The Occupy movement comes under frequent attack from the institutional Left (and, it goes without saying, from the liberal establishment) for not offering a clear list of official demands — for, in other words, not offering a platform.
But that criticism misses the point. Occupy doesn’t have a single platform, in the sense of a list of demands. But it is a platform — a collaborative platform, like a wiki. Occupy isn’t a unified movement with a single list of demands and an official leadership to state them. Rather, Occupy offers a toolkit and a brand name to a thousand different movements with their own agendas, their own goals, and their own demands — with only their hatred of Wall Street and the corporate state in common, and the Occupy brand as a source of strength and identity.
Although the ends are quite different, the model of organization is much like that of al Qaeda: An essentially leaderless organization, a loose network of cells, each of which adopts the al Qaeda brand or franchise for its own purposes. It’s a much more effective use of resources to provide a common platform and then let a thousand flowers bloom.
A conventional, hierarchical activist institution wastes enormous resources on administrative apparatus and endless negotiations just to get everyone on the same page, before anyone can do anything.
A common platform allows any number of movements, made up of voluntary aggregations of individuals with shared goals, to build on it on a modular basis, and to act without waiting for permission from the headquarters of the One Big Movement. And whenever they do anything that seems to work well, any other node in the network can adopt that tactic as its own without asking anyone’s leave.
That’s why the glocal Occupy movement is throwing off innovations like a fission reaction throws off neutrons. If anything, it’s done so even more since the wave of shutdowns in the U.S. divorced it from occupation as a primary tactic and scattered its seeds to the wind.
But let’s go back a ways. The Pentagon Papers weren’t published pursuant to an official decision by a nationwide anti-war movement, and Woodward and Bernstein didn’t try to found a national political movement to impeach Nixon. In both cases, the immediate actors simply published the information, and allowed anyone who would to leverage that information. They thereby created a free platform that could be developed by any number of antiwar and anti-Nixon activists for their own ends.
Fast forward to Summer 2010. Julian Assange simply published the cable dump at Wikileaks. Every single activist movement that piggybacked on that platform, starting with the uprising in Tunisia, did so on its own initiative, making — its own judgment — the best use of the free, common platform offered by Assange. So it’s gone from Tunisia to Egypt, to the Arab Spring, to Madison, to the demonstrations in Britain and Spain and Greece, to Occupy Wall Street, and back out to the global Occupy movment in hundreds of cities around the world.
Now, with the Occupy movement (thanks to Bloomberg et. al) no longer wedded to occupying public squares, the wave of innovations seems to roll in on a weekly basis. First Occupy Our Homes, and now Occupy the Ports.
According to Lester MacGurdy at Oakland Occupier, Occupy Oakland has begun to deal with police evictions by retreating, waiting until the cops are gone, then going back. Police are essentially heavy infantry who move slowly and ponderously into place, and can move only as quickly as their bloated logistical train moves with them. Protestors are light infantry who can disperse and reconcentrate on short notice. “The tactical evolution that evolved relies on two military tactics that are thousands of years old — the tactical superiority of light infantry over heavy infantry, and the tactical superiority of the retreat over the advance.” You can bet this will be standard procedure for every Occupy group in America in a week’s time.
The corporate state and its thugs in black uniforms and kevlar are big, impressive, and make lots of loud noise — just like a T. Rex blundering into a tar pit. The resistance is small, agile and resilient — just like a swarm of piranha. And in the end, we’ll hang their bleeding heads on our battlements.
In the immortal words of Bob Marley: “The stone that the builder refused shall be the head cornerstone.”
Citations to this article:
- Kevin Carson, Occupy Doesn’t Have a Platform, Hernando [Florida] Today, 12/20/11
- Kevin Carson, Occupy Doesn’t Have a Platform — it is a Platform, River Cities’ [Iowa] Reader, 12/17/11
Sun Tzu is interesting. The original article Kevin is referring to was from the Portland Occupier. Not Oakland. That was also good although a bit inaccurate and naive. I believe he wrote some stuff about the phalanx for example that was completely inaccurate. Many of the people in the movement are just finding their feet with regard to direct action and even physical confrontation. It will be a steep learning curve but Occupy has a lot of smart people and they are adapting.
I’ve heard some alarm and criticism of the idea that people in the movement would use military tactics or nomenclature to discuss the conduct of direct actions. Understanding how your opponent thinks and being open to innovative ways to respond to him isn’t a bad thing.
Strangely enough, the best sources for this are some of the old salesmen for the Iraq invasion. Victor Davis Hanson (at Fresno I believe) was a shameless shill for Bush and the Neocons. However, he is also an important academic figure in the study of warfare in the ancient world. Folks need to swallow their outrage for a moment and read his work, or John Keegan’s vis a vis war and the mindset of warriors and leaders. The corporate state system is very evil. Relatively few of its leaders or foot soldiers are though. We have to understand them.
Similarly, welcome the the returning vets and seek their counsel. Even low level grunts (the most inclined to join Occupy) are going to have valuable input when they see how people have organised themselves. Try and establish links with cops for the same reasons. David Graeber said recently that revolutions only succeed when the cops/soldiers refuse to keep shooting people.
@ dude
BTW, I don’t think glocal is a typo. Think globally, act locally. I like it.
I don’t know who you are quoting (others have suggested Sun Tzu), but those are both wrong, at any rate without further context that qualifies them heavily.
