[Debate] Fwd: Jeremy Brecher : The 99 Percent Organize Themselves
m_redmond at btinternet.com
m_redmond at btinternet.com
Sun Nov 6 20:36:14 GMT 2011
The indignados/indignants, now occupy movement, is shaking the labour
movement and all other institutions who have relied on passive
membership and luke-warm support, out of their complacency. Even Ed
Milliband is saying the St Pauls protesters must be taken seriously,
whilst simultaneously denouncing the big strike against pension cuts on
the 30th November.
Of course it hasn't come from nowhere overnight. People involved have
been working in autonomous environmental groups, peace picnicking and
camping outside parliament for 10 years, actively supporting people in
sub-standard housing, campaigning on unpopular issues like asylum and
are often active in more than one group. Lots has been learned and I
HOPE that someone is writing a history of recent activism.
What I have noticed in this occupy is the greatest attempts being made
to reach out to everyone from the police to city workers and no belittling of anyone's point of view. There is a long way to go and
much pain on the horizon I'm sure but it feels as though a boil has been
lanced. Even if (when) enthusiasm subsides, what has been learned won't be lost. What I would like to see now are more neighbourhood occupations.
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--- On Sun, 6/11/11, Peter Waterman <peterwaterman1936 at gmail.com> wrote:
From: Peter Waterman <peterwaterman1936 at gmail.com>
Subject: [Debate] Fwd: Jeremy Brecher : The 99 Percent Organize Themselves
To: "DEBATE" <debate-list at fahamu.org>
Date: Sunday, 6 November, 2011, 11:02
Peter sez:
Jeremy Brecher is a veteran US labour historian and activist.
This is a second piece of his on the Occupy movement.
Interestingly, I received this from Jai Sen, of CACIM, New
Delhi, which has been publishing a series of books,
'Challenging Empires', about the World Social Forum and the
global justice and solidarity movement. He received the piece
from Jeremy in the USA. What I find of particular interest
here is the dialectic Jeremy reveals between the Occupy and
the labour movement, as well as the historical comparisons and
contrasts he draws. As well as the 'communications
internationalism' evident from the long but rapid journey from
the USA to India to South Africa (and wherever else this item
lands up).
What goes around comes around?
Not to forget the Oakland slogan: The Beginning is Near!*
Pw
*The reference here is to 'The End is Nigh!', of which the web
provides this useful specification:
"Nigh" means near and the saying really means "The
End of the World is Coming Soon". The phrase derives from a man
who could often be seen walking up and down London's Oxford Street
wearing a sandwich board bearing these words. The meaning was
purely religious - he was warning of the 'impending' Christian
vision of Apocalypse - but the phrase has since entered the
popular consciousness as a slightly derogatory term for someone or
something warning of impending doom.
Now read on...
Published
on The Nation (http://www.thenation.com)
The 99
Percent Organize Themselves
Jeremy Brecher | November 4, 2011
In mid-October I spent two days and a night with Occupy
Wall Street in Zuccotti Park. Since then I’ve read a
barrage of advice for what OWS and its companion movements
around the world should be doing. But I’ve been haunted by
another question: What should those of us who are
sympathetic to OWS (according to polls, roughly two-thirds
of Americans are), but are not going to relocate to a
downtown park, be doing to advance the wellbeing of the 99
percent?
I got one part of my answer as I groggily logged on to
the web at 5:30 the morning after I returned home from
Zuccotti Park. When I left the park, its private owner
Brookfield Properties had announced it would clear the
park “for cleaning” and enforce rules preventing tarps,
sleeping bags, and lying down. Mayor Bloomberg said the
NYPD would enforce those rules, effectively ending the
encampment.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the eviction.
When OWS put out a call for support, thousands of people
began to converge on the park for nonviolent resistance to
eviction. Unions called on their members to protect the
encampment. The president of the AFL-CIO’s Central Labor
Council lobbied the city to cancel the crackdown. Lawyers
prepared to bring suit to protect the occupiers’ first
amendment rights. City council members and other New York
politicians lobbied the mayor to halt the eviction.
