In his comment of March 27, 2012, Sam’s refers to our reply (On ‘Aufhebengate’ November 15, 2012) to TPTG’s open letter as pretentious (twice), having no connection to TPTG’s position except to distort it, and whose only intent is to “rubbish the TPTG.”
It seems incredible to us that such an interpretation could be divined from our short letter, but up front, we will clearly state, we have no intention or desire “to rubbish TPTG. “, On the contrary, simply because we disagree on a proposal that they made, it does not mean that we don’t respect this organization and value its contributions to the common struggle.

IP’s text is quite clear: a pro-revolutionary cannot under any circumstances work for, or with, an organ of state repression, even under the pretext that his job requires it or that the work is merely scientific or hypothetical in nature.

We insist that there is a class line at stake in this issue, and by writing and publishing articles on “crowd control” and “humane” policing in forums and journals linked to such efforts (not as critiques of such methods or exposure of the role that such methods play in the defense of capitalist order), that class line is crossed.

The other issue that Sam takes up, our objection to the “proletarian counter-inquiry” proposed by the TPTG did not appear to us, as Sam claims, merely an initiative to analyze the question of “how cops manage crowds.” Parenthetically, IP would have gladly have been a part of such an initiative. Neither did it seem to be simply a warning about the actions of a specific individual who claimed to be a pro-revolutionary; rather the demand for a “proletarian counter-inquiry” smacked of a tribunal of the sort all too well-known in past revolutionary movements. Such tribunals were not the province just of the Bolshevik state, and it is clear in our letter IP did not see the proposal of the TPTG as having anything to do with that history, which is an integral part of the history of capitalism, regardless of what Sam believes. In fact, such tribunals existed in the Bolshevik party long before 1917, and they have existed in many revolutionary movements of the historical communist left from the 1920′s to the present time, as well as in anarchist groups. They have been used in the midst of faction fights, with the aim of preventing debate or expelling minorities from the ranks of the group.

Our text was intended to remind the TPTG of that history and of the political uses which such tribunals have served; to make the point that a “revolutionary counter-inquiry” was not the appropriate vehicle to respond to what we saw as a serious breach of revolutionary behavior. The alternative is not the reference to an “ideology of humanist leniency” with which Sam wants to paint us, but rather a clear defense of the class line.

Fischer for IP.

The issue features the following articles:

The Historical Perspective: A Face Unveiled (Editorial)
Workers of all Countries Become Outraged
They Don’t Get it (IP leaflet on Occupy)
Does Capital Own Democracy (correspondence)
Occupy: Results and Prospects
Two Battles at Longview and the Occupy Movement
England Burning (discussion on the UK riots)
Farewell to Will Barnes
Virtual Trillions

Articles will be posted to the IP web site in the near future, and subscriber/exchange copies will be sent out this week.

The New York post office box is now closed. All snail mail should be directed to

PO Box 47643, Don Mills, ON, M3C 3S7, Canada.

The meeting takes palce at 1105 23rd Avenue in Seattle and starts at 3PM.

Participating tendencies (in alphabetic order)
- Anarcho-syndicalism
- Black Orchid
- Communization
- Insurrectionary anarchy
- Nihilism

Schedule
3-5PM: debates on
- The enemy (capitalism or civilization?)
- Revolution (ultimate goals and how to get there)
- Class & identity
- The role of revolutionaries

5-6PM: dinner break

6-7:15PM: debates on
- Unions & solidarity networks
- Prefigurative (anti)politics
- The Occupy movement

7:15-8PM: open discussion with audience

More information on Facebook

Revolutionary and non-sectarian anarchists, socialists, and communists are coming together to report on their activity in OWS, share insights and discuss next steps, support each other, and hopefully work together productively in the future.

Our first meeting, initiated by a small group of anti-capitalist activists, took place on January 8th. About forty-five people attended and, after a productive discussion, agreed to continue meeting.

We are not looking to ‘take over’ OWS, or build a separate alternative to it, but to form a network for anti-capitalist activists already active in the movement. No decisions have been made about what we might do!

Next Meeting Sunday January 29th 6:00 PM
The Commons 388 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn (three blocks from the Atlantic Avenue Subway Stop)

Agenda
6:15 – 6:45 One-to-One Introductions and Small Group Conversations
6:45 – 7:45 Discussion on what is happening in New York City
7:45 – 8:15 Small Group Discussions on Common Work

Come join the conversation and contribute to an explicitly anti-capitalist current within the occupy movement.

