shattered window of an Oakland coffee shop that had been destroyed by a cadre of anarchists during a nighttime clash with police, someone wrote, “We’re sorry, this does not represent us.” Below that, someone else wrote, “Speak for yourself.”



old white guy and atheist working at glossy anticapitalism magazine start movement meme adopted by anarchists and transgendered which becomes the rootinest tootinest truth to powerest campout that e're got pepper sprayed. discuss or grumble or w/e

#2
Post rating: +
i'm really glad they decided to take a peaceful approach, it's the proper strategy against a 'peaceful', violence-orientated power formulation. i think it wouldn't be effective in the least, if it wasn't such an enormous affront to the carefully-sculpted symbolic signifiers 'democracy' and 'peace' that liberal democracy has cultivated.

not to mention getting a beating is probably the most effective means to discipline a resistance in a socially-permissive culture. permissive in the sense of consumer orientation, but also in the sense of ambiguity towards serious structural problems (characterized by apathy and weak nihilism)
#3
Poronto
Post rating: ~
atheists. ugh.
#4
tardy on these heaters
Post rating: ~
so basically what youre saying is its a fundamentally reformist movement with a social base in socially marginalized middle class

reeks of proto-fascist opportunist vulnerabilities
#5
Post rating: +

babyfinland posted:
so basically what youre saying is its a fundamentally reformist movement with a social base in socially marginalized middle class

reeks of proto-fascist opportunist vulnerabilities


yes, which is why it's so crucial right now for indigenous, black, and chicano/immigrant groups to become the backbone, along with unions.

though i'm sure they're (rightfully) wary

#6
tardy on these heaters
Post rating: +

Crow posted:

babyfinland posted:
so basically what youre saying is its a fundamentally reformist movement with a social base in socially marginalized middle class

reeks of proto-fascist opportunist vulnerabilities

yes, which is why it's so crucial right now for indigenous, black, and chicano/immigrant groups to become the backbone, along with unions.

though i'm sure they're (rightfully) wary



black agenda report said their people were pretty forcibly excluded from participating with their own demands, though on the other hand here in Seattle and in Oakland the Decolonize Occupy faction is fairly prominent. Death to dance-ins and yoga revolution, up with JDPEN

#7
[account deactivated]
#8
Post rating: ~

babyfinland posted:
reeks of proto-fascist opportunist vulnerabilities


and that's a bad thing?

#9
tardy on these heaters
Post rating: ~
Black Agenda Report's recent postings re: OWS

The Hood and Occupy Boston Didn’t Mix Well

Some Black activists who attempted to collaborate with Boston’s OWS outfit came away less than satisfied. Jamal Crawford, of the city’s Occupy The Hood umbrella, cited the Boston OWS’s “leaderless structure,” “lack of foundational principles,” and “lack of organization” – as well as “abundant” white privilege and instances of racism – for failure to forge a working relationship. “The question has never been, Can Black people navigate in a white world, because that’s something we’ve been doing,” said Crawford. “The real question has been, Can white people navigate in a Black world – and that remains to be seen.” Crawford, however, credits OWS headquarters in New York with having been “very supportive of Occupy The Hood.”



Occupation Has Energized Oakland Black and Brown Movement

“This current moment has opened up a lot of opportunities for us to get more resources, in terms of new people who are really motivated,” said Robbie Clark, a housing activist with the Oakland-based non-profit Just Cause. “A lot of organizations are willing to come together about how to win some concrete demands, especially around bank accountability, workers rights and immigrant rights.” Clark said “people are learning from how the Occupiers have been able to engage masses of people” – even if those masses are not necessarily Black and brown. The Occupiers have also learned from local activists of color, said Clark. “This movement around economic equality can be traced back to Reconstruction: 40 acres and a mule.”



The Occupation is Not a White Thing

“When racist stuff comes up in the larger movement, we’re first to respond to it,” said Andrew Hoyles, of the People of Color Working Group at Occupy Wall Street, in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park. One problem is that media seek out “a white face, oftentimes a white male,” to interview. “That’s a struggle. The issues that people of color face didn’t start with college debt.” It’s very important, Hoyles said, “that Black people in America start to see Occupy Wall Street not as a white issue. It’s very much their issue.” The 99% “aren’t just educated white men in debt; it is the ones who have continuously been the first to be fired and the last to be hired.”



