Financial backer of Adbusters

[Lenina Rosenweg]

The New York Times yesterday had an article on one Robert S. Halper, a filthy rich retired Wall Street broker who (According to the NY Times) came up with the idea for Occupy Wall Street. Halper was apparently very successful and retired in his late 40s. He donates $100,000 a year to various causes. He has donated between $50,000 to $75,000 to Adbusters over the past ten years and at a meeting with Kalle Lasm, the editor of Adbusters came up w/the idea of Occupy Wall Street.He's also donated $2,500 to Mitt Romney, whom he met at a fund raiser.

The paper copy of the article is a bit longer than the online version

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/20...0Halper&st=cse


Halper's donations pale in comparison with that of the Koch brothers who basically created the Tea Party and the Herman Cain campaign. Halper readily admits he is "part of the 1%." He seems to have somewhat mixed emotions about the movement and says he did not start it.

This seems to be a classic case of the bourgeoisie attempting some reform to stave off revolution.

Jacque Necker anyone?

Thoughts?

[阿部高和]

Occupy Wallstreet is mostly misguided bourgeois types anyways, so it doesn't surprise me the sheep flock to the evil shepard. I've seen very few I'd actually want leading the vanguard of any revolution.

[BuddhaInBabylon]

like you said (according to the new york times) he came up with the idea for occupy but the truth is that the WHO of it isn't important. the what started it is way more significant and while if what the paper says is true about his involvement in the movement, then so be it. he SHOULD be conflicted if he has any blood in his veins at all. But the conditions and causes for this movement to arise when and how it has precede any of his or anyone elses input. Enough is enough and it just so happens that Occupy took off like a motherf*&^%$. So hell yeah. I've engaged some comrades in Occupy DC and Occupy Baltimore and done some interviews there and gathered some statistics, and again and again you hear from the masses that the lack of a "leader" much less a "founder" is one of the movements strengths, though this being only the first phase of a much broader, longer endeavour. Who knows what's to come. I don't know if you have an occupy closeby to you, but i would go down and ask around what people know about that.

I say nothing can stop it. Concessions, placations, and the like are impossible. At least that is where i stand.

[Lenina Rosenweg]

Of course. i support the OWS movement a billion times over. If Adbusters didn't
start" it, something else would have.I am involved in it myself. I just thought the article was interesting.

[BuddhaInBabylon]

yeah it definitely is....i wonder, how many of the one percent we can convince to abdicate their wealth to the movement by promising that they will be called Mr. Awesome for the rest of their lives....? If you were known by no other nomenclature than Mr. or Ms. Awesome for the rest of your days, i think it would be worth giving 5 billion dollars to the cause of social justice.

[North Star]

Doesn't matter where the money came from now. OWS is out of Halper's hands and it is out of AdBusters too. The masses are building class consciousness through OWS slowly but surely. They have certainly come far enough not to listen to AdBusters blindly if they said "time to tone it down, you're scaring people."

[A Marxist Historian]

Doesn't matter where the money came from now. OWS is out of Halper's hands and it is out of AdBusters too. The masses are building class consciousness through OWS slowly but surely. They have certainly come far enough not to listen to AdBusters blindly if they said "time to tone it down, you're scaring people."

Well, I'd like to think that's true, but really it isn't.

The OWS consciousness isn't class consciousness, but populist consciousness. And the Democrats are busily trying to coopt it, just like the Demos so successfully coopted the Populists a century ago.

It is very possible that all of this can just be corraled into re-electing Obama. At least Obama thinks so, and he is a pretty bright guy.

OWS is not in the hands of Halper, nor of Adbusters, but the people who are running it are mostly following the lead of the Spanish "Indignados," a movement that seemed promising at first but rapidly ran out of gas, due to its programless character. Sooner or leader people want answers, and the OWS movement doesn't have any, it just expresses indignation. Which is just as well, as given its political level any explicit answers it came up with would be wrong.

The same thing that happened in Spain could and probably will happen here, though we could get lucky.

Nonetheless, this is very significant. It is the first shot across the bow for popular protest and resistance in America vs. the capitalist assault on not just the American working class but virtually the entire American people. And it lays the necessary groundwork for more serious and solid movements of the future.

-M.H.-

[Rocky Rococo]

the people who are running it are mostly following the lead of the Spanish "Indignados," a movement that seemed promising at first but rapidly ran out of gas, due to its programless character. Sooner or leader people want answers, and the OWS movement doesn't have any, it just expresses indignation. Which is just as well, as given its political level any explicit answers it came up with would be wrong.

The same thing that happened in Spain could and probably will happen here, though we could get lucky.

