[D66] Politics and the international Occupy movement

[Antid Oto]

Politics and the international Occupy movement
By the WSWS editorial board
14 October 2011

The spread of the Occupy Wall Street protests internationally has undeniable
political significance. On October 15, occupations will begin in cities in
Europe, Asia, Australia and New Zealand, Canada, South America and Africa.

The movement that is developing is, in its essence, anti-capitalist. The
protests are animated by aspirations for social equality. Their banner slogan,
“We are the 99 percent”, is imbued with working class hostility to the
monopolisation of society’s wealth by a tiny financial and corporate elite—the
“one percent.”

In the United States, the myth of the superiority of “free enterprise” has been
discredited in the minds of tens of millions, particularly in the three years
since the onset of the global financial crisis. The conditions facing workers
and young people in the centre of world capitalism are forcing them to seriously
consider radical social change and the perspective of socialism.

The occupations emerged outside the influence of official political
institutions, parties, trade unions and pseudo-left protest organisations and
are implicitly directed against their subservience to big business interests.
They are giving voice to the opposition to mass unemployment, the slashing of
wages and conditions, soaring education and health costs, environmental
degradation and war.

The resonance of such sentiments around the world expresses the fact that the
experiences shaping the attitudes of the American working class have been universal.

Three years after the financial collapse, it is clear that the speculative and
semi-criminal financial operations that came to dominate the wealth accumulation
of the capitalist “one percent” have led to the breakdown of the entire
structure of world capitalism and a descent into economic depression and
inter-state tensions.

In every country, the mantra of the ruling elite is the same. They are demanding
that the full burden of the crisis they caused be imposed on the working class
through job destruction, wage cuts and the elimination of essential social
programs and rights. Capitalism has failed as a world system. It offers only a
future of poverty, degradation, environmental catastrophe and, if not
overthrown, the threat of devastating new wars between rival capitalist nations.

However large or small, the initial global protests this weekend reflect the
elementary awareness that the working class everywhere confronts common problems
and a common enemy—globally organised finance and corporations and the elite
that owns them. There are no national solutions.

The critical issue now is to make conscious the impulses that have given rise to
the Occupy movement. The fight that faces the working class and oppressed will
require a worked out political perspective of revolutionary social change on an
international scale. It is essential that a thorough discussion take place on
the questions of political program, strategy and tactics.

First of all, the working class must discuss and carry out a political break
with the nationalist and pro-capitalist organisations that serve the ruling
classes—the Democratic Party and AFL-CIO in the US, the social democratic and
Stalinist parties and trade unions across Europe, the Labor Party and unions in
Australia, and their equivalents in other countries.

The fact must be faced by Occupy protestors that defenders of these reactionary
organisations have rushed to try and take control of the movement in order to
block such a discussion. They are easily identified. They are those who are most
vocally insisting that “no politics” should be permitted within the protests.
The administrator of the “Occupy Sydney” Facebook page in Australia is one
example. He or she declared this week: “[A]ny political party or group who
wishes to try and hijack this into a political agenda, we will throw them out.”

Such positions are profoundly anti-democratic and hostile to the aspirations
behind the Occupy movement. They amount to nothing more than a ban on any
critique of the parties and unions whose pro-capitalist political agenda is
responsible for the conditions facing the working class. It is an attempt to
censor socialist politics and prevent the development of a genuine political
alternative.

At every level, “no politics” is an absurdity. It is obvious to any serious
person that a struggle against the capitalist “one percent” poses critical
political issues. Every social movement in history has been compelled to adopt a
standpoint on the basic question of politics—which class should rule.

A genuine movement for social change must be orientated to the revolutionary
mobilisation of the only social force that has the power to overthrow
capitalism—the international working class. It must advance a solution to the
historic problems confronting society as a whole. It will need to be consciously
aimed at ending the private ownership of the means of production and the
nation-state system which are the basis for the domination of the capitalist
oligarchy and give rise to the contradictions wracking the world economy.

The danger that is confronting the Occupy movement is that it will be reduced to
yet another protest that vents popular anger and opposition, but is harmlessly
channeled back behind the parties and institutions of the political establishment.

In the United States, for example, supporters of the governing Democratic Party
are already seeking to direct the Wall Street protests into the campaign for the
re-election of Barack Obama in 2012, on fraudulent “lesser evil” claims that he
is more of an opponent of Wall Street than the Republicans.

In Australia, elements within the protests this weekend are seeking to direct
them into futile appeals for change by the Labor Party government, its Green
Party partners and the trade unions—the very organisations that are presiding
over an escalating assault on the living standards of the working class on
behalf of the Australian corporate elite.

Across Europe, similar efforts will be made to steer the movement under the wing
of the official political establishment. Organisations like the New
Anti-Capitalist Party in France, the Left Party in Germany, and the Socialist
Workers Party in Britain work deliberately and consciously to block any
independent political movement.

What is required is a conscious rebellion against the pro-capitalist
apparatuses. A unified world party of the working class must be forged, one that
will combat every form of nationalism and chauvinism and lead the struggle in
every country for the establishment of genuinely democratic workers’ governments
and the socialist reorganisation of society. The progressive answer to the rule
of the “one percent” and the failure of capitalism is the transformation of the
major financial institutions and corporations into publicly owned and
democratically controlled institutions, and the planning of world economy to
meet social need, not private profit.

The Socialist Equality parties and the World Socialist Web Site, as part of the
International Committee of the Fourth International, consciously embody this
perspective. We encourage all participants in the Occupy protests
internationally to contact us for a discussion on the policies, history and
tradition of the world Trotskyist movement.

http://wsws.org/articles/2011/oct2011/into-o14.shtml