If this kind of movements continued to "leaderless", I don't think that they can even be able to put a scratch on the 1%.

This event is clearly propelled by a kind of Chris Hedges-style liberal populism that views the contradictions of of capitalism as the fault of "big corporations" and "unscrupulous businessmen", rather than as (despite all evidence!) inexorable products of the system as a whole. What should the role of Communists be in organizations/demos that have "demanding" (from who??) a kinder, gentler capitalism and "restoring democracy" as their primary goal, if any?

Wonderful Eli, you just said my words. I can clearly see the future of such kind of "movements".

Its a movement which thinks "Oh! U.S.A is not evil, its the Corporations"

Wall Street plundering, corporate welfare and war are not products of "a few bad apples" and we should be there to assert that.

Organizing a radical pole and making this a nationally televised and shocking incident is what should be done by revolutionaries. I want to be careful with my language here and not imply that this is what should be done, but I think that having a bunch of people sit down on the trading floor so that they can be carried away by police within an hour won't accomplish anything. Making sure law enforcement doesn't have 'control of the situation' should be crucial, and that could be done by reporting fires in nearby buildings, calling airport shuttle services and taxicabs from multiple companies to congest traffic, and whatnot, so that it would slow down any response and completely stall capitalist activity. It would also make this a powerful piece of political theatre, rather than a weak and ineffectual liberal cry for ruling class sensitivity.

I agree that such movement as this one tend to not grasp that Capitalism cannot be reformed, but even so, I don't think we should be so disparaging. Sure, this probably isn't the smoldering embers of revolution, but that hardly means there's nothing that can be gained here. Just the general disillusionment this demonstrates is something we can appreciate.

I think the "leaderless" nature of this is as much a statement of fact as it is a statement of principle. We remain in the midst of a global economic crisis that awaits a serious analysis and without that analysis we are "leaderless"-- we are effectively theory-less. Saying, "it is the system, not a few bad apples" or "it is the U.S. not the corporations" or whatever is not going to suffice for a theory that can guide practice.

I make this point only because the 6 comments above seem to be critiquing this initiative as if a better idea, a better plan, exists and this demo is just some diversion from something more important.

Clearly, if the "one demand" of the demo is an end to corporate person hood it is dead in the water before it starts. The demand would be an important reform maybe MoveOn,org will take it up; but it is hardly inspiring, and hardly a solution to the current crisis. It wouldn't change much. But, before we mount the high horse we might consider how the weakness of the demand reflects the current weakness of working class analysis, organization and activity.

I feel that this action is what we need. "leaderless" so what. "It's just wall street" so what. For too long leftists of all kinds have sat in their armchairs bitching about the "correct leadership" and doing NOTHING. If I can make this I will. And after listening to a member of Leading Light go on and on about the uselessness of trying to motivate the American Worker, I say support any rebelliousness we can. Let's let people know there is a thriving left in the US and we are not just going to sit in our campus lounge-chairs and accomplish nothing.
Let this be just the beginning. I'd like to see a takeover of congress, but this is a start and it reminds me of what is happening in Egypt and Tunisia.

Not to mention, they should do it on a day where there are actually traders on the floor - it's weak as fuck that they aren't. And (some) are talking about tenting there, making it an "American Tahrir square," and the like.

when* and *it's weak as fuck that they aren't doing it on a day where it's open.

Eli M-H -

Obviously this isn't a call by communists for communists, its a broad call for action against specific and most visible symbol of capitalism.

But I think you are asking the wrong the questions here. This has potential to spark ideological conflict beyond immediate budget issues and into larger questions of society and I think that is very important in this moment. In many ways this circles back to our discussions of some intermediate radicals - not yet communists, but still marked by a degree of loyalty to bourgeois democracy. We need a creative response to that contradiction. And I think this could be one such response.

I'm not sure why some here are so quick to disparage this action. A misguided notion of revolutionary "purity?" An excuse for not doing anything? An aversion to the unwashed left liberal masses?

Maybe revolutionaries should actually, you know, try to provide a little bit of "guidance." Isn't leadership, after all, born in struggle? The organizers say that this is a leaderless action. Well if that's true then why aren't some revolutionaries willing to step into that vacuum? Why aren't they ready to go down and stand on a soap box and passionately explain to the people that it's the capitalist-imperialist system that is at fault and not just a few bad apples? Or are we all just waiting for the day when the left liberals finally, spontaneously, wake up and come over to revolutionary politics?

I think focusing the attention here on Wall Street specifically is a great idea. Tens of millions of Americans are absolutely livid at what is the dominant institution of the neoliberal era of capitalism. Why in the hell wouldn't we take advantage of that to teach the people how Wall Street fits into the larger picture of the capitalist-imperialist system?

Keith says we're waiting for a serious analysis of the global economic crisis. I'm not sure what he means by "serious" here. Is David Harvey's analysis not serious? Or Robert Brenner's? What about Chris Harman's? I think we've seen a lot of serious analyses of this crisis. Is there a single analysis that all revolutionaries agree on at this point? No. But that doesn't mean we have to pretend that know nothing and can't do anything until we find the analysis we all agree on.

I couldn't agree more with RedFly. If I could make in to N.Y. for this event I would have...

Maybe this could be a wake up call for the communists and radicals in this country to start taking some initiative and planning/executing some actions that demand a response by the Pig infrastructure.

Also, it hasn't even happened yet, how is the communist crystal ball already condemning this action to the dustbin?

I think Communists should welcome and participate in this action taking place on Wall Street this weekend Sept 17th..

We should always do what we can to encourage,reinforce and deepen a broad based popular culture of opposition to,critique of neo-fascistic corporate vampirism.

We need to create a proletarian culture opposing capitalist exploitation which would make such a culture be perceived by the masses as a rational,healthy and live response to Capitalist exploitation.

Oppose,condemn Wall Street,the government,the banks,finance companies..the entire chickenshit structure of american (and foreign) blood sucking corporations.

I think it would be reasonable to say that tens of millions of Americans already have a visceral hatred of the corporations who torment them on a daily basis,make their lives miserable,in many cases almost living hells being carried out in thousands of open and not so open perfidious ways...foreclosures,consumer ripoff,interest,hidden fees and charges,fines,coercion,extortion,swindles,scams,harassment,threats,lies,deceit..etc etc etc!!!


As to the role of Communists,at this point,as far as presenting a viable alternative(replacement) to the capitalist system communists are not in that much of a better position than the left progressives putting together anti-corporate critiques and actions.

Working people seek concrete solutions and alternatives to the capitalist system.They ask very tough questions which we can only provide thick theoretical solutions which more often than not leave them wondering if communists are wild eyed dreamers or what?

Moral arguments and abstract Marxist philosophy is not enough to move the proletariat.
Working People have real questions,they want to know how Communism would actually impact and affect their daily lives in practice.

We Communists have a great critique,but no concrete answers to such serious and extremely difficult questions.

Bottom line .. Communists have no real "New Synthesis" to offer the proletariat.
We are doing a half-ass job at the most.

So in that sense we are no better off then the progressive left.
Give them credit,at least they are doing something instead of just talking..

why must there always be a leader? why cant we understand our differences, and work towards a better future for everyone...because we are all involved!

Remember the Whiskey Rebellion!!!! it only shows the hypocrisy of these United Sates...and has set a stagnation of contraditions from every President since then...this occupation that started and the other one that starts Oct. 6th...and for the ones that will and shall follow...are rooted souly in the history/herstory of what this country is about and how it started...cause at one time it was fighting some "other " power but even in that a civilation was killed...and another was enslaved...but from the moments from whence the tea was poured into the Antlantic...this nation was always going to be faced with this....standing up for your belief system is not a travesty or a spoiled reaction...it is truth and the way of this nation...it is bolted in our shared story...it cannot and will not be denied! For history is doomed to repeat itself...with freedom does come a responsibility...and that responsibility is showing itself today...just as it did in those so many yesterdays. The past cannot and will not be forgotten...for it got us to today...and it will be repeated again and again...but we can move beyond beyond it...for there is no greatest generation...but to create a brighter and stronger tommorrow...is all we have...and with every breath, bone and drop of blood i and others will ensure the liberty and freedom for all..for when we lose the strength of our collective and individual visions and dreams, it is humanity that will die- there is no great nation...we must accept all our blemishes good and bad...for we are in this together...so instead of continuing to have conflict and struggle(leave that for movies, novels and poets) what we need is to love...be strong for each other...and the future that is in our hands..and all that is yet to come, for it is theirs and not ours!

The Occupy Wall Street movement <b>claims</b> to be "leaderless". This probably has a lot to do with pandering to certain anarchist concepts commonly held to on the middle class White American left.

However, like all human institutions, this movement has leadership. Specifically, Kalle Lasn, co-founder of the venerable counterculture magazine AdBusters, was the person who initially came up with this idea and has aggressively promoted this action on twitter, facebook and elswhere on the internet.

No matter what position we take on a group and it's political positions, we have to be objective about who and what that group is. That includes debunking any organization's pretenses of "leaderlessness"

Looks like the police caught on to the plan and are already down there to block it.
http://youtu.be/XwN0K5Cjkmc

I hear the police are cutting cell service in Bowling Green, and the police just got an order to begin clearing the streets of media. Can anyone on the ground confirm?

Also: #OccupyWallSt went viral on twitter, so Twitter blocked it from trending. Now #takewallstreet is trending. Ain't that something.

They should have covertly organized a flash mob yesterday or the day before to take the Street by surprise.

@Eric, cell service is fine at Bowling Green. People have moved from there and gathered further north. Someone came into the crowd yelling that police were clearing out the media. People asked for his source, he said "Twitter." Since there was no other verification, the general assembly continued on. As of now, there has been no overt police intervention, and I estimate that at least 1000 people are there now.

More later.

the leaders of this are not as naive as you think. of course they know you cannot demand the end of capitalism, but it is about creating the space for people to come together, revolutionary consciousness will be built through struggle and the situation they are trying to create is one which will lead people to think more about fundamental contradictions.

this is to say, don't take their words so seriously, rhetoric must always be strategic, the fact that adbusters has gone from selling shoes to calling for occupation reflects a big shift in its politics.

and, in terms of the 'leaderlesss' thing, if they had declared one person or a group to be leader they would never have had the turnout they are getting today. criticizing them for this is the sort of kantian idealism that revolutionaries need to rid themselves of.

@ Guy - According to Zerohour in comment 22, the turnout was only 1,000. His account is confirmed by the Socialist Party leader Billy Wharton, who reported on his facebook page a turnout of 800 at the rally. That jibes with New York 1's coverage of the rally.

So I wouldn't be so quick to praise the strategy that produced that kind of low turnout.

