As I have said before, OWS mobilized more workers and oppressed people in a month than the entire “Leninist” left has put together in three decades. The occupy movement *is* the vanguard.

Well, thank you. :)

Ross, you forgot to add a sectarian analysis… Here Pham Binh gets the spirit exactly right, and you have missed the boat.

I am all for a Marxist analysis of the movement and the situation it came from, sensitive to its strong and weak points and making constructive suggestions.

But you visit once, write it off, visit once more when it has grown and change your position a bit, but there is no flavor in your huge article of what it is like to engage as part of this movement and try to introduce Marxist analysis to it, rather than just apply Marxist concepts out of books to analyze the movement from afar.

Your conclusion comes straight out of the Platypus phrase book: “The historical recognition of the extent to which the conditions necessary to foment social revolution have disappeared over the course of the last century is vital to any emancipatory political project in the present.” WHAT ABOUT EGYPT, TUNISIA?! Sure, they were not socialist revolutions leading to worker’s power (although strikes played a key role and there was revolutionary socialist input in Egypt, and the process continues). But they were certainly “social revolution.” And the conditions for such have also been seen in Bolivia, the Philippines, Syria, etc.

Your next sentence: “It indicates to us that there is much work that remains to be done, in order to sow the seeds of social consciousness that might lead to a more sustained opposition to the capitalist social order.” is literally true, but given the huge visible increase in this consciousness the emphasis seems all wrong, as if to justify the Platypus abstention from all real struggles and its line that today academic sectarian criticism of the left is what is needed.

If we are to re-form the left to make revolutionary Marxist concepts relevant to a working class again it must be from a constructive engagement in real movements like OWS, not from a bunch of academics combining the worst disdain of movements of Adorno with the worst sectarianism of the ICL/Sparts.

The far left has been talking about creating vanguards since 1917. Well, here it is.

Reflections on the Occupy Wall Street Phenomenon: What it Represents, Its Prospects, Its Deficiencies

http://wp.me/pgGDG-K4

THE LEFT IS DEAD! LONG LIVE THE LEFT!