Nonetheless, this is very significant. It is the first shot across the bow for popular protest and resistance in America vs. the capitalist assault on not just the American working class but virtually the entire American people. And it lays the necessary groundwork for more serious and solid movements of the future.

-M.H.-

I know that it is uneven, but in some regions of Spain, your potential positive has emerged from the movement. Particularly in Catalunya and the Basque country, the indignado movement spawned ongoing neighborhood and village assemblies, self-directed local grassroots organizing circles that come together to engage in community-based action, and just to reclaim public use of space. In particular in Barcelona there has been the creeping American-style privatization of public space. The neighborhood assemblies simply appropriate whatever public space seems desirable for their gatherings and actions. If anything remotely like that can find any traction here, even in just a few places, it could be the kind of foundation crack that is never good for established hegemony.

[Die Neue Zeit]

The OWS consciousness isn't class consciousness, but populist consciousness.

Every genuine class struggle is political, not economic. Even socialist consciousness isn't so much political as economic, like the consciousness associated with mere labour disputes. The OWS consciousness seems to be at least political consciousness.

[Robocommie]

What was it Lenin said about the capitalists selling us the rope with which to hang them?

[blake 3:17]

What was it Lenin said about the capitalists selling us the rope with which to hang them?

That was a sale, this is a donation.

[RadioRaheem84]

Yeah I think it would've been preferable for a rich capitalist class traitor bankrolling these movements to make sure they're not co-opted. Not donations from a moderate liberal, hell moderate conservative since he is voting for Romney.

Big difference between this guy and Engels (a real class traitor).

[Prairie Fire]

Regarding the "occupy" movement...

You need to consider that Adbusters itself is funded by the Tides foundation, who's contributors include prominent capitalists (Rockefeller, Ford, Pew, Heinz, Mellon, Gates, Hewlett, Packard, Johnson, Soros,etc).

So, Adbusters itself is co-opted from the beginning ( as are other moderate "left" Tides recipients: ACORN, Amnesty, Democracy Now, Greenpeace, Human Rights Watch, League of Women Voters, MoveOn.org, NAACP, PETA, Ploughshares, a bunch of anti-Tar Sands "environmentalist" organizations in Canada,etc), so it is fair to say, I think, that by following the money trail one can see whom the initiators of the "occupy" movement are taking marching orders from.

In my city with the "occupy" movement that sprang up, we noticed a marked disparity between the way that the city municipal government was actually quite accommodating to the "occupy" protesters, as opposed to how they handled large-scale demonstrations in previous years (i.e. G8, etc).

Contrary to all the claims that there is a media black out on the occupy movement, it seems to get front-page coverage in every publication and news outlet that I come across. Sure, some of the coverage is a bit displeased about what is taking place (of course the bourgeoisie have different factions with their own agendas, so some of the more die-hard rightist factions are going to gripe a bit), but ultimately the "occupy" coverage in the bourgeois press has translated into publicity and promotion for a movement that otherwise never would have went global.

While I'm told that some sectors of organized labour are starting to get involved in these things from city to city(i.e. some of the Postal Workers Shop stewards in my city), ultimately what stuck out to me most like a sore thumb was the total absence of the working class in the "occupy" movement, and that in and of itself was enough to get me to take a closer look at it.

While the anarcho-syndicalists that I know have been crowing at how it is a "movement without leaders!", it is also a movement without objectives. It is a movement without a program, a movement without tactics, and in the face of the very real attacks on labour across North America (in my country, the government is again passing back-to work legislation against the Air Canada workers, as they did previously this year against the Postal Workers), it is fulfilling a diversionary role and is undermining the fighting forces of the working class that were already in place, rather than strengthening them.

I know that many in my city were excited to run out into the milieu of the local "occupy" movement that sprang up, start disseminating literature, and bring some level of political coherence to the forces gathered.

Me, I avoided this movement like the plague for a few reasons:

1. What (class) forces where behind this endeavour

2. the working class, by and large, was not participating (let alone in a leadership role)

3. Marxist-Leninists organize on a definite basis (i.e. a given workplace, a community/town, an educational institution, etc), because this is the way to build concrete political forms and organizations, and these are the precondition to actually having some real socio-economic power and overthrowing the existing relations of things.

Best case scenario, the occupy movement is going to be like the Battle of Seattle, or similar movements. If I had to make a clairvoyant prediction, I would guess that:

* Frustrated petty-bourgeoisie students will hang out in the park at the centre of my city for a few days, their numbers constantly declining,

*The revisionists, anarchists and other "usual suspects" of the activist "scene" will come out of the wood-work and hand out conflicting literature and pamphlets to these people. Over-all, they will descend on the "occupy" movement like carrion birds on a rotting corpse, all the while declaring that this is the revolution (or at least a preliminary stage,), because they are too fucking lazy and incompetent to organize anything themselves, so they attach themselves to any mass-movement like a leech attaches itself to a swimmers leg, tailing the liberals and social-dems (again). It also doesn't help that they have no understanding what-so-ever of the class forces at work here.

