Three challenges Occupy must overcome.
LUCY NICHOLSON/REUTERS
Hey you nimble dreamers, believers and jammer tacticians out there,
Our movement has reemerged from winter hibernation to find that this
spring we are different but so too is the political and tactical
situation. Occupy now faces a series of existential challenges that will
define the month of May and set the tone for our long-term future.
#1 challenge: Jump over the corporate media
It took the
New York Times
two weeks last year to wake up to the insurrection percolating in their
own backyard. This May Day, we saw an insidious attempt to ignore and
discredit us right across the mainstream media. Time to jam the
corpo-commercial lie machine and shift the way information flows and
meaning is produced. Here is occupier Charles Young’s take on the
blackout:
“I know. It’s just a coincidence. Or conspiracy theory. The .01% who
rule the United States would never stoop to such stunts to knock Occupy
Wall Street off the front page and surround it with mentions of
terrorism… But Occupy wasn’t on the Times’ front page, online or in print, either.”
#2 challenge: Block the co-optation of our movement
Last
September, the old left didn’t want to touch us. Then Occupy captured
the world’s imagination and now they are jumping in to channel our
energy into electoral politics and symbolic actions. Founding Zuccotti
Marisa Holmes warns that the co-opters are a deep threat to our
movement:
“This is an election year. Everything is at stake. There will be many
more attempts like The 99% Spring to come. The 1% have no intention of
funding a movement that actually poses a threat to their power. They
seek to manage social movements via foundations thru resource
allocation, top-down structures, and co-opting language. In the past
this strategy has proven effective at dividing, conquering, and
integrating movements into respectable forms of activism, and it’s
starting to take hold… We have realized our collective power, and we
must not be pacified!”
#3 challenge: Occupy the future
Our most difficult task
of all is to describe, build and sustain the post-capitalist future we
want to live in. Here is Slavoj Žižek’s stab to get your juices flowing:
“It is not enough to reject the depoliticized expert rule as the most
ruthless form of ideology; one should also begin to think seriously
about what to propose instead of the predominant economic organization,
to imagine and experiment with alternate forms of organization, to
search for the germs of the New. Communism is not just or predominantly
the carnival of the mass protest when the system is brought to a halt;
Communism is also, above all, a new form of organization, discipline,
hard work.”
Hey occupiers: the old world has no future; their leaders have
no solutions. Now everything from how we live to how we love and how
the world is governed is up for grabs. Can we rise to the challenge? Let
the tactical brainstorm begin.
for the wild,
Culture Jammers HQ
OccupyWallStreet.org / Tactical Briefing
#29 and
#30 / On
May 12, retake the squares and on May 18, spark the
#LAUGHRIOT then join the movement in
Chicago
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