Those that initiated the early occupations in most cities were white. They have re-established the long-lost right of the poor to comngregate in public and express their discontent. If this is not to be a right which only whites enjoy, it's time for us to step up too. There will be race and class tensions, with the increased participation of black and brown people in the occupation movement. But these are growing pains, and necessary. It's time, as Glen Ford has said, to claim our place in the 99% and spell out what that looks like.


http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/occupy-where-whats-it-black-and-brown-people

The question for Black America is not what’s going on in the heads of young white people in Zuccotti Park, but how WE will organize in our own defense against Wall Street, which has “done more damage to Black people than anyone else” in the country. Barack Obama, “most of the traditional Black organizations, and the entire Black Misleadership Class” are all bought and paid for by finance capital. “Our job is to wake our people up, so that we don’t sleep through this moment.”


http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/occupy-all-harlems-save-ourselves-dictatorship-wall-street

#10
Post rating: ~

babyfinland posted:
The Hood and Occupy Boston Didn’t Mix Well


shocker

#11
Post rating: ~
i dont think it's surprising that people with massively less financial resources cant afford to stand around and whine about things for weeks on end
#12
Post rating: +
graeber wrote a thing for nakedcapitalism a little while back (i dont know why but hes been showing up there from time to time) w/ some interesting anecdotes and a bit of analysis

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/10/david-graeber-on-playing-by-the-rules-–-the-strange-success-of-occupy-wall-street.html

Just a few months ago, I wrote a piece for Adbusters that started with a conversation I’d had with an Egyptian activist friend named Dina:

All these years,” she said, “we’ve been organizing marches, rallies… And if only 45 people show up, you’re depressed, if you get 300, you’re happy. Then one day, 200,000 people show up. And you’re incredulous: on some level, even though you didn’t realize it, you’d given up thinking that you could actually win.

As the Occupy Wall Street movement spreads across America, and even the world, I am suddenly beginning to understand a little of how she felt.

On August 2, I showed up at a 7 PM meeting at Bowling Green, that a Greek anarchist friend, who I’d met at a recent activist get together at 16 Beaver Street, had told me was meant to plan some kind of action on Wall Street in mid-September. At the time I was only vaguely aware of the background: that a month before, the Canadian magazine Adbusters had put out the call to “Occupy Wall Street”, but had really just floated the idea on the internet, along with some very compelling graphics, to see if it would take hold; that a local anti-budget cut coalition top-heavy with NGOs, unions, and socialist groups had tried to take possession of the process and called for a “General Assembly” at Bowling Green. The title proved extremely misleading. When I arrived, I found the event had been effectively taken over by a veteran protest group called the Worker’s World Party, most famous for having patched together ANSWER one of the two great anti-war coalitions, back in 2003. They had already set up their banners, megaphones, and were making speeches—after which, someone explained, they were planning on leading the 80-odd assembled people in a march past the Stock Exchange itself.

...

But as I paced about the Green, I noticed something. To adopt activist parlance: this wasn’t really a crowds of verticals—that is, the sort of people whose idea of political action is to march around with signs under the control of one or another top-down protest movement. They were mostly pretty obviously horizontals: people more sympathetic with anarchist principles of organization, non-hierarchical forms of direct democracy, and direct action. I quickly spotted at least one Wobbly, a young Korean activist I remembered from some Food Not Bomb event, some college students wearing Zapatista paraphernalia, a Spanish couple who’d been involved with the indignados in Madrid… I found my Greek friends, an American I knew from street battles in Quebec during the Summit of the Americas in 2001, now turned labor organizer in Manhattan, a Japanese activist intellectual I’d known for years… My Greek friend looked at me and I looked at her and we both instantly realized the other was thinking the same thing: “Why are we so complacent? Why is it that every time we see something like this happening, we just mutter things and go home?” – though I think the way we put it was more like, “You know something? Fuck this shit. They advertised a general assembly. Let’s hold one.”

