> As far as I know there was an immense amount of both focused and
> 'far-reaching,' conversation in that 'movement.'
There was conversation. That's not what I was talking about.
>But as several have pointed
> out on this list and elsewhere, Wisconsin (including OW*S) represents a 'new
> start,' involving new constituencies. You can't use it and the "anti-global"
> movement to knock one or the other. The latter involved the usual suspects,
> a gathering up of possibilities from the past.
I've been one on the list to defend your emphasis on the newness of "Wisconsin," but when you state it this unsubtly, I don't. I also disagree that "Seattle" was just reignited oldtimers. I know plenty of people who had their first political experiences in those movements and who are still active and doing other things today. You may disagree, but I've never seen you present any evidence that what you say is right.
> It was a complete success in
> its own terms, and it is silly to talk about it learning or not learning
> something.
Really? So are you saying we should just skip over everything that happened between the 60s and now, because those four decades provide no lessons. History!
> And it's premature to see OWS as a coherent movement that can (already) be
> judged. I emphasize the need for theorizing "where we have gotten to," but
> all these critiques (positive and negative) are premature unless you regard
> them as merely voices in a conversation that has hardly begun yet.
Okay, this is at best tremendously reductive of my tremendously reductive 22-word headnote, so I guess you just needed to get that off your chest. Because the article was forwarded as a piece of that conversation, of "where we have gotten to." And I would think, though apparently you disagree, that comparisons with the past should be a part of that, especially as there is not-insignificant overlap between then and now.
So let me expand a bit: One of the things this article indicates, and what I think is an improvement, is that people have already started to interrogate the protester-police relation. The alterglobo movement, for all it did, never did this. (Sorry, pwog/liberl bitching about the black bloc did not alter the dynamics of the relation.) That's why a pattern emerged: summit-protest-police repression-arrests-outcry: the police are so mean. Every action became the same, and while originally that had the function of laying open antagonisms, after awhile all it did was allow the police to refine the techniques of repression. The police set traps and the protesters walked into them every time. It became comical.
The article I forwarded hinted that people are already starting to rethink how they interact with the police. It seems to start with recognizing very quickly what the police are. Remember at the beginning of Occupy when people tried to seduce cops into joining them? I don't see that happening anymore. So some people are starting to look elsewhere, for both points of conflict and points of resonance. I don't think the alterglobo movements got very far in that search--or if they did, they sort of just saw the IMF et al. as international cops--or even saw the need to embark on the search.