Against all expectation, Mayor Bloomberg announced that
Brookfield was abandoning the “cleanup” plan and the
company announced it would try to reach an accommodation
with the occupiers. The mobilization of supporters had
forced the Mayor and the park owners to back down. I had
my first answer to what the rest of the 99 percent can do:
Protect the occupations.
Since then, there have been similar mobilizations to
protect occupations in cities from Atlanta to Oakland.
Many have involved a similar combination of public
officials, trade unions, and rank-and-file 99 percenters
just showing up to defend their rights. In one
extraordinary case, law enforcement officials themselves
were responsible for saving the Occupy Albany encampment
in Academy Park across from the State Capitol and City
Hall. As protests grew, Police Chief Steven Krokoff issued
an internal memo stating, “I have no intention of
assigning officers to monitor, watch, videotape or
influence any behavior that is conducted by our citizens
peacefully demonstrating in Academy Park” and that the
department would respond “in the same manner that we do on
a daily basis” to any reported crime.
According to the Albany Times-Union, Albany
Mayor Jerry Jennings, under pressure from the
administration of Gov. Andrew Cuomo, thereupon directed
city police to arrest several hundred Occupy Albany
protesters. The police refused. The Times-Union reported
that “State Police supported the defiant posture of Albany
police leaders to hold off making arrests for the
low-level offense of trespassing, in part because of
concern it could incite a riot or draw thousands of
protesters in a backlash that could endanger police and
the public.” According to the official, “The bottom line
is the police know policing, not the governor and not the
mayor.” Meanwhile, Albany County District Attorney David
Soares informed the mayor and police officials that,
“Unless there is property damage or injuries to law
enforcement we don’t prosecute people for protesting.”
A 99 Percent Movement?
I remember well how the movement against the Vietnam war,
so powerful among the youth on America’s campuses in the
1960s, was largely isolated from the rest of the country.
Something very different is happening right now, however:
The Occupy movements have been building alliances through
direct action mutual aid. And 99 percenters are connecting
with them and utilizing their spirit and methods to
contest their own injustices. The result is that OWS,
instead of becoming isolated, is morphing before our eyes
into what some are calling the 99 Percent Movement.
When Rose Gudiel received an eviction notice for her
modest home in La Puente, a working class suburb of Los
Angeles, she announced, “We’re not leaving.” She and her
family hunkered down while dozens of friends and
supporters camped in their yard, determined to resist.
When thousands started to gather outside Los Angeles City
Hall to launch “Occupy LA,” Rose Gudiel went down and told
her story to one of its first General Assemblies. A group
from Occupy LA joined the vigil at her home and some
stayed to camp out. Next Rose Gudiel and an Occupy LA
delegation protested in front of the $26 million dollar
Bel Air mansion of Steve Mnuchin, CEO of OneWest, which
serviced her mortgage. Next day they held a sit-in at the
Pasadena regional office of Fannie Mae, where Rose
Gudiel’s 63-year old disabled mother made an impassioned
plea to save her home and nine protesters were arrested –
all broadcast that night on the TV news. The next day Rose
Gudiel received a letter from the bank saying her eviction
had been called off and soon she had a deal for a
renegotiated mortgage. Housing advocates are now
considering a campaign called “Let a thousand Roses
bloom.” MSNBC commented that Rose Gudiel provides “an
example of how the sprawling “Occupy” movement – often
criticized for its lack of focus – can lend muscle to
specific goals pursued by organizations and individuals.”
