shag: no, it is not.
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Let's have some fun. In the whole history of 'the left,' an action which above all would seem to have a purpose beyond recruiting more militants was the Storming of the Winter Palace. That _was_ The Revolution. What could recruiting more militants have to do with that? Well, there's a wonderful book, Albert Rhys Williams, Through the Russian Revolution, that is well worth anyone's time if they can get hold of it. And Williams was there when the event occurred. The core of the chapter on it concerns the point at which men begin carrying out loot, and a peasant soldier stops them. This is ours now, he tells them, mustn'g steal what belongs to the Russian people. And so forth. His appeal works. The 'looters' cease to be looters and are transformed into Soldiers of the Revolution - and had this transformation not taken place the _apparent_ purpose of the storming of the palace, the final orverthrow of the Old Regime, could not have, could not have, been achieved. That soldier who stopped the looters grasped the necessity of transforming the meanng of the act from the mere possession of a building and its contents into The Revolution consisted in turning the looters into Revolutionaries: Everythng else achieved by storming the palace depended on this core purpose (though the actors in this case only disvovered their real purpose AFTER THE ACT.
And is not that a powerful paradigmn within which to respnde to #OWS? First the mere action: then weeks, months, perhaps years of struggle the purpose of which is to establishe afer the fact the meaning/purpose of the original Occupation, the purpose of which could not be known in advance. The peasants stroming the Winter Palace had not the slightest idea of their purpose, but there would have been no way to discover that purpose, to give their action _after the fact_ the real purpose all along, had they not first JUST ACTED. An attempt at analysis BEFORE the action, a paralysis of that action by analysis, would have made analysis impossible. It would have been impossible because there would have been no action on which to focus the anlaysis.
Tbat's a start, perhaps, in trying to figure out whether my claim or your rejection is correct.
Carrol
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