Wall Street Occupiers, Protesting Till Whenever
N. R. Kleinfield and Cara Buckley, New York Times
A man named Hero was here. So was Germ. There was the waitress from the dim sum restaurant in Evanston, Ill. And the liquor store worker. The Google consultant. The circus performer. The Brooklyn nanny.
The hodgepodge Lower Manhattan encampment known as Occupy Wall Street has no appointed leaders, no expiration date for its rabble-rousing stay and still-evolving goals and demands. Yet its two weeks of noisy occupation has lured a sturdily faithful and fervent constituency willing to express discontentment with what they feel is an inequitable financial system until, well, whenever.
They arrived by design and desire. Or by sheer serendipity.
Like Jillian Aydelott, 19, and Ben Mason, 20. They are a couple, both having taken an indefinite leave from school in Boston to travel across the country, very much on the cheap. Stopping in Providence, R.I., five days ago to sleep at a homeless shelter, they encountered a man who called himself Germ and said he was an activist. He was coming to the protest. They figured why not. They have yet to leave.
Ms. Aydelott’s feeling was: “Nothing is happening. People on Wall Street have all the power.”
... It all began when a Canadian advocacy magazine, Adbusters, posted a call for action on its blog in July. A New York group naming itself the General Assembly, inspired by recent meetings in Madrid, began to hold organizing meetings in Tompkins Square and other public places, leading to a Sept. 17 march near Wall Street. Shooed away from Wall Street, the protesters wound up in Zuccotti Park, which is bounded by Broadway and Liberty Street and has become their base.
Most of the demonstrators are in their teens or 20s, but plenty are older.
(30 September 2011)
We've passed the point of the media avoiding the subjct of Occupy Wall Street. We're now in the stage of condescension -- "aren't they cute?". The problem is that the NY Times reporters approach this as infotainment. The accounts in the alternative media, in constrast, are serious journalsm. They try to figure out what is going on, what the significance is. To me this is a further indication that the cutting edge of journalism is in the blogs and independent media. -BA
We Are the 99 Percent
We Are the 99 Percent
We are the 99 percent. We are getting kicked out of our homes. We are forced to choose between groceries and rent. We are denied quality medical care. We are suffering from environmental pollution. We are working long hours for little pay and no rights, if we're working at all. We are getting nothing while the other 1 percent is getting everything. We are the 99 percent.
Brought to you by the people who occupy wall street. Why will YOU occupy?
I am 27 years old. I have $40,000 in student loan debt. I still have no degree to show for it, but cannot continue school because I have no money to survive. I have not been able to find ANY work in over a year, and only short term temp jobs for nearly two years prior to that. I will likely be homeless in less than two weeks. My car just broke down, and I have no money to pay for the repairs. I live off of $200 per month in food stamps. I can no longer provide for myself, let alone for my girlfriend and her 3 year old son. I came from a military family with a history of service to our country in multiple wars. At places like McDonald’s and WalMart I am considered “over educated” and thus unemployable.
(continuously updated)
A brilliant use of "people telling their own stories." -BA
The Nuts and Bolts of #OccupyWallStreet
Pham Binh, The Indypendent (NYC)
On day 12 of Occupy Wall Street (OWS), I helped moderate a meeting of the “open source” OWS working group by keeping a list of speakers and co-chairing. I am not sure what the open source group is supposed to do exactly, but I decided to attend this meeting after watching a middle-aged man call in the General Assembly for developing demands and goals on the OWS live feed and people in the crowd telling him the open source working group was tasked with this.
After the daily 1 p.m. General Assembly meeting ended, OWS divided into its working groups, including media, labor, outreach, and a number of others. I walked over and sat down next to the point person (or “ leader”) of the working group, a young white guy in his twenties who looked like a 60s throwback with his long, straight hippy-style hair, rainbow tights, fatigue shirt, and Ziploc bag of rolling papers. Of course, you can never judge a book by its cover — he is also a student of behavioral economics and mentioned that academic studies have shown that the OWS’s decentralized, highly participatory, and lengthy process of dialogue is the best way to organize.
The open source meeting swelled very quickly to 20 or 30 people, an indication that a lot of people want to figure out what OWS’s demands should be. The group moderator remarked that the group was so big it was practically a “second General Assembly.” His brief introduction to the process whereby OWS would define its vision (he repeatedly used the phrase “visioning”) was interrupted as many hands went up, asking to be called on; at least 10 people wanted to speak and each was allowed a minute and a half.
What emerged from the discussion was that there is no consensus that demands are even necessary. Quite a few protesters argued along the lines that this is movement or process of dialogue is the demand/goal and that therefore demands are not necessary; one said our demand to the world should that they “join us.” Two older people, one in his sixties, the other in his thirties, spoke out for having clear, specific demands as being a very necessary step to creating a sustainable protest, much less a movement.
... The OWS political process is very participatory, cumbersome, and time-consuming. One strength of their process is that it avoids the top-down control that Wisconsin’s union leaders exercised to scuttle the protests and developing strike wave that shook the state in favor of harmless (and ultimately fruitless) recall efforts.
To participate and help shape OWS politically requires dedicating many, many waking hours every day to ongoing, continuous debates and discussions. This is not necessarily a bad thing but in practice ends up favoring the participation of those who can afford to skip work and/or school for a week or more. With unemployment over 9% (a figure even higher for the 18-25 age group), it should be no surprise that these are the people taking the fight to the enemy’s lair.