Perhaps this might be a good time to ask why this rally didn't resonate with Metro New York area underemployed middle class college educated youth the way the Plazas movement clicked with underemployed middle class college educated youth in Portugal, Spain, Greece, Tunisia and Egypt.

Adbusters and Anonymous (the leaders of this "leaderless" rally) seemed to think that it would.

Seems like they were wrong about that.

IIRC, the Greensboro sit-in began with four people, so a thousand ain't so bad. I know there was some hype that there would be more, but I think that a thousand is actually pretty respectable.They are still there and its 11pm. If they make it through Monday morning I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that this thing will grow. Having it start on the weekend was smart in my view. It reduces the likliehood of an early confrontation and lets people claim space and start to create a culture. Yes the "leaderless" thing is bullshit on one level, but Keith's point is also correct. What is being attempted here is the opening up of a space. A space in which revolutionary and communist ideas can contend if we don't act like asses. I think it is far too early to say that this hasn't resonated. This country and this city are hard nuts to crack. The individualism and alienation mean that the ramp-up to a movement of the plazas here is going to be somewhat steeper. Hopefully this will take off. Or there might be several false starts. We already saw Bloombergville and there is the plan for Freedom Square in DC in a month. A lot of people want something like this to succeed, but the cynicism and mutual distrust have to be worn down.

@ tell no lies - Don't get it twisted, I'm sure the organizers are good people with their hearts in the right place.

Unfortunately, the objective conditions are what they are and perhaps they overestimated the degree of anger, despair and burning need for social change among underemployed middle class college educated White young adults in America.

However, let's assume I'm wrong. Let's say that this movement takes off like a thoroughbred racehorse come Monday morning. Let's say that by week's end they're filling the financial district from Ground Zero on the westside to 55 Water St in the east and from South Ferry in the south to Hanover Sq and City Hall Park on the northside.

We'd still be dealing with a movement with a very brittle social base among a volatile section of the middle classes.

Movements like that are as likely to break right and ally with the capitalists as they are to break left and ally with the working class (remember the German National Socialists and the Italian Fascists 90 years ago?)

Also, middle class movements lacking a solid alliance with either of the productive classes (working class or capitalists) have a tendency to collapse into a heap of dust after a certain point.

RemEmber the antiglobalization movement of 1999-September 10, 2001? Remember the anti war movement of 1967-71?

In other words, sometimes cynicism is justified by historical experience.

Cynicism is ALWAYS justified by historical experience. When accompanied with crystal ball certainties it becomes an iron law. If you are looking for reasons for cynicism they are always there.

The Berkeley Free Speech Movement was a a movement of white middle class youth. Conditions today are obviously different along many axes. Yes a movement of this sort will have its contradictions and there will be both some explicitly rightist forces that will seek to involve themselves and there will likely be all the class and racial blindspots that a movement with this composition typically has. All that said I think these sorts of movements are important precisely because they represent cracks among those more privileged by white supremacy and imperialism and they can create openings that broader forces can use. I know perfectly well that if a thousand working class Black and Latino 20-somethings attempted to have a political slumber party in the vicinity of the heart of US capitalism that they would have been shut down by now, most likely with considerable violence. But if this becomes a permanent encampment of several thousand there is no reason that several hundred Borough of Manhattan Community College couldn't march 6 blocks to join in or for that matter High School students from any of a dozen nearby schools -- all feeling the effects of austerity budgets. Or occupy some other space if that makes more sense. And here also is where the rhetoric of "leaderlessness" can become an invitation for new forces to take the initiative. Of course nothing of the sort might happen and the thing might just fail to gain critical mass and fizzle as the revolutionary cynics stand on the sidelines mumbling about "objective forces" at the moment when new subjective forces are trying to be born.

@Tell No Lies - Claiming to be "leaderless" is not only nonsense, it's also a cover for a type of anarchist despotism. I'm sure we've all had the experience of working with activist groups which claimed to be run by "consensus" and to not have "leaders" but which in fact had a very obvious "unofficial" leadership. These type of non leader leaders often use the consensus process and the cloak of "leaderlessness" to rule with an iron fist.

It's far superior to have a leadership who are politically honest enough to openly proclaim themselves as leaders, and to have some sort of formal limits on their powers, than to have non leader leaders who pull the strings from behind a scrim of pseudo ultra democracy.

As for your historic example, the anti war student movement that sprang out of the Berkeley Free Speech movement of 1964 had totally disintegrated within a decade. At the time, lots of folks claiming to be Marxists took the position that the working class was brought off and bourgeoisified and the future of revolutionary activism was with the student movement.

Of course, once President Nixon withdrew Army and Marine Corps infantry forces from Vietnam in 1970, and modified the draft so that most middle class male youth could reasonably assume that they wouldn't have to go into the military, that movement collapsed.

Historically this has always been true of middle class movements that didn't find themselves in the orbit of one of the productive classes (capitalist or workers).

Just look at the anti war movement of 2003-2004. Once it was clear that the peace parades had failed and the US government was going to invade and occupy Iraq no matter how many middle class people stood in the streets with signs, that movement fell apart.

We can also look at the anti globalization movement. That movement rose to prominence with the famous Seattle protests of 1999. They soon became a one trick pony - mobilizing large bodies of middle class college educated White youth to travel from city to city and international bankers conference to international bankers conference, staging rally after rally.

Sometimes it worked, like Quebec City.

Sometimes, it came off odd and privilege-laden - like when thousands of affluent White kids marched into a poor African American, Eritrean, Ethiopian and Salvadoran city (Washington DC) and fought in the streets with Black police officers. I had to actually explain that one to a Black union carpenter who had seen it on TV - she had assumed that the black clad White kids were (her words) "Nazis" and she thought it was a good thing that DC's African American police officers had defended the city against them!

In any case, when US imperialism took a one-two sucker punch from 19 kamikaze pilots with boxcutters on September 11, 2001, the anti globalization movement had no answers, and fell apart within days of the fall of the towers.

Don't get it twisted - when student protests are reinforced by labor strikes and other forms of working class protest, the middle class youth rallies can be a useful supplement to the far greater social weight of the working class in action. Just look at Tunisia for a recent example. However, the decisive element there was that the middle class protests allied with one of the productive classes - in this case, the workers.

Labor strikes have far more impact on society than a group of underemployed white collar professionals sitting in a city park.

On the flip side, when middle class movements link up with a section of the capitalist class, they can be a useful spark that helps that class bring it's far greater social weight into play. Just look at the Iranian student movement of 1978 and the Islamic fundamentalist wing of the Iranian capitalist class that it helped to bring into power.

As for this protest, if it triggers a strike by New York's municipal workers or some sort of mass wildcat walkout of the city's immigrant janitors and restaurant workers, we might see some kind of permanent impact. On the other side, if the protests down in Zucotti Park trigger some sort of campaign for banking reform by liberal capitalists like Warren Buffet, it will also have an impact. If they don't end up in the orbit of the workers or the capitalists, five years from now, we'll barely remember this protest happens.

This is not to dis those folks in Zucotti Park - they're nice kids and I'm sure their hearts are in the right place.

Just,objectively, their class does not have the social weight that the workers or the capitalists do.

When the working class or the capitalist class are in motion, the ground shakes under their impact, because those two classes are decisive to the process of production and circulation of commodities that our civilization depends on.

When middle class professionals are in motion, the leaves don't even sway on the trees, because that class sits, at best, on the distant periphery of the production and distribution of society's goods and services.

I'm not trying to hurt anybody's feelings here and if you're reading this and you're a middle class person, I don't think less of you.

I'm just talking about the laws of motion of capitalist society.

First off, revolutionary communists have no control (Praise Be) over who moves into acts of resistance and when they do it; the exception being when revolutionary communists initiate and lead a particular struggle.

Equally sorry is the attitude that reduces revolutionary communists to those who, from red-tiled towers strewn with the Canon, analyse (read: piss on) any acts of resistance that don't come stamped "Grade-A Proletarian." Shite! What a waste.

It is a sad day when we look upon social stirrings and have to find the template that says it is okay to support this in some way (or use that same template to disparage it). Whatever happened to "fan the flames" of resistance. Who gave us the crystal ball to determine what will succeed and what will dissapate, and when?

Finally, the laws of motion in capitalist society are not predictable; revolution is not a process of harnessing these laws in some linear way, wating for the right theoretical elements to line up and come under our command. They are guidelines, that leave plenty of room for emergent novelty, contingency, and complete surprise.

Definetly coming from along the lines of what TNL and RW Harvey have said.

Fan the flames of resistence. How can those calling themselves communists shit on people when they take rightoeus stands and experiment with new forms of resistence in line what has been emerging around the world in the last year. Even if we can recognize or perceive certain flaws in their politcal thinking and organization.

We should be hoping that these things spread, that prarie fires emerge; and we should be thinking about how to relate to such developments as communists. We shoukd have an attitude like the KOE in Greece according to the WHIE reports, and have a positive attitide to novelty and emerging forms and currents of resistence.

Instead we take harsh and demoralizing tone, and then feel good about shouting "I told you so" if these endeavors fail.

What is there to feel good about. Don't we want to see resistence spring from all corners of society. Isn't the job of communists to be able to speak to how capital effects and oppresses all the different classes and social strata under its boot and to be able to give speak to all this in a way that resonates with all those different sections of society? To be "tribunes of the people".

What I hear from alot of folks here is basically a stand that would leave communists in such a position that if something did blow up from these type of actions, there would be no basis for us to have any effect, any influence whatsoever.

Needless to say, I think such negativity and pessimism is not only wrong headed it also marks a huge strategic flaw. It is a position that keeps us (communists) marginalized.

Chairman Mao says "no investigation, no right to speak."

The commentators here who are merely cheerleading the idiocy that has passed for leadership on the part of a "movement" which has liquidated its anti-imperialist work, taken to economism, and has mechanically tried to replicate every fucking populist form of struggle from Wisconsin to Spain are themselves a part of the very issue that Maoist youth must hold up for criticism, they're themselves upholding the line of lackadasical communism.

This was not an experimentation but a mechanical replication of form which had already failed in NYC in the action known as Bloombergville. The lessons of that fiasco were never summed up by their organizers, and the same organizers grabbed the AdBusters call from the void and attempted to do this. Under the banner of the petty-bourgeois colored struggles in Spain and Greece our petty-bourgeois friends here took up the same banner of form without the proper extensive political work that existed in both Spain and Greece (which while more successful are themselves failures of the petty-bourgeois leadership of those movements). There is nothing experimentative about this work, nothing imaginative or creative. The actions of these organizers, particularly the ISO, is nothing more than mimickery that has a now 100% failure rate.

