Bon texte sur les occupations

http://www.zcommunications.org/this-is-three-years-late-in-praise-of-occupy-wall-street-by-paul-street



«The young people camped out near Wall Street in lower Manhattan to protest the power of the financial elite are an easy target for cynical and know-it-all types of various ideological persuasions. The kids are “dirty” and “disorganized.” They lack a “clear focus” and a “concrete agenda.” They are a passing and excessively Caucasian “circus of Deadheads” – neo-Yippie “post-modern neo-Rastafarian Know Nothings.” They are a bunch of silly “slackers” – a group of aimless “twenty-somethings with too much time on their hands.” They are carping and complaining about complex policies and an economic “system they don’t understand” and to which “they have no alternative.” They need to clean themselves and their act up, find their places, read some serious great books (a good capitalist neoliberal recommends Milton Friedman or Friedrich Hayek, and a good Marxist recommends, well, Marx) and develop more rigor, realism, and/or radicalism.

Well, I’ve been down to the New York financial district’s Zucotti Park twice. I’ve marched with and attended a General Assembly meeting of Occupy Chicago. And I’ve spent some time with Iowa City’s version of Occupy Iowa, which is camped out three blocks from my house. And I’m not too impressed with all the criticisms. Don’t get me wrong. I’m a technically middle class, middle-aged, and over-educated left Marxist who has probably read a few hundred too many books for my own good. Do I wish I’d met more tough-minded critics of the profits system and the bourgeoisie than I have on my journeys into the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement and its different regional offshoots? Sure. Was I disappointed to meet a young starry-eyed New York protestor who thinks capitalism can and should be saved in a “more humanized form” (a completely utopian and counter-productive belief in my opinion) and another such protestor who had good things to say about the racist libertarian Ron Paul? Yes. Do I wish I’d seen more folks from New York, Chicago’s, and Iowa City’s most truly disadvantaged, working and lower class, and non-white communities? Okay. Yeah.

But so what? They’re kids and this movement is in its very early stages. I sure didn’t have “everything figured out” in my 20s, that’s for sure. I still don’t! I met more occupiers who share my sense that capitalism itself – the source of the egregious inequality that is the main target of OWS’ ire – is the problem. It may well draw in more genuinely oppressed and working class Americans as time goes on. And there’s much to be said for the movement’s distinctly fluid, diverse, non-doctrinaire, and even eclectic ideological character. That sort of free-flowing diversity and eclecticism is precisely characteristic of protest movements that possess a genuinely grassroots and popular character. This is not the fake-populist “Tea Party,” where all the supposedly “grassroots” and “anti-establishment” messages come in the form of 5 or 6 canned grievances and demands cooked up in the propaganda shops of hard-right Republican elites like Dick Armey and the Koch (Charles and David) brothers».

Ce n'est peut-être pas parfait, mais quel mouvement social ou populaire peut prétendre l'être? Oui le mouvement est peut-être trop blanc, composé majoritairement d'hommes, jeunes et qui proviennent de la classe moyenne. Mais on pourrait dire exactement la même chose du mouvement anarchiste.

Ultimement je pense qu'il serait bon de voir un effort mutuel pour que ça change. Autant pour le mouvement actuel que pour le mouvement anarchiste. Mention honorable à Pwel qui s'est pointée, ce que je n'ai pas encore fait. Et ferai peut-être, d'une manière ou d'une autre.

Pour revenir au mouvement anarchiste, je dirai ceci : il n'a pas le monopole de la révolte légitime (détournement de Weber) et qu'on le veule ou non, il a été décevant en ce début de siècle et n'a pas su rejoindre les masses.