Phi Beta Iota: Keep an open mind. This is deeply serious and directly relevant to understanding the convergence of the honest right, the honest left, and OccupyWallStreet.
Don DeBar (aligned with Cynthia McKinney) sends:
Zinoviev on Lenin and the (1905) Petrograd Soviet
What Lenin meant to convey was that the Soviets were not the ordinary class organisation, whose purpose, according to the Mensheviks and Social-Revolutionists, was to fight only for the economic demands of the working class within the framework of bourgeois society. In his opinion such Soviets would be doomed in advance. In fact, no Soviets were needed for such a purpose. In his view, the Soviets were organisations for the seizure of state power, and for transforming the workers into the ruling class. That is why he again and again told the Petrograd workers in the course of 1916: ‘Ask yourselves a thousand times whether you are prepared, whether you are strong enough; measure your cloth nine times before you cut. To organise Soviets means to declare a war to a finish, to declare civil war upon the bourgeoisie, to begin the proletarian revolution.’
The OWS formations carry such potential, albeit (likewise) in an embryonic state. Their internal democratic structures are the key to this, and that is the part that should be replicated. As assemblies of people are constituted among more and more communities (and the accomplishment of this is extremely important to insuring that the internal democracy of each group is replicated in the aggregation of all such groups, in whatever form that ultimately takes, should it develop that far), both the possibility of coordinate mass action and the potentiality of an alternative political structure that represents all segments of the population emerges. The lesson from Lenin as applied to OWS is to recognize both the positive and negative potential that it represents and to both engage it and shape it to fit the needs of all communities. In the United States in particular, given the historically dominant role of racism in the social order, that means ensuring that the construct that is springing into existence before our eyes is made to become responsive to the direction of the traditionally oppressed communities, particularly communities of color.
Assuming that the most important task is to address the racist nature of this society and to prevent this from being replicated in whatever emerges from the present activities, it would seem that, as the best defense is a good offense, the oppressed communities here (and elsewhere, as this is becoming a global phenomenon) must organize as never before, and in a way that is compatible – in form and substance – with the present model, and which will thus insure that the voices and self-determined interests of these communities will find full expression.
See Also:
Nafee Mosaddeq Ahmed, A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilisation: And How to Save It
Thomas DiLorenzo, The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War
Charles Eisenstein, Sacred Economics – Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition
Robert Higgs, Against Leviathan: Government Power and a Free Society
Hans-Herman Hoppe, Democracy: The God that Failed: The Economics and Politics of Monarchy, Democracy, and Natural Order
Mike Huckabee, Simple Government
Jörg Guido Hülsmann, Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism
Ron Paul, Liberty Defined–50 Essential Issues That Affect Our Freedom
Daniel Pinchbeck, Ken Jordan, et al, What Comes After Money? Essays from Reality Sandwich on Transforming Currency and Community
Justin Raimondo, An Enemy of the State–The Life of Murray N. Rothbard
Murray Rothbard, A History of Money and Banking in the United States: The Colonial Era to World War II
Robert Scheer, The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street
1992 E3i: Ethics, Ecology, Evolution, & intelligence (Full Text Online for Google Translate))
John Robb: Economic Reality & Political Treason
Robert Steele: Citizen in Search of Integrity (Full Text Online for Google Translate)
Robert Steele: Electoral Reform in a Box (DIY Kit)
Robert Steele: OccupyWallStreet Message and Method
Reference: Steele at Huffington Post on Books
Vatican, Ethics, & Truth I (Full Text Online for Google Translate)
Vatican, Ethics, & Truth II (Full Text Online for Google Translate)
What’s Wrong with America? Let Me List the Books….
More from Dan DeBar: My thinking on this is not fully developed, but, if you can spare 58 minutes and suffer some of the fits-and-starts of my thought process in the process, I did go into some depth in this video – – which starts off a bit slow, but eventually gets across a good picture of my thinking on the matter. As I felt I got deflected somewhat by the host from my main point – that of the centrality of the issue of racism to any solution of the problems being articulated by, or serving as the catalyst for, the OWS “movement” – I fleshed that out a bit more in this video.
