``At first, I thought that the youth involved in the Occupy movement in the U.S. was uninterested in this historical experience, but over time I've had to revise my belief. There's a tremendous excitement and interest in re-examining all this, even if -- sometimes -- ...people rush to emphasize the differences at the expense of missing the commonalities'' Julio Huato
Meandering comments follow.
Cool. I keep thinking I should have read back then (60s) what I am reading now. But I know damned well I wasn't ready. And then too, the old left of my day were so doctrinaire, so rigid they were insufferable.
The much more loose coalition of the Vietnam Day Committee suited me better. See the rather incomplete wiki on VDC. It mentions the UCLA teach-in. There had been dozens before in Berkeley of much lower key starting around civil rights and FSM. The brother of a friend brought back a giant mimiograph history of Vietnam and some other materials to read for Christmas break in LA. I thumbed through it picking bits and pieces, going back to Wilson? Your kidding? It was some three hundred pages and I had no intention of going through it.
Lesson---make the materials much shorter, outline is best, with an executive summary. There is actually a little model at the end of the Eighteenth Brumaire where Marx outlines all the events he has chronicled in the previous hundred and something pages and article ends in a few pages of reflection and analysis. I don't know if it was in the orginial, but Trotsky's History has several appendices to consult. We've always got wiki to check.
Teaching was (is) one of the central tasks of political organizing. Finkelstein mentions Gandhi and notes the task wasn't enlightenment but action. In the meantime there is certainly plenty of room for enlightenment on the history of protest, reform and revolution.
There is also swamping the legal system through all channels. We might need an alternate to the current system of justice, but we also have a system of justice to use. This is very tedious work, but I spent hours and hours going over draft law and cases at Boalt library and prepared a magnum opus to get out of the draft. It didn't work at first, since I got drafted. But the second phase, prosecution by the US Attorney was a different story. Some poor asshole had to read that stuff. At that point they were averaging 1000-1300 cases a month. I got out when they returned the case to the draft board for failure to follow administrative remedies. Not much of an anti-war principle, but it worked.
Lawyers and paralegals are essential tools. It's easy to see, since virtually all the financial sector's behavior is within contested legalisms.
It should be apparent an extended occupation is really dreaded by the establishment, on the grounds of the holiness of property. The university used to go completely wacko if even a minor group held a few rooms for a few hours. They called in the National Guard to protect People's Park, which was UC System property. Institutional and corporate property is the Achilles heel that is forever deliciously exposed.
On Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro. Yes! My first introduction to socialism was reading various bits and pieces on Fidel and Che and the problems of the early revolution. They helped tremendously to see. I was still a teenager when Kennedy amped up to go to nuclear war over sugar.
On the last point, facts matter and we need facts for education. Yes, and yet, I have watched my friends eyes roll, my downstairs neighbor (Jewish, and still doesn't get the problem with Israel) just yesterday started screaming at me over Iran. He came up stairs later and we worked it out. Some facts are very strong and hard to swallow.
``Lenin's long and detailed factual arguments (e.g. in his polemic against the Narodniki on the nature of the dominant social structures..''
Narodniki? Do the wiki. Amazing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narodnik
But the major point, know your society and understand its existing socio-political structures. For me this is a hard one. I think about the economic classes as rough income levels. But this generality completely glosses what most people take to be more important. That is their racial, ethnic, social, and historical differences all across the same income level.
The racial profiling issue is a clear example. The unemployment and underemployment differentials across these socio-historically constructed divisions is another. I would identify that as a major barrier to a united front. It can not be bridged with mere rhetoric about the 99 percent. It will need a lot more work.
On a personal level it was relatively easy to bridge these gaps because I was in my working class mode and serviced all these divisions.
Structurally these divisions appear in the NGO system. The history is interesting, so I'll sketch it. This is based on reflections on Adolph Reed's rant on Tim Wise. Each of the general category of NGOs was at one time part of a social movement that at some point got federal or state funding to provide services to a `special' community. In the case I am most familiar with were the disability movements. These organization were subsequently starved for public funding and turned to private donors to keep the doors open. Meanwhile a business mentality took hold as the old guard politics disappeared. What has emerged is a business-community partnership model.
I spent a year 2011-12 struggling within one of these community organizations. It was funded under Obama's American Reconstruction and Recovery Act (ARRA). A lot of ARRA is based on this concept of business community partnership.
It was completely impossible to get anything done to reach the goal of building an open community maintenance and repair shop. It seemed to be deliberately sabotaged and occasionally ended in me yelling at meetings. On reflection the problem was the organization mind-set. Their idea was a non-profit business model. This was clearly absurd, since the clients were dead broke. Whatever the outcome, the essential beginning of getting equipment and tools together, etc. never got beyond timid first steps.
I won't go into the gory details. When the funding ran out March 2012 the project ended. Of course I had to do minor battle to get the last paycheck.
There are very bad lessons to learn. The same kind of sclerosis that clogged the union movements for decades was perfected to a more sophisticated level in the social movements of the 1960s.
This evolutionary disease might be a near universal ailment. Consider Stalin and don't get side tracked by all the dead bodies and gulag. What did Stalin do with the revolution? Somewhere in Trotsky, he notes that the old monarchy state apparatus came back to fill the ranks of the communist government bureaucracies--if not the reconstructed personnel, then the mind-set. Combating that development was part of the rational for permenant revolution.
This evolutionary rot has serious consequences for concepts of reforming the system. We are supposed to know that's what the Democratic party represents, and that is certainly true. But the problem goes beyond that toward even more radically minded movements. I am not saying it isn't worth the reform battle, but just be aware.
I think the answer is indoctrination, a old bad word, so let's use the better sounding words `education' and `training'. Remember that the reason for the sclerosis was is the 24/7 business propaganda and its money that infuses every pore and capillary of the political body. Moyer's video essay on ALEC is particularly relevant. Watch it if you (all) haven't.
Cuba, Venezula, Bolivia et al are all struggling on the sclerosis front (guessing). There maybe there are detailed lessons about this subject from them.
I know one potential answer, one technique. You hire the same people you serve, not for political correctness, but because with good selection they will care and already know the problems and maybe the solutions. Selection and training are critical to weed out the opportunists and other bad elements.
In order to see the grand nightmare of the NGO track look at Haiti. That was a Bill Clinton project in community-business partnership writ large.
CG