The Socialist Webzine wishes all of our readers a very happy New Year filled with love and revolution!




The Socialist Webzine asked members to share their political New Years Resolutions. These are the responses. Add yours to the comments sections.

These are ongoing goals that I have. I would like to see 10,000 new active Party members in CA before the end of 2012. I would like to see more Party members consider running for local office. 

Mimi S.- California

To read more, to listen well and to keep learning. I'm also resolved to do what I can to empower new and soon-to-be SP members to fight for the People. And fun -- CA is resolved to bring more of it to all the work we do. 

Lynn L.- California

At least double the membership of the New York State party.

Larry R.- New York

One is to get a new chapter of the SP going here in Santa Cruz. Two members here now as of today.

Steve A.- California

To dance on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange after Occupy Wall St. takes it over!

Billy W.- New York

I'd like to see a 50+ person local meeting, for OWS to grow and become a bigger and more powerful movement and personally, to read more, listen more and grow as an organizer

Kristin S.- New York

I don't make New Year's resolutions, political-or-otherwise. That way, when I don't follow-thru on them, I can't be accused of being counter-revolutionary!

Steve C.-California

I'm gonna read all 3 volumes of Capital in '12!

Kate F.- Maine, Socialist Alternative

My resolution is to build the Party and support Party electoral campaigns (including mine!). I also hope to have a kick ass Summer Organizing Conference. I will also help to build the social and economic justice movement in my community.

Greg P.- New Jersey

My resolution is to help build the SPUSA SF Bay Area Local and to do some great work, education, and outreach with the Feminist Practice Tendency (which I hope soon turns into a Commission).

Tina P. - SF Bay Area Local California


To motivate the members of my local to become more involved.
To motivate those supporters of our local to finally join the party!
To increase our active participation in Virginia Peoples Assembly and May Day RVA
To build on connections made in the council campaign to get the party more involved in communities of color and public housing.
To get arrested while simultaneously achieving a living wage with cost of living increases for direct and contracted employees at the University of Virginia.
To increase anti-war efforts of the SP-USA and the SP of Central Virginia, including my own efforts.

Brandon C.-Virginia

I resolve to be less susceptible to despair.

Doug Henwood, Economist- New York

I resolve to get out of my shell and start "raising hell" for socialism!

James B. - Minnesota

I resolve to see at least 3 active commissions in the SPUSA, to read at least 30 leftist books, and to work on assertive communication. I resolve to go to where I can be helpful instead of waiting for people to come to me for help. Finally, to work with all of the left, including Maoists, Marxists-Leninists, Stalinists, Anarchists, Pan-Africans, and anyone else who seeks to end capitalism and figure out how we can help each other even when we disagree.

Nik O.- Philadelphia

My resolution is to enable members out of touch with the party to empower and organize themselves.

Veronica N.- St Clair Shores, MI

Raising awareness and practice of using indigenous peoples names for geographic features and areas here on Turtle Island.

JLH

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Socialists have the “patient impatience” that Dr. Martin Luther King once spoke about in relation to the Civil Rights movement. We are patiently growing our organization and, in the process, working to strengthen the movements we are engaged in.


From Wukan to Wall Street - A Democratic Socialist Year in Review
by Billy Wharton
co-chair Socialist Party USA

2011 ended just as it began – with mass protests against a deeply authoritarian regime. This time it was in the Chinese village of Wukan a place that had once been a “showcase of growth and harmony,” but is now transformed into the center of protests against inequality and political corruption.  A Chinese official sent to quell the protests caused by the dissident villagers described the mood, “the public's awareness of democracy, equality and rights is constantly strengthening, and their corresponding demands are growing.”  What a perfect summary of the spirit of 2011, a year when people all over the world began to realize their collective strength and ability to change the course of history.

Not surprisingly, 2011 was a great year for the Socialist Party USA.  Our organization has grown over the past year.  Even better, we have grown in a healthy manner by adding new members who are interested in spreading the message of democratic socialism and new locals in areas where there were none before.  Places like Philadelphia, Salt Lake City and in various parts of California all now have fledgling socialist locals.  This is a signal that the long hard winter of left-wing political organizing in the United States may finally be ending.  And nothing helped to thaw the ice more than Occupy.

Occupy Wall Street connected Americans with the wave of protests taking place across the globe.  It has been a collective eruption of the pent up anger and frustration building at the base of our society.  Chants of “We are the 99% (and so are you)” and “Banks Got Bailed Out, We Got Sold Out,” resonated with millions of people who had seen their homes, their jobs and their futures destroyed by yet another capitalist economic crisis.

Socialist Party USA members have been involved in Occupy from the start.  We were there on the first day in Downtown Manhattan and we led one of the first break away marches toward Wall Street.  We were there on the Brooklyn Bridge facing down the police and joining 700 others in going to jail for a movement.  We have also participated in countless hours of organizing meetings and political discussion.  And we have participated in nearly every other Occupy action at locations throughout the country.  

We intend to be builders of this movement – broadening it, inviting more poor and working class people in and lending our organizing expertise to Occupy. Simultaneously, we offer our vision of democratic socialism in order to create a society based on peace, solidarity and justice.

2012 promises to be an even more exciting year for socialists.  We will continue our positive work with the Occupy movement.  As the capitalist economic crisis produces even deeper negative effects on working people, OWS may grow even stronger.  We welcome the return of protest politics to the American political landscape.  We want to extend the use of non-violent civil disobedience.  We want broaden the challenges to the top 1%.  We can make history in 2012, transforming it from the “year of the protester” to the year of democratic revolution.

We also have an exciting electoral campaign to wage in 2012 that will challenge the two ruling parties of the system.  In addition to our local candidates for office, Stewart Alexander from California and Alex Mendoza from Texas are our Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidates.  They will draw on the long tradition of socialist presidential campaigns such as those of Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas while rooting their message in the growing present-day desire for jobs for all, healthcare for all and an end to stranglehold of the Military Industrial Complex.  Alexander/Mendoza 2012 will be a campaign of real hope, a place that offers a few answers to the question of whether another world is possible.

Socialists have the “patient impatience” that Dr. Martin Luther King once spoke about in relation to the Civil Rights movement.  We are patiently growing our organization and, in the process, working to strengthen the movements we are engaged in.  Yet, we also feel the impatience for change expressed by the Wukan protests, by those engaged in last year’s Arab Spring and by the Occupy protests.  

We hope that 2012 will be our year to help to place democratic socialism where it belongs – as the preferred political choice for poor and working class people.  

If you are already a member, I ask you to continue to expand our message – organize locally in the name of the Socialist Party, help build a local Occupy movement and encourage others to Vote Socialist in 2012.  If you are not organized, but are interested, I encourage you to contact us and learn more about the positive possibilities and history of democratic socialism.

Working together, we can transform this country from a playground for the 1% to a healthy, productive society that operates democratically.   

***

Please consider making a generous end of the year donation to keep our organizing going:
http://socialistparty-usa.org/contribute.html



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A total of 11 activists have been murdered since December 2010 – an unprecedented number in Mexico.

by Daniela Pastrana
from Upside Down World

(IPS) - Gabriel Echeverría de Jesús, 20, and Jorge Alexis Herrera, 21, paid a high price for taking part in student protests in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero: they were killed when police tried to break up their roadblock.

After the Monday Dec. 12 police crackdown on the students, who were calling for funding for increased enrolment and better conditions at a rural teachers college, the bodies of the two students were left lying on the highway that runs from Chilpancingo to Acapulco in Guerrero, one of the three poorest states in Mexico.

The young men were studying to be rural school teachers at the Ayotzinapa college, which is famous in the country because Lucio Cabañas and Genaro Vázquez, guerrilla leaders in the 1970s, studied there.

Echeverría was earning a degree in phys-ed and Herrera was studying to be a primary school teacher. A third student was seriously wounded.

Guerrero Governor Angel Aguirre of the leftist Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) dismissed the state's attorney general, police chief, public security secretary and deputy public security secretary Tuesday, and the federal attorney general's office announced that it was launching a probe into the students' deaths.

"Things got out of control," deputy public security secretary Ramón Miguel Arreola admitted to the press before he was sacked. He was referring to evidence that local and federal police opened fire on the protesters.

