> Yeah - Eric, I'd really like to hear what you're referring to here.
>
> SA
What I say is likely to be only semi-coherent (made more so by a couple of drinks), and maybe trivial, but it started from noticing that lots of anarchist luminaries had been (there seems to have been a turn in the last few days) very skeptical and even critical of OWS, and mostly for the same reasons that nonanarchists have been: it's lack of political direction, analysis, and tactics. That reminded me that despite anarchists' sometimes thinking otherwise, their ideas about politics and protests are in the first instance ideological, even if they are more likely than other leftists to base theirs on positive (creative) impulses. For instance, the affinity group, the anarchist base unit of politics, is based on the shared, articulated political concerns of a group of people. But OWS and its initial movements were totally, sometimes comically, free of any such articulated positions. You could argue that is was completely free of politics altogether, but even if you don't think that, you have to admit it was free of ideological specificity. So anarchists were confronted with this thing that was, for lack of a better terms, purely affective and negative (as opposed to ideological and creative): it was a felt wrong by people who didn't seem to have much of an idea of why and how they were wronged and who was wronging them. It didn't have a program, and even though anarchists usually have more minimal ones than others, they still have them.
Also: OWS alters anarchists' position in mass movements. During the alterglobo days, anarchists, particularly black bloc, were able to perform their disruptive tactics but still the protests had some sort of form because the more "responsible" participants sharpened the antagonisms and defined the targets. (Despite constant liberal/left bitching, this worked the other way too: protests became events, and not just dreary labor, largely because of anarchists and black blocs.) But OWS has been mostly free of responsible organization; it's been almost cartoonishly anarchist. In confronting anarchism with itself (to overstate it just a bit), OWS seems to have forced anarchists to rethink and reformulate questions about organization and ideology but also its relation to mass politics and mass movements.
Anyway, those are preliminary thoughts of a nascent movement based on not much evidence.