OWS crumbled in ways right out of various leaked three letter agency guides to disrupting grass roots movements.
I'd love to see it get another try, with how news sources have become far more decentralized. Less opportunity for major news orgs to kill the momentum.
Full disclosure, the destruction of OWS is pretty much the one thing I allow myself to go "full tinfoil hat" over.
OWS was not well-organized. Palestinian solidarity groups are doing better. The key difference is in being able to coherently make informed decisions as a group and then act on them as one.
Every OWS encampment was basically 5-30 orgs all doing their own thing and then fighting about horizontalism and being naive about how the cops and City Hall would treat them. We need to be able to act like 1-3 orgs (even if there are more), politically educate so we can avoid mistakes, and create good structure as early as possible so that expectations are set and time isn't wasted and bad decisions are avoided.
The US left is basically slowly relearning the basics of organizing. Get involved and make it go faster!
Like we did with Occupy Wall Street or are doing now for Palestine?
No, harder. Much, much harder.
OWS crumbled in ways right out of various leaked three letter agency guides to disrupting grass roots movements.
I'd love to see it get another try, with how news sources have become far more decentralized. Less opportunity for major news orgs to kill the momentum.
Full disclosure, the destruction of OWS is pretty much the one thing I allow myself to go "full tinfoil hat" over.
OWS was not well-organized. Palestinian solidarity groups are doing better. The key difference is in being able to coherently make informed decisions as a group and then act on them as one.
Every OWS encampment was basically 5-30 orgs all doing their own thing and then fighting about horizontalism and being naive about how the cops and City Hall would treat them. We need to be able to act like 1-3 orgs (even if there are more), politically educate so we can avoid mistakes, and create good structure as early as possible so that expectations are set and time isn't wasted and bad decisions are avoided.
The US left is basically slowly relearning the basics of organizing. Get involved and make it go faster!