Mexico's 16 public rural teachers colleges are a holdover from the socialist education initiative of former president Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-1940), although some were founded earlier. The first requisite for being accepted at the college is to be poor. In the last few decades, the schools have survived repeated budget cuts and harassment from the authorities, who see them as hotbeds of radical activism.

Human rights activists under fire

The deaths of the student protesters occurred in the midst of a spate of murders of human rights defenders.

On Sunday Dec. 11, the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity, headed by Mexican writer Javier Sicilia, held a demonstration in Mexico City to protest the murder and forced disappearance of seven of its members, including six in the space of just two weeks.

"Human rights defenders have been left without protection," sociologist Carlos Cruz, founder and director of Cauce Ciudadano, an organisation that works with young people in the capital and other Mexican cities with high levels of violence, told IPS.

A total of 11 activists have been murdered since December 2010 – an unprecedented number in Mexico.

The sights seem to have been set on the peace movement that emerged after Sicilia's 24-year-old son Juan Francisco was murdered, which is demanding an overhaul of the militarised security policies of the government of conservative President Felipe Calderón.

On Nov. 28, Nepomuceno Moreno, a man who was looking for his missing son and had become one of the pillars of the victims' movement, was killed in the capital of the northwestern state of Sonora, shot by gunmen who intercepted his car in broad daylight just six blocks from the governor's office.

A month earlier, Moreno had denounced threats and harassment by local authorities and asked President Calderón for protection.

His death reminded Mexicans of the murder of Marisela Escobedo, gunned down on Dec. 16, 2010 outside the governor's office in the northern city of Chihuahua while demanding justice for the killing of her daughter.

Four days after Moreno was killed, on Dec. 2, Norma Andrade, founder of Nuestras Hijas de Regreso a Casa (May Our Daughters Return Home), an organisation searching for missing young women in the northern border city of Ciudad Juárez, was shot and seriously wounded.

That same day, the body of actress Julia Marichal, who had gone missing on Nov. 12, was found. The murder is apparently not related to her peace activism, although it has not been clarified.

On Dec. 6, Eva Alarcón and Marcial Bautista, indigenous activists from Guerrero, were travelling to the capital in a bus that witnesses say was pulled over twice: at a military checkpoint where soldiers asked if Bautista was among the passengers, and he didn't answer; and later by hooded, armed men who forced the two environmentalists off the bus.

They have not been seen again.

Both Alarcón and Bautista had officially requested protection after receiving death threats.

Presence of reporters and activists offered no security

The day they disappeared, four armed men held up a caravan carrying Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity activists who were on their way to act as observers to a meeting of the Nahua indigenous community in Santa María Ostula, in the southwest state of Michoacán on the Pacific coast.

The gunmen forced the activists – including six journalists - in the caravan to lay face down in a clearing in the jungle and pulled aside 73-year-old Nahua community leader Trinidad de la Cruz, who was beaten and tortured within their earshot.

The assailants then seized their cell-phones and forced them to get back in the vehicles and drive away, down a road where there was no place to stop for three hours.

"They told us a black pickup would be meeting us halfway, to make sure we didn't head in another direction, and that if we dared turned around, we would be blown to bits," one of the people in the caravan said.

In June 2009, the indigenous community of Santa María Ostula had retaken more than 1,000 hectares of their communal property that had been occupied 40 years ago by ranchers.

On the land they built a new village, Xayakalan, which is the gateway to the Nahua region and to a coastal area coveted by real estate, mining and tourism companies interested in putting in roads and developing the area.

The disputed land also surrounds the Lázaro Cárdenas port, a strategic point on drug trafficking routes.

The cost of the struggle for land has been high for the indigenous community: 28 people have been killed and four have been "disappeared" in the last two years.

The 40 families living in the village are hemmed in by paramilitary groups that do not allow in any authorities, whether civilian, police or military – a case similar to that of San Juan Copala in the southern state of Oaxaca, where another humanitarian caravan was attacked in April 2010.

The situation is so serious that in December 2010, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights told the Mexican state to take measures to protect the people of Santa María Ostula.

At the Nahua community meeting that the members of the peace movement were to attend as observers, the villagers discussed a "peace plan" proposed by the authorities to settle the land dispute.

On Nov. 28 – the day Moreno was killed in Sonora – naval officials, the federal police and the state government promised to protect the peace movement caravan.

De la Cruz, a respected community leader, had sought refuge in a neighbouring state after he was beaten and threatened on Nov. 14.

On Dec. 6, when the caravan in which he was travelling was forced to pull into a clearing in the jungle, he was on his way back to Santa María Ostula to report the names of the people who had attacked him, with the protection of the peace movement activists and reporters.

But he was killed six kilometres before reaching the town, as the caravan drove out of Xayakalan. His body was found the next day, with several bullet wounds and signs of torture.

The authorities have not clarified why the federal police who had orders to accompany the activists abandoned the caravan when it reached the village.

Activists say the outlook is grim. "The bubble of safety that the presence of the press gave us has burst. Now we have to rethink how we do things," one of the witnesses who heard de la Cruz being tortured told IPS.


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Stewart Alexander, the SPUSA nominee for President of the United States, is calling for a Basic Income Guaranteed (BIG) for everyone 20 years of age and over.




FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Election 2012: SPUSA Candidate Alexander Calls for a Basic Income Guaranteed (BIG)

LOS ANGELES, CA - DECEMBER 26, 2011 - The Socialist Party USA supports the provisions of a livable guaranteed income; the Peace and Freedom Party California supports the establishment of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) to alleviate poverty and homelessness; now Stewart Alexander, the SPUSA nominee for President of the United States, is calling for a Basic Income Guaranteed (BIG) for everyone 20 years of age and over.

Stewart Alexander has supported the concept of a basic income guaranteed for more than two decades and his program is very similar to the international Basic Income Guaranteed (BIG) concept. Under Alexander’s BIG plan, an individual would qualify for the guaranteed income at the age of 20 and would receive a basic minimum income indefinitely adjusted to inflation.

Alexander says, “This is a basic income guarantee that would be received by all, the rich and poor. It is a basic income that is unconditionally granted on an individual basis. There are two very important elements included in the BIG Plan: First, it would be paid to individuals rather than households, and second, it is paid to everyone irrespective of any income from other sources.”

The concept of a guaranteed income has been around for more than 200 years. In the spring of 1968, presidential candidate Richard Nixon led the effort calling for the U.S. Congress to adopt a system of income guarantees. It was publicly presented by President Nixon in August 1969, adopted in April 1970 by a large majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, and was later rejected in the U.S. Senate.

Alexander notes that his BIG Plan is not intended to solve the unemployment crisis that currently exist nationwide. However, he says that his plan will help to meet the basic needs of the unemployed, the poor, the elderly, college students, the homeless, and the basic needs of veterans, single parents and the disabled.

Alexander says the BIG Plan is a fundamental component of his broader “Real Deal” plan, “Millions are now living in poverty nationwide; the basic income guarantee will be designed to insure that the basic human needs of all are met.”

###

About Alexander-Mendoza 2012
Stewart Alexander and Alejandro “Alex” Mendoza were elected by the Socialist Party USA National Convention in Los Angeles, CA to represent the party as its presidential ticket on October 15, 2011. Stewart Alexander is a working man from Los Angeles, CA and Alex Mendoza is a self-employed landscaper from Dallas, TX. For more information about the SPUSA's platform and principles, visit http://socialistparty-usa.org/platform/. For interview requests or press appearances with Stewart Alexander and Alex Mendoza, contact media[at]stewartalexanderforpresident2012.org.
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Repeating the same old lines of victim blaming is not brave. It’s dangerous.


by Zerlina
from Feministing


In 2007, I went out to a party with my friends. It wasn’t a night where I was drinking more than usual but I had a few cocktails. It was a work night so by the end I was mostly tired more than drunk and just ready to go home.

When I got home, however, I was sexually assaulted. And this is when the term “victim blaming” became a part of my life.

The existence of “victim blaming” was always at arms length until then. It was always happening to someone else, not me. I’m smart. I took self-defense in college. I don’t walk through dark alleys at night. I make sure I’m aware of my surroundings so I am able to make it home when I’m drinking. I make sure I don’t leave with men I don’t know as to not be assaulted by them.