So we gathered up a few obvious horizontals and formed a circle, and tried to get everyone else to join us. Almost immediately people appeared from the main rally to disrupt it, calling us back with promises that a real democratic forum would soon break out on the podium. We complied. It didn’t happen. My Greek friend made an impassioned speech and was effectively shooed off the stage. There were insults and vituperations. After about an hour of drama, we formed the circle again, and this time, almost everyone abandoned the rally and come over to our side. We created a decision-making process (we would operate by modified consensus) broke out into working groups (outreach, action, facilitation) and then reassembled to allow each group to report its collective decisions, and set up times for new meetings of both the smaller and larger groups. It was difficult to figure out what to do since we only had six weeks, not nearly enough time to plan a major action, let alone bus in the thousands of people that would be required to actually shut down Wall Street—and anyway we couldn’t shut down Wall Street on the appointed day, since September 17, the day Adbusters had been advertising, was a Saturday. We also had no money of any kind.

Two days later, at the Outreach meeting we were brainstorming what to put on our first flyer. Adbusters’ idea had been that we focus on “one key demand.” This was a brilliant idea from a marketing perspective, but from an organizing perspective, it made no sense at all. We put that one aside almost immediately. There were much more fundamental questions to be hashed out. Like: who were we? Who did want to appeal to? Who did we represent? Someone—this time I remember quite clearly it was me, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a half dozen others had equally strong memories of being the first to come up with it—suggested, “well, why not call ourselves ‘the 99%’? If 1% of the population have ended up with all the benefits of the last 10 years of economic growth, control the wealth, own the politicians… why not just say we’re everybody else?” The Spanish couple quickly began to lay out a “We Are the 99%” pamphlet, and we started brainstorming ways to print and distribute it for free.

...

To be perfectly honest, as one of the old-timers scrambling to organize medical and legal trainings, lessons on how to organize affinity groups and do non-violent civil disobedience, seminars on how to facilitate meetings and the like, for most of us, the greatest concern during those hectic weeks was how to ensure the initial event wouldn’t turn out a total fiasco, with all the enthusiastic young people immediately beaten, arrested, and psychologically traumatized as the media, as usual, simply looked the other way.

We’d certainly seen it happen before.

This time it didn’t. True, there were all the predictable conflicts. Most of New York’s grumpier hard-core anarchists refused to join in, and mocked us from the sidelines as reformist; meanwhile, the more open, “small-a” anarchists, who had been largely responsible for organizing the facilitation and trainings, battled the verticals in the group to ensure that we did not institute anything that could become a formal leadership structure, such as police liaisons or marshals. There were also bitter battles over the web page, as well as minor crises over the participation of various fringe groups, ranging from followers of Lyndon LaRouche to one woman from a shadowy group that called itself US Day of Rage, and who we sometimes suspected might not have any other members, who systematically blocked any attempt to reach out to unions because she felt we should be able to attract dissident Tea Partiers. On September 17th itself, I was troubled at first by the fact that only a few hundred people seemed to have shown up. What’s more the spot we’d chosen for our General Assembly, a plaza outside Citibank, had been shut down by the city and surrounded by high fences. The tactical committee however had scouted out other possible locations, and distributed maps: around 3 PM, word went around we were moving to location #5—Zuccotti Park—and by the time we got there, I realized we were surrounded by at least two thousand people.

The real credit for what happened after that—within a matter of weeks, a movement that had spread to 800 different cities, with outpourings of support from radical opposition groups as far away as China—belongs mainly to the students and other young people who simply dug themselves and refused to leave, despite the endless (and in many cases, obviously illegal) acts of police repression designed to intimidate, and to make life so miserable in the park (refusing to allow activists to cover their computers with tarps during rainstorms, that sort of thing) that its inhabitants would simply become demoralized and abandon the project. And, as the weeks went on, against calculated acts of terrorism involving batons and pepper-spray. Still, dogged activists have held out heroically under such conditions before, and the world simply ignored them. Why didn’t it happen this time? After so many years of vain attempts to revive the fervor of the Global Justice Movement, and constantly falling flat, I found myself, like Dina, asking “what did we actually do right?”