* A few token reps from this or that Union will show up for a day or so, but ultimately the composition of those gathered will be Students and the usual suspects from activist circles.

* There will be some interesting experiments with forms of mass participatory democracy, but ultimately it will be self defeating because they are chasing an idealized conception of "consensus", rather than (perish the thought) Democratic Centralism, or any other majority decision making method that involves a majority decision and responsibility to commit to decisions that have been taken (even if you voted against them).

* This movement without a program will run out of steam within the month, and that everything will return to how it was.

* Several forces will be derailed from ongoing work that was already in progress and was not initiated by a post-modern bourgeois magazine.

This is the situation as I see it. While all of these hipsters keep trying to re-invent the wheel every decade, the tactics and game plan for a revolution are more or less unchanged for over century now.

What works: Organize the working class, Organize on a definite basis so that you actually have real power (i.e. if you organize in a work place, you can call a strike), have defined objectives, and by doing ongoing work among the people you will develop the subjective conditions for revolution because the more you lead the people into even the most minor confrontations with the status quo (i.e. wage and benefit disputes, etc), the more they learn first hand about the nature of the bourgeois state and stratified class society, and all reformist options are revealed as ineffective and are exhausted. Solidify these organizations into the party, and seize power as an organized class force from another organized class force (the bourgeois state).

What doesn't work: Gathering a bunch of students and random individuals downtown when a call is issued by a capitalist-backed "left" magazine, no agenda, no program, no participation of the working class, no real power or clout (because the random individuals gathered don't represent collectives with the power to disrupt production, etc), no organizational forms, no game plan, and waiting with signs in a given area until people get bored/see how ineffective it is and go home.

[piet11111]

Even if OWS fails its still a vitally important learning experiment for the working class.

Lessons will be learned and conclusions drawn and if a next time is required then we will all do a lot better.

[Agathor]

[QUOTE=阿部高和;2268288]Occupy Wallstreet is mostly misguided bourgeois types anyways,/QUOTE]
Any evidence?

[GatesofLenin]

What? Koch brothers are one of the most corrupt business owners in the world! I should know, they own a factory near me and donate alot of $$$$ to avoid environmental fines. No wonder all the Tea Party politicians want to lower taxes on the top 1% and eliminate all environmental regulations. $200 million in pollution fines, nice job Koches.

[A Marxist Historian]

Every genuine class struggle is political, not economic. Even socialist consciousness isn't so much political as economic, like the consciousness associated with mere labour disputes. The OWS consciousness seems to be at least political consciousness.

Yes, it is implicitly political, despite its aggressive anti-politicism. But the implicit politics are populist not Marxist.

Which is not the end of the world. I'll certainly take it over Tea Party consciousness!

The immediate danger is the corraling of OWS populism into bourgeois Democratic Party politics and re-electing Obama. Which is what happened to the original Populist movement with William Jennings Bryan in the 1890s.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

This is sectarianism, not seeing the forest for the trees.

Yes, it is likely to run out of steam, yes there are all sorts of dubious elements in it, yes its leadership is worthless. But that's the way things often work in the real world.

Now I don't know about Canada, but in the USA we have the first stirring of mass protest vs. the assault of the working class. Turning up your nose at it and "avoiding it like the plague" is just stupid, equally or even stupider than thinking it is The Revolution.

In America, the composition varies enormously from city to city. Where I am, in Berkeley it comes quite close to your caricature of it, but in Oakland the occupiers are mostly working people and quite often black and other racial minorities.

And everywhere, a lot of the occupiers are homeless people who normally are helpless and have no place to go and now for once have the opportunity to protest. The very lowest stratum of the "reserve army of labor."

In general, there are a lot of people at these protests who have never been involved in political movements before in their lives, and who are open to and listening to socialist ideas. The masses are starting to move, and one should not just sit on the sidelines and sneer.

-M.H.-

Regarding the "occupy" movement...

You need to consider that Adbusters itself is funded by the Tides foundation, who's contributors include prominent capitalists (Rockefeller, Ford, Pew, Heinz, Mellon, Gates, Hewlett, Packard, Johnson, Soros,etc).