And herein lies the problem. The entire debate the last few weeks about binge drinking and rape is wrong. And as Jos eloquently wrote last week, it’s the wrong conversation.

The argument that feminists overreacted to a sexist anti-drinking advertisement is arguing against a straw man. The straw man being that the feminists who called out the ad for being standard victim blaming were de facto okaying binge drinking. No one made that argument.

The idea that it takes some large amount of courage to “speak out” against an argument that feminists didn’t really make is pretty offensive to me, especially since this issue has affected me in such a personal way. So here are a few arguments that should have been made instead:

1. It doesn’t matter if you are 100% sober, you can still be the victim of a rape.

This should be obvious but unfortunately because women are taught to avoid rape by doing certain things and avoiding others they are lead to believe that they can avoid being a victim. Sure, there are proactive things you can do to keep yourself feeling safe generally, but the problem is that until rapists stop making the decision to rape, there will still be rape victims. Victims can’t be the ones to avoid rape.And that’s why the ad campaigns and PSAs targeting female behavior are so off the mark.

2. All of the “tips” for women are focused on stranger in the alley rape.

I was raped by someone I knew. He was in my apartment because I let him in. I didn’t walk down an alley at night hammered and get jumped and assaulted by a man I had never seen. That is why a PSA about not drinking and the general “we can do A or B” to keep ourselves safe are so woefully inadequate. I would actually argue that it puts us in more danger, not less. Because there are women who probably look at other women like me who couldn’t avoid rape and think to themselves, “It wasn’t me because I didn’t drink so much,” or, “It was her because she was wearing something provocative.” I’m hear to tell you that while it may make you feel safer, you aren’t really safe.

That reality is harsh, I know, but rape prevention should actually prevent rape and be real when it comes to the risk of it happening to you. And the truth is you can’t avoid rape. A woman who is raped was just unlucky enough to be in the same room with a man who chose to commit rape. So those that say don’t drink and walk home in a miniskirt late at night are missing a very important point: he’s not usually in the alley. He’s in your apartment and you let him in. All the proactive behavior in the world isn’t going to protect you from the man that’s already in your house.

3. It’s not as important to make the connection between drinking and rape as it is to make the connection between rapists and rape.

After my rape I was blamed for my assault because I had been drinking. I was told that I shouldn’t have been wearing a short skirt. Or let the man into my apartment even though he was a friend. I was told that if I had just done [insert 100% you would not have been raped if you had just done this piece of advice here] you wouldn’t have been raped.

And all of this is a lie. It’s just a damn lie. I was assaulted because a rapist decided to commit rape. If I had been sober and he chose to rape me guess what? Same result. If I had worn sweatpants and he chose to rape me you guessed it, same result. If I hadn’t let him into my apartment that night you could argue it wouldn’t have happened that particular day, but the problem is he was dating one of my roommates and wasn’t even there on my invitation. So how do I prevent him from being there and in turn prevent the rape? I can’t. And you can’t. And until we focus on the real issue of targeting the people, mostly men, who are committing rape it will continue to happen.

Repeating the same old lines of victim blaming is not brave. It’s dangerous. I don’t want anyone to suffer the same trauma that I have. But I know that 1 in 5 women already have or will in their lifetimes. And telling us not to drink alcohol isn’t doing anything to keep me safe from a man who makes the choice to rape me in my own apartment whether I’m sober or drunk.


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Homeless family reclaims a foreclosed home in Brooklyn, NY with the help of Occupy Wall St.







Occupyourhomes.org




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We understood it is a soldier’s duty to disobey such laws when they conflict with moral law or natural or “higher” law.




by Lawrence Rockwood

A Socialist Webzine Exclusive

Starting on Friday, December 16, at Fort Meade, Maryland, the US Army held a week long pre-trial hearing of PFC Bradley Manning, the Army intelligence analyst accusing of releasing classified information to WikiLeaks. On Saturday, hundreds of supporters, many bused in from Occupy Wall Street, rallied and marched between the gates of Fort
Meade to encourage Manning and even sang for him on his 24th birthday.


A number of speeches were broadcasted at this event. Former Army Lieutenant Dan Choi, the gay activist who was discharged from the military for revealing his sexual orientation, honored Manning as a gay soldier who shared the integrity all the those who openly challenged the Army’s former “Don’t Ask / Don’t Tell” policy, the integrity of revealing the truth whatever the cost. Veterans like lifelong activist John Penley who also faced imprisonment and extended solitary confinement for his anti-war stance during his enlistment in the Navy during the Vietnam War, spoke of Manning as being emblematic of the greater anti-war movement. A member of Manning’s defense committee called Manning one of the central inspirations of the Occupy Wall Street movement and the Arab Spring where thousands have turned their arrests into opportunities to place their own counties on trial for the failure to hold to democratic values.

This Article 32 hearing was the military equivalent of a grand jury hearing whose purpose is to determine whether there is sufficient evidence and law for the case to proceeding to a court martial, the military equivalent of a criminal trial. Two miles within Fort Meade, PFC Manning’s attorney, David Coombs, was utilizing all the usual legal maneuvers associated with any high visibility trial. However, in addition, while crowds at the gate continued to hail him as a hero who released classified information as a whistleblower exposing war crimes, Coombs in his closing arguments on Wednesday described PFC Manning in a very different light than his defenders at the gates. As a disturbed soldier, who was psychologically troubled and disaffected by military policy, he argued that the Army had no right exposing Manning to classified information in the first place.

Besides these two radically different defenses of Manning, there was a third. Among the demonstrators who stood out among the demonstrators at the gate in defense of Manning were three career military professionals, three “lifers.” A retired Navy Lieutenant Commander. A retired Air Force Non-Commissioned Officer, and myself, a former Army Counterintelligence officer with 23 years of uniformed service who was
also court martialed for exposing human rights violations being hidden by America’s trillion dollar secrecy industry.

We understood that IF this soldier was guilty of the charges against him, he was justified in his conduct, not as an anti-war gesture, not the act of LGBT personal integrity, nor even as a pro-democracy activist, but as a military professional. We were aware that in the German city of Nuremberg after World War II the American military led an effort to try senior German officers for obeying, not violating, their country’s national security laws. We understood it is a soldier’s duty to disobey such laws when they conflict with moral law or natural or “higher” law. We remembered that our own military executed officers and soldiers for failing to make choice that PFC
Manning made when faced with low level classified documents revealing the highest levels of criminality imaginable. In the case of Nuremberg, the defenders were under the illusion that the usual following of orders under “good order and discipline” trumped the affirmative just war obligation for soldiers to prevent war crimes to include torture and genocide. In the case of PFC Manning, the prosecutors are under the illusion that the security classification of rather low level secret material trumps the affirmative just war obligation to expose war crimes. We, as life-long military professionals, understood Manning’s prosecution was nothing other than the historical inversion of the Nuremberg Precedent.

Nothing demonstrated the stress created by this internal institutional contradiction than an incident on Monday in which Former Army Lieutenant Dan Choi, a Manning supporter, was thrown out of the hearing for wearing his dress uniform and had his rank symbolically torn from his uniform in an act of severe disrespect. Soon after, famed Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg was thrown out of the court house for introducing himself to Manning. These actions are without historical precedence as experienced by this author at his own court martial, but are consistent with the torturous treatment that Manning has received at the hands of his captors. Even the war criminal Lieutenant William Calley who murdered hundreds of civilians at My Lai in Vietnam in 1968 was allowed to greet supporters during breaks in his court martial.

With the last day of the hearing, December 22, as expected, it is almost a certainty that the hearing officer will recommend proceeding with the court martial of PFC Manning. In the court martial expected to start in the spring, let us hope demonstrations on his behalf continue and that every voice in defense of this soldier is heard.

At the OWS general assembly, the support for paying for a bus to take demonstrators to Fort Meade was unanimous. As revolutionary democratic socialists, we are committed to the rule of law as a foundation of social justice, but only as that law is founded on the basis of moral law. Natural law theorists from St. Augustine in the 4th century to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. have argued that an unjust law is not a law the needs to be obeyed. That is the significance of the court martial of PFC Bradley Manning. Manning’s attorney, in his closing argument, alluded to this truth when he said that “in the end, history will be the judge of my client.”

