as most post modern americans i am a frequent visiter of facebook. i discovered the OWS protests not through any media outlets, but from a single post from one of my "friends". immediately i knew that it was not what it seemed. the crowds of wrinkle-free, long-haired, disheveled nouveau hippies were not just out there because they didn't want to pay their college loans - although, that is most certainly part of it - they want a revolution. they are outspoken opponents of capitalism. they lay the blame for our current situation clearly at the feet of wall street, big banks & evil corporations. the words of the protesters looked eerily familiar, as if i'd read them before.
my curiousity was aroused. i went to the official site and read a small blurb explaining the aim of the movement.
"Occupy Wall Street is leaderless resistance movement with people of many colors, genders and political persuasions. The one thing we all have in common is that We Are The 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%. We are using the revolutionary Arab Spring tactic to achieve our ends and encourage the use of nonviolence to maximize the safety of all participants."
huh, arab spring, eh? wonder what they're all about?
"The Arab Spring (Arabic: الربيع العربي; also known as the Arabic Rebellions or the Arab Revolutions) is a revolutionary wave of demonstrations and protests occurring in the Arab world. Since 18 December 2010 there have been revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt; a civil war in Libya resulting in the fall of its regime; civil uprisings in Bahrain, Syria, and Yemen; major protests in Israel, Algeria, Iraq, Jordan, Morocco, and Oman, and minor protests in Kuwait, Lebanon, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Western Sahara. Clashes at the borders of Israel in May 2011 have also been inspired by the regional Arab Spring.
The protests have shared techniques of civil resistance in sustained campaigns involving strikes, demonstrations, marches and rallies, as well as the use of social media to organize, communicate, and raise awareness..."
i just read the wiki page, i figured the official arab spring site was only in arabic. still curious, i looked up "technics of civil resistance".
"The term civil resistance, alongside the term nonviolent resistance, is used to describe political action that relies on the use of non-violent methods by civil groups to challenge a particular power, force, policy or regime. Civil resistance operates through appeals to the adversary, pressure and coercion: it can involve systematic attempts to undermine the adversary's sources of power. Forms of action have included demonstrations, vigils and petitions; strikes, go-slows, boycotts and emigration movements; and sit-ins, occupations, and the creation of parallel institutions of government. Civil resistance movements' motivations for avoiding violence are generally related to context, including a society's values and its experience of war and violence, rather than to any absolute ethical principle. Cases of civil resistance can be found throughout history and in many modern struggles, against both tyrannical rulers and democratically elected governments. The phenomenon of civil resistance is often associated with the advancement of democracy."
non-violent force, protests & revolution. these are reoccurring descriptive terms that are a common thread so far. by the way, isn't non-violent force a oxymoron?
i continued to study this movement. the OWS site had a link to "a call to action."
A Modest Call to Action on this September 17th
Posted Sept. 17, 2011, 9:46 p.m. EST by OccupyWallSt
"This statement is ours, and for anyone who will get behind it. Representing ourselves (not the movement as a whole), we bring this call for revolution.
We want freedom for all, without regards for identity, because we are all people, and because no other reason should be needed. However, this freedom has been largely taken from the people, and slowly made to trickle down, whenever we get angry.
Money, it has been said, has taken over politics. In truth, we say, money has always been part of the capitalist political system. A system based on the existence of have and have nots, where inequality is inherent to the system, will inevitably lead to a situation where the haves find a way to rule, whether by the sword or by the dollar.
We agree that we need to see election reform. However, the election reform proposed ignores the causes which allowed such a system to happen. Some will readily blame the federal reserve, but the political system has been beholden to political machinations of the wealthy well before its founding.
We need to address the core facts: these corporations, even if they were unable to compete in the electoral arena, would still remain control of society. They would retain economic control, which would allow them to retain political control. Term limits would, again, not solve this, as many in the political class already leave politics to find themselves as part of the corporate elites.
We need to retake the freedom that has been stolen from the people, altogether.
If you agree that freedom is the right to communicate, to live, to be, to go, to love, to do what you will without the impositions of others, then you might be one of us.
If you agree that a person is entitled to the sweat of their brows, that being talented at management should not entitle others to act like overseers and overlords, that all workers should have the right to engage in decisions, democratically, then you might be one of us.
If you agree that freedom for some is not the same as freedom for all, and that freedom for all is the only true freedom, then you might be one of us.
If you agree that power is not right, that life trumps property, then you might be one of us.
If you agree that state and corporation are merely two sides of the same oppressive power structure, if you realize how media distorts things to preserve it, how it pits the people against the people to remain in power, then you might be one of us.
