Occupy Wall Street 3: Now What?

slow day in clinic so I'm sitting here thinking bout anarchist/Marxist readings of like health and the medical apparatus

anyone have any suggested reading? basically wondering if I'll have anything to do after the revolution

I've been to Cuba, they have clinics, you'll be fine (semi-j/k)

the reason occupy is more important than any american social movement since the 1930s or maybe 1890s is that the "reform" it concerns is deeply desired by huge swaths of the population. granted, the reason the population's so unhappy isn't just because some bankers stole a lot of money but because they're at the edge of a huge and disruptive period of uncertainty brought on by the machine-ideology america used to gather the world's wealth into its arms beginning to gather it out of them -- and the main good point that 389257328957298429-word article (almost) makes is that if all you want is reform, if you are a Good Capitalist, then you shouldn't have any problem with america's inevitable demotion as king of the capitalists: it's even deserved. regardless, while we're trying to figure out what to do about this transition, and trying to work out an evolutionary direction for our species capable of dealing with the really really really nasty era we're about to enter as our explore-expand-exploit-exterminate technique hits a wall, it'd be nice to have a functioning government and an upper class comprised of something besides thieves and grifters. we can harness the tremendous popular desire that's awakening for those things, or we can write bad but uncompromising prose for the delectation of the fifty people who agree with us. or we can do what lenin did, and try to jump the historical queue with guns. that worked well.

the state has a monopoly on violence, and charging directly into the lions' mouth is not a winning strategy. but does that mean an activist shouldn't throw a tear gas canister back as an act of self defense? should we stop someone from building a barricade in the street to hold the line against kettling riot cops cause it's a bad PR move? (ps: are flaming trash cans to burn off tear gas ~always~ destined to be misinterpreted as a sign that says "wooo let's riot"? pps: are police statements ~always~ destined to be taken as an actual account of the way shit went down by people who never get busted in the head?)

barricades and anything else anyone wants to do to hold the line are i think important+necessary and i don't think they are a bad PR move. flaming trash cans i don't mind. throwing a tear gas canister back "in self defense" -- there is no self-defense. the protesters can't defend themselves against the weapons of the state. any escalation will inevitably end with the protesters being beaten and arrested. building a barrier in the street might end the same way, but most of the people watching will be on your side, and the cocoon of moral authority the bullies with the clubs and gas luxuriate in will begin to erode.

i know it sounds totally namby-pamby to be all about PR and i know that there are lots of people who have been in a one-sided war with the cops since they were born and that they are desperate to get some fucking dignity for once by fighting back. but you can't fight back against the cops physically; they will always win. there's only one way to fight the cops and it's on tv. you can win there.

(and no of course it's totally infuriating and awful when everyone -- even sympathizers -- believes the shit the cops feed to the reporters who couldn't bother to be there. we can be thankful at least that we live in a better age than any previous age for fighting that kind of thing.)

Isn't that the lesson of '68: manipulate the media and thereby "win" America?

haha well if that's the lesson of '68 i guess the lesson is It Doesn't Work! i think this is a riper moment, historically, than that one though -- and if not, well, i'm open to suggestions as to what we should do to get results. besides just try to offer an alternative to the christian fascists and wait for the collapse.

well, I mean that's what Nixon and the right did in '68: manipulate the media and five or six years' worth of white resentment. Have we done anything comparable?

Speaking for myself, a resident of a city of laughable conservative instincts, I'm amazed how the language of OWS has entered popular discourse. I meet a number of people a week who now allude to the 1% and their relation to it. It helps that, through one of those happy accidents of fate, OWS, the average American's awareness of his fragile financial state, election year histrionics, and some overlap with Tea Party principles, have formed this nexus.

oh ha you meant the right! yeah they did great. i thought you meant like abbie hoffman.

my radical bubble

^^^ volume two of your memoirs

and yeah it's a huge and amazing victory for occupy that so many people in the country are now vociferously aware that they are getting screwed by something instead of just being thankful for their credit-bought toys and the theoretical promise of future rewards for service. in 2012 we need to keep the pressure on a million different linked points of american culture -- including! the institutional violence of the corporate oligarchy's footsoldiers in blue -- but i think we need to do it always with one eye, maybe two eyes, on the mass, and on the camera. it's really hard but the people on the ground are more than capable of it.

sorry one more: when i'm like BARRIERS YES, TRASH CANS YES, THROWING BACK CANISTERS NO, i don't mean to sound like i know what the right thing to do is in every police-confrontation situation; of course i don't. all i'm saying is, you know that stupid picture of mayor quan looking mournfully at the toppled plastic city hall and heaving a sigh for her city? everything the cops did that day was to get that picture. we have to be aware of this because we can't let them have pictures like that.

and yeah it's a huge and amazing victory for occupy that so many people in the country are now vociferously aware that they are getting screwed by something instead of just being thankful for their credit-bought toys and the theoretical promise of future rewards for service.

suspect that this has more to do with the natural effects of a prolonged recession than with occupy in particular (occupy being one of those effects), but yes, the "99%" language is extremely useful

I've been really surprised by how little Bey has been invoked w/r/t Zucotti to date. He seems like the clearest antecedent/"theorist" of how stuff was going down for a period.

