This is a reply to Look Out, #Occupy: Here Comes the DCCC
While I don't doubt attempts by Democrats to coop #Occupy, I don't see how they can succeed. Not in the near term future, anyway.
Here is the money quote from OWS participant, who commented on the NY Times article: "Protests Offer Help, and Risk, for Democrats", by Tony Buontempo.
In the comments I am about to make, I want to emphasize I have not been giving authority to speak on behalf of Occupy Wall Street NYC. No one has authority unless granted by the General Assembly to speak on behalf of the movement. I speak for myself.
I am at NYC OWS everyday. If the Democratic Party thinks it will coop this movement, they have another thing coming. Individuals members of the party are welcome to participate, as is everyone who clearly sees the failure of corporate capitalist market driven society.
However, when I speak one on one to the vast majority of people at OWS, they, we, see the Democratic Party as just as much to blame as the Republican Party. There are some members of both parties that have support in the movement, Dennis Kucinich, Bernie Sanders, and Ron Paul are a few. But for the most part, the parties and their corporate free market ideology are not supported by the vast majority of us. There are some that do, no doubt, but they are in the minority.
The disparaging comment in the artilce by the unnamed Democratic operative about the Anarchists stands as the best example of why they will never get our support. The Anarchists have been at the forefront of our movement. Though not the majority, they have been here since day one taking the full weight of the pepper spray, beating, and jailing of the capitalist state. They are our Working Class brothers and sisters, and we would never abandon them they way the Democratic Party abandon us.
Given that OWS has started out leaderless, and is therefore amorphous enough so that people don't even know how to think about it, perhaps the best outcome for OWS' future is as a sort of trans-partisan platform, or operating system.
OpenLeft.com was founded with the idea of it serving as a sort of operating system:
We see the internet and the Open Left as a sort of operating system for a new political system, where groups can plug in and form coalitions more easily and effective on the left, and we see a strong set of dynamics pulling us into this new coalition-focused direction. We hope to host many of these groups, serving as a forum for strategic discussion of goals and tactics.
Similarly, maybe the greatest good that can come out of OWS is it being a foundational level for political activism, which is transpartisan, targets any and all political parties, and serves as both an open forum and open recruiting base. In return, OWS needs physical support ($$) and their desire not to be coopted has to be respected. (I.e., the $$ can’t come with strings.) Their structure (such as it is) seems to be impervious to cooption, anyway.
An operating system doesn't "endorse" a program, and any program that takes over the operating system is seen as a bad thing - either a trojan or a virus. An operating system protects itself and other programs from 'bad programs', that try to appropriate memory that doesn't belong to it, by killing the run of the offending program.
Likewise, OWS might best fulfill it's place in the democratic ecosystem by not endorsing any party, but by allowing 'good' (reformist) representatives of these parties to share it's civic spaces for bona fide purposes.
1:59 PM PT: Glenn Greenwald’s latest article: “Can OWS be turned into a Democratic Party movement?”.
In 2 words: "No way".
