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> On Wed, Nov 9, 2011 at 1:43 PM, Jordan Carroll <jordanscarroll at gmail.com>wrote:
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>> Maybe it's because I'm filtering everything through my prelim reading list
>> but, as I read the debates over Occupy Oakland, I keep coming back to a
>> passage from *The Armies of the Night* by Norman Mailer:
>>
>> The New Left was drawing its aesthetic from Cuba. The revolutionary idea
>> which the followers of Castro had induced from their experiences in the
>> hills was that you created the revolution first and learned from it,
>> learned of what your revolution might consist and where it might go out of
>> the intimate truth of the way it presented itself to your experience...
>> The
>> idea behind these ideas was then obviously that the future of the
>> revolution existed in the nerves and cells of the people who created it
>> and
>> lived with it, rather than the sanctity of the original idea.... The
>> aesthetic of the New Left now therefore began with the notion that the
>> authority could not comprehend nor contain nor finally manage to control
>> any political action whose end was unknown. They could attack it, beat it,
>> misrepresent it, and finally abuse it, but they could not feel a sense of
>> victory because they could not understand a movement which inspired
>> thousands and hundreds of thousands to march without a coordinated plan.
>> The bureaucrats of the Old Left had not been alone in their adoration of
>> the solid-as-brickwork-logic-of-the-next-step; no, the bureaucrats of the
>> American Center, now liked it as much, and were aghast at the political
>> activity which ignored it. (105)
>>
>> I don't think the New Left and Black Bloc anarchism are perfectly
>> equivalent, but it makes me wonder how a tactic might be said to be
>> experimental, open-ended, and spontaneous when it trails a long history of
>> similar actions.
>>
>> Jordan S.C.
>> ___________________________________
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>>
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