Forum Post: Interesting Criticism from a non-OWSer
Posted 12 years ago on Nov. 23, 2011, 3:22 a.m. EST by riethc
(1149)
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
While I don't agree with the conclusion of this critique, I think he has some valid points.
The OWS Will Fail - Here's Why: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30Ie-Xr6NMY
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I completely agree with him on every point.
See this is what I have been talking about you need clear decisive goals and you need to leave your radical leftist ideas at home. It is not going to kill anyone to project more moderation in a movement to get more people on board. The majority of Americans are moderates and right now is the best time to get them on board since they are feeling alienated from the shitty teapartisms in Washington, and the wimpy democrats that make life soo much harder for them.
I think that guy has some really valid points.
I like his three main points. 1. Take the power to mint money back from the hands of private bankers. 2. End the influence of money in politics. (I don't remember the third).
As for saying that the OWS has 'failed' or will 'fail', I would argue that they have already been successful.
For one thing, the OWS did not state that they all had one mandate. If you don't have defined goals, you can't really fail to meet those goals.
Two, as far as providing a common meeting ground for people from various political perspectives and backgrounds to meet each other and start networking, OWS was a huge success. (Consider that Universities and fraternities are sometimes little more than places to meet others and network with them.)
Three, OWS has demonstrated it's presence and it's strength in being unified, being global, and remaining non-violent.
Non-violent civil disobedience is really our best strategy at the moment, since the 1%'ers can't hope to debate us, so they must resort to violent force to remove us. As far as I am concerned, this shows their fear and desperation. Also, even if dispersed, it does not mean we will disappear. It just means that we will be driven underground where it will be harder to keep tabs on us.
I think the 99% splitting into factions is likely, if it hasn't already happened. The danger with saying that the 99% shouldn't associate itself with 'fringe' elements such as Communists and Anarchists is that these groups are also part of the 99%, just as the homeless and the mentally ill are.
In a group without leaders, you can't make a decision to cut yourself off from individuals that might be deemed as 'unpalatable', in the hopes of attracting more people to the cause. Who makes that decision, and what do you base it on?
The strength of the 99% movement is it's all inclusiveness. We don't all agree with one another, but we can still support one another. We are all united under one cause.
United we stand, divided we fall.
I think you may have missed the point somewhat because by your reasoning even the 1% is also the 99% as they are small and they are "fringe", not part of the majority. This watering down of reasoning is exactly where OWS misses the mark. The most successful revolutions and movements DID have leaders and did have very focused goals even if the spark was serendipitous. Look at Egypt, the majority of the nation stood together with one goal in mind and that was the removal of Mubarak. In this they were successful but because they didn't have a comprehensive form of action being a group with no leaders there was nothing to fill the vacuum left when Mubarak was ousted, no formal strategy for what better system they would replace it with, they couldn't because they were made up of many different fractions, people with very disparate points of views when it came down to what should be done. Consequently this left them with a military government not much different from Mubarak and now they are back on the streets getting beaten, killed, arrested and tortured. Right now OWS isn't even achieving what was successful in Egypt which is having a set goal that unifies the nation, not the fringes of the nation, not segments of society but the majority who are everything and anything but radical. My point is that its fine to say the homeless and communists are welcome but when the media highlights them as members of the movement, when you hear 100 different voices with 100 different demands you lose many of the majority who could be instrumental and are indeed necessary if OWS is going to throw the system off kilter, they need to understand clearly what the movement is about from an ideological and politically practical point of view. You say we can all support each other, but support each other in what exactly? This is the point. Everyone agrees that government doesn't work for the common good and that the financial/corporate sector is having a destructive influence on our government, economy and culture but those are very broad statements until you get down on what should be done about it (strategy meets goal). If the focus are a few main points such as was suggested in the video then you will find a wider group of people who really are the all and average american jumping on board with OWS in ways far greater than offering it their sympathy. I think he made a good point when he said having a communist on your side in the US will be as off-putting to the majority of americans as having a KKK member. Americans MAY become open to socialist democratic ideals but frankly they don't even know what those are but they can never accept communism or anarchism as models when its historically antithetical to the cultural and ideological