Click on the headline to link to the archives of the Occupy Boston General Assembly minutes from the Occupy Boston website. Occupy Boston started at 6:00 PM, September 30, 2011. The General Assembly is the core political institution of the Occupy movement. Some of the minutes will reflect the growing pains of that movement and its concepts of political organization. Note that I used the word embryo in the headline and I believe that gives a fair estimate of its status, and its possibilities.
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An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend All The Occupation Sites And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Protesters Everywhere!
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Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It, It’s Ours! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
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Below I am posting, occasionally, comments on the Occupy movement as I see or hear things of interest, or that cause alarm bells to ring in my head. The first comment directly below from October 1, which represented my first impressions of Occupy Boston, is the lead for all further postings.
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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 (the General Assembly, its unrepresentative nature and its undemocratic consensus process) 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 ourselves "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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In the recent past as part of my one of my commentaries I noted the following:
“… 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.”
A couple of the people that I have talked to lately were not quite sure what to make of that idea. The idea that what is going on in Occupy Boston at the governmental level could, should, would be a possible form of governing this society in the “new world a-borning” with the rise of the Occupy movement. Part of the problem is that there was some confusion on the part of the listeners that one of the possible aims of this movement is to create an alternative government, or at least provide a model for such a government. I will argue here now, and in the future, that it should be one of the goals. In short, we need to take power away from the Democrats and Republicans and their tired old congressional/executive/judicial doesn’t work- checks and balances-form of governing and place it at the grassroots level and work upward from there rather than, as now, have power devolve from the top. (And stop well short of the bottom.)
I will leave aside the question (the problem really) of what it would take to create such a possibility. Of course a revolutionary solution would, of necessity, have be on the table since there is no way that the current powerful interests, Democratic, Republican or those of the "one percent" having no named politics, is going to give up power without a fight. What I want to pose now is the use of the General Assembly as a deliberative executive, legislative, and judicial body all rolled into one.
Previous historical models readily come to mind; the short-lived but heroic Paris Commune of 1871 that Karl Marx tirelessly defended against the reactionaries of Europe as the prototype of a workers government; the early heroic days of the Russian October Revolution of 1917 when the workers councils (soviets in Russian parlance) acted as a true workers' government; and the period in the Spanish Revolution of 1936-39 where the Central Committee of the Anti-Fascist Militias acted, de facto, as a workers government. All the just mentioned examples had their problems and flaws, no question. However, merely mentioning the General Assembly concept in the same paragraph as these great historic examples should signal that thoughtful leftists and other militants need to investigate and study these examples.
In order to facilitate the investigation and study of those examples I will, occasionally, post works in this space that deal with these forbears from several leftist perspectives (rightist perspectives were clear- crush all the above examples ruthlessly, and with no mercy- so we need not look at them now). I started this Lessons Of History series with Karl Marx’s classic defense and critique of the Paris Commune, The Civil War In France and today’s presentation noted in the headline continues on in that same vein.
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A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay to spread the available work around. Organize the unorganized- Organize the South- Organize Wal-Mart- Defend the right of public and private sector workers to unionize.
* Defend the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. Spent the dues on organizing the unorganized and other labor-specific causes (example, the November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio).
*End the endless wars!- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan! Hands Off Iran! Hands Off The World!
*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Quality Healthcare For All! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! Forgive student debt! Stop housing foreclosures!
*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed.
Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!
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Charles Fourier (1772-1837)
“The Study of Groups”
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Source: The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier. Selected Texts on Work, Love, and Passionate Attraction. Translated, Edited and with an Introduction by Jonathan Beecher and Richard Bienvenu. Published by Jonathan Cape, 1972;
First Published: 1829 in Le Nouveau monde industrielle et sociétaire.
Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.
Proofread: by Andy Carloff 2010.
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The term “group” is conventionally applied to any sort of gathering, even to a band of idlers who come together out of boredom with no passion or purpose — even to an assemblage of empty-minded individuals who are busy killing time and waiting for something to happen. In the theory of the passions the term group refers to a number of individuals who are united by a shared taste for the exercise of a particular function. Three men have dinner together: they are served a soup which pleases two of them and displeases the third; on this occasion they do not make up a group because they are in discord about the function that occupies them. They do not share a common passionate inclination for the soup.
