You Can’t “Grow the Movement” by Dissing the Kids: On Chris Hedges and Occupy

Ted Rall has a post about You Can’t “Grow the Movement” by Dissing the Kids: On Chris Hedges and Occupy from Katherine M Acosta. Chris Hedges is apparrently trying to purge the Occupy movement of Anarchists and other undesirables.

The main issues appears to be:

Central to the dispute between Hedges and the anarchists who helped to found Occupy is the issue of violence versus nonviolence – and how those are defined. In general terms, anarchism refers to the absence of rulers (hence, the “leaderless” Occupy movement). The idea is not lawlessness or general chaos, but rather, freedom from hierarchical authority and ruling power enforced by violence. Anarchism has a long history in the United States and many anarchists were involved in the early labor movement. Then, as now, anarchists sought to push back against police brutality. One contemporary method for doing so is the black bloc.

Emphasis Mine

I find this issue of non-violence comes up every time a movement starts to become successful. Detractors says that violenece by the demonstartors, strikers, or others reduces support among the ‘nice’ people whose support is needed for the movement to succeed.

Fuck these ‘nice’ people! They support a system that is always violent to the less fortunate. They profit from this legalised violence. They do not want to lose their privileges under the current system.

Violence in the exercise of self-defence threatens the system. The system relies on sullen compliance. Once you shake off the shackles of living with the system, the system begins to lose its legitimacy. It is no seen as the only alternative.

And when the system goes, so does the privileges of the ‘nice’ people. This is why they are so concerned about the violence of the oppressed. They seen a lot of lamposts whit nooses hanging from them in their future. They know what awaits them for their class colloboration. They are not going to be part of a movement that deprives them of their ill-gotten gains.