Understanding OWS: the meta-thread

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Re: Understanding OWS: the meta-thread

Postby JackRiddler » Sat Mar 10, 2012 10:42 am

3×5 wrote:Honestly, a big part of why I stopped attending Truther meetings and actions was because of the prevalence of people who ran in that circle who I agreed with on the key issues, and who also seemed to have a tenuous grasp on reality. It also made me wonder if the infiltration there simply involves quietly convincing a bunch of visibly insane people to embrace conspiracy theories, and then make sure they show up to everything.


Is it all right if I endorse this? It's the inherent weakness of a truth movement, as right and powerful as one can be.

OWS is nothing like this, however, because it's a social justice movement.
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

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Re: Understanding OWS: the meta-thread

Postby Nordic » Sat Mar 10, 2012 3:44 pm

3×5 wrote:Honestly, a big part of why I stopped attending Truther meetings and actions was because of the prevalence of people who ran in that circle who I agreed with on the key issues, and who also seemed to have a tenuous grasp on reality. It also made me wonder if the infiltration there simply involves quietly convincing a bunch of visibly insane people to embrace conspiracy theories, and then make sure they show up to everything.


I am positive that is a big part of how it works.

I think we saw this happen, step-by-step, after 9/11.

The people responsible for things like 9/11 are extremely sophisticated, after all. Way ahead of almost all of us. I saw it start with Phil Jayhan videos posted at Democratic Underground. It wasn't long before they "holograms" and the "no plane" things came out, and pretty soon you couldn't look at a video online of 9/11 without wondering if it had been completely doctored.

The people behind all this are quite brilliant, in an extremely evil sort of way.
"He who wounds the ecosphere literally wounds God" -- Philip K. Dick
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Re: Understanding OWS: the meta-thread

Postby Allegro » Fri Apr 06, 2012 11:30 pm

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I’ve bumped this thread because it as well as others have some excellent posts containing information primarily characterizing the #Occupy movement.

Please add other threads you think are pertinent #Occupy retrievals.

Thanks.
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Re: Understanding OWS: the meta-thread

Postby bks » Sun Apr 08, 2012 9:57 pm

Allegro,

Thanks again for your fine curation. It really helps make this board the resource it can be!

Back to topic: What excited me about OWS from the beginning was its noni-capitalist character. Here we had a social formation that seemed to understand that it had to confront the capitalist mode of consciousness as much as it had to confront the objective power structure. The reading I've been doing on the historical development of capitalism makes it pretty clear that capitalism is not merely a thirst for profit or love of money. It is a mode of being in which a number of things are going on at the same time, the most important of which may be that labor has been fully commodified and is offer-able on a global labor market to the highest bidder, and there is an acceptance on the part of the working class[es] that their labor's final value is expressible in monetary terms. That moment where laborers realize that they need to sell their labor to reproduce themselves is the moment that cements a capitalist mode of relations. Wage laborers aren't "frustrated capitalists"; under the conditions of hegemonic capitalism they've accepted the terms of commercial exchange. Thus any confrontation with this way of life has to confront that capitalist subjectivity. OWS did [and does] that. Other protest movements of the recent past in the US have not.

Of course it's also important to expose the corruption of the finance system and the endless lust for war, but unlike the tepid anti-war movement or the fake calls for" fiscal responsibility" on the right, OWS sought to actually create new social relations in real space. Capitalism is a set of social relations; it can only be superceded by re-doing social relations in a non-capitalist mode and creating a post-capitalist consciousness. That's obviously a looooooong process, but OWS is undertaking it and therefore it concerns me to hear that there is discussion within OWS of "working within the system." I'm sympathetic to the value of marginal improvements, but there is no way to bring about a post-capitalist consciousness within the current system. That project entails at minimum the decommodification of labor and the socializing of a greater percentage of private profit, and that will never be tolerated by the system.

Nation-states as historical entities are played out. They don't protect people's rights any longer; they're there to serve the interests of capital, and everyone knows it. The only thing countries do in the way of "providing for" their citizens are the things that capital needs them to do: provide the infrastructure allowing people to get to work, investing and promoting technologies that strengthen capitalist social relations, and policing deviance and desire for change. They perform these functions despite the fact that capitalism is on its last legs, having imperialized all it pretty much can. The game now is to just suppress wages as much as possible as markets continue to dry up [yeah, there's China but it won't be like it was in the US - they don't (and won't) earn enough] and that will require the ramping up of coercion as things get worse. And they'll get worse.

I really hope OWS doesn't compromise on its truly radical aspects. It's the best chance we all have to see real, peaceful change in the foreseeable future.
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Re: Understanding OWS: the meta-thread

Postby JackRiddler » Sun Apr 08, 2012 10:47 pm

All agreed, with the caveat that "working within the system" is a wide range of possibilities, some of which retain a radical analysis and move towards transformation and some of which are simply forced, meaning that not everything that could be described that way is wrong, or avoidable. Also, it's going to take a looooooooong time and the boundaries on this question will often be unclear.

