Forum Post: What Occupy needs right now.
Posted 12 years ago on Dec. 10, 2011, 9:40 p.m. EST by ARod1993
(2420)
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
Honestly, I don't know whether it's going to be possible to find all of these things in one person, but we should be searching to find a person and/or assemble a workgroup comprised of people with these characteristics because it would make our lives so much easier:
-A veteran of the movements of the 1960s and 1970s, who has seen firsthand what works and what doesn't and is willing to focus on the former.
-Someone who can cross the boundaries between worlds, who may fully sympathize with and is considered by others (and himself) to be a part of the movement but has access to and can put on all the trappings of the professional so as not to scare or piss off middle America.
-Someone with a very sharp mind and a background in economics and finance, who when asked "How exactly did Wall Street screw us?" can provide an exact, technically correct answer.
-Someone who is very good at breaking down and parsing complex technical ideas for everyone to understand, so that he could walk anyone and everyone through the workings of Wall Street and K Street without losing accuracy and still producing a strong emotional response.
-Someone with insider knowledge and/or background on how politics and campaigns work, so that any political action mounted in the name of Occupy will have a serious shot at success rather than being a sideshow like Nader was.
-Someone who knows how to unify and synchronize disparate elements of a movement so that all of the different arms are capable of working in concert toward a common end.
-Someone who is willing to get behind the idea of moderate, regulated capitalism and knows how to successfully sell that idea to a public that in large part may not necessarily be ready to hear it.
-Someone with enough personal authority that when he tries to haul the anarchists and the communists back into line he actually can instead of being happily ignored or worse, get into a potentially divisive power struggle.
Find me a person capable of all, or at least most of these things, and you've found yourself someone the perfect face and driving force for the Occupy movement.
Try Elizabeth Warren, I think she is the real deal and she is gaining against the Massachusetts Rep Sellout.
She is an expert in finance and a figther for the 99% - how rare.
see link:
http://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2011-12-09/article/38971?headline=THE-PUBLIC-EYE-Elizabeth-Warren-Voice-of-the-99-Percent--By-Bob-Burnett
Like Ghandi, we go out among the dissaffected and help them to stem the forclosures, help the homeless to occupy vacant houses, help Iowan farmers to fight off Wall St., help save those up to their neck in credit card debt etc., etc. Thus our actions speak louder than words and in the process we put our enegies toward productive outcomes. We stand by the people, and if we earn it they stand by us.
It doesn't sound like you have spent any time at all at OWS or any other occupation or you wouldn't be writing such nonsense. You would be aware, for example, that in terms of political maturity, OWS is way ahead of anything we ever did in the '60s. You would be aware that, for example, OWS has already formed a bond between organized labor and the left intelligentcia unlike any seen since the 1940s. You would be aware, if you read any of the theoretical work coming out of OWS just how sophisticated it is in the world of bourgeois economics. You would be aware that OWS has rejected electoral politics as beyond our capacity to fix at this point. You would be aware that while there are different tendencies in OWS it is essentially a united movement, not only in the US but internationally. You would be aware that the dominant tendency in OWS is anti-corporate and there is a very strong and intellectually vibrant tendency in OWS that wants nothing to do with capitalism, reform or otherwise. You would be aware that we have plenty of great leaders. And you would be aware that it was people strongly influenced by the anarchist intellectual tradition that not only started this movement but remain its most intellectually coherent tendency.
I know about the anarchists and the communists, and I have nothing personal against them. I'm not putting any of this out there because I disagree with what you're trying to do and I agree with OWS with all my heart. I just watch the people who slur you and smear you, and I can't see a countervailing face and voice to counter those smears and slurs, and it really hurts me to see it happen. I'm thinking of this as a PR guy trying to figure out how to sell you to a nation that's only beginning to open its mind and not wanting to see you get ignored or stepped on or branded as something that most people are too scared of to accept.
The fact is, that many of the people who were the initiators of OWS are radicals. They remain the most coherent political tendency in OWS. So far they have not been at all sectarian and they have done a really great job in reaching out to social sectors that don't necessarily agree with them, a much better job, I might add, than have any liberals done in the past 40 years or so. That said, it strikes me that it would be both disingenuous and dishonest for people in OWS who hold radical views to deny that that was the case.
What I'm worried about is the knee-jerk reaction that you're going to get from a whole chunk of this country when they hear words like "radical" and "anarchist" and "socialist" and I'm trying to figure out how to circumvent it. If you were to take the economic policies implemented by Bush II and espoused by people like Rick Perry, Herman Cain, and Ron PauI, and present them to America as the Republican platform in 1980 when this nonsense started, you would have been called a loony and a heartless piece of crap and nobody would have voted for you except your fellow loonies. Fast forward thirty years and whole chunks of this country actively support those policies.
If OWS is packaged in a very particular way to the rest of the country then you could probably get them to accept it. Then all you'd have to do is work slowly enough on your eventual goals that the pace seems natural to the electorate and nobody's going to bother you. Even if they were to try they would be fairly easy to shut out of the game. My point is that you can move a consensus a thousand miles if the step size is small enough, but conversely too large a step size too soon will provoke a gut aversion reaction.
My experience is that more and more people are more and more open to more and more explicitly radical ideas. There is nobody further from anarchism than a labor bureaucrat. Yet they have welcomed solidiarity with OWS. For the first time since the 1940s sections of organized labor are open to an alliance with explicitly radical intellectuals.
They way to get people used to radical ideas is not to hide from them or pretend that they are something other than what they actually are. The fact is, many people have considerable congnitive dissonance and often behave in ways that are quite radical while at the same time professing rather conservative ideas intellectually. The problem is to bring people intellectual understanding up to their actual behavior. For example somewhere between 40 and 60% of the population are staunchly and consistently pro-union even though only 10% of the population are actually covered by a collective bargaining agreement. Most people are antiwar even though the nation is at war all over the place. Most people are for medicare for all when the question is framed that way. One could go on and on, but the fact is, a clear majority hold very left wing ideas even though they don't see them that way. Their self understanding would be greatly improved if they really understood how radical these views are rather than hiding from them.
I know that's most likely the case, but I also get very nervous about betting on followings that I can't count on in the polls. I'm assuming you're right that a lot of people hold fairly progressive ideas when it comes to individual policies but haven't yet put the puzzle pieces together as far as what that means for their ideological and political stance. That seems to be a fairly common trend; people start to wake up to what's going on but haven't quite shaken off the old buzzwords and rallying cries.
What I meant by rebranding is to take advantage of that dissonance and redefine those buzzwords and rallying cries. In other words, instead of agreeing that these ideas are radical and socialist, present them as not really all that radical at all. Welfare for our poor is not about socialism or taking from people, it's a return to a long-standing American tradition of tight-knit communities and the ideal of "leave no man behind". Business regulation isn't a radical attempt to impede free commerce, it's a return to the proud Bull Moose tradition of Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders. Unions aren't evil monopolies, they're the insurance policies for ordinary guys like Ralph Kramden.
What you're suggesting is that people are already starting to make those connections implicitly, but as of yet fear to vocalize these connections because they fear being branded communist or socialist and thus (since those are still dirty words) un-American and unacceptable. What I'm suggesting is that we strengthen people's allegiances to the specific policies in a manner similar to what I laid out above until people are confident enough to go out and vote based on those policies, and then eventually they'll be willing to espouse these policies even if it means standing arm in arm with anarchists and communists.
The fact is socialism and anarchism have extremely rich intellectual traditions. Anybody with an undergraduate degree or for that matter any kind of regular experience as a trade unionist ought to be aware of this.
I know there is a lot of yahooism in the world, the people who get their "news" from Fox news are reportedly less well informed than people who don't pay any attention to the news at all. But the fact is they are a disorganized mass and what OWS is doing is organizing people. The vast majority of people who spend any time at all at an occupation are fundamentally transformed by it. Admittedly that has become more difficult since the evictions, but that is a passing phenomenon. OWS continues to grow. Serious reoccupations are only a matter of time. OWS may manifest itself in some other way though I suspect it will be reoccupations. It will not go away for several reasons including the fact that it is a world wide movement and it is addressing real, objective problems that also will not go away.
The radicals of OWS are considerably more open about their politics than were the Communists of the 1930s, and more successful at it to boot.
The anarchists have indeed been quite effective. They have managed to gather a large following coming from various political views. That is not an easy feat. I tip my hat off to them and say "Bravo!".
The anarchists have gathered a large following? lol.
Occupy is quite a large movement. It's worldwide. Considering most people do not consider themselves anarchists, it's quite remarkable that they were able to amass such a large following.
You seem impervious to irony.
Your irony was not clear. There are a lot of lame posters who don't even know Occupy was started by anarchists. Iv'e read many of your posts and most of them didn't seem to be written by someone with a lot of intelligence. Had your comment been written by badconduct or nucleus then I would have known it was irony.
Funny, I've read a lot of your comments and they seem to be the trasnparent work of a troll.
To each his own opinion. That's what makes Occupy a strong movement. You think I'm a troll, and I think you're an idiot. And, that's OK.