Reply #14: But is anybody really preparing for the "fight you" stage?

[starroute]

Information moves fast these days, and we've been through the ignoring and the ridiculing in just a few weeks. But the fighting can go on for a long time.

The 1% were caught off balance by OWS and haven't been able to respond effectively so far. Also, the entire elaborate apparatus that they have developed since the 1970s -- all the right-wing think-tanks and public policy groups -- is designed to put pressure on government and politicians and not to deal with popular protest. Even the tactics of marginalization that make it possible to ignore massive one-day marches and rallies are not as effective against small but sustained occupations.

But you can be quite sure they're regrouping and working out a strategy, and that we can expect to see the pressure begin by the end of the month. The most obvious tool they can use is to get cities to shut down the encampments -- declare them public health hazards or whatever and sweep them out. And that is not a battle that I think the protesters can or should try to win.

As anybody who's ever played Risk knows, trying to hold territory when you're being attacked from all sides is a losing strategy. It's far more effective to spread out and be in so many places at once that nobody can take you down. In other words, a kind of Anonymous "We are legion. Expect us." strategy.

The occupiers are the vanguard, but they can't do it alone -- and it would be foolish to let the energy that they've generated be diverted into a fight that can't be won. That energy needs to be released into the larger system. Instead of a few thousand occupiers-in-fact, we need a few hundred thousand occupiers-in-spirit. And the marvelous unity of purpose that has been created through the human microphone has to be sustained over a much broader and more diverse community.

But what would it mean to be an occupier-in-spirit? The best model I can think of is the gay assertion, "We're here, we're queer, get used to it." The people who have showed up for the occupations have been here all along, but they haven't been visible because they've tried to blend in to the background and not call attention to themselves. That's what has to end.

People need to identify themselves as OWS-ers. They have to appear in public not as Democrats or liberals or any of the usual labels but as representatives of the principles of OWS. They have to insist that those principles be given top priority in every political debate and they have to reframe ongoing local issues as examples of those principles. They might even dog the Republican primaries this winter and target both the voters and the reporters to inject the OWS principles into the process.

They have to be *everywhere* and be insistent enough and at times rowdy enough to make themselves unignorable.

And if that happens, even if the physical occupations are dispersed or whittled down by winter weather, the movement will have seeded itself throughout the country. And at that point, it will no longer be vulnerable to any simple tactics of police repression.