[lbo-talk] David Graeber interview on OWS

[// ravi]

On Oct 3, 2011, at 8:46 PM, shag carpet bomb wrote:
> if you just turn your back on all this and say, fuck that noise, we're
> going to get together and hold a big party and talk about what's
> pissing us off because, sometimes, you don't really know why you're
> pissed off or what you want until you've have a good long scream about
> it. so maybe it'd be good to find out who's out there, who else is
> thinking like us.. sometimes, what matters is to speak to one another
> and creating a shared set of sub-cultural understandings, symbols, and
> practices.
> 
> because one thing we know from the history of social movements is
> this: they have to have a shared set of subcultural symbols and
> practices. they have to have a shared language. protests, as several
> studies have shown, are not only about speaking to some targeted
> organization or institutions, it's mostly about speaking to each other
> - the people who share a point or points of view. and that's good
> because it creates solidarity. and a movement ain't going to go
> anywhere if they don't have practices that create and recreate
> solidarity over the long haul.

Exactly! SA writes in response:

On Oct 3, 2011, at 9:17 PM, SA wrote:
> By now I'm used to the widespread allergy to criticism of any kind. What's surprising is to hear it from you --  you who unhesitatingly gripes about everything and everybody under the sun. Nobody has to pay any attention to my criticism. But if you really thought my griping were irrelevant noise, I assume you'd just ignore it.

There are different listeners here - we are okay with listening to your criticism and responding to it or ignoring it. Here on this list. But the more important question is should the protestors listen to your criticism? (or for that matter, any of ours!). And the answer is the above section from shag. That’s because (IMHO) their process (consciously or otherwise) is different from the sort of thing you are using, at a meta level. They are not at the state of “prefiguring” the future much less worrying about how to provision for a million people. They are at the stage shag describes above. If there is one thing then that we can say about their beliefs, then it is that they [implicitly perhaps] believe that this is the right first stage. I know your original response to Julio mentioned the bit about “prefigurement” as a caution (not as the central point) so I am not disagreeing directly with you here, but with the general idea that this effort is ready for rigorous criticism.

They have a couple of things right off the get go - the idea of occupying a space (rather than just marching and going home). And the idea of targeting Wall St: the only concrete “goal” they have specified. In doing so, intentionally or not, they have hit upon a simple but powerful method which also pulls the rug from under the Tea Party.

	—ravi