[Peace-discuss] Fw: The Occupy Movement, Co-optation and the 2012 Elections

Mon Dec 5 19:54:36 CST 2011

----- Original Message ----- 
From: Larry Duncan 
To: Larry Duncan 
Sent: Monday, December 05, 2011 7:12 PM
Subject: The Occupy Movement, Co-optation and the 2012 Elections

http://www2.socialistorganizer.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=466&Itemid=1

The Occupy Movement, Co-optation and the 2012 Elections

Editorial
(November-December 2011 Issue of The Organizer newspaper)

Hundreds of thousands of people have taken to the streets across the country since September 17 in the Occupy Wall Street movement to protest the intolerable conditions of massive unemployment, growing inequality, rampant home foreclosures, and stepped-up cuts in the social safety net. Their outrage has been focused against the bailout of Wall Street, while Main Street has been left to languish, and against the influence of big-money over the political system.

This explosion of anger against the unbridled greed of the banksters and speculators in the span of just two short months has changed the terms of the national debate. No longer is the discourse dominated by the dangers of Big Government and Big Unions; today the media and the population at large are talking about the role of Wall Street and the banks in destroying our economy and subverting democratic rights. This is no small feat.

The Occupy protests - with chants of "Enough is Enough! - We Refuse to Pay For Their Crisis! - They Got Bailed Out, We Got Sold Out!" -- speak for the working-class majority in this country.

Today, as the Occupy encampments are being shut down by violent police repression nationwide -- under directives from Homeland Security and therefore under the political responsibility of President Obama and the Democratic Party -- Occupy activists are discussing what to do next to advance the movement. This is the context in which a diverse series of heavy-weight political players -- from the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) to The Nation magazine -- are ratcheting up their efforts to co-opt the Occupy movement and steer it into the Democratic Party's 2012 election campaign, some with a hard sell, others with a softer sell.

SEIU's Hard Sell

The SEIU has been the most brazen in its effort to co-opt the Occupy movement. In mid-November, Mary Kay Henry, president of SEIU, gave President Obama her union's early endorsement, with the following motivation: "We need a leader willing to fight for the needs of the 99 percent. ... Our economy and democracy have been taken over by the wealthiest 1 percent."

SEIU has put together a coalition -- which includes the AFL-CIO, MoveOn.org and numerous liberal organizations -- with the goal of busing thousands of protesters from across the country to "Occupy Congress" in Washington, D.C., on December 5-9.

In an interview with Greg Sargent (Washington Post Opinion, The Plum Line, November 18), Henry explains the purpose of Occupy Congress. One goal of the protests, Henry says, is to pressure Republicans to support Obama's jobs creation proposals. This is a jobs bill which, at best, would create 1.5 million to 2 million jobs, nowhere near the 15 million jobs that the AFL-CIO leadership had been calling for but has since dropped by the wayside. Even worse, the jobs program would be paid in large part by cutting Social Security taxes, thus weakening the fund and leaving it more exposed to the budget cutters -- which is unacceptable.

Henry argues that this support for the Democratic Party is not in contradiction with the Occupy movement, noting that Occupy Wall Street has created a framework -- "we are the 99 percent" -- within which such activities would fit comfortably. "We want to draw a stark contrast," Henry said, "between a party that wants to scapegoat immigrants, attack public workers, and protect the rich, versus a president who has been saying he wants America to get back to work and that everybody should pay their fair share."

Glen Greenwald, writing in Salon.com on November 19, decried this attempt by SEIU to "integrate Occupy Wall Street into the very political institutions that it has slammed with such anger." He stated:

"The notion -- advanced by SEIU -- that it's the Democratic Party and the Obama White House working to bring about the changes and implant the values of the 99 percent is so self-evidently false as to be insulting."