For more information, write to: againstprofitnyc@gmail.com.

To occupy our world, we must expropriate its current owners, dubbed the 1% but more appropriately described as “capital.” But not everyone in the Occupy movement agrees with this conclusion. So now that the movement enters a new phase, and everyone is talking about what the next step will be, it finds itself at a crossroads. We are all bound together by our outrage over the injustice this system inflicts but we draw different conclusions. Some think our aim must be to reform the system, to change the laws to protect politicians from the corrupting influence of money. Others like us think that, as long as the capitalist core of the system survives, it won’t matter how democratically politicians are elected, they will always be bound by higher laws, the laws of capital. Congress, the Democratic party and its trade union allies, the cops, the mayors, governors etc, are all integral parts of the soulless machine that structures society in the interests of capital. They can never represent the interests of the 99%.

In 2012, the spectacle of the electoral circus will suck up a lot of media-attention and it threatens to suck up part of the Occupy movement as well. The challenge to those who refuse to be co-opted by the very forces against whose policies the movement has risen, who don’t want to become foot soldiers for progessive Democrats or the unions, is to pose an alternative perspective to the movement.

How to concretize the battle cry “Occupy!” ? How to resist the forces of co-optation ? How to reach out to the ‘99%’ in the workplaces, whose involvement is vital to our movement ? How will the deepening of capitalism’s crisis in the coming year increase the pressure and affect the spread of the Occupy movement ?

These and other questions, the anti-capitalists in the Occupy movement need to discuss. We invite them to do so at an open meeting, on January 8th.

January 8, 2012
6:00 PM – 8:00 PM
The Commons
388 Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn
(three blocks from the Atlantic Avenue Subway Stop)

Issued by : a group of anti-capitalist activists
For more information, write to :
againstprofitnyc@gmail.com

———————————————

Dear comrades

We inform you that the result of “Socialist Workers’ League of Korea” (SWLK) trial.

SWLK 8 militants received the verdict of guilty by the court of appeal on December 16. The court of appeal enhanced sentence.

Oh Sei-chul, Yang Hyo-sik, Yang Jun-seok, and Choi Young-ik was sentenced to 2 years in jail with a stay of execution for three years and fined 500,000 won.

Nam goong won, Park Jun-seon, Jeong Won-hyung, and Oh Min-gyu was sentenced to 1 year 6 month in jail with a stay of execution for three years and fined 500,000 won.

The notorious National Security Law, enacted in 1948, has long been used to repress socialist, communist and labor struggles in South Korea.

As the SWLK case attracted a lot of socialist attention, the South Korean socialist gathered together to support the defendants.

We appreciate your interest in organizing the support of SWLK militants.

The Commons
388 Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn (three blocks from the Atlantic Avenue Subway Stop)

We write on the day before Occupy protesters will be acting up and down the Pacific Coast to blockade the ports. We pledge our solidarity with them and look forward to hearing of their success. The strategy of a port shutdown hints at the recognition that the future of the Occupy movement requires the development of a clear and powerful anti-capitalist current. We believe that the time has come to place the development of an organizational expression of such a current on the agenda of New York activists. We therefore are inviting all those interested to an initial meeting on January 8th at the location above. There will be several brief presentations but plenty of time for discussion. What follows is a preliminary exploration of a number of the issues that we see as pressing. We look forward to hearing your reactions and your ideas.

The 1% of the 99%

In the current economic and social crisis, the ability for workers to effectively make gains through the structures of our unions is almost non-existent. In fact, for the past two months of the occupation movement here in the United States, union leaders have either scrambled to play catch-up with the social needs of the working class, undermined the movement’s grassroots efforts at contesting these attacks by moving to the right of them, or acted its own policing force against not only its official members, but political activity in general.