An alliance has been developing between the occupations
around the country and many different layers of organized
labor. In New York a group from OWS joined a march of 500
to a Verizon store held to support the contract campaign
of Verizon workers. “We’re all in this together,”
53-year-old Steven Jackman, a Verizon worker from Long
Island, said about Occupy Wall Street. In Albany, New
York, Occupy Albany joined a protest outside the State
Capitol featuring a roasted pig wearing a gold top hat,
sporting a gold chain and chomping on a cigar. The
adoption of OWS themes and language was apparent. A local
union official said, “The corporate pig’s been out there,
taking a bite out of America, out of the 99 percent, for
years and I’m inviting all of the 99 percent of America to
come on down today and take a bite out of the corporate
pig.”
The collaboration of OWS and labor can take some unusual
forms. To support art handlers of the Teamsters’ union,
activists from OWS started showing up at Sotheby’s
auctions, masquerading as clients. They would suddenly
stand up and, instead of offering a bid, disrupt the
proceedings with loud denunciations of the company’s labor
practices. OWS activists likewise went to a Manhattan
restaurant owned by a prominent Sotheby’s board member,
clinked on glasses for silence, and then denounced the
company as a union-buster. Jason Ide, president of the
Teamsters local that represents the art handlers, told
the Washington Post that the Occupy tactics
surprised and inspired him and his members – so much so
that the workers have become regulars at OWS. “Now is this
rare opportunity for labor unions, and especially the
union leadership, to take some pointers,” for example by
considering the civil-disobedience approach taken by
Occupy demonstrations.
Meanwhile, a close working relationship has developed
between climate and environmental activists and the Occupy
movement. A number of environmental activists, including
Bill McKibben and Naomi Klein, were early endorses of the
Occupy movement, and a delegation from Occupy DC marched
to join a rally against the Keystone XL pipeline. Next a
group of students and climate activists organized an
“#OccupyStateDept” action and occupied the area outside
the Ronald Reagan Building overnight to protest the
Keystone XL pipeline – and to secure admission to a
hearing on the pipeline the next day. Ethan Nuss, who had
stood in line for 14 hours, told the hearing, “Every day I
wake up and work for a vision in this country of a 100
percent clean energy economy that will create jobs for my
generation when my generation is facing the largest
unemployment since the Great Depression.” Bill McKibben
urged pipeline opponents to join the Occupy DC encampment
and invited Occupy DC to join the upcoming anti-pipeline
action at the White House.
Bringing It All Back Home
Just as workers, community residents, students, and even
housewives in the 1930s adopted the “sit-down strike” to
address their grievances, so the robust but nonviolent
direct action of the Occupy movements is being adopted by
diverse communities and constituencies to address their
own concerns. For example, a hundred students and teachers
recently occupied a New York Board of Education meeting to
protest budget cutbacks, layoffs, large class sizes and
overemphasis on standardized testing. After the city
school chancellor and school board members fled the
meeting, the crowd held an impromptu “general assembly.”
Her voice amplified by the echo of the “people’s
microphone,” an elementary school student named Indigo
told the assembly,
“Mic check. I’m Indigo, and I am an eight-year-old third
grader, and I’m sad Ms. Cunningham is doing work for free.
I don’t think it’s fair that teachers are getting laid
off. The thing that would help me learn more would be if
we had smaller classes. My teacher, Ms. Lamar, has to
shout to be heard.”
99 percenters are also bringing the OWS message back into
their own communities. For example, OWSers joined a
protest in Harlem against “stop and frisk” racial
profiling by law enforcement officials. Soon, activists
began holding Occupy Harlem General Assemblies. And civil
rights and labor groups, including the Coalition of Black
Trade Unionists, the A. Philip Randolph Institute, the
Labor Council for Latin American Advancement, the Asian
Pacific American Labor Alliance, the National Action
Network, and the New York State and New York City chapters
of the NAACP organized their own rally in City Hall Park
and march to the Zuccotti Park to show their support for
the OWS movement.
Occupy College provides another example of how 99
percenters are taking the Occupy message – and mode of
self-organization -- into other arenas. It is organized
both to support the Occupations around the country and
around the world, and to address the specific issues
affecting college students like the cost of education and
the burden of college debt that have been important themes
of the Occupy movements. Occupy College has established a
website and is initiating National Solidarity Teach-ins in
early November at colleges around the country.
