[D66] The political issues in the fight against Wall Street

[Antid Oto]

The political issues in the fight against Wall Street
5 October 2011

The Occupy Wall Street protest, now in its third week, has struck a powerful
chord throughout the US, with similar occupations developing in Boston, Chicago,
Los Angeles and other cities and towns across the country.

The demonstrators and their demand for social equality have given expression to
the growing hostility of millions towards capitalism, the banks and the
corporations, and the burning need for jobs, decent living standards and a
guarantee of health care, education and other basic social necessities.

The growth of this movement is generating mounting concern within American
ruling circles. This was expressed Tuesday in an article by New York Times
financial columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin, who quoted a Wall Street CEO worried
about his “personal safety” and warned that the protest constituted “a warning
shot about the kind of civil unrest that may emerge—as we’ve seen in some
European countries—if our economy continues to struggle.”

It is not the bankers who have to fear for their personal safety, but the
demonstrators, who have been subjected repeatedly to police brutality and mass
arrests for exercising their free speech rights.

Nonetheless, Sorkin’s warning about civil unrest is entirely justified. These
are among the first prominent social protests in the United States in more than
30 years. Most of those involved in the occupations have never seen significant
struggles for social change in their lifetimes. Coming on the heels of the mass
demonstrations in Wisconsin last February, they signal the reemergence of open
class struggle in the United States, the center of world capitalism.

Such struggles do not arise by accident. They are driven by the powerful
contradictions of a world capitalist system which, three years after the
collapse of Lehman Brothers, has produced catastrophic unemployment levels and
deepening poverty for millions, while those at the top continue to pile up
obscene levels of wealth.

What has kept such struggles bottled up for so long in the US? Since the late
1970s, there has been an ongoing and ever accelerating transfer of social wealth
from the masses of working people to a financial oligarchy, the top 1 percent.
Working class resistance to this process, from the 1981 PATCO strike on, was
systematically betrayed by the unions, which have integrated themselves ever
more closely into the corporations, the government and the Democratic Party.

The results are plain to see, nowhere more starkly than in New York City. There,
50 percent of total income goes to the top 1 percent, some 90,000 households
with an average annual income of $3.7 million. This gilded layer rakes in more
in a single day than the poorest million people in the city earn in an entire year.

The struggle against social inequality and the capitalist system in which it is
rooted is above all a political struggle. How could it be otherwise when the
issues at stake are the distribution of wealth and power in society? Those in
the Occupy Wall Street protest who want to carry it forward face sharp political
challenges and decisions.

As this movement develops, it faces the danger, as so often happens with every
form of protest in America, of being channeled into the grip of the Democratic
Party. Such was the case with the antiwar demonstrations that began under the
Bush administration, became regulated according to the electoral calendar and
were finally wound up once Obama entered the White House, where he has continued
and expanded Bush’s wars.

In its news coverage of the anti-Wall Street protests, the New York Times quotes
Georgetown University professor Michael Kazin, who states, “Rants based on
discontents are the first stage of any movement.” The article goes on to quote
Kazin as saying that the requirement for the protest to turn into a “lasting
movement” is for “newly unleashed passions to be channeled into institutions and
shaped into political goals.”

There is no doubt that the “institutions” he has in mind are those affiliated to
the Democratic Party and the political establishment.

To that same end, there has been a pilgrimage to the Wall Street protest by an
increasingly unlikely group of supporters, including former World Bank Vice
President Joseph Stiglitz, who assured protesters that the problem wasn’t
capitalism but a “distorted economy.” Billionaire financier George Soros has
expressed his sympathy for the Wall Street demonstrators. It is as if Marie
Antoinette decided to pay a courtesy call to the corner bakery.

Their main fear is that the protest over the conditions created by the crisis of
the capitalist system will crystalize into a movement armed with an
anti-capitalist program.

This fear is shared by the group of unions that are participating today in a
march from City Hall to the protest site in Zuccotti Park. They hide the fact
that far from leading any struggle of their own against Wall Street, they have
actively collaborated in the imposition of the austerity measures demanded by
finance capital against their own members and the working class as a whole.

For example, the largest of the union endorsers, 1199-SEIU, joined Governor
Cuomo’s Medical Redesign Team and supported its recommendations earlier this
year for sweeping cuts in health care funding, resulting in layoffs and an
assault on Medicare. Others have carried out similar betrayals.

If the union bureaucrats have endorsed the Wall Street protest it is not to join
in any fight, but rather to smother it and turn it into a vehicle for the
Democratic Party and the Obama reelection campaign.

The issues raised by the Wall Street protests pose the necessity of a struggle
against the capitalist system.

Above all, this requires a turn to the working class and the mobilization of its
independent strength against the financial parasites who have looted the whole
of society. It means building new organizations of struggle in the workplaces,
neighborhoods and schools.

The political starting point of this struggle is a break with the parties of big
business, the Democrats as well as the Republicans. The working class must unite
all the oppressed—workers, students, youth, the unemployed, the elderly—in the
building of a new mass political party based on a socialist program.

This must include the demand for an emergency public works program to provide
employment for all in the vitally necessary work of rebuilding schools,
hospitals, housing and infrastructure and improving the conditions of life for
working people.

The right to a livable income, high quality health care and education, decent
and affordable housing and other social necessities must be guaranteed for all
through a fundamental reorganization of society and redistribution of wealth.

The capitalist system has failed working people in the United States and around
the globe. The only viable alternative is the socialist reorganization of
society, placing the banks and corporations that dominate the US and world
economy under public ownership and the democratic control of the working class,
to serve social needs rather than private profit.

As in Egypt, Greece and elsewhere, working people in the United States are being
thrown into new struggles by the crisis of the profit system. Like the
protesters on Wall Street, the working class enters these struggles without the
political program, organizations and leadership that are needed to win. Only the
Socialist Equality Party and the World Socialist Web Site are working on an
international basis to build the revolutionary alternative that is required.

Bill Van Auken

http://wsws.org/articles/2011/oct2011/pers-o05.shtml