But if we look historically, these union strategies are consistent with their historical role within capitalist society as the mediation between management and workers. The primary activity of the trade union—through the means of a group of people in leadership positions, or the bureaucracy– is to negotiate a contract for the benefits, wages, and (sometimes) specific working conditions of labor in their exploitative relation with their employers. In order to accomplish this, they operate as an organization over and above rank and file workers in order to maintain an exclusive and specialized relationship with management, thereby perpetuating a relationship of dominance over their members despite occasionally, and partially, allowing them to express their dissent. In fact, this dissent can help negotiations as well: “If you don’t promise X, Y, or Z, we cannot be held responsible for what these crazy workers might do! However, if you do promise [which doesn’t mean carry out] we can most likely keep them working productively for you.” Additionally, and within the context of the current crisis, trade unions are able to achieve less and less, and as a result, the rank and file are left without any means to struggle through the union. And because the results of negotiations which, for example, bargained away the “right” to strike, are carried forward into a time when it is structurally impossible for capitalism to make concessions, struggles beyond bureaucracy are more and more of a necessity. To hope that the union bureaucracy will respond to the needs of the working class is to circumscribe hope as the leash of submission.

This position does not come from the individual politics of trade union bureaucrats themselves, from their personalities, or even from a particular caucus that has leadership. It is instead the historical role of unions as the mediators between labor, that is, the workers who produce the profit, goods, education, etc. for society as a whole, and capital. The union bureaucracy cannot imagine a world without capitalism, because their existence is predicated upon negotiations within its mechanisms and enforcements.

If we look at the activities of the unions in New York over the last month alone, for example, we can see this clearly. For many of those involved in the occupation movement, who have remarked that Occupy Wall Street itself has shifted the unions towards a more left position, there is a surprise when the first signs militancy within the protests brings with it derailment as the union leaders transform the anger of the working class into platforms for the Democratic Party. Let us take a closer look at some recent events.

November 17th: Upwards of 50,000 people protested in the streets of New York. There were marches and mobilizations all over the city, at least one of which avoided police intervention all the way from Union Square to Foley Square, as well as an occupation of a university space to provide free anti-capitalist education for both students and non-students alike. Later in the evening, at least 32,000 people attempted to take the Brooklyn Bridge in an effort at direct action. People were bewildered and dismayed when they tried to go onto the street itself to block traffic, they instead witnessed a number of trade union leaders funneling people onto the walkways.

When the march got to Brooklyn, it was again confounded when a series of political leaders andbureaucrats were arrested peacefully in a clearly pre-negotiated “planned civil disobedience”, which was much more of a performance than anything that stopped the movement of capital.

November 21st and 28th: Several hundred protested at a CUNY Board of Trustees public hearing at Baruch College. The college has high levels of security and turnstiles. When students attempted to hold a forum in the lobby, which is open to the public, a combination of police and campus security officers beat and arrested several students. The following week, another protest was held. This time, a coalition of the PSC (an AFT local that represents faculty and staff at CUNY), city council-members including Charles Barron, and other union and non-profit groups held a barricaded protest and with the assistance of members of various “left” political parties, as well as progressive students, directed protestors into the barricades. Protesters were visibly dispirited to move from a boisterous protest in the streets of midtown Manhattan, into a police corral and subjected to speeches on the importance of voting. A week later, the PSC held a teach-in where they valorized the arrests of the 21st; this was exploitative and hypocritical.

MTA Contract Negotiations: Regarding the ongoing contract negotiations of the Transport Workers Union (TWU), due to expire early next year, the Local 100 leadership has demonstrated explicitly that it has no plans for combating the MTA’s proposed cutbacks in jobs, wages, benefits, services, as well as a 3-year wage freeze for transit workers. It is assumed that any grassroots efforts at striking will be met with the same union response in 2005: openly bringing in scabs as well arguing in court for the illegality of any walk-out.

Those are just a few examples of the practical activity of trade unions, and their structural inability to do what’s necessary: to actually confront and overthrow capitalism itself.

What we need right now is for autonomous political organizing in both unionized and non-unionized workplaces, schools, and in the streets. These are the efforts that made the November 2nd Port Shutdown on the west coast possible. It was not the arbitration of the bureaucracy through its attempts at domesticating class struggle, but instead the participation of multiple fractions of the proletariat, both unionized, non-unionized, and the unemployed, which took the initiative to construct the blockades. On December 12th, again there are plans to shut down shipping ports all along the west coast, including that of Los Angeles, San Diego, Portland, Tacoma, Seattle, Vancouver and Anchorage, without official union authorization. As is to be expected, the ILWU leadership stands opposed to such an action that practically calls into question the circulation of capital and commodities. Despite this however, both longshoremen and other unionized, non-unionized, and unemployed workers will participate on December 12th, and in doing so, will demonstrate the increasing antiquated forms of the hierarchical union bureaucracies for expressing the needs and desires of the proletariat itself.