So, Adbusters itself is co-opted from the beginning ( as are other moderate "left" Tides recipients: ACORN, Amnesty, Democracy Now, Greenpeace, Human Rights Watch, League of Women Voters, MoveOn.org, NAACP, PETA, Ploughshares, a bunch of anti-Tar Sands "environmentalist" organizations in Canada,etc), so it is fair to say, I think, that by following the money trail one can see whom the initiators of the "occupy" movement are taking marching orders from.

In my city with the "occupy" movement that sprang up, we noticed a marked disparity between the way that the city municipal government was actually quite accommodating to the "occupy" protesters, as opposed to how they handled large-scale demonstrations in previous years (i.e. G8, etc).

Contrary to all the claims that there is a media black out on the occupy movement, it seems to get front-page coverage in every publication and news outlet that I come across. Sure, some of the coverage is a bit displeased about what is taking place (of course the bourgeoisie have different factions with their own agendas, so some of the more die-hard rightist factions are going to gripe a bit), but ultimately the "occupy" coverage in the bourgeois press has translated into publicity and promotion for a movement that otherwise never would have went global.

While I'm told that some sectors of organized labour are starting to get involved in these things from city to city(i.e. some of the Postal Workers Shop stewards in my city), ultimately what stuck out to me most like a sore thumb was the total absence of the working class in the "occupy" movement, and that in and of itself was enough to get me to take a closer look at it.

While the anarcho-syndicalists that I know have been crowing at how it is a "movement without leaders!", it is also a movement without objectives. It is a movement without a program, a movement without tactics, and in the face of the very real attacks on labour across North America (in my country, the government is again passing back-to work legislation against the Air Canada workers, as they did previously this year against the Postal Workers), it is fulfilling a diversionary role and is undermining the fighting forces of the working class that were already in place, rather than strengthening them.

I know that many in my city were excited to run out into the milieu of the local "occupy" movement that sprang up, start disseminating literature, and bring some level of political coherence to the forces gathered.

Me, I avoided this movement like the plague for a few reasons:

1. What (class) forces where behind this endeavour

2. the working class, by and large, was not participating (let alone in a leadership role)

3. Marxist-Leninists organize on a definite basis (i.e. a given workplace, a community/town, an educational institution, etc), because this is the way to build concrete political forms and organizations, and these are the precondition to actually having some real socio-economic power and overthrowing the existing relations of things.

Best case scenario, the occupy movement is going to be like the Battle of Seattle, or similar movements. If I had to make a clairvoyant prediction, I would guess that:

* Frustrated petty-bourgeoisie students will hang out in the park at the centre of my city for a few days, their numbers constantly declining,

*The revisionists, anarchists and other "usual suspects" of the activist "scene" will come out of the wood-work and hand out conflicting literature and pamphlets to these people. Over-all, they will descend on the "occupy" movement like carrion birds on a rotting corpse, all the while declaring that this is the revolution (or at least a preliminary stage,), because they are too fucking lazy and incompetent to organize anything themselves, so the attach themselves to any mass-movement like a leech attaches itself to a swimmers leg, tailing the liberals and social-dems (again). It also doesn't help that they have no understanding what-so-ever of the class forces at work here.

* A few token reps from this or that Union will show up for a day or so, but ultimately the composition of those gathered will be Students and the usual suspects from activist circles.

* There will be some interesting experiments with forms of mass participatory democracy, but ultimately it will be self defeating because they are chasing an idealized conception of "consensus", rather than (perish the thought) Democratic Centralism, or any other majority decision making method that involves a majority decision and responsibility to commit to decisions that have been taken (even if you voted against them).

* This movement without a program will run out of steam within the month, and that everything will return to how it was.

* Several forces will be derailed from ongoing work that was already in progress and was not initiated by a post-modern bourgeois magazine.

This is the situation as I see it. While all of these hipsters keep trying to re-invent the wheel every decade, the tactics and game plan for a revolution are more or less unchanged for over century now.

What works: Organize the working class, Organize on a definite basis so that you actually have real power (i.e. if you organize in a work place, you can call a strike), have defined objectives, and by doing ongoing work among the people you will develop the subjective conditions for revolution because the more you lead the people into even the most minor confrontations with the status quo (i.e. wage and benefit disputes, etc), the more they learn first hand about the nature of the bourgeois state and stratified class society, and all reformist options are revealed as ineffective and are exhausted. Solidify these organizations into the party, and seize power as an organized class force from another organized class force (the bourgeois state).

What doesn't work: Gathering a bunch of students and random individuals downtown when a call is issued by a capitalist-backed "left" magazine, no agenda, no program, no participation of the working class, no real power or clout (because the random individuals gathered don't represent collectives with the power to disrupt production, etc), no organizational forms, no game plan, and waiting with signs in a given area until people get bored/see how ineffective it is and go home.