From Occupation to Revolution II

If OWS decides explicitly that its goal is revolution, it would transform the OWS movement. It would be a qualitative leap and set the agenda for the coming years: a national and international conversation about how to make a revolution and what a post-revolutionary society can be like. If OWS does this, then folding the tents in the heart of winter (or losing them to a police raid) won't matter because the revolutionary strategy can be carried out even without them. What OWS will gain is what does matter: a whole new level of consciousness, determination, and ties to the community and each other internationally.

But what exactly does it mean to make revolution our goal? How is that different from what OWS is already doing? Does it mean picking up a gun or smashing more windows or attacking the police? No it does not. It means doing what is discussed below.

One of the most popular chants of the Occupy Wall Street occupations is, "The banks got bailed out; we got sold out." People want a more equal and democratic society and they know that the 1% with the real power in our country want the opposite. How can the OWS occupiers make society more equal and democratic?

On this, opinions vary widely. While everybody wants more people to join and support the occupation, there is presently little agreement about what "joining and supporting the occupation" should mean in practice. What, exactly, do occupiers need to do in order to achieve a more equal and democratic society?

Some believe that if occupiers keep their tents at the various parks around the country long enough, then the desired changes will happen. Others believe that if enough people get themselves arrested in civil disobedience actions to demonstrate the sincerity of our convictions, that will exert "moral suasion" (as Gandhi called it) on the rulers and make them change their ways. Some think that if everybody can agree on a few realistic demands and communicate them clearly, that will do it. And some believe that electing different politicians to office will solve our problems.

None of the above actions, however, will achieve the desired goal, because these actions don't remove from power the plutocracy that holds the real power in America and that wants America to be undemocratic and unequal, and these actions don't abolish the capitalist system from which the plutocracy derives its power based on concentrated wealth.

Tents in parks won't stop a ruling class that commands the greatest military force on the planet.

The plutocracy already knows we are sincere, and they don't care if we offer ourselves to be arrested to make the point.

Any "realistic" demands we make will have to avoid challenging the power of the plutocracy or the capitalist system from which it derives its power, or the demands will be dismissed as "unrealistic." Defining our goal as a set of "realistic" demands means declaring that we will stop bothering the plutocracy when it makes the demanded changes. Our movement will then be over; the plutocracy will remain in power, able to take back whatever it gave; and before long we'll be back where we are today.

The plutocracy was never elected, and cannot be un-elected. Politicians in our society only have the power that the plutocracy delegates to them; they most certainly do not have the power to remove the plutocracy from power.

It will take a revolution to remove the plutocracy from power, and to begin creating a new kind of society based on equality and mutual aid and genuine democracy. The strategy and tactics of the OWS movement should be directed towards building a huge, popular revolutionary movement, one that explicitly aims to remove the plutocracy from power, that has a vision of a new and better kind of society that can inspire hundreds of millions of Americans to fight for it. This kind of movement can win the support of soldiers and sailors so that, when the ruling class orders the military to attack the revolution, they will disobey and instead join and help defend the revolution with their weapons. This is how a revolutionary movement, when it reaches critical mass, will be able to prevail even in a contest of violent force with the ruling class.

The world does not have to be a capitalist one, based on class inequality and the glorification of self-interest. Most people want a very different kind of society. We can create a society that is the way most people want it to be, in which products and services are created to satisfy real needs and reasonable desires consistent with sustainability and environmental wisdom, not to make a profit for the few at the expense of every other consideration; in which the economy is based on sharing, from each according to ability and to each according to need, where products and services are provided according to need, not according to who has enough money to buy them; where there are no rich and poor because everybody has an equal right to enjoy the benefits of the wealth that society produces.

We can create a genuine democracy in which all law-making power resides in local community and workplace assemblies that all adults who support the principles of equality and mutual aid can attend. Instead of social order on a large scale being imposed by a centralized government democratic in name only, it can be achieved in a truly democratic manner by voluntary federation of local assemblies. (This is discussed in some detail in "Thinking about Revolution.")