These events have certainly shown that union bureaucrats are not ignoring struggles beyond their shops. However, their responses to the crisis remain profoundly uncritical in confronting the severity of developing conditions. There can be no illusions that in the external management of the class as a whole, this representation (that is, the unions) radically opposes itself to the working class itself. A bureaucracy which directs the workers and pacifies an inherently antagonistic relationship between capital and labor cannot help but be the enforcers of class domination. However, when we discover the unions collaborate in the constant reinforcement of class domination, not only in the form of its labor as commodity to be bought and sold, but also in the form of unions and parties, we also discover that we are as opposed to the parties and union bureaucrats as the bosses themselves. We contain a revolution that will not leave anything outside ourselves!

Issued by: a group of anti-capitalist activists on December 12, 2011
For more information on some of those involved, write to:
Against Profit NYC

Those who feel the effects of the governments’ austerity programs in their everyday life are starting to realize ever more clearly that these are not temporarily painful, yet necessary sacrifices. They are becoming aware of the fact that the drastic cuts will not only last for years or even decades, but that their own future is becoming ever bleaker. We are probably at the start of a new era: Ever since society was brought back down to the earth of cold hard economic facts, the culturalist carnival of differences has come to an end. Society’s colorful superstructure has scaled off to reveal, in Orthodox Marxist terms, the drab, universal base. And the crisis has achieved what activists striving to link struggles have been incapable of for decades: millions have taken to the streets simultaneously with the same purpose. All they’re left with is an ever more precarious survival under the reigning conditions. For them, it’s all or nothing.

The widely feared collapse of the financial markets was prevented by extensive governmental interventions; exorbitant stimulus packages were able to stabilize industry and even effectuate momentary economic upswings here and there. Germany, in particular, was able to establish itself as a profiteer of the crisis at the cost of the weakened competitors due to its momentary export boom, at the same time becoming the leading advocate of the austerity doctrine. The determined efforts to tackle the crisis failed nonetheless; the problem was merely shifted to the state level and the banking crisis has molted into a sovereign debt crisis, which threatens to break the Euro zone.

At first, Greece drew most of the attention. Unable to raise new money on the financial market on its own, the Greek government was forced to officially request financial help. The troika, consisting of the European Union, the European Central Bank, and the international Monetary Fund granted the Greek state a loan amounting to 110 billion Euros, but this soon turned out to be insufficient.

The Euro’s tumble continued and in May 2010, European heads of government agreed on a European Stabilization Mechanism worth 750 billion Euros to prevent sovereign default by any member of the Euro zone. Above all, the so-called PIIGS, that is Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain, are thought to be in danger. But even such massive measures were unable to halt the crisis.

Meanwhile, there is now talk of allowing Greece to default, although the consequences for the Euro zone’s future are unknown. If Greece defaults, Greek banks and pension funds will be hit first, as they own about 50% of the government’s bonds and a bailout by the Greek state would, of course, be out of question. Beyond that, important banks in Belgium, France, and Germany would also be in imminent danger, as they, too, hold considerable numbers of Greek bonds in their portfolios. However, the magnitude of the calamity cannot be measured simply as the sum of the shaky government bonds; the crucial point is that these bonds, in turn, serve as securities for further loans, which would no longer be secured as a result of national bankruptcy. Because of these interdependences, which indirectly affect the whole of the European banking sector, banks directly hit by a Greek sovereign default would not be the only ones in danger. Rather, in the medium term, a collapse of the Euro would be possible, which is why negotiations about a recapitalization of European banks with government or EU money are currently taking place. The Euro zone can bear neither a meltdown of the finance sector nor the insolvency of individual members. To keep these things from happening, it is now resorting to leverage techniques. The latter emerged in the mid-1990′s when the trade in financial products was given a boost by enormous numbers of unfunded credit default swaps being sold in the hope that the bloated market could expand just a little more.

