The Occupation of Wall Street Spreads

Simon_Jester · Post by **Simon_Jester** » 2011-10-16 07:19pm

I'd argue that it was all one- the anarchists and communists were fighting for better working conditions at the same time that others struggled non-violently. Antagonisms between rich and poor, rural and urban, and so on expressed themselves both violently and non-violently, just as in the 1960s.

Post by **K. A. Pital** » 2011-10-17 03:48am

Samuel's definition of "peaceful struggle" must be "anything short of a real civil war where millions die", apparently.

Samuel · Post by **Samuel** » 2011-10-17 03:05pm

I was refering to the progressive movement, which managed to get change without violence, not the entire era. Please, read my posts.

I didn't count the labor movement because it is much longer term (Bakustra's claim for example is that it still hasn't succeeded) so I wasn't going to count it as successful policy change.

Simon_Jester · Post by **Simon_Jester** » 2011-10-17 04:04pm

Samuel wrote:I was refering to the progressive movement, which managed to get change without violence, not the entire era. Please, read my posts.

I didn't count the labor movement because it is much longer term (Bakustra's claim for example is that it still hasn't succeeded) so I wasn't going to count it as successful policy change.

But the progressive movement was tied to the labor movement; there was massive overlap between the two movements, with many prominent figures in one being important in the other. People alive at the time did not perceive some kind of wall of separation between the two; most historians today don't either. Why do you?

Post by **K. A. Pital** » 2011-10-17 04:23pm

That separation sounds pretty artificial to me. It reeks of the idea that those labouring peons were unable to get anything done without some technocrats in white gloves who just came and gave them it all for no reason but the goodness of their heart and the purity of their mind's desires. That's strange.

Besides, even if those were two different movements, that doesn't detract from my point: non-violent resistance usually has greater success when there is a violent counterpart to it which makes the threat real.

Post by **Broomstick** » 2011-10-17 05:26pm

Simon_Jester wrote:But the progressive movement was tied to the labor movement; there was massive overlap between the two movements, with many prominent figures in one being important in the other. People alive at the time did not perceive some kind of wall of separation between the two; most historians today don't either. Why do you?

Probably because that is often the way it is taught in US public schools.

If you think about it, the powers-that-be have an interest in emphasizing historical non-violent protests, including overemphasizing their influence, and downplaying, minimizing, and even completely ignoring the more violent movements.

Edited to fix the damned coding

Coop D'etat · Post by **Coop D'etat** » 2011-10-17 06:07pm

Broomstick wrote:
Simon_Jester wrote:But the progressive movement was tied to the labor movement; there was massive overlap between the two movements, with many prominent figures in one being important in the other. People alive at the time did not perceive some kind of wall of separation between the two; most historians today don't either. Why do you?
Probably because that is often the way it is taught in US public schools.

If you think about it, the powers-that-be have an interest in emphasizing historical non-violent protests, including overemphasizing their influence, and downplaying, minimizing, and even completely ignoring the more violent movements.

Edited to fix the damned coding

The powers that be also have a strong incentive to emphasis the idea that change comes from the acts of "great men" and leaders leading rather than them being politicians pushed by the demands of an interested populace.

Samuel · Post by **Samuel** » 2011-10-17 07:49pm

Simon_Jester wrote:
Samuel wrote:I was refering to the progressive movement, which managed to get change without violence, not the entire era. Please, read my posts.

I didn't count the labor movement because it is much longer term (Bakustra's claim for example is that it still hasn't succeeded) so I wasn't going to count it as successful policy change.
But the progressive movement was tied to the labor movement; there was massive overlap between the two movements, with many prominent figures in one being important in the other. People alive at the time did not perceive some kind of wall of separation between the two; most historians today don't either. Why do you?

Because I view the labor movement as something that existed for most of US history, not just a couple decades and something that goes back and forth. American labor managed to make gains... was turned back, made gains, turned back, etc.

CrateriaA · Post by **CrateriaA** » 2011-10-17 07:57pm

One book I recently read called "The Big Squeeze" that detailed the hardships for the modern US worker. One of the reasons they said the corporations wanted less regulations (that came to fruition during the 80s) was due to a view of the 1940s-1970s worker having too many privileges which somehow caused problems for the economy and wanted to essentially treat them as little more than serfs so to maximize profit under their insane neoliberal mindset.

EDIT: I forgot to include the Digital Revolution and the massive layoffs that ensued as compies could do the job without having to pay them.

