On Oct 18, 2011, at 5:38 AM, Mike Beggs wrote:
> Speaking of which, wasn't this going to be YouTubed? Did I miss a
> link? Would love to hear at least a report.
It's supposed to be. I think they've got ambitions about editing it.
It came down to three "old" leftists - Marxist, socialist, whatever, meaning me, Jodi Dean, and Chris Mainsano (with the occasional assistance of the non-neutral moderator, Seth Ackerman, who did a splendid job) - against two anarchists - Malcolm Harris and Natasha Lennard. Lennard cited Foucault a lot, and talked about "fucking" several times, for reasons best known to herself. To them, the occupation is the revolution. It's all about practice. They both objected when Seth asked how OWS might lead to, say, free college tuition. Harris disclosed that schools are prisons, and Lennard, a Brit who went to Cambridge and Columbia, complained that David Cameron went to a free university, and look how he turned out.
But it was a great event, actually - the most contentious left panel I've ever participated in. Some of the audience seemed unsettled by the heat of the disagreement, but the consensus, ha ha, of the audience and a unanimous panel was that it was very productive to get all this stuff out there. Several audience members said that none of this is being discussed at Zuccotti. Everyone's too polite to fight. Anarchists are very much into manners.
Speaking of which, I learned this from Wikipedia yesterday:
> Anarchist anthropologist David Graeber has distinguished the two philosophies as follows:
>
> • Marxism has tended to be a theoretical or analytical discourse about revolutionary strategy.
> • Anarchism has tended to be an ethical discourse about revolutionary practice
Indeed.
Doug