Communist Workers Group (CWG-USA)

(First published Spring 2012)

Coming hard on the heels of the spring 2011 protests at the Wisconsin state capitol and the popular uprisings in North Africa, the Occupy movement burst onto the scene in the fall of 2011 as a welcome sign that the masses in the world’s leading imperialist power were awakening at last from their long slumber. The Occupy protests started, logically enough, at the power center of finance capital on Wall Street, but quickly spread to other cities and internationally. The Occupy Wall Street encampment in New York City’s Zuccotti Park began on September 17. By October 9, Occupy protests had taken place or were ongoing in over 95 cities across 82 countries, and over 600 communities in the United States.

By calling attention to income and wealth inequality in a way the traditional Left had been unable to accomplish, the Occupy movement succeeded in refocusing the center of gravity of political dialogue in the United States. But it achieved its broad popularity at the cost of programmatic, strategic, and tactical clarity. Although it has reached out to the labor movement, it has done so only to a varying degree, and has deliberately avoided adopting a class identity. Worse, it has rejected the traditions of workers’ democracy and mass labor actions in the name of “leaderlessness” and “diversity of tactics.” In so doing, it has limited its own potential to galvanize the working class, and exposed itself to cooptation by reformism and electoral politics.

Occupy’s useful life is far from over. The plutocracy remains sufficiently concerned about it to have moved the G8 summit scheduled for May 2012 from Chicago to Camp David. In late March, Occupy staged attempts to set up new camps in Manhattan and Oakland; as we go to press, these camps are under police attack, and their fate is uncertain. Occupy organizers have announced that they are planning a comeback this spring, leading up to a major action on May 1, 2012. But if Occupy does not move beyond fetishizing the encampment tactic, police confrontation, and the general assembly consensus process to embrace an explicitly working class identity, a mode of organizing based in workers’ democracy, and a class struggle program, it is doomed to eventual demoralization and defeat.

IMPACT

Occupy Oakland and the Port Shutdowns

One of the first major Occupy encampments to crop up in the wake of the initial Zuccotti Park action was Occupy Oakland, which took over the plaza in front of Oakland’s City Hall and renamed it in honor of Oscar Grant, young black worker and father brutally executed by the local transit police on January 1, 2009. Situated in the heart of the historically progressive San Francisco Bay Area, Occupy Oakland attracted considerable support from the rank and file of the labor movement as well as left organizations, students, and the oppressed communities.

Occupy Oakland was also one of the first encampments, after Zuccotti Park, to fall victim to a brutal police onslaught. On October 25, 2011, during an attempt to evict the encampment from the plaza, police fired a “non-lethal” projectile point-blank at two-term Iraq War veteran Scott Olsen, critically injuring him. News of Olsen’s injury flashed at Twitter speed around the world, and immediately all eyes were on Oakland. News that Egyptians were marching on the American Embassy in solidarity with Oakland swelled internationalist fervor across the Occupy movement, while live feeds flashed demonstrations across a thousand cities standing militant vigil for Olsen.

Occupy Oakland then took the bold step of calling for a general strike, despite not having the social leverage to accomplish the task of shutting down the entire city. It was quickly acknowledged that labor would not down tools, but that with enough pressure the Port of Oakland could be closed. Thus, the misnamed general strike ultimately manifested itself as a “day of action” culminating in a mass picket to shut the port.

On November 2, a racially diverse cross-section of Oaklanders and other Bay Area residents, numbering in the tens of thousands, marched from Oscar Grant Plaza to the Port of Oakland gates. From there, they spread out over a distance of between three and five miles to the farthest berths, dividing their forces to assure adequate picket lines were formed up at each gate. The vast crowd included workers (organized and unorganized), unemployed, youth, students, parents, elders, disabled, marching bands, affinity groups, anti-police brutality groups, every variation of socialists, communists and anarchists, and Occupy activists . The enormous power latent in the so-called “99%” became self-evident during the port shutdown, and a shift in consciousness percolated across the crowd as the participants experienced the force of solidarity. The working class of Oakland was becoming self-aware and self-expressing. They had broken out of isolation, atomization and demoralization and cast off the shackles of business unionism, and were putting their stamp on the international class struggle in a profoundly significant and exemplary manner. No cargo moved in or out of the port that night. The union tops won’t fight the Taft-Hartley anti-strike laws, but that night, the working class showed that as a class, we can!

