Comments on: Return of the Repressed

By: Martin

Martin — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 11:43:10 +0000

Considering the work you’ve done, I’d say you were the intellectual godfather of the Occupy movement, not Elizabeth Warren. Yet I remain an apostate of its claims for effect.
1. Just as in the 60s, there is no appreciation for the enormity of the corporate supersystem. All well and good to diagnose the social ills – but where is there the slightest sociology of the dimensions of corporate control?
2. Why always the valorization of protest? In Egypt, the brave and stupendous occupations have brought about no political change other than exchanging one tyrant for his military.
3. Fighting the police is not war. They get paid overtime, they have now been given massive funding, they get the right to prosecute, they get majority backing.
4. The left keeps functioning on vain, self-ennobling dramas of “hope” and “change,” and in America this takes on a peculiar academic exceptionalist glorification. OWS kids are not going to take over city councils and town meetings, senates nor assemblies. Getting Thomas Friedman to pen manifestos of sympathy calling for identification of politicians with their corporate sponsors means, yes, the wind has shifted, but winds blow this way and that, and the edifices are built of granite.
5. I hold the wise elders responsible for patronizing the young – you have a right to see great and glorious worldwide revolution from coming from these heavily surveilled encampments, but the underemployed college youth should also hear nihilism and pessimism – after all, which has ruled our times?

By: ccarlsson

ccarlsson — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 18:31:35 +0000

apparently the OWS Financial Committee insists that *IF* they give the money to Oakland, OccupyOakland must set up a nationwide legal defense committee with the money… There might have been some other conditions imposed too, but that’s what I heard from someone close to me who is very involved in Oakland and knows folks in NYC well…

By: Lily Shahar Kunning

Lily Shahar Kunning — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 18:08:56 +0000

Wonderful coverage as always, Chris. I too have been hoping for a widespread movement that takes its organizing lessons in practical anarchism and wondering why on earth it has taken this long.

I also did not know that OWS was withholding $. What are the conditions?

By: Allyson Steinberg

Allyson Steinberg — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 15:33:31 +0000

Thanks Chris, I did not know that OWS was withholding donations to Occupy Oakland and requiring specific uses, etc. Very fucking exciting times.