By John Ballard
Except for the civil rights movement, this is the most compelling attempt to bring about social, political and economic change in America in our lifetimes.
There was a nuclear disarmament movement but we still have enough nuclear weapons to annihilate mankind several times over. (The famous "peace symbol" was a creation of Bertrand Russell derived from superimposing the semaphore signals for N and D but no one remembers and the meaning has been lost.)
There was a womens liberation movement but it's still an uphill struggle.
There was an anti-war movement but we still have wars.
I have no intention of trying to say anything sage. I do know that anyone with a brain should be paying attention and reading as much as possible. This is what I've come across just today.
?�Occupy Wall Street,� a primer by Exra Klein
Klein is doing yoeman's work with this story. Drill into this piece for more links. There is more to read than anyone has time to ingest, but that tells me how important this movement is.
This YouTube video, uploaded September 23, has six-hundred plus comments and a note that "-"we didn't close the comments - youtube did."
?Matt Stoller: #OccupyWallStreet Is a Church of Dissent, Not a Protest
This is only a snip. Go to the link for much more...
You can tell this is a somewhat different animal than other politicized gatherings. No one knows what to expect. There are no explicit demands. It�s not very large. And yet, celebrities are heading to Zuccotti Park. Wall Street traders are sneering and angry. The people there are getting press, but aren�t dominated by it. People are there just to be there, because it feels meaningful. The camp is clean and well-organized, and it feels relevant and topical rather than a therapy space for frustrated radicals. Just a block away is the New York Fed, a large, scary, and imposing building with heavy iron doors, video cameras, and a police presence that scream �go away�.
There are a lot of police, but unlike the portrayal in the press the relationship between the protesters and the police is fairly good. The arrests and macing you saw happened because protesters decided to march to Union Square without a permit, and many joined the march on the way. Police began arresting people to keep control of the streets, and that�s when the macings happened. I�m not downplaying what happened, but context is important for understanding why the camping in the park isn�t really problematic while the marching has seen conflict. Police and firefighters routinely come through the park to make sure there are no open flames and no tents, often to applause. There are hints of a more menacing presence; I was told by several organizers that men dressed in business suits accompanied with what looked like police have on several occasions ordered them to vacate the park, handing protesters official-looking orders that on closer inspection were not actually from any governmental authority. Lawyers at the protest made it clear these were to be ignored.
The organizers themselves seem quite experienced. Adbusters didn�t have much to do with the protest organizing, in fact much of the energy came from people that did anti-budget cut campaigns against Mayor Bloomberg in New York City, as well as the May 12th protest march. The organizers have set up committees to handle most tasks, like media and sanitation. There�s a hotspot, and lots of computing and video equipment to record and broadcast. There are living space areas, and the camp site has had to contend with rain without the benefit of tents (which are illegal).
?�You�re creating a vision of the sort of society you want to have in miniature.�
David Graeber is an anthropologist at Goldsmiths, University of London, and author of �Direct Action: An Ethnography.� He was also one of the initial organizers of the �Occupy Wall Street� protests. And he thinks the people asking for a list of demands are missing the point of the movement quite dramatically. We spoke this morning by phone.
Ezra Klein: So when did your involvement with these protests begin?
David Graeber: July 2nd. That was the first actual meeting. What happened was AdBusters put out this call for these protests. We had heard there was supposed to be a general assembly on July 2nd. So I just showed up. But it was a rally, not an assembly. Some Marxist groups had set up stages and megaphones and was making speeches and were planning a march. So we said we don�t need to do this. We pulled a small group together and decided to have a real assembly.
So we wandered over to another part of the area and began a meeting and people kept migrating over. But we had a problem because we only had six weeks. AdBusters had already advertised the date to 80,000 people. And their date was a Saturday. You can�t really shut down Wall Street on a Saturday. So we were working under some significant constraints. We assembled 80 or 100 people and formed working groups for outreach, process, so forth and so on. And we began meeting every week.
