Chris Hedges: Occupiers Have to Convince the Other 99 Percent

[marmar]

from truthdig:




Occupiers Have to Convince the Other 99 Percent

Posted on Oct 24, 2011
By Chris Hedges


The occupation movement’s greatest challenge will be overcoming the deep distrust of white liberals by the poor and the working class, especially people of color. Marginalized people of color have been organizing, protesting and suffering for years with little help or even acknowledgment from the white liberal class. With some justification, those who live in these marginalized communities often view this movement as one dominated by white sons and daughters of the middle class who began to decry police abuse and the lack of economic opportunities only after they and their families were affected. This distrust is not the fault of the movement, which has instituted measures within its decision-making process to make sure marginalized voices are heard before white males. It is the fault of a bankrupt liberal class that for decades has abandoned the core issue of economic justice for the poor and the working class and busied itself with the vain and self-referential pursuits of multiculturalism and identity politics.

The civil rights movement, after all, achieved a legal victory, not an economic one. And for the bottom two-thirds of African-Americans, life is worse today than it was when Martin Luther King marched in Selma in 1965. King, like Malcolm X, understood that racial equality was impossible without economic justice. The steady impoverishment of those in these marginal communities, part of the Faustian deal worked out between the Democratic Party and its corporate sponsors, has been accompanied by draconian forms of police control, from stop-and-frisk to militarized police raids to the establishment of our vast complex of prison gulags. More African-American men, as Michelle Alexander has pointed out, are in prison or jail or on probation or parole than were enslaved in 1850, before the Civil War began. The corporate state keeps some two-thirds of poor people of color in the United States trapped in internal colonies—either in the impoverished inner city or behind bars. And the abject failure on the part of the white liberal establishment to stand up for the rights of the poor, as well as its decision to throw its support behind Democratic politicians such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, who abet this institutionalized and economic racism, has left many in these marginal communities disdainful of protesters from the newly dispossessed white middle class.

“The black community and the community of color have been dealing with these issues for decades,” the Rev. Raymond Blanchette, an African-American preacher from Queens, said in Zuccotti Park in Manhattan one day last week as we closed our jackets against a chilly wind whipping down the canyons of the financial district. “Now the white community around the country is beginning to see it and experience it firsthand. It’s pretty shocking to them. The African-American community and other communities of color are saying, ‘Welcome to the world I live in.’ That’s why you don’t see that many of those (nonwhite) faces here. It’s like, OK, now you decided you are going to speak up because now you’re the one that’s affected by it. One of the reasons I’m here is because I see the viability of this movement. I want to bring those communities together.”

The power elite have desperately tried to tar the movement with a series of calumnies, branding protesters as hippies, anti-Semites, drug addicts, leftists, anarchists and communists. They have so far been unable to blunt the fundamental truth the movement imparts: We have undergone a corporate coup. It has to be reversed. But this truth has yet to resonate among those who for decades have been betrayed and ignored by white liberals. ...........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/occupiers_have_to_convince_the_other_99_percent_20111024/

[dixiegrrrrl]

1. I like his use of the phrase "internal colonies"

and the way he is identifying the blow back from divide and conquer policies of the past.
( hopefully of the past)

[starroute]

2. Hedges is good on many grounds -- but he undervalues the 60's

In this article, he blames the 60's for hedonism, identity politics, and a lack of interest in economic justice. And all of that is true to a degree -- but only if you cherry-pick and ignore both the context and the most serious expressions of the period.

In terms of context, the late 60's were the very peak of the post-World War II economic boom in the US. There seemed to be no way to argue with the dominant economic system on pragmatic grounds -- so its only points of weakness were its inauthenticity, its materialism, and its emotional hollowness. This was primarily what the 60's counterculture was about, and though Hedges is right that it didn't have much of an alternative to offer except self-indulgent bohemianism, he doesn't realize that it was also the essential first step on the road to OWS.

In fact, all the dissident subcultures of the decades since -- from punks to radical environmentalists to Goths to Grateful Dead fans -- have in common a rejection of materialism and an emphasis on cultural autonomy, and do-it-yourself creativity. And the identity politics that Hedges decries may have been self-centered but were also the seedbed for many of the tools and attitudes that we now see on display in OWS, from collective decision-making to an awareness of oppression as a cultural mechanism.

Everybody does what they can in the context of their moment and with the resources available to them, and I wish Hedges would show a bit more humility and awareness of his own intellectual roots.