Forum Post: what on earth is the good of protesting if you cant agree on a platform?
Posted 12 years ago on Dec. 21, 2011, 10:56 p.m. EST by zati321
(169)
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
your original idea was great: 99 percent are screwed while the 1 percent are rolling in money. why dont you take a look at today's newspaper and tell me who you think is on the side of the 99 percent with the payroll tax cut vs tax cuts for millionaires only. its real tough to figure out
[facepalm]
This criticism (which is repeated ad nauseum by establishment liberals) completely misses the point. Occupy doesn’t have a single platform, in the sense of a list of demands. But it is a platform — a collaborative platform, like a wiki or Linux. Occupy isn’t a unified movement with a single list of demands and an official leadership to state them. Rather, Occupy offers a toolkit and a brand name to a thousand different movements with their own agendas, their own goals, and their own demands — with only their hatred of Wall Street and the corporate state in common, and the Occupy brand as a source of strength and identity.
Although the ends are quite different, the model of organization is much like that of any genuine insurgency: An essentially leaderless organization, a loose network of cells, each of which adopts the particular brand or franchise for its own purposes. It’s a much more effective use of resources to provide a common platform and then let a thousand flowers bloom. Conventional, hierarchical activist institution wastes enormous resources on administrative apparatus and endless negotiations just to get everyone on the same page, before anyone can do anything.
A common platform allows any number of movements, made up of voluntary aggregations of individuals with shared goals, to build on it on a modular basis, and to act without waiting for permission from the headquarters of the One Big Movement. And whenever they do anything that seems to work well, any other node in the network can adopt that tactic as its own without asking anyone’s leave.
That’s why the global Occupy movement is throwing off innovations like a fission reaction throws off neutrons. If anything, it’s done so even more since the wave of shutdowns in the U.S. divorced it from occupation as a primary tactic and scattered its seeds to the wind.
Please explain [facepalm]
"what about your platform" is a tired and repeated "criticism" that betrays a complete misunderstanding of the principles along which OWS is organized. This specific question is asked by establishment liberals in order to de-legitimize the movement into something that conforms to the doctrinal organization standards of movements which become narrower in focus, and thus capable of being diluted.
It is our fluidity and ability to respond in an autonomous fashion that makes us resilient.
Except right now you may be autonomous but fluid you're not. The biggest problem I figure Occupy needs to start worrying about is the possibility that it will choke on its own constituents. The bigger a coalition is, the more diverse it is. The flip side of that is that the bigger a coalition gets, the more likely its members are to hold differing or even completely opposite views. The greater that general discord is, the less likely it is that enough people will be able to agree on damn near anything, and in turn the more discordant a movement's followers are the harder it is to mobilize that movement toward concrete systemic action.
Having a leader or a group thereof is the way that you beat that paradigm. You pick a group of however many people you want to run things and make policy decisions on a day-to-day basis, and then you agree to abide by those policy decisions assuming that they fall within reasonable, collectively understood boundaries. You then also include some means of holding your leaders accountable for the cumulative effects of their actions on a regular basis.
You don't even have to call them leaders, or even to centralize the duties of a leader in one group. Just set up a general logistics workgroup responsible for overseeing the day-to-day operations of the protesters and massing large groups of them where necessary. Set up a PR workgroup composed of sober, articulate, clean-cut moderates who are capable of appealing to people fairly far outside our standard political and socioeconomic demographics to convince them to vote for people we trust.
Set up a political workgroup (or in fact affiliate officially with the 99% Declaration) to manage any political campaigns or primary runs attempted in the name of the Occupy movement (including the selection of candidates, but those candidates would need majority approval from the rest of the movement before actually running) that would be responsible for PR efforts, fundraising, and general campaign management. Then just give the finance workgroup a voice in and a position reporting to the logistics workgroup, and there you go.
A specific policy platform would be nice for the political and PR arms of the movement, simply because it makes it far easier to sell the ideas behind Occupy to reluctant Middle Americans (which is something you're going to have to do to a certain degree if you don't want to be branded as fools or wingnuts); although it wouldn't necessarily have to be strictly adhered to by the protest wing it would make a nice simple set of guidelines to keep us on track.
I've been sayin . . .
This is the 3000th topic on this subject.
how many topics per subject?
half of you(the males) want to overthrow govt andhave no system at all; the other half of you(female) dont thnk the govt does ENOUGH for healthcare, childcare, etc: its a total contradiction. there IS NO MESSAGE.
yeah, real "fluid." the vietnam protesters wanted to END THE WAR. the civil rights protesters wanted to END SEGREGATION. the egypitan protesters wanted MUBARAK OUT. the tea party protesters want OBAMA OUT. they all know what they want. already, you're seeing the ows tire of camping out and "taking to the streets." sure, it was fun for a while, you got laid--but now, it's a pain. just imagine if it was like egypt and have people shooting at you: that would be even worse, no? yup, even after three months the "movement" has been around, it's "tired old criticism" by "the establishment" like me(lofl), but you need to realize you're not going to topple society, so you better try to work within the system and address some of the REAL problems of our society, rather than the tired old vague abstractions in your post most of us outgrew after freshman year in college...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EewGMBOB4Gg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z9WVZddH9w
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