[lbo-talk] Anarchists worry about success

Ferenc Molnar ferenc_molnar at hotmail.com
Thu Oct 6 05:47:30 PDT 2011



>From my frenemy, Andy Podell:

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I wanted to forward some notes about last Tuesday's discussion of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) at 17 Beaver.  

Around fifty people showed up for the discussion. There were some who had been with the occupation from the beginning and were intensely involved and others, like myself, who had been back and forth from Zuccotti Park but less involved. 

I'm not sure what we are calling ourselves these days but the room had an anarchist vibe to it. There were a few union members and people who offered perspectives from different countries and political movements.

A Greek woman, who spoke on Skype, offered some comparisons from her involvement in the Syntagma Square protests in Athens. 

She said that the General Assembly in Athens was not used as a deliberative body or even a consensus tool. She said the main decisions were made in the working groups. In Athens there had also been more of a balance between "Thematic Groups" and Working Groups. The Thematic Groups had worked on analysis, demands, etc. At OWS there have been many Working Groups but no specifically Thematic Groups.

The Greek woman also said that in hindsight it had been very easy in Syntagma Square for ideological or institutional groups to infiltrate the working groups to push them in a particular direction. And that this is one of the weaknesses of the Direct Democracy structure. She offered no remedy for this problem.

This comment was echoed by two people at the gathering who pointed towards one particular working group named Arts and Culture. 

Arts and Culture, from its beginning had a heavy concentration of "paid activists" working in it. These activists were paid by "foundations".  Arts and Culture had taken it on themselves to act as a kind of peace-keeper for OWS and A&E's insistence on adhering to what it saw as non-violent strategies for marches and direct action was a point of controversy for others in the occupation.

An organizer who had been with the group from the beginning defended A&E as an alternative to police liaisons and said that A&E's interest in security was internal; making sure people were safe inside the occupation.

A brief discussion about OWS's relations to the police followed. One person identified the police as the problem. Others saw them as just doing their job.  A person who identified himself as a Longshoreman said that "there is something to be said for a movement that is not in a power struggle with the police".  

A woman from Hamburg offered a brief comparison to an occupation she had helped organized. She said that it was similar to other global demonstrations since the Arab Spring in that her group began with 20 or 30 people and within days had swelled to thousands.

A Russian woman made a comparison to 1917 and the storming of the Winter Palace and warned about the excesses of revolution. An East-Asian man countered that "there are too many Winter Palaces to storm". And then there was a mutual agreement that the financial system was diffuse and encompassing. Pensions, social security, investments, union dues, college loans, etc. Even if the majority of us are fucked over by this system we are all bound up in it.

So how do we fight so diffuse and encompassing an enemy?  

A young man made a comparison to the mixing of the classes during the French Revolution. He said that during the revolution when the class structure began to break down, people of different classes found themselves thrown together in close proximity for the first time. And what was most surprising about this proximity was the smell; each class was shocked by the others' smell. When public spaces are turned into revolutionary spaces what occurs is a revolutionary mixing.

Does that mean a new unity, I asked? A unity between formerly separated classes and ideologies? A meeting place between Socialists, Anarchists, left and right Libertarians, union members, liberals, maybe even conservatives? Is that the great potential in all these liberated public spaces? A sudden dawning on the 99% of the world that we have more in common than less?  

Not unity, said the young man, chuckling over the word. Tolerance, he said. We're beginning to tolerate each others' smell.

The disembodied voice from Greece left us with a final thought. 

What we're seeing in the liberation of public spaces, she said, is the return of something very ancient. Something that we had lost. We lost it because of our misunderstanding of survival. Capitalism is about survival. But we don't just want to survive. We want to live.



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