Wednesday's general strike in Oakland pointed up some of the promise, and the problems, of the loose-knit Occupy Wall Street movement.
When it began in New York, less than two months ago, I wondered what the protesters were trying to accomplish. I also wondered why it had taken so long for a protest movement to focus on Wall Street.
The big protest in Oakland Wednesday marked another big step in what I think the movement is actually about, i.e., an attempt to create a new intellectual space, as it were.
A space both within people's minds, as in changing consciousness, and a space within the media flow.
It's a new presence on the scene, and a logical political development as such. But it's a delicate sort of thing.
"The 99%" is a brilliant concept. And so is the focus on Wall Street as the epicenter of casino capitalism.
The "Occupy" part of Occupy Wall Street gets more problematic, when taken literally. And the Occupy fill-in-the-blank becomes more problematic still.
Take Occupy Oakland, for example. What does it mean to "occupy Oakland?"
Oakland has a lefty mayor, Jean Quan. It's not easy to find a more politically correct mayor than Quan, a UC Berkeley-educated pol who backed the disaster known as Ebonics during her stint on the Oakland school board. (Quan is an inoffensive sort elected in a surprise as a little scrutinized widespread second pick in the city's well-meaning new ranked choice "instant run-off" system. She managed to offend all sides through her desire not to offend. First by siding with the protesters but being out of town when the police moved in to end the encampment, then by letting the encampment start up again.)
Before Quan, Oakland's mayor was Ron Dellums, a self-avowed socialist who railed against the military-industrial complex for decades in Congress.
Which is to say that Oakland is not exactly the belly of the beast. To the extent there is a big machine, and to the extent that it's run from anywhere, it's sure not run out of Oakland.
Oakland is already occupied, or close to it, in the sense of being on board with the 99% concept.
But if something else is envisioned, something more literal-minded, something like the Paris Commune of 1871, a short-lived assumption of power by the working class, founded on theories of participatory democracy, well, that's another matter entirely. Especially considering that the general strike called for Oakland on Wednesday did not materialize.
A general strike is not just a large protest, it's a mass work stoppage. That didn't happen, nor did it come close to happening.
Even the brief closing of the Port of Oakland was not a strike. The actual workers didn't go out themselves, they were prevented from working by the protesters. And now they are back at work.
Then there was the problem of Wednesday night.
As of 5 p.m. Pacific Wednesday, the Occupy Wall Street-affiliated general strike in Oakland appeared relatively stable, quite large, quite spirited, and not a general strike. Despite many activist claims in the morning, the Port of Oakland was not closed at any time during the day.
The crowd was well into the thousands, but certainly not sizable enough to occupy much of the city and most businesses and public agencies had remained open. There had been some vandalism, but not much and what there has been has been largely quelled by other protesters. The often aggressive Oakland police had a lower key presence.
In the early evening, after a large march to the port by a swelling crowd of protesters, the port was closed. Some protesters tried to get on and block the Bay Bridge, but were themselves blocked by California Highway Patrol officers who had anticipated the move.
Most protesters either dispersed or returned to downtown Oakland. And there, very late on Wednesday night, a familiar pattern ensued. A small group of protesters turned to vandalism and taunting of police, seizing an empty building which had previously housed a social service agency, before more than 100 were arrested.
Oakland was the scene of big and frequently violent protests in 2009 and 2010 over the killing of Oscar Grant -- for whom Occupy Oakland has renamed the plaza they've taken over -- an unarmed black man killed by a white transit cop (an unfortunate fellow who says he thought he'd pulled his stun gun). There was much looting and vandalism done in the name of protest. The police blamed most of the violence on a small band of anarchists, as they do now.
But small band or not, the violence gets big media coverage, as anyone who understands media would expect. Unless the problem is solved, i.e., the rough stuff is done away with, the Occupy movement has a terrible problem.
When I was in Campuses United Against Apartheid, part of the successful movement to force the university system to divest its investments in corporations doing business in apartheid era South Africa, at UC Berkeley, I got a lot of experience in protest politics. Especially Bay Area style.
The Bay Area has its own permanent protest cadre. Angela Davis of '60s radical fame was a somewhat fading figure a few decades ago during the anti-apartheid movement, and she was front and center again on Wednesday in Oakland.
And there's a phenomenon I call premature vanguardism, in which activists spending all their time in the eye of the storm come to imagine that, since they have all this media attention, they must be leading a wave of social change and that, if they decide something, it has vast import.
There are many predictable calls from conventional liberals for the protesters to get behind predictable programs, to become, in other words, like them. But since the protesters operate on consensus, something very hard to achieve, and are an expanding and contracting mass depending on timing and circumstance, that's off-target.
Group dynamics reward those who put in the most time, and almost by definition those folks will be those who are most divorced from the mainstream. The only question is how doctrinaire they are, and those doctrines aren't likely to be club-able.
