I think a lot of the wind got taken out of the sails of the labor solidarity side of May Day when the Golden Gate Bridge Labor Coalition decided to call off its action. A lot of time and energy went towards planning the bridge shutdown, and we didn't have anything in place to redirect that energy to. (There were some shady stuff leading up to that. I know what they told us at GA - that OO had agreed to be involved on the conditions that they would have input in the logistics of it and would get support from the other stakeholders involved (outreach on behalf of the action, not being maligned to the press, etc), and those conditions weren't met - but that can't be the whole story, because there were other non-OO GGBLC actions planned that fell through quite suddenly. I would love to have been a fly on the wall when this stuff was decided.) We had time built into the day where (ideally) people would go and do autonomous actions, some of which could have been labor solidarity-related, but nobody did them. How do you plan a good action against "legislators who are eroding the labor movement like it's going out of style" in 30 minutes and round up people to do it with (when a lot of your labor pool is fired up from the mini-raid a few minutes ago)?
I think the anti-police thing can end up being circular. Occupy gets framed as constantly in conflict with the police, even though there's so much more to it, and people who care about other issues (education, food, labor, housing, etc) barely see any outside recognition for their work. On the other hand, people who see a movement that spends a lot of time in conflict with the police as something they want to be involved in (because they care passionately about police brutality, because they have a personal axe to grind, because they like conflict and breaking things, whatever) get drawn to it. So people working on other issues either break off quietly and do their thing alone or with another group, and the crowd that likes the FTP side of things gets bigger. I'm not sure how to reverse that, other than by somehow getting attention drawn to the non-police related stuff that is being done to balance out the smashy-smashy narrative. (Which is a lot easier said than done; our press releases get met with resounding indifference.)
I think the anti-police thing can end up being circular. Occupy gets framed as constantly in conflict with the police, even though there's so much more to it, and people who care about other issues (education, food, labor, housing, etc) barely see any outside recognition for their work. On the other hand, people who see a movement that spends a lot of time in conflict with the police as something they want to be involved in (because they care passionately about police brutality, because they have a personal axe to grind, because they like conflict and breaking things, whatever) get drawn to it. So people working on other issues either break off quietly and do their thing alone or with another group, and the crowd that likes the FTP side of things gets bigger. I'm not sure how to reverse that, other than by somehow getting attention drawn to the non-police related stuff that is being done to balance out the smashy-smashy narrative. (Which is a lot easier said than done; our press releases get met with resounding indifference.)
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