"Rise like lions after slumber… Ye are many, They are few."
Shelley, The Mask of Anarchy

It was a long time coming. Governments collapsing in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and perhaps soon in Yemen and Syria; repeated uprisings against austerity in Greece, riots in Britain, 100,000 “incidents” per year in China, month after month of student mobilization in Chile; finally, the worldwide wave of struggle of 2011 came to the United States in Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and subsequent occupations in perhaps as many as 1,000 American cities and towns. For the United States, as for many of the countries in the Middle East, decades of the glaciation of struggle melted away in weeks. 2011 may not have had quite the global reach of 1968, but in the United States at least, in some ways, it surpassed 1968 in the months of sustained confrontation in so many places at the same time. As we said last spring about the important Madison forerunner of the fall Occupy movement, the old mole did its work well. Whatever else may happen from now on, a new historical period has opened up, and the decades in which the grinding post-1970s crisis were borne in silence, or sporadic uprisings were defeated in isolation, are over.

Something has escaped the control of the Democrats, the NGOs, the SEIU and the left sects—of official society and those attempting its mere facelift—which will not be easily brought to heel. Hundreds of thousands of people who had never before been in mass mobilizations (or mobilizations of any kind) found themselves confronting the police, facing tear gas and pepper spray, going to jail and learning in the streets what can never be learned any other way, namely the real role of the state’s “special body of armed men” and the fluidity and ebbs and flows of an unfolding practical movement in motion. As Marx once put it, “one concrete step forward of the real movement is worth a hundred programs.” 2012 shows every sign of being the year of further steps, and all the forces of the old world are scrambling for places in spurious hopes of shunting the movement into the Obama re-election campaign and into a kinder, gentler union movement, one which has for so long declined in its parochial, provincial preoccupation with keeping up the dues base long enough for the current generation of bureaucrats to retire with their multiple pensions and “après nous, le deluge.” (For most people, young or old, black or brown or white, the deluge started long ago.)

Insurgent Notes thus devotes the bulk of this issue to the Occupy movement.

Occupy in the United States of course invites inevitable comparison with the 1960s. And though we do not wish to discourage the great majority of participants in OWS and elsewhere too young to have experienced that decade, by invoking the long shadow of the sixties, a few comments are indeed in order to measure the historical distance from that era. The social and economic situation today is obviously far more dire. True, 1968 was exactly the year in which post-1945 trends toward greater income equality (not just in the United States but throughout the “advanced capitalist” world) were reversed, to become more unequal in the United States today than even in 1929. And one theme common to 1968 and 2011 is that of downwardly-mobile college-educated youth; it’s just that in 1968, the great majority of New Leftists did not yet know that most of them were downwardly mobile. No one today, in contrast to then, is talking about the “affluent society” or the “leisure society” or the looming “ten-hour work week,” conjured up by some post-scarcity-futurologists who didn’t understand that technology per se is not capital, and that capital only exists by exploiting living labor.

The 2011 movement, given the more critical situation which gave rise to it, has been on a much faster learning curve than the United States movement of the 1960s. If we view the “sixties” as lasting, in reality, from 1955 (the Montgomery bus boycott, the mass wildcat in auto against the UAW’s much-touted contract of that year) to 1973 (the “oil crisis,” the end of the postwar boom and the end of the wildcat movement) we note that it was not until 1965 that black militants (whatever their other problems) broke with the earlier pacifism of the civil rights movement, that the movement against the Vietnam War needed years to move from marginality to broad support in the population as a whole, and that the white, middle-class New Left student movement needed similar years to evolve from the vague discontent of the 1962 Port Huron statement to anything resembling an anti-capitalist perspective (however warped the largely Stalinist, Maoist and Third Worldist forms of that “anti-capitalism”) by 1968–69.

By contrast, the Occupy movement of 2011, particularly on the west coast, took only weeks (or less1 ) to see the need to link up with broader working class strata, to begin to question (at least by an important minority) the capitalist system per se, to go beyond its early pacifist outreach to the police, to attempt, with some success, to go beyond its initially white middle-class core to ally with blacks and Latinos, and most importantly, to strike an important chord of sympathy with the broader population.

OWS also echoed the early 1960s New Left in its mistrust of leaders2 , ideologies and demands. This reflected a decade or more of experience by some of its core members in actions before and after the 1999 Seattle mobilization against the WTO, with the consensus meeting format (sometimes diluted to 90 percent or 80 percent agreement) and the “people’s mic.” These methods were developed for many reasons, among them the negative counter-model of older left faction fights and left sect attempts to infiltrate and manipulate meetings in search of recruits. Many “stars,” Hollywood and others, who visited occupied sites in sympathy or support duly accepted the same rules. The consensus format may not survive when more strictly working-class strata go into motion and more divisive questions confront the movement (the latter having already surfaced in Occupy in a number of cities over the question of the police, the presence of Ron Paul sympathizers, the splits between the liberal/social-democratic majority at the origins and the emerging radical currents, etc.), but it did have the merits of forcing speakers to talk succinctly and to the point, to avoid ideological diversions and to keep attentions focused.

Nor should it be forgotten that the early 1960s New Left also began with a distrust of “ideology,” only to wind up in the late 1960s mired in the worst “first time tragedy, second time farce” regurgitation of 1930s variants of Stalinist ideology. “Ideology” is by definition a falsification of reality, to which we counter-pose theory. “Consciousness is something the world must acquire, even if it does not want to,” as someone once wrote.3 Like all young movements emerging from deep social processes, Occupy will have to confront more clearly where it stands on questions of program, its relationship to the millions of working people who sympathized from afar but went about their daily routines often a block away from the occupations, the dynamic of race and class in American society, not to mention to the capitalist mode of production and its abolition. It was refreshing indeed, in contrast to the 1960s, that the participants in Occupy were clearly struggling for themselves, and not in a vague solidarity with little-understood peasant guerrillas or bureaucratic statist regimes on the other side of the planet. That reality, by itself, turns the page on an era.

OWS and its nationwide offshoots did, however, have a diffuse ideology, and that ideology was populism, a current with deep roots in American history. While the idea of the “99 percent” did serve to capture the popular imagination by highlighting the unprecedented amassing of wealth by the “1 percent” (or the 0.1 percent, or the 0.01 percent) in recent decades, it equally fostered many illusions, beginning with the pacifist outreach to the police. But equally if not more problematic were a series of mystifications, above all the excessive focus on financial institutions as the heart of the crisis, as opposed to a global crisis in the spheres of material production and reproduction underway for decades,4 of which “financialization,” however defined and however important, is merely a symptom and a response to deeper trends. Amidst the myriad of targets of the occupation movements, “capitalism” was merely one more item on a laundry list, with generally little understanding of what capitalism, or its actual abolition, entails, thus leaving the door wide open to populist slogans from “Abolish the Federal Reserve” to “tax the rich” and “make the rich pay their fair share.” Some significant part of Occupy still remains vulnerable to the Keynesian siren songs of a Joseph Stiglitz or a Jeffrey Sachs.

One of the movement’s strengths was its resistance to the pressure from various outside forces, starting with the media, for “concrete demands,” not to mention for leaders able to negotiate such demands5 and thus become targets for repression and co-optation. As someone put it, even OWS activists who wanted demands did not know what those demands were. CLR James remarked long ago that the realities of capitalism in its statist phase6 educate people directly and prepare the point of departure of revolt with an inchoate sense of what is necessary. However diverse and scattered the specific consciousness of participants, the lack or refusal of demands expressed the deep reality of the movement as one of a blocked society, which implied total transformation, however poorly articulated. What were the “demands” in France in May 1968 or in Argentina in 2001/2002, or other situations where “power lay in the streets”? What are the “demands” in Greece today? The total transformation required—we call it revolution—is not something one “demands,” but something one does.

The movement also expresses in its concrete existence what may be its most important practical discovery: after decades of the (mainly) failures of workplace struggle, of the dispersion of the working population in further suburbanization and ex-urbanization, of whole de-industrialized regions, of casualization and the decline of stable, long-term employment in one workplace, the Occupy movement discovered the remaining central public space as the one place of visibility capable of reaching large numbers of people. “Making shame more shameful still by making it public” (Marx7 ) was an important part of what OWS and its spinoffs were about, after decades in which so much degradation and rollback had been suffered in atomized silence, buried by the trashy feel-good media and the enforced anonymity of people who suffered increasing job insecurity, the reality or threat of homelessness, ever-more expensive health care or no health care at all, useless diplomas and “retraining” from dubious fly-by-night educational scams, downsizing, lengthening work weeks and declining real income with two and three precarious jobs, disappearing pensions, skyrocketing school tuitions, arbitrary week-to-week shift changes and scheduling (designed for no other reason than to tire, and demoralize, and fragment any potential workplace solidarity), electronic surveillance, and “just in time” production methods. Like the Argentine piqueteros who realized the increasing limits of struggle focused on the factory, and expanded it instead to the supermarket, the hospital, the police station and the freeway blockage, OWS discovered a form of militant organization in which a thousand different grievances could be aired and made visible, not least through its often skillful use of new electronic media.

Insurgent Notes thus presents in this issue several accounts of the occupation movement in New York City as well as in Baltimore, Atlanta, Los Angeles, and, perhaps most importantly, in Oakland and Seattle, where the radicalization was arguably (along with Portland) the deepest and where the linkup with workers the most direct. These accounts show, in some important instances, an evolution away from pacifist dreams about the police, the growing participation of working people and working people of color, the different local relations between Occupy, the official labor movement and the rank-and-file (as in Oakland and in Seattle), how the movement (as in Seattle) confronted the problems of violence within the occupation, and how, through experience, a radical current emerged in relation to the liberal/social-democratic forces that were dominant at the outset and, in other instances, where little of that happened.

We would like to acknowledge the reprinting of an Insurgent Notes leaflet, distributed on November 17th at Union Square and Foley Square, in Hella Occupy, a pamphlet distributed across the country on December 12th. We appreciate the additional distribution of our perspective.

We also continue our chronicling of the decomposition of the United States economy and society with an article on US infrastructure; with a letter from Paris on the background of Olivier Besancenot, who made a furtive appearance in New York promoting his disintegrating “New Anti-Capitalist Party,” and finally an update on the “indignados” movement in Barcelona.

• 1It should not be forgotten that Occupy Portland and Occupy Seattle had before them from the beginning the reality of the (still far from resolved) August confrontation between longshoremen and police in Longview, Washington, which is treated in several contributions to this issue of Insurgent Notes.
• 2OWS and other occupations were not quite as free of “leaders” as was widely touted by both the movement and the media; cf. John Heilemann’s article in the December 2011 issue of New York Magazine or the Oakland “insurrectionist anarchists” mentioned in Jack Gerson’s article in this issue of IN. Over time, these “non-leader leaders” became known as the “1 percent of the 99 percent.”
• 3Karl Marx, Letter to Arnold Ruge, 1843.
• 4For more on this, see The Remaking of the American Working Class: The Restructuring of Global Capital and the Recomposition of Class Terrain.
• 5Here again, OWS, or parts of it, recalled the success of the 1960s media in setting up spectacular “leaders” who then in one way or another distorted the reality, bringing them their fifteen minutes of fame, and smaller numbers even remembered the battle cry of the I.W.W. from a hundred years ago “We are all leaders.”
• 6CLR James, Facing Reality, Bewick Publications, 1958. James was talking about “state capitalism” as a world phenomenon of the 1950s, but his remark can equally be applied to the arguably more pervasive, quasi-totalitarian expansion of commodity relationships since then.
• 7A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.

The two most common refrains I’ve heard from people at my job on the Occupy Wall Street movement is that:

1) It is nothing more than a media spectacle, or
2) An ephemeral protest that will die out soon enough.

I have even been told that workers at a Burger King close to Zucotti Park were lamenting their low wages all the while facing signs which demanded an end to wage slavery. As frustrating as this may sound to the left, who are justifiably excited over a revival of radical politics, many workers cannot see the movement’s relevancy to their own lives, yet still feel the pangs of the crisis perhaps more painfully than most. This apparent disconnect, however, is not due to ignorance of the message of OWS or its distortion by the media—as if a precondition of revolutionary consciousness requires taking stock of every shred of information available. Neither can it be explained as a phenomenon related to an urban environment as such. Rather, this gap rests on the mistaken assumption by the Occupiers that their struggle is the common struggle for all of the working class, as exemplified in such opaque terminology as “the 99 percent.” This conflation lays the groundwork for a variety of other problems which reinforce a certain type of radical politics that on one hand “demands nothing/everything,” while at the same time locates crisis in finance and banking. Thus discussions of political pluralism or “diversity of tactics,” which seeks to be as inclusive as possible to all participants, the Occupiers’ support of and commiseration with unions as institutional victims of the crisis as well as attempts to block foreclosures, all provide an ambiguous yet complex picture of a movement grappling with the issue of class and its representation in 21st century America.

One continuing feature of OWS has been the notion of “no demands” and the political heterogeneity of the occupations and movement in general. The occupations officially started on September 17th and were aimed at the “financial heart” of capitalism, namely Wall Street, as it was perceived to be the primary location of where capital reproduces itself and by default, where the core of the crisis emanated. Tents pitched, the Occupiers ended up in Zuccotti Park where they were able to obtain food and other items for living without cost based on donations from supporters who had access to such means.[1] This first stage grew immensely not just across the country, but globally within weeks. The very idea of occupying a public space allowed the movement to become open to all who felt the pangs of the crisis to come and bring their own concerns. This open space was able to absorb all ideas which seemed to be politically marginalized by the media and by politics proper, that is, those of the state. This plurality convinces many that due to the far-ranging political beliefs, all could be accommodated under a broad message no matter what their position or situation was. Fringe right-wing libertarians could stand next to bourgeois environmentalists while both participated in a session of “the People’s Mic” from a socialist lecturing on Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation. They may bitterly disagree with one another on an individual basis, but that is not what OWS is about; it is not personal politics but a united politics based on general outrage due to the crisis.

As September turned into October, much of the old guard of the labor movement expressed a mixture of glee and caution to the Occupiers, who they saw as potentially manipulative. However, with the weakened position of unions both due to decades of neoliberal victories and also of the immanent bureaucratic tendencies of union themselves, they were soon joined by thousands of students in a march from Foley Square near City Hall to symbolically join the Occupiers in Zuccotti Park. On October 5th, approximately 20,000 rank and file workers, union leaders, community organizers and students marched in unison. Reactions from onlookers, particularly the working class, were largely positive, with truckers honking their horns, construction workers clapping and restaurant and bar workers throwing fists in the air. The atmosphere seemed to be one of genuine unity from all who felt the pangs of the crisis. One banner which had been unfurled at a fountain at the center of Foley Square announced the “American Autumn.” The unions thus seized upon precisely this opportunity in order to reinvigorate public sympathy and associate their struggle as those of the workers, especially those of the public sector. Rather than taking actions which could indefinitely paralyze the city from working and therefore really put the question of labor’s involvement in OWS in a more pointed and concrete manner, the unions opted to marshal their own on November 17th in order to make sure there would be no confrontation with the NYPD. No general strike, no nothing. The Occupiers, caught up in the left populist rhetoric of understanding the unions as defenders of the working class, have offered no substantial critique of the role of unions, in spite of many opportunities which could have been taken but were missed. Certain socialist elements within OWS have often voiced their complaint about the faint-hearted role of the unions in radicalizing the movement, but were either continually ignored or shouted down for the sake of mass appeal and plurality.

Other strategies which have been somewhat less frequent yet perhaps appeal in a more direct manner to the working class such as walking the picket line and preventing the foreclosure of homes. In Brooklyn, hundreds of Occupiers prevented several families from eviction and the police, whose normally abusive behavior towards OWS seemed to out of character as no mass arrests or acts of violence were committed. These events are ongoing, yet have thus far not materialized into an expansion of the Occupation.

Elsewhere in America…

Since the official start of the crisis in 2008, the working class in New Jersey has also engaged in its fair share of strikes and protests. Public sector workers in New Jersey have been on the defensive since the right-wing Republican governor Chris Christie stepped into office in 2010, first attacking the NJEA, the teachers’ union. Small protests had broken out, but nothing to the extent of what happened in Madison, Wisconsin last winter of 2011. The aggressive campaign against state workers has been justified as to correct New Jersey’s spiraling debt which had reached a peak under the former liberal Democratic governor Jon Corzine.[2]

In September of 2010, longshoremen launched a wildcat strike on the docks of Port Elizabeth in solidarity with their comrades in Camden and in Philadelphia who were being squeezed by Del Monte Fruit Company. Del Monte was attempting to save on shipping costs by moving its operations to a non-unionized (ILA) dock in Camden. The strike spread to Newark, Staten Island and Brooklyn. Hopes were high that it would become national, but ended within a few days that same month. Actions have occurred with or without the unions in New Jersey and elsewhere in America, and rather than opposing financiers, striking workers have come up directly against their own bosses who are in the business of providing “productive” services.[3] Such occurrences, due to their short-lived nature, receive some coverage before being subsumed by sports news and interest pieces on gardening, etc. Few media commentators would ridicule such actions, but in so many empathetic gestures, stress the danger if it were to spread further.

The general opinion of OWS among workers I’ve spoken with has been a combination of dismissal, pride and ridicule—often by the same worker. Dismissal, because they don’t see how the occupation of public spaces like parks and city-owned land could possibly halt the crisis in its tracks. One worker reacted with surprise when he heard that there was outrage on the part of the Occupiers after the OWS Library had been torn down—“It’s not even a real structure, so what do you expect?” At face value, this may seem callous, reminiscent of Victor Hugo’s indignant poet who scolds the illiterate arsonist for burning the Tuileries Library in Paris. Speaking with this worker and others, who have likewise called the initiative of setting up tents in Manhattan as food for the media, have also praised it—“finally, somebody in this country is standing up for something”—and even recognizing that “protests [like OWS] take time.” These contradictory perspectives point to a tendency that in fact wants to see the occupation go beyond their current state to something more militant, and see this as their opportunity to do so. For these workers, however, their critiques also suggest that it is not their fight. In the midst of union revitalization, their fight is to combat the reformist tendencies, the poison pill contracts of the TWU, ILU and SEIU if any progress is to be made in improving their own lives.

“Into the Wild”

Almost two hours south of Zuccotti Park, less than a hundred or so men, women and children have set up tents in the woods outside of Lakewood, New Jersey. They are unemployed chefs, construction workers and retired pensioners—all of whom are looking for jobs. They subsist off of church charity and the site is built like a small town, complete with road signs and visible pathways. Their involuntary displacement in the woods is not symbolic. More and more, the working class finds itself outside in tents, or in other cases, cars. Not just in New Jersey, but also in Florida more of these tent communes have cropped up over the past year. Yet their demands have not been voiced as an attack on greedy bankers and their ideology is one of self-blame. They have already proven months before September 17th that occupying public and private space is feasible, that pulling together without the use of money is possible and that tying one’s belt tighter are all tendencies of survival in the midst of crisis.

Capital can tolerate people leaving their apartments at will to sleep outside, to march, to demonstrate, to occasionally fight and provoke fights with the police. It cannot tolerate when these same people decide to organize their workplaces against the dictates of profit, or to cease working at an NGO and in any of the FIRE industries.[4] It cannot tolerate when they refuse to leave their apartments because of an eviction notice. It cannot tolerate when these same actions multiply en masse and demand further participation that may lead to confrontation with the police and military, not out of ideological rage, but out of necessity. No longer will it then be a question of representation of the working class or preservation of its classic forms of organization, but the total abolition of waged labor by the working class themselves.

Notes

[1] Later a “Finance Committee” was established, having receiving approximately $500,000 in donations.

[2] Corzine has been subpoenaed by a House committee for financial malfeasance in MF Global, a futures broker.

[3] A slogan which both Occupiers as well as their conservative detractors have used to describe any individual who produces something, regardless of their relation to their tools, equipment, the shop-in short, to their relationship to the means of production. Workers, those who have nothing but their capacity to perform work for a wage, find themselves being abstractly lumped together with small business owners and the self-employed. Such a term like “productive class” promotes an identity (like “the 99 percent”) over a social relation, the working class or proletariat.

[4] FIRE = Finance, Insurance and Real Estate.

November 15–Dawn of the Dead

By now the story is well known: In the early morning hours of November 15, organized forces of the NYPD stormed the Occupy Wall Street encampment, evicting those who remained in Zuccotti Park by force. Those in the park had been “temporarily” ordered out a few hours earlier under the pretense of allowing access to sanitation crews.

In the lead up to the eviction, social media, email, and phones of those with any connection or interest in the ongoing occupation lit up with calls to come to the defense of the encampment. A similar attempt to clear the park under the rubric of “sanitation” had earlier been abandoned in the face of mass opposition, and there were hopes that this attack too could be turned back.

I had visited the park a few times before since Occupy began, and quite honestly wasn’t impressed. The potential of the movement, revealing itself in short bursts and in various actions, was visible from the beginning; but the actual camp in Zuccotti was quite limited. But although I had no desire to spend my nights in the encampment, I felt a real need to help defend it, driven largely by a deep-seated opposition to the egregious acts of the state.

I arrived just as the shit hit the fan, but was too far away to be hit by the splatter. The police kept onlookers, supporters, those who had fled the encampment, and even members of the media far away from the park—or at least far enough way to prevent them from seeing what was going on.

Most of those involved in the encampment beat a hasty retreat when it became clear that the cops were going to move in. A common theme heard amongst the crowd was that people should avoid arrest so that they could participate in the planned “Day of Action” on November 17. Still, others were adamant that their “new home” in the park had to be defended. For them, simply maintaining the encampment signified victory. In the end, a few dozen stalwarts remained as the police pushed forward, locking themselves together and preparing for what was to come.

Tensions ran high. A few scuffles broke out on the periphery as the baton-wielding police cleared Zuccotti and pushed hard against the wall of humanity that surrounded it.

During all of this and throughout the day, I argued to anyone would listen that it was a mistake to make a fetish out of the physical occupation of the park. I did my best to explain that attempting to maintain the encampment at all costs would in all likelihood lead to an undue expenditure of time, energy and resources (fighting matches, arrests, bail, etc.). I argued that it was necessary at all times to remain flexible, weigh our options, and not get bogged down.

The biggest advance marked by the emergence of the occupation is that it has brought thousands throughout the city, state, and even the world, into contact with each other, opening regular discussions and debates up among people from different ages, regions and industries. Though proponents can come under attack, this state of affairs cannot be arrested, beaten or evicted.

In the early morning, there was little support to be found for my arguments. That would change as the day went on.

In a short period, the eviction was completed, with everyone besides the police and clean up crew forced out and away from the park. Different proposals were raised, though none won over the crowd. There was a feeling of mass confusion. Finally, a group broke off and headed north, through the heavily fortified corridor, to Foley Square.

As the group marched toward its destination it was met by numerous police who apparently were stationed at their posts in advance, in anticipation of just such a turn of events. At every intersection, these cops would come out into the street with each red light, holding back a section and dividing the ragtag group into smaller and smaller pieces. As someone at the head of the pack later explained: “We were marching, then some of us turned around and realized there was no one behind us anymore!” One member of the media described it as “a very professional way of breaking the group up.” By all accounts, the slicing and dicing would have made a butcher proud.

Not everyone was a part of the Foley-bound group. In fact, the only sure thing at that time was that nothing was sure. Different people made different claims and proposals, throwing out the names of numerous locations to serve as the new center.

The biggest development came when a large number headed to Duarte Square, a small public space that borders a fenced-in, undeveloped park-like property owned by a church. By the time I arrived at the area, there were a few hundred people in and around the square, with a few dozen straddling the top of an easy-to-climb wooden fence that lines up one side of the church property. A makeshift encampment was starting to come together inside, and occupy banners hung from the chain link fence that made up the other three sides.

The majority of people were either standing in the public section of Duarte Square or on the sidewalks around the church property. The familiar drum circle appeared. There were very few cops visible.

As I circulated through the group, I argued that the location left a lot to be desired. It was obvious to me that locking yourself into a cage is not a good idea. For the most part I was waved off or ignored, though a few individuals did voice agreement.

The new focus for most became the enclosure. I continued to move around outside, looking for people I recognized and talking to many of those I didn’t. I wound up at the back end of the enclosure, where a number of onlookers had gathered. Suddenly, I saw it: a line of armored police emerged from a side street in military formation. Then another. And another. One by one the groups marched slowly around the square and boxing it in. Most inside the square seemed oblivious. Some of us tried to make others aware of what was materializing, but our warnings largely fell on deaf ears.

Those of us not willing to wait around for the inevitable advance made our way outside of the police line while it was still possible. We joined a growing crowd on the side of the park, watching everything unfold through the links of the fence.

A new square police formation then appeared outside of the other. This one, which faced outward, was meant to keep the small but growing crowd away from the “clean up squad” as it moved in. When the inside formation began its advance, any remaining doubt of what was about to happen was removed. Some fled the enclosure. Others set up shoddy barricades at the gate which appeared to amuse the waiting police more than anything.

Finally a group of armored cops busted in, easily hurdling the knee-high barricade and chasing down those inside the fenced area. Onlookers gasped and yelled as officers hit those trying to retreat with nightsticks from behind. One who managed to wrest a stick free from his would-be-assaulter received the worst of it, coming under the attack of several well armed officers. After receiving his summary beating, he was drug out of the square horizontally.

It was at this time that I began to yell out, over and against the apologia of one particularly unsavory toady among us. Unable to hold back my fury, I raised my voice loud enough to be heard by all, including the line of police standing only a few feet away. What started out as an outburst meshed with the feelings of the crowd, disgusted as they were by what they had just witnessed. To my surprise, despite making the sort of confrontational, openly communist arguments that would usually bring disdain, the crowd became electrified, audibly voicing its approval.

“The police are nothing more than the defenders of capital,” I yelled. “They defend the interests of corporations and banks against the people who actually do all the work, who create all the wealth that they lock in their fucking vaults.” The support grew louder!

To be clear, this is not to say we were on the verge of Another October. But it was certainly the best hearing I’d ever received for such arguments; and it was taking place on a sidewalk in downtown Manhattan.

Many individuals in the crowd, which was largely made up of people who had not had any exposure to Occupy before then, shouted out things like “right on,” “exactly,” etc. I continued on, saying something like: “The police will never defend us, never join us, never be on our side. If you’re raped or have your car stolen you’re out of luck. But if you’re a bank or corporation, you have this massive armed apparatus at your disposal, to enforce your interests at the expense of everyone else.” Cheers broke out. The police line that confronted us menacingly only moments earlier grew visibly uncomfortable.

As the raid wound down, members of various media began to approach me, attracted no doubt by my furious pronouncements. I was quite happy to utilize my madness to gain access to a wider audience.

I was asked to state my arguments by an interviewer from an independent news outlet and another from a French radio station. I restated my previous arguments regarding the fetish of the park occupation, the advance the widespread discussions and debates represented, and the need to move forward.

I argued for the need to connect the struggle to active labor. To paraphrase: “Imagine most of the students and even a huge number of office workers came out and started supporting this. Great, right? Now imagine the transit workers that drive the buses and subways joined this. Imagine the truckers that bring everything in and out of the city joined us. That would shut down the entire city. Imagine a replay of the 2005 transit strike that brought the city to a screeching halt, then add in mass support and participation by large numbers of unemployed people, people in other industries, etc.” The crowd, which had by then focused on the question and answer session going on, was nearly unanimous in their agreement. I heard more than a few say that such an action would be a great way forward.

The interviewer from the French radio outlet, who was clearly more familiar with such mass actions than his American counterpart, asked if I was calling for a general strike. I answered that at the present time a general strike in the traditional sense could be problematic due to the existence of a huge number of isolated, desperate, unemployed workers that would almost certainly guarantee a plentiful supply of replacement workers, and the desire of many capitalists to get out from under the workplaces they own. I pointed to examples of factories like the Stella D’Oro cookie plant in the Bronx being shut down following strike action. (The ground under the Stella D’Oro factory was recently sold at a huge profit to make way for yet another set of retail shops). I said that workers shouldn’t, and in all likelihood wouldn’t, take action that would effectively amount to firing themselves.

Instead, I argued that mass strikes in combination with workplace occupations would be the best way forward. I said that workers occupying a factory or other workplace could actually utilize the army of unemployed people by inviting them to come and take part, participate, and share in anything produced. Additionally, I said such occupations would have to move beyond basic demands and raise their sights on worker control of all of society. I was astonished to find these arguments again met with widespread approval by many of those around me. These high points were brief. Soon the square was empty. The line of police remained, but the crowd began to dissolve.

A smaller group of those most interested in what I was saying started to congeal. We started to discuss these questions and more. Most introductions began with a common refrain: I’m in debt, I have no money, I have no job. Most were interested in the occupation since it first made headlines, but only one had actually participated in it before that day.