(29 September 2011)
The Danger of Simplicity
David Swanson, War is a Crime
... chess isn't simple. But compared to fixing the mess our nation and our world are in, it's child's play. Yet, we are constantly bombarded with demands for the "one simple move" to fix everything in our politics. How insane is that? And the "news" media tell us what's happening in a manner that could not possibly report coherently the complexity of a single chess game yet attempts to inform us about the entire world.
Now, I have no quarrel with short pithy posters and sound bytes. I'm not proposing that we mumble doctoral theses into television cameras. But we need to bear in mind that the medium is the moron.
The people on the receiving end of television chatter are not as stupid as television itself. There is such a thing as diminishing returns in the arms race of dumbness through which we dumb everything down until we reach the ultimate perfection of pure political messaging and grunt a single syllable.
We've taken the reasonable idea of a simple unifying cause that requires little explanation. We've combined it with the self-flagellation of progressive framers and messagers who imagine they aren't getting on the tee-vee because evolution deniers are wittier and pithier, rather than because of who owns the networks.
(29 September 2011)
Leninist assumptions and cult hierarchies
Simon Pirani, Weekly Worker (Communist Party of Great Britain)
Simon Pirani was part of a panel of three who addressed the CPGB's Communist University under the title of 'They fuck you up, the left'. This is an edited version of his speech
---
I was a member of the Workers Revolutionary Party from 1972, when I was a teenager, until 1985. For a year before that I was in the Young Communist League, along with friends from school, and after I left the WRP I was in its largest offshoot until the early 90s. Since then, although I have been active in politics, including writing about contemporary Russia and a book about the Russian Revolution, I have not been a member of any organisation.
I am going to talk not about the particular politics of the leftwing groups, but about their culture. In other words, the way they operate, the way their members live their lives. This includes the relationship between members of the group and other people; what we might call their ‘moral code’; and the often unspoken assumptions that group members have about the way they behave - about big things, such as work, family, enjoyment, friendships; and about smaller things, such as the way we speak, the way we dress, etc.
It is very easy to think of things we do not like about the behaviour of leftwing groups. An obvious example is the way members of some of them unquestioningly repeat the party line and behave intolerantly towards those who do not accept it. I would argue that these symptoms are part of the culture of these groups in a wider sense.
Context
Leftwing groups, including those that resemble sects, operate in a society dominated by a ruling class that is hostile to their aims. Inevitably they are profoundly influenced by the morals and culture of that society, and find it difficult to counter that influence.
This is partly because they limit themselves almost entirely to political questions and do not think about or discuss morals and culture. They do not think about how we live and how we behave, and so everything remains on a superficial level. In my opinion the movement to communism cannot be defined merely as a political movement: it is something much deeper than that.
Arising from this context, there are cult-like and highly negative aspects about the vast majority of the groups - including some that were relatively successful in their own terms.
... I think there is a problem with the legacy of Bolshevism - although there is also plenty of evidence of hierarchy, authoritarianism or intolerance in anti-Leninist groups, such as anarchists.
(29 September 2011)
The behavior that Pirani describes is not restricted to leftist groups. I've experienced it in the "Teenage Republicans" and observed it in religious groups. As poliitical activism heats up, I think we will see more of it. -BA
Murdoch and Berlusconi: the fall of two media empires and the network multitudes
Giorgio Griziotti, Open Democracy
The simultaneous fall of the Murdoch and Berlusconi media empires – symbolic of an epoch – is not a coincidence but part of a deep global change in which the exponential growth of horizontal communication networks plays a central role. In this global epoch, despite the thin line between new democratic opportunities and the old threats of control, unforeseen democratic movements are demanding a new kind of democracy.
The fall of the two most symbolic and influential media barons of the last thirty years might strike one as at most an important and pleasant coincidence. Here, I will reflect on the causes and implications of this double event and on how it could be a decisive model for a certain manner of exodus from the previous era. My argument is that what happened was no casual coincidence but rather determined by a movement of multitudes that, using networks of horizontal autonomous communication, has drained power from the vertical media empires. I address certain links between the two people in question in order to shed light both on their behaviour and the ideology that animates them.
One thing is certain: nothing will ever be able to restore the terrible power that they have exercised throughout all these years.
... I fully concur with the recent analysis of Judith Revel and Toni Negri, in which they highlight the common denominators of the social movements that have emerged from Tunisia to Spain, passing through England, Italy, Greece, Egypt, Syria and a growing number of important countries, including Israel:
"These are revolts born, in Egypt, Spain, or England, out of the simultaneous refusal of the subjection, exploitation and plunder this economy has prepared for the lives of entire populations of the world, and the political forms within which the crisis of this biopolitical appropriation has been managed. And this is also true for all the so-called “democratic” regimes. Such a form of government appears only preferable for the seeming “civility” with which it masks the attack on the dignity and humanity of the existences it crushes, but the vanishing of political representation is now at the point of collapse.[xxi]"
Still, I’d like to add that the main and indispensable tool of these developing movements is precisely the autonomous, horizontal communication network of the multitude. The use of internet and its progressive integration with mobile networks, are breathing life into a new paradigm, as we shall see. This is the crux of the matter for democratic communication and also the main cause of the fall of media empires.
The exponential growth of user-generated media such as social networks, blogs and the joining of mobile internet with the body (bio-hypermedia) are visibly generating an effect of critical threshold in which a new creation of the commons in all its forms – including revolt – are developing not only more and more rapidly and in vaster and vaster spaces, but are overwhelming the old world in ways and in locations that are quite unpredictable: first in Tunisia and now in Brasilia, Santiago del Chile and Tel Aviv.
(30 September 2011)
