I bet some of you have been checking back here, expecting me to write something about Occupy Wall Street and the Occupy movement. The truth is that events have been moving so quickly that it's been hard to find a moment to stop, step back and analyze--and when I do I'm usually doing that with other activists and not on a blog.
There has been a lot written about this movement already--SocialistWorker.org is now daily required reading if you want to keep up--and so much has happened that it is really hard to sum things up. I feel like some sort of summary post is necessary before going into more detail about things like the raid on Zuccotti/Liberty Park, which, astoundingly, happened only about ten days ago. So I want to start with five general points about Occupy.
1. Occupy is a movement against class inequality and class oppression--in particular, against the austerity, budget cuts, and permanent high unemployment and high debt that the global ruling class sees as the only solution to the global financial crisis. This is why it's spread so quickly and so widely--because despite the fact that we're not supposed to use the C-word in America, there is an enormous, untapped reserve of class anger boiling just under the surface.
One of the most powerful achievements of the movement is the sense of class identity, class solidarity and class anger that has come to the surface in a remarkably short period of time. All you have to do is look at the We Are The 99% blog to see this. There are over 200 pages of posts on it now. Over and over again, the stories boil down to the same basic content: "I did everything right. I worked hard. And now I'm screwed, desperate, debt-ridden. This cannot go on." In these handwritten testimonials from all over the country, you can see the sham politics of individual responsibility breaking down before your eyes. People are starting to realize that it isn't their personal failing if they can't find a job, stay out of debt, make ends meet for their family. It's the fault of a system that's stacked against us.
While Occupy has some echoes of the global justice movement, it is profoundly different because this time we're not fighting in solidarity with victims of neoliberalism in the Global South. This time the victims are us. The policies that financial institutions like the IMF and World Bank used to foist on developing nations have come home with a vengeance and are now being visited on huge swaths of the populations of Europe and North America. The ruling class (or, if you don't want to use the C word, the 1%) have been waging class war against us, and for the first time in a generation, we are getting a glimpse of what it could look like if our side fought back on a mass scale. The struggle is still primarily a street movement. It has not yet reached the point of production (through strikes, factory occupations, etc.). But sooner or later, it will.
2. Occupy is not like other movements. In fact, it's not like any movement most people alive today have been involved in, unless you are old enough to have been an activist in the 1960s. Even for those of us who are seasoned activists, the idea of weekly and often daily protests, and of hundreds and sometimes thousands of people involved in organizing on a daily basis, in dozens of cities across the US, is something new. Add to that the fact that the vast majority of these protests are unpermitted and frequently face intense levels of police violence--as intense as any I've seen in the US--and you have a whole generation of activists (both new people and those who've been around for a while) on a very steep learning curve out of sheer necessity. Regardless of what comes out of this movement in terms of concrete victories, a new generation of the left is being forged, and it is so long overdue.
3. Occupy is more than the encampments, but the encampments are important. One of the great things about this movement is the fact that you can now put "occupy" in front of almost anything and people will have some general recognition of what that means. While the permanent encampments in parks and public places are one element of the movement, they are not the whole movement. Students have occupied campuses, using both encampments and other tactics to protest tuition hikes, budget cuts, and the treatment of campus workers. Teachers in New York launched an ongoing Occupy the DOE campaign to protest school closings and privatization. One of their first actions was to use the now-ubiquitous "mic check" to shut down a meeting of the unelected, Bloomberg-appointed Panel for Education Policy in late October. Since then, activists across the country have mic checked Scott Walker, Eric Cantor, Karl Rove, Newt Gingrich, Israeli propagandists, and even President Obama. At the same time, large national and international days of action have brought tens of thousands (collectively, probably hundreds of thousands just in the US) into the streets every couple of weeks--in New York on October 5 (20,000), October 14 (several thousand at the crack of dawn for an emergency defense of Liberty Plaza), October 15 (up to 100,000 in what became a massive unpermitted street party in Times Square), November 2 (several thousand in solidarity with the general strike call from Oakland), and November 17 (32,000 according to the police scanners). When you add in the countless smaller protests of a few dozen to a few hundreds that are an almost daily occurrence, the combined scale and pace of these mobilizations is unlike anything at either the height of the global justice or antiwar movements.
