I continue to marvel at the assmunches on Google+ and elsewhere that deny that socialists and communists are at the core of the Occupy Wall Street experience. Hello! Of course they are!
Why do people deny what is obvious and true? Part of it is the old stealth-socialist tactics, of course -- deny, deny, deny. Pretend you are just "starting a national conversation" (I've been hearing them say that for decades). Pretend you are just doing "community organizing" and just "working on single issues". Old, old story, and now visible in the White House with the Radical-in-Chief, the Community-Organizer-in-Chief -- and look where that is getting us!
The premise of Schoen's survey is that Obama -- David Plouffe at the White House -- is doing the wrong thing trying to embrace the OWS gang because they are too far to the left and more extreme than most Americans are comfortable with. And he is absolutely right about that.
Most Americans, even if unhappy about "Wall Street" don't want to overthrow the government, seize other people's property in riots and revolution and install "people's soviets".
Yet these people do.
It defies the mind how the lefty blogs like Daily Kos can get away with fetishing one part of one answer "only 4 percent want radical redistribution of wealth" -- and miss the glaring, looming larger picture: *31 percent of those polled were willing to use violence to get their way".
That violence isn't being deployed to "have a national conversation" or tweak taxes on capital gains, people. That violence is designed to *radically redistribute wealth*. Like the answers to a dozen other questions that mean the same thing -- install the "progressive agenda"; put in a flat tax; overthrow congress; install direct democracy. All of these are ways and means to the same end -- radical redistribution. First, of course, they will help themselves -- all avante-gardes do!
Now, you don't have to listen to me about what OWS really is -- just listen to OWS operatives themselves!
If you don't want to hear it from me, hear it from Stephen Benavides. At first glance in the leaked emails, he seems like just a concerned labour guy from a trade union with a rather anodyne and feel-good proposal for the demands that prove so elusive for these fleabaggers, as some are calling them. Stephen Benavides is from United Steel Workers Local #9479 and North Texas Association of Public Employees. What could be more typical of a union worker in our country? "Progressive" but that's it, right? Nothing more than that, right?
Here's Stephen's agenda proposal in the leaked emails:
* Engaging in direct and transparent participatory democracy;
* Exercising personal and collective responsibility;
* Recognizing individuals’ inherent privilege and the influence it has on all interactions;
* Empowering one another against all forms of oppression;
* Redefining how labor is valued;
* The sanctity of individual privacy;
* The belief that education is human right; and
* Endeavoring to practice and support wide application of open source.
Most of this vaguely-worded stuff would be endorsable by just about anyone, left or right -- and that's the idea. But of course packed within each phrase is a canned Marxist-Leninist cant.
How do I know that? Because I look at where *else* Stephen Benavides is:
On his Facebook profile; marching on the communists' global holiday May 1st; and on Facebook pages -- Stephen is in the cult-like International Socialist Organization (ISO), the publisher of Workers' World who have flocked to these marches like flies on honey, trying to claim them as their own, and in part succeeding. Since college, when evidently he was recruited and became an enthusiastic member of the ISO, he has imbibed the comrades' line -- and now he spouts it and uses the stealth tactics.
ISO *is* a cult. Read what other socialists say about it:
All of this is par for the course in most "Marxist-Leninist" organizations. And the ISO certainly does romanticize the years of Leninism under Lenin in Russia, just as it condemns the years following Lenin's death and the eventual exile of Leon Trotsky. While the ISO might admit that "mistakes were made" by the Bolsheviks before Stalin's rise to power, they are all said to be purely the result of "objective conditions"; no basic problems with Leninist thought or practice are ever acknowledged. The ISO claims to maintain the "democratic centralist" mode of organization, in which internal debate is ostensibly unrestricted, but once the entire group votes on a particular question, all members are required to defend that position in public as the position of the group. In ISO practice, this means that dissidents must voice a "line" which they do not believe, lest they be denounced as "petit bourgeois dilettantes" by the line-enforcers. Those unable to follow the line either leave or are kicked out with due haste, hence the ISO's high membership turnover rate.
All a known quantity; all awful stuff -- the ISO has always justified the Stalin terror which is why no respectable socialist I ever knew would have anything to do with them. They have always been a sectarian outfit as well, with splits and turnover just as explained. But this is Stephen's ideological home, and he's a key organizer of OWS.