Captain Lawrence P. Rockwood, PhD, US Army (dismissed), OWS Protester and Arrestee, Chair, Socialist Party of New York State




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How do our tax dollars support war? This video explains.

Tax Dollars At War from Softbox on Vimeo.

From the early 1990s through 1996, survey results indicated that workers were becoming much more concerned about being laid off.



by Doug Henwood

Originally Published on Left Business Observer

Mike Konczal assembles some striking quotes from Federal Reserve transcripts showing how obsessed the monetary overlords are with keeping wages down. I won’t recycle any of the quotes—check out his post for the full flavor.

Reading these, Mike wonders what the contribution of the Fed has been to wage stagnation over the last few decades. My sense is, not much since Volcker left in 1987. There’s no doubt that the Volcker crackdown of 1979–82, with a second-wave attack in 1984–85, did cause a major shift in the relative power of capital and labor. What employers saw as a frightening insolence among the working class in the 1970s was broken by the early 1980s recession—a point that Reagan underscored by firing the air traffic controllers and replacing them. Employers got the message that it was ok to bust unions, and they did with great fervor.

The expansion that followed that recession, though marked by decent employment gains, was accompanied by a massive wave of Wall Street-led takeovers and restructurings. Mass layoffs even in relatively good times became routine. And this had an effect on worker consciousness: they’d agree to anything the boss demanded, lest the plant be closed and the work shifted elsewhere. And sometimes even if they agreed, the plant would be closed eventually anyway.

With Greenspan’s ascension to the Fed chair in 1987, the business of the central bank became less one of controlling inflation—which means constant wage vigilance—and instead one of cleaning up the messes that financiers created. Cleaning up financiers’ messes meant a bias towards low interest rates, not tightness.

Here’s a graph of the real federal funds rate since 1955. Real means the actual rate less inflation over the previous year. The federal funds rate is the interest rate that banks charge each other for overnight loans; it’s the Fed’s main policy target, and the rate under its most direct control.



Over the long term, it’s averaged 1.5%. (That was also its average during the Golden Age, from 1955–73. Note that real fed funds stayed above the average line for almost the entire 1960–73 period, the really fat years for the American working class.) During the Volcker days, October 1979– August 1987, it averaged three times the 1.5% mean. During the Greenspan era, August 1987–January 2006, it averaged 1.6%, just 0.1 point above dotted line. There were periods of tightness, like the late 1980s and late 1990s, but they weren’t all that different from the pre-Volcker patterns.

Actually the late 1990s were the only period of sustained and broad wage growth in the last 40 years, and Greenspan let it continue because he was a true believer in the New Economy productivity revolution. With productivity growing at a 3.5% rate, and wage growth of 2.5% (including fringe benefits—and closer to 1.0% without), there was plenty of room for profits to grow too. Not only that—the working class was still afraid, which to Greenspan was a good thing:

Several years ago I suggested that worker insecurity might be an important reason for unusually damped inflation. From the early 1990s through 1996, survey results indicated that workers were becoming much more concerned about being laid off. Workers’ underlying fear of technology-driven job obsolescence, and hence willingness to stress job security over wage increases, appeared to have suppressed labor cost pressures despite a reduced unemployment rate.

At the time of that testimony, in 1999, he was worried that that effect might be ebbing, with a 4% unemployment rate. So policy was tightened—until the dot.com bubble burst. Once there was a financiers’ mess to clean up, interest rates were cut dramatically.

So I’d say that the Fed hasn’t really had to tighten to keep wages down in almost 25 years. The “real sector”—the absence of unions, the low and eroding value of the minimum wage, the threat of outsourcing, and all the other familiar weapons of the class war from above—have been doing their work for them. Should that change, the Fed will be vigilant at heading off the threat of “wage inflation”—meaning raising interest rates to jack up the unemployment rate, thereby inducing the appropriate level of worker anxiety. But right now it has its hands full trying to keep the world from falling further apart, which is why we have a real fed funds rate of around –4%.



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Occupy's voice is one of prophetic action and courage.
That voice cannot be silenced by institutional concerns.



Friends,
Within the Episcopal Church in New York there has been some controversy over whether or not Trinity Church Wall Street will allow the Occupy movement to use Duarte Park, a church-owned vacant lot, for protesters. The parish has said no and has been backed both by the Bishop of New York and the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church.

The side in favor of allowing the use includes another Episcopal Bishop, Bishop George Packard. He has gotten letters of support from around the world, including from Archhbishop Desmond Tutu.

This is the letter that i sent to my bishop this morning. I am hoping for a change in position.


Dear Bishop Sisk,

I deeply respect you as a person and the important leadership position that you
occupy in the Church. I have heard your own prophetic voice in your sermons, for
which I give thanks.

Having said that, I am deeply concerned by your response to the request from the
Occupy movement concerning their request to occupy a vacant square owned by
Trinity Wall Street. As a rector I appreciate the importance of maintaining the
vitality of the gifts left to us by previous generations. I also understand the
concerns for security, sanitation, and safety. I believe those concerns can be
met by reasonable people working together.

I fear that we as a diocese are prepared to be on the wrong side of history in
this movement. I would humbly join the voices of Bishop Packard, Archbishop
Tutu, and the Council of Elders and encourage you and Trinity leadership to
reconsider this decision. Occupy's voice is one of prophetic action and courage.
That voice cannot be silenced by institutional concerns.

Thank you for your leadership.

With Deepest Respect,

Kevin+

The Rev. Kevin Fisher, Rector
St. Mary''s Episcopal Church




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"Out of clouds of pepper spray and phalanxes of riot cops a new generation of revolutionaries is being forged, and it would be a shame if the Peter Camejos, Max Elbaums, Angela Davises, Dave Clines and Huey Newtons of this generation end up in separate “competing” socialist groups ... Now is the time to begin seriously discussing the prospect of regroupment, of liquidating outdated boundaries we have inherited, of finding ways to work closely together for our common ends. "

By Pham Binh

December 14, 2011 -- Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal -- Occupy is a once in a lifetime opportunity to re-merge the socialist and working-class movements and create a viable broad-based party of radicals, two prospects that have not been on the cards in the United States since the late 1960s and early 1970s. The socialist left has not begun to think through these “big picture” implications of Occupy, nor has it fully adjusted to the new tasks that Occupy’s outbreak has created for socialists. In practice, the socialist left follows Occupy’s lead rather than Occupy follow the socialist left’s lead. As a result, we struggle to keep pace with Occupy’s rapid evolution.

Occupy Wall Street (OWS) mobilised more workers and oppressed people in four weeks than the entire socialist left combined has in four decades. We would benefit by coming to grips with how and why other forces (namely anarchists) accomplished this historic feat.

The following is an attempt to understand Occupy, review the socialist response, and draw some practical conclusions aimed at helping the socialist left become central rather than remain marginal to Occupy’s overall direction.

Occupy’s class character and leadership

Occupy is more than a movement and less than a revolution. It is an uprising, an elemental and unpredictable outpouring of both rage and hope from the depths of the 99%.

Occupy is radically different from the mass movements that rocked US politics in the last decade or so: the immigrants’ rights movement that culminated on May 1, 2006, in the first national political strike since
1886, the Iraq anti-war movement of 2002-2003 and the global justice movement that began with the Battle of Seattle in 1999 and ended on 9/11. All three were led by liberal non-governmental organisations (NGOs). They sponsored the marches, obtained the permits and selected who could and could not speak from the front of the rallies. Militant, illegal direct action tended to be the purview of adventurist Black Bloc elements or handfuls of very committed activists.

Compared to these three movements, the following differences stand out: Occupy is broader in terms of active participants and public support and, most importantly, is far more militant and defiant. Tens of thousands of people are willing to brave arrest and police brutality. The uprising was deliberately designed by its anarchist initiators to be an open-ended and all-inclusive process, thereby avoiding the pitfalls of the failed conventional single-issue protest model. The “people’s mic”, invented to circumvent the New York Police Department’s (NYPD) ban on amplified sound, means that anyone can be heard by large numbers of people at any time.

