Hopefully I'm preaching to the choir at this point, but for those of you who still may be holding out hope that this movement goes anywhere, you need only consider what they are asking for to see how completely hopeless a cause it is.Read it at Reviving Economics
May Day May Day, our Movement is Dying
by Garth Brazelton
When Mario Savio and the Free Speech movement were raging at Berkeley, I was thinking, why are these weirdos ruining a great university. I was at officer in the US Naval Reserve at the time and pretty gung ho about "America." I came from a Republican family in a Republican dominated state.
After I saw what was really going down in Vietnam, I became radicalized and joined the anti-war movement after I completed my three year tour of active duty. In 1967, things had come a long way since Berkeley 1964, but the movement was still a blip on the screen. In the early Seventies, I was marching on the Capitol Mall in Wahington, DC, with hundreds of thousands of other protesters.
Don't write off Occupy just yet. Big changes don't come overnight.
We are still very much at the beginning stages of this, and it actually started a lot bigger than the Berkeley uprising in 1964. A lot of those lessons were learned and now the Internet has made instant communication possible globally.
Solidarity is on the rise, and many young people have are sending a message they aren't going to roll over. Who was it that said, "You have nothing to lose but your chains"?
Also see - How Swedes and Norwegians Broke the Power of the ‘1 Percent’
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Readers, I can think of no better way to celebrate May 1st as International Labor Day, than to re-publish this article. In effect the economic and fiscal reforms were markedly post Keynesian-like but actually prior to Keynes's General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money in Feb. 1936, or Adolph Lowe, Abba Lerner, Hyman Minsky, or the rest of the authentic post-Keynesian lineage. Note Well that Milton Friedman and Paul Krugman et al are effectively bastard-Keynesians. for now, Tadit Anderson
While many of us are working to ensure that the Occupy movement will have a lasting impact, it’s worthwhile to consider other countries where masses of people succeeded in nonviolently bringing about a high degree of democracy and economic justice. Sweden and Norway, for example, both experienced a major power shift in the 1930s after prolonged nonviolent struggle. They “fired” the top 1 percent of people who set the direction for society and created the basis for something different.
Both countries had a history of horrendous poverty. When the 1 percent was in charge, hundreds of thousands of people emigrated to avoid starvation. Under the leadership of the working class, however, both countries built robust and successful economies that nearly eliminated poverty, expanded free university education, abolished slums, provided excellent health care available to all as a matter of right and created a system of full employment. Unlike the Norwegians, the Swedes didn’t find oil, but that didn’t stop them from building what the latest CIA World Factbook calls “an enviable standard of living.”
Solidarity is on the rise, and many young people have are sending a message they aren't going to roll over. Who was it that said, "You have nothing to lose but your chains"?
ReplyDeleteThey still need to move beyond a lot of the anarchist silliness and get serious. Right now, it's all "actions" and no aims.
"They still need to move beyond a lot of the anarchist silliness and get serious. Right now, it's all "actions" and no aims."
ReplyDeleteNot really. Many of the key players are extremely intelligent, resourceful, and street-smart. All you see on display is street theater, and there is method to the "madness." The key things are patience, persistence, resilience, and the ability to absorb what is thrown up in opposition.
A lot of what is happening now is asymmetrical strategy and tactics with a view not so to much to win victories as to draw the opponent into making mistakes and expending resources, while increasing the base.