make up of the nation. This isn't Europe where those political and economic models are more prevalent and better understood. Americans are still stuck in the right-left paradigm and thus the movements Tea Party and OWS will become expressed and understood as such, as extremes of that paradigm, this is all that would be understood, therefore you will leave the majority who belong to neither extreme outside of movement (the real 99%). The moderate voices of the movement are not the ones who will be heard at the end of the day in the same way that the press highlighted the most negative aspects of the Tea Party and left out the working class joe who was concerned about losing his home and angry about bailouts in washington. Its the image of the extremists that was left on the minds of most americans. The problem isn't bringing people from various political perspectives together in one arena, the problem is affecting real social and political change. If there is no strategy for that then you will only have a wide spread of protests targeting everything but nothing, something that the system has no problem containing. Remember this is a time when system overhaul is demanded and people fear system failure, its this failure that is pushing people out of on the streets but the true political and financial giants that are the 1%, the ones who set agenda and manipulate markets for their own gain while the majority suffers are faceless and they are not afraid. Its their system, a system riddled with technological surveillance, global policing and virtual control over everyone's lives. They don't mind if you prance around or if you get in a scuffle with cops on the streets, they believe that most americans will lose interest in the movement when the movement proves ineffective at even throwing stones in the right direction. It just doesn't take unity and a mighty heart to break this, it also takes a great deal of sober strategy. If you want OWS just to be remembered as a youth movement with good intentions then go right ahead and invite the homeless and the radicals but those elements will not drive the change we are all looking for.
Non-violent civil disobedience is really our best strategy at the moment, since the 1%'ers can't hope to debate us, so they must resort to violent force to remove us. As far as I am concerned, this shows their fear and desperation.
I think it just shows the lengths they'll go to. If they have to in order to keep getting their way, you can bet they'll escalate right up to live rounds and killings. Then what?
I think it just shows the lengths they'll go to. If they have to in order to keep getting their way, you can bet they'll escalate right up to live rounds and killings. Then what?
Well, then you start responding like the Dutch resistance to the Nazi invasion. When the Nazis invaded Holland, the Dutch people simply refused to serve them. No food in restaurants, no groceries, no taxi rides, and so on.
An army travels on it's belly. Cops have to eat, get their cars fixed and their hair cut. Their kids have to go to school. Imagine how the Police will begin to feel if they can't get served a meal in a restaurant, get a cup of coffee, or get a beer in a bar? Imagine signs in store windows that say "We don't serve the NYPD." Imagine they can't find janitors to clean their own police stations, or the garbage collection refuses to pick up their garbage?
Also, if the Police start shooting you, or arresting you in mass numbers, and you stop going to work and stop paying your taxes, then what?
They would be biting the hand that feeds them, that's what!
The salary of the Police and the politicians comes out of the pockets of the taxpayers. The entire system is dependant on you going to work, buying groceries, and paying taxes. If that stops happening, the whole system grinds to a halt.
Also, if and when that happens, the amount of people in resistance will far outnumber the Police force or military.
Historically, actions like this are only successful if there are BOTH elements present in a revolution. You need a peaceful non-violent resistance, AND an armed guerilla force.
When Gandhi kicked the British empire out of India, his passive resistance was only possible because there were also armed Indian resistance groups hiding in the jungles fighting the British.
When Martin Luther King was preaching non-violent civil disobedience in the civil rights movement of the 60s, there was also the Black Panthers ready to use weapons to bring about the necessary change.
When faced with a certain, peaceful resolution, or an uncertain, violent one, generally the peaceful resolution will be chosen as a way to save face. History will usually only note the pacifists, while vilifying the militarists, since the 1%' ers that write the history want to discount the importance of the armed guerilla elements. They also try to spin it so that 'peace' means 'passive' (i.e. inactive).
Think of it on a personal level. You are my enemy who wants to steal my stuff. I offer you two hands, one is the open hand of a truce, the other is a clenched knock out fist. You are uncertain of my power or fighting ability, or how many friends I have, or what kind of weapons I might be carrying, but you know the neighbours are watching.
If you take the open hand in truce, at least it gives you some more time to assess the situation. It also makes you look more smart, and reasonable in front of the neighbours (i.e. enemies/ allies/ trading partners).
If you choose to fight right away, you have lost your negotiating power forever. You also have to worry about getting ambushed by a friend in the bush, or getting attacked from behind.
