On Dec 8, 2011, at 12:57 PM, shag carpet bomb wrote:
> bady's kicking ass lately:
>
> What I saw was the best of a generation, not because they took
> themselves as representative of some vanguard, utopian future, but as
> an integral part of the long, slow, and brutal work of remaking spaces
> for democratic process.
I'm tired of this disavowal of vanguard and utopia. It's not honest. Occupiers are leading the way, and hoping others will join them. And they're doing so with a utopia in mind. You can't write all this stuff about reclaiming public space without having some notion of what a better public space would look like - some approximation, that is, of utopia. It's like you have to say these things out of some 90s-ish, anti-totalizing, anticommunist reflex.
Also I don't buy his argument about how targeting Wall Street is somehow less radical - or more "liberal" - than this reclamation of public space. Wall Street is a symbol, or personification in some sense, of the nature of financial and political power, exercised via the financial markets. It's about ownership and control. It's at the core of politics. That's why OWS has had such resonance with the broader society - it's extremely clear and accurate. It has a lot to do with why Oakland is the way it is. It has a lot to do with why people are being foreclosed upon. Challenging foreclosure and moving homeless people into vacant properties is an attack on Wall Street's power that also makes the mechanism of that power very clear and concrete. Putting a tent where a cop tells you not to is related to that power, but at several removes. I'm kind of skeptical that the Reclaim the City rhetoric has the same resonance with the broad public that it does with graduate students in geography.
Doug