LGS reads like a weatherman wandered into a critical theory conference while on an acid trip.

Bey's writing is great but on the other hand there's the whole pedo/NAMBLA thing

Yeah, there is that whole thing. But you know, anyone who has ever defended or lauded Allen Ginsberg would be lauding a NAMBLA-promoting pedo, too, so I kind of push that aspect of Bey out of my head.

Here's an interesting essay. That ISN'T hard to read or condescending. It's about the TAZ in our contemporary times.
http://anarchistnews.org/node/21363

but does that mean an activist shouldn't throw a tear gas canister back as an act of self defense?

I'm not that well-versed in the theory of mass movements. I can't recall ever reading a book on it. But I'd say that the answer entirely depends on the state of the society within which the mass movement is forming.

I'd say that if the mass of society feels its oppression and frustration to the point where armed insurrection starts looking like the only way to get justice (see: Libya, Syria), then images and messages of violent self-defense will be emboldening and encouraging to that mass, and an implicit "woo-hoo let's riot" is read as "let's throw off our oppressors". iow, it is positive. Not coincidentally, this is what the community of color is saying to you when they say, show us you will fight with us.

otoh, if the mass of society feels anxious and threatened, but has no clear concept of who their oppressors are or how they work, then they will rally to a message of justice, but only if it implies greater safety from the felt threat. iow, they desire a path ahead, but a safe path to a place of refuge. (This may be a huge confusion on their part, but a very human one.)

Because of who they are and how they think, the mass of Americans need the starkest possible contradiction to the propaganda of the power structure. The pictures of protestors calmly being maced by a strolling cop as they sit passively on the ground is just such a stark contradiction. It generates enormous power to trouoble the mass and make them think. The civil rights movement, at enormous human cost, learned how to wield this power.

The image of a masked young man in the middle of the street hurling a smoking tear gas canister at the police will only increase their anxiety and identify OWS as another threat, not an ally. - or at least not a safe ally, but more like their crazy friend in high school who keyed cars, turned over trash cans and wanted to streak at the graduation ceremony. They feel extremely queasy about such allies.

(ps: are flaming trash cans to burn off tear gas ~always~ destined to be misinterpreted as a sign that says "wooo let's riot"? pps: are police statements ~always~ destined to be taken as an actual account of the way shit went down by people who never get busted in the head?)

to briefly overgeneralize: yes. yes.

sterling do you mean a weatherman or a Weatherman? :)

aimless the point about different modes of communication and action being appropriate to different social and political contexts is one of those obvious but perceptive ones i'm surprised almost nobody has mentioned above. in other words: otm.

otoh, if the mass of society feels anxious and threatened, but has no clear concept of who their oppressors are or how they work, then they will rally to a message of justice, but only if it implies greater safety from the felt threat. iow, they desire a path ahead, but a safe path to a place of refuge. (This may be a huge confusion on their part, but a very human one.)

or: if the mass of society does not feel oppressed but is concerned about and wants to address certain specific issues in a constructive fashion, then they will rally to a message of justice, but only if it seems sensible and likely to achieve desirable ends.

take your capitalist running dogs and go back to your job at bain capital, bossman!

Thinking about Bey for me is weird, because it turns into thinking about the person I was when I first read him, and into thinking about how the sorts of visions he conjured up don't have a necessary place in the world, and how it felt to realize that.

i know it sounds totally namby-pamby to be all about PR

haha dude you are talking to the media team of odc i feel u

the point about different modes of communication and action being appropriate to different social and political context

i sorta thought i made it implicitly in my shit on movement building, but maybe it was too implicit

Any CEO will tell you, you have to control your brand in the marketplace. The USA is, more than anywhere in the world, consumerist and commercialized. The Violent Insurrection brand needs to be split off and developed seperately within the OWS family of brands, like GMC split off from Chevy.

^ joeks, bro

ha, my man:

legbacarrefour
Really dont share the faith in "radical transparency" that a lot of occupiers have. Sometimes, I dont wanna have a camera shoved in my face
23 minutes ago Favorite Retweet Reply

legbacarrefour
I hear "radical transparency" & I hear echoes of "radical self-reliance", the Burning Man ideal of "pull yourself up by your own bootstraps"
21 minutes ago

legbacarrefour
Or "radical self-expression" where radicalism gets conflated w/ magical self-actualization of white people
20 minutes ago

legbacarrefour
It seems more like radical transparency is about the self-actualization of people watching livestreams and their avatars than "democracy"
6 minutes ago

anyone heard this radio show?

