On Mon, 3 Oct 2011, SA wrote: Organizing the *provision* of food, tents, blankets, information, etc., to a few thousand people is a problem of a completely different order from manufacturing food, tents, blankets, cameras, computers, etc., -- and all their inputs, raw materials, and long-distance transport -- for several million people.
MP: With that last phrase -- for several million people -- you've defined prefigurement as impossible. Which is a position you can take: prefigurement is bunk. Is that what you want to say? That it's stupid for small groups to say they are, in any way, the society they want to achieve?
If it's anything, prefigurement is the embodiment of a vision, not the display of working scale model.
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This is one of the reasons I say socialists should not formulate their goal as socialism. It's liberation -- and it's up to men&women who inherit that freedom to make of what they can.
Movements must strive to embody as much democracy as possible: that vision they can embody. We can't know what our heirs will do with that democracy; we do know that the continuation of capitalism is incompatible with human survival.
But now we don't know what democracy is; so what OWS embodies is not democracy but the s truggle for democracy, which involves continual redefinition of what we mean by it.
Carrol
P.S. "Exit plans are useful in mass struggles, but that too is a matter of experimentation. There is no reason why these protesters should have tried to plan one in advance.