If you put light infantry up against heavy infantry, other things being equal the latter will always win, on the principle that a good big guy will always beat a good little guy. Apparent exceptions, such as the first time the Athenians got a Spartan force to surrender (by harassing them with archers), relied on making other things unequal; on that occasion the Spartans were cut off on a small island by Athenian control of the seas, and the Athenians could take all the time they needed and couldn’t be trapped while the Spartans just had to take it. Similar things apply in later guerilla wars etc.
As for “the tactical superiority of the retreat over the advance”, merely consider the vast casualties routinely inflicted on a flying foe by Napoleonic pursuit after a victory. You only get a tactical superiority of the retreat when it really is “a strategic withdrawal/’rearward advance’ to previously prepared positions” (a phrase often abused to obscure defeat), carried out by a disciplined force in good order making lots of real and feigned counter-attacks to break up the pursuit. There are numerous examples of the British being trained and led well enough to do this, e.g. Yorktown, Corunna, Torres Vedras, and Dunkirk, and even then – despite the tactical success in falling back – one became a disaster after other strategic failings and two merely retrieved a basis after a lost campaign, leaving only one that delivered a good result (Pusan somewhat resembled this, but rather by accident as unrelated initiatives retrieved the situation). Yorktown would have been a major victory if only the position had been prepared well enough (which made Torres Vedras succeed) or naval support and supporting amphibious attacks had been sufficient (which made Pusan succeed).
Why is this site assigning my recent comments (not just on this thread) a date in 1999 and trying to place them out of sequence where readers are less likely to spot them? My own system date is correct. It seems to be happening if they are held for moderation.
Hmm… I’m not the only one whose comment dates are being scrambled, so the problem is at your end.
I’m not sure the comparison of OWS with al qaeda and ‘cells’ is a great idea. First of all, al qaeda is a fictional entity whose name comes from a C.I.A. list of ‘assets’ – undercover operatives (fake terrorists). Second, since the passing of the “infinite detention and torture” act, which excuses the government for kidnapping anyone suspected of ‘supporting terror’ – including the act of protesting – without a charge or trial, creating this association with terrorism expands the government’s excuses and options to suppress #occupy way beyond the use of riot-geared police.
That quote came from Psalm 118 long before Bob Marley.
Boy that Bob Marley sure is an original thinker. (cf. Psalm 118:22 – The stone which the builders refused is become the head stone of the corner.)
Guys, I'm pretty sure that the attribution to Marley was intentional by way of humor.
But, I could be wrong. Like Peter Boyle said, "sock it to me."
The quote is actually Bob Marley's allusion to Psalm 118. The exact wording is Marley's.
My recent post New Book in the Works
Good analogies/references Kevin.
Still need to watch for "professional organizers" and their goat-roping efforts, but the notion that it IS the platform is dead center bullseye.
My recent post as I said, it's just water
"The tactical evolution that evolved relies on two military tactics that are thousands of years old — the tactical superiority of light infantry over heavy infantry, and the tactical superiority of the retreat over the advance.”
Hmm, have OWS people been reading Sun Tzu. That would be interesting!
*global (sixth paragraph)
So Kevin, what do you think of Ron Paul?
Dave: I've used the analogy to the principle of mass, with swarming demonstrators achieving mass through temporary concentration of force followed by rapid dispersal — a 3GW model, as opposed to the 2GW model used by cops. Swarming large organizations entirely through communications overload is 4GW mass, achieved entirely through directed firepower.
BTW, back to Bob Marley and Natty Dred: I'm looking forward to the "Send dem wicked weeping for their soul" part.
My recent post New Book in the Works
Tycho88: He's certainly a statist when it comes to closed borders, and I think he sympathizes to some extent with statist policies on reproductive freedom and drugs at the state and local level. I enjoy watching him make the GOP hawks' jaws drop open in the debates.
My recent post New Book in the Works
Hmm intersting. It seems to me on the states rights issue that he is actually advocating some version of the Rothbardian vision of competing jurisdictions or associations voluntarily entered into and, crucially, voluntarily exited out of if one doesn't like the terms of association. The open borders issue ditto. Maybe Ron Paul doesn't like gay sex (who knows?) but at least he would never dream of turning a right wing collectivist preference into a social policy. He would also end the drug war.
My recent post Media Coordinator Update, 12/16/11
excellent post. occupy is prefugurative and it is setting itself up as a counterpower. it's not about making demands to an illegitimate state, but about organising ourselves in the the only way that is truly political: outside the state.
Actually it's at IntenseDebate's end. C4SS is not the only site I moderate comments for, and bizarre stuff is happening with them elsewhere as well.
According to David Graeber, he "was was in the right place at the right time." He doesn't want to be a (or the) spokesperson for OWS, but he was seen as such by some media outlets (e.g. http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/david-graebe…. The more OWS peeps that understand him, the better in my opinion, as he is an anarchist. His new book on debt is fascinating.
Here's my problem with this analysis of Occupy: it is reinventing that nascent period after the American Revolution where the boundaries of governance were being debated. Obviously one critical difference between them and Occupy is that, in the end, they chose a federated model, but the debates of how to constitute a Republic are still valid. I feel like when I'm in a General Assembly that the 400 years of European Enlightenment never happened. Do they think they should re-invent political science?
So I don't think Occupy can be (yet) THE platform, until it includes history rather than negating it.