The key to building this revolutionary movement is to first explicitly declare that building a revolutionary movement is the strategic goal. Then tactics can be evaluated with respect to how well they serve that goal. The chief element of the strategy is spreading the revolutionary ideas--that the ruling class has no legitimate right to rule over us, that revolution is necessary, that it is possible, and that it is the way to create a far better society based on equality and mutual aid and democracy. Tactics would emphasize communicating these ideas to the wider public: chants during demonstrations, leaflets passed out wherever the public is, talks by us where people live and work, teach-ins, interviews given to whatever media will do them. And tactics would include various creative ways to involve the public in actively discussing and developing revolutionary ideas, and recruiting others to help spread the message.

What about confrontational actions? These tactics also should be evaluated the same way. Do they spread the revolutionary message? Sometimes a confrontation with authority can indeed bring wider attention to our revolutionary message. But this depends on how we engage in the confrontation. A confrontation that exposes the illegitimacy and immorality of the rulers, for example when people pack a courtroom to protest eviction proceedings against a family, is good. A confrontation that gives the rulers what the public will perceive as a legitimate reason for using police force against our movement is bad. Confronting the police, in and of itself, does not help, and can backfire if it enables the rulers to paint a false picture of us in the public eye.

What about violence? Violence in self-defense may not be tactically wise in a given situation, but it is not immoral. The philosophy of nonviolence is wrong to say it is. Violence against property, when it is not clearly in self-defense, serves no good purpose and makes it easy for the rulers to turn the public against us. Violence against unarmed civilians has nothing to do with self-defense, and it is immoral.

If we focus on spreading the revolutionary message, then there will come a time when the revolutionary movement is large enough and has the support of sufficient numbers of soldiers and sailors to successfully defend itself against violence by the forces remaining loyal to the ruling class. At this time we should use whatever force, including violence, that is necessary to defend ourselves and the goals of the revolution.

But we are not yet at the point when we can actually prevail in a contest of violent force with the ruling class. Therefore it makes no sense to pretend that we are and to deliberately get into violent fights with the police that we have no way of winning. When the police attack us violently, we should do our best to make an orderly tactical retreat. Our strategic offense is what is most important: to spread a message about what we believe and what we want. The message isn't that we can defeat the well-armed police today; it is that the movement we are building is for values and objectives that most people share, and it can grow large enough one day to win a contest of force with the ruling class.

We need to keep our eye on the revolutionary strategy. Let us not get deflected from it by wishful thinking of the sort that says that "moral suasion" or "enough tents" or "better politicians" or "reasonable demands" will make the rulers change their ways.

Let us neither be deflected from the revolutionary strategy by those who propose tactics that have nothing to do with spreading revolutionary ideas. There is a totally false Hollywood image of what it means to be a revolutionary, made up of images of Che Guevara and black-shirted bomb-throwing (or window-breaking) "anarchists" who strike a revolutionary pose and talk tough with bravado. Police provocateurs, agents of the ruling class, try to get us to act this way, or themselves act this way in our name, because they know that as long as we equate our movement with such actions we will not be thinking about how to spread revolutionary ideas and mobilizing the public around those ideas, and the public will be turned against us.

The rulers have many agents with many different disguises, all pretending to be our friends, trying to persuade us what to do. They can be very persistent--that is their job! They appeal to our wishful thinking, or our desire to view ourselves as courageous, or anything else that will work, as long as it prevents us from understanding what a real revolutionary strategy is, and carrying it out. Now, more than ever, we need to think carefully about strategy and tactics. Just doing what seems to be "in the air" or whatever the most persistent individuals advocate is not good enough to win. It will take a huge revolutionary movement to win, which can develop if, and only if, we aim to make it happen.

We should make every Occupation a base camp for spreading the idea of revolution. Occupations should actively reach out to the larger community, as Occupy Boston did recently when it cooperated with Occupy the Hood and local people to stage a large rally in Dudley Square in Roxbury, the heart of the black community. The rally focused on local concerns, especially police brutality, but put them in the larger picture of savage inequality in American society.

Occupiers: Let this be our Message to the American People

The 1% with all the money, and their Republican and Democratic politicians controlled by money, do not represent the 99%, do not serve the 99%, and do not have any legitimate right to govern the 99%.