Thus, the whole issue keeps spinning in a circle and even the media’s deceptive fragmentation of the crisis into a plethora of crises – real estate crisis, credit crunch, fiscal crisis, sovereign debt crisis, Greece or Ireland crisis, and so on – can hardly hide this. This is because, despite what the talk of ever new individual crises suggests, all of them have the very same origin in the crisis of the real economy. Ever since the post-war boom ran dry in the early 1970′s the rates of profit have been faltering, because ever less living labor keeps ever more dead labor running.(1) The excessive debt the European states and the US started to incur at this point is a symptom of a capitalism losing its economic dynamic; measures originally conceived as a temporary economic stimulus morphed into a permanent policy of subsidies for the productive sectors. However, this policy of excessive deficit spending was unable to sufficiently preserve enticing possibilities for the valorization of surplus masses of capital or to create new ones. Surplus capital gushed into the financial sector, which was bloated more and more until the crisis of 2007/2008 manifested itself as a financial crisis. The bursting of one financial product bubble after another from 2007 on is merely an expression of the scarcity of investment opportunities for capital, which has shot itself in the foot with its permanent technological-scientific upheaval of production.

The cries for a restoration of the “primacy of politics over economics”, which currently dominate the op-ed sections of newspapers and can also be heard in the protest movements, fails to grasp the problem, because they are incapable of understanding the role of banks and lending. They do not only provide the necessary lubricant to keep the accumulation cycle in continuous acceleration; above all, the origin of lending is the part of surplus value that cannot be directly returned into the cycle because of latent over-accumulation. In a sense, the organic way out of the crisis would be a gigantic destruction of capital: bloated financial values would have to be wiped out, banks left to fail; the market would purge itself through company bankruptcies; wage levels would fall even further. After that, the “old filthy business” (Marx) would start from scratch in a new cycle. However, because a laissez-faire policy, which would give such a devaluation free reign appears too risky at the moment even to liberal economists due to its unforeseeable, but certainly drastic consequences, crisis management through state interventions has been the first choice so far. This has led not only to astronomical national debts, but has also cemented the fundamental problem of over-accumulation and merely postponed the unavoidable crash – meanwhile, the stakes keep growing. The increasingly desperate actions of politicians and economists, who, in a climate of ludicrous market fetishization, are behaving like dog trainers unable to cope (“the markets have to be calmed down”, “the markets have to re-gain their confidence”, “be reined in”, “put on a leash” and “put in their place”), reveal to what little extent they are in control of the situation. Their aimless bustle and increasingly open cluelessness and, last but not least, the acquiescence of leading neoliberals to a course of state intervention bear witness to the fact that they have neither a plan nor a clue, but not to the claim, made by Naomi Klein and co, that the crisis is just politics of word choice, designed to serve the “ruling class” in its quest to advance the “neoliberal project”. The same is true of talk of a lack of an alternative to the austerity programs. This lack of an alternative is not merely a rhetorical trick to serve the class struggle from above; in fact, the wiggle room for state actions keeps getting smaller. It has been exhausted in the past decades by necessary subsidies and stimulus programs, particularly since the onset of the crisis in 2007/08.

The most indebted countries are forced to push through the decreed cuts; giving in to the demands of social movements would be construed as weakness and incapacity and cause their position to deteriorate even further. Even in countries that are not immediately threatened by state bankruptcy, re-consolidating state finances is a must, as they have to be prepared to absorb the costs of preventing the collapse of further banks, in order to prevent the meltdown of the financial sector.

Considering this, the prospects for reformist politics are scant. The austerity programs being pushed through tooth and nail are, of course, attacks on the proletarianized, whose livelihoods are increasingly being taken away or cut radically. In Greece the suicide rate – thus far the lowest in Europe – rose by more than forty percent in the past year. In the US, 28 million people received food stamps before the onset of the crisis; in July of 2011 there were 45 million, about 15 percent of the population. They receive an average of 134 dollars; six million of them have no other means of income.

By that standard, the resistance by wage earners has been rather meek. A first wave of protests starting in the fall of 2010 relied primarily on the traditional means of resistance, but they were no match for the state’s keenness to push through the programs. The protests started in France, where a pension reform sparked days of action controlled by the unions and occupations of schools. Most notably, strike and blockades in refineries by workers, unemployed and other discontent people caused gasoline shortages in France. The motto of these actions was bloquer l’économie (“block the economy”), a slogan chanted in part by the rank and file of the CP-allied CGT, much to the dismay of union leaders. But the government stood strong and the pension reform was passed. In late September, a one-day general strike was held in Spain against the relaxation of dismissals protections, after the social democratic government led by Zapatero had already lowered public workers’ wages and frozen pensions, in order to balance the budget. The bill passed. A general strike against an austerity program in Portugal, the first called by both of the two largest unions, the CGTP and the UGT, since 1988, was also unsuccessful. According to the unions’ figures, it was the largest general strike in over twenty years; but the government stated that it has no leeway when it comes to cuts. There were no compromises. In the same month, tens of thousands of British students put up resistance against drastic raises of tuition fees and the education budget being cut by forty percent. In London, the party headquarters of the Tories was attacked; despite the riots, the increases of tuition were pushed through. In Italy, tens of thousands of students protested cuts in education simultaneously by blocking highways and occupying universities; there were intense riots, but the education reforms were passed unamended by both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate.