And so we call on people to act
We call for protests to remain active in the cities. Those already there, to grow, to organize, to raise consciousnesses, for those cities where there are no protests, for protests to organize and disrupt the system.
We call for workers to not only strike, but seize their workplaces collectively, and to organize them democratically. We call for students and teachers to act together, to teach democracy, not merely the teachers to the students, but the students to the teachers. To seize the classrooms and free minds together.
We call for the unemployed to volunteer, to learn, to teach, to use what skills they have to support themselves as part of the revolting people as a community.
We call for the organization of people's assemblies in every city, every public square, every township.
We call for the seizure and use of abandoned buildings, of abandoned land, of every property seized and abandoned by speculators, for the people, for every group that will organize them.
We call for a revolution of the mind as well as the body politic."
the picture was beginning to get clearer: take, seize, control, protest, act, power. this movement has a clear agenda and it is revolution. as a christian, i wondered why, if these people have access to enough contributors to maintain an ongoing protest for over a month, why didn't they begin raising money through charity & good will, to give to those who they say are the 99%? why was their time occupied with protest? the answer is, power. political power is the aim of this movement.
so intrigued was i at this point that i ran to my bookshelf and pulled down a few books. books that i thought might contain similar calls to action. i quoted the original marxist call to action in my last post. but, it bears repeating, this time the whole final chapter: Chapter IV. Position of the Communists in Relation to the Various Existing Opposition Parties
"Section II has made clear the relations of the Communists to the existing working-class parties, such as the Chartists in England and the Agrarian Reformers in America.
The Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class; but in the movement of the present, they also represent and take care of the future of that movement. In France, the Communists ally with the Social-Democrats against the conservative and radical bourgeoisie, reserving, however, the right to take up a critical position in regard to phases and illusions traditionally handed down from the great Revolution.
In Switzerland, they support the Radicals, without losing sight of the fact that this party consists of antagonistic elements, partly of Democratic Socialists, in the French sense, partly of radical bourgeois.
In Poland, they support the party that insists on an agrarian revolution as the prime condition for national emancipation, that party which fomented the insurrection of Cracow in 1846.
In Germany, they fight with the bourgeoisie whenever it acts in a revolutionary way, against the absolute monarchy, the feudal squirearchy, and the petty bourgeoisie.
But they never cease, for a single instant, to instill into the working class the clearest possible recognition of the hostile antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat (this is what right wing rhetoric calls advancing cultural warfare), in order that the German workers may straightway use, as so many weapons against the bourgeoisie, the social and political conditions that the bourgeoisie must necessarily introduce along with its supremacy, and in order that, after the fall of the reactionary classes in Germany, the fight against the bourgeoisie itself may immediately begin.
The Communists turn their attention chiefly to Germany, because that country is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution that is bound to be carried out under more advanced conditions of European civilisation and with a much more developed proletariat than that of England was in the seventeenth, and France in the eighteenth century, and because the bourgeois revolution in Germany will be but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution.
In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things.
In all these movements, they bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time.
Finally, they labour everywhere for the union and agreement of the democratic parties of all countries.
The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.
Working Men of All Countries, Unite!"
i have to ask again, does this sound familiar?
in just a quick glance through one of my favourite books from one of my favourite writers; modern times by paul johnson, i came across a description of lenin in the years of the bolshevik revolution.
"certainly politics now obsessed him, then and for ever, and his approach was always cerebral rather than emotional...aged twenty two he dissuaded friends from collecting money for victims of a famine, on the grounds that hunger 'performs a progressive function' and would 'cause the peasants to reflect on the fundamental facts of capitalist society'."
so, instead of contributing money, food, clothes & time toward helping to meet the needs of those who are - in the words of our current revolutionaries - the 99%, it was politically expedient to allow them to hunger. why? because, to a revolutionary, the revolution is more important than the humans for which it claims to be concerned.
returning now to my original motivation for writing today, the target of today's, OWS protest: the homes of the bank owners. this will fail as it always has. the ultra-rich have enough money to insulate themselves from these kinds of attacks. the thing about it is, the protesters know this. if not, the organizers of the protest know it. that is why they will eventually turn on the petit bourgeois, those wannabes who consort with the enemy in hopes of eating the scraps from the table. i call, BULLSHIT.
as i said when i first started this post, i LOVE my life. there is nothing that would make me screw up what i have, ESPECIALLY, some misguided revolutionary wannabes fresh out of college who don't have enough peach fuzz to cover a small shriveled grape!
i truly hope the time never comes that i have to defend myself against a group of unorganized neo-revolitionaries. but, if they decide to continue on this quixotic quest, i can envision bad things happening.
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