#13
Post rating: +

Crow posted:
i'm really glad they decided to take a peaceful approach, it's the proper strategy against a 'peaceful', violence-orientated power formulation. i think it wouldn't be effective in the least, if it wasn't such an enormous affront to the carefully-sculpted symbolic signifiers 'democracy' and 'peace' that liberal democracy has cultivated.



yeah, that dynamic has been really fascinating. there have even been mayors and university officials awkwardly trying to make distinctions between "good non-violent civil disobedience" and "bad non-violent civil disobedience"

#14
[account deactivated]
#15
The Future is Here
Post rating: ~
Isn't it pragmatically best for the movement to be white? Like doesn't that make it easier for a white woman miscarrying, granny being bashed, etc to filter to the average person and make them care? Or is there something I'm totally missing? I dont know anything
#16
Post rating: ~

discipline posted:
what shocks me the most about that adbusters article is how poor at tactics those hippie dudes are ... pack up and leave midway thru december? jeet cripes

honestly I was going to write a long QQ thread about how I'm done with occupy this go around... it's been a week now since I showed my face down there. I used to spend like 40 hours a week there but now I'm just working on my school stuff. truth be told a lot of what brought me down was the organizational stuff. I like the human mic and stuff but to assume a movement is completely horizontal is bullshit. there are always leaders that are going to emerge. I quit because I was starting to assume that role for a lot of people and I didn't want the responsibility of being looked at like that while being unable to do much else except manipulate because of process.

spokesmen nobody knew were coming up with reformist crap and people who had been there since day one, homeless activists who worked their asses off, were getting laughed down by a bunch of students. you had this underclass of uneducated and vulnerable doing day-to-day stuff like waste and kitchen and security and all the bourgie kiddos were clogging up process and university and working groups that didn't contribute anything. we had kids from these "high caste" working groups come by the kitchen and complain how hierarchical it was... when confronted with the fact they hadn't shown up to help in the kitchen they'd blame it on us and being too hierarchical! most of the people I knew at the camp were praying for formalized hierarchy by the time I left, because this weird unspoken semi-hierarchy based on class, gender, race, econ situation was getting REALLY weird. the last time I was there, there were 4 different econ working groups who were stressed about delivering statements to the guardian more than strategizing how to raise consciousness in the camp about basic issues. it seemed like people were out for the experience by the end and not for challenging the status quo.

like this guy in adbusters talking about packing up mid december... what the heck? why not get people doing direct action every day so the city cracks down? crackdowns are a necessary integral part of nonviolent resistance. READ A BOOK HIPPIE! of course, that happened, but now my fear is they are just packing up after last thursday's actions. now I see stuff about shutting down the day after thanksgiving... how much more unfocused can we get?

maybe this is a result of the atomization of politics over the last decade or so. people got up in arms because their fracking/vegan/kurdish/one Love agenda wasn't on the same priority as finance. as a result everyone got frustrated and went home. I guess the danger of a horizontal movement in a vain atomized society like USA is that no one has a common rallying cry anymore. "no demands" is such a weak position to take if you're not willing to follow it with some really extreme direct action. ok, 99 people symbolically got arrested on brooklyn bridge last thursday while 32k or something marched over on the pedestrian path. why didn't 32k people sit on the damn bridge? I guess people are still looking out for number one.

anyway, I'm hoping this serves as a learning experience. maybe a hardened vanguard is gonna come out of this. but like, I remember reading this open letter from POC to occupy and the basic message was "we have a lot more to lose than you do, so we want to see how serious you are about getting ish done before we sign on".. I dunno, maybe something will change in the next few weeks and I will change my tune. until then... *shrugs* I dunno oops, I guess I wrote a QQ post after all...



Good post. The relationship between POC and the occupy movements has been interesting since the anarchists behind the general assembly process and the consensus based form of the occupation has privileged voices of color since day one and "occupiers" have stressed that they try to take into account racism and systematic privilege, but it's obvious that it hasn't worked as countless stories of racism, seclusion of minorities and more radical voices have been prevalent everywhere despite the "leaderless" leaders who seem to be majority white males. The responses from already existing organizations of POC and existing struggles in POC neighborhoods have been lukewarm at best.

What does this show? That well intentioned white people (including me) are not enough to eliminate racism and in fact may be even worse because occupiers get extremely offended if called racist or privileged? That the movement has always been a reformist, utopian waste of time (since those really hurt by the depression are basically all people of color)? That even the most radical, anti-racist whites are harmful, as Fanon says about Sartre in Black Skins, White Masks:

When I read that page, I felt that I had been robbed of my last chance. I said to my friends, 'The generation of the younger black poets has just suffered a blow that can never be forgiven.' Help had been sought from a friend of the colored peoples, and that friend had found no better response than to point out the relativity of what they were doing.


