babyhueypnewton posted:Cars the problem is that despite a lack of leadership and "almost always made up of a great many groups with a great many political positions" a concrete politics did evolve in OWS. It was social fascism.
Only if you buy into the people who hijacked it, such as Micah White, and believe everything they say. I choose not to do that because it doesn't seem like a very smart thing to do.
babyhueypnewton posted:You're buying into the self-mythology of OWS,
No, that's... literally what you're doing. See above. You weren't there either, were you?
We don't have to imagine the end result of OWS or its importance. It happened again and was called CHAZ/CHOP. It was
...another instance where the lazy thing for Marxist-Leninists to do is parrot copaganda. So I think we shouldn't do that. CHAZ/CHOP was, among other things, a failure of socialists to exercise leadership in the area. That opens up a lot of productive and self-critical questions to inform future politics. I enjoy bashing anarchists probably more than everyone else on this site, but it's not very useful just to parrot what the pigs have to say on topics if you weren't around to witness events.
babyhueypnewton posted:We have to think bigger than repeating the 60s. We already had a bunch of liberals become interested in socialism and a bunch of socialist parties experience rapid growth. It all was for nothing,
Wow, whoa, yeah cool everyone agrees with all of that, but reddit-style preaching to the choir and a quarter won't even get you a phone call nowadays.
But if you were old enough, and you didn't get involved, and now you want to dream up a fantasy version of OWS that retroactively justifies your lack of involvement, yeah I'm going to call you out on it. You can't dream up a foundation for politics from your own lack of activity. They have to be founded on material fact.
Because the stuff people are describing here, people who weren't there and don't know and don't seem to have done anything but buy the most shameless hucksters' version of it... it's just completely wrong. Like... mind-blowingly wrong and off-base. And if you can't even start from accurate facts before diving off into airy-fairy over-theorizing, you can't reach any conclusions that are worthwhile in any way to politics. In fact, if you mischaracterize every street action in which you didn't participate as default a pig conspiracy, you do the pigs' work for them.
I do think there is something to talk about with the lack of leadership of "BLM," hence the name and how easily it was used by this or that huckster. But OWS was something different, it was equally a rupture with the previous leftist practice of the anti-globalization movement, also superficially based on anarchist ideology. That had some progressive potential given its connections to Latin America and the remaining left-natiomalisms, whereas our generation that came of age with Obama and OWS were actually backwards in comparison. That is why the last serious party formations emerged out of the period from the anti-globalization movement to the protests against the Iraq war, despite the so-called left shift of the last decade it has reaffirmed the class interests of the labor aristocracy without even needing any organizations of its own*. How many times must this happen before we give up on the "lack of proper leadership" explanation, or at least attempt to explain that phenomenon instead of leaving it to the contingent realm of political decisions.
*It's not a coincidence that we are parasitically attached to organizations like the DSA, PSL, and CPUSA depending on what variety of "online" politics you like. The consumer aristocracy is dependent on vestiges of the labor aristocracy to speak in its interest, I see no divergence or political potential as the former becomes the latter, just the death of the last shadows of Eurocommunist politics. OWS was a flash in the pan, only living on as various color revolutions abroad. It has been made totally irrelevant, along with the entire Sanders tragedy, by the black national uprising against colonial occupation and genocide. We're only talking about it because people who were part of that long tragedy don't want to admit they were caught with their pants down after a decade of post-OWS left-liberal pandering. We have some French posters here as well, they had a very recent OWS on French cultural terms and I remember everyone here being suspicious of the "working class" in the streets. I think the probable victory of Marine Le Pen reaffirms that (even if she loses this is only because the French system is particularly undemocratic, given a German or Dutch type of election she would win easily).
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It would be nice and easy if everything that failed to lead to revolution could be disclaimed by revolutionary politics. But that's not only a lie, it's a recipe for eternal defeat. Socialists must confront history head on, not make excuses for ourselves. And again, it's doing the pigs' work for them to treat politics as though it were some sort of divine purity that's forever tainted when it's fucked with by the pigs, because it's ALWAYS fucked with by the pigs. Third-worldism isn't an escape hatch from that, either.
babyhueypnewton posted:All the parties that focused their energy on harvesting disillusioned liberals from these movements were totally unprepared for "BLM" and missed any real chance at revolutionary leadership of a real revolutionary potentiality because they had been too busy thinking about their new friends without ever stopping to think about their own positioniality.
