Friday, April 13, 2012

Wow, Occupy Warns on the Co-Opting of the Movement by the 'Old Left' and Obama

From Adbusters, the organization that launched the Occupy movement:
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
I'm not sure what this is about. The Occupy movement appears to be a very confused group, though distancing itself from the Old Left and Obama are promising signs (unless it is done for strictly tactical reasons). The point remains that the movement appears to be anti-everything. There is a lot to be anti about these days, so by accident Occupy will be anti some things that should be ended. Overall, though, Occupy is a wacky movement that appears to have no well defined principles or goals.

2 comments:

  1. "The inflated verbiage of these adolescents was only a poor disguise for their lack of any ideas and of any definite program. They had nothing to say but this: We are young and therefore chosen; we are ingenious because we are young; we are the carriers of the future; we are the deadly foes of the rotten bourgeois and Philistines. And if somebody was not afraid to ask them what their plans were, they knew only one answer: Our leaders will solve all problems.

    "It has always been the task of the new generation to provoke changes. But the characteristic feature of the youth movement was that they had neither new ideas nor plans. They called their action the youth movement precisely because they lacked any program which they could use to give a name to their endeavors. In fact they espoused entirely the program of their parents. They did not oppose the trend toward government omnipotence and bureaucratization. Their revolutionary radicalism was nothing but the impudence of the years between boyhood and manhood; it was a phenomenon of a protracted puberty. It was void of any ideological content." - Bureaucracy, 1944, Ludwig Von Mises.

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  2. I think that they're just trying to get more people to hop on board. Once they get the people, it will be business as usual. Kind of like the Tea Party talked about high taxes, intrusive government, ending the Fed, etc. Only to reveal itself as a statist movement. I know, I know. When the TP started it was grassroots, and it was co-opted. I was there, I remember. However, even after it was co-opted it was still sold as a liberty movement, which is obviously horse shit.

    It's all the same tactics that were used in the 60s and many other times in history. Keep the people divided and fighting amongst each other so that they never get a chance to really pull together to see and take on the real threat-- the state.

    I know, I sound like a whacko to many people. I don't care. After having been to war, traveled the world, studied economics, history and philosophy, seen the lies first hand, etc; it is like a switch has been turned in my mind. Once that switch has been turned, there is no going back.

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