livingbytruth November 7, 2011

Chicago and other movements, organizations and institutions.

I liked very much the position that Occupy Chicago is a forum for
individuals. We participate as individuals and it as such that we can
champion groups. We can speak for groups, but groups don't speak for us.

Perhaps similarly, we as Occupy Chicago can agree on the right of
individuals to organize themselves on any basis, including the natural
interest of workers to have shared representation in their relationships
with their shared employer. I think we can agree that we wish for that
right to be fully exercised and manifested in vibrant, effective,
democratic, constructive, productive unions.

This makes us more conservative than unions, and helps unions because it
helps them ground themselves in a broader support. "We are the 99%" means
that we're claiming the most conservative ground, in that we're including
practically, hopefully everybody (including executives, middle managers
and bureaucrats) and we're making clear the minimum that we can all agree
on. We're thus uniters, not dividers. We bring up the rear so that
others can be more radical, more progressive and move us all forward, not
just a divisive few.

In Lithuania, during our quest for independence from Soviet occupation,
Sajudis (the broad reform movement) did not directly espouse independence,
but always championed the right of the Lithuanian Liberation League (led
by the hard-core dissidents) to demonstrate and to exercise democratic
rights. The LLL never involved more than 3% or so of the population, but
thanks to Sajudis, it achieved absolutely every one of its goals, not only
independence, but Lithuania's membership in the EU and NATO. The two
groups worked in perfect tandem. The reform movement, which was allowed,
and even inspired and infiltrated by Gorbachev and the KGB, was able to
work constructively with the local Communist party and push it forward,
too.

I learned that a successful movement involves a spectrum of dissidence, an
unbreakable chain which includes the most dedicated political prisoners to
the victims of deportations to the respected intellectuals to the folk
singers to the bureaucrats who let things slide to the police who don't
get mad to the soldiers who decide not to shoot. There's no way to slice
that up, to divide and conquer. We don't need for everybody to be
hard-core. We need to make sure there aren't any gaps in the spectrum.
Occupy Chicago is a manifest example of a full spectrum.

Martin Luther King Jr., I was told, said it this way: "A healthy
organization always has a wider movement around it." It needs to be true
for Occupy Chicago as an organization so that Occupy Chicago could itself
be a wider movement for healthy organizations.

Andrius

Andrius Kulikauskas
ms@ms.lt
(773) 306-3807
http://www.occupyme.net
http://www.selflearners.net

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