[D66] Occupy Wall Street movement at a crossroads

[Antid Oto]

Occupy Wall Street movement at a crossroads
26 October 2011

The Occupy Wall Street protests against inequality, which began in New York City
over a month ago and have since expanded to hundreds of cities and towns
throughout the United States and internationally, have arrived at a political
crossroads.

The ruling class has responded with a two-pronged strategy. Attempts to channel
political discontent back within the political system have been combined with a
growing wave of arrests and stepped-up police violence.

The latest action was the most brutal. Hundreds of police officers from 12
agencies, decked out in riot gear, surrounded an encampment in Oakland,
California early Tuesday morning. Under the direction of Democratic Party Mayor
Jean Quan, the police used tear gas, bean bag guns and a sonic cannon to attack
and arrest about one hundred peaceful demonstrators and lay waste to the
occupation site.

Riot police maintained a heavy presence in Oakland throughout the day. In the
evening, hundreds of police met further demonstrations with more tear gas and
flash grenades. There were reports of many injuries. Arrests have been carried
out in dozens of US cities, including New York, San Francisco, Dallas,
Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Phoenix and Denver. Across the Pacific Ocean,
encampments in Sydney and Melbourne, Australia have been forcefully shut down
and the participants rounded up.

These acts of political repression—which if they occurred in Iran or Syria would
be condemned by the US political establishment and media—are being carried out
with the tacit approval of the Obama administration. Quan’s order came two days
after Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s former White House chief of staff,
oversaw the arrest of 150 protesters.

For his part, Obama has said nothing about the crackdown. On Tuesday, the
president was only a few miles away from the Oakland repression, attending
fund-raising events across the bay in San Francisco.

While the immediate target is the Occupy protesters, the repression is also a
dress rehearsal for broader social struggles on the horizon. Under both Bush and
Obama, the state has made deep inroads into basic democratic rights. The pretext
is the “war on terror,” but the real target is domestic opposition to the
demands of the corporate elite.

The increasing repression poses all the more directly the fundamental political
issues raised by the protests, above all the necessity for a political struggle
against the Obama administration, the Democratic Party and the capitalist state.
Even as it carries out mass arrests, the Democratic Party and its adjuncts—from
the trade unions to a variety of middle-class “left” organizations and academic
celebrities—are continuing their attempts to channel opposition behind the
Democrats and Obama’s reelection campaign.

The political perspective of these organizations, of pressure on the Democratic
Party, has been thoroughly exposed by the experience of the Obama
administration, which in all of its policies and in its very composition is a
government of, by and for Wall Street. The repression by the state provides its
own answer to all those who claim that the rights of the working class can be
secured through the existing political system.

The Occupy movement is an initial expression of overwhelming popular hostility
to the banks and corporations. However, the basic questions of program and
perspective have only begun to be addressed.

What is posed above all is the necessity for the independent social and
political mobilization of the working class, the vast majority of the population
in the United States and internationally. Every factory, workplace and
neighborhood must become a center of resistance to the policies of the ruling
class and its political representatives.

The past three decades were dominated by the artificial suppression of the class
struggle, in which the trade unions played the central role. Strikes virtually
disappeared in the United States, even as the wealthy accumulated a share of the
national income without precedent since the 1920s. Where struggles erupted—as in
the demonstrations of hundreds of thousands in Wisconsin against budget cuts and
attacks on workers’ rights earlier this year—the unions worked to direct them
back behind the Democratic Party in order to betray and defeat them.

Twenty years ago, the collapse of the Soviet Union was followed by proclamations
by the propagandists of the ruling class of the “end of history” and the demise
of the class struggle. The official “left” played its role by attempting to
suppress any discussion of class in favor of the various forms of identity
politics. Socio-economic class was presented as an altogether subordinate
category to race, gender and sexual orientation.

The events of this year have exploded these conceptions. From the revolutionary
upheavals in Egypt, to mass demonstrations in Israel and social eruptions in
Europe, the class struggle has reemerged as the basic historical force. The
Occupy movement itself foreshadows an explosive eruption of class struggle in
the United States, the center of world capitalism.

The reemergence of working class struggle is rooted in the crisis of the
capitalist system and the response of the ruling class to this crisis. Hundreds
of millions of people around the world, unable to tolerate the conditions
imposed upon them, are beginning to fight back.

If the events of this year have confirmed the centrality of class struggle and
the objective basis for a socialist movement, they have also confirmed that the
successful prosecution of the class struggle is impossible without politics.

Those within the Occupy movement who preach “no politics” and “no leadership”
serve to maintain the stranglehold of the prevailing politics. It is precisely
leadership and politics—that is, a party and a program—that are required above all.

The unconscious historical process that is bringing millions of people into
struggle against capitalism must be transformed into a conscious socialist
political movement of the international working class.

The basic aspirations expressed in the Occupy movement—including above all the
fight for social equality—cannot be achieved within the framework of capitalism,
in which economic and political life is subordinated to private profit. A
movement of the working class must be aimed at establishing a workers
government, which will have as one of its first tasks the transformation of the
banks and major corporations into publicly owned and democratically controlled
institutions.

The Socialist Equality Party in the United States and its sister parties around
the world are spearheading this struggle, and we urge all workers and youth who
want to take up this fight to join the SEP.

Joseph Kishore

http://wsws.org/articles/2011/oct2011/pers-o26.shtml