While there has been a lot of debate in recent years
about face-to-face vs. Internet organizing, in fact the
Occupy and 99-percenter movements have brilliantly
combined the two. While many Occupy groups and General
Assemblies have been highly local, there is also
widespread self-organization occurring on the web by
groups such “Knitters for Occupy Wall St” and “Knitters
for the 99 Percent” linking people all over the country
who are making warm clothes for the occupiers. Here are
some ways 99-percenters might want to think about
organizing with their own real and virtual communities:
Bring a speaker from your local Occupy group to a
meeting in your living room or to whatever organizations
you belong to.
Organize a General Assembly in your neighborhood to
discuss the issues of the 99 percent. Discuss what is
upsetting people and decide on some concrete action to
address it.
If your PTA supports teachers’ jobs and programs for
low-income students, get them to visit their political
representatives and also do a joint action with your
local Occupy group.
If your church’s food pantry or homeless shelter needs
money, hold an action at your local bank offices
demanding that they feed the homeless in “their”
community. If they won’t, ask your elected officials to
take a look at the benefits they receive from “their”
community. (Remember, according to Mayor Bloomberg it
was the threat of city council officials to look into
benefits received by the owners of Zuccotti Park that
led them to back off their efforts to shut down OWS.)
Create a Facebook page for your own equivalent of
“Knitters for the 99 Percent.”
Create a group to monitor local media and to protest
when they favor the concerns of the 1 percent over those
of the 99 percent.
Organize public hearings in your town about what’s
really happening to the 99 percent and how the 1
percent’s power is affecting them.
Create your own temporary occupations in your own
milieu addressing concerns about housing, jobs, media,
or whatever else concerns you and your fellow 99
percenters.
While the connections that have developed with unions are
of great importance, we need to remember that the great
majority of 99 percenters don’t have unions.
Self-organization of non-union workers is a crucial next
step. Take some of your co-workers down to visit your
local occupation. Invite someone from your local Occupy
group to meet with people from your workplace. Discuss
what support you can give each other and the 99-Percent
movement.
The Power of the Powerless
There is clearly a bigger movement growing out of the
Occupy movement. But how will it develop? Some expect it
to become like the Tea Party, a pressure group within the
political party system. Others imagine something like the
Tahrir Square demonstrations that toppled the Mubarak
regime in one concentrated upheaval.
Neither of these visions takes enough account of the role
of “secondary institutions” – schools, religious
congregations, workplaces, communities, ethnic groups, and
subcultures – in American society. The cooperation and
acquiescence of these institutions provide the “pillars of
support” on which both the government and the corporations
depend – and through which their power can be humbled. And
they provide arenas in which people can make change that
will genuinely affect their lives long before they are
powerful enough to defeat corporate control of national
politics.
In our top-down, corporate-controlled political system,
even our political parties and local governments can be
considered secondary institutions. Those who are active in
political parties and organizations can play a role
supporting the Occupy movements and addressing the needs
of the 99 percent. You can invite a speaker from your
local Occupation group; support them in the street; and
insist your organization’s leaders and the politicians it
supports take a pro-Occupation stand. You can identify
ways in which your organization and those it supports
acquiesce in the interests of the 1 percent and demand
that they stop.
The same is true of local governments. In Los Angeles,
for example, the City Council unanimously passed a
resolution supporting "the continuation of the peaceful
and vibrant exercise in First Amendment Rights" of the
Occupy LA.
Beyond that, local governments and political parties can
start pursuing the interests of the 99 percent and stop
supporting those of the one percent. In Los Angeles, for
example, the same night the city council voted to endorse
Occupy LA, it also reaffirmed its support for a
“Responsible Banking Initiative,” which would leverage the
city’s over $25 billion in pension and cash investments to
pressure banks to invest in the city. Moving city funds to
non-profit development banks is also being discussed.
