Battle for the Soul of Occupy
sinkers.org
As we prepare for the May uprising, two power centers of our movement have announced plans for a spectacular bi-coastal May 1st bridge blockade. On the West Coast, Occupy Oakland and Occupy San Francisco are planning rush hour disruptions on the Golden Gate Bridge while in New York City, occupiers say they will block one or more Manhattan-bound bridges. These acts of nonviolent direct action will set the tactical tone for the next phase of Occupy: they signal the turn towards Strike actions aimed at disrupting the flow of money. And, on a deeper level, these blockades come at a pivotal moment for Occupy as the movement grapples with a battle for its soul.
The question many occupiers are debating is whether the spirit and voice of Occupy will stay with the new left horizontals who launched the uprising or whether it will move towards MoveOn’s 99% Spring, and their old left buddies at The Nation magazine, Ben & Jerry’s, et al.
For the first most spectacular days of Occupy – such as on September 24 when eighty Zuccottis were arrested and shocking footage of women getting maced was replayed on national television – MoveOn ignored our movement. They decided to jump on board much later when 700 nonviolent occupiers were arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge. They saw this mass arrest as an opportunity to fold Occupy into their electoral Rebuild the Dream campaign to bolster Obama. At a time when Occupy was inspiring hundreds of thousands of people across the nation to take the squares, set up leaderless encampments and reinvent democracy in people’s assemblies, MoveOn held an October 5 online “Virtual March on Wall Street” with their friends at Rebuild the Dream.
At the peak of Occupy, when the people’s movement had catalyzed a global day of action on October 15 that saw millions of us in 82 countries rally in financial districts and capital cities for real democracy, MoveOn tried to cash in on Occupy’s momentum with a donation pitch. “We have to capitalize on this momentum now,” wrote MoveOn in an email to its members. “Can you chip in $5?”
And now, MoveOn wants to hijack our movement with their 99% Spring.
MoveOn is an existential threat to our movement because they don’t have a revolutionary bone in their body … if we give these clicktivists any more room then they will pull off a managed cooling of our revolutionary fervor … they will neuter the kind of bold, militant nonviolent direct actions that are the key to the next phase of our movement. Don’t let them do it!
Jump, jump, jump over the dead body of the old left!
159 comments on the article “Battle for the Soul of Occupy”
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Anonymous
This is such petty bullshit. Alienate your friends and supporters, I'm sure that will succeed. Progress is piecemeal and built on collaboration, not petty infighting. Moveon can get the message out to 4 million people. Who gave occupy donations that allowed a bus tour and community meals? The same clicktivists you vilify. Go fuck yourself and stop dividing the 99%.
Anonymous
"progress is piecemeal" --- you must be a progressive. Your theory of change is false. Progress happens in sudden bursts, as Occupy has proven.
dravazed
Easy, easy. MoveOn is indeed a vehicle directly tied to the misnamed Democratic Party, and it exists to keep people in the tent--to pull the lever for warmongers and bankers with the D after their names. Remember who Zero put in his Cabinet of Horrors? Why, that great embodiment of democracy, Goldman Sachs. And let's not even start in about civil liberties.
MoveOn is WORTHLESS and worse than worthless, when it comes to the question of *power*--and that's the central issue. The Dem Party exists to keep power in the hands of the 1%--just like their shadow, the GOP.
That said, there are indeed some great folks in and around MoveOn actions, and we should unite with them wherever possible--which will be more often than not.
Anonymous
These groups are not the "old left." They are the liberal establishment. The real old left has a solid, albeit misguided, track record of standing for justice and rejecting corporatism and reformism.
kodiak bears in...
The last comment was just trolling but in all seriousness, there's no reason to spend any meaningful amount of time or energy fighting battles like this. Yeah reformists are lame as shit an all that but you have to either find a way to work with them or ignore them, making it clear that they don't represent your views in any way. Fighting them is nothing more than a convenient distraction, and it shows a real lack of political imagination from people who are supposedly the vanguard of revolution.
There's nothing wrong with accepting an inside/outside approach to changing things, especially when you don't have to do any work yourselves to implement the inside part, as MoveOn so readily wants to. Really what we need is inside/outside/at home approach, where "at home" is our own communities but also our own lives and ideologies, and taking the high road to revolutionizing ourselves means not getting caught up in fights like this which are just petty and narccisistic.
I'm personally concerned every time Adbusters comes out with statements like this, because the tone and rhetoric always reeks of a shitty attempt to assert or reassert their position in front of the Occupy movement in a de facto leadership role. If Occupy is genuinely worried about being coopted, they need to look no further than Adbusters and it's leadership, which has been subtly working that angle since day 1 (and before).
Ctizzie
Please... Adbusters is hardly the existential threat the Democrats and their cohorts are.
You've presented what many would call a "false equivalency." I, for one, am not worried that some 150,000 subscriber zine based in Canada is going to jump in front of the last, possible chance for United States Americans to save themselves from becoming the ultimate capitalist ouroboros, eating itself into oblivion. I'm not worried a website I have to seek out on my own is going to successfully control the narrative of the ongoing occupations I'm associated with.
The Democratic Party, on the other hand, exists solely to stifle any revolutionary inclinations within the American Left and codify them safely back within capitalist terms. That is their raison d'être - especially since the ascendancy of the Democratic Leadership Committee (see: Clinton, Obama's entire cabinet, etc...) The dutiful handmaidens of that odious "party" are as plentiful as they are obvious (CHIRLA, Moveon, the SEIU, Rebuild The Dream, etc...) and are precisely the ones who are moving, independently of every Occupy I know of, with their highly-publicized, "99% Spring" farce. And those forces are the same, entrenched and monied interests who will never recognize any semblance of "horizontalism" or of "anti-capitalism," two ingredients which cannot rightly be stripped from the global movement "Occupiers" joined in September.
Is it stupid to talk about the very same people who are going to put us all in jail? The ones who are going to do precisely that - and then carry on with the "99% Spring" as if nothing were amiss? If history is our guide - that is what fate foretells for Occupy.
Unless we speak up just as vociferously against them as we do the Wall Street titans who control them all.
kodiak bears in...
You make a lot of good points. It's fair to say that last post probably overstated Adbusters as an actual threat, because I really don't see it as a threat (at least not an important one). What I mean to communicate is that I'm suspicious of their motives for putting things like this out. I'm many months removed from Zuccotti Park so I don't know what the sentiments are like in New York City right now, but what compelled me to comment originally was just my own annoyance at what seems like unwarranted spokespersonship, not that that's even a real word.
You, and I guess the article are right that Occupy needs to be wary of attempts by the established left to nullify its radical potential, but where I think that sentiment becomes misguided is when you start using your political capital, your time and your energy to fight a group like MoveOn rather than using those things creatively and productively towards your own goals.
As far as the 99% Spring goes, it's nothing but language in my mind. Let them have the slogan, we all know it's a hollow class analysis and it just proved to be a useful symbol to explain that wealth distribution is totally fucked. Occupy isn't meant to win it's battles on shallow rhetoric, that's the organized left's specialty. If you want to resist being pushed out of the picture by groups like MoveOn, you don't play them on their terms, the only way to distance yourself from them is to keep practicing what you're preaching and to push the boundaries. It takes showing people that the alternatives you're practicing are way better for them.
You're right that radical movements have been coopted, exploited and destroyed throughout history by established order, and Occupy has learned from that history and been fully aware of that danger from the beginning. What worries me though is when I think ahead to whatever future we find ourselves in, and reflect on what we learned from Occupy. It's not the revolution (yet), and this manifestation of struggle named after a single tactic, will eventually lose its momentum and become something else. What worries me is that Occupy's practice of refusing to work with anything resembling the establishment is right the fuck on in principle but will prove to be a death sentence in practice, because getting the American people to disregard all familiar politics in favor of direct community based democracy is exactly the right idea but naive to actually expect.
Yes, MoveOn is a group working with the democratic party, yes the democratic party is married to the interests of business and power maitenance, yes those interests have everything to gain from our failure, but let's not get so caught up in these storylines of oppression that we are no longer able to meet other people where they're at. We know we have something beautiful and powerful to offer, but that leads to absolutely nothing when you draw lines in the sand that most people aren't willing to cross. At that point you might as well be living in a remote commune in British Columbia having GA's with woodland creatures or some shit.
I'm too tired to close this out eloquently so I'll just say "Wu-Tang forever" and call it a night.
kodiak bears in...
Also, in the previous post I said that the previous previous post was just trolling, but what I meant was, I was saying what I genuinely believe, but kind of being a dick about it because there were no thoughtful discussions to conveniently engage in yet. The new left is still dead, and I DO want to jump over it's body.
dravazed
Greatly appreciated both your posts.
Anonymous
Dems have made an art out of appearing to work for the people while handing everything over to controlling elite. It is the illusion of representation that has killed America from within. People have to see this or we will never dig our way out of this. Our country has been turned into a war colony of debt slaves for the elite's control of the planet.
Semantics and false paradigms are the enemy and have been for a very long time.
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