The conventional means of class struggle were unable to put enough pressure behind their demands anywhere and the protests failed in every respect despite enormous mobilization efforts. In this climate of social unrest the Arab Spring starting in early 2011 became a formidable beacon and inspired a second wave of protest. The Spanish movement was the first to import the square occupations that had been so successful in Egypt and in Tunisia to Europe. The call for Democracia Real Ya! (“Real Democracy now!”), simultaneously the name of a platform and its most important demand, was able to mobilize masses of indignados (“the indignant”), as they called themselves, to occupy central squares in over a hundred Spanish cities. Following the principles that the Democracia Real platform had propagated – unity of the indignados, decision-making in general assemblies, no open presence of political parties or groups, non-violence – more or less closely, the occupations showed themselves to be collectively capable of spontaneous self-organization and represented a rupture in the everyday lives of the participants, but soon revealed considerable weaknesses related to the form of the action itself. Direct democracy based on the consensus principle turned out to be impractical in assemblies with more than a thousand participants.

Significant discussion was impossible, and a meaningful consensus could not be reached.(2) Moreover, the ideology of non-ideology advocated by the Democracia Real platform was fishy from the start – how could an economic crisis, which then manifested itself as a legitimation crisis thereby gripping the totality of society, be solved with nothing more than a new political form, namely real democracy? In many places this ideology played a part in silencing radical critique and advocating the replacement of politicians, new election laws, ethical banking, and other equally tame demands. An ideology of non-violence that does not even allow for self-defense was shown to be a total failure, at the latest, the moment the police wanted to evict the occupation of Plaça Catalunya in Barcelona and pacifists impeded those attempting to defend it. At least in Barcelona, the central square occupation dissolved in the Summer into neighborhood assemblies that led to loud demonstrations, road blockades and other promising actions from time to time, but were unable to take root in the center of town.

Despite the ambivalent results of the Spanish model, it soon caught on and this form of action spread to other countries. In Greece, where general strikes, occupations and protests had taken place on a regular basis since 2008, often coupled with militancy, the square occupations gained a special kind of momentum. Syntagma Square in Athens was able to exert enough pressure to force the two major union federations ADEDY and GSEE to comply with the occupiers’ call for a general strike; a novelty, not just because one of the general strikes that came about this way went on for two days, making it the longest in years, but also because the protestors’ steadfast refusal of the austerity plans went so far as to accept sovereign default – the most radical answer to the notion that cuts are necessary. The option of either accepting objective necessities or striking one’s employer into bankruptcy now presents itself on a state level in Greece, where both the effects of the crisis and resistance against cuts are strongest. Forced to decide between sovereign default and austerity measures that drive the economy further into ruin, the Greek government is left with very little wiggle room. The attempt to attain public approval for the austerity policy by means of a referendum and thereby regain legitimacy for the social democratic government failed, mainly due to European leaders’ opposition, and the menace of public unrest continues to lurk. Within the antiausterity front, the Stalinist KKE along with PAME, the union under its control, has already distinguished itself as the party of order. On October 20, it placed thugs in front of police lines. There, they beat protestors trying to prevent the parliamentary vote budget cuts.

In Israel, a country where the Middle East conflict has always drowned out questions of class relations, weeks of occupations and protests with hundreds of thousands of participants amid the crisis put rising rents and lack of housing on the agenda as a topic that could no longer be ignored by society. And in the United States a movement of occupations under the label “Occupy Wall Street” started in mid-September in New York but soon spread to other cities, including many outside of the US. Occupy movements have now formed in most major American and European cities and have repeatedly been the starting point of militant activities. They are marked by a kind of practical internationalism that is probably, above all, the result of the participants’ horizon of experience, making them immune to any sort of nationalist discourses. The novel forms of protest are also a response to the crisis to the extent that they are no longer centered around the workplace, but are pushing into city centers, thus allowing the growing mass of the surplus population, the unemployed, and the precariously employed, but also college and grade school students, to participate. Although self-organization, as of yet, has for the most part not gone beyond life in the squares and rarely puts property relations in question, events like the general strike in Greece, resistance against evictions from housing started in the Spanish Asambleas, solidarity with wildcat strikes in Oakland, New York, and elsewhere, and, last but not least, the militancy in defense of occupations demonstrate that the occupied squares could be the starting point for more.

