The Antisocial Socialist

Zizek on the Avengers, Occupy, and oh really, do you need an excuse to listen to Zizek rant about things? It's Zizek being himself. Also, he's not dating Lady Gaga. If you were wondering.

I accidentally a whole anti-protest guide to anarchists. Is this bad?

In his court motion warning that Karn is an “anarchist,” Richmond’s Deputy Assistant Attorney Brian Telfair doesn’t allege the possibility of any violence or property destruction. Instead, he cites a blog post by Karn about acquiring government information through legal requests. The title? “FOIA Rocks!”

Your goal, ladies, gentlemen, genderqueer, and sundry others, is to be more like Dorli Rainey, badass octogenarian. This retired schoolteacher has the Seattle PD quaking in their boots so hard they had to pepper-spray her, lest she foment global insurrection against their ruling class masters. This was not enough to keep a superheroine like Rainey down, and she got right back up and continues to fight the Man.

May we all follow her example and become just a little more awesome.

Occupy Toronto is going to get attacked. They've been able to go this long because the police are justifiably concerned about fallout after the G20 debacle if they get brutal on the occupiers.

The Honourable Wife-Beater, as we have seen, does not really care about bad publicity. And if he says "jump," Bill Blair will ask, "on the heads of how many dirty hippies?"

The propaganda efforts have already started. With 58% of Canadians surveyed in favour of Occupy, confrontations in other cities have been depicted as involving a certain degree of violence on the part of the protesters, with an emphasis on weaponized bodily fluids.*

St. James Park now seems like a very good location, as the church has said that the protesters can flee to its grounds if need be. But get ready to see things get, if not Oakland-level ugly, then really bad.

* This is not just propaganda; I entirely believe the Ottawa RCP shit-blanket story, despite having zero love for the Cult of Avakian.

Join the Marines out of some misguided sense of patriotism, probably.

Do two tours of duty in a pointless quagmire of a war.

Come back home and take part in a peaceful demonstration.

Get your skull fractured by a cop's tear gas canister.

Land of the free, baby!

(My best to Olsen and all other victims of the Oakland PD's brutality.)

So who wants a whole whack of photos from Occupy T.O.?



( Some of these came out well for demo photos )

So, I think OWS and its global offshots are an amazing historical moment. Like many veteran activists, I'm struggling with what a movement that claims to represent 99% of the population really means. Obviously, it involves some diverse and possibly unpalatable ideas—the lack of leadership, vague ideology, and the presence of so many people who have never protested in their lives leaves the movement open to being co-opted by, say, the Truthers or the Democratic Party or other opportunists. It's also a strength. It's been a long time since the Left in North America was truly populist, and we desperately need those new bodies and new ideas.

Strategically, I feel that Occupy T.O. has already made a few crucial errors. Megan Kinch, a dedicated activist whose opinions I trust, has an inside look at the planning meetings, which were not as democratic as one might hope. I also heard that the organizers discouraged unions from bringing banners (my union was going to bring its banner, but a call early this morning nixed that); rejecting the resources and expertise of organized labour is a huge mistake. Unions have made vital contributions to OWS and OWS has radicalized and reenergized unions. No reason why we shouldn't bring our banners and identify ourselves!

The biggest problem I felt was that we did not stay in the Financial District long enough. Sure, it's great to have a camp-out in the park, at least until the cops evict everyone at 2 am like they do to OCAP all the time. But OWS is not, primarily, about sleeping in a park; it's about maintaining a presence on Wall St. We marched through the Financial District but didn't stay there, and certainly on a Saturday, we weren't disrupting business as usual. The symbolism of sleeping in a park is questionable at best.

Finally, I felt like our newest and freshest activists repeated a mistake that is common to seasoned activists—adopting the forms of historical or international successful actions without thinking about pragmatism. The human megaphone tactic seen in New York was adopted because blasting speakers in Manhattan is apparently illegal. In Toronto, it is perfectly legal. However, the organizers ignored the perfectly functional speaker system in favour of the human megaphone. It may sound cool and get many (but not all) people in a crowd participating, but it doesn't get detailed information, like march routes across as easily as just using available technology. I actually saw a group of maybe eight people voting on something ("we won't serve food until the sanitation issue is dealt with"—eek!) using human megaphone tactics, which makes no sense whatsoever.

This said, it was a positive thing to not only see this many people flood the streets of my city, but also that they were promoting an overtly radical, anti-capitalist message. It wasn't altogether different than what we were saying during the G20, but there was absolutely no violence—the police were shockingly unobtrusive and I didn't see them hassling anyone—so the messages actually didn't get lost.

Here's the Occupy T.O. site, if you're interested in following what's happening here.

I went home because I was starting to feel dizzy and tired again. It seems like they've got events planned into January, so I'll be back.