[lbo-talk] Where are We?

[Carrol Cox]

A day or so again someone (I forget who) started a laogical reply to my 
suggestion that Wisconsin was the beginning. He or she said if that, 
then we go further back, or something like that, and at that point I 
deleted the post without reading further. Of coruse all political 
arguments,as Milton recognized, lead back to Eve eating the apple. But 
we'll just start where it makes  current sense. We start with Wisconsin 
because that event affected local conversation among activists all over 
the nation; it changed the air we breathe; the kinds of things we plan. 
And as Eric & I argued a day or two ago, political movements have pauses 
and those pauses do not constitute a defeat or an ending.  Or if they 
do, it will be months or years before we will see them as such, and what 
counts here is what we see as such, what shapes our conversation. And 
there is no doubt here. Conversation changed after Wisconsin. And had 
conversation not changed, OWS would not have happened, or would not have 
triggered the reverberations that it did in every Middlesex village and 
farm. Now, like the Wisconsin events, OWS will sort of fade away at some 
point, but it will have left a radically changed world or political 
terrain behind it. The meaning of Wisconsin when it happened was vague, 
even  opaque; its goals unknown. But now we know part of its meaning, 
summed up in those cryptic letters, OWS. One might say that the anatomy 
of OWS is a key to the anatomy of Wisconsin.

And this is part of the reason for not fussing too much about the 
"mistakes" happening in that park, the false worship of Ron Paul, the 
silliness of explaining it all by reference to The Fed. And we should, 
now, be able to see what a truly wonderful analysis "bad shit happening" 
was. It covers all the possible directions in which the meaning of OWS 
will unfold; it is certainly true, and it leaves it to future thought 
and action to unfold what partsof that shit we need to focus on. We will 
discover that in a year or two probably.

Carrol