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 By Corey Oakley for www.sa.org.au
This year has seen an explosion of protest and rebellion around the world on a scale not seen in a generation.
In Egypt and Tunisia, dictators have been brought down by mass popular revolutions that have let loose uprisings throughout the region. Across Europe working class resistance to austerity has reached extraordinary heights – in Greece there have been no less than 15 general strikes in 2 years.
And now in the US, which had seemingly escaped the kind of revolt engulfing Europe, we are witnessing the awkward but exhilarating birth of a new movement. The wonderful slogan “we are the 99 percent” has completely reshaped the political debate. It is like the boy who pointed out that the emperor had no clothes. Suddenly the truth about society has been laid bare – there are words to express the mass anger against the super-rich minority who have given themselves lavish bonuses while driving millions into poverty.
Occupy protests have spread from Wall Street across the US. Police repression – vicious and in the case of Iraq veteran Scott Olsen nearly fatal – has not defeated the movement. In Oakland, the call for a general strike on November 2 to defend the movement saw tens of thousands on the streets. Adam Gabbatt reported how:
Thousands joined the march to shut down the Port Of Oakland, protesters appearing to surprise themselves with the strength of the turn out. As the march weaved through downtown Oakland it was difficult to assess size, but when protesters walked up the bridge to the port, affording the first opportunity to look back at the crowd, there were gasps and whoops. The demonstration stretched some 300m, spanning six lanes of traffic, with little to no police presence for the first two hours. Once inside the port protesters were welcomed by truck drivers hooting horns. The younger and more agile quickly scaled trucks, waving flags as thousands of protesters continued to walk into the main port area.
One of those who addressed the crowd through the human mic was Joseph Carter. He told them:
I am a two-time Iraq war veteran and this is the only occupation that I believe in. For too long our voices have been silenced, suppressed and ignored in favour of the voices of Wall Street and the banks and the corporations.
It is sentiment like this that led US Socialist Worker to editorialise last week that “Occupy is helping to build a new left on a scale unseen in the US in the last 40 years – one that’s rooted in the working class.”
The US movement has galvanised people across the world. In Australia we have seen Occupy camps in a number of cities. In Melbourne and Sydney these were violently broken up by police. In Melbourne though, this has not been able to break the movement – 2,000 people marched through the city last weekend determined to reoccupy, and now, after a fierce debate about what to do, a camp has been established in Treasury Gardens.
Though nothing like on the scale of the US, the many thousands who have in some way participated in the Occupy movement here are looking for fundamental change in our society – and are trying to figure out how we can achieve it.
The 1 percent will cling to their power
This global awakening is cause for enormous hope. But it is not enough to simply cheer on the occupations, strikes and protests. The fact that people are on the streets and fighting for their rights is a gigantic step, but it is only the first step. The ruling class – the 1 percent – have no intention of meekly giving up their power and allowing us to build a new, democratic, equitable society. They will fight us with everything they have got.
Back in 2009, well before there was any sign of a fightback in the US, we reported how Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence, was arguing to a US Senate committee that it needed to learn the lessons of the “dramatic political consequences wrought by the economic turmoil of the 1920s and 1930s in Europe, the instability, and high levels of violent extremism.” He argued that “The primary near-term security concern of the United States is the global economic crisis and its geopolitical implications.”
In response to concerns from senators that he focused security concerns on the economic crisis rather than terrorism, he replied that he was “trying to act as your intelligence officer today, telling you what I thought the Senate ought to be caring about”.
Well, we’ve got their attention now.
The Occupy movement has already come under sustained attack from the right. Fox News, the chief cheerleader for the fraudulent Tea Party movement, has well and truly lost its appetite for street politics, and is frothing at the mouth about how the Occupy movement is all a sinister plot to destroy America.
Democrats have been more moderate in their criticisms, trying to co-opt the movement into a re-elect Obama campaign. But it was a Democrat Mayor in Oakland, Jean Quan, who ordered the vicious police crackdown. The same has happened in numerous other occupations across the country.
In Melbourne, the Occupy movement has had to deal not only with police violence, but a concerted attempt to use provocateurs, intimidation of individuals, and the spreading of disinformation designed to increase divisions within the movement.
The right wing press – particularly the Herald Sun – has run a hysterical (though occasionally hilarious) campaign of lies and slanders in an effort to demonise and isolate the protests.
And this is in the context of a movement that, while important, is still in its embryonic stage. We need to ask ourselves the question: if this is the response from the state, the media and the political establishment to a few hundred people camping in a square for a week, what would they do if we built a movement that seriously threatened to throw the 1 percent from power?
We have seen the response from the ruling elite of the Arab world when faced with revolution. Every means has been used to put down the uprisings; thousands have been jailed and killed. It is naïve to think that the architects of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would be any less brutal if they thought it necessary to hold onto their power.
But while the apparatus of state violence is a crucial weapon of the status quo, just as important is their political machine, which will use every means to prevent real change.
In Egypt, the army was unable to shoot down the revolutionaries because the generals feared their soldiers – ordinary, poor Egyptians – would side with the people against them. So instead, in alliance with the established parties who also represent the interests of the rich – the Muslim Brotherhood and the various liberal-establishment figures – they have campaigned relentlessly to end the protests and strikes demanding economic justice and real democracy.
