The movement currently sweeping across the United States expresses widespread anger toward the big corporations and financial institutions, but thus far, no real demands have been put forward. No solutions. Not even a generic Band-Aid to be applied to the oozing, gaping wound of capitalism!

From the Occupy Wall Street Movement to the blockade of the West Coast ports

The movement currently sweeping across the United States expresses widespread anger toward the big corporations and financial institutions, but thus far, no real demands have been put forward. No solutions. Not even a generic Band-Aid to be applied to the oozing, gaping wound of capitalism!

It started with an ongoing series of demonstrations in New York City based in the Wall Street financial district. The protests were called by activist groups, and have been aimed at economic inequality, corporate greed, political corruption and lobbyists. The slogan, "We are the 99%", refers to the disparity of wealth in the US and elsewhere, where the bulk of the world's money and power is situated in the hands of the richest 1% of the population. Beginning in September 2011, the protests have since spread to nearly a thousand US cities, with hundreds to thousands of participants, with massive media attention and increasing police repression. Donations have kept the movement afloat, and the only sign of major trouble is the rapidly approaching winter weather.

We've all seen the TV news reports, we've all heard the talking heads. But what exactly does the Occupy Wall Street movement (OWS) want?

According to what has been gleaned from the generally-chaotic din, it is asking for more jobs, more equal wealth distribution, and less corporate influence over government. A kind of "compassionate capitalism". That seems to be the entire message. With polls suggesting over 50% of US voters are viewing the OWS favorably, the two major US capitalist parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, have both jumped on board the 'populist OWS bandwagon', further diluting the already impossibly weak brew of lukewarm anger the leaders of the OWS movement have been ladeling out.

Many of the protesters think this more compassionate capitalism will be obtainable by exerting moral pressure: if the capitalists are made to feel guilty for their selfish and greedy behaviour they might be persuaded ‘to share', rather like infants in a kinder garden. In fact the capitalists have been quite happy to shift the debate onto this terrain, and to provide us with role models from among the ‘great men' of capitalist philanthropy such as Carnegie and Rockefeller. Thus it is no coincidence that we see stepping forward as valiant defender of the protesters (and capitalists), and hero of the hour, none other than... Bill Gates!

If the predominant voice emerging from the OWS movement is that capitalism needs to be purged of its most blatantly corrupt elements, and made ‘more caring', hopefully once these protesters have been forcibly dragged off the streets by the police, and the authorities have finished ostentatiously spraying disinfectant on the pavements where they were previously encamped, some of them will end up believing instead that ‘the 1%' needs to be overthrown rather than ‘guilt tripped' into being more caring and sharing to ‘the 99%'!

Hopefully the protestors will eventually come to see that capitalism is now a corpse that walks and has had its day, and the only discussion worth having is about how its grave diggers, the working class, will accomplish their historical task of burying it.

Obviously it is a case of an inter-classist movement. One of its leaders writes: "We must strengthen the Occupy movement by allying it with the workers and the trade unions, with migrants, students, unemployed, homeless, communities of resistance and religious groups". What possible coherence could be given to any political directive that includes all these groups, classes and ideologies? It is another broad "front" which has as its common basis only idolatry of democracy, a fetish which none dare question. Occupy is neither an economic movement nor a political one but is a confused, and confusing, mixture of both. It is an inter-classist movement, and along with the inevitable anarchists, preaching their indiscriminate and disabling message of opposition to all organization, we find also liberal, petty bourgeois and Christian socialist elements, all vying with each other to gain recruits to their various causes; and all of them having the effect of throwing genuine class fighters off course.

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The surprise and anger of the OWS demonstrators to the authority's heavy handed breaking up of their occupations and tent encampments resulted in a curious grafting of their movement onto that of a pre-existing workers' economic struggle.

On 18 November, Occupy Oakland, following an initiative launched by Occupy Los Angeles, proclaimed

«the blockade and interruption of the economic apparatus managed by the 1% through the co-ordinated closure of the ports of the entire West Coast, fixed for 12 December. The 1% have devastated the lives of the lorry drivers, dockers and workers who create their wealth, just as attacks by the police co-ordinated on a national scale have transformed our cities into battlefields in the attempt to destroy our occupation movement. We invite each occupation of the West Coast to organise a mass mobilisation to blockade their local port. Union-busting needs to be attentively monitored, in particular the breaking of the contract with the dockers by EGT at Longview Washington. Occupy Los Angeles has already approved a resolution to take action in the port of Los Angeles on 12 December to close the terminals of SSA, which are the property of Goldman Sachs.
«Occupy Oakland extends this invitation to the entire West Coast, and calls for continuous solidarity with the dockers of Longview Washington in their ongoing struggle with EGT (...) During the general strike of 2 November, tens of thousands of people blockaded the port of Oakland to persuade EGT they need to stop their attacks on the Longview workers. Given that EGT has ignored this message, and continues to attack the dockers, we will now close the ports of the entire West Coast».