Flush with the achievements of November 2, the Occupy movement called for a second port shutdown on December 12, 2011. This time, the reach of the protest was extended to the entire West Coast. Its core focus was the fight to defend the ILWU 21 dockworkers in Longview, Washington, who were threatened with displacement by a scab union at a newly built grain terminal. As it did on November 2, Occupy also sought to call attention to the shameful situation of the port truck drivers, who have been barred from organizing for better wages and working conditions because the law has falsely labeled them “independent contractors” who cannot bargain collectively under the antitrust laws.

The December 12 West Coast Port Shutdown was not uniformly successful, but it did have an impact. It helped to fuel a subsequent effort to organize a caravan of workers and unemployed to block the first grain shipment scheduled to leave Longview. In the face of this organizing effort, the multinational corporation that built the Longview terminal finally bowed to the inevitable, and reached a contract – albeit a deplorably concessionary one (see sidebar) – with ILWU Local 21.

Occupy Oakland’s decision to shut down the ports on the West Coast on November 2 and December 12 was criticized by mainstream media, union officials, and even some labor activists who consider themselves progressive. They complained that Occupy does not represent union workers, that the port shutdowns were not officially endorsed even by the ILWU or the labor councils in the port cities, and that the actions hurt the people who work at the ports. They argued that if Occupy wants to support the labor movement, it should follow the instructions of the labor bureaucrats rather than acting on its own.

If Occupy and its supporters had heeded this advice, the ports would never have been shut down. Oakland’s unions responded to Occupy Oakland’s call for the November 2 port shutdown with letters of support for what they called a “Day of Action,” but not one dared to defy Taft-Hartley by calling their members to walk out in unison and create a real general strike. Instead, they told workers to take vacation time if they wanted to participate. If you have to take a vacation day to attend an action, or if you are able to get ride public transit to get there, it is not a general strike. Labor did pay for the toilets and lunch, but when it came time to shut down the port, it was the Oakland rank and file working class who took the lead!

In the run-up to December 12th, the labor leadership’s role got worse. The ILWU leadership took a stand against their own rank and file and against the community that supported them. Under pressure from the Port Management Association and the Democratic Party, the Alameda County Labor Council even went so far as to consider a resolution opposing the port shutdown. The resolution was ultimately tabled.

As these facts demonstrate, the criticisms of Occupy for failing to show sufficient deference to the official leadership of organized labor ignore the fact that the present union bureaucracy, hog-tied by its links to the Democratic Party and its craven fear of violating the oppressive Taft-Hartley anti-strike law, has demonstrated time and time again that it is incapable of fighting effectively for the interests of even those few workers who belong to a union, much less the interests of the working class as a whole. Although unions in the US did wage militant struggles in the distant past, under today’s leadership, we cannot rely on them to do so again. At least three factors prohibit labor, under the current leadership, from launching the overdue counterattack. First: no working class political independence; second: anti-labor laws; and third: professionalization, institutionalization and class collaboration of labor’s leadership.

That is why, having run out of patience waiting for the union leadership to take action in the face of the current economic crisis, the working class of Oakland took action on its own, and kicked Wall Street where it counts by shutting down the Port of Oakland – twice!

Occupy and the Oppressed Communities

When Occupy emerged in Oakland, youth, the Black and Brown communities, and the most radical elements of the labor movement were already primed to present the generally white “middle class” Occupy supporters with tasks that would challenge the movement on questions of special oppression, class exploitation, and class struggle. Occupy Oakland has been perhaps the most successful in integrating the agenda against police brutality into the movement, and in igniting conversation among its labor and Black and Brown communities.

The Oakland community had already been organizing against police brutality for the last three years following the BART police execution of Oscar Grant. As the racist and anti-working class nature of this police brutality was revealed, a block between labor activists and anti-police brutality activists developed into a one-day political strike by ILWU Local 10 on October 23, 2010. This action shaped and promoted the development of an anti-racist class consciousness among many workers and youth in Oakland.