We may perhaps have a bigger difference on the role, if not of the nation, then of the state. Repression is the ultimate bottom line and empire (for those who can partake in the sick "game") the margin-raising measure of first and last resort. The backbone of that will always require nationalism and blut und boden, the kind of idealism that corporations inspire only at a cost and the kind of quasi-religious legitimacy that only the flag confers. We're not talking about law here, but power at its purest. Understood that as much of this as possible will be privatized and that threats will be inflated to make more business out of MIC and NS-IC, but it's not only business. The welfare state (a labor cost) is to be made small enough to drown in the tub but the fascism that grows from capitalism has a life of its own.
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Re: Understanding OWS: the meta-thread

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Mon Apr 09, 2012 10:02 am

Seems like the appropriate venue for this:

Having finally read "War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning" straight through, it definitely changed how I see Hedges' now-infamous Black Bloc essay. At the very least, it made a lot of the "gatekeeper" and "elitist journalist" snark that greeted his essay look damn hollow.

Tom Hayden had a piece in this week's Nation about the Port Huron Statement (not that great, though) and I sensed the same concern -- Hayden watched the Progressive Labor Party morph into the Weathermen Underground and feared the same trajectory for Occupy splinters. Hedges, on the other hand, has seen that insanity through dozens of conflicts that ended far, far worse than the American 1960's flipping over into the 70's. Once I get some AM lists out of the way, I am going to re-read the Hedges piece in light of the book I just ate. I think understanding who he is and what he's been through will make for some critical perceptual changes.

Then again, maybe not.
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Re: Understanding OWS: the meta-thread

Postby JackRiddler » Mon Apr 09, 2012 12:59 pm

To add to what I was saying above: the state, war and empire can also still be viewed as distinct drivers from the profit motive and the commodification of labor (which requires a rationalized production and policing of the human resources). All those functions of the state bks mentions are furthermore absolutely necessary to capital, as he says, but needs to be underlined. Capital and the state are a symbiosis in which the state still retains much of its own, in part ancient drives and logics.

Or wait, here's something relevant.



http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/04/09/ ... tate/print

April 09, 2012

Just Say "Hi-Ho!" as They Strip Search You
Kurt Vonnegut and the American Police State


by DAVE LINDORFF



Back in the early 1980s, I had the extraordinary good fortune to get to meet one of my literary heroes, Kurt Vonnegut, up close and personal. We shared a police wagon, sitting next to each other for a ride to the station to be booked for blocking the door to the South African consulate in a demonstration against that country’s then policy of white rule and apartheid.

I can’t say I got to know the author very well, but he was quite friendly and interesting to talk to, and after our arrest and booking was over, and we were released, I shared a cab as far as his house.

I got to thinking that thanks to the latest outrageous 5-4 decision by the US Supreme Court (supported fully<> by our Constitutional law-teacher President Barack Obama and his Solicitor General), which says it is now perfectly okay for police to strip-search innocent people picked up on any charge — even a traffic offense or a leash-law violation, or alleged failure to clear a warrant for a bald tire — had Kurt and I been busted for the same kind of protest today, we’d “know” each other much more intimately. For example I’d probably know if Vonnegut had hemorrhoids, and he’d know about a patch of skin discoloration on my balls.

Is this a great country or what?

But seriously, we have really reached a pretty grim point when the court that is supposed to be protecting our rights under the Constitution, and the president, who is supposed to uphold and defend that document, collude in saying that once a person has been taken into custody by police, she or he really has no rights. The 4th Amendment about being “secure in your person”? Forget it. The cops can now
strip you, grope you, check your butthole and humiliate you all they want, even if you are innocent of any charge. And by the way, they can lock you up with hardened convicts and hold you after they do that, until you get a lawyer or post bail. No “cruel and unusual punishment”? Well, I think most people would agree that getting stripped and intimately searched by some leering cop when you hadn’t done anything would qualify as punishment, and it certainly is cruel, so the Eighth Amendment is in the toilet too. (We already knew the First Amendment — the one about freedom of speech and assembly and the right to petition over grievances — was toast. Just ask Mayor Mike Bloomberg or any of the other mayors who ordered the brutal crushing of dozens of Occupation encampments over the past half year.)

