AS is not monolithic and we struggle with our positions on many things. We see this as a sign of our openness, lack of dogmatism, and honest search for truth. This translation of an article by a Trotskyist group shows our sympathies for good work with good impacts on the working class’ revolutionary agency, no matter who is behind it, because we are not dogmatic sectarians. While we give props to all organizations and actors who contribute to the growing power of the proletariat, we do theoretically vacillate between support for state-recognized working class organizations like unions and rejection of them as co-opted vehicles that tie the working class to capital even as it appears to make “gains.”

Translated from http://www.pts.org.ar/spip.php?article814

The increases reaches 44% of payroll

Triumph of the Subway Workers

Friday, February 11, 2005

Socialist Workers Party of Argentina (Partido de los Trabajadores Socialistas)

One can already follow the journey the metro workers accepted yesterday in the agreement that was announced in the middle of the night Wednesday by the UTA. Metrovías conceded 19 percent plus the 100 pesos the it gave the government by decree. With the rest added up, for the delegates the increase was 44 percent.

The subway workers achieved a salary agreement through which they earned 44 percent more than they were earning in December. Through a week of conflict in which services on the five lines and the Premetro ended up totally paralyzed, yesterday they accepted the agreement between Metrovías and the UTA, which set an increase of 19 percent, and they lifted the forceful measures. So you can understand what this means, the salary of a ticket seller will come to be over 1200 pesos, and that of an operator will surpass 2200.

“At the start of the complaint, we said that we wanted to lay the groundwork for future salary discussions. We understand that what was under debate was if the workers had the right to earn a living wage, that would permit access to education and culture,” said the delegates Carlos Pérez and Roberto Pinalli at the announcement of the strike’s end. “If was a difficult conflict, we started to win because we could explain to the public opinion that we weren’t ashamed to have salaries of over 1000 pesos in a country where there are people that make 400. The existence of 400 peso salaries, 300 peso retirements, and managers that make 40,000 pesos is what makes us ashamed.

The improvement adds two great items: on one side the increase drawn up by Metrovias, which will be 19 percent. On the other, the 100 pesos that the Government granted in a general manner, by decree, to all the workers in January. Additionally, it recognizes a bonus of one percent as compensation for unpaid night hours and holidays.

The addition of these benefits implies for the business an increases of more than 12 million pesos in payroll (a 44 percent increase compared to December). As such, from now on the lowest category, that had a salary of 681 pesos, will rise to 910, whereas the highest will go from 1530 to 1921. All the employees will receive, additionally, 200 pesos in ticket credit and 156 as a travel allowance. The seniority bonus will be calculated on a case by case basis for all conductors, with that as such the employee, be he a low-level laborer, will receive a minimum 1921 pesos for each year worked.

The minister of labor, Carlos Tomada, detailed that, “the agreement reached consists of a 19 percent that translates to 250 pesos, which we consider an important increase for the workers of Metrovias”. The explanation is linked to the fact that the magnitude of the wage increase is going to influence future complaints.

The agreement has, finally, two valued points in the sphere of the union: it doesn’t include a social peace clause, and neither does it mention the idea of installing more ticket-selling machines.

The full story:

The conflict between Metrovias and the workers had begun in November. The business is concessionary of service: it manages the functioning of the subways, but it isn’t in charge of capital investments, since the national State buys the trains and the government of Buenos Aires pays for the rail extension projects. The company receives transportation subsidies (last year they were 65 million pesos), despite its claim at the beginning of the complaint that it couldn’t grant salary increases because its balances showed losses.

The plan for struggle was for progressive stoppages. In the final week, services were interrupted three hours per day, then four, five, and finally twenty-four hours. But the tension wasn’t only put on that arm wrestling between Metrovias and the workers (such that to curb the departure of trains laid down on the tracks nine times), but also in the parallel dispute that the delegates maintained with the direction of their union, the Union Tranviarios Automotor (UTA), which is led by Juan Manuel Palacios.

The body of delegates is a combination of leftist independents, peronistas, and militants from MST and from PO. Palacios is the right hand man of the head of the CGT, Hugo Moyano. The delegates, who drove the conflict, had legitimacy in the eyes of the workers, but the UTA, with its status as the union, is the only entity legally authorized to sign agreements. This situation is the cause of friction and episodes of absurd overtones. The final one occurred at midnight that Wednesday. At the end of a day in which all negotiations had failed and a new forty-eight hour stoppage had been announced, Palacios called a press conference and announced in an unexpected manner, that he had arrived at an agreement with the business sector. Consequently, he said, the conflict was ending.

The director was surrounded by his peers from the UTA. “Why aren’t the delegates here?”, asked a reporter. “Not one came”, said Palacios. “But, are they aware of the agreement?”. “We’re just leaving to inform them”, answered Palacios. He had arrived at an agreement in an audience with only Metrovias and the Minister of Labor. From a legal point of view, he had done nothing wrong.

Urgent matters

The body of delegates heard about the new proposal from Metrovias watching the press conference and confirmed the strike. In the subways no one knew that they had signed and there were urgent assemblies in the five strike headquarters, with the people that were nearby being informed of the new development.

At one in the morning the UTA sent a copy of the business proposal to all five subway lines. A group of eight from the union arrived at Virreyes station. The delegates didn’t let them come down, although they agreed to come up to receive it. The delegate Nestor Segovia pointed out,“Its the rank and file and not the union who decides if the agreement is accepted.” A series of subsequent assemblies determined that the offer was favorable. The stoppage was lifted eighteen hours later, at half past seven in the afternoon, after all the shifts and sectors backed the agreement.

But according to the minutes Palacios signed it in a new hearing with Metrovias and the minister of Labor. And there was occasion for a new round of comedy, because the delegates, informed of the meeting, went to one of the offices of the ministry to join in the hearing. Followed by the TV channels and the radio stations, they were at the at the building at 100 Callao street where the final negotiations had been conducted and they didn’t find anyone. The agreement was being signed in the headquarters of the ministry of Labor, on Leandro N. Alem.

During the week that the conflict lasted, the company tried to put emergency services into operation operated by hierarchical personnel, but the trains’ departure was disabled by workers who laid down on the tracks. For this reason, Metrovias presented nine charges to the Ministry of Justice that will now follow their course, since the signed agreement did not foresee the withdrawal of the demands.

 One AS comrade:

 This is terrible, unions are the left wing of devalorization.

 Reforms and concessions are impossible in today’s crisis.

 Anyway, this is an exceptional example of worker militancy and a fighting union. It can’t be reproduced. They got lucky.

 We really need to smash all value relations, and settle for no less. 

Response by another AS Comrade:

 To respond to your devils advocate arguments,

 Your points are all false. 

 “This is terrible, unions are the left wing of devalorization.” This is false in the case described in the article because the union won a general wage increase, which increases the total wage bill, increasing the valorization of labor power, not devalorizing it as you spuriously assert. Even the workers’ desire to have a wage that affords them ‘education and culture’ is presumably valorized by this victory, an extraordinary victory indeed seeing as education and culture are outside the scope of the simple labor power that is usually exchanged. The union leader and the legal union entity, not the entire union which consists of the delegates and rank and file as well, does play a conservative role, but it is acting more as the right wing of a class conscious proletariat than the left wing of devalorization. I say this because, as the workers were about to launch a 48 hour shutdown of the Subways in Buenos Aires, the official union leader held closed door hearings with the company and the ministry of labor to come to a compromise that greatly favored the workers. In and of itself this isn’t even that conservative, as it sealed the deal on a large victory right when the company was ready to give in. But insofar as the workers were progressing towards proving to the proletariat that they have the power to paralyze capital completely for 2 days, and that was thwarted, this was a conservative stifling of the workers revolutionary agency, not a left wing face for devalorization. Additionally, the agreement was made without the democratic participation of the workers, so it contained the seeds of a Stalinist bureaucracy type degeneration of a revolutionary proletariat, not a liberal degeneration of capital. However, the union itself, meaning its delegates and memberships, were able to continue with their plans to shut down the city until they got each local to vote on the agreement, albeit one made by the union leader behind closed doors, showing that unions are not endemically folded into the left wing of capital, even when their leaders and legal structures are very conservative elements of the right wing of the proletariat, because the mass and body of the union can be the real leading force if it has politically advanced ‘delegates’ and is prepared to shut down the means of production. 

