Occupy 2.0: The Great Turning

[marmar]

from YES! Magazine:



Occupy 2.0: The Great Turning
Michael Nagler on building a movement to build a new reality.

by Michael Nagler
posted Apr 05, 2012

The spinning wheel, and the spinning wheel alone, will solve the problem of
the deepening poverty of India.
—Mahatma Gandhi

Anyone who thinks consumption can expand forever on a finite planet is either insane
or an economist.
—E.F. Schumacher

After a roaring start, the Occupy movement hit a wall in the form of rough-handling and evictions by the police. Occupiers could have given up on nonviolence—as a small faction will always try to get us to do—or just given up; but instead we have gone back to the drawing board, while continuing to occupy select spaces, this time with advance training. This is exactly the right response. As my former Berkeley colleague Todd Gitlin writes in The Nation, “To take on a warped state of affairs that has been decades in the making will take decades,” and for this purpose the encampment culture is “both necessary and inadequate.”

It’s time to step back, take stock of the situation we’re in, and work out a roadmap of the way home.

The worship of wealth that has brought corporations into a position of dominance in the world today has also brought in its wake two unexpected benefits. First, it planted in the minds of many the idea that some kind of world unity was possible: "Globalization from above" awakened the old dream of "globalization from below," the dream of world unity without world domination. Secondly, by releasing many of the traditional constraints on greed (they were already pretty weak) it gave the one percent enough rope to really squeeze the economic middle class, taking away from them the false comfort of "a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage," and thereby reawakening, though in new forms, the class struggles of the 1930s. This has finally exposed the inherent contradiction of an economy based on indefinitely increasing wants—instead of on human needs that the planet has ample resources to fulfill.

These new realities are what Walter Wink calls “gifts of the enemy,” a natural feature of nonviolent struggle. The sometimes rather brutal evictions from New York’s Zuccotti Park, Los Angeles, Oakland, Washington D.C., and other sites, along with the beating and pepper-spraying of students in California last November, could redound to our advantage. They might serve as a wake-up call revealing the militarization of America—though there are not many signs of such awakening yet in this numbed nation. ..........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.yesmagazine.org/people-power/occupy-2.0-the-great-turning

[xchrom]

1. Du rec. Nt

[malthaussen]

2. The operative phrase is

"They might serve as a wake-up call." (emphasis added) It depends on how many are paying attention.

It's problematical whether or not an unarmed majority can, by peaceful means, secure the surrender of power from the entrenched elites: there are few precedents for it. But first, the unarmed majority have to all be pointed in the same direction...

-- Mal

[bemildred]

3. Only has to happen once and the current crop of big-shots are toast though.

Never give up.

[malthaussen]

4. Not suggesting giving up

Just noting that this is probably not going to be a walk in the park.

-- Mal

[bemildred]

5. Quite right. nt