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Occupy, Nucleus of the New Society?
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Dan Clore
May 19, 2012, 7:46:22 AM5/19/12
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News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
http://c4ss.org/content/10402
Occupy: Nucleus of the New Society?
by Kevin Carson
May 18, 2012
Many Occupy supporters on the Left express concern that it could be
coopted by the mainstream institutional Left and harnessed to a
political agenda of NPR liberalism. The recent prominence of Van
Johnson’s Rebuild the Dream and MoveOn.org seems to provide at least
superficial justification for such fears. But those fears are groundless
— mainly because there’s no official Occupy “movement” to be coopted.
Sure, liberals are free to use the Occupy label to promote their agenda.
That is, after all, what Occupy’s all about: A brand, or platform,
ready-made for adoption on a modular basis by anyone who sees fit to use
it. The more different groups using the Occupy brand, each with its own
anti-corporate agenda, the better. It’s not a zero sum game.
The beauty of Occupy is that its module/platform architecture, and its
openness to anyone who wants to create a new node for their own
purposes, make it an ideal laboratory for experimentation in
revolutionary praxis. Any local node is free to try out new ways of
doing things, and to share its experience with others; the new
techniques are freely available to any other node in the network that
finds them useful. No permission, no administrative coordination to make
sure everybody’s on the same page, is needed at any step in the process.
It’s the same kind of stigmergic platform as Wikipedia, a Linux
developer group … or Al Qaeda Iraq. Self-selected individuals and local
groups make contributions to praxis entirely on their own initiative,
the smallest contribution can be leveraged with no transaction cost, and
all contributions immediately become the common property of the entire
movement.
I’ve hoped for some time that Occupy would cease to be mainly a protest
movement and instead become mainly a school of living. That is, that —
like the neighborhood assemblies in Argentina ten years ago — it would
become a venue for local communities to disseminate the skills and
technologies for building counter-institutions and a counter-economy
that could flourish outside the decaying neoliberal system.
Some early signs in this direction were teach-ins like those of Juliet
Schor (author of Plenitude) and Michel Bauwens of the Foundation for P2P
Alternatives. Another was the “Occupy Our Homes” campaign, which offered
some promise of evolving into a nationwide squatter movement to reclaim
vacant housing. The term for things like this is “prefigurative
politics”: That is, rather than attempting to pressure the power
structure of the existing society for reforms, they exemplify the
successor society in formation.
This spring, we see renewed occasion for hope. For example Occupy the
Farm has occupied the Gill Tract, a vacant five-acre tract of land near
the UC Berkeley campus slated for commercial development, and is
cultivating it to raise food for the community.
All kinds of other counter-economic projects are available for Occupy to
adopt. One of them is the kind of repair cafe that’s being pioneered in
Amsterdam, as a way for low-income people to keep their broken
appliances in use. The same general idea, neighborhood workshops and
repair centers using the members’ shared tools and skills as a base for
subsistence outside the cash nexus for the unemployed and underemployed,
has been around at least since Colin Ward and Karl Hess.
Another variant of the same idea is the hackerspaces in many communities
around the United States. Local digital barter currencies, on the same
basic architecture as Tom Greco’s mutual credit clearing systems, are
springing up all over the country. Open source machine tools, like those
under development by the hardware hackers at the Open Source Ecology
project, can produce factory quality goods at a two-order-of-magnitude
reduction in cost. Soil-intensive horticultural techniques can feed one
person on a tenth of an acre.
The human capital built up by Occupy in local communities has great
potential as a clearinghouse for sharing and promoting such projects,
and as a seed around which the new society and the new economy can
crystallize.
As my friend Rose Anderson stated in a recent discussion:
“The unmitigated greed of the 1% unintentionally forced a paradigm shift
while no one was looking…. The jobs aren’t coming back, but as this
situation drags on the number of people figuring out they don’t have to
wait on the government and corporations will be the most perfect storm
of societal change ever inadvertently created … Occupy is just the
beginning.”
Exactly. The real potential of Occupy is not to pressure Congress to
adopt Obama’s infrastructure program, or the Buffett Rule, or any of the
other shiboleths of “Progressive” politics. It is, rather, to serve as
the nucleus of the new society in being.
--
Dan Clore
New book: _Weird Words: A Lovecraftian Lexicon_:
http://tinyurl.com/yd3bxkw
My collected fiction: _The Unspeakable and Others_
http://tinyurl.com/3tyj9cq
Lord Weÿrdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://tinyurl.com/292yz9
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
Skipper: Professor, will you tell these people who is
in charge on this island?
Professor: Why, no one.
Skipper: No one?
Thurston Howell III: No one? Good heavens, this is anarchy!
