> COX: Demonstrations are not directed at the state: they are
> directed at those who have not joined them yet. The goal is
> to grow.
They are directed to both. Think of demonstrations as acts of production (acts in which we produce ourselves historically, and that's what all production ultimately is: production of ourselves). Then this applies to the collective producer:
"By thus acting on the external world and changing it, [s]he at the same time changes his own nature. [S]He develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act in obedience to his sway. [...] We pre-suppose labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his [her] structure in imagination before [s]he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement. [S]He not only effects a change of form in the material on which [s]he works, but [s]he also realises a purpose of his [her] own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which [s]he must subordinate his will."
At the risk of offending anybody, that's Saint Karl, Capital 1:7:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch07.htm
shag wrote:
> In terms of the commune, I think that demand is clear: join us.
It's both "join us" (to the rest of the 99%) and also (to the 1%): "give in," "give up," "break ranks," "surrender," "resistance is futile."
The commune is a structure *and* a movement. This is St. Karl in the German Ideology:
"Communism is for us not a [definitive, JH] state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence."
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm#p48
Should we think of OWS as a movement or a social structure? Yes to both. OWS exists in time (and space). Hence, it can be viewed both as a "flow" (agency over a period of time) or a "stock" (structure existing at a point in time). That abstract distinction between the two inseparable aspects of the same OWS phenomenon is irrelevant to its practical life -- unless it confuses people, unless we pit one aspect against the other, like Carrol is fond of doing, in which case the abstract distinction becomes practically relevant in a negative sense. OWS is *already* both social agency and social structure. The issue is not whether it is one or the other, but rather how it can -- as a social agent and structure -- make itself more effective. And that requires consciousness and organization, unfolding from its own "logic." OWS speaks in prose whether it knows it or not. Better to know than not to know. Consciousness means a better (more concrete) definition of its stance re. itself, the rest of the 99% and, by implication, the 1%; its methods, etc.