facility:dewey square

  • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lab3eoRcrXo

    Noam Chomsky’s talk at the Occupy Boston encampment on Dewey Square on Oct. 22. He spoke as part of the Howard Zinn Memorial Lecture Series held by Occupy Boston’s on-site Free University. Zinn was a historian, activist and author of « A People’s History of the United States. »)

    You can’t achieve significant initiatives without a large, active, popular base. It’s necessary to get out into the country and help people understand what the Occupy movement is about, what they themselves can do, and what the consequences are of not doing anything.

    ... Delivering a Howard Zinn lecture is a bittersweet experience for me. I regret that he’s not here to take part in and invigorate a movement that would have been the dream of his life. Indeed, he laid a lot of the groundwork for it...

    « The world is dividing into two blocs, the plutonomy and the rest, » Citigroup summarized. « The U.S., U.K. and Canada are the key plutonomies, economies powered by the wealthy. »

    As for the non-rich, they’re sometimes called the precariat, people who live a precarious existence at the periphery of society. The « periphery » however, has become a substantial proportion of the population in the U.S. and elsewhere.

    So we have the plutonomy and the precariat: the 1 percent and the 99 percent, as Occupy sees it, not literal numbers, but the right picture....

    For the first time in human history, there are real threats to the survival of the human species. Since 1945 we have had nuclear weapons, and it seems a miracle we have survived them. But policies of the Obama administration and its allies are encouraging escalation....

    Something must be done in a disciplined, sustained way, and soon. It won’t be easy to proceed. There will be hardships and failures, it’s inevitable. But unless the process that’s taking place here and elsewhere in the country and around the world continues to grow and becomes a major force in society and politics, the chances for a decent future are bleak.

    You can’t achieve significant initiatives without a large, active, popular base. It’s necessary to get out into the country and help people understand what the Occupy movement is about, what they themselves can do, and what the consequences are of not doing anything.

    Organizing such a base involves education and activism. Education doesn’t mean telling people what to believe, it means learning from them and with them.

    Karl Marx said : « The task is not just to understand the world but to change it ». A variant to keep in mind is that if you want to change the world you’d better try to understand it. That doesn’t mean listening to a talk or reading a book, though that’s helpful sometimes. You learn from participating. You learn from others. You learn from the people you’re trying to organize. We all have to gain the understanding and the experience to formulate and implement ideas.

    The most exciting aspect of the Occupy movement is the construction of the linkages that are taking place all over. If they can be sustained and expanded, Occupy can lead to dedicated efforts to set society on a more humane course...

    http://assr38.wordpress.com/2011/11/01/ows-occupy-the-future-by-noam-chomsky