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