[lbo-talk] Occupy Oakland's imminent implosion and the widereffects

Chuck Grimes c123grimes at att.net
Sat Nov 5 21:08:17 PDT 2011


Subject: [lbo-talk] Berlusconi's Mousetrap


> this is the real deal
>
> http://vimeo.com/8672001
>
> The Protests against the G8 in July 2001 in Genoa Italy ...

This video was two hours long. It was worth watching after Doug's also excellent as usual interviews.

Now some points about OO. This is not like the scenes in Genoa and more recently in Cairo where it was pretty obiviously cops in civilian gear and or secrete police plus agent provocateurs creating incidences.

The Indymedia essay posted by SA I think is more relevant. I can't really say for sure, because I was home watching. For an acturate accessment you really need to be in street to grasp the situation.

Some of these actions and reactions are pretty unique to location and its history. I wasn't surprised OPD came out in military-like force complete with heliocopters, crowd barriers, several kinds of tear gas delivery systems, pepper spray, and somekind of cloth wrapped pellets. This was a planned and coordinated assault. These tactics were developed in the late 60s here. People I think forget that the random violence from sections of crowds built up over time as `peaceful' methods proved useless to stop the war, stop segregation, and do anything for poverty.

The peaceful marches, boycotts, and a strike for a day were the usual routine. Then as night fell, the clusters of vandals came out and trashed windows, smashed cars up, and played chase games with wondering clusters of cops. The news media and officials point to the mess and deplore the violence...

Nevermind the bickering and abstract principles. Just show up in more and more numbers during the day until all control is lost. The `violence' is a distraction. The real action is found in numbers climbing. People show up because they are fed-up with the bullshit. Nobody controls these sequences and certainly not officialdom, the masters of capital, or their military and domestic police forces. And perhaps sadly, neither do the democratic, liberal, or radical oppositions. These things flow like a flood

There is a deep raw truth to see. Power is meaningless without the consent of the governed. When that breaks down the entire apparatus of power evaporates. The social contract explodes by spontaneous combustion. Rousseau was right in a very restricted sense that you must believe The People are a good natured sort who can govern themselves. Well, so I trust.

Personally I have a lot problems around my own violent behavior in the past. Now I am just too old, but I understand its heart, which was repression and domestic violence as a child. I vowed never, but of course I was fooled because I didn't understand the oppression of the human world was violent through the masters of class war, the very rich.

In Hobbes time it was not all against all, but the monarchy of the elite against all else. Spinoza could see it, but thought that his rationalism for the elite would save him. It didn't. Voltaire thought mockery of the pretense of power and pomp was sufficient. It wasn't. And so, decade by decade it built up into the French Revolution.

We might have that chance again. Allah, I hope we (I) get to see it as the magnificent spectacle of a global revolt, a tsunami of epic proporition like the disaster this spring in Japan. I was breathless, up all night, drinking, in horror and ecstasy as the Pacific Ocean the largest global body of the earth reacted. Against that scale, if I died or was crushed to death, it meant nothing, and was in some nonrational way even meaningless to think in personal terms which was itself a liberation from bondage.

This year is not going to be forgotten. We really are living inside the cycle of recurrence of 1792, the events 1803 as depicted by Beethoven, 1848, 1903, 1917, 1930s, late 1940s, 1968. I've never seen anything like what I see now. The word global has replaced epic in some mystical sense of scale that merges with the physical forces of the planet.

I imagine the ancient stones of the Parthenon on the hill above Athens, the battered stones and their silent wittness of the centuries of chaos below. How many times have they seen these scenes?

And then the Collisium, the symbol of Roman oppression and their stones of wittness, their shadows at night and the lurid chaos of human desires and the fall of power.

Here is an inspired rant by Danny Glover:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=50IXNRiIuWg

Bhaskar Sunkara writes:

``Regardless, this whole analysis seems out of touch. The property destruction * was* trivial. Yes, the moment needs self-policing. Yes, tactically attacks on property are counterproductive. But I don't have any tears for Whole Food windows or "local and independent businesses." The problem is the media narratives focused on these events more than the actions themselves.''

Yes. Exactly. Now ask why Whole Foods got hit? Because they pretend to be some alternative to Safeway and therefore charge extra. Kiss my ass. We are supposed to pay more for non-polluted food? Nevermind. This was how the whole ecology movement was co-opted and commodified then sold back as a consumer movement. Fucking ridiculous.

CG



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list