 As to the second point, “Reforms and concessions are impossible in today’s crisis.,” this is false in the immediate sense of the example given by the Buenos Aires subway strike because concessions, a 44% increase in payroll, were made. Reforms, i.e. changing the political economic structure, were not made as far as I can see, as the only win was a wage increase. When people say this they usually mean that in the long term, a general trend of reform that allocates increasing power and wages to the working class on average across the whole proletariat over an extended period of time, is impossible. This strike suggests that this is false because workers were able to make the capitalist power structure do something that it didn’t want to do, that went against it’s ‘long term trend.’ But there might be larger macro arguments for ‘impossibility’ that speak to how, in this example, the wage increase comes from government subsidies, which comes from taxes and/or state debt, which comes from profit which has a declining rate and is further removed from real value production, which causes a vicious cycle of economic destruction as fictitious values are circulated etc…. I can’t definitively deal with that one here, but I would say this example proves, concessions are possible and scores two points for reforms. 

 As to the third point, “Anyway, this is an exceptional example of worker militancy and a fighting union. It can’t be reproduced. They got lucky.” This example is extraordinary but not exceptional. The political economic conditions that produced this struggle, financial crisis in Argentina, more recent global financial crisis, wages too low to reproduce workers, years of struggle etc. are not exceptional. These are the conditions that workers across the globe are facing, albeit a few years behind the Argentinian curve. So if we hold that worker militancy and fighting unionism are caused by material conditions and subjective intervention, as opposed to particular cultural/psychological peculiarities or random outlier occurrences, then it follows that what occurred in Buenos Aires could occur in many other parts of the globe as material social forces develop in similar ways to how they did in Argentina. What is missing is the subjective intervention, which in this case took the form of a body of delegates who were mostly ‘ a combination of leftist independents, peronistas, and militants from MST and from PO.’ This strike proves that this kind of worker militancy that can be reproduced when the conditions are ripe and militants subjectively intervene at a strategic point in the structure of the working class movement, which is not the leadership or legal rights of the union, but is at the shop floor, above the ‘rank and file’ level, at the ‘delegate’ level, where the actual leadership of class struggle, i.e. shutting down a city and holding mass assemblies of workers, must take place.

 The final point you make, ‘we really need to smash all value relations, and settle for no less,’ is also false because it is a fallacy to think that any social reality can appear instantly from nowhere. A thing changes to another thing by going through gradual quantitative changes until those quantitative changes add up to a qualitative changes. For example, for a flower to appear, the level of hormone in the lateral shoot apical meristem must reach a critical quantitative level before the shoot irreversibly takes on the identity of a floral shoot. And the length of the night had to change by quantitative increments until it reaches that critical level where the plant makes just the right amount of hormone to induce flowering. Not to mention that the plant had to go through many other forms, from being the seed of an earlier plant, to germination, to vegetative growth and so on before it could get to flowering. To put it simply, change requires both a quantitative and qualitative aspect, and current value relations must change incrementally until they become something qualitatively different, or else something else besides value relations must be incrementally changed into communist relations of production. But even in the latter case, value cannot be smashed instantaneously, just as a building cannot be reduced to rubble instantaneously. To destroy anything requires a series, be it fast or slow, of quantitative changes that eventually produce the phenomenon we perceive as a qualitative change. When a piece of iron rusts and falls apart, it takes the oxidation of billions of Fe2+ atoms over months or years that eventually ‘destroy’ the iron, when really it has just turned to dust. When a bomb explodes it requires a series of chemical reactions that incrementally build up heat and pressure, albeit very quickly, until the container goes through the qualitative change of bursting open and sending forth shrapnel and hot gas at high velocities. So even if we seek to destroy value, we must do so my increments until the regulation of resource allocation by the exchange of equivalent congelations of socially necessary labor time is nothing but a memory or the subject of artists’ reflection. The challenge for us is to know what those increments are! And to chip them away as quickly as possible. 

  In solidarity,

 An AS comrade

The mass strike…suddenly opens new and wide perspectives of the revolution when it appears to have already arrived in a narrow pass and where it is impossible for anyone to reckon upon it with any degree of certainty.

                                                          - Rosa Luxemburg, “The Mass Strike.”

Occupy Oakland has reshaped politics not just for this city or the West Coast region where its impact has been greatest, but for the US as a whole and has given hope of revolution within the belly of the beast to millions of people around the world. Significantly, Occupy Oakland has injected a clear anti-capitalist current with the broader Occupy movement and has been able to implement an array of tactics to galvanize those politics. What are the lessons we draw from our young movement? The following is Advance the Struggle’s reflection on the movement. Comments, critiques, and discussion are welcome.

Table of Contents

I.    Fight for Space Morphs into Battle for Class Power

II.   Context of Occupy Oakland

III.  Political Origins

IV.  Attack: OPD Raids Occupy. OUSD Closes Schools.

V.   Counter Attack: November 2nd General Strike

VI.   November 19th: Unpermitted anti-school closure march

VII.  December 12th: West Coast Shutdown.

VIII. Class Struggle or Substitutionism?

IX.   Our Future

__________________________________________________

I.    Fight for Space Morphs into Battle for Class Power

Revolutionaries around the world often ask why the people in the US don’t rise up against its government. With the rise of the Occupy movement, a global audience has been glued to the unfolding events surrounding this struggle, and tens of thousands within the US have participated in perhaps their first political protest. Like most movements, Occupy has its contradictions; in fact, its contradictions have largely been celebrated as diversity of political opinion. Working out the political contradictions through action, movement, struggle – in short, through practice – is the only way that masses educate themselves, becoming more clear in their critique of existing social relations and participate more fully in the implementation of strategies for change. Occupy has been a success just as much for the learning process it has unleashed as for the victories it has gained against “the 1%”. In what follows, we attempt an overview of developments at Occupy Oakland and refer to some debates within the movement. We aim to preserve the tone of unity and broad inclusion that has made Occupy so remarkable. What will be explored below is the relationship between Occupy Oakland’s class composition, the tools it uses to formulate strategy and the tactics implemented in practice.

II.   Context of Occupy Oakland

The surplussing of Oakland’s proletariat has been a racialized process, with Blacks and Latinos bearing the brunt of unemployment, often resorting to sub-legal employment in the criminalized sectors of drug and sex trades. White proletarians moved out decades ago, to new suburbs that offered capital low to zero property taxes, incentivizing “white flight” and the related Tax Revolt that is epitomized by the notorious Prop 13 which undercut funding sources for social services that California’s working class relied upon for survival. Prisons have become the capitalist solution to spatially fix our rising surplus populations, with over a million Black people incarcerated in the US.  Loren Goldner states in Theses for Discussion that capital “must either devalue existing commodities, whether labor power or capital plant or consumer goods, until a new general rate of profit can coincide with some real expansion, or else the working class must destroy value.” In the context of Oakland, capital has used the first two strategies (devaluing labor-power and closing factories) with impunity. The 30% dropout rate of youth of color is an intuitive reaction of the young proletariat to defunded schools and public sector services alongside evaporating employment opportunities. Black and Brown youth are forced by circumstances into prison, unemployment, underemployed, or low skill minimum wage jobs, the informal economy, etc.