This is completely fictitious, there's a direct throughline of black and indigenous nations organizing that was present at OWS in most cities (but constantly sidelined and suppressed for obvious reasons) which informed the formation of BLM and any competent organization that was paying attention to post-OWS trajectories was completely aware the entire time of the forces that would eventually cohere into BLM and similarly Idle No More etc. Aspiring revolutionary parties didn't miss a chance at leadership due to being unprepared and surprised out of nowhere. They turned up their noses and chose not to participate, weren't reached out to or welcomed because they weren't wanted, aren't up to the task, unfortunately still bogged down with structural theoretical and social problems that prevent them from being a significant political force.
There's still a massive amount of work to be done in communist organizations both to counteract a century of anticommunist propaganda and to get over our own chauvinism. All the orgs I've been in contact with have just barely passed the threshold of moving from pure survival to being able to even begin the work of growing (except trots but they obviously don't count,) miles away from being in any position to take leadership of a mass movement.
I'm also curious where you were seeing parties "focusing their energy on harvesting disillusioned liberals," because outside of shit we can safely ignore like Jacobin, as far as I'm aware that didn't happen either. Maybe there's USA proper stuff that went on I'm not aware of. I agree with you about energy being finite and priorities being necessary but the mistaken alignment of effort you seem to be positing here, well not only did I never see it, it just plain wasn't possible in the first place. And I guess if that's what you mean by unprepared, then yeah sure. But there's no counterfactual alt history possible where instead of pandering to liberals the PSL or whoever led BLM. That's fucking crazy.
...were you surprised by BLM? Is that what's going on here? Because like, I wasn't, I'm pretty sure most of the people here weren't. And I resent the fantasy you've conjured up. I've been talking about the excitement of comrades radicalized by the failings of OWS and wishing for more of that, and here you are yammering on from your own imagination about recruiting liberals. My comrades are the indigenous peoples of this stolen land, the brave Palestinian diaspora of this city, refugees from American terror the world over, the displaced and dispossessed stranded in this wasteland of a petrostate willing and able to struggle for the future. Get your head out of your ass.
cars posted:Probably the most important thing to understand about Occupy Wall Street is that, as a national movement that involved pretty much every political tendency on the left end of politics in the United States, EVERYTHING in those politics that's come after it in the country—including ML politics, Maoist politics, all Marxist and Communist politics, whatever you like—and, by extension, in much of the English-speaking world, is partially the PRODUCT of OWS, not just the careers of the people who hijacked the name and profited from it. That's how history works. There's no going around it, there's only going through it, creating it and being created by it in a dialectical process.
It would be nice and easy if everything that failed to lead to revolution could be disclaimed by revolutionary politics. But that's not only a lie, it's a recipe for eternal defeat. Socialists must confront history head on, not make excuses for ourselves. And again, it's doing the pigs' work for them to treat politics as though it were some sort of divine purity that's forever tainted when it's fucked with by the pigs, because it's ALWAYS fucked with by the pigs. Third-worldism isn't an escape hatch from that, either.
cars posted:And "online" is really just the latest manifestation of salon politics: there has always been a tendency on the global left, not just the Western "left", that says, "If any political group were worth my time, I'd already be leading the charge, clever person that I am." This attitude is literally worse than useless, and tends to lead to a host of miniature George Orwells, that is, a brood of wannabe cops waiting to be tapped by the state.
Tell the children
I didn't want to say anything but this shit about assuming what others did and did not do in real life needs to stop. I do not talk about where I live or what I do because this forum is not safe but please do not assume anything about anyone's political history. I don't know what X left party was up to and I'm sure many on the left convinced themselves they were connecting the "white working class" and black lumpen but in reality that did not happen and could not happen. We agree on that but only third worldists seem to be interested in explaining why. The other explanations are simple tautologies, where a lack of leadership or anti-communist propaganda or just general weakness is both the cause and effect of the left's weakness.
