Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
“When Adam
delved and Eve span,
Who was then
the gentleman?”
—
Slogan of the Peasants’ Revolt, England, 1381
Until early
September, when the members of what became Occupy Wall Street first hit the
streets of New York’s financial district, staging marches from a campground on
a private park whose owner had given them permission to be there, it looked
like the whole concept of economic class as a political issue was as dead in
U.S. politics as free silver. Earnest commentators filled the pages of liberal
and progressive publications with sober articles documenting how the richest 1
percent of Americans had slowly increased their share of the nation’s wealth
until they now control 50 percent of it all — and the nation yawned.
Republicans instantly denounced any hint
of a proposal to tax the rich as “class warfare,” motivated solely by envy on
the part of social “losers” who could be rich themselves if they’d only worked
harder, saved more, been more “worthy.” (Actually most rich people, now as in
1381, got that way by coming out of the right womb.) Democrats, anxious to appear on the side of the working people but scared shitless
over anything that might stop the rich from contributing to their campaigns,
basically ignored it altogether. And the rag-tag remnants of an American Left
pretty much confined themselves to talking about it … to each other.
Then came Occupy
Wall Street, a movement consciously patterned after the “Arab Spring” protests
that brought down the governments of Tunisia and Egypt, and all of a sudden the
phrase, “We are the 99 percent,” became part of U.S. public consciousness. No
longer is political debate in the U.S. trapped between a Democratic Party which
once — because a mass Left pressured them to do it — gave us a minimum wage, Social Security,
unemployment insurance, Medicare, Medicaid and the legal recognition of labor
unions, and is now killing all those advances with the death of a thousand
cuts; and a Republican Party and a Tea Party which joyously and proudly want to
get rid of the social safety net, the labor movement and any government taxation or regulation of corporations in
one fell swoop. While it’s unclear what the future holds for the Occupy
movement — whether they’ll remain as resourceful and intelligent as they’ve
been so far in coping with police repression, media ridicule and their
inability (so far) to affect the political process or whether they’ll repeat
the mistakes made by previous attempts to revive the U.S. Left — they’ve opened
the dark sky of American politics, economics and media propaganda with a simple
message: a free society cannot remain so if its wealth, income and political
power are brutally concentrated at the top of the economic scale.
Occupy protests
have spread not only nationwide, but worldwide. The nations of Western Europe,
which American progressives once looked to as models of social democracy, have
become as repressive as the U.S. Their so-called “socialist” or “social
democratic” parties are now no more radical than the U.S. Democratic Party, and
the Right-wing regimes currently in power in all Europe’s major economic powers
— Britain, Germany, France, Italy — as well as the nominal “socialists”
currently running Europe’s worst economic basket case, Greece — offer nothing
but “austerity,” code for slashing the size of government, making workers
poorer and impoverishing their people for the sake of their bondholders. The
determination of the upper classes not only to enrich themselves and impoverish
their people but root out any discussion of social justice has gone so far that
it’s creating a backlash. People — not enough people to make a difference
politically, but enough to put the ideas of redistribution and the social
responsibility of the well-to-do back on the table — are rising up, just as
they did in England in 1381, in France in 1789, throughout Europe in 1848, in
Russia in 1917 and in the Arab world earlier this year.
The Occupy
movement is often criticized for not offering a specific list of demands.
That’s taking one of the great strengths of the movement and calling it a
weakness. Occupy is not a top-down hierarchy like the various Tea Parties,
which though they have genuine, committed grass-roots support (which we ignore
at our peril) have been designed largely by their wealthy funders and whose
agendas and slogans have been supplied to their activists like recipes in a
cookbook. Naomi Klein, a strong supporter of Occupy, got it right when she told
MS-NBC that Occupy was “not a movement, but a moment” — a moment of awareness
that there has got to be a better way to
run an economy, a nation, a world, than to base all decisions on profit, greed
and exploitation. Occupy shouldn’t
be making demands yet because we’ve been told for so long that capitalism is
the end of human history — that “there is no alternative,” as former British
prime minister Margaret Thatcher put it — that we have only the foggiest ideas
of what a non-capitalist or post-capitalist economy and society should look
like.
When Occupy Wall
Street expanded and new Occupy movements started springing up across the
country, including in San Diego, I worried that they would repeat some of the
mistakes that have hamstrung previous attempts to revive the U.S. Left. They’re
avoiding, or working their way away from, some of them — like the insane
obsession with so-called “consensus decision-making” that has made many Left
organizations not only unworkable but actively unpleasant and soul-draining.