Eventually, our small group made it back to Zuccotti Park. Not much was happening. A crowd was gathered around. The double ring of barricades was back in place. The park was now occupied by a combination of NYPD officers and private security guards, with everyone else on the outside looking in.

The exterior ring of the barricades was eventually penetrated; first by one, then another, then the whole crowd. Soon we could walk freely between the two sections. Only a portable metal fence and a few dozen cops separated us from the park.

In the hours that followed our little group joined up with a friend of Insurgent Notes and a few others. Some great discussions followed, sometimes bringing in interested parties who overheard our conversation. People came in and out. A large number agreed with my arguments, and a number of contacts were exchanged.

The police presence was large, but the atmosphere seemed incredibly free. From time to time, people would outright defy police orders, the crowd would turn its attention to the conflict, and the police would back down. Even more often, individuals would berate the police stationed in and around the park—calling them the sorts of things that would usually get your arrested, beat down, or both—and then went on about their business. The crowd was quite varied. The left sects were notable only in their absence.

Eventually, a police captain announced over a bullhorn that people would be allowed back inside the park, but would be searched upon entry. Expressly forbidden were the things like tents and sleeping bags that make camping out possible. A small opening was made in the barricade, and people began to file in. At this point, our group had greatly thinned out. I had been out for several hours and decided to depart.

Of course, despite the tensions and conflicts encountered throughout the day, things continued to function normally in most of the city. I was brought back to that reality after leaving the area around Zuccotti. Business as usual… tourists, workers and Wall Street parasites jostled for space on the crowded sidewalk leading back to the subway.

The real isolation of Occupy Wall Street—even on this day, with all its increased visibility, involvement, attention and support—was obvious. This was clearly demonstrated a few hours earlier at a Burger King restaurant across the street from Zuccotti Park. Inside, I overheard workers complaining about management and talking about their plight working for little pay in such a dehumanizing environment. Despite being able to see the encampment through the window of the restaurant, they made no connection between their conditions and what was going on. This is indicative of the situation more generally.

November 17–Day of the Dead

The events of the long-promoted “Day of Action” have been recorded by a large number of observers and participants. Walls of words, photos and video abound, accessible to anyone with an internet connection and a little bit of free time. What follows then is more of a reflection on the day’s events than a play-by-play account.

1. In the early morning there was a rally of more than a 1,000 people near Zuccotti Park, which was the starting ground for an announced attempt to disrupt “business as usual” in the Financial District.From the gathering, groups broke off toward Wall Street. Routes were marked by participants carrying flags that signified the perceived threat of arrest.The New York Stock Exchange was approached from several different directions, with groups emerging in various intersections at different times. All streets leading in were barricaded, with more barricades beyond them.

Where I ended up, the crowd forced the police to move a barricade back. The same happened elsewhere. Eventually, the circle had closed in from several sides and we were all closer to the stock exchange. At that point, it wasn’t clear what would happen.

The kinds of scuffles broke out that can be expected. Here and there the police would do in some poor soul, claim they did this or that, and then carry them off to a van headed for jail. In general though, the NYPD seemed more restrained than usual. It appeared they wanted to hold off the crowd rather than deal with mass arrests. Some barricade movements were clearly strategic.

A few small groups penetrated the barricades on their own, but they were all quickly found out and dealt with. Other such incidents found a similar end. Eventually, despite physical advances, the whole thing sort of petered out.

The motto of the action was “Shut Down Wall Street.” That certainly didn’t happen. But the street activity around it was surely disrupted.

The police set up checkpoints in the area, only letting people with suits and/or “proper identification” that indicated they worked in the area through. The rest were kept away.

Plans for “subway occupations” received a lot of attention. Train stations near Wall Street were filled with police and their specially-trained dogs, and officers also rode on the trains themselves. In the end, not much actually materialized in the way of protest activity on the subways. In a handful of stations, exits were reportedly chained open to let passengers board the trains for free.

2. Around noon I headed back to Zuccotti. It was the usual scene, though there was notably less pro-police sentiment than in weeks past. It seemed the events of the 15th had changed a lot of minds, and also drew out more who knew better than to think the cops were our friends or protectors.Illusions in capitalism remained, with more than a few arguing that all that is needed is to get “money out of politics” and “let capitalism work.” Any mention of class politics was for the most part unpopular—after all, “we are all the 99%.” But conversely, there was some rudimentary communist sentiment. At the very least, participants were questioning things, and most were very much open to discussion.There was word of student strikes around. Since the park was more stagnation than standoff at this point, I headed off, eventually stopping at two separate universities. Each had public student meetings that drew no more than a few dozen participants.

3. In the afternoon, there was a student rally in Union Square. Around 1,000 people showed up, mostly from a student march that had originated uptown. It was the typical rally for the most part, though the chant “students and workers, shut the city down” is not one often heard these days in the U.S.Noticeable in the crowd were a number of professionally-made campaign signs typical of the “full-time activist” crowd. This was an indication of what was to come.

4. In the evening I traveled to Foley Square, where the “big rally” was scheduled to happen. When I passed by earlier in the day, I noticed that the area had been cleared out, with police signs announcing a “planned parade.” I had asked many who it was that secured the permits for this rally, but no one in Zuccotti or the morning actions near Wall Street seemed to know.I arrived early on, with the first few handfuls of people. A stage was set up. In front of it, peace marshals signed in and received their instructions.As people began to file in from the subway station in small groups, they snapped up copies of the Insurgent Notes statement. Quite a few expressed their agreement with its calls for moving toward workplace occupations.

Then, there was a shift. Organized contingents suddenly arrived from all sides. In a matter of minutes, the square was full with thousands of people. Banners of most of the unions, joined by the distinct signs of pressure and front groups, flew high above the heads of the various groups who appeared seemingly from nowhere. And the processional activists joined them, with their ready-made signs, sound systems, stages, etc.

The left sects showed up too. There were all there; enough acronyms to fill up a bowl of alphabet soup, though it’d be as hard to swallow as any of their various claims to the mantle of “proletarian vanguard.”

The transformation was as obvious as it was speedy. Despite all attempts at co-option, the Occupy movement had remained well outside of the narrow confines of “acceptable politics.” This event became something else: another good old reformist funeral march.

The militancy that remained, seething under the surface, was drowned out in a sea of mediocre pressure politics.

Many familiar faces of the park occupation and subsequent struggles were sidelined. I saw quite a few sitting dejected in the grassy field at the back of the square, while the deafening tone of screeching “organizers” bellowing hackneyed old phrases blared out from the oversized speakers. One of the contacts I had made on the 15th who was there called it “a fucking circus” and announced her intention to get the hell out of there. Cold and tired, I decided to follow suit. The “regularly scheduled” march, brought to you by the SEIU & Co., was forced to go on without me.

After the parade ended, all but a few packed up their things and went home.

His extreme alienation can be contested only through a contestation of the entire society. This critique can in no way be carried out on the student terrain: the student who defines himself as such identifies himself with a pseudovalue that prevents him from becoming aware of his real dispossession, and he thus remains at the height of false consciousness. But everywhere where modern society is beginning to be contested, young people are taking part in that contestation; and this revolt represents the most direct and through critique of student behavior.

–On the poverty of student life

On November 17th, 2011, the Study Center at 90 Fifth Avenue, an office building leased by the New School University, was occupied by participants in the all-city student assembly in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street. The building was taken during a march from a student rally at Union Square to Foley Square in downtown Manhattan—where the march was supposed to converge with a trade union march on the Brooklyn Bridge. For eight days the study center was occupied and almost from the very beginning conflicts of political nature began to rise within the occupation.

The occupation was not a specific New School occupation, in the sense that it was not conceived and planned by just New School students, revolving around campus issues. It was planned and organized by the city-wide student assembly and had, from the very beginning, been seen as part of the city-wide movement. The reason for taking the building at the New School was logistical and based on the possibility of its success. The occupation, regardless of outcome, was an incredible learning experience. Most importantly it revealed the many different political tendencies at work, as well as where to move forward. It started in a very euphoric mood. Almost immediately, events were set up and coordination among the various student general assemblies was established. The space was quickly transformed into a educational social space for the entire city’s radical movement. Pushing it further than even making it open to all students, one of the struggles for the occupation from the beginning was to make it open to all people regardless of student status.

General assemblies were conducted immediately. Within the space there were daily general assemblies for the occupation, as well as the weekly all-city general assembly. The people’s university, which was previously held in Washington Square Park, was held there. Teach-ins were organized on a variety of topics, mostly dealing with the global capitalist crisis.

Overnight, the space was transformed from a space where the regular everyday life of student-hood was reproduced. A space where automatons sat staring directly, never talking. It was transformed from this to a space where discussions were taking place, on a variety of topics, not just explicitly political ones. But it became a social space where people could come together to work on projects, discuss topics of the day, organize other activities. The space was transformed into something different. People, who had never said a word to each other, from all over the city, were coming together and working and organizing, as well as organizing the day-to-day necessities of the occupation. A radical cinema was set up, with films running constantly, a station was set-up for silk screening and the making of banners and shirts.

The building was leased by the New School from a front company for one of the major banks. The landlord was unsurprisingly hostile, but his main concern was the fire codes. The president of the university, in contrast to his draconian predecessor, attempted to, take a very liberal handed approach to the occupation.

The occupation was never at any point total. Only the second floor was occupied. The security at the front of the building still had control of the main door. There should be no illusion that it was a total occupation with the freedom to completely recreate the space. It was, from the beginning, a negotiated space—whose existence and survival depended on negotiations with the administration. But that should not take anything away from the achievements of the occupation. Even in its limited form the occupation was an experiment; a temporary attempt at a different form of education, a different form of coming together and learning.

A few days into the occupation, the president proposed to resolve the issue by offering a gallery at the Parsons School of Design. The said gallery is open to view from the street and would make an excellent space for such an exhibit at the New School. The irony of it was lost on many of the students. The New School is an institution that uses some myth of radicalism in order to better sell its commodity. For an occupation to be taken and put into an art gallery said more than people were willing to admit. The offer also came with conditions. Most importantly that non–New School students would have to be signed in and that non-students would not be allowed entry, being the real point that changes the relation. The other was that it would only be open till the end of that semester. With all its limitations, the occupation at the original space was miles ahead of whatever could be done at this gallery. Now, there should have been no illusions that the occupation could have lasted forever, but to validate this new space was another matter all together. What was valuable about the occupation would have been completely missing from the new space. Even the educational activities would have been of a different nature. The new space would effectively turn it into another university event space no different from any other. They even put paper up on the walls so students could write graffiti without damaging the walls, as well as big letters on the window stating [“-uck capital.”] with the F removed. This said more than anything the nature of what was happening. This division brought out the real fractions within the existing student component of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

On the sixth day of the occupation, the president of the university called a “town hall” meeting to discuss the issue with the wider student body. Here was when the dissatisfaction of the student body became clear. This was used as an opportunity by the university administration and certain faculty to use the dissatisfaction of these students against the occupation. They were invited by some students present to attend the general assembly at the occupation that evening where the proposal would be discussed. The general assemblies being open to all, this was a vehicle through which an amazing display of bureaucratic manipulation and political opportunism was performed. It was during this general assembly that all the conflicts came to the fore. Students who had been hostile to the occupation from the beginning flooded the general assembly. Most of the people present, including many faculty members, were there only to vote out the occupation and leave. “For many of us the large attendance was a success, but very soon it became clear that the sole goal of the majority of participants present was not discussion, but a yes vote for the destruction of the occupation. The intention was to disrupt any possibility of dialogue and to frame the voting of the assembly in the manner of representational politics and parliamentary theater.”

The assembly turned quite aggressive and inflammatory. Emotions ran high and differences were expressed. Certain differences were apparent. But what were essentially political differences were once again obscured beneath the veil of identity politics. It was during this assembly that this was manifested in its most blatant and vulgar form. A number of students, from the management and business school, began to scream vitriol at the occupiers. These few students, who happened to also be people of color and women, were accusing the occupiers of being children of wealth (one even screamed that the occupiers were from the Hamptons.) Soon the debate was framed in terms of the space being occupied by spoilt rich white male anarchists. Never mind that the real debate was over students that wanted to be given a privileged place according to how much money they spent and those that wanted to make the space open to everybody. It was two different visions of the space. One of these students even stated that “Why should I pay $40,000 a year to let just anyone come and use this space?” Views such as this were held to somehow be more authentic and less bourgeois than the position that the space should be open to all in society and that the relationship between education and private property should be questioned and rearranged and, in so doing, provide a critique of capitalism as a whole. Once again instead of talking politics, the discussion became one of identity and background. The even remotest answer of any of these challenges only feeds into an already dead end. It legitimizes it by its very discussion. By this time an important factor in the occupation had been altered. By having the main discussion not be around the university president’s proposal, as well as the dissatisfaction of New School students, the occupation was effectively reincorporated into a New School issue and dealing with campus politics.

Something that was shocking about the occupation was how identity politics was used in such a reactionary way. The discourse of race and colonialism was used to defend private property. It revealed the worst excesses of the attempt to talk about these issues abstracted from the critique of capitalism. Although there was a great diversity to those who were participating in the occupation, it was always portrayed as something of a white man’s club. There was an illusion that everything was being run by straight white men. This completely ignored all the various women, people of color, queer people, etc., who were participating and making sure that their voices were heard. It was these comrades that made it a point to organize discussions and workshops such as the “safe spaces” workshop. For these people, it was difficult because while they were struggling to make sure the occupation was cognizant of their interests, they had to struggle with being made invisible and having their voices silenced. “Most who have had problems in the space have consistently returned, recognizing that the politics surrounding the occupation are not solidified, but are instead immanent to the space itself.”

Those who were opposed from the beginning to the occupation used this as a means to disrupt any support from the larger student body. A complaint that was often expressed by students who had some up and seen their study space transformed was “You’ve disrupted my routine.” This complaint expresses something deeper than what may be taken at face value. These people missed the point. For some of the student radicals in the occupation, alienating these voices was a source of anxiety. They could not see that one of the objectives of a strike or occupation is precisely the disruption of the flow of everyday life. It is a critique of this everyday life in practical material form. That is exactly the point that the routine was disrupted. This comes from the typical activist mentality that the goal is to gather numbers into some coherent umbrella and organization, and channel it into a form of struggle which does not cause the disruption and in turn the critique of capitalism at its daily experience. It fears that this approach which causes this disruption will be of some detriment to the “student movement,” which they hope they can build for some day, which never seems to come. Instead they could not realize that in a world of total alienation, it is important for people to become conscious of their alienation, and this does not come with the affirmation of that same alienated existence.

A cry that had become quite an important point was that of “alienating the student body.” While the writing of graffiti in many ways may rightly be seen as infantile, the obsession over it with regards to how it would appear to the outside, especially the wider student body, was revealing of many underlying fears and limitations on the part of many who were obsessed with this point. What many of these people failed to understand that the objective was not to have the space be a space for New School students, but for the larger radical community in NYC to have a space to organize. A radical social center in the heart of NYC was something that the city lacked. It was also an occupied space, that makes its own rules, and more importantly is confrontational by nature. As in most occupations, which are illegal and thereby confrontational, it is a reclaiming of space. Not only is the space transformed, but the people participating in this reclamation are also transformed along with the relations between these people. In this process, the space and the people within are in a constant state of becoming and transformation. Unlike the established society, in these moments the rules are not laid out. There is no blueprint, so there are certain excesses and contradictions. If anything, it reveals how ingrained the ideology of the established society is, that this became so incomprehensible to many. The horror at even the most benign acts of illegality, such as writing on the walls, or drinking alcohol in the space, were obsessed over and used by those with a fear of anything outside their control as a scare tactic. And this caused much confusion within the occupation.

The issue of safety within an occupation, especially within a space claiming radicalism, is of utmost importance. But this, in line with the conflict on graffiti, became a point that was used against the occupation. Discussions of people feeling accepted and safe were used to reaffirm a normalcy that just reconstituted what was struggled to overcome.

The plans of the administration worked. They were successful in using the larger student body against the occupation by manipulating their discontent as well as the divisions within the occupation. A vote was taken and the majority decided to move to the new space. A number of occupants decided to stay in the original space and not move to the new one, recognizing that the general assembly had been manipulated and used against the occupation. This threw many of the occupants who had voted to leave into a panic. Their biggest fear was that they would lose the student body’s support forever. But this was not an issue any more. For the struggle was now beyond the confines of the New School. In fear of their political opportunity being sacrificed, many of these elements who are either close to or members of some of the various left parties began a campaign of demonization of the students who had denounced the general assembly and remained. Accusations of vanguardism, ultra-leftism, and conspiritorialism were thrown at this faction of the occupation. This was clearly a process of red-baiting in order to save their own places in the future administration. But it succeeded it revealing political differences. It revealed their confused position. They profess revolution and radical thought, but in the face of something which they cannot control or predict, they retreat into the arms of the stability that they know. They chose to be closer to the administration and present themselves as the good and rational radicals as opposed to the unpredictable anarchists with their disdain for decency and private property.

These students include those who hope to gain future prospects as academics writing about their student radical days and hoping that events like the occupation will make for good publishing material. Then there are those that hope to become the leaders of the “student movement,” which will then give them good political clout in the future. Often these students are involved with one of the various left-political parties and toe their line. They carry hopes of resurrecting a dead form, which was decrepit even in its heyday. They hope to create the student movements of Europe and Latin America and in so doing wrest demands. They hope that in this process they can position themselves as being representative of “the political will of the student movement.” Their hope rests with the idea that this student movement can then attach itself to labor and follow the trade-unions into the sunset.

The experience of the occupation with all its shortcomings and contradictions was an incredibly positive experience. It is in the aftermath of this that we can better see our position in the struggle and where the fractures lay. For eight days a radical social space existed where a new type of learning was taking place. Where even if angry and shouting, people were having discussions that allowed them to think about the world they live in in a different way. It also brought people together, and even in the aftermath it pushed people together who saw that they had political commonalities that they may not have known before. People who had previously not known each other became comrades.

The manipulation from outside by the administration as well as the opportunism of many of the student “radicals” inside the occupation helped clear some of the illusions with regards to student politics. It presents with regards to the movement on the campuses the limits of certain activity, and the way foreword to move beyond into something else. The central division that has now arisen on the university campuses in the aftermath of the occupation is one tendency that wants to affirm a student identity in the hopes of building a “student movement,” and another, which sees its future only in the supersession of this identity, and advancing the struggle to a higher phase.

All these events have now laid out a clearer situation on university campuses throughout New York. The influence of the various student unions, as well as the various left organizations invariably are the main obstacle towards radicalizing the situation on the campuses. By constantly channeling the struggle towards appropriate means they invariably slow down the momentum of struggle that attaches it to the struggle outside of the campuses. The fascination with building a student movement is the hope of expressing its “political will.” This embodying of the representation of the student body is a hope to be in the position of mediator that can provide this representation. Like the trade unions in the work place as well as the left parties this role must be critiqued as well as the administration and the bosses. This activist mentality is what invariably points towards restoration before things have even gotten rolling.

At the New School, perhaps because of the pretensions towards critical thinking, the role of the left organizations is not as direct, but the same role of mediation which is held up for struggle exists through the various student unions and well organized assemblies. Some of these people are members of left organizations, but they don’t do open recruiting on campuses. Yet, many of those that still fall into this line ideologically (for this obsession with democracy and form is nothing if not ideology) have a presence. On the campuses of the City University of New York, the situation is slightly different, if not more serious.

This attack should not be confused with organizing on university campuses. The university is a major place where various forms of social reproduction and capital accumulation take place. So to organize at the university is as important as organizing at the workplace or in the community. But these forces build an obstacle to any meaningful organizing on the campuses, and turn it into a waste of time content with playing the same game, one that will hopefully teach the proper skills and lessons for a career in administration and management. At a time when the role of trade unions is becoming more and more apparent to workers, these students hope to build at best a large scale “revolutionary” student movement, invariably reproducing a form which has long been shown to be superseded.

The “poverty” of organizing around the student identity was realized long ago; to attempt to resurrect an archaic form is to attempt to play catch up with history. It is an attempt to get to a point that the working class seems to need to go beyond. The attempt to build an official student movement, with official representatives, places an obstacle before the real movement of history. The objective of the critique on campuses is to expose the manipulations and maneuverings of petty bureaucrats and would-be professional activists. To expose at all points the limits to our movements both outside and within the movement itself. The attempt to build a movement with a political will that can be clearly articulated, with demands that can be clearly realized, is to fail to understand the necessary flux of history, particularly in high times of struggle. Its results almost always amount to decapitating the real movement, in favor of an orchestrated one. “This method of organizing is one that they are unable to and refuse to transform when confronted with a movement that is against of any form of leadership or representation.”

They know that the struggle today is not in the affirmation of a student identity. Not in the struggle to liberate her student-hood, but to struggle against the existence of student-as-student, as much as worker-as-worker. There needs to be carried out a struggle that does not point to a self-managed democratic alienation. Where the alienation that affects students is not pointed to the increase of a few more tables to study at, or for private school students to struggle for what public school students have lost long ago. To do so is also to misunderstand where we are at historically. Alienation cannot be overcome through alienated modes of struggle.

The organizational question is one of central concern, the shortcoming of the militant is the belief that this question has already been resolved, one has only to realize it. It is quite an historical irony that those who choose to be the standard-bearers of a tradition obsessed with overcoming “trade-union consciousness” seem to do nothing but reify this consciousness and create an obstacle to going beyond it.

In Cleveland, in 1944, streetcar workers threatened to refuse to collect fares in order to win a pay increase–the City Council gave in before they actually used the tactic…This type of action would in most cases have to be taken outside the union, since few union bureaucrats would use such a clearly class-directed tactic, and thus of necessity the workers would have to organize this themselves.

–Root & Branch[1]

Wall Street and Beyond

For some, Occupy is a long awaited popular resistance to global capital triggered by its most recent crisis and aftermath. Considering the fall in the living conditions of the working class since the largely diverted crisis of the early ’70s, a mass movement against capital (though only a particular form) such as Occupy has been anticipated by many on the Left—since at least the end of the anti-globalization protests. For those of the pro-revolutionary milieu, the exact positive content, trajectory and significance of Occupy is a key question. Despite its varying forms, self-descriptions, promulgations and demands (or lack thereof), one thing is fairly certain: Occupy, with its rhetoric and peculiar actions, has not spread deep enough—into the ghettoes, the ruined towns and cities, among the marginalized, and directly into the sphere of circulation or the point of production.

The bureaucrats at the helm of the labor unions have paid a great deal of lip service towards Occupy. Despite the suspicious motives of these managers of a different stripe, the U.S. labor union movement as a whole has been notably self-critical over the past decade and has been awaiting a burst of energy the likes of Occupy for some time. It can be assumed that the slow decay of the unions and their influence leaves all strata of labor hoping for a resurgence from below, setting aside worries about its direction, cynical or otherwise, for a later time. Still, the working class, unionized or not, employed, underemployed, laid off, or informal have yet to find a galvanizing way of taking Occupy to their workplace or their communities, which is to say, they have yet to risk militant activity against austerity and the general assault against workers.[2]

Occupy has, if at a minimum, made the statement that the proletarian masses (i.e. the global 99 percent or some odd amount) have a profound connection against the power of the few. This statement has a great significance following four decades of fragmentation, culture wars, identity politics, and flight from workers’ identity. Again, at a minimum, Occupy has tried to transcend stale ideological, bureaucratic, institutional or structural forms with its general assemblies, “people’s mic,” abstention from electoral politics and lack of demands. The allusion of this latter ingenuity is those needs that the masses require cannot be demanded but must be commanded or simply implemented. So then, in line with this, the kitchen, library, medics and councils of Zucotti Park are executed by the grassroots of the movement. This core logic (as blemished as it may be in practice) and its attraction have substantial implications for those who look to the self-organization and direct action of the proletariat as the harbinger of revolution. Unfortunately, neither the working class nor the Occupy activists and participants have yet to make full use of this logic, let alone the rank and file, to their own detriment.

The Subway Connection

Transit workers belonging to New York City’s Transport Workers Union Local 100 exhibit a familiar sight in the 21st century U.S. labor movement: broke, angry, slandered, disillusioned, directionless and top heavy. Following the often perceived failure of the 2005 strike, which momentarily realized the transit workers’ power of threatening the symbolic citadel of global financial capital, transit workers’ participation and dues contribution in their union is at an all time low.[3]

What’s more, though once a hard hitting rank and file with untamable militancy, New York’s transit workers lack the organization they once had, the hope they once exhibited and the public support they deserve. In the midst of the current NYC budget crisis, an opportunity presents itself to the rank and file. Talk and agitation of a “fare strike” arises from the interface between the transit workers and Occupy Wall Street. That is, transit worker members of the labor committee of Occupy Wall Street have taken up pamphleteering with this new threat, as contract negotiations loom large.

This inspiration points to the burgeoning possibility of rank and file workers, in a particularly disruptive sector, following the latent logic (or perhaps an interpretation) of Occupy. The extent to which the TWU follows through with it may yield insight into the potential readily available in harnessing the same sentiment and logic that yielded such widespread support in the Occupy movement.

The history of the TWU is something of a tragic story, one of patience, rank and file militance and hope betrayed. The possibility of a fare strike tactic is historically adequate to the needs and capacities of rank and file transit workers today, especially in the present moment, as a result of their past experiences and betrayals after elevating the most radical rhetoric to power inside their union. The current frustrated state of the TWU members derives most immediately from the 2005 strike and its aftermath. However, for a more robust understanding of the weight of this frustration and disillusionment, and how tactics like the fare strike help contemplate moving beyond it, we must detail the sequence of experiences and the impressions they have left.

Brief History of TWU
[4]

At the beginning of the 1990s, the Transit Authority (TA) put forth changes to train operator and conductor scheduling that threatened seniority privileges. A slowdown spread—an easily implemented and effective tool as it reduces revenue while at the same time disrupting the leviathan internal economy of New York City. The slowdown was supported by the burgeoning reform group New Directions (ND). The illegal action lasted over a week and was finally successful, the scheduling threat was rescinded.

In early 1992, a long delayed contract agreement was announced which surrendered a great deal of previous gains. A foreshadowing of automation ruled the tone for the contract, offering cuts to wages and benefits for new hires in exchange for “productivity” bonuses for those senior workers. This pandering to seniority fell on deaf ears as the workers, to their credit, refused to help entrench a two tier contract. A “Vote No” campaign ensued; massive demonstrations, large marches across the Brooklyn Bridge, slowdowns and extensive communication resulted in the first ever contract rejection in Local 100. Through an arbitration threat and paternalistic second call vote, enacted by reigning president Sonny Hall, the contract was finally ratified. Nonetheless, autonomous rank and file activity, dissention and communication networks were set up for the future.

In 1996, the Transit Authority threatened to lay off 2,000 cleaners due to a proclaimed budget deficit. In exchange for a guarantee of their positions, “unorganizable” workfare workers were to be employed in a Clinton-era deal. 1999 seemed to promise good tidings as the contract was set to expire during the December 15th holiday season, giving bargaining power to the workers that allow shoppers to explore the island of Manhattan. With the MTA claiming a surplus in their budgets, the outlook for negotiations looked promising. The insults of the ’90s were building up to strong expectations and a loss of patience. Slowdowns and service disruptions led up to the termination date of the old contract, hinting at the workers’ power to shut the city down.

A mass membership meeting was called on the last day before the end of the contract. Thousands were in attendance lauding calls for a strike. At this meeting, the union local’s own Vice President read an injunction that the then-mayor Rudy Giuliani arrogantly contrived, claiming that Local 100 members were forbidden to strike or even discuss striking![5] Despite the warning, workers were livid and continued to support a strike call. After the meeting members marched to the union hall to hear contract negotiation updates. This powerful display signaled that the rank and file were teeming with anger and confidence. Despite all this, the president of the local negotiated a contract that sacrificed seniority rights and did nothing to deal with the Health Benefit Trust which was very obviously running out of resources. Due to a large wage increase and the passing of the prime strike season, members approved the contract.

Actions Speak Louder than Words

Roger Toussaint, a member of the dissenting New Directions caucus, was elected in 2001. This election signaled that workers were fed up with contract concessions and givebacks. Workers voted in the caucus that had the most radical program. At this moment, the Health Benefit Trust was almost completely out of resources and the union was lacking organization. Toussaint initiated a set of paternalistic top-down initiatives with superficial rank and file gestures. For example, he set up mass steward trainings, but in the end their training was simply to make them better union literature distributers. Also, Toussaint ruled motions calling for rank and file organizing committees out of order. According to Steve Downs, the “strategic choice behind these decisions had lasting effects on the local and limited how much would actually be accomplished.”[6] These actions would prove to be gravely prophetic.

