OWS - A Perspective

I don’t want a job. I want a life. I want a creative life that puts my creativity to work creating positive products for a better society. I want to belong to a society that focuses on the community, not as an entity to be served or receive benefits from, but a community of autonomous individuals who create and produce what they want, providing their personal expertise as they move along. This sounds ideological, and it is in the sense that I expect people to behave better than history has shown. What I like about the OWS is the disappearance of leadership from the vanguard. The vanguard is the people, the powers that be must negotiate with the people, not the people’s representative. In fact the powers that be (de facto) don’t have to be dealt with at all. Recognizing their authority is a mistake. Recognizing their power is necessary. However to recognize their authority is to give them de jure status that they don’t have. Which is why they are so freaked out right now. “How dare you not acknowledge us!” They scream and rant that we have no leaders and no platform. Here’s a platform: We the People will continue to occupy until we have regained our country. The 1% is welcome to join the 99% just as soon as they quit trying to be the 1%. The 99% is happy to change to the 100%, just as soon as the 1% stops trying to have special rules, special advantages, special status. Period. Much as Jesus told those who wished to join him to give up everything and follow him. It didn’t mean to become a beggar, but to give up all the special status that their material goods reflected. He didn’t say that we had to all become wandering teachers and proselytize without producing. If humanity behaved as such, nothing would function and everyone would starve. However, what he meant was that we have to give up our status, our claim to special favors, to superior attitudes toward all. ALL! There is no effort that makes one superior in any way. Being a job creator is as ridiculous a term as king. “You need us!” They clamber, and then tell us how to take care of them. They need us. Without the 99%, the 1% goes nowhere, does nothing. This illusion that money creates jobs, that jobs aren’t there until money creates them is absurd. The job needs to be done. Crops need to be grown, buildings built, and streets need to be swept. There is no need for this bureaucratic mass of managers who will “dictate to us what needs to be done”. Anarchy is not the elimination of organization, but the organic growth of work. There is work to be done. It must be done. Not everyone is willing to do the same work, nor do they need to. Work can be shared so that there is time for creativity and study. There is no need for longer hours of backbreaking work when there are so many unemployed and underemployed. I add the many who have “jobs” especially service jobs and office jobs. whose job neither fulfills any real production nor does it give any value to the life of the job holder. Anarchy is grass-roots and local. Federalism and democracy are top-down, whether people like to admit it or not. How did the capitalists become the managers of the resources? Generally by illegal and unethical means. Survival is the only necessary means of motivation. Either we will survive or we won’t. Anything else used as motivation comes across as false, insincere, ideological. We have an environmental problem, the problem isn’t the environment, but human survival. What will we do? We will let those who hold and control the assets to deprive us of what they profligately waste. They sit on a heap of assets that they refuse to distribute based on the lame idea that they somehow deserve to be compensated for sitting atop the assets. Their power comes from our belief that somehow they deserve to have these assets. That they will be better at distributing and controlling the assets than the “mob”. But there is no mob, except when there is need. Usury must go. “A hungry mouth is an angry mouth.” When people say that the OWS movement does nothing but live off the donations of others, they are right. But let’s look at why donors donate to such a “welfare state” of living. OWS is outside the system. Because they have chosen to live outside the system, they must find support elsewhere. In the system, one can continue to accept the drippings off the slop table of the wealthy and survive within the system, but one must be part of the system. Donors recognize that to find an alternative to the system, OWS must be supported by taking from the system and giving to the occupation. The donations are actually removing wealth from the system and giving it to the organic development of an anarchistic society that will provide for all within its means. Because we’re all in this together. Some of us are not ready to leave the system, because we still feel a level of comfort in the system, or we recognize that we need to support the occupation with our destruction of the system by donating to the occupation. What leaves the system in goods and assets, not in fiat money destroys the system. The occupation already has taken over many aspects of the system. It feeds the people (all the people). It provides shelter of sorts, these shelters must become more permanent and more disruptive of the system (occupying abandoned and empty buildings). Those who remain in the system to support the occupation must help to bring down the system.