#Occupy X has come to Australia. The various actions in a number of capital cities don’t seem to have the drawing power that #Occupy Wall Street and its various viral spinoffs in the United States have, but that’s no particular reason, as Jeff Sparrow argues, to join in the varied vapid ‘arguments’ made against the Australian protests.
There’s no doubt that something is going on globally. Again, demands that protesters express demands are somewhat beside the point. What is happening is a reflection of a crisis of the legitimacy afflicting global capitalism in its neo-liberal manifestation.
For mine, John Quiggin sums up the key positive of this movement for progressives:
We are therefore (surprisingly to me) suddenly back in a situation where a progressive movement can reasonably claim to act in the interests of a group that is (I’m quoting Erik Olin Wright from memory on the Marxist conception of the working class)
(a) the overwhelming majority of the population
(b) responsible for nearly all the productive activity (as against the 1 per cent’s incomes drawn from a parasitic financial sector)
(c) economically desperate or at risk of becoming so.Can all of this be sustained? I don’t know, any more than anyone else. But #OWS has already achieved things that most people would have regarded as impossible a month ago, and for the moment at least, the momentum is still growing.
Meanwhile, as is his wont, Matt Cowgill looks at the stats on income inequality and the top 1% in Australia.
Is that why “Occupy The Elevator” in Melbourne drew as few as it did?
Bwahahaha. If there’s one word that sums up the OWS crowd, it isn’t “productive” (or is there an export market for worthless hippy deadbeats?).
Quiggan never disappoints.
As opposed to all the solid hard working citizens who go to Alan Jones’ rallies?
No, as opposed to the 99.99% of the population who don’t go to rallies at all.
Varying quality and sometimes the feed gets a bit patchy, but frankly there’s been some amazing stuff available via the (at times dozens) livestreams
Main feed
Global revolution livestream
The 7am deadline to ‘clean’ the park in NY last friday was about prime time viewing here, and the strength and power of the thousands of people there was palpable even via a slightly scratchy live stream. Awesome viewing actually.
Wasn’t surprising to anyone that watched that (I reckon), that the company and NY mayor were going to backdown or face a massive conflict between the NYPD and protestors in the heart of NY at 7am on a friday morning.
For celebration the protestors then went impromptu marching.
There’s also some great videos out there.
Anyone who takes their eyes away from contrived and confected daily issue of TV news will have a completely different (more realistic) state of perception about the situation.
The human sound system used (no electronic amplified sounds allowed!) and other developments the groups have made, the live feed and posting of police and official ph lines for viewers to call when camps/occupations are being attacked.
This is all the most interesting and inspiring real human endeavour in the so called ‘western world’ that I’ve seen for a while. Which according to polls resonates with many across the US and Europe today, and to most of those who give a shit about anything other than themselves in Australia.
Certainly seems to have impacted the attendance and interest in getting out to CSG rallies here, where there were quite a few we are the 99% banners.
Frankly all power to #occupy folks as they approach a winter and the miserable forces of greed won’t even let them put up a tent for comfort.
Actually it feels like the suckholes who think that meanspirited and spiteful manipulation of others, or repressing the legitimate concerns and feelings by people, are going down far worse than they have for a while.
Pity that so many Australians seems so mindlessly and comfortably numb.
I’m sure the same economic shit is coming our way, and frankly a significant number of Australians probably need a dose of truly hard times so they can get a bit perspective on what life is really all about.
Spiteful, winging, bitching, greedy, self-obseesed nongs…. Australia seems to have far too much of that these days.
I think in the states and Europe, there are so many that literally have very few options or nowhere else to go to. Despite the obvious physical limitations of the impending northern winter, it will rumble along somehow.
If nothing else it provides a balance to the tea party equivalents here and elsewhere and may actually give governments the courage to tax the rich a bit harder and be a bit more critical of “private is best” and similar platitudes.
Thanks for the link, Kim
The claquers of the Right haven’t worked out whether their dominant tone with regard to OWS should be contempt or fear.
Get back to us when you have made a decision on which sheaf of talking points to discard, chaps and chapettes.
@1
Pathetic. Some people try to make an effort and this is the kind of whining toady that stands on the footpath screaming unfunny abuse because it lacks the wit and the confidence to actually engage in the debate. I just wonder how it manages to find enough meaning in existence to get out of bed.
Patrickb @ 8 – heh like was made fun of the the convoy of no consequence?
The low numbers that we’re seeing in Australia are most likely due to the fact that things are generally pretty good here economically compared to most of the rest of the world. We don’t have the huge numbers of unemployed that have the time to turn up to these things – thus the numbers shrink quite considerably during the week.
Quoll @ 4 – the brutality of the NYPD caught on video is quite enlightening, even if they too are part of the 99%.
Owing to circumstances Australians are less obviously victims of bankster criminality than most others, including Americans.
Yet we are all subject to the same regime of corruption and cronyism. Solidarity with others is a sound reason to stand up and to be counted. And more self-interestedly, tomorrow it may be the turn of Australians in the barrel instead of Greeks or Irish. Perhaps these folks may be persuaded to take some interest in our plight were we to have already extended them the courtesy of our concern for them.
This protest may have started with unfocussed rage. But there is nothing inherently wrong with an introductory episode of consciousness-raising.
The crime committed against Americans and against us all was so huge that it has taken some time for its nature and dimensions to be comprehended. Only now are Americans and the rest of us beginning to sift through the ashes of the past three years to achieve some perspective.
In the US Obama has been complicit in covering up the nature of the crime. Indeed, Obama has embraced into his administration many of those guilty of malfeasance and actual criminality.
Only now are some voices asking detailed and forensic questions.
One of these voices is Congressman Cliff Stearns. I urge a viewing of his interrogation of Bush’s Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson.
In this clip Paulson admits misuse of the bailout funding:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hhPvas-Q8Y&feature=youtube_gdata_player
Prosecution of malfeasance and laws to prevent a repeat of this misappropriation would appear to be causes that would unite all occupiers with a very large slice of the rest of the electorate.
We are therefore (surprisingly to me) suddenly back in a situation where a progressive movement can reasonably claim to act in the interests of a group that is (I’m quoting Erik Olin Wright from memory on the Marxist conception of the working class)
(a) the overwhelming majority of the population
It can do no such thing. No-one elected them and they are a small group comparatively. They are attempting to act as the 99% they aren’t doing so.
Interesting that Quiggin and LP are both jumping on the bandwagon now.
This movement was kicked off by adBusters which does not fit into the standard left-wing spectrum, express the same theoretical mindset or interact in the same manner. By the Left I mean everyone from the ALP to progressive intellectuals, Greens, SA etc.
From a blogger who wrote down his impressions:
The people down in City Park Melbourne are a varied mob but generally they’re a mixture of Socialist Alliance and Rainbow Serpent types. Quite distinguishable. In the US where corporatist politics and the economic situation are much worse there are more people. I guess to what extent these movements or this movement impacts on the politics of the state will depend on the state of things in that nation.
I think its important to consider 3 issues relating to this.
1. List of countries by unemployment rate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_unemployment_rate
2. Happy Planet Index.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Planet_Index
3. Life expectancy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy
Yep, health ,wealth and happiness.
If someone can just run all that through a computer model , we can see which poor bastards have a REAL reason to complain.
Don’t be surprised if it’s not Australians.
Whether in Australia or elsewhere it is also, if not mainly, about developing new methods and rediscovering old methods of organising. It’s about feelings of collective solidarity. Daughter and son both involved in Australia. Hooray them.
Establishing eye contact when verbally responding to or admonishing a interlocutor at the encampments or general assemblies is also de rigueur, akn, for the tender ones.
Hooray for them indeed.
Among many things that this movement can be about is control over some of the conditions of one’s life.
The banksters spent the 1980s onwards creating a closed world of finance that was unknowable to wage earners, home buyers and investors. Indeed, even insiders didn’t understand what the barons of finance were up to.
These machinations have wrought uncertainty, fear, dislocation and misery upon millions. Even the most cautious of people, like some of my American relatives, have had their life plans disrupted and life chances undermined by these events.
World citizens have every reason to do whatever is legal to make sure that these financial barons or their successors never have the power to do it again.
Why should trailing indicators like life expectancy or employment stats or some measurement of past “happiness” dictate our future actions?
Why are Australians aping the US Flea Party lot? Haven’t they got any ideas of their own?
Best comment seen to date on The Flea Party is the following:
“As Mike Stopa, a Harvard nanophysicist wrote on the MetroWest Daily News even the “Occupy” protests aren’t about production; they are about consumption: the consumption of therapy to be exact. “Deep in the human heart there is a persistent need to emote.”
‘How else to explain the throngs of protesters who are even now pouring out in cities across America, erecting tent cities and sleeping day after day on the hard ground (OK, maybe on uncomfortably firm air mattresses), demanding social justice, free college education and higher credit scores? And how else to explain the popularity of the viral video starring the newest Siren of the Left, Elizabeth Warren, who is running for the Senate against Scott Brown, wherein she makes an impassioned plea for, well, more roads. Oh, and more teachers. And more police to protect us. …’
Anyway, we will be seeing more of Warren and more of the protesters. And many will be stirred by their fiery emoting; even if the target is none too clear. Many of us, on the other hand, (in particular the parents among us) will recognize the compulsive, unfocused emoting by another name: a temper tantrum.”
Mk50
Brisbane
SHIT is really going CRAAAAZZZYYY!!!! at occupy Brisbane.
http://www.livestream.com/occupybrisbanelive
Geez, a lot of people getting banned on that OB feed!!
Anyway, Occupy South Park is a hooot.
http://smotri.com/video/view/?id=v1549732b9a3
Stay happy folks, g’nite.
What exactly has been achieved that was regarded as impossible a month ago? Honest question.
@12
“Interesting that Quiggin and LP are both jumping on the bandwagon now”
Christ, how the right wing mind works. Now we’re in trouble for supporting something … we support.
@9
No real comparison to my mind. The CoNC had as its gurus the likes of Sopie Mirabella, Allen Jones and Chris Monckton. There’s you laughing stock right there.
Just shows how trivial their world view is.
The bankers did nothing the politicians had not incentivised them to do. The people, the demos, elected, and reelected, and reelected again, the politicians who passed the legislation and imposed the regulations.
The last few years is not a failure of the market, but a practical demonstration of why free marketeers hate corporate welfare and state interference.
If the banks had been allowed to go bust instead of being bailed out by overmighty government they might have learnt a few lessons.
“The bankers did nothing the politicians had not incentivised them to do”
Have you heard of people known as lobbyists?
“If the banks had been allowed to go bust instead of being bailed out by overmighty government they might have learnt a few lessons.”
What, all of the banks allowed to go bust? Once those dominoes started to fall …..
Russell @ 24
Yes, and yes.
.. and the resulting chaos would mean the end of the hated social democratic form of goverment, and the return to something more authoritarian? Is that what you’re looking forward to?
Immanuel Wallerstein Commentary No. 315 (it’s not yet in his archives).
Patrickb @ 22 – well Mirabella, Jones and Monkton are worthy targets of some laughter. But much of the laughter was directed at the people themselves who although I believe are probably mostly just simply misguided and ill-informed, but are otherwise genuine people making a bit of an effort, much like those in the current 99% protests in Australia.