One of the most important elements that makes Occupy an uprising and not merely a mass movement is its alleged leaderlessness. Of course as Marxists we know that every struggle requires leadership in some form, and Occupy is no exception. The leaders of Occupy are those who put their bodies on the line at the encampments and get deeply involved in the complex, Byzantine decision-making process Occupy uses known as “modified consensus”. Occupy’s leaders are those who make the proposals at planning meetings, working group, and general assemblies (GAs) that attract enough support to determine the uprising’s course of action.

The people leading the uprising are those who are willing to make the biggest sacrifices for it.

Since Occupy is self-organising and self-led by its most dedicated participants, attempts to make its decision-making process more accessible to those who are not willing or able to dedicate themselves to Occupy 24 hours a day, seven days a week will fall flat. “All day, all week, occupy Wall Street!” is not just a chant, it is a way of life for Occupy’s de facto leadership.

This reality has affected the class character of encampment participants, who tend to be either what Karl Marx called lumpenproletariat (long-term homeless, hustlers, drug addicts and others who have fallen through the cracks of the capitalist edifice) or highly educated (white) students, ex-students and graduate students. The former joined the encampments not just to eat and sleep in a relatively safe place but also because they hope the uprising will win real, meaningful change. The latter tend to dominate Occupy’s convoluted decision-making process and what motivates them is identical to what motivates the lumpenproletarian elements: hope that Occupy will win real, meaningful change. Many of these people are saddled with tremendous amounts of personal debt, have worked two or three part-time jobs simultaneously, or were unable to find work in their field despite their expensive, extensive educations. They were destined to be secure petty bourgeois or well-paid white-collar workers before the ongoing fallout from the 2008 economic crisis claimed their futures and put their backs against the wall. This is the material reality underpinning the determination of Occupy participants to keep coming back despite repeated arrests, beatings, and setbacks. Their determination is the stuff revolutions are made of.

The advantage of Occupy’s structure and form is that the Democratic Party, liberal NGOs and union leaders have been unable to co-opt the uprising before it exploded into over 1000 US towns and cities and targeted President Obama. The disadvantage is that it limits Occupy geographically to places where authorities will tolerate encampments and sociologically to the least and most privileged sections of the population, to those who have no where else to go besides the encampments and to those who can afford to camp out for weeks at a time.

The undocumented immigrant who works 60 hours a week and the wage slave who works 40 hours a week will find it very difficult to shape Occupy’s decision-making process. Attempts to scrap Occupy’s existing structures and forms to make them more accessible to those other than full-time occupiers carry two inherent risks: 1) opening it up to forces that would love nothing more than to turn the uprising’s fighters into foot soldiers for Obama’s 2012 campaign and 2) diminishing the power wielded by Occupy’s most dedicated participants. In places where Occupy does not take the form of a permanent encampment its decision-making process can be even more diffuse and difficult to participate in.

OWS’s birth and the socialist response

The US socialist left did not cover OWS in its daily publications until after NYPD deputy inspector Anthony Bologna pepper sprayed cornered women on a sidewalk near Union Square on September 24. The Socialist Equality Party’s coverage on its World Socialist Web Site began on September 26, the Party for Socialism and Liberation’s (PSL) coverage in Liberation News began on September 27, the International Socialist Organization’s (ISO) first article appeared in Socialist Worker on September 8 and Solidarity’s initial discussion began on October 3.

This tardiness reflected the socialist left’s deep-seated scepticism at a protest without demands, a rally without a permit, OWS’s talk of prefiguring a future non-capitalist society in an outdoor camp in the middle of Manhattan’s financial district and a “leaderless” “horizontal” process. The preponderance of these anarchist elements, combined with the socialist left’s theoretical sophistication and political preconceptions, led to a “wait and see” approach that consigned us to the role of rearguard, not vanguard.

The uprising succeeded not only in spite of its alleged weaknesses but because of them. Repression from above and determination from below combined to win Occupy mass support in the weeks after September 24. The socialist left made OWS a priority and moved beyond sending its members to OWS organising meetings in early October as the trade unions, MoveOn.org and other left-liberal groups mobilised for the October 5 march of over 20,000 to protest the NYPD’s bait-and-arrest operation on the Brooklyn Bridge the previous Saturday.

Socialists on anarchist terrain

Occupy is undoubtedly related to the “occupy everything, demand nothing" trend that appeared in student mobilisations against budget cuts to higher education in 2009-2010. David Graeber, the anarchist OWS organiser who coined “we are the 99%”, pointed out how anarchism informs Occupy’s refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of state and corporate authorities and its insistence on direct action, direct democracy, non-hierarchical organising, consensus and prefigurative politics.

The task for the socialist left with respect to these issues is to understand: 1) how and why these methods dominate the uprising and 2) what to do about it.

Anarchist practices have become widespread because success breeds imitation. Just as the 1917 Russian Revolution a century ago spawned communist workers’ parties with tens of thousands of members hoping to imitate the Bolshevik example in their own countries, so today the thousands of people inspired to imitate OWS in their own towns and cities copied what proved in practice to be an effective means of bringing tens of thousands of workers and oppressed people into motion, the socialist left’s criticisms notwithstanding. In the weeks following September 17 OWS’s facilitation working group, which is tasked with running the New York City GA , trained organisers all over the country in the modified consensus process with dozens of video sessions broadcast over livestream.com in addition to face-to-face sessions with dozens, perhaps hundreds, of OWS participants. Many of these trainees then traveled to other cities or returned to their home cities to launch new occupations.

Occupy is the vanguard of the 99% and OWS is the “vanguard of the vanguard", to borrow an expression of Leon Trotsky’s. OWS’s vanguard role explains why its methods prevail over those preferred by more traditional organizations such as unions, liberal NGOs and socialist groups.

The socialist left must learn to navigate Occupy’s anarchist terrain if we hope to shape and lead the uprising instead of being shaped and led by it. Trying to overturn existing practices in favour of Roberts Rules of Order, majority voting and formally electing leaders by making proposals along these lines at GAs will fail because Occupy participants have not been shown by example that these methods are superior.

In short, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, and if it is broke, show and prove what a better model looks like.

The reality of OWS is that the “horizontal” modified consensus method, the GA and the spokescouncil are all highly dysfunctional but not fatally so (at least at this stage). Prior to the eviction, many OWS working groups began secretly hoarding street donations they received from the GA’s official finance working group (FWG) because they put lots of money into the general fund but faced serious hurdles in getting any money out of it for badly needed items due to OWS’s protracted, bureaucratic decision-making process. Also, because FWG administers over $500,000 in internet donations, many working groups saw no need to contribute to a fund flush with cash and resented what amounted to a one-way cashflow.

The money hoarding was part of a divide that emerged between full-time occupiers who felt disenfranchised and eventually boycotted the GA on the one hand and movement types (many of whom did not sleep in Liberty Park) who believed that the modified consensus process was the single most important element of the uprising on the other. This divide manifested itself geographically with the emergence of a “ghetto” and a “gentrified” area that was captured in a Daily Show segment.

The spokescouncil structure approved by the New York City GA, aimed at alleviating its frustrating and undemocratic logjams, simply transferred those problems to the spokescouncil while not significantly improving the GA’s process. All of these problems worsened after NY Mayor Michael Bloomberg evicted OWS from Liberty Park and OWS did not contest the eviction by returning there, a blow the uprising is still struggling to recover from (an improved encampment is planned for a new location).

Although the socialist left might see these problems as a vindication of its dim view of modified consensus and Occupy’s decision-making process generally, the task of socialists is not be vindicated but to aid the uprising in overcoming its stumbling blocks with practical solutions arising from the experiences of Occupy participants that utilise the uprising’s existing framework, infrastructure and terminology.

Instead of proposing at a GA or a working group to scrap modified consensus from the outset, a more fruitful approach would be to raise process reform proposals only after building close relationships with fellow activists through joint work. If (or when) they become frustrated with the shortcomings of modified consensus, a suggestion to modify the 90% approval margin necessary to overcome a block to a two-thirds margin or 50% plus one might then become appealing.

The difficult, painful and protracted process of trial and error cannot be skipped. We may be right about the shortcomings of modified consensus, but only peoples’ direct experience will prove it conclusively.