Now, if you knew I was a push-over that wouldn't fight back, you probably wouldn't hesitate to punch me out and take my stuff. If you thought I wasn't afraid of a fist-fight, you might try to get me to take out someone you didn't like by stealing my stuff and blaming it on a neighbour (i.e. like the Tea Party taking on the Democrats).
When the same person offers both options though, the peaceful one is preferred.
-The Occupy Wall street movement is the non-violent face of the revolution.
-The Tea Party are the armed insurgents ready to take over the government by force.
I know there is a great political divide between the Tea Party and the OWS at the moment. It's unfortunate that they have fallen for the rhetoric of Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and the like.
Well, then you start responding like the Dutch resistance to the Nazi invasion. When the Nazis invaded Holland, the Dutch people simply refused to serve them. No food in restaurants, no groceries, no taxi rides, and so on.
And was that enough to achieve liberation?
Also, if the Police start shooting you, or arresting you in mass numbers, and you stop going to work and stop paying your taxes, then what?
General strikes are fine in theory, but someone is always willing to be a scab, or go back to work when a gun is put to their head.
Historically, actions like this are only successful if there are BOTH elements present in a revolution. You need a peaceful non-violent resistance, AND an armed guerilla force.
Exactly so. But I'm not a revolutionary. I'm not advocating revolution or insurrection of any sort. Just pointing out that you can't have revolution without backing it up with force. I do like OWS (can't stand Tea Party) I just disagree with the revolution theme. What I want is simply reform, a restoration of government that has at least the semblence of concern for the people's interests and well-being. I'd be perfectly happy to just go back to before Reagan for a do-over (though I'd like to keep, or rather restore, his environmental legislation and build on it, but everything else of his, and everything since him ... no!)
And was that enough to achieve liberation?
heh, well no. Not in itself. However nothing happens in a vacuum. I don't think the Americans joining WW2 was enough to 'end it' either, any more than the Russians fighting on the eastern front and suffering massive losses was. The French underground didn't end it by itself, nor the Italian underground, the Czechs, etc.
Really though, it was a strategy. It still is a strategy. It was a way of fighting, resisting. It's better to fight than not to fight.
General strikes are fine in theory, but someone is always willing to be a scab, or go back to work when a gun is put to their head.
Yes that's true, but a General strike is still a massive slowdown and a major headache for the 1%. I didn't say it would be easy, or without it's problems, or a counter method. This is a war, after all.
The problem with putting a gun to someone's head to get them back to work is that you get some pretty crappy work, sometimes deliberately designed to injure or kill the enslavers.
Also what kind of work is it most people do in the United States now? All the mindless assembly line stuff that slave labour is best at has been outsourced and shipped to other countries.
It's pretty hard to put a gun to someone's head and force them to flip burgers, or drive a truck, or deliver newspapers. Especially when you consider you would need one gun for every five or six heads.
Not to mention the fact that the US would be completely revealing themselves as a brutal fascist dictatorship, the same thing they have been railing against since world war two.
Also I don't think that the language, tradition and history of Americans will let them tolerate a Police state for too long. 'Land of the free and home of the brave' has a hollow ring to it, if you have to turn the whole country into an armed Police state like the United States of Soviet Russia.
Well, my fellow Ontarion, lets stop talking about the US and expand to the whole of the First World since none of these problems are really unique to the States, and neither of us are Americans in any case.
In terms of Holland - yes, it helped. But like you said before, liberation required armed struggle at some point, and despite all the noncompliance, the Germans were still able to extract resources and money from Holland because for every guy that refused them service or did shoddy work, there were ten more who didn't. And that's pretty much the case in most general strikes too. The Americans tried a few and so did we, during the IWWs heyday. And yet here we are ...
As far as the mask slipping. Well, it will slip one way or the other. They seem to realize this, why else would they be setting up police states, unless they figured they would need them? They don't want it, but they'll operate without the mask and let the teeth show in all their hypocracy if that's what it takes to hold on to their power.
True, this is a world-wide revolution, and a world wide condition. I think the US is the epicenter of it though.
