That there will be violence between now and 'then' goes without saying, but that actually offers no perspective at all on whether violence (or rather, law-breaking) on a given occasion is called for. In reference to the Occupations, they are not The Revolution; we don't know what they are really, as I said with some care in a post this morning. We have to do more thinking than has been done so far, and I'm not even sure where it should begin, though criticism (a) won't change the behavior or practice criticized, and (b) won't contribute to the process of theorizing what is happening. More has to happen, mostly in local activity partly independent of or following the cessation of the Occupations. We have an embryonic left now of enormous but not understood potential.
Carrol
-----Original Message----- From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org] On Behalf Of Michael Smith Sent: Friday, November 18, 2011 10:26 PM To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Subject: [lbo-talk] Folly Square -- well, no, not REALLY
I've been pondering my mixed feelings about last night's OWS event at Foley Square. Might as well confess that I was a little disappointed that the crowd was so well-behaved. I'm deeply convinced that no real social change ever happens without some lawbreaking, and that stopping traffic is the very least you can do. But last night, a crowd of 30,000 people -- by some accounts -- allowed themselves to be squeezed onto the sidewalk, so louts in SUVs could continue to drive down Centre Street. Business as usual: a very important symbolic point.
Unfortunately, there seems to be a connection here to the union contingents. It's wonderful that the unions have come to the party, of course. But they really seemed to be in charge last night, and their recent history -- I mean in the last half-century or so -- and institutional culture are anything but insurrectionary.
Full disclosure: It creeped me out to see all these SEIU types wearing T-shirts with the word 'MARSHALL' [sic] printed on them in big letters. And at the narrowest point of the Centre Street sidewalk bottleneck, in front of the municipal building, one saw an extraordinary spectacle: a double line of these 'marshalls' lined up *in front* of the police cordon, and facing, like them, *toward* the crowd -- rather than toward the enemy. Have I made the picture clear? It was like the 'marshalls' were the first line of defense against the crowd, and the cops were the second. I thought then, and still think, that there's something very wrong with this picture.
During the tense ten minutes or so when barricades were getting kicked over and the pigs were sweating big greasy smelly beads of coward sweat, there was a young chap -- not a union guy, I think; looked just like a regular mid-20s Occupier -- who did a 'people's mic' thing and tried to calm all us hotheads down. I can't reproduce his exact words, but what it came down to was that the right-wing media -- which is to say, all the media -- would have a field day if we got out of line.
The kids are all right. But all of us, of course, are still dragging around various selections of mind-forg'd manacles. Among them, the fetish of law-abidingness, and the fear of backlash and bad press, are surely among the most burdensome.
But I don't want to turn into some kind of Jacobin-magazine alter-kaker, so let me end on a pleasanter note:
http://boingboing.net/2011/11/17/interview-with-the-occupy-wall.html
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Michael J. Smith mjs at smithbowen.net
http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org http://www.cars-suck.org http://fakesprogress.blogspot.com
Any proposition that seems self-evident is almost certainly false. ___________________________________ http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk