Battle for the Soul of Occupy
Alright you jammers, occupiers and Springtime dreamers,
First they silenced our uprising with a media blackout… then they smashed our encampments with midnight paramilitary raids… and now they’re threatening to neutralize our insurgency with an insidious campaign of donor money and co-optation. This counter-strategy worked to kill off the Tea Party’s outrage and turn it into a puppet of the Republican Party. Will the same happen with Occupy Wall Street? Will our insurgency turn into the Democrats’ Tea Party pet?
It’s up to you to decide if our movement goes the way of Paris ’68, the dust bin of could-have-been-insurrections, or something more daring, more inspiring, something not yet dreamed.
Will you allow Occupy to become a project of the old left, the same cabal of old world thinkers who have blunted the possibility of revolution for decades? Will you allow MoveOn, The Nation and Ben & Jerry to put the brakes on our Spring Offensive and turn our struggle into a “99% Spring” reelection campaign for President Obama?
We are now in a battle for the soul of Occupy… a fight to the finish between the impotent old left and the new vibrant, horizontal left who launched Occupy Wall Street from the bottom-up and who dreams of real democracy and another world.
Whatever you do, don’t allow our revolutionary struggle to fizzle out into another lefty whine and clicktivist campaign like has happened so many times in the past. Let’s Occupy the clicktivists and crash the MoveOn party. Let’s #DEFENDOCCUPY and stop the derailment of our movement that looms ahead.
for the wild,
Culture Jammers HQ
OccupyWallStreet.org / Tactical Briefing #25, #26, #27 and #28 / Check out Oakland occupier Mike King’s take on MoveOn’s 99% Spring
306 comments on the article “Battle for the Soul of Occupy”
Displaying 141 - 150 of 306
Page 15 of 31
Mark Read
This author doesn't even make sense. How on earth would Non Violent Direct Action training come in handy...as part of electoral strategy?
And, honestly, if we want to transform our social and political reality we have to get serious and clear-eyed about building a broad-based political movement. Righteous puritanism is not a particularly good strategy. The #occupy movement is currently losing numbers, not gaining them.
There are real enemies out there. They work on Wall Street and K Street and they dominate a political and economic system that will literally KILL US ALL. I suggest we worry about our liberal hypocrite allies AFTER we have built a broad based movement that will rise up against entrenched power. Part of building that movement is keeping the MoveOns and Mother Jones' onside, with us. We agree on many, many things, and for the time being we need to grow our movement. We will do that by infiltrating and converting, not by alienating and rejecting.
Are we serious about the fight for change or just a bunch of kids that want to be more-radical-than-thou? This author sounds like the latter.
Anonymous
thank you
Anonymous
Q: "How on earth would Non Violent Direct Action training come in handy...as part of electoral strategy?
A: To data mine disgruntled and disillusioned voters who have been attracted to the Occupy movement .2. To identify and train 100,000 volunteers prepared to up the ante with conventional CD tactics against selected Republican - and only Republican targets ,forcing the opposition (both the candidates and their corporate sponsors) to spend time and money responding to a upsurge in street heat and negative press in their own backyards. Meanwhile, the Obama national campaign will maintain its focus in reaching out to switch voters, titrating the messaging based on the latest polls and trends in campaign contributions, 4. Most importantly, to insure that no alternative social justice movement is allowed to compete for resources or challenge the legitimacy of the process in a way that could impede Democratic GOTV efforts later this year..
Anonymous
you nailed it.
Goal is to create resonance with Obama's election campaign by encouraging 99% Spring to pick targets that will benefit Obama election.
New Old Left
Yes, and to stay away from targets that might unite Democrats, Republicans and Independents.
Anonymous
It sounds most to me like the movement has been encouraged by moles sent from Karl Rove to pick targets, and reject potential coalition partners, to benefit the GOP. Being co-opted the "the old left" is the least of your worries.
Anonymous
You're the only mole I see. Time to go back to Kos or wherever you crawled out from.
Mark Read
Convoluted and paranoid.
Occupier
Read this:
99% Spring reminds me of the AAEI coalition, another MoveOn front coordinated by Tom Matzzie that worked with Nancy Pelosi in 2007 to see to it that the Iraq war was funded and used as a political stick to beat Republicans in 2008. Or the massively funded Health Care for America Now coalition backed by MoveOn in 2009 which made sure that single payer health care was ignored while the White House pushed its pro-insurance industry legislation derided as ‘Obamacare’. In this latest case, the so-called 99 Spring, MoveOn is enlisting other NGOs to create the appearance of a populist uprising from the Left, when it’s all about keeping the rabble in line and aimed at the Republicans to re-elect Obama.
Want current evidence of the coordination among Obama and 99% Spring? The major campaign hook for Obama this week is "tax justice." And MoveOn is urging the trainers of the 99 Spring to focus on tax justice demonstrations as their first action. It couldn't be any more obvious.
This is just Democratic Party manipulation of the so-called "movement" to re-elect Obama, a failed President for the 1%.
Anonymous
"Proof"
Whining about "old left" (a term that itself promotes ignorance) does what exactly? How is it revolutionary or radical or direct or action?
So use your head and take advantage of the situation.
If Obama is trying to appeal to 99% then good. That is his job. Hold him to it. Don't let him get away with another scam because you are too pure to enter politics.
Adbusters was a great idea when it critiqued the culture of mass manipulation though advertising. But in "using the system to change the system" Adbusters has been seduced by the manipulative advert. Nothing but empty sentiment and dissatisfied romance. That is not how people get things done. Sure you can paint a pretty picture and sell it to those who can afford it but Adbusters is the co-opted group. Vancouver housing prices are inhumanly high. What do you do to address anything substantial.
We need radical ideas not warmed over "consciousness changing" from the 1960s. Drugs, nor pretty "Culture Jams," are never going to shock to shock the mainstream into some revolutionary awareness. If that was going to work it would have 50 years ago. If anyone should be charged with being the "old left" it is the glossy magazine adbusters who have barely come up with a decent spoof ad since the 90s. The old old left of unions and organising in the 1930s got a lot more done. And they compromised too. They let Roosevelt save Capitalism. Maybe it was a mistake. But I'd hate to think where we would be if people in the 30s were as self centred is Adbusters would have us be today.
Pages
Add a new comment