Thanks For Burning The Flag, Dipshit.

Just a quick post on how absolutely fucking retarded this Occupy Oakland guy is. Here is a big reason why the Left never goes anywhere in the U.S.A. The New Left, founded in the 1960s by rich white college kids who decided they were more oppressed than the proletariat, has never been serious about revolutionary change. Quite the opposite, these little punks are far more interested in playing at revolution. To them being a radical is a game and the last thing they want is to have an actual revolution where they might have to do some real work or really put their ass on the line.
You can be goddamn sure that the yellow capitalist press in this country is going to run this image 24/7 over the next few days. This is the image that will go up on the television screen every time the story is about the #Occupy Movement.
The idiots in this image are clearly not thinking about the big picture. Hell, I really doubt that they give a shit about the big picture. Far from this act making some kind of statement all I see is a bunch of spoiled snot nosed shits playing a prank. And that's pretty much how every other working class person in America feels about it. Do the people of the Occupy Movement really expect us to follow clowns like this into revolution? Seriously?
The majority of #Occupy needs to denounce this act of vandalism. I don't give a damn if you think this is a 1st Amendment issue, despise the flag as a symbol of imperialism, or whatever. To the majority of American workers, burning our flag is the same as spitting in their face.
The elites of America have television, newspapers, radio, and all the other forms of media at their command. All we have is our good name. Like it or not, we are engaged in a propaganda war.
Guess who's winning?
Update: There was also a flag burnt by an Occupy Charlotte protestor. The Occupy Movement is committing political suicide before our very eyes.

Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day!

It's the time of year where The Man pauses to pay tribute to its favorite appropriated revolutionary, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Junior. So it's a good for us to remember that he wasn't just an outspoken black man who stood up for civil rights, but a perpetrator of "direct action" and, in the eyes of the oppressive institutions of his time, a criminal.

It was criminal in the 1960s to defy racial segregation. It was criminal to have marches, boycotts, sit-ins, and strikes. Standing alongside the everyday men and women involved in the struggle for equality, MLK was repeatedly arrested - according to the King Center, 30 times.

Sort of flies in the face of what we think of as "criminal," doesn't it?

Like many great thinkers, some of his best words were written from prison. Good lord, that letter finds a whole new realm of relevance with the rise of Occupy Wall Street!

Don't let the LCD flag-waving media turn King into another talking head with a sound-bite dream. 150 years after slavery, racism is still alive and well in America; OWS has taught white and privileged Americans the truths of police brutality which the black community has known for decades. And not everyone the State would like to paint a criminal is in fact our enemy - some are trying to help us face the brutal force we accept all too easily.

The Fowley, MN security debate

Two good Strib editorial pieces will fill you in here (contra) and here (pro).

I'm approaching from the perspective of a political radical, a heretical marxist, and a security officer when I consider this controversial issue. That's part of my disclaimer.

And part of how my marxism has deviated from all those endlessly arguing, worthless factions is that I don't think "The State" should control everything. And I don't think the market is perfect, either. So there's that.

Personally, I applaud experimentation. Fowley is brave in examining new models of public safety. The finance sector-sponsored recession is making unique demands on our traditional institutions and until we as communities can reclaim our losses (ha! right....), we've got an opportunity to find new ways to operate. I think that's great.

It bugs me when people put their ideology before the well-being of society. It's putting the cart before the horse. Some radical lefties might say, "Worker's patrols can secure the streets." Sure, they could, like they did in the early Soviet Union and Minneapolis 1933 and plenty of other revolutionary situations. But they don't just spring up out of the ground.

I like the security industry. Security professionals can do a lot of things the regular cops just don't have time to do. Why pull out the big guns before you know if a situation warrants it? Traffic stops, parking or curfew violations, barking dogs or loud radios ... let public security handle it, save your cops for the domestic abuses and armed robberies that they're qualified for.

