ISO's "backlash against Occupy Oakland"

[A Marxist Historian]

There hasn't been a whole lot of discussion of Occupy Oakland here on Revleft lately, for some reason.

Actually, maybe this is the reason.

Here is the commentary of the ISO on the brutal police assault on Occupy Oakland.

"One obvious issue is the actions of a small number of people who broke into City Hall late at night on January 28 and committed acts of vandalism. This irresponsible and backward behavior handed city officials and the media a perfect weapon to smear the whole movement."

http://socialistworker.org/2012/02/06/backlash-against-occupy-oakland

Now, we aren't talking here about smashing windows of small businesses, or busting up peoples' cars like in Portland. We're talking about busting up City Hall, the command center for the vicious campaign of arrests, brutalizations, smears and intimidation against Occupy Oakland. What the hell is wrong with that? Maybe not brilliant tactically, but the gutsy people who did it should be defended and not crapped on.

The focus of the local anti-Occupy media campaign is around somebody burning an American flag--an activity certified as legal by the US Supreme Court, for what little that is worth. And I hear some folk in Occupy Oakland are now trying to certify their "patriotism" by fluttering the bloodsoaked Stars and Stripes themselves.

ISO supporters here on Revleft have something serious to account for. Do you guys really support this crap?

-M.H.-

[The Douche]

Welp, waiting for input from ISO members.

[Prometeo liberado]

Is this more of the Black Bloc nonsense? The PSL has taken up this issue internally as well. Mostly emailing the old, Chris Hedges I think, article around to start discussion. As I am not familiar with ISO outside of the ILWU discussion here could someone tell me a little more. Seems that leadership and rank and file speak different languages. Also they seem wield and unreasonable amount of power within the ILWU.

[marl]

The ISO is also against the May 1st General Strike, it's the same debate at Greek rioting and whatnot with the KKE vs Black Bloc.

[The Douche]

The ISO is also against the May 1st General Strike, it's the same debate at Greek rioting and whatnot with the KKE vs Black Bloc.

What?! Source?

[Veovis]

Now, we aren't talking here about smashing windows of small businesses, or busting up peoples' cars like in Portland. We're talking about busting up City Hall, the command center for the vicious campaign of arrests, brutalizations, smears and intimidation against Occupy Oakland. What the hell is wrong with that? Maybe not brilliant tactically, but the gutsy people who did it should be defended and not crapped on.

And yet, what did these actions accomplish? How did it advance the goals of the working class?

I'm not defending the city government, but we have to think pragmatically about these sorts of things. Busting a few windows in city hall accomplishes very little for us, yet gives the opposition an opportunity to make themselves out to be the victims. It's not fair, but it's the way it is.

[marl]

What?! Source?

http://socialistworker.org/2012/02/08/discussing-the-way-forward


And yet, what did these actions accomplish? How did it advance the goals of the working class?

I'm not defending the city government, but we have to think pragmatically about these sorts of things. Busting a few windows in city hall accomplishes very little for us, yet gives the opposition an opportunity to make themselves out to be the victims. It's not fair, but it's the way it is.

They'll constantly find new ways to smear us - glass or no glass.

[Renegade Saint]

Does anyone think breaking into city hall accomplished anything? Does anyone think that things like this (and burning flags) don't alienate people who could otherwise be supporters? Or who, at the very least, would be willing to be open-minded towards us?

Seriously, I'd like to know what you all think these actions accomplish.

It's not rocket science people. If you're only getting 1500 people out on a march (in fucking Oakland of all places) you should obviously remain peaceful. The struggle is obviously not advanced enough that direct action will be useful. When you can get 100,000 people on a march (they're doing it in Russia, and they have record cold weather) then, and only then, should you be talking about direct actions like invading city hall.

Jimmie Higgins is in Oakland, so he'll probably have more to say on the matter.

[marl]

Does anyone think breaking into city hall accomplished anything? Does anyone think that things like this (and burning flags) don't alienate people who could otherwise be supporters? Or who, at the very least, would be willing to be open-minded towards us?

As critical as I am of these tactics, I honestly doubt it will do anything in Oakland other than scare off a few Ron Paulites and shit. When the word got to the arrested - who are mostly the college liberal types - they cheered.

[Veovis]

They'll constantly find new ways to smear us - glass or no glass.

True, and I'd be singing a different tune if the struggle here were as advanced as the struggle in Greece, but as of right now it isn't, and vandalism of city property is still seen by the majority as an attack on property paid for by tax revenue, and by extension as an attack on working people.

The level of consciousness in the U.S. is so abysmally low that we have to be very careful. Shitty tactics rightfully deserve to be called out and criticized.

[Renegade Saint]

As critical as I am of these tactics, I honestly doubt it will do anything in Oakland other than scare off a few Ron Paulites and shit. When the word got to the arrested - who are mostly the college liberal types - they cheered.
Then you're seriously out of touch with American society.

People who were on the march cheered? Super, but that doesn't say anything about broad popular support.

[marl]

Then you're seriously out of touch with American society.

People who were on the march cheered? Super, but that doesn't say anything about broad popular support.

Many people have the capability to distinguish between two different cities.

[Veovis]

Then you're seriously out of touch with American society.

Seconded. Here in Portland (not exactly the most conservative of cities), the news media was bemoaning the destruction of the grass in Chapman park caused by the Occupation. And people were agreeing! We have a long way to go before there's any sort of shift in consciousness here.

[Renegade Saint]

Many people have the capability to distinguish between two different cities.
If Oakland is so different from the rest of America why did only 1500 people show up at this march in the first place?

[marl]

If Oakland is so different from the rest of America why did only 1500 people show up at this march in the first place?

Who am I to speak for everybody - but here's my observation: many people have a positive view point of OWS but don't do shit (as a result of a lack of class consciousness, and thus the outreach working groups exist), and a single incident in Oakland isn't going to change that view point.

[The Douche]

http://socialistworker.org/2012/02/08/discussing-the-way-forward



They'll constantly find new ways to smear us - glass or no glass.

Oof. Don't have a general strike cause it won't shut down the economy? How does the ISO propose that we build a movement, and reintroduce the strike as a weapon if we don't conduct them until millions support it?

We're fighting and learning, and I don't understand the alternative of the ISO.

[Prometeo liberado]

Right or wrong, when actions like burning the flag occur along with banging up city hall then would be protesters start to "shop" protests. That is, very selectively picking of what will get their presence according to what tendency will lead it. As opposed to the reason for the protest. I understand that discipline runs counter to what many feel is their right to rebellion but a case can and is made for it with this incident. Right or wrong.

[¿Que?]

Assuming that trashing up city hall, burning the flag, and other black bloc type shit really does alienate people, I really don't think this strategy of going all out and admonishing this type of action is the correct way to deal with it. Again, assuming that it does indeed alienate people.

No, actually, what the whole left needs to be doing, and in manner effective and strong enough to counter the mainstream line, is focusing on the obviously worse and more egregious assault and violent actions perpetrated against protesters by police. Enough bickering already.

Plus, am I the only one who's thinking of this song?
z8vGw6u0ehE

The trees we got lifted by made our feet dangle
So when I say burn one I mean is Star-Spangled

[Veovis]

Oof. Don't have a general strike cause it won't shut down the economy? How does the ISO propose that we build a movement, and reintroduce the strike as a weapon if we don't conduct them until millions support it?

We're fighting and learning, and I don't understand the alternative of the ISO.

Personally, I think calling for a general strike is an admirable thing, but I have serious doubts that it will accomplish anything at this point. Once again, the struggle isn't advanced enough.

Worst case scenario if it flops, it could cheapen the general strike as a working-class weapon. A sort of "boy who cried wolf" effect.

[Ostrinski]

ISO is a trollocracy.

[Ostrinski]

The proper tactics argument is idealistic in that it supposes that class consciousness develops on the lines of how receptive the working class is to radical politics independently of their material situation. People become receptive to radical politics when their interests are reflected by them, when their plight is shit and can only be ameliorated through socialist revolution, not because what radicals say and do resonates with their standards of right and wrong.

"Oh. Those kids are burning flags. Guess I'll just keep starving." :rolleyes: Elitist bullshit. Think people, think.

[Искра]

Blahblahblahblah another social-democratic group working against working class. Good thing is that outside revleft nobody cares about them.

Wanna be KKE lol

[Veovis]

The proper tactics argument is idealistic in that it supposes that class consciousness develops on the lines of how receptive the working class is to radical politics independently of their material situation. People become receptive to radical politics when their interests are reflected by them, when their plight is shit and can only be ameliorated through socialist revolution, not because what radicals say and do resonates with their standards of right and wrong.

During times of crisis, people radicalize to the left AND to the right. Here in the U.S. there is a dangerous possibility of people radicalizing in the wrong direction.


"Oh. Those kids are burning flags. Guess I'll just keep starving." :rolleyes: Elitist bullshit. Think people, think.

"Oh, those kids are burning flags. Guess I'll support those lovely men in black shirts who promise to give me a job after they round up all those America-hating troublemakers!"

That's more like it.

[Renegade Saint]

Oof. Don't have a general strike cause it won't shut down the economy? How does the ISO propose that we build a movement, and reintroduce the strike as a weapon if we don't conduct them until millions support it?

We're fighting and learning, and I don't understand the alternative of the ISO.
Well obviously you start small, organizing your workplaces and strikes in your community.

What's the point of calling for a general strike, when it will. Not. Happen? Not even if every group represented on this forum was working night and day in support. The time for a general strike will be right when strikes are happening on a regular basis already. Has it ever been otherwise. Has anyone ever successfully pulled off a general strike that they called months in advance? This seems like someone in France in February '68 calling a general strike for May. General strikes are things that happen of the moment.

[Jimmie Higgins]

The ISO is also against the May 1st General Strike, it's the same debate at Greek rioting and whatnot with the KKE vs Black Bloc.Bullshit. We are against calling it a general strike because it won't be one and the occupy movement doesn't have the organizational ability to pull that off. We do, however support a day of action on May Day and are helping to build these events locally and nation-wide. If we loose the debate and people still call it a general strike, so be it we will still help build it while explaining that we need much more class organization to really build a meaningful general strike.

We also helped build and lead the "general strike" that happened in Oakland and shut down the port working with other radicals such as members of the IWW (even when other groups or induviduals have acted hostile to us). The KKE on the other hand actively works to cut out other left-wing forces, hold their own occupations and protests.


Now, we aren't talking here about smashing windows of small businesses, or busting up peoples' cars like in Portland. We're talking about busting up City Hall, the command center for the vicious campaign of arrests, brutalizations, smears and intimidation against Occupy Oakland. What the hell is wrong with that? Maybe not brilliant tactically, but the gutsy people who did it should be defended and not crapped on.

The focus of the local anti-Occupy media campaign is around somebody burning an American flag--an activity certified as legal by the US Supreme Court, for what little that is worth. And I hear some folk in Occupy Oakland are now trying to certify their "patriotism" by fluttering the bloodsoaked Stars and Stripes themselves.

ISO supporters here on Revleft have something serious to account for. Do you guys really support this crap?

Are you accusing us of patriotism? I'm not sure what your charge is here since the article (the second by this same comrade, the first was only about condemning the police repression, this one coming out after when debates had already emerged inside of Occupy Oakland about the supposed "vandalism") essentially makes the same case you do.


IN THE aftermath of Occupy Oakland's attempt to take over a vacant building January 28 and a day of police attacks that led to nearly 400 arrests, the Oakland political establishment, the police and the corporate media have been on the attack against the Occupy movement.


Media reports of the January 28 protest repeated the distorted police and city version of what happened, giving a false picture of violent demonstrators who are out of touch with the concerns of Oakland residents. Mayor Jean Quan likened the Occupy movement to "children," and Councilman Ignacio De La Fuente accused participants of the movement of engaging in domestic terrorism.


But the experiences of the more than 1,000 people who participated in the January 28 demonstration--and now reports of abuse and violence against activists while in detention--prove that the police were the ones bent on violence.


This is how this article begins, so in no way were we condemning the protesters at all!

You take one sentance out of context and make it sound the ISO are the ones creating this cricism and yet in full context:


At the same time, the demonstration and its aftermath raise important questions about the next steps for the Occupy movement, and a discussion of them is taking place on the left. Among people who have participated in Occupy Oakland activities and organizations that have been allies in the struggle, there are doubts about the movement's tactics and direction.


One obvious issue is the actions of a small number of people who broke into City Hall late at night on January 28 and committed acts of vandalism. This irresponsible and backward behavior handed city officials and the media a perfect weapon to smear the whole movement.


You say, "what could be wrong with that besides being tactically stupid" and THAT IS WHAT THE ARTICLE IS ARGUING!


The vandalism committed inside City Hall was stupid and inexcusable. It predictably provided ammunition for the Oakland establishment and the corporate press to attack the Occupy movement. This small group made it easy for the media to smear everyone who participated in the day of protest.


Meanwhile, the media conveniently ignored or downplayed the overwhelming violence of police. The mass arrests were taken out of context to make the protesters appear to be the instigators, when the vast majority of activists were nonviolent. In fact, when the second march was hemmed in outside the YMCA, the chant from protesters was "Let us disperse."


Thanks to the media's distorted coverage, Mayor Quan and Oakland police were able to present themselves as victims of a movement that is out of hand--and the brutal and unlawful treatment of hundreds of protesters became a secondary issue when this was by far the largest act of violence of the day.


I have to think either you didn't read the article or you are trying to make a fight where there is none because the issue isn't burning an American flag and the issue isn't getting into city hall in the abstract. The issue is that are small random acts of vandalism or mass militant protest going to be the way forward for the movement and drawing in more working class people into it!?

[Jimmie Higgins]

Oof. Don't have a general strike cause it won't shut down the economy? Don't call a general strike when you can't pull it off becuase when 2,000 protest in downtown Oakland on the "general strike" then our movement looses credibility and the next time we try and shut down the port or do something big no one will come out because they won't trust that we can pull it off.


How does the ISO propose that we build a movement, and reintroduce the strike as a weapon if we don't conduct them until millions support it?Repeating the same tactics over and over with no consideration of the circumstances or balance of forces will drive this movement into the ground. In October we could make this attempt because there were 2000 people or more just as our GA's and then we also had much more support from the community and rank and file unionists had enough time for them to get resolutions in support passed but not enough time for the union leaders to try and demobilize these efforts. Now on the other hand we barely make quorum, people often only come to GA to get their things passed, and we've lost a lot of popular support in Oakland because while we've been making shields, the Oakland city council and chamber of commerce have been organizing and waging a propaganda war.


We're fighting and learning, and I don't understand the alternative of the ISO.Our alternative is to still do the May Day actions, bring back international worker's day, try and explicitly tie in native working class organizing with the immigrant rights workers organizing. This will help the occupy movement rebuild its base and be seen again as a place where rank and file workers can get together and organize on a class-basis as well as a place where non-union workers or other community members can come to help these struggles and build general solidarity and fights against the rich.

Like I said, if people call it a general strike, but do things like this, then it's more or less a semantic argument. My fear is that people arguing for a general strike will think that even if there is no organizing with union workers, no community outreach, and a low-turn out that they can still have a "general strike" or have 300 people try and shut-down the bridge or the port and they will all get arrested, the movement will be demonized and there will be no movement for the poor and for workers going into an election season and so all the progressive occupy supporters, rather than being pulled to the left by the movement, will be pulls back to the Democrats as the "only viable hope to stop the 1%".

[marl]

Don't call a general strike when you can't pull it off becuase when 2,000 protest in downtown Oakland on the "general strike" then our movement looses credibility and the next time we try and shut down the port or do something big no one will come out because they won't trust that we can pull it off.
Are you fucking kidding me

[eyeheartlenin]

http://socialistworker.org/2012/02/0...the-way-forward

Wow! Twelve whole paragraphs attacking the call for a general strike on May Day, from the paper of the international "Socialist" Organization! I never thought I would see that.

Where I live, in an East Coast college town, the ISO is supremely sensitive to what Democrats will like or not like, and which is obviously way more important to them than any allegiance to "socialism." I am guessing that is why they attack the call for a general strike on May Day.

Where I live, when the local antiwar coalition was being formed, someone proposed that the coalition join in the defense of Mumia Abu Jamal, and the ISO'ers at the meeting voted against defending Mumia, on a technicality, because it was an antiwar coalition.

In the same coalition, and this has been some years ago, a leftist created a poster condemning the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, and connecting Israel's occupation to the US occupation of Iraq, and when a Zionist objected to the poster at a meeting, the local ISO honcho was on his feet within seconds, demanding that the leftist censor his own poster, which the leftist poster-maker quite property refused to do. All of which demonstrates, to my satisfaction anyway, that the ISO's primary concern is maintaining the comfort zone of their target demographic, which, in our town, at least (and probably elsewhere), demonstrably is the Democrats.

Oh, and I could not possibly make this stuff up. I never thought anyone on the left would want to leave Mumia high and dry, on a phreaking technicality.

While calling the ISO a wannabe KKE (the Greeks I know pronounce that as "coo coo eh") is a little inaccurate, since the ISO is a long way from possessing any mass influence AFAIK, it's still a brilliant formulation, and it made my evening. :)

[Veovis]

Wow! Twelve whole paragraphs attacking the call for a general strike on May Day, from the paper of the international "Socialist" Organization! I never thought I would see that.

Where I live, in a southern New England college town, the ISO is supremely sensitive to what Democrats will like or not like, and which is obviously way more important to them than any allegiance to "socialism." I am guessing that is why they attack the call for a general strike on May Day.

Read Jimmie Higgins's above posts. Then again, you're judging an entire organization on the actions of a few people from one branch, so you're obviously not here to develop a properly informed opinion.

[A Marxist Historian]

And yet, what did these actions accomplish? How did it advance the goals of the working class?

I'm not defending the city government, but we have to think pragmatically about these sorts of things. Busting a few windows in city hall accomplishes very little for us, yet gives the opposition an opportunity to make themselves out to be the victims. It's not fair, but it's the way it is.

Was it a dumb idea? Quite possibly. But that's not the issue.

You have the fist of the state coming down on Occupy Oakland, including I have heard ISO members in Occupy Oakland getting busted.

The spirit of "an injury to one is an injury to all" seems extremely missing from this statement, which hands a weapon on a silver platter to the cops persecuting these guys, and in fact Occupy Oakland as a whole, including the ISO'ers busted too come to think of it.

You say you ain't defending the city government, but in this statement you're basically on the side of the city government vs. the guys who busted into City Hall and burned an American flag.

-M.H.-

[Veovis]

Was it a dumb idea? Quite possibly. But that's not the issue.

You have the fist of the state coming down on Occupy Oakland, including I have heard ISO members in Occupy Oakland getting busted.

The spirit of "an injury to one is an injury to all" seems extremely missing from this statement, which hands a weapon on a silver platter to the cops persecuting these guys, and in fact Occupy Oakland as a whole, including the ISO'ers busted too come to think of it.

You say you ain't defending the city government, but in this statement you're basically on the side of the city government vs. the guys who busted into City Hall and burned an American flag.

