Occupy Will Be Back
Posted on Jun 18, 2012
By Chris Hedges
In every conflict, insurgency,
uprising and revolution I have covered as a foreign correspondent, the
power elite used periods of dormancy, lulls and setbacks to write off
the opposition. This is why obituaries for the Occupy movement are in
vogue. And this is why the next groundswell of popular protest—and there
will be one—will be labeled as “unexpected,” a “shock” and a
“surprise.” The television pundits and talking heads, the columnists and
academics who declare the movement dead are as out of touch with
reality now as they were on Sept. 17 when New York City’s Zuccotti Park
was occupied. Nothing this movement does will ever be seen by them as a
success. Nothing it does will ever be good enough. Nothing, short of
its dissolution and the funneling of its energy back into the political
system, will be considered beneficial.
Those who have the largest megaphones in
our corporate state serve the very systems of power we are seeking to
topple. They encourage us, whether on Fox or MSNBC, to debate inanities,
trivia, gossip or the personal narratives of candidates. They seek to
channel legitimate outrage and direct it into the black hole of
corporate politics. They spin these silly, useless stories from the
“left” or the “right” while ignoring the egregious assault by corporate
power on the citizenry, an assault enabled by the Democrats and the
Republicans. Don’t waste time watching or listening. They exist to
confuse and demoralize you.
The engine of all protest movements rests,
finally, not in the hands of the protesters but the ruling class. If the
ruling class responds rationally to the grievances and injustices that
drive people into the streets, as it did during the New Deal, if it
institutes jobs programs for the poor and the young, a prolongation of
unemployment benefits (which hundreds of thousands of Americans have
just lost), improved Medicare for all, infrastructure projects, a
moratorium on foreclosures and bank repossessions, and a forgiveness of
student debt, then a mass movement can be diluted. Under a rational
ruling class, one that responds to the demands of the citizenry, the
energy in the street can be channeled back into the mainstream. But once
the system calcifies as a servant of the interests of the corporate
elites, as has happened in the United States, formal political power
thwarts justice rather than advances it.
Our dying corporate class, corrupt,
engorged on obscene profits and indifferent to human suffering, is the
guarantee that the mass movement will expand and flourish. No one knows
when. No one knows how. The future movement may not resemble Occupy. It
may not even bear the name Occupy. But it will come. I have seen this
before. And we should use this time to prepare, to educate ourselves
about the best ways to fight back, to learn from our mistakes, as many
Occupiers are doing in New York, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia and
other cities. There are dark and turbulent days ahead. There are
powerful and frightening forces of hate, backed by corporate money, that
will seek to hijack public rage and frustration to create a culture of
fear. It is not certain we will win. But it is certain this is not over.
“We had a very powerful first six months,” Kevin Zeese,
one of the original organizers of the Occupy encampment in Freedom
Plaza in Washington, D.C., said when I reached him by phone. “We
impacted the debate. We impacted policy. We showed people they are not
alone. We exposed the unfair economy and our dysfunctional government.
We showed people they could have an impact. We showed people they could
have power. We let the genie out of the bottle. No one will put it back
in.”
The physical eradication of the encampments and efforts by the corporate
state to disrupt the movement through surveillance, entrapment,
intimidation and infiltration have knocked many off balance. That was
the intent. But there continue to be important pockets of resistance.
These enclaves will provide fertile ground and direction once mass
protests return. It is imperative that, no matter how dispirited we may
become, we resist being lured into the dead game of electoral politics.
“The recent election
in Wisconsin shows why Occupy should stay out of the elections,” Zeese
said. “Many of the people who organized the Wisconsin occupation of the
Capitol building became involved in the recall. First, they spent a lot
of time and money collecting more than 1 million signatures. Second,
they got involved in the primary where the Democrats picked someone who
was not very supportive of union rights and who lost to [Gov. Scott]
Walker just a couple of years ago. Third, the general election effort
was corrupted by billionaire dollars. They lost. Occupy got involved in
politics. What did they get? What would they have gotten if they won?
They would have gotten a weak, corporate Democrat who in a couple of
years would be hated. That would have undermined their credibility and
demobilized their movement. Now, they have to restart their resistance
movement.