Nor should they be.
Think tanks and cocktail parties usually aren't mechanisms of political breakthroughs. They're mechanisms of routinization.
A protest movement is something different, a vector of change that acts as a beacon, not a position paper.
Ironically, the routine that many protesters despise is a danger for their movement. An occupied park or other public space is daring and controversial for a time. But if it is allowed and, over time, ignored -- which would be a sophisticated establishment response -- it can become part of the background scenery. Like Hare Krishnas used to be.
And the temptation to go beyond that by turning to more aggressive confrontation runs the risk of marginalizing the movement by turning off the very 99 percent they want to speak for.
Probably all they can agree on is better political theater and selective acts of opposition, like getting people to withdraw their funds from big banks. And, so long as the theater is not destructive, that has real value in stimulating and re-centering debate.
You can check things during the day on my site, New West Notes ... www.newwestnotes.com.
William Bradley Huffington Post Archive
Douglas Anthony Cooper: Occupy Conservatism
Bishop James Magness: Veterans: A New Era of Serving God and Country
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-bradley/joe-frazier-dead_b_1085164.html
It has less than a year, in any event, if it hopes to have any impact on the outcome of the 2012 elections. And, at the risk of sounding predictable and off-target not to mention counter-intuitive, that should be part of what motivates these protesters if they wish their movement to be a vector of change and motivator of progress through the foreseeable future.
>Group dynamics reward those who put in the most time, and almost by definition those folks will be those who are most divorced from the mainstream. The only question is how doctrinaire they are, and those doctrines aren't likely to be club-able.
What are you talking about?
But at the very least, protesters have to avoid becoming fodder for a conservative victory if they are to be at all successful.
Comprehensive perspectives and intellectual history are all well and good. But, if we are in for a repeat of November 2010 next year, then what can be the positive impact of the OWS movement over the course the next half decade?
>But if something else is envisioned, something more literal-minded, something like the Paris Commune of 1871, a short-lived assumption of power by the working class, founded on theories of participatory democracy, well, that's another matter entirely.
Don't be so ridiculous ...
The Paris Commune is a legend in left-wing circles. I was joking with a friend in New York who was burbling about OWS there.
I guess this means that they won't be doing everything in their power to prevent Republicans from being elected next November, as they don't make any distinctions between the two parties, intellectual history notwithstanding ...
>The Paris Commune is a legend in left-wing circles. I was joking with a friend in New York who was burbling about OWS there.
http://www.myteapartyconvention.com/
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2010/09/national-tea-party-convention-cancelled-over-lagging-ticket-sales/
I hope this isn't too off topic.
Less off topic, since violence came up:
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In case I created the mistaken impression that Tea Party supporters aren't *likely* to commit violence, the potential and the ability definitely exist. I merely maintain that the major factor that has prevented Tea Party violence thus far is *because* they command such a massive media voice.
There needs to be no violence. Period. Full stop.
Unfortunately it's difficult to talk objectively about violence, because anything that sounds like a logical explanation begins to sound like an excuse. I agree that it needs to stop. Explanations aren't justifications.
From the far-right "Patriot" Post:
Ballots or Bullets?
http://patriotpost.us/alexander/2011/08/25/ballots-or-bullets/
The article is sufficiently divorced from reality (and shows the sheer mass hallucination that mainstream America is up against).
But the comments are about evenly divided between those of sane, mature principle and those calling for bloodshed.
I missed that part...
http://blog.sfgate.com/nov05election/2011/11/04/occupy-oakland-explains-the-violence-or-doesnt-video
On a tangent, what this illustrates so well is how hard it is for people to self-organize. You know all those countries we tsk-tsk because they have revolution after revolution? Well, it must be like this. Endless squabbling, and nothing getting done until some frustrated guy grabs a gun and, however temporarily, makes everyone march to his drummer. It makes you realize what truly great men our Founding Fathers were, what seriousness and sense of purpose they had.
And yet still, our system is broken. But it won't be OWS that fixes it.
Frustrating to watch, because it would not be hard to jump into that press gaggle and clean the whole situation up in 15 minutes.
>http://blog.sfgate.com/nov05election/2011/11/04/occupy-oakland-explains-the-violence-or-doesnt-video
We see this in Syria. Right now, the Syrian middle class is pretending hard that nothing's going on. They're not joining the protests of their fellow citizens not because they're afraid of the current regime but because they're more afraid of the protestors. They have sectarian issues we can't pretend to understand, but we can understand our own issues. So who was the fool who thought 99% of America could relate to a white guy in a beard and dreadlocks banging on a bongo drum next to a sign that reads "My degree in Urban Studies is worthless?"