D.Turtle · Post by **D.Turtle** » 2011-10-17 08:25pm

Samuel wrote:Because I view the labor movement as something that existed for most of US history, not just a couple decades and something that goes back and forth. American labor managed to make gains... was turned back, made gains, turned back, etc.

Wait a second - didn't the labor movement just really get started in the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century? Pretty much exactly the time the progressive movement took place?

What labor movement was there before the progressive era?

Samuel · Post by **Samuel** » 2011-10-17 10:11pm

D.Turtle wrote:
Samuel wrote:Because I view the labor movement as something that existed for most of US history, not just a couple decades and something that goes back and forth. American labor managed to make gains... was turned back, made gains, turned back, etc.
Wait a second - didn't the labor movement just really get started in the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century? Pretty much exactly the time the progressive movement took place?

What labor movement was there before the progressive era?

I'm not saying the labor movement existed before the progressive movement. I'm saying the labor movement continued to exist and fight long after the progressive movement was spent and continues into the present.

Simon_Jester · Post by **Simon_Jester** » 2011-10-17 10:43pm

Yes, but the movement can be divided into distinct phases- the goals and tactics of the 1880s were quite different from those of the 1930s, the 1960s, or the 1990s.

thejester · Post by **thejester** » 2011-10-18 01:36am

Not sure if anyone else has seen this, but thought it was an interesting commentary on the movement:

The intellectual roots of the Wall Street Occupation:

The movement has repeatedly been described as too diffuse and decentralized to accomplish real change, and some observers have seen the appearances by academic luminaries as an attempt to lend the protest intellectual heft and direction. Certainly, its intellectual underpinnings and signature method of operating are easier to identify than its goals.

Economists whose recent works have decried income inequality have informed the movement's critiques of capitalism. Critical theorists like Michael Hardt, professor of literature at Duke University, and Antonio Negri, former professor of political science at the University of Padua, have anticipated some of the central issues raised by the protests. Most recently, they linked the actions in New York and other American cities to previous demonstrations in Spain, Cairo's Tahrir Square, and in Athens, among other places.

But Occupy Wall Street's most defining characteristics—its decentralized nature and its intensive process of participatory, consensus-based decision-making are rooted in other precincts of academe and activism: in the scholarship of anarchism and, specifically, in an ethnography of central Madagascar.

Eulogy · Post by **Eulogy** » 2011-10-18 01:58am

So OWS is like Anonymous? That will really make it hard for rich sociopaths and their thugs to strangle them, but I am leery of their current course. They need to really define their objectives and target the right problems or they won't go anywhere (pun not intended).

Simon_Jester · Post by **Simon_Jester** » 2011-10-18 02:04am

It's not that simple, Eulogy. The argument is that the protestors are in some respects self-organizing, as a response to attempts to deny them the power and right to organize- they organize their own improvised public address systems when not allowed to set up their own, for example.

It's not that the members are "anonymous" or that it would be especially helpful if they were. It's that they're taking pages out of some unconventional playbooks, or so it seems at first. I suspect that the movement's organization and goals will become much clearer after it's lasted a while; at the moment, the world is still adjusting its collective brain to grasp the fact that they exist at all.

Post by **K. A. Pital** » 2011-10-18 05:13am

A successful resistance movement in a world where police provokes and keeps tabs on people and shit MUST resemble Anonymous in some fashion; it must merge with Anonymous in fact. It must be mask-covered people, lest they flash their faces in front of the police, it must be decentralized decision-making because guess what, the police and special services learned to infiltrate and annihilate popular movements over the course of the XX century by discrediting or striking against their leadership and decapitating the organization, after seeing a wave of revolutions and seeking to find the means to combat them.

Such are the cards. I think that people with faces hiddden carrying V masks are the future.

Stravo · Post by **Stravo** » 2011-10-18 10:03am

Stas Bush wrote:Such are the cards. I think that people with faces hiddden carrying V masks are the future.

I disagree. Martin Luther King and Civil Rights leaders didn't wear masks, Gandhi didn't wear a mask and no one in the Tea Party (rightly or wrongly that movement won a right to sit at the table) wore masks...granted some dangled tea bags on their heads but no masks. Masks are the mark of a coward, someone trying to hide something. You can't get the general populace to rally around people who dress like crooks or bank robbers.

D.Turtle · Post by **D.Turtle** » 2011-10-18 11:03am

In addition, the vast majority of protesters aren't wearing masks. They simply aren't needed.

