The Rude Pundit: The End of the Occupy Camps Is the Start of the Next Phase

Last night, in Philadelphia and Los Angeles, the police moved in by the hundreds to clear out the Occupy encampments. In L.A., Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa used the tiredest excuse of them all: think about the children. In a city with at least 13,500 homeless kids (and that's just the ones that show up at schools), L.A. probably could have spent the money it used for the 1400 cops and 200 arrests at the City Hall camp on, say, housing some of the kids who don't want to be on the streets.

You can bet that we'll be hearing about more crackdowns as the winter progresses, until almost all the camps are gone. And to that, the Rude Pundit says, "Finally."

Don't get him wrong. He fully supports the occupiers and their colonization of urban spaces, the footholds of American renewal. He even understands why defending the camps has become so important. For some, whether fresh-faced, middle-class college student or unemployed middle-aged homeless person, the camps are a taste of what power and democracy are like. They are a small victory in a concrete swamp of constant indignity and degradation. Smelly, ugly, and full of sloppy dissent, the Rude Pundit thought they were beautiful. It's why he wanted and still wants people to donate stuff to the remaining encampments. If they're gonna stay, then he wants these hippie harbingers of the future fight to be safe and warm.

But the camps need to be seen for what they are and what they've accomplished: they had to come into being in order to show that there are large numbers of people willing to put their bodies on the line for a cause. They needed to remind us that the public square is not virtual and that civic engagement in the real world is necessary and vital for the reclamation of the country. That has been done. But right now the media is focusing too much on the camps as symbols and their eviction as a loss, with some even portraying the evictions as a victory over an ill-prepared, misguided, easily-mocked group of anarchists and leeches. Don't let the fuckers have the victory. Don't let them take back the narrative.

Of course the occupations have to be destroyed by the police. That was the point, wasn't it? Draw out the authorities. Get them to respond to your actions. Transform yourself into beings with your own agency, no longer objects to be acted upon. And how does that not bait the ones with the batons and the pepper spray and the ones who order them to attack?

The Rude Pundit doesn't mourn the end of the encampments in the same way he didn't mourn moving from teenage years to adulthood. Now we've seen that action is possible, that community is possible, that mass public support is possible. It's time to move to targeted direct action, and, no, that doesn't mean supporting candidates for election. That's bullshit co-opting and dilution of the movement. Leave that to Occupy Wall Street's sympathizers. It means direct confrontation, like the new effort to stop foreclosures from occurring. (The Rude Pundit will be out there next Tuesday.)

And it means that Adbusters had it right when it declared, in the heated environment after New York was shut down, "We will turn this winter into a training ground for precision disruptions – flashmobs, stink bombs, edgy theatrics – against the megacorps and the unrepentant 1%, a festival of resistance in the snow with, or without, an encampment that'll lay the tactical foundation for our Spring Offensive."

While we need to take care of the outdoor occupiers, we cannot cling to slivers of land when we have a nation to take back.

http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/

Thanks!

I will continue to support and defend occupy encampments with money, time, and effort.
The purpose IS to have them destroyed. Christ would not be Christ if he were not crucified.

"Of course the occupations have to be destroyed by the police. That was the point, wasn't it? Draw out the authorities. Get them to respond to your actions. Transform yourself into beings with your own agency, no longer objects to be acted upon. And how does that not bait the ones with the batons and the pepper spray and the ones who order them to attack?"

So again I say, I support occupiers with everything available, but this is merely the begining.

RP is right. The encampments were a great way to bring people together and get them talking -- long-time activists, newly-awakened college students, aging original-era hippies, guerrilla gardeners and radical foodies, the homeless-by-accident and the homeless-by-design.

But that crash course in consciousness-raising has met its initial goal and the next step has to be to Occupy Everywhere.

Far from wasting its energies on the failed mass-demonstration model, OWS has to spread out into every town and byway. It has to be the Occupy the Highway people, marching from New York to Washington and now about to set out from DC to Atlanta, Georgia. Or the fine folks of Occupy North Adams, Massachusetts -- who aren't actually occupying but having potluck suppers with cheese pierogies and chocolate-chip brownies.

It has to be about taking back America and about taking back the planet -- working from the bottom up. And at the same time, it has to be about taking back public space

Along those lines, I'm currently looking forward to seeing what happens on Friday with Occupy Broadway -- which seems intended to recast occupation as street performance in a form that can spring up anywhere and can't immediately be shut down.

http://interoccupy.org/occupy-broadway-on-friday-122-6pm/

On December 2, 2011 New York artists will introduce tourists and New Yorkers going to Broadway shows or shopping themselves into debt to the idea of occupation as CREATIVE resistance with non-stop free performances. We will set up in a privately owned public space (POPS) near Times Square, turning once blandified space into a space for cultural production.

“The city created privately owned public spaces for the people, in exchange for bonus height and bulk in these spaces,” notes Benjamin Shepard, co-author of The Beach Beneath the Streets. “As State Judge Stallman made clear last week, the people have a right to be in these spaces 24 hours a day.”

In recent weeks, we have seen a push to tramp on our rights to public assembly, public space and by extension democracy itself. In response, we join a global struggle using occupation as a form of creative resistance. Occupations are spreading around the world and around New York City, even UPTOWN! Bloomberg Beware, you take our park, Now Liberty Park is everywhere! In a time when downtown theaters are rapidly losing their spaces, being turned into high-end fashion stores, Occupy Broadway is a symbolic attempt to regain the space of theatre as an accessible, popular art form, bringing it back to where it all started – in a public space, for the common citizen. We are using public space to create a more colorful image of what our streets could look like, with public performances, art, and music. Through this movement, New York re-imagines itself as a work of art, rather than a retail shopping mall. With capitalism gone mad, foreclosures increasing, and bank crises consuming whole communities, we are signaling through the flames that there is another way of living. Join us.

Occupy public space. Reclaim democracy. Enjoy the show. We're all part of the show!

Get off the sidelines and break through the fourth wall.

Nailed IT!



Solidarity99!
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You are so right.

Thank you Rude Pundit. :toast:

Many of the people at OWS camps DIDN'T vote in the 2010 elections when their participation would have surely made a difference in many close races. Frank was generous in saying that those people that didn't vote have no right to complain. I go a bit farther, anyone that didn't vote in 2010 when me and other democrats were working our asses off to hold back the angry and dishonest republican wave, FUCK THEM!!!

And it's obvious they move and maneuver quite well in our modern connected age. I marvel at them and have nothing but admiration for them. So far they've won every move.

:loveya:

K&R

:applause:

K&R

Nice take, Rude Pundit!