Socialists and Occupy working groups

Every local Occupy has working groups organised around a wide variety of tasks, a reflection of Arun Gupta’s observation that “all occupations are local". The challenges facing OWS are not the same as Occupy Philadelphia, Portland, Mobile or Nashville. OWS has over 40 working groups, some of which were forced to transform after the eviction (sanitation became focused on housing, for example) due to new circumstances. Local Occupys have adapted OWS’s model to their local needs and created a dozen or so working groups such as labour, demands, direct action, security, medical, food/kitchen, comfort, internet, media and facilitation.

The socialist left has generally limited its participation in Occupy to a handful of working groups, usually those engaged in what Ross Wolfe of Platypus correctly described as mental labour — demands, labour outreach, direct action — and shied away from the physical labour or “grunt work” done by security, comfort, medical and food/kitchen. This is problematic because it cedes the majority of working groups to the influence of other political forces (anarchists and liberals), inadvertently creating “Red ghettos”.

Prioritising groups devoted to mental as opposed to manual labour is predicated on the false notion that running a kitchen or securing tents to sustain occupiers is less political or less important than talking about demands or ideological issues. When Genora Dollinger led the Flint sit-down strike in 1936, feeding strikers hot food was just as crucial to beating General Motors as picket lines were. Without one the other was impossible. The example of post-eviction OWS bears this out as well. At this stage of the uprising’s development, mass mobilisations and political discussions have no launching point or organising centre without a physical occupation, and the physical occupation of a space requires a lot of “grunt work”.

The socialist left must be involved with all of Occupy’s aspects and develop a reputation for being the most committed, most serious, most effective fighters. Only on that basis will we be able to effectively influence people and steer the uprising’s course.

Anarchists and the Black Bloc

One stark difference between Occupy and its great dress rehearsal, the global justice movement, is the role played by Black Bloc (BB) and the broader anarchist reaction to BB. BB (not an organised group but a tactic) came to the fore of Occupy for the first time during the November 2 Oakland general strike called in response to the police department’s crackdown that left Iraq veteran Scott Olsen in the hospital with a serious brain injury (he was hit in the face with a tear gas canister).

The first notable BB incident was the vandalism at Whole Foods and major banks during the November 2 day-time marches. The second incident occurred when BB led a failed attempt to seize the Traveler’s Aid Society (TAS) later that evening after the general strike succeeded in shutting down Oakland’s port with a 10,000-strong throng. Although related, these two incidents should be examined separately because they involve different issues and had different dynamics.

The vandalism at Whole Foods seemed like a replay of BB’s infamous Starbucks window-smashings in 1999 that came to (unfairly) symbolise the global justice movement. Things turned out differently this time when BB’s actions touched off physical fights among demonstrators, with people shouting and eventually throwing objects at BB when they refused to stop damaging the property of Whole Foods and other corporate behemoths along the march route. BB acted with impunity in the global justice movement because the mantra of “diversity of tactics” prevailed, which, in practice, meant no one had the right to tell anyone else what they could or could not do even if their actions damaged the movement as a whole. This childish attitude has given way to a much more serious approach by Occupy participants who feel a strong sense of ownership over the uprising and will not allow adventurists to wreck it.

The Whole Foods incident led to thoughtful criticisms of BB’s actions in the context of Occupy from fellow anarchists. This marks a significant turning point in the maturation of US anarchism. The socialist left needs to incorporate this reality into its Occupy strategy.

Later that evening, 150 people led by BB occupied TAS, an empty building that became vacant as a result of recent budget cuts. After dropping a banner in celebration of the easy seizure of TAS, the crowd of occupiers swelled to
700 or so. They erected barricades at the two nearest intersections and set them on fire when hundreds of Oakland riot police appeared (the cops kept a low profile throughout the day). The fires and small barricades blocking the street did nothing to stop police from marching on TAS and arresting those who stayed to defend it (many BB fled to avoid arrest).

The reaction within the anarchist camp to the TAS debacle was even more visceral than to the Whole Foods incident. A local street medic blasted the BB members for fleeing the scene they helped create and a post on San Francisco Indymedia’s website, presumably from those who led the seizure, defending the action drew intensely critical comments slamming their political and tactical failures during the short-lived occupation. Kim Lehmkuhl even went so far as to describe the fire starters as faux-anarchists, provocateurs, and used other profanity-laced pejoratives unfit for a political publication to describe their actions.

By contrast, the socialist left’s criticism of the TAS occupation focused on process rather than substance. Todd Chretien wrote in Socialist Worker that the action’s organisers failed to participate in much less win the approval of Oakland’s GA, that they underestimated the police, and “sought to replace the power of mass unity with the supposed heroism of an elite”.

These mistakes are irrelevant to why the TAS occupation failed. This line of argument is one of many indications that the socialist left may not fully understand how Occupy works.

The overwhelming majority of actions, especially direct actions, that Occupy engages in are not approved by GAs. Autonomous groups (sometimes working groups officially recognised by local GAs, sometimes not) call actions, and occupiers choose to get on board or not. If every group with an idea for an action had to get GA approval, said action would simply never happen because of the bureaucratic nature of the modified consensus process when used by large groups. Expecting anarchists, especially BB, to come to a GA for approval before taking action is not realistic, nor is it a viable strategy for dealing with the very real problem of adventurist trends within Occupy. Furthermore, the TAS occupation was not an attempt to hijack or disrupt an explicitly non-violent march by an ultra-left minority as the Whole Foods incident was.

OWS itself began with the “heroism of an elite”, the 100-200 people who risked arrest by sleeping in Liberty Park starting on September 17 to make their point. Without their heroic action, the “mass unity” of the Occupy uprising would never have been born.

The TAS occupation failed because:

1) The occupiers didn't sneak into the building and begin quietly building fortifications inside to hold it. Instead they celebrated the seizure by blaring dance music, unfurling a large banner on the side of the building and dropping hundreds of leaflets from above. This attracted the attention of the local media and alerted the Oakland police to the situation, which gave them time to muster their forces for an attack at the time of their choosing.

2) After celebrating their victory publicly, TAS occupiers set up ineffective, tiny barricades (not more than a two or three feet tall) strewn across the two nearest intersections. Neither of these barricades were staffed with enough occupiers to hold those positions.

3) The mini-barricades were set on fire but not physically defended from the slow, methodical police advance.

Hundreds of people outside BB got involved in an exciting action that was ill conceived, poorly executed and an avoidable failure due more to the organisers’ inexperience (no doubt this was their first time trying to seize a building with hundreds of people) than any horribly elitist ultra-left politics. Setting up barricades was a necessity, but their placement on the outside of the building half a block away with a few dozen defenders (who set them ablaze) did nothing in terms of accomplishing the goal of holding TAS. If 150-700 people unobtrusively barricaded themselves inside of the building and held it until the next day, TAS could have been a big victory and opened a new chapter in the uprising which, thus far, has depended on seizing and holding outdoor locations for mass assemblies.

Our tasks with respect to the anarchists are twofold:

1) to work with them in neutralising adventurists and ultra-lefts when their activities threaten Occupy as a whole, and
2) to out-compete them in daring, audacity, creativity, improvisation, and revolutionary elan in the most friendly, collaborative, and comradely manner possible.

Only when we do both will we truly be contending for leadership of the Occupy uprising and fulfilling our duties as socialists.

Reds and blue

One of the socialist left’s most consistent criticisms of Occupy has concerned the issue of the police. PSL’s Liberation News ran an article entitled, “Are the police forces part of the 99% or tools of the 1%?” The Internationalist Group attributed the predominance of whites at OWS to its “line” on the police: “A main reason why there are relatively few black and Latino participants in Occupy Wall Street is this positive attitude toward the police, who day-in and day-out persecute the oppressed.” Socialist Worker correspondent Danny Lucia concluded an article entitled “Officer not-at-all-friendly” this way:

I'll ask the same question now to all those chanting and blogging about the police being part of the 99 percent. When you chant and blog support for the cops, when you publicly speculate that maybe deep down the cops really like you, how does that make you appear to your darker-skinned comrades in the movement who have no doubts about how the police feel about them?

The New York City ISO even held a public meeting on the topic: “Our Enemies in Blue: Why the Police Are Not Part of the 99%.”

Socialists are duty-bound to object to politics, strategy, tactics and slogans we believe harm or impede movements of the oppressed and exploited. On this point there can be no debate.