During the occupation of the Wisconsin Capitol in the previous winter, many of these same forces came together around a port shutdown in solidarity with public workers that was spearheaded by ILWU Local 10 on April 4, 2011. These actions exemplified, for many, the role labor could and should be playing in organizing actions to defend the most oppressed communities and the interests of the entire working class.

Thus, the fact that Occupy Oakland chose to memorialize Oscar Grant when it renamed the site of its occupation was significant. Occupy Oakland drew racially and otherwise diverse crowds to its encampment, its general assemblies, and its major actions on November 2 and December 12. Yet as time went on, some participants from the oppressed communities began to feel marginalized. The organizational machinery behind the scenes was increasingly dominated by privileged young white activists who could afford the time and energy to attend countless working group meetings and prolonged evening General Assemblies. It did not help the oppressed communities’ perception of Occupy when the police action that injured, but did not kill, white Iraq war veteran Scott Olsen triggered far larger demonstrations and a far more militant reaction than had appeared in the wake of the police murders of several local Black youth (Oscar Grant, Kenneth Harding, Raheim Brown). Occupy Oakland gave little or no support to the campaign to support and defend Sean Gillis, the whistleblowing paramedic who called attention to Oakland Fire Department paramedics’ bungled treatment Oscar Grant’s bullet wounds, and was harassed and demoted for his truth-telling. When Trayvon Martin was murdered in Florida in March 2012, only a few hundred attended the ensuing protests in the Bay Area.

By the time Occupy Oakland’s goals and tactics shifted from the successful port shutdowns to the disastrous attempted building takeover on January 28, many in the local Black and Brown communities had lost faith in the Occupy movement. Its blindness to the unconscious racism inherent in its mode of functioning, and its failure to give sufficient emphasis to the fight against racial injustice, had alienated

Internationalism

From the first pizza pie ordered by the Egyptian movement and sent to the public workers at the Wisconsin Capitol occupation in the early winter of 2011, a revived internationalism began to develop in the working class. The Occupy movement was inspired in part by the struggles of the people of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and the Middle East during the Arab Spring. As the tents went up in Zuccotti Park, American workers began to look internationally for class inspiration, to a degree not seen since the days of the Spanish Civil War.

In its turn, the Occupy movement has gotten both the attention and support of its working class brethren around the world. Occupy has revealed to the world that the US is a declining imperial power, and that its working class is as desperate as those in others parts of the world. Occupy has also shown that even US workers, widely viewed abroad as passive and subservient to capital since the postwar boom years, are capable of rising up and fighting back when pushed to the wall.

The globalization of capital has made it more important than ever for those who wage the struggle against capital to form ties with our counterparts around the globe. The workers’ movement cannot succeed unless it develops an internationalist consciousness, in solidarity with our brother and sister workers overseas. It is in all of our common interest to defeat the imperialist wars and interventions waged by the United States, NATO, and their allies. The international inspiration and impact of Occupy have brought us closer to this goal.

LIMITATIONS

The Occupy movement deserves credit for galvanizing support, across the US and worldwide, for a popular struggle against the global domination of big capital and its imposition of austerity measures on workers and youth. But Occupy, with its cross-class, left-wing populist identity and ideology, is no substitute for an organized, disciplined, class-conscious movement with a solid anticapitalist program. As we will show, Occupy’s susceptibility to reformism and its espousal of consensus decisionmaking and “leaderless” anarchism are actually two sides of the same coin. If the Occupy movement does not transcend its organizational and ideological limitations – and soon – it cannot succeed, or even survive.

The General Assembly and Consensus Processes

“Mic check! Mic check! Mic check!” This is how you take the floor during the general assembly. “Direct response! Direct response!” With a little chutzpah and these two phrases an individual can control the discussion. Is it expedient, yes, and at times it works. It can be used to make group decisions which the majority can understand and decide upon quickly. Furthermore, if any leader (or a layer of members) comes forward and plans an action and can muster the votes at the GA then that action simply becomes part of Occupy’s “diversity of tactics.”

At the same time, this system – combined with the consensus (100%) and even modified consensus (90%) requirement for proposals to pass – has effectively kept the Occupy movement from charting a course toward working class action independent from ruling class politics. Rather, this system allows and promotes the ruling class ideology through the multiple transmission belts of the liberals, progressives, labor leaders, pacifists, fake socialists, and anarchists.