One thing that helped a lot was a smattering of people from Spain and Greece and Tunisia who had been doing this sort of thing more recently. They explained that the model that seemed to work was to take something that seemed to be public space, reclaim it, and build up an organization headquarters around that from which you can begin doing other things.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
EK: It also seems that the tradeoff here, from an organizational standpoint, is that if you say you want, say, a tax on Wall Street, then the people who aren�t interested in a tax on Wall Street stay home. So remaining vague on demands can make the tent bigger. But it also seems that, at some point, people are going to need to be working towards concrete goals and experiencing dicrete successes in order to sustain the energy of a movement like this.
GB: As the thing grows, new organizational forms will develop. At this point, the New York occupation has 30 different working groups for everything from handling sanitation to discussing labor issues and tax policy. So we�re trying to set up ways that people with different interests can plug into the movement. There�s even a newspaper. The �Occupied Wall Street Journal.� Of course, this is nothing compared to what happened in Tahrir Square, where they even had dry cleaners.
?#OccupyWallStreet & the failure of institutions by Jeff Jarvis
Like all journalists, Jarvis has a lot to say, mostly positive. Words and opinions are stock in trade for media types.
Already I have the feeling that at some point Occupy Wall Street may get long on words and short on action. As much as I love reading, I'm about to overdose and this thing is just getting off the ground.
In a Foreign Affairs essay in 2008, Richard Haass argued that the world is moving from bi- and unipolarity (that is, the Cold War and its aftermath) to nonpolarity (i.e., no one�s in charge). �We now operate in an open marketplace of influence,� I wrote in my last book. �One need no longer control institutions to control agendas.�
Now one needs a network. #OccupyWallStreet is that network, the headless tail. Even it�s not sure what it is. Indeed, I think it would have been better off not issuing a manifesto written by a committee of the whole park, going after even animal rights and ending with its own Ninth Amendment: �*These grievances are not all-inclusive.� Henry Blodget mocks many of their demands. Feminisnt says they aren�t specific enough. They can�t win.
But I think they are already winning. #OccupyWallStreet is a start and it is growing, as Micah Sifry wrote: �There�s something happening here, Mr. Jones.�
?the class implications of �know your history�
Sarah Jaffe is a blogger, an independent political journalist, a feminist pop culture critic, and a self-proclaimed nerd girl. She writes about politics, labor, feminism, comics, rock�n'roll, film, pop culture, books, and whatever else someone will give her space to pontificate upon. She has been a freelance writer since 2002, with work published in The Nation, The American Prospect, Bitch magazine, Bust magazine, Newsarama.com and many other publications.
So many times the left would rather be pure than win battles. We would rather be self-assured that we are right, that we always use the appropriate language, that we have read the right theorists and the right histories and our friends are refreshingly diverse and we recycle and buy long-lasting lightbulbs.
But right now, Occupy Wall Street is getting in people�s heads. It�s doing it by being there, day after day, week after week (now Week 3). It�s creating a space, a church of dissent, as Matt Stoller called it, where you can go and make friends, where you can be fed�ANYONE can grab a free meal, which is absolutely a draw for unemployed people struggling to make ends meet�and where you can borrow books from an ever-growing library, where you can join a teach-in�Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz was there yesterday explaining economics to people�and where you can learn.
It�s not perfect. Of course it�s not perfect. The incident on the bridge was a clusterfuck and 700+ people spent a night kettled in the rain and then in jail because of it.
But it�s attracting people beyond the usual suspects, and it�s creating a space where you can learn. Because most people? They get radicalized when something happens to them. They get angry when they can�t pay the rent but they hear that Bank of America got bailed out�and then turned around and charged them $5 to use their debit card.
That�s not pure or perfect or theory or nice. It�s true, though.
?And of course stay tuned to hashtag #OccupyWallStreet.
In In the time it took for me to put together this post Twitter piled up over seven hundred new tweets.
No comments:
Post a Comment