[P2P-F] Fwd: [NetworkedLabour] On #Occupy, Suppression of #Dissent, Power Politics, problems of representation and the #BernieSanders Campaign

[Michel Bauwens]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Orsan Senalp <orsan1234 at gmail.com>
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 <networkedlabour at lists.contrast.org>, squares <
squares at lists.takethesquare.net>, WSF discuss <
WorldSocialForum-Discuss at openspaceforum.net>


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-wedess-hijacking-occupywallstnyc
<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



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