[lbo-talk] won't this backfire on Chomsky?

C. G. Estabrook galliher at illinois.edu
Mon Oct 10 15:10:08 PDT 2011


[I think this is a fairly (perhaps unfairly) tendentious account of what Chomsky said. Here's another. --CGE]

‎...The occupations are "remarkable" and "extremely important", [Chomsky] said, not least because of prominent youth involvement. But they nonetheless suffer from significant limitations, limitations that radical media ought to make it a priority to help them transcend. Reading from the Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Boston demands, as well as from the 'Occupied Wall Street Journal' produced by the former, he split the contents into two camps: moderate, even mainstream, demands; and demands that are so unrealistic and far off in the future that they pose no threat to any currently-existing forces. This helps explain the unusual level of mainstream support for the occupations, he argued. The task of a radical media is to conceive of the occupations as beginning of a long-term process of popular education, struggle and development of alternative institutions, and to highlight specific issues where popular energy should be focused. If media with radical priorities fails to fill this gap, there is a danger that the movements will set themselves up for disillusionment and decline (as happened with the surge in popular activism in the early 1970s, for instance). His advice to Occupy London, scheduled for next week, is to recognise that "you're not going to win tomorrow". The aim should be to launch a long-term process to develop the alternative structures that, over time, can make radical goals obtainable...

From <http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/blog_comments/rebellious_media

>.]

On Oct 10, 2011, at 12:23 PM, shag carpet bomb wrote:


> i was confused at first, given Chomsky's instense defense of the tea
> partiers and his attack on leftists who washed their hands of them..
>
> But then I see that he was speaking at the Rebellious Media
> Conference, and not to the UK Uncut audience, so crafting his message
> to particular audiences. /When they're radicals, he says that the OWS
> movement is naive, but when asked about it a few days before that, he
> appeared to endorse OWS.
>
> I'm not sure I understand this strategy. Won't it backfire if OWS
> people find out he's denouncing them?
>
>
>
>> http://ianbone.wordpress.com/2011/10/09/chomsky-sticks-boot-in-to-occupy-wall-street/
>>
>> Been at the Rebellious Media conference all weekend – more of which
>> later. I caught the second half of Chomsky’s speech saturday
>> morning –
>> anout 1200 people there. I was impressed. Chomsky took no prisoners.
>> He described the Occupy wall streeters as ‘ naive people who have
>> no
>> comprehension of the real world’. He then went on to look at the
>> demands of the occupiers in both New York and Boston -and illustrate
>> how they could easily be accomodated by the existing banking system.
>> There was a class war going on said Chomsky repeatedly but only one
>> side was currentlt waging it and it wasn’t us!! For the wall
>> streeters read UK Uncut here who have similarly lame financial
>> demands
>> which are similarly easily accomodated. Theres an argument to be made
>> that ‘anything is better than nothing’ but like Chomsky i dont
>> think
>> it is. ‘People will live an intense period of activism for
>> months’said
>> chomsky ‘then vanish from poltical activity forever because of the
>> nature of their demands which pose no threat to the system’...
>
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