"Wall Street funded the Democrats far more than the GOP in the 2008 election; the Democrats' key money man, Charles Schumer, is one of the most devoted Wall Street servants in the country; Obama empowered in key positions Wall Street servants such as Tim Geithner, Larry Summers, Bill Daley, Rahm Emanuel, and an endless roster of former Goldman officials; ... the President named the CEO of GE to head his jobs panel; ... and the Democratic President, after vocally urging an Age of Austerity, tried very hard to usher in cuts to Social Security and an increase in the age for Medicare eligibility."

Greenwald's exposé of Wall Street-Democratic Party collusion is good, but it leaves out the main indictment of the Obama administration: Obama and the Democrats played the central role in selling out Main Street when they bailed out Wall Street to the tune of more than $8 trillion (including the funds from the Federal Reserve).

When union activists have objected that Occupy Congress is explicitly aimed at supporting Obama's jobs bill and the Democratic Party, Occupy Congress organizers have replied, echoing Mary Kay Henry, that this should not be a problem as Occupy allows for a "diversity of tactics."

The Nation's Softer Sell

Other liberals are a bit more clever in their co-optation approach. In an op-ed article published widely November 25 under the title, "Channel the Anger and the Hope," Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of The Nation magazine, lavishes heavy praise on the Occupy movement and then goes on to write the following:

"For me the central question now is how to channel the anger and hope of Occupy into strategies that will forge a new politics and economy. ... This requires a politics of conviction, but it also demands avoiding a denunciation of the Obama administration's every misstep and failure. ...

"While I do have my disappointments with President Obama, ... he is now talking more forthrightly about jobs and fairness, and challenging the ridiculous idea that asking the wealthiest to pay their fair share is akin to class warfare. ... It is time to work with determined idealism and grounded pragmatism to begin building the kind of society we have dreamed of but not yet achieved."
No doubt Ms. Vanden Heuvel's "grounded pragmatism" will lead to a more specific call down the road to get on board with Obama to stop "the ferocious forces of reaction and establishment power and money," as she calls them.

Whither Occupy Wall Street?

Occupy Wall Street is structurally vulnerable to this co-optation.

While every Occupy protest features signs and banners that read, "Wall Street Got Bailed Out, We Got Sold Out!", very few, if any, signs can be seen, and very few, if any, speeches can be heard, denouncing the Obama administration and the Democrats for enabling the Wall Street banksters who sold us out. Wall Street didn't do the job on its own; it took the politicians in the twin parties of capitalism, led by Obama, to turn over our money - and mortgage our future -- to these speculators and swindlers.

The main leading forces in the Occupy movement -- with their opposition to placing demands on the State and eventually winning political power -- do not offer an independent, working-class fightback perspective to the workers and youth who burst onto the scene and have sought in the Occupy movement an avenue for struggle.

As important as the encampments have been for establishing this movement, and while they must be defended against the State, the emphasis on "liberating space" reflects a utopian view that it is possible to build islands of a free society within a sea of capitalism and, therefore, that societal change will principally come about from individual lifestyle choices. History shows that until working people control the wealth of society, it is impossible to build and sustain an alternative egalitarian society.

Likewise, organizational structures based on strict consensus are profoundly anti-democratic in that they allow a small minority to block the will of the majority, and therefore are not suited to building a sustainable mass movement against capitalist austerity.

These political dynamics have led most of the Occupy movement to refuse to take on the Obama administration. This void has been filled largely by calls to demand "greater accountability" from Wall Street and the banks or call on their supporters to take their funds out of the major banks and place them in cooperative-style credit unions.

At a public forum in New York City on November 9 sponsored by The Nation magazine, well-known authors Naomi Klein and William Greider repeated time and again that Occupy Wall Street is essentially a modern-day version of the Populist rebellions of the past.

Klein offered the Mondragon federation of cooperatives in the Basque region of Spain and the expansion of local farmers' markets as the examples of what the Occupy movement must now fight for here in the United States.

Greider, for his part, pointed to Lawrence Goodwyn's "The Populist Moment," as the place to look for examples of how a new "movement culture," "participatory democracy," and economic cooperatives could work in this country.

