[lbo-talk] More on BB antics and their defende...

shag carpet bomb shag at cleandraws.com
Mon Feb 13 11:55:21 PST 2012


well, look at it this way. normally, in a year divisible by four, we would have been on our 3rd, perhaps 6th, month of debating. I think one election cycle, 2004? Yoshie got things fired up in Dec 2002 already (possibly 2006?) It always goes something like this:

omigod you are a horrible loser if you don't vote the dems

omigod you are a loser if you don't vote third party

omigod you are a loser if you vote at all

omigod republicans are scary scary scary crazies

omigod democrats are vile pigs and if you focus on the scary reps all the time, you just encourage the dems to be even viler pigs

omigod if you spend any time on the election, you destroy the left

omigod that you even breath one word about the election you are destroying the left

the debate is over the exact same issue as the BB/Occupation/Greeks/Indignados/Anarchist debates.

the debate is ALWAYS about who has the correct theory as to how to change power relations in society.

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Gosh, what a torrent of verbiage on this thread, and I'm trying to work out what it's all about. It seems as if it is about the occupy movement, then again it seems to be about direct action vs. 'theory'. Now I think the direct action protagonists are precisely articulating a theory (without the scare quotes), a theory about how you change the relations of power in society.

For what it's worth, I don't think that anyone has really got a theory of how capitalism morphs into its opposite, nor did Marx have either. I think all of us here (I said 'I think') supports the general thrust of the OWS movement, as a movement of protest. But I think there are only a few here who think it provides some sort of model of how capitalism will be overthrown. This is cloud cuckoo thinking, if only because of the fact that a great many of the people involved and their supporters are not anti-capitalists. Take Lou Reed as a case in point. Most of them just seem to dislike bankers and/or republicans.

I'm obviously not close to the action, but just trying to make sense of what this debate is actually about.

Tahir

-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)



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