Any number of OWS protesters would probably agree that they'd rather have been monitored by security folks than arbitrarily brutalized by the NYPD or other baton-happy riot goons. You don't need cops at a protest until things get hairy.

Using security officers for routine, low-hazard stuff adds a layer of finesse to civilian law. If it saves over-worked cops from having to work too much overtime, and saves the city from having to pay too much overtime, that's cool. I say, let the community decide what to do about safety and security. If they get some buy-in, they're more likely to view law enforcement as a partner than an oppressor, and that's the way a community ought to run.

Victory Without Demands

Within the spectrum of thoughts that take #OWS seriously there are two prominent currents creating a discussion I enjoy. The question is over whether or not a movement can be "successful" with a "tactic" of "no demands." One current of thought points to Occupy California, which issued no concrete demands at first (statement) and, at least temporarily, seemed to end in "defeat"; ie, not a lot of institutional gains appear to have been made.

The other opinion on this subject looks at absence of these tactics as a positive, or at least inevitable, aspect of the movement. This is the side towards which I lean. I wasn't a part of Occupy California, and only watched at a distance from here in Minnesota where a similar campaign (opposed to budget cuts, etc.) generated virtually zero publicity (statement from one of the participating groups here). It had clearer demands, such as a moratorium on tuition hikes (if memory serves me correctly). But it didn't go anywhere. Last year around this time, a march around the Loring Park neighborhood with a hip-hop show featuring Guante (an artist I admire and respect a lot) was energetically attended and yet made zero lasting splash.

This dog has done more for "the movement" than that march in Oct 2010 (not pictured).

All across the country for decades, grassroots activists have been building their protests and vocalizing their demands. Even the biggest demonstrations - such as those against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or for LGBTQ rights - have been ludicrously slow in gaining attention in the media, much less institutional traction. We have, in fact, seen a decade or more of entrenched corporate politicrats ramrodding their own agendas through the federal government. One reason Obama was able to win by such a large margin in the '08 elections is that he spoke, however abstractly, to the very concrete and diverse hopes of tens of millions of people: an end to war and torture, the beginning of new health and jobs reforms. But he only passed half-measures watered down by Republicans and remained faithful to the cash ambitions of corporations and Wall Street.

We should all know what happens to a dream deferred - and if we didn't already, we see it now - and it is not in fact one dream, which is the agenda of the totalitarian clique - it is many dreams, myriad dreams. A collective and participatory dream.

People who try to "draw valuable lessons from history" often end up dismissing old methods by insisting "they didn't work" at x, y, or z period. There is an almost lazy ignorance of the role of material conditions and changes in society. As Nietzsche put it, "The historian looks backward; eventually he also believes backward." If we're serious about fidelity to realism, in opposition to idealism and denial of the life experience, we can't get hung up on terms like victory and defeat. We need to foster the growth of movements that liberate our human potential. That means understanding very well the causes and conditions under which they operate.

You have to recognize that #OWS doesn't just represent a shared emotion, isn't just another protest, isn't just going to go away. It's a trend in our social arrangements. It's a product of the interaction of complicated factors. Its persistence - it's flourish and contagion in even just a few weeks - is indication of a new watershed. A deep and lasting change in how the global citizen sees the world.

New York City, Capital of the World that was, birthplace of the world to come?

This is the cutting edge of the folks who no longer accept the debate as it has been inherited. For the occupiers it isn't about debt and taxes, safety nets and healthcare and retirement benefits. This is the language of the bourgeoisie, of the middle class, of the bought-off proletariat that fought hard and settled for being included/deluded/diluted in the American Dream. Some of these words can still be found in the signs and rhetoric, but they are dying off like desiccated branches. They begin to taste like ash. The occupation, seated at the edge of a new experience, gropes in the dark for new props, new signs, new words to explain what will be next.

We build the old from the new. Boil, distill, mix ... human is the alembic.

