"What Did We Actually Do Right?" On the Unexpected Success and Spread of Occupy Wall St... - 0 views
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For those who desire to create a society based on the principle of human freedom, direct action is simply the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free.
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Bakari Chavanu on 23 Oct 11Seems like some people in the movement turn activism itself into a goal, rather than focusing real change. That's why politicians typically end up getting things done, because they focus on solutions, though those solutions don't always help most people.
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Actually, the development of consensus process, which is probably the movement’s greatest accomplishment, emerges just as much from the tradition of radical feminism, and draws on spiritual traditions from Native American to Quakerism. This is where the whole exotic language of the movement comes from: facilitation, “the people’s microphone,” spokescouncils, blocks; though in the case of Occupy Wall Street, augmented and transformed by the experience of General Assembly movements across the Mediterranean.
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But the experience of actually watching a group of a thousand, or two thousand, people making collective decisions without a leadership structure, let alone that of thousands of people in the streets linking arms to holding their ground against a phalanx of armored riot cops, motivated only by principle and solidarity, can change one’s most fundamental assumptions about what politics, or for that matter, human life, could actually be like.
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