Moreover who were these masses assembled in the tens of hundreds of people? In a city of over 8 million people and a metropolitan area over 20 million, what were the faces of the 1,000 or so people at Wall St? In a non-white majority city where young Black and Puerto Rican men face 25% unemployment at official scale, who were these masses? What will be revealed is that these were not in fact the simple "masses" but a section of them - dispossed yuppies (young urban professionals), graduate students, and anarchisty punk youth. No Hip Hop but plenty of Trip Hop.

In the main summation must begin with assessing the actual goals and politics.They called for 20,000 people and only brought forward a little over a 1,000. It has now a few hundred. They called for a tent city but now there are no encampments, there are no tents because they abide by the law enforce by the pigs who have a force encircling them. The promised occupation but only sit in a park.

I am here struggling for all Maoist youth here to in fact challenge their own elders and their own conventional thought - comrades in NYC had predicted this ahead of time and struggled properly with the leadership of this event to begin reassesing their ideas, we challenged them to take up revolutionary proletarian politics, we're challenging them to take up new courses and insisted upon the death of this economist populist movement. The movement must be reframed to live, it must be reframed in anti-imperialist struggle in the neo-colonies and internal colonies of this Empire. For this to happen Maoists must begin to build mass movements of their own character type, to insist upon leadership of the petty-bourgeois radical forces through being a vanguard of proletarian forces.

Don't tail the petty-bourgeoisie of the Squares, bring the proletariat and oppressed nationality people to the foreground of struggle by building vanguard organization of your class. We hope people as well read my own piece which anticipated all the results of this action and offered a critique of the event to its leadership on friendly terms. http://ignite-revolution.org/2011/09/12/bring-forward-revolution/

Actions and movements can't always happen on the terms set by communists or Maoists. You can make a critique and there may be aspects of it that have some validity. That doesn't mean that you can only support something if your line is in command from the start. That's a strategy that begs for isolation. Contrast that to the way the KOE reacted to similar class forces in Greece? They went into the square for communist to have an effect, knowing that effect would not be immediate.

However, what was done by Ignite to build for this action? If you are working in and among "internal colonies", then why not organize those you influence to participate? Isn't it necessary to build unity between the proletariat and the petty-bourgoisie? Wouldn't the thinking of those more oppressed forces inspire radical shifts in how pb forces look at what they are doing? Isn't it true that "dispossed yuppies (young urban professionals), graduate students, and anarchisty punk youth." always have and will certainly need in the future to play a critical role in any emerging revolutionary movement?

Base on what I have seen from the looking at how this took place in NYC, the role of forces like yours has been one-sidedly destructive. There is nothing being built, only self-isolating polemics. Going on websites for the action and posting hostile comments encouraging people not to participate is not reasoning with these forces on "friendly terms". Because of actions like these in the course of the build up to this action, many young activist (many of them young and revolutionary minded) have been turned off by certain forces like yours (I have heard this sentiment expressed in meetings I have went to while this action was being organized), and this only hurts communists, it doesn't help.

This is not a "friendly" method. It is not a method that forges strategic alliance between classes or even between radical minded forces already in motion.

This is not to say that there is no room for critique and struggle. But what was essentially done as I understand it is that forces such as yours, saw that their line and their politics would not have immediate influence over the action, and thus they became hostile to it and refused to help build it. And they went further, they publicly trashed it. This behavior worked as a self-fulfilling prophesy (although the action seems to be more successful than some expected)-- you tell people not to get down with it and when no one does you say I told you so. What is that?

And finally it is actually not true that numbers have dwindled into the hundreds. I've heard from observers there presently that the numbers have actually swelled.

Now why would any communist (or Maoist) not want that and see it as a positive development?

Why such hostility to Gregory? He makes a very valid point, along with neftali. I guarantee that he didn't mean to come off as overly deterministic in claiming that middle class movements will crumble. Let's keep it real. The exposes by Anonymous, and their subsequent overall influence, is limited to digital communities occupied mostly by White males. Likewise, Adbusters is sold in Barnes and Noble and other bookstores in White suburbia. I hate to be pessimistic, but it was no surprise to me that such an event didn't reach the level of high expectation that it's organizers hoped it would be. There was little corporate media coverage, in that it was very much limited to a Fox News report on it, and maybe an internet article here and there too.

Perhaps we are hoping that there will be a prairie fire when we look at the recent student and labor insurgency over the budget cuts. I admit it, it was easy to get caught up in the spirit of populist anger when I marched to 'protest' the slashing of state higher education funding. So caught up that I couldn't even realize that maybe the territorial base of revolution wouldn't start in the neighborhoods and institutions of the privileged.

We are living in a time where Marx's old dictum has been reversed: instead of the petty bourgeois being proletarianized, the higher level of living and economic resources handed to the white working class because of imperialist theft (here and abroad) has enabled them to attain a higher position of bourgeois privilege.

Also: I think an important way communists could have made the event different was by employing more radical tactics (see my first comment, on disrupting police response, which perhaps would be better for smaller cities or rural areas), and by encouraging participation by agitating for it in working class and oppressed nationality neighborhoods and mass organizations.

Nat W. you're either speaking from your ass or purposefully lying.

First, no one in IGNITE or our leading cadre organization has told people not to participate in this action.That is an outright lie of a secterian character; it purposefully puts in the terrain of movement wreckers and therefore is nothing more in this context than an accusation of either foolishness, chauvinism, or pigishness. In my own piece I had written we ourselves weren't decided about participation or non-participation (however we leaned towards non-participation).

We did not participate in any activity of the organizing nor the general assemblies, we purposely took up a role of abstention from this action because our criticism was that this action was going to result in failure we could not go along with, failure which we already had seen at Bloombergville. First as tragedy, then as farce. Our only interaction with people organizing for this were in the pockets of our mass work where organizers asked us to participate to bring our criticism of how this was going to be a failure to their general assembly! We opted to not to that precisely because that is opportunism. We opted to continue our mass work and to raise the line struggle that exists within our movement to the level of polemic precisely because of the refusal of organizers to sum up Bloombergville, to be real about the projections of this rally (they knew themselves the possibility of disaster).

The method of Nat W. is a scattered-minded Maoism, one which doesn't assess the primacy of certain tasks - the primacy of building a party, the primacy of conducting work amongst proletarian forces, to bring consciousness of ourselves to the masses but would rather contend on tired forces who've in over two years of activity have mounted this action, have culiminated our work in this action. This is not judgment of its participants, but the actual trajectory of petty-bourgeois economist and Euro-Amerikan chauvinistic work conducted in the last year in this city and its surrounding area. An action calling for occupation of a the heart of the center of circulation of world finance, which had no tactical teams of leadership, no demands, no ideas prior in the state of this movement was in fact doomed to this disaster.

Further if our critique really did "hamper" this action then it only begs to show there is a consistent base of people which this critique resonates with, the line of the minority is becoming the line of the majority - this is true in the CUNY system for example and in community organizations. Why would we have dropped our work for this? I want a good reason.

More to the point what Nat W. proposes to do is to hide political line struggle from the masses of people, to hide contention amongst organized forces, differing political trends and lines - to liquidate political organization and line into the amorphous Square. To create sordid peace for the movement. We in fact had gone to the level of raising the line struggle to the public precisely because these things can no longer be hidden from the masses during time of revolutionary conjuncture. That we must insist on new trajectory and path to create proletarian formations throughout the city which can in fact advance liberation. History is being made quickly, certain forms of organization are already saturated and done before they even have put their feet on the ground. We invite all comrades to take this opportunity to reflect on their methods, reflect of the inconsistent void of leadership that has been created since the degeneration of much of the organized left including Maoist forces. We've been completely unprepared for the conjuncture of downturn of finance capital and the Obama administration and have resigned ourselves to movementism.

Nat W. insists for us to look at KOE as model - but why? There is no reason to think what they're doing will end in success, in fact there seems just simply stagnation of that movement which has been unable to effectively deliver results in regards to contact with the state. I at least in fact considered KKE's position as more principled and suitable in regards to a movement which tells you to put your politics at home - it ensures the political hegemony of the petty-bourgeoisie. We call for United Front with independent intiative of the Proletarian Vanguard Party, but we must build that organization and not liquidate ourselves in the soup of eclecticism and the sordid peace of a couple of organized groups.

It is possible that I may have misrepresented the actual words. That it was not actually stated that people should not participate. However, in the places where I have seen this go public and in places where I have heard certain individuals in Ignite talk about the action, I maintain that the tone was never a friendly one. This does not make these ideas the ideas of Ignite nor of Neftali, though again from my experience regarding at least these individuals is that they have actually gained a solid reputation as destructive and hostile (whether the perception is true or not). This is not a verdict on Ignite as an organization, though it can also be said that some of this private behavior cannot bode well for Ignite, nor for the goal of building partisanship toward communist politics in general. Those who know the situation can judge my comments on their merits.

I am not really interested in being an orthodox Maoist, for no kind of true path will be found by strictly adhering to this or any other body of theory, especially when looked at as Neftali seems to as some sought of doctrine.

I really made no comments about primacy of work, nor did I say that actions like the one we are talking about shouldn't be critiqued. They should. Though I maintain that our overall approach should be one of support for resistance among any non ruling strata against oppression; and our critique should start out from that orientation "it's right to rebel against reactionaries."

It strikes me as odd the idea that two years of trying a particular approach should be judged as enough to determine that it has no legs. This is not much different that the experience of the RCP jumping from project to project with no summation. It seems to me that it is alright to try something multiple times and fail, as long as you are learning from the progress. So I don't see the fact that these groups are trying repeatedly at something for a relatively short amount of time as the eveidence that their approach is flawed. There maybe other reasons, other flaws to point out, though this is not one of them.

Neither do I think it follows that a certain approach will fail to have a significant effect simply because of its class nature. That is what Neftali seems to contend and it is an erroneous way to think about how things develop. In reality there are things that emerge and "get legs" in spite of the overall logic of where their lines will actually or ultimately lead.

The role of communist is not to stifle, or if stifle is not the correct word, to discourage and throw dirt on genuine attempts to challenge power. On the contrary, I would argue that it is the role of communists to fan the flames of such resistence. In that sense it becomes necessary at times for communist to put more of an emphasis on fanning the flames and less of an emphasis on our disagreements with the "leaderless leadership" of such movements. In a strategic sense this is part of contending for leadership.

And to be clear this does not mean that our positions should not be known. I am saying that are critique should come out of a political approach that wlecomes all forms of resistence.

There may be times when we can argue for our political initiative and leadership in building actions and campaigns but are any communist organizations really at that point yet? Maybe you think so.

Certainly, from my vantage point the community organizations and CUNY system you speak of can't really be said to be moving behind the communist "line of the minority" in any significant way. 1,000 people for an occupation is laughed at, though can Ignite or Kasama for that matter organize those numbers effectively for a protracted action or even a demo?

I agree that people should look at this action and its methods, as Neftali calls for. But they should do so, and they should so while helping it to succeed and grow, and offering a critique that can provide the type of leadership that is needed. We should not look at it as skeptics with pessimistic hostilty, which is what I get not only from Neftali's analysis, but from many others who have posted here.

And again, I think this is an approach that begs for isolation and reflects a politics that I would not like to see in command.

But perhaps all this is just my scattered-minded Maoism. I'll leave you with your orthodoxy. Good luck.

Yes it is thoroughly scattered-minded and piggish.

First and foremost, I am not sure who you are but I presume you're a member of the Kasama Collectivity in NYC. In that respect lets speak quite frankly since you name behaviors, lines, etc. I myself have only spoken to two people of that collectivity about this event and both actually more or less agreed with the line that IGNITE was putting forward in the main in regards to this action. Considering that I can induce your identity and inform you that I had never spoken to you about this event and more or less whatever young comrade had spoken to you about this event will no longer speak to you again. If they had spoke of this event to you privately disparagingly and you're here to reveal that to people then we should not consider you a trustworthy element.

The issues of behavior and cultural practices which are in fact problematic are in fact in this concern secondary, the issue is that of political line and no Maoist devolves conversation in regard to general line to the issue of practices. What could these practices be? We've stated we have never involved ourselves with any of the organizing process of this event, involved ourselves in none of the General Assembly precisely because we decided that the way to handle our line struggle with youth involved was through private discussions and critique. Some ignore the criticism, and continue forward stubbornly, some are trying to reconcile with us work, and others are trying to take it to mind. You paint us as movement wreckers? But I'd like to know exactly how that is? What are you referring to, what had been done? The matter must be of grave concern or if it was a second hand scoffing joke to you by a young comrade then it follows this is in fact unprincipled and piggish attempt to paint us as movement wreckers. You join alongside ISO instead of the advanced youth in CUNY, this shows the true nature of work of some supposed comrades for all to see. You join the chorus of their rumor mongering, their behind the back stabs which are usual of them, and you refuse to deal with line and trajectory of the concrete practices of organized political formations.

When it comes down to Two Line Struggle the fact of the matter of it is One Divides into Two. In all struggles we consolidate advance, win over the intermediate, and isolate the backward elements. After Bloombergville we had united the advanced section of the youth of this movement, we continue to struggle with intermediate forces, and attempt to isolate backward elements. In regards to student and youth work we in fact united advance section, we continue to struggle to win over intermediate, and we demand the isolation of the backward. We in CUNY work have demanded in any CUNY work the exclusion of the International Socialist Organization from any coalition work on a CUNY level on premises actually consistent with the line raised by Chris Day in his piece on how SLAM was formed. This is something we hope to develop as the LIBERATE CUNY COALITION which is still in process of formation - contrarily there is another formation which consists of only ISO, a member of OFS, and individuals who are actually more sympathetic to ourselves than them. They simply aren't ready to exclude ISO. However our budding work already is formed around the main significant CUNY formations in multiple schools so there is no need to struggle in the terrain of their formation but only on the level of line. We still seek broadest possible unity, but we assert that unity must advance beyond the weak coalition organizations of the last three years perpetuated in the main by the ISO (let us not mention it is our experience of coalition work with ISO which informs this decisions and why you simply speak out of your ass in a sectarian manner, coalitions we've seen consistently deform between anarchist and ISO trends precisely because of both of their errors).

This has of course informed a general issue in the youth movement where ISO has attempted to isolate us but failed - they have had cadre delete us as friends, they have attempted opportunistically to pidgeon-hole us as Stalinists, as crazed Maoists, they vocally mock the line of a free New Afrika as "weird" or "Stalinism." They opportunistically tell the people they have no issues with us, but then attempt to speak to the leadership of our cadre organization to discipline us for bringing forward the line struggle in public, for calling for their obsolesence as necessary for the development any genuine revolutionary movement and for proper United Front with genuine forces. Some people have been broadly confused by this and see us as being sectarian, but the advanced have rallied towards this line in such enthusiasm as to literally scare the ISO to attempt to split us in private conversations, to even go to former members they've expelled (and attempted in the past to paint as untrustworthy elements) and ask them to join in their coalition (while publicly speaking of no existing problems). Good friends and comrades have politely told them no or actively taken up work in criticizing their Euro-Amerikan chauvinism and opportunist behavior. For anyone familiar with CUNY they will actually understand this for what this is - the healthy move forward in the end, the only option in ending the chronic loss of our movement.

Again this of course informs the whole of the youth movement and creates confusion precisely because

1) CUNY is the sight of the young working class and petty-bourgeois sections of oppressed nationality people who are being trained in intellectual and administrative skills. They're the source of new leadership of the New York movement in the main. Where the public high schools effectively function as an auxillary of forces when there is properly developed movement.

2) If CUNY student organizers and activists have agreed in the main with us, they have decided not to participate in this action. And they were right to do so considering our critique was in fact correct, it did in fact very well predict the course of events in this action and the unreadiness of the forces in carrying it forward. The only participants then become scattered youth, many from the private colleges, many out of state, ISO, OFS, and thats it. We should remind people that PSL, and the IG, did not participate as well, and altogether ignored the event depriving another section of young leadership from CUNY.

So therefore those CUNY forces at the event are already forces we've struggled with and disagreed with our line of march, other youth as well knowing of our criticism but still wanting to remain in the naive domain of some kind of post-politics. So the naturally informed subjectivist opinion of our "solid" reputation is the temporal affect of the moment of line struggle, and will actually hurt us none precisely because again our line relationship to questions of CUNY and a United Front remains the majority line of activists and organizers in CUNY itself. There is no choice for anyone but to be forced to deal with our criticism and to deal with us (whatever their disposition). That you merely ruminate in the gossip of the crowds, that you in fact decide to join in this perpetuation of things with those individuals and speak about one comrade or another's disposition is in fact sectarianism.

Now laying the context lets discuss the meat of the matter which is this event in relationship to us.

The event was a setup for fiasco and disaster. A force took up quickly after an already failed event at Bloombergville an event called for by a petty-bourgeois radical magazine a demand it could fulfill. There was never in the cards the possibility of an occupation of Wall St. nor 20,000 on the streets. Why? Because simply it was not realizable by the movement. AdBusters provided no organizing for this action they just told people to show up, but they set up all the line and demands - this amounted to nothing but in fact political chauvinism on their part. The actual organizers were unfortunately in the position to knowingly deal with unrealistic expectations but also attempted to rally something worth while but were not able to build anything. There was no organizing, but outreach. There was no coherency to any line besides the one set forward by AdBusters' editors, there was no ability to change the location, the type of action, or anything...just follow a line set forward from a magazine which was not capable of organizing this action, speaking to no forces, in a movement which could not maintain it.

Very simple things could've actually been worthwile to salvage this - relocation to Union Square would have naturally produced a much larger action and it would've grown. Reorganizing the occupation to become something of "days of rage" where there would have been prepared organization of base locations, putting people up in houses and aprtments, using communication outlets from BBM to twitter to amass forces at different locations and different times during a span of whatever determined action. NOT DOING A GENERAL ASSEMBLY, NOT OPENLY LAYING OUT PLANS TO PIGS FOR THEIR EASY PREPAREDNESSS. Having tactical leaderships and squads.

The plan was simply a disaster from the get-go, it attempted to mechanically replicate activity and did so very poorly and got nothing. Before this it attempted to mechanically replicate Wisconin in Albany. What is out of step is precisely the leadership of this movement which for over a years time has trotted from one failure to another in the economist struggle each time with further deminished forces.

The only actual successul action was May 12th organized by NYCC and if anything its the form of organization which in fact worked - community centered organizations, trade unions, people with a base in the working class mobilized all sectors of New York to an even which numbered 20,000 and in fact coordinated so well a march which left NYPD guessing. So the only action that worked is the one which some people consistently refuse to take up.

We in this regard have called for reorganization of revolutionaries to build base areas, to create proper united fronts, and mobilize masses of people. Are plan starts with CUNY building organizational forms which can politicize students and youth to come to the masses with revolutionary politics, to transform CUNY into cadre factories for not the whole of the movement. We're in fact very clear about this need for mechanicism which restores growth in our movement. We insist upon students to struggle for CUNY but to commit class suicide in relationship to it, to take the struggle up for the broad masses as well as themselves. To think of their trajectory of work in regards to revolution - this is immediate task to CUNY which we couple with the secondary task of build mass formations which enable an even broader section of masses to take up particular forms of struggle. We also in the spirit of Left Refoundation will attempt to build relations with other formations and tendencies for United Frront and insist them in their own development (however with notable exceptions, like ISO).

This our general strategic orientation.

In regards to issues of lines and Maoism there already exists a comprehensive critique of the type of politics you're offering in regards to my "dogmatism" I guess.

http://bermudaradical.wordpress.com/2011/01/06/you-cut-yourself-grabbing-that-knife-a-critique-of-the-kasama-project/

We again would like to state this largely is coming from the experience of Maoists who've developed a considerable core of young proletarian people in this city to our comrades, and in this respect Nat W. is quite literally a no-body in that experience. Quite literally a novice in the struggle of young people and knows effectively nothing of who, where, and what is the movement in the city. Proof is in the pudding comrades, where is his method going, where is ours going?

He would have us liquidate our work, join in this empty attempt of the radical petty-bourgeoisie to salvage their political work which has fallen off a cliff. We have no interest precisely because the value of the work is not in fact worth it. It comes from an assesment and analysis of forces who actually conduct the work, and who are you?

@gregorybutler: claiming the anti-globalization movement ended on Sept 10, 2001 is ridiculous and uninformed. It went on for several years including the significant protest in Cancun, Mexico in 2003. Protesters at WTO meetings have not just included supposedly "privileged" white Americans but people from many other countries including Korea and India. I can't claim to know THE reason why the anti-globalization movement has become quieter and less significant, but it has some relationship to the WTO itself becoming less significant. Besides the protesters, the leaders of the 3rd world became more aware of how the WTO fucked their countries over and played a role in the weakening of the WTO. No, I'm not saying it went away, but a lot of the pretense that the 3rd world doesn't want to be complicit in its own destruction has decreased, the WTO is no longer a united front. We won the battle but not the war.
Allegations that all white protesters were "privileged" continues to irk me. Obviously Gregory has never talked to any of these activists. It's as ridiculous as stereotyping all Black people as living in ghettos. Or as all being middle class like in the Bill Cosby show. Time to recognize we live in a class society. Definitely white people don't have the burden of racism keeping them down, but otherwise any race can be unemployed, uninsured, and unrepresented.

[moderator note: We require a respectful exchange here on Kasama. It is not ok to personalize responses (characterizing other participants in hostile ways) or to dismiss others and their arguments in ways that drag down the discussion ("ridiculous," "scatterheaded," "piggish" etc.)