-M.H.-

Nooooo, I'm on the side of the protestors, but I'm criticizing their actions because they ended up harming themselves more than hurting their opponents.

[eyeheartlenin]

Read Jimmie Higgins's above posts. Then again, you're judging an entire organization on the actions of a few people from one branch, so you're obviously not here to develop a properly informed opinion.

What any group does is way more significant than what it prints in its paper, I think. And I also believe that what a group is willing (or unwilling) to fight for in a coalition is a very good indication of its real politics. Surely, all that's obvious.

[Veovis]

What any group does is a way more significant than what it prints in its paper, I think. And I also believe that what a group is willing (or unwilling) to fight for in a coalition is a very good indication of its real politics. Surely, all that's obvious.

Maybe, but do you have any evidence of a large number of branches behaving this way?

And the fact that a group is unwilling to waste energy and credibility on an action that isn't going to happen in a 3-month time frame is a wise decision in my book.

[A Marxist Historian]

Personally, I think calling for a general strike is an admirable thing, but I have serious doubts that it will accomplish anything at this point. Once again, the struggle isn't advanced enough.

Worst case scenario if it flops, it could cheapen the general strike as a working-class weapon. A sort of "boy who cried wolf" effect.

I have serious doubts as to whether OWS is in any position to call a general strike at this point, you have to be realistic.

But fer chrissakes, when people are in jail, even if what they are in jail for is kinda stupid, you have to rally behind them, not trash them. There's nothing wrong with invading City Hall and busting it up, other than that it's bad PR. It's not the job of revolutionaries to be defending Jean Quan and her lackeys from OWS.

-M.H.-

[Veovis]

I have serious doubts as to whether OWS is in any position to call a general strike at this point, you have to be realistic.

But fer chrissakes, when people are in jail, even if what they are in jail for is kinda stupid, you have to rally behind them, not trash them. There's nothing wrong with invading City Hall and busting it up, other than that it's bad PR. It's not the job of revolutionaries to be defending Jean Quan and her lackeys from OWS.

-M.H.-

What about OWS defending itself from bourgeois propaganda and smear campaigns?

[A Marxist Historian]

Bullshit. We are against calling it a general strike because it won't be one and the occupy movement doesn't have the organizational ability to pull that off. We do, however support a day of action on May Day and are helping to build these events locally and nation-wide. If we loose the debate and people still call it a general strike, so be it we will still help build it while explaining that we need much more class organization to really build a meaningful general strike.

We also helped build and lead the "general strike" that happened in Oakland and shut down the port working with other radicals such as members of the IWW (even when other groups or induviduals have acted hostile to us). The KKE on the other hand actively works to cut out other left-wing forces, hold their own occupations and protests.



Are you accusing us of patriotism? I'm not sure what your charge is here since the article (the second by this same comrade, the first was only about condemning the police repression, this one coming out after when debates had already emerged inside of Occupy Oakland about the supposed "vandalism") essentially makes the same case you do.



This is how this article begins, so in no way were we condemning the protesters at all!

You take one sentance out of context and make it sound the ISO are the ones creating this cricism and yet in full context:



You say, "what could be wrong with that besides being tactically stupid" and THAT IS WHAT THE ARTICLE IS ARGUING!



I have to think either you didn't read the article or you are trying to make a fight where there is none because the issue isn't burning an American flag and the issue isn't getting into city hall in the abstract. The issue is that are small random acts of vandalism or mass militant protest going to be the way forward for the movement and drawing in more working class people into it!?

C'mon, Jimmie. If the article just said that what they did was unwise, or even stupid, I wouldn't have a problem with it.

But it went way, way beyond that.

It said, and here I'm just quoting again from the Socialist Worker article, that they "committed acts of vandalism" and called that "irresponsible and backward behavior."

Now, last I heard, "vandalism" is something they send you to jail for. And not only that, it was "irresponsible and backward."

I can just see the prosecutors reading that to the jury, saying, look, this is what even some of the other OWS people are saying.

And that's no fantasy, that's exactly what happened to Mumia on one of his court appeals, the prosecutors just read from some of the stuff published by so-called Mumia supporters dissing his attorney's arguments that Arnold Beverly had confessed to the crime, and that's all the appeals judge needed to hear to dismiss that particular appeal.

I can't help noticing that you put quotes around the word "vandalism." Well, the article didn't. I hope that indicates that you do indeed have a different attitude to all this than does whoever wrote that piece, and that you are only defending it out of loyalty to your organization.

As for patriotism, I assume it wasn't ISO supporters carrying American flags, I would certainly hope so anyway. ISO people are not the only people involved in Occupy Oakland who can use some serious criticism.

-M.H.-

P.S.: On the general strike issue, well, you're right about that.

[A Marxist Historian]

What about OWS defending itself from bourgeois propaganda and smear campaigns?

How does trashing one wing of OWS help defend it from bourgeois propaganda and smear campaigns?

The right way to fight back was to put all emphasis on the vastly greater violence and brutality of the cops, ripping up the Constitution in Oakland, not by saying or at any rate implying, gee, we have nothing to do with those guys, prosecute them not us.

Criticism of Black Bloc tactics should focus on if they do things that really are not defensible, like smashing the windows of small black businesses or smashing autos in Portland, and even then should be very careful in tone so as not to be grist to the mill of the OPD, and should be using words like "unwise," not words like "acts of vandalism" and "irresponsible and backward."

-M.H.-

[Martin Blank]

You say, "what could be wrong with that besides being tactically stupid" and THAT IS WHAT THE ARTICLE IS ARGUING!

Actually, no. That is not what the articles are arguing. It's one thing to describe an action as "tactically stupid", or "silly", or other similar terms. Such terms not only rightly imply an unseriousness and cavalier approach to the struggle, but, on the flip side, an acknowledgment of subjective sincerity -- i.e., they did a dumb thing, but their heart was in the right place. You question their actions, not their integrity.

But when you start describing those actions as "irresponsible", "inexcusable", "unacceptable" and so on, the difference becomes more fundamental -- more qualitative. No longer is it merely a division over tactics; now it is elevated to the level of principle (or, at the very least, strategy). Now it is no longer just actions being questioned, but integrity. That opens doors to a lot of dangerous assertions -- assertions that will generate more heat than light and could become more damaging to the movement than any amount of broken glass or burned flag.

Don't take this as little more than an argument over "tone", because it goes beyond that. It's not the hostile tone that is the problem here, but the absolutism of the criticisms in SW. If this is an argument over fundamentals, then it's time for both sides to drop the wallpaper and get to the matter at hand.

[Martin Blank]

What about OWS defending itself from bourgeois propaganda and smear campaigns?

You say this as if the ruling classes wouldn't simply find another excuse to attack the #Occupy movement. As marl put it at the beginning of this thread: "They'll constantly find new ways to smear us -- glass or no glass". We've certainly seen that here with the local #Occupy groups. Anything that the corporatist media can dredge up will be used against the movement, including, on occasion, real events. And if not a single #Occupy participant was there to give Fox News another bogus News Alert, they'd sure as hell make something up. It doesn't matter what #Occupy does ... including doing nothing. The corporatist media and politicians will still manufacture what they need to tear the movement apart.

[Welshy]

What about OWS defending itself from bourgeois propaganda and smear campaigns?

And you think that by isolating other protesters out and parroting the peace police positions about how taking more radical actions (like occupying the the airport and City Hall) would make it easy for the police to attack protesters and the media to slander the protests, you are helping OWS? What ever happened to solidarity? I swear with this attitude you are only a couple steps away from handing anarchists or insurrectos (anarchists or not) over to the police in order to save the protests from being attack!

[Veovis]

And you think that by isolating other protesters out and parroting the peace police positions about how taking more radical actions (like occupying the the airport and City Hall) would make it easy for the police to attack protesters and the media to slander the protests, you are helping OWS? What ever happened to solidarity? I swear with this attitude you are only a couple steps away from handing anarchists or insurrectos (anarchists or not) over to the police in order to save the protests from being attack!

There's a difference between solidarity and giving stupidity a free pass without criticism. I support OWS, I don't support actions that harm the movement.

[Lucretia]

The conversation has shifted to a discussion on the property destruction of city hall, but I would like to focus more on this issue of flag burning. Are ISO members here really condemning the flag burning because it will alienate people? Gee, I guess internationalism will alienate people, also. So will the idea of collectivizing the means of production. Guess we should discourage people from advocating for that also. :blink:

[bcbm]

are the occupy's where people have only used 'the right tactics' more successful than those where dangerous, violent radicals have taken hold?

[Welshy]

There's a difference between solidarity and giving stupidity a free pass without criticism. I support OWS, I don't support actions that harm the movement.

Define what hurts the movement? I have heard plenty of liberals who have argued that having any anti-capitalist sentiment hurts the movement because it derails the "message". I have also heard people argue that protesting the police attacks on OWS hurts the movement because it derails the message. I have also heard people argue that striking hurts the movement because it hurts the workers who don't get paid and/or don't block the ports because it will alienate the workers (and it turned out that it did actually help the Longview workers gain a victory, though smallish). It can be argued that everything that doesn't turn OWS in a democrat pressure group will cause the police to attack it and the media to slander it.

Also I'm not an advocate of the Black Bloc tactic, but I'm just sick an tired of hearing this liberal peace police crap coming out of people who are suppose to be socialists.

[Veovis]

Define what hurts the movement? I have heard plenty of liberals who have argued that having any anti-capitalist sentiment hurts the movement because it derails the "message". I have also heard people argue that protesting the police attacks on OWS hurts the movement because it derails the message. I have also heard people argue that striking hurts the movement because it hurts the workers who don't get paid and/or don't block the ports because it will alienate the workers (and it turned out that it did actually help the Longview workers gain a victory, though smallish). It can be argued that everything that doesn't turn OWS in a democrat pressure group will cause the police to attack it and the media to slander it.

Also I'm not an advocate of the Black Bloc tactic, but I'm just sick an tired of hearing this liberal peace police crap coming out of people who are suppose to be socialists.

Where do we draw the line? Was the smashing of a Honda Civic here in Portland a few weeks ago good for the movement?

[Welshy]

Where do we draw the line? Was the smashing of a Honda Civic here in Portland a few weeks ago good for the movement?

I would say it is neither good nor bad. Are these actions being done in a significant amount to make them even worth discussing from a tactical POV? Or is it being made an issue because the liberals and the bourgeois media want to make it an issue? To be honest the ISO would be better of talking about ways to help organize work place occupations, strikes and self-defense against police brutality rather than talking like a radical wing of the peace police (when I say ISO, I mean the ISO as an organization as I know members who are almost always to the left of the organizations official positions).

[Comrade Jandar]

I wish marxists were as militant as the anarchists. The lack of solidarity with these comrades is sickening.

[Le Socialiste]

Maybe, but do you have any evidence of a large number of branches behaving this way?

And the fact that a group is unwilling to waste energy and credibility on an action that isn't going to happen in a 3-month time frame is a wise decision in my book.

Regardless of whether or not it is right to call the May 1st action a 'general strike', I still think it's worthwhile to devote the time and energy to make it happen. I'm quite happy to criticize calling it a 'general strike', but we should still strive to fulfill its original purpose.

[Le Socialiste]

I have serious doubts as to whether OWS is in any position to call a general strike at this point, you have to be realistic.

But fer chrissakes, when people are in jail, even if what they are in jail for is kinda stupid, you have to rally behind them, not trash them. There's nothing wrong with invading City Hall and busting it up, other than that it's bad PR. It's not the job of revolutionaries to be defending Jean Quan and her lackeys from OWS.

-M.H.-

Who is doing that? Please show me where anyone in this thread has defended the actions and statements of Jean Quan and the establishment. No one's doing that...

[Le Socialiste]

And you think that by isolating other protesters out and parroting the peace police positions about how taking more radical actions (like occupying the the airport and City Hall) would make it easy for the police to attack protesters and the media to slander the protests, you are helping OWS? What ever happened to solidarity? I swear with this attitude you are only a couple steps away from handing anarchists or insurrectos (anarchists or not) over to the police in order to save the protests from being attack!

To be fair, occupying the airport (at this point in the struggle) is tactically shortsighted and doomed to fail. I'd be all for such an action if the vast majority of people in and around the area were present and/or supportive, but right now we're not in a place to do it; not to mention the ominous statements coming from Oakland's officials about how what we did on Jan. 28th amounted to "domestic terrorism"...

No one's saying we should turn comrades over to the police. I sure as hell wouldn't do that, and would condemn anyone who did. I may disagree with the actions of some people at this point in the movement's development, but it won't push me to physically stop them from doing it.

[Veovis]

Regardless of whether or not it is right to call the May 1st action a 'general strike', I still think it's worthwhile to devote the time and energy to make it happen. I'm quite happy to criticize calling it a 'general strike', but we should still strive to fulfill its original purpose.

Precisely. If enough people come out for a parade - well it's basically the same thing as a general strike since it accomplishes the same goal.

[Prometeo liberado]

Define what hurts the movement? I have heard plenty of liberals who have argued that having any anti-capitalist sentiment hurts the movement because it derails the "message". I have also heard people argue that protesting the police attacks on OWS hurts the movement because it derails the message. I have also heard people argue that striking hurts the movement because it hurts the workers who don't get paid and/or don't block the ports because it will alienate the workers (and it turned out that it did actually help the Longview workers gain a victory, though smallish). It can be argued that everything that doesn't turn OWS in a democrat pressure group will cause the police to attack it and the media to slander it.

Also I'm not an advocate of the Black Bloc tactic, but I'm just sick an tired of hearing this liberal peace police crap coming out of people who are suppose to be socialists.

I have to agree with this in it's entirety. Although I understand that flag burning and whatnot will alienate people. I'm coming around to thinking that those might be people who haven't yet let go of the idea of working in the system. I dare say dead weight on the backs of the movement.

[A Marxist Historian]

Where do we draw the line? Was the smashing of a Honda Civic here in Portland a few weeks ago good for the movement?

Who owned the Honda Civic? If it wasn't owned by say a police chief or prosecutor or politician or something, then yeah, I draw a line between smashing that Honda Civic and smashing Oakland City Hall.

A class line.

And whether it was good for the movement is, at this point, not the issue.

Is there a single Occupy movement where stuff "bad for the movement," and by that I mean more serious stuff than this, has happened? Like people talking about how cops are "part of the 99%," f'rexample?

Is burning an American flag a good idea? I'm not sure.

But what I know for sure is that waving an American flag is a real bad idea.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

Who is doing that? Please show me where anyone in this thread has defended the actions and statements of Jean Quan and the establishment. No one's doing that...

OK, maybe that was overstatement.

But that article in Socialist Worker clearly was not defending the arrested folk who busted into her City Hall. The words used sure sounded as if the author had more sympathy with her and her nice Hall with pretty paintings or whatever than with the so-called "vandals."

-M.H.-

[Welshy]

To be fair, occupying the airport (at this point in the struggle) is tactically shortsighted and doomed to fail. I'd be all for such an action if the vast majority of people in and around the area were present and/or supportive, but right now we're not in a place to do it; not to mention the ominous statements coming from Oakland's officials about how what we did on Jan. 28th amounted to "domestic terrorism"...

I agree that since we don't have the numbers trying to occupy an airport would most likely and if the ISO had stop their with criticism and elaborated on where to go in order to make that a possibility in the future, then I wouldn't have had a problem. It is the parroting the liberal peace polices arguments of "it will give the police a reason to crack down on us" and "it will give the media stuff to slander us with" that is what is bugging me. We all know that the police don't need a reason to crack down on protests because they have done just that in past during peaceful protests. And as far as the media is concerned they have been slandering us from the beginning, so I don't see them changing unless we become a democrat pressure group.



No one's saying we should turn comrades over to the police. I sure as hell wouldn't do that, and would condemn anyone who did. I may disagree with the actions of some people at this point in the movement's development, but it won't push me to physically stop them from doing it.

I'll admit that I was probably being to harsh with that statement and I don't think that everyone in the ISO is bad (I know as I have close comrades with in), but I think this Black Bloc debate has gone into an unhealthy obsession and takes away from the important discussion on how to make OWS actions more militant and it has caused some left groups like the ISO to posture in away that puts them against more militant action. Who knows maybe this some of my disappointment with the KKE spilling over into this debate, but I don't like seeing any group that is suppose to be socialist following the peace police line.

[Martin Blank]

I'll admit that I was probably being to harsh with that statement and I don't think that everyone in the ISO is bad (I know as I have close comrades with in), but I think this Black Bloc debate has gone into an unhealthy obsession and takes away from the important discussion on how to make OWS actions more militant and it has caused some left groups like the ISO to posture in away that puts them against more militant action. Who knows maybe this some of my disappointment with the KKE spilling over into this debate, but I don't like seeing any group that is suppose to be socialist following the peace police line.

I have to agree with Welshy's statements here about this growing, obsessive concern about property, the media, etc. With the #Occupy movement more or less cut from its moorings (the physical occupations of space), it has, as a whole, become more susceptible to the pressures of petty-bourgeois "public opinion" -- whether the outlet for that "opinion" is a local government official, a media bobblehead or chief head-cracker for your local finest. In many ways, the level of criticism has really not changed, and the intensity has actually fallen slightly. What has changed is us.

With the absence of the physical occupations and the daily activity surrounding them, we are subjected more directly to the same daily criticism that has been going on since the beginning of the movement. It's just that now we're able to hear it more. It's not that the criticism is getting worse, it's that we're paying much more attention to it than we were when we were out there at the occupation every day.

In many respects, what we're seeing here is exactly what the ruling classes are hoping will happen: let the #Occupy movement fester in relative isolation during the winter months and wait for the organism to start eating itself. We cannot let the broader left wing of this movement lead the charge on this (like we have so many times in the past). We don't have to like or agree with each other's tactics and methods, but we do have to realize that when the ruling classes and their state come after one of us, it is only a prelude to them coming after all of us. And it won't matter whether you're an anarchist, communist or socialist -- whether you agree with Black Bloc tactics or not -- whether you support workers' self-defense or non-violence -- whether you call it an occupation or a commune, a general strike or day of action.

I may strongly and fundamentally disagree with the methods and tactics many anarchists engage in, including elements of the Black Bloc, but I will tell you all this: When it comes down to the forces of the ruling classes and their state bearing down on #Occupy in an attempt to divide and conquer, I will stand and say, "I am the Black Bloc!", because the alternative is cowardly submission to existing order.

[Os Cangaceiros]

I don't really understand what the point of preserving the general strike's "good name" is, personally. The ISO makes it sound like there will be the opportunity for "the real thing" sometime in the unspecified future, but it will be sabotaged by the fact that people will remember back in 2012 that there was some silly march which was called a general strike and won't participate. That seems kind of ridiculous. Either a mass work stoppage happens or it doesn't, who cares what it's called.

Often times the conditions for such events take place over a course of days and weeks, not years. Such was the case recently in Wisconsin, although we all know what happened there. Such was the case in many other dramatic mass strikes. The bottom line is that the period of time we're living through doesn't present itself too often, both when we look at the international situation, and the national situation, particularly the NATO/G8 summit during May and the small signs that the American economy may be improving a bit.