To soldiers, sailors and members of police forces, we say: Do not obey orders from the 1%, to attack the movement of the 99%. Our movement aims to create a fundamentally more equal and democratic society. If you obey such orders you will be taking the side of the dictatorship of the rich and attacking your own people. Refuse such orders. Come over to the side of the people--your neighbors and friends and relatives.

To the American people, we say: Once again it is time for revolution in America. Instead of a British king we have a ruling class of bankers and billionaires who control the government and all the important institutions of society. The powerful men and women who run our world were not elected and cannot be unelected. They can only be removed from power by revolution.

Our goal is democratic revolution, to break the power of the ruling elite and create a society run by and for the people: a true democracy, with a non-capitalist economy in which all who contribute to it share equally in its benefits.

Join us. Show your support with signs saying "Equality" in your windows and in any other way you can think of. Help to spread these ideas far and wide. We are the 99%. We can make a new world.

Please read "Thinking about Revolution" at www.NewDemocracyWorld.org

Occupiers: When the Cops Say Clear Out, What Should We Do?

What should Occupiers do when the police order us to clear out?

This is a tactical question that can only be answered by first identifying the strategy we want to advance with our tactics. So let me start by talking about strategy.

Somebody in the Boston Occupation made a great sign: "The beginning is near!" Yes, the Occupation is a terrific beginning. But the beginning of what?

I hope it is the beginning of carrying out a strategy that can win. The strategy is to build a revolutionary movement that grows to include the great majority of Americans, including most soldiers and sailors who will refuse orders to attack it. Such a movement will inspire the 99% with a vision of a non-capitalist society based on equality and concern for one another and genuine democracy instead of the opposite values held by the 1%. Such a mass, popular revolutionary movement, if we build it, will be able to defend itself against all of the violence that the ruling class will try to use to stop it from making a new and better world.

Most occupiers know, however, that we are not there yet. We may be speaking for the values and the interests of the 99% but not all of the 99% fully understand that yet, and they are not all on board yet.

The nature of the verbal and written attacks on the Occupation indicate how far we've come and how far we still need to go to get the majority of Americans on board. When the Occupation first stared out small, the attack on us by the talking heads and mainstream news media consisted of ignoring us. It is a sign of our growth and increasing respect by the public that the media now feel the need to acknowledge our existence. The two main attack themes that I've noticed are the following:

"If they're against Wall Street then they're against capitalism!"

"They're just a bunch of spoiled college kids."

These themes are directed at our current weaknesses, and they should alert us to the need to strengthen ourselves where we are weakest.

Regarding the first one, we are indeed against Wall Street because we are against class inequality, which is what capitalism produces and depends upon. So yes, we are against capitalism. We want a society based on equality, not a capitalist one based on class inequality. We want a society based on democracy, not a capitalist one in which money is power and most don't have any. And we want a society based on people helping each other, not a capitalist one based on pitting people against each other in a competitive race to the bottom.

But the public has virtually never heard capitalism denounced in the name of the values that the public already embraces: equality and mutual aid and democracy. They have only heard it denounced by Communists who are notoriously anti-democratic and famous for creating societies in which "some are more equal than others." And the public is always told that without capitalism we would not have smart phones or anything else ever created during the last several hundred years of capitalism, as if human creativity only exists when there is class inequality. When it comes to engaging the public in this vital discussion, the beginning is near, but only the beginning.

Regarding the second attack, the "spoiled college kids" theme, this will remain our weakness until we have recruited many many Americans who are not college students. We can do this. But we are only beginning.

One way we'll know that we've got enough Americans--a critical mass--on board with us to really start thinking about making a revolution is this. We'll know we're nearly there when the kind of people who today accuse us of being against capitalism start saying something like, "Hey, I'm against capitalism too. Who isn't? But those crazy extremists are going about it the wrong way. They should work within the legal system to make changes, bla bla bla." We're not there yet. We're only at the beginning.

So what will we do when the police, as is very likely at some point in the near future, order everybody to leave the parks that the occupiers are occupying?

