Forum Post: Choose an Intellectual Leader
Posted 13 years ago on Oct. 7, 2011, 11:23 a.m. EST by rippercat
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Chris Hedges and Noam Chomsky are examples.
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How? Why? Of course there are bumps in the road but this is a brand new movement, still in its infancy and in that context it's doing just fine. We should just keep on keeping on. Once 20 or 30 million people are occupying will be time enough to think about a next step.
How exactly are we supposed to get to that point, though? I'm highly skeptical of the idea that we can get 20 or 30 million people in the streets with any real regularity. Anarchy and communism are still dirty words to an incredibly large chunk of the population, and while you'll get some support for organized labor there isn't exactly much of that left in this country and you're not going to get 10% of the population to leave their homes and their jobs to protest.
I was not talking about putting 20 or 30 million people "in the streets." I was talking about getting 20 or 30 million people occupying. I'm also skeptical that that many people will organize themselves, but if we are to fundamentally transform society democratically from below, that is what it will take or at the very least it will mean a GA or some equivalent formation, is every community, school, military barracks, nursing home, prison and work place.
Of course the vast majority of people tend to recoil at alien words like socialism, but the fact is the leadership of every social movement in history has been far more radical than were most of the rank and file activists and supporters and more people's minds are opened from activism rather than as a strictly intellectual process.
It is true that most people have responsibilities that would preclude their occupying full time, but nearly everyone could occupy part time and there are millions of unemployed, homeless, students, retirees and the partially disabled who could occupy full time. What is more in 10 months in the 1930s America saw the greatest occupation movement in history when half a million workers occupied their work places (in those days these were called sit down strikes), violated property rights and refused to leave until their right to organize themselves into labor organizations was recognized. The greatest step forward for the occupy movement will be the revival of the sit down movement, the occupation of the work place which every worker is physically, if not legally, able to do.
It's important what we mean by "leader." Noam Chomsky has carefully warned about the dangers of a single individual being elevated to a messiah status during movements for change. The amazing part about Occupy is that it is a movement by people from all walks of life. I think what we need to do is spread the intellectual ideas, rather than the people who voice them.
http://occupywallst.org/forum/the-mentalist-season-4-episode-11-always-bet-on-re/
Leaders who serve no organizational bureaucratic role but act as moral leaders are not chosen though some electoral process. They emerge organically and more often than not they are chosen by the press rather than the masses of people who make up the movement. We don't need leaders like that even if the media does.
I am my own intellectual leader (and so can you)! Sapere aude!
But if you are looking for a thread about who inspires people politically:
Jesus of Nazereth
Siddhartha Guatama (The Buddha Shakyamuni)
Immanuel Kant
Jeremy Bentham
John Stuart Mill
Karl Marx
John Rawls
W. D. Ross
William Frankenna
Shelly Kagan
P.F. Stawson
Judith Jarvis Thomson
Peter Unger
I could go on and on (and on)...
Decent list, and even if some of the religious figures mentioned didn't exist, or weren't responsible for many of the words attributed to them, who cares I guess (it doesn't make the "words" any less valuable, at least not to me).
Whether or not Christ existed, in the same sense in which you and I exist, is a non-sequitur. All that matters is The Sermon on the Mount/Beatitudes exist are attributed to him. And likewise with the Buddha Shakyamuni, the Eight-Fold Path is attributed to him.
That's all I care about (politically anyway).
I mean ... that's what I just said, WTF??
that was not meant to be a shot at you, I was clarifying my original comment for anyone else reading. I assumed we were pretty on the same page.
Put Nietzsche and Marx together in a room. (Note I'm not suggesting Nietzsche = Nazi with this idea.) However they're taking a nap and don't seem to want to answer the phone.
Umm, Nietzsche wasn't a Nazi (he hated antisemitism). His fucktard sister made the association between his works and the Third Reich (after he was dead). It's fine to disagree with Nietzsche (I don't agree with him on many things either), but he was no Nazi, in fact he was the polar opposite.
I know, I wrote that Nietzsche wasn't a Nazi in my post, apologies if that wasn't clear through my method of articulation.
I think it was my bad actually (apologies), I just reread your post (you wrote it just fine, I must have been tired or some shit when I read it).
Glenn Greenwald, Umair Haque, Dylan Ratigan ... all good in my book
And then alienate anyone that does not believe exactly as Noam Chomsky believes.
There are many people on the same ship. The one percent would love to have a head to pay for or criticize. Leaders are not needed. You need to learn to understand the theory behind un-centralized movements and stand alone complex. As long as the movement have no central leadership, it cannot be bought, and it cannot be stopped.
Need for leadership = I need a person to think for me because I am so much of a brainless zombie that I cannot get ideas on my own.
they both suck