Nevertheless, the new protests’ one-sided attacks on the finance sector are their biggest weakness. Not only does this make them open to the anti-interest crowd, all sorts of conspiracy theorists, and in a few cases even open anti-Semites, but, by concentrating on the “excesses” in banking, the protests merely blindly join in the already rampant fetish of the financial markets. To the extent that they concern themselves exclusively with the banks’ “machinations”, they ultimately cloud the view on capital relations, instead of making it clearer. A symptom of this is the slogan that started in New York and caught on all over the world: “We are the 99%, they are only 1%”. It expresses the very real experience that the broad majority of the population is supposed to sacrifice ever more to overcome the crisis and, to this extent, hint at a rather vague understanding of the class
contradiction; on the other hand, it blames all the misery on the one percent profiting the most and raise only the issue of individual excess rather than of social relations. The movement still stands somewhere between class struggle and populism.

To the extent that they made discernible demands, the protests failed in every respect and had to fail. In times that Keynesianism has been proved worthless and in light of its weakness, the state is no longer a viable addressee for demands. However, this has yet to be reflected in the emergence of revolutionary consciousness, but rather in a strange sort of disorientation. The attempt to escape the obsolete forms of protest and stale ideologies, along with the heterogeneous composition of the protesters, also goes hand in hand with a paralysis of the new protests. The assambleas’ and occupations’ mobilization spanning across milieus is only made possible by a conception of common politics rooted in the article of faith of unconditional tolerance. But, without carrying out conflicts within their own ranks, the movements will be subdued by the dictate of consensus building, unable to address decisive questions out of fear of a division in the common project – and perhaps this, and not the recognition of political demands’ obsolescence, is responsible for the absence of demands. The phenomenon of protesters who are vaguely discontent and speak of values and ethics is symptomatic for a crisis currently expressing itself as a spectacle at whose mercy are the international protest movements as much as the professional crisis managers. “We must guard against the tendency to mistake this weakness of the capitalist mode of production for a weakness of capital in its struggle with labor.”(3) Crises have always strengthened the position of capital vis-àvis the proletariat. The falling demand for labor power undercuts the workers’ bargaining power and austerity programs cut social spending precisely when it is needed most. In absence of a revolutionary perspective – which is currently not visible anywhere – the workers’ interest is first and foremost to keep their jobs, and the interest of the unemployed is to get one. The realization that the rat race on the labor market would have be put to an abrupt end, should the square occupations issue into a collective appropriation of production, could lead out of this predicament.

Nevertheless, what we are currently experiencing across the world is the flaring up of new interlinked movements than can happily do without the traditional political forms. If they realize the clout they could gain, much is to be won. If, on the other hand, they stay at moral indictments of bankers and politicians, a historical opportunity will go to waste. The rapid successes of the square movements in the Middle East against outdated state apparatuses will not be possible in countries in Europe or America not ruled under dictatorial conditions. In this manifest crisis the unpropertied are only left with the choice of accepting an ever more meager existence or of putting the curse of wage labor to an end. They have to choose whether to swallow all they are being fed or to reject it altogether.

Friends of the Classless Society,
Berlin, Eiszeit, Zurich, La Banda Vaga, Freiburg

1 Cf Sander: A Crisis of Value, Internationalist Perspectives 51-52, 2009 and Friends of the Classless Society: Thesen zur Krise, Kosmoprolet 2, 2009.

2 Cf. Peter Gelderloos, Spanish Revolution at a Crossroads, counterpunch.org.

3 Bar-Yuchnei (Endnotes), Two Aspects of Austerity (August 2011), http://endnotes.org.uk/articles/16 .

Today, after two months of occupations and the attacks on the occupations in Portland, Oakland and now Manhattan, OWS might be crossing a new threshold–a massive convergence of students in Union Square and a working-class convergence in Foley Square attempting to give reality to the growing calls for a general strike. That new threshold should include the extension of the occupations to buildings for the coming winter and, beyond that, to workplaces, where the working class can make the system stop, as a further step toward taking over the administration of society on an entirely new basis. Whatever happens today (November 17th) and in the coming week of action, it is time to assess the strengths and limits of the occupation movement both in New York and around the U.S.

