[lbo-talk] Where are We?

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Fri Oct 7 12:34:58 PDT 2011


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



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