On Wed, Dec 16, 2020 at 06:53 PM, Michael Yates wrote: > > I wrote this 7 years ago. I thought it was pretty good then. Be curious > what newer members of this list think of it. >
IMO this is very good--"We are the 99%" I think remains, nearly a decade after OWS, a valid--if not essential--slogan. On the other hand, what I keep calling the vulgar Graeberite anarchism that pervades the basically white occupation movement surrounding BLM, while it clearly bears the stamp of OWS, appears to have degenerated into a complacent form of risky play-acting that is an obstacle to the kind of organization necessary to build an effective mass movement. The emphasis on direct action and the rejection of demands--"defund the police" IMO being a BLM thing, not a white radical thing--is a recipe for political failure, although v. Graeberism appears capable of fermenting underground for years when beaten back by the authorities I'm very worried about this impasse, especially since the election of Joe Biden seems to have taken the wind out of the sails of BLM and the nameless other radicalism that has hitherto shadowed it. The broader movement appears to be fragmenting and losing its constituency while John Kelly has appeared to stand at the head of an actual fascist movement in the US, which has until now failed to come up with a duce despite the endless cries of "fascist." If the past is any guide, the left may basically go to sleep while Biden prepares the neoliberal petard that will blow up the Democratic Party for good. Everyone says that the cult of Trump is something new since 2016, forgetting that Obama pioneered the personality cult of a president who would be whatever you wanted him to be no matter what he actually did or said. Now the great spongy mass of self-defeating Democrats--having coopted the current activist left into a lot of good little Biden-lovers--are sprinkling sand over all those suckers and trying to put them to sleep just as Obama did before. I think "We are the 99%" is still great stuff, but the dying and reviving OWS is just not enough to put it across, and IMO something has to happen on the left to turn that around within the next two years. > > > -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#4523): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/4523 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/79025554/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