As far as comparing the Dutch resistance and the passive resistance we have now. There is a difference. The Dutch were invaded by a foreign army, and had to rely on foreign liberators to repel them. In this case, there are no 'foreigners' left. It's the middle and lower class of the entire planet against the oligarchs at the top.
We can live without them, they can't live without us.
Yes of course they control all the armies and police, for the moment. They control the governments, the courts, the roads, the power plants, the factories, the communication networks. However, they need the 99% to fill those positions.
So right now, it is an information war. The battle is for the minds of the 99%. Right now, the Occupiers aren't even 1% of the 99%. It is unlikely that we will get 99% of the population on our side. As you have pointed out, there were always the dutch (german, italian) kids that would turn in their parents for chocolate.
Of course the mask has slipped. I suppose the 1% are counting on most people not really noticing. In a lecture by Zizek, he showed you what the future of Fascism would look like. It was an Italian game show. Italy has become a Police state, yet many Italians aren't aware of it since there are lots of things to watch on television. Pretty girls in short dresses are winning cars, so how can anything be bad?
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Exactly so. But I'm not a revolutionary. I'm not advocating revolution or insurrection of any sort. Just pointing out that you can't have revolution without backing it up with force. I do like OWS (can't stand Tea Party) I just disagree with the revolution theme. What I want is simply reform, a restoration of government that has at least the semblence of concern for the people's interests and well-being. I'd be perfectly happy to just go back to before Reagan for a do-over (though I'd like to keep, or rather restore, his environmental legislation and build on it, but everything else of his, and everything since him ... no!)
Well a revolution doesn't have to be violent, or use violence to achieve it's objectives. Revolutions are just a massive, sweeping change to everything, like the Industrial revolution or the computer revolution. Whether you want it or not, or agree with it or not, it's here, it's happening now, and it is global.
I think that most people would like things to go back to the way they were in the period of prosperity between 1940 and 1980. That is when the taxes on the wealthy were higher, and there was a lot less poverty, by the way.
Unfortunately, the government went 'rogue', and started eliminating all of the labor reforms that your grandparents and great grandparents had to fight forty or fifty years to achieve. Things such as busting unions, reducing wages, etc. What they failed to recognize is that if you don't pay your workers enough, they can't afford to buy the products you manufacture.
Now we are back to the way things were in the 1900s. There is even one state experimenting with the idea of bringing back child labor. It might even take another thirty or forty years of struggle, just to get back to where we were in the 1940s.
However, those days are NEVER coming back. There are factors to consider, such as negative population growth in the industrialized countries (1 in 5 Americans will be seniors in 2030), the collapse of an infrastructure based on petroleum.
Also consider the fact that the dollar is based on nothing, and the fact that the power to create money has been placed in the hands of private bankers...who LOAN the US Government it's own money...as a debt, at compound interest.
The austerity measures of cutting back on roads, schools, and infrastructure that has been happening since the 1980s? That has been just so that the US can pay off the INTEREST on the national debt. Like any debt, that amount is just going to keep skyrocketing unless something is done about it immediately.
In other words, everyone else but the bankers have to slave and starve and suffer, so they can pay back the money that the bankers make from nothing, and loan out at interest.
Ben Bernake has already stated that he has lent out 100 Trillion dollars of US treasury money, and doesn't have to tell anyone who he lent the money to.
There is also the fact that most of the manufacturing base in the US has completely disappeared. During the great depression, the factories were closed because they couldn't afford to pay workers. When the economy started up again, the factories unlocked their doors and everyone went back to work. Today, there are no more factories to go back to.
So I am not entirely convinced that reform will be enough. Nor will this be an easy fight, or a short one.
What do I see as being 'moderate' reforms?
Reinstating the Glass-Steagal act might be a good start, and ordering an audit on the Federal reserve, then closing it down and giving the power of creating money back into the people/ Government.
I would also argue for nationalizing all of the banks, and making loans and mortgages available to U.S. citizens at zero or low interest. There is no reason that banks should be privately owned. It's not as though competition in paper shuffling and making financial boom and bust bubbles has really helped the economy.
These three things in themselves might be hard enough to get implemented. So far Ben Bernake and the bankers that run the US Government AND Wall street have successfully resisted every attempt at an audit. How come you can be audited by the IRS, your business can be audited, and the Federal reserve (a privately owned company) is exempt?
