liceo posted:i can't speak for other regions because i was young and naive and only really "knew" my city's version of it. nevertheless i was still decently involved in my area (rust belt city) but this is also my experience through and through. maybe that's misperception but i don't think so because i still know a high percentage of people involved.
Yeah the ones in which I was involved, it was majority unemployed/underemployed, with a minority of petit bourgeois anarchos and left-liberal Democrat types who were mostly day-to-day visitors at best. Local MLs/MLMs and associated groups seemed to take a long-haul approach that I appreciated, contributing productively while understanding this was an incubator for struggle. Local Trots, thankfully, were all but no-shows except when marches were happening, as they'd turned tailing the masses into some sort of official policy.
The PB, anarcho/liberal types sure would have liked to run everything, but the well-known issue with OWS was that the obsession with consensus-derived decision-making (I'd had my fill of it in the early 2000s) meant no one really could be in charge. Food distribution started up without the organization needed to defend it, and that got the cops salivating because the homeless population was the easiest excuse for them to knock over the camps while they still had the nominal support of the community around them. Eventually that's how it happened. No infiltration was needed, because the lack of central leadership meant defense of the camp couldn't be mustered against early-morning militarized-cop raids.
The people who are now held up as the "founders" and "leaders" of OWS, both by themselves and their liberal cohort and by younger "leftist" conspiracy theorists online who weren't old enough to be involved (and again, I don't blame them for being a little over-zealous)—cash-in hacks such as Micah White—had relatively little influence over the OWS actions and camps even in the cities where they were directly involved. As an ex-anarcho, I've certainly seen infiltrators move in and wreck organizations and actions. But my experience was that Occupy Wall Street camps mostly fell from brute force applied from the outside: cops waiting around for the homeless to join the camp and for local left-liberal booj and PB sympathizers in their neighborhood to get nervous as the impoverished local press desperately fanned the flames with scare stories. Then the cops used the presence of the homeless as justification for deploying all the military hardware they'd been stockpiling over the decade previous.
Over the years, that led to a lot of what we saw happen very quickly in summer 2020. The anger was real and had proximate causes in particular police abuses and murders, but what was different was that many organizations started actions ready to defend themselves and their neighborhoods with responses proportionate to what the police state brought to bear. They broke away from the Democrat hug-a-cop activities immediately, usually in the first day of large-scale actions, and a great many of the unorganized participants followed them. Nowadays, many of those leaders are getting assassinated by cops while the press looks the other way, and as grim as that is, it's also got those organizations and their descendants keeping score as they prepare for the next crisis.
liceo posted:the above post was written before i saw the most recent one from you.
np, it's the Way of the Webforums
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This is the sort of shit that the pigs had to do in 2020 (the church was allegedly providing sanctuary to people the cops were after). A big reason why is that many local leaders and organizations in 2020 had learned through participation in Occupy Wall Street that the only space truly "occupied", truly secured, was the space underneath people's feet while they were still standing up. The OWS camps couldn't secure their own "occupying" camps; they invested in anti-cop boundary-guarding tactics that couldn't be put into play quickly enough against an early-morning raid.
In 2020, those leaders and organizations (and organizations descended from the OWS-involved ones) started with that new understanding, that two bodies cannot occupy the same space at once and that's all you can count on when the cops are essentially armored infantry moving in formation. And proceeding from that, they found that when street actions were joined by unorganized locals, those acting could move in numbers big enough to physically crowd out the police. The police eventually began to respond in kind, abandoning large portions of metro areas to group in tight formation around certain arbitrary points.
The funny and acceptable thing that's happened recently, though, is that a bunch of cops are cashing out the big fat pensions they've been sitting on in a sort of sullen-kid protest against how they might end up getting bad-mouthed in the press or even (in a handful of rare cases) getting dragged into court if they just up and murder someone during a traffic stop. Goatstein's greatest post might be the one about how putting tiny digital cameras in the hands of the public didn't prove that sasquatch or alien abduction was real, but instead revealed a truth much more stunning to much of white Amerika: black people were right about the police.
What I don't think a lot of people anticipated—I know I didn't—is how angry the cops would get over it, even as they remained first at the trough for every wave of public spending, including lapping up most of the grants given out for COVID-19. They'd gotten so used to their freedom as the top-dog street gang (and their pig unions had secured such unheard-of retirement packages in this day and age) that a bunch of them started quitting over the mere possibility they might get bad-mouthed in a public space. Those that remained made symbolic gestures that often included quitting from the SWAT detail in the hope that it would make local governments drop to their knees and beg forgiveness. And a lot of them are doing just that, kow-towing to the cop gang... but for the cops to squeeze the money like that, for it to pinch at all, they had to undermine their own effectiveness in a manner that will take time to completely reverse.
So, if another similar point of crisis arrives within the next 2-3 months or so... when the cops in many cities do something like you see in the above picture, and they will, they will have fewer bodies to deploy elsewhere. Not so few that they'll be immobilized, but enough fewer that it will open up many opportunities for highly visible action. And that will leave a lot of territory to be occupied by other bodies. I don't think that's likely to result in a truly revolutionary struggle next time around, but it will likely push a lot of organizations from the realm of tactics to the realm of strategy when it comes to "occupation". The cops being back in a position of reacting will cause them more problems with the public, even as they try to build up to put themselves back in the drivers' seat during street actions as they were when they first militarized, because so far, there is no real digital or high-tech solution that allows them to hide when they're removing two feet from the ground. That still requires highly visible applications of brute force.
toyot posted:leaving and coming back, it's plain to see, cars, your dumb punditry is now more than half the words written on the rhizzone. and it's mainly non-marxist, CIA fear-stoking garbage. silly punditry consuming all the oxygen.
now THIS is some quality 'stangin
liceo posted:interesting, i've read that for other regions for sure. swampman and i were talking about this recently too and the thing that wrecked my area's was mostly heroin and severe alcoholism. maybe that was planted by the outside or maybe not, but that's what made it crumble, at least in my view.
There were problems with drugs and alcohol where I was as well. People being under some influence contributed to multiple fights and sexual assaults. I remember this leading to a change in the atmosphere at night - smaller groups banding together for protection and a noticeable amount of people not coming around anymore. It certainly didn’t help fend off the police, but my memory was that it was months still before the police were really brought in to kick folks off the land. (In part I think that they waited until most other potential land-to-occupy options had been locked down aggressively)
toyot posted:it's a forum with lots of smart people, not your personal blog.
solidar posted:In part I think that they waited until most other potential land-to-occupy options had been locked down aggressively
yeah I think this is part of what led to a lot of the changed tactics in 2020. Because the camps were encircled and the alternatives were closed off before the cops moved in. It became clear to a lot of people that perimeter tactics to keep police from securing and patrolling didn't work when the hand closed, leading to "the only ground you occupy is underneath you."
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tears posted:blinkandwheeze posted:
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cars posted:reactionary tendencies—doctrines of race purity, misogyny, anti-science, quietism—seem to adhere to the exact same couple people every time
y'all just let me know when the Committee renames these as "Based And Blackpilled" though, i'll respect demcen. lol
Remarkable filing in the case of high-level Atomwaffen member Kaleb Cole outs Joshua Caleb Sutter, the publisher of Martinet Press (Iron Gates, Liber 333, Bluebird), AWD member & a key figure in the O9A Tempel ov Blood, as an FBI informant. Since '03 https://t.co/WDZNx5Eeen
— Ali Winston (@awinston) August 21, 2021