Equally foretelling was Toussaint’s intervention in the strike of Local 100 members against a private bus company regarding their lack of a contract. Liberty Lines workers struck for a contract, but the strike was supported, then called off by Toussaint after only a day. Later, in the summer of 2002, Local 100 bus drivers struck in Queens. These workers were without a contract for over a year at this point. Some of their demands included greater employer contributions to benefits and job security in the face of privatization. Workers struck for five weeks but were betrayed by Toussaint who negotiated a contract behind closed doors that caved in on the job security question. The Vice President of this division led a walkout from an executive board meeting after he denounced Toussaint for hijacking the strike and caving in.

In the face of a budget deficit, the wake of 9/11, and a persistent health benefits funding crisis, New Directions captured some of the rage within the rank and file with the 2002 contract negotiation slogan of “Second Class No More!”[7] This slogan alluded to the fact that TA employees made less wages, had smaller benefits and were disciplined more than the other two transit workers of the MTA: the Long Island Railroad and the Metro North Railroad. The latter two rails were operated by predominantly white workers while TA workers were predominantly black and latino. Toussaint however, merely feigned a strike in 2002 while pushing forward a paltry contract. The sloganeering was sufficient to tap into the complexity of rank and file anger; the talk of a strike gave workers the impression of a militant leadership and the slogans quelled their distrust.

If the tension had reached a boiling point with the misfirings of the 2000s, the pot began to overflow surrounding the 2005 contract. Despite the obvious pressures, no mass mobilizations were organized, no strike preparations were developed, and no connection with “social struggles” were declared. On the MTA’s part, however, there was rabid warmongering. It stated that, despite its $1 billion surplus for the year, none would be set aside for improved wages. In addition, pension contributions would arbitrarily increase for first year workers. This outright disrespect was too much to manage; the executive board was forced to swiftly declare a strike. No clear goals were put forward by the leadership, nothing was rallied around; the union bureaucrats stood on the sidelines, half-hearted and disassociated.[8]

Solidarity existed across divisions as, although no picket trainings occurred, pickets went up around the city. The workers stood out on the cold picket lines with perfectly unified effectiveness; New York City ground to an immediate halt. The workers from different divisions joined together and discussed their grievances. Their goals were clear and obvious: they stood against disrespect, harassment, and “second class” treatment. They stood for healthcare, better working conditions, and a better life. Yet their goals and desires must have been evolving as they met and sensed their incredible power.

Blistering public relations attacks were made by the mayor, the governor, and the MTA; the public was left with a poor perception of the strike and an unclear set of demands; the leadership of other NYC unions and their own International turned their backs. Other unions found the strike too polarizing to give support, while the International directly betrayed Local 100 and stood opposed to the strike.

The executive board, with Toussaint’s helping hand, finally voted, after a mere three days, to end the strike without an agreement or any concessions-even though the power and effectiveness (i.e., in terms of participation) of the strike was brutally successful. Quickly following this, Toussaint agreed to worker contributions for healthcare and allowed wages to be eroded by inflation in a cowardly set of contract givebacks. Defiantly, the contract was rejected by the membership and only ratified later under “binding arbitration.” To add injury to insult, the local was fined, each worker was docked a days’ pay (on top of their lost strike wages), and the local lost the right to automatically deduct dues. Finally, Toussaint was jailed for ten days for presiding over the strike. The politicians and lawmakers would end the local’s militancy the hard way.

Toussaint’s involvement in the two private lines strikes showed that, besides him riding a populist radicalism to presidency, he was more interested in managing struggles in cooperation with employers than leading a powerful and aggressive rank and file-and an influential fraction of NYC (and therefore U.S.) labor. Toussaint led a current of the reform movement leadership that focused on taking power above all else, a strategy that time and again has lead to an upward drifting separation from the grassroots. For Toussaint, this drift led to his ascent to a bureacratic position as Vice President of Strategic Planning with the International, the same body that condemned Local 100′s strike.

Aftermath of Strike

Union participation and rank and file militant activity is currently at an all time low in terms of attendance at membership meetings and talk of striking. A majority of workers don’t pay union dues. This disillusioned majority of a once vibrant and militant union has had enough of the leadership’s chicanery following the called off strike of 2005. Slowdowns however, still occur with a low profile, striking at management without official consent.

Attacks continue, now harder than ever with the overwhelming spread of automation in New York City’s subway system. According to one rank and file bulletin: “In 2010, the MTA hypocrites laid-off 460 Station Agents (SAs), ‘saving’ the MTA about $50 million. Over 900 transit workers were laid-off system-wide last year, about 250 SAs on Mother’s Day weekend alone. Today, 147 remain out of work. Returning them to work is now a contract demand.”[9]

As the footsoldiers of nation/continent-wide austerity programs, municipal governments and economies all over the world are in a fragile state—no less with New York City’s economy—making the stakes now higher than ever for NYC transit workers. Further, anger at the MTA among the citizenry of New York City has reached an apex. Riders find themselves with drastically less service and a transit system that can’t handle a relatively small amount of disruption (as winter 2010 revealed). As for workers, the siege is on all sides as the MTA openly states that “any wage increases during the first three years of a new agreement will be offset by savings from union concessions and that wages will increase at only inflation rate.”[10]

Debt in Service

The heavy reliance on financing has, to many, put the MTA at the behest of Wall Street instead of being funded by tax dollars. Put best by the MTA itself:

The MTA has also proposed borrowing $14.8 billion—the largest amount in its history. Such a heavy reliance on debt would further stress the operating budget. Debt service would reach $3.3 billion annually by 2018, or 64 percent more than in 2011, and would remain at that level through 2031. These estimates do not even consider the cost of the next capital program, which begins in 2015.[11]

The accelerated financialization of the MTA drives transit worker frustration and system-wide instability. In December 2010, the MTA tripled its number of top Wall Street “senior” investment advisors, salesmen, and bond insurers. Bloomberg News estimated that Wall Street firms will collectively earn about $31 million in extra fees for their role in the MTA.[12]

Cuts in funding for the MTA have been a steady pattern amongst politicians, pushing the MTA to turn out bonds to private buyers to fund capital projects. Instead of publically funded services, the MTA can claim that its revenues are not adequate and turn to Wall Street for help. Further, this perpetual indebtedness allows the MTA to cut into labor costs and raise fares in the name of the mere interest collecting on its debts. Today the largest and fastest growing expense of the MTA is its $2 billion annual debt service. In addition, their current policy is to service this debt before all costs, including wages and the very operating expenses of the transit system of one of the world’s largest cities. The downward spiral of indebtedness (and full privatization) is accelerating: “the MTA has a funding gap of $9.9 billion in construction and renovation funding (capital funding) over the next 10 years. To plug the hole over the next 3 years, the MTA will sell a whopping $8 billion in MTA bonds.”[13]

The crux of the budget balancing and bond dividends falls on workers and riders alike. The MTA plans on increasing fares in 2013 and 2015 to help make up for their budget gaps. Pink slips, service cuts, and overtime restriction amount to savings towards another portion. They are counting on TWU givebacks and effective wage freezes (in relation to inflation) to make up the rest.

Fare Strike

Here, the novelty and timeliness of the Occupy inspired fare strike shines through. A fare strike is when a rider or worker physically jars open emergency exits or opens up turnstiles to make commuting free—all the while denying revenues to the MTA like a traditional strike. The connection between transit worker and rider here is a profound one. While, the station agent was previously forced into the role of cashier and security personnel, now the station agent acts in direct solidarity with the rider. In addition to the obvious cosmetic advantages of this maneuver—especially in contrast to the 2005 strike in which transit workers had poor public support and were seen as selfish—these workers are making a class connection in the statement: “We are both being screwed here!”

A fare strike would also be a slap in the face of NYC’s bloated police force. Ever since Giuliani’s heavy handed “Broken Windows” tactic in the late ’90s-early ’00s, “jumping the turnstile,” or getting a free ride on the train, has been comprehensively attacked. It’s not uncommon for police to haul people off to the “tombs” (i.e., central processing jail) for a night for this offense. Cameras and guards are always on the lookout. Often the station agent is seen as an extension of this policing.[14] In this activity, transit workers will be making connections with some of the most devastated and desperate working class communities.

Conclusion

With a history of misplaced trust and betrayals by self-proclaimed radical leaders, New York’s transit workers have had enough of the TWU bureaucracy and their empty promises. The slowdown has been and is an example of rank and file activity that rejects management and unions’ mediation alike. Most recently, transit workers have refused to haul Occupy prisoners, they have been seen stopping their vehicles while holding out union cards when they interact with Occupy rallies and they are participants in working groups of OWS. On November 17th, the anniversary of Occupy, scattered subway stations across NYC were chained open by anonymous activists. The current organizing and agitating for a fare strike by OWS involved transit workers stems from the fusion of rank and file militancy with the autonomist struggle and confidence born of Occupy Wall Street. The possibility of workers taking direct action with the “99 percent” has class-wide implications, however confused the sloganeering may be. Already these connections have been forged and are being built upon by the grassroots interface of the OWS labor committee and transit workers in the pamphleteering, whisper campaigns, and strategizing done around the fare strike idea.[15]

This exciting usage of a strike, in its form and content, drives together class interests—riders and transit workers alike—against the capitalist owners of the MTA and their political minions. Further, it channels anger at ubiquitous and amorphous financial capital towards a specific target, instead of an irrational hysteria towards reclaiming a “Main Street”–driven capitalism. Perhaps most significantly, it decommodifies transportation in the process. Whether or not a fare strike leads up to the coming mid-January contract negotiations, the tactic, along with slowdowns, will be a part of rank and file transit workers’—and riders’—arsenal against the MTA if it is accepted.

Notes

[1] Root & Branch, eds., preface to “The Seattle General Strike,” Root & Branch: The Rise of the Workers Movements, as quoted in Fare Strike! San Fransisco 2005, by Insane Dialectal Posse.

[2] Outside the posturing of November 17th, etc.

[3] Notably, dues are not automatically deducted from TWU members as a result of a punitive injunction following the 2006 strike.

[4] The following section draws from Steve Downs’s Hell on Wheels: The Success and Failure of Reform in Transport Workers Union Local 100, amongst other narratives. Downs’s work is an account of the failed reform movement within Local 100 which raised the strike-quelling Roger Toussaint to his presidency. As Downs was himself a founder and leading organizer of this reform movement, his short history does a great job of summarizing key contract negotiations, rank and file sentiment, and internal political machination despite its often obvious bias and political bent (i.e., he is a member of the left Trotskyist group, Solidarity).

[5] This was just to emphasize the already illegal act of transit strikes as outlined in New York’s Taylor Law, incidentally enacted following a powerful transit strike in 1967.

[6] Steve Downs, page 26.

[7] “NYC transit workers reject givebacks” by Harry Harrington for the Industrial Worker.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Supplement to “Contract Bulletin #22” by Marty Goodman.

[10] “Financial Outlook for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority,” New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Marty Goodman.

[13] ibid.

[14] Unlike in France or Germany, for example, where station agents, conductors and bus drivers often look the other way when someone does not pay, leaving this job to the municipal security or police.

[15] This article is intentionally discreet regarding specific references to people, parties, actions, and dates involved in the aforementioned organizing.

November 17th was an amazing day. A few things happened in NYC which my eyes could hardly behold. Hopefully, more of that will happen in the upcoming years of struggle.

I went to the attempt to occupy the Stock Exchange. The numbers were big: several thousand people at 7am-ish. The marches got divided into 3 or 4 smaller ones. The one I was at blocked traffic on Broadway and Pine, I believe. There was a mic-check style debate with 50 people or so on the merits of being in solidarity with the NYPD. While the debates went along usual lines of differences, I want to say it was productive and that there were many more people who wanted to have a clear difference with the NYPD. This has not been my experience in the past. Hopefully, this shows that political lessons are being learned. It seems that at least a 1/3 out of this 50 was against seeing the NYPD as part of the 99 percent—a good development. At the same time many sang the national anthem. I did a mic-check and said, “What would Iraqis have to say about the national anthem with lines like ‘Bombs bursting in the air’?” The crowd had no response. Contradictions; contradictions!

Eventually, we headed back to Liberty Park. What is amazing is that the crowd tore down one entire side of the barricades. Even more interesting for me is that when the police tried to push us back into the park, the crowd rallied and pushed the police back to the edge of the street. I have not seen anything like that in NYC before. My sense is that more and more people are getting confident about their ability to enforce their collective power. I would guess it is fragile and all that, but a different feel in the crowd. I certainly was slightly “high” off the last several days of struggle as well and feeling solidarity with the crowd.

Next, I went to the Graduate Center of CUNY which is in mid-town/business/tourist central. It was attended by 30–40 people. I was a little surprised by the turnout. I rushed over to CUNY-Hunter to see what was up with the strike. It was about 1:30ish when I got there and about 20 students inside Hunter were protesting. I was very surprised by the small turnout. Soon after, I went to Union Square. Very quickly, thousands of students gathered. I was pretty surprised considering how small the other events were. I passed out a bunch of Insurgent Notes literature. I was not able to get into conversations with people, cuz I was just in mass flyering mode, but pretty much everyone took the literature.

What happened next blew my mind away. By the time the march left it was huge. People just took the streets and blocked traffic. We marched through stopped cars, trucks and taxis. The trucks and taxis were in solidarity with us—rolling down their windows, waving, and raising their fists, and honking their horns. It was very powerful. One truck driver of color got out and giving everyone high fives. People rejoiced to see that happen. It was unbelievable to walk through all the various avenues and streets and literally stop traffic. The cops were nowhere to be seen. Eventually on one of the intersections they brought a semi-truck to block the entire road and some cops stood their ground to force us onto the side walk. People just walked around them and back onto the street. I could not believe it.

It was a powerful lesson. I have really had to think about what I think about militancy and I think I have misunderstood it at times. I saw that when people want to do something, they will just do it. I am also wondering what the NYPD higher ups were thinking. Maybe they knew rich Columbia and NYU students were attending and did not want to bust their heads so took a more hands off approach. Not sure. I definitely am against the idea that doing radical shit means you are a superhero—which sometimes the activities of anarchists and others reinforce. What happened yesterday was that many first time protestors did something pretty illegal, but it was in mass numbers.

Eventually we got to the Foley Square. Nothing too exciting! It was evening and I was exhausted. I went home.

Earlier

As many of you know, Occupy Wall Street in Manhattan was cleared. This is part report back and part reflection/analysis. You can check the OWS websites for a more play by play account so I will not get into all that.

I first want to say how inspiring this movement continues to be even with all its contradictions. My fundamental urge, no matter how many disagreements I have with OWS, is that it is on the right side of things, I still feel connected to it, and it has changed this country for the better. I am also being challenged by this movement politically and organizationally. I am seeing many folks with probably less radical politics make the right decisions time after time. And seeing folks with the “correct political” perspective become more and more marginal—including myself, cuz we have little to offer.

I arrived at Occupy Wall Street by 2 am after receiving a text message. The NYPD had closed down Brooklyn Bridge and all subway lines from Brooklyn into Manhattan except the R. I took a cab. I came from a meeting of Anarchists and Marxists on next steps for concrete organizing. The NYPD had created a 2–4 block perimeter around Liberty Square Park. No one was allowed to get in. I gathered with a crowd of 200–300 people. We were not sure what to do until we got text messages from communications of Liberty Square Park that we should meet up at Foley Square. At Foley Square, a debate took place over what to do next.

Take Back Occupy or Survive Till Thursday

I don’t know how many, but some people were very pissed that we had left the Liberty Square folks to get arrested. As the crowed and police gathered, I got up on a platform and argued we should go back and challenge the police. (Later, I found out 1,000 NYPD were at Liberty Square). I believe Sharon Smith from the ISO said no, we should live to survive another day and build for a general strike. While at the specific moment I disagreed with her strongly, looking back I think it was a fair and principled position she argued.

This discussion would happen again and again as we ran through the streets of Manhattan, being chased by lots of NYPD. One by one, protestors would get arrested by the NYPD. I saw maybe 20 arrests happen this way. Some of us would argue for staying around the protestors, but one OWS-er said it well, if we are not going to de-arrest right now, then we need to keep moving. What settled in for me was kind of a guerilla insurgent strategy. If we cannot hold the ground, and are going to be decimated by the police, then we need to keep moving and make ourselves a hard target to pin down. I get it.

I agree with the de-arresting. But it also seems the crowd was not prepared to de-arrest and for all the militant rhetoric of revolutionaries like me, neither was I. So practically that meant evading the police all night—humbling experience of rhetoric versus reality, very humbling. In that way many of the more probably liberal OWS-ers have a better grasp on realty and praxis than I did and probably many other revolutionaries. I would be cool for a militant minority of radical-minded people de-arresting, but there appears to be no such formation. The revolutionary left in NYC at this moment does not exist in any organized form. What it seems to be is a bunch of isolated individuals who have radical critiques of OWS, but no practical alternative or organizational form to demonstrate what something more radical looks like. In NYC there are definitely enough individual revolutionaries to form something, but it has not happened. I also am aware that there are tons of differences in such a broad term as revolutionary.

Lack of militancy

We got in a confrontation with the police around 6 am. About 500 people gathered a couple blocks away from Liberty Square Park. Eventually, the police said we needed to get off the streets. A crowd of 100–200 people gathered to stop the police from breaking through. We locked arms and tried to hold our ground. It was amazing how quickly the police broke through. It was also amazing how peaceful the entire thing was.

It really left some us wondering why the crowd was not more militant. It also left us wondering what the role of revolutionaries should be in escalating militancy. Some of the objective problems are definitely everyone is worried about the police cameras everywhere and the general seriousness of the NYPD. There is also the subjective problem that revolutionaries have no organizational framework through which to operate. Then there are the problems that the feeling of the crowd I get is definitely more of a liberal/nonviolence scene.

I saw some Black Nationalists argue against throwing garbage in the streets. I am not sure what angle they were coming from. Whether it is from a conservative place or whether it was a sensible assessment of reality. I talked with some Anarchists/Marxists about this question. If folks were really serious about violence, what kind of preparation was needed? Frankly, no one came prepared, but we are all talking about it rhetorically. I can agree then with the Black Nationalists about not being violent. If we are gonna be violent, where is our preparation? This is the NYPD, not something to be fucked around with. Look at the crowd. People will just get an ass-whooping and look like fools. It is a more complicated debate than liberal = nonviolent and revolutionary = violent. The reality is that in NYC, the revolutionaries talk about militancy and their militancy is throwing garbage in the streets: Fanon, the Panthers, and IWW’s legacy indeed! (Sarcastic, if it is not obvious.)

As an aside, and to be clear that I am not some bureaucratic fool about this stuff, I went to an anti-Nazi demonstration in Toledo. I don’t know if anyone was prepared other than the Anarchists who came. But a large crowd of Black youth showed up and threw tons of rocks at the Nazis and cops. I don’t know if they had a plan, probably not. It was a good victory against the Nazis that day.

We talked about Robert F. Williams and the Deacons for Defense and Justice. I focused on how it took a long time for the Civil Rights Movement to move from a position of nonviolence to something more militant; how that was a historical development being forced by the situation to develop that, and the difference between the heroic militant like Robert F. Williams and the mass involvement of people on more Pantherish terms.

Throwing Kleenex Around

Probably the most comical thing which occurred during the night was the sight of Anarchists, Marxists and other folks dressed in Black throwing garbage in the streets. Many OWS-ers got very pissed. It was the usual nonviolent and keep-it-civil arguments. While I thought the policing of the Anarchists was off, I have to say this was not very productive as far as I can tell. The only sensible argument I heard from Anarchists why throwing garbage in the street made sense was to slow down cop cars behind us. Although at times, it seemed throwing garbage bags and cans in the street was more of a political statement for some people.

Before I go any further, I want to make it clear I am not against violence. I am for attacking police cars, looting Nike stores, Macy’s, and attacking banks. I see a political point to these things. I can see layers of the lumpen and working class agreeing with it and participating. I have no idea who in society will relate to garbage being thrown in the streets. Again, I really don’t care about garbage in the streets. But the Anarchists make it a political point. I frankly think it makes the whole concept of violence and militancy look rather stupid. Militancy and violence should revolve around the sanctity of private property or the cops, etc. I do not know in what way throwing garbage in the street clarifies those things. It only reinforces what many liberals claim it to be: juvenile, pointless, etc. I also think that when normal people see stuff like garbage thrown in the streets, it only reminds them that this is young white kids playing revolutionary. My point is it raises no debate worth discussing.

I saw very nasty debates inside the movement. I guess my point is, if we are gonna have the debate, do it around something which has real content like the things I mentioned. But I just wonder what this says of the Anarchist/Marxist left at this point. That our militancy is reduced to throwing garbage in the streets—really?

What Has Happened

Regardless of what the New York Times and other media outlets say, it looks like the movement has been galvanized. While the numbers at night were much smaller than I thought. I think maybe 1,000–1,500 people came out to defend the park. By 6 pm in NYC, 3,000–5,000 people were at Liberty Square Park. I will say, I don’t think the rank and file of labor is heavily involved. People kept saying labor is coming and I did not see many workers. Most of the people I saw looked like students, former students, unemployed people who used to be students, etc. I mean workers were there at the park, but in much smaller numbers than the rhetoric about unions supporting the movement. I would say at tops 15 percent of the people were people of color, with Asian-Americans being the largest component of that 15 percent.

Also, and amazingly enough, although serious infrastructure is no longer allowed at Liberty Square Park, many churches and other groups have donated space in the area where Occupy will be running out of. It is an amazing logistical operation in that sense. There is talk of occupying buildings in the winter. I don’t know which buildings and the rest of the details.

There is a lot of excitement about November 17th. Rumor has it unions are bussing in people from out of state so the labor march is gonna be huge. It seems the November 17th stuff has reenergized lots of people.

Guess that is all for now.

On Monday December 12, the Occupy movement shut down the major west coast ports of Oakland, Portland, Longview (Washington), and Seattle. There were partial shutdowns or support actions at the ports of San Diego, Vancouver, and Long Beach, as well as in Hawaii and Japan. Wal-Mart distribution centers were blockaded in Denver, Salt Lake City, and Albuquerque. Other actions occurred in New York, Houston, Tacoma, and Anchorage. The Seattle, Long Beach, San Diego, and Houston protests were met with police violence.

These coordinated actions showed that the Occupy movement is still very much alive, the various rants to the contrary by the bosses, the mass media, and assorted leftists notwithstanding. This is certainly true in Oakland, where I live. The nearly 10,000 protesters who shut down the port showed that Occupy Oakland’s November 2 Strike and Day of Action was no fluke. The December 12 actions rattled the entire Oakland establishment – corporate Oakland and the liberal politicians and labor bureaucrats who for years have carried their water while cultivating a “progressive” image. And the port shutdowns up and down the coast have delivered a strong message to the world maritime conglomerates: the Occupy movement will rally mass support to defend the longshoremen in Longview WA against a vicious union-busting attack from a multinational conglomerate.

NEXT UP: MASS CONVERGENCE ON LONGVIEW

The Longview longshoremen, ILWU Local 21, are locked in a life-and-death struggle with the Export Grain Terminal corporation (EGT). EGT is a joint venture between three conglomerates: U.S.-based Bunge North America, Japan-based Tochu Corporation, and South Korean-based STX Pan Ocean. EGT just spent $200 million to construct a highly automated grain elevator at the Port of Longview. Although EGT signed a lease agreement with the Port promising that all cargo work would be done with ILWU labor, it won’t honor that agreement. EGT tried to hire non-union labor and, when that failed, contracted with another union, Operating Engineers Local 701, that is willing to raid ILWU 21 and to cross their picket lines.

EGT is using tactics straight out of the coal field labor wars of the 1920s. They hired private “security” (Pinkerton-like goons). They’ve enlisted the local cops to stalk, harass, and assault ILWU members – tailing them around town and even dragging them out of their homes in the middle of the night.

Local 21 has fought back. In the course of the battle in Longview, ILWU members and their supporters have blocked trains from bringing grain to the terminal and organized mass pickets to disrupt its operations. 220 of the local’s 226 members have been arrested. Both the Washington and Oregon state labor federations have passed resolutions supporting the Longview ILWU and condemning the Operating Engineers for raiding and for crossing ILWU 21′s picket lines.

This ought to be a central priority for the AFL-CIO, because if EGT succeeds in locking out ILWU 21, it will set a precedent for union-busting up and down the coast. The AFL-CIO ought to provide material support to ILWU 21. It ought to tell the Operating Engineers to either end their raid or face censure and expulsion. And it ought to build towards a general strike against the union-busting. But none of this will happen. AFL-CIO president Rich Trumka won’t take sides and he won’t act. Trumka calls it a “jurisdictional dispute”. Indeed, the AFL-CIO leadership – and not just the top leaders, but most local officials and staffers as well – have for decades bought into the “team concept” of collaboration with management. Fundamentally, they believe that there is no alternative to capitalism. Thus, when the system is in crisis, they try to coerce workers to passively accept austerity (cuts to jobs, compensation, pensions and social security, and public services). So instead of leading mass organizing drives, they raid each other’s unions as union membership dwindles to barely one in ten workers.

A confrontation is imminent. EGT plans to bring in its first ship in mid-January. So with Trumka and the AFL-CIO sitting on their hands, what can be done? Here is where the Occupy movement can play a role. On December 17, Occupy Longview, which has close ties to ILWU 21, called for a mass convergence on Longview in January to block the loading of the EGT ship. On December 21, Occupy Oakland voted overwhelmingly (123 – 2) to respond to Occupy Longview’s call by organizing a caravan to Longview. Occupy organizers are projecting well over 10,000 – perhaps as many as 25,000 – occupiers descending on Longview from around the West. And unlike ILWU International President McEllrath (who opposed the December 12 port shutdown by an “outside group trying to advance a broader agenda”), ILWU Local 21 President Dan Coffman welcomes support from the Occupy movement. This from Coffman: “On behalf of Local 21, we want to thank the Occupy movement for shedding light on the practices of EGT and for the inspiration of our members”.

In addition to the convergence on Longview, Occupy can support and help propagate the call from ILWU rank and file militants who are urging the International to strike the entire West Coast when the EGT ship arrives – and, if McEllrath won’t issue the call, then the locals and the rank and file need to organize a coast-wide wildcat. Let’s recall that in significant – although admittedly infrequent – cases, ILWU locals (and, in still rarer instances, the entire West Coast ILWU) have acted in defiance of the contract and the law to shut down the ports, even without the spur of community (“outside”) picketers. (To name such instances: the 11-day boycott of South African cargo famously saluted by Nelson Mandela; a one-shift West Coast shutdown to support Mumia; a one-day strike against the war; a shutdown in Los Angeles in solidarity with Australian longshoremen; and a Puget Sound ferry strike in defiance of injunctions.) Shutting down the big ports of Oakland, Portland, and Seattle got the attention of the world maritime industry. Shutting down the twin megaport of Long Beach / Los Angeles would deliver a heavy blow: Long Beach / Los Angeles handles 40% of this country’s shipping, nearly ten times as much as the Port of Oakland.

So we believe that the ILWU can win this immediate battle. But it will take far more to win the long-term war. First of all, it will take identifying the true nature of that war. Today longshore is highly automated and longshoremen are the highest paid but one of the numerically smallest group of workers at the port. Meanwhile, the most numerous workers at the port – the port truckers – are by far the lowest paid, the most exploited, and are completely unorganized (forced to work as independent contractors). There cannot be a long-term victory for labor on the longshore without organizing the unorganized port truckers. But more than forty years ago, the ILWU agreed to deals around containerization / automation that guaranteed high pay, benefits, and job security in exchange for allowing gross attrition of jobs as workers retired. The ILWU has been far too content to rely on this arrangement, rather than reaching out aggressively to support and help organize the port truckers. So although Longview Local 21 is fighting militantly against EGT and is reaching out to Occupy for support, the ILWU International shows zero interest in organizing or otherwise fighting for the truckers. Such organizing remains essential. We ought not to look to the ILWU International to do it.

Our enemies try to play on this weakness to exacerbate the divisions. Thus, from Oakland Mayor Jean Quan:

The people who are planning to stay at the port—do they have families who have trucks that because of the shutdown in the economy may lose those trucks? A day’s pay – $600, $700—could be the difference as to whether they can keep that truck or not.

Quan is disingenuous: most truckers clear less than $100 / day for a long day’s haul – often as little as $50. But she is poking at a weakness, and it’s one that we can ill afford to ignore.

Let’s be clear. Occupy has not ignored the port workers. Indeed, port truckers in Los Angeles’s Latino community were the first to call for a December 12 port action, when they voted to withhold their labor on this day, which is a cultural holiday in the Latino community. In solidarity with them, Occupy LA voted to blockade ports servicing the SSA shipping company, partly owned by Goldman Sachs. Occupy Oakland then joined their call and broadened it, calling for a west coast port shutdown in solidarity with the truckers and with the locked-out longshoremen of ILWU Local 21 in Longview, and to disrupt the profit chain of Goldman Sachs and “Wall Street on the Water”.