[Jimmie Higgins]

A Marxist Historian, you claim that protesters brought and were waving US flags and one was burned... no, the flag was from inside the city hall lobby - the issue is not buring a flag and I've been to tons of demonstrations where people bring flags and burn them, I even had a 4th of July party where that was the theme. If you don't even know the details of what you are talking about, I don't think your arguments can hold much water. The issue was not burning a flag in the abstract, it's that a small group of people committed an individual act of vandalism that is helping the city to drive a wedge into the movement - and is doing so successfully when you consider how union leaders are using this as an excuse to try and revoke the support resolutions that rank and filers forced through after Scott Olsen was shot. We want to argue for tactics that will help us win, help us successfully occupy a building, and successfully expand occupy oakland beyond the existing radical core. This core is great and the desire to have a general strike and shut down the mechanisms of capitalism and the desire to neutralize the police are all great, but the existing radical core is not able to do things as they are, we need to build and unlike in the past there are now much broader layers of people willing to take militant action.

I don't think our numbers were only 2,000 that day because people in Oakland don't want us to take on foreclosures and homelesness and the greed of the city and the banks - they don't trust that we can pull it off anymore, they don't trust that if we can't pull it off that the whole march won't turn into a kamikaze clash with the cops.

We need to rebuild our bases, reconnect the movement with the large percentages of people that supported us after Scott Olsen was shot.

This is the way forward as I see it, whereas small random acts or just repeating the same tactics over and over like a militant echo of the moralistic nonviolent anti-war marches.


What any group does is a way more significant than what it prints in its paper, I think. And I also believe that what a group is willing (or unwilling) to fight for in a coalition is a very good indication of its real politics. Surely, all that's obvious.

My comrades got arrested I had comrades who were on the tactical committee for the building occupation. After the first building occupation attempt we argued that a successful attempt would have to be backed by a large force like when we shut down the ports. Done successfully this would help rebuild our movement and show that we can untie around a specific target and get things done. Fighting in a coalition and trying to argue what we see as the best way forward for the movement is EXACTLY WHY WE WROTE THIS article. Eyeheartlenin, were you there at the attempted building occupation? I was, I helped formulate the article in question and I stand behind it 100% as well as the piece by the same author that he wrote the night of the building occupation:


THE DAY after the demonstrations, the Oakland police, Mayor Quan and the corporate press went on a massive publicity offensive, accusing the Occupy Oakland movement of being violent and out of control. Quan likened the demonstrators to "children" and urged the Occupy movement to "stop using Oakland as its playground." Council member Ignacio De La Fuente slandered the movement by accusing some its participants of engaging in "domestic terrorism."


No mention was made of the police's indiscriminate teargassing in residential neighborhoods, beatings of activists held against walls, dispersals orders that were supposed to apply all day or mass arrests to stop the occupation of a vacant building.


There are debates among activists about some of the tactics used on the demonstrations and the plan for the occupation. In particular, vandalizing City Hall did nothing to take the struggle forward, but predictably gave the media another excuse to slander all demonstrators.


But there is no excuse for the one-sided use of violence against demonstrators by police, who were clearly looking for any excuse to attack. The Oakland Police Department and the city spend $50,000 every time a weekly anti-police brutality march takes place in Oakland, and each major mobilization, like the one Saturday, costs much more in cop overtime and mutual aid from other departments.


The Oakland City Council and Mayor Quan are showing once again where their priorities lie--money for a repressive police force instead of desperately needed social services, or reopening buildings for the community's benefit, like the convention center Occupy Oakland tried to take yesterday.


While activists didn't succeed in regaining space for the Occupy movement, Saturday's protest shows that the Occupy movement still has resonance with the Oakland community. More than 1,000 people mobilized to seize a building and turn it into another center for organizing.


At the same time, one lesson activists can take from the January 28 demonstration is that we need even greater numbers of protesters and broader support in order to be successful in such occupations. For sure, the second march of a few hundred people was far too small to stand a chance of success against police who showed earlier they were intent on cracking heads.


This second article was in response to the specific arguments and debates that happened in the movement after Jan 28. This article, in no fair reading of it, sides with the city or the pacifist liberals. It condemns the city in fact and argues that idol threats and individual acts of vandalism help the city in its PR war against the movement.

[Prometeo liberado]

I see as a sure thing that the flag burning and all the rest is going to happen and I never had a problem with it happening though do think it will turn people away. My point is that there will be a bill to pay in terms of negative press from the left and the establishment. That being said if the OM can muster past this somewhat small bump in the road then we come out a more unified movement. The various tendencies will have one less thing to point fingers at each other for. And dead weight liberals will have vanished. At the end of the day we kinda all are Black Bloc. There really isn't another choice.

[Martin Blank]

The issue was not burning a flag in the abstract, it's that a small group of people committed an individual act of vandalism that is helping the city to drive a wedge into the movement - and is doing so successfully when you consider how union leaders are using this as an excuse to try and revoke the support resolutions that rank and filers forced through after Scott Olsen was shot.

Jimmie, I think this would be happening whether or not some screwball burned a flag. After Obama's SOTU speech last month, Trumka sent out a statement declaring "the era of the 1 percent is over" -- and, by implication, so was the #Occupy movement. Since then, both AFL-CIO and CTW unions have been pulling their officials and staffers out of local #Occupy groups across the country, apparently redirecting their resources back to electoral activity. (We covered this in our radio show earlier today.) The local unions in Oakland (and the SF Bay Area in general) may be using this flag burning and broken glass as a flimsy excuse, but that's all it is. The orders have come down from on-high: #Occupy is over, Obama is the candidate of the 99 percent, get people to the polls in November. One way or another, you should expect support from union officials to dry up.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Actually, no. That is not what the articles are arguing.Really, because I helped formulate it, but I guess you know better than the person who was talking through this with the author.

The article was printed for the exact reasons and intentions I stated, to participate in a heated debate within Occupy Oakland that was already existing.


But when you start describing those actions as "irresponsible", "inexcusable", "unacceptable" and so on, the difference becomes more fundamental -- more qualitative.
Fundamental, you mean like a few posts later when you say:

I may strongly and fundamentally disagree with the methods and tactics many anarchists engage in, including elements of the Black Bloc

Let's go through some facts here and push aside this armchair speculation of phantom charges by people who for the most part actually agree with the content of what was said.

1. Oakland ISO was involved in coalitions for the building take over
2. We had a contingent there the day of
3. Several of our comrades were arrested when the later march was Kettled
4. Our members wrote an article that night condemning the police actions and the scapegoating of protesters by the city.
5. The next GA had a huge debate beforehand about what to do. Some people said it was great and we have the same support if not more, liberals whines and threatened to stop supporting and participating (and some even accused the people who broke into city hall as undercover police povacatures).
6. We wrote our response which was that the movement needs to rebuild it's base and that idol threats and random vandalism or mechanical confrontations with the police are not the way forward.
7. We also wrote a piece arguing against the "Black Block is Cancer" article that also tries to argue against pacifism on one side and people who think that there's no need to assess in the movement or figure out how to move forward on the other (i.e. have no criticism of the failed occupation attempt).

So MH, Cthulhu, Welshy - please explain to me why you do think that a dozen or two people breaking into city hall with no way to hold it or do anything other than burn a flag helps the movement. Explain why you don't think people should argue and debate what tactics and approach are best for the movement? And did you actually even read the article in question? When we spend several paragraphs denouncing how protesters were rounded up and then MH says we don't stand with the arrested protesters, it makes me wonder.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Jimmie, I think this would be happening whether or not some screwball burned a flag. After Obama's SOTU speech last month, Trumka sent out a statement declaring "the era of the 1 percent is over" -- and, by implication, so was the #Occupy movement. Since then, both AFL-CIO and CTW unions have been pulling their officials and staffers out of local #Occupy groups across the country, apparently redirecting their resources back to electoral activity. (We covered this in our radio show earlier today.) The local unions in Oakland (and the SF Bay Area in general) may be using this flag burning and broken glass as a flimsy excuse, but that's all it is. The orders have come down from on-high: #Occupy is over, Obama is the candidate of the 99 percent, get people to the polls in November. One way or another, you should expect support from union officials to dry up.Of course it's a flimsy excuse for what they want to do, that's not the issue for me. The issue is that the movement had forced them to TAIL US! It would be a lot easier to hold them to it and expose them for having the wrong approach if the movement was able to still draw out the numbers and the rank and file members; if Quan's propaganda hadn't been successful.

Our articles support the building attempt and I think they did everything right until we were outflanked by the police who either had intel from the secret committee or just figured out where we were headed. At that point with hundreds of police already occupying our target and only a couple thousand marchers, it was clear to me that we could not take that location, I stuck around because I had been told there were two other locations - except apparently there weren't. At any rate, this we defend, the protesters who got kettled we defend and we defend the protesters who did some idle vandalism though we do not defend these tactics as anyway to build this movement.

I think some people here and some in occupy have mistaken the radical core for the movement itself - 1,000 radicals is a huge step forward and why I'm still organizing in occupy Oakland, but those 1,000 need to convince the, say, 10,000s who support us in spirit to actually be organizing with us. When that happens we won't be debating about if we can pull off a general strike, we'll be debating how long to continue the strike.

[Welshy]

So MH, Cthulhu, Welshy - please explain to me why you do think that a dozen or two people breaking into city hall with no way to hold it or do anything other than burn a flag helps the movement.

At least with me, this question is pointless. Like I have said before I don't advocate Black Bloc stuff (though I don't get mad when some shops get busted either) also from what I've read about Jan 28th it was over all a mess. But my issue is that ISO is 1) not challenging the liberal peace police positions but are instead saying the same things as the peace police, 2) You guys seem to be spending more time attacking black bloc that voicing concrete ways you guys would make actions more militant and expand working class involvement (I don't mean gaining more union bureaucrat support) and 3) you are showing no solidarity for your fellow leftists who got arrest but instead you sit here attacking them rather than debating with them on what's the next step to make things more militant (I don't care if you guys are debating this in the local GA, this article is nothing but an attack on them and only serves to stifle this debate nationally and to divide the movement in a harmful way).

Damn it feels like I'm arguing with FSL, where being critical of the KKE and asking what the next step is = burn everything to ground, fuck the workers, but instead this time it is, don't agree with the ISO = trash everything and beg that the police beat us and OWS silly.

EDIT: I know there was some talk about the next step in this article but it consisted of at most 3 sentences and was at the very bottom. To be honest the entire article should have been about that with the black bloc issue being secondary if it even had to have been in there.

[Jimmie Higgins]

At least with me, this question is pointless. Like I have said before I don't advocate Black Bloc stuff (though I don't get mad when some shops get busted either)Neither do we. Where were we ever made that shop windows get broken? Through the Oscar Grant movement, we have been arguing in Oakland and the SW articles we've written that this so-called violence is not violence and the city is to blame. I have made this case repeatedly on this website and the article our branch has written make the same argument. In fact, did you read this:

Oakland police attack Occupiers (http://socialistworker.org/2012/01/31/oakland-police-attack-occupiers)

It was written by the same author as the second article. Now did you read this second article? Did you miss the condemnations of the city throughout? Did you miss the very first paragraph which reads:


IN THE aftermath of Occupy Oakland's attempt to take over a vacant building January 28 and a day of police attacks that led to nearly 400 arrests, the Oakland political establishment, the police and the corporate media have been on the attack against the Occupy movement.
Media reports of the January 28 protest repeated the distorted police and city version of what happened, giving a false picture of violent demonstrators who are out of touch with the concerns of Oakland residents. Mayor Jean Quan likened the Occupy movement to "children," and Councilman Ignacio De La Fuente accused participants of the movement of engaging in domestic terrorism.


How do you think our condemnation should have been clearer?


also from what I've read about Jan 28th it was over all a mess. But my issue is that ISO is 1) not challenging the liberal peace police positions but are instead saying the same things as the peace police,
The resulting flurry of discussion about what Hedges got wrong or right has helped generalize the debate about tactics beyond Oakland, and it has clearly engaged a wide layer of Occupy activists and supporters. But there has also been a drawback: Hedges argued that Occupy must adhere to nonviolence in all cases, and many of the responses, for and against, stayed on the same terrain of abstract principles, applied universally to the movement.


2) You guys seem to be spending more time attacking black bloc that voicing concrete ways you guys would make actions more militant and expand working class involvement (I don't mean gaining more union bureaucrat support) and We are debating these politics and the way forward with people in the radical core of occupy. I don't think the words black block appear anywhere in the article

http://socialistworker.org/2012/02/06/backlash-against-occupy-oakland

In the article about the Chris Hedges article we do mention the Black Block and how Hedges mischaracterizes these tactics. We also argue against propaganda of the deed and mechanical confrontations with police while equally arguing against mechanical pacifism

http://socialistworker.org/2012/02/16/confronting-the-debates (http://socialistworker.org/2012/02/16/confronting-the-debates)


Hedges is wrong in many of the characterizations he makes of Black Bloc anarchism--his stand-in target for anyone advocating confrontational tactics. No doubt this is because he isn't very familiar with traditions on the radical left. But Hedges is also wrong in his characterizations of the Occupy movement, which he has been closely associated with from the start.


He claims, for example, that the movement's "steadfast refusal to respond to police provocation" is what "resonated across the country." "Losing this moral authority, this ability to show through nonviolent protest the corruption and decadence of the corporate state, would be crippling to the movement," writes Hedges. "It would reduce us to the moral degradation of our oppressors. And that is what our oppressors want."


This misses the boat. The Occupy movement "resonated across the country" because of its political message--which tapped into widespread disaffection with vast inequality and a political system rigged to uphold the power and privileges of the 1 percent.


But Hedges' larger point is to portray nonviolence as a principle for any movement at any time. Does he think civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer, who said she kept loaded guns beneath her bed, reduced herself "to the moral degradation of her oppressors"? Did Egyptian revolutionaries who defended Tahrir Square with whatever weapons they could lay their hands on lose their "moral authority"?



3) you are showing no solidarity for your fellow leftists who got arrest but instead you sit here attacking them rather than debating with them on what's the next step to make things more militant (I don't care if you guys are debating this in the local GA, this article is nothing but an attack on them and only serves to stifle this debate nationally and to divide the movement in a harmful way). You're just wrong, have you read these articles? We do call the actions of vandalism as unproductive and "stupid" but we don't condemn militants, we want to try and win them to rebuilding the movement's base so that we can actually regain ground.


EDIT: I know there was some talk about the next step in this article but it consisted of at most 3 sentences and was at the very bottom. To be honest the entire article should have been about that with the black bloc issue being secondary if it even had to have been in there.Again where is black block mentioned specifically? The whole article is about what is the way forward and to answer that it's important to understand where it is now: this seems like more than three sentences, and also seems central to what the article was about, not paripharal.


THE OUTCOME of the attempted building occupation raises a number of valid questions and debates about the next step forward for Occupy Oakland.

Of course, when city officials like Mayor Quan raise objections, they are out to undermine the movement. But it's also true that people who have participated in and supported Occupy protests have legitimate concerns, not only about the tactics of a few activists on January 28, but the direction of the movement.


An earlier attempt at a building occupation--on November 2, the night after the successful Oakland general strike call and shutdown of the city's port complex--failed because the organizers of the action tried to carry it out in secret, without an open and democratic discussion. By comparison, the plan to occupy the Kaiser Center on January 28 was organized after a General Assembly vote, publicized openly for a month and built as a mass action.


However, the successful raids that shut down the Occupy encampment have presented challenges for the movement. While networks of Occupy activists and working groups still function, it has become harder for the less-visible movement to keep its connection to broader layers of support. This has been reflected in the declining size of Occupy Oakland demonstrations--15,000 people for the November 2 general strike call, 5,000 to 7,000 for the December 12 West Coast Port Shutdown, more than 1,000 on January 28.


Whatever the hopes and expectations of activists before January 28, it's clear in retrospect that occupying and holding a building like the Kaiser Convention Center couldn't take place with the numbers that turned out that day. An aggressive police force was able to stop several attempts at entering the building. The second march that evening was stopped before it reached another target for a building takeover, but the several hundred people who participated would have been even more overmatched by police.


At this point, going on the offensive with even more ambitious occupation plans would be a disaster. Yet this is exactly what some tendencies within the Occupy movement are advocating. The most dramatic is a statement issued before January 28 by the Occupy Oakland Move-In Assembly that calls for the indefinite occupation of the Oakland International Airport and City Hall. The call ends with the words: "Don't fuck with the Oakland Commune."


Bluster aside, actions like these wouldn't attract enough people for a successful mobilization. They would be a guaranteed setback for the movement, providing the political and media establishment with another opening to attack Occupy activists and further opening the gap that has begun to develop between Occupy Oakland and the wider community.
The way forward is to focus on campaigns and activities that can build up the broader support for Occupy. As activists in every city know, there is no shortage of struggles that Occupy can engage in order to reach out to wider layers of people. For example, in many cities, actions to occupy not large abandoned buildings but foreclosed homes have promoted solidarity among different movements--and achieved some successes in stopping evictions.

In Oakland, schools and libraries are still slated to be closed by a city administration that devotes huge sums to police who attack demonstrators. Nurses and port truck drivers are fighting for better conditions at work. Students, faculty and workers in the California university systems are building for mobilizations on March 1-5 against the cuts in education. Joining these struggles will give all a better chance at victory.

In all these struggles, the police, backed up by hostile city and state officials, will do whatever they can to stop us. We may not be able to overpower these forces on their own terms, but our movements can outmatch them with the strength of our numbers and our solidarity.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Woah, what the fuck did you just say?


Damn it feels like I'm arguing with FSL, where being critical of the KKE and asking what the next step is = burn everything to ground, fuck the workers, but instead this time it is, don't agree with the ISO = trash everything and beg that the police beat us and OWS silly.
As a veteran of the Oscar Grant movement and as someone who lives less than a mile from where he was killed, as someone who was there on move-in day, as someone whose good friend did 5 years in CA prisons, as someone who has had numerous comrades arrested and harassed by cops, I have no respect for someone who says something as unprincipled as this. Fuck you, just fuck you, you ignorant pimpled asshole if you think we want the police to beat and arrest us. We want this movement to grow and to make gains for the working class.

We don't agree with consensus voting as the best method, we don't agree with a lot of things in the occupy movement, yet we are trying to help build it. We were at the building takeover and argued in the committees and sometimes lost and yet we still worked with it.

You have no credibility in my eyes after spouting this kind of ignorant shit and calling people on the revolutionary left supporters of cops. Political disagreement=slander everyone who disagrees. Fuckwit.

[Martin Blank]

Really, because I helped formulate it, but I guess you know better than the person who was talking through this with the author.

OK, first things first.... Calm down. Have some dip. I'm not looking to get into a fight with you. I want to discuss these questions, not scream at you from 2,000 miles away.


Fundamental, you mean like a few posts later when you say:

Actually, no. In my case, I said "fundamental disagreements with tactics", which means having some very strong tactical disagreements. What I was trying to explain is that using words like "backward", "inexcusable" and so on convey a message, whether you mean to or not, that goes far beyond even strong tactical disagreements. Sure, communists and socialists do have principled differences with anarchists on many questions, but that's not the issue right now.