Our enemy is the most organized, centralized, militarized national security state ever assembled, and is united to take every action “necessary” in defense of private ownership of the means of production. Its defeat will not be accomplished by public assemblies where a handful of reformists can block the development of program, or a handful of pacifists can block the formation of labor, Black and Brown self-defense guards, the arming of pickets, or the formation of workers’ militias. Invariably, in public assemblies using the Occupy method, a minority will block the assembly from drawing the class lines that are necessary to lead the working class past the illusions of pacifism, the class collaboration of the labor leaders, the moral imperative of the liberals, the ultra-leftism and susceptibility to provocateurs of the so-called “black block” anarchists, and the pseudo anti-leadership philosophy being promoted.

In an attempt to self-define, the movement identifies with the “99%”. But that is clearly a rhetorical ploy based on fuzzy sociology. The real ruling class, the top oligarchs are more like 0.01% and they have a good 7-12% of the population materially dependent on them and committed to the perpetuation of their rule. But what kind of movement could you build around the slogan “We are the 87.243%!” Left to its own fuzzy sociology and its own interactive process, Occupy is an expression of the radicalized petty bourgeois feeling the pressure of capitalism’s implosion. Yet at the same time, and despite the fuzzy sociology, the class character of the mobilization at Occupy can change on a dime, with massive gathering of trade unionists and workers at the encampments. This has happened a number of times, with masses of trade unionists coming to Occupy Wall Street events in New York City, and in Oakland when the Occupy Oakland Labor Solidarity Committee assembled in the days after Scott Olsen was injured.

The result of changing class characterization, lack of leadership and no real programmatic demands, leaves Occupy at the whim of the most charismatic speaker at the assembly. The illusion represented by “diversity of tactics” leaves the movement open to any and every scheme proposed, thereby undermining its ability to move in a focused, productive direction. “Diversity of tactics” is a measure to take when you have a plan and it’s not working, so you need to change the road you take to get to your destination. Without a destination in mind, however, “diversity of tactics” becomes a diversity of directions which weakens the movement and is one of its greatest limitations.

Reformist Demands

The Occupy movement has spoken to people unlike any other in our recent history, and has jostled people out of their resigned and conformist slumber to take a stand and act for the future of themselves, their children and the world society as a whole. Unfortunately, however, Occupy has failed to identify and articulate a program that can bring about the necessary fundamental change in the structure of our economy and our society. The Occupy movement has developed many lists of the wrongs of capitalism, but under the guise of adherence to its consensus process, has assured that discussion of demands to define the movement is not entertained. The end result is to edge out, contain, and prevent debate over working class program and revolutionary action. As the “99%” tries to self define, the programmatic vacuum resulting from insistence on consensus and leaderlessness prevents the movement from overcoming the politics of the dominant paradigm, allows the liberal/progressive critique to prevail, and limits the movement’s program to “logical” or “common sense” demands.

A typical example is the Occupy movement’s emphasis on opposing “corporate personhood,” the doctrine espoused by the United States Supreme Court in its infamous  Citizens United decision. The abolition of “corporate personhood” was the focus of a national Occupy-sponsored day of protest on January 20, 2012. But emphasizing this reform obscures the truth that the problems we face are not a result of “corporate personhood,” or even of corporations in and of themselves, but of capitalism.

Under the capitalist economic system, the means of production (factories, mines, technology, etc.) are privately owned, and the people who own the means of production use them in the way that will make the most profit, rather than choosing to make the things that people need most. Capitalists have no interest in housing the homeless, employing the jobless, feeding the hungry, healing the sick, protecting the environment, or educating the young. There is always more profit to be made doing other things. Even if we got rid of corporations altogether, our system would still treat protecting private property and maximizing profits as the top priority. This is not because of corporate personhood, but because of the capitalist system itself.

It is capitalism, not corporate personhood, that is responsible for the current worldwide depression. Why? Big businesses moved most of their manufacturing out of the developed countries, where workers’ standard of living was relatively high, because they could make higher profits by building factories in countries like China, where wages were lower. Meanwhile, Wall Street used the money that flowed back to the United States to gamble for profit on speculative bubbles like mortgage-backed securities. When the bubble burst, the economy tanked.

