[lbo-talk] those demands? forget about 'em!

[Chuck Grimes]

So, do not view anarchism as the cause of the problem.  View it as the 
symptom.  The urgent problem is lack of raw disposition to fight 
collectively, lack of unity, lack of self-education in the struggle, and 
lack of organization.  Work on these fronts and anarchism will become 
unnecessary in due time.  What is the urgency of demands now now now?  What 
will be lost (compared to the feasible alternative) if OWS doesn't make a 
pronouncement on full employment or monetary policy or what-have-you now now 
now?

Julio Huato

-----------

All good.

The looming economic, social, and political crisis-disaster that we face are 
the sources of this urgency.

``The urgent problem is lack of raw disposition to fight
collectively, lack of unity, lack of self-education in the struggle, and 
lack of organization.''

Agreed. There is another problem for me, which is communication. It's very 
difficult for the rest us outside NYC to figure out what is happening in the 
anarchy of voices.

Instead of developing a critique, I'll refer OWS to some of its critical 
friends. Here is Black Agenda, Glen Ford:

``Having challenged the plutocrats and all their minions - and gaining 
majority support of the American people in the process - the "movement" is 
called upon, from inside and out, to make specific demands. Of course, Old 
Fred taught us that power concedes nothing without a demand. But the wrong 
demands can undo a popular project, so this is not something to rush into. 
And, in many cases, there is no point in demanding anything from your enemy, 
except that he drop dead in a hurry...'

http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/occupy-wall-street-what-you-can-demand-versus-what-you-must-do

I noticed that the OWS Action group is popular. This sort of thing forms the 
de facto demand called for. It's like various occupations of yore, when we 
would hold meetings in the ASUC building. Students have a right to hold 
meetings in their putative building. Using the ASUC had all sorts of 
bullshit regulations, permits, registered groups only, only so many people 
allowed, blah, blah, blah.

I guess I am beginning to come around. I was thinking last night that we 
often had no real leadership or it changed so often that it worked more like 
a committee. Various actions were planned like Stop the Draft Week. It 
needed some organization because we needed collect money to rent buses to 
get to the Oakland Induction Center. The action lasted through a week and 
really took off when the cops started pushing and knocking around local news 
crews who had to use the street to cover the wild beatings of people running 
a gauntlet...

The great virtue of being a loose sort of changing leadership was that this 
made it impossible for the cops and FBI from cutting the head off so the 
body falls apart. This tactic failed because there was no hierarchical 
structure.

CG