I'd like to start a new thread on the issue I've been concerned with since working with Occupy. During the Winter period the movement risks losing its widespread force and ability to marshal the millions toward a common outcome. In other words, the multiple concerns around "issues" that the movement addresses create a kind of social drag that weakens its revolutionary intervention. If all progressive issues are wrapped into Occupy, it just becomes a pseudo-party, like the Tea Party. Even if organizers clearly don't want that, the risk is that public perception makes it so.
The Hannah Arendt Center, as progressive as it gets, registered a strong critique about the lack of objective and intent in the core of the movement. See http://www.hannaharendtcenter.org/?p=3891
"The task today is to respond with new and thoughtful action, which requires that we abandon our preformed judgments and attachments that have brought us to this space. Giving up our prejudices is difficult, as is accepting the challenge of the new. And yet the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements have shown that there is a hunger for a new politics that breaks the bounds of traditional political discourse. Our New Year's wish to all of you is that 2012 might bring a bold politics that can bring forth a new politics from out of the cauldron of crisis."
In November we held dialogues on the purposes of Occupy to create a common moral understanding based on purposes held by the organizers and participants. I'd like to see whether we can facilitate the development of common moral purpose (e.g., highest priority purposes for response) from across the various centers of action and organizing. What might we do in line with this need?