Edited by babyhueypnewton ()
babyhueypnewton posted:In my experience there were two separate political histories. One was the history that began with OWS and began in 90s anarchism (though a regression like I said). It may have intersected with Obama-era liberalism but in my experience was removed from it given its overwhelming whiteness and ideological indifference to politics. The other directly intersected with Obama-era liberalism and its failure, came out of the anti-war movement (and the remnants of the new communist movement), and culminated in the Baltimore uprising centered on the murder of Freddie Gray. Though OWS, which was primarily a DC phenomenon in the DMV area, was 4 years before, I didn't see any relationship between it and what happened in Baltimore which was far more about the betrayal of Obama and neocolonialism more generally rather than any populist economic message. The first line of politics led to Sanders who directly inherited its language and class basis and provokes the same dead-end political questions. The second led to "BLM" and I saw little intersection between their locations, class background, politics, or ideology.
If you don't see any intersections then you're willfully blind to the political exchange that was happening all across the USA and Canada during the period. People during Occupy converged and organized (badly) about more than just the one financial event, and encompassed more than just a single political line. These trite filings of contemporary political movements into cute little taxonomic boxes where they don't touch is approaching idealism. That's not how history works. And if you want to force me to split hairs on this I will, when I'm talking about OWS, I mean the broader Occupy protests across the continent, which should have been obvious from context, and yes some people of colour who were at Occupy Baltimore and elsewhere took away lessons that informed their organizing years later. If you'd read or talked to anyone involved you'd know that, but it shouldn't be required for you to figure it out.
babyhueypnewton posted:I didn't want to say anything but this shit about assuming what others did and did not do in real life needs to stop. I do not talk about where I live or what I do because this forum is not safe but please do not assume anything about anyone's political history.
People should never say anything on here that they don't want cops and their grandma to know but I said absolutely nothing intended to dig into your history of political work, only asked for you to elaborate on what you were seeing because your perspective made no sense to me. You can't make arguments with broad pronouncements about what parties were saying and doing and then cry foul when asked to specify what parties were saying and doing. Don't try to accuse me of that shit, and don't try to accuse Cars, who has only pointed out that people shouldn't make shit up about things they didn't witness and didn't ask for anyone to do a cred check either. You haven't been shy talking about yourself on here before when it suits your ego, so don't give me the crocodile tears now about being unsafe when you perceive a challenge to your cred. That's not what I was going for and not what this is about.
solidar posted:The energy and fervor was sublimated into the false promise of the electoralism of ‘08 and then into the digitalization of public spaces in the 2010s
Energy was also dissipated in the form of simply having so many talking heads and careerists on sympathetic to OWS at the time. I think those that hadn’t come over to the immortal science of Marxism Leninism were comforted by the Dylan Ratigans and the Chris Hedges’ of the world. Like, hey even if the occupy kids aren’t getting it done, we’ve got “culture” on our side. That gave a feeling of “it’ll be okay”.
These trite filings of contemporary political movements into cute little taxonomic boxes where they don't touch is approaching idealism.
It has nothing to do with taxonomic boxes, it has to do with fundamentally opposed class interests and the nature of the labor aristocracy organising for itself within a prison house of nations and a system of global apartheid. Neither you nor cars are really listening and I'd rather not talk about any involvement with specific locations because there are people who would like to doxx me, the cops are secondary. I've here 10 years and am lucky I didn't give up key information in my youth, it has nothing to do with ego except my nostalgic attachment to a place that is still full of nasty people. You and cars will have to feel justified that I was talking about something I wasn't involved in and know nothing about. Shouldn't have elaborated and stood up for sovnarkoman because he was absolutely correct about what you said, meaning cars had to bully him away for stepping out of the heirarchy which you silently accepted
the only thing i d like to withdraw here is the time i lost engaging an american, which is unfortunately impossible now. what i can do instead is to stop wasting more time with this nonsense tho
I guess we can add a Canadian as well
2. What was the general class composition of the movement, what were its demands, and how did they relate to its class interests?
3. What were its successes and failures?
4. What response did it prompt from the dominant class? And how severe was that response, from general tolerance to murdering people?