The Bay Area’s main sectors of economic growth have been in high tech industries like Pixar in Emeryville, tourism like Jack London Square, eco-businesses like solar panels, and non-profits that sell labor-power maintenance services to the state and private capitalist foundations. All of these sectors favor college educated people with “middle class” cultural traits, not urban youth with low-quality underfunded training. With property values decimated by the crisis, hordes of “employable” white and/or college educated people of color have moved into ghettos, being channeled back into the cities that a generation ago were abandoned by these very strata. This racial and intra-proletarian tension between mostly (by no means exclusively though) white (semi-) professionals and exclusively Black and Brown largely unemployed has been demonized as gentrification, but it is probably more a reflexion of white and college educated professionals’ rapidly increasing precarity. In August 2011, Oakland’s unemployment was officially at 16.5 percent, a stark condition in a local economy where, according to a 2009 report, African American workers living in Oakland earned about 60 cents on the dollar of their White counterparts, while Latinos earned about 47 cents. Oakland’s social problems are not isolated, but working class conditions in urban centers around the US, and the world, have also been severely declining. Some have used the term ‘planet of the slums,’ the rise of a large surplus population, to define the millions of people thrown out of the work process, which leads to jail, precarious work, and a complete uncertainty regarding the future. The Occupy movement’s slogan of “We are the 99%” came out of the declining college-educated, professional, largely white upper strata of the working class, reflecting their fear and anger at capitalism’s 30 year stagnation and sense of unity with those who have long inhabited precarious, dangerous, devalued niches in the class structure of the US.

On top of these developments, Oakland has suffered from a permanent state of police violence, when in the 1950s, racist Southern military personal were intentionally recruited by Oakland and Los Angeles Police Departments, a big factor giving rise to the Black Panthers in 1966. Killings of Black and Brown people have continued all the way to the present. One of the movements that shadows the Oscar Grant struggle was the 2007 death of Gary King Jr in Oakland, killed by Sgt. Patrick Gonzales in a neighborhood that was historically Black Panther territory, as their original office was a few blocks away from the murder. Sgt. Patrick Gonzales also patrolled the rally against BART Officer Mehserle, who was being released from jail after his murder of Oscar Grant, and helped lead the shutting down of the Oakland Occupy camp October 25th.  These figures continued to patrol Oakland streets and protests virtually unpunished from their crimes, and led the suppression of protest.

 Beyond Oakland’s Bay Area bubble, in the national landscape, the Chicago Republic Windows and Doors factory occupation and California’s anti-budget cut student movement were opening shots against the capitalist crisis. Workers in Chicago inspired from the South American factory occupations heavily present in Argentina, and the class struggle traditions that were maintained within the EU (Electricians Union), were combined into the action against the Chicago Windows and Doors Company. The California student movement, organizing an array of marches, occupations and strikes, began a movement against austerity climaxing on March 4th 2010, inspiring the Puerto Rican general strike shortly after. New York brought forth its Occupy Wall Street movement, inspired from the combination of Madison, Egyptian, and Greek struggles, and very quickly several cities in the US and around the world followed suit.  Wall Street, a symbol of American and even global capitalism, is a serious political target where our movement is no longer bashing the evil greedy CEO, but rather the 1% that rules capitalist society and benefits from the economic cuts of the last 4 years.

Occupy Oakland is a genuine reflection of the working class of Oakland and its affiliated radical community. It has gained strength in its inclusion of everyone, but with this inclusion also come limitations. Occupy Oakland’s space was open to all; homeless people and those shut out of the workforce were heavily present at the camp. Part of this is due to the technological character of production which reduces the amount of workers needed for capitalist commodity production; another part comes from the related assault on public infrastructure and services, leaving millions with little recourse. Occupy Oakland has been a movement of surplus students, surplus professionals, surplus low-wage workers, and the ultimate surplus population: the homeless. This is a cross-section of the proletariat, with representation from all strata within it. The contradictions between these working class strata, thrown together in structural unity sharing an as yet unarticulated class interest, have manifested in contradictions within Occupy Oakland. The product is a diverse social movement propelled by the diversity of the oppressed layers of the working class, mobilizing incredible actions with the language of class struggle but without the ability to push class struggle into real motion because many of the protesters’ social niche lie outside of any stable or formal workplace. Occupy Oakland’s limitations in all this diversity can be summed up in the question: “Here is the working class, where are the workers?”

III.  Political Origins

IV.  Attack: OPD Raids Occupy. OUSD Closes Schools.

The energy of this action was powerful. The afternoon march turned into nighttime protests in the streets. That night, the general populus was stunned when Iraq War veteran, Scott Olsen, was struck at close range by OPD with a projectile causing a life-threatening skull fracture.

Olson was a member of Veterans for Peace and Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW), which later on November 11th, led an Occupy Oakland rally and march against police brutality. One Oakland teacher and political organizer reflected on his experience in the 1960s and reminded a new generation that he was convinced a revolution in the US was possible when veterans begin to revolt against the system.

Within a day of a police raid on the camp that almost killed a veteran and cost the city of Oakland $1 million, the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) announced the closure of 5 elementary schools. The meetings announcing school closures had hundreds of working class families, mostly Black, denouncing the district’s decision and calling upon the power of Occupy Oakland to demand justice concerning the issue of keeping schools open. Here stood the objective basis of a dual contradiction between the state and the proletariat, namely the attack upon the heavily unionized public sector infrastructure – in this case, the closing of 5 elementary schools – and the violent attack upon the camp. This same contradiction is what causes so much confusion about our attitude to the bougeois state, as we simultaneously appreciate the public sector and hate the police even though they are but wings of the same apparatus.

State violence on the part of police agencies (and more broadly ICE and Homeland Security) has led many sections of the proletariat, particularly the brown, black, and more unemployed sections, to see this wing of the state as a clear enemy. The brutal actions of the Oakland police against workers and communities of color in general is enough evidence for anyone to recognize and anticipate the type of attack they would bring down upon an unpermitted encampment such as Occupy Oakland. But of greater importance is the recent legacy and memory of militant campaigns against police violence, as epitomized in the struggle for justice for Gary King Jr, Oscar Grant, and more recently, Raheim Brown.

Street battles have tested the ability of Occupy Oakland movement to master the art of street fighting tactics, while the ILWU’s one day work stoppages (including one to demand justice for Oscar Grant) helped the movement imagine the possibilities of a strategic fusion of the economic (e.g., the union) and the political (e.g., the anti-police brutality and anti-war) spheres through their tactical combination (battles in the streets and battles in the sites of our daily exploitation).

Thousands of participants were drawn to Occupy Oakland’s movement and General Assembly and were motivated to reproduce the countries last general strike, which was Oakland in 1946. The class struggle memory was powerful as it was drawn to life producing a social movement energy, Oakland style. But with this powerful energy bringing thousands together in a powerful general assembly, workers of important workplaces were not discussing how their position and coworkers can contribute to a strike movement. The contradiction of Occupy Oakland’s composition with its class struggle language wanted to shutdown the system like in 1946, but the origins of 1946 and November 2nd 2011 are incredibly different. The former was started by women clerks at a retail store striking to form a union and having shuttle drivers joining the picket. Soon enough hundreds of thousands of workers joined the picket line creating a general strike from a particular workplace struggle generalizing into a struggle that incorporate the whole city. November 2nd was inspired by Occupy Oakland’s movement with the appalling attack on Scott Olson. Here lies both the continuity of the memory of past class struggle in the present, and the complete political difference between the form of struggle between 1946 and 2011.

V.   Counter Attack: November 2nd General Strike

A New York Times article reported on the counter-attack of worker militants resisting the attempt by a transnational corporation EGT (Export Grain Trade) to hire non-union workers (as well as union workers of another union) to undermine International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) local 21.  What was at stake? The EGT, a Forbes 500 global corporation undermining ILWU, one of the most militant contemporary unions, was a serious move towards a generalized attack on all union rights.

Since May, ILWU Local 21 has been escalating the fight in a two-year-plus battle to force the multinational conglomerate EGT to abide by the ILWU contract, while a new $200 million grain terminal was being built in Longview. This was the first new terminal built on the West Coast in the last 25 years. On September 1st, about 500 longshoremen stormed the new $200 million terminal in Longview carrying baseball bats, smashing windows, damaging rail cars and dumping tons of grain from the cars, police and company officials said. Later in the day, more than 1,000 other longshoremen shut down the ports of Seattle and Tacoma by not going to work. “It’s a wildcat and it’s unsanctioned,” said Craig Merrilees, the union’s chief spokesman. “Workers did not show up to work today at the ports of Tacoma and Seattle. Piecing things together, it appears that folks voted with their feet and stood by their conscience to send a message and express concern about what’s happened in Longview.”

