For clairty, while I agree with many of the author's points, I don't share their aversion to all foundation funding on principle. As long as the connections and goals are not fraudulent think tanks and foundations can have a place in a democratic socio-political system.
In comparison, Vis Mises and Campaign for Liberty are frauds: they pretend to be for everyone's freedoms, but actually are working to roll back civil rights.
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http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=2269900&postcount=13
21st October 2011, 06:47
by Prairie FireRegarding the "occupy" movement...
You need to consider that Adbusters itself is funded by the Tides foundation, who's contributors include prominent capitalists (Rockefeller, Ford, Pew, Heinz, Mellon, Gates, Hewlett, Packard, Johnson, Soros,etc).
So, Adbusters itself is co-opted from the beginning ( as are other moderate "left" Tides recipients: ACORN, Amnesty, Democracy Now, Greenpeace, Human Rights Watch, League of Women Voters, MoveOn.org, NAACP, PETA, Ploughshares, a bunch of anti-Tar Sands "environmentalist" organizations in Canada,etc), so it is fair to say, I think, that by following the money trail one can see whom the initiators of the "occupy" movement are taking marching orders from.
In my city with the "occupy" movement that sprang up, we noticed a marked disparity between the way that the city municipal government was actually quite accommodating to the "occupy" protesters, as opposed to how they handled large-scale demonstrations in previous years (i.e. G8, etc).
Contrary to all the claims that there is a media black out on the occupy movement, it seems to get front-page coverage in every publication and news outlet that I come across. Sure, some of the coverage is a bit displeased about what is taking place (of course the bourgeoisie have different factions with their own agendas, so some of the more die-hard rightist factions are going to gripe a bit), but ultimately the "occupy" coverage in the bourgeois press has translated into publicity and promotion for a movement that otherwise never would have went global.
While I'm told that some sectors of organized labour are starting to get involved in these things from city to city(i.e. some of the Postal Workers Shop stewards in my city), ultimately what stuck out to me most like a sore thumb was the total absence of the working class in the "occupy" movement, and that in and of itself was enough to get me to take a closer look at it.
While the anarcho-syndicalists that I know have been crowing at how it is a "movement without leaders!", it is also a movement without objectives. It is a movement without a program, a movement without tactics, and in the face of the very real attacks on labour across North America (in my country, the government is again passing back-to work legislation against the Air Canada workers, as they did previously this year against the Postal Workers), it is fulfilling a diversionary role and is undermining the fighting forces of the working class that were already in place, rather than strengthening them.
I know that many in my city were excited to run out into the milieu of the local "occupy" movement that sprang up, start disseminating literature, and bring some level of political coherence to the forces gathered.
Me, I avoided this movement like the plague for a few reasons:
1. What (class) forces where behind this endeavour
2. the working class, by and large, was not participating (let alone in a leadership role)
3. Marxist-Leninists organize on a definite basis (i.e. a given workplace, a community/town, an educational institution, etc), because this is the way to build concrete political forms and organizations, and these are the precondition to actually having some real socio-economic power and overthrowing the existing relations of things.
Best case scenario, the occupy movement is going to be like the Battle of Seattle, or similar movements. If I had to make a clairvoyant prediction, I would guess that:
* Frustrated petty-bourgeoisie students will hang out in the park at the centre of my city for a few days, their numbers constantly declining,
*The revisionists, anarchists and other "usual suspects" of the activist "scene" will come out of the wood-work and hand out conflicting literature and pamphlets to these people. Over-all, they will descend on the "occupy" movement like carrion birds on a rotting corpse, all the while declaring that this is the revolution (or at least a preliminary stage,), because they are too fucking lazy and incompetent to organize anything themselves, so they attach themselves to any mass-movement like a leech attaches itself to a swimmers leg, tailing the liberals and social-dems (again). It also doesn't help that they have no understanding what-so-ever of the class forces at work here.
* A few token reps from this or that Union will show up for a day or so, but ultimately the composition of those gathered will be Students and the usual suspects from activist circles.
* There will be some interesting experiments with forms of mass participatory democracy, but ultimately it will be self defeating because they are chasing an idealized conception of "consensus", rather than (perish the thought) Democratic Centralism, or any other majority decision making method that involves a majority decision and responsibility to commit to decisions that have been taken (even if you voted against them).
* This movement without a program will run out of steam within the month, and that everything will return to how it was.
* Several forces will be derailed from ongoing work that was already in progress and was not initiated by a post-modern bourgeois magazine.
This is the situation as I see it. While all of these hipsters keep trying to re-invent the wheel every decade, the tactics and game plan for a revolution are more or less unchanged for over century now.
What works: Organize the working class, Organize on a definite basis so that you actually have real power (i.e. if you organize in a work place, you can call a strike), have defined objectives, and by doing ongoing work among the people you will develop the subjective conditions for revolution because the more you lead the people into even the most minor confrontations with the status quo (i.e. wage and benefit disputes, etc), the more they learn first hand about the nature of the bourgeois state and stratified class society, and all reformist options are revealed as ineffective and are exhausted. Solidify these organizations into the party, and seize power as an organized class force from another organized class force (the bourgeois state).
What doesn't work: Gathering a bunch of students and random individuals downtown when a call is issued by a capitalist-backed "left" magazine, no agenda, no program, no participation of the working class, no real power or clout (because the random individuals gathered don't represent collectives with the power to disrupt production, etc), no organizational forms, no game plan, and waiting with signs in a given area until people get bored/see how ineffective it is and go home.
That last paragraph 100% applies to people conned into the "Truth" movement: leaders claiming to be experienced organizers just calling for random gatherings "in the streets"(or wherever). And when it did "work", it was because is wasn't really random; it was the Alex Jones patriot base being rallied under the pretence of grass roots.
It won't end well.
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