Occupy should not marginalize itself

Last week marked three months since Occupy Wall Street's encampment at Zuccotti Park was shut down in a show of brute force by the New York City government. If we expect the fall of Occupy to give way to an American Spring of renewed struggle on an even larger scale, as I have heard many occupiers predict, it is past time for us to start thinking about how we are going to make that happen.

The question of whether struggles like the hundreds of thousands marching on N17 last November in New York, or the port shutdown and "general strike" in Oakland on Nov. 2 last year, are possible without some shift in the dynamic of the struggle remains open. Here is where we start to see a very real threat to the movement, that does not come from the police or halls of government, but from within.

Anyone who has been paying attention to Occupy since the end of the encampments might notice a series of increasingly desperate, violent and adventurist struggles intended to provoke confrontation with the state and reignite mass protests. One such example is the action in Oakland on Jan. 28. After masses of people failed in trying to take over a building for a renewed encampment, a small group going by the name "the Occupy Oakland Move-in Assembly" went into City Hall, trashed a children's art gallery and burned an American flag, warning the city government: "Don't fuck with the Oakland Commune."

The Oakland Commune…if only it were so. Behind these supposedly revolutionary words and action, however, lurks a philosophy of struggle that is dangerous to the point that it will wreck the movement, if it has its way. Substituting a few enlightened "revolutionaries" for a mass movement that poses the question of power is in fact a deeply conservative strategy in that it does not trust the masses of people to act of their own accord. What's more, it has failed every time it's been tried. Not only has it stopped the so-called revolutionaries in the past, but if their actions in this instance are allowed to continue, they are more than capable of wrecking real chances for mass resistance.

We see this "radical" strategy being presently enacted in the call for what has variously been called a "General Strike" or a "Day Without the 99 Percent," for May Day (International Workers' Day), which was first made by Occupy Los Angeles and has been taken up within many Occupy groups nationwide. Intended to echo the hugely successful "Day Without an Immigrant" protests on May Day of 2006, the protest call reads in part, "Will you buy nothing in support of the 10 million foreclosed homes expected in 2012? Will you march out of classes for the millions of uninsured children in this country? Will you general strike with me?"

Certainly all of the issues noted in the call for protest are worthy of concern, and worthy of having a general strike over. But the call itself displays profound ignorance of the actual nature of a general strike. General strikes are those events in which all workers, or at least a sizable majority, walk off the job to deny their labor power to the one percent and force them to pay attention to their demands. Successful general strikes like those in Seattle in 1919, Toledo, Minneapolis and San Francisco in 1934, or of course, the current nationwide one in Greece, are intrinsically linked to the power of workers, organized in unions, to act collectively and pose a real challenge to the power of the ruling class.

What is most worrisome in the current call for a general strike is that it assumes that one can be called in the absence of organized labor. While only 11 percent of workers in this country are unionized, many of those who are—including teachers in our public schools, longshoremen on our docks and ports and workers on mass transit systems—have the power to slow or shut down large cities. The call does not pay the slightest attention to unions­—in fact, in discussions I have heard and participated in, some activists have suggested it would be a good thing if the unions did not participate, as they represent a privileged layer of workers which is not interested in engaging in real struggle.

This kind of attitude needs to be called out. The only forces currently capable of striking effectively in this country are the unionized workers with traditions and memories of struggle. The question "Will you general strike with me?" effectively says that a general strike can be any random assembling of individuals engaging in "radical" action. In this way, it would effectively alienate organized labor, which I and other socialists argue is the key to future struggles, the only force capable of posing a sustained, organized challenge to the status quo.

A general strike cannot be conjured out of the air. In political struggles such as the ones we are engaged in, you cannot go from zero to 60 miles in seconds flat. To have a nationwide general strike will likely take years of patient work in movements and workers' struggles. Certainly, in the meantime May Day should be used as a day of action, including protests, marches and whatever else it may entail. But there will be no strike, and it will not be general.

Occupy is, to use a cliché, between things ended and things begun. At this stage it would be a great shame if we allowed our impatience with the current state of affairs to overwhelm our capacity for sober analysis and reassessment. What the next phase of struggle will look like is not entirely clear. What is clear, however, is that repeated actions with ever-more "radical," ever-smaller numbers of people intended to reignite mass action will lead us straight off a cliff.

—Bill Crane '12 is an Asian studies major.