I have little doubt that what is taking place in the Federal reserve is the greatest act of fraud in human history. If that is true, the National debt could be cancelled as fraudulent.
Well a revolution doesn't have to be violent, or use violence to achieve it's objectives. Revolutions are just a massive, sweeping change to everything, like the Industrial revolution or the computer revolution.
Those aren't political revolutions though. And I'd argue that the industrial revolution was actually quite violent. They had to remove people off the land and pack them in desperate droves into the cities, and the way they did this was by things like the Enclosures and Highland Clearances in the UK where the industrial revolution first took off. But it's happened everywhere industrialization has spread. In Russia for instance it was achieved by doing the same thing just much faster, under Lenin and Stalin.
That's sort of beside the point though, since we're talking about political revolution. If it's political revolution, you mean to alter the form of government and replace it. This simply can't be achieved without violence, for a whole host of reasons, the fact that the previous gov't won't give up power so easily is only one of them. The revolution has to take it upon itself to maintain order and create a new security for the population, take up the previous gov'ts monopoly on legitimate use of force just to enforce its laws. If you want to jail the bankers, or enforce any other laws, you are appealing to the use of force, since ultimately it's violence or the threat of violence that gets someone in a cell. All law is backed by force. Then you also have to provide security against the counterrevolution, or foreign aggressors who don't want it to spread to their nations, and so on. In short it's basically impossible to have a nonviolent political revolution. If you're going to keep the old form of government, then it's not technically a revolution at all, it's just reform, no matter how sweeping the changes.
Yes you are absolutely right about this of course.
However, it wouldn't be prudent to use violence or threat of force at this juncture. The Police and Military will be used by the state to suppress a revolution, yet they are really part of the 99% and not the 1%. Their job is law enforcement, not to act as a publicly funded private army.
We need to be able to offer the olive branch FIRST, and when that is rejected resort to more crude methods if necessary.
At the moment though, the Police and Militaries of the world are far better armed than the public. The advantage that we have is in numerical superiority, as well as moral authority. If the Police continue to be brutal to the protestors, and -IF- the movement continues to grow, those that defend the interests of the 1% will find themselves between a rock and a hard place.
The problem as I see it with using violence to purge the old regime is that you are often exchanging one group of thugs for another. This is why it is far better to slowly apply the pressure through civil disobedience and hope that more of the Police and Military start joining our ranks. (Some have done so already).
I think that some of the revolutions which have occurred recently in Eastern Europe have been non-violent.
Yeah, thugs can be a problem, but ideally you would get around that by setting up a democratic, parallel government-in-waiting beforehand. That's what separatists usually do, that's what they did in the American and Russian revolution. But some of it can be ugly ... like underground circuit courts and whatnot. Because if you can't get the police to come over, you have to move in on their game and undercut their legitimacy.
I think what we really have here is a semantical disagreement. I don't think you really want to tear up the constitution and institute a whole new system of government. I think you just want to build the potential to do so as leverage, but you have to realize you might have to actually do it, to have any leverage.
Personally I think it's not as bad as all that. They can be rolled back without revolution, without even the leverage from threat of revolution. Just a matter of winning what you call the information war. I don't believe the 1% actually have the stones to risk revolution anymore than OWS has the stones to wage one. They are only willing to go so far as their personal safety isn't compromised. They're corrupt, thank God, which means when whatever they are doing isn't in their personal best interest anymore, they will stop. It could be worse: they could be fanatical True Believers (which they seem like sometimes, but that's not them, just their useful fools).
Well, I certainly don't think you should tear up the constitution. If anything, reinstate it. Make some amendments certainly, such as ending corporate personhood, and perhaps keeping the power of the treasury in the hands of the elected government.
At the moment though, the American Constitution (and it's many successors) is one of the few things keeping the entire world from slipping into tyranny.
The argument has been made that the American revolution has never ended, and this is merely a continuation of it. "The tree of Liberty must be watered with the blood of tyrants and patriots", as Thomas Jefferson once said.
The only problem with reform that I can see is that another forty years will pass and we will be right back to this same situation again. Also the world has changed since the time of the founding fathers. For one thing, there is no need for most people to work, thanks to robots. We are dependent on a source of fuel which is rapidly depleting, and the borders between nations are largely dissolved, thanks to the internet.
