The future of the Occupy movement

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8 SOCIALIST ACTION DECEMBER 2011 Barry Weisleder is federal secretary of Socialist Action (Canada), and Canada editor of Socialist Action newspaper.

TORONTO—On Nov. 23 police en­ forced an Ontario Superior Court order to Occupy Toronto to vacate St. James Park, a few blocks from Cana­ da’s corporate financial hub. Occupy camps around the world are also un­ der siege. The challenge is clear: Spread this movement from the parks and city squares to the sites of social production, distribution, and exchange. On Nov. 13, I spoke to a ral­ ly at Occupy Toronto on this theme:

I’ve been asked to describe how the work of Socialist Action relates to the Occupy movement, and how we can grow and develop our work together. The first order of business is: congrat­ ulations! Congratulations to everyone who initiated the Occupy movement. From Tahrir Square in Cairo, to our sis­ ters and brothers in Athens and in Wis­ consin. From Wall Street to London to Madrid to Toronto. What began with the Arab Spring, and spread like wildfire to over 1400 cities worldwide, cannot be extinguished. It is the voice of the voice­ less. It is the cry of unemployed youth. It is the cry of dispossessed aboriginal peoples. It is a beacon of hope for the victims of ethnic cleansing, women’s oppression, class exploitation and en­ vironmental plunder. No matter what the clowns at City Hall may do, Occupa­ tion is here to stay. Dismantle it in one place, and it will sprout again, like a sea of dandelions.

That’s because Occupy expresses a seismic shift. It is the shift from igno­ rance and complacency, to awareness and action. It points not only to gross economic inequality and injustice. It points not only to the greed and malfea­ sance of the ruling 1 per cent. It points to the need to rid this planet of capital­ ism—the toxic system responsible for the social ills that ail humanity.

Have a look at our newspaper, Socialist Action, and see how we work to win sup­ port in the labour movement, and to de­ fend Occupy against police repression. That’s what we must do here: Defend the Occupy movement. Defend it from bozo politicians, from police repres­ sion, from the commercial media that inflates the complaints of a few petty bourgeois restauranteurs into a social calamity—the only apparent solution for which is the suppression of freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. We say: Hands off Occupy Toronto. It is the best thing that’s happened to this park and to this city in a long time.

That brings us to a bigger challenge: How to extend the Occupy movement to the factories and offices, to the mines and mills, to the stores and schools, to workplaces, and to communities across this city and across this country. We can draw a lesson from Quebec, where this past week, over 200,000 students shut down schools and occupied the streets to oppose tuition increases and to demand free, quality, public post-sec­ ondary education. We can take encour­ agement from the Orange Wave (NDP surge) last spring that marginalized the discredited Liberal Party in its wake. We are inspired by environmental activ­ ists whose actions forced U.S. President Obama to delay construction of the Key­ stone XE pipeline.

These events underline a compelling truth: Occupy is a powerful symbol, a resilient rallying point. It has changed the channel. It has ignited a conversa­ tion of millions. But to win, to truly win human liberation and save civilization from the ravages of the profit system, we need to shut capitalism down. We need to re-boot production on a green, democratic basis, and build a coopera­ tive commonwealth.

That’s what we in SA mean by social­ ism, a democratic cooperative com­ monwealth, where production is wholly owned and controlled by working peo­ ple, where the military is reduced to a rescue and disaster relief corps, where the 1% are expropriated, and where the state is transformed into the servant of the 99%. That’s what socialism will look like.

What stands in our way? If it were just the 1 per cent, it would be easy to over­ come, and it would have been done long ago. Standing in the way of economic democracy is a gigantic apparatus of minority rule. The cops, the courts, the bought-and-paid-for media, religious institutions, the managerial elite, and the capitalist political parties. How can (continued on page 9, in “Save the Canadian Wheat Board!”)

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Flush from its part in NATO’s bloody intervention