Battle for the Soul of Occupy

Jump, jump, jump over the dead body of the old left!

306 comments Adbusters, 12 April 2012

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 251 - 260 of 306

Anonymous

17 April 2012 at 06:07 pm

I know progressives, and that comment ain't progressive. It's coming from an ideologue Ron Paulista.

Anonymous

16 April 2012 at 10:12 am

This usurping is the natural outcome of running an unprincipled and reformist campaign.

When this was proposed - to Occupy, in the July issue, Adbusters declared that it was to “demand that Barack Obama ordain a Presidential Commission tasked with ending the influence money has over our representatives in Washington.” In other words, to make an appeal to the very party responsible for the trouble (or, at any rate, the most recent perpetrator). There was an emphasis - insistence - on "No Politics!" from the word go - which leaves any movement open to co-opting by the usual apparatus.

Rosa Luxemborg posed the question: Reform or Revolution more than a century ago. You chose Reform, the choice has to be Revolution.

Anonymous

17 April 2012 at 06:06 pm

Yea, good luck with that. Checked how many Americans want to overthrow the U.S. government lately?

What a freakin' joke some occupiers are. Heads so far up their ideological butts they cant think with one realistic shred.

Anonymous

16 April 2012 at 10:22 am

http://wsws.org/articles/2011/oct2011/occu-o14.shtml - This was written way back in October - the old left has been pushing hard to get the occupiers behind the Dem Party from the word go, really. This is not a new development.

An excerpt:
It is an iron law of American politics: any prominent “left” figure who does not identify the Democratic Party by name and insist on a complete break with that party on a socialist basis, is a shill or an apologist for the Democrats.

That goes for a variety of celebrities who have visited the protest site in New York, including philosopher Slavoj ‌Zi‌zek (“Don’t be afraid to really want what you desire”) and activist Naomi Klein (“The system is deeply unjust and careening out of control”), who moralize about capitalism in general without offering any solution to the greatest obstacle facing the American working class: its continued subordination to the existing system through the Democrats. Klein endorsed Obama in 2008, a fact she failed to mention during her October 6 appearance in Zuccotti Park.~~~

VoterReg

16 April 2012 at 10:33 am

I got my voter registration card last week. I plan on taking part in whatever remnants of a system we have left while also spreading the goals I share with Occupy at the same time.

Anonymous

16 April 2012 at 11:16 am

Hi Guys,

Ok as a long-time radical leftist activist who's been battling from deep inside the trenches for decades, I must say that I've come to the conclusion that the only way we are going to win is if:

We all just shut the fuck up, take a shower, and find a job.

Thanks for your attention.

Anonymously dis...

16 April 2012 at 12:29 pm

What a wanker!

If you have such briliant ideas for our future then maybe you should try getting involved instead of deriding those who show their caring through direct action.

Your assumptions about the educational levels, employment, or hygiene of those who show active interest in preventing the disolution of democracy do nothing more than expose the nature of your own ignorance.

Go back into the tall building you surely work inside of and continue to steal $$$$ from little old ladies who don't know any better.