While the movement stretches well beyond the encampments, the role of the tent cities as (semi-)permanent organizing centers should not be underestimated. At the height of its development, Liberty Plaza became both a fairly impressive self-organized community and a vital political gathering space. It had a library of 5,000 books, a thoroughly-stocked kitchen that served probably hundreds of free meals a day, clean energy via bike generators, a multi-faith sacred space, a media center and an info tent keeping tabs on the times and locations of countless meetings, training, discussion groups and protest events happening each day. Far more important than any of these, it was the central, identifiable place where new people came to talk politics and get involved in the movement, and where activists who had been slogging away at small struggles for years could form powerful connections of solidarity and shared interests. It was a place where people came to teach and learn, to debate and strategize, to start to figure out what they thought about the world and how to change it. The hunger for knowledge, history, books, newspapers, for ideas and learning, was palpable. In a country where collective political space is virtually nonexistent, the existence of such an organizing hub in the very shadow of Wall Street was incredibly powerful--and ultimately, too dangerous to be allowed.
The police know what they are doing when they attack the encampments. By destroying the physical infrastructure of the Occupy movement, they're also attacking our ability to organize. "We built a community there, and they destroyed our institutions," said one activist after the NYPD razed Liberty Plaza, and she was right. Destroying an encampment physically scatters the movement, as people spend time in jail or supporting those in jail, trying to reclaim seized possessions, finding other places to sleep, etc. It's intended to send a message that the reclaiming of space for purposes of organizing resistance will not be tolerated, and that basic democratic rights like freedom to assemble will themselves barely be tolerated at all.
4. There is an intense, sustained, nationally coordinated police offensive against Occupy. There had been police violence against Occupy protesters from the start--one of the movement's most iconic images remains the pepper-spraying of several young women at a protest in New York one week after the movement's birth. But as it moved into its second month of existence, the movement faced a highly coordinated wave of repression, which started in late October in Oakland and peaked with the clearing of Zuccotti Park in a military-style raid in the early morning hours of November 15. This systematic nationwide assault, aimed at destroying as many of the encampments as possible, was coordinated, it seems, through conference calls organized by a think tank called the Police Executive Research Forum, whose board of directors reads like a who's who of the architects of American police repression since the birth of the global justice movement. It has been accompanied by a secondary offensive of campus police against student protesters--most notably at Berkeley, UC Davis and CUNY--aimed at preventing the Occupy movement from getting a new foothold on campuses.
5. This is only the beginning. Regardless of what happens with the physical encampments, the spirit of the Occupy movement has already penetrated a very broad layer of society very quickly. One of the strengths of Occupy is its broadness. It's a generalized revolt against the sense that a tiny elite (what Marxists would call the ruling class) control both the financial system and the political system. There are all kinds of debates and varying points of view about how the levers of economic and political power came to be so closely interlinked, and whether they can ever be separated (ie. is it really possible to "get money out of politics," or is it impossible without fundamental change because the political system is set up by and for the economic elite and not "the people" as we're taught in Civics class?) These debates will continue for a long time, as this is a new and growing movement. But new manifestations of the Occupy spirit are popping up every day.
The challenge now will be to bring the defiance and creativity of Occupy to every struggle--against budget cuts, school closings, foreclosures and evictions, incidents of police brutality and racism, campus struggles, and most importantly to any strikes and labor struggles that emerge. Things may quiet down in some places over the winter--or they may not. I would not be surprised if we see another massive wave of struggle in the spring, perhaps culminating at the NATO/G8 meeting in Chicago in May--a meeting of the global 1% if there ever was one. I would also not be surprised in the least if the next wave of struggle focuses on something no one could have ever predicted. What we do know is that the US has finally--finally--joined the global revolt against neoliberalism in a serious way.