Like their worker counterparts in Longview, Occupy Oakland was not going to lay down easy. It looked to Longview as a counterpart in a common struggle against “the 1%”, and as it started to build the November 2nd General Strike, it included solidarity with Longview ILWU members.

Participants in Occupy Oakland were by and large students, former students, anarchists, lumpen, homeless, non-profit workers, union workers and non union workers . . . all “proper” revolutionary subjects. But the general assemblies at Occupy Oakland did not have workers representing industry that they, as workers, could shut down only because it is they who keep them running – by compulsion of wage slavery. Only a few ILWU rank-file were active in these general assemblies, while the attempted general strike implored longshore workers as a whole to shutdown the port of Oakland. The surplus populations in political motion are legitimate revolutionary subjects, but workers struggling in vital structural institutions- the ports, airports, schools, transportation- are necessary to really fight capitalism. On the one hand, the movement could be seen as a diverse grouping of the working class, some thrown out of work, other being students with no future in the professions, fighting EGT because the ILWU union is legally handcuffed. On the other hand, one can see this movement substituting itself for longshore and port worker class struggle to gain media attention and political hype. There is truth to both of these interpretations, which taken together express a real contradiction the movement. However, we see the contradiction resolving itself in the development of an advanced part of Occupy Oakland putting, for the moment at least, the battle of Longview, Wa. port workers at center focus. It is not true that Occupy movements represent a new tendency of proletarians alien to a workplace forcefully blocading a workplace or industry with little coordination or consideration for these particular workers’ will.

From October 26th to November 2nd, Occupy Oakland was at its most dynamic. It’s dynamism was best represented by the incredible energy, ever-present through the participants’ and supporters’ unity, the language of class struggle and memory from the Oakland general strike of 1946. All of this was couched in the “99%” rhetoric of the Occupy movement. People of all walks of life came to Oscar Grant Plaza to pick up thousands of fliers to put out in every available space. The act of building for November 2nd was in itself transformative in a way similar to the lead-up to March 4th 2010 which was a watershed event in the struggle against austerity. In both cases, 100s of people become confident in their role as organizer, identify as an activist, and engage in theoretical questions brought up in the process.

The improvised form for building a general strike bore social movement fruit. November 2nd was massive. Estimations vary between 10,000 and 100,000 people.

The mayor said 200 of the city’s civilian workforce numbering 2,500 called in sick or took the day off through other means. It was also reported that 18% of Oakland’s teachers took that day off as well. ILWU reported that 40 out of 325 stevedores failed to come to the morning shift work and a third of longshoremen were opposed to work that day. Several businesses shut down. A 4pm rally produced a march headed to the docks and a 5pm rally backed it up, with both marches including over 10,000 people.

The marches went through parts of Oakland that have not been completely integrated or involved with the Occupy movement, like West Oakland as the crowds marched to the port. This improvised march, collective collaboration and eventual port shutdown was a massive success, yet the improvised form contained its own limits: a dynamic social movement protest calling itself a general strike.

In order to have multiple, successful and collaborative general strikes, it would have to take more than just spontaneous calls for action. Occupy Oakland has been engaged in organized and spontaneous action for a while now, a process of reflection and growth that is important to long-term struggle. The reflection part is extremely important, but so far limited in Occupy Oakland. What people have started and continue to do, is think through long-term strategy to sustain struggle in working or study groups. Spontaneous calls for shutdowns or strikes can be empowering and offer quick political responsiveness, but to maintain and build class struggle, including under an “occupy” rhetoric, we need long-term class-struggle collectives rooted in working-class communities.

VI.   November 19th: Unpermitted anti-school closure march

On November 11th, as Occupy Oakland was being cornered by the state, the November 19th march was proposed at the general assembly. The Mayor was coordinating with homeland security to shut down the occupation. Two days later, Occupy Oakland was attacked by police on November 14th. Occupy Oakland reconvened at the main library with a powerful body of over a thousand people, and organizers started building November 19th as the next major action to challenge the state offensive.

The march was proposed to unions who wanted get involved in Occupy Oakland, including UNITE-HERE 2850, the California Nurse’s Association, and the Alameda Labor Council. Once it was proposed and passed, concerns were immediately raised that the trade-union bureaucracy could use this opportunity to take over the movement. In the building of the march, Occupy Oakland organizers including AS cadre were constantly discussing what role the Alameda Labor Council should play on the day of the march. At least one person criticized merely working with union leaderships and staffers as inherently inviting corruption into the movement. A large group of Occupy Oakland organizers, including us, didn’t abstain from working with union bureaucrats, but instead worked to prevent union leaderships from bringing their Democratic allies with them. To this end, the terms for speaking on the march were set at 3 Occupy Oakland speakers, and 3 from the participating unions, no Democratic Party speakers or promotion allowed. On the day of the march all of the predictions, positive and negative, were tested by reality.

On the day of the march, organized labor was hardly present besides small showings from ILWU local 34, and 10 and the Oakland Educators Association due to their earlier participation with Occupy Oakland. Alameda Labor Council sent an email out to all their members the day before, but did not organize to bring out the membership. The union workers who came out did so through member-to-member organizing, informal networks of union workers reaching out to friends.

The first portion of the march put bills on Banks demanding the forfeiting of profits made from Oakland foreclosures. The second part consisted of an un-permitted rally of thousands in front of Lakeview Elementary. One parent said that in his 30 years living in Oakland, he had never seen such a massive rally for public education. The head of the Oakland Educators’ Association spoke at the rally along with several parents, all in favor of a recall campaign they were organizing against the school board.

The third part of the march ended at 19th and Telegraph, taking over an abandoned lot in a planned expansion of Occupy Oakland’s space. Masked occupiers tore down the fences around the lot and set up camp, but when the thousands from the march filtered away the police moved in and evicted the camp, confiscating material and arresting many. The main stream media didn’t pay any attention to the anti-school closure character the march had and only focused on the establishment of the new camp.

So what about the concernse about threat of Democratic Party co-optation through the unions? At the end of the day, working with union bureaucrats had no apocalyptic consequences for Occupy Oakland. The OEA leadership did push a recall campaign, but were not allowed to pair that push with support for Democratic Party nominees to fill the seats. For many listeners that next step is implied of course, but Occupy Oakland as an audience had already been politicized to such an extent that people were much more likely to sympathize with kicking politicians out than bringing them in. In fact, we think that a recall campaign is a good strategy for the current level of consciousness and organization of Oakland parents and teachers. A recall is a real threat to the school board members’ personal power.

OEA, CNA, UNITE-HERE and the Alameda Labor Council did almost nothing to bring out their memberships, and it showed. But in our opinion union affiliation provided some needed working-class cred at a time when Occupy Oakland was beginning to get isolated by bourgeois media attacks and support among Oakland residents was dropping quickly. The march was massive, overwhelmingly radical in speeches with the (in no way reactionary, but also not radical) exception of the recall campaign, and very empowering for the embattled Occupy Oakland movement.

A few days before November 19th, December 6th and December 12th had been proposed as the next political days of action. On December 6th, the anti-foreclosure organizers of Occupy Oakland, along with non-profits, ACCE and Causa Justa / Just Cause, Occupy Oakland two houses for evicted families and community use. One of the houses has been up for a few weeks, occupied by a group of people who allow for the house to be used for political meetings other community activities. But on Dec 29th the house was shutdown by OPD and 12 people were arrested.

Occupy Oakland continued through the storm, even though it did not solve its own contradiction of being a dynamic social movement with class struggle language but still not developing actual class struggle from the workers of Oakland against their immediate bosses and that class’s policies of austerity within the workplace.

VII.  December 12th: West Coast Shutdown.

On November 18th, a proposal was made at the Occupy Oakland General Assembly to coordinate a West Coast shutdown of all the ports against EGT (Export Grain Trade) and Goldman Sachs. At the November 19th march, thousands of flyers were distributed for the December 12th shutdown. Occupy Oakland made informal links with ILWU local ten rank-file workers and President of ILWU local 21 Dan Coffman (who has been arrested 6 times fighting law enforcement during the current battles with EGT). These political connections have created an alliance with the Occupy movement and the ILWU to fight the EGT company.

