---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Orsan Senalp <[email protected]> Date: Mon, Mar 14, 2016 at 12:50 PM Subject: [NetworkedLabour] On #Occupy, Suppression of #Dissent, Power Politics, problems of representation and the #BernieSanders Campaign To: Nw Labour discuss <[email protected]>, squares < [email protected]>, WSF discuss < [email protected]> By VladT So the last 24 hours have been quite interesting in the world of Occupy and activism and this is going to be a rather long post. It all started when we saw that Occupy Wall Street was hosting an event in zuccotti, which is awesome, I don’t think Occupy Wall Street hosted an event in Zuccotti in a very long time. But there was a problem — the event was a campaign event for Bernie Sanders, a telethon in fact. Now a lot of us, me included are supporting Bernie to win the nomination, and eventually the presidency. In this world of limited choices, he is obviously the only choice. However, there is something wrong with campaigning for him in name of #occupy — namely when we started this movement, back when we were in the thouthands, we all agreed that to stop cooption of this concept by any political party we will adopt a statement of Autonomy — which basically says that we will not become a tool of any one party, and we will not endorse any one candidate. This has a lot to do with our ideas of leaderless movements. You can’t discredit an idea by discrediting the leader if there are many, tying yourself to one candidate can be problematic. In a sense the social movement will become absorbed by the political parties and by their hierarchical nature Beyond that a lot of us wanted to build an alternative to the 2 party system, give people more direct power in their lives — direct democracy was our dream. we experimented with general assemblies, with spokes and so on. So what happened? How did #OWS go from this statement of autonomy, embracing of different voices and tolerance to becoming an extension of a presidential campaign? well that is a long story, but in a nutshell once we were all evicted out of our camps, a small group of activists started working to consolidate all the twitter accounts and Facebook pages under their control. Some of these methods were super problematic — for example the main twitter account of occupy wall street nyc (@occupywallstnyc <https://medium.com/r/?url=http%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2Foccupywallstnyc>) was hijacked by a person who changed all the passwords and locked everyone out. he then when faced with an actual lawsuit related to the theft punted the account to one of his accomplices, and we didn’t have time or resources to really go after the 2nd person…. so we just let it lie and focused on our own organizing work over the last year. But to get some idea of what went down you might want to read these 2 links: http://occupywallstreet.net/story/wolf-occupy-wall-street-statement-justin-w... <https://medium.com/r/?url=http%3A%2F%2Foccupywallstreet.net%2Fstory%2Fwolf-occupy-wall-street-statement-justin-wedess-hijacking-occupywallstnyc> http://globalrevolution.tv/blog/568 <https://medium.com/r/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fglobalrevolution.tv%2Fblog%2F568> The underlying theme here is that a new “model” has emerged — for lack of a better term we can call it capitalistic social media activism. This activism relies on having access to large social media networks, controll of large movement social media accounts a necessary ingridient, parachuting into disaster areas and using that media power to setup ngo type organizations that raise money and provide “services”. Now the key point here is parachuting it — true to the existing old ngo model they dont actually create local, empowering organizing — no these efforts are controlled by chiefs who have access to these large diffusion pools, and they use these to suck resources and space that would have been available for local groups and activists to enrich themselves and the organizations they control. Now these people decided they will engage in electoral politics in context of occupying the democratic party — great idea actually. but why do it in name of #OWS when there was this whole big deal made from the get go not to do this in name of #OCCUPY? well they said hell with it we control all the accounts, so we will just speak for the movement. And hence the big conflict about representation was born. Rest of the text: https://medium.com/@vladteichberg/2f196a31dbbb _______________________________________________ NetworkedLabour mailing list [email protected] http://lists.contrast.org/mailman/listinfo/networkedlabour -- Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://commonstransition.org P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/