I'm not sure, good information is hard to come by and the self-appointed black occupy philosopher Cornel West is useless. The Oakland occupation seems to have a different racial characteristic than the others, and seems also to have been the most successful. As for your other stuff, interesting observations, I'm across the world so my knowledge of the occupy movements has come primarily from the livestream and the news, yours is definitely a perspective that is welcome.

#17
Post rating: ~

Myfanwy posted:
Isn't it pragmatically best for the movement to be white? Like doesn't that make it easier for a white woman miscarrying, granny being bashed, etc to filter to the average person and make them care? Or is there something I'm totally missing? I dont know anything



That's like saying isn't the movement best if made up of rich people and powerful lobbyists like the tea party? Yes in that it will get listened to and not beat up by the cops, but that implies it is not a movement at all but rather a political party or a theatre played out by the bourgeoisie. The proletariat has always been made up of blacks and hispanics (who as far as I can tell have been ignored by the occupy movement) in the United States and the accumulation by dispossession that the protesters are vaguely against has almost entirely affected minority families as the statistics show:

http://pewresearch.org/pubs/2069/housing-bubble-subprime-mortgages-hispanics-blacks-household-wealth-disparity

and if the movement really does put aside minority issues to look good in the media and not alienate those with power which seems to be actually happening whether your post was serious or not it's as shameful and self-defeating as the Isrealis ignoring palestine in their version of the occupy movement.

#18
The Future is Here
Post rating: ~

babyhueypnewton posted:

Myfanwy posted:
Isn't it pragmatically best for the movement to be white? Like doesn't that make it easier for a white woman miscarrying, granny being bashed, etc to filter to the average person and make them care? Or is there something I'm totally missing? I dont know anything

That's like saying isn't the movement best if made up of rich people and powerful lobbyists like the tea party? Yes in that it will get listened to and not beat up by the cops, but that implies it is not a movement at all but rather a political party or a theatre played out by the bourgeoisie. The proletariat has always been made up of blacks and hispanics (who as far as I can tell have been ignored by the occupy movement) in the United States and the accumulation by dispossession that the protesters are vaguely against has almost entirely affected minority families as the statistics show:

http://pewresearch.org/pubs/2069/housing-bubble-subprime-mortgages-hispanics-blacks-household-wealth-disparity

and if the movement really does put aside minority issues to look good in the media and not alienate those with power which seems to be actually happening whether your post was serious or not it's as shameful and self-defeating as the Isrealis ignoring palestine in their version of the occupy movement.



oh that makes sense

#19
Post rating: ~
real origin of occupy movement


During June 2011 Leef received a notice to vacate the apartment that she had rented in Tel Aviv for the previous three years. After several weeks of searching to no avail for a new apartment within reach of her film-editing job, Leef discovered that the rental prices in the entire Tel Aviv metropolitan area had doubled in the previous five years.
As an act of protest Leef decided to pitch a tent at Habima Square in Tel Aviv. Leef also opened a Facebook protest page and began inviting people to join the protest in the streets. Soon afterward the protests gained momentum as thousands joined the protests, pitching tents in the central streets of cities across Israel. sparking off the 2011 Israel housing protests. On 29 August 2011, in the context of allegations of Leef's background and intentions, Leef abruptly ended an interview when asked about not doing mandatory military service or Sherut Leumi, her affluent upbringing, what the Trajtenberg Committee was dealing with, and a question about her lack of presence or if she has even slept in the Tel Aviv tent area. She revealed that she received an exemption from the army for having epilepsy but had volunteered in a children's shelter, and that she had not slept in the Rothschild Boulevard tents the preceding week.

