[lbo-talk] occupation and situationists was Re: enemy's turf

[Carrol Cox]

Locally, quite a few people have picked up on an observation I began to 
make in May: Wisconsin lit a long, slow fuse. We have acted on that 
expectation; we've generated many new linkages among various local 
groups of quite varied nature. We've spent quite a bit of time 
discussing how we can build locally on the 'push' given by OWS. Just 
Wednesday evening the four local Reds met with two of the local 
anarchists and chatted for a couple hours about this and that. One of 
the anarchists reported on his frustration with getting the GA of the 
local Occupation to think about long-range possibilities. At one point I 
said to him, look, in certain ways Common Action (the anarchist group) 
is more inmportant than the Occupation. Don't burn yourself out. 
(Emphasis: CERTAIN ways.) We all six of course were in total agreement 
that the Occupations have opened up a new world of possiblities we have 
to explore. We didn't try to reach any 'judgment' of the Occupations, 
local or global. We just chatted about possibility.

We know that we want somehow to repeat our June & August events bringing 
together various local groups, but it's still pretty much up in the air 
just how we will proceed.

Andre Gorz gives a period of upsurge about five years to accomplish 
whatever it is going to accomplish. That's both very short and yet long 
enough to give some room for thought, for exploring possibility. In my 
first response to Michael Smith's Walmart idea I tried to initiate such 
a discussion here. A whole world is opening up. Some of us have waited 
40 years for such an opening. We are not going to be shut down by a 
priori expectations of what political action must be.

Carrol