5. What other movements of interest existed within the general umbrella of the dominant movement?
6. what was its long term impact?
toyot posted:cars posted:Look, I want to say something first: if you sat out OWS, that's fine. No one's disappointed in you at this point. But you don't have to come up with a fatuous pseudo-theoretical framework to backwards-justify your lack of involvement.
cope harder. sovnarkoman's even more right than he knows. i remember a GA in texas discussing whether or not mexican immigration should be more strictly policed (50/50 split). sound like anarchists to you? and i remember at a yankee occupation in the NE, chomsky got up and to cheers spoke on how encouraged he was to see, what he called, the first non-class-based movement for 'democracy', then some liberal shit about how amerikan democracy expands 'the franchise' (ie inclusion in the settler lifestyle) over centuries, and how OWS was amerikan democracy healing itself. of course, OWS had a class interest: the class of future landowners. given OWS's aims and enemies, it should have been an obvious dog to bark, but for the life of me i can't think of any discussions, factions, or post-OWS thinkers who came out for land reform and the destruction of private land ownership. but i definitely remember going to an 'audit the fed' march.
occupy makes sense when you understand that there's a very large landowning class which is in class conflict with wall street banks. banks collect interest equal to the sticker price of the land as pseudo-rent. so to rouse the young white masses, many of which live in the cities before moving the burbs to raise families, it took a generational threat to the structure of landownership. even for whites who'll never have a mortgage, continuously rising prices for the same dirt, inherited and sold for profit, that's how the white nation gets its big money (many whites structure these once-in-a-lifetime windfalls into their life plans). so when the banks threatened all that, crashed land prices, fucked up the easy mortgages, the future landowners of amerika had a neat solution: if you deny us our hinterland, then we'll squat this valuable urban land. and people wonder why occupy wall street caught fire! the banks threatened their class interest. moving on!
Not even 48 after this was posted, DSA Twitter is now castigating anyone who doesn’t think it’s actually good to be a homeowner and a socialist… good call
toyot posted:cope harder.
don't sign your posts
dimashq posted:Not even 48 after this was posted, DSA Twitter is now castigating anyone who doesn’t think it’s actually good to be a homeowner and a socialist… good call
the only error being made is confusing DSA with the entirety of OWS, which is admittedly a pretty big error
Flying_horse_in_saudi_arabia posted:"so true bestie. take the blackpill. ligma copium tendies" - lenin
karphead posted:i didnt pay any attention to ows, sorry
should be seeing more of this post itt
The reason why Communists worldwide looked at Occupy Wall Street with interest and, in almost every case, offered it some measure of support, is because the financial dealings centered on U.S. securities markets were of global interest too, to put it mildly, and OWS was a response in close proximity. I find it baffling that anything so recent has been rewritten in so many people's minds here. I did not think of this site as prone to that sort of myopia.
If you think most of the people at OWS camps were homeowners, I mean... no. No they obviously weren't, nor were most of them the sort of second-mortgage star-wishers that define the DSA's ruling cohort. Most of them were reserve labor army, unemployed or underemployed, statistically necessarily from the service industry. If you want to level critique, a productive place to start would probably be the homeless used as the major excuse for cops to attack and destroy OWS encampments, that is, the lumpenproletariat as a factor.
Start from those facts, because it's not just defeatist but deluded to rewrite history as though all of the above weren't true, as though Communists held themselves high-and-mighty apart from a popular movement against the finance industry and police state. And it was mostly the latter in practice that OWS opposed, given the highly localized urban focus of the encampments and actions in cities with no high-finance trading floors—again, a useful place to begin critique that actually reflects the facts! Albeit one already deeply explored, so much so that people here seem to take it for granted.
But when you try to rewrite Communists out of the history of OWS, that's not productive in any way. You put yourself in the online bubble of the kids who think their choice is "Bernie Sanders" or "blackpilled". It's a bad place to be.
liceo posted:not all positions (and none that i've seen in the last few weeks) that contradict status quo rhizzone posting are "far right conspiracy theories" and - this thread aside - i really encourage you to check that against posters' posting repertoire rather than resort to accusations
I'm talking about far-right conspiracy theories and right-wing pepe catchphrase bullshit, which should be eliminated yesterday from everybody's posting on this forum. Again, I don't really think that's controversial. If it is controversial, this place has problems that need to be addressed, and I'm glad to bring that discussion to the surface.
liceo posted:that's a way better critique than calling it far-right-online conspiracy.
I was more noting how the far-right catchphrases seem to coincide with posting far-right conspiracy theories in other threads, though I would note that it was and is a far-right conspiracy theory that the executive branch of the U.S. federal government planned and executed Occupy Wall Street. But it seems safe to say that idea isn't being advanced by anyone in this thread, so I'm happy to put that one to bed.