Occupy Politics

[andrewducker]

Has there been any sign of the Occupy people politicising? As in, putting people up for election as an entirely separate party, getting local support, and eating away at the other parties by engaging people who don't believe that the two big parties have anything useful to offer.

Comments

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

No, as far as I know they're still a bunch of hippies in tents that the media is now mostly ignoring.

[guybles.livejournal.com]

From the odd patches of yellowed grass I saw in St Andrews Square, not to mention the somewhat smaller mess tent, I'd suspect they are mostly just getting cold and bored.

I rather suspect they lost media attention when they stopped doing anything other than hanging around. Taking ages to come up with a manifesto probably didn't help them any.

[0olong.livejournal.com]

They got a big section on Newsnight the other night, fwiw.

[0olong.livejournal.com]

Occupy London, that is.

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

No because they are smart enough to know that would put Mitt Romney in office.

They saw what happened to the GOP when the Tea Party started putting up candidates and they don't want to do that to the democrats.

This.

[0olong.livejournal.com]

It's a capitulation to the two-party system that's served everyone soooo well up to now, but it may well be rational in the circumstances to keep applying pressure in ways that don't necessarily split the broadly anti-evil vote.

[chess]

Nope; some people talk about it now and again, but the US ones seem to have either rallied behind Ron Paul or given up on mainstream politics (and started building resilient communities, or using the constitutional courts, etc).

The UK ones seem to be tentatively reaching out to the Green Party as possible fellow-travellers rather than attempting to start up their own party, although there is also talk on the Anonymous / libertarian side about reaching out the the Pirate Party that's had success in some of Europe.

[andrewducker]

Well, it's good that they're getting involved.

Shame that they're going for Paul though.

[chess]

The left don't like to admit it, but through the whole Occupy / 15M movement and its precursors there has always been a fairly equal split between the libertarians/anarchists and the socialists/communists.

The anarchists would hate to be lumped in with the libertarians, but basically you get anarchists on the no-authority end of the no-authority vs good-authority scale where you don't have quite such an overwhelming cult-of-the-individual, and libertarians where you do get heavy US-style individualism (like in the UK).

[rhythmaning.livejournal.com]

I think the set up of Occupy - no leaders, no demands - actually works against politicisation, I think.

Establishing an agenda and developing a manifesto would split the movement.

[0olong.livejournal.com]

The Spanish indignados eventually came up with a manifesto, which didn't seem to help much. Consensus-based decision making on a large scale doesn't seem to lend itself to tightly focused requests...

[bemused-leftist.livejournal.com]

Yes. They're getting better results than any other strategy would get, imo, at least in the US. They're shouting a diagnosis, instead of arguing about which bandaids to use.

[bemused-leftist.livejournal.com]

Some of them went to Democratic caucuses and got elected as 'uncommitted delegates.' Which seems to me a good move. If a challenger to Obama shows up, they can support him/her, and even if not, they've made a visible statement (without committing themselves to anything too detailed).

[in-thy-bounty.livejournal.com]

I can reveal that Occupy Longformacus has not had any long-lasting political effect so far.

[apostle-of-eris.livejournal.com]

What a peculiar Rorschach test this seems to be!
Are you really taking it for granted that electoral politics ≡ politics? The not being pinned down may well be an important strategic advantage. As soon as you have an official platform, you're a photo op for some grinning suits who make solemn promises, and you're never heard from again.
What we all want is to take things back from the crooks and blood-suckers.

And btw, when there's work to be done, there's no better team than anarchists and libertarians. Not the posers who flaunt either label, but the committed. Since we agree so well on where we are and how it works, there's tremendous common ground.