In Brooklyn, Assemblyman Vito J. Lopez proposed a
millionaire’s tax to raise $4 billion to prevent the
cutting of vital social services. Absent such a tax, he
proposed a $4 billion fund to be voluntarily contributed
by 400 companies in the financial sector each contributing
five to ten million dollars for three years to create
jobs, fix infrastructure, and build affordable housing. He
did not say how the companies would be persuaded to
contribute, but his proposal was made at the start of a
march from the Brooklyn Borough Hall across the Brooklyn
Bridge to Wall Street.
I remember when, during the Vietnam War millions of
people joined the monthly demonstrations and “work breaks”
known as the Vietnam Moratorium – only to have the
national leadership shut it down and move into electoral
politics. Although some politicians and labor leaders have
called for OWSers to campaign for Obama or the Democratic
Party, such a shift is unlikely to happen to the Occupy
movement. For those who want that to happen, their best
strategy will be to make Obama and the Democratic Party
something the Occupy movement (and the rest of the 99
percent) believe is worth supporting. Start freezing
foreclosures, taxing the rich, creating new public works
jobs, and housing the homeless. Build an alternative to
corporate greed and they will come.
Winter Soldiers
The occupations have been incredibly successful. But
nothing can fail like success. Z Magazine founder
Michael Albert, just returned from conversations with
protest veterans in Greece, Turkey, London, Dublin, and
Spain reports he was told that their massive assemblies
and occupations at first were invigorating and uplifting.
“We were creating a new community. We were making new
friends. We were hearing from new people.” But as days and
weeks passed, “it got too familiar. And it wasn’t obvious
what more they could do.”
Besides boredom (rarely a problem so far), winter is
coming. I can testify just from sleeping out on one rainy
night in October that, whatever the occupiers’
determination, it’s going to be tough. Some will need to
create sturdier encampments better protected against the
elements. Some will need to come inside.
When a threatened army successfully repositions itself it
is a victory, not a defeat. What matters is that the
social forces that have made OWS and its kin continue
their feisty, imaginative, nonviolent reclaiming of public
space by marches, occupations, and other forms of direct
action without getting pinned down in positions they can’t
sustain. That way they can continue their crucial role in
inspiring the rest of us 99 percenters to organize
ourselves.
For that, they need help right now from the rest of us 99
percenters. In New York, there is now a campaign to let
the protesters stay and set up tents. Elsewhere
possibilities for using indoor spaces where occupiers can
“come in from the cold” (with or without official
permission) are being explored. Occupiers need both
material aid and political pressure from unions, religious
group, and ordinary 99 percenters to make the transition
to the next phase.
In 1932 at the pit of the Great Depression, labor
journalist Charles R. Walker visited “Hoovervilles” and
unemployed workers’ organizations around the country. He
predicted:
There will be increasing outbursts of employed and
unemployed alike – a kind of spontaneous democracy
expressing itself in organized demonstrations by large
masses of people.” They will “march or meet in order,
elect their own spokesmen and committees, and work out
in detail their demands for work or relief. They will
present their formulated needs to factory
superintendents, relief commissions, and city councils,
and to the government at Washington.
What Walker called a “rough and ready democracy” is what
OWS and its progeny around the country are creating today.
The unemployed councils Walker described lasted only a
few years, but from them sprang the Workers Alliance, a
hybrid of a trade union for workers on government public
works projects and a welfare rights organization. It in
turn was a crucial springboard for the industrial union
movement that would transform the US economic and
political system.
The Occupy movement is not unlikely to last forever, nor
would it be a good thing if it did. It could be forgotten
like so many movements of the past. But it instead it
could be remembered as the progenitor of the 99 Percent
Movement. That depends on the rest of us 99 percenters.
Source URL: http://www.thenation.com/article/164403/99-percent-organize-themselves
_____________________________
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