The general strike on 2 November, to which this proclamation refers, had taken place in Oakland a couple of weeks earlier, and according to one account managed to muster "tens of thousands of workers, part-timers and students". The Central banks and many schools were closed down, and also all of the wharves. Severe traffic disruption in the rest of the city also meant many other businesses shut up shop for the day.

The organising body of this local general strike was a general assembly of workers. No credit can at all be laid at the door of the big central unions. The AFL-CIO and Change to Win, an alternative coalition of trade unions formed in 2005, immediately tried to boycott the strike by invoking anti-strike laws which they themselves had underwritten in the contracts of the individual categories. They were also quick to invoke the Taft Hartley Act of 1947 which, along with numerous additional add-ons at local state and federal level, effectively bans general strikes and sets out severe penalties; and which, it is worth mentioning, the big unions have launched no major campaign to oppose... But once important teachers' and dockers Locals had declared their support for the strike (although not going out themselves), the big unions climbed down and decided against a frontal attack. Only the small but historic IWW and the dockers' Local 10, previously participants of the blockade of ships carrying armaments destined for the troops in Iraq in 2003, actively organised the strike in the places of work.

The subsequent blockade of the ports on December 12 involved marches and protests in ports along the entire West Coast from San Diego to Portland, and up to Anchorage in Alaska, but participation was low. Only In Portland and Oakland did the blockade have any real success, again receiving support from the local sections of the dockers' union (ILWU) but not from union bosses. Indeed Robert McElrath, the national secretary of the ILWU, appearing to sense his position threatened, was quick to denounce "the attempt of external groups who by putting forward their political demands are co-opting out struggle".

Other union spokesman then tried to sow divisions by pointing to the Occupy movement as responsible for ILWU members losing a days work, ironically thereby also appearing to support the non-unionised and self-employed lorry drivers, also up in arms about having lost work.

There is now talk about another big strike on May 1st of 2012.

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A great project, of course; but it won't be supported by the ‘99%'. If we look behind the statistic and the percentages we can see that this ‘99%' is also composed of the middle and lower strata of the bourgeoisie. These only support the working class when they can see it is winning, and adopting a robust anti-capitalist stance. Until then only the workers will be prepared to fight because they have a direct economic interest in confronting capitalism, and only they, along with the unemployed and retired workers, will get organised. In the USA it was only when the workers entered the arena that new vistas of possibilities really presented themselves; and an ambitious project such as shutting down the ports of the entire West Coast became a realistic prospect.

If capitalism is to be overthrown there needs to be a clear vision of the road ahead and how it is to be reached. Any struggle that doesn't know how to acknowledge the lessons of past struggles will fail. They teach that the working class army which will eventually overthrow capitalism will crystallise around practical demands in the realm of the economic struggle and will assume the form of class based trade union organisations. This army, to be effective, will need to be led by its international class party; a party which traces its history back to the middle of the 19th century and is the repository of the political experience of the working class movement.

Only the Communist Party is conscious of the historic role of the working class as the natural and material opponent of capitalism. The latter can no longer offer up any further concessions to the class it exploits, whose labour produces everything; a class quite capable of effectively organising its economic life without capitalists, for it is now very evident that the latter's much vaunted and highly rewarded ‘organisational expertise' is severely lacking; an ‘expertise' which in fact is nothing more than a rationalisation of their position as exploiters; a parasite's rationalisation.

Only the working class, or rather, the proletariat, a historical and dynamic term rather than a sociological one, can directly challenge this parasitism with its revolutionary movement, once it has rediscovered its original and intransigent political programme, which was already fully articulated back in 1848.

The American working class has spilled much blood in the past and has a long history of confronting a particularly ruthless, brutal and blatantly exploitative national capitalism, has shed much blood for in the past. Now it must rediscover its proud tradition of class struggle, its political organisation, the International Communist Party; a rediscovery that will be made in a country where communism has, perhaps more than in any other, been correctly identified as capitalism's enemy number one!

http://www.international-communist-party.org