For the same reason, Occupy’s focus on “tax the rich” – including its ill-fated campaign for a “millionaires tax” in California (see sidebar) – ignores and obscures the fact that the priorities for spending tax revenues are not set by the working class or the “99%,” but by politicians whose job it is to serve the interests of the plutocracy. Putting more money in the coffers of government will do nothing to change the balance of power between capital and labor.

In order to build the kind of society we all want to see, we first have to grasp the simple fact that what lies at the root of the world’s problems is not corporations or rich people, but the profit-driven economic system as a whole – that is, capitalism. Calling for reforms like “abolish corporate personhood” and “tax the rich” implies that the social problems of our country (not to mention the global economic crisis) can be solved by limiting big business’s political campaign contributions and forcing rich people to hand over more tax dollars to the government. This is a pipe dream. The truth is that these reforms will do little or nothing to solve our economic, environmental, and human needs problems, bring peace to the world, or create a genuinely democratic political system.

By limiting its focus to issues that are mere surface manifestations of the underlying problem of capitalism, Occupy – whether consciously or not – actually serves the interests of the capitalist class. The struggle for reformist demands channels activists’ time and energy away from building for a direct challenge for power, and redirects these precious resources in a direction that poses no threat to capitalist control of the economy.

Absence of Working Class Identity and Program

The impulse underlying the Occupy movement is that there is a class war going on – and the “99%” did not start it. The corporate plutocracy has been waging an all-out war against organized labor for decades, to the point where 89% of workers no longer belong to a union. Their latest ploy is to blame public workers and their unions for the current structural crisis of capitalism – as if the demands, of teachers, firefighters, and public health workers for a “fair wage” and a threadbare pension were responsible for crashing the biggest economy in the world.

As a result, over the past decades, the situation of working people and the poor in the United States has gone from bad to worse. While this was happening, the “leadership” of the union movement did nothing to fight back directly, instead contributing money, volunteers, and votes to the Democratic Party. They have continued in this vein even while Democratic politicians have cut budgets, slashed social services, and imposed take backs on public workers. When Obama promised “hope” and “change,” the union tops cheered, and they will back him again in 2012.

By now it is crystal clear that channeling our discontent into electoral campaigns brings working people nothing but false hope, and change for the worse. The Democrats have promised us health care reform; jobs; the Employee Free Choice Act to boost union organizing; and environmental protection. They have delivered precisely NOTHING. We are still faced with a shrinking job market, a lower standard of living, rising education costs, cutbacks in social services, home foreclosures, budget cuts, tax cuts for the rich, and bailouts for the banks. And still, the union leadership backs the Democrats, refusing to assert labor’s political independence and fight back with mass working class actions. As the international crisis of capitalism imposes austerity on all the working people, dependent peoples, and marginalized and specially oppressed communities, the labor bureaucracies have displayed their inability to respond with appropriate class force to turn the tide against capital and in favor of labor.

As for the Occupy movement, while it self-defines as independent of both corporate parties, the vacuum left by its leaderlessness and lack of program creates an opening for reformists, pacifists, and labor (mis)leaders to steer it in the direction of Democratic party electoral politics. As we head into the 2012 campaign, we can expect to see reformism, pacifism, liberalism, and business unionism join forces to corral the working class away from independent political action and back to the big Democratic umbrella. The centrists, fake socialists, and anarchists play along by not challenging these reformists, and by failing to fight for demands and actions that pose working class solutions based on resolving the basic contradictions of capitalism.

The most egregious variants of these methods are displayed by figures such as ex-Black Panther and ex-CP member Angela Davis, who, for all her experience, offers no program other than self-actualization platitudes from author June Jordan, and by Michael Moore, who evokes the moral imperative against “capitalist greed,” and proposes “democracy” as the solution. No better are fake socialist organizations such as the ISO, which in San Francisco has endorsed anti-working class proposition C and freely distributed “tax the rich” posters. The ISO, at least, should have read the 1938 Transitional Program of the Fourth International, which demonstrates how to articulate a program of transitional demands designed to guide workers to take production into the hands of the working class.