In Los Angeles and Long Beach, Latino immigrant truckers have been fighting for workplace and political rights for some time with a history of having wildcat strikes (strikes with no union support). The Long Beach truckers militantly struck in 2005 against high gas prices, and 2006 with the May 1st movement, stopping a serious amount of commerce at the port of Long Beach. On April 15th 2006, independent truckers from LA called for an “immediate SALARY increase of 25%” and stated, “WE have to begin an era of strikes until the Ports and Rails enter into collective bargaining agreements with us. Until then, we must continue to form collectives at every company and support each other at the terminal, port and national levels. We ask all truck drivers to meet at the ports, rails, truck stops, and usual gathering locations.” On May 1st 2006, the truckers did just that and had a massive strike stopping incredible an amount of commodities. Several business papers took notice of the strike. The same group of truckers decided to have an action on December 12th, the birthday of the Virgin of Guadalupe in response to the 26 truckers fired for immigrant rights while sporting their Teamster jackets. Goldman Sachs was identified as the corporation connected to such attacks on the Teamsters. Through these events, we can see the build up of momentum against large corporations like Goldman Sachs and the heavy anti-union sentiment workers faced since 2006.

As momentum generated towards December 12th, the ILWU Longshore international sent multiple communications distancing themselves from this action. Political distance for some of the ILWU was a necessity, since the political structures, finances, and political positions constricted by their contract made it impossible to openly engage in the shutdown. But the bureaucracy went farther than this; they consciously attacked the December 12th action: “To be clear, the ILWU, the Coast Longshore Division and Local 21 are not coordinating independently or in conjunction with any self-proclaimed organization or group to shut down any port or terminal, particularly as it related to our dispute with EGT in Longview (Wash).” Another ILWU communication states that “[t]he ILWU considers its dispute with EGT, which is attempting to open a grain terminal in Longview, Wash., with the use of non-ILWU labor, to be a crucial issue for the union, but the ILWU does not want outside groups using that issue to attract support from the union rank and file for a ports shutdown.” But these positions do not necessarily represent the political thinking of the rank-file ILWU workers. No rank-and-file came out against the action; on the contrary, a small militant minority were actively engaged, pushing their coworkers to join the December 12th shutdown in order to give it the character of a strike within the Oakland Occupy social movement.

While the ILWU bureaucracy openly attacked December 12th, the mainstream capitalist media capitalized on their comments, publishing hundreds of articles that attempted to reinforce a division between the union and the occupy movement. The mainstream media was reporting that the “ILWU [was] asking Occupy protesters to call off the action,” but what the mainstream media did not investigate was what section of the ILWU was pushing this. Craig Merrilees, Communications Director for the ILWU, was going to meetings to tell people that December 12th was not passed through the union’s democratic process, claiming that the union was to have nothing to do with it. However, other radical rank-and-file ILWU workers commented that the international was doing the work for the capitalists, producing confusion and eliminating confidence within the movement. Occupy Oakland didn’t flinch, and moved forward with December 12th.

There was enough communication between ILWU local 10 and independent truckers, eventually building worker sympathy when workers respected the community picket lines at the port. However, only one ILWU rank-and-file worker was publicly engaged with the shutdown while most other port workers were passively engaged. There were too many rank-and-file longshoreman and truckers passively engaged in the movement. Speaking about port-related struggles on the bullhorns on the picket lines are effective ways to show support.

Nevertheless, as shown through the action at December 12th, mass picketing works in terms of national collaboration and security against police repression. Secretive occupations often lack forces to fight the state, but mass militant picketing on December 12th stopped police cop cars from breaking the lines. Approximately 1,000 people in the morning and 5,000 in the evening shutdown the port during two large shifts, and a later shift at 3:00 am. 500 protestors shutdown the port of Portland, with 300 people on terminal 6 and 200 people on terminal 5, and 60 people shutdown the port of Longview Washington. 800 people shutdown the port of Seattle, specifically Terminal 18, the busiest terminal, and terminal 5 with a large presence of working class youth of color blasting politicized hip- hop freestyles. Los Angeles had hundreds of people meet at 5am to shutdown the Long Beach terminal against Goldman Sachs. A report stated that Goldman Sachs stocks lost 5% of value that day. Several other ports staged solidarity actions as well, in San Diego, Houston, and Vancouver Canada.

In an article written by Cal Winslow’s December 5th Counterpunch article, Who’s Speaking for Whom: The Case of Occupy and the Longshoremen’s Union, Winslow investigates the problem of the Occupy movement politically representing the needs of union. Winslow’s overall argument assumes a deeper separation, rather than mere surface tension, between ILWU and the Occupy movement. Winslow states;

And if Occupy Oakland is serious about EGT, it can still mount a campaign against these union busters in Longview, and against Goldman Sachs, a player here, apparently, and do this in coordination with the ILWU, or do it with the longshoremen themselves. And look around, there is no shortage of battles, surely not here in California; they are all around us, on the campuses, in the hospitals, hotels, in the factories and fields. Support them…Occupy Wall Street, including Occupy Oakland, can continue to inspire the 99%, get them involved. Inspire them to be actors in history, not subjects.

The class struggle current within Occupy Oakland, conscious of the movement’s own contradiction and limitations, has been working constantly towards developing relations with workers at the port, in order for them to be their own agents of change in the movement. Occupy organizers made numerous visits to the port and ILWU local ten to build a common movement of workers and activists for the December 12th shut down. A limited but attempted coordination took place. The contrary political angle which led people like Winslow to make such an argument came from the idea that street protests equate with class struggle.

Contrary to Winslow’s argument, our comrades in Bay of Rage, who should be respected for their instrumental work in making Occupy Oakland happen and keeping the movement totally independent of the state and overtly anti-capitalist, have argued the following:

The subject of the “strike” is no longer the working class as such, though workers are always involved. The strike no longer appears only as the voluntary withdrawal of labor from a workplace by those employed there, but as the blockade, suppression (or even sabotage or destruction) of that workplace by proletarians who are alien to it, and perhaps to wage-labor entirely. We need to jettison our ideas about the “proper” subjects of the strike or class struggle.

A closer association of social movement street activity with class struggle is positive, but we feel it too easily dismisses the untapped revolutionary potential of workers at the workplace. All sectors of the working class are “proper”, but their agency must be harmonized and integrated if it should result in the construction of a democratically planned society in the future.

As folks like Winslow write off our movement for not fitting neatly in a 1930s class struggle framework, others are actualizing the potential of workplace struggle. Both sides contain a political limit in their outlook. They do not lead to a strategy of a class-wide offensive uniting “classical” workplace workers struggle with the struggle of the dispossessed. For example, the Toledo Ohio strike of 1934 organized unemployed and autoworkers in a class-wide offensive, creating a general strike. Another example was the unemployed protest in 1932 which laid down the framework for the three general strikes in 1934, San Francisco, Toledo Ohio, and Minneapolis. Instead of jumping from one favorite part of the class to privileging another sector’s agency, we should be focusing on how to build organizational vehicles within each sector (in this case employed/unemployed) and across the class as a whole (across workplaces and communities) to reconcile whatever contradictions arise in the revolutionary process.

VIII. Class Struggle or Substitutionism?

The debate around December 12th was whether a third party was speaking for workers and their struggle, or whether Occupy Oakland was a body of workers that exerted their independence and engaged in a radical action that the unions could not lead. A current of Occupy Oakland was conscious of this problem and did its best to orient towards the union and non-union port workers. Five independent truckers wrote a public letter in support of December 12th, and explained how their independent contracting position makes them bear all the costs of transportation. Interestingly enough, they shared a slogan, “We may not have a union yet, but no one can stop us from acting like one.”