In the event, the LA port truckers were unable to repeat their successful wildcat of May 1, 2006, when they effectively organized a significant number of the more than 15,000 southern California port truckers to shut down LA / Long Beach longshore operations. Nevertheless, the successful port shutdowns in Oakland and the Washington and Oregon ports have fully focused attention on the desperate struggle in Longview.

But organized labor has ignored the port workers. And the Occupy movement itself has steered clear of direct labor organizing. It does not educate about the need to organize the unorganized, and Occupy leaders have discouraged efforts to educate internally and organize externally around a set of concrete demands that could speak to the needs of the unorganized and ensure that organized jobs are decent jobs. This leaves such organizing at the mercy of the labor bureaucracy. Can Occupy sustain and deepen a mass movement on this basis? Without at least discussing this question and developing strategy, the Occupy movement is bound to act as a large “solidarity” movement: engaging in episodic disruptive mass actions followed by weeks of lull where organizing slows to a crawl while waiting for new struggles to support and/or new occasions for disruptive direct action; supporting others’ struggles and demands from the outside. This leaves Occupy vulnerable to the nature of those struggles and the content of those demands. To be clear: I am not proposing that the Occupy movement as a whole adopt a set of detailed demands and set out to organize the unorganized. (I think that Occupy derives much strength by remaining essentially a broad united front under the general umbrella sentiment of economic justice and anti-capitalism.) But I do believe that groupings inside of the Occupy movement should do so – and that this should be a priority for Occupy labor outreach groups.

Lesson to the Left: Occupy Oakland Has Not Capitulated to the Democrats

The Occupy movement – and especially Occupy Oakland – has demonstrated remarkable resilience and an almost unprecedented ability to repeatedly mobilize mass actions against economic injustice and police brutality. Many of us have underestimated this movement. Leftist blogs are filled with statements like “Occupy Oakland is dead” and warnings that Occupy is capitulating to the liberals, capitulating to the Democrats, capitulating to the labor bureaucracy — and that unless this or that formula is followed failure is certain. If we are to be taken seriously by this movement – and, perhaps more to the point, if we are to understand it and help it to move forward – we need to first acknowledge that the movement hasn’t corresponded to the preconceived notions of veteran socialists. Moreover, it has far exceeded our expectations. And, despite problems, it continues to act independently of the Democrats and the bureaucrats. Indeed, its deep-seated, if inchoate, anti-capitalist message and its remarkable ability to mobilize mass disruptive protests have left the Oakland establishment dazed and disoriented.

In the weeks preceding the west coast port shutdown, the Oakland establishment engaged in perhaps the most concerted effort to defeat labor solidarity since the campaign to bust the Professional Air Controllers union in 1981. Perhaps the clearest signal of the importance of the port shutdown to world maritime interests was the decision of the Port of Oakland to place an ad in the New York Times (3000 miles away, but the home of Wall Street). The ex-radical, left-liberal politicians who run Oakland city government and their long-time friends and political allies in the local union bureaucracy rallied to the defense of the shipping and financial corporations. Recriminations were hurled by ex-Maoist Mayor Jean Quan (who ranted about “economic violence … a small group of people are going to hold this port, this city, this economy hostage”). Port Commissioner and prominent local labor official Victor Uno, together with his wife Josie Camacho (secretary-treasurer of the local central labor council), argued that a port shutdown would inflict hardship on longshoremen, port truckers, and other workers. ILWU International President Bob McEllrath, under a not-so-veiled threat of a lawsuit by Goldman Sachs (part-owner of shipping conglomerate SSA and a target of the Occupy movement), sent a letter to ILWU members warning, “Support is one thing. Outside groups trying to advance a broader agenda is quite another and one that is destructive to our democratic process.”

But their campaign failed, and its failure took them by surprise. The cops had estimated that at most 300 protesters would try to shut down the port. But more than 1,000 picketers showed up at the Port of Oakland to shut down the morning shift, and nearly 10,000 shut down the afternoon shift. Now, Occupy Oakland has organized the largest mass militant demonstrations in at least forty years, targeting corporate Oakland and suspending business as usual. And it has done it on multiple occasions.

This has dragged into the open the true role of the ex-radical politicians who run Oakland city government and their long-time friends and allies in the local union bureaucracy. All of these “progressives” operate on the assumption that Oakland’s well-being depends upon the well-being of Oakland business – especially the port, the developers, and the banks. So to them, anything that gets in the way of business hurts the people of Oakland. Thus, Quan argues that shutting down the port is “economic violence” that “holds the city hostage”, and City Council members echo the same refrain. Of course, in the context of the current, deepening global economic crisis, there will be no end to corporate demands for cuts, layoffs, and handouts from the city. The Occupy movement has challenged this assumption, and the politicians are ducking for cover. Their election has been based on their “left” image, but for years they have been pawns of the corporate bosses. Occupy is forcing them to choose: which side are you on? The labor bureaucrats, who have for decades embraced the “team concept” of collaboration with management, are caught in the same bind.

Consequently, cracks are developing in the “progressive” cabal, as long-time Quan allies hedge their bets. Thus, Quan’s long-time comrade Dan Siegel resigned as her legal adviser to distance himself from her authorization of cop violence in October. Oakland Education Association President Betty Olson-Jones, another ally and personal friend, supported the port shutdown (OEA was the only union to support the December 12 action). The local labor council condemned Quan’s authorization of cop violence against Occupy and declared that she is “on the wrong side of history”. Sharon Cornu, a mover and shaker in the local Democratic Party and the former head of the local labor council, resigned as Deputy Mayor. To be sure, they continue to hedge their bets: thus, within days of the port shutdown Olson-Jones was a featured speaker at a mass meeting organized to try to salvage Quan’s career; a few days later the local labor council leadership held a press conference to urge workers to “give the Mayor a chance” so that “she can bring jobs to Oakland”; Cornu continues to praise Quan’s handling of Occupy Oakland.

So Occupy has not capitulated to the liberal politicians. But neither does it pose a political alternative to this leadership. Occupy remains a powerful force, but its power lies exclusively in its ability to mobilize massive but episodic direct actions. It consciously eschews political action. Left unchanged, this will cede political leadership to one set or another of representatives of the bosses. Whether or not the Occupy movement as a whole adopts a specific course of political action, it is important that the movement at least understands the importance of combining mass political action with mass direct action, and creates space and opportunity for its participants to pursue this.

Lesson to the Left: Occupy Oakland Has Not Capitulated to the Bureaucrats

Just as Occupy has not capitulated to the liberal politicians, neither has it capitulated to the labor bureaucracy. It is, however, a fact that much of Occupy Oakland’s labor outreach committee consists of the old “labor left”, including several who have made a career of carrying water for and currying favor with the local labor bureaucrats and the “progressive” politicians. This is one of the factors that have caused many, myself included, to conclude, mistakenly, that the “progressives” had taken charge – or, at a minimum, that capitulation to them was well under way. To be sure, there are problems here – most importantly, perhaps, has been the tendency to overly orient to the labor bureaucrats. This came out most sharply when the Occupy Oakland leaders insisted on treating the local bureaucrats as equal partners in organizing an “Occupy / Labor” rally and march on November 19. They used the terms “labor”, “organized labor”, and “labor leadership” synonymously, and did not seem aware that except in rare instances the bureaucrats can’t or won’t mobilize their members. Thus, although a few thousand marched on November 19 – and although several labor officials spoke at the rally, it was not a “labor march” at all – there were only two or three labor contingents on the march, each of fewer than 10 people. This helped local labor officials strengthen the image they present to their rank and file, without mobilizing the rank and file and without in any way changing their long-term collaboration with management.

Nevertheless, Occupy has not capitulated to the labor bureaucracy. If one does not appreciate this, one cannot really understand the December 12 port shutdowns, when only one union (OEA) supported the action and the full power of corporate Oakland and much of the labor bureaucracy was arrayed against Occupy. Instead, the direction of Occupy Oakland’s labor work continues to be largely determined by the “insurrectionist anarchist” core that has been the power behind the scenes for all of Occupy Oakland since its inception in early October. That direction remains to organize mass disruptive direct action protests, and there is little evidence that they have altered their approach to accommodate labor officials or politicians. The insurrectionists are not about to capitulate to the progressives – at least not in the near future.

But while there has not been a capitulation to the labor bureaucracy, much of Occupy’s labor orientation has been to attempt to engage unions through the union leadership. The interests and actions of workers are not synonymous with the elected leadership of their unions, particularly at the International level. The Internationals, and many locals, are integrated into the Democratic Party machine and act as agents for labor-management collaboration, government ideology and policy in administering concessions and opposing militant action. Thus, as we discussed earlier, the labor movement cannot move forward without an aggressive campaign to organize the unorganized and to provide jobs with adequate pay and decent working conditions. This simply will not happen at the initiative of the labor bureaucracy – indeed, they will squash it and / or try to channel it into a campaign to organize some of the unorganized into rotten sweetheart contracts. It is very important to be clear about this, because without such clarity Occupy will inevitably “leave to Caesar what is Caesar’s” – i.e., to treat the elected labor leadership as though it represents the interests of the organized workers, rather than those of the Democrats, the state, and – at bottom – the bosses.

Originally published by Insurgent Notes

The Occupy movement took the country by storm, growing faster than the most optimistic revolutionaries could have predicted. For months we watched as strike waves, occupations, and insurrections swept the rest of the globe, turning the economic crisis into a political crisis from Greece to Egypt to Chile. For months, we wondered why the US proletariat was so passive in the face of the class war the 1 percent waged against us through budget cuts, crumbling social infrastructure, and layoffs that leave more of us unemployed while the rest work harder than ever in more and more dangerous and stressful conditions. What is wrong with us? If the rest of the global proletariat can rise up and fight back, why can’t we?

The Occupy movement has shown that we can. We are now part of a global class struggle that shows no signs of stopping. This struggle manifests itself in different forms and at different paces in different times and places. Even if the occupation movement splinters or dies out, it will likely resurge again in new ways because the global economic and political crisis shows no sign of stopping, and the movement has only just begun to give us a taste of what we are capable of when we come together and act boldly.

There is a whole army of Democratic Party operatives, liberal journalists, professors, union bureaucrats, and nonprofit leaders who criticize the vagueness of this movement because they wish to insert their ready-made political platforms into the mix, to hijack the movement and make it a battering ram to push through agendas they had already planned long before we started occupying. They are waiting for us to get frustrated with our own lack of goals and lack of strategy so they can show up and install theirs at a moment of fatigue and crisis when we doubt our own capacities and feel we need to be saved by the experts. Radicals in Seattle have defined these folks as formidable enemies that need to be opposed at every step. We try to differentiate them from less experienced occupiers who are new to politics and who cling to liberal ideas because it’s all they’ve been exposed to so far. We disrupt the former and we work with the latter.

A radical tendency has been steadily growing within Occupy Seattle, and this tendency is set on preventing the left wing of the Democratic Party from hijacking and controlling the movement. This radical tendency is very dynamic, and is not simply the “professional activists” from various Leftist sects. People who considered themselves a-political 2 months ago are now starting to ask each other whether we need a revolution in this country. People who tried to smile at cops 2 months ago hoping this would keep them safe are now wearing masks to demonstrations knowing the police are a threat to everyone’s safety. People who thought we needed professional, bureaucratic leaders 2 months ago now vehemently insist that the direct democracy we practice in the occupations must be defended by any means necessary against the bureaucrats who continuously try to undermine it.

If you scan the corporate Seattle media you will see repeated laments from liberal establishment mouthpieces, arguing that Occupy Seattle has gone off course, that it has become more radical than the rest of the Occupy Wall Street movement, that anarchists and communists have way too much influence here. They are generally right about these points; of course, they think it’s a bad thing and we think it’s a good thing. But how is it that Occupy Seattle got so radicalized?

Before Occupy Seattle broke out, there was already a growing radical political milieu in Seattle, which formed through the struggle against police brutality last year, and through creative organizing initiatives such as the Seattle Solidarity Network. Widespread non-sectarian cooperation between radicals from various political tendencies has allowed us to start developing highly public and accessible revolutionary perspectives, strategies, and actions. The non-sectarian and friendly vibe between our circles has made it easier for new people to work with us without having to penetrate through cliquish or arrogant borders. This is probably the biggest reason for our successes.

One reason for this non-sectarian vibe could be that most of the tendencies in this radical milieu are new, and base our priorities on the needs of the current moment, not on the fault lines formed by debates 10–20 years ago. The radical tendency in Occupy Seattle now includes Hip Hop Occupies, Black Orchid Collective, insurrectionary anarchists around the Tides of Flame publication, anarcho-syndicalists, members of the People of Color Caucus, Red Spark/Kasama, the anti-fascist /self-defense working group (see below), and a large number of newly radicalized activists who are still defining their politics. This radical tendency is much more proletarian and much more multi-racial than the liberal faction. There are also individuals from socialist groups who participate from time to time, though the socialists in general have been less connected to these emerging milieus.

Here I will outline some broad approaches this radical tendency has taken. Not everyone in the tendency would agree with these points, but they are an emerging general strategy that is a product of many discussions. Our approach has been to very publicly present revolutionary perspectives, demands, and strategies, to create a revolutionary tendency within Occupy Seattle that also expands beyond Occupy Seattle and is not confined by its framework or borders. We don’t insist that the entire moment adopt our political perspectives, and instead we agree to disagree and to keep debating it out. But we also don’t abstain from Occupy, simply attempt to recruit from it into separate projects, or confine ourselves to enclosed “radical caucus” or identity based caucuses, as important as these are. We are everywhere in the occupation, building it and openly demonstrating revolutionary ideas, practices, and culture. We fight capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, heterosexism, colonialism, and able-ism in every aspect of our activity. We also do not push for absolute unity within our own radical circles; we work with anyone who is a revolutionary against capitalism and the state, who is active in the struggle, and who is trustworthy. This means there is lively debate and discussion when we hang out together.

In terms of demands, we have several complementary approaches. One, we put forward very practical, winnable demands, but link them to the need for broader revolutionary change (for example, when the daycare at Seattle Central Community College was set to lose its funding our anarchists allies made a great flyer titled “Save the daycare, destroy capitalism”). The goal of fighting for winnable demands is to build working class confidence, but these alone can be reformist if not linked to a broader vision. Second, we put forward far-reaching but concrete and practical demands, and are very clear and up front that they would require revolution to achieve. For example, in response to transit cuts we demand free transit, no cops on the trains and busses, and a transit system run by workers and riders. Third, we link this to the concrete act of occupying key useful resources, taking them back from the system and administering them democratically. We do this by occupying busses and refusing to pay, or by occupying an abandoned house and putting banners out front saying “occupy everything—no bosses, no landlords.”

What we have avoided is demands that require us to take up the burden of articulating ways the system can reform itself. For example, demands like “tax the rich” immediately prompt questions like “how are you going to get that passed in the legislature, which politicians support it, can you get it on the ballot, etc.” Our approach is more along the lines of: “we want to occupy, strike, and blockade the flow of capital to resist austerity measures and budget cuts, and when we do the 1 percent will either get scared enough that they will hire their own staff to figure out how to pay for health care, education, jobs etc., or they will try to repress us because the system itself can’t keep running without imposing austerity, which is just one more reason why we need a revolution.” One critique we have received recently is that we should be doing more to inoculate against possible reforms or concessions that might be given to buy off these struggles. The system is in crisis and over the long run does not have anything to offer the working class, but in the short run it does still have the capacity to dish out selective concessions. We need to work on clear arguments anticipating future forms of co-optation, preparing ourselves and others to reject these and to keep building toward revolution. We chant “cops, bankers we don’t need them, all we want is total freedom.” But the system will not collapse automatically, and the working class will need to become highly conscious of the obstacles that it will face along the way toward total freedom.

What is most dynamic about the Occupy movement is its balance between

1. taking back the useful products of our labor (occupying spaces and resources without asking permission), and
2. engaging in mass direct action around broader political struggles such as fighting budget cuts, opposing banks, etc.

Without the first part, this just becomes another ineffective protest movement constantly opposing things but never building an alternate and rarely winning anything immediately useful to working people. Without the later, it becomes an isolated subculture intent on perfecting social relations within our occupation, camp, or squat, losing sight of the fact that this is not yet direct democratic communism, that the food we share is still grown under exploitative conditions, that our ability to participate is marred by the labor we do or do not do for exploitative bosses, etc., and this won’t change until millions of people come together to bring down the system—we can’t simply secede from it and ignore the rest of society. Radicals have consistently defended and maintained this balance, which explains why we are growing in strength. We have avoided the twin pitfalls of pressure politics (too much protest, not enough occupation) and lifestyle politics (too much navel gazing, not enough mass direct action).

Some of the middle class people who started the movement may have seen the very tactic of occupation as a form of pressure politics, though they quickly attracted large layers of people who are disillusioned with electoral politics and wanted to start building new forms of direct democracy, and are attracted to the forms of organization used to govern the occupied spaces (General Assemblies, workgroups, etc.).

Radicals here in Seattle recognized that the content is equally important as the form. You can have a perfectly developed facilitation process in General Assembly, with “progressive stack” methods to ensure that women, people of color, and other oppressed groups are heard equally. However, the occupation still exists in a capitalist division of labor where some of us have been trained in certain skills that others don’t have… some of us have been trained to argue and administer well, and others to cook and do caring labor. This division of labor is patriarchal and white-supremacist, and it won’t go away until we stop treating labor as a commodity to be divided up and sold. Also, the movement needs to be about concretely taking back, sharing, and eventually (if we occupy land and workplaces), producing, useful things for each other; it can’t just be about democratic decision making out in the cold rain. The chant “everything for everyone, the revolution has begun” has become very popular in Seattle, and we think it gets at this point.

Many of the first people to organize Occupy Seattle were downwardly mobile urban professionals (dumpies) who the economic crisis had dumped into the middle of the proletariat. The majority of these folks in Seattle are white, but not all. We wrote a piece summarizing the early limitations of the movement, emphasizing that the dumpies can join but they should not be allowed to use their managerial background to dominate, and other layers of the working class, especially workers of color, should be in the lead. Over time, the emphasis on sharing useful resources communistically and democratically attracted layers of homeless people who found direct benefits from being in the camp. Some have said this is a problem because these folks are not “political” or are not “active in marches,” etc. First of all, this is simply not true. In Seattle, homeless folks have been on the front lines, including in major clashes with the police. Jennifer Fox, a homeless, pregnant 17-year-old woman, was struck in the stomach by the cops, after which she miscarried. Moreover, this line of thought betrays an overemphasis on politics as protest, as pressure politics, instead of as attempts to directly take back use values and share them through occupation, which itself is political, especially if it helps the working class develop organizational forms to meet its own needs. Of course the danger is we could become a social service agency that provides material goods as the state does less and less of that—that’s why we need to take resources from the 1 percent, not just donate them, and we need to also fight cuts to social services while we occupy.

At first, Occupy Seattle occupied Westlake Park, ground zero for the WTO uprising in 1999, and a common spot for protests in the city. This gave us visibility. It gave us a way to challenge the gentrification that has occurred in Seattle the past 20 years as the rise of Microsoft, Amazon, Starbucks, and the biotech industry lured global capital to this formerly blue collar town.

However, occupying one of the corporate hubs of the entire West Coast proved difficult in the face of police harassment. At first the police’s response was passive aggressive. This is the post-WTO police force and they learned from their mistakes. They were careful not to use tear gas, baton rounds, or pepper spray which might prompt a backlash or might radicalize people by showing them what the servants of the 1 percent are willing to do to maintain capitalist power. Instead, they shined light in our eyes, made us stay up all night, and hoped we’d get so sleep deprived we’d turn on each other. These are prison guard tactics adapted for use in a public park. We made two attempts to occupy the park with tents, and each time the police tore them down with raids.

The relative passiveness of the police gave ammunition to the liberals who wanted to argue that police are part of the 99 percent, and that we should welcome them and try to win them over. We would not be surprised if their tactics were calculated to help shore up this tendency and encapsulate the movement. However, their strategy backfired to some extent, largely because Westlake is home to many homeless youth who joined the camp early on and took the lead in organizing militant resistance to police tactics. Radicals and homeless youth quickly formed a block together, shouting at police, and several times even pushing them out of the park.

This was the first emergence of a strategy which would become more refined over time—the radicals in the crowd would avoid police provocations to riot, but would engage in mass refusal to obey police orders, refusal to move, and open hostility to the police aimed at making them unwelcome in our space. These tactics seemed to build political confidence among occupiers. They avoided the dangers of a riot situation we and our supporters are not prepared for, but also tapped into folks’ sense of dignity, defiance, and frustration with the often scripted and passive forms of civil disobedience promoted by liberals (“okay, everyone who wants to get arrested come over here, we’ve told the police what we are about to do, they’ll ask you to move, just say no and go peacefully and silently when they take you”).

This approach lessens the division between those “risking arrest” and those not risking. It maximizes participation for folks who are willing to risk but would prefer to avoid arrest, which tends to be a large group. We are mindful that some folks cannot risk arrest because of immigration status, parole, etc., and we prioritize ways they can also participate without taking the risk, but for those who can risk, we have chosen tactics that encourage mass defiance and disobedience.

Each time these tactics were used early in the movement, it would spark open air debates of hundreds of people about the role of the police, which ended up raising all sorts of crucial political questions about class, the state, and how capitalism functions. Over time more and more people became critical of the police, culminating in a joint Occupy Seattle/Oct 22nd anti–police brutality march. Many of the folks who mobilized last year against the murder of Native woodcarver John T. Williams came back out. The crowd was more multi-racial than most Occupy events, and there was a spontaneous standoff at the precinct, several arrests, youth of color openly advocating armed self defense vs. the police. The liberals flipped out about this and kept saying we were “diverting” the movement away from the core issue of fighting the banks by making it about police too. Our response was: it’s about both—police are tools of the 1 percent.

The people of color caucus, anarchists, us, and other radicals united to pass this “decolonize” resolution in the General Assembly. It emphasizes this is stolen native land, we’re not trying to continue that colonial occupation, we’re trying to end it. When we say “occupy Seattle” we mean it in the tradition of militant workers who have occupied their factories from Argentina to S. Korea. A related motion to change the name of the movement to Decolonize/Occupy Seattle failed after vigorous debate. Most radicals use this new name regardless. When we shut down the port on Dec. 12th, the march was lead by a huge grafitti banner with the words “arise and decolonize.”

The radical tendency also successfully passed a GA resolution saying no occupiers should call the cops on other occupiers. This was an attempt to block the dumpies from calling the cops on homeless youth for simple things like drinking which could be addressed among us. It was a direct challenge to their class chauvinism. It was not meant to be an absolute prohibition; for example, we are not about telling survivors of sexual assault that they have no right to contact the state—that is up to them, though of course for many women, especially women of color, calling the state is also unsafe and an alternative needs to be built.

After constant police raids that kept shutting down our camp, we moved from Westlake plaza to Seattle Central Community college. This involved the radicals uniting in a faction fight against liberals who were undemocratically negotiating with the mayor to move to City Hall, behind the back of the General Assembly. The faculty union at Central supported the camp. It’s at a working class campus with many students of color, in a gentrified historically queer neighborhood.

This camp had its problems, but it did function as a base of operations to plan dozens of very dynamic, unscripted direct actions. There was a series of direct actions October 2nd against Chase CEO Jamie Dimon when he came to town, including an occupation of a Chase bank in solidarity with the Oakland strike that happened the same day. This was a major turning point in the movement, and a culmination of the kinds of street tactics mentioned above. Outside the bank we did a lot of anti-capitalist agitation—speeches and chants like “workers of the world unite, join, join the general strike,” and “hey hey, ho ho, capitalism’s got to go”. People locked down to do a hard blockade inside. After the police sawed off the pvc piping around the activists’ arms and dragged them out, people in the crowd lay down and blocked the paddy wagons so they couldn’t move. The cops responded by beating people with clubs and bikes and pepper spraying. This completely changed the crowd dynamics. The liberal neo-Gandhians didn’t know what to do, and the more radical layers of the crowd responded by holding their ground, refusing to move, and in some cases folks started fighting back, jumping on cop cars, etc., and pushing the cops down the street. This was not a black block action and it was not initiated by long-term revolutionaries though many were present at the front lines. It was led by people who had started largely as liberals but have become radicalized the past 2 months through previous confrontations. The cops and media are saying it’s the most confrontational demonstration here since the WTO.

Later that evening, a union-initiated rally against Dimon turned into a blockade of the Sheraton hotel, where the 1 percent was having a dinner party on the balcony overlooking the rainy cold streets filled with proletarians. It was like something out of the French Revolution. This demonstration ended with more arrests and pepper spray, and debates with liberals about whether or not to do the blockades.

One goal of the Seattle Central Camp was to spark a movement on campus against budget cuts. Efforts were made to hold student-worker assemblies, but not enough outreach was done along these lines, partly because so many of the organizers got caught up with other responsibilities, including dealing with drama inside the camp.

The very first night we were there, some Neo-Nazis came into the camp with “hail hitler” tattoos on their chin, doing Nazi salutes. They left bleeding. Neo-Gandhian liberals laid hands on anti-fascist militants to try to stop them from intervening. This put people at risk by immobilizing them so the Nazis could have attacked them, so some of the anti-fascist activists threw them to the ground. Some of the liberals chanted “om,” hoping the Nazis would go away. After this, a multi-tendency antifascist working group formed that patrols the camp every night. This event has lead to ongoing debates about nonviolence vs. diversity of tactics, and some liberal static about defending Nazis’ free speech rights.

There was ongoing tension in the camp, including lots of misogyny and rape culture, as well as drug abuse and constant fights. The liberals were incompetent at handling this and many of them acted as enablers by refusing to use the necessary force to remove people from the camp whose behavior had become a clear threat to other people. They blocked radicals most times that we tried to intervene forcefully to defend ourselves, especially when we tried to intervene to confront misogynistic behavior. Eventually, a few of the liberals from the official “Peace and Safety” committee started working with us because they saw how destructive and ineffective their policies were.

Many of these security problems were blamed on homeless people. The reality is they are coming from homeless and housed folks alike. The problem is with violent, oppressive behavior, not with poor people. We have been especially adamant about this when we have heard anti-homeless rhetoric from union staff people who come down to the camp. We emphasize that these Occupy camps are new form of the ’30s Unemployed Councils; they are organizations that provide immediate needs while fighting militantly against the system. Workers and unemployed folks need to unite. If workers want to win any workplace struggles, they should be working with homeless folks to build flying squad pickets to back up their own job actions, and they should also be fighting for unemployed folks’ own demands and needs, not just theirs. Let’s make it like the Toledo Auto-Lite strike in the ’30s.

At least now, dumpies are not the only class layer defining the primary public face of the movement. Now we need to focus on how to reach more employed proletarians from deeper layers of the class, and unemployed but housed folks from the neighborhoods. House occupations and anti-eviction campaigns could be the next step.

The Seattle Central Community College administration over-exaggerated these problems in the camp in order to justify kicking Decolonize/Occupy Seattle off campus, which happened in early November. A professor refuted their claims in a recent article. Many people got tired of the drama in the camp, or sick becuase of the cold, and stopped staying there. Instead of focusing on defending the camp, militants have been focused on occupying buildings. An abandoned house was occupied in the Central District, a historically Black neighborhood. It was a combined effort of anarchists, Black organizers from the neighborhood, and homeless youth. The message of this occupation was an attempt to fight gentrification in the neighborhood, and an expression of the contradiction between the use value of housing and its exchange value under capitalism. Their simple media statement, scrawled in marker on the wall reads: “There are abandoned houses. There are homeless people. This makes no sense.”

Several hundred folks from Decolonize/Occupy Seattle also attempted to take over an abandoned warehouse in Capitol Hill. Immediately upon occupying the space, folks began cleaning it up, painting the walls with beautiful murals, holding some of the most civil and thoughtful General Assemblies so far, barricading doors, etc. Notably, radicals initiated this action, but liberals supported and actively helped build it. In the early morning hours, a SWAT team raided the place through the roof and kicked everyone out, leading to a number of arrests.

Finally, Occupy Seattle voted unanimously to support and build the West Coast Port Shutdown action on Dec. 12th. This was a coordinated response to the coordinated police repression against the movement, and an attempt to shut down Wall Street on the waterfront as retaliation for the austerity measures that the capitalists have been pushing. It was also a labor solidarity action with port truck drivers who face racism, poverty wages, and unsafe conditions, as well as ILWU members who sabotaged grain shipments in Longview, WA, after multinational conglomerate EGT attempted to run a grain terminal there without their labor.