The two individuals who like the soup form a false group. To be properly organised and susceptible to passionate equilibrium a group must include at least three members. It must be arranged like a set of scales which consists of three forces of which the middle one keeps the two extremities in balance. In short no group can be composed of less than three people sharing a common inclination for the performance of a particular function.
One might object: “Although these three men are in discord about the trifling matter of the soup, they are in agreement about the main purpose of the get-together which is friendship. They are close friends.” In this case I would answer that the group is defective because it is simple; the only tie that binds it is a spiritual one. To make it into a compound group, a sensual bond would have to be added, a soup liked by all three members of the group.
“Bah! If the three are not in agreement about the soup, they will have shared preferences for other kinds of food. In any case the group actually does have two bonds, for besides the bond of friendship, these three men are united by the bond of ambition; they are in cabalistic league. They have gotten together for dinner in order to hatch an electoral intrigue. So there’s the double link, the compound bond that you require.”
This would only be a bastard compound relationship, formed by two spiritual bonds. The pure compound demands a mixture of the pleasures of the soul and those of the senses without any sort of dissidence. In this case the meal begins with a disagreement about the soup and the group is falsified despite the double bond... .
Since passionate series are composed only of groups, it is necessary first of all to learn how to form groups.
“Ha! Ha! Groups! What a silly subject that is! It must be very amusing to talk about groups!”
This is the way our wits reason when one talks about groups. At the start you are always subjected to a salvo of stale jokes. But whether the subject is comical or not, it is certain that people know nothing about groups, and that they don’t even know how to form a proper group of three people, much less one of thirty.
We have numerous treatises on the study of man. But what can they tell us about the subject if they neglect the essential portion, the analysis of groups. In all our relationships we persistently tend to form groups, and they have never been an object of study.
Civilised people, having an instinct for the false, are constantly inclined to prefer the false to the true. As the pivot of their social system they have chosen a group which is essentially false: the conjugal couple. This group is false because it only includes two members; it is false in its lack of liberty; it is false in the conflicts or differing inclinations which break out from the very start of married life over expenses, food, friends, and a hundred other little details like the degree of heat in an apartment. If people do not know how to harmonise basic groups of two or three people, they must be even less able to harmonise the whole.
I have been speaking only about sub-groups whose minimum size is three people. A full group in the societary system must include at least seven members, for it must include three sub-divisions or sub-groups. The central sub-group must be stronger than either of the two extremities which it keeps in balance. A group of seven may be divided into three sub-divisions consisting of two, three and two members. Each of these sub-groups devotes itself to one aspect of a given activity. Groups consisting of two members are false when they act in isolation, but here they are admissible since their activity is linked to that of others.
The central sub-group (which consists of three people) is in a state of balance with the two extreme sub-groups (consisting of two members each). The reason for this is that in any activity the central sub-group always performs the most attractive functions; the greater attraction of its functions compensates for its numerical weakness. Thus its influence within the group is equal to that of the four other members who perform two different functions... .
A group is sufficiently large if it includes seven members, but it is more perfect with nine members. Then its three subgroups can be supplemented by a pivot or leader and an ambiguous or transitional member. For example:
Transition 1 ambiguous member
Higher wing 2 intermediate members
Center 3 initiates
Lower wing 2 beginners
Pivot 1 leader
This division emerges naturally in any gathering for work or pleasure if the passions and instincts are allowed to express themselves freely. Man has an instinctual aversion to equality and a penchant for hierarchical patterns. Thus when free expression is permitted, this nuanced, hierarchical scale will emerge in a series of nine groups just as it will in a group composed of nine individuals.
There must be at least seven members in a full group and at least twenty-four in a full series. But to replace individuals who are sick or absent it is better for each group to consist of twelve and each series of forty members. In this way each group and series will be assured of having its full complement of leaders and ambiguous members.
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