There is no guarantee they will be "successful." Of course not: history takes dictation from no one. That's the fundamental downfall of totalitarian thinking! There is no such thing as "summing up," no such thing as "the final word." (Because life is beautiful.) But every morning that you wake up and you have the option of wandering over to a public space occupation and picking up a book from a book tent and sitting and listening to a drum circle, or reading Vonnegut on a bench, or drinking free coffee from a small business that proactively supports free speech and democracy, or can have a civil conversation with an environmentalist, or an anarchist, or an End the Fed advocate, and feel calm and at ease and thrilled by a deeply social satisfaction - some instinct in us unfed by the privatization of public space - that is the thrill of life. Of living. Of experiencing humanness differently than advertised or advocated or inherited.

If we need to redefine "victory" in order to overcome the limitations of the term, then we can say every day where and when there is an occupation, there is something of the old victory, and something of the new. Who can say how long it will last?

But the real question you should ask is, you detractors and/or critics and/or skeptics, is this: what will make these people go home? Now that they've come together and learned just how widespread and interlinked their net of oppression is - now that they've seen an entirely new arrangement is possible - how could they possibly ever stop?

A sentiment that may be finding its conditions ripe, for once.

Our One Demand: *Everything*

Revolution is ballet on the back of a bull.

It's been far too long, and it is far too late past our naivete to presume we can make some totalitarian summary of what has occurred since the Arab Spring.

With no more or less than that hesitation, the pause of someone who has not commented on the game despite watching closely for a summer - and most of an autumn - I turn my analysis towards Occupy Wall Street, the populist movement that has grown from a dozen protesters in Zuccotti Park to a swarm of tens of thousands in New York and thousands more in over 70 cities in the nation and the world.

It is, of course, a direct employment of the same tactics used to bring down Ben Ali and Mubarak, the same tactics leveled in the tilt against (a medievally entrenched) Gadhaffi, against the tyrants of Bahrain and Syria and Yemen and Iran. For different reasons, not all of them have "succeeded," at least as far as having their demands met.

And a lot of U.S. critics are especially derisive of #OWS because their demands seem nebulous, without realizing that this is a manifested symptom of how terribly fucked up this country has become. There are at least a dozen strong demands among the protesters, and countless other intelligent, thoughtful, and creative ideas coursing through its collective veins. A lot of people come out waving a sign about their "pet issue," but see others with different issues and think to themselves, or say aloud, "Right on!"

It is a conglomeration of decades of unmet demands.

And as such, it neither can nor needs to articulate "clear" demands. We the occupation as a whole have little faith that such demands would even be met, and even if they were the Democratic spirit of "bipartisanship" and the Republican ideal of "obstructionism" would only leave us further dissatisfied.

This is the next stage of the global populist uprising, what protesters and commentators are very rightly calling the "American Fall." Government as it has existed in this country for the last sixty years, ruled by oligarchical cash, cannot continue. Nor can it facilitate its own further evolution. The very social forces that gave rise to the state have changed into the anathema of the state. Its products have made it obsolete. The institutions of tradition are bankrupt, having spent the last 150 years careening through a menagerie of manifestations: monarchy, bourgeois republic, state socialism, Stalinism, fascism, authoritarianism. With the internet and all of human history now at our fingertips, we see through every cynical maneuver the ruling elite take to re-establish their rule of profit.

I'm faintly amused whenever I hear one side or another take up a debate about whether or not #OWS "wants" the "end of capitalism." Is it "anticapitalist"? Certainly one key demand is "the end of corporate personhood," a cornerstone of capitalist structure. But you can no more call for the "end" of capitalism than you can call for the end of the west wind.

Social forces are material forces, governed by social and material causes. No matter to what degree the protesters are aware of the fact, capitalism has run into one of its greatest impasses in unprecedented ways. Socially, ideologically, even physically - even the Earth itself has slid past the brink of ruin without any clear way back. The protesters from #OWS are only evidence that more folks feel the crush and the worry and the lack of alternatives than ever before.

The bottom is falling out. Some are losing their fear. Others will follow.