Click on the headline to link to updates from the Occupy Boston website. Occupy Boston started at 6:00 PM, September 30, 2011. I will post important updates as they appear on that site.
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We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
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#TomemonosBoston
Somos la Sociedad conformando el
99%
Dewey Square
Cercerde South Station
ASAMBLEA GENERALTODOS LOS DIAS
6:00PM
vvww.occupyboston.com
Tomemonos Boston se reuniarin en el Dewey Square en Downtown Boston a discutir cambios que la ciudadania puede hacer en el gobierno que afecte un cambio social positivo.
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Markin comment October 1, 2011:
There is a lot of naiveté expressed about the nature of capitalism, capitalists, and the way to win in the class struggle by various participants in this occupation. Many also have attempted to make a virtue out of that naiveté, particularly around the issues of effective democratic organization and relationships with the police (they are not our friends, no way, when the deal goes down). However, their spirit is refreshing, they are acting out of good subjective anti-capitalist motives and, most importantly, even those of us who call themselves "reds" (communists), including this writer, started out from liberal premises as naive, if not more so, than those encountered at the occupation site. We can all learn something but in the meantime we must defend the "occupation" and the occupiers. More later as the occupation continues.
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Markin comment October 20, 2011:
Recently I have, as an old-time radical, a 1960s radical but don’t hold that against me, been commenting in this space about my favorable reaction to the creation of the Occupy Boston site (and the several hundred others set up here in America and world-wide in the wake of Occupy Wall Street). I have backed that favorable reaction with all kinds of support, including physical defense of the Occupy Boston site in the early hours of Tuesday October 11, 2011 when the Boston police raided and shut down the second site. So I have some "street cred" for making the following observations.
During the course of various conversations over past couple of weeks , mainly with the young campers and their supporters, I have repeatedly made the statement that “the torch has been passed.” This statement has met with a certain amount of bewilderment and incomprehension on the part of some young listeners. All that the statement means, perhaps reflecting my own political origins as a left-liberal democrat who fiercely supported John F. Kennedy’s presidential victory in 1960 and was enthralled by his use of the term in his inaugural address in 1961, is that we older radicals now had young radicals to pass the lessons of the struggle on to. Unfortunately, until very recently, I and a fair number of other older radicals, were somewhat in despair because with a very un-radical “missing generation” in between (our sons and daughters, and today’s youth’s parents) the links to the past struggles might not get passed on. I breathe easier now knowing we have reinforcements, and plenty of them.
Of course as Vladimir Lenin, leader of the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia, among many others has noted each generation will come to revolutionary consciousness in its own way, finding its own ways to express its own social wants. Naturally whatever is new under the political sun a healthy respect for the past struggles is part of the order of the day for today’s youth. Those of us from the 1960s, for example, made every mistake in the radical book, including ignoring, contemptuously ignoring, the successes and failures of earlier struggles from the 1930s, the then-Great Depression struggle. Today’s youth should avoid that misstep.
Obviously today’s movement is driven, and driven hard, by the dramatic increase in possibilities of networking created by the latest information technologies. I would not wish to return to the old hand-crank mimeograph machines in order to get our message of the day printed, or the almost Dixie cup way we communicated just slightly faster than the old pony express. Yes, let technology help spread our “new world” message, fast, faster, fastest.
I am, however, not so enamored of some of the organizational methods that I have witnessed at Occupy Boston. The idea of the General Assembly with each individual attendee acting as a “tribune of the people” is interesting and important. And, of course, it represents, for today anyway, the embryo of what the “new world” we need to create might look like at the governmental level. However some of the endless deliberations over minor issues set my teeth on edge. Moreover the various parliamentary procedures and “touchy-feely” mannerisms seem build to drive a rational person crazy. More importantly, this notion of consensus, the need to have a “super-majority” for any definitive actions rather than a simple majority is going to come back and haunt us at some point when an action comes up which is desperately necessary for survival yet is controversial. (Fortunately that did not happen at the Assembly that voted overwhelming to defend the second Occupy Boston site, but it could have).
More ominous, but just this minute rather too anecdotal on my part to push too far, is the question of leadership, a leadership with its own agenda, of what appears to be, and is publicized as, a “leaderless” movement. To paraphrase Orwell- some of the “leaderless” are more equally leaderless than others. All the points in these few paragraphs are by way of things to think about. Some of it will get sorted out as the movement grows, some will fall by the wayside as too obtuse for the practical struggles ahead. Mainly though, as I noted above, this new generation will learn the lessons of the class struggle in its own way. Everybody though, young or old needs to stand by this slogan - An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend All The Occupation Sites And All The Occupiers Everywhere! Hands Off Occupy Boston !
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