The Role of Anarchism

Occupy is also home to many strains of anarchists. Most of the anarchists ignore or disparage discussion of program, and when challenged to a discussion at the Occupy in Oakland to compare Marxism and Anarchism, the anarchists refused to show up. This anti-political posture actively impedes the working class from developing a class-identified program that can serve as a pole of attraction away from reformism. Worse still is the small, isolated group of self-defined anarchists who espouse “black-blocking” and refuse to discuss program or to prepare for joint action. Instead, under the rationale of “diversity of tactics,” they go on sprees of window smashing and random vandalism, which are easily infiltrated by police provocateurs and used to evoke violent backlash against the entire movement.

Following the port shutdown on November 2, 2011, some anarchistic youth and squatters attempted to seize a vacant building in Oakland, previously used by a homeless services organization, to bring it back to the service of the homeless. A much larger and more significant attempted building takeover was organized by Occupy Oakland on January 28, 2012. These actions challenged the irrationality of capitalism, which allows housing to remain vacant while people are driven out of their homes and onto the streets.

This tactic is exemplary, but as the experiences of November 2 and January 28 showed, it cannot be carried out effectively without a disciplined mass effort built with the support of labor and the communities of the oppressed. When attempted without proper planning and discipline, actions like these are highly vulnerable to infiltration by unprincipled thrill-seekers and police provocateurs. Actions such as lighting fires in the street and breaking windows can easily be taken by cops dressed as “black blockers” in order to give their storm trooper colleagues an excuse to crush the squatters. These outbursts of violence do nothing to organize the working class and prepare for the seizure of power, and are therefore just as counter-revolutionary as the non-program “program” of the liberals and reformists.

The unfortunate events that transpired in Oakland on January 28, 2012, threatened to be the nail in the coffin for Occupy. Several thousand activists showed up to march towards and occupy an empty city-owned building (the defunct former Henry J. Kaiser Convention Center), which was to be set up a working “home” for the Occupy movement. This was an anarchist inspired and led action, planned as a stunt. The action served only to prove (as if we did not already know this) that the state will smash heads to prevent the movement from seizing property. The planners had to know that trying to seize a valuable piece of city-owned property would result in confrontation; indeed, some came prepared with helmets, body armor, shields, and metal barricades to protect the crowd.

The small core anarchist group was swelled by a number of socialists, communists, students, church groups, and even disabled activists and parents with kids, about 2000 in all. Many were not prepared for the violence that ensued. Those who had come with shields are to be commended for forming up defense lines to try to shield the crowd from the blast of tear gas grenades. But despite this effort, it was clear early on that the action was doomed to end in failure and mass arrests. After the crowd was turned back from its original target and began to march through the streets of downtown Oakland, the OPD pursued and contained them with a wall-to-wall phalanx, sweeping the crowd in front of their formation. Ultimately, the cops kettled the protesters and filled their paddywagons with arrestees.

This was not a working class demonstration. It was, instead, an infantile leftist action which put many unarmed activists in danger. In Greece, these same type of anarchists worked together with the union bureaucracy to betray the historical needs of the working class. In sum, the January 28 action was a tactical mistake, brought about by the “leaderless” quality of the movement, which lacks a clear plan and goal, not to mention discipline; has no grasp of military tactics; and entered into a confrontation without the overwhelming numbers and force of arms that were needed to have any hope of success. The day served to demoralize Occupy supporters and was a real setback for the movement, linking it to the black block anarchists in the eyes of many previously sympathetic workers, and opening it up to the accusation that it has fetishized a tactic (occupation) rather than focusing its efforts on goals that matter.

Again, the entire debacle was caused by lack of leadership, an eagerness to employ a “diversity of tactics,” and the absence of any clear direction, leaving Occupy like a cork floating at sea, at the whim of every passing storm and island. Without a concrete program to fight for, Occupy’s efforts to remain active, visible, and relevant have an artificial tone, and cannot motivate the thousands of rank-and-file workers, unemployed, and youth who are still hungry for a way to contribute their energy to changing the system.

The Pitfalls of Pacifism

Seemingly opposite to the appetite for violence of the “black block” are those pacifists who can be heard calling out to the cops, “You’re part of the 99%.” These pacifists perpetuate the lie that the state is class-neutral, and the cops are workers just like the rest of us. As left historian Howard Zinn succinctly put it, “You cannot be neutral on a moving train.” Promoting the lie that cops are part of the “99%” ignores the fact that every working class kid in the United Kingdom learns as a child, and that most people of color figure out by their teen years: the role of the cops is to keep poor and working class people in their place, especially when they organize strikes and community self defense, or when the “99%” decide to fight back. The cops are enforcers for Wall Street. They, as an institution, cannot be won over by moral arguments, any more than corporate stockholders can be convinced to elevate morals and ethics over profit.