The period of time between October and December was densely packed with rapid progression, daily new developments, and a generally spontaneous organizing structure. Action was the priority, with mobilization being the primary activity. Mobilization for consecutive actions is a different, although obviously related, task from organizing working class power. Organizing for working class power includes mobilizations, but goes deeper in the sense that it is builds for a lasting and growing influence. This takes time, which is not always available. The fast-paced political tempo has created an environment where mobilizing is far more favorable than organizing. Acknowledging this point leads us to deal with the earlier contradiction of a social movement speaking class struggle language without building clear class struggle motion; it is easier to mobilize for a protest with posters and text messages than it is to build representative organizations of workers in the belly of the beast of bourgeois dictatorship, especially with the high degree of surveillance characteristic of many workplaces. In this early stage, it is to be expected that the working class mobilize in the relatively safe space outside the workplace before networks and organizations based inside the workplace manifest as vehicles for the daily reproduction of resistance to exploitation. There is reason to believe that workplace agency will assume a more prominent role in this movement as we move forward.

Hundreds of newly politicized organizers recognize the need to increase the proletariat’s organized resistance in the workplace and community. The IWW has been making important strides in organizing the non-union working class through workplace direct-action politics. Activists organizing against school closures are now digging their heels and trying to organize a wide body of Oakland school workers, teachers, and parents to fight these austerity measures that would devastate thousands of working families. After Spain’s General Strike, several informal circles began doing successful anti-eviction work. Paralleling Spain’s anti-eviction work, an autonomous anti-landlord group from Occupy Oakland and East Bay Solidarity Network has been developing its grass-roots fights against slum landlords. Occupy the Hood is now developing its public political existence with aims of building a deeper movement in Black and Brown communities and workplaces led by people from these communities. Longview, WA, inspired by the Occupy movement, has been discussing an attempt to organize a general strike when the EGT ship gets to the port. These beginnings will need time to develop into politically cohesive units, but when they do, they will be the most stable building blocks for coordinated mobilizations against capital, and beyond that, the re-organization of society on a socialist basis.

The Oakland Tribune reported on December 13th that, “Port officials said this morning that ‘due to the protests during the last 24 hours, there is a heavy backlog of work to get through.’ There are seven vessels at dock this morning.” Without the workers at the port directly being involved in the port shutdown, port officials can adapt to the (outside) movement and speed up the work after the economic blockade. The workers will remain at the workplace generating surplus value for bosses because, unfortunately, the proletariat still needs wages to subsist; their agency must be appreciated as the crucial constant in our revolutionary formula.

It is worth mentioning that Isaac Kos-Read, director of external affairs with the Port of Oakland, admitted their vulnerability in general terms, “A disruption at that time of year is really serious for us. This is a peak season for us for agricultural products.” Workers all along the chain of production, from the farms in the Central Valley and the Interstate transportation arteries to the port and warehouse distribution hubs, cannot and should not be overrun by a social movement that confuses itself for the labor movement. If the street protest is the sphere where the working class is finding its strength, it is precisely there that the decision must be made to recycle its political advances into heretofore underdeveloped or not yet mobilized spaces and sectors to maximize and diversify the community of revolutionaries. In the long run, this will make our revolution more complete, more representative of the working class as a whole, and strategically better prepared to outmaneuver the bourgeois which always attempts to split the proletariat. It is always proper for the working class, employed or not, to mobilize and disrupt valorization, but it is much harder to do so when there is an unorganized workplace devoid of vehicles for the reproduction of revolutionary praxis. Since workplaces and communities are apparently lagging behind the movement on the streets, our emphasis at this time should be on building power there, not dismissing it on the basis of a couple successful mobilizations on the streets.

When fuel prices skyrocketed in 2005, there was a wildcat strike of mainly immigrant truckers at the port of Oakland. But the lack of any real strike committee to coordinate the strike led to its defeat. Most who participated in December 12th were probably not aware of the port workers experience of past struggles. If the port workers in mass, from the super-exploited “independent contractor” truckers to the better paid ILWU local 10 rank-file (who themselves have their own antagonisms and tensions), struck, stopping port operations with the support of Occupy Oakland, then we would have seen an actual strike against capital threaten capitalism far more severely than what we saw on December 12th. Beyond the port, the remaining 11% of the working class who are in unions are placed in strategic sectors; ports, airports, transportation, hospitals, and schools. If thousands of union and non-union workers become involved in mass democratic General Assemblies, which are the political motor of Occupy Oakland, then we could develop the power to call for coordinated strikes, resolving Occupy Oakland’s immediate contradiction between the worker-organized strike and politico-organized protest.

IX.   Our Future

All organizers of Occupy Oakland should be proud of our dynamic actions on November 2nd, November 19th, and December 12th. For the time being, we must shift our political time clock, stop rushing from action to action in emergency mode and build a long-term movement. A long-term movement includes digging deeper and deeper roots within the Black and Brown communities, structurally important workplaces, while also maintaining the radical imagination and democratic spirit of the movement. In short, there needs to be a shift from mass mobilizations to consistent and long-term organizing.

This movement has demonstrated itself to be stronger than any one left organization or union. Learning how to work with people from all different political backgrounds is key, in order that the tentacles of the movement can reach farther than any singular force. But we mustn’t spread our tentacles too thin; mobilizing hundreds and thousands of people can reach its limits. Only when we mobilize and organize in working class communities and workplaces can we begin to challenge the contradictions facing Occupy Oakland. This mobilization takes the form of coordinated short-term tactical actions along with long-term class struggle which can begin to brake-down the division between port workers and our social movement.

Attempting to coordinate short-term protests and long-term class struggle through coalitions often lead to an array of problems that lacks a unified political strategy for such a project. Social movements without a revolutionary perspective often fragment into informal gossip ridden circles that don’t see the importance of pushing for the working class to become a class-for-itself, creating a class-wide offensive against capitalism.

Creating long-term class struggle with short-term tactical operations is not easy. There are many challenges: the surplus population section of the proletariat engages in destructive activity; the unemployed need new forms of organization; non-union workers need alternative forms of struggle against workplace austerity and discipline, which a front of the IWW has been doing impressive work on; unionized rank-file members need to challenge the bureaucracy of unions that we saw heavily lash out against December 12th… and the list continues.

So the question now is, what is on the horizon for the Occupy movement for the next 6 months? Can organizers of all walks of political life unite on a common perspective of organizing for a class-wide offensive? All types of people are engaged-in this movement, and are attempting to understand the power of this movement to move forward in its radical potential. On the one hand, the plurality of the movement gives it diversity and creativity. On the other, without a clear revolutionary strategy of how to successfully fight the one percent makes our movement lack a direction. We don’t want to eliminate any creative diversity of the movement, nor have the movement run into destructive walls. Such a balancing act requires both a patience and foresight: to listen and learn, agitate and propose solutions. The possibility for change and momentum has brought so many people together, bringing out a potential force to organize for revolutionary ends. This can happen if enough organizers within the movement can agree for which such a revolutionary framework is worth fighting.

The Occupy movement has become one of the greatest learning lessons for a new young radical generation and has produced and brought to life hundreds of radical fighters who organize non-stop- often selflessly- often operating off vices and meager sustenance, as well as the flavor of revolutionary potential. Such people are the human material for a new revolutionary movement to build a new society based on use, not profitable exchange.

]]> http://advancethestruggle.wordpress.com/2011/12/31/occupy-oakland-advance-the-struggles-political-reflection/feed/ 0 Advance the Struggle Nov 2nd Sunset Cranes Big http://advancethestruggle.wordpress.com/2011/11/02/occupy-everything-goes-proletarian-revolutionary-strategy-the-occupy-movement-and-the-general-strike/ http://advancethestruggle.wordpress.com/2011/11/02/occupy-everything-goes-proletarian-revolutionary-strategy-the-occupy-movement-and-the-general-strike/#comments Wed, 02 Nov 2011 07:07:18 +0000 Advance The Struggle http://advancethestruggle.wordpress.com/?p=1238 Continue reading →]]> We On a World Tour

The occupy movement which started in North Africa, Egypt, and the Middle East, followed by Wisconsin, and blending with popular and labor movements in Southern Europe and the UK, has spread to the US with a vengeance.

In typical US fashion, the Occupy protest has remained a vague vision, a confused critique, and a couple catchy slogans. Despite its shortcomings the movement hits the populace in the solar plexus with the truth.

How can something come so true, yet be so cloudy?

Our occupation in Oakland has become a focal point for the global movement, gaining solidarity from Africa, the Middle East and Europe. Most recently, global solidarity has been expressed in the form of calls for strikes and renewed protest in solidarity with our decision to have a general strike November 2nd here in the Bay Area where we have a fighting spirit that we are proud to share with sisters and brothers across the country.

What are we fighting for? How do we clarify what we hold to be true?

For years, revolutionaries have been prodding at the US populace to wake up, stop drinking the Bush-Obama kool-aid, and criticize capitalism. We have stood up against the Wars, fought back against the immigration laws, rejected budget cuts, and resisted racist police murder.

Each of these movements has brought together a  mass of people that seems to dissipate almost as quickly as it appeared. But enough folks stuck around through each cycle of struggle to give hope that conditions were ripening for a bigger breakthrough in the near future. Each of these struggles has been like an isolated dot on a page. Now the struggles are coming together, dots are being connected and so is a growing mass of people. All these struggles of the past decade have overlapped a little, and now they are coming together as one big picture in a movement that is changing shape every day.

“What do they really want?”

In Oakland, a movement has been growing to fight school closures. The heartbreaking threat of 5 elementary school closings drew a mass of about 500 people to the most recent Oakland Unified School District board meeting. Saving schools is a local issue that helps to give the occupy movement something to actually fight for – a concrete demand. Concrete demands are necessary because we have to know what we are fighting for, not just what we reject. We have to be able to explain to the rest of the working class why they should join us.

Wherever demands have materialized throughout the 3 or 4 years of the economic crisis, they have involved demands on the state to intervene on behalf of the working class in one way or another. We have been fighting to save the services provided by the state.

But to an advanced layer of the movement, mostly based in higher education sector and connected to socialist or anarchist networks and organizations, slogans such as “save our schools” and “tax the rich” do not suffice. These militants with more advanced, anti-capitalist politics are saying that this system is totally broken and that we need to build an entirely new system of some kind of socialism.

The point where the need for immediate next steps, clear articulations of the goals of the movement, and tactical precision, meets ideological values and anti-capitalist logics has been the limit-point of the movement. The potential of a movement is determined by the limit of what the masses of people in struggle can imagine. Advanced militants of a movement usually have the most far-reaching imagination, and it is their role to open the creative vision of the working class.

The ruling class is always trying to chop our imagination to just the next day, the next month, at most the next year, all while erasing history and the working class’s consciousness of it. Capital chops our calendar off at the next cycle of paychecks and bills. Capitalist time is scarce and bitter. Marxism integrates the past into the future by showing materially how older social forms gave birth to the existing ones, and how the existing social form will give birth to a future one. Elements of the past social forms persist in the present, as do elements of the society of the future.

The Hydra Grows New Heads

Key questions for our movement today can be approached from the point of view of past versus future. One theme that has been used a lot is the comparison of our current situation with that of the 1930s Great Depression. The past injects itself into the present discourse not just as a reference point for what a crisis looks like, but also as offering a menu of solutions to crisis. Present-day demands by organizations tied to the Democratic Party include a government jobs program, which was the centerpiece of a Move-On.org march that was organized early on to end at Oakland Occupy. This solution is drawn directly from FDR’s New Deal, a relationship to the past that mirrors calls for defense of the public sector as a whole, which is a product of the New Deal and its successor, President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. We should keep in mind that the New Deal jobs programs didn’t do much at all to alleviate the depression. It was hundreds of billions of dollars in tank, ship, bomb, and plane production that ended the depression.  Not only is war a disgusting solution for economic crisis, but today it isn’t even on the menu for leaders of the capitalist system looking to solve the economic crisis. The Iraq and Afghan wars have gone on for a decade, costing trillions, and the economy is still getting worse.

The situation of crisis in the 1930s through the mid-1940s gave birth to a higher stage of capitalist development. The US military, the dollar, and the whole form of multi-national corporations emerged out of WWII to engage a whole new cycle of capitalist development spurred by private enterprise with the support of a state that was stronger than ever. The main role of the state became to create the conditions that supported the expansion of capitalist enterprise, reproducing everything they needed to thrive. Some of these things appeared to be good for the working class, such as free education, unemployment benefits and public housing and welfare for the poor. An important part that the state played in reproducing the conditions for capitalist development was the integration of the working class, the breaking down of borders between nations, genders, and races. De-segregation and affirmative action began as issues in the workplace, where capitalists replaced white men with black men, and women both black and white, during the 30s and 40s. Integrating the workplace was good for women and blacks, because they had access to decent wages like they never had before, but capitalists were still able to pay them less than the white men who preceded them, and thus were able to keep more money for themselves as profits. Later on, immigrants from Latin America would largely take the place of Black workers in agricultural and domestic work with many of the same effects.

But just because these things made life under capitalism more tolerable for many workers in the US, did this mean that they were solutions to the crisis of capitalism? NO! Every decade that went by, the rate of profit was less and less, although capitalists still made big profits, and these profits still went up and up, they went up at a slower pace than they did before. Also, these profits were re-invested less and less in real production, and more and more in financial assets. By the time the mid 1970s came around, there was a surplus of labor and the layoffs began. Black workers were the first victims of the shrinking labor market, losing jobs in factories and distribution that they fought hard for less than a generation before. As the ranks of unemployed black people swelled in the 80s, attacks on benefits for the unemployed and welfare came up. In 1978, California passed Proposition 13, which drastically cut the taxes paid  by mostly suburban homeowners in order to defund social services that largely inner city residents depended upon.

This was the beginning of what came to be called the Tax Revolt that defined the core of the Conservative program ever since. This backlash against the Civil Rights movement lasted 30 years. The Occupy movement marks the end of the hegemony of that backlash. On this point, we need to be clear. This is the end of an era, the beginning of a new one. Liberal leftists and Democrats are taking the end of the hegemony of the backlash to be an opening for a revival of that which preceded the backlash – the Great Society and the New Deal. They offer us an even more distant past as the program for overcoming the program of the recent past. They offer the New Deal part II and we can expect the Backlash part II in response. Fascism is what we will get, unless we succeed at stimulating the revolutionary socialist imagination of the working class. We must inspire confidence that a socialist future is more realistic than a New Deal part II.

Rooted in the decades-long economic crisis of capitalism (which started in the early 1970s) but extending toward a whole host of political crises ranging from War on Drugs to the wars in the Middle east, and incorporating a vast social crisis which includes racial re-segregation, reversal of gains for women’s rights such as abortion, and a sharp social antagonism around sexuality whose most concrete expression is in the form of the gay marriage struggle, the movement is still not capable of defining itself.

Method for the Madness / Skip the Pitfalls

Revolutionary Marxism is the key to unlocking the imagination of the working class. Raising up the seeds of the future (socialism) from the soil of the present (capitalism) is a matter of method: what method to stimulate the imaginations of millions of working class people, beyond the limits of mere reform, to the more realistic horizon of revolutionary society?

How we can defend some aspects of the state, and also claim that the whole thing needs to go? The tension in this question has at times propelled the movement forward, and at other times frustrated the movement and layers of people new to the struggle. If it is true, as Rosa Luxemburg claims in “The Mass Strike”, that what remains after each wave of mass upheaval is a “residue of consciousness” that fertilizes the soil of revolution as the flood waters of ancient rivers did the soil of the fields, our richest theoretical gains may derive from the tension between reform and revolution that inevitably arises in times of great crisis.

Rather than being two opposite sides, these aspects of the class struggle here in Oakland are complementary. We can argue they are complimentary because the best way to defend aspects of the state like public education or healthcare is with class struggle strategy and tactics backed by a dialectical materialist analysis of the historical forces in motion. Therefore, by winning these struggles, we build the confidence of the masses in the strategy and tactics that flow from the marxist method, and we develop a hegemonic praxis that is harder to co-opt. Either we win and build the strength and knowledge required to smash the state, or we lose and are forced to create these services ourselves by expropriating the productive property required to create them. Either way, if we defend them with a marxist praxis, that defense will complement the smashing of the state.