It would be a big mistake if, when this happens, we forget what our long term task is--to spread our ideas to more and more of the public and recruit more and more people to joining in that effort. If we mistakenly think that our most important task is to maintain control of the parks where we've been camping, then our movement will suffer greatly.

The police at this time have the ability to win a contest of force--violent force--with us. We should not make it our purpose today to try to win a fight with the police. At the present time, the beginning of our movement, that would be futile. When we have grown the revolutionary movement to critical mass it will not be futile, but very possible. If we delude ourselves into thinking that we can overpower the police today, then the result will be a huge defeat and a terrible demoralization of the movement. The rulers will succeed in sending their most important message to the American public: "Resistance is futile. The numbers who want a different kind of world are and always will be too small to succeed. We have the power. You don't."

If, on the other hand, we make an orderly TACTICAL retreat when it becomes necessary, and continue to take the STRATEGIC offensive by reaching out to the public with our revolutionary ideas, using all the ways we can invent, then we will continue to grow stronger.

Please read "Thinking about Revolution" at www.NewDemocracyWorld.org for in depth discussion of these ideas.

What is the Occupation the Beginning of?

Somebody in the Boston Occupation made a great sign: "The beginning is near!" Yes, the Occupation is a terrific beginning. But the beginning of what?

I hope it is the beginning of a concerted effort to build a revolutionary movement that grows to include the great majority of Americans, including most soldiers and sailors who will refuse orders to attack it. I hope it inspires the 99% with a vision of a non-capitalist society based on equality and concern for one another and genuine democracy instead of the opposite values held by the 1%. And I know that such a mass, popular revolutionary movement, if we build it, will be able to defend itself against all of the violence that the ruling class will try to use to stop it from making a new and better world.

I also know, and I think most occupiers know, that we are not there yet. We may be speaking for the values and the interests of the 99% but not all of the 99% fully understand that yet, and they are not all on board yet.

The nature of the verbal and written attacks on the Occupation indicate how far we've come and how far we still need to go to get the majority of Americans on board. When the Occupation first stared out small, the attack on us by the talking heads and mainstream news media consisted of ignoring us. It is a sign of our growth and increasing respect by the public that the media now feel the need to acknowledge our existence. The two main attack themes that I've noticed are the following:

"If they're against Wall Street then they're against capitalism!"

"They're just a bunch of spoiled college kids."

These themes are directed at our current weaknesses, and they should alert us to the need to strengthen ourselves where we are weakest.

Regarding the first one, we are indeed against Wall Street because we are against class inequality, which is what capitalism produces and depends upon. So yes, we are against capitalism. We want a society based on equality, not a capitalist one based on class inequality. We want a society based on democracy, not a capitalist one in which money is power and most don't have any. And we want a society based on people helping each other, not a capitalist one based on pitting people against each other in a competitive race to the bottom.

But the public has virtually never heard capitalism denounced in the name of the values that the public already embraces: equality and mutual aid and democracy. They have only heard it denounced by Communists who are notoriously anti-democratic and famous for creating societies in which "some are more equal than others." And the public is always told that without capitalism we would not have smart phones or anything else ever created during the last several hundred years of capitalism, as if human creativity only exists when there is class inequality. When it comes to engaging the public in this vital discussion, the beginning is near, but only the beginning.

Regarding the second attack, the "spoiled college kids" theme, this will remain our weakness until we have recruited many many Americans who are not college students. We can do this. But we are only beginning.

One way we'll know that we've got enough Americans--a critical mass--on board with us to really start thinking about making a revolution is this. We'll know we're nearly there when the kind of people who today accuse us of being against capitalism start saying something like, "Hey, I'm against capitalism too. Who isn't? But those crazy extremists are going about it the wrong way. They should work within the legal system to make changes, bla bla bla." We're not there yet. We're only at the beginning.

So what will we do when the police, as is very likely at some point in the near future, order everybody to leave the parks that the occupiers are occupying?