Listening to the interviews of them on the radio it seems to be a general grab bag of issues not nearly as focused on the economy as they are overseas (eg people upset about the treatment of refugees).
the financial sector clearly can’t manage yet they’re given bailouts, bonuses, QE’s, tax cuts and now australia is going to donate.
i call on the greens to stop swanny giving our money to banks. wait til greece (for example) defaults and deal directly with the people through their government.
alan kohler has been demonstrating nicely why people are angry.
What do you understand the word “impossible” to mean, Terje?
Honest question.
Katz – impossible means not possible. As in not able to be done. Yet I still don’t see what this protest has achieved. No laws have changed, no government policies has shifted. I honestly don’t see what has been accomplished, other than the occupation of some public space.
How about a group of diverse folks discovering some common causes and an effective means of publicizing them?
Sit-ins in segregated diners in the 1960s began in the same small way with opponents ridiculing these efforts.
I think the Occupy Wallstreet movement is important because it gives voice to that proportion of the population that has been studiously ignored by the main stream media. Why do we want to reduce taxes for people earning more than $150,000 pa, why do we want to allow Xstrata, Rio, BHP and other foreign owned miners to avoid paying for resources dug up.
Occupy Wallstreet and the Spanish demos started small and have grown larger each week
It appears that Australia is more equal that the USA but we are 10 years behind the US and the latest Australian figures used are for 2008, an abberration year with the global financial crisis. There is a difference between wealth and income, and probably the inequalities have increased in the past 2 years.
Occupy Wallstreet has provided a rallying point for those people who didn’t have a voice, the unemployed ‘dole bludgers’, the underemployed ‘dole bludgers’. The potential is great, watch this space!
I should mention that I’m living in the US for a few months, and my comments were about the situation here, which is far more unequal, and far more desperate for those at the bottom, than that in Australia (at least for the moment). Australian protests are best understood in terms of a protest about economic developments in the world as a whole, which helps to explain why the participants are mostly activists with pre-existing commitments to various causes rather than people who have not previously protested – a group much more evident in the US
Australian branch of “We are the 53%” to be started in 3…2…1…
Terje, you need to temper your purported impatience. OWS has been going for about 6 weeks. For the first three weeks the MSM studiously ignored them. For a week the MSM mocked them.
Only since the pepper spray incident has the movement achieved any traction in the media. Since then the tactic has spread worldwide.
I do not believe that you are unaware that drafting and passing legislation takes time. A reasonable person would acknowledge that insufficient time has elapsed to expect the passage of legislation.
Instead, I perceive your premature declaration of the failure of the OWS movement to be a heavy-handed rhetorical gambit.
“I honestly don’t see what has been accomplished, other than the occupation of some public space.”
People have stopped pretending the bank bailout wasnt essentially criminal act of theft from the public. There is open contempt for Wall St – but even more for the lackeys who impose austerity on the public while hand over public purse to the very same idiots who caused this crisis.
This has brought the whole system into deep disrepute. The signifiance off OWS is now that people are openly saying so, and its repoted globally.
Its not just the protest, look at any US talk show. Greenspan “low doc” capitalism is in a fully-fledged legitimation crisis.
Its also a defeat for the teapartry: they (who were formed in opposition to the idea that ordinary punters might also benefit from the bailout) have lost ‘the streets”.
99%: too big to fail.
There’s some interesting interesting stuff in the ATO income statistics (thanks Matt Cowgill). The ATO reports average taxable income by occupation (about 450 of them). I fully expected something finance-y to be at the top, as per OWS.
But no, the highest average income (in 2008-09, the latest year for the stats) is surgeons ($297,755) followed by anaesthetists ($256,799). The highest average income for something that looked financial was for finance dealers, whatever that means, ($230,536).
Of course, this is a lot, but it isn’t stratospheric. It seems likely that there is probably as much inequality within the finance profession as between the finance profession and everyone else.
Katz, you’re platinum, mate.
People like you make me glad for the internet, even as its eyes are picked out by the likes of crows like Paulsen.
@28
Listening to them on the radio was like listening to spoilt children. The problem with the CoCNers was that they didn’t really have a rational argument. I mean the same people who disrupted the parliament with shouts about the defeat of democracy have for years complained that we are a 2 party state, it’s quite easy to argue that the participation of the independents is adds to the democratic process. I don’t think their was a single, credible institutional voice underpinning whatever case the CoCNers were trying to make, this isn’t the case with the Occupy X protests.
@31
Disingenuous trolling? As Katz points out, protests don’t necessarily bring instant results unless of course it involves storming the Winter palace. I don’t know what you time frame is but, like all things libertarian, it’s probably unrealistic.
OQS has moblised open public disrespect for the three creepiest ideological hypocrisies of big finance:
1. privatise your gains and socialise your losses.
2. Like all good capitalists,we fear competition above all else.
3. Though we reject regulation for your benefit, we would completely fail without the state.
F**k them!
US Marine protests cop violence against #OWS protestors …
oops {protesters}
Lefty E @ 37 & @ 43
Criminality?
Sure, the money was stolen by big government politicians from ordinary people and handed over to their cronies in big business. The banks did nothing that government had not incentivised them to do.
Do you think banks would make sub prime mortgages if left to themselves? Never used to happen; it took Carters Community Reinvestment Act to force banks to do that. Although they only really took off after the Act was strengthened by Bill Clinton.
As to your points 1, and 2, absolutely. Loads of capitalists hate competition; they love the protection and monopolies that Big Government can hand them if they snuggle up to it.
Free marketeers on the other hand, they hate the crony capitalism that allows this sort of conspiracy against the public good to occur. This is the sort of repulsive outcome you get when Big Government politicians and Big Business, or Big Labour, or Big Green, or Big Any Interest Group, start scratching one anothers backs.
Privatising losses and socalising losses is anathema to free markets, destructive of a free society, and part and parcel of the crony capitalism that progressives, and way too many conservatives, indulge in when they gain power.
True for non-indigenous Australians.
Chris Harper: nice that you agree with Lefty E’s grievances. However, your claims as to the benefits of a ‘free market’ capitalism are a utopian fantasy born of libertarian philosophy; this philosophy is, like all forms of formal anarchism, something of an infantile disorder. It is unacquainted with historical fact. There never was a ‘free’ market and there never will be. Industrial capitalism and the state go hand in hand. You know this which is why libertarians adopt the anti-state mantle of anarchism. But it is misguided. The state is the guarantor of all sorts of market certainty without which markets collapse into mere barter and trade in kind. It is also the guarantor of civil liberties without which social life collapses into pre-modern barbarism (see any of the failed or half developed states in the Arab speaking world). Sorry to argue from authority but Polanyi’s (1944) ‘The Great Transformation’ is widely accepted as one of the great analyses in political economy. A must read preparatory to joining serious conversation on states, freedom and markets.
Sorry, the end of @ 46 should be “Privatising gains and socalising losses”
Chris Harper:
Stupid, stupid stupid talking point. You don’t know what the CRA does or where the problems lay in the American banking system. If you did, you wouldn’t have written this. It’s stupid and ignorant and shows everything you know about this topic is straight from libertarian propaganda.
sg @50, I am not buying into someone else’s argument, but I have to say that describing any post as “stupid”, “ignorant” “propaganda”, etc, without actually even attempting to address the actual argument it contains, can only be described as, well for want of better words, stupid and ignorant.
OK since I am here anyway, I will buy in briefly: Chris Harper is quite right.
Chris Harper is wrong about the furphy about the CRA has been exploded countless times. Only mendacity explains revivifying the lie.
Then this:
Yes crony capitalism had willing enablers in government. For example, this:
http://www.businessweek.com/investing/insights/blog/archives/2008/09/community_reinv.html
And perhaps Chris Harper didn’t view the link at #10 where Paulson admitted to misappropriating public funds. Certainly, the Congress voted him the funds but not for the purpose of preserving Goldman Sax.
Wozza and Chris Harper, can you think of any particular reason why I should waste my precious time doing research that you’re too ignorant and biased to try yourself?
Here is a Wall Street Journal article that explains one of the many reports into this matter. Here is a speech from the Federal Reserve governor on the matter. Are you satisfied yet?
Patrick b – Christ, how the right wing mind works. Now we’re in trouble for supporting something … we support.
There is more than one mind Patrick, there are billions of them. Some of them even work some of the time. Seeing the opposition as a hive mind can sometimes mislead you. For example I was not criticizing anyone for expressing support I was, if anything, criticizing them for not supporting it sooner and pointing out that this is a phenomenon that did not originate with the traditional organs of the Left. It ain’t your show.
I approve of it thus far btw. I also approve of the Tea Party. That is not an endorsement of any particular principle or demand associated with either group. I like the phenomenon.
No, I didn’t think you would be satisfied by a single report and a speech. So here (pdf) is another report from a US law firm detailing the superior performance and lower foreclosure rates of CRA compared to non-CRA loans. This opinion from Mark Thoma supports the view.
Every time either of you pop your heads in here it’s just so you can bark out some or other right-wing talking point. Have you ever stopped to think about why it is that you are so easily deceived by the last glib lie you heard from a wingnut? Is it because you have a daddy complex? Is it because you find analytical thinking difficult? Regardless of the reason, you might find it really helpful if next time you hear some rabid right-wing attack dog squeezing out another steaming pile of bullshit, you should stop and think “oh, every other time I thought this sounded plausible, it’s turned out to be embarrassingly wrong. Maybe I should check it before I recite it?”
Helen @ 47 – Other than a bit of PR has the indigenous #occupyCanberra event running for about 30 years achieved much? Although admittedly they moved parliament house in the meantime
Chris – The bankers did nothing the politicians had not incentivised them to do.
You say that a lot. IT IS NO EXCUSE.
The people, the demos, elected, and reelected, and reelected again, the politicians who passed the legislation and imposed the regulations.
These regulations have been built up over time going back to the Hoover administration and before. Most of us do not understand this tangle very well. Those that do, like Alan Greenspan, went ahead and pushed it over the tipping point anyway.
The last few years is not a failure of the market, but a practical demonstration of why free marketeers hate corporate welfare and state interference.
‘Free marketeers’ are anti corporate welfare in principle but in practice rarely make much of a noise about it unless it is welfare they themselves need in which case there’s a deafening howl if it’s denied. It’s not market failure no, it’s the failure of the government to properly regulate the thing. Under the immense tangle of red tape and the towers of statutes passed by a legacy of decades of interest driven policy there are gaping holes in the fence.
Thus far Mr Obama seems to’ve continued the American tradition of backing away from the real problems and turning instead to creating a whole bunch of new ones. But whatever mess history attributes to him does not in anyway exonerate the economic liberals who preceded him. This happened on Greenspan’s watch,l the policy was neoliberal and had been for quite a time and the GFC resembles similar incidents created in the pre-’29 world before laissez-faire was first condemned.
The Left aren’t the only ones who fail to learn the lessons of the past.
sg @ 53
Nope. Not asking you to either.
If you wish to present arguments contrary to mine tho, that I would welcome. I am always happy to learn something new, especially if it leads to my reevaluating my position on any issue.
sg @ 55
I have no memory of ever having been abusive and spiting insults to you, or anyone else. If I have I am sorry. However, do you truly believe that doing it yourself enhances your argument? If so, I would be interested to know how, and if not, I would be interested in knowing why you do it.
As far as left wing / right wing goes, over the years my left wing friends have labeled me right wing, but my right wing friends label me left. It is most confusing. Me? I tend to eschew those labels completely. I find the world to be a little more nuanced than that – don’t you?
Thank you for the links, I will read them.
I didn’t declare the OWS movement a failure. All I did was question what it had a achieved. John Quiggin described it as having achieved the impossible which seems like a hyped claim in need of some basic justification. The consensus here seems to be that it has not yet achieved much other than some media attention and like most protests some consciousness raising. Obviously it fills many on the left with hope of an impending change of the political and economic order but any such hope is premature (and as with a lot on the left probably misguided).
Lefty E – it is a bit ridiculous to claim that this is some form of significant breakthrough in ordinary people protesting the bailout of banks. The Tea Party movement has been prominently making exactly that point since 2008. Although the Tea Party is more inclined to blame the government for providing the bailout rather than the banks for receiving it.
The push to audit the Federal Reserve and to expose the nature and degree of many hidden bailouts came from Ron Paul who’s 2008 Presidential bid is in many quarters seen as the origin of the Tea Party movement. It is nice to see others join the protest against the bailouts and against an unaccountable Rederal Reserve but OWS isn’t at all original in this regard. In fact OWS is a Johnny come lately.
Chris, “spitting insults” doesn’t enhance my argument, but I am genuinely interested to know why people like you and Wozza are so credulous when it comes to right-wing talking points like the one you spouted above and now admit you haven’t bothered doing the research on. “Thank you for the links, I will read them” – you mean you didn’t bother looking for any alternative views on it before you formed the firm opinion, so confidently expressed at 46, that banks were “forced” to make sub-prime mortgages?
At this point it appears that your entire understanding of the sub-prime crisis is based on a deception that was cooked up at Free Republic. The origins of this lie have been known since 2008. This simple, stupid lie has been around for 3 years and neither you nor Wozza ever bothered to check it?
Do you or Wozza think there might be any other talking points you’ve been fed from the same sources over the last 3 years that you might need to go back and check up on? Perhaps a review of your entire comment at 46 might be a good start?
p.s. Further to my earlier post libertarian Ron Paul indicates some sympathy for the OWS protests in the following interview:-
Lefty E @ 37
Good point. I’d go further and say that it makes a complete mockery of the Tea Party, and could possibly signal its end.
@54
Er … so OK, you win, you supported it first. Good there’s no end to the trivialities that occupy the right wing mind.
So Terje, you now acknowledge that OWS has already achieved something.
Therefore your statement:
is no longer applicable.
And I am happy to acknowledge the work of Ron Paul and other GOP politicians in exposing the criminality of many crony capitalists and their government enablers, and the extent to which the Obama White House has become captive of the financial oligarchy.
Apart from police getting antzy, the OWS protests have been relatively peaceful, with the shit/fan/ a little ways off yet for about 70% of the 99%. Once the sane and educated become both homeless and hungry in large numbers, then it does promise to get a little uglier.
Does seem however that the 99% are enjoying the opportunity to tell corporate leaders to get fucked, problem is they aren’t listening and it’s business as usual. (4 million new model IPhones sold in the last week.)
Unfortunately even blood on the streets offers no promise of change but for change to occur I’m afraid that’s what’s going to have to happen. Unless of course political leaders find the gumption to start actually prosecuting for it.
(I n c e n t i v i s e d. Ugh. ) Nearly as ugly a word as ugh.
dear akn
i have no quibble with your take on the ows demonstrations, the success of which i hope soon exceeds everyone’s expectations. but when you say “libertarian philosophy [...] like all forms of formal anarchism is something of an infantile disorder”, i must speak out.
libertarians are to anarchists as self-funded retirees are to pensioners. the resemblance is superficial; for both problem is the state, but only for one is the solution socialism.
yours sincerely
alfred venison
Katz – your mincing words.
JQ implied something formerly considered “impossible” had been achieved. He used the word “impossible” but to be fair to his context we ought to take his meaning to be that something either “amazing” or “significant” had occurred.
I pointed out that the achievement is actually trivial not amazing and not significant. So sure I acknowledge something has been achieved but not something amazing or significant.
The Tea Party is generaly regarded as having has had an effect on Republican primaries for several elected positions. That is significant. If OWS can achieve a similar effect or can change government policy or forster a legislative agenda that entails meaningful reform then I’d call it significant.
During the early days of the Tea Party I admired the message and the enthusiasm but I figured it wouldn’t last. However it has lasted and it has shifted debate in the USA. The OWS movement thus far has not done much at all.
A bit of a generalisation. Several different groups use the term anarchist. Only some are socialist.
Alfred Venison: quite agree with you about libertarians and anarchists. The libertarians merely borrow the rhetoric of anti-statism and would be unaware of the mutualism of someone like Kropotkin. I have reservations mainly about ‘theoretical’ anarchists who apparently cannot embody their principles in this world/life. Not such hard principles to live by in my view.
akn @ 70
You seem to take a stereotype attitude to libertarians, tarring them all with the same brush, ignoring the range of libertarian thought and awareness.
Truly, is making any statement assuming all libertarians adhere to some preconception on your part any more valid than any broad statement beginning with – “Socialists think that……” without regard to the variations within socialist thought, from social democracy through to marxism, assuming that Christian socialists, Maoists, Trotskyites, etc all hold to a common viewpoint, and assuming that all are shallow in their thinking?
Without immediately jumping to wikipedia to check, do you even know what a libertarian is? Can you name any libertarian philosophers?
All kinds of people have described themselves or been described as libertarians. My point is that if you are genuinely a libertarian there are no obstacles within liberal democracy to you leading a life along your own libertarian principles. My experience over the last decade has been of anti-social Randites describing themselves as such libertarians without much heed to anarchist philosophy. But educate me, please – name your fave philosophers.
True enough if we had a liberal democracy but in fact we don’t. We have a social democracy and many of remaining liberties are in peril. The reason libertarians get vocal is because they would like Australia to be a liberal democracy. In some regards it is a liberal place but in many regards it isn’t.
Yes I’m sure it’s terribly hard for you to live in social democratic Australia TerjeP.
Has the movement actually achieved anything? How about this?
http://leninology.blogspot.com/2011/10/occupy-wall-street-and-us-working-class.html
Sigh,
Randite objectivism is not necessarily = libertarian. More to the point, I did try and read Atlas Shrugged, I have known people who claim it changed their lives so I thought I should give it a try, but I found it unreadable. I could never get past the first few chapters, the characters were cardboard cutouts, and the setup seemed stereotyped and contrived. I gave up in disgust.
When the day comes I guess objectivists and libertarians will probably be on the same side of the barricades, but I won’t guarantee it.
In a free society anyone can lead a life based on whichever principles they wish, so long as they don’t interfere with other people and their choices. But that is true only of a free society. In fact, it would be a workable definition of what constitutes a free society. Todays liberal democracy? Nope. I can’t opt out of enforced collectivism, so I’m not free. In a socialist society? No chance.
BTW, libertarians can be anarchists, they can also be minarchists, anarcho-capitalists and consequentialists, or all of them, to a greater or lesser mix.
Consequentialists and objectivists are not based on non agression, other variants tend to be. Now that is a major difference in both principle and motivation.
As to being anti-social? Anything but. Libertarians tend to take the view that social interaction, without state interference, is to be preferred, and will accomplish more anyway. If anything it is the big government socialist types who are anti-social, given that they don’t accept that free people, working together without government using threats of violence in order to compel, can achieve their mutual goals.
That you can call libertarians anti-social demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding of the world view.
Leave people alone, allow them to cooperate freely, without coercion, and they can accomplish miracles. Force them to cooperate, and you get queues for bread.
Funny how Ayn Rand was so focussed on opting out of forced collectivism that she collected medicare. And who was the great libertarian philosopher who would only come to America if he was guaranteed medicare? I think Fran dug it up recently. Pack of trust-fund babies and hypocrites.
And no, libertarians cannot be anarchists. They’re such respecters of private property that they even stole the name…
“Yes I’m sure it’s terribly hard for you to live in social democratic Australia TerjeP.”
It is if you don’t want to pay the plebs the minimum wage.
Ah, here we go. A Cock brother invited Hayek to the Institute for Human Studies to rail against social security, but Hayek would only come if he could get medicare – otherwise his health insurance would be unaffordable (as the IHS admitted at the time!) Fortunately when last in the states he had opted into a voluntary social security payments scheme, so was eligible for social security benefits “anywhere in the Free World.”
That’s some top quality moral relativism right there, that is.
Here in the US, the change in the tone of public debate following the rise of #OWS has been palpable. Whereas people on the left, including me, have been banging on about the Piketty-Saez data on the 1 per cent for quite some time, and to little effect, the facts about their growing monopoly on income, wealth and power are suddenly on centre stage in the US debate. The counterattacks from the right have been simultaneously desperate and feeble.
More concretely, it’s already had an impact on the Dems political line, as with Harry Reid’s proposal for a millionaires tax. And, Wall Street has reacted, switching its support from Obama to Romney.
BTW, Helen you’re quite right and I meant to mention the position of indigenous Australians, but was rushing off as I finished.
Because there won’t be any robber barons and organised mobsters deciding to apply their own coercion and constraints upon free cooperation if there’s no government?
How does your non-collectivised society propose to protect itself against the non-cooperators who will always exist and who will always organise a system of exploitation?
The private banking system creates from nothing all the money to equal increases in our productivity + inflation.This is now $108 billion pa.Our total debt has risen from 3% of GDP in 1976 to 53% of GDP today.
We are their debt slaves.They control our Govts and much of the corporate world.This is why the RBA was in focus in Sydney.
Solution; Bring back Govt owned banks and pass legislation for the RBA to have fractional reserve powers of money creation.This is the message.It is not a left or right issue.It is about fairness and justice.
Terje:
I agree with this. Indeed in my first comment on OWS on another thread I made the same essential point. It’s harder to mount an insurgency against an incumbent president. Yet this is precisely what Eugene McCarthy did against LBJ in New Hampshire in 1968.
As I said then, I doubt that OWS has the legs to drive such an insurgency within the Democratic Party against Obama. However, it will be interesting to see whether OWS will have an impact on congressional primary races.
I know that this is OT but this is Kim’s thousandth post. Congrats Kim.
Katz @ 82,
The real game changer is, and this is what John Quiggin was aluding to I believe, is whether the OWS has an impact on voter interest. the Occupy Wall Street campaign is giving the 99% an identity. That is the most significant change.
They talk about the US sleeping giant, well it just woke up. Let’s see if it has a hunger for change.
TigTog 81,
I think that you only need to look to the happenings in refugee camps (embryo communities), of which there are many, to observe all of the human behavioural influences to which you refer, reliably repeated in each and every one of them, albeit to varying degrees.
BilB@84
To achieve something akin to what McCarthy achieved in 1968, OWS needs to establish infrastructure on the ground in New Hampshire. NH politics is the most retail of retail politics where activists literally walk through the snow in tiny villages to get the vote out.
US politics is also very personality-driven. OWS needs a credible face to present to the punters. I’m not aware of any figure who has pressed him/herself forward to perform that role.
All these things may be achieved between now and the Iowa Caucuses. But unless they do, OWS will miss the bus this time round.
OWS’s alternative course is as a countercultural movement. This approach would immediately alienate the moms and pops, dividing and weakening the movement.
PrQ @80 said in part …
OWS increased support amongst the wealthy for the Repugs? Really?
OWS, Katz does not need to become an organisation in its own right, it simply needs to vote for existing politicians who represent the 99% of people’s needs. ie Democrat and Obama. And Obama only needs to be the one riding that wave.
Fran,
Wall Street changed its support over the “wealth tax” proposal, is how I read JQ’s comment. ie more of the support the wealthy not the people theme.
BilB, primary races within the major parties are often more important than the election itself.
The Democratic Party primary and caucus process is incredibly complex. To cut to the chase, simply turning up to vote on the first Tuesday in November is insufficient for a movement aiming at significant political change.
Huh? There aren’t many US politicians who represent “99% of people’s needs”, and at a federal level, they’re as thin on the ground as trees on the tundra. Bernie Sanders is the one who comes closest, and he’s no Democrat. Obama does not represent the 99%.
The danger for the OWS, as Matt Taibbi points out, is a “fusillade of attempts from many different corners to force these demonstrations into the liberal-conservative blue-red narrative”.
This is a wonderful series on SBS about global economics, USA and China etc, by one of my favourite filmmakers, Adam Curtis. It feeds into this discussion in a very interesting way.
“All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace”
http://www.sbs.com.au/documentary/program/allwatchedoverbymachinesoflovinggrace
@76
What will you use as your dispute settling mechanism? I presume you would reject common law as it is, well, common and relies on legal constructs such as the reasonable person, that is a person representative of the majority.
DOSG,
” people on the right-Republican side attempting to portray OWS as a puppet of well-known liberals and other Democratic interests”
It does not matter what OWS are portrayed as, so long as they vote en mass.
US politics seem from election to election to be driven by the issue of the day with the interested mass with that view being the dominant voters bothering to vote in that particular election. The Tea Party only got up in the last election because they spent the most money (4 billion dollars election total) and were the most motivated to vote with the mass abstaining.
This next election could very well see a rerun of voter interest similar to that which got Obama elected (primary motive dipose of everything Bush) but with a theme “we need to eat” (primary effect dispose of everything Tea Party).
The key to success will be how the politicians align themselves to the primary consciousness, which at the moment is “we can’t pay our bill’s either public or private….fix this mess”.
Chris Harper @ 76
You say “free people, working together without government using threats of violence in order to compel, can achieve their mutual goals.”
I totally agree with this; probably the only useful idea Hayek recognized was ‘self-organisation’. But he did not understand this process, which is fair enough given that it is still difficult to apply the principles to human behavior.
But the essential problem in your statement is that ‘self-interest’ is not a mutual goal. What would a mutual goal for human societies be?
Fine @ 91
I did see that doco on SBS last night. The images they used were insightful and said more than the commentary, eg, the slow motion film of Clinton flirting with those teenage girls. But the most significant images for me were of Ayn Rand being interviewed. It seems clear from her behaviour – the eye movements and tension in her body – that she was not behaving rationally.
dear akn
i’m late as usual, but thanks for the reply.
you’re right that people using anti-state rhetoric are often poorly informed about the range of anarchist thought regarding the state & alternatives & the critical role of socialism/mutualism in realising a society or nation without a national state. ignorance of kroptkin on mutualism, or even tolstoy on “love” (his equivalent some argue) is but one example, another might be ignorance of proudhon’s strong support for & advocacy of the “federative principle” [du principe federatif] a principle he advanced in the 1860s not only for new emerging states like italy but for established states like france, too. a federal state in france – i’d like to have seen that. not to mention, in passing, his influence on tolstoy (does anyone learn anymore how tolstoy came to the title for “war & peace”?)
few know, either, of proudhon’s “bank of the people” concept, which actually got off the ground & functioned for a while during difficult times, and is present, in spirit, in many contemporary co-ops & informal labor exchanges. like one succesful labor exchange in the blue mountains, late last century (1990s), that the tax department closed down. according to c b mcpherson [democracy in alberta: social credit & the party system] proudhon’s “bank of the people” concept, via his influence on gessell, informed the alberta experiment in social credit; legislation to create a “bank of alberta” to actualise this theory & apply it to the provincial economy during the depression, was twice disallowed by the lieutenant governor.
further encomiums for people like gustav landauer, or errico malatesta, or louise michel (communard & my inspirational left-wing “pin-up” for many years) will have to wait for other opportunities.
yours sincerely
alfred venison
So who should the OWS vote en mass for? The problem is that they have a death of candidates that will neuter the financial shenanigans going on in the States. The Republicans are appalling, and Obama ain’t going to cut it any more. A lot of Americans are sick of voting for the Democrats just because they’re the lesser evil.
I’ll link to another Taibbi piece, because he says what I want to say.
Neither do I. And until he and his fellow Dems align themselves with the OWS by deeds – not nice-sounding words – the protesters should not go out of their way to align themselves with them.
Occupy Wall Street? Occupy Congress and the Senate, more like it. Bunch of 1 percenters to a [wo]man.
I don’t know why anybody believed the likes of Obama or Rudd. They were clearly full of it. I know that Bush and Howard were also liars but they generally lied for their core voters not to their core voters.
Now if Obama did the actions advocated here by Charles P. Pierce, I would suggest that OWS throw themselves behind the Dems. Until then, they should keep their powder dry.
dear Chris Harper
“BTW, libertarians can be anarchists, they can also be minarchists, anarcho-capitalists and consequentialists, or all of them, to a greater or lesser mix.”
oh baloney! sounds more like simply libertarians desperate to gain credibility by spurious association with their betters.
yours sincerely
alfred venison
Dear Alfred,
Thanks for the above very informative and thoughtful contribution. You have fueled my interest even further and I will be embarking on further reading based on some of your references. By the way I confess my ignorance as to the matter of how Tolstoy arrived at the title War and Peace and ask you to inform us all.
As a matter of interest as a recovering socialist I am more and more interested in anarchism. This has been partly driven by a recent employment history within the state administering to the needs of a group of highly vulnerable people. I used to say, before my ongoing suspension and disciplinary issues, that I was pleased that we were there to help because God only knows what we damage we have done had we set out to really fuck up people’s lives.
Finally, it seems to me that the new forms of centreless networking and non-programmatic opposition are indeed best suited to the times. I admire the young for their commitment to gender and race equality in organisational matters and the way that they are creating a new counter-hegemonic culture.
LeftyE – Its also a defeat for the teapartry: they (who were formed in opposition to the idea that ordinary punters might also benefit from the bailout) have lost ‘the streets”.
The Tea Party and the 99% movement are different things and operate in different ways. They aren’t lined up against one another fighting for turf on Wall St. And the one issue that keeps getting mentioned by both is the bail-out.
They’re both against it. Sorry Neo-Keynsians. These guys don’t like you either.
As Terje has pointed out they are having an effect on the GOP. The 99% movement’s attitude in general appears to be a plague on both their houses. I’m down with that.
I know the Tea Party are like, different from you and , like, don;t agree with you on everything. But, gee, do you have to think of them as the enemy?
Chris H – Leave people alone, allow them to cooperate freely, without coercion, and they can accomplish miracles.
I went down to the Tent City last night and hung out for a while. Nice scene, there was a French busker teaching people songs and everything. I think most of the people I spoke to last night would agree with you and say that’s what they’re trying to do.
Kim – How does your non-collectivised society propose to protect itself against the non-cooperators who will always exist and who will always organise a system of exploitation?
How do you know this will always happen? Don’t you believe in progress? And who decides who these non-cooperators are?
I’ve been marked out and often as such by various human groups for doing nothing more than something that pleases me, doesn’t affect anyone but is considered ‘weird’ or ‘abnormal’. And the herd hassles you for it.
Ouch, Fran. Yes, I meant “dearth” – although “death” would be appropriate. Ike, FDR or Truman all feel progressive compared to the current lot.
@Adrien,
Actually I said that, not Kim.
1. A subset of the population exists who prefer to take advantage of others than cooperate with reciprocity. History shows such people have always existed, and I know of no evidence that such traits can be successfully eradicated from the population.
2. Of course I believe in progress. In social systems progress occurs via critical thinking about personal and property security and planning systems of checks and balances that limit the possibilities for exploitation, also an effective justice system that segregates identified exploiters from the rest of the population after the fact. I know of no evidence that non-collectivised societies larger than village-sized can effectively protect themselves from exploiters.
3. The people who are harmed by those who lie, steal, intimidate, bash and murder are those who decide who the non-cooperators are.
Non-conformity is not the same as non-cooperation. Certainly, humans can be shits to those who don’t conform – does that mean that they don’t deserve a social system that protects them from those who would steal from them or physically harm them?
I’m running Occupy North Perth and I’ve got a 4 year old and a 6 year old on the job because they knwo exactly what they want and keep asking for it.
occam, if the 4 year old and the 6 year old want an end to political corruption and bank bailouts, they’re no doubt more grown-up and sophisticated than you are.
Adrien said:
They are the enemies of human progress and the friends of studied, reckless and aggravated ignorance. They are misanthropy and parochialism in human form. They are the catspaws of the richest folk in the world and testimony to the ethical abyss into which capitalism can cast working humanity.
If you could put aside his Monoroe Doctrine chauvinism, racism and eugenicism (which of course you can’t) , Teddy Roosevelt, would be more liberal than this lot.
sg – thanks for that verballing – Yes of course I support more politcal corruption and bank bailouts!! More mOre More!!!
When did you stop bashing your wife?
The fact is, I am on record on this site stating that I am opposed to the bailouts that have been occurring – especially Greece. I wasn’t initially, but having observed the death by a thousand cuts that is occuring I have changed my mind.
I have listened to a number of interviews of particpants around the world in these Occupy protests and most of them clearly have difficulty deciding what to eat for breakfast let alone what they want to achieve with their protests let alone what they might even have a slim chance of realistically achieving. My kids rate better than these protesters in terms of decision making, co-operation and protesting on all counts.
oops Monroe
Tigtog – Actually I said that, not Kim.
As you did, apologies.
A subset of the population exists who prefer to take advantage of others than cooperate with reciprocity. History shows such people have always existed, and I know of no evidence that such traits can be successfully eradicated from the population.
A lot of people agree on the evil ‘subset’, it’s by what traits such is defined that causes difficulties. The Tea Party protests against the government, those in Liberty Park and elsewhere protest corporations. Who is right? Is it the super-rich or the indigent who’re the problem? Aristotle said both groups were antithetical to democracy. Or perhaps it is the people who feel no empathy.
Any society which is both orderly and at liberty balances collective and individual ‘solutions’ or tendencies. Generally the argument comes in when one disagrees about the mix. Fine. Advocates of ideological positions tend to put most of their energy into propping up the facts that support their doctrines and ignoring those that are inconvenient. Despite our intelligence we have been doing this quite a while.
This is surfeit of overconfidence in our theories and our ability to be ‘critical’, to ‘reason’ etc. In our enthusiasm for whatever favourite toy train set we have in mind when contemplating society’s messy problems we forget that reality is organic, rough edge always moving and never entirely consistent, unlike our models. Because of the theocratic nature of the debate, also, it seems that both the ‘liberal/conservative’ side and the liberal/socialist/progressive’ side consistently fail to learn from their mistakes.
Non-conformity is not the same as non-cooperation.
Well I wouldn’t think so either. But I’ve run into many a herd animal who disagrees and sometimes violently. I guess this is the justification for the State and an apt one but in my experience the cops didn’t need me and expected the same.
TicTog – Actually I said that, not Kim.
Yes you did I’m sorry. Not wearing glasses and should be.
The subset of the population to which you refer would commonly be thought of as criminals. However both the Tea Party and We Are The 99% are identifying certain institutional subsets as criminals or attempting to. Who is right?.
Well let’s leave that aside for the minute. Yes the State is necessary as a bulwark against violence, theft, rape. Necessary now. But ’twill always be thus?
Societies in the past as you say have governments to contain this. But they have also had a great deal of difficulty picking and punishing those truly responsible. I wonder how many tens of thousands of innocent people were punished for crimes they didn’t commit before Cicero came along and asked the court to consider who benefits? Even today we have trouble making decisions about who the ‘non-cooperators’ are.
Non-conformity is not the same as non-cooperation.
And yet in my experience and in the experience of every person whose inclinations often conflict with the tastes of the majority that is not de facto true. The State has had to incorporate special designs to meet this nefarious aspect of human conduct. You’re use of ‘non-cooperator’ washes over this. To harm another is more than simple non-cooperation. It is action which deliberately maligns. It is wrong to beat someone up and take their wallet. But the same moral condemnation should not be wrought on someone who objects to government policy and the socio-economic characteristics of whatever group may do so is no excuse to condemn them.
I’m not saying that you are condemning in such a matter but there are those on your side who do:
Funnily enough this binary and mutually hostile posture appear to me a guarantee that the technocratic apparatus wins. But then were all part of that ain’t we.
Fran – it’s simply astonishing that a person of your intelligence after the 20th century and all its lessons still thinks it’s up to you to decide what is and is not progress.
I reckon we leave progress out of it a while. The culture’s broken, the wheels fell off. Let’s fix it first before we hit any more roads.
Adrien said:
What’s astonishing is that you could imagine that anyone who would make a claim to intelligence would not think it germane to consider what it would entail and exclude, and then declare on the matter.
I’m able to speak on my own behalf and others can take issue, if they think it apt. Here in Australia, we call that politics.
HTH
That’s not how those who set themselves up as barons are usually referred to. Criminals are merely a subset of the subset who are advantage-takers rather than mutual cooperators.
If you’re going to get hooked up on a word you don’t like, let’s try another one, that I used just above – the advantage-takers who operate from greed and/or malice and who skim more than their fair share of the cream off the top of the mutual cooperative endeavours.
I don’t give a shit whether your inclinations and tastes differ from mine i.e. whether you conform or not. I do care whether you cooperate: say if you shirk your share of the contributions and then try and take more than your share of the product in return.
A technologically advanced society requires specialisation and those specialities need to be supported by an infrastructure with compatible segments across a large area to enable efficient exchange of the specialised goods and services which a technologically advanced society consumes just to keep on ticking over let alone progressing. People who claim that they’ve created successful enterprises all by themselves without any input from the complex and specialised social infrastructure which surrounds them are deluded or lying, and that infrastructure simply cannot exist on a large scale without some sort of central regulatory system that can mandate Codes of Practice which ensure that everything connects together properly from one street to the next, one town to the next, one city to the next etc. Such regulatory systems require funding, and if you want to take advantage of the socially and physically stable society they provide then the mutual cooperation of everybody paying taxes to a central fund is part of the deal.
I do care whether you cooperate: say if you shirk your share of the contributions and then try and take more than your share of the product in return.
So you’ll be pissed of at me if I cheat on my taxes or stay on the dole without looking for a job?
That’s not how those who set themselves up as barons are usually referred to.
Indeed it the rise of the baronial order that is being challenged here. Funnily enough people writing unfashionably of the virtues of market economies (here I’m thinking of Wilhelm Röpke and Michael Oakeshott) expressed, in their criticisms of excessive collectivism, much conern about corporations, the concentration of private capital and the capacity of same to lead to totalitarianism. Oakeshott’s outrage at the then new ability of corporations to own pieces of one another tends to be left unconsidered by most people who quote him these days.
In the views of these people the question is not about taking part in a shitfight between regulation and deregulation but instead ‘how to regulate’ in such a way that limits their powers of any one institution or person. What I feel that the 99%ers and the Tea Party have in common is a concern to limit such power. One concerns itself with private power, the other with public power but they are often the same thing mandated by the same people and supported on a bipartisan basis.
The intelligentsia of the Left and Right, those among such who are actually principled in delivery and not simply playing ping-pong in furtherance of the interests that back them, are stuck in the ideological vortex created during the 19th century with theories that remain largely unamended by experience. I reckon the kids in these camps have long seen thru all that.
The kids in these camps . . . spot on – immature goats.
And these children
That you spit on as they
Try to change their worlds
Are immune to your consultations
They’re quite aware of
What they’re going through
Using a Bowie knife on me – oh the pain.
Lemony Snickett just weighed in.
The great thing about the authors of childrens books is that they’re quite good at cutting through the crap.
http://occupywriters.com/by-lemony-snicket
@120 – para 13 – so I suppose we should be making arrangements with Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs to let them do whatever they want to do.
Yep – that load (1 to 13) was worthy of a Children’s book.
My apologies Occam. I had no idea that people wanting basic needs were akin to motorcycle gangs. Nor did I realise their numbers were so large.
I shall read three pages of http://the53.tumblr.com/ in contrition.
What’s astonishing is that you could imagine that anyone who would make a claim to intelligence would not think it germane to consider what it would entail and exclude, and then declare on the matter.
You’re saying I’m astonished because you think Tea Party people are stupid and say so? Or is there treatise on the ontology of intellect I’ve stumbled upon? Let’s have a look at your quote shall we?
‘Progress’ may be imagined by you to be such and by someone else to be something other. There have been many, oft bloody, battles between people with different ideas of progress. Ironically many seem to revert to barbaric savagery in the name of progress.
Right now there’s a view that the nation-state should seek to reassert itself by reintroducing the corporatist apparatus that predominated in the developed world c. 1933-1979. Others disagree. Where the polity progresses from that point depends on the effects of this debate and these interests and how they play out. The assumption of progress from this stage to that has been discredited. Things go backward too.
As opposed to misanthropy in cat form? Can cats be parochial?
I guess those who don’t work are then morally upstanding. It’s very poetic but it is stuffed to the brim with hatred. It’s so hard to explain to those who take an interest and express opinions viz political matters that the world would progress if everyone could just lay off the bloody beef a bit!
dear akn
i too am impressed & heartened by contemporary young people’s propensity to organise along flat structures. i am inspired to cautious optimism by their example in this regard.
the full title of proudhon’s study i referred to is “on the federative principle & the need to reconstitute the party of the revolution”. it was published in 1863. i am pleased as punch that the translation i read at uni is now available free on-line here. apparently courtesy of translator, research council of canada & uni of toronto press. it’s a reliable scholarly translation with a good translator’s introduction linked within but which can be accessed directly here. i can wholeheartedly recommend it to you. in print its a thin hardcover (c. 200 pages) so you might want to consider printing it or transferring it to am e-reader for ease; the footnotes are embedded in the text, so it’ll bear e-device reading with no loss of scholarly rigour, if that’s your preference. the translator’s intro is of course shorter.
vernon does not translate most of the lengthy last part of the book, that deals with issues surrounding the unification of italy, for which prodhon advocated a republican & federalist constitution. proudhon was implacably opposed to napoleon le petit & his baleful interferences in national liberation movements from poland to italy to lebanon to mexico (and to egypt after proudhon’s death). he came, he raised expectations, he pissed off, frustrating everyone & achieving little lasting good. remember poor old maximilian hapsburg, whose father, spurred by le petit, had such ambitions for him.
tolstoy had read proudhon’s “what is property?” in russia during the ’50s & was favourably impressed. the two spent some time together in brussels in 1861, during tolstoy’s visit west & while the exiled proudhon was working on a study he called “la guerre et la paix”. tolstoy & proudhon got on well together. tolstoy borrowed proudhon’s title for his novel.
yours sincerely
alfred venison
Well well well. I see that none of the factory pre-sets around here has changed, not one jot nor a tittle.
That’s sort of comforting, in a way.
Ya know, re our #Occupy buddies, it’s really all just sort of like a great man said…
You put de lime in de coconut
And drink it all up.
Woo hoo! Don’t worry though, this is just a one-off…
Luv to all,
japerz
Japerz!
Some cracked pepper spray with that?
tigtog @115: “A technologically advanced society requires specialisation and those specialities need to be supported by an infrastructure with compatible segments across a large area to enable efficient exchange of the specialised goods and services which a technologically advanced society consumes just to keep on ticking over …”
A fantastic paragraph that spells out beautifully why membership of a society requires payment of subscriptions!
tssk @120: love Snickett’s points!
thanks andyc! Every now and then I look at my life in the heart of a major city and briefly think worrisome thoughts about what something like an EMP (to go worst case scenario) would do to the systems we rely on every day, and wonder how long we’d take to descend into chaos without them. That’s what reading plenty of cold-war thrillers and SF does for one!
I can’t see any possible way that large cities could provide sufficient security and stability for their inhabitants if run on strictly libertarian principles. Too many of the distribution systems (just as one example) require the sorts of reliability guarantees that only “enforced collectivism” can provide. So are the various strands of libertarianism open about how their principles and policies will mean the end of major cities, and are they sure that everybody would want that?
Adrien said:
That bears no obvious relationship to what I said. It seems to me that the concept of progress is absolutely fundamental to politics and accordingly it was astonishing that anyone of intelligence could regard what it entailed/excluded as not germane to politics.
You’re having a bet each way here. If progres isn’t worth thinking about or is a distraction from something more pressing, then what it is and is not is moot, surely?
Putting that aside …
Of course not all people conceive of progress as entailing the same things and as we see with the Tea Party, some see it as an existential threat.
That is a problem but it’s by no means confined to those tossing about the term progress. Why that should constrain discussion of what is and is not progress reamins unargued by you. Indeed, if people are misusing the term and doing brutal things in its name, that would be an occasion to reflect even more closely on what counts as progress and what counts as reaction.
You quote me:
then continue
Now you’re just being obtuse for the sake of it. The language was clearly metonymic and the allusion was to humans.
Again, you are being obtuse. Capitalism deals badly both with those who work and those who are on the margins of employment. I never referred to their morals. My reference was to the character of their advocacy and its provenance.
Plainly, I find their advocacy offensive, but I don’t hate them personally. I feel sorry for those of them that are mere dupes, though I hold greater concern yet for those who will suffer at the hand of those they enable.
Yes, Im for stating the obvious, and its strikes me that OWS is doing exactly that: its time to increase taxes on the wealthy, rather than impose austreity measures on the poor.
if that isnt the obvious lesson of both the US and EU economic crises, then I dont know what is.
It seems to me that the concept of progress is absolutely fundamental to politics
It is for some people. For others ‘progress’ is something that happens outside politics and the question is about keeping the State from obstructing it. Many people thought the Soviet Union was progress, inside and out. During the 1920s however the industrial art of the Soviet Union started to display more and more Pharaohnic imagery: giant Stalins and masses of little people. This was the truth. It wasn’t progress it was regression.
I don’t bundle in the progress accomplished by socialists in democratic societies with totalitarian communism btw.
Now you’re just being obtuse for the sake of it.
Well.. yes.