I am not opposed to the use of violence or force in general, including in relation to the #Occupy movement. I have said on more than one occasion that armed workers' self-defense is something that communists needed to raise, especially as the armed enforcers of capitalist order were cracking down on local occupations. (We included in several of our statements, including the Platform of Action we formulated.) I've also said that the energies put into the guerrilla-style hit-and-run tactics we saw in Oakland would have been better used in the development of a self-defense unit that would defend the occupation from outside provocations and attacks.

But this is a far cry from wholesale denunciation of such tactics as "backward" and "inexcusable". Whether you like it or not, this places you on the left flank of those like Chris Hedges -- not because you are choosing to stand there, but because that is the only space you've afforded yourself by engaging in such absolutist formulations. You've created what I'd like to think is a false expectation -- that is, that members of the ISO will oppose any kind of property damage, whether carried out by a small group or a mass force, whether resulting from acts of self-defense or not, as being "backward" and "inexcusable". In other words, you've created an expectation that members of the ISO in Oakland will bloc with the pacifists and liberals.

Now, I know this is not your intent. You explained that in your post, and I have no reason to question your sincerity on this matter. But that matters very little to the liberal-pacifists who will skip past any criticism of themselves in the pages of Socialist Worker and try to "wedge" the argument based on your use of terms like "backward" and "inexcusable". They will specifically use those terms to continue their fight to push out the anarchists, not simply because they agree with the description (and/or read more into it than you meant), but also because they will want to put you in a rhetorical corner. In this sense, they will rely on your sense of "democratic centralism", and expect you all to defend the language used in SW. They will try to use your terms to re-frame their message ... and it just might work.

Should they be successful, they will have, in fact, achieved a double victory; they will have not only ousted the anarchists, but will have also neutralized one of the larger socialist groups involved by using their own words against them.


So MH, Cthulhu, Welshy - please explain to me why you do think that a dozen or two people breaking into city hall with no way to hold it or do anything other than burn a flag helps the movement. Explain why you don't think people should argue and debate what tactics and approach are best for the movement? And did you actually even read the article in question? When we spend several paragraphs denouncing how protesters were rounded up and then MH says we don't stand with the arrested protesters, it makes me wonder.

I did read the articles, which is why I am not saying what TMH has said; you may not be screaming "Drop all charges!", but the point is made. Moreover, I'm not saying that the flag-burning incident helped the movement; I think that referring to the burner in question as a "screwball", as I did in my earlier post, sorta makes it clear where I stand in relation to that. My problem with the entry into City Hall was that it was too few in numbers. An occupation of the City Hall could have been a poignant moment in the struggle in Oakland, if it had been better organized and larger. Sure, having only a dozen or two try to take City Hall is silly. Several hundred, on the other hand, would have been another story. It would have been smarter if the person who had that bright idea had tried to get more people involved, but the idea itself was not a bad one.

And I do think that having an open, honest discussion about strategy and tactics for #Occupy is necessary. We've been having a dialogue with occupiers since October, spanning across leaflets, statements, issues of Working People's Advocate and now the Party's first radio show, about many of the broader questions facing the movement. That's not the issue here. The issue is, as it has been, formulating your criticism and disagreements in a way that can be used by the larger enemy: the conscious servants and enablers of the 1 percent (i.e., the rest of the exploiting and oppressing classes).

It's always walking on a thin line when you're trying to polemicize in such an environment as this. A lot ends up riding on formulation and emphasis.


Of course it's a flimsy excuse for what they want to do, that's not the issue for me. The issue is that the movement had forced them to TAIL US! It would be a lot easier to hold them to it and expose them for having the wrong approach if the movement was able to still draw out the numbers and the rank and file members; if Quan's propaganda hadn't been successful.

Well, remember that Quan knows all the old tricks. As someone who went through the New Left and into the New Communist Movement in the 1970s (she was in Jerry Tung's CWP), she's familiar with how a lot of the movement's "tried and true" tactics work. And she is definitely demonstrating how much of an asset she is to the ruling classes these days by being able to beat you in a propaganda battle. You need to think more outside the box when it comes to neutralizing her effects.


Our articles support the building attempt and I think they did everything right until we were outflanked by the police who either had intel from the secret committee or just figured out where we were headed. At that point with hundreds of police already occupying our target and only a couple thousand marchers, it was clear to me that we could not take that location, I stuck around because I had been told there were two other locations - except apparently there weren't. At any rate, this we defend, the protesters who got kettled we defend and we defend the protesters who did some idle vandalism though we do not defend these tactics as anyway to build this movement.

Fair enough. As I said, I'm not questioning that. As for the intel about the location, apparently someone leaked that either the night before or the morning of, because several people I know learned the final destination before the march even started. Whether that means there was a mole or simply a lack of discipline is for you folks on the ground there to figure out.


I think some people here and some in occupy have mistaken the radical core for the movement itself - 1,000 radicals is a huge step forward and why I'm still organizing in occupy Oakland, but those 1,000 need to convince the, say, 10,000s who support us in spirit to actually be organizing with us. When that happens we won't be debating about if we can pull off a general strike, we'll be debating how long to continue the strike.

I hear what you're saying, and there is a lot of truth in it. At the same time, though, I do caution you about setting too high of expectations. (Yeah, I know. But what else can I say?)

[Jimmie Higgins]

OK, first things first.... Calm down. Have some dip. I'm not looking to get into a fight with you. I want to discuss these questions, not scream at you from 2,000 miles away.Well when I make a case and you say, "actually you don't mean what you say" - it's a little frustrating.


Actually, no. In my case, I said "fundamental disagreements with tactics", which means having some very strong tactical disagreements. What I was trying to explain is that using words like "backward", "inexcusable" and so on convey a message, whether you mean to or not, that goes far beyond even strong tactical disagreements. Sure, communists and socialists do have principled differences with anarchists on many questions, but that's not the issue right now.The article doesn't even get into anarchism, it mentions only the actions not really any political tendency because anarchists have also been a big part of this debate and anarchists led this much more organized, though failed, attempt at occupying the building. I think the organization was solid, the problem with the official part of the march (i.e. not the few people who broke some city hall stuff) was an estimation of what our forces could really do once the cops had outmaneuvered us. I have confidence that people can and will learn from this and that's why I want to have a debate with them about the way forward.


But this is a far cry from wholesale denunciation of such tactics as "backward" and "inexcusable". Whether you like it or not, this places you on the left flank of those like Chris Hedges -- not because you are choosing to stand there, but because that is the only space you've afforded yourself by engaging in such absolutist formulations. You've created what I'd like to think is a false expectation -- that is, that members of the ISO will oppose any kind of property damage, whether carried out by a small group or a mass force, whether resulting from acts of self-defense or not, as being "backward" and "inexcusable". In other words, you've created an expectation that members of the ISO in Oakland will bloc with the pacifists and liberals.Yet a building occupation is "property damage" - we want to build a movement that can sucessfully do this. I went to the GA and when we were discussing the anti-repression committee, someone got up and said, "come see me if you want to know how to make shields out of garbage cans". There's nothing problematic inherently with this and it would be quite useful if we were trying to defend the camp, but it won't be a very good way to stop people from getting ketteled and arrested. So it's important that the movement have some time to consider a way forward, the danger is in just repeating the same things over and over and allowing the city to learn how to deal with us while we get no better at dealing with the city.


Now, I know this is not your intent. You explained that in your post, and I have no reason to question your sincerity on this matter. But that matters very little to the liberal-pacifists who will skip past any criticism of themselves in the pages of Socialist Worker and try to "wedge" the argument based on your use of terms like "backward" and "inexcusable". They will specifically use those terms to continue their fight to push out the anarchists, not simply because they agree with the description (and/or read more into it than you meant), but also because they will want to put you in a rhetorical corner. In this sense, they will rely on your sense of "democratic centralism", and expect you all to defend the language used in SW. They will try to use your terms to re-frame their message ... and it just might work.Then it will be hard since we have many articles that condemn principled non-violence including one that is about the Hedges article.

I don't think anarchist politics are mostly bad for the movement, there are some sets of ideas that are though and they are more on the anarchist-liberal side anyway - individualist actions and so on. There have been similar critiques of the individualist tactics within anarchist list-serves and so on and so I hope that US anarchism grows and learns and develops out of this movement and that's why these debates are important.


I did read the articles, which is why I am not saying what TMH has said; you may not be screaming "Drop all charges!", but the point is made. Moreover, I'm not saying that the flag-burning incident helped the movement; I think that referring to the burner in question as a "screwball", as I did in my earlier post, sorta makes it clear where I stand in relation to that. My problem with the entry into City Hall was that it was too few in numbers. An occupation of the City Hall could have been a poignant moment in the struggle in Oakland, if it had been better organized and larger. Sure, having only a dozen or two try to take City Hall is silly. Several hundred, on the other hand, would have been another story. It would have been smarter if the person who had that bright idea had tried to get more people involved, but the idea itself was not a bad one.That's what we are trying to contrast - those who see the radical core as the movement itself, capable through these semi-moralistic adventures and those who see the radical core as the movement that can help organize many more beyond ourselves to take over city hall with 10,000 people, or take over a building with 2,000 inside and several thousand outside keeping supplies coming in, keeping the cops out etc.


The issue is, as it has been, formulating your criticism and disagreements in a way that can be used by the larger enemy: the conscious servants and enablers of the 1 percent (i.e., the rest of the exploiting and oppressing classes).Quan is not saying, "Here, look at how bad these protesters are and how they are bent on destruction... there these two lines in a Socialist Worker article". But the city, media, and liberals are using the flag-burning incident to retro-actively justify the mass arrests and so the movement needs to 1, counter this and SW has in multiple articles (including this one) pointed to the Oakland city and police. But 2) we also have to counter the city-hall propaganda because it's actually making inroads and any reasonable person in the occupy movement here has to recognize that our actions have gotten smaller and public support has declined after a sustained effort by the city and the chamber of commerce.


Well, remember that Quan knows all the old tricks. As someone who went through the New Left and into the New Communist Movement in the 1970s (she was in Jerry Tung's CWP), she's familiar with how a lot of the movement's "tried and true" tactics work. And she is definitely demonstrating how much of an asset she is to the ruling classes these days by being able to beat you in a propaganda battle. You need to think more outside the box when it comes to neutralizing her effects.True, but she was on here heels after the port shut-down.:D


I hear what you're saying, and there is a lot of truth in it. At the same time, though, I do caution you about setting too high of expectations. (Yeah, I know. But what else can I say?)Well this is the potential and I think that there are real experiences in Oakland that show that we can relate and expand both in terms of racial composition but also in terms of being more rooted in working class issues and struggle.

Stopping home foreclosures are things that we can do with 1500 militants and it will help us gain a reputation as actually making meaningful change in working class communities. We've been helping build local immigrant worker struggles and other grassroots labor efforts, and again this will build the base of the movement and make it much more organically connected to working class militancy. This is what we need to do right now, flashy actions without trying to win back the base that came out in the many thousands before will just lead to diminishing returns and frustration.

[The Douche]

I don't understand the importance in condemning/supporting what was essentially a revenge action.

City hall was broken into after the arrests, right? Wasn't it done sort of as a "fuck you" and as morale booster? And whats the ultimate issue the ISO is getting at with this article? That burning flags and trashing things alienates liberals? Why is the ISO always making these veiled attempts at recruitment of liberals? It often seems as though the ISO's primary goal, every time it does or says anything, is to recruit a few liberals into its organization.

The liberals have been at odds with the commune in Oakland from very early on. (which is not the impression I've gotten from other occupations) Just a little while ago the liberals split off and made their own occupation, for fucks sake. The commune is still going and they've (the libs) all gone home...

[Искра]

Well, cmoney, isn't point of every such leftist organisation to use movements like this to recuit new members? Who cares about class struggle, buy our papers, become our member and we will tell you what can you do and what makes sense... :rolleyes:

[The Douche]

Well, cmoney, isn't point of every such leftist organisation to use movements like this to recuit new members? Who cares about class struggle, buy our papers, become our member and we will tell you what can you do and what makes sense... :rolleyes:

I mean, obviously this is what my ideology leads me to, but I do try and give people the benefit of the doubt sometimes. Even leftist organizations (who obviously have as one of their goals, recruitment) can, on occasion, have a good position or a good analysis.

But I see a lot of pandering to liberals by the ISO. And its weird, because usually their members don't bother me to much, its the statements and the papers/magazines that leave me scratching my head. Like, I'm sure, when the ISO members who were arrested, sitting in jail, heard that city hall had just been trashed, they cheered, but then they get out and the organization tells them they ought to be condemning it...

[Искра]

This makes organisations counter-revolutionary and not people. I mean, SWP used to be quite big party in UK and I they had probably a lot of decent revolutionary members, but their leadership was shit... because their politics is shit. After all Cliff suported US in Korean War. Shame that people with good class politics are atracted to such cults, but whatever... class struggle goes on with or without them.

[gorillafuck]

some people act as if the media would be supporting them if they didn't break any windows. they'll be demonized anyway.

[Welshy]

I'll respond to the other stuff later since I just woke up, but I'll respond to this first.


Woah, what the fuck did you just say?

As a veteran of the Oscar Grant movement and as someone who lives less than a mile from where he was killed, as someone who was there on move-in day, as someone whose good friend did 5 years in CA prisons, as someone who has had numerous comrades arrested and harassed by cops, I have no respect for someone who says something as unprincipled as this. Fuck you, just fuck you, you ignorant pimpled asshole if you think we want the police to beat and arrest us. We want this movement to grow and to make gains for the working class.

First off quit the activist dick measuring contest that seems to be quite frequent around here when someone gets pissed off. I know people who have a much longer more impressive list who belong to shit organizations. Secondly I didn't accuse you wanting to have us beat by police and such but I'm saying that based on the article that was posted one of its big arguments of is that these actions give the police an excuse to attack us. And when me Cthulhu and AMH disagreed with the ISO it became that we supported the actions that were the topic of this thread article. And if that were the case, according to the author of this article, we would be advocating something that would be asking for the police to attack us. So calm down.



We don't agree with consensus voting as the best method, we don't agree with a lot of things in the occupy movement, yet we are trying to help build it. We were at the building takeover and argued in the committees and sometimes lost and yet we still worked with it.

Good keep doing more of that, and less of race to see who can denounce the black bloc and vandals the quickest crap.




You have no credibility in my eyes after spouting this kind of ignorant shit and calling people on the revolutionary left supporters of cops. Political disagreement=slander everyone who disagrees. Fuckwit.

And you have no credibility in my eye if you are going to keep giving kneejerk responses like this.

[Renegade Saint]

The notion that the ISO is trying to recruit liberals is absurd. We're not. In fact we try to marginalize the liberals in groups like Occupy. The group we're interested in recruiting are those whose politics could best be classed as "undefined". They know something wrong with the system, they often don't bother to vote because it's waste of time, but they're not sure where to go from there. Many of those people will be turned off by things like flag-burning. Later in their political development they'll lose that prejudice, but they're not there yet.
The type of people who are working for Obama for America and show up to vote democrat every two years don't get any of our attention or recruitment efforts.
So please, stop the "the ISO recruits Liberals" slander.

[The Douche]

The notion that the ISO is trying to recruit liberals is absurd. We're not. In fact we try to marginalize the liberals in groups like Occupy. The group we're interested in recruiting are those whose politics could best be classed as "undefined". They know something wrong with the system, they often don't bother to vote because it's waste of time, but they're not sure where to go from there. Many of those people will be turned off by things like flag-burning. Later in their political development they'll lose that prejudice, but they're not there yet.
The type of people who are working for Obama for America and show up to vote democrat every two years don't get any of our attention or recruitment efforts.
So please, stop the "the ISO recruits Liberals" slander.

Dude, uh, all leftists groups who actively seek to increase their membership appeal to people with liberal ideas...

The ISO is not specific in this regard, but the language used in your campaigns makes it more apparent than some other groups. (like all the "yes we can" dick riding around Obama)

[Renegade Saint]

Dude, uh, all leftists groups who actively seek to increase their membership appeal to people with liberal ideas...

The ISO is not specific in this regard, but the language used in your campaigns makes it more apparent than some other groups. (like all the "yes we can" dick riding around Obama)
Someone early in their political development who has some "liberal ideas" (that they've absorbed from our political culture through osmosis) is not the same as an actual committed liberal (who are usually vehemently anti-socialist).
Obviously we're not limiting our outreach/recruitment efforts to people who are already Marxists.

Save the "dick-riding" comments for groups that actually did/do it, like DSA and CPUSA.

[Kassad]

The ISO panders to liberals every day. On campuses, they recruit people involved in social justice issues and slightly radicalize them enough to go out and sell the newspaper. That's why the revolving door recruitment is what the ISO is famous for. Also, they parroted the "yes we can" bullshit back in 2008, so I don't know what kind of revolutionary that was aimed at.

[The Douche]

Someone early in their political development who has some "liberal ideas" (that they've absorbed from our political culture through osmosis) is not the same as an actual committed liberal (who are usually vehemently anti-socialist).
Obviously we're not limiting our outreach/recruitment efforts to people who are already Marxists.

Save the "dick-riding" comments for groups that actually did/do it, like DSA and CPUSA.

Appeals to liberalism are not cool in my book, but then again, neither is recruitment, hell, neither are organizations, you're not gonna find common ground with me on those issues.

I didn't say the ISO endorsed Obama or other liberals (like CPUSA or DSA), I said they rode the Obama movement's dick, which, I think they did...

[gorillafuck]

a lot of the left back in 08/09 were influenced by Obamas rhetoric. I remember I went to some youth activist thing a while back in 2009 and there was a banner that said "YES WE CAN stop the wars etc."

[The Douche]

a lot of the left back in 08/09 were influenced by Obamas rhetoric. I remember I went to some youth activist thing a while back in 2009 and there was a banner that said "YES WE CAN stop the wars etc."

Yeah, that represents a blatant attempt to ride the coattails of the Obama movement and recruit liberals. "You like Obama, well, you'll love us!".

[Kassad]

Their contingent in DC a couple years back kept chanting "Hey, Obama, yes we can! US out of Afghanistan!" I flipped them off for it, but they deserved worse than that.

[Jimmie Higgins]

I don't understand the importance in condemning/supporting what was essentially a revenge action.This debate was already happening in the GAs here in Oakland after Jan 28th. We wanted to put our opinion on it out there. The problem with the debate was that on one side you had people moralizing about the "violence of the movement" and on the other, the people that wanted to defend militant action (which is good) the problem was that many were not actually saying that the event wasn't a success and that not only had the city managed to arrest 400 of us, but the also successfully won a propaganda campaign. The move-in committee rightfully condemned the police attack, but also said that this action made us more popular with people in Oakland - this is a disconnect from reality that will make the movement repeat mistakes mechanically and will cause it to ground into a halt.


City hall was broken into after the arrests, right? Wasn't it done sort of as a "fuck you" and as morale booster?Does it grow the movement. Are these tactics helpful? Or is it and individualist moral statement just the militant mirror image of pacifists who make a statement by allowing themselves to be arrested. Neither kind of tactics are principles and neither are always useful in a given situation.

What made Occupy Oakland sucessful, it wasn't the small actions, it was 10,000 shutting down the port. The police couldn't do shit and it made the city government fall into open and messy internal debate - what a nice switch. I want to see more of that and for it to go futher, but in order to do that we need to rebuild our base as occupy. That means showing in action that occupy is a valuable tool for Oaklanders to fight back against eviction, workplace abuses, gentrification, city give-aways to the rich, etc.

Then when we call for a general strike, all the neighborhoods where we save people from evictions, all the workplaces we supported on the picket line, immogrants will see a multi-national fight-back, blacks and latinos will see occupy as a place where muli-racial groups are fighting racism will be behind us and many will support us.

Right now, occupy is becoming insular. A radical core has formed and that is a fantastic development and what makes occupy more significant than recent protest movements. I'm glad that people want to go further and want to take more militant steps, this is a good atmosphere to be working in and the "mistakes" as I see them are sympathetic and understandable mistakes compared to people who want lobbying or support the Democrats etc. But in order for us to fulfill the potential of occupy and the potential for major militant actions, we also have to be more than the radical core and I think this is a mistake a lot of the militants in occupy are making right now. There's a potential repeat of many of the mistakes of the new left and there's no reason for that since we've seen what happened then when people thought that the revolutionaries themselves made the revolution.


And whats the ultimate issue the ISO is getting at with this article?Exactly what the subheading says, to talk about what we think the next steps for the movement are and what we think concerning this debate about tactics.
That burning flags and trashing things alienates liberals?Again, there are probably thousands of protests ISO members have been at where someone burns a flag. Flags are a non-issue, but an impotant act of vandalism in this case allowed the city to spin the whole event around this issue and makes it harder for us to make our case.

Why is the ISO always making these veiled attempts at recruitment of liberals? It often seems as though the ISO's primary goal, every time it does or says anything, is to recruit a few liberals into its organization.I wish people in this debate would stop offering their uninformed opinion as if it were fact. Recruitment of liberals - first, this is not about recruiting people for the sake of recruiting people, don't be a cynical ass. Sure we hope to win people to our politics and hopefully our organization too, but this is about winning people to an argument about what we think will help the movement.

It's very simple, what do you think will grow the occupy movement at this point? Threats for things we can't pull off or for things that amount to an induvidual gesture of frustration, or building a movement with roots in our communities, that can tie all these little class struggles together, and organize large numbers of people to take militant actions at the valves of capitalism. Is it base-building and a mass movement or is it small groups of vandals? Which is needed now and which should be encouraged?


The liberals have been at odds with the commune in Oakland from very early on. (which is not the impression I've gotten from other occupations) Just a little while ago the liberals split off and made their own occupation, for fucks sake. The commune is still going and they've (the libs) all gone home...The liberals who are won to pacifism or have their own thing are not the group I think we need to be organizing and trying to win back. I'm not talking about sort of self-counsious ideological liberals but about the thousands of people who came to the port shut down and other events as well as the tens-of thousands if not more that more passively support the aims and militancy of the movement and could be drawn in (specifically people in working class black, Chicano, and asian neighborhoods here in oakland and other cities).

[Jimmie Higgins]

First off quit the activist dick measuring contest that seems to be quite frequent around here when someone gets pissed off. I know people who have a much longer more impressive list who belong to shit organizations.Not my point. My point was not what I've been involved in in general, the point is that what you said :confused:was personally insulting and you can't get away with slimy shit like implying that we'd might the cops on activists - twice you did this in this thread - and not expect to be called on that shit.


Secondly I didn't accuse you wanting to have us beat by police and such but I'm saying that based on the article that was posted one of its big arguments of is that these actions give the police an excuse to attack us.Read the article. It says that the city USED this to retroactively justify the violence. We're not saying it's their fault in fact we EXPLICITLY make the case that this action happened AFTER the mass-arrest and it was and EXCUSE.


And when me Cthulhu and AMH disagreed with the ISO it became that we supported the actions that were the topic of this thread article. And if that were the case, according to the author of this article, we would be advocating something that would be asking for the police to attack us. So calm down.Do you support the actions? I was asking because Cthulhu and AMH don't and yet they're criticizing the ISO for stating something that they essentially agree with - that's a different debate then compared to debating someone who supports these actions as a way to move things forward in the movement. That debate I want to have and I think would be useful.

Look if people come at this politically I will return that in kind, if people want to make all these inferred claims or sloppy generalizations and annedotes and staw-men, then it's going to more frustrating for me and a less useful debate. Those kinds of things in a thread tell me that the question of this or that political issue isn't the point for the critics, they just don't like our organization or its general politics and the political debate is just an excuse to bash us and call us a "trollocracy" and whatnot.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Jimmie, I think this would be happening whether or not some screwball burned a flag.Of course, but it we would have stood a better chance of countering these attempts if the city's propaganda war hadn't made some inroads with working class people and the rank and file of those unions.


After Obama's SOTU speech last month, Trumka sent out a statement declaring "the era of the 1 percent is over" -- and, by implication, so was the #Occupy movement. Since then, both AFL-CIO and CTW unions have been pulling their officials and staffers out of local #Occupy groups across the country, apparently redirecting their resources back to electoral activity. Yes! This is why occupy is such a huge potential counter-weight to those efforts. If we can build relationships with the rank and file, if we force resolutions of support, it's easier to draw the distinction between fighting the 1% through class-based militant protests and an always failed strategy of supporting the Democrats. We can always stand on the outside and criticize the union officials and make speeches about how rank and file action, not negotiation are going to actually help people win, but occupy represents a chance to actually organize the people who agree with us inside the unions and then provide a clear counter-posed example to these lobbying efforts.


(We covered this in our radio show earlier today.) The local unions in Oakland (and the SF Bay Area in general) may be using this flag burning and broken glass as a flimsy excuse, but that's all it is. Of course, the problem is that it's working and occupy has to reassess what kinds of actions and what kinds of things will shift momentum back to us and make it harder for union officials to write off the movement. Impotent threats and individual actions will not get this accomplished and so I think it's important to make that argument.


The orders have come down from on-high: #Occupy is over, Obama is the candidate of the 99 percent, get people to the polls in November. One way or another, you should expect support from union officials to dry up.This is a pretty deterministic way of looking at things because it dosn't take into account what rank and file workers can do to impact things; worker's aren't just passive robots for the unions they can actually impact the union and struggle against their leaderships and many of the more radical occupy's in the US can potentially play a big part in organizing rank and file militants and organizing general working class struggles which could at the very least pose a concrete counter-example to business-unionism if not eventually help organize rank and file militants to challenge the undemocratic or collaborationist policies of their unions.

[Martin Blank]

Of course, but we would have stood a better chance of countering these attempts if the city's propaganda war hadn't made some inroads with working class people and the rank and file of those unions.

Any bourgeois or petty-bourgeois propaganda is bound to make inroads with some sections of the working class, especially the more conservative and socially-backward elements. It happens. My question to you is about how you're countering their propaganda blitz. Specifically, how are you refuting their assertions and educating about the facts? There are ways to level that playing field.


Yes! This is why occupy is such a huge potential counter-weight to those efforts. If we can build relationships with the rank and file, if we force resolutions of support, it's easier to draw the distinction between fighting the 1% through class-based militant protests and an always failed strategy of supporting the Democrats. We can always stand on the outside and criticize the union officials and make speeches about how rank and file action, not negotiation are going to actually help people win, but occupy represents a chance to actually organize the people who agree with us inside the unions and then provide a clear counter-posed example to these lobbying efforts.

OK, I want you to stop right there. Take a step back and look at the dichotomy you've drawn for yourself. You have afforded yourself only two options: 1) try to draw the union officials back to your side, or 2) "stand on the outside and criticize the union officials". Remember when I said before that you need to think outside the box? This is one of the boxes I'm talking about. There are more options and alternatives than you afford yourself here. They may be "non-traditional" options, but this is a "non-traditional" situation.

You tell me that "occupy is such a huge potential counter-weight" to the efforts of the union officials. I agree, but not necessarily in the way you think. The content of #Occupy does represent a "huge potential counter-weight" to the stale and weak-willed offerings of the union officials, but not in the form in which you're presenting it. Different material conditions demand different forms and organs of struggle. In this case, the "potential counter-weight" emerges as workplace-based #Occupy groups.

I have no doubt that #OO has a large number of contacts from the various local unions and workplaces in the area. Those contacts could be organized into their own workplace-based #Occupy organizations, responsible for increasing contacts within those workplaces and unions, educating about #Occupy and organizing solidarity. This would result in #Occupy operating on the same ground as the union officials, capable of countering their propaganda and presenting an alternative pole of attraction at that workplace. No longer would it be a matter of #Occupy being "on the outside" or "on the sidelines". With workplace #Occupy groups, composed of those who work there, the movement begins to take root and, more important, begins to transform into a more class-based movement. This, in turn, begins to help clarify answers to the questions and concerns you raise below:


Of course, the problem is that it's working and occupy has to reassess what kinds of actions and what kinds of things will shift momentum back to us and make it harder for union officials to write off the movement. Impotent threats and individual actions will not get this accomplished and so I think it's important to make that argument.

Fair enough, but your choices are not tail or be tailed.


This is a pretty deterministic way of looking at things because it dosn't take into account what rank and file workers can do to impact things; worker's aren't just passive robots for the unions they can actually impact the union and struggle against their leaderships and many of the more radical occupy's in the US can potentially play a big part in organizing rank and file militants and organizing general working class struggles which could at the very least pose a concrete counter-example to business-unionism if not eventually help organize rank and file militants to challenge the undemocratic or collaborationist policies of their unions.

I admit I have no confidence in union officials and staffers doing anything they haven't already decided to do. That's a criticism I can willingly accept. But that doesn't mean I just sit back and wait for the inevitable. I have no confidence in union officials and do not rely on them, therefore I concentrate my efforts on the members themselves and helping to empower them to make the decisions and take the actions necessary to neutralize the officials. Workplace-based #Occupy groups (the "#[email protected]" concept) are the most effective and empowering way I can see for doing exactly what you and I want to see happen.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Any bourgeois or petty-bourgeois propaganda is bound to make inroads with some sections of the working class, especially the more conservative and socially-backward elements. It happens. My question to you is about how you're countering their propaganda blitz. Specifically, how are you refuting their assertions and educating about the facts? There are ways to level that playing field. I'm not talking about people who wouldn't actively support us anyway, I'm talking about a movement that locally brought out 2,000 people for a FTP march, 2,000 to GAs a couple of months ago now barely managing 2,000 people to take over a major building in Oakland. If we want to take over buildings and challenge property rights we have to build the base of this movement and win many of these people back. Let's talk facts of the movement here: participation has declined, public support has declined, and unless there is a change of course and a refocus on base-building, the radical core of marxists, anarchists, and other radicals, will be generals without an army in quick order rather than part of a large movement bringing militant actions back to the scene.

We counter this city media-propaganda through building actions that will bring more people in and demonstrate the Occupy Oakland or similar militant grassroots organizing are the more viable and effective vehicle for taking on the "1%" and defending the interests of workers, not negotiations with the bosses or voting Democrat.


OK, I want you to stop right there. Take a step back and look at the dichotomy you've drawn for yourself. You have afforded yourself only two options: 1) try to draw the union officials back to your side, or 2) "stand on the outside and criticize the union officials". Remember when I said before that you need to think outside the box? This is one of the boxes I'm talking about. There are more options and alternatives than you afford yourself here. They may be "non-traditional" options, but this is a "non-traditional" situation.This dichotomy is a fiction of your head. I didn't say "win union leaders" where did I say that? I said win rank and file who can pressure the unions into passing resolutions which will give some official cover and make it easier for us to organize and bring out more workers. The few union leaders who are willing to support militant actions without being pressured, fine we should use any advantage we can squeeze from them. Being able to organize pro-occupy pro-militant rank and file members will then in the near future allow us to actually bring up a much more meaningful challenge to the union's ubiquitous support for the Democrats.


You tell me that "occupy is such a huge potential counter-weight" to the efforts of the union officials. I agree, but not necessarily in the way you think. The content of #Occupy does represent a "huge potential counter-weight" to the stale and weak-willed offerings of the union officials, but not in the form in which you're presenting it. Different material conditions demand different forms and organs of struggle. In this case, the "potential counter-weight" emerges as workplace-based #Occupy groups.

I have no doubt that #OO has a large number of contacts from the various local unions and workplaces in the area. Those contacts could be organized into their own workplace-based #Occupy organizations, responsible for increasing contacts within those workplaces and unions, educating about #Occupy and organizing solidarity. This would result in #Occupy operating on the same ground as the union officials, capable of countering their propaganda and presenting an alternative pole of attraction at that workplace. No longer would it be a matter of #Occupy being "on the outside" or "on the sidelines". With workplace #Occupy groups, composed of those who work there, the movement begins to take root and, more important, begins to transform into a more class-based movement. This, in turn, begins to help clarify answers to the questions and concerns you raise below:



Fair enough, but your choices are not tail or be tailed.



I admit I have no confidence in union officials and staffers doing anything they haven't already decided to do. That's a criticism I can willingly accept. But that doesn't mean I just sit back and wait for the inevitable. I have no confidence in union officials and do not rely on them, therefore I concentrate my efforts on the members themselves and helping to empower them to make the decisions and take the actions necessary to neutralize the officials. Workplace-based #Occupy groups (the "#[email protected]" concept) are the most effective and empowering way I can see for doing exactly what you and I want to see happen.ISO members founded the Labor Solidarity Group (with allies, but it was our member who brought them together and has been leading that group). It's a sharktank of a coalition, but when it works well that's what it's doing, meeting with groups of workers, trying to organize the rank and file. This will help us rebuild our base, but it's a mistake at this sage to think that also getting resolutions passed against the normal inclinations and politics of the labor leaders has a huge effect and will help energize people to WANT to work with occupy Oakland. The rank and file workers who do organize in occupy Oakland are scattered throughout various unions - maybe there are cases where they have a small core of coworkers around them, but really think about it, if we can't get 2,000 people out to a demonstration, would occupy at work based out of workplaces be able to get off the ground? If we build those basis and rebuild the trust we had, then I do think things like that would be possible, but not presently. SO again, on there's a good propagandistic call, then there's actually trying to figure out how to get to the next place from the conditions and circumstances facing the movement right now.

[Martin Blank]

Jimmie, I'm going to need a day to respond. I'm too jammed up with other work right now to give your reply the proper attention.

[A Marxist Historian]

I don't really understand what the point of preserving the general strike's "good name" is, personally. The ISO makes it sound like there will be the opportunity for "the real thing" sometime in the unspecified future, but it will be sabotaged by the fact that people will remember back in 2012 that there was some silly march which was called a general strike and won't participate. That seems kind of ridiculous. Either a mass work stoppage happens or it doesn't, who cares what it's called.

Often times the conditions for such events take place over a course of days and weeks, not years. Such was the case recently in Wisconsin, although we all know what happened there. Such was the case in many other dramatic mass strikes. The bottom line is that the period of time we're living through doesn't present itself too often, both when we look at the international situation, and the national situation, particularly the NATO/G8 summit during May and the small signs that the American economy may be improving a bit.

In Wisconsin last spring, you had the conditions for a general strike. Workers in Wisconsin were up for it. But the union bureaucrats, lefties by the way, who they trusted diverted the whole thing into the recalls. And the ISO, who had a fair amount of folk in the movement there, went along with that too.

But this Mayday thing is another matter. Who knows, maybe on May 1 workers will be in a general strike mood, anything is possible. But that seems awful unlikely, so I am afraid that this will be a flop.

You can't suck a general strike out of your thumb just because you want one. They have to come organically out of the class struggle.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

A Marxist Historian, you claim that protesters brought and were waving US flags and one was burned... no, the flag was from inside the city hall lobby - the issue is not buring a flag and I've been to tons of demonstrations where people bring flags and burn them, I even had a 4th of July party where that was the theme. If you don't even know the details of what you are talking about, I don't think your arguments can hold much water. The issue was not burning a flag in the abstract, it's that a small group of people committed an individual act of vandalism that is helping the city to drive a wedge into the movement - and is doing so successfully when you consider how union leaders are using this as an excuse to try and revoke the support resolutions that rank and filers forced through after Scott Olsen was shot. We want to argue for tactics that will help us win, help us successfully occupy a building, and successfully expand occupy oakland beyond the existing radical core. This core is great and the desire to have a general strike and shut down the mechanisms of capitalism and the desire to neutralize the police are all great, but the existing radical core is not able to do things as they are, we need to build and unlike in the past there are now much broader layers of people willing to take militant action.

I don't recall making any claim that the protesters were burning their own flags instead of Mayor Quan's, seems to me you're reading that into my posting. I don't see how that makes any difference whose flags they were.

This is not like destroying the property of some innocent bystander, nobody is less innocent that Quan and the other inhabitants of City Hall.

Was it tactically wise? Nah, seems like it wasn't. But that's not the issue.

The issue is why Socialist Worker is stabbing the people who did this in the back, while the police are tracking them down? It's the ISO driving a wedge into the movement here.

It's the cops who are the vandals, not the Oakland OWS people who busted into City Hall. They're the ones treating the US Constitution like toilet paper.


I don't think our numbers were only 2,000 that day because people in Oakland don't want us to take on foreclosures and homelesness and the greed of the city and the banks - they don't trust that we can pull it off anymore, they don't trust that if we can't pull it off that the whole march won't turn into a kamikaze clash with the cops.

We need to rebuild our bases, reconnect the movement with the large percentages of people that supported us after Scott Olsen was shot.

This is the way forward as I see it, whereas small random acts or just repeating the same tactics over and over like a militant echo of the moralistic nonviolent anti-war marches.

My comrades got arrested I had comrades who were on the tactical committee for the building occupation. After the first building occupation attempt we argued that a successful attempt would have to be backed by a large force like when we shut down the ports. Done successfully this would help rebuild our movement and show that we can untie around a specific target and get things done. Fighting in a coalition and trying to argue what we see as the best way forward for the movement is EXACTLY WHY WE WROTE THIS article. Eyeheartlenin, were you there at the attempted building occupation? I was, I helped formulate the article in question and I stand behind it 100% as well as the piece by the same author that he wrote the night of the building occupation:

This second article was in response to the specific arguments and debates that happened in the movement after Jan 28. This article, in no fair reading of it, sides with the city or the pacifist liberals. It condemns the city in fact and argues that idol threats and individual acts of vandalism help the city in its PR war against the movement.

No, it doesn't "side" with the city or even the pacifists as such, but with police violence raining down on OWS, it basically says, leave us alone, cops, we're not vandals, we're not irresponsible, and as for those folks who are, well, that's between you and them, leave us out, we wash our hands of them.

With an out clause or two buried deep, deep in the article, about how the ISO really does want all the prisoners freed, etc. I'm sure I'm not the only one who didn't even notice it till it was pointed out. Whoever got that in there (perhaps you, judging from your description of the editing process) deserves some credit for that, but it really doesn't matter in terms of the overall impact of the article.

I think that's disgusting, and so do a lot of other people here, and not just the Black Bloc advocates.

-M.H.-

[Danielle Ni Dhighe]

If we have to tone things down to peaceful liberalism just so we won't alienate some people, then what's the point?

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

If there were any legitimate revolutionaries in the ISO they'd call a national conference to dissolve their organization, for the good of the proletariat and all humankind.

[Welshy]

Not my point. My point was not what I've been involved in in general, the point is that what you said :confused:was personally insulting and you can't get away with slimy shit like implying that we'd might the cops on activists - twice you did this in this thread - and not expect to be called on that shit.

Once again in the post you responded I never said you would call the cops on the other protesters I said that based on the logic in the article and how you were arguing it sounded like anyone who disagreed with you and the ISO wanted to give the cops excuses to beat the protesters. This is different from me saying that the ISO would call the cops on other protesters.



Read the article. It says that the city USED this to retroactively justify the violence. We're not saying it's their fault in fact we EXPLICITLY make the case that this action happened AFTER the mass-arrest and it was and EXCUSE.

And the article talked about a future action that will involve the airport and about how that would give the police an excuse to use repress protesters and the media an excuse to slander them. Now we both know that the police and media have needed excuses like that in past to do this, so all you (the ISO) are doing in this argument is just parroting the peace police argument against these actions instead of keeping to talk about build up to the point where we could effective occupy the airport.



Do you support the actions? I was asking because Cthulhu and AMH don't and yet they're criticizing the ISO for stating something that they essentially agree with - that's a different debate then compared to debating someone who supports these actions as a way to move things forward in the movement. That debate I want to have and I think would be useful.

I don't support the actions per se and if I were organizing actions these wouldn't be the ones I would choose. However I don't cry over a flag being burnt or some acts of vandalism. My issue is with how the ISO chose to address these actions. They spent more time moralizing on the issue of vandalism and repeating the arguments of the pacifists than they did on how to build forward in a way that would produce larger and more militant actions. I'm sorry if I wasn't being clear enough about that.

Also I will apologize for my tone as I had already admitted in a previous post that my frustrations with what was going on with the KKE was leaching into my posting.

[Binh]

"During the attempt to take over the Kaiser Convention Center, a group within the march deployed homemade shields for an advance on police lines. This confrontational tactic was not only doomed to fail, but it put the rest of the crowd at greater risk of arrest or violence." http://socialistworker.org/2012/02/15/building-a-stronger-occupy

What I don't get about this is how anyone can blame people carring shields for the police response. It makes me wonder how they'd react to Panthers tailing cops with guns and lawbooks in hand as they did in the 60s.

[The Douche]

Its totally illogical. Did the ISO think the convention center could be taken without confrontation?

Whats wrong with using things to protect ourselves from injury at the hands of the police?

[bcbm]

we must become human shields and use our moral upstanding and concussions to defeat the police

[andrewsplane]

The Socialist Worker article is not blaming protesters for the police response-- Bihn's obsessive sectarianism towards the ISO is again distorting his interpretation of a very simple argument.

The argument is a tactical one. A small number of people marching at the cops with toy shields, holding "Fuck the Police" marches, and parading around in black blocs are all tactics that serve to narrow the movement to a radical middle-class fringe, rather than build it up into a mass force that can actually have an impact.

As a reader of Peter Camejo, Bihn (and others) should re-read his classic essay on ultra-leftism. It discusses how ultralefts, lacking a radical organization of their own, perpetually use such "radical" tactics to try to artificially turn mass movements into the radical organization they're unable to build. This is what some "insurrectionary anarchists" and others are trying to do to the Occupy movement. If they succeed they will drive away the working class participation we need.

Socialist Worker is completely right to challenge this ultra-left adventurism, and all serious revolutionaries should do the same.

[Jimmie Higgins]

we must become human shields and use our moral upstanding and concussions to defeat the police No, we must out-organize. Like pacifists, it was the people with shields in this case who were mistaking moarlism for politics. Do you really think 50 people with shilds could successfully take the building against, what, 12-14 police departments who have much better coordination, intel, and tactics that a group with garbage-can shields? I don't think the people with the shields actually thought this, I think when the plan didn't workout they decided to confront the cops anyway, a moralistic gesture. If some did think that they could still take the building at that point, then they are just overconfident which is easier to be sympathetic to, but it still means that the decision was a tactical error.


Its totally illogical. Did the ISO think the convention center could be taken without confrontation?

Whats wrong with using things to protect ourselves from injury at the hands of the police?No, but did you think that 1500 people could take and then successfully hold a building already surrounded by a huge police presence. From what was publicly organized for the event, the idea was that the location would be secret (already a problem with the organizing since you yourself told me someone texted you the location beforehand) and it would take a mass mobilization to hold it once an advance team had opened it up. Also it was said that there would be multiple possible locations in case the police caught wind of one. That was my understanding of the plan, but when we got there and the cops had it surrounded and apparently "plan B" was just to try the back entrance of the same building. At that point the organizers should have called for a GA and if they wanted to confront the police who were already set up blocking all entrances, then they could have tried to win people to supporting this new thing and at least then it wouldn't have been 50 people courageously, but futilely, holding shields and trying to take the place. My feeling is that we would have had a GA and what would have won out was to try some other plan or to try again. Personally if I had it to do over again, I would have tried to do a Mic Check or something to get a GA started, but without a clear contingency plan, without some kind of point person for the March who could have tried to let people know what was going on, it was just chaotic and everyone was standing around asking, "Do you know what is going on?".

Workers won't take over society without a confrontation, but that doesn't mean that you can walk into your workplace and try and take it over tomorrow. There were a million people occupying the plaza in Egypt (as well as nation-wide support and concurrent strikes and protests) and they succeeded in only removing a figure-head. But people in the US think that 1500-2000 people can challenge the whole concept of property rights in the US-fucking-A?! No, I think if we had had 5,000 people and the police hadn't already surrounded the building, we could have surrounded and taken the building probably until nightfall or as soon as our numbers began to dwindle again. If we had 10,000 we probably could have walked right in there police or not and then we could also set up a support protest outside and maintain it and be able to keep the police from just starving the occupiers out. We can't pull these kinds of numbers, the kinds of numbers it took to shut down the port right now, so if we want to actually move forward, we have to go back and rebuild some.

We supported this action and I think the plan as it was originally told to me sounded like a solid attempt to build this action successfully. But when we got to the convention center with low numbers and the cops already had the place surrounded and so at that point it's time to regroup and do something else. Now the movement in Oakland as a whole, IMO, should be trying to regroup and rebuild support so that we can have mass marches in numbers too large for the police to stop these kinds of actions.

[Jimmie Higgins]

We can't out-tactic the police on the streets, that's playing the game they've been trained for and in fact why the police exist in the first place. But with numbers and organization and confidence we can effectively neutralize them and push them aside. When longshoremen supported a anti-war picket of a couple hundred to maybe over 1000 at the port, the police shot people and arrested them. When 10,000 shut down the port last year, the police sat on the margins because they knew they couldn't do anything. The police have only been able to repress this movement when we've done small actions or when our numbers have dropped. Mass militant action means that we can do what we want and then if the police confront us, we might successfully be able to push them back like in Tahrir.

[Os Cangaceiros]

But who cares? You said yourself that it only accomplished the removal of a figurehead in Egypt.


There were a million people occupying the plaza in Egypt (as well as nation-wide support and concurrent strikes and protests) and they succeeded in only removing a figure-head.

Sounds more and more like the analysis of the dreaded "insurrectionary anarchists". :rolleyes:

[Os Cangaceiros]

I mean, I don't think that the "insurrectionary anarchists" can accomplish anything either, but at least they made a conscious effort to try and understand why things have gone so wrong in the revolutionary movement for so long, rather than recycle the same stale discourse that suddenly portends relevance whenever the first signs of revolt roll around, which of course have nothing to do with ISO or any other denizen of the leftist ghetto. In fact it often comes in direct opposition to the ostensible left-wing, ie the two-pronged insurrection in Egypt, one against the government, the other against Egypt's old trade union structure.

[Rocky Rococo]

I don't know why MayDay has to be a General Strike or anything other than MayDay, Workers' Day, with parades and marches and rallies and pickets and cultural events, in other words what Mayday has always been everywhere in the world except the US, and has been in some places in the US for some stretches of time (e.g., my great-grandfather was on the organizing committee for the Chicago Mayday parade for over 40 years.) Making it a holiday of our own, one not dictated by church or state, but the people's own holiday, isn't that bigger in some ways than any "general strike"? And by not handing the media and the bourgeoisie a measuring stick they can use to belittle us, it strips them of their ability to define us down.

[andrewsplane]

Explosive, what do insurrectionary anarchists have to show for their effort to understand what has gone wrong? If you are talking about "communization theory," it is a silly collection of cliches. It is bad bourgeois sociology dressed up as radical theory; old, pessimistic generalizations about the death of the working class and the left deduced from the neoliberal offensive of the last 3-plus decades. Fashionable rubbish.

Here's a good review of "The Coming Insurrection," a very silly pamphlet:
http://www.isreview.org/issues/73/featrev-cominginsurrection.shtml

And sorry to disappoint you but we on the radical left are all still part of the "leftist ghetto" of which you speak, whether you belong to a revolutionary socialist network or self-identify as a "hipster communist." This is not because some organization or set of individuals have had a "stale discourse" that needed editing. It is because capital worldwide was able to restructure after the crisis of the 70s and re-impose its priorities, crushing, co-opting and disorganizing the left. The left is tiny and fractured in 99% of the world, not just in the US.

The funny thing is that as class struggle finally begins to pick up internationally, the revolutionary organizations you are so contemptuous of have a way of stepping in, building their ranks, and playing a modest but serious role. The Revolutionary Socialists in Egypt-- an organizational fraternal with the ISO and SWP-UK-- is doing so in Egypt today. The far left in Greece is rapidly growing. As class struggle intensifies, the far left has the chance for the first time in a generation to grow dramatically.

If you have an alternative magical solution to building revolutionary organizations, please tell. But if you prattle on about "stale discourses" again you are going to lose your seat at the dinner table.

[The Douche]

Jimmie, your whole argument boils down to the number game, just like every other critique the ISO has made regarding Oakland. Could 1500 people take the civic center? I dunno, maybe, maybe if they all had shields, and all of them were willing to commit to it.

What good would calling a GA do? I think that would be a huge tactical mistake, you can't call a GA, with 1500 fucking people, right in the middle of an action, while surrounded by the police. If the police were allready prepared and planning to do a mass arrest, what do you think would have happened if everybody stopped marching, sat down, and started having a GA?

The ISO's strategy of "keep accepting defeat until we reach a critical mass of people" is idiotic. How will we reach a critical mass of people if we 1) never win any battles 2) never even attempt to fight any battles?



Andrewsplane:

First off, don't flame bait;


parading around in black blocs are all tactics that serve to narrow the movement to a radical middle-class fringe

And its a super weak attempt, because everybody knows it was the acts of confrontation and property destruction that drove the middle-class liberals away from occupy oakland.


And sorry to disappoint you but we on the radical left are all still part of the "leftist ghetto" of which you speak, whether you belong to a revolutionary socialist network or self-identify as a "hipster communist." This is not because some organization or set of individuals have had a "stale discourse" that needed editing. It is because capital worldwide was able to restructure after the crisis of the 70s and re-impose its priorities, crushing, co-opting and disorganizing the left. The left is tiny and fractured in 99% of the world, not just in the US.


No, we are not all part of the ghetto you speak of. I would rather do literally nothing, than participate in the organizations of recuperation and mediation that constitute the left. And that is exactly what I do. Sometimes I may get involved in some shit that has some relation to anarchy or communism, but I do them out of a necessity, not under the guise of building for revolution.

And no, the left is not a ghetto because capital crushed it, it is a ghetto because capital absorbed it, thats why all around the world the communist parties, socialist parties, and unions function as a steam vent to prevent revolution. Thats why your fucking party, 2 years ago, was campaigning against occupations as a tactic, and against the slogan "occupy everything", which has now been raised by a surprising ammount of people.


The funny thing is that as class struggle finally begins to pick up internationally, the revolutionary organizations you are so contemptuous of have a way of stepping in, building their ranks, and playing a modest but serious role. The Revolutionary Socialists in Egypt-- an organizational fraternal with the ISO and SWP-UK-- is doing so in Egypt today. The far left in Greece is rapidly growing. As class struggle intensifies, the far left has the chance for the first time in a generation to grow dramatically.

If those organizations are your examples of success, the revolutionary socialists in Egypt, and the KKE in Greece. Then all I can say is "hahaha".

[andrewsplane]

Could 1500 people take the civic center? I dunno, maybe, maybe if they all had shields, and all of them were willing to commit to it.

Yes, if only they all had shields. Then the action would have succeeded. Perhaps OO should hire you as tactical consultant, CMoney.


The ISO's strategy of "keep accepting defeat until we reach a critical mass of people" is idiotic.

Occupy is engaged in a small but growing number of eviction defenses, direct actions, and strikes, and the ISO is involved in these across the country, sometimes playing a leadership role. It is through these struggles that a "critical mass" is being built. Perhaps if you overcome your shield fetish and sectarian posturing, you could make better sense of reality? But given the following, I'm not holding my breath:


I would rather do literally nothing, than participate in the organizations of recuperation and mediation that constitute the left. And that is exactly what I do. Sometimes I may get involved in some shit that has some relation to anarchy or communism, but I do them out of a necessity, not under the guise of building for revolution.

Ok, so you don't give a shit. And you don't really do shit. And the revolution is not a "necessity." Ok. So why on earth should anyone take anything you write seriously?


And no, the left is not a ghetto because capital crushed it, it is a ghetto because capital absorbed it, thats why all around the world the communist parties, socialist parties, and unions function as a steam vent to prevent revolution.

Everyone is a sell-out but you, CMoney, aren't they? You are the last revolutionary standing. Except you "do literally nothing." Nevermind. The revolution is not a "necessity."


If those organizations are your examples of success, the revolutionary socialists in Egypt, and the KKE in Greece. Then all I can say is "hahaha".

I said nothing about the Stalinist KKE, so I'm afraid the "hahaha" is on you. But anyone who carefully investigates, rather than projects their obsessive sectarianism, can easily find out that inside ANTARSYA, inside SYRIZA, and inside the RS in Egypt are thousands of individuals who are putting everything on the line to smash capitalism-- including their lives. And from what I gather they have little tolerance for nihilistic nitwits.

[Ocean Seal]

Oof. Don't have a general strike cause it won't shut down the economy? How does the ISO propose that we build a movement, and reintroduce the strike as a weapon if we don't conduct them until millions support it?

We're fighting and learning, and I don't understand the alternative of the ISO.
I have to say that the anarchists actually have reasonable positions whereas Leninists seem to be fail to understand how a movement really needs to be built.

Has Leninism become useless?

[The Douche]

Yes, if only they all had shields. Then the action would have succeeded. Perhaps OO should hire you as tactical consultant, CMoney.


I've seen 300 people break police lines. I find it pretty easy to believe that 1500 could, if they had the necessary supplies and the will to do it.

Obviously that was not the case. Which is neither here nor there, the issue is you and your organization's condemnation of anybody who tries anything.


Occupy is engaged in a small but growing number of eviction defenses, direct actions, and strikes, and the ISO is involved in these across the country, sometimes playing a leadership role. It is through these struggles that a "critical mass" is being built.

Actually the ISO opposes the general strike, but is reluctantly participating. I challenge you to present situations where the ISO is playing a positive role as leadership in any struggles.


Ok, so you don't give a shit. And you don't really do shit. And the revolution is not a "necessity." Ok. So why on earth should anyone take anything you write seriously?

Our conception of revolution is totally different, as are our conceptions of how to get there. But one thing is certain, neither my actions, nor your actions, can cause revolution. And you're a fucking moron with no reading comprehension. I said sometimes I get involved with things that could belong in the activist ghetto that you revel in, but I do them because they are necessary for me, as a working person in capitalism (so revolution is also, obviously, necessary). I refuse to do the things which groups like the ISO find so important, namely, building up membership in organizations. That is and always has been the ISO's primary goal in whatever they engage in, which causes them to do really stupid fucking work, with really shitty company.

I spent way to many years doing what the party I was in wanted me to do, because it was boring but necessary work or whatever. Which essentially boiled down to being footsoldiers for liberals. Fuck that, its a waste of time. It is better to do nothing than to dig our own fucking graves.


Everyone is a sell-out but you, CMoney, aren't they?

Nope, just you an all the other role players stuck in the first half of the 1900s.


housands of individuals who are putting everything on the line to smash capitalism-- including their lives.

"Thousands" is a pretty small number in the grand scheme of things, buddy. So you'll have to excuse me if I don't swell with hope at your suggestion that revolution lead by trotskyists is right around the corner. Especially if their organizations are anything like the ISO.

[andrewsplane]

Redbrother, do you believe there will be a general strike of some type anywhere in the US on that day, or anything resembling a general strike?

If so, please explain what conditions exist for such a strike that many of us deeply involved in Occupy don't see.

If you agree with me that nothing resembling a general strike is likely to take place on May 1 2012, do you not see any pitfalls in propagandizing for an action which will not resemble what it purports to be, that will likely not even come close?

Do you see no negative consequence for the movement's internal morale or public credibility in separating words from deeds so dramatically? Some questions to consider.

[Olentzero]

Strikes aren't something "we" conduct. (I'm not sure who cmoney means by "we", but it appears to mean a small radical organization or group in this context.) If strikes are nothing more than actions called by groups with no real roots within even organized labor - let alone the entire working class - they're doomed to be small and invariably fail. Working people aren't going to draw any positive conclusions about strikes from that kind of thing, and the goal of millions supporting strikes will remain an unattainable pipe dream. Successful strikes come from within the working class - take Flint 1937, for example, or Minneapolis 1934 - and involve the larger community because they are convinced by experience that there is no other way.

Strikes are a weapon, and should be used, but that doesn't mean it has to be used no matter the situation. Used wrongly or indiscriminately, it can damage your own cause more than promote it. It's kind of like using a gun to deal with a fly buzzing around your friend's head. Which one is the bullet more likely to hit?

[andrewsplane]

Our conception of revolution is totally different, as are our conceptions of how to get there.

And what "conception of revolution" would that be, Comrade Cmoney? Apparently its mode of argumentation involves dropping the f-bomb frequently.

Please enlighten your readers.

[The Douche]

Strikes aren't something "we" conduct. (I'm not sure who cmoney means by "we", but it appears to mean a small radical organization or group in this context.) If strikes are nothing more than actions called by groups with no real roots within even organized labor - let alone the entire working class - they're doomed to be small and invariably fail. Working people aren't going to draw any positive conclusions about strikes from that kind of thing, and the goal of millions supporting strikes will remain an unattainable pipe dream. Successful strikes come from within the working class - take Flint 1937, for example, or Minneapolis 1934 - and involve the larger community because they are convinced by experience that there is no other way.

Strikes are a weapon, and should be used, but that doesn't mean it has to be used no matter the situation. Used wrongly or indiscriminately, it can damage your own cause more than promote it. It's kind of like using a gun to deal with a fly buzzing around your friend's head. Which one is the bullet more likely to hit?



Is there something in the water that suddenly made trots on revleft loose their reading comprehension skills?

Did you really accuse me of being a substitionist? You're the one in a goddamn "vanguard" party, pal...


Your suggestion that occupy is not part of the working class, and has no connections to it so fucking wrong. I think the goal here is reintroduce the strike as a weapon. You need to understand, political strikes are illegal in this country, and so are solidarity strikes. The goal is to bring to the table, the idea of the strike as a weapon and the general strike as a concept. The ISO of course, would prefer a "day of action", and not a strike, which won't do jack shit for anything. It will perpetuate the same thing the left has always been doing, and that sort of language and those calls are the ones what are actually distanced from the working class.

And finally, fuck organized labor, it is a minority in this country, and always will be. The unions are a roadblock on the path to revolution, not the fucking express train.

[bcbm]

No, we must out-organize.

so do it. the black bloc has nothing to do with you or your group organizing. literally nothing. if a few angry people in black are enough to do the serious damage to the movement as it is continuously being presented, then the movement had no chance of success anyway because real police repression would crumple it like a piece of paper.


Do you really think 50 people with shilds could successfully take the building against, what, 12-14 police departments who have much better coordination, intel, and tactics that a group with garbage-can shields?

no


I don't think the people with the shields actually thought this, I think when the plan didn't workout they decided to confront the cops anyway, a moralistic gesture.

as i understood it the police attacked first.



what do insurrectionary anarchists have to show for their effort to understand what has gone wrong?

some newspaper boxes in the street and broken windows but, then, thats really all they are asking for. they're not trying to build ranks.


The funny thing is that as class struggle finally begins to pick up internationally, the revolutionary organizations you are so contemptuous of have a way of stepping in, building their ranks, and playing a modest but serious role. The Revolutionary Socialists in Egypt-- an organizational fraternal with the ISO and SWP-UK-- is doing so in Egypt today. The far left in Greece is rapidly growing. As class struggle intensifies, the far left has the chance for the first time in a generation to grow dramatically.

but grow to what?

[Os Cangaceiros]

Explosive, what do insurrectionary anarchists have to show for their effort to understand what has gone wrong? If you are talking about "communization theory," it is a silly collection of cliches. It is bad bourgeois sociology dressed up as radical theory; old, pessimistic generalizations about the death of the working class and the left deduced from the neoliberal offensive of the last 3-plus decades. Fashionable rubbish.

Here's a good review of "The Coming Insurrection," a very silly pamphlet:
http://www.isreview.org/issues/73/featrev-cominginsurrection.shtml

First of all, I wasn't refering to TCI, the writers of which don't characterize themselves as being anarchists, insurrectionary or otherwise. So there's that. Personally I was underwhelmed by TCI, so there's that as well.

Second, since you mentioned "communization theory", I can honestly say that the writings I've read on the subject by Theorie Communiste or Endnotes or any other publication is about ten times more interesting than anything I've ever read in "Socialist Worker".


And sorry to disappoint you but we on the radical left are all still part of the "leftist ghetto" of which you speak, whether you belong to a revolutionary socialist network or self-identify as a "hipster communist."

I'd say that this is partially true, but I think it's also a matter of degree. For example, if you're attending seminars about the lessons of the Russian Revolution today and how we can turn our 200 member party into the next socialist vanguard, you're definitely mired deep in the quicksand. :rolleyes:


This is not because some organization or set of individuals have had a "stale discourse" that needed editing. It is because capital worldwide was able to restructure after the crisis of the 70s and re-impose its priorities, crushing, co-opting and disorganizing the left. The left is tiny and fractured in 99% of the world, not just in the US.

Hahaha, you actually think that I feel that the rest of the world has it better than we do, in terms of the far left? The dominant trend in left-wing politics in much of the developing world is the same kind of cold war-type posturing and formulations of power which have failed time and time again. And yes, like cmoney said, it's not that the far left were crushed by capital, it's that the far left were more than happy to serve as capital's willing executioners, especially in Europe and the USA.


The funny thing is that as class struggle finally begins to pick up internationally, the revolutionary organizations you are so contemptuous of have a way of stepping in, building their ranks, and playing a modest but serious role. The Revolutionary Socialists in Egypt-- an organizational fraternal with the ISO and SWP-UK-- is doing so in Egypt today. The far left in Greece is rapidly growing. As class struggle intensifies, the far left has the chance for the first time in a generation to grow dramatically.

Really, the ones I'm "contemptuous" of? Pretty strong word. I'm not contemptuous of them, I'm just aware of their acute limitations. People have also accused in the past of somehow being opposed to unions, which also isn't true at all. Again, just aware of their problems. The Revolutionary Socialists are extremely marginal players in Egypt's national scene in comparison to their bros in the Muslim Brotherhood, and groups like SYRIZA are a joke compared to the KKE (glorious mass party that it is).


If you have an alternative magical solution to building revolutionary organizations, please tell. But if you prattle on about "stale discourses" again you are going to lose your seat at the dinner table.

The only answer I know for sure is that you don't have the answer, lol

[Olentzero]

Your suggestion that occupy is not part of the working class, and has no connections to it so fucking wrong.The Occupy movement isn't the only group within living memory to have called a general strike, you know. How many of those groups have successfully called a general strike?
And finally, fuck organized labor, it is a minority in this country, and always will be. The unions are a roadblock on the path to revolution, not the fucking express train.So who's supposed to go out on this general strike, then? Unorganized labor? You're expecting people with little to no experience in previous successful strikes - with the resultant level of confidence - to commit to an action that demands the knowledge, experience, and confidence that comes from having successfully called, and won, previous strikes?

Yeah, good luck with that.

[The Douche]

The Occupy movement isn't the only group within living memory to have called a general strike, you know. How many of those groups have successfully called a general strike?So who's supposed to go out on this general strike, then? Unorganized labor? You're expecting people with little to no experience in previous successful strikes - with the resultant level of confidence - to commit to an action that demands the knowledge, experience, and confidence that comes from having successfully called, and won, previous strikes?

Yeah, good luck with that.

The Oakland general strike drew over 100,000 people out. That is the closest thing to a general strike the US has seen in a really, really long time. And yes, most of those participants were in unorganized workplaces. Only 11.8% of the workers in the US are organized. You literally could not have a general strike without the use of unorganized labor.

It is the unions which will (and have/do) fight against the general strike, because they are illegal.

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

Only 11.8% of the workers in the US are organized.

I think that statistic includes anyone who receives a paycheck. So yeah, ~12% of people who receive a paycheck are in a union, but a lot of people who receive paychecks are managers, administrators, bureaucrats, professionals, etc. So it includes the waged petty-bourgeoisie. And there are also huge numbers in service jobs.

The percentage of working class folks in key industries (manufacturing, public transportation, shipping, etc.) is actually a lot higher (though it is of course not anywhere near 100%). These are people who can shut down society by withdrawing their labor (see: airport strikes, dockworker strikes, transportation shut downs, mining strikes, etc.).

If all the retail workers at K-Mart, Target and Urban Outfitters in NYC went out on strike tomorrow, it would have very little effect. If all the bus drivers, subway operators, and truck drivers went out on strike, the financial capital of the world would literally grind to a halt.

These are important facts that are often forgotten.

[A Marxist Historian]

The Oakland general strike drew over 100,000 people out. That is the closest thing to a general strike the US has seen in a really, really long time. And yes, most of those participants were in unorganized workplaces. Only 11.8% of the workers in the US are organized. You literally could not have a general strike without the use of unorganized labor.

It is the unions which will (and have/do) fight against the general strike, because they are illegal.

I don't know where that 100,000 figure comes from, sounds ridiculously high to me. But in any case nobody knows, because Oakland OWS just issued a proclamation, it didn't actually organize a general strike because it can't, it isn't a working class organization, but a random "horizontal" coming together of various components of "the 99%," i.e. everybody not a Wall Street fat cat. A semi-permanent "flash mob," organized on the Internet more or less.

In fact, a lot of the folk who took off work did so because their union encouraged them to do so, especially city employees. And Mayor Quan even promised not to fire people who did.

Union bureaucrats will fight against real general strikes, as they believe in reform and compromises with capitalism rather than overthrowing it. But real general strikes, like say the 1946 general strike in Oakland that so many people talked about as the model, will be carried out by rank and file union members, or will not happen.

Individual workers who are not at least members of unions, if not higher forms of working class organization like workers councils and revolutionary parties, are powerless, and can at best passively jump on the bandwagon of other entities they are not part of and which are not necessarily working class at all.

In the Third World, bourgeois nationalists and religious fundamentalists call "general strikes" all the time, sometimes quite successfully. An OWS "general strike," if it somehow succeeded, would be the same sort of thing really.

I'll believe the OWS is a working class organization on the day workers at some shop or factory or whatever try to occupy their factory in the name of OWS. Not before!

OWS got its start occupying Wall Street, the land of the financial bourgeoisie, and has been occupying public squares in front of government offices ever since. It is not about occupying the means of production, not even the Port of Oakland, which should be occupied by longshoremen, not OWS visitors from outside.

-M.H.-

[The Douche]

Your analysis is so absurdly fucked that I don't even know how to respond to it at this point.

Not even those in organizations like the ISO, which are opposed to the terminology (though not the action) wouldn't present such an absurd analysis as yours...


I don't even see what you're suggesting as an alternative, maybe thats my problem with your post?

[Ravachol]

OWS got its start occupying Wall Street, the land of the financial bourgeoisie, and has been occupying public squares in front of government offices ever since. It is not about occupying the means of production, not even the Port of Oakland, which should be occupied by longshoremen, not OWS visitors from outside.

So you subscribe to the idea of sectorial partitioning of the social wealth? 'The steel mines to the steel 'workers', 'the ports to the longeshoremen'?

It would be well to remember the experiences of May '68:



Although students and revolutionary workers are the dynamic forces behind the occupation of the factories, once all the workers have been convinced to move inside the factory and "occupy" it, union officials close the factory gates on the students standing outside, and they isolate the revolutionary workers on the inside. The union functionaries isolate the young workers from the old by painting the young workers as extremist adventurists who will bring the police running into the factory, and from the foreign workers by insinuating that only the union is fighting for the improvement of wages of the foreign workers, and if the union fails, then the foreign workers might lose their hard-won jobs and be forced by the police to return to their countries.
(..)
What is even more important is that “students” did not “take over” the universities. At the Sorbonne, at Censier, at Nanterre and elsewhere, the university was proclaimed social property; the occupied buildings became exuniversities. The buildings were opened to the entire society — to students, teachers, workers — to anyone who wanted to come in. Furthermore, the ex-universities were run by their occupants, whether or not they were students, workers, townspeople. At Censier, in fact, the majority of the occupants were not “students.” This socialization was accompanied by a break-down of the division of labor, the division between “intellectuals” and “workers.” In other words, the occupation represented an abolition of the university as a specialized institution restricted to a special layer of society (students). The ex-university becomes socialized, public, open to everyone.


To clarify, by whom do you think the banks should be occupied? And by whom should the barracks be occupied? The police stations? Seeing as you don't come across as a supporter of burning them all.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Jimmie, your whole argument boils down to the number game, just like every other critique the ISO has made regarding Oakland. Could 1500 people take the civic center? I dunno, maybe, maybe if they all had shields, and all of them were willing to commit to it.So revolutions happen through ze power of ze WILL to triumph! It's not about organization, the balance of forces or anything like that?


What good would calling a GA do? I think that would be a huge tactical mistake, you can't call a GA, with 1500 fucking people, right in the middle of an action, while surrounded by the police. If the police were allready prepared and planning to do a mass arrest, what do you think would have happened if everybody stopped marching, sat down, and started having a GA?I don't know what good would a GA do? Well when we got to the convention center, the march stopped as the leaderless leaders decided what they wanted to do. The rest of us were stuck between two fences, a major road and a lake on one side and hundreds of riot cops on the other. We were already stopped and no one knew what was going on. A GA would have allowed people to get onto the same page and discuss what they wanted to do next.


The ISO's strategy of "keep accepting defeat until we reach a critical mass of people" is idiotic. How will we reach a critical mass of people if we 1) never win any battles 2) never even attempt to fight any battles?Well considering that we DID NOT TAKE OVER THE LOCATION, it's the people constantly arguing for escalation that are idiotically arguing for repeated defeats. Some might be over-optomistic which is fine and maybe they have learned from this, but for a minority it's about a moralistic drive to always confront the police or even for some about "spectacle".

We know we can shut down ports and bring out large numbers, because we have in the past, we can not do that right now and we need to rebuild that capacity.


And its a super weak attempt, because everybody knows it was the acts of confrontation and property destruction that drove the middle-class liberals away from occupy oakland.Not at first. We shut down the port and won more liberal people to support this.


And no, the left is not a ghetto because capital crushed it, it is a ghetto because capital absorbed it, thats why all around the world the communist parties, socialist parties, and unions function as a steam vent to prevent revolution. Thats why your fucking party, 2 years ago, was campaigning against occupations as a tactic, and against the slogan "occupy everything", which has now been raised by a surprising amount of people.We fucking helped to build occupations when done in ways we thought would grow the movement. We were against adventurist and "radicaler than thou" occupations such as when UC Berkeley students had a sit-in that the had built but someone who wanted to do an occupation then chained the doors shut without people in the action being told this was going to happen. We are against the formulation "occupy everything... DEMAND NOTHING", not occupations as a tactic. Our members occupied a Democratic politician's office in 2008! Last March before OWS we unsuccessfully tried to occupy the California Capitol building.

[Dabrowski]

The steel mines to the steel 'workers',

Tell me more about steel mining.

[Ravachol]

Tell me more about steel mining.

Oh how very clever, yes Steel is an alloy and isn't mined. I hastily posted something. That's not the fucking point. If you want to discuss metallurgy I suggest you do it in the adequate subforum or come up with actual arguments. At least all the steel in the world isn't gonna "Reforge the 4th International!"

[The Douche]

So revolutions happen through ze power of ze WILL to triumph! It's not about organization, the balance of forces or anything like that?

I'm sorry, was the goal of that action to obtain the civic center for use as a radical/community space, or was the goal of the action to make revolution?


I don't know what good would a GA do? Well when we got to the convention center, the march stopped as the leaderless leaders decided what they wanted to do. The rest of us were stuck between two fences, a major road and a lake on one side and hundreds of riot cops on the other. We were already stopped and no one knew what was going on. A GA would have allowed people to get onto the same page and discuss what they wanted to do next.

So we can't say what good a GA would have done, and there is a possibility a GA (which is not something that can happen fast and easy) would've given the cops the opportunity to arrest, and they had the march penned in an area where mass arrest would've been strategically possible.

I don't think a GA would be the right thing to do in that situation. But regardless, why didn't you just do a mic check if you wanted to?


Well considering that we DID NOT TAKE OVER THE LOCATION, it's the people constantly arguing for escalation that are idiotically arguing for repeated defeats. Some might be over-optomistic which is fine and maybe they have learned from this, but for a minority it's about a moralistic drive to always confront the police or even for some about "spectacle".

I wouldn't even suggest trying to take over a static location like the civic center anyways man. We can't even win that battle, even if we take it, they will evict us. So the not taking of the location is kind of irrelevant to me, because even if you had taken it, it wouldn't be in our hands right now, the cops would've gotten it back, within days if not hours.

But I also still maintain that one reason the location wasn't taken is because there wasn't enough escalation...


We know we can shut down ports and bring out large numbers, because we have in the past, we can not do that right now and we need to rebuild that capacity.

No shit bro, its not a question of if we need that, but how we do it.


Not at first. We shut down the port and won more liberal people to support this.

What are you getting at? I think its a good thing to drive the liberals away, and the port shutdown didn't do that because it was essentially a spectacle organized between OO and the ILWU. The port wasn't shutdown because of the power of the community, it was shutdown because the union decided to support OO. Which is kind of hopeful and inspiring, but not inspiring like the self-action of the working class.


We fucking helped to build occupations when done in ways we thought would grow the movement. We were against adventurist and "radicaler than thou" occupations such as when UC Berkeley students had a sit-in that the had built but someone who wanted to do an occupation then chained the doors shut without people in the action being told this was going to happen. We are against the formulation "occupy everything... DEMAND NOTHING", not occupations as a tactic. Our members occupied a Democratic politician's office in 2008! Last March before OWS we unsuccessfully tried to occupy the California Capitol building.

I'm referring specifically to actions in NY, and I don't want to say anything about what I'm thinking of in particular, cause its potentially slanderous, and I can't find the article that I remember reading, and I don't want to make any accusations and have it turn out to be false or whatever. I don't know anything about the ISO's involvement with the student occupations in California, I only heard about conflicts between anarchists and SO.

[ellipsis]

The J28 didn't succeed because, IMO security culture was lax, the location was widely known a month in advance. When police have planned and are deployed in defensive positions when the march arrives, no numbers or tactics or planning would allow for any sort of occupation to happen.

[Binh]

The Socialist Worker article is not blaming protesters for the police response-- Bihn's obsessive sectarianism towards the ISO is again distorting his interpretation of a very simple argument.

The argument is a tactical one. A small number of people marching at the cops with toy shields, holding "Fuck the Police" marches, and parading around in black blocs are all tactics that serve to narrow the movement to a radical middle-class fringe, rather than build it up into a mass force that can actually have an impact.

As a reader of Peter Camejo, Bihn (and others) should re-read his classic essay on ultra-leftism. It discusses how ultralefts, lacking a radical organization of their own, perpetually use such "radical" tactics to try to artificially turn mass movements into the radical organization they're unable to build. This is what some "insurrectionary anarchists" and others are trying to do to the Occupy movement. If they succeed they will drive away the working class participation we need.

Socialist Worker is completely right to challenge this ultra-left adventurism, and all serious revolutionaries should do the same.

Obsessive? You only seem to comment on various internet forums when I do.

OWS was a "radical" tactic and it worked. Brilliantly. And they had 1/5 of the people OO did when they tried to seize that convention center.

Also, if you're going to keep my name in your mouth all the time, learn how to spell it. It's only four letters. :)

[Jimmie Higgins]

OWS was a "radical" tactic and it worked. Brilliantly. And they had 1/5 of the people OO did when they tried to seize that convention center.It succeeded with small numbers at first because it wasn't seen as a threat. Additionally, many of the posters on this site dismissed it as a liberal action called by Adbusters.

The movement won in NYC, however, when it was first faced by oppression but then defended by growing numbers of supporters and then even the trade unions.

