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submitted 8 months ago by spujb@lemmy.cafe to c/196

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[-] Ultragigagigantic@lemmy.world 4 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

I liked your paragraph on focusing on building something better that will draw people in.

When Occupy was huge, I had wished they had not focused so heavily on camping in parks and instead bought cheap land in the middle of nowhere and built "Occupy town". Somewhere people can come and join the movement with their family and not worry about living in a tent.

Make our own jobs in federated worker co-ops like Mondragon, our own community defense organizations, our own public housing, our own city government. If we had picked a state like Wyoming, it would only take about 15k people from each state to move there to take over the entire state government.

I get people were trying to do that in every park and also stay visible in the media, but I felt like it was just to limiting to stay in such locations.

[-] Excrubulent@slrpnk.net 4 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

I think the point was to occupy places where powerful people were, to show them that they're not untouchable. One thing I've heard Anark talk about is that communes that separate themselves from society don't tend to have much revolutionary potential. They're just kind of checking out.

Also, David Graeber said something very interesting about Occupy, that although the narrative was that they failed, the main thing they were trying to draw attention to was the IMF and the World Bank, and how their structural adjustment policies were laying waste to whole societies. He said that despite the fact that Occupy ended and was driven out by cops with bulldozers, the IMF and the World Bank don't have anything like the power they used to, and that has a lot to do with the visibility that Occupy brought to them.

Who knows how much death and suffering was averted globally thanks to their actions? If they had focussed only on making a place to live within the US they wouldn't have been able to achieve that. I think that's a pretty good legacy.

Also with the coops, Anark has covered a different federation of coops in Venezuela called Cecosesola: https://youtu.be/xfE6Nsuaf50?si=MbXZ3kpTNI2-mTUm

It might be a better template than Mondragon, who seem to have reduced membership considerably, with non-member workers making up a huge percentage of their ranks.