From Lenin’s Tomb
Readable & interesting report & comment here on Occupy London. While it may be a “punctuating moment” iI seems a very important one as the whole theme of this is like no other demonstrations I have seen, it is against capitalism, like the ones at the global summits, but this time there is no global summit, it global capitalism full stop. The slogan of the 99% is also very unifying, and makes a potent point.
This isn’t a revolutionary situation, but merely a punctuating moment in the temporal flow of class struggle. But the purpose of slogans mentioning ‘Tahrir Square’ is to accentuate the internationalism of the movement, to point to its deep systemic roots, to express solidarity with the Arab Spring, to hope that this is the beginning of our own Spring, and to identify the commune as the political form of these aspirations. At the most prosaic level, it expresses the movement against austerity in its most ‘political’ moment, complementing the ‘economic corporatist’ moment of trade union struggle. It identifies the political class rule of the 1% as the key problem; the colonization of the representative state by big capital. And it proposes its own direct democratic answer.