Again, you are being obtuse. Capitalism deals badly both with those who work and those who are on the margins of employment.
I’m not being obtuse I’m being sarcastic. Your comment and the rhetoric of the far left generally implies that capitalism is the most dastardly system ever devised by human hands. Yet the reality is that it has made the majority of those living with it better off materially then our most lofty ancestors. Indeed the capacity of so many to conceive of and object to capitalism and do something about it is due to, um, capitalism. It is however true that capitalism tends to render people insecure in their estates.
And it seems to me that this is what the Wall St protests and the Tea Party are getting at, each in its different way. They are objecting not to insecurity so much as the fact that an entrenched elite has emerged which are secure in their position no matter how badly they f*ck up.
I agree that capitalism has led to ethical abyss. Or rather modernity – science – has. What good is the human centred metaphysics of millenia in the face of a vast cosmos that may itself not be the only one? What good are the inherited customs and traditions grounded in village life in an atomised world of choices that lead to myriad associations without common goal? This is a problem. But the solutions tend to be spiritual not political.
You’re having a bet each way here.
No I’m simply suggesting that perhaps it’s time to accept that different people harbour different world-views, that they are entitled to do so, that that is the way of it and we’d be better off if we all tried to understand before we condemn.
It’s my idea of progress I guess.
People expecting the OWS to automatically support the Democrats are in for a rude surprise.
Adrien said:
That means almost nothing to me, and to the extent it has semantic content, it seems utterly vacuous.
Imprecise. Many people thought that the USSR would assist in the struggle of humans to overcome the constraints on humans imposed by scarcity, by touching off a worldwide proletarian revolution that would create a system which would strengthen the productive forces where capitalism could not. As it turned out, they were wrong, largely because the human material with which they had to work was too poor, and because authoring new stable and equitable political systems amidst chaos is exceptionally difficult, but the USSR per se was simply another iteration of human organisation and apart from the politics it enabled in the context of the wider struggles of working humanity for empowerment, was neither progressive nor reactionary.
It’s hard to believe that you can have come this far in life and make that claim. We leftists know only too well that capitalism was a radical improvement over all previous forms of social organisation. No other system promised so plausibly to free humans from the impositions of nature and their own ignorance. Marx attested to this repeatedly in his writings. Yet we are not pollyannas on the matter. Capitalism was and is in many respects a thoroughly brutal system. What was progressive about it was the development of the productive forces, the aggregation of human labour power and its success in fostering human collaboration — the creation of social labour, the creation of surpluses beyond mere subsistence, which opened up the possibility of the transformation of the lives of humans from those which were solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, to borrow from Hobbes, into lives that were rich, textured, extended. Capitalism was the largest step humanity had taken in the direction of material abundance. Of course, like two-fingered typing, it can only take humans so far. Having authored the modern world, the challenge for humans was to continue to improve labour productivity, to increase collaboration, reduce the call on human labour and ensure that its benefits and burdens be equitably shared.
I call that progress. It is bound up with the goal of freeing people from the need to sell their labour power, so that humans — everyone of us — can realise our full possibility, unfettered by the demands of others or scarce resources. That politics which fosters the approach to this state — I call progress, and that which subverts it — I call misanthropic, for it strikes one way or another at human empowerment and possibility.
I’ve always accepted that — including in this very conversation, which, had you been less inclined to sarcasm, you might have noticed. I’m one of a tiny minority on the planet, and so I can hardly have it otherwise.
.
This is utterly vacuous. The word “entitled” here is a weasel word. Nobody can prevent anyone from believing anything they please, and accordingly, everyone is ipso facto ‘entitled’ to a Weltanschauung of their choice. It would scacely matter if I thought they weren’t.
In practice though this use of ‘entitled’ is an attempt to smuggle the concept that we are bound to respect the pronouncements of others, regardless of how intellectually or ethically implausible they may be into political culture. That’s not the case at all. If someone emits flatus in a lift, and I know who it is, I am going to object strenuously, notwithstanding their ‘entitlement’ to let fly. So too it is with those who feel they should stink up the place with their ignorant, reckless, misanthropic cris de coeur.
BTW, I’m a bit bothered by the term “progress” myself.
The OWS got a lot of flack for not defining their goals early on. Myself, I feel it’s a positive development. It sounds like a movement that has embraced honest doubt, and that should be welcomed. There are too many ideologues in politics, and many more that are part of the “Dictatorship of Reason” – to use a term cribbed from John Ralston Saul.
Progress seems to imply progress towards somewhere, but what if you don’t like where it’s going? A lot of the early progressives like Teddy Roosevelt and H.G. Wells were into the eugenics movement. (So were Liberals slash Tories like Winston Churchill, and Nazis as well. It was an equal opportunity error.) Progressives of the early 1900s might have liked developments like worker’s rights and feminism, but multi-racial democracies like Australia may have appalled them beyond measure. It’s not what they were progressing towards.
Let’s stay with doubt for now. Let the OWS work out their goals in their own time.
Progress seems to imply progress towards somewhere, but what if you don’t like where it’s going?
Exactly. And there will always be disagreement about where we should go. Almost all politicians spruik ‘progress’ and in this they attempt to appeal to one or other worldview with its assumptions about what ‘progress’ entails. This is mainly a sales pitch. Often their actual activity does not move society along this road of progress. Bill Clinton was regarded as ‘progressive’ but his policies were more neoliberal than Reagan’s. This is why so many advocates of liberal economics as the road to progress approve of Clinton’s administration.
Intellectuals have their notions of progress which remain fundamentally unaltered since their world-views were first articulated in the 19th century. So the propaganda war entails the defense of various intellectual gods and negative assessments of the way things are going according the idealistic models promoted by same. In the aftermath of WWII one non-conformist conservative noted that:
We still make that mistake. We promote policies on principle without asking what the consequences might be. Clinton promoted policies according to the principle of self-promotion. His advocacy of neoliberalism was unaccompanied by any true understanding of economic liberalism or its limits. So he repeals the Glass-Seagull Act to show us what an economic liberal he is and pushes the deregulation one step far enough to set up a house of cards.
Yet the only people willing to see this are those who are not economic liberals. And they in their enthusiasm for the current opportunity to reinstitute economic collectivisation also fail to learn the lessons of its failures. I think Chesterton was quite right when he wrote that “The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.”
The dialectical relationship between the two worldviews, their distillation into rationalist policy books and the resultant laws and absence thereof that their political agents institute are producing the ever-mounting rubble and hot wind that blows Benjamin’s angel backward toward oblivion.
Is that progress?
Down & Out said:
I’ve no problem with keeping an open mind but, if one is to acheive anything more than a feelgood series of assemblies one must have at least a broad and paradigm within which to work. Without that, the movement is prey to being co-opted and hijacked, particularly as this is a movement of people who are largely marginalised. It may well be fair enough to avoid developing specific program statements but it should be a movement aimed at inclusion and equity.
Argue for a different destination? Show why this desitnation is best suited to the needs and percetpions that have drawn people to set aside their normal lives and come to protest.
It seems odd that having worried about not getting prescriptive you object to eugenicists getting a hearing. Teddy, along with many others liberal-inclined folks at the time certainly was into eugenics, but without a paradigm based strongly around inclusion and equity one could easily find oneself rubbing shoulders with people holding similarly unsavoury ideas or worse.
Doubtless, that is just what they will do. Even if we here at LP were to devise and unanimously endorse a 10-point plan for them, I suspect it would make precious little impact on them.
I don’t believe however they can go very much longer without clearly defining themselves in relation to existing privilege and usage. Sooner or later they are going to have to declare on the “income redistribution” question. They are going to have to say, at least in broad terms, how the state can deal with unearned wealth and public investment policy and welfare provision and so forth.
Without that, there will be burnout and people will go back to their lives, chastened by the futility of their unarticulated demands for social justice.
“Yet the only people willing to see this are those who are not economic liberals. ”
That’s not accurate, just self-serving. Liberals, of my acquaintance, anyway, were appalled and predicted eventual disaster as a result of Clinton’s slipperly-slope action on this. That doesn’t mean that there weren’t just as many acting just as opportunistically as anyone else of any other political slant.
The problem I see is more of the “old boy network”, where Treasury and economic advisers are sourced from the major investment banks and then head back there (or, worse, into lobbying) when their stint is done (or they get a better offer), round and round. This is about power, and left or right, power is power and what drives those who have put us in the position of tent cities.
Most politicians these days aren’t spruiking progress, either, but “growth”, and we all know what that really means and who really benefits, and it ain’t anyone at OWS.
I take it back: “economic liberals” vs. “liberals”. But the rest can stand.
Even if we here at LP were to devise and unanimously endorse a 10-point plan for them
They don’t want ten point plans.
I don’t believe however they can go very much longer without clearly defining themselves
They don’t do that either. Their ethos is largely unspoken, diverse and organic. Like nature.
there will be burnout and people will go back to their lives
In Liberty Park maybe. The American system is overloaded with technocracy, public and private and I can see it all going quite bitter once those forces co-opt and defuse the anger. But at the core of this global movement is an activism and a ‘politics; which consists of living life. Down at city park in Melbourne they’re having fun.
Their ethos does not fit neatly into the standard ideological dichotomy. They might say ‘capitalism isn’t working’ but they’re unconcerned with the standard theories as to what that entails. This is because, at the same time, they practice things associated both with capitalism (markets) and socialism (co-operatives).
They spruik public space, they also want to ban fractional reserve. I’d say it’s a new ideology but it isn’t even that. They don’t want ideologies anymore. I was down there the other night the most representative thing were a bunch of musicians. They were playing songs from a particular band.
That song, the lyrics and the video and the music are probably as close to a manifesto as you’re gonna get.
@137 – The cynicism, nihilism and anti-intellectualism endlessly repeated by this poster is boring to say the least.
We get it. You don’t get left/progressive/utopian/visionary/game-changing/radical/subversive/anti-capitalist or whatever most people prefer to call it politics.
You never did. Never will.
Who cares? It’s not about you, honey.
Greg A – That’s not accurate, just self-serving.
I’m not serving myself Greg. I’m generally regarded as a libertarian and I’m generally comfortable with this label. However when it comes to stuff like this and the UK riots etc I usually find myself in conflict with libertarians. I am reminded of my anarchism.
And all the while regard these labels as archaic vestiges of a rationalist era that still weighs on us.
Liberals, of my acquaintance, anyway, were appalled and predicted eventual disaster as a result of Clinton’s slipperly-slope action on this.
I remember that Clinton was supported and loved by a lot of ‘em and only a few dissenting voices tended to treat him with any skepticism. Christopher Hitchens lost an awful lot friends in those years. I don’t remember much fuss made by anyone about the removal of the Glass-Seagull Act. But I may have just missed it.
Generally however people were more concerned with defending him over the Lewinsky thing. It may not be much relevant but I remember Rolling Stone magazine interviewed a lot of musicians at the end of his term. Most were liberal and most of them said he was ‘great. There were exactly two, David Byrne was one such I forget the other, that criticized him. Byrne for his carpet bombing of Iraq as the act of a war criminal (yes indeed).
I take it back: “economic liberals” vs. “liberals”. But the rest can stand.
Liberalism used to be coherent but cleaved in two after Roosevelt. It remains that way which leads to the absurd spectacle of those who adhere to the principles of classical liberalism being happy with Andrew Bolt as their spokesman.
