[lbo-talk] the illusory middle 75%

[aren aizura]

Doug wrote:
> If we can't mobilize a significant minority of the!
>    middle 75% of this society, then this movement will evaporate.
I don't know that this bears more argument, coming on the heels of the demands discussion which demonstrates that we all have different ideas about what, precisely, will mobilize this "movement" or achieve something lasting. But you're not addressing my point -- which was not that OWS are having a problem mobilizing a population but that the population also looks and feels and thinks differently to what you're claiming.

There's a deeper issue here, which is the claim that decarceration work simply fetishizes prisoners, a symptom of the left problem of fetishizing the most oppressed. Clearly lots of left politics makes this mistake. I don't agree that *all* decarceration work fetishizes prisoners. But if you just talk about the "middle 75%" you lose the capacity to analyse how racialization works with and through capitalism. A friend of mine has a similar critique in reference to insurrectionary anarchists dispensing with "anti-racist activism", because it's been deployed to police tactics by claiming property damage is "white anarchists" fucking things up for communities of color. So, they don't work with folks doing anti-racism work or anti-oppression work. All fine and good. But as she said, "that way we don't know how to think about race." People on your end of things end up valorizing the "working classes" (or, for the IA folks, their own "insurrection") just as egregiously as the people 
valorizing the "most oppressed". It's a false binary.

Best,
Aren