However, the socialist left’s objections on this issue are not rooted in the needs of the uprising but in our desire to “teach” Occupy Marxist orthodoxy. According to the socialist left, OWS was and is too friendly to the police, when, in reality, OWS had the opposite problem: hostility to the NYPD was so strong that incidents of groping, sexual assaults and rapes that began almost from day one of the occupation went unreported for weeks. This practice changed as the incidents escalated and occupiers realised it could not be handled “internally”,
(When such reports were filed, the NYPD blamed the victims, creating an opportunity for OWS to link up with SlutWalk.)

None of the socialist publications acknowledged or seemed to be aware of this development within Occupy, nor did they offer any practical guidance on what to do about the sexual assaults that plagued occupations across the country.

The socialist left objects to the inclusion of the rank and file of the police force in what Occupy calls “the 99%” by which the uprising means everyone outside the wealthiest 1% who destroyed the economy, paid themselves and rigged the political system. These objections have been framed in a problematic way; the issues have been mixed up and, as a result, Occupy’s “friendliness” towards the police in the face of repression appears to be stupidity, insanity, or both. For example, Lucia wrote in the article quoted previously:

Maybe the horrifying [police] attack on Iraq vet Scott Olsen and the rest of Occupy Oakland will finally settle the debate inside the movement about whether or not the police are on our side. Up until now, some protesters have been determined to maintain sympathy for the cops despite the near-constant harassment of many encampments.

No act of police violence will “finally settle the debate” about whether the police are part of the 99% because there is no debate, at least within Occupy. The police rank and file are part of the 99%. They are the part of the 99% that keep the rest of the 99% in line at the behest of the 1%. The police rank and file are professional class traitors. Shouting “you are the 99%!” at them drives that point home far better than calling them “pigs” or “our enemies in blue”. PSL’s juxtaposition, “are the police forces part of the 99% or tools of the 1%?” is false because they are both. It is not a case of either-or.

To argue that the police are “not part of the 99%" means to argue that they are somehow part of the 1%, a radically and demonstrably false notion. This explains why the socialist left’s argument on this issue has gained zero ground within Occupy despite all the beatings, arrests, abuse and brutality.

Where the police rank and file fit into the 99%-1% dichotomy is separate from questions like whether Occupy should march in defence of police pensions or if shouting “you are the 99%!” or “join us” at the police is something Occupy should do. These are the live issues facing Occupy that the socialist left should be discussing and providing a political lead on instead of criticising who occupiers maintain “sympathy” for.

Occupy is absolutely correct in its openness to including rank-and-file cops in a struggle against the 1%. This correctness has been proven in practice many times over. Police in Albany resisted pressure from Democratic Party Governor Anthony Cuomo to clear and arrest occupiers. Retired Philadelphia police captain Ray Lewis joined OWS and was arrested in full uniform during the November 17 day of action; he carried a sign that read, “NYPD: Don’t Be Wall Street Mercenaries”.

It is precisely because the uprising says, “you too, officer, are part of the 99%” that Christopher Rorey, a black officer with the DeKalb County Police Department, emailed Occupy Atlanta for help fighting the unjust foreclosure of his family’s home. Occupy Atlanta sent a dozen occupiers, delaying the foreclosure temporarily. Now the bank (government-owned Fannie Mae) is taking legal action to force Rorey to turn over all email correspondence between his family and Occupy Atlanta, as if evicting them was not enough.

If the socialist left’s “line” on the police prevailed in Occupy and the uprising treated rank-and-file cops as “the enemy”, none of these things would have happened. If officer Rorey is not part of the 99%, then Occupy Atlanta is guilty of betraying our cause and siding with “our enemies in blue”.

No single socialist publication has mentioned Rorey’s case in any of its articles on Occupy and the police because doing so would force them to answer the most basic of political questions: which side are you on?

Occupy Atlanta was not afraid to pick officer Rorey’s side and we should not be afraid to either.

As socialists we should be going out of our way to organise actions that might split the police along class lines or cause them disciplinary problems. Cases like Rorey’s are a golden opportunity. It offers us the exceedingly rare possibility of fanning the flames of discontent within the police force, between the rank-and-file cops and their bosses, between the police force and the 1% they work for.

The tension between the police and their political bosses became evident after the Oakland police union issued a scathing rebuke to Oakland’s Democratic Party Mayor Jean Quan, who ordered them to clear Occupy Oakland and then tried to distance herself from the crackdown after they nearly killed Iraq veteran Scott Olsen and provoked a general strike. Imagine the difficulty that would have emerged within the Atlanta police department if they had been ordered to clear the house of a fellow officer, his family, and “pro cop” occupiers.

It is for these strategic reasons that Occupy the Hood founder Malik Rhaasan spoke positively about the prospect of marching on NYPD headquarters in defence of their pensions. Such an action would put the NYPD in the awkward position of possibly pepper spraying and arresting a “pro cop” march. Rhaasan’s position should also serve as a warning to disproportionately white socialist groups not to use the suffering of oppressed peoples at the hands of the police to make bogus arguments about Occupy and the police.

The task of socialists is not to “teach” Occupy that the police are “our enemies in blue”. Our task is to overcome the police as a repressive force, to neutralise them, as US Marine and Iraq veteran Shamar Thomas did when he stopped 30 cops from arresting peaceful Occupy protesters at a massive Times Square OWS demonstration. Thomas shamed them, implied they were cowards, and told them there was “no honour” in brutalising the very people they are supposed to protect. He utilised the contradiction between the stated purpose of the police and their actual purpose to impede police repression on behalf of our real enemies, the ruling class.

The danger of the Democratic Party

After the socialist left recognised the importance of Occupy and got on board, it began warning of the danger of being co-opted by the Democratic Party. A typical example was Dan La Botz’s article “Occupy the Democratic Party? No Way!” which used current and historical events to make a very strong case against the Democrats but did not offer any practical guidance on how to avoid being taken over (aside from just saying “no” to the drug known as the Democratic Party).

This type of negative “don’t do the following” or “it would be a mistake if” advice to Occupy is common for socialist publications. Danny Lucia’s “Co-opt-upy Wall Street?” in Socialist Worker had a detailed account of how the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) broke promises made in joint meetings with OWS organisers when it took over the November 17 march to ensure there would be no traffic disruption on the Brooklyn Bridge or grassroots people’s mic speakouts at the closing rally. (Given the SEIU’s union-busting in the health-care industry on the West Coast, this betrayal should come as no surprise.) Lucia argues SEIU’s actions were part and parcel of its strategy to maximise the vote for the Democrats and minimise Occupy’s militancy.

However, the practical conclusion Lucia draws about how OWS should deal with this is to “not to turn away from organized labor, whose participation in OWS in New York City has been one of the movement's biggest strengths”. He continued:

OWS has breathed new life into a labor movement that has been in retreat for decades. At the rank-and-file level, the Occupy movement was a lightning rod for many people who have been looking for a way to take action. … Continuing that engagement with labor will be important for the future of the Occupy movement. And within unions, it will serve as a counter-weight against officials who want labor to go back to mobilizing only for the polls—rather than for the protests that have galvanized people around the country in a long overdue struggle against the One Percent.

These arguments are correct so far as they go, but they do not go far enough. These are not concrete, practical conclusions. Of course Occupy should not abandon its work with unions (no one in OWS is in favour of doing so), but refusing to shun unions in general does nothing specific to prevent SEIU from hijacking future marches. Should OWS organise any future actions in conjunction with SEIU since it has proven it cannot be trusted, especially as the 2012 elections approach? Should SEIU representatives be allowed to attend OWS logistics meetings? If the SEIU tries to hijack another action, what should OWS do? March somewhere else? Hold an ad-hoc GA to discuss a potential course of action?

The article says not a word on these burning questions.

The task of the socialist left is not simply to warn and advise Occupy about the danger of being co-opted by the Democratic Party (a danger that is keenly felt by a large number of participants, including liberals) but to propose, organise and lead Occupy actions against individual Democratic Party politicians and the party as a whole, thereby creating facts on the ground that will make co-optation difficult or impossible.

