Occupy Your Workplace

Response to a vulgar idealist

response to: http://dissentmagazine.org/atw.php?id=676
comment at: http://jacobinmag.com/blog/2012/02/the-window-at-starbucks/

This article peaks with "we don’t need to excise people from Occupy, we just need to grow it." I'm thinking YEAH. And we get "[anarchists are] a convenient scapegoat for more fundamental failings." I'm thinking HELL YEAH!

But then it dives right in the toilet. Back to "more traditional forms of left-wing organization"?! Ditch consensus for majority decision making?!

The "glossy allure" is not around spontaneity, it's around SUCCESS. Success is something, I admit, that the contemporary left is not very familiar with - so it has a spooky edge to it. We ALL believe too much in spontaneity, that's the same thing as saying we don't know exactly why any of it worked. Anybody who, at this point, DOESN'T have some spontaneist illusions is not actually trying to meet the challenge of the present time, is not approaching the tasks before us with appropriate humility, is hiding behind the "more traditional forms."

The dialectic between consensus and autonomy is what has given the occupy movement the mobility to encompass a broad base of experimental actions, and still maintain a real coherence and tendency towards unity. It is through maintaining this tension that we will begin to develop leadership capacity on the left - the capacity we need so badly if we are to succeed, to win, to gain some measure of political power.

Yes, we need to articulate strategies that will "make Occupy bigger and more effective" but this will not come by way of stripping away the principles which are actually working. Yes, Black Bloc adherents who refuse to be reined in are only one small part of the overall challenge, but the challenge is to be faithful to the movement, not to win it away from the anarchists.

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more of the current dialogue
David Graeber: http://nplusonemag.com/concerning-the-violent-peace-police
George Lakey: http://wagingnonviolence.org/2012/02/how-not-to-block-the-black-bloc/ 
in Counterpunch: http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/02/08/a-bustle-in-hedges-row/

Spontaneism in OWS

From an email thread within the Labor Outreach Committee of Occupy Wall Street.

Thanks Jackie for forwarding these two articles:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_cancer_of_occupy_20120206/
http://viewpointmag.com/2012/02/06/santa-rita-i-hate-every-inch-of-you/

I think the deeper issue at stake is the spontaniesm of which we are all - in varying degrees - guilty. This finds only one of it's extremes in the Black Bloc, and by focusing exclusively on the "misdeeds" of the BB Chris Hedges totally misses the larger question.

Purucker, for his part, is much more keyed into this issue:

Many of us were coming to grips with the recognition that we went into Saturday thinking that there was a crew of radicals in Oakland who had it all figured out. All we had to do was show up at their event and things would go off without a hitch, which is how it had worked at the general strike and the port shutdown.

This is an evolution of the tension, present from the start, between two values deeply embedded in OWS: consensus and autonomy. These values play the role of a political dialectic within the movement - neither one can, or should, win. On the contrary, the swing from one to another is part of the motor which is powering the movement. We require autonomy in order to experiment, and consensus to keep us on a path of seeking unity. The element within the BB which rejects the consensus process is only one deviation from the necessary fidelity to both principles.

-Sam