As for that old relic of British Common Law, “innocent until proven guilty,” which supposedly is imbedded in our legal system, forget it, too. Justice (sic) Anthony Kennedy, who wrote the court’s majority opinion, drove a stake through that foundation principle of jurisprudence when he wrote that “The search procedures [at issue in the trial] struck a reasonable balance between inmate privacy and the needs of the institutions.” Kennedy’s opinion, which must have jurists like Earl Warren, Thurgood Marshall and William O. Douglas puking in their graves, leaves me wondering what horrible alternative this legal midget thought was being balanced against the alternative of not strip searching the appellant, Albert Florence. A black New Jersey resident who was stopped for no reason by while driving with his wife and two small kids, was arrested by a New Jersey traffic cop who ran a “make” and found a court contempt warrant for an allegedly unpaid fine. Though the fine had actually been paid two years earlier, Florence was strip-searched by prison guards before being locked up in a cell together with convicted criminals.

I guess the other side of Kennedy’s legal teeter-totter must have been having Florence get raped by a broom handle, as some sick New York City cops did to Haitian immigrant Abner Loima after arresting him outside a Brooklyn bar where he had tried to intercede to break up a sidewalk fight.

We are reaching the point where I suspect Occupy movement and anti-war activists who protest against Wall Street crimes and planned war crimes by the the US government against Iran should be prepared to be strip-searched if they get hauled off to jail.

That would have sure changed my first experience of being arrested, back during the 1967 Mobilization against the War march on the Pentagon. Along with several hundred other protesters who occupied the Mall of the Pentagon overnight back in October of that year, I was clubbed by US Marshals and then hauled off to Occoquan Federal Prison in Virginia, where I spent three days in a dormitory cell with about 100 other guys. It was a radicalizing experience for me to be locked up as an 18-year-old kid with people were veterans of the Freedom Riders in Mississippi and other early civil rights struggles. Today, we’d probably all have been strip-searched, which would have made the whole experience a lot more negative. It probably would have radicalized me even more, but I surely wouldn’t have quite the same fond memories of my incarceration.

Other arrests would have been less fondly remembered too, if Kennedy’s strip-searching were the rule, including my night in a Concord jail on a charge of “trespassing” at night (actually trying to camp out) at the park at Walden Pond, my bust for panhandling (actually playing guitar for tips tossed in my case) in the Yosemite Park main parking lot), and of course, my anti-apartheid arrest with Vonnegut.

The country seems to have crossed over a dark threshold. We are now a police state in all but name. Cops and wannabe cops are shooting innocent people and nothing gets done — the latest being the tragic slaying, by a shot to the head, of Rekia Boyd, a young black woman in Chicago. In this case, we had a drive-by shooting of a completely innocent person, not by a gang member but by an off-duty cop, who claims he was “threatened” by a man in a group of people who had a cell-phone to his ear. The likelihood of this out-of-uniform killer’s being charged with anything is small, and of his being convicted of anything for this outrage, virtually zero.

Many white people may think that they don’t have to worry, because it’s mostly blacks and Latinos and other minorities who suffer this kind of treatment and abuse, but they are deceiving themselves. As a white guy who got plenty of cop abuse back in the ‘60s and ‘70s just for having a beard and long hair, I can assure you that when police are given a free rein, they use it against everybody except the rich white guy in a fancy suit and an expensive car, and even then, he’d better not mouth off.

There is a dangerous change in the wind, and it’s not just strip searches and random shootings of innocents by rogue cops. Police across the country, since 9-11, have morphed from public safety workers to paramilitary occupiers, and from law enforcement officers to The Law.

Consider that we have word that the Department of Homeland Security, a mega umbrella agency created in the wake of the 9-11 attacks which oversees most of the federal security apparatus, and which supplies state and local police through federal grants, along with the FBI, have purchased an astonishing 750 million rounds of ultra-deadly hollow-point bullets and 40 caliber ammo. As well, Homeland Security has reportedly purchased a large number of semi-portable steel checkpoint guardhouses, complete with high-impact bulletproof glass windows and doors.

What is an agency that is responsible not for war but for domestic security doing buying such lethal gear and structures that would clearly be used for controlling free transit?

One can only wonder. I spoke with a government flak at Homeland Security, and was told he couldn’t have an answer for me until Monday regarding those contracts.

And of course, there is also the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, signed by President Obama when nobody was looking, or even sober, on Dec. 31. That act, among other things, says that for the first time, the military can arrest people within the borders of the US, including US citizens, and allows them to be held indefinitely without trial, which is about as far from any Constitutional government and Bill of Rights as you can get.

Meanwhile, as my friend and co-author of The Case for Impeachment, Barbara Olshansky, once said, after being strip-searched repeatedly by Transportation Security Administration goons during her travels by air on business for the Center for Constitutional Rights where she was an assistant director, it might be a good idea to buy some new clean underwear, “just to make sure you look good for your next arrest.”

If he were still around to see this day, my old paddy wagon colleague Kurt Vonnegut would probably just smile wryly and say, “Hi-ho!”


Dave Lindorff is a founder of This Can’t Be Happening and a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, forthcoming from AK Press. He lives in Philadelphia.

We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

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