There is not really any such thing as a radical tactic. Even a general strike call could be a conservative tactic depending on the situation such as if part of a worker's movement wants to do workplace takeovers but the union leadership advocates a 2 day general strike as a counter-posed position. Tactics always depend on the situation and right now if we continue on course with just doing small adventurist actions (that tend to just be symbolic) then we won't have an effective counter to pull people drawn to liberalism towards self-activity rather than Democratic party electoralism. That there is a radical core of people who want to take things further is a fantastic development for the US, but that core will be impotent and meaningless unless we can also relate to non-radicalized workers and draw them into struggles so that they can then also become organizers in their communities and workplaces or schools or as rank and file union members and so on. This larger not-yet radicalized group of people are the ones who identified with the class undertones of the occupy message and they are the ones who came out to support the port shut-down and defend OWS and can potentially make this movement much more powerful.

[The Douche]

The movement won in NYC, however, when it was first faced by oppression but then defended by growing numbers of supporters and then even the trade unions.

What exactly was the victory in NYC you're referring to?

And how was the official involvement of the unions a positive thing, given the nature of the union movement in the US, and the attempts, following union involvement to usurp the energy of occupy, and direct it into official channels (like Occupy Congress)?

[Os Cangaceiros]

What happened in NYC was actually really interesting, I thought, and an extremely good example of major unions subverting political actions into the more acceptable arena of party politics, in this case Democratic party politics. I mean, in December you had one of the biggest labor marches that NYC had seen in decades, tens of thousands of people, and that was essentially Occupy Wall Street's funeral dirge. Yes, organized labor helped off-set the threat of immediate eviction in the earlier days of the occupation, but it also helped kick the dirt into OWS's grave.

[A Marxist Historian]

Your analysis is so absurdly fucked that I don't even know how to respond to it at this point.

Not even those in organizations like the ISO, which are opposed to the terminology (though not the action) wouldn't present such an absurd analysis as yours...


I don't even see what you're suggesting as an alternative, maybe thats my problem with your post?

What's the alternative? What should people do on May 1?

Well, it's the traditional workers holiday, going back to 1886, here and internationally. I'd be totally in favor of a general strike on Mayday. But you can't just suck one out of your thumb by issuing a proclamation. It has to grow organically out of the actual class struggles of the actual working class.

You have to do serious organizational work, creating something permanent not fly by night. At some point maybe OWS could have been a basis for that, but by now, I think it's pretty clear that it can't be.

So the most important thing for radicals to do within OWS is to fight for a socialist program, and be ready to split at the most opportune moment from the non-socialists within OWS, who are bound to dominate it ultimately if it doesn't simply collapse altogether.

I mean, even here in Northern California, the left wing of OWS, what happened when OWS occupied the capitol in Sacramento the other day?

Finding themselves compelled to come up with demands, since they were occupying the Capitol, all the occupiers could come up with was bourgeois liberalism on the left wing of the Democratic Party.

Why? Because it isn't a workers movement, but a movement of "the 99%." So anything else would have been inconsistent with OWS's basic nature.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

So you subscribe to the idea of sectorial partitioning of the social wealth? 'The steel mines to the steel 'workers', 'the ports to the longeshoremen'?

It would be well to remember the experiences of May '68:

To clarify, by whom do you think the banks should be occupied? And by whom should the barracks be occupied? The police stations? Seeing as you don't come across as a supporter of burning them all.

The point is not to seize the social wealth and I suppose hand it out to anybody who wants it, like looting a grocery store, but to take over the means of production and change the relations of production. (That I have to say this to you of all people I find amusing.)

What you are missing out on is that, like it says in the song, we need no benevolent saviors, from OWS or anywhere else, but that the workers need to liberate themselves. What is to be done with the ports and the factories after the revolution? Well, we need to reindustrialize deindustrialized America, a few good five year plans, but that's another discussion altogether.

Manwhile, before fantasizing about the future, let us set about organizing the working class to act on their own behalf. And start where workers are at. So yes, if you want to occupy a port, it's the longshoremen themselves who need to get the ball rolling, rather than outsiders coming in quite sure that they know better than the workers themselves in their own unions what needs to be done. They have an organization, the ILWU, which they identify with. Its leaders are sellouts, so radicals within the ILWU need to organize a rank and file rebellion vs. their leaders--and not, like former ILWU Local 10 Prez Clarence Thomas, Jack Heyman, etc., try to use support from OWS as a substitute for that.

I'm not dissing the November occupation, it was a great thing, a wonderful way for the people of Oakland to protest vicious police brutality vs. Occupy Oakland. But let us not confuse it with a general strike of the workers themselves, or think that it was something leading in any way, shape or form to working class action for workers' self-liberation.

It was the citizens of Oakland, responding to a call from OWS, protesting against police brutality. Something people in Oakland have been angry about at least since the days of the Black Panther Party. Really, it was a continuation of the protests against the police murder of Oscar Grant.

-M.H.-

[Leftsolidarity]

I got through 2 pages of this until I couldn't take it anymore. The only thing the ISO members seem to do is sing together about "It's not the right time.", "The struggle isn't advanced enough.", "Those aren't the proper tactics."

Same old shit that we always see in partys that like to talk the revolutionary lingo but drag behind the working class instead of pushing it forward.

I don't like to "demonize" certain parties over a couple statements or missteps but I think the ISO seriously needs to re-evaluate what they are saying.

I might not think that going into the city hall would be the best of options but I'm sure as hell am not going to publically critize it. Also, if you think it's alienating people, people need to know about it. I haven't even heard about this until this thread so I doubt it's a problem.

[Ele'ill]

The ISO interactions I had here leading up to the final eviction night involved talking with ISO members here and there throughout the weeks and attending an open meeting they hosted at Portland State Uni. The ideas/proposals/points of concern etc.. I had no problem with. Don't know exactly what happened but the ideas never turned into action. There are several Portland ISO people on the forum here I'd like to maybe hear from them.

[Jimmie Higgins]

What exactly was the victory in NYC you're referring to?

And how was the official involvement of the unions a positive thing, given the nature of the union movement in the US, and the attempts, following union involvement to usurp the energy of occupy, and direct it into official channels (like Occupy Congress)?

The victory in NYC was preventing the police from evicting the camp.


What happened in NYC was actually really interesting, I thought, and an extremely good example of major unions subverting political actions into the more acceptable arena of party politics, in this case Democratic party politics. I mean, in December you had one of the biggest labor marches that NYC had seen in decades, tens of thousands of people, and that was essentially Occupy Wall Street's funeral dirge. Yes, organized labor helped off-set the threat of immediate eviction in the earlier days of the occupation, but it also helped kick the dirt into OWS's grave.

Yes this is the role of unions right now in US society. They were going to support Obama and they will. But the movement potentially can pose an alternative and show that it's militancy and rank and file action, not voting Democrat that is effective. But the movement needs to prove it can be effective for this to happen. And if the movement is only looking internally to the already radical forces (in the dozens or hundreds depending on the city) brought into the movement, then we are not going to be effective and we aren't going to be able to present an alternative. This is a period of potential radicalization and so we should be looking to radicalize the tons of people who are pissed off, supported the anti 1% rhetoric and attitude of the movement.

Part of what is so significant about Occupy is that it was bringing out numbers far greater than just the left to rallies against the rich. Most of the labor leaders in the Bay Area I'm sure didn't want to support the port shut-down in Oakland - in fact they tried to get out of it, but pressure from rank and file members (including ones in my branch) were able because of the large support for the moment at that time, corner the leaders so that they would be exposed if they didn't support the call. Additionally Occupy Oakland has been asked by rank and file workers to help with pickets and we were involved in 3 labor actions with largely immigrant workforces.

But this is much harder now because of the propaganda by the mayor, chamber of commerce, and Democratic machine in Oakland but also the movement's drive for escalation of the movement rather than building it. The escalation worked well to a point when people were more or less being spontaneously drawn to the movement. Now the situation is different and the more we escalate, the more our numbers decline.

Again, right now we think the movement needs to solidify its supporters and win back its base. Being involved in these labor actions, creating a political space for rank and file workers or community activists to organize at a grassroots level and make connections and so on will help create more support for the movement, more of a sense of self-ownership, and lay the groundwork for things like having maybe a shadow labor board of rank and file militants or create networks to stop evictions in black or Latino neighborhoods in Oakland.

Do people think the movement is fine as it is? Is 1000 militants in a city enough to actually take on the ruling class by itself of should those 1000 be trying to reach out to the 100,000s who have supported us and can again if we have an effective movement?

[The Douche]

The victory in NYC was preventing the police from evicting the camp.

But the camp has been evicted.


The escalation worked well to a point when people were more or less being spontaneously drawn to the movement. Now the situation is different and the more we escalate, the more our numbers decline.

You don't think decline in numbers is related to 1) lack of qualitative accomplishments and 2) state repression?

And following those points 1) qualitative accomplishments haven't panned out because the solutions that we're ultimately seeking, the problems occupy ultimately confronts, aren't solvable by the bourgeois state, which is where people are used to looking to. People expect to be able to protest and have demands met/reforms granted but that won't solve the problems that occupy is raising. Which makes it difficult for us to continue, but what we're doing is highlighting the cracks in capital's facade, and its a necessary part of pushing the communist project forward.

2) State repression is always going to happen, and each time it does its going to set us back a little bit, but the key is to continue on in the face of this repression, retreating from it will ensure that we never escalate to a level more advanced than the one we're currently at.


Again, right now we think the movement needs to solidify its supporters and win back its base.

So, tone down the rhetoric and actions, and re-recruit the liberals?


Is 1000 militants in a city enough to actually take on the ruling class by itself of should those 1000 be trying to reach out to the 100,000s who have supported us and can again if we have an effective movement?

But the goal isn't just to have a movement with the support of 100,000s, its to create communism, why should we shy away from that, just because its not currently popular? And how will repeatedly refusing to raise that banner, and refusing to engage in communist tactics help us move the communist project forward?

[Jimmie Higgins]

But the camp has been evicted.I'm speaking specifically about the first attempt when union members and community members mobilized and stopped it. The camps have been evicted because of a coordinated attack, but the cities couldn't have done this without first successfully isolating our movement. In Oakland, they only raided when our numbers were small and when they knew they could demonize us, when we had much broader events with larger numbers they couldn't do anything.


You don't think decline in numbers is related to 1) lack of qualitative accomplishments and 2) state repression?
Yes, more or less I think you're right.

And following those points 1) qualitative accomplishments haven't panned out because the solutions that we're ultimately seeking, the problems occupy ultimately confronts, aren't solvable by the bourgeois state, which is where people are used to looking to. People expect to be able to protest and have demands met/reforms granted but that won't solve the problems that occupy is raising. Which makes it difficult for us to continue, but what we're doing is highlighting the cracks in capital's facade, and its a necessary part of pushing the communist project forward.Well I think the "no demand" dogma is problematic and has allowed people to say, "well I like what they say, but...". The "no demands" thing is also just not true. Having the encampment was a demand, stopping an eviction is a demand, demanding charges against our allies be dropped is a demand (obviously). People argue that demands "legitimize" the state - well according to anyone harassed by the cops or put in prison, the state is legitimate regardless of whatever political ideas we might have. I think it's a dodge to say "no demands" because the state has to be confronted head-on and that means making demands and exposing how and why the state works and for who while, if we win, showing that organized self-action by workers is decisive in actually achieving change. Was calling for Mubarak to leave legitimizing the state or was it a demand to rally greater numbers of people? I think we do need concrete demands, maybe not over-arching ones, but at least action by action.


2) State repression is always going to happen, and each time it does its going to set us back a little bit, but the key is to continue on in the face of this repression, retreating from it will ensure that we never escalate to a level more advanced than the one we're currently at.I agree with this, but the way it's played out here is just to repeat the same tactics and we're just getting diminishing returns.


So, tone down the rhetoric and actions, and re-recruit the liberals?Who said toning anything down? I'm talking about being smart and tactical. No tactic is always the best or most radical thing to do at any time. 10,000s people shut down the port - the vast majority of them would probably describe themselves as "liberal" so it's not about toning things down, but figuring out how to navigate in this new phase of the movement where spontaneity alone is no longer enough.

The unions initially supported the movement, now they are trying to co-opt or distance themselves. Of course much of the leadership probably never wanted to have anything to do with the movement and are happily chained to the Democrats, but why this change? Because the capital-L liberals, not workers with some liberal ideas or sympathies, but the ideological ones in power have been organizing to pull people in their direction. At the same time we weren't doing out-reach and were favoring escalating tactics OVER organizing. So I think in this phase of the movement, the emphasis needs to be on organizing so that the 400 radicals are organizing and bringing in some supporters and so on.


But the goal isn't just to have a movement with the support of 100,000s, its to create communism, why should we shy away from that, just because its not currently popular? And how will repeatedly refusing to raise that banner, and refusing to engage in communist tactics help us move the communist project forward?How the hell do you think communism will be created if thoes 100,000s aren't self-organizing at the grassroots level and confident in their ability to independently shape society?

I think this movement has huge potential and is one of the greatest experiences of my political life. But it's in a tricky phase right now and I personally fear that it won't recapture any real ability to move forward again or draw people to militant and anti-capitalist ideas if we just continue doing the same things over and over.

SW criticized the anti-war movement too because it doesn't mean anything to bring out 100,000 protesters if they just go home and feel good about themselves. After the initial big rallies broke through the pessimism that everyone in the US was ardently pro-war, the goal of the movement should have been to organize local struggles so that there were ways for people in working class communities to organize themselves as well as for potentially 100s if not 1000s of people to become local grassroots political organizers. Instead there were just big marches repeated over and over despite whatever shape the movement was in. Part of the appeal of some of the adventurous tactics in the occupy movement are no doubt a way that people are trying to correct some of the mistakes of the anti-war movement, but I think they are ending up repeating the basic mistake of seeing tactics as principles or ways and repeating the same tactics over and over.

So militant things I think we could accomplish right now (and that people in the movement are already on top of and working on) are things like home foreclosure defense - it's not as flashy as a building takeover, but it's something we can actually achieve with the numbers we can currently turn-out, it's a militant defense of people over property rights and people over banks, it would make workers unable to say "I like their message, but what are they doing" it would show that 2,000 workers and community members can do what Obama or Quan won't despite all their crocodile tears for people suffering from the economic crisis, and it would probably turn many new people into organizers.

[The Douche]

People argue that demands "legitimize" the state - well according to anyone harassed by the cops or put in prison, the state is legitimate regardless of whatever political ideas we might have. I think it's a dodge to say "no demands" because the state has to be confronted head-on and that means making demands and exposing how and why the state works and for who while, if we win, showing that organized self-action by workers is decisive in actually achieving change. Was calling for Mubarak to leave legitimizing the state or was it a demand to rally greater numbers of people? I think we do need concrete demands, maybe not over-arching ones, but at least action by action.

What kind of demands are we really suggesting here? Of course the state has a degree of legitimacy because it can use force. Thats not the kind of legitimacy we're talking about when we say that the state is an illegitimate authority.

The demand that charges be dropped or whatever are different from demands of campaign finance reform or whatever. Those kind of demands place the power in the hands of the state and reduce the working class to a pressure group which can effect policy. We don't want to effect policy, thats not our goal, our goal is communism. And communism obviously can't come from our formulation of demands on the state.


How the hell do you think communism will be created if thoes 100,000s aren't self-organizing at the grassroots level and confident in their ability to independently shape society?

But how does calling for the end of corporate personhood contribute to the communist project?


I think this movement has huge potential and is one of the greatest experiences of my political life. But it's in a tricky phase right now and I personally fear that it won't recapture any real ability to move forward again or draw people to militant and anti-capitalist ideas if we just continue doing the same things over and over.


Yeah, but I don't know how "grassroots organizing" around "the issues" is going to help us move forward either.


it would show that 2,000 workers and community members can do what Obama or Quan won't despite all their crocodile tears for people suffering from the economic crisis, and it would probably turn many new people into organizers.

But its also turning the movement into a movement which is fighting to maintain the status quo. Fighting to make sure people can keep paying their mortgages shouldn't be a task of the communist movement.

[Jimmie Higgins]

What kind of demands are we really suggesting here? Of course the state has a degree of legitimacy because it can use force. Thats not the kind of legitimacy we're talking about when we say that the state is an illegitimate authority.Ok.


The demand that charges be dropped or whatever are different from demands of campaign finance reform or whatever. Those kind of demands place the power in the hands of the state and reduce the working class to a pressure group which can effect policy. We don't want to effect policy, thats not our goal, our goal is communism. And communism obviously can't come from our formulation of demands on the state.Yes, communism comes from the working class organizing and overthrowing capitalism, but how does the working class come to that consciousness that they should run things? How do they get organized? It is generally first around concrete reforms. The 8 hour day. Get rid of Mubarak. The right to collective bargaining. The right to hold a protest. Ending racist practices.

And within these struggles there is a liberal pull and a radical pull. On is to see these struggles as a way to "fix" the system, but these struggles can also lead to more radical conclusions among people involved especially when radicals are involved and can push for the class politics in the struggle.

This doesn't mean all reforms are equal. Many won't do shit to advance the class struggle, many are compromised in harmful ways such as the anti-death penalty proposition in California that wants life without parole and basically slave-labor for convicted life-sentence murderers. Radicals have to be savvy and base their support or rejection based on if it will help the working class struggle. For example, I don't see any benift to liberal gun control bills - even if these are popular with working people, they won't help people build class consciousness. A law against abortion restrictions though could help organize people to fight against sexism and just pushing the idea of equality helps the entire class. It won't bring about a revolution by itself, but an anti-sexist struggle advancing might mean a larger movement develops in which issues of women in the workplace come up etc and fighting against sexism is a precondition for any sucessful workers movement imo anyway.


But how does calling for the end of corporate personhood contribute to the communist project?First I wasn't arguing for that. But sure that's where many of the liberals who've been involved with occupy are currently at, and that's not a struggle I think would go anywhere, but tons of those people were marching to the port when it was shut down, so I think that shows the potential of occupy and how those people who have been traditionally supportive of liberal views could be won towards more militancy. The victory of the port shut down wasn't in having some perfect set of tactics, but that so many people were taking part, that's how it succeeded and that's how the movement made a mark.


Yeah, but I don't know how "grassroots organizing" around "the issues" is going to help us move forward either.I don't know... working class people learning about the nature of system from their own experience in challenging it, gaining confidence and knowledge in how to organize and methods for struggling.


But its also turning the movement into a movement which is fighting to maintain the status quo. Fighting to make sure people can keep paying their mortgages shouldn't be a task of the communist movement.We're not collecting money in hats to give people some charity. The potential in this work is involving whole neighborhoods in defending their neighbor's home, challenging the whole idea that bank profits are more important than human needs, it's showing people in the community that Occupy doesn't just talk 99% and it's just "hanging out in the plaza" but that there are ways for the 99% to fight back.

The radical left has more or less been cut-off from working class life in the US since after WWII. Things are changing now and I think Wisconsin, Occupy, and many smaller examples show that there's a potential for that to change. But that means not just doing whatever actions we want and waiting for the masses to follow our enlightened lead, it means organizing in existing working class struggles that can potentially help advance class struggle. This includes things like foreclosure defense, organizing against anti-union laws and so on.