So take another look at his agenda then, through the lens of what you know ISO to be:
Now you realize "collective responsibility" is collectivism, forcing people into collectives.
Now you realize "direct and transparent participatory democracy" is just an overthrow of representative democracy by elections, and the installation by force of soviets, or organs of revolutionaries taking over the state. Transparent, sure -- transparent Bolshevism.
Redefining how labour is valued? Um, the labour theory of value a la Marx, or what, comrades? Free health care -- sure, we get that. And, surprise, surprise, open source.
Empower one another in all forms of oppression to do...what? Follow the hardcore agenda of ISO.
But this is a day at the beach compared to some of what else is there at the OWS.
I really had to goggle at this gal named Jodi Dean in Geneva, NY (Hobart College, active in the APSA, with a decidedly mixed rating noted for her bias) -- Geneva, NY is near where I grew up as a child, in Penn Yan, NY (for us, going to Geneva was going to the "big city" where they had a shopping mall LOL). It's funny to me to see this college where teachers who grew up on farms or vineyards went to in order to staff our country schools now sporting a wild-eyed communist like that of the sort that even would embarass the Soviet Union where I studied.
Jodi isn't just a fangirl of Zizek, the Soviet Who Got Left Behind after the collapse of the USSR. She pushes him even further. She's written 10 books! Mon Dieux! Count the silverware!
Because she wants to take people's stuff -- and use violence to right the wrongs that she thinks exist in society -- as seen from her bucolic Finger Lakes Region podunk college.
You can see it in the film where she is speaking about her new book, The Communist Horizon, which is a curious American Ostalgie: ""Communism didn't end in 1989. Instead, the communist horizon is our horizon," she intones.
But let's go over to see her with a group of other lefties -- anarchists, socialists, communists, clueless hangers-on, in a meeting at the radical leftist New York bookstore Bluestockings, where there is a debate about OWS with some of the OWS operatives and the editor of an obscure lefty online magazine called Jacobin -- I guess they believe in the guillotine?
This is two hours of your life you'll never get back, but I listened while I did some other chores and here are my notes. You can see the list of panelists at this link -- I'm not going to take the time to identify who said what -- what's important to look at are the ideas:
"engage with the state and ultimately take it over" -- says the young lads. For all the world, these nerdy short guys with the crinkly hair and heavy glasses look like 1950s beatniks. But they are in earnest about their anacho-socialist agenda.
"over half the population supports it" claims OWS -- yet that's simply not true. The Daily News poll shows 6 percent support it and 94 percent don't. I don't see any credible poll finding *half* supporting it -- and if they knew that supporting OWS mean supporting radical revolution -- they wouldn't. The poll that finds *New Yorkers* supporting it in the amount of 67 percent has to take into consideration that New Yorkers are far more liberal, and vote predominantly Democracy, than many other areas of the country.
A young man says OWS is a "Rorshach blot". I'll say. The liberal media is particularly adept at pretending to see a mass, mainstream movement in this collection of oddballs, goofs and hardcore socialist operatives.
"A huge percent describe themselves as anarchists," says OWS.
But...they have a debate. "Take over state or not?" Well, gosh. Let's hope they just keep talking. We don't need these people taking over the state! Maybe they will get drunk, hungry, and lice-ridden like Guy Debord and friends in 1968 and...go home.
Now Jodi rises up -- and I'll identify her here because she's definitely the most ominous of the bunch -- and she rebels against the younger participants in OWS saying "I can only speak for myself." This was something I heard them say too. They've internalized this from the cadres who are trying to keep it pretend-fluid. But Jodi, with all the directness that provincial Upstate New York can bring to this task, says "it hurts understanding collectivism" when you say "I can only speak for myself."
Sigh.
She lays out her vision of OSW as the "opening of a collective space and a collective venture"
Exactly. What I've been saying all along. Bureaucratic-collectivist start-up -- a venture that even has its first round of funding (Should we call it series-C for communism?) from venture communists.
"As long as people speak in these individualist terms, that collective side of it gets lost," says Jodi. I'll say!
