On Sun, Dec 4, 2011 at 4:47 AM, shag carpet bomb wrote: [clip]
I think you are really taking part of a real position, and adding some stuff to it that is not there. I think a lot of people would say that one thing movements can sometime accomplish is to make politicians and the powers that be quake in their boots and reform from within to make change that relieves some pain and suffering.
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Yes, this is true, but it doesn't establish what you want it to establish. Social Movements force politicians to make reforms - but those reforms are crafted by those politicians and have no necessary relation to what the given social movement demanded. (That's one of the reasons demands are a trivial concern.) For example, in the'40s a Socaial Movement demanded universal old age pensdions funded by a corporate tax; what the politicians gave them was Social Security, grounded in a regressive tax and tied to the lifetime earnings (from specified sources) of the worker. A really shitty affair subject to constant meddling and ultimate sabotage. Another movement demanded the right to organize; what it got was the Wagner Act and the Taft-Hartley Act, which pretty much eventually crippled the union movment. And so forth.
Don't cite the Civil-Rights movement: that movement only deanded that the abstract civil right of bourgeois equality be extended to Blacks. That reform was vital, but it was also the groundwork for completely defeating the actual aims of the Black Liberation Movement.
The experts you want to count as "allies" are the experts who "counsel" Congress to pass these reforms that cripple the movements and to "counsel" the mvements to be "practial" (Crackpot realism) and accept without complain this submerging of their own actual aims in the "gifts" the state offers them.
Sachs remains not just not an ally but a serious enemy. If #OIWS can make use of him fine; if they accept his counsel as relevant to _their_ actions and not merely to the information of their members, then they are seriously endangering their purposes.
Carrol
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