The truth is that 99% of America looks at OWS and sees something that scares it more than the current state of affairs.
Name one time that the Tea Party attacks banks.
>>> t the frustratio n over banks and government with which they began
And BTW, union support for Occupy Oakland was mild at best. Union truck drivers at the port of Oakland stated the regular citizens had no right to interrupt the port and only unions had that right.
Our individual share of the public debt is now about $45,000. Virtually all of that money went to finance wars that profit defense contractors and to bail out businesses that capitalism says should have been left to fail.
You throw in "the same applies to big business" as an afterthought, and even then, it seems like you have a thing for "developers." This is all so penny-ante. Have you no concept of the trillions that large corporations have stolen from us? At least what the unions get goes to benefit some little people. Nothing that the corporations get benefits little people.
Read this. This is where your outrage should be directed at.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-real-housewives-of-wall-street-look-whos-cashing-in-on-the-bailout-20110411
"The benefits the unions "won" were not obtained fairly."
The benefits public employee unions obtained were done so through collective bargaining, which is by far the fairest way for all workers to make positive changes for themselves and their families. If all workers demanded the right to organize, you would see wages increase dramatically across the board, as historically they did in this country after the massive organizing of the 1930's and 40's.
It was an impressive effort, just not a general strike.
Incidentally, why pull a general strike in Oakland? I sense a lot of visceral reasons, but not strategic reasons.
I am a San Franciscan and our supervisor, Sean Elsbernd. is no different than the other 10. They always vote as per instructions from developers and public employee unions. It's a pay for play govt at its worst.
I can tell you for sure the interim mayor of SF, Ed Lee is most concerned about the local Occupies messing up his America's Cup events and lost income for the city. He and Jean Quan more or less share the same owned brain. Both are effectively sales reps for mainland China.
I believe the essence of Occupy is people want to see special interest money cut off to politicians so the general public will get a fair shake from govt and banks. Don't forget to add public employee unions to the pay for play list. The general public has no lobby; maybe Occupy will change that.
The 99% concept is brilliant, which is why Fox News is spending so much energy attacking it, and why you are here as well.
The execution is less than brilliant.
Actually, no, I'm not. OWS does not speak for the 99% of Americans it's decided to co-opt. They barely speak for the percentage of Americans who make up the Dem party.
Not interested in the tedious Fox attacks. Peddle that nonsense elsewhere.
Second, OWS is under-performing its concept.
See, that's not hard to understand at all, is it??
All these occupiers and squatters have a problem. The vandalism we saw in Oakland is a testament to that. These are folks with entitlement mentalities. And those with such mentalities will try to get what they want - even by force and rioting. They don't mean to just inconvenience, but to deprive others (like the port workers and shop owners) of their livlihoods.
OWS and the squatters know full well that part of their lot are violent anarchists, yet they do nothing to discourage them, but call them part of their movement.
Of course, violence is pretty much guaranteed when a group of folks that think they're entitled don't get what they want.
They also managed to inconvenience and disrupt many common folks just going about their business or doing they jobs.
I believe OWS has been successful -how many people just a few weeks ago were versed on mortgage backed securities fraud? Some, perhaps, but many more have now looked into a system that many now conclude is rigged.I think that this has shown some of the inadequacies of traditional media, and the changing dynamic where everyone has a camera and video on hand in their phone, and the means to disseminate that. The video of police dressed like paramilitary in Oakland lobbing an explosive device into a crowd helping the wounded was shocking.
I think OWS is a symptom of 14 million unemployed, and additionally 8.9 million underemployed, stagnation in DC. With a middle class facing hardships combined with the perception that the future looks bleak you can see this anger expressed in people leaving Netflix and big banks, with people feeling screwed over.
The stagnation has led to the "remedy" of the Super Congress, where austerity cuts are being proposed with trigger options has serious implications of decree by fiat. You can see this in the Eurozone in actions towards Greece, where the voice of the governed is silenced, and considered too radical to implement.
The program seen now in Europe where austerity measures, the dismantling of collective bargaining and privatization schemes was a model that many believed that Whitman in CA would have followed had she been elected.
My personal feeling is that without addressing the fundamental problems of a toxic financial system that we could well be in store for more "shock and awe", with a precipitating incident that either leads many more to join OWS, or form new groups where they feel a more cultural identity. Certainly this has led to a wider discussion, and that is in my opinion a good thing.
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Exactly; Which resonated with the public. Now that message is obscured by interlopers with various other agendas. It's the jobs, stupid which should be kept before the public. They are not hippies. They are unemployed looking for work should be their mantra.
Kayvan Sabehgi in intensive care with a lacerated spleen after protests in Oakland, a week after Scott Olsen was hurt. He says police beat him with batons
Sad to see another Vet almost killed by Oakland police. This story is nowhere in the MSM yet.