It would be a big mistake if, when this happens, we forget what our long term task is--to spread our ideas to more and more of the public and recruit more and more people to joining in that effort. If we mistakenly think that our most important task is to maintain control of the parks where we've been camping, then our movement will suffer greatly.

The police at this time have the ability to win a contest of force--violent force--with us. We should not make it our purpose today to try to win a fight with the police. At the present time, the beginning of our movement, that would be futile. When we have grown the revolutionary movement to critical mass it will not be futile, but very possible. If we delude ourselves into thinking that we can overpower the police today, then the result will be a huge defeat and a terrible demoralization of the movement. The rulers will succeed in sending their most important message to the American public: "Resistance is futile. The numbers who want a different kind of world are and always will be too small to succeed. We have the power. You don't."

If, on the other hand, we make an orderly TACTICAL retreat when it becomes necessary, and continue to take the STRATEGIC offensive by reaching out to the public with our revolutionary ideas, using all the ways we can invent, then we will continue to grow stronger.

Please read "Thinking about Revolution" at www.NewDemocracyWorld.org for in depth discussion of these ideas.

Race and the Occupation

The Occupation movement spreading across America is inviting the 99% to join together to defeat the power of the 1% and to make a better world. They envision a world without inequality, which would mean (as many are coming to see) without the capitalist system that is based upon, and promotes, inequality.

In the General Assemblies there are discussions of race, and how that relates to the movement for a better world. In this discussion I believe it is important to keep two facts in mind.

#1. In American society life is harder, on average, for working class blacks and Hispanics than for working class whites.

#2. In American society life is hard and getting harder for all working class people, regardless of race.

Some people focus on fact #1 and say that whites are privileged. Some on the Left, for example, talk about "White skin privilege." But "privilege" is the wrong word. The reason is this. The ruling class uses racial discrimination not to improve the lives of whites, which is what "privilege" implies, but to weaken the working class with divide-and-rule in order to more effectively oppress and exploit all working people, including whites--fact #2.

It doesn't make sense to refer to this racial discrimination as a "privilege" for the whites when it is being used to oppress and exploit whites as well as non-whites. Using the word "privilege" obscures the role of racial discrimination as an instrument for oppressing all races.

Furthermore, using the word "privilege" and the phrase "white skin privilege" tends, naturally, to promote among whites the wrong emotional response. We want all working class people, including whites, to feel righteous anger, not guilt: anger at the ruling class, not guilt from seeing themselves as unfairly "privileged." Angry people overthrow their oppressors. People who think they are guilty of enjoying privileges given to them by the ruling class don't.

In fact, we want whites to feel anger at the ruling class for using racial discrimination to divide-and-rule working class people. This is how racial unity against racial discrimination and ruling class oppression is built.

Please, let's drop the "white privilege" vocabulary. Let's talk about racial discrimination as a ruling class weapon that hurts us all. Let's reach out to people of all races on the basis of fighting our common enemy for shared goals, for equality. We will be a lot stronger if we do this.

The ruling class's purpose in using racial discrimination is to foment distrust between people of different races. Decades of slavery followed by Jim Crow followed by much higher than average unemployment and exclusion from higher-status jobs and positions in society and disproportionately greater imprisonment of black people was intended to make white people view blacks as intellectually and morally inferior to whites. It was also intended to make black people view whites, whether rich or poor, as the oppressor of blacks. It is an unfortunate fact that the ruling class has had some success with its divide and rule strategy: what people of different races think about each other, unconsciously if not consciously, has been negatively affected by decades of living in a society shaped by a ruling class determined to foment distrust between different races. Given this effort by the ruling class to divide and rule, what is significant about race in the U.S. today is not that there exists some distrust between the races, but that so many people nonetheless try so hard to build trusting relations of solidarity between the races.

The existing negative ideas and attitudes about race, however, do need to be identified and refuted, especially when they affect how we behave towards each other. To succeed in building a movement that can defeat the ruling class and create a better world, we need to keep in mind that good people can have bad ideas, that criticizing a person's bad idea or attitude about race is different from denouncing the person as a bad person as if they were trying, like the ruling class, to oppress people. We need to practice friendly criticism among ourselves, to root out the ideas and practices that the ruling class  encourages among us to weaken us all.