Both Klein and Greider are not wrong in this assessment of the Occupy Wall Street movement as, essentially, a Populist movement. Notwithstanding the largely agrarian character of the Populist movement in its heyday (in the 1890s), there is a striking similarity in the cross-class composition and political targets of these movements, directed as they are, against the financial oligarchies of their time -- the 1 percent.

But any serious student of the Populist movements of the past has to understand that the demise of these Populist movements -- or put another way, their gradual liquidation -- came through their co-optation into the Democratic Party, albeit not always directly.

And the reason for this liquidation into the Democratic Party is actually explained -- though not intentionally -- in the introduction of "The Populist Moment" when, echoing the Populists of that era, Goodwyn categorically rejects the Marxist concept of class. Goodwyn advocates a "movement culture" of the "people," without class distinctions, and explains that the "presumed analytical clarity of the category of class" is nothing of the sort.

It is precisely this rejection of the existence of class society -- and class struggle -- by large sections of the Occupy Wall Street movement that make it so vulnerable to the Democratic Party operatives and their fellow-travelers. It's what enables SEIU, The Nation, and all too many progressive intellectuals to say that support for the Democrats in 2012 is just one among many "diverse tactics" to be deployed by the Occupy movement.

Support for the Democratic Party in 2012 by any wing of the Occupy Wall Street movement would represent a lethal blow to the Occupy movement as a whole. The Democratic Party is financed, run and controlled by Wall Street and the capitalist class. It is not a vehicle, even a partial one, to advance workers' struggles. On the contrary, it is the graveyard of all workers' and social movements.

* * * * * * * * *

http://www2.socialistorganizer.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=467&Itemid=1

Why Class Matters: Occupy and Workers' Resistance

There is a concerted drive the world over by the ideologues of capitalism, and relayed by the neo-Populists, to dissolve the working-class majority into a new political category called "civil society," which includes both workers and bosses on the grounds they have "common interests" against the 1 percent.

But workers and bosses cannot "work together" in harmony because their interests are diametrically opposed.

Wage earners -- called the "gravediggers of capitalism" by Karl Marx for their capacity to overturn the system that relies on them -- make up the huge majority of the population in the United States. Workers survive by selling their labor to the capitalists, in exchange for a wage.

The economy and all of society inevitably grind to a screeching halt without the labor of working people. Workers -- Black, white, and immigrant; men and women; blue-collar and white-collar - have the power to shut down any city in a matter of minutes just by folding their arms. We run the schools, the fields, the stores, the factories, the offices, transportation; we are the soldiers in the military; and we produce and distribute food, gas, light, heat -- everything.

Working-Class Upsurge

This reality of class struggle can be seen played out every day both at home and abroad with the rise of working-class resistance to the capitalists' onslaught on our jobs, rights and conquests.

Internationally, this has been expressed in the central role of the working class and its organizations in the revolutionary uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia, Greece, and beyond. Similarly, general strikes have swept dozens of European countries in recent months.
The first and perhaps most explosive re-emergence of the U.S. working class on the national scene took place last February in Wisconsin when hundreds of thousands of workers and youth -- at the initiative of the Teaching Assistants trade union (TAA) and then of the South Central Wisconsin Federation of Labor -- took to the streets with their organizations, occupied the State capitol for three weeks, organized strikes and held regular mass demonstrations in the freezing cold to demand that the governor withdraw his plan to attack public-sector workers by dismantling their collective-bargaining rights.

Workers nationwide rallied to support the struggle in Wisconsin, sending shock waves throughout the U.S. ruling class.

While the massive uprising in Wisconsin did not succeed in stopping the attacks on collective bargaining (given the default of the trade union officialdom, which offered huge concessions in wages and benefits in exchange for an agreement to rescind the governor's bill), the uprising electrified the country, showing that a massive struggle in the streets (including a mass occupation of a state capitol) by workers, youth and their organizations, could potentially turn the situation around.

