1. Occupy is a civil war not a PR war.
The easiest way for the occupy movement to have been a waste of everyone’s time is for us to allow it to become a PR war. What does that mean: a PR war? It means allowing the movement to become a new way of marketing obedience. Public Relations is precisely the antithesis of conflict. It is a way of managing images to ensure that nothing ever happens, and if it does, to ensure that it will remain unknown and isolated. That the occupy movement is the antithesis of everything that PR represents is the only condition for it to have any meaning whatsoever.
If it falls in with PR, which is of course the path of least resistance presented to it, it will come to nothing; there will be an Occupy-land set up at Disneyworld. PR-ification is the easy way, it is the response that Empire hopes to divert the Occupiers into in order to restore the equilibrium that the occupation has provisionally disrupted. We need to take a step back and ask what good can possibly come from this sort of collaborationist stance. If we have PR on our side, will PR ever want to support actions that seriously challenge misery and starvation? or will PR instead attempt to leverage their support into a means of pacification? If we get involved with PR at this stage it will be the gravest possible mistake. What needs to happen is to bypass the world of PR and challenge its legitimacy as a depiction of reality. This is not accomplished by conforming to its standards. Instead we need to destroy the world of PR using all available means of violence. This includes the media themselves and the sort of social fabric they create one in which violence against commodities is equated with murder, and even considered a worse crime.
2. Pacifist tactics taint everyone involved evenly – consenting or not. Destroying property destroys moral authority.
Much has been written about the need for a diversity of tactics and the inhibiting effects of dogmatic pacifism. None of this has been a call for blind terroristic violence. Instead, it has been a call for thinking about violence. Instead of starting from a position that cedes violence to the police, and renders all who resist as innocent victims and thus as negligible social force–we can call this pre-defeat–we need to start from a position of actually wanting to triumph and to destroy that which destroys us. Dogmatic nonviolence guarantees that we will lose before the first action is taken. If the occupation movement is to be a serious force,
The affirmation of pacifism assumes that there is a good will that no longer exists between financial elites and “regular people.” We have all become superfluous and replacable in their eyes. The era of leftist new deals and decolonization movements is now over. It depended on the power of the Soviet Union which no longer exists. Capital has shown again and again that without that external threat it does not feel compelled to make any concessions. Soviet military force or the threat thereof was the sole motivator behind the era of concessions following 1917. Of course, working class militancy within capitalist countries played a role, but the existing figure of revolution triumphant terrified the capitalist and induced it to attempt to buy off workers and colonial subjects through propaganda campaigns which would be severly undermined by brutal self-assertion and imposition of wage-reductions and sweat-shop conditions. Thus, the illusion of democracy. Today, instead the ideal model put forward by capital is the model of authoritarian capitalism that we can see in places like China and Signapore. To miss this point is to struggle in vain. Perhaps certain members of the 99 will get elevated to positions of spectacular visibility, but in the end this will depend on their renunciation of the desire of those they are supposed to “represent” by the spectacle that grants them visibility.
Pacifist tactics are complicit with the illusion according to which Capital and life are compatible. We live in a time in which the slum is the dominant form of social development poushed by global capital. This is where we are headed if we collaborate…
Well burrowed, old mole! 