Occupy Wall Street began as a consensus organization but quickly worked away
from that model and set up a so-called “super-committee” to plot direction and
strategy — risking the alienation of some ultra-Leftists for whom any resort to representative democracy is a denial of
their principles. It also seemed to have dawned on Occupy that the reflexive
anti-Americanism of many U.S. Leftists has cut us off from the strategy used so
effectively by the Tea Parties of linking their struggle to the American
Revolution. At the end of September Occupy Wall Street issued a “Declaration”
(published here in full above) consciously modeled on the U.S. Declaration
of Independence, complete with bullet points listing the abuses uncontrolled
corporations have loosed on the American people.
The biggest
issue Occupy will need to address, and hasn’t yet, is its relationship to the
electoral system. This has become a pitfall for generations of American
Leftists, and Occupy confronts it at a dangerous juncture in U.S. politics
comparable to the situation in Germany in the early 1930’s. The deepening
economic crisis, the power of the corporate media in general and the Right-wing
media of talk radio and Fox News in particular to shape the way many Americans
perceive that crisis, and the failure of the Democrats’ half-measures to get us
out of the slump have created the strong possibility of a total Republican
takeover of the U.S. government — of which they already control half, the House
of Representatives and the Supreme Court — in the November 2012 elections. If
they win the presidency (quite likely, though by no means assured, since
presidents running for re-election on a piss-poor economy usually lose) and
take the Senate (virtually a mathematical certainty since the Democrats will be
defending 23 seats and the Republicans only 10), the result will be a sweeping
transformation of the U.S. into a Right-wing country — from the USA to TPA, Tea
Party America — comparable to what Hitler and the Nazis wreaked on Germany in
1933.
In my analysis —
and I know most Occupy participants would almost certainly disagree with me —
it is absolutely crucial for America’s future that we unite, vote and campaign
straight down the line for Democrats in 2012. We should do that without any
illusions that the Democrats are our friends, but with the full awareness that
the Republicans are such dastardly enemies, not only of the 99 percent but of
the earth itself, that in the short term at least, we need to keep what Noam
Chomsky calls “the reality-based wing of the ruling class” in power. We
shouldn’t hang back from criticizing especially egregiously corporate-friendly
Democrats and challenging them in primary elections. But we should give up any
notion of not voting at all — or voting for alternative parties, which in the
U.S.’s winner-take-all election system means the same thing — in the present
emergency. Given that the Republicans are committed to wiping out all controls on corporate power, ending organized labor,
privatizing virtually all government functions and getting rid of the welfare
state, and their “drill, baby, drill” assault on the environment will virtually
ensure the end of the earth’s ability to support the human species, we have to
bite the bullet and accept that in the current crisis, any Democrat
is better than any Republican.
In the medium
term we can debate reforms we can demand from the political system, including a
Constitutional amendment to end the idiotic fiction that corporations are
“persons,” worldwide taxes on financial
speculation, a return to the upper-bracket income tax rates of the 1950’s and
1960’s, an end to corporate subsidies and tax loopholes, restoration of the
Glass-Steagall Act and other New Deal-era legislation that severed consumer
banks from investment banks, reform of the labor laws to make it easy for
workers to organize, and aggressive antitrust enforcement literally to cut the giant corporations down to size. In the
long term we can work out the models by which humanity can grow beyond
capitalism — and throughout this process we must do the work on ourselves to
grow beyond our own individualistic, competitive urges and, in a saying of
Gandhi’s that’s become an obnoxious cliché, “be the change that we wish to see
in the world.”
Twelve years ago, in November 1999, a Leftist
movement swept through the streets of a major American city — Seattle — with a
simple demand: an end to unfair “free trade agreements” that enriched
corporations and greased the skids on which they sent American jobs overseas.
It was killed by the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and the wave of
repression that followed. Occupy could likewise be killed by a Republican sweep
of the November 2012 elections and the even more intense repression against it
likely to follow. But if it can hold on, learn from its mistakes and build for
the future, Occupy has a chance to break the corporate-capitalist stranglehold
on America’s and the world’s imagination and begin the process of moving away
from economies and societies based on greed, individualism, monopolism,
imperialism and a capitalist system that rewards humanity’s worst traits and
punishes its best.