We also know that a true mass movement in the US would involve not just thousands or tens of thousands of people, but millions. What we have seen in the past two months is just a small taste of the struggles to come. But (to steal from Sherry Wolf) it tastes good.
There has been a lot written about this movement already--SocialistWorker.org is now daily required reading if you want to keep up--and so much has happened that it is really hard to sum things up. I feel like some sort of summary post is necessary before going into more detail about things like the raid on Zuccotti/Liberty Park, which, astoundingly, happened only about ten days ago. So I want to start with five general points about Occupy.
1. Occupy is a movement against class inequality and class oppression--in particular, against the austerity, budget cuts, and permanent high unemployment and high debt that the global ruling class sees as the only solution to the global financial crisis. This is why it's spread so quickly and so widely--because despite the fact that we're not supposed to use the C-word in America, there is an enormous, untapped reserve of class anger boiling just under the surface.
One of the most powerful achievements of the movement is the sense of class identity, class solidarity and class anger that has come to the surface in a remarkably short period of time. All you have to do is look at the We Are The 99% blog to see this. There are over 200 pages of posts on it now. Over and over again, the stories boil down to the same basic content: "I did everything right. I worked hard. And now I'm screwed, desperate, debt-ridden. This cannot go on." In these handwritten testimonials from all over the country, you can see the sham politics of individual responsibility breaking down before your eyes. People are starting to realize that it isn't their personal failing if they can't find a job, stay out of debt, make ends meet for their family. It's the fault of a system that's stacked against us.
While Occupy has some echoes of the global justice movement, it is profoundly different because this time we're not fighting in solidarity with victims of neoliberalism in the Global South. This time the victims are us. The policies that financial institutions like the IMF and World Bank used to foist on developing nations have come home with a vengeance and are now being visited on huge swaths of the populations of Europe and North America. The ruling class (or, if you don't want to use the C word, the 1%) have been waging class war against us, and for the first time in a generation, we are getting a glimpse of what it could look like if our side fought back on a mass scale. The struggle is still primarily a street movement. It has not yet reached the point of production (through strikes, factory occupations, etc.). But sooner or later, it will.
2. Occupy is not like other movements. In fact, it's not like any movement most people alive today have been involved in, unless you are old enough to have been an activist in the 1960s. Even for those of us who are seasoned activists, the idea of weekly and often daily protests, and of hundreds and sometimes thousands of people involved in organizing on a daily basis, in dozens of cities across the US, is something new. Add to that the fact that the vast majority of these protests are unpermitted and frequently face intense levels of police violence--as intense as any I've seen in the US--and you have a whole generation of activists (both new people and those who've been around for a while) on a very steep learning curve out of sheer necessity. Regardless of what comes out of this movement in terms of concrete victories, a new generation of the left is being forged, and it is so long overdue.
3. Occupy is more than the encampments, but the encampments are important. One of the great things about this movement is the fact that you can now put "occupy" in front of almost anything and people will have some general recognition of what that means. While the permanent encampments in parks and public places are one element of the movement, they are not the whole movement. Students have occupied campuses, using both encampments and other tactics to protest tuition hikes, budget cuts, and the treatment of campus workers. Teachers in New York launched an ongoing Occupy the DOE campaign to protest school closings and privatization. One of their first actions was to use the now-ubiquitous "mic check" to shut down a meeting of the unelected, Bloomberg-appointed Panel for Education Policy in late October. Since then, activists across the country have mic checked Scott Walker, Eric Cantor, Karl Rove, Newt Gingrich, Israeli propagandists, and even President Obama. At the same time, large national and international days of action have brought tens of thousands (collectively, probably hundreds of thousands just in the US) into the streets every couple of weeks--in New York on October 5 (20,000), October 14 (several thousand at the crack of dawn for an emergency defense of Liberty Plaza), October 15 (up to 100,000 in what became a massive unpermitted street party in Times Square), November 2 (several thousand in solidarity with the general strike call from Oakland), and November 17 (32,000 according to the police scanners). When you add in the countless smaller protests of a few dozen to a few hundreds that are an almost daily occurrence, the combined scale and pace of these mobilizations is unlike anything at either the height of the global justice or antiwar movements.