Post by **K. A. Pital** » 2011-10-18 11:12am

Stravo wrote:
Stas Bush wrote:Such are the cards. I think that people with faces hiddden carrying V masks are the future.
I disagree. Martin Luther King and Civil Rights leaders didn't wear masks, Gandhi didn't wear a mask and no one in the Tea Party (rightly or wrongly that movement won a right to sit at the table) wore masks...granted some dangled tea bags on their heads but no masks. Masks are the mark of a coward, someone trying to hide something. You can't get the general populace to rally around people who dress like crooks or bank robbers.

MLK got killed in the end and Ghandi succeeded while Ullaskar Dutt and thousands of anti-colonial warriors like him were tortured in the Andamans.

I understand where you're coming from but oligarchies learn on past mistakes and charismatic wide-scale centralized popular movements that rally around one figure are now hard to forge. Even harder to make them achieve some concrete goal.

OWS suffers from the same plight but at least some key members take issue in the protection of their identity. To brave yourself is only acceptable in the First World and even here it gets less and less acceptable. As for why, let me say one thing - that's a personal experience, but the First World "police agencies" are not to be trusted, never, by any protest movement. Never.

D.Turtle · Post by **D.Turtle** » 2011-10-18 11:30am

I don't know where you are getting your information, but it is simply wrong. The only people running around in those god-awful V masks are "Anonymous" fanboys/members. The vast majority - including all the organizers, leaders, etc - are not wearing any masks.

Post by **K. A. Pital** » 2011-10-18 11:39am

D.Turtle wrote:I don't know where you are getting your information, but it is simply wrong. The only people running around in those god-awful V masks are "Anonymous" fanboys/members. The vast majority - including all the organizers, leaders, etc - are not wearing any masks.

I'm not sure I find the masks "god-awful" and I'm sure I saw other masks beside the Anon ones. I saw people in Scream masks, etc. all sorts of masks. Of course, not like 100% of the people wear masks. Which indeed would be pretty stupid. But some do.

You want to ask my opinion? I see no reason to flash my real identity to whatever law enforcement agency there is in any nation. I've seen too much happening to people to be sure that I can just walk out with my face in the open. It is a personal thing. Maybe you're right and I'm just being paranoid. But I'm not paranoid without a reason.

Shroom Man 777 · Post by **Shroom Man 777** » 2011-10-18 12:12pm

The Anonymous masks were because they were protesting Scientologists and it was precisely because they wanted to avoid litigation or harassment from the Scientologists' powerful legal apparatus. You even had Scientologists trying to rip the masks off the protesters.

I for one can understand the need for anonymity due to threats from the establishment. But then again, I'm not from a comfortable well-to-do nation where everything is all "civilized".

Samuel · Post by **Samuel** » 2011-10-18 12:17pm

I think a bigger problem than the government cracking down on you is your image getting up on the internet and employers not hiring you because you're anti-establishment. Something tells me the man does not like employing people who rage against the man.

Simon_Jester · Post by **Simon_Jester** » 2011-10-18 01:40pm

Although we can see problems like this in Britain. In the recent riots, you had huge numbers of people being caught on the ubiquitous surveillance networks in London and arrested for looting days after the fact. If a crackdown on a protest movement occurs, that could easily happen to demonstrators occupying Wall Street or any other place, if their faces are a matter of record. Modern technology makes this very easy to do, whereas once upon a time you would need a small army of spies to keep tabs on all the members of a group and be sure of recognizing them on sight.

As to whether a crackdown on a protest movement in the US is likely, that is very hard to estimate. People with faith in the basic constitutional health of American democracy would consider it impossible.

People who are thinking about this in a more global context, remembering all the countries that have nominal freedom of assembly but where the government ignores the freedom of assembly whenever it's inconvenient, may not agree.

Likewise people who (like Stas) believe, not entirely without support, that when a capitalist economic oligarchy's political power is threatened by a mass movement, they can and will cast aside the pretense of democracy. This belief is not new, and not unjustified when we look at what's happened in countries like Spain and Chile over the years, with anti-communist governments coming into power via a coup and staging bloody crackdowns as soon as the far left threatens to make large gains.

Stas could probably quote The Iron Heel at more length than in his sig, to illustrate that people have been worrying about this possibility for more than a hundred years. Jack London didn't just write stories about dogs in the Arctic, you see...

And of course anyone, even one confident in the basic strength of the American constitution, might worry about private employers and whatnot.

D.Turtle · Post by **D.Turtle** » 2011-10-18 02:03pm

All this theoretical argument about masks, etc misses the point: Masks are not a defining or even large part of the Occupy movement.

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