"post structuralist thought"
"the miracle of what's going on"
"The creation of a collectivity"
"Come to discuss the potential of communism as the contemporary name for left political and economic aspiration. What possibilities does it 0pen up? What aspects of our current conjunction
suggest the continued force of communism as a universal and egalitarian ideal?"
"3 branches of government and parliamentary democracy are all to blame for our problems, they
prevent radical democracy democracy cannot achieve equality; Obama a "crazy deception"
denounces "self-organizing" of anarchism; raising chicken is "nice community things" that
don't change the system; pre-17th century -- stuck in small agrarian communities
no airplanes or vaccines
larger attack on state for 30 years -- neoliberalism
"centralized planning is wrong"
fetishizing of rights
the loss of communism as a shared vocabulary
not old-style authoritarian Bolshevik but not so loose they can't accomplish anything
"take over the state and change things"
"same process anarchists have used for years, and finally working"
"journal article on socialism, union marches, nonprofits, all far less threatening to state than occupation -- occupation as tactic -- came from ultra left communists writing "occupy everything" "demand nothing" comes from this tradition and it's working
Interesting -- the OWS say that "occupy everything" came from ultra-leftists at the University of California
But...disagreement on this take about the origins
"sit down strike invented by unionists decades ago, not just kids in UCLA"
"tactical victory piles up and in the end you have a revo -- but I just don't see it
"undermine neoliberal ideological hegemony"
"powers that be are everywhere and all our coded relations" -- Natasha Lennard -- ah, and a word on this gal. The OWS propagandists have made huge hay over the notion that "A New York Times reporter was even arrested" as part of their shtick about the "evil brutal police".
But she isn't a New York Times reporter, as in a full-time credentialed staff person. She's a freelancer who has never written anything for the Times except 3 articles on the occupation. Before that she was at Politico and Salon (surprise, surprise). Perhaps she was too far out for them. She likes to say "fuck" a lot and speaks in a British accent so that has most of the young men in the room staring at her mouth in awe. But she's spouting arrant anarchist bolshie clap-trap. I marvel that the Times could keep her on this assignment when she is so biased -- they don't have any reporters that can cover this without also *instigating it*?! Because *instigating it* is exactly what she is doing, and now I see if she got arrested, it wasn't by accident because she was a journalist covering it -- she is definitely not playing that role AT ALL -- it's because she went in the road and occupied the bridge as a political act.
Jodi again -- "Food, water, transportation are "common" not controlled by the market
"a set of spheres that are common" -- so that's how she gets to communism in our lives by declaring that certain goods that are public are somehow communalized.
people want jobs -- don't want a Foucaltian experience, someone comments sagely.
"How do you know what they want you aren't talking to them"
"Take the banker out of his fucking tower and string him up in the public square"
(Gosh, that's awful)
"Not just lefties but 99 percent"
"a directly antagonistic movement"
"capital can't do it any more, capital can't accommodate everyone, it's broken, coding people and telling them to fall in line; politics needs division" -- Jodi again, instructing the workers.
"some kind of common system"
"some ONE you're again not just some THING" -- introduce that class hatred and personalize it Jodi, go, go, go!
Appropriately, someone now raises the problem of the "leading vanguard". Given that Jodi is trying to play that role of educating and instructing the workers, it's inevitable. Can we have a social movement without hardened cadres who "know better" run it, as we've had for the last 50-100 years?
Guess not.
"The movement is better off pushing in a communist direction"
Sigh.
An older woman, a lefty, gets up and tries to say it simpler:
"we want to participate in decisions that affect our lives"
"what is the state"?
"what kind of relations constitute the state"
"separated, alienated we"
She seems to be saying that we shouldn't see the state as somehow unapproachable and unoccupiable, because anyone of us can demand to participate in it.
Not so Jodi.
Here's the money quote:
"Rich guy capitalist, you don't agree, so we have to take your stuff."
Paging Fred Wilson. You want this gal from an upstate college to come take your stuff?!
There's some discussion then as to whether college should be free. Should that be a demand?
"Free college is a reading room in a prison," says Jodi.
"what we really don't want is capitalism itself"
"I would love to see some sort of revolution," says somebody.
"How to scale that up," asks the business observer dude.