#20
Post rating: ~

discipline posted:
what shocks me the most about that adbusters article is how poor at tactics those hippie dudes are ... pack up and leave midway thru december? jeet cripes

honestly I was going to write a long QQ thread about how I'm done with occupy this go around... it's been a week now since I showed my face down there. I used to spend like 40 hours a week there but now I'm just working on my school stuff. truth be told a lot of what brought me down was the organizational stuff. I like the human mic and stuff but to assume a movement is completely horizontal is bullshit. there are always leaders that are going to emerge. I quit because I was starting to assume that role for a lot of people and I didn't want the responsibility of being looked at like that while being unable to do much else except manipulate because of process.

spokesmen nobody knew were coming up with reformist crap and people who had been there since day one, homeless activists who worked their asses off, were getting laughed down by a bunch of students. you had this underclass of uneducated and vulnerable doing day-to-day stuff like waste and kitchen and security and all the bourgie kiddos were clogging up process and university and working groups that didn't contribute anything. we had kids from these "high caste" working groups come by the kitchen and complain how hierarchical it was... when confronted with the fact they hadn't shown up to help in the kitchen they'd blame it on us and being too hierarchical! most of the people I knew at the camp were praying for formalized hierarchy by the time I left, because this weird unspoken semi-hierarchy based on class, gender, race, econ situation was getting REALLY weird. the last time I was there, there were 4 different econ working groups who were stressed about delivering statements to the guardian more than strategizing how to raise consciousness in the camp about basic issues. it seemed like people were out for the experience by the end and not for challenging the status quo.

like this guy in adbusters talking about packing up mid december... what the heck? why not get people doing direct action every day so the city cracks down? crackdowns are a necessary integral part of nonviolent resistance. READ A BOOK HIPPIE! of course, that happened, but now my fear is they are just packing up after last thursday's actions. now I see stuff about shutting down the day after thanksgiving... how much more unfocused can we get?

maybe this is a result of the atomization of politics over the last decade or so. people got up in arms because their fracking/vegan/kurdish/one Love agenda wasn't on the same priority as finance. as a result everyone got frustrated and went home. I guess the danger of a horizontal movement in a vain atomized society like USA is that no one has a common rallying cry anymore. "no demands" is such a weak position to take if you're not willing to follow it with some really extreme direct action. ok, 99 people symbolically got arrested on brooklyn bridge last thursday while 32k or something marched over on the pedestrian path. why didn't 32k people sit on the damn bridge? I guess people are still looking out for number one.

anyway, I'm hoping this serves as a learning experience. maybe a hardened vanguard is gonna come out of this. but like, I remember reading this open letter from POC to occupy and the basic message was "we have a lot more to lose than you do, so we want to see how serious you are about getting ish done before we sign on".. I dunno, maybe something will change in the next few weeks and I will change my tune. until then... *shrugs* I dunno oops, I guess I wrote a QQ post after all...



if you have time can you maybe talk about how this relates to that old Jo Freeman "Tyranny of Structurelessness" essay (if at all). i am interested in the nitty gritty of how this kind of organisational approach goes wrong. also do you think that the abandonment of redistributive claims in favour of identity claims that zygmunt bauman bemoans is responsbile for the atomisation etc. fanks

#21
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also i thought this post was really interesting altho it got picked up by drudge or something which fucked the comments

http://fritztucker.blogspot.com/2011/11/american-autumn-pt-3.html

I’ve attended two mock Spokes Councils in the past month. At the Spokes Council in Washington Square Park on October 15, the unelected facilitators set the agenda: Occupy Washington Square Park. Then they set the terms of debate, breaking the group into three circles: those who wanted to occupy and possibly get arrested, those who wanted there to be an occupation and would assist those being arrested, and those who wanted to build the movement in other ways. I went with the third group.




The facilitators told each group to elect a facilitator, a note-taker, and a spokesperson who would read the notes from each group’s meeting. Almost immediately, one of the members of the OWS inner-circle asked my group if anybody had a problem if she facilitated. Nobody objected, so she was “elected.” Although she was in the one group that opposed occupying Washington Square Park, she lectured us about the need to occupy public parks.




I was vocal in my group, arguing that the fundamental problem in our hierarchical, bureaucratic society is the lack of a truly democratic, dialogic way of relating to one another—not that public parks close at midnight. I repeated the arguments I had raised in previous General Assemblies, concluding that OWS’ main goal should be to develop dialogic, democratic methods in the occupied areas, and to extend this way of life into every home, workplace and school, and in local, regional, national and international bodies.




My advocacy for radical democracy wasn’t particularly popular. Ironically, the predominantly middle-class, white men leading the movement claim that their hostility to democracy is in the interest of “protecting minorities,” referring to oppressed genders, races, classes, ages, and nations. Far from being “minorities,” these people make up the majority of the world’s population; the worldwide outcry for democracy vitiates the paternalistic notion that the oppressed need “protection.”




