Here is a response a comrade sent to me about the interviews with labor activists that I posted on my blog (and which were first posted on mrzine). Some interesting questions are raised. We welcome comments. We are all waiting to see what will happen at our local Occupy camp on Saturday, planning to join a larger demo to defend the space, which will include unions from around the province. I read the interviews on the MRZine, and I must say that I was really disappointed in the level of political analysis in many of the responses. While we all are excited and thrilled at the growth of this new movement that actually challenges the effects of neoliberal capitalism in terms of massive inequality, the role of the financial system/banks, and the general sense that young people have no future in the current system, the placing of the obvious sense that the economy is "not working" into the everyday common sense that makes it something that so many people are now talking about – all are so wonderful and are justly celebrated here. Also, there is an important sense that the links between the Occupy movement and labor struggles – and workers inside and outside of the labor movement – promise all kinds of political learning for the latter, appreciation of the role of the workers’ movement in the former, and a synergistic potential that was missing from the anti-globalization period. But I was really surprised that aside from some comments about remaining justly concerned about what having the labor movement engage and learn in a genuine manner, and others that appreciate the limits of the political discourse used in the Occupy movement, the form of democracy practiced there and the actual tactic itself - there was an inability to really seize the nature of the movement’s real strengths and shortcomings. And, in the process, not play the role that socialists should play in thinking of ways of moving in the direction of a more clear and radical working class politics. I noticed the following: · 99% is a wonderfully useful way of describing members of the working class and others who are losing their capacity to either survive or have a decent life in the current era. But it is not class: it overlaps in many ways, but it overlooks much of the commonality that the multifarious segments of the working class share (as you have described in numerous ways and places). Indeed, it is a left populist concept, which is not to say that it doesn’t help place the issues in the public consciousness, but it also hides and misses the underlying structural realities of the class situation and feeds into a "comfortable" and lazy form of thinking that reinforces the notion that all we need to do is to restore "fairness" that supposedly underlies the capitalist system in the US. Certainly this mostly comes out as constructive for our movement, and as many of the comments point out, it is different from the cult of "middle class." But it is hardly class consciousness and thinking that it is, leaves us farther than ever from helping to convert the notion of "99%" into a real understanding of class – and building a real sense of class, through creating a collective movement which reaches across the segments that neoliberalism has created. The feeling that one’s life chances are not going to get better because of a corrupt system, is not the same as understanding that the very structure of the system is the problem and that one’s life chances can be changed in ways other than clearing the "blockages" to individual upward social mobility. Raising the populist notion of attacking the 1% is hardly an example of a "class war." The point isn’t to denigrate this way of raising anger and resentment, but we need to argue that this is only a base, a potential that we need to build on. The Occupy movement is only a huge first step, but the role of socialists is to help develop spaces and experiences where we can move beyond left populist understandings and develop elements of the class realities the underpin these very important but superficial understandings. Why that matters, is that without doing this, the Occupy movement will end up disappearing without leaving a legacy of committed political activists who can move into more organic forms of organizing working class people in neighborhoods and workplaces and unions and create socialist organizers. Similarly so with the populist characterizations of the financial system, which is completely interdependent (if not identical) to the rest of the capitalist class. Here again, the way it is raised lends itself to both righteous anger, as well as simply calling for regulation (and generating an small undercurrent of Anti-Semitism). · There is no sense amongst these interviewees that they see this as important, the idea of doing what they can to help this movement move to a higher level. (This is not, sadly, unique to the US left). They strongly – and positively – talk about how to infuse labor movement struggles and practices with some of the audaciousness and "radical" attitudes of the Occupy movement. But there is nothing about moving beyond the populism and into building the kinds of struggles and educational and organizational spaces that might bring socialist ideas into the mix, and help many of these Occupy people make a creative synthesis between their forms of organization, mobilization and thinking and Marxism. Of course, there is more than this. Some do talk about the need to transform the union movement and that this has to happen both from within the unions and through pressure from outside. But there is no sense that there needs to be a clear infusion of socialist ideas and explanations and that the populist efforts of the Occupy movement might lend itself to this (they create marvelous openings, but you can’t take advantages of openings if you don’t see them). So, unfortunately, the best outcome they can call for is a more left social democratic politics that might not find a home in the Democratic Party, but can only call for options that either lead to re-creating the "left" of the Democrats, or eventually drifting into its orbit inside or around the party. Sorry for the rant-like nature of this, but I was really disappointed. Many other US left essays on Occupy that I have read have been excellent in a number of ways, but also do not get beyond this celebration of the confrontation between the 1% and 99%. Celebration is certainly called for, as is support, but how can this build further without dealing with the elephant in the room?