At the moment, it seems like a sort of cold war. The 1% have demonstrated they are not above transgressing constitutional rights to enforce their unelected authority. The 99% have demonstrated that they are willing not only to resist, but also to hold the enforcers accountable. Now, with the evictions, the entire movement has been pushed underground, where it may continue for decades.
Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Yet, all power is merely borrowed with the consent of the governed. Now the sleepers have awakened.
In my honest opinion I think the movement will turn into what this guy is talking about in the spring.
Here's where I stand on everything... it's not extreme and I think most people from both sides can agree with this.
I am not anticorporation and anti-banks. I am against corporations that abuse their power and are infiltrating our government. I am against the abuse of the monetary system that the federal reserve is responsible for. We have a debt based privatized monetary system that is not in the constitution. The abuse of Wall Street, the federal reserve, and the government has caused our US dollar to decrease in value drastically over the past 14 years.
Propose a bill to end the patriot act.
Propose a bill to end massive contributions from lobbyists, unions, and corporate influences. The "supreme" court ruled McCain-Feingold unconstitutional. Obviously the supreme court is corrupt. They claimed that "McCain-Feingold" denied "free speech" even though 1: Money isn't free and 2: 100% of US citizens still would have had freedom of speech and the ability to contribute to campaigns. So how was the supreme court able to say it suppresses free speech? Another fact, a lot of corporations are owned through many investors. Sometimes these investors are foreigners. I didn't know foreigners in other countries were allowed to participate in our government. The government is supposed to be governed by it's people. I feel like most members of the government have never read the constitution.
I'd say propose a bill to nationalize the federal reserve but that bill has already been created and is being reviewed by the Financial Institutions and Credit Committee. Look up The National Emergency Employment Defense Act of 2011.
All these rich people keep telling us that our country is in massive debt... all the while they keep making more money. These rich people are members of congress and the president.
"Both parties are rotten - how could they not be, given the complete infestation of the political system by corporate money on a scale that now requires a presidential candidate to raise upwards of a billion dollars to be competitive in the general election?"
I'm also anti-war for many reasons. I can go into more detail if you're interested. But I don't include it in my general message like I have above. I think a lot of people will agree with my large comment here. It is not extreme and it simply involves removing the corrupt from their positions. I like our system... I think it works, I think it has worked, I just think it's been hijacked and turned into something else. We need to restore sanity.
those are interesting and somewhat valid points, but not completely, because the thing it does not take into account is the ability of peoples opinions to be changed, or the ability of the movement to get lucid.
Saying it will fail as a prediction is, i suspect, a bit silly, because its already succeeded in several key areas. Its changed the narrative. Its blown holes through the propaganda wars assorted memes. Its removed effectively from the table and retired a large number of those memes, and it has grown at an exponential rate (doubling in size every week) till it is a global phenomenon.
There is entropy, certainly going on, but there is also reverse entropy, and implicate order in this instance can be a dominant force- all that has to happen is even a few thousand people to wake into genuine lucidity, and they can lead the way out of the matrix.
This then means that while this may be a well intentioned criticism, its also wrong. Occupy movement has opened up direct democracy and consensus process and community building. Those tools once unpackaged are Djinis that can't be put back into the bottle.
The Revolution is now, all it takes is for those involved within it to stop their own sleepwalking and awake the OTHER half.
http://occupythiswiki.org/wiki/Main_Page
The person in the video is absolutely right. He even goes too far by having 3 demands. It really should only be one. End the corruption in Washington by reforming election laws. Ending the fed is an enormous task. calling all our troops home is perceived by many to be dangerous. But everyone can agree that our country has lost our representative government, and that is something we can end.
I'm a strong believer in what the OWS movement is saying, but I agree that the guy in the video is probably right. I think that OWS is at least successful in voicing discontent, but ineffective in creating change.
Are you a troll paid to criticize OWS in an attempt to spell its downfall?
No, are you?
No, but I wish I was getting paid by someone. I need the money. I don't consider it trollish when someone criticizes the movement. I consider it healthy. But yeah, if you know anyone will to pay for critical thought, then you can refer me. Most OWS supporters consider it trollish when someone criticizes the movement, more so if that person's arguments are strong.