Our messaging and reasons for shutting down the port can be found here. Locally, we linked this action to the struggle against Democratic Governor Christine Gregoire’s devastating proposed cuts to social services, education, and health care. Here is a selection from the document cited above, explaining why we shut down the port:

1. We will shut down the port to resist the budget cuts that target working class people. The 1 percent are confident they can cut our health care, education, food aid, and social services because they think we won’t fight back. They are wrong. If they cut our safety net to pieces, we will cut their profits. The port is a major source of profits for the 1 percent, especially during the holiday season when they ship goods produced by Asian workers under horrible labor conditions to American malls where increasingly broke workers buy holiday presents on credit, worried about whether we will lose our jobs, food stamps, or health care. We are tired of worrying, so now we are fighting back. A port shutdown will hit the 1 percent directly in their wallets. Happy Holidays you scrooges.
2. We will shut down the port to bypass the corporate-controlled politicians and confront the 1 percent who really call the shots. In December, some members of Occupy Seattle will be occupying the Capitol building; the rest of us here in Seattle will occupy capital: the port facilities of transnational corporations. Together, we fight against the same cuts. Capital means the machines, trucks, ships, stores, cafes, hospitals, etc.—all the things the corporations own, which we work on to make their profits. One of their biggest pieces of capital is the port of Seattle. We know the 1 percent controls the politicians who are cutting the working class’s standard of living. So instead of begging politicians to stop cutting us, we’ll do what our friends did when they occupied Wall Street and go straight to the source of the problem: the capitalists. The ports are Wall Street on the waterfront—without them running, Wall Street makes no profits. If they cut our livelihoods, we will cut their profits.

A very solid team of organizers came together to do outreach at schools, welfare offices, bus stops, university campuses, etc. We leafleted regularly to port truckers and to rank and file long-shore workers, asking them to honor our picket line in solidarity. The action really helped solidify and expand the radical tendency that has been growing in Seattle all fall.

There is some confusion out there about our relationship with the ILWU. There is too much to comment on to really do it justice in this piece. We are working on a critical reflection piece analyzing the Dec. 12th action; this will be published shortly here.

To summarize, the action was independent from the ILWU but we did seek advice from friends who are rank and file long-shore workers. This may have not been clear to the rest of the country, but we were asking the rank and file long-shore workers to honor our independent picket line which we were putting up for our own reasons—the action was not primarily an ILWU solidarity action. We certainly expressed solidarity with rank and file workers in Longview, but this was not the only reason to shut it down. We were also doing it directly in solidarity with immigrant truck drivers, who showed a lot of support during the action by honking their horns, throwing up peace signs, etc. We made it clear we had our own reasons for doing this action, which we were expecting ILWU rank and file workers to respect:

By building this solidarity, Occupy Seattle will show that we also are part of the workers’ movement. Because the 1 percent uses repressive labor laws and union busting firms to disrupt organizing efforts, only 11 percent of US workers are organized into labor unions. On December 12th, Occupy Seattle will take a stand to defend our right to organize on the job. We also recognize that the U.S. working class is starting to get organized in the Occupy movement, which makes us part of the workers’ movement. Many who are involved in the Occupy movement are members of unions. Many of us also make up the remaining 89 percent of U.S. workers who are not in unions, as well as the large sections of the U.S. working class who are unemployed, underemployed, students, and homeless. Our picket lines might not have the same legal standing as official union picket lines, but when the unions first started picketing back in the day they were also considered illegitimate. Occupy Seattle’s picket lines are still picket lines organized by working class people, in solidarity with fellow workers. December 12th is the first of many actions that Occupy will take as a new wing of the workers’ movement.

Here is an article written by several friends from Decolonize/Occupy Seattle who were closely involved with organizing for the December 12th West Coast Port Shut Down describing what happened here on the 12th:

SEATTLE, Wash—Monday, December 12th, Occupy protesters and allies shut down several major ports along the West Coast. In Seattle, we stopped all evening work at Terminals 18 and 5, causing millions in profit loss to major corporations Stevedoring Services of America, American President Line, and Eagle Marine Services.

Yesterday’s actions drew a wide swath of the 99 percent. Protesters of all ages demonstrated, and people of color turned out in large numbers. The protests included a coordinated city-wide high school walkout, a rally emceed by Hip Hop Occupies, and a three mile march to the ports. The shutdown was organized by members of Occupy Seattle in solidarity with Occupy Oakland and with the struggles of LA, Oakland, and Seattle port truckers and Longview long-shore workers. Occupy Seattle’s People of Color caucus produced need-to-know guides for the action.

The shutdown was solidly an Occupy action, funded by the heartfelt donations of occupiers and their supporters, and a hefty donation from Occupy Oakland. We received absolutely no material support from any union. This was a direct action in the truest sense of the term: it was rapid-fire, organized on a shoestring budget, bypassed stalling bureaucracy, and mobilized the energy of an inspired community united against economic injustice.

The actions were planned with special attention to the long tradition of democracy and direct action within the ILWU. We picketed Terminals 18 and 5 in light of the longstanding ILWU principle of respecting other pickets. Union policy dictates that if arbitrators rule that picket lines are too dangerous to cross, ILWU workers will be compensated for the work they missed. The protests were wildly successful. Truck drivers and port workers repeatedly expressed support for the protesters, waving and honking as they passed.

Terminal 18—the Port of Seattle’s largest and busiest terminal—was the first to be shut down. Protesters took the main intersection, swiftly forming a blockade of roadside debris to stop the incoming shift, while redirecting outgoing traffic onto one lane. This effectively blocked three gates, while the fourth had been shut down by the port in anticipation of the action. The Seattle Police Department, not protesters, temporarily stopped workers and truckers from leaving the port by forming a bike chain as protesters yelled at them to “let the trucks through.”

Under pressure from protesters, police backed away, but later stopped traffic once again, stating that they were trying to clear the road for police convoys to enter. In solidarity with the protesters, the truckers honked their horns loudly and persistently, and the frustrated calls of the crowd forced the cops back off the road. Occupiers then continued to direct traffic out of the port, delivering flyers of Scott Olsen’s statement to drivers as they passed (see below).

At 5 PM reports came that ILWU workers were not being called in to work at Terminal 18 and that no long-shore work would be done on Harbor Island that shift. The terminal was shut down for the evening.

Protesters then proceeded to Terminal 5, the location of the Port’s only other ship that day, chanting “Whose Ports / Our Ports.” Approximately one hundred protesters formed a human barricade and moving picket line at the terminal gate, while another hundred stood by in support.

Some protesters who remained at Terminal 18 were herded onto the sidewalk. When they tried to maintain the blockade, conflict escalated. The police used pepper spray and flash grenades to disperse protesters, in one case forcibly pulling back the head of a protester to spray him in the face. A few protesters flung road flares and a bag of paint at the police in retaliation. In the resulting chaos, a number of protesters were arrested.

The crowd of Terminal 18 dissipated and joined Terminal 5. After two hours of picketing, the union arbitrator once again ruled in favor of protesters, calling off work at the terminal.

The Occupy Movement Strikes Back

Many of us showed up to this action having learned from the experiences we’ve had in the short months since we began assembling together. Having previous engagements with the police, we knew to protect ourselves. Legal observers and medics were interspersed through the crowd, and the majority brought bandannas and scarves to cover their noses against flash bombs and other chemical weapons utilized by the police. Some of us sported the goggles that we learned to use after pepper spray incapacitated activists during the march on Chase Bank.

Occupy Seattle’s action was one of the last in the day, following successful port shutdowns in Longview, Portland, Oakland, and other places. A hundred of our friends in Bellingham continued to break the flow of capital by protesting on the railroads, some locking themselves to the tracks in defiance. Solidarity was extended to us even from Japan, where the International Labor Solidarity Committee of Doro-Chiba made a statement of support. We send our sincere thanks to Oakland and Portland for extending their protests in response to the police aggression in Seattle that left several of our friends with stinging eyes, bruised faces, and ringing ears. We extend our support and love to Houston and San Diego, where the police have used similarly aggressive tactics.

Today, we stand in solidarity with the unemployed, the underemployed, the incarcerated, and the 89 percent of the working class who don’t belong to unions. We stand in solidarity with students protesting education cutbacks and rising debts, with low-wage workers protesting union-busting, with those facing foreclosure, and with the unemployed. We believe that a workers’ movement does not merely belong to the unionized, nor does it recognize imposed political borders. This is the building of a new movement. We rise from our roots in the labor movement, the civil rights movement, and anti-colonial struggles across the world.”

We see this action as a success, and as a first step in building a class struggle that can go beyond the limits of 20th century trade unionism. We are organizing now to follow up and expand on these struggles. There are other points that need to be celebrated, and several self-criticisms we’d like to raise about this action, but those will have to wait for our upcoming analytical piece.

Related articles

• Decolonize Seattle vs. Occupy, or, now that it’s over here are my thoughts (losthighwaytimes.com)
• Factions That Endorse Violence Are Driving Away What’s Left of Occupy Seattle (slog.thestranger.com)
• Editorial: Should We Occupy or Decolonize? (theindustrycosign.wordpress.com)

Blue-light Baltimore

Anyone taking the south-bound night train into Baltimore glimpses a memorable vista as the train comes into the city, passing blocks of boarded up row houses and desolate streets on the city’s working class east side. Stretching across the horizon as far as the eye can see is an arc of flashing blue lights, like those on a police car. The lights are portable police cameras mounted on lamp posts throughout the inner city, designed to dissuade drug dealing. But as everyone knows, in reality it’s just a charade of cat-and -mouse, pushing the dealing a few blocks off before it returns once the cameras shift again; a charade that has gone on for years now with no discernible effect. “Blue light Baltimore” is more than a metaphor, however; it’s a lived reality for much of the city and a sign of the depth of social crisis already embedded here before the collapse of the 2008 spun into recession without end.

Baltimore was one of the hardest hit cities in the early days of the subprime mortgage crisis, a situation well captured in the documentary American Casino.

Predatory lending by national banks like Wells Fargo in neighborhoods such as Belair-Edison and Sandtown pushed up to one third of housing in some stage of foreclosure, a situation that caused the city in a failed attempt to sue Wells Fargo for intentionally targeting minority neighborhoods. But except for a few abortive attempts in the early stage of the housing market crisis by the now-defunct ACORN (Associated Communities Organized for Reform Now) to symbolically occupy houses, few protested. Instead, people internalized foreclosure as personal failure and private shame.

I remember attending a conference a couple years ago put on by mainstream community groups working on foreclosure issues. Social workers and organizers were puzzled why, despite intense outreach efforts, no one was coming in for help. One organizer spoke about foreclosure avoidance services at a local church and afterwards the minister came up and whispered to her privately how his family was being foreclosed. But—and this is key—he was too ashamed to mention it publicly in front of his congregation. As a result of this collective denial, people moved out at night without saying anything to neighbors, thereby avoiding the humiliation of public eviction when the Sheriff came. In American Casino few interviewed losing their home to foreclosure, even those who were most conscious of how they were being screwed over by banks, saw their private suffering as a collective problem open to collective action. While people understood all too well the systemic roots and injustices behind their personal tragedies, most could in the end only envision personal solutions as the way out.

Holding On and Making Do

Up until now, this resort to personal solutions has been the main response to the current crisis here. Many of the survival strategies pointed out in the Insurgent Notes article by Henri Simon in issue #1 are the new norm—or extensions of old survival techniques. Others can be added, such as income maximizing strategies providing under the table services that indirectly depend on tapping state funding, such as setting up informal day care centers and assisted living homes for welfare and Social Security check recipients. Skilled trade workers such as roofers, carpenters, and electricians secretly do side jobs at lower prices on company time using company tools and equipment for inner-city working class households; a case of workers not only recuperating their labor power but also a situation where what on the surface looks likes individual survival also demonstrates an underlying sense of collective solidarity with others. When I asked an acquaintance, a 57-year-old Black drywall worker who was forced to move back to a trailer in rural Virginia, partly because of personal problems and partly because of the collapse of the construction industry, how he survived, he wrote back:

Thank God, my home and acreage has been paid off for years so I only have to pay personal property taxes. I did grow weed the first two years that I was back home but I broke the addiction to dealing because of fear of being detected by the younger violent dealers and rip off boys. People who knew me in my younger years started becomlng suspicious of me doing something since there was no construction going on. I live (very) simple because my savings have dropped drastically. I sold my Home Depot, Diebold, AFLAC and Exxon stock in that order. I mistakenly thought that I was going to get some drywall contracts somewhere with the many contacts that I have in different states. I did not think that it was going to get this bad. I hide funds so that I can qualify for food stamps and fuel assistance. I have had some drywall work since I have been home and I used to return to the D.C. area often to do work for clients that have known me for years.

In a city like Baltimore where the drug trade is a major employer of last resort, it’s impossible to accurately gauge what role this sector plays in providing or supplementing income for many people unable to get jobs or earn adequate income in the formal economy. The visible drug markets on the corners, the targets of the “blue lights,” are just the tip of a larger iceberg that extends underneath, influencing and conditioning (mostly negatively) facets of social life, everyday interactions and extension of trust. Besides the direct distributing and street corner drug sales, the drug economy generates secondary and tertiary ripple effects on the local economy and individual income strategies too. A woman I used to give rides to after school, a former heroin addict, cut off social services but still getting Medicaid, used legally obtained Oxycontin to barter child care services from neighbors and friends. Another woman I used to work with set up a hair salon on weekends in her basement to cut drug dealers’ hair, saying she made more money in a few hours than she did all week working.

This reliance on various individual survival strategies, shifting between legal or “illegal” depending on circumstances, is not an example of “false consciousness” or backwardness but has to be placed in context, namely the fragmentation and isolation stemming from the last several decades of declining sociality, itself a result of shifting changes in the economy, with the resulting effects on personal life and patterns of consumption.

The Decline of the Social

Traditional collective institutions in Baltimore, from unions to community organizations, have faded over the past several decades. A poignant example of this decline can be seen in the practice of local construction unions in the Baltimore area now being forced to hire paid picketers to staff picket lines, so incapable are these organizations of generating any genuine interest or participation from their own members. The sit-down corner bar, once a mainstay of working class neighborhoods, gets converted into the plexiglass-protected carry-out, where what little interaction goes on now takes place behind shielded glass and iron grates. Entertainment is brought into the home through cable television with its hundreds of channels and not something you go out to socialize with others for. The need to work multiple jobs drastically cuts down on free time. The result of these and many other trends is an individuation and atomization in working class Baltimore that has largely eroded and undercut a sense of larger collective identity and participation.

But if in a very primitive sense the aforementioned individual survival strategies carried out in such conditions show some germ for a larger potential collective response, holding out distant hopes for a better future, the depth and speed of the current crisis is pushing more people into crisis themselves. Survival strategies meant as temporary stop-gaps until an economic rebound will be tested and eventually exhausted as the economic crisis not only continues, but deteriorates with no foreseeable end—except for repeated demands for austerity and declines in living standards. Unless, of course, there is a qualitative and quantitative change in resistance.

Another real possibility, not necessarily contradicting the first, is the further entrenchment of drug distribution networks in the inner city as the fiscal crisis of the local state forces cutbacks in public services and the state presence shrinks except for its police presence. As an example of what such a future may bring, in a case reminiscent of Naples or Ciudad Juarez, last year Baltimore authorities busted one such network, the well-organized Black Guerilla Family, that had managed to infiltrate street-level anti-gang and violence mediation programs and through a front group even produced a pamphlet written by its leader calling for entrepreneurism and community “self-help” which was endorsed, to their later embarrassment, by several local politicians.

Thus coming to grips with the impact of Occupy Baltimore means not just evaluating what the movement has been able to do or not do on its own terms but rooting its experiences in this larger picture of class decomposition and re-composition that in Baltimore followed in the wake of the same patterns of deindustrialization, suburban flight and disinvestment gutting other former manufacturing cities like Detroit, St. Louis, and Cleveland.

Occupy Baltimore’s Impact

I can’t speak about the internal workings of Occupy Baltimore because I didn’t get down to the site to form my own impressions before it was peacefully shut down by the city in mid-December. Instead I will discuss what I think has been Occupy’s larger effect on the city, with its strengths and weaknesses.

From the beginning, Occupy here was able to draw on existing activist networks around Red Emma’s bookstore and café. This meant from the start that Occupy benefited from previous networking and informal organization and didn’t have to constitute them from scratch, as was the case in other cities. Occupy Baltimore also profited from a hands-off strategy by the police and city administration, which when combined with the tactical savvy of local organizers, meant that Occupy successfully avoided the confrontations like those playing out in Oakland, Denver and elsewhere.

Occupy Baltimore also basked in mostly sympathetic media coverage. True, there were a few negative stories, mainly relating to alleged crimes committed by some of the fringe elements who gravitated to the camp during its high point. And predictably, the local Fox affiliate tried to set up an expose discovering drug paraphernalia in tents. But these were exceptions to the rule. Surprisingly, the local daily, the Baltimore Sun, printed an Occupy Baltimore guest op-ed, a consideration this paper rarely extends to any remotely similar point of view. To a large extent, this sympathy came because Occupy Baltimore like elsewhere drew disproportionate support from under- and unemployed young members of the local “Creative Class”: art students, web programmers, media workers, musicians, downtown hipster marginals and bohemians, etc., white, well-educated and articulate.

At the same time, Occupy Baltimore managed to get significant mainstream union endorsements and support. Unions such as SEIU suddenly adopted the Occupy slogan in leaflets. On October 26th, heads of 13 city union locals, including the Fraternal Order of Police, sent an open letter to Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake calling for the Mayor to “stand down” and not remove but continue to dialogue with protesters. The Maryland/DC AFL-CIO followed up in late November with a support Occupy resolution calling for the Mayors of both cities not to evict Occupy camps. While undoubtedly much of this support came from a calculated desire not to be caught off-guard and left behind by a movement that threatened to turn into a mass outpouring of anger against the banks and income inequality and escape control by traditional organizations such as the unions and Democratic Party, in the context of the sclerotic and ossified standards of local labor union practices, these were significant steps, even though the resolutions had no teeth in them and thus were for all practical purposes, posturing and positioning.

Another tangible victory for Occupy Baltimore came with the open meeting of an alternative economic development committee involving Occupy with the Baltimore Development Corporation (BDC). The BDC is a shadowy public-private business partnership funded in part with public funds from local taxes that is exempt from sunshine laws requiring open meetings; the BDC has always resisted outside scrutiny. The fact that the head of the BDC felt compelled to meet with the Another Baltimore Development Committee is Possible and Occupy in a highly orchestrated meeting on the steps of the BDC offices to open “dialogue” demonstrates once again on one hand the fear that the Occupy movement would overstep the usual channels of containment and on the other hand the desire for the local city administration and other similar players to “ride the tiger,” i.e., continue symbolic ritual “dialogue” until the movement winds down and is no longer considered a threat.

But more important than how the union leadership responded is the effect Occupy has had on ordinary union members and other workers. For example, at a two month Occupy Baltimore evaluation meeting I attended in mid-December, which attracted close to 200 people, mostly new to politics, a UNITE organizer speaking from the floor said how “energized” union members became whenever they visited the Occupy camp. It’s impossible to know how much of this cross pollination has taken place. Although affecting relatively few people, this new permeability between the previously separated, countering fragmentation and sharing experiences and dialogue despite all of Occupy’s significant limitations, still has opened up possibilities not seen here for many years. A process that has probably been repeated to one extent or another in the hundreds of Occupy sites around the country. It won’t be enough in itself to shake off the decades-long narrative of defeat but it’s a promising start.

Related articles

• The Countrywide Settlement in Context: Discrimination and the Subprime Mortgage Meltdown (beaconbroadside.com)
• Southwest Baltimore School On Alert After Scarlet Fever Outbreak (baltimore.cbslocal.com)

The Occupy Atlanta (OA) movement, like the OWS movement more generally, revealed a national response to the general economic crisis. Many imagine the economic crisis forced up a spontaneous gathering of forces of a new generation. In Atlanta, that new gathering really only lasted for a few days and became alienated and dispersed while the occupation lasted weeks. Far more than we realize the occupation was a product of established “progressive” organizations and calcified ideas which have been an obstacle to a new liberation struggle for decades now. Still, as dedicated activists and new community organizers began to mobilize themselves, the contradictions between what they claimed to be fighting for, and their actual perspectives, tactics, and political program became clear.

Of course, no mass movement is ever distinguished by one set of ideas. But if participants are genuinely radical minded and asking questions in an attempt to get to the root of society’s dilemmas, they are often transformed by their experiences. While most participants are not philosophers or historians and may not know specifically what they want to achieve, those in movement often strive to liberate themselves as they confront institutions and the obstacles they place in their own path—such as skepticism that ordinary people can directly govern themselves without hierarchical leaders. Very often they discard one idea or leader for another in an attempt to overcome partial awareness and mistaken choices. It will, of course, be a truly new beginning when working and oppressed people arrive on their own authority, confident in their capacity to emancipate themselves and directly govern.

The Occupy Atlanta movement exhibited great potential to support a vision of popular self-emancipation. Yet, at no time did the self-appointed official spokespeople of OA advocate politics consistent with this goal. There has been some confusion about this because of the way the initiators of the OWS movement have portrayed the movement itself and how the corporate media has generally perceived its public emergence.

In the OA movement, the Quakers/American Friends Service Committee was in the driver’s seat from the beginning. Secondarily, Jobs with Justice (in Atlanta the Teamsters are central, not SEIU) emerged as a major force. Both defined getting Big Business out of politics consistently in a manner that declares the Republicans as the enemy and lets the Democrats (and their capitalist patrons) off the hook. This is the current standard in the “progressive” approach to community organizing. Nevertheless, as the movement evolved locally and nationally the potential of the OWS movement began to be clarified.

Unfortunately, but not unexpectedly, OA never held truly popular assemblies as they claimed, nor did they live up to their claims to support a direct democracy. In the first few gatherings a popular audience from Atlanta did show up. Yet, what was organized in Woodruff Park when the largest crowds came out was a type of crowd politics where the organizers monopolized asking rhetorical questions and projecting these on to an uninitiated crowd. The only decisions that were made in these interactions regarded on what terms activists were to practice civil disobedience in the event the police attempted to dislodge the activists from the park.

From the very beginning, there was a program or platform which the leaders were guided or animated by—which was never made transparent to the uninitiated. This was called the 99% Declaration. There was never anything like a real Popular Assembly facilitated where these set of politics, or another program or demands, were raised to be voted up or down. Instead, the only discussions that were held in the park were of an affinity group nature—was civil disobedience desirable and on what terms? The goal of the 99% Declaration is to have a national convention of delegates which passes a program of transitional demands palatable to, but slightly to the left of, Obama, such as healthcare by a single payer system and restoration of Glass-Steagall—laws which assume the capitalist state can regulate Big Business. Thus, there was discontent from the very beginning by the most advanced and sincere radicals who participated in the gatherings—and whose identities were hijacked by the most prominent organizers. The media portrayed the OWS movement as a “leaderless” force of “anarchy”—yet, all who stood for these principles began on the outside looking in and stayed there.

Under the premise of Quaker civility and non-violence (with none of the better instincts of someone like Staughton Lynd), there has been a type of harassment of anarchist and Marxist sentiment within the coalition. Some of the Teamsters/JWJ people felt threatened by the Georgia Federation for Direct Democracy’s From Popular Assemblies to Provisional Government document, claiming it was “ultra-left” and that whatever valid ideas the document raised were too “ahead of their time” to be seriously considered, much less implemented. The document advocated direct democracy and workers’ self-management in workplaces, schools and neighborhoods by popular councils and assemblies and called for a break with the “Old Politics” of both the Democratic and Republican parties. But after the Oakland events, the bureaucratic Maoists and Trotskyists within the Teamsters staff started talking more left and suggested they were for workers’ control of production.

As with other cities, naive but well meaning young people began to be beaten out of the Democratic Party by the Democratic mayors and their police—many on the internet discussion list say things like “I have lost all respect for Mayor Kasim Reid.” The widely unseen reality is that the Quakers and Teamsters/JWJ, who cast themselves as primary organizers of OA, were the ones who got the vote out for Mayor Reid’s election in the first place. Notably, at one early gathering in Woodruff Park, the major Teamsters/JWJ leader was on the phone directly with the Mayor and the Quaker leader (OA’s public face, Tim Franzen) held his own private consultations with the Mayor (on the street in the Mayor’s police trailer) before the Mayor’s police finally removed the protestors from the park weeks later.

There were, in fact, many instances within OA where anarchists, Wobblies, and other radicals assumed roles of organizers and facilitators in the park, but these individuals most often decided to focus their efforts on “housekeeping” type activities and failed to openly challenge the liberal element that was present. Either in fear of losing the popularity contest to their more organized liberal opponents, or mesmerized by the mere presence of a seemingly direct democratic “consensus process” for decision making, these sincere radicals often allowed themselves and their ideas to be steamrolled in the name of process. Too often, these individuals seemed to believe that maintaining a movement for direct democracy was somehow synonymous with adhering to the wishes of the liberal majority within OA. After the first few nights, there was relatively little mass audience. The park was now perennially occupied by conscious and motivated activists. This is the context which allowed for the in-depth debate to move away from the “assembly” where it belonged, and be relegated into the realm of the internet.

Sadly, the Facebook discussion quickly became the venue where the real political discussions took place. In these message boards, those who adhered to the most consistent direct democratic and anti-capitalist politics were smeared by activists who ran the listserv, who themselves had no politics independent of Obama and the Democrats. But from the time of the first park occupation, some assorted Wobblies, anarchists, and some African-American socialists maintained devastating criticism on these Facebook discussion lists. There are some better politics waiting to break out.

Many radical activists who were present at OA may suggest that forming a “Radical Caucus” was a symbolic break with liberal factions like JWJ, the Teamsters and the Quakers. Unfortunately this break was only symbolic. While many radicals were sincere in their opposition the liberal politics of these groups, the failure of the sincere radicals in this Caucus to put forward a coherent political agenda based on direct democracy and workers’ self-management implicates the ineffectiveness of this “break.” Even within the internet discussions, radical activists often allowed themselves to be baited by certain liberal organizers and trade union bureaucrats into arguments concerned merely with the appropriateness of the Radical Caucus holding anti-police demonstrations. Such debates arose as the liberal element clearly sought to lay blame in advance on OA’s radicals for the inevitable police disruption. Under such terms of discussion, sincere radical activists saw their radicalism become overly focused on psychologically antagonizing liberals instead of promoting a set of new politics which would speak to working and oppressed people’s potential for self-emancipation. It should not be assumed that this tactical manipulation of sincerely radical activists by liberal and trade union organizers was accidental. It wasn’t.

From the very beginning, with the controversy on the first day of whether John Lewis (owned by Coca Cola and American Express) should be able to speak, until the relative end when the Mayor sent the SCLC elders, like Joseph Lowery (owned by Coca Cola and Georgia Power), as emissaries, the Occupy Atlanta movement has been overwhelmingly white but not completely white. There were African-American lesbian women among the Quaker contingent. There were African Americans and Latinos among the Jobs with Justice contingent. There were people of color revolutionary socialists critiquing both of these groups. So, if people of color were present among all ideological tendencies, how did the Occupy Movement get bogged down by discussions of white privilege when no major grouping or specific politics was finally condemned for such a stance?

Interestingly, the Teamsters/JWJ grouping on the first couple of nights was on the outside of the OA leadership critiquing the Quakers/AFSC for behaving in a white privileged fashion. Both groups were multi-racial and both groups were weighed down by white privilege ideology. But the Quakers initially allowed white males to disproportionately speak to a sizable people of color audience the first night. The Teamsters/JWJ wished to see more women and people of color speak. But when each grouping spoke, they did so from a liberal, American Exceptionalist perspective. Neither group condemned the President or Mayor who were people of color Democrats. No local demands were made on the Black led city government. Soon the Teamsters/JWJ and the Quakers/AFSC were on the same page. Perhaps the Mayor’s office helped them get it together.

The White Privilege/Guilt politics was used from the very beginning to extend the legitimacy of Obama and the Mayor and the Black Democrats who lead the city. Often a Jim Crow context was used to explain inequality in the city which was simply false and a-historical. There were no attacks on Coca Cola—despite the fact we were in Woodruff Park and they are the major patrons of the Democratic Party. While protesters renamed this Woodruff Park “Troy Davis Park”—there are many parks and buildings all over the city named for Robert Woodruff—the founder of Coca Cola. There was no comment on the tall school of policy studies which shadows the park named for Andrew Young, associate of Dr. King and former Mayor and representative to the UN under President Carter.

