My friend and former LBridge colleague Christine commented on my post about the Occupiers from a few days ago. I think her criticisms and points are completely valid. Certainly, I am not making any claim to a better sort of politics or activism than the activists – I am an armchair activist, at best. A bourgeois marxist with zero praxis.
But I’m a strong believer in the idea that minds cannot be changed through confrontation, and my main discomfort with the occupiers is that they seem to thrive on a sort of aimless confrontationalism that comes across as confrontation-for-the-sake-of-confrontation, which would be the worst sort.
Perhaps if I was there among them, I would feel differently. In past lives I have been “down in the crowd” in some types of political activism, generally rooted in a commitment to anti-war movements. And as the Arab spring has been showing, or the colored post-Cold-War revolutions of 1989-91, activism can yield spectacular results in the right geopolitical setting.
So the question is, is the setting right, in the US, right now? Seen from afar, dissatisfaction with the system certainly seems incredibly high. In my own self, it’s high enough that I dread going back “home.” I’m happier to be an outsider in someone else’s dysfunctional system, e.g. South Korea at the current moment.
Anyway, I’m just meandering, here. I don’t mean to come across as anti-Occupy. I just had a cynical moment of reactionary libertarianism.