Ultimately, the mythology perpetuated by the pacifists prevents workers and oppressed people from preparing workers’ and Black and Brown self-defense guards, and thereby allows the cops, the ICE, the racists, the homophobes, and other bigoted elements to brutalize our people and our movements, and to smash our organizations and our picket lines. The anarchists and pacifists, the liberals and fake socialists, all come together to disarm the working class by elevating the movement over program. This opens the road for myths such as cops being part the “99%”, and the crisis of capitalism being seen as a moral failure rather than the trajectory of an outdated mode of production unable to contain its own contradictions.

In short, by denying the need to clearly define a working class action program in order to create a class struggle movement, the reformists, anarchists, and pacifists alike mislead the unaware into class collaboration and capitulation to our class enemies’ program, and into adopting modes of struggle that lead to the defeat of our class. Neither window breaking nor turning the other cheek  will ultimately serve us, any more than electoral politics. Only mass independent working class action, planned under workers’ democracy and using tactics based in the power of the class, can bring us victory over the capitalist state and its body of armed men.

TOWARD A CLASS STRUGGLE PROGRAM

The Need for Revolutionary Leadership

Revolutionary Marxism recognizes that to overcome the pitfalls of reformism, pacifism, liberalism, anarchism, and centrism, the working class must construct its own revolutionary party based in the working class and among the most oppressed peoples. The task of building a revolutionary leadership involves an ongoing critique of these ideologies and a concrete challenge for leadership of the workers’ movement. The most pressing task is the construction of an internationalist workers’ party that can hone a multinational cadre of revolutionaries who can intervene in and provide leadership to the workers’ movement, and prepare it for the seizure of power through the development of a living transitional program that exposes the limits of capitalism and outlines the working class alternative.

The uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) provide many warnings and lessons. Despite the media focus on Tahrir Square, much of the background organization came from the working class quarter, which engaged in rolling waves of strikes and formed neighborhood committees to defend against both cops and thugs.Those struggles relied on support from working class strikes and the defection of rank-and-file members of the armed services to the side of the protesting masses. Workers in the United States need to learn many of the same lessons in working class independence, rank and file organizing, and workers’ democracy.

The Arab Spring also offers us another, equally important lesson. Despite the sacrifice and struggle of the Egyptian and Libyan masses, their lack of an alternative leadership left a vacuum into which the repressive forces of the bourgeoisie and the top army leadership later stepped, only to renew the repression of the people. This development exposes the limitations of leaderlessness, and of mass resistance unsupported by a class identity and a class struggle program.

Working class political independence must be both international and local, and is based on the formation of representative bodies composed of democratically elected workers’ deputies subject to immediate recall, who form factory committees, neighborhood councils, and inter-factory and inter-district workers’ councils, supplemented by the unemployed and marginalized layers of the population similarly organized. These bodies jointly take to themselves the tasks of seizing, defending and reorganizing the economy. The formation of workers’ councils of this sort is essential to centralize and guide the strike movement, to win the soldiers to the people’s side, and to take united action to defend the socially created wealth from the grasping hands of imperialist exploiters and their comprador lackeys who enjoy the fruits of subservience to imperialist dictates.

The Need for an Anticapitalist Program

To fix the problems in our economy, our environment, and the world, we need to eliminate the cause – the capitalist profit system – and replace it with an economy based on human needs, not quarterly profit. If we do not develop a program that unites us in an open struggle against the capitalist system itself, the Occupy movement is doomed to be demoralized and eventually defeated.

To be victorious is to establish a workers’ government and a workers’ state. Illusions in pacifism, gradualism, and reformism, and faith in the parliamentary road, must all be navigated and swept aside by the concrete experience of the masses; this is the process of consolidating the lessons of the class struggle. Otherwise the movement will be defeated and disarmed, and the rule of capital will perpetuate with increased levels of exploitation and misery. Many of these same lessons in working class independence, in rank and file organizing, and in workers’ democracy that needed to be learned for successful revolutions in MENA need to be learned by Occupy as well. And just as the Egyptians sent pizza to Wisconsin and marched on the American Embassy in solidarity with Oakland and Scott Olsen, Occupy needs to further develop its internationalist consciousness, and oppose and fight to defeat US imperialist wars and interventions. Otherwise, Occupy will fall into the trap of nationalism and social pacifism.