From here, we will have to figure out how to synthesize the (still) largely white of middle class origin Occupy movement with the mostly black and brown working class families who produce the value that holds society together. Moreover, we will have to build this synthesis in the context of a worldwide upheaval which is made up of (and in some cases led by) professionals and young people who hope to become professionals one day. We will have to find a way to include millions of people who live in contemporary capitalist world and whose livelihoods depend largely on the economic role of the state, defend the notion that a government bigger than just one group of specific interests should provide for the general well-being of the whole society. In other words we have to defend the concept of democracy, while insisting that democracy be used in the interest of the working class which is perhaps not 99% of the population but pretty close.

One reason we see such vague demands here in the US is that this movement still lacks a real working class base. In general the working class has needs that are not being met, but could and should be met. These needs include high quality free housing, healthcare, and education; good jobs that do positive things for the world and have good working conditions, short hours and high pay for every single person; freedom from state violence, particularly in the forms of police brutality and war. We need to organize on a class basis to make class wide demands that flow directly from these needs, and to ally with strategic sectors of the class that could win those demands, such as transportation workers, food production workers, sanitation workers, factory workers and so on. We can ally with them by preparing support for a strike of that sector and encouraging militant rank and file organization within that sector. By educating workers in strategic sectors about the history of international proletarian revolution and agitating them to take a leading role to win the demands of the class, we can forge a real working class base for this movement.

If the working class decides to draw the line in the sand and battle it out with the powers  that be in order to defend their needs, these needs will not only be defended – our dreams of a healthy society based on good work, good working conditions, and free high quality services will come true. No politician will give this to us. We have to build it ourselves.

Occupy Oakland showed how we can build a new society. Yes, it was a tent city in which a lot of people did not have jobs or responsibilities to their families, so they could be there 24/7, but look what they did! They fed 1000s of people, and lived basically in peace for  2 weeks in the middle of a city that is devastated by the capitalist system. This is a drop in the bucket. With a socialist revolution, we could make a system where billions of people have free housing, good jobs doing good things for the people, and a lot of leisure time to do art, learn about politics, make music, and do anything else that is peaceful and constructive.

We need to have confidence that the occupy movement has been just one stage in a growing working class upheaval that is reaching the point where we will have to get comfortable calling it a revolutionary situation. This is the direction that we are going, and we should all be filled with hope. Where does the society of the future have a foothold in the present? Is it in the public schools? Yes, in the sense that the response to the attacks on the public schools might assume the form of school occupations where parents, children, teachers, and members of the working class community determine their conditions, link up with other sections of society that in upheaval, and become bases of the class struggle. The class struggle can become a struggle by the working class to run away from its sectorally isolated jobs, its segregation between home, work, and community.

Build a Working Class Base to Occupy the Means of Production

A school-based struggle would bring elements of the future socialist society into the present, would allow the working class the opportunity to run its own life, govern itself, and be in unity with the class as a whole. Will such a struggle emerge out of calls to explicitly build socialism, or is it more likely to emerge out of defense of some element of the future that has already been won such as public spaces, democratic promises of equality for all? It is a mistake to argue that defending the state sector gives false illusions to the working class that the system can work because it is clear that it can’t work. It is even more clear that the democratic promise of equal education for all that came out of the Civil Rights movement of the past is a principle that will be central in socialism and that it seems as righteous to the working class today as it ever did. It is also a mistake to argue that the working class doesn’t care about lofty ideas like socialism and that we can only reform our way toward an incrementally brighter tomorrow. The working class will need to know why the past reforms have been snuffed out by the same capitalist system that put them in place.

By defending the gains of the past, such as public education, we can build the seeds of the society of the future, and build bases of power for the confrontation against the state apparatus. The movement already has to confront the  state in the form of riot police, but we will have much more serious battles ahead. Millions of workers will have to be armed not just with weapons, but with correct ideas. The unity between workers and revolutionaries will have to be total, founded upon a trust earned through struggle, respecting the correct ideas that workers already have about some things.

All politicians–from heads of state to the school board–stand naked in the contradictions of our times. The working class is demanding the simple dreams which capitalism cannot fulfill.  Things swing wild in the struggle as the future is pulled into the present at an ever quickening pace, yet is obstructed by the past that tries to hold things back. Revolutionaries can unleash the imagination of the working class, by showing real steps forward for real actions they can participate in and lead that represent their own immediate self-interest yet have positive repercussions for the power of the class as a whole.

What can revolutionaries do to maximize this moment? Demands, goals and visions are necessary. At every stage of revolutionary struggle, we need to see our next step as clearly as possible, and actually take those steps in action. Defending things like public education through direct action such as strikes and occupations lead seamlessly into new social relations that form the strategic basis of revolutionary power – integration of the class across sectors.

Revolutionaries fulfill many roles, play many functions, and often are following behind the masses merely interpreting their actions. But one key function is to illuminate the path ahead with a vision, demands, focus, and strategic next steps. When these resonate, are unified, and articulated by millions of people in more or less the same way, dreams become reality, ideas become material, fuel for the advancement of humanity to a higher stage.

Goals for the whole working class:

End the Wars

Free education, healthcare, housing for all

Positive work for all

Socialist revolution

Goals for the Oakland working class:

No school closures

Equal rights for immigrants, no deportations

Stop gang injunctions

http://insurgentnotes.com/

One important component in the radical Left’s impulse for solidarity with oppressed people across the whole world is a condemnation of Israel’s relationship with Palestine, which is considered racist, colonial, fascist – a settler state par excellence. In our critique of Israel, we forget that nations are composed of antagonistic classes, and that the dialectic of class struggle in Israel-Palestine is not exclusively an anti-colonial one. The duty of a conscious Israeli to the world proletarian struggle for liberation does not lie in a self-sacrificing or suicidal “traitor-ism” wherein good Jews give themselves over to the Palestinian cause as a servant to it.

In May train workers wildcatted against the political arrest of union members for protesting privatization of the trains

Determining a program for women’s liberation that can actually be into practice is no easy task. AS has been trying to figure it out throughout our short history as a collective. One thing has injected a fair amount of insight, a concrete manifestation of many of the theoretical conclusions we had started to come to grips with. That is the internationalist socialist women’s organization, Pan y Rosas.

A comrade of ours visited Argentina a while ago and ever since her return has been agitating AS around the politics of Pan y Rosas (Bread and Roses). So far, we are very impressed, and even though their strategy leans more toward the electoral than we think is merited, we have profound respect for their application of theory to practice which focuses on the women sector of the working class without embracing a “sectoralist” perspective that divides this work from that of the male sector.

PyR is an all-women’s socialist group connected to a Trotskyist party, the Partido de Trabajadores Socialistas (Socialist Workers Party). In extremely patriarchal countries like Argentina and Mexico where reproductive rights are nearly non-existent and femicide is a huge and growing problem, PyR has implanted itself within factories and other workplaces to build women’s agency as workers and as women. They resist the boss and the state, in the process defying established gender norms and building women’s solidarity rooted in Third World reality.

Women are the majority of the paid proletariat, and most of the time, they are unpaid workers in the home (“the proletariat of the proletariat”). PyR sees women’s oppression in its totality, fighting patriarchy in all its manifestations without falling down that slippery slope of stage-ism wherein the primary task of feminism is perceived to be settling the score with men of their class, as a precondition to fighting the enemy shared by all genders: capital. Let’s hope that their male comrades are not abstaining from the struggle for women’s liberation under the false notion that according to the principle of “self-determination” only those directly effected by a particular form of oppression have a right or duty to fight against it.

PTS, the multi-gender trotskyist party, has its own video/news network called TV PTS  set up and has covered much of Pan y Rosas’ activism. In this video, a media mogul, Ricardo Fort, meets the resistance of his mostly woman workforce. He is also the owner of a factory where most of the workers are women who face terrible conditions and sexual harrassment. This patriarchal capitalist going down!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aqw5wNxmSrM

more PyR in action:

And finally, here is a response to the Pan y Rosas program by our comrade Sasha Yanga. Translation of program and this reflection to come in dedicated post, we just couldn’t wait to big up Pan y Rosas and put it out there that AS is engaging feminism from a proletarian perspective: