Occupy’s Meme Warrior

[marmar]

from In These Times:



Occupy’s Meme Warrior
Adbusters’ Kalle Lasn on Occupy and a resurgent Left.

BY Joel Bleifuss



.......(snip).......

What challenges does the Occupy movement face?

It is a replay of what happened in 1968 when an insurrection in the Latin Quarter of Paris exploded onto campuses and cities around the world. For a few brief moments it looked like the first global revolution. Occupy is round two of 1968. Young people around the world have this sinking feeling that the next 30, 40 or 50 years of their lives will be one big black hole of ecological and political and financial and personal crisis. And if you are facing that sort of prospect you realize that unless you stand up and fight for a different kind of future, you don’t have a future. Unlike 1968, it is going to have legs.

We on the Left have become an ineffective, whiny, complaining, finger-pointing kind of movement that hasn’t had a new out-of-the-box idea for a couple of generations. Everything we’ve tried, including the Battle of Seattle and all sorts of anti-globalization movements, has fizzled out.

A power struggle is going on in the movement, between the old vertical type of a Left and a new young Left that has social media at its finger tips and isn’t so enamored with the old wolf pack mentality but is ready to do things in a much more horizontal way without leaders – sometimes even without demands. The question is: In this tussle between the old Left and the new Left, who will win? And if temporarily the old Left triumphs then we’re in for a hard year this year and possibly even next, but bit by bit this movement does herald a new Left. This movement has made the Left cool again.

How does one build counter-hegemonic power and get beyond “crowd sourcing,” which is really what the Occupy general assemblies are?

In the next few years there will be what I call a “meme war” – a war of really big ideas within economics. Will we be able to pull off a paradigm shift from neoclassical economics to this new ecological or bionomic or psychonomic discipline that is bubbling underneath the surface? Will we be able to change our current dysfunctional marketplace into one in which the price of every product tells the ecological truth? Will we be able to impose Robin Hood taxes and dismantle this global casino with more than $1 trillion a day flushing around the system in derivatives and credit default swaps and other financial instruments? ..............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/13093/occupys_meme_warrior

[xchrom]

1. He is an awesome guy & it's a very good read. Nt

[RobertEarl]

2. And can we do all this while using the iphones?

No. Because iphones can be cut off in seconds.

The only system that stands a chance is the original: A Democratic Republic. It just needs updating. Reformation. Polishing.

Besides iphones and the like are part of the problem in that they are produced by the greediest of corporations.