At the same time, behind the scenes, the military has incited extreme right wing groups into sectarian massacres of Coptic Christians, in an attempt to divide Muslims and Christians and divert attention from the real enemy: the alliance of the army generals and private capitalists.
And it is not just the open parties of big business and the state that are used by frightened governments to contain revolt. In Greece, the police have relentlessly attacked demonstrations with tear gas and batons. But during the 48 hour general strike in late October it was not the police but the Communist Party who acted, literally, as the last line of defence for a besieged government.
The hundreds of thousands of demonstrators who surrounded the parliament on October 20 were held back from storming it by rows of stewards from the Communist controlled union federation who physically blocked access and fought off attempts to push through their lines.
It was a graphic, physical illustration of how conservative mass organisations in the workers movement (and the Greek Communist party is profoundly conservative and anti-revolutionary) can hold back and contain radical struggles if there is no cohered alternative of sufficient size that is committed to leading, rather than dampening down rebellion.
How can we overthrow the 1 percent?
To point out the difficulties that any real challenge to the 1 percent will face can seem like unnecessary negativity. After all, the raw optimism of many in the Occupy movement is what gives it energy and audacity. On a tiny level I saw this at a general assembly meeting in Melbourne, which had been dragging on for hours and getting nowhere. People were starting to drift off, until someone got up and yelled “Come on, we can keep going ‘til we get this sorted – after all we are trying to start a revolution!” She was met with a roar of approval.
But if talk of revolution is to be anything other than idle sloganeering, we need a sober appraisal of the forces that are ranged against us, and what it will take to defeat them.
The fact is that to get rid of capitalism will be a monumental fight. There are many aspects to this, but two in particular are crucial. Firstly, we need a movement that sets against the power of capital the might of fighting working class organisation.
In Egypt, it was an explosive strike wave across the country that turned the tide in favour of the revolution when Mubarak looked like he might outlast the protesters in Tahrir. Only at that point did the generals conclude that getting rid of Mubarak was a better option than risking a full blown social revolution.
In the US, Occupy Wall Street looked like it was in trouble until, after the arrest of 700 protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge, thousands of workers, called out by the unions, joined a mass protest that gave real social weight to the movement. Again in Oakland, after the police attack, it was the call for a mass strike and the involvement of the unions in the demonstrations on November 2 that changed the terms of debate in favour of the protesters and got the police off the streets.
In Australia, one of the weaknesses is the lack of union involvement. Although a number of unions – like the CFMEU and NTEU – have offered verbal support, there has been nothing in the way of mass union mobilisations to defend our right to protest.
But to challenge the system on a fundamental level, much more will be required than a few solidarity actions called by the unions. Working class organisation will need to be rebuilt from the ground up. The legacy of decades of quiescence and accommodation will have to be replaced with a new class-struggle unionism based on rank and file workers.
Ultimately, a revolutionary challenge to capitalism can only be based on mass working class action by the millions. Workers will need to establish a new form of democratic power, based in the workplaces, a power strong enough to provide an alternative to the current state apparatus which exists only to maintain the rule of the minority.
And yet working class organisation and resistance is in and of itself not enough. This brings us to the second element that is necessary to fight the system: revolutionary organisation.
Time and again in the last half-century – from Hungary in 1956 to Portugal in 1974, Iran in 1979, Poland in 1980-81 and many others besides – workers demonstrated their capacity to create organisations with the social weight to overthrow and replace the old order.
But these revolutions were all defeated. The reason was not any lack of combativity or revolutionary spirit on the part of the workers, but the lack of political organisations that could point a way forward, argue against those who would betray or co-opt the movement, and win what is the single most important argument in a revolution: you, the masses, have the power – now take it!
We are, of course, a very long way from such arguments now, particularly in Australia. But this does not make the task of building revolutionary organisations any less urgent.
Most people are coming into the struggle with very little idea of the history and traditions of the workers movement. In countries like Australia and the US the most basic questions – like what attitude to take to the police – are up for grabs.
All kinds of whacky theories get a hearing – from the Zietgeisters to the people who think (presumably in an attempt to make the Zietgeisters look sane) that the point of the Occupy movement is to figure out how the 99 percent can reconcile with the 1 percent.
There is no point in simply sneering at the kaleidoscope of crazy that at times seems to devour the Occupy movement in countries like Australia, where the lack of union involvement gives a space for a right wing minority to try and impose a startlingly reactionary agenda.
The madder ideas get a hearing because the left is weak, because the traditional organisations of the labour movement and the left have either disappeared or have, like the ALP, capitulated entirely to the agenda of the powerful.
We need a new revolutionary left that can play a role in giving some coherence to the movement. A left that stands for ground-up resistance and organisation, not electing respectable looking lawyers to parliament in the hope that they will act on our behalf. A left that is clear that the police, and also the courts and the mass media, are our enemy. A left that insists that workers' struggle is the key to any sustained resistance to the system.
We need a new revolutionary left that tries to link the different struggles – for indigenous rights, refugees – with the broader movement of workers who want to defend their living standards. We need a left that states unequivocally that the working class struggle is a global struggle for the liberation of the oppressed.
More than anything, we need a left that says we need to fight the system, not compromise with it – that the only way to defeat the 1 percent is through mass revolution.
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