porphyrogenitusAnd…more again on Left-Anarchism and unlimited ‘participatory democracy,’ Chomsky-style; from a post quoting a sympathetic source:
“The GA [General Aseembly] became the main venue for this torture, and sitting through it was like watching someone sandpaper an open wound. Everyone said “Fuck the GA” as a joke, but as time wore on, the laughter was getting too long and too hoarse; a joke with blood in it. The metaphorical pain became less metaphorical with each eviction, with the gnawing feeling that something was coming.
Because the GA had no way to reject force, over time it fell to force. Proposals won by intimidation; bullies carried the day. What began as a way to let people reform and remake themselves had no mechanism for dealing with them when they didn’t. It had no way to deal with parasites and predators. It became a diseased process, pushing out the weak and quiet it had meant to enfranchise until it finally collapsed when nothing was left but predators trying to rip out each other’s throats.
By the time I returned to NY from visiting the camp in DC, exhausted with the pain of six evictions, the NYC GA was a place where women were threatened with beatings, and street kids with calls to the police. All the reasonable people had gotten the fuck out. It had become a gladiator pit no one enjoyed watching. Even Weev, the famous internet troll, didn’t last through the nastiness of the GA I took him to. He left while I wasn’t looking, without saying goodbye. We never spoke about it. I didn’t blame him, and I didn’t have to ask why. It was the tiny, brutal, and bitter politics of failed people.”
Now, of course, Chomsky claims that Lenin never tried factory democracy. And to some extent this is true. But the period of the Russian Revolution did try it – “Soviets” – Worker’s councils – sprouted up in Russia all throughout 1917. They mostly produced just this outcome, as quickly as Occupy did, and either suppressed themselves (collapsed in just this fashion, though often with more internecine violence) or were yoked to the Lenin Regime then self-liquidated in the wake of the October Revolution.