Occupy Wall Street

well, as an aside, with maybe one or two exceptions, equating radical anything with american trade unions is naive. they're an effect of sector-monopoly practices, the idea behind which was to depoliticize the union movement. worked like a charm from the point of the merging of the afl and cio, which gutted the latter politically. wasn't always like this---the cio was pretty radical in the 30s and 40s....i don't see any reason to do more than welcome union support. but radical? hardly. there's nothing in the united states remotely like the cfdt in france. there just isn't.

 

Yes, of course the American labor movement has been completely declawed over the past half a century, much of it through legal means.

In my post I referenced unions not as the actually existing American unions, but unions in the original sense of workers getting together to effect change through economic and political actions.

 

neo-liberalism-->monetarism--->supply-side---->trickle down or onto---->the washington consensus--->all more or less synonyms.

i'm thinking that if i can write a pretty broad summary of much of what ows is up to while sitting on my couch in massachusetts during a break in taking care of my very ancient siberian husky then it cant be that hard. it just can't. whether you agree with what is happening is another matter--on that there can be discussions---but acting as though you can't figure it out---i don't buy it.

@dippin-->the occupation movement isn't that different structurally from the movements that started a lot of unions. what's different is the geography of capitalism itself, so it's a different class composition. what this looks a whole lot like, though, is mai 68. and remember the grenelle accords?

 

As for Cyn's question about double standards:
it seems to me that it is clear that there is a double standard when it comes to Solyndra and the occupy wall street movements. In the sense that oil and nuclear subsidies are not examined or subjected to the same economic and political analysis that Solyndra has been, and in the sense that there is a demand for coherence and eloquence from occupy wall street that is not present in most analysis of the "Tea party" or the "moral majority" movements.

 

People taking to the streets have come to your rescue, cyn. Anyone who doesn't have a grasp of this really needs to take a close look at the history of activism in this country and stop taking it for granted. People have fought and died on the streets of this country to come to your rescue.

 

Roachboy,
If we are talking about 1968 politics, I'd guess my point is that occupy wall street is more "1968 in Germany" than "1968 in France." Not that I am against it at all, but that it seems fairly timid and reformist.

 

i agree with that, dippin--it's not an old school revolutionary movement in part because there's no language really available for that. but organizationally, it's a lot like paris was in particular---the emphasis on direct democratic process in particular. it also links back to a long tradition of direct-democratic self-organization as a mode that folk adopt when operating outside bureaucratic organizational forms---which is itself something interesting to think about, whether there is a Problem with bureaucratic rationality (there's a host of them, many obvious) that is being performed rather than articulated explicitly. that cuts to a center of contemporary capitalist organization, something that's happened to it since the rise of management as an intermediary sector in manufacturing across the 20s in the states (imported kinda abruptly into western europe after world war 2 so from those perspectives appears more a sharp break than it would from here). but i digress.

insofar as the possibility of something more radical spinning out of this movement--a lot depends on the responses or lack thereof. you'll know something big is happening if a call goes out for a general strike and it takes.

 

Why are we talking about this in a thread about Occupy Wall Street? I can promise you no one is there protesting against a green energy company that failed.

I'd like to get this thread back on track, please. Take your discussions of Solyndra elsewhere because they're not a part of this thread topic.

 

I don't think I really need to explain it much better, cyn. I didn't say anything about 'saviors.' I am saying that you enjoy rights today that were hard won for you by people who sacrificed sometimes even their lives to make a stand. To dismiss it because you work with assholes is, well, kind of appalling.

I suspect that if, come Monday, you were to go in to work and find conditions as they existed 100 years ago, you would piss your pants. Number one because you wouldn't have a job there in the first place because you aren't white. Do you think the rights you have today were handed down by employers out of the goodness of their hearts? Um, no. People took to the streets, all over the US in big towns and small, and were often killed and beaten for them.

 

I didn't mean to imply that these specific people in NYC are going to rescue you, although they might. Only that you have already been rescued.

 

the globalization--if you want to use that stupid term---of the labor pool has resulted in a fundamental breakdown of the social contract that enabled coherence in the capitalist social system in the metropole (where we live).....either this globalizing labor pool stuff has to be stopped or a basic change in policy has to accompany it within the metropolitan countries that seeds new options. under neo-liberalism, the first has been happening without brakes and the idiotic bromides about trickle-down effects and words like "innovation" have substituted for anything like a realistic assessment of the consequences of the first, which has been basic to preventing anything like a coherent policy orientation toward addressing the socio-economic consequences of it. all you're doing, cyn, is repeating the dominant ideological framing of the matter. that you seem entirely unaware that you're doing it and treat it as though it were somehow normal to think that way changes nothing at all. and it is that dominant ideological framework that explains the occupation. so you're hoovered into the frame that the occupation is reacting against. no wonder you have trouble with it.

 

us agriculture was fundamentally reoriented by earl butz under the nixon administration. the state of american agriculture---it's network of subsidies, its concentration, its reliance on monocropping, its recurrent overproduction issues---all follow from policy choices made in the 1970s. it's all part of the run-up into the farce that neo-liberalism has been--the nixon administration was fundamental to the shift out of what the regulation school calls fordism, which designates the model for capitalist organization that came out (too complicated to explain here, and the verb "to come out of" is from a european perspective more than an american) world war 2.