Government has finally abandoned the public interest for good, Kirkland says. He sees little potential for taking it back.
It’s now “about building self-sufficient communities that can support themselves without the government,” he said. “It’s no longer political. It’s social.
The Occupy movement, Kirkland says, teaches people how to cope with the absence of government. As social programs, school offerings and health and pension benefits get cut, working-class people will have to learn to take charge of their own communities.
Because of the movement, “they’ll be prepared for when there is no government to serve them,” he said.
Kirkland and Seidewitz do not agree with notions in the mainstream media that the Occupy Wall Street movement has died out.
“The parks were magical,” said Seidewitz, “but they served as a place where we all met each other.”
The encampments were educational. They helped people build connections and form social groups. But camping in a park and talking to like-minded people, she said, can only do so much.truthdig
“It’s now about creating alternative media sources, which is easier to do now that we have all these connections,” she said. “We’ve all woken up. So it’s not about a park anymore.”
One Year Later: Lessons Learned From Occupy Wall Street
Thomas Hedges, Center for Study of Responsive Law
3 comments:
That might be what is happening to the American movement, since decades of capitalist brainwashing have left disaffected young Americans with tremendous ambivalence and emotional conflicts about embracing and fighting for the most obvious and straightforward left political solutions to the onslaught of rampaging American capitalism. But my sense is that in Quebec and Spain and elsewhere, there is now more coherence and more potential for effective political change in the resistance movement. I think Americans will come around as they continue to read, ponder and engage with the global movement - and realize what the only real options are.
The world we live in now is too small, too interconnected and too globally imperiled to allow for local, countercultural alt-community solutions. The global capitalist monster has its jaws open and is poised to devour us and our children and grandchildren. It's destroying our planet, taking over our colleges and universities, dismantling governments and democratic communities and purchasing their assets. There is no escape from it; no hiding from it; no encampment in the forest that it will leave out of the campaign of pillage. It's fight or die.
They are fighting in the street in some places like Greece and Spain but that is because it has become existential for them. Not so for that many in the US yet.
While I stayed somewhat active politically after the Seventies, I realized back then that waiting for change was very likely going end up in my waiting for the rest of the my life. Not only that I preferred the alternative lifestyle. So I got on board with the alternatives countercultural thing as a "career choice" and never looked back. Never regretted making that choice.
But it was not that big a jump for me, since I had always been attracted to a "bohemian" lifestyle, and although I had pursued a "normal" route growing up, that's where I hung out and when it had come time to make choices I gravitated closer and closer to a more artistic path than traditional, somewhat to the dismay of my parents, as it got further from the track that they have envisioned for me. But they supported me when they were convinced that I had thought it through, for which I am grateful. Others had a whole of lot opposition, and it was much harder for them.
But that was then, and the situation has changed rather dramatically as the neoliberal forces make their move to seize global control. While I would say that countercultural alternatives are still needed, I agree that this time a much broader and deeper confrontation is in the making.
I would still say that non-participation is the first step. The degree of non-participation will vary depending on different people's circumstances but the thrust should be not feeding the beast. As long as people feed the beast it will grow and feed off them.
Yes, I'm not saying people shouldn't go for alternative community or bohemian lifestyles if that's what floats their boat. I'm just saying that I don't think they will find an escape in them from the threats to their generation.
Americans are perhaps somewhat spoiled by their historical experience of many opportunities for freedom and escape into the vast continent to pursue their own paths. But I don't think the challenge this generation is facing is the same as that faced by previous generations. The world is smaller now; the corporations want to own all of it, and all of us, and won't stop until they do. And they are destroying the planet. If the icecaps melt and the climate goes utterly haywire, it won't matter much whether you are living in some experimental anarchist village in Montana or a neighborhood of NYC.
And there is a vast global population now of angry and dissatisfied and unemployed young men, casualties of systems of domination, plutocracy and exploitation. Their rage, if it explodes, will encompass most of the globe.
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