From FireDogLake:
"The nearly two week occupation of a New York park near Wall Street known as Occupy Wall Street, initially undertaken by a few, has grown into a significant mobilization of people."
(emphasis mine)
Stupid word, mobilization.
Armies mobilize. Armies are mobilized. Industries mobilize workers. It's a hierarchy thing. Boss wants bodies moved. Bodies do what they're told. Mobilization takes orders.
People, especially free ones, gather.
Crow's Eye: Maintaining a commitment to Pointless Acrimony™ and Hate Filled Invective™! Also available in corvid mischief and traditional sly dog's mistrust.
12 comments:
I am sure you will enjoy David Atkins advice on how the protestors could be more "effective":
Contra the spirit of the current protests, goals and strategy are necessary, even if it's as simple as a single unified demand. It doesn't have to be complicated, but there has to be something central for people to cling onto. In Wisconsin it was opposition to Governor Walker's legislation. In the Arab Spring, it's getting rid of the national dictator.
I really hate that guy.
fish,
Atkins is the "thereisnospoon" Dem apologist?
Most commentators have relied upon their usual fatuous instincts. First, describe the protestors acting in concert. Second, accuse them of lacking organization. Define them by one's own game plan (hierarchy, lobbying, campaigning) and then say they're no good at it. Define the terms and win the argument. The unimpressive art of politics.
"Something central for people to cling to." The jaded fixed ideas of public relations. And what do journalists and politicos want us to cling to? Symbolism, inevitably. The same thing leaders in general want. Can't have actual substance: too volatile. It might cause a tremble in the fault lines of power.
Apparently it is not enough for protestors to exist. They must symbolize. They must be representative figures.
Perhaps the demonstrators should give a Power Point lecture. Graphs. Pie charts. Stickers. Magic markers for the key concepts; capital letters for mottoes and slogans. Or is it the other way around?
What if the protesters hired focus groups, vigorously polled, and lined up sponsors?
Madison Ave trough feeding limited attention span grumblers crying "lack of focus" echo Slavoj Zizek's "critique" of the "errant" London rioters. Liberals in different vocations have identical misgivings towards protests that forgo "unifying principles". Incroyable!
They wish to find comfort in the "order" and "simplicity" of protests. It stems from a desire to have "a story told", an agreeable and harmonious narrative that doesn't upset their digestion.(Yes, it's ridiculous and betrays the reformist bien pensant idylls of timorous aesthetes.)
An anecdote:
Flaubert laughed and made an upside down triangle with his hands when a critic voiced his displeasure with the "aimless and amoral" L'Education Sentimental. He wanted harmony, progress, an uplifting teleology. Flaubert's gesture hinted that life is not so harmonious, and mostly a degenerative process.
The Liberal zeal for "well meaning" gestures and "wholesome" endeavors attempts to straiten ways and foster harmonic facades. It is a kinder, gentler coercion. Flaubert's critic and those who criticize the recent protests because they fail to follow a code, like Aristotelian Unities, react from an urge to erase all traces of the less "wholesome" and iniquitous facets of life from general view.
Mobilization is a stupid word. When I hear I think of how it was used as a term to signify a disciplined and heroic effort to retool a war machine(Hitler's Germany). Also Ernst Junger's rancid book glorifying it...
Personal history has left me a tad on the cautious side, in real life.
I have an instinct, if you will, against posing for police photographers.
And empty gestures.
I started off seeing this as an empty gesture, the short of shit done by bored white kids who don't know the stakes and who laugh at the funerals of someone else's lover; but upon learning how they'd organized their decision making process, it's clear to me that I misjudged the reality out of a too-familiar proximity to the mediation of their images.
Still, it's genuinely pleasing to know that they're reclaiming a social commons on terms which don't yield their sense of community to a top-down, corporatized, messaged plan.
Success and failure don't matter.
Though I'd also prefer that a few of the actual ringleaders on cap's side would have cause to sweat a sleepless night.
That written, being there and doing stuff will only work until some police lieutenant gets bored, or until a besuited priest in the service of a mammonic temple imagines spit has fallen upon his loafers.
David Atkins's bio at Kos: 1st Vice-Chair, Ventura County Democratic Party; Executive Board Member, CA Democratic Pa
He's more than an apologist. He's a genuine paid shill.
I really don't think CAP had -anything- whatsoever to do with organizing the Occupy protests. CAP's treatment of the protests has been mostly dismissive and snarky. I suspect they'll come around eventually (once organized labor lends the protests more gravitas), but for now the CAP crowd sounds exactly like the NYT crowd; they'd rather report on Rick Perry's latest campaign strategy.
Also, Jack, I disagree about your mobilize/gather distinction. "Gather" sounds passive -- at least to me. Deer "gather." Candle holders at a vigil "gather." Wall Street would love to be in a country of "gatherers." It's *mobilizers* who are far more unnerving.
so jp morgan is bankrolling the NYPD with millions. Well, that should be no surprise to any of us, but it's worth knowing it's official info:
http://www.jpmorganchase.com/corporate/Home/article/ny-13.htm
sorry to post three times in a row, i know it's bad form.
Cabeza,
It's all good.
We don't agree on gathering/mobilization - but I'm thinking to the people who aren't committed.
If you're a non-pol/non-rad trying to understand what's going on in NYC, DC, Boston and the other cities, "mobilization" probably doesn't communicate what it does to people who have schooled themselves in 1920s-1970s rhetoric.
"Mobilization" carries a threat, either from rads and out ilk, or in the sense used by capitalists and army commanders. But, it doesn't threaten the established order. It plays into fears about a leftist army doing shadow work for Obama. I'm not exaggerating, here, either:
http://forums.hannity.com/showthread.php?t=2328281
These are the 33% of Americans who also think Skousen was onto something.
lambert,
Well, damn. Thanks for the info.
Post a Comment