It's nice and snowy out, but i'm stuck inside for the most part this weekend, rushing against time and inertia to get my grades in. Having spent most of thursday standing on the sidewalk outside the New School's Graduate Faculty building didn't help much (with the grading.) I was going to post some lessons i took from what I saw during the occupation - the opportunities created by the conjuncture and the strategies such a conjuncture encouraged, some of the problems, etc, but i'm not sure that a public blog is the best place for such ruminations. I will say, though, that the rush by some anarhcists to condemn the settlement as collaborationist strikes me as short sighted. I consider myself an anarchist, but I'm not sure why that has to involve the utter collapse of politics and tactics, the total fetishization of direct action beyond prefigurative politics to the point of pathology, the inability to think in terms of longues durees and the assumption that any action that does not produce widespread revolutionary uprisings (which i'm all for) must be categorized as a failure and must therefore have been hijacked by collaborationsists and crypto-liberals. There's nothing inherently bourgeois, counter-revolutionary, statist, or anti-democratic about strategy, about committing to build movements that keep growing, about not dismissing everyone who isn't waving around The Conquest of Bread or rocking an anti-flag patch on their knapsack as a outre statist yuppie.

"Outside" solidarity could have been more focused at times - the cuny contingent that showed up around 10 PM on Thursday was really brilliant in terms of channeling the power and focus of the crowd. Letting anyone who wants to speak is cool, but there has to be some way to deal with the sectarian crazies and didactic anarcho-individualists who think they're teaching you something by shouting the same tired slogans over everyone else.

There are many things the New School In Exile folks did that were very, very effective. I won't rehearse them here because I think its best for us to practice some semblance of security culture, at least online, about how we discuss the weaknesses of administrative and police repression tactics and the stregnth of how folks challenged them, but i don't want it to seem like I'm being a whiny mr. complainsalot. On the contrary, i find yesterday's victory inspiring and encouraging and the collection of folks inside and outside of 65 5th avenue was exciting to be a part of. I was particularly struck by how explicit folks were about tying their work to what's been going on in Greece and Italy ("We're in Greece, We're in Rome, Tell Bob Kerrey To Go Home," "Occupiamo Tutto,") etc. I think the question on all of our minds should be where does this go next? How do we expand the struggle? How do we "generalize the wave," as it were?