Lifelong activist and labor lawyer Staughton Lynd has posted a “A Letter To Other Occupiers,” wherein he highlights the movement’s accomplishments to date and its current period of internal reflection. Based on his reading of the history of past movements, from the 1930s to the sixties, he suggests a note of caution vis-à-vis the planned May protests vs. the G8 in Chicago:
… we need to be gentle with ourselves and one another, recognizing the special difficulties of this task. The European middle class, before taking state power from feudal governments, built a network of new institutions within the shell of the old society: free cities, guilds, Protestant congregations, banks and corporations, and finally, parliaments. It appears to be much more difficult to construct such prefigurative enclaves within capitalism, a more tightly-knit social fabric.
I sense that, because of this difficulty in building long-term institutions, in much of the Occupy universe there is now an emphasis on protests, marches, “days” for this or that, symbolic but temporary occupations, and other tactics of the moment, rather than on a strategy of building ongoing new institutions and dual power.
The full story is at http://www.zcommunications.org/contents/184898.