The uprising in Wisconsin also gave impetus to a drive in Ohio -- organized by the trade unions and independent of the Democratic Party -- to launch a referendum process to overturn a similar anti-union measure in that state. On November 8, the referendum to overturn Senate Bill No. 5 passed by a large margin: 61%, and this in a state that boasts of having the largest Tea Party base. This was a huge victory for the trade union movement.

This movement has been expressed in the direct class struggle itself -- with a two-week Verizon workers' strike (which galvanized huge union and community support nationwide), the first-ever nationwide strike by nurses last October; and strikes and mass walkouts against cuts in education by teachers, teaching assistants, and students across California in October and November.

Sharp Longshore Confrontation

Perhaps the sharpest class confrontation, however, has been in Longview, Washington, where the ILWU members have been on strike six months to oppose changes in their contract language demanded by the EGT grain conglomerate. For weeks the workers occupied the waterfront and prevented all cargo from moving. This was reminiscent of the factory occupations of the 1930s. But state authorities ordered state troops to storm the waterfront and break up the dockworkers' occupation. Longshore workers and their families were beaten, pepper sprayed, and arrested by police armed with tear gas, rubber and live ammunitions to protect the interests of EGT.

Solidarity with the Longview workers was, in fact, one of the main reasons for the port shutdown on November 2 in Oakland, California -- the fifth largest port in the United States. This action was organized by ILWU members in conjunction with more than 30,000 people in the framework of a General Strike/Day of Action called by Occupy Oakland.

But a standoff remains in Longview, with the ILWU leadership and AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka refusing to escalate the struggle coastwide to help the workers get back their jobs and their union contract. But here, as in Wisconsin, the last word has not been said by the workers themselves.

Occupy movements up and down the West Coast, supported by ILWU rank-and-filers, are now organizing a West Coast Port Shutdown on December 12, 2011 in solidarity with both the ILWU Local 21 Longview workers and the truck drivers (mostly Latinos) in the ports of southern California who were fired in a union-busting attack when they attempted an organizing campaign. These truck drivers selected the date of December 12 for the action; it is the day of Our Virgin of Guadalupe, a day revered by workers of Mexican origin in the United States.

What Way Forward?

On November 28, the Emergency Labor Network -- a network of unionists and labor activists formed in Cleveland, Ohio, in early March 2011 -- issued a statement that calls for building committees to promote the fightback around the demand of "No Cuts!"

The ELN statement reads, in part:

"The assault on the safety net and human services programs is a bipartisan one. This underscores the need for building a powerful independent movement that opposes all cuts on an uncompromising basis. ...

"A stop has to be put to any and all attacks on our vital social programs, and Ohio shows that when the unions put their pedal to the metal we can prevail, we can push back their attacks, we can stop them in their tracks.

"[W]e urge the formation of committees in our unions and in our communities to promote public forums on these burning issues, build action coalitions locally against the cuts, and move our unions and organizations at the federal, state and local levels to mobilize to stop and rescind the cuts."

This statement is extremely significant; it points the way forward for the labor and Occupy movements today. The Organizer newspaper fully supports this ELN text and urges its readers and supporters to join in building fightback committees against the cuts.
The trade unions have the means to organize mass mobilizations and strike actions to demand: "No Cuts! Make Wall Street Pay for the Crisis!" With the growing momentum created by the Occupy Wall Street movement, the time is now for the union movement, in alliance with the independent organizations and struggles of Black and Latinos, to pull out all the stops and organize the kind of fightback that can put a stop to the ruling-class assault and turn things around for once and for all in the interests of the working-class majority.

At the same time, it will also be necessary -- and this is inextricably linked to the previous point -- to open the widest discussion within the labor movement and beyond about the need for the unions to break with the Democratic Party and build their own party -- a Labor Party based on the unions and the organizations of Blacks, Latinos, and all the oppressed.

These discussions will be promoted in the pages of Unity & Independence, the monthly supplement of The Organizer newspaper, in the weeks and months ahead.

-- The Editors

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.chambana.net/pipermail/peace-discuss/attachments/20111205/391c5f31/attachment-0001.html>