Guys like Röpke and Oakeshott attempted to salvage the valuable core of the ideology whilst at the same time dealing with its errors but when economic liberalism reasserted itself it did so in alliance with illiberal conservatives and in ignorance of the critique elucidated by those two gentlemen. Instead we had the establishment of a new doctrine grounded in Hayek.
Those on the Left with a few notable exceptions (George Orwell) ignored them. That’s not a condemnation. It seems the Right do this as well. They are right now ignoring Marx. They also ignore Oakeshott who’s prescription for political liberty sternly disapproves of the ability of corporations to invest in one another and it does of trade unions attempting to becoming the governing institutions of society.
The problem I see is more of the “old boy network”
Entrenched privilege grounded in association and membership of an elite group rather than merit. I agree totally. The ism that’s really to blame is feudalism. It didn’t go away.
This is about power
Bertrand Russell said that after your needs are met it’s all about power and glory. If you take those terms at their most basic and general I think he’s right. Oakeshott said if you want to be free (and to be equal you must be free as well)then power needs to be limited so no group or individual gets too much. One side said the government’s got too much, the other corporations. They’re both right.
Look what I found at the Tumblr for We are the 53%.
139: “Look what I found at the Tumblr…”
Cute, to be sure; but don’t you think what our #OWS buds would really like, is a site called “the Tumbrl”? IYKWIMAITYD.
Details. They make life interesting.
And now I rilly must stop, before this becomes a bad, bad habit all over again.
Onward, Daleks! Social justice is just over the horizon!!
Heh indeedy-doo.
And one more heh, for good measure.
dear akn @70
i too am impressed & heartened by contemporary young people’s propensity to organise along flat structures. i am inspired to cautious optimism by their example in this regard.
the full title of proudhon’s study i referred to is “on the federative principle & the need to reconstitute the party of the revolution”. it was published in 1863. i am pleased as punch that the translation i read at uni is now available free on-line:-http://www.ditext.com/proudhon/federation/federationDOThtml
[replace "DOT" with a full stop & feed to yr browser]
apparently courtesy of translator, research council of canada & uni of toronto press. it’s a reliable scholarly translation with a good translator’s introduction linked within, but which can be accessed directly:-
http://www.ditext.com/vernon/proudhonDOThtml
[replace "DOT" &c]
i can wholeheartedly recommend it to you. in print its a thin hardcover (c. 200 pages) so you might want to consider printing it or transferring it to am e-reader for ease; the footnotes are embedded in the text, so it’ll bear e-device reading with no loss of scholarly rigour, if that’s your preference. the translator’s intro is of course shorter.
vernon does not translate most of the lengthy last part of the book, that deals with issues surrounding the unification of italy, for which prodhon advocated a republican & federalist constitution. proudhon was implacably opposed to napoleon le petit & his baleful interferences in national liberation movements from poland to italy to lebanon to mexico (and to egypt after proudhon’s death). he came, he raised expectations, he pissed off, frustrating everyone & achieving little lasting good. remember poor old maximilian hapsburg, whose father, spurred by le petit, had such ambitions for him.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Manet,_Edouard_-_The_Execution_of_Emperor_Maximilian,_1867DOTjpg
[replace "DOT" &c]
tolstoy had read proudhon’s “what is property?” in russia during the ’50s & was favourably impressed. the two spent some time together in brussels in 1861, during tolstoy’s visit west & while the exiled proudhon was working on a study he called “la guerre et la paix”. tolstoy & proudhon got on well together. tolstoy borrowed proudhon’s title for his novel.
best wishes to your daughter & son “on the barricades”.
yours sincerely
alfred venison
dear pain
i was hoping you’d be back…
IYKWIMAIhYD
Adrian-”I don’t remember much fuss made by anyone about the removal of the Glass-Seagull Act. But I may have just missed it.” I remember a bit of fuss about the Glass-Steagall act in the grauniad back in the nineties, but I paid it little mind, silly me.
Was that other muso Jello Biafra? He was just on the Rs talking about the above act among other things like how Tipper may have cost Al more votes than the pregnant chads.
Of course I feel safe discussing Yankee punks as tpitafkajpz is not relapsing
I was wondering how long it would be before it would show it’s ugly face.
It is all “ze joos” fault of course.
Really Fran?
What a wonderful job was done by “progressives” as you call them, in the 20th century to meet that challenge.
Lenin, with the full support of Trotsky, tried it. in Russia. The result? Mass starvation until he brought in the NEP (capitalism) to spare the Russian people from starvation, not to spare them from their suffering, but in order to secure his dictatorship from a third revolution. So that, with that crisis passed, he could reimpose his “progressive view” – i.e. shoot a lot more of them and leave the rest to starve, which is a part of the progressive creed to which you adhere.
Lenin withTrotsky, who is your special favourite, because he is not Stalin, are your models of progressive views.
His creature Stalin continued Lenin’s progressive views on the Russian people for another 25 years, and there you had 25 million dead, leaving aside the depredations of the Nazis. Then less than seventy years after Lenin’s death the people of Russia decided, in a most decisive way, that his way was not progressive at all. And introduced their own sad system of capitalism, which they still think is better than the “progressive” script that you want to enforce upon them.
Mao did it. The result? Seventy million dead. Including forty million in the disgustingly named “Great Leap Forward”. Then Deng Xiaoping reintroduced capitalism and, for whatever the imperfections of their political system (being communist) the Chinese people haven’t looked back.
Pol Pot did it. A quarter of the Khmer people died in his three and a half years of implementing progressive policies. Happily the Vietnamese intervened to throw him out. Almost as happily the “international community” combined to throw them out in 1993. After that Cambodia emraced capitalism and its people are now prospering.
One could go on about every other country in the world where the “progressive” society you have advocated has failed totally.
But there is hope for you. I would never wish that there wouldn’t be.
That is North Korea. Haven of all your hopes. By all reports they all really eat well there and live remarkably ethical lives.
You should be proud of them, and their progressive leader, as I am sure you are.
Long post WARNING !!!
“”"Revealed – the capitalist network that runs the world”"”"
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228354.500-revealed–the-capitalist-network-that-runs-the-world.html
The top 50 of the 147 superconnected companies
1. Barclays plc
2. Capital Group Companies Inc
3. FMR Corporation
4. AXA
5. State Street Corporation
6. JP Morgan Chase & Co
7. Legal & General Group plc
8. Vanguard Group Inc
9. UBS AG
10. Merrill Lynch & Co Inc
11. Wellington Management Co LLP
12. Deutsche Bank AG
13. Franklin Resources Inc
14. Credit Suisse Group
15. Walton Enterprises LLC
16. Bank of New York Mellon Corp
17. Natixis
18. Goldman Sachs Group Inc
19. T Rowe Price Group Inc
20. Legg Mason Inc
21. Morgan Stanley
22. Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc
23. Northern Trust Corporation
24. Société Générale
25. Bank of America Corporation
26. Lloyds TSB Group plc
27. Invesco plc
28. Allianz SE 29. TIAA
30. Old Mutual Public Limited Company
31. Aviva plc
32. Schroders plc
33. Dodge & Cox
34. Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc*
35. Sun Life Financial Inc
36. Standard Life plc
37. CNCE
38. Nomura Holdings Inc
39. The Depository Trust Company
40. Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance
41. ING Groep NV
42. Brandes Investment Partners LP
43. Unicredito Italiano SPA
44. Deposit Insurance Corporation of Japan
45. Vereniging Aegon
46. BNP Paribas
47. Affiliated Managers Group Inc
48. Resona Holdings Inc
49. Capital Group International Inc
50. China Petrochemical Group Company
Greg M
On occasions I have disagreed with Fran, on this occasion I do not but rather I do disagree with your comments. It is a favoured tactic of the right to reduce every progressive initative in our society to a comparison with the extremes of monopolistic dictators and compare progressive and social initiatives (like welfare saftey nets) to some form of “communism”.
And yet we do have a society despite Margaret Thatcher’s attempts to deny it – we are seeing it now. Further people want a society, not just individual greed. Various societies across the globe are now demonstrating and making their presence felt on the streets and in general the people are not happy.
When the wall came down we all learned that communism wasnt all it was designed to be. Since Wall street came down, we are rapidly learning that free markets arent all they are purported to be either.
Can we learn from this or do we just use the same tired labels?
From your list of famous despots I would have thought you would realise our enemies are not philosphies, they are just humans with inhumane ideas passing them off as great ideas.
Yes, yes, we know, GregM. [Admiring the chutzpah of #OWS] = [love of Stalin, Mao, Che, Pol Pot, Castro, Kim], and, oh, I don’t know, eating babies at midnight.
You, sir, have won bullshit bingo!
Again.
Well done!
Indeed Merc …
When one’s own reason fails, summon the boogeymen to vilify those with reason at their shoulders.
GregM: Lenin a “progressive”? Don’t see it myself. Progressivism as far as I understand it is gradual change – passing laws to stop child labor and quash monopolies – not storming the Winter Palace, nor killing people with glasses because they might be “intellectuals”. “Progressivism” (if it was ever translated into Russian) would probably be seen as a wishy-washy bourgeois right deviation by the Commies.
I think you’re being silly with your straw man arguments. Tut tut.
Thanks Alfred.
Jumpy, Jess posted the academic paper on the network a wee while back, it might have been on a Saturday Salon if you want to look it up.
“Tumbrl” – Heh! Don’t get your mob cap in a twist just yet, Charlotte, modest proposals for some reregulation to prevent the invisible hand from constantly putting its sticky fingers in the till and a little taxation of the 1% do not the Terror make.
GregM. You forgot Gadaffi. Supported by Tony Blair.
The riot police have entered the City Square in Melbourne.
@Tssk
“GregM. You forgot Gadaffi. Supported by Tony Blair.”
Supported also by the UN.
Are they on horseback Chav? I remember the first time we visited Melbourne in the 90′s. We emerged from the bus station to find one of the main streets empty.
We looked down one end and it was blocked off by protestors. We turned and saw the horses heading towards them at quite a pace.
Needless to say we moved out of the way!
Are they on horseback Chav?
Some of ‘em.
I am hoping some of the occupiers currently being kettled and arrested may now reconsider their previously ambiguous role of the police and the state…
It’s all cleared away, no more tents, time for the X-Mas tree to go up. Shut-up, shop.
Something symbolic about that, sweeping away the protestors as a risk to the Christmas retail sales season.
@Tssk
“sweeping away the protestors as a risk to the Christmas retail sales season.”
If you were a retailer there with your future relying on the Christmas shopping, you too would be glad to see the protest moved on.
“”"sweeping away the protestors as a risk to the Christmas retail sales season.”"”
More to do with a Royal visit soon I recon.
Not the Royals fault by the way.
At least the occupiers can go home and have a nice hot bath/shower and start consuming corporate products again, knowing they made a stand. :p
@139: Really?
We can’t have protests disrupting Christmas retail. It’s unAustralian!.
@Fran
“We can’t have protests disrupting Christmas retail. It’s unAustralian!”
You have obviously never owned your own retail business.
Do not judge those in whose shoes you have never walked.
Neither do I, Down and Out. But that’s the way Fran sees him. He is, after all, one of the two most important men in her life. She named one of her kids after him because they shared a birthdate, and she is proud of that to this day.