Some younger ones begin to question. Be in assemblies endlessly?
"you have to be managing everything all the time...all the risk is on you...I don't want to do that"
You see how totalitarianism happens when you hear a young man cry like that, whining that he has to make decisions and shoulder responsibilities. It's actually a good thing to "manage everything all the time" and have "all the risk on you". But he wants cradle-to-grave socialism, like I guess all "mass man" supposedly want - except not in this country.
How did he get this way? Short answer: Mom working, Dad unavailable, raised on the Internet.
And here the OWS operative tells you like it is. So you don't have to hear it from me:
"it's a small group of people who are doing it"
"the same guy who in every article is quoted"
"it's a small group making all the decisions"
"the GA just go along with whatever"
Exactly!
"if we do overthrow something and have to get organized.. then what?
"spokescouncil"
"anarchists brought "a charge" to the movement that the old left hasn't -- all the energy comes from
the anarchists; anarchists are incredibly condescending to old leftists for reasons that seem insipid or impatient"
"We're all comrades, right?"
"all about the practice, all about the site, all about the process"
"real-time
anarchist gets up to talk and says frankly -- "I don't want to take over the state, but smash it utterly"
Critique of Wisconsin:
"trade union bureaucrats didn't call a general strike"
"but instead focused on getting Democrats elected"
Now, some soul-searching:
"what happens when the occupation ends"
"when tumult and shouting of ecstatic moment dies; who calls future mobilization"
young man who admires Frances Fox Piven (but don't tell Glenn Beck that!)
How to keep OWS going? He's confident he can do it with "a week's worth of recruiting at Brooklyn College"
Others groan at the word "recruitment".
"is outreach a better world," he says. "go to institutions where people are located"
"I will not reveal what I am," Ms. Transparency and Accountability says from the back of the room *chuckles*. But she's fairly coherent.
"stop philosophizing," she tells everyone.
"allow for productive disagreements so movement can reflect upon its actions"
"the idea that representative democracy is authoritarian -- no, it's not an authoritarian system,
cops coming in and arresting us is authoritarian" -- that from the helpful and smart older socialist who has at least some common sense
"not everything is friendly" -- says somebody about OWS. I'll say. A guy started rebelling at all this "people of colour" stuff by insisting that he, as a white man, was a person of colour too, and that they needed to end this obsession with skin colour and just come together. EVERYBODY groaned and booed him -- so hidebound are they in the politically-correct identity politics.
"We want the commons and we want to run things collectively...but we don't have people who want
that yet"
Um, no, kids, you don't.
"to manage a commons collectively"
"insurrection hard left and communists demands have not been made that alienate either group
"reorganizing society communally" (euphemism of the above)
NYT Natasha now rants about "New Labor/Clinton type of PR"
Someone asks -- look these are all socialist aims -- extremists -- an agenda
but...how to get the center involved?
Suggestion (from me): er, drop all this Marxist-Leninist bullshit, maybe?
"point was to get the center -- awakened consciousness"
"convince that system is broken"
"spokes on a wheel, not spokesperson"
"left is boring," says a young man. You got that right!
Jodi brings them back to the main point: "are there going to be more actions that are violent"
"has there been any?"
What's communism without violence!
There hasn't been any violence yet, but is it necessary? she asks rhetorically.
There are possible outcomes, she explains:
-- inviting cop violence
-- doing some kinds of violence -- provocation,
--destruction of property
-- keep non-violence and work with moveon.org
-- work with democratic party
"but...why divide? Can't the movement have all of it going on at once?"
"It might take actions against property so people don't get bored with it"
"more friendly toward differences"
"first nations critique -- on occupied line"
"tone at OWS less argumentative"
"don't believe in the premature reconciliation of differences" -- says an old socialist hack.
OWS participant explains:
lack of demands:
o allows more to come together
o prevents cooptation by Democrats
"opened up a new possibility in the world that we didn't see 2 years ago" says Jodi.
The greed -- the terrible greed -- of these people with their sectarian, hateful views. They can't wait to take power. They can't wait to smash stuff. They can't wait to take people's stuff.
Bolsheviks. And you don't need me to tell you this. Just listen to them talk themselves.
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