I doubt this will elicit an answer, but perhaps it might serve as echo cancellation…
On Oct 19, 2011, at 10:28 PM, SA wrote:
> The weird thing is, if you ask any Stalinist, Maoist, whatever, how the state can be physically overthrown, they'll tell you the exact same thing: there has to come a time when the cops drop their guns and join the opposition. Only they at least have the realism to understand that that won't happen until years of mass struggle have brought things to the point where huge sections of the population have become sympathetic to revolutionary politics. And that can only happen after revolutionary, or at least radical politics has shown itself to benefit people in their daily lives.
And what constitutes years of mass struggle that is revolutionary or radical politics? Making demands? (the lack of which seems to incense some of you so much). Or “taking over the school”, to quote Doug? The “logic” (Doug’s word) behind Graeber and the Zuccotti occupation, per Doug, is the hope that cops can be persuaded to drop their guns and join the occupiers. A better logic would be to start taking over schools? Is there any list member who is willing to sign up for that and deal with the violence and imprisonment that will follow? Or is it better logic to come up with a list of demands? What then? Negotiations? With the government? Obama? Wall St CEOs?
IMHO, the focus on anarchists or process or some particular element of OWS misses what is interesting. Such focus (again IMHO) is an act of obtaining coherence by creating a mirror image of oneself, that can then be argued against. What is interesting has been, I think, well stated by Carrol.
—ravi