While the movement stretches well beyond the encampments, the role of the tent cities as (semi-)permanent organizing centers should not be underestimated. At the height of its development, Liberty Plaza became both a fairly impressive self-organized community and a vital political gathering space. It had a library of 5,000 books, a thoroughly-stocked kitchen that served probably hundreds of free meals a day, clean energy via bike generators, a multi-faith sacred space, a media center and an info tent keeping tabs on the times and locations of countless meetings, training, discussion groups and protest events happening each day. Far more important than any of these, it was the central, identifiable place where new people came to talk politics and get involved in the movement, and where activists who had been slogging away at small struggles for years could form powerful connections of solidarity and shared interests. It was a place where people came to teach and learn, to debate and strategize, to start to figure out what they thought about the world and how to change it. The hunger for knowledge, history, books, newspapers, for ideas and learning, was palpable. In a country where collective political space is virtually nonexistent, the existence of such an organizing hub in the very shadow of Wall Street was incredibly powerful--and ultimately, too dangerous to be allowed.
The police know what they are doing when they attack the encampments. By destroying the physical infrastructure of the Occupy movement, they're also attacking our ability to organize. "We built a community there, and they destroyed our institutions," said one activist after the NYPD razed Liberty Plaza, and she was right. Destroying an encampment physically scatters the movement, as people spend time in jail or supporting those in jail, trying to reclaim seized possessions, finding other places to sleep, etc. It's intended to send a message that the reclaiming of space for purposes of organizing resistance will not be tolerated, and that basic democratic rights like freedom to assemble will themselves barely be tolerated at all.
4. There is an intense, sustained, nationally coordinated police offensive against Occupy. There had been police violence against Occupy protesters from the start--one of the movement's most iconic images remains the pepper-spraying of several young women at a protest in New York one week after the movement's birth. But as it moved into its second month of existence, the movement faced a highly coordinated wave of repression, which started in late October in Oakland and peaked with the clearing of Zuccotti Park in a military-style raid in the early morning hours of November 15. This systematic nationwide assault, aimed at destroying as many of the encampments as possible, was coordinated, it seems, through conference calls organized by a think tank called the Police Executive Research Forum, whose board of directors reads like a who's who of the architects of American police repression since the birth of the global justice movement. It has been accompanied by a secondary offensive of campus police against student protesters--most notably at Berkeley, UC Davis and CUNY--aimed at preventing the Occupy movement from getting a new foothold on campuses.
5. This is only the beginning. Regardless of what happens with the physical encampments, the spirit of the Occupy movement has already penetrated a very broad layer of society very quickly. One of the strengths of Occupy is its broadness. It's a generalized revolt against the sense that a tiny elite (what Marxists would call the ruling class) control both the financial system and the political system. There are all kinds of debates and varying points of view about how the levers of economic and political power came to be so closely interlinked, and whether they can ever be separated (ie. is it really possible to "get money out of politics," or is it impossible without fundamental change because the political system is set up by and for the economic elite and not "the people" as we're taught in Civics class?) These debates will continue for a long time, as this is a new and growing movement. But new manifestations of the Occupy spirit are popping up every day.
The challenge now will be to bring the defiance and creativity of Occupy to every struggle--against budget cuts, school closings, foreclosures and evictions, incidents of police brutality and racism, campus struggles, and most importantly to any strikes and labor struggles that emerge. Things may quiet down in some places over the winter--or they may not. I would not be surprised if we see another massive wave of struggle in the spring, perhaps culminating at the NATO/G8 meeting in Chicago in May--a meeting of the global 1% if there ever was one. I would also not be surprised in the least if the next wave of struggle focuses on something no one could have ever predicted. What we do know is that the US has finally--finally--joined the global revolt against neoliberalism in a serious way.
We also know that a true mass movement in the US would involve not just thousands or tens of thousands of people, but millions. What we have seen in the past two months is just a small taste of the struggles to come. But (to steal from Sherry Wolf) it tastes good.
No comments:
Post a Comment