That's a perfectly useful conversation to have.
Joanna
----- Original Message ----- From: "Carrol Cox" <cbcox at ilstu.edu> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Sent: Sunday, November 6, 2011 8:16:37 AM Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Occupy Oakland's imminent implosion and the widereffects
Tj brings out clearly how so much of the kvedthing on this list reflects a lack of proportion. It reminds me of the insistence of some "disciplined" groups that one can't be on their team unless you label Castro a Stalinist. And some of the same people longing for purity in the Oakland Occupation are the same ones who use "purity" as their kneejerk response to this or that version of Marxism. I think the charge of "purism" has been slung about pretty freely on this list over the last decade -- well, in these criticisms of Oakland we see a really bad case of Purism.
Carrol
-----Original Message----- From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org] On Behalf Of Tayssir John Gabbour Sent: Sunday, November 06, 2011 9:44 AM To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Occupy Oakland's imminent implosion and the widereffects
On Sun, Nov 6, 2011 at 3:18 AM, Bhaskar Sunkara
<bhaskar.sunkara at gmail.com> wrote:
> What's striking in that video is the liberals are so ready to brawl
> with the anarchists to defend some Whole Foods. Where were these
> folks when low income neighborhoods were having their houses stormed
> by foreclosure agents? Oh, probably at Whole Foods buying some free
> range.
Yes, looking at those three videos posted here, the only violence came from the liberals tackling the fellows who were spraypainting/smashing windows. With ageist slurs like calling them "teenagers" and "childish". Creepy.
(I was perfectly ready to believe the window-smashers were wrong. Like if the protestors were surrounded by twitchy police, and suddenly some black-clad villains swooped in from nowhere with molotov cocktails to make the police go nuts. But this wasn't the case in the videos.)
Employee theft greatly exceeds the cost of this rare property damage. Many estimate that "25 to 40 percent of all employees steal from their employers" [1], resulting in costs of $50 billion/year. (Businesses often do nothing until employee theft goes above X% of revenue, assuming it as a cost of business.)
So, if 25-40% of employees steal, what is the reaction of a significant segment of the working class, when Whole Foods must pay a rounding-error for new windows?
(Those of us cushy professionals who eat "free-range" and sip merrily from the chalice of life may understandably wonder why so many people steal. But simply imagine working at a fastfood place day-in-and-day-out, bored as hell, ordered to sometimes clean up after someone defecated all over the bathroom, or there's that manager who takes psychological comfort in making you his marionette, or they stiff you on your paycheck... So you take some extra food to lower your costs or whatever.)
All the best,
Tj
[1] http://www.referenceforbusiness.com/small/Di-Eq/Employee-Theft.html
On Sun, Nov 6, 2011 at 3:18 AM, Bhaskar Sunkara
<bhaskar.sunkara at gmail.com> wrote:
> Sounded like the OP was shedding some tears for "local and independent"
> businesses, as if they aren't even more exploitative to their employees
> than your average chain store. What's striking in that video is the
> liberals are so ready to brawl with the anarchists to defend some Whole
> Foods. Where were these folks when low income neighborhoods were having
> their houses stormed by foreclosure agents? Oh, probably at Whole Foods
> buying some free range.
>
> I just feel like this condemnation feeds into the media narrative that
> places extra emphasis on the actions of these few. Anarchists have always
> been around breaking shit at protests. This is nothing new. I'm all for
red
> shirted cadre of some future Party formation guarding the flanks of
> protests a la what some of the organized Left does in Greece, but we're
not
> at that point yet. I don't see what happened in Oakland as a disaster. Nor
> do I think these Black Bloc tactics will spark "widespread looting" in the
> city. If it did it might be vindication for the anarchists.
>
> On Sat, Nov 5, 2011 at 10:06 PM, // ravi <ravi at platosbeard.org> wrote:
>
>> On Nov 5, 2011, at 10:00 PM, Bhaskar Sunkara wrote:
>> > 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."
>>
>>
>> But why “out of touch”? That this is tactically a bad thing, not an issue
>> of shedding tears for Whole Foods etc, is pretty much the bulk of the
>> analysis thus far. No?
>>
>> —ravi
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