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/mike-feder-occupied-territory/

I listened to Mike Feder in the '80s/90s on WBAI/Pacifica, really phenomenal talker and broadcaster.

http://www.cbssports.com/nfl/story/17077947/unless-you-want-to-alienate-target-audience-occupy-someplace-else

This is, in fact, an apolitical column. Or anti-political. Whatever it is, it's full of resentment that the Occupy movement would use our passion for the Super Bowl against us, infiltrating something we love so we have to focus on something they hate. And what they hate is the "right to work" legislation passed Wednesday by the Indiana senate, legislation that would make Indiana the first state in the Rust Belt to prohibit labor contracts that require workers to pay union dues.

If you're not into politics, so be it. I'm not here to tell you what "right to work" legislation would mean to Indiana for two reasons: One, I don't know. Two, I don't care. Not here. Not this week. Not at the Super Bowl, the single greatest annual event -- sports or otherwise -- in this country.

gregg doyel is PIG-BITIN' MAD about these darn occupiers ruining the super bowl!

i honestly can't make heads or tails of the tone of that piece

like one second i'm smdh @ a guy that doesn't get it, and the next i'm thinking he's pulling some deep-cover satire

Lots of you, most of you, won't be pleased to have your time wasted Sunday with coverage of the Occupy movement outside Lucas Oil Stadium. Lots of you probably are irritated that I'm wasting your time today, writing about the Occupy movement instead of Patriots tight end Rob Gronkowski's ankle or Giants quarterback Eli Manning's legacy.

self-clown??

things like that schwartz essay are why ppl become libertarians in college.

would happily read 100 articles from reason magazine i fully disagree with before reading another article that uses terms like "the amerikan way."

hahaha truth bomb

http://motherjones.com/mojo/2012/01/occupy-oakland-black-panther-roots

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/02/02/416270/nfl-union-super-bowl-protests/

The union, which encouraged workers to meet with their state representatives in the days before the law passed and organized rallies outside the statehouse Wednesday, will pass out leaflets and pamphlets around Super Bowl village and Lucas Oil Stadium, the site of the game, Harris said.

http://a2.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/395592_130339110419914_100003314764100_138427_1009891760_n.jpg

would happily read 100 articles from reason magazine i fully disagree with before reading another article that uses terms like "the amerikan way."

― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Wednesday, February 1, 2012 5:32 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

a thousand times yes. and it's not just the juvenile language, there's a divisive, condescending and simplistic slant to the whole mindset. the product of getting into an intellectual rut and fighting tooth and nail to stay there.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=qQanou_L0gY

would happily read 100 articles from reason magazine i fully disagree with before reading another article that uses terms like "the amerikan way."

― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Wednesday, February 1, 2012 5:32 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

a thousand times yes. and it's not just the juvenile language, there's a divisive, condescending and simplistic slant to the whole mindset. the product of getting into an intellectual rut and fighting tooth and nail to stay there.

― his hands are a dirty fountain through which lives spurt (contenderizer), Thursday, February 2, 2012 8:29 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

he's just so fucking uncharitable. you'd think he was the perfect human the way he castigates just about everyone. it's like he wilfully denies the complexity of human motivation.

it's like he wilfully denies the complexity of human motivation.

― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Friday, February 3, 2012 4:48 AM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^^^^^ this is what spurned me from radical politics for years

pigs

http://www.salon.com/2012/02/02/occupy_oakland_protesters_denied_medication_in_jail/singleton/

Even as the Securities and Exchange Commission has stepped up its investigations of Wall Street, the agency has repeatedly allowed the biggest firms to avoid punishments.

here's a DC address that needs occupying.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/03/business/sec-is-avoiding-tough-sanctions-for-large-banks.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha2

the agency has repeatedly allowed the biggest firms to avoid punishments.

pigs

otm

Its up to Hoos to change the SEC

I am Hoos. (/spartacus)

ILX general fap for May 1st (after whatever)

pigs

http://www.salon.com/2012/02/02/occupy_oakland_protesters_denied_medication_in_jail/singleton/

― Literal Facepalms (Dr Morbius), Friday, February 3, 2012 2:32 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

There is some nasty behavior in this story, but the angle suggests that it's unusual for inmates (talking about jail, not prison) to be denied medicine for a day or two. The beatings were the awful part.

In my checkered past I've been in jail a couple times and I was denied meds. In New Orleans I had a little visit to the Orleans Parish Prison* (jails are called "parish prisons" in Louisiana) where I met a guy who I'm still friends with. He was HIV + and he went without meds for 2.5 days. He never once got to see a nurse or doctor, and he said guards just didn't respond to his telling them he needed meds.

I was only there for about 18 hours, during which time there was a guy w/ a bleeding head injury who never got to see a doctor. He hollered a lot, and tried talking to a deputy who sat down outside the cell, but the deputy slammed the solid metal door shut in his face.

In the worker's rights org I worked for, arrests were part of the job for some people, and they were always some new kind of terrible (except for one Quaker guy who the jailors apparently fawned over b/c he *looked* like Quaker, w/ the beard actual Quaker hat).

*Orleans Parish Prison = "OPP" which is pretty lol

just b/c it's not unusual for inmates to be denied medicine doesn't mean it's not awful.