The Occupy movement must also outgrow its original base, and focus on drawing in more working class people. A movement, a series of actions, or a strike call without demands may mobilize those already in Occupy’s camp, but a program is required to drive a wedge between the union leaders (who seek to divert the workers into the Democratic Party campaign) and the rank and file, who are looking for real answers. To attract these workers, Occupy must propose real answers to the questions of declining wages; attacks on defined benefits; increased costs of medical insurance; declining educational resources; the lack of jobs for our youth; the mass incarceration of black and brown young men; the ongoing foreclosures; the ICE and La Migra attacks on our immigrant brothers and sisters; the imperialist wars and ongoing war drive run by the Democratic leadership, and the imminent climate change catastrophe.

Building for a General Strike Movement

How can we organize for real, lasting change? There is one thing that capitalism still needs from us: our labor. The most effective weapon we have in this struggle is our ability to refuse to allow big business to profit from our labor – that is, to go on strike. So to win this fight for once and for all, we need more than demonstrations in support of reforms. We need to develop the Occupy movement into a nationwide set of popular/worker/labor assemblies that meet to plan and prepare for a nationwide, political, indefinite general strike, with the aim of taking power into the hands of working people and their allies.

As anyone who has studied the history of the workers’ movement knows, the action on November 2, 2011, which Occupy Oakland referred to as a general strike, was nothing of the sort. To overcome its current limitations and succeed, Occupy must develop an action program oriented to the goal of building a real general strike – one that calls all workers, public and private, organized and unorganized, out of their workplaces and onto the streets, all over the nation, and not just for a day. Preparing for such an action requires the creation of class struggle caucuses, intent on transforming the unions into class struggle organizations fighting for the historic interests of the entire working class. Independent workers’ organizations that unite the most oppressed and marginalized people with the ranks of labor and the Occupy participants need to be formed. Common working class demands should issue forth from independent class struggle organizations to guide the working class into taking actions that lead to class power!

Only workers’ assemblies, based on democratic representation by elected workers’ deputies from the factories, offices, schools, and other workers’ organizations, can mobilize the social power needed to take mass unified action in the form of indefinite general strike action leading to the seizure of power by the working class. This lesson needs to be learned and relearned by each generation that comes into conflict with capitalism. Such assemblies have emerged in every workers’uprising since the Paris Commune. But their emergence alone is no guarantee of victory. Indeed, the same social forces we see holding back the Occupy and “indignados” movements today will find their way into workers’ assemblies and will do their best to hold the workers back.

Only when deputized representative rank-and-file militants from the BART union, AC Transit, the supermarket workers, ILWU, OEA and other key unions, call for and attend a real workers’ general strike committee (WGSC) can a general strike become a reality. In addition to representatives from these unions, representatives from the oppressed black and brown communities must also have a sizable representation in the WGSC. WGSC must win the rank-and-file militants from the key unions who participated in the November 2 port shutdown. This can be done by mass leafleting at job sites, use of independent media such as Pacifica radio, black and brown media, the left press, labor/workers’ media, as well as social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

Strikes alone are not a panacea, but in the process of organizing for a strike, we will lay the foundation for the formation of a mass workers’ party – not an electoral party, but a unified body that fights for a workers’ government. Only a workers’ government can replace capitalism with a new system that is based on workers’ self-management, workers’ planning for human needs, and workers’ democratic control.

And, because capitalism is a global system, we need to make connections with our brother and sister workers internationally. Just as the original Occupy Wall Street action was inspired in part by the Arab Spring, we need to join forces with, inspire, and be inspired by the mass movements of working people everywhere. We are all oppressed by the same tyrant: the capitalist system! We must all work together to overthrow it and replace it with a system that focuses on meeting human needs, improving the quality of life for all people, and repairing our damaged planet, rather than the accumulation of profit, privilege, and power in the hands of a few.