The same group fucking up BLM is the same group that fucked up OWS.
Who?
imo it's moreso a lack of centralized leadership. There is no Huey Newton here, or a collection of impressive members on the ground as well as in the media. Instead you have a effete dude in a sweater vest endorsing fast food products.
Any sort of internet heavy movement is going to have a hard time centralizing leadership. That sort of setup let the destructive element in, which you can call rad feminism, lgbqt, or Social Studies Warriors.
OWS had multiple problems, but the unity of the movement was broken up by the divisive tactics of that element. They came in, created separation, started pursuing causes that had nothing to do with the main point, and eventually leads to nothing but drama and self-promotion.
You can't really have your brightest and best leaders step up and organize when they have to qualify via things like the Progressive Stack. These groups/ideas come from Critical Theory and Critical Race Theory, which ends up having a simpleton's idea of power and oppression. Such a view will never get you leadership and progress, because leadership is a sign of hierarchies and those are a symptom of the oppressive system. They do not believe that organization and leadership can happen naturally or be beneficial to the group, so they tear down those that rise up and those that could do good live in fear of being the oppressor or seen as such.
https://medium.com/@YotamMarom/undoing-the-politics-of-powerlessness-72931fee5bdaThat's a long run down of the dissipation of OWS by someone within it, so I'll select some quotes.
But the truth is, it wasn’t the state, or the cold, or the media. The real problem underneath it all was a deep ambivalence about power. In fact, all of the things that made Occupy Wall Street brilliant had this paradox built into them, this politic of powerlessness woven deep inside, like a bad gene or a self-destruct mechanism.
For example, the mantra of leaderlessness came from a genuine desire to avoid classic pitfalls into hierarchy, but it was, at the same time, a farce, and divorced from any sense of collective structure or care for group culture. It foreclosed on the possibility of holding emerging leaders accountable, created a situation in which real leaders (whether worthy or not) went to the shadows instead of the square, and made it impossible to really develop one another (how, really, could we train new leaders if there weren’t supposed to be any in the first place?).
Groups like AntiFA and LGBQT have the same conundrum. They disavow leadership and hierarchical organizing, and end up a giant fucking mess that eventually gets coopted by its worst elements.
I spent years being angry about it. I was angry at the people who had attacked the group I was part of from the inside, the people who bullied me into giving up every piece of leverage I had by making me feel like I didn’t have the right to organize the folks I had access to, who punished me every time I was quoted or interviewed, who came to the meetings I facilitated and intentionally disrupted them. The stories are too long and too many to recount here, and anyone who was in the middle of it has their own share of war stories too.
From there, I went wandering. I bumped straight into the movement’s social media call-out culture, where people demonstrate how radical they are by destroying one another. It felt like walking into a high school locker room. In this universe, we insist on perfect politics and perfect language, to the exclusion of experimentation, learning, or constructive critique. We wear our outsiderness as a badge of pride, knowing that saying the right thing trumps doing anything at all. No one is ever good enough for us — not progressive celebrities who don’t get the whole picture, not your Facebook friend who doesn’t quite get why we say Black Lives Matter instead of All Lives Matter, not your cousin who mourned the deaths in Paris without saying an equal number of words about those in Beirut. Instead of organizing these people, we attack them. We tear down rather than teach each other, and pick apart instead of building on top of what we have.
Sounds all too familiar.