Why We Have No Demands

Some people commenting on the Occupation movement sweeping America are saying that the movement needs to come up with specific demands. But this would be a big mistake.

It is a strength, not a weakness, that we are not making demands. We need a revolution. We all surely know that, don’t we? We need to remove the ruling class--the 1%, the plutocracy, the corporate elite, whatever one calls them—from power. We do not want this ruling class to do anything except to stop ruling. By making a demand on the ruling class, we would be saying to them that we want you to continue ruling, but to just make this or that reform in how you rule. Wrong!

Demands are messages to the rulers. We need, on the contrary, to direct our message to the ruled.

Our message is: Revolt against the rulers, remove them from power, abolish the capitalist system that is the basis of their power, and create a genuine democracy based on equality and mutual aid.

Please read "Thinking about Revolution" for more discussion of this.

Leaders

The Occupy Wall Street (and Boston etc.) protestors say, "We have no leaders." This is true in one sense, but false in others. To see why, we need to consider the very different roles that people can play, all of which get lumped together, confusingly, under the term, "leader."

Sometimes a person who has a cult following is called a "leader" and in this sense the Occupy folks apparently do not have a leader. Good! Sometimes when people elect a president, prime minister, chairman or some similarly titled person, that person is called a "leader." The occupiers don't have one of those either.

But the occupiers do have people who provide leadership of different sorts. One important kind of leadership is helping people to develop clarity in their thinking about the situation. Such a leader would help people gain clarity in seeing that the conflict is between the positive values--equality, solidarity, democracy--shared by the rank-and-file versus opposite values--inequality, competition, top-down control--held by the elite enemy. This kind of leadership aims at giving the rank-and-file greater confidence in themselves as the source of what is good in the world and the source of what can make a better world. Such leadership can come from different people at different times; whenever anybody speaks at a meeting and contributes to this clarity, they are--at that moment at least--a leader.

Another kind of leader is a person whose role is that of a commander. "Commander" is not a derogatory word. There are times when it is very important to have a commander, or even a military-style hierarchy of commanders. Commanders are necessary when the rank-and-file need to make tactical decisions, as a group, too quickly for consensus methods to work, or in a situation when it is impractical to use a consensus method of decision-making. For example, when the "occupy" protestors are assembled in a marching column and marching through the streets, it is not possible to use consensus methods to make decisions about whether, when confronted with an unexpected fork in the road, to take the left or the right road.

Apparently this situation arose when the Wall Street Occupation march was crossing the Brooklyn Bridge and the cops in front of the march directed it to turn off the pedestrian walk and onto the main road for vehicles, as part of a trap to provide a pretext for arresting more than 700 protestors. The protestors who happened (by chance alone?) to be at the front of the march were confronted with a decision: follow the direction of the cops, or refuse to leave the pedestrian walkway. The people at the head of the march may not even have been aware of the fact, but at that moment they were commanders. Their choice determined where everybody behind them would march.

No doubt due to innocent lack of experience, these chance commanders made a poor decision, allowing the police trap to succeed. The moral of the story is that, in advance of situations like this when it is appropriate, the movement needs to democratically choose individuals with sound judgement to be its commanders. These commanders should be obeyed in the specific context for which they are selected; but otherwise they should be treated as just equal rank-and-file members of the movement.

Another role that is sometimes referred to as leadership is the role of facilitator of a large meeting using consensus methods. This is an important role. When individuals take the initiative to play this role well, that is a good thing, even if they do not happen to be selected by a formal democratic procedure. If the individuals acting as a facilitator do a poor job, then the rank-and-file need to step in and replace them with better facilitators.

The experience of movements from earlier decades is sometimes expressed this way: "When people say, 'We have no leaders,' it really means that there are leaders, but they operate in the shadows without transparency and accountability." There is much wisdom in these words. Instead of saying, "We have no leaders," it would be better to say, "We have many different kinds of leaders. Whoever provides clarity is a leader when they do that. We democratically select our commanders if and when we need them. We have good facilitators. Those are our leaders."