Please stop this tone and method of discussion. Discuss ideas, events, summations substantively and without personal snark.]

Your comrade actively is putting forward misrepresentations of our collectively which extend out of desperate forces attempting to shore up their ranks in their dismal decline beholden to their crude economism, and I am not able to call this in fact for what it is?

He alludes to private conversations with individuals but I am personalizing this?

I am not to call the politics "scatter-minded" but he has free rain to describe my own as dogmatism, as self-isolating, as cynical.

How about the moderation stand objectively instead of one-sidedly on the issue

To be clear, this is what I said,

"...in the places where I have seen this go public and in places where I have heard certain individuals in Ignite talk about the action, I maintain that the tone was never a friendly one."

Show me where in my comments I have spoken about private conversations.

Also my intention is not to bad-mouth your organization.

It is good that it has developed a strategy for building a revolutionary core and movement in NYC.

What I think is wrong is the orientation toward the action itself.

And the orientation to the action goes beyond the nature of those who organized it. What about the youth and students attracted to this movement who are new to politics? It did not seem that many of the people at this action were connected to the traditional left groups.

Criticizing the line of the groups involved is one thing, but there is also a tone and literal statements in the rhetoric of your critique that characterizes the people who participated as somehow tampered by their class position, as opposed the class nature of the political lines involved. I describe you method as orthodox and something that leads to self-isolation and I would add that this particular aspect of your critique and analysis seems to cater to identity politics. This is your full quote:

"Moreover who were these masses assembled in the tens of hundreds of people? In a city of over 8 million people and a metropolitan area over 20 million, what were the faces of the 1,000 or so people at Wall St? In a non-white majority city where young Black and Puerto Rican men face 25% unemployment at official scale, who were these masses? What will be revealed is that these were not in fact the simple “masses” but a section of them – dispossed yuppies (young urban professionals), graduate students, and anarchisty punk youth. No Hip Hop but plenty of Trip Hop."

You can argue that line is primary, however, here line is not what is discussed. Rebellion can emerge in many different sections of society, and again I think the point is that that should be looked at as positive. I don't think that the fact that the crowd was overwhelmingly white means that it deserved no support.

And I think from some of my observations of the organizing. I was never personally organizing for this but was at a general assembly and on its listserv, there were some mischaracterization in the organizing that was actually done. It does seem that there were attempts to reach out to unions, community organizations and such. It seems qutie natural though that because of the nature of the action, a protracted occupation; that the initial particpants would be those who objectively had the ability to leave their ordinary leaves and camp out for a long period of time. Objectively there were forces who could not participate, at least in the beginning and students and underemployed would logically make up the core of such an action.

Another thing I take issue with is your assessment of this already as a failure. The action is ongiong and has drawn a significant force, and has grown from Saturday to Sunday. And this action was held not just in NYC but simulanteously with other actions both within the US and internationally. I would contest that there is an air of internationalism in the spirit of the event and among its participants. Whether it can be called anti-imperialism in the thing I don't know but if you were asked to share your criticisms certainly you were give a forum (a friendly forum) by the Genral Assembly. Those are your own words.

Again your organization must decide how to disperse its forces, and I respect the strategy you are developing, even if I feel you exaggerate its progress. I am not suggesting you liquidate your work as you accuse me of, I'm merely saying that your orientation to the action itself seems to be very hostile. Yes, I have formed this opinion and others have also.

Finally, I don't claim to be any big shot. Alot of the time I attend meetings or am around other private discussions and I mainly stay quiet and observe. But I do form opinions about what I observe about both the political lines and the actual behavior (the tone and method in which leaders and organizations relate to each other and the broader heterogenuos masses). And I can speak to my comrades and on this and other forums about what conclusions I form. To the extentit appears I have mischaracterized some things, I am sorry for that, though in no way may the limits of my stature prevent me from expressing my opinions.

The conduct I've witnessed over a period of time has led me to the conclusions i have formed about individuals I have referred to (but did not name). In this sense, while I may have differences with the politics of ISO, I can draw a similar conclusion that some actual behaviors do merit discipline by the leaders in said organizations. That is my personal opinion and nobody elses. That is not an attempt to misrepresent collectivity, it is a conclusion I have drawn in relationship to the way debate and discussion is carried out cross-organizationally and how that is effected with by a certain method of argumentation. Again, my personal opinion, nobody elses.







And here I do think tone and behavior is important

Neftali writes:

<blockquote>"He alludes to private conversations with individuals but I am personalizing this? ? I am not to call the politics “scatter-minded” but he has free rain to describe my own as dogmatism, as self-isolating, as cynical. How about the moderation stand objectively instead of one-sidedly on the issue"</blockquote>

[<strong>friendly moderator response: </strong>I am not just talking to just you Neftali. I am talking to everyone in this thread. Several people are calling each other "ridiculous" and so on.

Speaking to everyone: Stop personalizing this. Please adopt a civil and comradely tone -- and focus on substance. Check yourself and your tone of indignation. Simply dial it back.

If someone else's remarks <em>seem</em> personalized to you, please don't bite back.

Some arguments may (actually) seem "ridiculous" to you -- but then deal with the subject, lay it all bare and leave out the ridicule. <strong>

Two things often get in the way of substantive discussion:</strong>

1) It is a major issue on this site that sometimes people think that the correctness of their own views is obvious, and the stupidity of opposing views is equally obvious. You can see how such an assumption doesn't lead to particularly deep engagement. And it is ultimately illusory and more than a bit naive.

2) Sometimes people believe that the value of an idea can be evaluated by examining of the experience, authority, gender or ethnic identity of the speaker... If you think about it, such methods and assumptions quickly destroy any discussion of substance (and reduce everything to the undermining of the credibility of others). We can only give such method so much latitude before (obviously and inherently) any substantive discussion is destroyed -- and reduced to personal denunciations and squabbling.

Here, on this site, we deal with the idea, <em>not</em> the individual. We treat the value of an idea as <em>independent</em> of the person speaking it. And we also assume there is value to the expression and consideration of ideas that we personally might consider "wrong." (And I personally have learned a great deal from views I once considered "wrong.")

This moderator note is not about any individual -- We have not removed or snipped any comments so far -- though several have obviously gone over the line.

Our moderating is (obviously) not about preventing anyone's point of view from being heard. It is about what we collectively need to get to the heart of important matters.

Please stop personalization now. And focus on substantive issues of line. If you have issues with moderating, please handle it by email. All reasonable issues considered and acted on! This is your site ultimately.]

Let us begin with the very end of your post. That you seek actual unity with ISO on the basis of "disciplining" a member of our collectivity - despite everything I've outlined - simply shows the detail of your own sectarianism and your unburied hatchet. That will in fact not happen because our cadre organization, FRSO/OSL, had determined unprincipled behavior extending from multiple sources.

Now that considered - you're in fact in a position where you're forced to conduct work with us and this is how you approach your own personal complaints? A public site.

You said you didn't have a private conversation with one of us, but as I see you said you "heard us" speak about it? So you silently stood there in front of a comrade speaking about this event to reveal that here? What is the difference?

All this behind to the actual substance of things, I'll be quite short and blunt.

All ideas are stamped by classes, all classes have particular interests. I refuse Avakian humanism without Avakian, in essence what you simply deny is the class nature of our struggle and our activities. Petty-bourgeois radicals are middle strata in most respects to be won over, but the primacy of work is to consolidate the advance and to build organizations for class struggle led by the proletariat. To assemble a general staff for this struggle is the first task, to create conditions and basis for mass organizations led by this general staff is the second task. This is what we're in fact doing in the context of NYC and there is in fact little exaggeration to it. We managed in the course of a few months since the establishment of IGNITE a certain command of much the work at CUNY with organic intellectual forces. This is in fact more valuable than a scattered few hundred people of a mostly white anarchisty petty-bourgeois trend...quite legitimately. I would easily take ten Maoist youth for a 100 anarchist youth.

The petty-bourgeois nature of this action, its ideology, and its participants (in the main, there are of course exceptions to that rule). Makes in fact an important difference to our commitments - we choice to take the first few weeks of semester doing the drudgery work for preparing for the whole of the school year than waste time at something we've already done. it is not identity politics, but a question of class analysis and assesment as was brought forward by my initial piece and why I have termed your approached as "scattered brain."

When the smo ke is cleared, we will still be talking to its organizers and they are going to want to talk to us (and the bad taste of our critique will give them a chance to ruminate in it and sum up the lessons), if they disagree whatever their disposition they will likely still be in contact. We're not at this point going to involve ourselves any deeper besides possibly passing by. If you'd like to conduct objective rear-guard work that maybe bring forward one or two people, they will end up speaking to us anyway too.

Again this is a failure for reasons outlined. You're lying when you say this is growing, even your own comrades in NY reported it going from a 1000 to 500. If still stands at 500 that means it got 2.5% of its projected target - how could it be any less than a failure?

Quite literally why put in the time for this and not for our forces to organize for the coming SlutWalk or for the tenth anniversary of the Afghan War, or for October 22nd action.

Because I wrote the last post hiding in a corner from my phone at work - I missed some essential things.

This is not about you not being a big-shot, its about you not having done jack in the work we've done amongst youth. You assess the situation from a glance, project your prejudices, attack a communist youth formation in such a way that it in fact can create tension in the movement...doing it upon hearsay all the more the issue.

We on the other hand literally have been in the student and youth work for years, the formation of IGNITE was a huge advance in the development of this work in building a new revolutionary formation, we're putting forward a program of development which will put us and our allies at the head of youth movement - however this can only be done as One divides into Two. This is part of that division and there is a necessity to expose populist economism.

On a few other points - there was of course reach out, but there was much rejection of this action precisely because it was a mess. There was no organizing either, just outreach. Now let me ask you, if you were head of a community org - knowing what happened at bloombergville - and the same ppl reached out for the same basic action...why would you mobilize people for this.

And yes we received a friendly invite to the general assembly to issue our criticisms - but that was simply a ridiculous request. It would have put us in the position of Sparts. Just think for the moment please what you're writing and what kind of practice that really is, its the ultimate opportunism.

It seems the demonstration was broken up by the police.

I think that this action should be counted as a failure and that was predictable. Why? I belong to a number of different organizations and the first I heard of the event was on September 15th. I got an email and the press release was posted on Kasama on that day too. Two days before the event. I am not suggesting taht I am special I am just think that this reflects very poor organizing.

Leadersless or not this is not how you organize anything. These are sort of elementary errors. A couple of years ago some Rutgers students organized a walkout against the war. A walkout had previously because the organizers "put out a call" for students to walkout and that was the extent of their organizing. Organizing for the successful walkout began by building a coalition of every progressive political and cultural organization on the campuses and getting them to commit to turn out their membership. And then the organizing of unaffiliated students began. By organizing them I mean the students made a commitment to walk out of class on the appointed day. The walkout organizers knew that at least five hundred students would walkout because they had the names of the students who were supposed to show up. I think that is very basic organizing.

It seems to me that Neftali is talking about doing this kind of day to day work that is necessary to build organization and a movement. The event seems like a textbook example of the kind of spontaneity and its worship that Lenin criticized in "What is to be done?" The worship of spontaneity comes from a place of despair. We are in the midst of a deep crisis of capitalism yet the fortunes of revolutionary organization and movement have not risen as we might have imagined that they would in the face of such a crisis.

I've tried to make clear that my criticism was not of the entire organization of Ignite.

In the beginning, I made a criticsm of your original post, however I also called out similar posts on this thread with a similar attitude and orientation.

And I'm not criticizing the decision not to work on the action. I'm criticizing the hostile attitude toward it made in public, not only by certain individuals in Ignite but by many other forces.

In hinsight, I was wrong to express my personal feelings in regard to particular individual behavior and rhetoric publically. It certainly took away from the points I was trying to make. So I criticize myself for that poor decision and I apologize to your organization.

In terms of the student movement, I read and investigate the different lines and trends within it and our collective talks to people who are more directly involved to get a greater sense of what is going on there. I think this is more than just getting information and forming opinions based on hearsay.

The majority of my criticisms were based on what was public, though I went into areas where I should have not have and this took away from the points I wanted to make. That is my error.

I do feel like your class analysis has a strong strain of economic determinism in it yourself. It confuses class position at times for class outlook. Further it seems that decisions about where to "dig in" are based on a strucutral analysis of where the most oppressed sections are locationally vs. looking at things from where societal eruptions have the potential to take root thus creating opportunities for communists to link up their politics with broader sections of people.

So we disagree in that regard , though I appreciate that your young group is thinking about and coming up ideas about these questions.

In regards to my class analysis - this is a very important demarcation in relationship to what in fact I believe had become the Avakian turn, and I in fact see in your politics in this respect Avakianism without Avakian. Class outlooks come precisely from class positions, from contending class formations in relationship to each other. While there of course exists an abstraction of class ideology in regards to the process of class formation and class struggle, they in fact can't be clearly divorced. Such a divorce is truly the step towards an idealism that really seeks to emulate a radical humanism.

On the other hand we're not simply asking people to "dig in" to local work, this is in fact a distortion. We're in fact strategically building a political mechancism which would attempt to as we have stated develop cadre schools to bring forward intellectual forces (either organic in relationship to the proletariat or those who are joining the people through class suicide) into sectors of society which in fact will be on the leading strike against US Empire - the lowest and deepest section of the multinational working class of this country and all oppressed nationality progressive classes. This is derived from a structural analysis that looks at the condensation of contradictions, in its overdetermination to produce the particular social formation that appears under this state. That such analysis is made from the materialist assesment of possible revolutionary upheaval that is put forward by our leading cadre organization, FRSO/OSCL.

It is of course our opinion that this is precisely the Maoist method of using class analysis and historical materialism as a science to inform a long term political strategy. Whereas the position you're offering is in fact simply a radical humanism, revolutionary existentialism, in the end the ideology of the petty-bourgeois radical forces who brought forward this event...an ideology at least similar in its method.

Eruptions don't appear from the void, they appear in the structural coordinates produced by overdetermination of contradictions - following here again Lenin's logic of weakest link. It is our emphasis on working with oppressed nationality proletarian forces in this city as key to development of not only city revolutionary work, but regional, national, and world work. This is a global city in which internal colonies are housed for super-exploitation, where some communities' labor provides substantial part of any flow of capital back to their nations. Within this frame we also keyly analyze amongst which of these forces, in which geographical areas will provide suitable components for growth and development of revolutionary forces and for mass formations led by those forces. That assesment is done by looking at existing forces, the contradictions existent within a community both internally and externally.

It is an objective assesment that petty-bourgeois radical forces, especially amongst the youth of white America, can not provide us a stable base for revolutionary politics because precisely their class nature.

Also I do not understand for myself how you can accuse us of "ambulance chasing" politics of the RCP variant when precisely your line is in fact the logical justification for that type of methodology. An outlook which presumes the appearance of evental ruptures appearing from a void are precisely the type of politics which give basis for that methodology. We do not deny the appearance of the moment of rebellions from the void, however we deny the appearance of revolution from this. Vanguard formations must be ready for any upsurge of the masses; however it must conduct the work to build for revolution itself. It is also historically in its power, in its decision to make revolution that brings revolution. 1917 was a coordinated action by our General Staff opened up by the weakest link of Imperialism being destabilized, from 1927 to 1949 Comrade Mao Zedong made revolution through People's War (as was done in Peru, Nepal, India, and Phillippines). In no instance was a vanguard formation playing catchup, but in fact earned the right to its title as vanguard.

The distinction between ourselves is actually a distinction between idealism and materialism, metaphysics vs. science. We presume an actuality of revolution within the coordinates of capital itself whereas you're putting it forward in terms of potentiality. Whereas see revolution necessitated by the very movement of capitalism, that is the dialectical process of class struggle opens the sites of revolution...you're putting it forward in potentiality, that really capitalism is a murmur to loosely connected political phenomena. I had once shared the latter view, but examination of this crisis has revealed to me what I think is patently obvious - the truth of class war, the necessity of Vanguard political organization, the need to put science (and not philosophy) in the hands of the masses of people, and to smash this state and establish a benevolent democratic dictatorship of the proletarian masses along with its allies over all class enemies.

The truth of this can only be found not in the square, which hopelessly and montonously reproduces the petty-bouregois ideology of democracy, but in the practice of building for red jihad.

Thank you Neftali for clarifying your position.

For one the way I understand our communist history, I think you are starting to tell a story from its middle sought of speak. I don't think we primarily need to be looking at 1917 in Russia and 1927-1949 in China. I think we are more in a situation analogous to 1898 in Russia, May 4th Movement in China. In other words I think that we need to be looking at the ways those initial moments took place in which events independent of our organizing led to the emergence of beginning communist cells and the opportunity to merge these new communists colectivities with broader sections of people.

I'm not suggesting to just chase behind whatever new movements emerge. What I think is necessary is to conduct class analysis with an approach toward looking for those areas both geopraphically and also that arise due to ideological struggle and political events, where there are sections of the most oppressed begin to emerge who have become literate and conscious and potentially more open to communist politics. You state:

"Within this frame we also keyly analyze amongst which of these forces, in which geographical areas will provide suitable components for growth and development of revolutionary forces and for mass formations led by those forces. That assesment is done by looking at existing forces, the contradictions existent within a community both internally and externally"

I agree with this approach.

Though I'm weary of the conclusion that in the conjuncture we are in it that sections of "petty-bourgeois radical forces, especially amongst the youth of white America", will not provide a fertile ground for recruiting communist cadre. It seems to me that throughout histrory they always were and still continue to be and this has to do with the general contradictions in society that give these forces the freedom to think more about radical ideas. And this is the place in which I think you confuse class content with class outlook.

Organizing among the youth of color in CUNY is important and given the fact that more oppressed youth are going to college, there maybe more opportunity to organize them into cadre, however, in normal times these youth still have more restraints in terms of how involved they can get than sections coming from the petty-bourgoisie.

This is not an argument not to organize among the most oppressed. It is an argument for the evental approach. An argument for choosing more carefully given the scarcity of our numbers where to concentrate forces. In this sense we want to look for where there are sections of the most oppressed whether in communites, schools, various types of organizations, etc. who are already in motion. Clusters or nuggets of the most advanced. It is an argument against focusing on communities simply based on the level of oppression they face (though your analysis does seem more comlex than that).

Further I would beg the question, how is your strategy different from the strategy of the RCP in the 80s and 90s to build base areas in opressed communities? And shouldn't the time be spent to actually sum up that experience before risking the chance of accidentally reinventing the wheel?

In addition Neftali, as short point. It seems that FRSO/OSCL has a much better track record in organizing students than the RCP ever did and perhaps the idea of organizing students from oppressed communities to go back into those communities with communist politics maybe somewhat different.

However, there was an experience in the RCP where people from oppressed communites were trained as communist cadre and sent back into communities and had a hard time realting there new training. It wasn't so organic.

I think part of this and a possible flaw in your strategy is again that there is a strong strain of economic determinism in it. In other words, it assumes that becuase a student came from an oppressed community he will be more likely won over to communism and better able to relate his politics to the people.

This is not necessarily the case and another case I think for searching for clusters (nodules) of forces who are not necessarily communists but certainly radicalized who actually do have orgainic ties to their communities. I think this seems to be a strong strategic approach for fusing communism with the advanced forces and connecting to a wider section of the more intermediate

@Keith,

My disagreement with Neftali is not with his assessment of the orgainizing for this event, which he is in a better position than me to understand. My disagreement with him and other posters in this discussion is the hostility and distrust of the action based seemingly on the class positions of the people involved.

There is more however to this action that NYC and Wall Street to grapple with. There were actions in a number of US cities and also in other countries. It is a phenomenon worth exploring, for instance the role of Anonymous and the growing militancy of the internet and hacker community.

A dismissive approach to this phenomena on superficial and what I would consider to be a really mechanical conception of class blocks the ability to really learn anything from what is taking place here on a really global context.

I'm also not won to the idea that we have to be so scared of the petty bourgoisie taking over the movement. On the contrary if we ignore these things as they gain momentum globally then we do in fact isolate ourselves and then really lose the opportunity to lead as communists.

@Nat W. and Neftali

I think it actually is worthwhile to explore and critique our comrades in organizations for not participating in such actions. Not for the sake of saying "liquidate your work and become ambulance chasers" but rather in the spirit of critiquing a wooden and orthodox methodology. The idea that something which seeks to learn from rebellion around the world (Greece, Spain, Egypt, Tunisia, etc) has shaken the social fabric of societies and opened new freedom for revolutionaries to work, for sights of the oppressed and people generally to be lifted, and for people to learn the experience of fighting is something peti-bourgeois and therefore not worthy of our attentions is sterile and brittle.

Let me try to elaborate.

-For one there is a conception that revolutionary movements will mainly arise from forms which they have before, or at least our perception of how they arose before. (Unions, community organization, movementist organizations, etc).

-There is the lack of appreciation in this conception, which Neftali seems to argue, of process. Of what conclusions or politics can be drawn from such experiences that can be the seeds of communist organization, movements, and consciousness. Of the fact that out of the material that exists, or radical democratic and populist movements, that revolutionary lessons and conclusions can and often times do arise. We can look throughout history at this. Peasant rebellions in China, anti-Tzarist movements in Russia, demands for the right to vote in the South, etc.

-The idea that when movements arise, or have the possibility of erupting, that are not already communist in politics or fit into our preconceived blueprint of how revolution should unfold, that we should simply stand to the side of such things is to simply criticize movements and people (precisely as Mao argued against in his debates on the peasant rebellions in China) while events pass you by. They will find other leaders and class forces to fall behind. This is precisely why the KOE in Greece has been ballooning in recent years and why they are not alien to the movements of Syntagma Square. (Which they also raise their own critique of and work to influence and transform). Meanwhile almost every other leftist organization is left in the dust in Greece, obsolete. Some even go and protest at the squares.

-I think that it is a big problem that there is not more clarity among our comrades (ourselves and generally) on the importance of supporting resistance and new possible events (in the Badiouian sense.)

It is on this basis that I think we should critique precisely the hostility and the abstentionism toward the recent actions in NY. Not with hostility or sectarianism. But with comradely struggle, probably sharply.

I'm quite sure that there were all sorts of errors and shortcomings of the organizing: the structure, the outreach, the demands, tactics conception and whatever else. But can't communists help with that? Don't we have a great deal of insight and experience to offer? Then through that don't we have a responsibility to agitate and spread analysis about the fundamental problem and solution? And where we can't convince people shouldn't we still walk through the process with them, as comrades, friends and fellow travelers? And couldn't some people (a couple, ten, or hundreds) through that process be won to drawing revolutionary conclusions or maybe become communists themselves?

How else will rebels become communists? And how else will communists not be alien to people (generally) and potential revolutionaries?

The movements and moments of revolutionary rupture of the future will not happen in the ways that we expect or the ways decades old orthodoxy teaches us. Its long past time that we break with such ideas.

We should be supporting any struggle against the bulwarks of American imperialist capitalism. Waiting until we have a protest that it 100% ideologically correct makes no sense, and is self defeating. This has great potential, it is class war, even if many of the protesters don't understand all the implications of what they are fighting against. It is revolutionary, and communists of all stripes should be rallying behind it.

I have neither the time nor the inclination to get to deeply into this exchange as I find the personal and sectarian tone utterly at odds with a serious commitment to advancing understanding or unity. Since, however, my writing (as Christopher Day) on the origins of SLAM has been invoked in defense of Ignite's current practices, I feel it is important to clarify a little about that history.

SLAM was founded in 1996 as the then latest iteration of a broad coalition of forces involved in the various struggles at CUNY (in particular against tuition hikes and budget cuts, and in defense of open admissions and ethnic studies). For folks from outside NYC its important to understand that CUNY is a system composed of 18 separate colleges, each with their own campuses with a range of different forces active on each campus. In response to experiences the year before with CUNY-wide meetings being dominated by a number of small small mainly Trotskyist groups with little mass support on any campus we decided on a structure of campus-based coalitions that would each elect delegates. We did not exclude the ISO or any other Trotskyist groups and while we had often sharp political differences with them, exclusion was not our intention. The next school year (96-97) was a period of retreat for the movement that had erupted in the spring of 95 and given birth to SLAM and SLAM ceased to really function as a CUNY-wide coalition and instead became in effect its own organization with groups on several campuses (mainly Hunter, Brooklyn College, John Jay and City College) and with the Hunter group which had won control of the student government and therefore a a greatly enlarged resource base. In this process, the several Trotskyist groups that had initially participated in SLAM ceased to participate. While this eliminated certain arguments and while we were glad to see some of them go, there were two groups that actually had a significant base at CUNY -- the ISO and a collective based at Staten Island College called the Revolutionary Socialist Group.

I don't think I appreciated it at the time, but what we saw then as a political defeat for the Trotskyists was really a symptom of the generalized retreat, fragmentation and narrowing of the base of the movement at CUNY. We had been compelled to work together by a genuine upsurge of the masses of CUNY students, most of whose politics were frankly considerably to the right of the ISO and other Trotskyist groups. Absent the necessity of unity imposed by this upsurge our sectarian impulses had more free rein. We complained at the time that the ISO was abandoning the fight around CUNY issues in favor of the "issue du jour," but within the year we too were focusing on a variety of other issues too because the mass base for CUNY issues had dissipated. SLAM went on to do some interesting and exciting things, in large part because of its ideological heterogeneity. Even though the Trotskyists were gone, SLAM remained an alliance of socialists, communists, anarchists, revolutionary nationalists and others. That said I think there were some real costs to the departure of the Trotskyists, mainly in terms of cutting short important processes of political clarification. What we fancied an ideological blow against the ISO was nothing of the sort. Their bad politics had not been defeated in the minds of the masses in the course of an open and thorough debate. But the belief that they had been contributed to a self-righteous certainty that eclectic melange of anarchism, unread Third World Marxism, and sometimes crude identity politics that was our politics had been vindicated.

My point here is not that our criticisms of the ISO were significantly off-base. They weren't. It is however a recognition of the real danger of prematurely excluding opinions. Whats wrong in the politics of the ISO is also wrong in the spontaneous politics of broad sections of the people. In fact, in so far as the politics of the ISO are a coherent distillation of those politics they are generally better. And it is the best -- that is to say the most thought out and coherent -- version of those politics that we need to be engaging and arguing with in a continuous manner that educates everybody. And that is not going to happen if one elevates the exclusion of the ISO from all coalition work to a principle. In a political culture in which Marxism is pretty thoroughly marginalized, in which very few people have even read Marx and Lenin, the idea that there is some sort of urgency to excluding the ISO is, I think, a form of sectarianism that can only train people in dogmatism.

I'd be curious to see if we change any positions in the arguments some have laid out above given Tellnolies' report of attending a general assembly with 400 people, 1000 max at the events height, and the beginning article's suggestion of 20,000 participants.

Has history shown that this event was in case of fact petit-bourg. idealism, or something else? Did it break out like in a vein similar to the May 4th Movement or events in Russia circa 1898 (which I am personally less familiar with)? Why the absence of even more advanced segments of the masses, and how do we account for the anarcho flavor of the participants (which is a complex question given these folks' role as some of the bravest, most consistent fighters but an ideology at least some of us would argue is fatally flawed by non-working class politics)?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ct2G9G8sZdA />
I think this video captures the breadth, size and general tone of the occupation pretty well.

I only want to make a few points of general interest which I wish to respond to and I will be done with this thread:

1) As yesterday passed there was an attempt to unite Occupy Wall St. demonstration with a Troy Davis Demonstration, this was done by people rallying around Troy Davis. This attempt was judged as not being successful by a person who actually has been very critical of IGNITE. He stated that while the rally was going on the mass of occupy wall st. people stayed to the side mostly. I think thats the effective indictment of this Occupy Wall St. if that is true.

2) In relationship to the question of development of revolutionary organization and political forces, quite simply I find nothing more than what Nat W. proposes a very simplely a liquidation of Leninism altogether for a type of pre-Leninist Marxist revolutionary politics. This is in fact being called for when Nat W. calls for our moment as "May 4th" or whatever. This is simply a mechanical metaphysics at its purest which clothes itself in the discourse of a "critical" Marxism, it assumes because of the political weakness of MLM forces numerically in the United States that the anwser is fusion, Two becoming One, in relation to other forces. This is revisionism.

First and foremost no political moment can be replicated - each historical moment is of its own uniqueness, of its own conditions, which can never allow for replication but only development and demarcations from (Feyerband).

In this respect we see our work as a continuity of developing behind the banner of revolutionary science - we have judged that the notion of a saturated party form is in fact incorrect, that the party form based in the historical materialist tradition is the only organizational form equipped to come up against the state, to coordinate protracted revolutionary struggle, and when power is taken the party-state itself is the only sufficient organization to lead the very initial dictatorship of the proletariat to continue civil war, class terror, and to coordinate with other fraternal parties the principles and strategies for world revolution.

3) Understanding the decisions of SLAM and your piece, TNL, was in fact a good reason for us to begin pushing out ISO from our ranks and to consolidate advanced people towards the line closest to MLM through the IGNITE formation. However lets be clear we're not attempting to re-do SLAM. SLAM was in the end itself a failure, it liquidated itself in a whimper not a boom, and it did not produce for itself any revolutionary formations afterwards. Why is this? Precisely because SLAM opposed cadre organization, it created itself as a simple loose sem-cadre grouping of communists, socialists, social-dems, anarchists on the basis of a people of color line. We are not attempting to replicate this, IGNITE is a formation with four principles of unity and is given leadership by a cadre organization. We form a common United Front with people on SLAM's basis of unity itself, we put our people in the position to help develop BSUs', PRSUs', AASUs', and other mass formations.

Chris' opinion is formed under no inspection, no investigation of the conditions of CUNY work. Our exclusion of ISO is a necessary advance for revolutionary forces, we've decided this after three years of coalition work with them. We're at a stage at work in CUNY were advanced sections of people not only read Marx, Lenin, but also Stalin, Mao, Althusser, Avakian...this is our stage of development. Of one thing the advanced have very much a consensus on in our generation, it is the philistine weakness of your generation TNL. So don't impose your limitations as our limitations - the crisis of socialism has passed for us, the conjuncture is different...we live in the globalized police state of US Empire and it produces a different condition of speaking politics at CUNY. I've seen this transformation in my time, in my generation - Pedagogy of the Oppressed is being put down for Foundations of Leninism across the board. We address other young comrades' illusions around The Coming Insurrection not the ISOs' line. In so much we address ISOs' line we are addressing a dinosaur.

After the decade celebration of SLAM, no SLAM forces actually returned to develop revolutionary organization besides the members of FRSO/OSCL. All of them have left the arena of CUNY struggle for work in the non-profit industrial complex, for academic careers, for anything else that wasn't about building revolutionary organization and formation. They didn't even bother to shore up their base and leave a consistent grouping to produce new revolutionaries coming forward. We're not going to make this mistake. We hope our movement will be producing the Hueys', the Kochiyamas', the Richie Perezes' of the future and not the poverty pimp staff of yester-year.

Ok, my first response in reading this exchange here was, lolwut, the socdem FRSO spawned an ultra-left youth group? But in the interest of more constructive engagement, here are some other comments and questions.

So what's the plan for Ignite when your 'cadre organization' endorses Obama again? How do you reconcile your organic connection with FRSO with calling other people and trends 'the poverty pimp staff of yester-year.' Is this just a case of (ultra)militant language dressing up essentially non-revolutionary base-building politics?

It's hard not to chuckle at the condemnation of TNL's generation at CUNY for 'philistine weakness.' Maybe there's some truth to that, IDK. But clearly there were a lot of material pulls that (since before SLAM and continuing today) drew revolutionary activists from the CUNY scene into the non-profit, academic and 'anything else that wasn’t about building revolutionary organization and formation' worlds. (Indeed, one can see this trend going all the way back to the 1930s.) Despite living in the age of 'the globalized police state of US Empire,' those material pulls still exist.

When at the center of a super-militant student revolutionary milieu, as Neftalí no doubt is, it can be easy to get a distorted sense of reality, on multiple levels. One overestimates the long-term militant commitment and communist consciousness of one's closest comrades, one confuses the creation of a large scene around revolutionary activism at CUNY with broad popular revolutionary aspirations, one confuses a clear criticism of past mistakes by other revolutionaries in one's own mind with an accurate summation of those mistakes, one confuses aggressive and macho language with energetic and lively political criticism. In essence, one resides in an intoxicating bubble of youth militancy. If I were taking that drug myself, I wouldn't want to leave that bubble. But, since I'm not there, I would like to urge the comrade to step out from the bubble and reconnect with actually existing world.

&gt; Ok, my first response in reading this exchange here was, lolwut, the socdem FRSO spawned an ultra-left youth group?

This is a place where I'm not really an expert on the factional splits, but perhaps the issue is over whether we mean FRSO (freedomroad.org) or FRSO (frso.org)? Since 1999 there have been 2 factions using the name FRSO.

FRSO/OSCL has never endorsed Obama. Criticism always welcome, but please check your facts first.

*sigh*

Legalisms aside, when the most prominent member of an organization spearheads Progressives for Obama: http://www.thenation.com/article/progressives-obama, those of us who have not been initiated into the esoteric world of FRSO's internal justifications will draw their own conclusions.

Neftali,

There is much to disagree with in your comment, and even more in the generally sectarian tone. That said, I am completely in accord with your desire to demystify SLAM. It was one experience and it is absolutely true that it failed to consolidate a revolutionary core. Personally, I protracted my involvement in SLAM by several years beyond my student activist shelf-life in largely vain efforts to consolidate such a core and have been troubled by much of the post-mortem lionizing of SLAM.

It is true that my comments on the exclusion of the ISO are not based on any investigation of the current CUNY movement, so maybe I'm off base. But I suspect it is just as likely that it is as sectarian as it sounds.

I think there is much wisdom in Garrosh's quite clever comments. Maybe you'll succeed where we failed because we were "philistines" and you aren't. I certainly hope its that simple. You should know, however, that we had similar certainties about the failings of our predecessors. In any event, good luck.

Neftali wrote:

<blockquote>1) As yesterday passed there was an attempt to unite Occupy Wall St. demonstration with a Troy Davis Demonstration, this was done by people rallying around Troy Davis. This attempt was judged as not being successful by a person who actually has been very critical of IGNITE. He stated that while the rally was going on the mass of occupy wall st. people stayed to the side mostly. I think thats the effective indictment of this Occupy Wall St. if that is true.</blockquote>

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YXdXPjcB3w

Thrall: It doesn't require any knowledge of FRSO/OSCL's internal politics to conclude that there are a range of viewpoints among the membership of Freedom Road (all planted solidly within the political unities expressed in the FRSO/OSCL unity documents, available for your review at freedomroad.org). All you need to do is read the comments by self-identified members of FRSO/OSCL over the years on this very blog; That should give you enough information.

I have no interest in hijacking the comments section of this post to be about my own cadre organization---in fact, that is the last thing on earth i want to do, and this will be my final post on the subject. But for the record: there is no "prominent member" within FRSO/OSCL who towers above others.

Given the emphasis that the Kasama Project places on dialogue and engagement among revolutionaries of various trends, I would think that you would welcome an organization that (from the outside, at least) may seem to be able to hold revolutionaries of different viewpoints and harness the contradictions that brings in order to learn new things about the world.

I think the questions raised here are valid, but the snide tone we can all do without.

Meanwhile for the second night running, Keith Olbermann on his Countdown/Current TV has been promoting the Occupy Wall Street protest, interviewing participants, and talking about (with different guests) how this protest is another indication of how things are bubbling under the surface, are cumulative and could explode “like a geyser.”

Keith O. raises other questions as well, e.g. how the majority of the media and, then the government, are burying this story:

<blockquote> “Keith and author Will Bunch, senior writer, Philadelphia Daily News, call out the New York Times and other mainstream outlets for failing to cover the Wall Street protests that began on September 17. Comparing their social media strategy to that of the Arab Spring, Bunch hopes that the protesters — promoted on Twitter and by the magazine “Adbusters” and other alternative news sources — refine their goals to appeal to a broader audience.”

“This rhetorical question is, perhaps, self-answering. A protest called Occupy Wall Street, trying to underscore and gum up the financial industries' influence on who's rich and who's not -- why wouldn't that get extensive news coverage?

In our third story -- after five straight days of sit-ins, marches and shouting and some arrests, actual North American newspaper coverage of this -- even by those who have thought it farce or failure -- has been limited to one blurb in a free newspaper in Manhattan and a column in "The Toronto Star."

It started Saturday when about a thousand people marched into New York's financial district to express their anger over how the financial system treats the majority of Americans -- what they call the 99 percenters -- and to draw attention to the misdeeds of Wall Street. They have been confronted with an ever-increasing police presence which is blocking certain streets and attempting to keep protestors away from the stock exchange itself.

While the protesters are peaceful, tensions are beginning to rise. According to the group's own website, seven protestors were arrested yesterday, with four more being arrested today. The police have resorted to using a 166-year-old law which bans "the wearing masks in a gathering of two or more people except at masquerade parties." Simple solution to that crap? Call those protests outdoor masquerade parties.

While the majority of the media is ignoring the public uprising, it is not going completely unnoticed. Take, for instance, Yahoo which blocked any e-mail containing the group's website with the message, "Suspicious activity has been detected on your account." Yahoo later acknowledged the error, tweeting, "We apologize for blocking occupywallstreet.org, it was not intentional and caught by our spam filters. It is resolved. It may be a residual delay." </blockquote>

Etc.

Perhaps to over simplify, IMO some of the arguments in the comments so far kind of boil down to two things, both potential errors:

One is to be overly critical, examining every hair on the participants’ (and organizers’) heads, abstaining from participating and waiting for the “perfect storm” (which BTW will never happen); and by implication with them seemingly at the helm steering the ship. The flip side is to give this demonstration/sit-in, etc. too much credence, in its own right. This is not an end game. Instead, I think we should be looking at this "event" and supporting those activists (who are speaking for a much larger disgruntled audience) as part of a potentially larger picture--and with the anticipation of those cracks and fissures that are “bubbling beneath the surface.”

Thank you Poke Salad. This seems to be a difficulty inherent in more ideologically open formations. Like it or not, some members are in fact "more prominent," at the very least in the public eye, and one of the consequences of that is that their words and deeds are going to be taken as representative of the politics of the organization. When Mike Ely says or does something, it is interpreted as representative of Kasama when, in fact, there may be a variety of views on that matter in Kasama. This can be confusing to people and its not really their fault. At the same time people are not always unjustified in jumping to this conclusion. Kasama's formal basis of unity is briefer and broader than FRSO's, but in such situations there inevitably emerges a sort of de facto informal basis of unity which people may dissent from but which in fact guides the organization's overall practice and public image and the statements of leading members play a big part in that. I supported and argued here for people to vote for Obama in 2008, but people are not wrong in characterizing Kasama's general stance then as one of opposition to that. Similarly I think that people are not wrong to perceive the general stance of FRSO/OCSL as one of having supported the 2008 Obama campaign, not least because the organization's most prominent and charismatic leading member headed up Progressives for Obama and in many (most?) places FRSO/OCSL followed that basic orientation. And just as my views on electoral politics are not representative of the political center of Kasama (though I am encouraged to fight for them), based on previous experiences my read is that Ignite's views and tone are not representative of FRSO/OCSL's general approach to student work (though you are sincere in allowing their expression). I suspect that it is going to prove more difficult to take an organizationally agnostic position on the 2012 elections than in 2008 when Bush was in office, Obama didn't have a record as Commander in Chief, and left dissent on his candidacy in general was more muted. I am probably not the only one curious as to how FRSO/OCSL will navigate that. As you may recall one of the reasons I argued that Obama's election would be a good thing was that I thought it would force progressives to look more clearly at the nature and functions of the Democratic Party. That has begun to happen now and while the left is still very weak I think it is a better position to be in than had McCain won and people could have kept blaming the Republicans for all of the sins of capitalism and imperialism.

<blockquote>I suspect that it is going to prove more difficult to take an organizationally agnostic position on the 2012 elections than in 2008 when Bush was in office, Obama didn’t have a record as Commander in Chief, and left dissent on his candidacy in general was more muted. I am probably not the only one curious as to how FRSO/OCSL will navigate that. As you may recall one of the reasons I argued that Obama’s election would be a good thing was that I thought it would force progressives to look more clearly at the nature and functions of the Democratic Party. That has begun to happen now and while the left is still very weak I think it is a better position to be in than had McCain won and people could have kept blaming the Republicans for all of the sins of capitalism and imperialism.</blockquote>

This jibes with my experience.

I came of age politically during the 2000 Florida recount and the subsequent illegal invasion of Iraq. And though I could see the Democrats' complicity in all this, I naively believed at the time that it was just a matter of Blue Dogs (i.e. a few bad apples.) After the 2006 election when the Democrats' took back Congress and yet still refused to do anything to end the war or even attach strings to its continuation, my doubts grew. But the Democrats and their supporters were able to convince me that everything would be different when we got a Democrat in the Oval Office.

And then Obama started campaigning and I foolishly bought into, at least partly, his message of "hope" and "change." I wasn't naive enough to believe that Obama was going to end capitalism or imperialism all together, but I did believe that he was a moderate social democrat in the mold of FDR and that with the collapse of the financial system and the plunge into capitalist crisis, the end of the neoliberal era was in sight and Obama would move quickly to re-institute a New Deal-style of American governance.

Looking back on it now I can see that this was all pretty much a fantasy. Almost immediately when Obama took office he began reneging on his campaign promises and serving the status-quo. It was around this time, in the first few weeks of Obama's presidency, that I discovered this site and started to see things for the way they really are. I obviously feel like an idiot now for having bought into the bullshit the Democrats were selling, especially considering that so many of the folks here understood all this from the very beginning. Had I been privy to the kind of revolutionary analysis that folks participating here (not just the Kasama folks, but so many of the rest of you) put forth, I might have recognized my errors earlier. Maybe. I might also have disregarded it because, as TNL perceptively points out, a lot of progressive-minded folks needed to actually <em>see</em> and <em>experience</em> the cravenness of the Democrats for themselves before the scales begin to fall from their eyes. So in that sense, I think TNL was right. Obama's election has done a lot to expose this system for what it truly is and I think there are a lot more people like me out there who are beginning to wake up. I believe that one very important task for revolutionaries right now is to find these people and present them with the kind of hard-hitting revolutionary truths that will awaken them further.