“Would it
not have been better if those who organized the occupation of the
Capitol continued to organize an independent, mass resistance movement?”
Zeese asked. “They already had strong organization in Madison, and in
Dane County as well as nearby counties. They could have developed a Montreal-like movement
of mass protest that stopped the function of government and built
people power. Every time Walker pushed something extreme they could have
been out in the streets and in the Legislature disrupting it. They
could have organized general and targeted strikes. They would have built
their strength. And by the time Walker faced re-election he would have
been easily defeated.
“Elections are something that Occupy needs
to continue to avoid,” Zeese said. “The Obama-Romney debate is not a
discussion of the concerns of the American people. Obama sometimes uses
Occupy language, but he puts forth virtually no job creation, nothing to
end the wealth divide and no real tax reform. On tax reform, the
Buffett rule—that the secretary should pay the same tax rate as the
boss—is totally insufficient. We should be debating whether to go back
to the Eisenhower tax rates of 91 percent, the Nixon tax rate of 70
percent or the Reagan tax rate of 50 percent for the top income
earners—not whether secretaries and CEOs should be taxed at the same
rate!”
The Occupy movement is not finally about
occupying. It is, as Zeese points out, about shifting power from the 1
percent to the 99 percent. It is a tactic. And tactics evolve and
change. The freedom rides, the sit-ins at segregated lunch counters, the
marches in Birmingham and the Montgomery bus boycott were tactics used
in the civil rights movement. And just as the civil rights movement
often borrowed tactics used by the old Communist Party, which long fought
segregation in the South, the Occupy movement, as Zeese points out,
draws on earlier protests against global trade agreements and the
worldwide protests over the invasion of Iraq. Each was, like the Occupy
movement, a global response. And this is a global movement.
We live in a period of history the Canadian
philosopher John Ralston Saul calls an interregnum, a period when we
are enveloped in what he calls “a vacuum of economic thought,” a period
when the reigning ideology, although it no longer corresponds to
reality, has yet to be replaced with ideas that respond to the crisis
engendered by the collapse of globalization. And the formulation of
ideas, which are always at first the purview of a small, marginalized
minority, is one of the fundamental tasks of the movement. It is as
important to think about how we will live and to begin to reconfigure
our lives as it is to resist.
Occupy has organized some significant actions, including the
May Day protests, the
NATO protest in Chicago, an
Occupy G8 summit and
G-8 protests
in Thurmont and Frederick, Md. There are a number of ongoing
actions—Occupy Our Homes, Occupy Faith, Occupy the Criminal Justice
System, Occupy University, the Occupy Caravan—that protect the embers of
revolt. Last week when Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase,
testified before a U.S. Senate committee,
he was confronted
by Occupy protesters, including Deborah Harris, who lost her home in a
JPMorgan foreclosure. But you will hear little if anything about these
actions on cable television or in The Washington Post. Such acts of
resistance get covered almost entirely in the alternative media, such as
The Occupied Wall Street Journal and the Occupy Page of
The Real News.
“Our job is to build pockets of resistance
so that when the flash point arrives, people will have a place to go,”
Zeese said. “Our job is to stand for transformation, shifting power from
concentrated wealth to the people. As long as we keep annunciating and
fighting for this, whether we are talking about health care, finance,
empire, housing, we will succeed.
“We will only accomplish this by becoming a
mass movement,” he said. “It will not work if we become a fringe
movement. Mass movements have to be diverse. If you build a movement
around one ethnic group, or one class group, it is easier for the power
structure and the police to figure out what we will do next. With
diversity you get creativity of tactics. And creativity of tactics is
critical to our success. With diversity you bring to the movement
different histories, different ideas, different identities, different
experiences and different forms of nonviolent tactics.
“The object is to shift people from the
power structure to our side, whether it is media, business, youth, labor
or police,” he went on. “We must break the enforcement structure. In
the book ‘Why Civil Resistance Works,’
a review of resistance efforts over the last 100 years, breaking the
enforcement structure, which almost always comes through nonviolent
civil disobedience, increases your chances of success by 60 percent. We
need to divide the police. This is critical. And only a mass movement
that is nonviolent and diverse, that draws on all segments of society,
has any hope of achieving this. If we can build that, we can win.”
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