For example, after congressman Charlie Wrangel visited OWS to “show support”, OWS marched on his office because he voted in favour of a free-trade agreement with South Korea. In New Hampshire (a blue state), Obama was “mic checked” for his silence on the police brutality directed at Occupy and his refusal to do anything about the banksters’ ongoing destruction of the US economy. Jesse La Greca, who famously destroyed a Fox News reporter in an unaired interview that went viral, called for occupying the offices of “worthless Blue Dog” Democrats like Senators Ben Nelson and Max Baucus. OWS has also gone after an Obama fundraiser and the 2012 Democratic National Convention will also be a likely Occupy target (the host city has already tried to ban Occupy actions).

These actions are a reflection of the fact that Occupy is a rebellion against policies the Democratic and Republican parties have implemented for four decades, that most of the mayors who ordered crackdowns on encampments are Democrats, and that the uprising exploded under a Democratic Party president that millions of Occupy participants voted for in the hope that he would govern differently than his predecessors had. For these reasons the uprising does not see sharp distinctions between the two parties, unlike the 2002-2003 anti-war movement.

This is not to suggest that the danger of co-optation is non-existent but to point out that Occupy’s self-led self-organised nature does not lend itself to Wisconsin-style derailment (where the socialist left did not create popular bodies like GAs that could have served as authoritative counterweights to the union leaders and provided the basis for an Oakland-style general strike). Just as Occupy created new and unexpected forms, so too will the Democratic Party’s intervention into Occupy come in a form that is new and unexpected.

We must do everything possible to hinder that eventuality. Deeds not words, agitation not propaganda are decisive now.

Given Occupy’s fluidity, the socialist left should be careful about ruling any course of action out. An attempt to “Occupy the Democratic Party” is not necessarily a road for activists out of militant struggle and into the voting both. For example, Occupy activists might decide to copy the example of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party which held an integrated primary and then tried to claim the official segregated delegation’s seat at the party’s 1964 convention. This was an effort to bring the fight for civil rights into the Democratic Party, not an attempt to trap the civil rights fight in a dead end. We may see Occupy efforts to hold “99% primaries” that ban contributions by corporations and lobbyists and select delegates to the 2012 convention that challenge the legitimacy of the party’s official delegates. Such an action would probably be a road out of the Democratic Party since it would prove to thousands of people in practice that the party is owned lock, stock and barrel by the 1%.

This is hypothetical but Occupy thus far has pulled off many creative and original actions that the socialist left did not foresee but then wholeheartedly supported once they emerged. Failure to be open minded is what caused us to lag behind Occupy’s rise in the first place.

Some conclusions

The most basic and fundamental task facing socialists is to merge with Occupy and lead it from within. Socialist groups that insist on “intervening” in the uprising will be viewed as outsiders with little to contribute in practice to solving Occupy’s actual problems because they will be focused on winning arguments and ideological points rather than actively listening to, joining hands with and fighting alongside the vanguard of the 99% in overcoming common practical and political.

One difficulty the socialist left faces in accomplishing this basic and fundamental task is the divisions in our ranks that serve in practice to weaken the overall socialist influence within Occupy, thereby strengthening that of the anarchists. They have their Black Bloc, but where is our Red Bloc? Where are the socialist slogans to shape and guide the uprising’s political development?

Out of clouds of pepper spray and phalanxes of riot cops a new generation of revolutionaries is being forged, and it would be a shame if the Peter Camejos, Max Elbaums, Angela Davises, Dave Clines and Huey Newtons of this generation end up in separate “competing” socialist groups as they did in the 1960s. Now is the time to begin seriously discussing the prospect of regroupment, of liquidating outdated boundaries we have inherited, of finding ways to work closely together for our common ends.

Above all else, now is the time to take practical steps towards creating a broad-based radical party that in today’s context could easily have thousands of active members and even more supporters. Initiatives like Socialist Viewpoint’s call for a joint revolutionary socialist organising committee in the Bay Area is a step in the right direction. We need to take more of those steps, sooner rather than later. The opportunity we have now to make the socialist movement a force to be reckoned with again in this country depends on it.

Anyone who agrees with this conclusion, whether they are in a socialist group or not, and wants to take these steps should email me so we can find ways to work together.

Pham Binh’s articles have been published by Occupied Wall Street Journal, The Indypendent, Asia Times Online, Znet, Green Left Weekly and Counterpunch. His other writings can be found at www.planetanarchy.net.



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It is simply a matter of survival for democracy activists, labor rights activists and religious and ethnic minorities to be working together.



From the Campaign for Peace and Democracy

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Dear Friend of the Campaign for Peace and Democracy,

 
       In the face of escalating war threats, Iran's Network of Iranian Labor Associations (NILA) sent the message below to Amnesty International's December 10 Human Rights Day Event in Chicago on Human Rights in Iran, noting that "It is incumbent on us, in the weeks and months to come, when war drums are rolling, to alert our public to the dangers of the war option. There would be no room for campaigning for human rights when cities are bombed and civilians slaughtered. Therefore let us not forget to publicize this dreadful threat as we highlight the many cases of human rights abuses in Iran."

        The full text of NILA message is below, and is posted on the Iran Labor Report website.

In peace and solidarity,
Joanne                 Tom
Joanne Landy and Thomas Harrison
Co-Directors
Campaign for Peace and Democracy
New York, NY, USA
cpd@igc.org     www.cpdweb.org
 
************************************************************************

December 9, 2011

Dear friends,

We, trade unionists in Tehran and other cities, extend our warm greetings to you from half way across the world. Please forgive us for not sending you a video message. Unfortunately trade unionism is considered a dangerous offense by the Iranian government and labor activists here are persecuted like dangerous criminals. Hence the need for extra caution even in a simple message of greeting such as this.

Certainly, your event is special in more ways than one. While in the past there have been human rights conferences focused exclusively on persecution of political or civil society activists, or to repression against religious minorities, or on rare occasions, to the hounding of labor activists in Iran, to our knowledge an event devoted to all of these at once is rare, and quite welcome.

What activists in Iran from all these diverse movements have learned is that one can only separate these struggles at one's own peril. It is simply a matter of survival for democracy activists, labor rights activists and religious and ethnic minorities to be working together. In facing a powerful and ruthless dictatorship like the Islamic Republic, it would be shear madness to highlight our differences rather than our common ground.

It is therefore deeply satisfying to know that experts from various fields are discussing repression against political activists, followers of the Baha'i faith and labor activists in one panel as it is being done in Chicago today. One can hope that this model is taken up by other American and international human rights groups.

Finally let us share with you a major concern of ours today --one that demands maximum vigilance in the months to come. As you know, the Iranian regime is in the throes of its worst ever crisis. In fact we are dealing not with one but multiple crises: economic, political and ideological ones. This is beginning to hit the very heart of the regime: i.e. its social and political support base. This year, for example, the Ashura mourning ceremonies, devoted to the martyrdom of Shi'ism's Third Imam, was the most lackluster ever. While this may be greeted by outsiders as welcome news, in reality it makes the regime far more dangerous than in the past.

The recent attack on the British embassy in Tehran should be seen as a warm-up for what is planned. They are preparing themselves for war. The bloodier, the better, from their perspective. It would be their savior, a lifeline to the regime. Under the circumstances, it would be sheer folly for either Israel or the United States to go to war with Iran. Why give the Islamic Republic's leaders a fresh lease on life when every visible sign points to a terminal state of being? Unfortunately there are indications that this doomsday scenario is not so far-fetched. Despite denials in the last few days, Israel's right-wing government is actively preparing itself for that very option. It may do so for both domestic and strategic considerations, dragging the Obama Administration with it into the abyss. What would an attack on Iran achieve? It certainly can not destroy the country's nuclear program. It would only set it back for a very short time while giving every pretext for that regime to resume it feverishly afterward. It would consolidate the regime for many years to come and it would radicalize the Arab Spring into a radical Islamic fundamentalist nightmare.

It is incumbent on us, in the weeks and months to come, when war drums are rolling, to alert our public to the dangers of the war option. There would be no room for campaigning for human rights when cities are bombed and civilians slaughtered.

Therefore let us not forget to publicize this dreadful threat as we highlight the many cases of human rights abuses in Iran.

We wish you a very successful event on this Saturday December 10.

The Network of Iranian Labor Associations
Iran




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