That happened to Occupy Wall Street, and to Black Lives Matter. Both failed to focus on specific, achievable goals. And so, they never got beyond the consciousness raising stage. If Occupy Wall Street had focused on "Tax the 1%" and "Break up monopoly landlords", and Black Lives Matter had focused on "Every killing by a cop gets investigated by the FBI" and "Fire the bottom 10% of cops", they might have achieved those goals.
My impression is that the movement gets co-opted as a generic partisan force, and then having specific goals is a detriment when the unstated goal is merely to elect a particular party.
The best goal for Occupy Wall Street would have been to break up all the Too Big To Fail institutions. The "problem" with that was twofold.
One, if that's the goal, and they manage to turn the election, then they'll expect the people they elected to actually do it. But politicians didn't wanna do it. Both parties are in the pocket of the banks.
And two, if they actually did do it, it would be done. The movement would have succeeded and lost its raison d'etre. If you solve the problem then you can't run on it again.
So you're completely right. The question is how to prevent movements from getting co-opted like this. Because actually solving the problem is the thing we should want.
BLM wasn't formed in response to police violence, so if it was to limit itself to a narrow tactical policy aim, those would have been odd choices.
Also, BLM has arguably had a broader and more substantial impact already than achieving either one of those narrow goals would have.
???
Do you have references to that?
I understand that BLM prominence started with the Ferguson protests against cop Darren Wilson murdering Michael Brown Jr
(Ps, forgot about Zimmerman murdering Trayvon. But that's also a cop-adjacent figure. What most people would define a vigilante)
Yes, it became prominent then because it was already well established with a network of activists, etc.; the principal triggering event (as your PS seems to acknowledge) was the slaying of Trayvon Martin.
> But that's also a cop-adjacent figure.
That may be a valid viewpoint, but it's not the fact that BLM organized around, which was the lack of accountability and the identity of the victim, not anything about the personal characteristics or background of the perpetrator.
“Police”.
> You're both saying that BLM was founded and organized around the lack of police accountability when killing black people
No, “police” was not part of the founding focus. Events involving police just happened to be the ones that brought the network to mass attention, after it was founded in response to a non-police (even if some might see it as “police adjacent”) killing with a focus that was not in any way focussed on whether those responsible but not held accountable were police, or “police adjacent”.
Courts of law are institutions of government, and surprisingly enough people sometimes disagree with the jobs done by institutions of government.
I'm sorry but I feel like this author is really out of touch here. Perhaps to someone who only interacted with it through the news, it seemed like they didn't get anything done. But that energy didn't just dissipate. It spread to almost every facet of American leftist organizing
Also saying Graeber gave us occupy is giving a lot more credit to him than I think is fair. And I think Occupy introduced a lot more people to Graeber than Graeber introduced to Occupy
And did you miss the 60's?
I didn't realize that Occupy had helped labor organizing.
Does leftist theory really help when trying to organize a business?
For more clarity on what can happen in organizations that are antagonistic to hierarchy and structure, I can think of no better read than “The Tyranny of structurelessness” by Jo Feeman https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm