(sorry again for blank msgs)
On Wed, Nov 9, 2011 at 2:28 PM, Max Sawicky <sawicky at verizon.net> wrote:
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> On Wed, Nov 9, 2011 at 2:25 PM, Max Sawicky <sawicky at verizon.net> wrote:
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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.
>>> ___________________________________
>>> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>>>
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