lenin’s shadow: organization

Radical politics still lives under the shadow of Lenin. To clarify, Lenin stands first and foremost for primacy of organization. And despite the recent turn away from Marxism since the fall of the actually existing of the soviet bloc and China’s pro-capitalist Dengist reforms, Lenin’s legacy hangs over social movement politics. Lenin’s successes should not be denigrated, for he accomplished feats that radicals today can barely dream for, but the relevance of Lenin to today’s problems needs to be seriously questioned.

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Ghost Stories

Transcript of a talk I gave December 10th, 2011, as part of an Occupy event entitled “Economics Justice, Economic Resistance.”

I. OCCUPY

I want to begin with two stories from the first weeks of the Occupy protests in New York City.

Think first of CNN’s Erin Burnett, who, in her segment “Seriously?!”, which covered Occupy Wall Street at Zuccotti Park downtown, asked the question, “What are they protesting?” What did she decide? That “nobody seems to know.”

Or, to use our favorite whipping boy, Fox News, look to the outtakes from their show “On the Record.” The Occupy interviewee, dogged with the question of how he wants the protests to “end,” artfully finds ways to refuse the question. His response? “As far as seeing it end, I wouldn’t like to see it end. I would like to see the conversation to continue.”

By now, I’m sure we have each come up with our own way to respond to this feigned ignorance. Some try to add to the seemingly endless list of demands. Others gesture to the Trotskyite desire for a permanent revolution. Even others try to simplify things down to a few key points.

II. GHOST STORIES

Today, I would like to propose something much more profound:

We need to learn how to tell ghost stories.

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