They serve the capitalist state
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... Occupations point way for labor SOCIALIST ACTION NOVEMBER 2011 7 women, and children and destroying a whole neighborhood.
Los Angeles activists should be espe cially cautious regarding illusions in the police. We should remember the 1991 police beating of Rodney King after a traffic stop, and the subsequent urban uprising after police were acquitted by a jury of 10 whites, one Asian and a Latino.
Marxists point out that the state is a product of the irreconcilable nature of the conflicts between the classes. With the emergence of the state, a separate armed force was needed to protect the interests of the ruling class (police, army, dent loan debt; an end to all wars by the U.S. and its client regimes.
OWS activists, and workers throughout the world, know that the banks have the money we need to achieve all of this. Reformist solutions such as res urrecting Glass-Steagall (i.e., separating commercial from investment banking) will not solve the problem. Nor will tighter regulation of the banks (which Obama has no interest in, in any case). The only solution is a literal occupation of Wall Street—taking over the banks, nationalizing them, and opening their books to public inspection and on that basis to control by councils of working people.
Getting to that stage, however, requires a qualitative growth both in breadth and militancy of the workers’ movement. At the moment workers do not appear ready to adopt occupation of their workplaces as a common tactic. In Madison this year we saw the oc cupation by public sector workers of their state capi tol. There were hopes that this would be extended to state capitols throughout the country. But hopes were dashed by pro-Democratic Party union officials who ended the occupation and derailed it into a pointless recall campaign against Republican state legislators.
We can be sure that the Democratic Party and its friends among union officials will try the same against OWS. The latter for now is so strong that of ficials are forced to say over and over, “we are not try ing to coopt you, we are here to support you.” But as the 2012 elections draw nearer, these same officials will move into action to coopt and if need be derail the Occupy movement—not to mention to stifle rank-and-file efforts to employ union power to challenge the bosses. Only an empowered membership can stop these officials from betrayal. And that is why ties forged while supporting existing union struggles (in New York, for instance, for Teamsters at Sotheby’s, laid-off AFSCME school aides, etc.) are so crucial.
A phrase commonly heard at OWS General Assem blies is “Occupy Everything!” It stems from the under standing that the movement can only succeed if it is extended not only to centrally located encampments in other cities, but to hundreds of workplaces and neighborhoods in each city. This ambitious strategic conception comes from a widely shared, if abstract, sense that a new form of society needs to be forged and that mass action of the working class itself is crit ical to this objective.
It is too early to say how far the occupations will spread and how concrete their program will become before the inevitable attempt by the rulers to use po lice repression to end it. But in Europe and the Arab “The fact that the police was originally recruited in large numbers from among social-democratic workers is absolutely meaningless. Consciousness is deter mined by environment even in this in stance. The worker who becomes a po liceman in the service of the capitalist state is a bourgeois cop, not a worker” (from the pamphlet, “Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It”).
Any union member who has been on strike, or any member of an oppressed community, can tell you the truth about cops. As activists, we should never call on the cops to “protect” us from the boss es or from fascist goons. Cops in Germa ny and Italy facilitated the fascist rise to power. It should be clear to us all that the police are here to protect and serve the 1 percent. n Socialist Action (Above) Occupy Grand Rapids, Mich.
world we have seen successive waves of mass occupa tions and general strikes, so the ending of one wave does not mean the end of the movement.
However, workers and youth in each country, and globally, need to assimilate collectively the lessons of these successive waves: What sparks them, why they last (or don’t), what demands will help revive, ex pand and unify them, and what it would take to turn a movement into a revolution.
To assess all the concerns raised above—i.e., the strategic and tactical considerations weighing on the spread of the movement and its potential program— a revolutionary party is essential. Not, as some who are leery of parties mistakenly think, to dictate to the movement. Quite the contrary. A revolutionary party worthy of the name is the repository of the memory, and current experience, of movements past and pres ent; a collection of its most militant and selfless fight ers, a distillation of its people and ideas, which grows precisely by deepening its many ties to an expanding movement, and on that basis proposing alternatives for the movement’s direction at each turn.
Socialist Action aims to build just such a party—and we see participation of our members in the Occupy movement as an essential task of party building. Only a party rooted in genuinely mass movements and in the working-class-based organizations at their heart can become the kind of party capable of leading the masses to power. Build the Occupation movement! Take the movement into every workplace and neigh borhood! n
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Lauren Souch / Blog TO