The discussion turned to which locations the movement should occupy, ignoring the question of whether occupation for the sake of occupation was a good idea. I suggested teaming with evicted tenants and former homeowners to occupy foreclosed homes, abandoned apartments and unsold condos—an act that would strike at the heart of the economic crisis, and endear the movement to the oppressed. This idea generated a lot of support, but was not repeated by my “spokesperson” when the groups reconvened.




At the teach-in on Sunday the 23rd, one of the leaders’ main gripes—rightfully so—was that the NYC-GA was inefficient and dominated by society’s vocal minorities, particularly middle-class white men. The underlying cause is not eliminated by the Spokes Council, but is in fact exacerbated by it. The major flaw of the General Assembly is the need for a 90% majority to pass proposals. This “modified consensus” ensures the continuation of the dominant culture through the passage of only the most conservative measures. In the Spokes Council, proposals can be blocked by 11% of the members of 11% of the Working Groups, meaning that a minority of 1.2% can stymie the will of 98.8% majority.

#22
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gah, stupid kids. to hell with anarchy, we need new authoritarian regimes that we can call our own
#23
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i want to know what instances of white privilege those black dudes were complaining about at occupy boston
#24
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70% chance they were just That Black Leftist Guy You Know Who Can't Stop Bitching
#25
tardy on these heaters
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goopstein posted:
70% chance they were just That Black Leftist Guy You Know Who Can't Stop Bitching



its hard to say since there have also been positive reports but yeah you kind of have to wait until you see a consensus coming out of minority communities before you can tell whether its liberals trying to wedge themselves into leadership positions or whether its a real issue.

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myf: if the occupy movement doesn't have a social base rooted in the most oppressed and exploited demographic classes then it will be satisfied with a reformist, fascist agreement with the establishment. if its just white students, then they will simply buy us off with some debt relief or something in exchange for employing us (in a militarized annexationist fashion) against minority communities (which has happened time and time again in american history)

#26
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the one general assembly I've been to recently included a long debate about "progressive stack" (the proposal that in some cases it is a good idea to fast-track or encourage minority speakers). there were some accusations of this being undemocratic and against the principles of a GA but there was actually a pretty good and illuminating discussion that critics took seriously, there was specific attention paid to the fact that in the abcense of formal structure, informal structures of gender/race/class/simple cliquishness will replace them.

i dunno if it would have gone so well if there'd been more than 30 people there, tho.
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#28
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goopstein posted:
70% chance they were just That Black Leftist Guy You Know Who Can't Stop Bitching



I sincerely doubt you know any black people let alone that guy.

#29
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you guys are p sheltered / went to a pretty conservative school if you never regularly ran into the black dude/duderina who complained about how everybody and everything was racist all the time. fun atmosphere. to be fair, that's not a behavior unique to The Blacks; most leftists cant go five minutes without angrily regurgitating platitudes about their pet issue, but The Blacks are more noticeable because their claim is somewhat credible at face value and they're scary to ppl

Edited by goopstein ()

#30
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wow way to be a hipster about politics but being a nerd instead. yes "those people" are distasteful - but not everyboidy has a taste for blood
#31
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when i saw chomsky and greenwald in cambridge a few weeks ago one of the questions was from a dude who was in a Full Retard, Blow-to-Go wheelchair and he took the opportunity at a venue about executive power breaches and blown up foreigners to rant about how cobblestones and freight elevators were a grave imposition to his civil rights as a broken worthless dollar-store cyborg.
#32
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it's v difficult for me to have any empathy for the disabled because empathy is about putting oneself in someone else's shoes and personally if i were as disabled as that guy i would have painted the walls with my brains the first chance i got

Mod edit: Forgot about huge fucking head. remind him, God! god is GOOD

Edited by Crow ()

#33
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#34
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my head is pretty normal sized, idk
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#38
tardy on these heaters
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PoC perspective

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/11/20111123162621715786.html
#39
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many camps have grown weirdly segregated in their division of leadership and labor as well as where people stay. it's pretty weird to observe the purely informal operations of privilege within a formally level space. I hope the cops or the feds have good surveillance records of all the meetings so we can study how that happened sometime