If one lives in the city of Atlanta and deals with an HR department in a workplace or gets a bank loan, Black women are in charge almost everywhere. If you lose your job or get foreclosed on, and have women of color and men of color police standby, during that whole experience one almost never sees white men. Majority people of color cops arrested the OA activists. Some suggested people of color were disproportionately affected by unemployment which is true. But this is misleading when nobody expressed in Atlanta that they were also disproportionately represented among management, politicians and police. Under such conditions concerns with white privilege were irrelevant and did not speak to the power structure in Atlanta. This is what equality looks like under capitalism in an overwhelmingly Black multi-racial community. None of the critics of white privilege were opposed to capitalism—at least not the capitalists and their managers in this city.

There has been some discussion of the pros and cons of brokering some alliance with the right-wing Tea Party movement, at its best perhaps as embodied by Ron Paul. But rightfully, the OA at no point wished to unite with racists and homophobes. But they also don’t realize how objectionable it is that they see themselves in many ways as equivalent to the Tea Party in pushing the Democrats from behind like the former appear on some level to do for the Republicans. The reality is Occupy and Tea Party are both funded by capitalist interests and endorsed by celebrities who don’t wish to break with the establishment.

At some point, the anarchists, Wobblies and Marxists (who are not for a Popular Front with the Mayor and the President) have to break with the Quaker and JWJ people. An alternative program based on workplace and neighborhood councils and assemblies as the direct location of government, condemning both the Democrats and Republicans, is what is needed. The dilemma is that while the corporate media led by CNN is willing to speculate on an ambiguous Occupy movement and the Fox news types would slander the most mediocre liberal as a communist, the moment to raise a competing program will only happen once. There is currently a race to see who will define this movement before the Obama electoral campaign gets into full swing—and hypocritically campaigns against corporate privilege as he is sponsored by Wall Street. This is because the national assembly of the Occupy movement will not propose direct democracy and workers’ self-management as a basis for a dual power or alternative direct democratic government.

The greatest outrage of this whole experience is that, while the Left of Occupy Atlanta has struggled to cohere itself organizationally (even as they win the real debates internally and online), there has been an appeal by the moderates to mobilize the Atlanta community around politics that they already support (without the OA)—support for Obama and the Black Democrats. Why fight with the police and sleep in the park for that?! They don’t understand that you don’t get the loyalty of the masses by telling them what they already know at their most conservative. The OA spokespeople never made a press statement asking people in their workplaces and neighborhoods to take matters into their own hands where they labored and lived. Instead, it acted as if a growing occupation of a park which did not oppose the city government and its patrons was going to overturn Big Business.

The Oakland events, especially the turn to the Port and dockworkers (however few as a result of containerization) we think pointed the way forward. But what we are fighting in Atlanta is not fear of Jim Crow police but the inability to confront soundly the Black police and Black corporate political establishment. We think the kind of resentment and tension that the movement in Atlanta stirred up at its height (again, one can see this by following the Facebook page) was wasted because it was perceived that the Occupy movement represented something which in fact it never did, a break with official society. Middle class people of color snickered at what they saw as dirty naive white people who in fact had the same exact politics as they did more or less.

We might conclude by reflecting on the initial debate over whether Congressman John Lewis should have been allowed to speak or not. He was not blocked from speaking because he was an ally of Big Business. He was blocked from speaking as a result of a dispute over whether he should have been privileged to jump the stack of future speakers which had been waiting. Many believed Lewis represented the radical tradition in the city of Atlanta. Lewis has been in Congress since the early 1970s and was famously attacked by white supremacist police at the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Alabama in the early 1960s. He was not the last to be assaulted by police fighting for freedom. And he cannot be permanently held in esteem for past service. There is nothing that distinguished him as a leader of the post–civil rights era. In fact, he represents the betrayal of a direct democratic conception of Black Power where the working people and unemployed should hold the reins of the city. The fact that the majority of activists, whites and people of color, still believe they are fighting a white power structure belies the reality that, two years ago at the Civil Rights Exhibit at the High Museum, John Lewis’s fine words about freedom were prominently brought to the audience by American Express. Until the Occupy movement discards outmoded ideas of power and authority, it will not be able to fulfill its mission of getting Big Business out of politics.

Related articles

• Mayor faces tide of anger over Occupy Atlanta (ajc.com)
• Old guard of civil rights movement mentoring Occupy Atlanta (ajc.com)

We first went to Occupy LA Sunday, October 9, 2011. “We” is the Palm Tree Proletarians, a loose group of anarchists and left communists in Los Angeles.

The Beginning

Amiri

None of us are camping out there; we all have work, school, children, or all three. That first Sunday we arrived around 2 pm, and the crowd appeared very lively. It’s important to understand the geography here: the demo is mostly on the front lawn and back lawn of City Hall, a building that occupies more or less a whole city block. A large city block. There is a very broad east–west street in front of City Hall, 1st Street, and directly across 1st street, to the south, are two other municipal buildings. One of them just happens to be the LAPD headquarters.

The other is the headquarters of the California Transportation Department, District 7. Both are quite sinister: the first in content, the second in form. The cop station is postmodern glass and stone, and looks like a modern office building. Inside is the most brutal and corrupt police force in the United States, after the NYPD, of course. The transportation department looks, frankly, like the Death Star, or what you imagine the Ministry of Love would look like. Its Leeds Platinum Award–winning, energy-saving design, slate gray color, matte, nonreflective material, and perforated dark aluminum gliding panels give it the appearance of nothing so much as a blocky robotic bat perching, slowly admiring its wings, fangs, and claws, as the panels slide around and open and close with the motion of the sun. Of course, both are fronted by enormous concrete plazas of Baron Haussman breadth, a sliver of sidewalk telling you where 1st Street actually begins.

Across the street is Occupy LA. There are tents covering every grassy space, young women in Chicken of the Sea mermaid costumes holding colorful sparkly blue banners decrying the damage wrought by industrial tuna fishing, other activists and onlookers walking around. There is not a crowd of “normal” people just walking around, perhaps because this is downtown Los Angeles on a weekend.

It clears out mostly, and this is the municipal center, not the commercial center of the downtown area. The sidewalks along either side of City Hall, leading to the rear, are concrete, no good for tents. People set up little tables and benches, but it’s difficult to occupy the sides of City Hall. Most people hanging there are just hanging out, taking a breather. The fire department is in the same building as City Hall, and you see its main entrance when you walk on the east side of the City Hall building, north, toward the rear lawn. The street behind City Hall is called Temple, and so, behind City Hall, across Temple, to the east, catacorner the City Hall building, is Fletcher Brown Square, which resembles a park. You can see inviting grassy knolls from a block away, but when you approach, you realize that only the elevated rim of the park is grassed. It’s really a concrete bowl, and it is mostly used by homeless people, who sleep on the concrete benches when other homeless have taken all the soft grassy spots around the rim. Which is one reason why it hasn’t been occupied as well, being a “vacant” area so close to the official occupation. And I do mean official occupation.

On October 9 there were two other events in downtown Los Angeles: one was a 10-mile bicycle demonstration that went through downtown, and passed in front of City Hall. The other was a series of events around the 14th annual Hispanic Heritage month. We saw the cyclists, but we did not see the Hispanic Heritage events, except for extra police presence east of Los Angeles Street on the drive north to City Hall from the freeway. There were also some streets closed off, but it was impossible to tell exactly why.

We parked a quarter-mile away and walked the rest of the way north, and we heard that there was a soundstage before we rounded the corner of Los Angeles and 1st Street. We could hear the pretty awful amateur folk music as we came closer. The first singer we heard was singing that we need a “love forcefield.” And then he started to preach, or teach, that the only thing that exists is love. “Love is all there is.” I don’t know who else feels that way, but it was pretty silly. I am still not sure who runs the stage day to day, but we P.T. Proles found each other by walking through the crowd, calling one another’s cell phones, and texting locations. We found Hector, David, Chris and Stacy (and their two boys) on the grass slope near the stairs to the stage. In the crowd were people listening to the singers, watching the stage, roaming about, checking out the literature people had brought, stopping to talk with the people who set up placards or tables, etc. There were not many of the classical sects present, or at least they didn’t have booths and “centers” set up. So much of the literature was populist or American liberal in orientation, as were many of the signs: “Banks got bailed out—we got sold out,” and “Money is Not Speech,” the latter a reference to the Citizens United Supreme Court Case (558 US (2010)), in which the Court finally just let it be known that money is indeed First Amendment speech.

There were several thousand people in front and back combined, but the crowd did not seem to be overflowing into the streets: the very broad, wide streets surrounding City Hall. The folk music stopped shortly after we PT Proles got together. An emcee took the microphone and big-upped the LAPD, saying that they were also part of the 99 percent, and that they had been helpful, etc., before relinquishing the stage to a man who warned us that he was about to get serious and technical about “the economy.” He wanted to explain to us the history of how things got this way. He started talking about the Glass-Steagall act, and how we needed to bring it back.

It was almost impossible for us to hear one another over the noise, so we moved to the back of the building. We would later realize there was a message in this medium: constant, deafening noise—music, lectures, etc.—from a “stage” at the top of the City Hall steps, directly above the fountain and concrete plaza bisecting the front lawn. This was not a place for any sort of discussion among the “party people,” which is how more than a new speakers and performers addressed the occupation. At the rear of the building there was a Chicano nationalist dance troupe performing in the middle of Temple Street, decked out in full indigenous regalia. They had drums, so we still could not talk to one another. The rear lawn was totally covered with tents, to the very edge of the grass, where the sidewalk began. We saw Fletcher Brown Square across Main Street and headed over. The wind was blowing that day, but much like the Los Angeles basin in general, the odors of the homeless sort of hung in the air despite the breezes back and forth. We found a spot under a tree recently vacated by one of the homeless people and started discussing what we should do. Chris and Stacy’s two boys jumped from bench to bench, between and among the dozing or dazed homeless, playing hide and go seek and various other games, while we decided what, if anything, to do.

I say “if anything” because if you’ve been to a demonstration in the United States since 9-11, you know what this one was like. The costumes, the dancing, the drumming, the American liberal swamp. Most of the people at Occupy LA so far have been college-age activists, middle class liberals, soft lifestyle anarchists and homespun populist philosophers. There is also a strong current of what you might call “hippies,” too, if I can be so anachronistic. Tie dye and spray paint. The only difference from the classic 2000-era demonstration was the lack of the sects and the presence of… the “libertarians.” You know, those reactionary Jeffersonian blowhards who think that a smattering of European political philosophy makes them something other than run-of-the-mill Babbits and race-baiting Reaganites. Who are trying to cope with the traumatic realization that the government is not only their enemy only when it’s giving “their” tax money to “welfare cheats,” “illegal aliens,” and “urban areas” (all of this is still quite “raced,” of course). I didn’t see any that first day, but I didn’t explore every nook and cranny, either.

We P.T. Proles decided to make some signs for next time. Our idea was that we might throw some salt on the wounded liberal outlook, tweak their disappointment with Obama, poke the quicksand and scum floating atop the liberal swamp, and thereby meet some people who already feel the limits of this, who want a firmer critique. That’s about all we have at the moment. Occupy LA is not a revolutionary uprising for several reasons, but that doesn’t mean revolutionaries can’t come out of it. And we, the atomized, un-self-conscious working class, do learn: a worldwide wave of demonstrations, like the Occupy Everything Movement is turning out to be, is its own very important lesson that no one should underestimate: there are others “like us.” Many more than you thought. We hope to help others to recognize that the others are not “we the people,” not “citizens,” not “taxpayers,” and certainly not “consumers,” but workers, separate from the unions, separate from the politicians and their parties, separate from “we the people.”

We came back October 16. On the way into downtown Los Angeles from West LA, we took the freeway, missed our stop, and had to get off at Maple. We drove up Maple, from I-10 (around 15th or so street) to 2nd Street. Apparently, Sunday is a big shopping day along this street, because it was packed, like you see pictures of Calcutta, packed—pedestrians in the street, traffic slowed to a crawl, informal traffic officers (really barkers for the various storefronts and parking lot operators) standing in the middle of the mayhem, attempting to guide drivers to one or another underground parking structure, or to wave you on through, thousands and thousands of people, 99 percent Latino, a handful of blacks. This crunch of shoppers, individuals, groups of teens, whole extended families, all doing their weekend shopping, mostly for clothes, perfume, electronics, knickknacks like that—there were no food or grocery stores—was about 4 blocks long.

Occupy LA was quieter. The sound amplification wasn’t as loud. The folksingers were more subdued. There were longer silences from the stage. I still don’t know who runs the stage practically, but I assume it’s members of the committee that got the permits and that “liases” with several LA City Councillors. And who ensured that, four days into the occupation, October 5, Mayor Villaraigosa felt comfortable enough to come and hand out rain ponchos to the demonstrators. While refusing to buy city library workers office supplies (one of the Proles works in the city libraries). They’re doing a terrible job with that stage. It has to be said. That same committee also isolated the anarchists among the core instigators of the occupation in those first crucial days, before mayoral candidate and City Council president Eric Garcetti told the occupation to “Stay as long as you need, we’re here to support you.” The Democrats and the Occupy LA committee have made it so that calling the occupation “a bunch of hippie anarchists” is becoming something of an ironic in-joke among hip supporters of the movement, as if to say “Well, if Obama’s a socialist, so am I, goshdarnit!”

Anyhow, in the crowd on October 16 were more union members. There were no actual union delegations besides the Wobblies. They’re not quite the AFL-CIO, though, are they? Or the United Teachers Los Angeles, a 40,000 member union of the Los Angeles Unified School District, which has been pummeled year after year with budget cuts and layoffs. UTLA “encouraged” its members to support the occupation as individuals. We met two comedians, one of whom was a member of UTLA, and told us about this encouragement. The other cracked jokes about the Bob Marley–impersonating folk singer on stage. There were also many individuals from the state university teachers’ union. While Ryann and I waited for the rest of the Proles, we chatted up a group of Wobblies till they retired to the rear of the building for a lecture on Workers’ Rights in the 21st Century for the 99 Percent.1

We made our first sign. “Surely, voting Democratic will help,” signed, the 99.9 Percent. We put it in the sign area and camped a little ways back up the hill. It turns out that people actually stop to read the signs. It’s a little hard to walk around with a sign, because there’s not a real parade area, and the space is so packed with bodies, tents, and bodies in tents. There’s not really a place to go. One puts one’s sign down, and walks around and talks with folks. Hector and Anita finally arrived, and told us about a woman who had been harassed a couple of minutes ago. She had been selling hot dogs on the sidewalk, and she was surrounded and harassed. By who was not clear. I asked if she was a police officer, and Hector said no, she was just a street vendor. See, street vending… is illegal. Yes. Illegal. Of course, you can’t walk a block in certain neighborhoods without seeing a street vendor, and you can’t drive a mile in any neighborhood without seeing a street vendor. I was confused.

Anita and Ryann went off to go get water while I finished blocking out the sign. Hector came up with several more sign-making ideas and an idea for next week, to amplify the message of discord with the bland liberal booshwah: we would set up a mock guillotine and put a wishlist beside it. At the end of the day, we would read the list and execute something in effigy. A vegetable or something inanimate, of course. It’s not about encouraging violence, but about confronting this reflexive, self-defensive nonviolence. Prophylactic Ghandiism, as though that will stop cops from cracking heads. Or win a better world for the alleged 99 percent. Ryann made our next sign: “Dear Unemployed Workers: Please drop dead. Love, Your Capitalist Pig.”

Anita and Ryann came back with a clarifying, if not edifying tale. They had walked around the corner, along the western sidewalk of City Hall, toward the rear. They came upon another street vendor being harassed. This time, it was a 15-year-old girl and her mother selling sodas. Who was harassing them? Members of the Occupy LA Security Committee. When Anita and Ryann came upon the scene, two male demonstrators were commiserating with the teenage girl, who had actually been lightly assaulted by another female demonstrator: Some Occupy LA demonstrators surrounded the girl and her mother, and told them they were going to ruin the occupation. How you might ask? By violating the City Health codes. In their numerous agreements with the City, the Occupy LA committee made it clear that they wanted to abide by every law and regulation, including city health inspections of their Food Tent operation. If street vendors were found in the area, that could be a violation of the Committee’s permits and legal standing, and the whole demonstration could be found unsanitary and unhealthy, a danger to the public and, more important, the demonstrators themselves. So, these citizens of the Occupy LA demonstration, many of whom have left their homes and sleep in the park, voluntarily homeless for the duration of the occupation, descended quickly upon these illegal (and presumably illegal) interlopers, to purge the occupation site of their deadly soft drinks. The female demonstrator took out a camera and began filming or taking pictures of the girl, and the girl raised her hand to block the pictures, and the woman slapped or pushed or moved her hand out of the way. The woman told the girl that she and others were going to put her picture all over the Internet, denouncing her as an enemy of the occupation, which they did. The girl became furious and started crying. And her and her mother were surrounded by other Occupy LA people by now, and then Occupy LA Security arrived: two men in yellow fluorescent vests, accompanied by a woman, not in a vest. They told the demonstrators to “disperse.” Oh boy. My comrades looked at them like they were crazy, and continued to talk to the girl. They advised her to go before the police showed up, and she and her mother left the scene. After getting their water, Anita and Ryann came back to open up a dialogue and to find out just who these maniac demonstrators think they are and what they think they’re doing telling people to “disperse.” They spoke to the two in the fluorescent vests.

“Why are you picking on this lady and her daughter, who are selling drinks for their survival? And why are you talking like a cop?” asked Anita.

“That is just a better way to say it than ‘get the fuck out.'”

The other security officer said that it was an appropriate word to use because it was in the dictionary, and he advised them to look it up.

“We have to make sure that the area stays clear of illegal activity.They’ll use any excuse to shut us down.”

“When the police want to come and disperse the occupation they will, and it doesn’t really matter what you do. Harassing street vendors will not keep the cops from doing whatever they want,” said Ryann.

“We have to protect the demonstration from reprisals.”

“So what are you worried about exactly? Crossing all your t’s and dotting all your i’s? So you can say that you did everything the law told you to do when the cops come and tell you to leave?”

“Yeah, we can’t give them any excuse! Some of us have been here all night and day for weeks now. Some people who come here are just weekend warriors. We’re trying to protect our demonstration from illegality. Are you sleeping here?”

Ryann plunged a mock dagger into her own heart and staggered back, stumbling.

“We’re just trying to protect our demonstration! We’re here, we’re occupying, and we want it to be successful! We are trying to help those street vendors but they are jeopardizing the occupation and could cause our food tents to be shut down by the Health Department!”

“Look!” said Ryann. “Right across the street is the police headquarters! You think that they won’t come and ‘disperse’ you if only you keep street vendors off the sidewalks? They will come in here and move you out whenever they goddamned well please! You think that because you obey health regulations they won’t move you out when they want to? What, do you want to make sure you have records of your fastidiousness… for what? Are you going to sue the LAPD? When they come and move you out? For whatever reason they make up?”

The security guys blinked.

“There are cameras everywhere. You are being watched. You think you’re occupying, but you’re occupied.”

The security guards’ eyes grew wide. They had never thought of it that way before. It sounds like they had never thought of it at all before.2

Hector joked that Occupy LA just might turn out to be the vanguard of the next wave of gentrification of downtown LA. “See? They’re already claiming ownership of the space, and they think they’re tough ’cause they can say, ‘Hey, I was homeless downtown for a month!’”

Our next sign revealed our new insight: “State Certified Temporary Autonomous Zone!© Vote Democrat 2012!”

Anita remained pissed off, and commented on how she kept seeing young Latinos come in to check things out and then promptly turn around and leave. She couldn’t tell whether it was the awful folk music or the Santa Monica wanna-be hippies. Her idea for the next sign was a direct jab at the liberal colonialists: “Fuck Hope.”

Hector and I had to go to the bathroom next, so we walked around the same way Anita and Ryann had gone. There was an interesting demonstration that aligned with his effigy execution idea: an artist had put out a series of pumpkins, marked with pictures of favorite leftist boogeymen like Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft, people like that. Barack Obama was nowhere among them. We definitely have to execute some vegetables next week.

After circling around the building, we came back to our base by the stairs. After passing a dreadlocked black man on the curb spraypainting T-shirts with the stenciled slogan‚ Love Is All There Is, we found Ryann and Anita in intense conversation: Ryann with a man with a portable easel and paintings packed on his back, and Anita with some comrades from South Florida we had met earlier.

You know the guy who has been harassed by the LAPD because he makes paintings of banks on fire? Alex Schaefer. He’s a real tool.

Ryann went over to speak to him upon recognizing him from the news. She quickly discovered that he is a “libertarian”—it irks him that people think he is a socialist or a communist because of his work, and he wants everyone in hearing distance to know it. She and a passerby named Ed, an ISO member, were trying to explain the difference between communist and state capitalist, but he kept going on and on about totalitarian Russia and China. I went up to see what all the fuss was about, and Ryann was telling the man to read some history before going on about solutions for the economic crisis. I listened for a while, and then jumped in when he started talking about how we need to abolish the Federal Reserve before we do anything else. Then we can cut the military budget, etc. One of the comrades from Florida said, “Hm… that didn’t work in the nineteenth century. What makes you think it will work today?” I asked Alex “Yeah! What makes you think abolishing the Fed will help anything?” He went on about controlling the money supply. I asked him “Why is controlling the money supply so important?” He didn’t know what I meant, really. I asked “Who benefits from fluctuations in the money supply?” He said “Crony capitalists of the government bureaucrats.” I said, “But why do they control the government?” “Crony capitalism.” “But where does it come from?” He didn’t know how to answer. “Concentration of capital, right?” “Yeah, concentrated wealth and power!” “How did things get that way?” He didn’t know how to answer. He said something about free market competition. “Yes, but the free market leads to concentration when somebody wins, right? Which is why the Fed was established in 1913?” Then he raised his voice and began preaching to the sky about how 1913 was Armageddon for the small businessman, and it was the beginning of the decline of opportunity for the little guy and how we need decentralized control of the money supply. Like an idiot William Jennings Bryan. Several low-brimmed characters had gathered by now and started muttering about other secret financial arrangements of this same group of bad guys going back to the French Revolution. Nobody said it, but they were talking about the Illuminati, of course, an underground group of German bourgeois revolutionaries, since become masters of the universe for a certain set. Alex calmed down and I asked “Well, why in 1913 did this group suddenly succeed in establishing this horrible power over us?” None of this kind of “libertarian” knows any history. They don’t think that way. Of course he didn’t know what I was talking about. “Maybe changes in the actual economy, in real material history of the growth of capitalism through the real hundred years of the nineteenth century required some sort of regulatory mechanism for big capital, finally, like the Federal Reserve? Alexander Hamilton didn’t succeed in setting up a Fed after the American Revolution. What changed? Something obviously changed to where they could succeed, right?” The cipher disintegrated after that. I wish I could remember all the names of the conspiratorial meetings and conferences people were bringing up. Most in the interwar period. Real secret history stuff.

Hector had had enough, and Anita made this sign. (Hector signed it Salvadorenos de LA.)

Ryann gave up shortly after that, too, and we returned to our campsite. It was getting cold, but we were gratified that our signs had attracted a lot of attention. People laughed at them, and even stopped to hold them up to take pictures with them! Especially the capitalist pig sign. One pair of Indian men posed with it, and Anita and Ryann chatted them up. They talked about all sorts of things, and one of the things the men brought up was how difficult parking was around here. It was also confusing because the benches and tables along the eastern side of City Hall looked a little too official—official enough to give someone the impression that there might be valet parking.

That’s the last sign we made October 16. Ah, détournement.

The End

Ryann

As the weeks went by, we watched the occupation turn from a meeting place and protest site into a tent city. If you were not camping overnight, there was increasingly no space for you on either side of City Hall park. Political discussion and people willing to discuss political issues seemed thus literally crowded out as well. The tent encampment became an end and not a means of further organizing. An occupation once filled with liberals, libertarians, anarchists, and anticapitalists of all denominations was drained, and, by the end, the only thing passing as political discourse was the mad ramblings of conspiracy theorists and libertarian types. Although we met some members of a newly formed anticapitalist affinity group the weekend of October 23.

On that Sunday, October 23, the meeting area that we had previously used was now covered in tents, and the signs that had garnered so much attention on our last outing were laying piled up near the trash. We placed our rescued signs under the trunk of the tree now serving as our meeting place. Our objective was to make more signs highlighting opposition to the prevailing liberal and libertarian rhetorics that had come to dominate the occupation’s political speech. We met and spent time making signs with Temper Goldie, one of the homeless occupiers.

Unfortunately, our signs did not generate the kind of discussion they did before. There was less political activity, fewer petitions, and less speech in general going on in the camp. A great deal of drumming, theater, and dance was performed on the concrete plaza in the middle of the front lawn—the only area not dominated by the tent encampment.

By Sunday, October 30, the middle class liberal element—like the mermaids and other green activists, and like the few “regular folks” who passed through the occupation in the first weeks—seemed to have vanished from the occupation. Perhaps suitable for the green types, their only traces were fundraising convention–style presentation booths—with highly designed graphics and placards explaining why you should donate to such and such new urban development or organic electric community—all unmanned.

Amplified by the sound system, the drumming and dancing was again intense and deafening, making speaking and hearing others extremely difficult in the front of City Hall park. I managed to speak with Temper, the homeless occupier we met the week before. She informed me that the occupation organizers had now begun to discriminate against the homeless that had joined their ranks. (A very large proportion of the occupiers of the front lawn were not “activists” but real, regular homeless people and Hollywood street kids, some of whom were also homeless, but young.) The communal showers had been removed and the organizers rationed the donated food and supplies. Now the best food and supplies were no longer available to the homeless occupiers. A violent incident involving her boyfriend and a mentally ill man left him hospitalized after being hit in the head with a metal rod. The occupation’s security committee refused to call the police afterward and discouraged Temper and her boyfriend from filing a police report because to do so would jeopardize the occupation’s continued encampment. We saw this same mentally ill man moments later raving, buck naked, in the middle of the “performance space” in front of the City Hall steps.

Temper had saved our signs from the week before from an overzealous recycler by attaching them to her and others’ tents. She was featured in Los Angeles Downtown News holding one of those signs. In fact, two of our signs made it into the publication. The signs reading “Maximum Occupancy 99%” and “Capitalism is working just fine, now what!” are ours.

There was no space available in the front of the park and so we ventured to the smaller, quieter, north side of City Hall. This small area housed numerous tents, the free library, and a small canopied lecture and discussion space about the size of a large tent, because it was in a large tent.

We set off to distribute a leaflet we composed: Occupy Everything: What Do We Want? (And Who is Us Anyway?).

Blank stares accompanied most of my attempts to speak with people while handing out the leaflet. I ended up talking with a woman who gave her name as Rockstar and a man identifying himself as DJ, their YouTube handles. Hector/Vlad saw me speaking to them and joined in. They were anarcho-libertarians documenting the occupation for their YouTube channels. We got into a heated debate about what communism means. Only a small portion of the conversation was documented.

After watching their video on YouTube, reading some of the sick and depraved comments, and realizing that we had no way to respond, we were struck by a flash of inspiration: Why not emulate them? Why not use our resources to establish a communicative pole for our ideas and those who think like us? It was hard to talk with most people about the leaflet we distributed, but among those who had something to say, they were surprised that a loose group of independent activists actually wrote something, originally, themselves, at all. That it wasn’t a dictum handed down from some central committee. At Anita’s house, we tossed around old scenarios about other demonstrations and occupations, and we thought of the Wobblies. Big Bill and the Magón brothers. Then the idea hit us: soapboxing. Sort of. We would set up a booth, table, or some sort of area, with a camera, in order to establish a level of seriousness in our discussion. Signed across our table we would have something like “Political Advice: The P.T. Proles Are: IN.” With a backward “r” or two, if we wanted to be humorous. Or something like “Ask A Marxist” if we wanted to be more serious. Those who wanted to participate would field questions from passersby, and we would have a barker, rotating. Yes, “Ask A Marxist.” Or something like that. The way we thought of it, having a booth, with a camera, where we were willing to engage in serious discussion, and put ourselves on the line, on tape, could possibly raise the level of the whole occupation, sharpen our understanding of how to respond to given lines of argument and questioning, and give us material to share with others online. We had finally discovered “what, if anything, to do,” and because it is not one-way communication, like YouTube comments, like the Occupy LA committee and its soundstage, even like our leafleting, it could actually be a transformative experience for us and our interlocutors.