There is no question that this is the most important movement to hit the streets in the US in four decades. Its wildfire spread to 1,000 cities in a few weeks attests to that. The avalanche of “demands” has suddenly made the social and economic misery of 40 years, largely suffered passively, with occasional outbursts of resistance, a public reality impossible to ignore from now on. Politicians, TV personalities and various experts have been caught flat-footed before a movement that refuses to enter their suddenly irrelevant universe. For all the “grab-bag” quality of what it has said, the movement has been absolutely right to refuse to identify too closely with specific demands, ideologies and leaders. Daily social reality over years has educated it all too well for it to fall into that game. Underneath everything is the reality of what the movement represents: the refusal of a society that places ever-greater numbers of people on the scrapheap. To identify itself too closely with any laundry list of demands would be to fall beneath the movement’s deeply felt sense that everything must change and the certainty that nothing should be as before.

In response, the largest forces with a potential to derail this movement into respectable channels (the Democratic Party and the union officials) are scrambling to control, defuse and repress it, as they did successfully, for example, in Wisconsin in the spring. They are not having an easy time of it.

The realities of occupations in 1,000 cities defy easy generalization. The news media has attempted to portray the core of the movement as young, white, unemployed and “middle class”–the latter tag being a fast-disappearing mistaken identity for the working class. Whatever the case in the early stages, in different cities (most notably in the November 2nd mass march on the Port of Oakland), significant numbers of blacks and Latinos, as well as older people, have expanded the movement in many places beyond the initial core.

Our purpose here is not to dwell on the thousand slogans, something that is to be expected from a very young movement made up to a great extent by people for whom this is the first such experience of their lives. Ideas such as the “1%” or “make the rich pay their fair share” or “make the banks pay” or “abolish the Fed” sit side by side with attacks on “capitalism”. We would suggest that the excessive focus on the “banks” does not recognize that the source of widespread misery is the world crisis of the capitalist (wage labor) system and, as a result, it does not point to the overcoming of the crisis by establishing a world beyond wage labor, namely socialism or communism (although we are well aware of the abuse of those words in far too many cases). To arrive at such a focus requires speaking openly of class. It is clear that the large majority of working-class people in the U.S., while sympathetic to the movement, have not joined it in any active way, if only because they are working and caught up in daily survival.

The occupation movement needs to build on the creative militancy in the streets of thousands of people (as shown in Oakland, Portland, Seattle, New York and elsewhere) to reach out to that large majority which sometimes seems, a block or two from the street battles, to be going about business as usual. The growing number of anti-eviction and anti-foreclosure actions has made that outreach. Taking over buildings for meetings and much-needed living space, as well as for workshops and teach-ins, could be an important next step. Beyond that should be the extension of the movement to work stoppages and occupation of workplaces, posing even more sharply than before the questions of private property and of “who rules”?

The pending contract renewal of Local 100 of the Transit Workers Union is one obvious link here in New York. The ongoing standoff between west coast dock workers (ILWU) Local 21 and the scab-herding EGT Corporation in Longview, Washington, is another. The planned occupation, together with parents and students, of five public schools slated for closure in Oakland, is still another. In such efforts, we believe that the movement will have little difficulty distinguishing between the rank-and-file workers (who have already joined it on occasions) and the trade-union bureaucrats who have passed one toothless resolution after another of “support” without the slightest, or only token, mobilization.

Still less needs to be said about the Democratic Party politicians–most notoriously, Oakland Mayor Jean Quan–who have tried to ride the movement for their own ends–before sending in the riot police.

However, occupation is only a further step: beyond it is the question of taking over the production of society for ourselves and running it on an entirely new basis.

Whatever happens in the immediate future, a wall of silence on the accumulated misery of four decades has been breached. Every day brings further news of attacks on working people as world capitalism spins out of control. Never has it been clearer that capitalist “normalcy” depends on the passivity of those it crushes to save itself, and from Tunisia and Egypt, via Greece and Spain, to New York, Oakland, Seattle and Portland, that passivity is over. The task today is to throw everything we have into approaching that point of no return where conditions cry out: “We have the chance to change the world, let’s take it.”

OWS November 17, 2011