-- _Gilligan's Island_, episode #6, "President Gilligan"
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
http://c4ss.org/content/10402
Occupy: Nucleus of the New Society?
by Kevin Carson
May 18, 2012
Many Occupy supporters on the Left express concern that it could be
coopted by the mainstream institutional Left and harnessed to a
political agenda of NPR liberalism. The recent prominence of Van
Johnson’s Rebuild the Dream and MoveOn.org seems to provide at least
superficial justification for such fears. But those fears are groundless
— mainly because there’s no official Occupy “movement” to be coopted.
Sure, liberals are free to use the Occupy label to promote their agenda.
That is, after all, what Occupy’s all about: A brand, or platform,
ready-made for adoption on a modular basis by anyone who sees fit to use
it. The more different groups using the Occupy brand, each with its own
anti-corporate agenda, the better. It’s not a zero sum game.
The beauty of Occupy is that its module/platform architecture, and its
openness to anyone who wants to create a new node for their own
purposes, make it an ideal laboratory for experimentation in
revolutionary praxis. Any local node is free to try out new ways of
doing things, and to share its experience with others; the new
techniques are freely available to any other node in the network that
finds them useful. No permission, no administrative coordination to make
sure everybody’s on the same page, is needed at any step in the process.
It’s the same kind of stigmergic platform as Wikipedia, a Linux
developer group … or Al Qaeda Iraq. Self-selected individuals and local
groups make contributions to praxis entirely on their own initiative,
the smallest contribution can be leveraged with no transaction cost, and
all contributions immediately become the common property of the entire
movement.
I’ve hoped for some time that Occupy would cease to be mainly a protest
movement and instead become mainly a school of living. That is, that —
like the neighborhood assemblies in Argentina ten years ago — it would
become a venue for local communities to disseminate the skills and
technologies for building counter-institutions and a counter-economy
that could flourish outside the decaying neoliberal system.
Some early signs in this direction were teach-ins like those of Juliet
Schor (author of Plenitude) and Michel Bauwens of the Foundation for P2P
Alternatives. Another was the “Occupy Our Homes” campaign, which offered
some promise of evolving into a nationwide squatter movement to reclaim
vacant housing. The term for things like this is “prefigurative
politics”: That is, rather than attempting to pressure the power
structure of the existing society for reforms, they exemplify the
successor society in formation.
This spring, we see renewed occasion for hope. For example Occupy the
Farm has occupied the Gill Tract, a vacant five-acre tract of land near
the UC Berkeley campus slated for commercial development, and is
cultivating it to raise food for the community.
All kinds of other counter-economic projects are available for Occupy to
adopt. One of them is the kind of repair cafe that’s being pioneered in
Amsterdam, as a way for low-income people to keep their broken
appliances in use. The same general idea, neighborhood workshops and
repair centers using the members’ shared tools and skills as a base for
subsistence outside the cash nexus for the unemployed and underemployed,
has been around at least since Colin Ward and Karl Hess.
Another variant of the same idea is the hackerspaces in many communities
around the United States. Local digital barter currencies, on the same
basic architecture as Tom Greco’s mutual credit clearing systems, are
springing up all over the country. Open source machine tools, like those
under development by the hardware hackers at the Open Source Ecology
project, can produce factory quality goods at a two-order-of-magnitude
reduction in cost. Soil-intensive horticultural techniques can feed one
person on a tenth of an acre.
The human capital built up by Occupy in local communities has great
potential as a clearinghouse for sharing and promoting such projects,
and as a seed around which the new society and the new economy can
crystallize.
As my friend Rose Anderson stated in a recent discussion:
“The unmitigated greed of the 1% unintentionally forced a paradigm shift
while no one was looking…. The jobs aren’t coming back, but as this
situation drags on the number of people figuring out they don’t have to
wait on the government and corporations will be the most perfect storm
of societal change ever inadvertently created … Occupy is just the
beginning.”
Exactly. The real potential of Occupy is not to pressure Congress to
adopt Obama’s infrastructure program, or the Buffett Rule, or any of the
other shiboleths of “Progressive” politics. It is, rather, to serve as
the nucleus of the new society in being.
--
Dan Clore
New book: _Weird Words: A Lovecraftian Lexicon_:
http://tinyurl.com/yd3bxkw
My collected fiction: _The Unspeakable and Others_
http://tinyurl.com/3tyj9cq
Lord Weÿrdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://tinyurl.com/292yz9
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
Skipper: Professor, will you tell these people who is
in charge on this island?
Professor: Why, no one.
Skipper: No one?
Thurston Howell III: No one? Good heavens, this is anarchy!
-- _Gilligan's Island_, episode #6, "President Gilligan"
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