We had our reservations, and some among us were more than hesitant about appearing on camera. The main thing, though, was just a nagging feeling that we might have missed our opportunity. The occupation had changed dramatically in just a few short weeks, and not for the better. But we all agreed to at least prepare to give it a shot, depending…

We packed up our camera and tape, Hector brought a tripod, and we set off for Occupy LA, Sunday, November 12. It turned out to be our last visit to the occupation. Unable to find any “unoccupied” area, we were forced to make our meeting on the stairs leading to the west side entrance of City Hall. This time even the conspiracy theorists were sparse; the drummers and dancers were less enthusiastic and numerous, and the general spirit of the encampment seemed dampened once more. It was just over. Whatever mood of hope or possibility there had been in the early weeks was definitively gone. Our planned intervention just didn’t make sense anymore. Not if we had to set up on the west side steps of the occupation away from all the foot traffic.

The mayor’s office had long since begun the threats of eviction. The court orders to halt the eviction were being filed. But obviously, with the police headquarters across the street from the occupation, the occupiers were already occupied.

In the two weeks between our last visit and the end of the occupation, the city made efforts to negotiate with the “organizers.” Unlike in New York, there were people who coordinated with the city, received permits, and collaborated with the LAPD. The city of Los Angeles offered the occupation “negotiators” a $1 annual lease of a 10,000 square foot office space near city hall, some farm land, and housing for homeless people who could camp on the land. But of course, the “negotiators” couldn’t actually deliver what the city wanted: for the occupation to quietly pack up, declare victory, and leave. The “negotiators” couldn’t possibly speak for everyone, and the negotiations broke down.

On Wednesday, November 30, the occupation campsite was removed by the LAPD. There were tunnels under the street from LAPD headquarters to City Hall. The P.T. Proles were not in attendance, nor was anyone we are affiliated with.

On Monday, December 12, the port of Long Beach was shut down. Anita’s friend Julio was in attendance. When he arrived at 8 am, the port was already shut down, and a massive traffic jam ensued. Julio did not see any organized groups or banners other than a couple of members of the ISO. Immediately after he joined the protest, the police gave the order to disperse, and many people left. The police were wearing riot gear without masks. This indicated to Julio that the police probably had no intention of using pepper spray or tear gas on the demonstrators. The crowd blocked the intersection and the police declared it an unlawful assembly. A young “Black Flag Anarchist” rushed a cop and hit him with a stick. The cops hit him and other demonstrators ran to rescue him. The cops allowed the guy to return to the group and did not pursue him. He was not arrested. Julio says there was no evidence that he was an agent provocateur. It was cold and raining and the weather got worse. By 9 am, there were a few hundred people remaining, and Julio left without incident.

• 1By the way, this whole 99% thing has been irking me: Life isn’t cheap these days. Stuff like this makes people think that a family bringing in, say, $250,000 a year is rich. One of Obama’s recent tax schemes wanted to increase taxes for households bringing in $300,000 or more. But in a major city like Los Angeles or New York, that income means an average family can actually pay all its bills without worrying about what to cut, eat out sometimes without worrying about whether they’ll be broke at the end of the month, afford good health insurance (and the copayments), own a recent model car, afford the maintenance, and *maybe* buy a house. In marginal Park Slope. Or Hollywood. *Maybe.* Not in Santa Monica or Manhattan. And they can’t afford private school for the kids with that income. Yes, most human beings on the planet must get by with much, much less, but the top 1 percent of income earners is definitely not the ruling class. The ruling class owns capital, and doesn’t carry car notes and mortgages. It’s actually the 99.9 percent or something like that, that runs the joint.
• 2There are pictures of this confrontation online. If you read the article and the slogans shamelessly photoshopped onto the images, you will note that the author shares the “protect our occupation from the illegal street vendors” attitude of the security officers.

Since July of 2011, the mainstream media have been increasingly talking about a “double dip” “recession” in the United States But we can safely assert that for most working people, the “recession” has never ended, and is about to get worse.

Background

To understand the class struggle in the United States since the financial meltdown of 2007–2008, we must briefly consider the history of the previous four decades, since the end of the wildcat insurgency of the late 1960s/early 1970s. The history of the American working class since ca. 1973 (as is well known), has been an almost uninterrupted wave of defeats and rollback. This has been described as a “class war in which only one side was fighting.” Real wages have fallen in those decades by a conservative estimate of 15 percent, and starting as early as 1960, the one-paycheck blue-collar family began to disappear. Today, in a typical working-class family, two to three paychecks are necessary, and at least one is required to cover housing costs (typically 50 percent of household income) alone. The average work week has increased at least 10 percent for those holding full-time jobs; in reality, the work force increasingly resembles the “hourglass society” with “professional strata” working 70-hour weeks, and a majority of the population casualized into irregular part-time work. The top 10 percent of the population has claimed roughly 70 percent of all increases in income over the same period. Large parts of the old industrial Northeast, it is once again well known, have been turned into the “rust bowl,” with low-paying, dead end “service” jobs (e.g. Wal-mart) replacing the old, moderately paid and relatively secure blue-collar jobs. The United States competes with South Korea for having the most dangerous workplaces in the “advanced” capitalist world, with 14 workers killed on the job every day. 2 percent of the population (seven million people),1 largely black and Latino, are awaiting trial, in prison or on parole, in large part the result of the “war on drugs.” With hundreds of thousands of people losing homes and apartments after losing their jobs, homelessness has soared, intensifying the “war on the poor” in police harassment, herding people into fetid shelters that are little more than prisons, and the criminalization of street people.

This, then, is a snapshot of social reality in the “richest country in the world.”

Decline of Strike Activity

In the face of this capitalist offensive since the 1970s, the classical strike, not to mention the wildcat strike, declined to near-invisibility. 20 percent of American workers were involved in strikes or lockouts each year in the 1970s, and only 0.05 percent in 2009. The old industrial unions were seriously weakened by de-industrialization and capital-intensive innovation requiring fewer workers; they fell from 35 percent of the work force in 1955 to 12 percent today, and the majority of those remaining are in public sector unions.2 In order not to be misunderstood: most of the major unions, up to 1973, were fighting the rank-and-file wildcat insurgency, not the capitalists. Nevertheless, their loss of membership reflects in part their inability to even continue the “business unionism” they practiced into the 1970s.) Those workers who retain regular jobs with decent wages and benefits, when they do strike, have almost without exception remained within the bounds of legality and narrowly-defined “bargaining units” that guarantee defeat before the struggle begins.

Pyramiding of Consumer Debt

The American working class and “middle class” (an ideologically-loaded term tied up with the nearly-extinct “American dream” of a steady job, home ownership and a decent retirement) partially compensated for the declining real wages after the 1970s with ever-deepening consumer debt. Beginning in the 1990s, this was complemented by the housing bubble, propagated by the media-touted myth that “housing prices never go down,” and fed in the 2000s by the “sub-prime” bubble, when virtually anyone could get a mortgage and buy a home, or get a second mortgage, and use these imaginary “assets” as a basis for further credit. A large part of the “recovery” from the 2000–2003 meltdown of the dot.com bubble was related to housing construction and the industries feeding into it, such as appliances and furniture. This piling up of consumer debt by working people, blue or white collar, paralleled the unprecedented increase of state (Federal, state and municipal) debt, and the external debt of the United States (total net dollars held abroad, minus U.S. assets abroad) of at least $10 trillion.

Thus the actual eruption of the crisis with the 2007 bursting of the real estate bubble, followed by the spasms set off in 2008 in the banking sector, was merely the culmination of a long process of buying time with debt pyramiding since the 1970s, reflecting an underlying crisis of profit (and ultimately of value in Marx’s sense) in the “real” economy. But that is, for the purposes of this article, another story.

The Political Dynamic

One must not overlook the weight of the November 2008 election of Barack Obama (elected in all probability by the outbreak of the crisis in October, weeks before) in the overall social climate. As in 1929–1934, the great majority of the US population has initially reacted to the crash with stunned silence. Obama, denounced by the “right” (the Republican Party, and in the past two years the radical right Tea Party faction of the Republicans) as a “socialist” (not to mention a “Muslim,” and even a “Marxist”), in fact has carried out policies to the right of his predecessor George W. Bush in almost every area. But the response to them has been muted because his liberal base has given his government every benefit of the doubt. Obama has intensified the “war on terror,” which increasingly is extended to domestic opposition3 ; he has deepened the US involvement in its losing wars in the Middle East (Iraq, Afghanistan) and drone bombings in Pakistan. His “economic team” included well-known hatchet men such as Lawrence Summers (who as Undersecretary of the Treasury had supervised the pummeling of South Korea in the 1997–98 Asia crisis), Paul Volcker (who as head of the Federal Reserve Bank had administered the deep recession of 1979–1982) and Tim Geithner (former head of the New York Federal Reserve Bank). This team has engineered huge bail-outs of the collapsing banks and real estate institutions, guaranteeing trillions of dollars of bad loans at 100 percent, while doing little or nothing for the blue and white-collar workforce, not to mention the ever-growing marginal and homeless population. Obama’s Orwellian health care “reform” (also denounced as “socialist”) was virtually written by the big private health insurance companies, which dominate the retrograde U.S. health care system. In December 2010 Obama extended unemployment benefits in a “deal” with Congress that also extended Bush’s tax cuts for the rich, which had cost the Federal government $200 billion a year in lost revenue every year since 2001, while the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost $1.5 trillion, if not more. His administration has overseen more deportations of illegal immigrants than in all the Bush years, falling most heavily on the marginal Latin Americans who came into the country during the pre-2007 housing boom to work in construction, and who lost those jobs when the boom collapsed. In the June–July Washington charade over the US Federal deficit, the radical right (Tea Party) minority, with huge leverage over the lower house of Congress, gave Obama cover to shift even further to the right, preparing for big cuts in “entitlements”—another ideologically-loaded term referring to medical care for the poor and elderly and for the Social Security system for retired people. These cuts will emerge from the “bipartisan” super-committee, composed of six Democrats and six Republicans, due to enumerate in November the cuts that no one wanted to specify in the resolution of the summer standoff. All these developments illustrate the historical role of the Democratic Party, namely to enact policies which would arouse serious opposition if carried out by Republicans.

Good cop – bad cop

The American political system has been described as consisting of a right-wing party and a far right-wing party; since at least the 1880s, the two dominant parties have been engaged in a “good cop/bad cop” routine. The poorer 50 percent of the population does not vote, and official politics has receded into a shadow play that feeds a general passivity and cynicism. This is one of the contexts that explain strange phenomena such as the current Tea Party; when people do mobilize, right-wing and (less in evidence today) left-wing populisms (the revolt of the “little guy”) are the first safety valves of the system.

The Tea Party emerged as a force on the right wing of the Republican Party starting in 2009, expressing better than other organized political groupings the right-wing populist rage which has been part of the American political landscape, off and on, since the late 1970s. It represents a “declining demographic” of older, white, “middle” and “upper middle” class people who imagine that America’s problems can be solved by a strict balanced budget at every level of government and therefore a “minimal state” overseeing an unfettered “free market.” Such an economy never existed, even in the pre-1914 era when the state was a much smaller part of “GDP” but still played a central role in tariff policy, Indian removal for the expansion of the southern slave economy, and land seizures for railroads and canals. The real content of this Tea Party mirage would of course be a great strengthening of state repression, and the military maintenance of the (declining) U.S. empire, while gutting all remaining “social” dimensions of the state that the US radical right associates with the “socialist” New Deal of the 1930s and Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” of the 1960s. Its overwhelmingly white social base points to a (largely) unspoken but very real racial agenda of people frightened by demographic trends pointing to a white minority in the population by 2050, and by a black president. The Tea Party’s real function in U.S. politics is to allow the “center” (Obama et al.) to move farther to the right, permitting the “center” to appear as a rational, sane alternative to the “market fundamentalists.”

It is important to note that a near-universal belief that the crisis was “caused” by some elite, whether bankers or government regulators, drowns out any serious analysis of the underlying “crisis of value,” of which banks, consumer credit, real estate bubbles or government regulation are mere epiphenomena.

In November 2010, right-wing populist rage at Obama’s “socialist” measures (the bailout of the banks, health care “reform,” watered-down and mainly symbolic attempts at government regulation of finance) led to massive Republican gains in both houses of the US Congress, wiping out a Democratic majority in the (lower) House of Representatives and almost capturing the Senate. Much of Obama’s 2008 base, disappointed (or disgusted) with his virtually open rule in the interests of big capital, simply stayed home. (One should not overlook the right-wing populist rage, rarely articulated openly, at Obama’s black skin.)

The “Recession” and Muted Resistance

Since fall 2008, the official unemployment rate in the United States has reached 9.1 percent, and is in all likelihood closer to 15 percent, with figures endlessly “revised,” including anyone who works one hour a month as “employed” and not including millions of people who have given up looking for work altogether. Hundreds of thousands of people have lost their homes after losing their jobs, especially in the previous “boom” areas such as California’s Central Valley, Las Vegas, or Florida; millions more are holding mortgages that are “under water” (higher than the actual value of their homes). There are years of backlog of empty houses and real estate prices continue to fall. At this writing—late September 2011—world stock markets have been gyrating wildly, which may outdate these figures within days.

One striking phenomenon connected to the housing collapse is the near-absence of collective resistance to foreclosures and evictions. This is an important contrast to the early 1930s, when in New York City (for example) thousands of people gathered to protect neighbors threatened with evictions,4 or in rural areas where farmers (often armed) attempted to protect farm land from seizure by banks. One comrade in one of the most economically-devastated cities (Baltimore, Maryland), which has rivaled Detroit in decline since the 1970s, reports that the great majority of evicted or foreclosed people there are simply “ashamed” of their situation, conceal it from neighbors, and leave quietly in the night.

Attacks on Health Care and Pensions

Since 2007–2008, overt class struggle has shifted to an important extent from the work place to the confrontation with the bankrupt state, at every level (Federal, state and municipal). But this shift was prepared by the earlier defeat of workers in virtually every blue-collar industrial sector, headed by the auto workers. Public sector workers and their services, after decades of propaganda about the superiority of privatization, can be demonized as privileged, overpaid parasites because they are the last workers still benefiting from relatively secure jobs and benefits. Since blacks are disproportionately represented among public sector workers, this demonization in some quarters also flows from a muted racial agenda.

A near-omnipresent dimension of this confrontation is over health care costs, given America’s retrograde private health care “system.”

The United States is the only “advanced” capitalist country having no universal health care. In 2009, 50 million people had no health insurance. Health care costs amount to 15 percent of “GDP,” and are projected to rise to 20 percent by 2020. Canada, with a universal health system, spends 10 percent. It is estimated that the elimination of private health insurers (HMOs, or Health Management Organizations) and their “administrative costs” would eliminate 20–30 percent of health care costs. Further costs are added by the close relationship between the major pharmaceutical companies (“Big Pharma”) and the political class. (Federal law, for example, forbids states to buy cheaper generic drugs from Canada.) A majority of Americans favor a “single payer” (universal) health system, but the mainstream political parties and the media have imposed a virtual blackout on discussion of that alternative.

Even before the full eruption of the crisis, many of the strikes that did occur were focused on health care.5 (For many people, particularly those with families, the private job-related health plan is as important, sometimes more important, than the wage itself.) As the crisis greatly reduced tax income of states and cities, they were increasingly unable to pay health care and pensions for retired public employees. At every level, politicians, demagogues and think tanks bemoan “spiraling health care costs” but silence any serious discussion of their true sources in the control of health care by private insurance companies and the bloated prices charged by the big pharmaceutical companies.

Starting in 2014, anyone of the 50 million people currently without health insurance will be liable to a considerable fine if they do not sign up with a private health insurer; current rates for an individual are on the order of $500 per month; for a family more than $1000 per month. (While this article was being written, a Federal court ruled this aspect of “health care reform” unconstitutional, but the Obama government will appeal the decision in a higher court.)

The health care crisis goes together with the crisis of pensions in both the private and public sector. Starting in the 1990s, more and more employers shifted from paying for full “defined benefit” pensions to paying into “40lks” where employer and employee both pay into a fund that is then invested…in the stock market, naturally with fees for the stock brokerage. Studies have shown that 40lks leave retirees with only 10 to 33 percent of what the older defined benefit pensions paid (and which only covered one-third of the work force at their peak). This trend, combined with the coming Congressional attacks on Medicare and Social Security, points to accelerating impoverishment of the elderly. The crisis depletes the budgets of state and local governments, leaving them unable to pay the pensions of retired public employees. (In November 2009, for example, Philadelphia transit workers struck for six days to win increased pension benefits.)

The Last Industrial “Worker Fortress”: Collapse of the United Auto Workers

A key victory in the decades-long attack on the US working class—in some sense the end of an era—was the acceptance in 2007 of a two-tier contract at the “Big Three” auto makers (GM, Ford, Chrysler) by the United Auto Workers (UAW), a contract that was rushed through to approval despite wide opposition from rank-and-file workers. Henceforth, new hires at the Big Three started at $14 per hour, compared to $27 per hour for older workers. The UAW contract since World War II had been a “flagship” agreement for many other industrial sectors, and in the next three years the number of two-tier union contracts in the United States increased from 2 percent to 12 percent.

In 2009, in the midst of the financial meltdown, GM and Chrysler both declared bankruptcy and were taken over by the US government. The bankruptcy was merely a strategy to restructure their debt obligations, first of all to retired auto workers. When the two companies emerged from bankruptcy weeks later, the UAW became a major shareholder in both of them. Through the bankruptcy proceedings, the companies had freed themselves of $50 billion owed to the health care fund for retired workers. A new fund, called VEBA (Voluntary Employee Beneficiary Association), will be administered by the UAW and will be based exclusively on the market value of GM and Chrysler stocks. A collapse of the stocks, or another bankruptcy by either company, will leave two million UAW retirees and their dependents with no health care, and their pensions would be cut or assumed by the US government at some discount.

Attacks on Public Employees; Wisconsin

Having knocked out the union that had been the model for wage agreements in U.S. industry for sixty years (total employment at the Big Three’s U.S. plants had been declining for decades although foreign auto firms have invested heavily in non-union plants in the South), capital intensified its offensive in 2011 by attacking public employees and public services, best illustrated in the state of Wisconsin but with similar developments in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, California, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York (state) and New York City. In Wisconsin, a newly-elected Republican governor, Scott Walker, attempted to abolish collective bargaining, leading to the biggest (and most sustained) post-2008 working-class mobilization to date.

In the November 2010 elections, Scott Walker and the Republican Party took over the Wisconsin state government in the general Republican landslide. (It later emerged that Walker had close ties to the far-right billionaire Koch brothers, who clearly saw Wisconsin as an experiment for strategy and tactics to be used elsewhere.) Once in power, they gave major tax breaks to the wealthy and to corporations, and then announced a state budget deficit, made far worse by those breaks. Walker proposed legislation for massive cuts in social services, enabling the state government to privatize at whim, and abolishing collective bargaining rights for public employees.6

The basic problem illustrated in the Wisconsin movement was the ability of the Democratic Party and the trade unions to control it and to defuse some real sentiment for a statewide general strike. This pattern was repeated again and again in other states, although nowhere has resistance to similar cuts achieved the depth of what happened in Wisconsin. The Democrats and the unions are closely linked because the latter are the major contributors to party campaign funds, which come from union membership dues. Thus in California, New York state, Minnesota and Connecticut, Democratic governors elected with strong union financial support pushed through cuts for public employees similar to Walker’s, but preserved the appearances of collective bargaining. In other Republican-controlled states, the results were mixed, and in some cases the governments backed off from full confrontation under the impact of the Wisconsin mobilization.

In Wisconsin itself, after the mass mobilization peaked in March, the Democrats and the unions pushed the movement into electoral channels, attempting to recall various Republican politicians and elect Democrats, entirely obscuring the fact that the Democrats who lost power in November 2010 had already imposed serious austerity, and had been planning more.7 Even these meek efforts, as the supposedly safe alternative to mass strike action, failed.

In short, the social controls on resistance to these attacks, the Democrats and the unions, did their work well throughout the country.

Smaller Struggles, Defeats and One Wildcat

Smaller struggles in the United States have also ended in partial or total defeat. In November 2008, workers at the Republic Doors and Windows factory in Chicago started to notice machinery disappearing from the plant during the night, a sure sign of an imminent closing. On December 2, 2008, company management announced that the plant would close in three days. On the scheduled closing day, Dec. 5, the 240 mainly black and Latino workers (members of the United Electrical Workers (UE), a union with a slightly more militant reputation than most) occupied the plant, demanding severance pay and health care benefits, and on Dec. 10 the workers accepted a severance package averaging $7,000 per worker and two months of health care. Management blamed the Bank of America for cutting off credit, but had recently bought a non-union window factory in the nearby state of Iowa. Workers picketed the bank, and workers from elsewhere brought food, blankets and sleeping bags during the occupation.

While the Republic workers had indeed won something, they did lose their jobs, a small fact overlooked in much of the “progressive” labor and left milieu’s hoopla about the struggle.

Another struggle with an even worse outcome for workers was the strike at the Stella d’Oro biscuit company in New York City. On Aug. 13, 2008, 135 workers in the Bakers Union walked out of contract negotiations. Originally a family business, with many workers having decades on the job, Stella d’Oro was taken over by a hedge fund that was demanding a 28 percent pay cut, an end to overtime pay for Saturdays and a 20 percent employee contribution to the health care plan. The union insisted on a legalistic strategy, doing nothing to prevent scabs from entering the plant, truckers from delivering flour, or to expand the strike to other bakeries. In May 2009, the workers offered to return to work without a contract, and were turned down. The union also convinced workers to rely on a favorable ruling from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the US government “mediation” body. The strike continued until the end of June 2009, when the government National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) did rule that the hedge fund was engaging in “unfair labor practices” by refusing to bargain with the union. In early July, on the day when the Stella d’Oro workers returned to their jobs, management announced it was closing the plant, and proceeded to do so.

In Boron, California, in late January 2010, five hundred miners working for Rio Tinto (the third largest mining company in the world) were locked out after rejecting a contract which would have eliminated pensions, reduced wages, and introduced labor “flexibility”—justified by “global competition.”

In mid-May, ILWU (International Longshore Workers Union) Local 30 accepted a new contract, approved by the workers by a 3-to-1 margin. The new contract included a 2.5 percent-a-year pay increase; for new hires, company-paid pensions will (as discussed above) be replaced with employee-funded 401(k) plans with a 4 percent company contribution. Paid sick days were reduced from 14 to 10 a year.

The ILWU had, once again, conducted the strike on a completely legalistic and localist basis. Scabs and managers, protected by a large-scale police effort, worked throughout the strike despite efforts by the Boron workers to stop them. Widespread support in the area and in nearby Los Angeles was never mobilized. Instead, the union made impotent appeals to Rio Tinto’s shareholder meetings and held American nationalist rallies at the British consulate.

As in the Republic case, the union and the “progressive” left milieu proclaimed victory.

In August of this year, 45,000 telephone workers in the northeastern U.S. went on strike against Verizon, organized in the CWA (Communication Workers of America) and the IBEW (International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers). Verizon wanted to “adjust” the contract to cut pensions, change work rules and make employees pay more for health care, citing the steady decline in landline service and the shift to cell phones and the Internet. Once again, health care was the single most important issue. The strike was “suspended” after two weeks, with workers returning to the job with no contract and bargaining continuing with no job action; the CWA claims that the strike showed its “seriousness.”

Finally, to end this survey of strikes on a more positive note, perhaps the most significant wildcat strike in years took place in the Pacific Northwest on Sept. 8. EGT, a Portland-based company, had built a state-of-the-art grain export terminal at the Longview, Washington port, as part of a global supply chain for shipping grain from the US to growing Asian food and bio-fuel markets. EGT is owned by Japan-based Itochu Corp, South Korea’s STX Pan Ocean and St. Louis–based Bunge North America. Itochu ranks 201 on Fortune’s Global 500 list of the world’s largest corporations, and Bunge is number 182. These companies want to operate the grain terminal without workers from the ILWU (International Longshore Workers Union) breaking the 75-year agreement established for the west coast by the San Francisco General Strike of 1934. In response, union members have been blockading train tracks and holding pickets, which led to confrontations earlier this summer with cops, and a Federal injunction banning all picketing. The union broke this injunction and on the night of September 8th, hundreds of longshore workers broke into the terminal, detained the security guards, and sabotaged the equipment, dumping all the grain on the railroad tracks so the trains would not be able to run. This amounted to millions of dollars of damage, and the companies will have to hire scabs to clean up the mess. There was quite a standoff with the police, and reports of workers essentially intimidating and backing down the cops with baseball bats from which they made their picket signs. In support of this action, the Seattle, Tacoma, and Everett ports had a one-day wildcat shutdown the following day.

ILWU officials claim they don’t know what’s going on, as if it were a spontaneous rank and file upsurge, but it seems there was actually a union meeting called during the day to gather the ranks and discuss further steps after the Longview sabotage action. The ILWU has control of hiring out of their halls (which is exactly what they’re fighting to defend now), and therefore they can call a meeting at anytime where workers won’t work but will go to the meeting instead. This may just be the first step, and there will be more actions to come. So far everything has been done inside the union and has been kept relatively secret, so there was no general call for solidarity actions in Seattle. It remains unclear if the companies will fight hard to set a precedent breaking the ILWU’s 75-year jurisdiction over the ports, starting with Longview, or if they will try the same tactic in other West Coast ports. This could just one local company picking a fight, and they could back down and settle for a compromise in the face of this militancy.

One interpretation of the situation is the ILWU, like the rest of US unions, is up against the ropes and is throwing some punches before it falls to the ground. But another interpretation is that they’ are feeling their strategic position in the current economic conjuncture and are standing up for themselves because they can.

These actions had an instantly electrifying effect among militants in the Seattle area. After a year of struggles against police brutality in Seattle, it was inspiring to many people to see a cop admit he was intimidated when workers confronted him with baseball bats. Some younger unemployed people who often question the relevance of labor struggles are now showing interest because these workers are showing some real backbone against their common enemy.8

Attacks on Public Education and Student Mobilization

Education is another dimension of social reproduction in which state austerity has led to mass mobilization. We can set aside for a moment the nature of education at every level as a vast credentialing machine designed to maintain class distinctions and hierarchy, and to prepare people to accept workplace and social discipline in the tens of millions of jobs that exist (such as the FIRE—finance, insurance, real estate—sector) only because society is capitalist. A communist society will revolutionize education, and “work,” beyond recognition. Be that as it may, beneath the elite (mainly private) schools (which now typically cost $40,000 a year to attend), the “cinder block” state and community colleges, in the aftermath of de-industrialization, remain the main path for working-class youth to jobs above the McDonalds level.

In California, where public education, as late as the 1970s was almost free, tuition at every level (university, state college, community college) has risen to thousands of dollars a year, and most students have to work at least part time to stay in school, as well as accumulate debts from student loans that can total $100,000 upon graduation. Due to cutbacks in elementary and high schools, resulting in part from the right-wing populist “tax revolt” of 1978 and since, the quality of California’s public schools (elementary and high school) dropped over several decades from 1st in the country to almost last, on a level with Mississippi and Louisiana. Schools deal with ever- increasing class size, inadequate materials (textbooks, etc.), attacks on teachers’ unions and the lowest funding per student in the United States. Combined with the soaring rates of incarceration (among the highest in the United States) it became notorious in the 1990s that the state of California had more black men in prison than in college. Both the Bush and Obama administrations have attempted to deal with this long-term crisis by imposing ever-greater regimentation of curriculum, reducing teachers to preparing students at every level for standardized achievement tests. (U.S. students notoriously score at the bottom in comparative international tests of high school students.)

Thus in the fall of 2009, students at the Los Angeles and Berkeley campuses of the University of California (UC) mobilized against further tuition increases, and in Berkeley thousands confronted the police. This was a prelude to a national mobilization on Mar. 4 2010, in which California was again at the cutting edge. This time, the movement extended well beyond the relatively elite UC system to the state colleges and high schools—where teachers and students walked out. In Oakland, California, hundreds of students shut down a major freeway for several hours.9

The California actions were the largest of similar mobilizations in more than 20 states on March 4, none of which succeeded in reversing the cuts.

Strikes in the Georgia, California Prisons

All the trends of contracted social reproduction, from mass unemployment to public unions of police and prison guards10 to the warehousing of black and Latino youth in the prison system, came to a head in the Georgia prison strike of December 2010 and a major prison revolt in California in July of this year.11 The Georgia strike began on Dec. 9 with thousands of prisoners, black, white and Latino, participating in seven prisons around the state. The strikes were coordinated by cell phone. The main demand was a wage for prison labor. Other demands were for more education, better living conditions including better food, access to medical care, and rights to family visits and telephones.

The strike was initially planned for one day, but prisoners decided to continue after guards responded with violence and beatings. Guards destroyed personal property of prisoners, shut off heat and hot water, and put prisoners into solitary confinement. State authorities attempted to play down the extent of the strike, and news coverage disappeared from mainstream media in a few days. The strike ended after six days, with no apparent resolution, except a state promise to “investigate.” In January, seven guards were suspended without pay for violence against prisoners.

