On Oct 28, 2011, at 4:48 PM, Dennis Claxton wrote:
> At 01:39 PM 10/28/2011, Eric Beck quoted:
>
>> A movement that began as a political response to economic injustice has become an economic response to capitalism.
>
>
> I don't understand this at all. What is the economic response?
The following passage:
> Critics will say that while these small acts of communism are well and good, they will never be able to provide for the millions who depend on capitalism for daily bread (Doug Henwood said something to that effect on last week’s Behind the News). Two months ago, though, these same critics would have said that organizing even a single commune was an impossibility, that communes inherently fracture and fail, and would in any event be too geographically isolated to matter. Clearly the mayors and police departments of the occupied cities see things differently. In any event, the communes exist and can’t be wished away. They’ve already begun to attract the jobless and homeless and underemployed and will continue to do so for as long as the occupations keep going.
Yeah, I did say that, because as wonderful as OWS et al are - and I think they're totally wonderful - they're not communes in any meaningful sense. Yeah, they've got nurses staffing clinics - but the nurses were trained in universities ( = prisons, of course), and they dispense things made in factories. Food is distributed, but it's grown and processed far away. Proceedings are livestreamed, using electricity generated by ConEd and fiber optics run by the likes of AT&T. Distributing goods & services produced elsewhere in small quantities is not "an economic response to capitalism."
Doug