That is the way we both understand it, but it is not the way Fran understands it. She is an unapologetic Leninist and her only criticism of him that I have seen is for minor foibles like not being sufficiently communist at particular times in his career.
She is entitled to her opinion and with that I am entitled to point out what that opinion is. So it’s not a straw man argument.
I doubt you would know enough about Fran to know what she named here babies GregM but you could always ask Fran if you wanted the truth.
I almost named my son Eamon after Eamonn de Valera, the first head of government of the free Irish state (but mostly because its lovely sounding name and I have to spend a lot of years calling him…).
But I did always like this quote of his
“If there is to be any hope of prosperity for this country it is by reversing that policy which made us simply the kitchen garden for supplying the British with cheap food. ”
Hmm – could be some parallels with Australia. We now supply the world with cheap coal and iron ore (is that all we are capable of)?
So you have inside knowledge on Fran’s baby naming?. I dont think so GregM.
Of course Lenin was a progressive. In October (OS) of 1917, he was leading the only party in favour of ending the war, resolving the land question and restarting agriculture. He was part of a party that was not Russian chauvinist but favoured the working people of the world overthrowing capitalism. He favoured industrialisation for backward Russia. Lenin saw to it amongst other things that abortion was made available to women and abolished laws against homosexuality.
That doesn’t mean that everything he did was tactically correct. FTR, Down & Out, there’s nothing wrong with progressives storming the citadels of the enemy like the Winter Palace, but he never attacked people who wore glasses or intellectuals — at least on that basis. His was a party of intellectuals. You’re thinking of Pol Pot.
Alice, back in April Fran told us that she had named one of her babies ‘Leni” and why. I pointed out at the time that if he had been born two days earlier she could have named him after another dictator just as appropriately for the evil he did.
Do try to keep up.
At least she is intelligent, if misguided.
Then I see this:
And I am reminded that amongst us there are the unintelligent (in fact cretinous) and misguided.
Would you care to provide just a shred of evidence for that comment of yours other than the dumbness of “that’s what I think.”
Some links to demonstrate the proof of your assertion, just so we can all verify it, would be appreciated.
Down and Out@153
You saw my words @148 and you doubted them.
You saw my response @167
Then Fran comes along @169 to give her own views on whether she believes that Lenin was a progressive.
Your words:
Her words:
Your argument is not with me, but with her. It’s not a straw man argument. It’s what she truly believes, involving killing lots of people, as Lenin did, without ever a word of criticism of him by her.
this blog is being ruined by bizarre thread hijacking and overly-long posts.
yours sincerely, the other 99%
#OccupyLP
AKA I want to have my own voice heard, and no one else’s. And I don’t want their opinions to be aired because I might disagree with them and that would make me feel very upset. Everybody must agree with me.
Spoken like a true democrat and someone who is furiously balancing.
yeah, you’re right, having posted for the first time at #172 I’m totally into not letting other people have their say. sorry I interrupted your bizarre obsession with Fran and Lenin, totally undemocratic of me.
Well fb, Lenin was totally undemocratic. Fran is his acolyte and even today points it out. Sorry for pointing out what her views are. But that’s democracy for you. I’m sorry you don’t understand that and want to shut free speech, which is an essential part of democracy, down.
But that is your problem, not mine.
Cheers
I’m with you Furious
GregM is Andrew Bolts Avatar.
#Occupy LP
Jusme mentioned him briefly upthread, but this article at the Drum is quite extraordinary; you know something is seriously amiss when Alan Kohler, hardly a left wing commentator, describes the relationship between banks and European governments in terms more usually applied to Mafia protection rackets:
Thanks to Pure Poison
http://blogs.crikey.com.au/purepoison/2011/10/21/hun-on-occupy-melbourne-no-smear-left-unmade/
I’m quite enjoying the sight of a newspaper defending (one of it’s columnists) free speech on one hand while having fun mocking the free speech of those it doesn’t like. Can’t wait for tomorrow’s ed.
The cognitive dissonance shouldn’t surprise me. It’s sister paper managed to criticise the PM’s lack of percieved ettitquette while breaching ettiquette itself in the one sentence, a feat that would make most peoples’ heads explode in irony,
I’m guessing tomorrow’s Herald Sun will be a colourful Christmas spread with the festive colours of some Greens having seven shades of red smacked out of them.
GregM said:
This is a caricature of my attitude to Lenin, Leninism, its relation to Marxism, and by implication, my attitude to the killing of people and the circumstances under which it can be warranted.
GregM and I have been around this topic several times, and GregM knows that his ostensible summary of my position is deliberately misleading, but he seems to feel that smearing me as some sort of putatively muderous psychopath serves his politics.
FTR, I do not support executions even of people guilty even of heinous crimes. I also oppose resort to torture. For example, had I been at the site of Gaddhafi’s capture yesterday, I’d have argued that due process should have followed and further, that he should not have been executed even if found guilty of crimes against humanity.
I also recognise though that when a state of civil war exists and a state’s power to control its agents is loose, killings that would be regarded by civilised people as unlawful do take place. There may also be circumstances in which killings may be the least of all harms. That’s an argument against allowing war (or civil war) to develop, but the responsibility for these deaths is on the shoulders of those who made c war inevitable. I am not a pacifist.
During the American Civil War, brutal killings were carried out on both sides. Yet that did not prevent progressives siding with the Union forces in that conflict.
One must keep in mind that Russia had not in 1917 had the benefit of anything we in 2011 would recognise as a society based on the rule of law and that the majority — the vast majority would not even have been regarded as literate. Its Tsarist autocracy had conscripted millions from the cities and the land to fight and die in huge numbers in a military conflict with Germany. The revolution in October was touched off by attempts to prolong Russian participation in the war. The civil war was a consequence of the attempts by the old regime to reassert control, and in Russia, unlike Australia, these conflicts were not confined to loud argument. In Russia at the time, feuds were settled in blood. Indeed, even today, decades after the USSR collapsed, Russia remains an unusually violent place, in which those who cross powerful interests run a seriously elevated risk of suffering an untimely death.
Lenin’s party — the Bolsheviks — had (along with pretty much every other anti-Tsarist party) been the subject of longstanding repression, which had intensified after 1914, when it opposed the war. It also recalled the events of the Paris Commune nearly half a century earlier, and they were entiled to imagine that those famous images of the dead communards would be how they would appear on the morrow of their overthrow. They also believed that while Russia, in isolation, could not hope to overcome its backwardness and lack of development, if the regime could spark successful workers uprisings in Western Europe, they could bring a rapid end to the war and resolve Russia’s looming food crisis, and lay open the road to the victory of the workers on a world scale — their own version of the “Arab Spring”. They were, accordingly, very much determined to hang on. It was a high stakes gamble, but unsurprisingly in the circumstances, they’d given very little thought to how they could establish stable government over a country as large as Russia that was lacking even an effective transport or communications system. They were obliged to rely on individuals and structures that, in the circumstances, were going to be effectively autonomous. They were also going to do this in the face of an insurrection by the “Whites” and their allies, backed by foreign powers and a food crisis caused by disruption to agriculture and crop failure.
Their responses paid little respect to the kinds of usages we would expect of societies based on the rule of law, accountability, a professional bureaucracy and so forth. I’ve argued in the past, that Lenin’s Bolsheviks ought to have anticipated this, and so bear at least some responsibility for subsequent events. Yet mapping what I said on the Gaddhafi thread, the fate of those siding with the Tsarist autocracy was in decisive part authored by them. Russia’s populace in 1917 was the result of their work. Stalin’s early life was in a Georgian monastery, and he learned his method at the knee of “orthodox” priests. If one is to criticise, one must show that the population of Russia in 1917 might have been better served by the Bolsheviks adopting some other course that would have been plausible at the time. I believe there were other such options, but obviously, that counterfactual is, at best, a guess informed by hindsight.
Lenin was a brilliant theorist and political activist, but he was also a product of the decades of the late 19th century and early 20th century. His brother had been executed by the regime, and that, independent of everything else, surely exercised an influence on his thinking. Every Old Bolshevik had suffered at the hands of theTsarist autocracy and blood vengeance was de rigeur. It is little surprising that the Civil War paid little heed to protect the innocent. Neither side did.
I believe I’m entitled to see in Lenin an effective Marxist revolutionary who lacked what was needed to found a new and progressive regime in the most difficult of circumstances. He held high the banner of the liberation of working people from the rule of the boss class on a world scale, and ultimately died as a consequence of his determination to prosecute the cause. That’s what I respect. GregM’s assertion notwithstanding, that does not entail endorsing a hagiographic reading of him as a person or political actor.
@GregM, how about you get a blog and call it franandlenininatreeblog.tld and lay out your accusations there instead of derailing multiple threads here with the same old song? We’re talking about a burgeoning 21st century political movement here. Discussion of 20th century movements may have tangential relevance of historical interest, but it should not dominate this thread.
Yes, and if you’re gonna talk about C20 movements surely the Yippies and sit-ins and student protests are more germane to this current phenomenon than dour Marxist-Leninists in early C20 Europe.
Gread read: Bartleby’s Occupation of Wall St.
Like so much good stuff, again, via Making Light.
there’s nothing wrong with progressives storming the citadels of the enemy like the Winter Palace, but he never attacked people
I believe those there were some cadets that got slaughtered and a women’s battalion that got raped on that night in October. Was that progressive too?
This is like Casey and Fyodor without the broomsticks and Campari.
Another great rant from heathen scripture on Robert Doyle and Occupy X. Warning about the language. While it would be great if his excuse for why his usage isn’t sexist was enough, I’m not sure it is enough to overcome other people’s sexist associations but that’s as off topic here as there
Adrien tried perhaps the most ridiculous troll at LP in recent memory as follows:
then went on to issue a trolling challenge
This is a text-based medium Adrien. The whole quote is still available:
Why embarrass yourself? I’m also not sure about the basis of your belief that people were raped or cadets killed in the storming of the palace. IIRC, two people, both Bolsheviks, died that night.
And Helen the Bartleby essay was excellent. I’m kind of wishing I hadn’t read the comments though
@187
Er … I would think if you have to ask the question then you need counselling. Either that or you’re into idiotic snark.
Sorry, @189
Fran, I’m not a troll and you’re resortation to insults is telling. I’m sorry about the provocation but you have a controlling mindset that is at odds with what this demonstration is about. I just wanted that embossed.
As to the assertion, I’ve heard a theort and never bothered to check. I’m not sure you have either.
From King and Queen to the 1% there is one connecting thread that includes the ownership of land, taxes upon the means of production,- “crown land” & the dominion of finiance “rule of law upon money”.
Relying upon the ignorance of the plebs the system of starting with nothing except bloodshed and deception, ending owning all, today this is based on fractional reserve banking, not taught in school and not discussed in media owned by those involved in FRB.
Present working of this FRB in western governments have allowed banks to be privatised, deregulated, including the rules of deposit ratio and lending.
Banks therefore can lend out ten times or more than held on deposit out of thin air, interest is charged on the whole, interest earns three times the loan principole average, created nine parts or more is cancelled out on repayment and the profit is the interest earned on fraud.
This is the basis for capital to go to Corporations to buy up at low cost from cash strapped governments all that the working public have produced writing off the cost of low interest on the taxpayer along the way.
This I believe the 1% see as causing unemployment as work is shifted to the cheapest labour source, aided and supported by government who care not for the people and are now indebted to both bankers and co-joined Corporations.