For years, California has been in the “vanguard” of maximum security “supermax” prison construction in the United States. One of the most notorious of these installations is in Pelican Bay. For the first three weeks of July, prisoners in the solitary concrete isolation chambers of the “Security Housing Unit” (SHU) at Pelican Bay went on a hunger strike, demanding an end to group punishment and snitching enforced by prison authorities, and demanding educational programs, human contact, weekly phone calls, and access to sunlight and better food. The strike spread to thirteen prisons ultimately involving 6,600 prisoners. SHU prisoners are locked in cells without windows 22 ½ hours per day under permanent fluorescent lights.

The strike ended on July 21 when prison authorities agreed to permit SHU inmates to have wall calendars, woolen caps for the winter time (the cells are unheated) and to “review” the enforced snitching.

Conditions in California prisons (with overcrowding at 200 percent capacity) are so outrageous that the reactionary U.S. Supreme Court found them to be in violation of the US constitutional amendment against “cruel and unusual punishment.”

Conclusion

The post–2007/2008 official response to the crisis has been nothing but an attempt to restore the status quo ante for capital, propping up trillions in bank and real estate debt. U.S. companies have stockpiled trillions more but do not invest them; at the same time, they have launched a full-blown attack on the total wage, in terms of pay, health care, pensions, housing foreclosures, and education. Crumbling U.S. infrastructure is estimated by the American Society of Civil Engineers to need $2.3 trillion in repairs and replacement costs. The “social indicators”12 of the “richest country in the world” show it to be a society more polarized than it was prior to the world depression of the 1930s. Since the 1966–1973 working-class strike wave, American workers have undergone decades of rollback, losing one defensive struggle after another. In this “slow crash landing,” and especially since the meltdown of 2007–2008, the whole structure of post-1945 American society has come unraveled. In the midst of this, working-class anger is widespread, with as yet no coherent form of struggle emerging, which moreover stands in rather sharp contrast to recent upsurges in Tunisia, Egypt, Greece, Spain, France, Britain and Chile. How and when this process will be reversed remains a totally open question.

• 1The increase in the prison population since 1970 almost exactly maps the number of industrial jobs lost in the same period. The United States has 25 percent of the world’s prison population.
• 2A significant percentage of public union membership also consists of anti-working class police and prison guards.
• 3In September 2010, members of the (Marxist-Leninist) Freedom Road Organization, who had been active in the American antiwar movement, were raided by the FBI in several cities, and much of their electronic equipment was seized. They are charged with contacts with “terrorist” groups such as the FARC (Columbia), the PFLP (Palestine), and Hezbollah (Lebanon). It has become within the realm of possibility that writing a favorable article about one of these “foreign terrorist organizations” (FTO’s) can constitute “support for terrorism” under the US Homeland Security Law.
• 4On the early 1930s see this very interesting article: Unemployed Councils, Eviction Riots, and the New Deal.
• 5David Himmelstein et al. in Bleeding the Patient. The Consequences of Corporate Health Care gives a good overview of the situation as of 2000; the situation has only worsened in the past decade.
• 6 For details on the struggle, in February–March of this year, see my article on Madison in Insurgent Notes No. 3 and the letter “More on Madison” in Insurgent Notes No. 4 (August 2011). The immediate response was a series of walkouts from schools around the state and a “sick-in” by teachers that amounted to a wildcat strike. The state capitol building in Madison was occupied for weeks by thousands of people, and mass demonstrations built every weekend up to March 12, when 125,000 workers massed for a rally. (Signs and slogans of the movement explicitly echoed the occupation of Tahrir Square in Cairo, but unlike in Egypt, the Wisconsin movement failed to overthrow Walker.)
• 7In early August, these recall campaigns failed to end the Republican majority in the Wisconsin upper house, after massive expenditure and mobilization.
• 8I thank a Seattle comrade on the scene for most of these details.
• 9See the article of John Garvey, “California is not Dreaming” in Insurgent Notes No. 1.
• 10On the relationship between education, prison guards and public employees unions, cf. John Garvey “From Iron Mines to Iron Bars,” in Insurgent Notes No. 1.
• 11The following information about the hunger strike and California prison conditions is from the Trotskyist newspaper Workers Vanguard, Aug. 5 2011. For a general overview of prisons and law enforcement in the United States since the 1970s, see the book of Christian Parenti, Lockdown America (1999).
• 12The United States, for example, is 42nd in the world in life expectancy, behind a number of developing countries, and has the highest infant mortality rate of any “advanced capitalist” country.

“We are in serious danger of our infrastructure collapsing. The threat to public safety is enormous.“—Ed Rendell, Governor of Pennsylvania1

The deadly collapse of a major interstate bridge in Minnesota in 2007 and the explosion of a steam pipe in the middle of New York City soon after brought national attention to the disintegration of infrastructure in the United States. The bridge had been deemed “structurally deficient” years earlier in 1990 (to be joined by some 77,000 other bridges by 2007).2 The pipe, part of a poorly maintained, century-old system, was either ruptured by an old water main found broken nearby or wore out on its own, breaking the main in the process. There have been 12 other steam pipe explosions in the city since 1987.

(When workers broke ground under Fulton Street in Downtown Manhattan recently the media was abuzz with reports that “5000 historic artifacts” had been unearthed. They forgot to mention that the decrepit steam pipe finally being replaced was one of them.)

The richest country in the world is faced with literal “boom”—in the form of exploding sections of electric, gas and steam systems—and “bust”—in the form of collapsing roads and bridges—on a widespread and regular basis.

Pennsylvania, perhaps the state most notorious for poor road conditions, appears to be falling apart at the seams. In June, 2010, a major bridge in West Newton was closed when a cleaning crew noticed “parts of it falling off.”3 The small town was formerly home to radiator and boiler production facilities. Today it distinguishes itself from ghost towns by maintaining a very small number of shops in its dilapidated center.

The story isn’t much different in the major cities. In 2008, the Birmingham Bridge, a major artery in Pittsburgh, was forced closed for weeks after a bridge deck and pier shifted only a year after extended repairs. Tellingly, even when open the bridge has several dead end lanes—evidence of a city belt system project that was abandoned with the majority of the area’s mills. These roads to nowhere perhaps say more than anything written here.

The recent structural failings in Western Pennsylvania are broadly indicative. Vital thoroughfares have been abandoned along with the “surplus population” they carry over the rivers. A recent study found that 90 percent of Pittsburgh’s “young men and women between the ages of 18 and 24 are dogged by obesity, asthma and other health issues, poor academic performance, criminal records, drug addiction and eyesight so poor that they couldn’t enter the military even if they wanted to do so.”4

Of course, the crumbling of infrastructure is not in any way limited to New York and Pennsylvania. These are just acute, localized symptoms of what is a national problem. As Transportation for America director James Corless recently pointed out, “There are more deficient bridges in our metropolitan areas than there are McDonald’s restaurants in the entire country.”5

According to the the American Society of Civil Engineers, 26 percent of the bridges in the United States are either deficient or obsolete. The Federal Highway Administration has estimated that nearly $80 billion dollars would be needed to bring these bridges up to par, yet the federal government only allocates around $5 billion annually to such work.

The long backslide in maintenance and development has come alongside the decline in the country’s manufacturing base. Much of the “essential infrastructure” is simply no longer essential for those seeking profit.

And indeed the issues in U.S. infrastructure as a whole are simply a national expression of a global phenomenon.

The considerable development of infrastructure across parts of Europe and East Asia in the last six decades is undeniable. Trips through Western Europe and Japan are now measured in minutes thanks to high speed rail, and one can drive across South Korea and back without running into as much as a pothole. To a certain extent this can be attributed to the “start from scratch” required by the mass destruction in these areas during World World II, the vast investments made after in the “post-war boom,” and the need—real or perceived—to move masses of war materiel efficiently during the Cold War standoff. Additionally, we cannot ignore the long-running aims of the U.S. and European powers to build up these countries as models and bulwarks against the Eastern Bloc, China, North Korea, etc., and seek out cheap labor power… There has also been a limited level of development in parts of Africa and the Americas in recent decades.

But none of this tells the whole story. Superficial appearances are deceiving. Like the Prince of Morocco, we find out the hard way: “All that glitters is not gold.”

Total investment in infrastructure around the world is in fact quite insufficient—by how much is up for debate. Current infrastructure expenditure in Asia amounts to only around 21 percent of what is actually necessary, and investments in Africa and Latin America fall tens of billions short of what would be required just to meet demand according to many sources. This hardly sounds unrealistic.

That capital would actually be able to meet demand is unimaginable, especially in this period of crisis, “correction” and austerity. After all, the existing infrastructure was created in the main to facilitate accumulation in the first place. As capital continues to seek out a path of return to an acceptable rate of profit, we can expect a dramatic increase in social decay. Ultimately, even if capital does not have to pull us into another world war to find a way out of the impasse, the remains of a large part of the existing infrastructure may very well end up looking as if we had been through one anyway. Places like Detroit offer a prelude of what is to come.

A healthy and viable mode of production is able not only to replace what is expended, but also to generally reproduce and expand. Today, the global capitalist system is capable of doing neither.

The need to reverse the decomposition of the existing products of human labor is directly tied in with the working class’s historic struggle to abolish capital and its destructive forces. The process will require the repair, extension and integration of the infrastructure currently in place on a world scale.

This monumental task will be greatly eased by the involvement of billions of people currently excluded from productive work by dint of their situation (imprisoned, in the military or state bureaucracy, burdened with domestic servitude, etc.) or position (working in completely superfluous sectors like advertising, finance, insurance and real estate, as isolated specialists, or not at all) who will be freed up with the overthrow of capital.

When generally divided up amongst all, the required labor contribution of each individual will shrink immensely; and the work will be directly rewarding.

The need for this is very real. This is not an academic exercise. In the absence of such a thoroughgoing transformation, we will be confronted with an increasing slide toward the depths of a barbarism from which we may never escape.

Related articles

• Philadelphia region ranks third in U.S. in deficient bridges (philly.com)
• Bridges That Divide: Small Infrastructure Falling Apart in Middle America (huffingtonpost.com)
• imabonehead: America’s Most Dangerous Urban Bridges – Forbes (forbes.com)
• Labor & ‘Occupy Pittsburgh’ Join Together in Nationwide ‘Bridge’ Actions (beavercountyblue.org)

• 1“The infrastructure alarm.” The Post and Courier. Updated: December 23, 2010. Retrieved: December 11, 2011.
• 2Cohen, Sharon; Bakst, Brian (Associated Press). “Minn. Bridge problems uncovered in 1990.” The Washington Post. Updated: August 3, 2007. Retrieved: December 11, 2011.
• 3“West Newtown Residents Frustrated With Bridge Closure.” WPXI.com. Updated: June 23, 2010. Retrieved: December 11, 2011.
• 4“Study: 90% of Pittsburgh’s young adults unfit for military service.” Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Updated: May 13, 2011. Retrieved: December 11, 2011.
• 5“Bridges in Pittsburgh labeled the worst.” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Updated: October 19, 2011. Retrieved: December 11, 2011.

Olivier Besancenot, the telegenic poster child of the French pseudo-left New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA) came to New York and spoke at the New School of Social Research in November 2011. He was asked by two persons who attended this meeting whether the NPA will call for a vote for the Socialist Party on the second round of the 2012 presidential and legislative elections in France.

He bluntly answered that his party will never do such a thing. Besancenot’s anwer was a plain lie, but a lie made possible by the awkward phrasing of the question. If he had been asked “Will the NPA abstain when faced with a Right or Far Right candidate at any presidential, legislative or municipal election in France?” then he would have been obliged to deliver the right answer: “No, we will always vote against the Right and the Far Right.” And as the Socialist Party belongs to the Left,1 according to Besancenot, the NPA and most Trotskyists in France, it means not only they will vote for the Socialist Party, whether they like it or not, but also they will publicly announce it in a more or less hypocritical way.

Generally LO has the reputation of being more radical than the other French Trotskyist groups, because they often repeat that there is no difference between left and right governments, but what they wrote in July 1972 (urging for a common candidate of the three main Trotskyist groups) is still valid today: “…we are ready to vote for socialist or communist candidates who would defend a program corresponding to the principal current demands of the working class” (Lutte de classe).

This formula was, and is, sufficiently vague to justify any vote for the Socialist or Communist Party candidates if these parties put forward a demagogical program (like the Common Program of the Union of the Left signed in 1972, which was never applied when the Left was in power) including some nationalisations or a higher wage or a kind of French New Deal with some employment increase in the public sector.

Usually Trotskyist groups limit themselves to saying, “We must beat the right on the second round,” or, “We must beat the National Front on the second round” (this was the case in 2002 when Chirac, candidate of the Right wing, was facing Le Pen, leader of the National Front, on the second round of the presidential elections—only LO refused to call for a Chirac vote, and they paid a high price for it: for several months they were heavily criticized and boycotted for this position, including in their workplaces).

Even if it wanted to adopt a radical or abstentionist position for the next presidential (April 2012) and legislative (June 2012) elections, the NPA is not in a position to apply such a tactic. It has lost two-thirds of its dues-paying members. It has declined from 9,000 to 3,000 members, returning roughly to the same numbers as the LCR (the number of real activists is probably no more than 1000–1500 for each of three main Trotskyist groups in France. The NPA lost two-thirds of its members for three reasons:

• some militants were outraged by the debate about the veil (a local section of the NPA in the Vaucluse region presented a candidate wearing a hijab for the regional elections, which was heavily criticized by NPA feminists and a small majority of the organization; at that time Besancenot declared that “a woman can wear the hijab and defend secularism and feminism” and that “a veiled woman is the proof of our integration in the [working class] districts”!;
• others left the NPA because they naively believed they would win many posts as local or regional councilors in 2010;
• still others left because they wanted an electoral alliance with the Front de Gauche, the Left Front, a coalition between the French Communist Party and the Parti de Gauche (the Left Party). (The latter is headed by a former… Trotskyist, ex-Socialist minister, a nationalist and authoritarian demagogue who succeeded, although the Left Party is much smaller than the CP, in forcing the Stalinist Party to support him and to abstain from presenting its own candidate). The model of the Left Party and of many people in the LCR and the NPA has been for years the German Die Linke (The Left)… So it’s not surprising that people leave the NPA for the Parti de Gauche, which is a bit bigger and offers more opportunities in terms of electoral positions and influence in traditional politics…

So the NPA is in a deep crisis; the new presidential candidate Philippe Poutou, a grey-haired Peugeot worker, is not as “charismatic” and “telegenic” as Besancenot, and the media, showing all their class prejudices, boycott him because they prefer the young “postman,” the ideal son-in-law with good looks, just as they boycott Nathalie Arthaud, spokeswoman for Lutte Ouvriere, because they prefer Arlette Laguiller, the LO candidate for…30 years.

As one can see, all these debates around Besancenot, Poutou, the NPA are centered only around electoral considerations, alliances with politicians, and relationships with the media. They have nothing to do with the increase in unemployment, poverty, misery, etc.

Groups like the NPA, POI (Parti Ouvrier International) or even LO are focused on the waged petty bourgeoisie, white collar workers of the public sector (and secondarily of the private sector) and skilled strata of the working class in the private sector (at least where there are still some factories of a significant size).

These “revolutionary” groups have nothing to offer to the mass of precarious, undocumented, unemployed workers, to the pensioners or to employees of small businesses. They have failed (until now, at least) to invent a specific propaganda and methods of organization for these layers of the working class. Trotskyists always argue and act as if the majority of the proletariat was concentrated in large companies and were stable workers influenced by large reformist or Stalinist organisations.

The influence of trade unions and left-wing parties is much weaker than in the “good old days” of Stalinist and social-democratic domination. Today, running for elections (organized almost every year in France as we have municipal, regional, legislative, presidential and European elections) leads “revolutionaries” to address and reach fewer and fewer workers. Young precarious workers and migrants don’t vote and the older workers tend either to abstain or vote for the right wing (around 50 percent of all workers). So revolutionary groups direct their propaganda more and more toward the waged petty-bourgeoisie, which still believes in the elections and votes for the SP, the CP and the Greens.

Related articles

• French Socialists Picking Presidential Nominee (online.wsj.com)

• 1In a discussion with Jean-Luc Mélanchon, candidate of the Front de Gauche for the next Presidential elections, Besancenot said Dominique Strauss-Kahn was the leader of the “socio-liberal wing” of the Socialist Party. Trotskyists love these kinds of nuances which enable them to support the so-called “Left” of the Socialist Party… Those who want to understand better Besancenot and the NPA’s politics can read (in French) the debate between him and Segolene Royal (candidate of the SP in 2007). Readers interested in the Long March of French Trotskyists toward opportunism can also also read: LO, la LCR et les élections : la Longue Marche de l’opportunisme (1976-1988), (1), LO, la LCR et les élections : la Longue Marche de l’opportunisme (1976-1988), (2), LO, la LCR et les élections : la Longue Marche de l’opportunisme (1976-1988), (3). And more recently about municipal Trotskyism, Le trotskysme municipal.
  

There have been doubts about the reach and penetration of the “indignant” (Sp: indignados) democratic citizens’ movement which began on May 15. The outcome of the November 20 elections helped to clarify things. In a way, the general election of November was a test to see how well the “indignant” could demarcate themselves from the electoral system, that is, to see how widespread and ingrained their slogan “they don’t represent anyone,” directed against politicians, parties and trade unions, really was. The slogan gave the impression that there would at least be an increase in conscious abstention.

However, this did not happen. Abstention increased by only two points over the previous general election of 2008, but fell by over four percentage points from May’s municipal elections (2011). There were slight increases of null and blank votes (the indignant movement debated electoral formalities, such as the significance of blank and spoiled votes), but it was completely irrelevant. We must also say that some of the organizations and “personalities” of the indignant movement campaigned openly for a shift of the vote to the left (which explains, for example, the increased vote for Izquierda Unida)1

Either way, the democratic and conservative horizon, characterized by the preservation of social guarantees under the current system of representation (as mentioned in our previous installment), was the dominant movement for most of the indignants. This was reflected in the election results. A part of the movement clearly opted to give its vote to “left-wing” parties (the substantial rise of Izquierda Unida) and other minor parties (Anti-capitalist, nationalist, Amaiur), and to the center-right (UPyD). This dispersion reflects the ideological spectrum of much of the indignation movement and its character as a democratic regeneration. Of course, this does not mean that the whole movement starting on May 15th wound up in the electoral system. The significant level of abstentions (around 28 percent) was indeed a conscious abstention, pointing beyond the indignants, and is involved in unspectacular but real actions at the level of neighborhoods (defense of housing occupations) or in workplaces (action against cutbacks).

The nature and composition prevailing in the indignant social movement (i.e., a middle class in accelerated decomposition) explains its functionality within the system of representation. It is a heterogeneous social segment of the working population (precarious, retirees, students, unemployed young men and women, trade unionists, civil servants, etc.). Nourished by democratic ideology, its political culture of humanitarianism comes with the NGO label and from the ideology of the traditional left, and is not leaning, at least for now, toward philo-fascist positions, as was the case at other stages of capitalist development, when the impoverishment of the middle class was the incubator of fascism and Nazism. This is because the explicitly xenophobic and racist mass has a very minor presence in public life, and because the PP (Partido Popular, the major center-right party) incorporates it within its structure,2 and on the other hand, because everyday racism and xenophobia, as suffered daily by the immigrants, do not count in the electoral circus. All this means that the indignation movement wound up legitimizing democratic totalitarianism and particularly the restrictive measures of social rights pushed through by legitimate electoral institutions.

A prime example is Artur Mas, president of the autonomous government of Catalonia (the Generalitat), whose coalition’s (CiU) electoral mass increased in the elections of November 20. Mas hardly had time to appear in the media, during the electoral euphoria, to say that the support obtained by his coalition showed that people understood the cuts (in health, education, welfare, etc.) that the Catalan government has put in place and which are causing quite a few protests by workers and different collectives affected over the last year.

The paradoxes of the democratic system are such that the dominant financial-industrial-commercial oligarchy and its apparatus of political representation, are based on an “apolitical” voter population (i.e., the by-product of the Franco tradition made up by people who “are not involved in politics “), while the active sectors advocating institutional changes, such as the indignant, are doomed to impotence and protest actions “bearing witness” within an institutional framework. One of the government officials of the autonomous community of Madrid spoke dismissively of teacher demonstrations in Madrid a few days ago, claiming they had been repudiated by the majority of citizens (given the electoral victory of the PP).

Be that as it may, neither during the campaign nor in the week after the election did the winning party dare to present its program of social cuts. Until now, the future Spanish prime minister (Mariano Rajoy) has met with bankers, businessmen, etc., as well as with the union leaders which, as we are accustomed, have negotiated on behalf of special interests, relating to grants, and access to training funds for the union apparatuses (CCOO and UGT), the latter being increasingly alienated not only from the entire working population, but also increasingly alienated from their own bases.

It should be noted here that the mobilization of public employees—where the highest level of union membership is concentrated—continues, and the unrest threatens to increase if, as advertised in Catalonia, for example, there is a new reduction in the salaries of public servants.

The central government is also committed to a restructuring that will reduce the enormous burden of bureaucracy in state administration, which in many cases is double the administrative structure of the regions (3.2 million public employees out of a workforce of 17.2 million).

Although the current relative social peace does not suggest serious problems for the next government of the PP, no one can deny the groundswell of social unrest that fear and helplessness will not be able to hold back if, as expected, the dynamics of deteriorating living conditions continues.3 In this sense, the statements a few days ago by a senior manager (J. Alemany) of the multinational company Abertis, closely linked to La Caixa (a Catalan savings bank), are especially significant; Alemany spelled out in detail that the measures necessary to deal with the current situation could not be limited simply to reducing wages, but also had to include measures of containment (subsidies) to avoid a progressive social decay that would eventually lead to greater instability and adversely affect the conditions for an eventual economic recovery.

Such statements coincided with the announcement, by a charitable organization, of the results of a survey, showing that 1.5 million people are below the poverty level in Catalonia (out of a population of just over seven million).

It is well known that social peace is needed for business to operate as usual. And such social peace cannot be guaranteed solely by repression, especially in a situation of the precariousness we are living in. But the instability which a PP government might unleash under the present circumstances suggests (as inferred from the words of the director of Abertis) a social polarization leading to an escalation of conflict.4 Moreover, the union apparatuses will be unable to hold back such a conflict if the tradeoffs amount only to perks for union professionals. With 22 percent unemployment (more than 5 million) and no prospect of improvement, the new government has a real hot potato on its hands.

However, the social passivity, despite mobilizations, in face of these maneuvers of a great capitalist restructuring, continues to surprise. On the immediate micro level, closures and the degradation of outpatient health care (e.g., indefinite lengthening of waiting lists for operations and diagnostics), do not result in the kind of response that might be expected. People seek out private solutions, making use of contacts, recommendations, friends, etc., to get by, but the democratic cloak of the managers allows them to proceed with the dismantling of the social safety net (it would be real poetic license to call it by the Spanish government’s term “welfare state”), through legislation and arrangements that, once set in motion, are irreversible, if there is not a break with the inertia that has led to this situation, which would mean a radical movement so far is nowhere in sight.

Thus, a real impotence spreads, although the discomfort is just as real, but irrelevant, while the perception of social decay advances not only in macroeconomic indicators, but also in the daily life of the street; it is noticeable in immediate experience (friends, neighborhood) and by a diffuse solidarity which nonetheless has not (yet?) acquired a significant political dimension. Attempts to reopen clinics, for example, involving the complicity of medical personnel and of those who use them, are merely statements of protest, because they quickly come up against the impossibility of self-management.

But it is not only repression or fear that restricts mass action. One must keep in mind the still-existing leeway (family savings, charitable assistance, friends, etc.) that allows people to find urgent solutions to critical personal situations. Of course these possibilities are fading as social breakdown advances, but for now these mechanisms of resistance cannot be dismissed when attempting to understand why there are no relevant initiatives of mass action.

Moreover, at the political level, the election results in the Basque Country, with the victory of Amaiur (a coalition of abertzales, i.e., hardcore separatists) ahead of the PNV (Basque Nationalist Party) and the other parties, opens up a period of uncertainty and of anticipated instability, with immediate implications for the overall management of the state. European nationalism, and of course Basque nationalism along with it, have been adopting more and more administrative (and fiscal) features. We are not dealing here with ethnic, cultural or linguistic nationalism, but with one that is directly economic. The rich regions, in the current context of widespread contraction of the accumulation of capital, are trying to preserve their situation at the expense of solidarity with other Spanish regions. This administrative nationalism, which is attempting to renegotiate its contribution to the national budget, means that Basque nationalism, much more than its Catalan variant, will be a factor of political destabilization. Municipalities and autonomous regions are accumulating substantial debts, which has led the central government to set a ceiling for the deficit and has created new tensions. We recall that the autonomous regions and municipalities have resorted to uncontrolled deficits, as well as to EU funding, to guarantee governability, i.e., subsidized social peace, through Keynesian policies that offer public jobs and favor the formation of a clientelist base of support.

These policies of public initiative (or public-private collaboration) were not only job creation schemes to buy the loyalty of voters, but also and especially devices to transfer public funds to large public infrastructure and service companies, behind which stand the banks. This has led to the proliferation of airports and roads, train stations and high speed railroads without any purpose except the enrichment of business groups, industrialists and financiers, and project managers.

Meanwhile, pressure from international speculators is forcing the Spanish government to issue debt at historically unprecedented interest rates. The background of the Spanish problem, i.e., the specificity of the impact of global economic crisis, is not so much sovereign debt (around 65 percent of GDP) or the private debt of firms and households (which exceeds 100 percent of GDP), but is above all the fact that the Spanish economy is in a subordinate position in the transnational accumulation process, with substantial structural weaknesses (less so in the Basque Country) that make it difficult to provide a solution to the crisis without incurring social costs (immiseration) whose dimensions precisely call into question the possibility of an eventual economic recovery.

Even in the context of the relative social peace we are living in, and despite the transfer of private assets and savings to the economic sphere, offsetting the decline in social assistance (erosion of family assets to cope with the crisis and with unemployed children), the forecasts point to a recession in 2012. In addition, the announcement of a new step forward in labor reform, whose concrete measures the new president has not dared to make public while he seeks a consensus with employers, the unions and the media, is an omen of deepening crisis where the living conditions of people are concerned.

The new government’s proposals, as can be inferred from the election campaign, come down to reducing labor costs, liquidating previously won rights, reducing corporate taxes and corporate contributions to social security, etc., i.e., to a series of measures which had disastrous consequences, as was shown in Argentina at the beginning of this century.

Either way, the “outrage” expressed in the Spanish streets, deflated after the electoral ritual, is confronted with the limitations of the movement’s citizen-based abstractions (electoral reform, the affirmation of democracy, denouncing corruption, etc.) when confronted with the reality ( labor reform, social cuts) imposed by capital and its democratically elected administrators. Or, perhaps, indignation has completed its cycle and we are at the beginning of the emergence of a new type of mobilization.

Related articles

• Basque And Catalan Nationalists The Real Victors In The Spanish General Election (ansionnachfionn.com)
• The Spanish Elections: What price democracy? (celynwales.wordpress.com)
• The Spanish election is a mandate for the indignados | Katharine Ainger (guardian.co.uk)
• Spanish Vote Heralds More Austerity (online.wsj.com)

• 1Translator’s Note: The “United Left” Party, a regroupment from the old Spanish Communist Party, which normally gets about 8-10 percent of the vote nationally.
• 2Badalona, for example, a city of 100,000 inhabitants on the outskirts of Barcelona, with a strong contingent of Spain’s immigrant population since the 1960s, and part of the red belt of Barcelona, has since last May had a mayor from the PP, whose campaign featured an openly xenophobic discourse directed against recent immigration (Chinese, Cashmiri, Romanian). It is an example of how the xenophobic right, like the LePenists in France, remains within the auspices of the PP. The CiU, counterpart of PP in Catalonia, their only difference being different nationalistic obsessions (Spanish for the PP and Catalan for the CiU), tries to dissimilate its xenophobia with all sorts of ambiguities, although its representatives periodically fall into line with the PP.
• 3A report by the business association indicates an increase in the theft of food in supermarkets in the last year. Also noteworthy is that the same report acknowledged that, in many cases, employees and guards turn a blind eye to such “criminal” acts.
• 4One anecdotal, but meaningful fact. On December 2, around 200 officials from the Modelo prison in Barcelona, members of the UGT and CCOO, blocked the access gate to the prison to protest wage cuts. Riot police responded with the same brutality normally reserved for squatters or the indignant. If the fissure increasingly opening on the social level is being extended even to such institutions, it can be supposed that governability is slipping out of the control of the managers of the capitalist order if they do not resort to other measures beyond the purely repressive.